The earlier stages of the affair were not calculated to weaken a belief in the effective non-intervention of Government.  Garibaldi went to Palermo, where he arrived in the evening of the 28th of June.  The young Princes Umberto and Amedeo were on a visit to the Prefect, the Marquis Pallavicini, and happened to be that night at the opera.  All at once they perceived the spectators leave the house in a body, and they were left alone; on asking the reason, they heard that Garibaldi had just landed—­all were gone to greet him!  Before the departure of the Princes next day, the chief and his future King had an affectionate meeting, while the population renewed the scenes of wild enthusiasm of two years ago.  Some of Garibaldi’s intimate friends assert that when he reached Palermo he had still no intention of taking up arms.  He soon began, however, to speak in a warlike tone, and at a review of the National Guard in presence of the Prefect, the Syndic, and all the authorities, he told the ‘People of the Vespers’ that if another Vespers were wanted to do it, Napoleon III., head of the brigands, must be ejected from Rome.  The epithet was not bestowed at random; Lord Palmerston confirmed it when he said from his place in the House of Commons:  ’In Rome there is a French garrison; under its shelter there exists a committee of 200, whose practice is to organise a band of murderers, the scum and dross of every nation, and send them into the Neapolitan territory to commit every atrocity!’ As a criticism the words are not less strong; but the public defiance of Napoleon, and the threat with which it was accompanied, dictated one plain duty to the Italian Government if they meant to keep the peace—­the arrest of Garibaldi and his embarkation for Caprera.

This they did not do; confining themselves to the recall of the Marquis Pallavicini.  Garibaldi went over the ground made glorious by his former exploits—­past Calatafimi to Marsala.  It was at Marsala that, while he harangued his followers in a church, a voice in the crowd raised a cry of ‘Rome or death!’ ‘Yes; Rome or death!’ repeated Garibaldi; and thus the watchword originated which will endure written in blood on the Bitter Mount and on the Plain of Nomentum.  Who raised it first?  Perhaps some humble Sicilian fisherman.  Its haunting music coming he knew not whence, sounding in his ear like an omen, was what wedded Garibaldi irrevocably to the undertaking.  It was the casting interposition of chance, or, shall it be said, of Providence?  Like all men of his mould, Garibaldi was governed by poetry, by romance.  Besides the general patriotic sentiment, he had a peculiar personal feeling about Rome, ‘which for me,’ he once wrote, ‘is Italy.’  In 1849, the Assembly in its last moments invested him with plenary powers for the defence of the Eternal City, and this vote, never revoked, imposed on his imagination a permanent mandate.  ‘Rome or death’ suggested an idea to him which he had never before entertained, prodigal though he had been of his person in a hundred fights:  What if his own death were the one thing needful to precipitate the solution of the problem?