folly and imbecility of a great number of others, aided by circumstances beyond the control of either the wise or the foolish players in the game; -this most strange, and not to have been anticipated, combination, frustrated the Emperor's plans and hopes. And thereupon his subjects withdraw their approbation, and manifest their discontent with the player who has, notwithstanding great skill and admirable knowledge of the game, lost the rubber they had backed him to win. In truth, the position of the French Emperor was strikingly analogous to that of Frankenstein in the celebrated tale, who gave life to a monster which, as soon as the breath of life had been breathed into its nostrils, grew suddenly too powerful to be controlled by its dismayed creator, and became the terror and the chastisement of his life. The Emperor did perform this feat. He did, if not create, at least recall from its secular hybernation to life and action, the dormant spirit of Italian nationality. On the instant, with portentously rapid growth, that spirit rose, and spread, and dilated itself into a giant's proportions and a giant's strength. It may well be believed that the appalled necromancer stood aghast at the unexpected result of his own incantations. But the deed was done; and it far exceeded his power, or that of any other earthly potentate, to undo it. In vain he strove to retain his control over the actions of the mighty spirit he had evoked! In vain he sought to modify and direct the path by which it started on its destined way! Nay, the huge creature itself if we may be allowed thus to carry on the similitude-had no power to arrest its steps, nor to change the direction of them. Inspired by a Heaven-ordained instinct, it could but advance in the path and towards the goal marked out for it by its own indefeasible nature. Vain to speak to it of the gratitude due to its creator;-vain to menace it with dangers to be encountered on the path on which it was called to start forth! It could do no other than advance-advance despite all obstacles -advance ever, till its destined goal should be reached! A disagreeable position certainly, for an Imperial Frankenstein! There can be no doubt, that as the two nations stand now, even if Italy had completed her unification, and Rome and Venice were already integral parts of Victor Emmanuel's kingdom, France would still be far the more powerful, the more wealthy, and the more thoroughly crganized of the two. For some years to come-barring the chances of renewed revolution and cataclysm in France-she will, there can be little doubt, remain so. But we think that some of the present generation will see this relative position reversed. In the first place, as regards the all-important point of population; it would probably be found to be not very far from the truth, if we assume that the present population of France is nearly forty-five per cent. larger than that of Italy. An immense difference! But there is to be taken into consideration the extraordinary fact, that the population of France, for some years back, has been all but stationary! Now, such a fact, unless it can be shown to have been caused by emigration, or by some other special and temporary circumstance, is, of all symptoms that can be manifested by a body social, the most fatal. The great primal law, which bids mankind increase and multiply, is so intimately and providentially connected with all the sources of human prosperity and well-being, and obedience to it is enforced under such heavy penalties by Nature, that its contravention by a nation, not only indicates that the first and most indispensable element of prosperity is wanting to that nation, but compels the conclusion that some hidden constitutional malady is at work-some internal cancer eating away the vitals of a people who manifest so ominous a phenomenon. In the face of such a symptom, it is no use to point to any superficial marks of florid health and prosperity. They must be in some way or other deceptive. The hidden mischief must be at work there, despite all appearances to the contrary. The well-known lines of Goldsmith express so beautifully a great social truth, which can never be too often inculcated, that, although they have been quoted oftener, perhaps, than any lines in the language, we will not refrain from quoting them yet once again : "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, When once destroyed, can never be supplied." Thus wrote the man whom Dr. Johnson called an "inspired idiot;" embalming, in strains the music of which the Doctor's verse could never emulate, a philosophic truth more weighty than any to be found in the Doctor's weighty prose. The inspired idiot wrote thus at a time when great fears were entertained by many men that England was in danger of falling into the decayed condition described in the poet's verse. Thank God! each successive census of the population of these islands has proved that such is not the case. England does obey the Creator's primal law. She does increase and multiply; and that with so expansive a force of vitality, as not only continually to increase the population of this already closely-packed kingdom, but to send forth from her robust loins such a race of the vigorous Anglo-Saxon blood to the uttermost parts of the earth, as would seem, if we send our glances down the stream of time into the far future, to assure the heritage and dominion of the earth to the posterity of that fortunately mixed race, the combined elements of which have assuredly produced the most powerful and capable type of humanity which the world has yet seen. As far as England was concerned, Goldsmith's fears were happily unfounded. But are there not signs which may warrant the apprehension that France is approaching that condition in which wealth accumulates and men decay? There are ugly symptoms there, not only in the deficiency of increase, but in the deplacement of population. France is suffering from that dangerous malady, a determination of blood to the head-a withdrawal of vital energy from the extremities of the body social, and concentration of it in the great centres, and especially to the great centre of population. Well would it have been for France, if the great Italian Captain, who shaped her destinies to issues which no Vienna or other human Congress could or can ever set aside, had been taught by the wisdom of the inspired idiot, and had borne in mind that the bold peasantry destroyed by the remorseless drain of his exhausting wars could never be supplied! These ominous features in the present condition of France must be matters of painful consideration to us, in a degree inferior only to that in which they should move the French themselves. For we know that the prosperity of our neighbours is an important element in our own wellbeing. But our present business is to consider them as they are likely to affect the future relative position of that country and Italy. In that highly-favoured land the natural movement of the population has not been for several generations arrested, even by the very unfavourable circumstances which have weighed upon it. And now, under the new conditions of the life, political and social, to which it has been called, a very rapid rate of increase may be expected. No kind of stimulus will be wanting to it. Increasing movement, increasing wealth, increasing activity, increased security, and enormously-increased hope and happiness,-all will tend to stimulate and encourage increase of population. All the physical characteristics of the country and its inhabitants are favourable to it. In large districts of the territory there is a state of things analogous to that which operates in America to produce a rate of increase unknown to older countries. In the south-eastern districts of the late kingdom of Naples, in Sicily, in Sardinia, in portions of the States recently under the misgovernment of the Church, there are wide expanses of fertile lands which can hardly be said to be peopled at all. Even in many of the more thickly-inhabited parts of the country, it occurs that the cultivators of the soil esteem a large family a means of prosperity and riches, instead of a source of difficulty and anxiety. A man is there the richer, in prospect at all events, and not the poorer, for every child that is born to him. The tendency to early marriages among the rural population is universal, as, under such circumstances, it might well be expected to be. In short, there is every reason to anticipate that, before the end of the century, the relative positions of Italy and France, with reference to the all-important point of population, will be changed. In half a century, from 1800 to 1850, the population of these islands was increased from sixteen millions to nearly twenty-eight millions, in the teeth of tremendous wars, of more than one visitation famine and epidemic pestilence, and of large emigration. And England added these twelve millions to a population previously far more dense than that of Italy. That increase was at the rate of all but seventy-five per cent; and it was accomplished in half a century. Under the different and far more favourable circumstances in which Italy will be placed in this respect, it is surely not too much to anticipate an increase of fifty per cent. in forty years' growth, which would make the twenty-six millions of Italians of the present day into thirty-nine millions in the year 1900. Yes! the groan of the French senator was not without reason;granting that the prosperity of a next-door neighbour must needs be an infliction and a misfortune to oneself. And the general feeling of France towards the new comer among the nations, and the policy of the Emperor, ever since the giant he liberated and awakened began to walk on its way alone, is clear and intelligible enough. It has been, however, and still is, complicated by a problem, which imports into the political question a whole host of considerations, interests, and feelings of a wholly different order and character; a problem which to the young Italian kingdom also is the most difficult and dangerous that it is called upon to solve. We speak of the question of Rome and the Roman Pontiff. Now, let us see, as clearly as we can, how this aspect of the matter presents itself; availing ourselves of our privilege, as private folks, to strip the facts of the case of all those euphonisms and mystifications, and reticences, which the men who make history find it necessary to use. We shall thus simplify the matter very notably. In the year 1849-when the Roman people had succeeded in throwing off the intolerable yoke of a power which had just proved itself to be alien in feeling, interest and policy, to the feeling, interest and policy of the nation it oppressed-the French Republic, which had itself just accomplished its own liberation from an incomparably less objectionable Government, sent an army to thrust back the unhappy Romans into their odious bondage, and to restore the power of their priestly tyrants. So shameless a deed was never probably perpetrated by any nation in its national capacity, since history has recorded the actions of mankind! The utterly corrupt and most odiously hypocritical motive to this wicked act is of course clear enough. The French republican leaders sought to purchase the adhesion of the army of forty-thousand priests in France, who, as usual, were ready to adhere to any power or any principle that would show itself willing to connive at the anti-social and antinational objects of Romish sacerdotal ambition. The Emperor, at his accession to power, found a French army in possession of Rome; and has been, and is, guilty of the great and grievous wrong of keeping it there; and indeed of tightening its grasp on the throats of the Roman people. But his evil doing is less in degree by much than that of the Republican Government which first committed the wrong. His motive, of course, was the same. And he too, in his turn, succeeded in purchasing the venal support of his country's most dangerous enemies. But, although willing to pay a certain price for this support, the Emperor was not willing to become the mere agent of the clerical party. And it has gradually become more and more clear that there is no firm standing-ground between that position and one of declared enmity to them and their policy. The imminence of an internecine quarrel between the Imperial Government and this army of forty-thousand welldisciplined and ably-commanded tonsured troops may have the effect of providing a solution for the first knot of the Roman difficulty. Up to the present time the Emperor has supported the Pope, partly because he is afraid to face the despairing rage of his own clergy, were he to abandon him; and partly because that support helps to stave off the dreaded consummation of Italian unity. And the French nation approve of his thus acting, partly for the sake of the latter reason, and partly because the Pope and Popery are the symbols and mainstay of a retrograde and reactionary policy and ideas. These motives are not marked by generosity or largeness of view; but they are infinitely more respectable than the avowed motive which is put forward by France in the face of Europe. France would fain have us believe that she is acting in this matter as "Eldest Son of the Church; that she, acting on the behalf of two hundred millions of Catholics, and obeying the dictates of her own tender conscience, is providing for the Head of her Church such a supply of victim subjects for him to exercise his sovereignty on, as is, they maintain, necessary for the due discharge of his functions as the Universal Bishop of Souls. "My conscience suffers violence," says the French pietist, "and my religious convictions are outraged, unless my supreme Bishop is allowed to be a Sovereign; therefore, although I know that his rule is such that I would not dream of submitting to it myself, I demand, for the advantage of my soul, that a sufficient number of struggling victims be handed over, bound hand and foot, to the helpless misery of priestly government, in order that my Bishop may have wherewithal to be a King." It is truly difficult to say whether the stupid absurdity of such a pretension most offends the intellect, or its gross injustice and loathsome mmorality most revolts the moral sense! Meanwhile, the victims of this notable arrangement-the blocks provided for priestly sovereignty to play its kingly freaks on-most unanimously decline to accept their part in the play. And they also the Italians have on their side a twofold reason for their resistance to any such arrangement. In the first place, they do not feel that their religion at all requires that the Head of it should have any sovereignty And, in the second place, they have an especial or any subjects at all. |