MARRIOTT ON THE RESTORATION
Looking no longer to the past but to the future, the most interesting feature of the Restoration still remains to be noticed. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the dukes of Savoy had acquired Piedmont, and thus succeeded in straddling the Alps. Their geographical position, as the prince de Ligne had cynically said, did not permit them to behave like honest men. Consequently by rather tortuous, but in the main successful, diplomacy they managed in the eighteenth century to add the royal crown of Sardinia to the ducal crowns of Piedmont and Savoy; and never was a European war concluded, however remote the principal combatants might be, but the house of Savoy was able to acquire several of the towns of Lombardy, stripping it, as the saying goes, like an artichoke, leaf by leaf. Their position was still further strengthened in 1815 by the acquisition of the annihilated republic of Genoa.
Such was the Italy of 1815, little if at all better than Metternich’s “geographical expression.”[26] But for all that the Italy of 1815 was not the Italy of the ante-Napoleonic days. Strive as they might, the diplomatists of Vienna could not set back the hands of time, nor erase from the minds of the Italian people the newly awakened recollection of their ancient fame; they could not stifle, strive as they might, their newly conceived but none the less passionate longing for the realisation of their national identity. A more accurate or more eloquent expression of this feeling could hardly be found than in the letter addressed, thirty years afterwards, by Mazzini nominally to Sir James Graham, really to the English people:
“There are over there (in Lombardy) from four to five millions of human creatures gifted with an immortal soul, with powerful faculties, with ardent and generous passions; with aspirations towards free agency, towards the ideal which their fathers had a glimpse of, which nature and tradition point out to them; towards a national union with other millions of brother souls in order to attain it; from four to five millions of men desiring only to advance under the eye of God, their only master, towards the accomplishment of a social task which they have in common with sixteen or seventeen millions of other men, speaking the same language, treading the same earth, cradled in their infancy in the same maternal songs, strengthened in their youth by the same sun, inspired by the same memories, the same sources of literary genius. Country, liberty, brotherhood, all are wrested from them; their faculties are mutilated, curbed, chained, within a narrow circle traced for them by men who are strangers to their tendencies, to their wants, to their wishes; their tradition is broken under the cane of an Austrian corporal; their immortal soul feudatory to the stupid caprices of a man seated on a throne at Vienna, to the caprices of the Tyrolese agents; and you go on indifferent, coolly inquiring if these men be subject to this or that tariff, if the bread that they eat costs them a halfpenny more or less! That tariff, whatever it is, is too high; it is not they who have had the ordering of it; that bread, dear or not, is moistened with tears, for it is the bread of slaves.”[e]