So you and others upbraid me with having put myself out of my ’natural place.’  What is one’s natural place, I wonder?  For the Chinese it is the inner side of the wall.  For the red man it is the forest.  The natural place of everybody, I believe, is within the crust of all manner of prejudices, social, religious, literary.  That is as men conceive of ‘natural places.’  But, in the highest sense, I ask you, how can a man or a woman leave his or her natural place.  Wherever God’s universe is round, and God’s law above, there is a natural place.  Circumstances, the force of natural things, have brought me here and kept me; it is my natural place.  And, intellectually speaking, having grown to a certain point by help of certain opportunities, my way of regarding the world is also natural to me, my opinions are the natural deductions of my mind.  Isn’t it so?  Still I do beg to say both to you and to others accusing that Italy is not my ‘adopted country.’  I love Italy, but I love France, too, and certainly I love England.  Because I have broken through what seems to me the English ‘Little Pedlingtonism,’ am I to be supposed to take up an Italian ‘Little Pedlingtonism’?  No, indeed.  I love truth and justice, or I try to love truth and justice, more than any Plato’s or Shakespeare’s country.[73] I certainly do not love the egotism of England, nor wish to love it.  I class England among the most immoral nations in respect to her foreign politics.  And her ‘National Defence’ cry fills me with disgust.  But this by no means proves that I have adopted another country—­no, indeed!  In fact, patriotism in the narrow sense is a virtue which will wear out, sooner or later, everywhere.  Jew and Greek must drop their antagonisms; and if Christianity is ever to develop it will not respect frontiers.

As to Italy, though I nearly broke my heart over her last summer, and love the Italians deeply, I should feel passionately any similar crisis anywhere.  You cannot judge the people or the question out of the ‘Times’ newspaper, whose sole policy is, it seems to me, to get up a war between France and England, though the world should perish in the struggle.  The amount of fierce untruth uttered in that paper, and sworn to by the ‘Saturday Review,’ makes the moral sense curdle within one.  You do not know this as we do, and you therefore set it down as matter of Continental prejudice on my part.  Well, time will prove.  As to Italy, I have to put on the rein to prevent myself from hoping into the ideal again.  I am on my guard against another fall from that chariot of the sun.  But things look magnicently, and if I could tell you certain facts (which I can’t) you would admit it.  Odo Russell, the English Minister here (in an occult sense), who, with a very acute mind, is strongly Russell and English, and was full of the English distrust of L.N., when with us at Siena last September, came to me two days ago, and said, ’It is plain now.  The Emperor is rather Italian than