this on every possible occasion.  At Villafranca, when the Emperor of Austria insisted on the return of the Dukes, he acceded, on condition they were recalled.  He ‘did not come to Italy to dispossess the sovereigns,’ as he had previously observed, but to give the power of election to the people.  Before we left Rome this spring he had said to the French ambassador, ’If the Tuscans like to recall their Grand Duke, qu’est-ce que cela me fait?’ He simply said the same at Villafranca.

Count de Reiset was sent to Florence, Modena, and Parma, to ‘constater,’ not to ‘impose,’ and the whole policy of Napoleon has been to draw out a calm and full expression of the popular mind.  Nobly have the people of Italy responded.  Surely there is not in history a grander attitude than this assumed by a nation half born, half constituted, scarcely named yet, but already capable of self-restraint and dignity, and magnanimous faith.  We are full of hope, and should be radiant with joy, except for Venetia.

Dearest friend, the war did more than ‘give a province to Piedmont.’  The first French charge freed Italy potentially from north to south.  At this moment Austria cannot stir anywhere.  Here ’we live, breathe, and have our national being.’  Certainly, if Napoleon did what the ‘Times’ has declared he would do—­intervene with armed force against the people, prevent the elections, or tamper with the elections by means of—­such means as he was ‘familiar’ with; if he did these things, I should cry aloud, ‘Immoral, vile, a traitor!’ But the facts deny all these imputations.  He has walked steadily on along one path, and the development of Italy as a nation is at the end of it.

Of course the first emotion on the subject of the peace was rage as well as grief.  For one day in Florence all his portraits and busts disappeared from the shop windows; and I myself, to Penini’s extreme disgust (who insisted on it that his dear Napoleon couldn’t do anything wrong, and that the fault was in the telegraph), wouldn’t let him wear his Napoleon medal.  Afterwards—­as Ferdinando said—­’Siamo stati un po’ troppo furiosi davvero, signora;’ that came to be the general conviction.  Out came the portraits again in the sun, and the Emperor’s bust, side by side with Victor Emanuel’s, adorns the room of our ‘General Assembly.’  There are individuals, of course, who think that through whatever amount of difficulty and complication, he should have preserved his first programme.  But these are not the wiser thinkers.  He had to judge for France as well as for Italy.  As Mr. Trollope said to me in almost the first fever, ’It is upon the cards that he has acted in the wisest and most conscientious manner possible for all,—­or it is on the cards etc.’

The difficulty now is at Naples.

There will be a Congress, of course.  A Congress was in the first programme; after the war, a Congress.