Strange to tell, Ferdinand II. rendered one considerable service to the national cause; not that he saw it in that light, but the service was none the less real because its motive was a narrow one.  Austria proposed a defensive league between the Italian Sovereigns:  defensive not only with the view to outward attack, but also and chiefly against ‘internal disorder.’  Piedmont was to be invited to join as soon as she had renounced her constitutional sins, which it was sanguinely expected she would do before very long.  Meanwhile Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Rome embraced the idea with enthusiasm, but the King of the Two Sicilies, who dimly saw in it an opening for interference in his own peculiar governmental ways, boldly declined to have anything to do with it.  And so, to Prince Schwarzenberg’s serious disappointment, the scheme by which he had hoped to create an absolutist Italian federation, came to an untimely end.

The Grand Duke of Tuscany timidly inquired of the Austrian premier if he might renew the constitutional regime in his state.  Schwarzenberg replied with the artful suggestion that he should hear what the Dukes of Modena and Parma, the Pope, and King Ferdinand had to say on the subject.  Their advice was unanimously negative:  Cardinal Antonelli going so far as to declare that Constitutionalism in Tuscany would be regarded as a constant menace and danger to the States of the Church.  The different counsels of Piedmont, conveyed by Count Balbo, weighed little against so imposing an array of opinion, backed as it was by the Power which still stabled its horses in the Convent of San Marco.  The Tuscan Statute was formally suspended in September 1850.

From that day forth, Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough.  To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—­named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—­laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church.  The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused of wishing to make proselytes, proclaimed the depth of intolerance into which what was once the freest and best-ordered government in Italy had descended.

The ecclesiastical question became the true test question in Piedmont as well as in Tuscany, but there it had another issue.

It had also a different basis.  In Piedmont there were no Leopoldine laws to destroy; what was necessary was to create them.  To privileges dating from the Middle Ages which in the kingdom of Sardinia almost alone had been restored without curtailment after the storm of the French Revolution, were added the favours, the vast wealth, the preponderating influence acquired during Charles Felix’ reign, and the first seventeen years of that of Charles Albert.  Theoretically, the Statute swept away all privileges of classes and sects, and made citizens equal before the law, but to put this theory into practice further legislation