The Sun.
London, England, 1856-05-13 00:00:00

Spirit of the Public Journals.

( From the Times of this day. )
Our readers are now in possession of the Note
addressed by the Plenipotentiaries of Sardinia to
the Paris Conference. Its contents have been al-
ready in a great measure anticipated by the con-
versations reported in the 22d protocol, but still it
is impossible to peruse such a document without
feelings of the liveliest interest and sympathy. The
Plenipotentiaries begin by stating that they were
disappointed in the hope that the Congress would
not separate without taking into consideration some
plan for restoring the equilibrium of Italy, now
disturbed by foreign intervention, although they
admit at the same time that, owing to the peculiar
position of Austria, such consideration turned out
to be impossible. They therefore introduce the
subject on their own account. The evils of Italy
they attribute to foreign intervention, and the sys-
tem of repression, which was justifiable perhaps in
184 S, has been persevered in for eight years, with
unremitting or even increasing rigour. They state
that this condition of affairs is fraught with a
double danger for Piedmont—first, the awaken-
ing of revolutionary passions, from which the tem-
perate and balanced liberty of a limited monarchy
has almost as much to dread as absolutism itself ;
and, secondly, from the measures which Austria
takes with the view or under the pretence of
counteracting revolutionary movements, the re-
sult of which is that she envelopes with a large
force the eastern frontier of Piedmont, occupies
Parma, fortifies Piacenza, and thus obliges her
weaker neighbour to maintain an amount of force
which drains her population, and is extremely in-
jurious to her straitened finances. Sardinia, they
remark with much truth, is the only State in Italy
which has been able at the same time to erect a bar-
rier against the revolutionary spirit and to keep
free from the insidious and still more perilous protec-
tion of Austria. Sardinia has combated anarchy not
with despotism, but with moderate and reasonable
freedom, and for this reason anarchy and despotism
are equally in league against her. Whatever,
therefore, promotes the cause of Mazzini or Itadetz-
ky—whatever stirs up the passions of the populace
or stimulates the cruelty and ambition of priests or
soldiers, the twin-born pests of Italy—is equally
dangerous for Piedmont, which, being built upon
popular and monarchical principles, has everything
to fear, whether from the sword of the despot or
the torch of the incendiary.
This, then, is the condition of Piedmont, and
this is the right on which she claims to bring be-
fore assembled Europe the Italian question. She is
possessed of an excellent constitution, a patriotic
King, and a people well fitted for the enjoyment
and preservation of freedom. But these blessings
she is not permitted to enjoy—nay, she is threat-
ened every moment with their loss or curtailment,
because it is the pleasure of certain conservative
Powers, on the one hand, to stimulate the passions
which fills her towns with political exiles and tend
to confuse her Government with that of her arbi-
trary neighbours, while on the other hand, these
same Powers are constantly acting with revolu-
tionary violence, and committing, in the name of
order, worse excesses than anarchy itself could de-
vise or execute. The ground taken by Piedmont
is the very one so often used to justify armed in-
tervention—the dread of the mischief which the
disturbances of one State may bring to the welfare
of another, only here the argument is used to pre-
vent, instead of to further, foreign interference.
There is, indeed, only one remedy for the affairs
of Italy. That is, to suffer her to become once more
what she has never been since that unhappy day
when the miserable ambition of Charles VIII. re-
peated with fatal success the policy of the Hohen-
stauffen, and again sent across the Alps those legions
of foreigners who swept away that peculiar civili-
sation which shed so much splendour over the
history of the middle ages, and has left behind
it the noblest monuments of art and genius
that the human mind has produced since the days
pvy timedastate
of ancient Greece. From that unleladie)
Frenchman, German, hay
and Spaniard
with rival fury that fair laud, which then lost what
she has never since recovered—the inestimable