desired the expulsion of Austria, they did so not because she prevented Italian unity, but because she forbade political reform.  Their risings, therefore, local and disunited in character, were bound to fail; the first fifteen years after the Congress of Vienna were occupied by a series of attempts to substitute a constitutional for an absolute regime in different parts of Italy, attempts which Austria crushed with a heavy hand.

The period which followed, 1830-1848, belongs to Mazzini and his “Young Italy” party.  His task was to fire Italy for the first time with the ideal of national unity and independence.  The conception of unity was a difficult one for Italians to grasp; all history seemed to fight against it.  There were, for example, not only the traditions connected with Rome to be reckoned with, but there was also the difference between north and south, and, perhaps most important of all, the local spirit of independence associated with the great cities like Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, etc.  Thus, over against Mazzini’s ideal of a single unified State there arose the counter-ideal of a federal system.  In this, however, later events proved Mazzini to be right.  Where he failed in foresight was in regard to the constitutional character of the State he dreamed of.  He wished not only to abolish all existing frontiers in Italy, but to do away with all existing state-systems.  The only Italy he could conceive was a republic, and Italy was not ripe for a republic, which was, for the rest, a form of government too much bound up with the disruptive traditions of the City-States to be acceptable.[1] But if Italy was not to be a republic, she must be a monarchy, and where could she find a prince to put at the head of her united State?  Clearly, she would accept no one who was not the declared enemy of Austria and the declared friend of constitutional reform.  For a month or so in 1846 it seemed that the Pope himself might be prevailed upon to undertake the role; and the elevation of Pius IX. to the Chair of St. Peter was greeted with wild enthusiasm in Italy because he was believed to be a Liberal.  These hopes proved illusory, however, and so the eyes of all patriots turned more and more in the direction of Piedmont.

[Footnote 1:  It is noticeable that Greece also played with the idea of a republic at first and eventually selected a monarchical form of government.  As a matter of fact, not a single nation-State, formed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna, has adopted the republican principle.]

This principality, which was part of the kingdom of Sardinia, ruled over by the semi-French house of Savoy, shared the northern plain of Italy with Austria, and at first showed neither anti-Austrian nor Liberal proclivities.  Victor Emmanuel came back smiling in 1814, saying that he had been asleep for fifteen years; the old regime was restored as though the Revolution had never been; and a rising of the