CHAPTER XXI. THE COMPLETION OF ITALIAN UNITY
Italy in 1814 was scarcely aroused to a national consciousness; in 1849 that consciousness was a dominant fact. Out of Carbonari plottings to mitigate the tyranny of local despots, out of the failures of 1820, ’21 and ’31, out of Mazzini’s Young Italy, and the preachings of Gioberti, had developed a strong and abiding desire not only for liberty, not only for independence, but also for unity, without which these could not endure. The idea of Nationality had sprung up in Italian hearts. The race which had given Christendom a religion, which had expressed itself in literature and in art and in science, and which had once led the world in commerce and industry, this race had at length set itself to win what it had hitherto lacked,—political freedom. Italy was to be no longer a geographical expression, but a nation.—Thayer.[b]
[1867-1878 A.D.]
The minister Ricasoli, who had the good fortune to associate his name with the union of Venetia to the kingdom of Italy, lived only a few months after the conclusion of peace with Austria. He had decided to reopen negotiations with the Roman court to determine at least those matters which had a purely ecclesiastical character. To this end he sent Tonello to Rome to treat on the business of the vacant episcopal seats. The affair was successful from the point of view of the Italian government; but it was not equally so with regard to that of the interest of the country.
[1867 A.D.]
Encouraged by this success the minister composed a plan of laws in which the relations of the church with the state were regulated upon the principle of the entire independence of the two powers. This hybrid law managed by Ricasoli with the ministers of finance and justice was presented to the chamber on the 17th of January, 1867. Before it was pronounced the country had expressed its discontent by means of the press. The Venetian provinces protested in public reunions, but the government prohibited these meetings. At the elections, however, the abstention of the clericals from the voting brought in a majority of the new chamber for the party opposed to the ecclesiastical law, and the minister, seeing the parliamentary party, sent in his resignation which was accepted.
Then Rattazzi reappeared upon the scene “like the doctor in extremis,” to use the phrase of Princess Rattazzi,[c] the author of his memoir. With him there returned those seditious and equivocal circumventions which again distressed Italy as the work of that fatal man. Borne upon the shields of the party of action which regarded him as its mind, as it had looked upon Garibaldi as its arm, he suddenly prepared for the work. And in the meantime while Sicily was a martyr to cholera and parliament was occupied in the important business of the liquidation of the Ecclesiastical Act, the party of action was agitating for hastening the solution of the Roman question. This question, as aforesaid, entered upon a new phase after the departure of the French from Rome and a short time after the solution of the Venetian question.