During the nineteenth century Italy in her Wars of Liberation gained, in a degree which this generation can hardly realise, the enthusiastic sympathy and the moral, and sometimes material, support of all the best elements in the British nation.  There were poets—­Byron and Shelley, the Brownings, Swinburne and Meredith—­who were filled with a passionate devotion to the Italian cause.[1] There were statesmen—­Palmerston, Lord John Russell and Gladstone—­who did good work for Italian freedom, and Italians still remember that in 1861 the British Government was the first to recognise the new Kingdom of United Italy, while the Governments of other Powers were intriguing to harass and destroy it.  There were individual, adventurous Englishmen, such as Forbes, the comrade of Garibaldi, who put their lives and their wealth at the disposal of Italian patriots.  But, beyond all these, it was the great mass of the British people which stood steadily behind the Italian people in its long struggle for unity and freedom.

[Footnote 1:  Even Tennyson, who was not very susceptible to foreign influences, invited Garibaldi to plant a tree in his garden.]

Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, “the soul, the sword and the brain,” which together created Modern Italy, all had close personal relations with this country.  Mazzini, driven from his own land by foreign oppressors, lived a great part of his life in exile among us, and here dreamed those dreams, which still inspire generous youth throughout the world.  When Garibaldi visited us in 1864, he was enthusiastically acclaimed by all sections of the nation, by the Prince of Wales, the Peerage and the Poet Laureate, no less than by the working classes.  It is recorded that, used as he was, as a soldier, to the roar of battle and, as a sailor, to the roar of the storm, Garibaldi almost quailed before the tumultuous roar of welcome which greeted him as he came out of the railway station at Nine Elms.  Cavour was a deep student and a great admirer of British institutions, both political and economic, and in a large measure founded Italian institutions upon them.  And the first public speech he ever made was made in London in the English tongue.  These great men passed in time from the stage of Italian public life, and others took their places, but amid all the shifting complexities of recent international politics, no shadow has ever fallen across the path of Anglo-Italian friendship.  And indeed during the Boer War Italy was the only friend we had left in Europe.

Italy’s membership of the Triple Alliance was always subject to two conditions, first, that the Alliance was to be purely defensive, and second, that Italy would never support either of her partners in war against England.  Thus, under the first condition, when Austria proposed in 1913 that the Triple Alliance should combine to crush Serbia, victorious but exhausted after the Balkan Wars, Italy at once rejected the proposal.  And, under the second condition, as German naval expansion became more and more provocative and threatening to Britain, we were able to transfer nearly all our Mediterranean Fleet to the North Sea, secure in the knowledge that, whatever might befall, we should never find Italy among our enemies.