THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
With the overthrow of Napoleon there was but slight betterment in the immediate condition of Italy. An attempt was made by the powers that had overthrown the French usurper to restore the Italian principalities to something like their ante-revolutionary status. But, as has just been noted, the spirit of liberty was taking possession of the land and its long enslaved people began to dream of better things than they had known for centuries. But their efforts to secure the freedom so long renounced were at first only attempts; one petty rebellion after another seemed to come to nothing. But, at last, under the guidance of such leaders as Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel, the seemingly impossible was accomplished: outside influences were subordinated; the papal power over secular affairs was restricted and at last virtually overthrown; and for the first time in something like fourteen centuries the geographical territory of Italy came politically under the sway of a single ruler who owed no allegiance to alien lands: the dream of the visionaries was accomplished: an Italian kingdom ruled by an Italian king took the place of the enslaved, disunited principalities of the earlier centuries.
True, this achievement was not the culmination that some of the most ardent patriots, with Mazzini at their head, had dreamed of. The aim of that leader, as of many another, had been to achieve not a monarchical but a republican unity. In their enthusiastic estimate the monarchical form of government was obsolescent. Their enthusiasm harked back to the days when Venice and Florence had carried out with so much success the precepts of democracy. Their imagination was fired also by the example of that newer republic of the West, whose free institutions have inspired so much of emulation and so much of hatred in the minds of different classes of people among the older governments of Europe. But if the dreams of these enthusiasts were not to be realised, it sufficed for the more conservative reformers that the constitutional monarchy, embodying many of the precepts and principles of democracy, had at last brought Italy under the sway of a single sceptre.