This was the first great calamity of the war.  But apart from the treachery of the king of Naples and the dereliction of the Pope, it was impossible it should end thoroughly well.  The people were in earnest, and have shown themselves so; brave, and able to bear privation.  No one should dare, after the proofs of the summer, to reiterate the taunt, so unfriendly frequent on foreign lips at the beginning of the contest, that the Italian can boast, shout, and fling garlands, but not act.  The Italian always showed himself noble and brave, even in foreign service, and is doubly so in the cause of his country.  But efficient heads were wanting.  The princes were not in earnest; they were looking at expediency.  The Grand Duke, timid and prudent, wanted to do what was safest for Tuscany; his ministry, “Moderate” and prudent, would have liked to win a great prize at small risk.  They went no farther than the people pulled them.  The king of Sardinia had taken the first bold step, and the idea that treachery on his part was premeditated cannot be sustained; it arises from the extraordinary aspect of his measures, and the knowledge that he is not incapable of treachery, as he proved in early youth.  But now it was only his selfishness that worked to the same results.  He fought and planned, not for Italy, but the house of Savoy, which his Balbis and Giobertis had so long been prophesying was to reign supreme in the new great era of Italy.  These prophecies he more than half believed, because they chimed with his ambitious wishes; but he had not soul enough to realize them; he trusted only in his disciplined troops; he had not nobleness enough to believe he might rely at all on the sentiment of the people.  For his troops he dared not have good generals; conscious of meanness and timidity, he shrank from the approach of able and earnest men; he was inly afraid they would, in helping Italy, take her and themselves out of his guardianship.  Antonini was insulted, Garibaldi rejected; other experienced leaders, who had rushed to Italy at the first trumpet-sound, could never get employment from him.  As to his generalship, it was entirely inadequate, even if he had made use of the first favorable moments.  But his first thought was not to strike a blow at the Austrians before they recovered from the discomfiture of Milan, but to use the panic and need of his assistance to induce Lombardy and Venice to annex themselves to his kingdom.  He did not even wish seriously to get the better till this was done, and when this was done, it was too late.  The Austrian army was recruited, the generals had recovered their spirits, and were burning to retrieve and avenge their past defeat.  The conduct of Charles Albert had been shamefully evasive in the first months.  The account given by Franzini, when challenged in the Chamber of Deputies at Turin, might be summed up thus:  “Why, gentlemen, what would you have?  Every one knows that the army is in excellent condition,