a just or a politic mode of touching for the king’s evil.  It would have the merit of novelty,—­and Americans are as fond of new things in their day of power as ever were the Athenians in the day of their decline.  A yet rarer merit it would have, in the fact that a great deal could justly be said on both sides of the question.  An umpire would probably decide in favor of 1859,—­because, he might say, had the events of that year been different, those of 1860 must have undergone a complete change.

The romantic conquest of Sicily by Garibaldi, and his successes in Naples, whereby a junior branch of the Bourbon family has been sent to “enjoy” that exile which has so long been the lot of the senior branch,—­and the destruction of the Papalini by the Italian army of Victor Emanuel II., which asserted the superiority of the children of the soil over the bands of foreign ruffians assembled by De Merode and Lamoriciere for the oppression of the Peninsula in the name of the venerable head of the Church of Rome,—­these are events even more striking than those by which the iron sceptre of Austria was cut through in the earlier year, because they have been accomplished by Italian genius and courage, the few foreigners in the army of Garibaldi not counting for much in the contest.  They prove the regeneration of Italy.  But it is evident that nothing of the kind could have been done in 1860, if 1859 had been as quiet a year for Italy as its immediate predecessor.  Before the leaders and the soldiers of Italy could obtain the indispensable place whereon to stand, it was imperatively necessary that the power of Austria should be broken down, through the defeat and consequent demoralization of her army.  For a period of forty-four years, Austria had had her own way in the Peninsula.  From the fall of Napoleon’s Italian dominion, in 1814, to the day when the third Napoleon’s army entered Sardinia, there was, virtually, no other rule in Italy but that which Austria approved.  The events of 1848, which at one time promised to remove “the barbarians,” had for their conclusion the re-establishment of her ascendency in greater force than ever; and the last ten years of that ascendency will always be remembered as the period when its tyrannical character was most fully developed.  The hoary proconsul of the Lorraines, Radetzky, if not personally cruel, was determined to do for his masters what Castilian lieutenants had done for the Austro-Burgundian monarchs of Spain and her dependencies, the fairest portions of Italy being among those dependencies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,—­to destroy the public spirit of Italy.  Could he have completed a century of life, or had there been no European nation ready to prevent the success of the Germanic policy under which Italy was to wither to provincial worthlessness, he might have been successful.  But Austria lost her best man, the only one of her soldiers who had shown himself capable of upholding her Italian position, when he had reached to more than ninety years; and it pleased Providence to raise up a friend to Italy in a quarter to which most men had ceased to look for anything good.