island and a man of resource and quick intelligence, was well qualified to execute the work of propaganda and to elude the Bourbon police.  Crispi travelled in all parts of Sicily for several months, and in September he was able to report to Mazzini that the insurrection might be expected in a few weeks—­which proved incorrect, but only as to date.  Mazzini forbade his agents to agitate in favour of a republic; unity was the sole object to be aimed at; unity in whatever form and at whatever cost.

In March 1860 he had an interview in London with the man who was to become the actual initiator of the revolutionary movement in South Italy.  This was Rosalino Pilo, son of the Count di Capaci, and descended through his mother from the royal house of Anjou, whose name, Italianised into Gioeni, is still borne by several noble families in Sicily.  Rosalino Pilo, who was now in his fortieth year, had devoted all his life to his country’s liberties.  After 1849, when he was obliged to leave Sicily, he sold his ancestral acres to supply the wants of his fellow exiles, and help the work of revolutionary propaganda.  Handsome in person, cultivated in mind, ready to give his life, as he had already given most of what makes life tolerable, to the Italian cause, he won the affection of all with whom he was brought in contact, and especially of Mazzini, from whom he parted after that last interview radiant with hope, and yet with a touch of sadness in his smile, as if in prevision that the place allotted to him in the ranks of men was among the sowers, not among the reapers.

Rosalino Pilo believed, as Mazzini believed, that Sicily was ripe for revolution, but he realised the fact that under existing circumstances there was an exceeding probability of a Sicilian revolution being rapidly crushed.  It was the tendency of Mazzini’s mind to think the contrary; to put more faith in the people themselves than in any leader or leaders; to imagine that the blast of the trumpet of an angered population was sufficient to bring down the walls of all the citadels of despotism, however well furnished with heavy artillery.  Pilo saw that there was only one man who could give a real chance of success to a rising in his native island, and that man was Garibaldi.  As early as February he began to write to Caprera, urging the general to give his co-operation to the projected movement.  It is notorious that the scheme, until almost the last moment, did not find favour with Garibaldi.  In spite of his perilous enterprises, the chief had never been a courtier of failure, and he understood more clearly than his correspondent what failure at that particular juncture would have meant.  The ventures of the Bandieras and of Pisacane, similar in their general plan to the one now in view (though on a smaller scale). ended in disasters, but disasters that were useful to Italy.  A disaster now would have been ruinous to Italy.  Garibaldi’s hesitations do not, as some writers of the extreme party have foolishly assumed, detract from his merit as victorious leader of the expedition; they only show him to have been more amenable to political prudence than most people have supposed.