Que sais-je? might be the form of his own answer, were any one entitled to question him concerning his own opinion on his own acts of 1859.  But of the effects of his attack on Austria there can be no doubt.  That Lorraines and Bourbons have ceased to reign in Italy,—­that the Kingdom of Victor Emanuel has increased from six millions of people to twenty-four millions,—­that the same constitutional monarch who ruled at Turin is now acknowledged in Milan, in Ancona, in Florence, in Naples, and in Palermo, being King of Lombards, and Tuscans, and Romans, and Neapolitans, and Sicilians,—­and that the Austrians are no longer the rulers of the Peninsula,—­these things are all due to the conduct of the French Emperor.  Had the peace of Europe not been broken by France, the Austrian power in Italy would have been unbroken at this moment, and Naples have been still under the dominion of that mad tyrant whose supreme delight it was to offend the moral sense of the world, and who found even in the remonstrances of his brother-despots occasion for increasing the weight of the chains of his victims, and of adding to the intensity and the exquisiteness of their tortures.

These solid advantages to Italy, this freedom of hers from domestic despotism and foreign control, are the fruits of French intervention; and they could have been obtained in no other way.  There was no nation but France to which Italy could look for aid, and to France she did not look in vain.  Of the motives of her ally it would be idle to speak, as there is no occasion to go beyond consequences; and those consequences are just as good as if the French Emperor were as pure-minded and unselfish as the most perfect of those paladins of romance who went about redressing one class of wrongs by the creation of another.  What Italy desired, what alone she needed, was freedom from foreign intervention; and that she got through the interposition of French armies, and that she could have got from no other human source.  This single fact is an all-sufficient answer to the myriads of sneers that were called forth by the failure of Napoleon III. to redeem his pledge to make Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic.  What other potentate did anything for that country in 1859, or has done anything for it since that memorable year?  Neither prince nor people, leaving Napoleon III. and the French aside, has so much as lifted a hand to promote the regeneration of Italy.  America has enough to do in the way of attending to domestic slavery, without concerning herself about the freedom of foreigners; and she has given the Italians her—­sympathies, which are of as much real worth to her as would be a treatise on the Resolutions of ’98 to a man who should happen to tumble into the Niagara, with the Falls close upon him.  England would have had Italy submit to that Austrian rule which had been established over her by English influence in 1814, when even the perverse, pig-headed Francis II. could see sound objections