"By brute force?" said Don Silverio. "That were madness. What would be the number of the able-bodied men of all three communes? Let us say two thousand; that is over the mark. What weapons would they have? Old muskets, old fowling-pieces, and not many of those; their scythes, their axes, their sticks. A single battalion would cut them down as you mow grass. You have not seen rioters dispersed by trained troops. I have. I have seen even twenty carabineers gallop down a street full of armed citizens, the carabineers shooting right and left without selection; and the street, before they had ridden two hundred yards, was empty except for a few fallen bodies which the horses trampled. You can never hope to succeed in these days with a mere jacquerie. You might as well set your wheatsheaves up to oppose a field battery."
"Garibaldi," muttered Adone, "he had naught but raw levies!"
"Garabaldi was an instinctive military genius, like Aguto, like Ferruccio, like Gian delle Bande Neri, like all the great Condottieri. But he would probably have rotted in the Spielberg, or been shot in some fortress of the Quadrilateral, if he had not been supported by that proclamation of Genoa and campaign of Lombardy, which were Louis Napoleon's supreme errors in French policy."
Adone was silent, stung by that sense of discomfiture and mortification which comes upon those who feel their own inability to carry on an argument. To him Garibaldi was superhuman, fabulous, far away in the mists of an heroic past, as Ulysses to Greek youths.
"You, sir, may preach patience," he said sullenly. "It is no doubt your duty to preach it. But I cannot be patient. My heart would choke in my throat."
Don Silverio looked him straight in the face.
"What is it you intend to do?"
"I tell you that you can do nothing, my son."
"How know you that, reverend? You are a priest, not a man."
A faint red colour came over Don Silverio's colourless face.