The origin of the red shirt might have remained in poetic uncertainty had it not been mentioned a few years ago in a volume of reminiscences published by an English naval officer.  The men employed in the Saladeros or great slaughtering and salting establishments for cattle in the Argentine provinces wore scarlet woollen shirts; owing to the blockade of Buenos Ayres, a merchant at Monte Video had a quantity of these on his hands, and as economy was a great object to the government, they bought the lot cheap for their Italian legion, little thinking that they were making the ‘Camicia Rossa’ immortal in song and story.

The coming to Rome of the 1200 legionaries aroused private fears in the hearts of the more timid inhabitants, but Garibaldi knew how to keep his wild followers in hand, and gallant was the service they rendered to Roman liberty.

That liberty was now on the eve of its peril.  The preliminaries of the French intervention in Rome are tolerably well known; here it suffices to say that every new contribution to a more precise knowledge of the facts only serves to confirm the charge of dissimulation, or, to use a plainer and far better adapted word, of dishonesty, brought against the French government for their part in the matter.  White, indeed, do Austria, Spain and Naples appear—­the avowed upholders of priestly despotism—­beside the ruler of republican France and his ministers, whose plan it was not to fight the Roman republic:  fighting was far from their counsels, but to betray it.  It is proved that the restoration of the Temporal Power was the aim of the expedition from the first; it is equally proved that the French sought to get inside Rome by distinct disclaimers of any such intention.  ’We do not go to Italy,’ they said, ’to impose with our arms a system of government, but to assure the rights of liberty, and to preserve a legitimate interference in the affairs of the peninsula.’  They adopted a curious method of assuring the rights of liberty.

The Pope would not have anything to do with the affair.  ’If you say openly that you are going to give me back my Temporal Power, well and good; if not, I prefer the aid of Austria.’  So he replied to the flattering tales whispered in his ear, while tales no less flattering were being whispered in the ear of Mazzini.  He declined to give the French any guarantees as to his future mode of governing; it cannot be said, therefore, that they were under the delusion that they were restoring a constitutional sovereign.

Efforts have been made to cast the responsibility of the Roman intervention entirely on Louis Napoleon.  Even Mazzini favoured that view, but it is impossible to separate the President of the Republic from the 325 deputies who voted the supplies for the expedition on the 2nd of April.  Does anyone pretend that they were hoodwinked any more than Ledru Rollin was hoodwinked, or the minority, which, roused by his vigorous speech, voted against the grant?  Louis