Another man of genius, an Italian whom a fortuitous circumstance made the citizen and the master of a country not his own, grasped both the vital necessity of unity from an Italian point of view, and the certainty of its ultimate achievement.  Napoleon’s notes on the subject, written at St Helena, sum up the whole question without rhetoric but with unanswerable logic:—­’Italy is surrounded by the Alps and the sea.  Her natural limits are defined with as much exactitude as if she were an island.  Italy is only united to the Continent by 150 leagues of frontier, and these 150 leagues are fortified by the highest barrier that can be opposed to man.  Italy, isolated between her natural limits, is destined to form a great and powerful nation.  Italy is one nation; unity of customs, language and literature must, within a period more or less distant, unite her inhabitants under one sole government.  And Rome will, without the slightest doubt, be chosen by the Italians as their capital.’

Unlike Dante and Machiavelli, who could only sow the seed, not gather the fruit, the man who wrote these lines might have made them a reality.  Had Napoleon wished to unite Italy—­had he had the greatness of mind to proclaim Rome the capital of a free and independent state instead of turning it into the chief town of a French department—­there was a time when he could plainly have done it.  Whether redemption too easily won would have proved a gain or a loss in the long run to the populations welded together, not after their own long and laborious efforts, but by the sudden exercise of the will of a conqueror, is, of course, a different matter.  The experiment was not tried.  Napoleon, whom the simple splendour of such a scheme ought to have fascinated, did a very poor thing instead of a very great one:  he divided Italy among his relations, keeping the lion’s share for himself.

Napoleon’s policy in Italy was permanently compromised by the abominable sale of Venice, with her two thousand years of freedom, to the empire which, as no one knew better than he did, was the pivot of European despotism.  After that transaction he could never again come before the Italians with clean hands; they might for a season make him their idol, carried away by the intoxication of his fame; they could never trust him in their inmost conscience.  The ruinous consequences of the Treaty of Campo Formio only; ceased in 1866.  The Venetians have been severely blamed, most of all by Italian historians, for making Campo Formio possible by opening the door to the French six months before.  Napoleon could not have bartered away Venice if it had not belonged to him.  The reason that it belonged to him was that, on the 12th of May 1797, the Grand Council committed political suicide by dissolving the old aristocratic form of government, in compliance with a mere rumour, conveyed to them through the ignoble medium of a petty shopkeeper, that such was the wish of General Buonaparte.  In extenuation of their