The Sun.
London, England, 1859-07-14 00:00:00

costumes that give life to the scene in that magni-
ficent square. Is Venice discontented Then she
does not know what freedom is, as Napoleon knows
and as our ultra-liberal friends in England know.
But let her not speak foolish discontents too loudly.
It is only a slice of Lombardy which has been
handed over to Sardinia—" Lombardy to the line
of the Mincio." Betwixt the " line" of the Mincio
and Venetia there are two large rivers which run
down to the Po, and the land watered by those
rivers is thick with first-class fortresses. It is the
old Austrian iron gate by which she entered Italy
at her will ; it is the lair of Austrian despotism, to
which she retired when there was danger in the
plains. Hence she could speed her tens of thou-
sands to crush any nascent exposition of discon-
tent. Ye free Sardinian Lombards, who enjoy
your freedom under the shadow of the western
walls of these great fortresses, and ye liberated
Venetians who, as you cultivate your Continental
possessions, can look up to cannon that frown upr
those eastern bastions, be not too loud in your free
talk. This country also is free. It lies between
the Alps and the Adriatic, and it must be free.
With Venice it shares the honour of being free
under Austria. But it is free as a pure Austrian
possession—an outpost of the Tyrol, advancing like
a wedge right into the body of Northern Italy ; it
is crammed with troops and arms as it has ever
been, and from it armies could be thrown out by
railways and might reach Milan or Venice in a few
hours. Austria still has, and by this Treaty, is to
continue to • have, this terrible Quadrangle.
In those cities, therefore, it were better to
talk softly of the newly-acquired free-
dom, and to congratulate each other in
whispers upon the glorious consummation of
their patron Emperor's promise of driving the
Austrians from Italy and making her free from the
Alps to the Adriatic. Tuscany and Modena are
also free. They are free by their own acts, for
they expelled their two Sovereigns, and then sent
off to the Emperor Napoleon half their youth as
volunteers. The free citizens of Tuscany and
Modena fought against their expelled Sovereigns
at Solferino, and helped Louis Napoleon to drive
them away. This was a mistake on both sides.
The true freedom for which the Tuscans and
Modenese were fighting consists in taking back their
old rulers, and, if their Grand Dukes had known
their true interests, they would have been in the
camp of the French, and not in that of the Aus-
trian Emperor. Hippias is going back to Athens
again—the freedom of Athens requires his restora-
tion.

Archbishop Whately insists that half the guar-
- rels of the world arise from an inattention to its
logic—people will not mind their definitions. This
is the cause of the difference that separated us some
time ago from the English Radicals and Italian
sympathisers. If they had only defined what they
meant by Italian liberty, and defined it in the sense
in which it now appears, we should never have
doubted the intentions of Louis Napoleon to give
it them. Without being extreme in our sympa-
thies for Italy, we must confess that if we had sent
Lord Stratford or Lord Clarendon to a Congress to
do what England could for Italy, and if Lord Strat-
ford or Lord Clarendon had come back, waving his
hat, and shouting, " Italy is free !" and if it turned
out that he had left Austria at Peschiera, at
Mantua, and at Venice, and had forced back the
Grand Dukes upon Tuscany and Modena, and
that this was what he called Italian freedom,
we should have been very much tempted to
cry out lustily for the impeachment of Lord
Stratford or Lord Clarendon as a traitor. If
we had had any notion that this was what
M. Kossuth and the gentlemen of Birmingham
and other idolators of the Emperor Napoleon
desired, we think we could have got it for them
without strewing Italy with corpses and crowding
the hospitals with miserable mangled soldiers.
There is nothing in all this which might not
have been wrung from Austria by force of diplo-
macy. It ought not to hurt her pride, and it
greatly increases her strength. She is relieved of
the trpuble of governing one turbulent and expen-
sive province, and she retains the power of devas-
tating it whenever she may please. She is now
placed in Italy like a swordfish beside a whale.
Austria is all weapon,—ltaly is all prey. Austria
has only surrendered what she might at any mo-
ment take back, but what she is probably now too
wise to desire. Sardinia has got what she must
hold on sufferance, and what, if attacked, she could
not defend. When the satraps of Austria are re-
established at Florence and at Modena, and when
she stands armed to the teeth, dominant and irre-
sistiblo in the Italian Confederation, Austria will
be greater in Italy than she ever yet has been. If
England had dared to propo-,e this to her before
the fight began, she could not have refused it; and
now it seems that 100,000 lives would have been
saved, and Italy would have been just as much
" free from the Alps to the Adriatic." Such are
the consequences of people not being in accord as
to the sense of the words they use. But we must
in justice to ourselves explain that the error has
not been ours alone. The man of all men who
should have understood the Emperor Napoleon,
the man who of all men understands the cause of
Italy, the man who of all men Italy hailed as her
Statesman as she hailed ,his master as her Cham-
pion—Count Cavour—was, like ourselves, deceived,
—the Free Italy that he imagined was very unlike
that which the two Emperors have devised, and in
disgust he has retired from the high position he has
so long filled, unable to meet the reproaches of
those whose hopes he had excited and whose indig-
nation he has so much cause to dread.

(From the Morning Post.)

Now that the war that we all shrank from is
over, and the peace that we all longed for is con-
cluded, it cannot be amiss to ask the British public
what it thinks of the position of England at this
moment with respect to the Italian question ?
What is the spectacle which we present to our con-
tinental neighbours? Where are the dignity, and
the strength of utterance, and' the purity of; pur-
pose, and constraining influence, which we have
been wont to exhibit whenever great European in-
terests have been in the balance ? England is lite-
rally nowhere. We, the leaders in the van of pro-
gress ; we, without whom no great European ques-
tion ought to be entertained, no great continental
war undertaken, no great peace concluded ; we,
who are entitled to be not only heard but heeded ;
we, who have bragged and boasted—not without
reason—of our proud pre-eminence; where are we
now? What have we to do with the readjustment
of the map of Euro. ? We, who have advocated
freedom all over the world, who have so boldly de-
nounced tyranny everywhere, and especially the
tyranny of one nation over another, who have
talked large things about the rights of Italy, the
sacredness of her cause, and the cruelty of her op-
pressions—what have we done to help her ? We,
who took such childish fright at the thought of
another Napoleon in Italy; who talked, wherever
a knot of Englishmen could be got together, of per-
idious designs and masked cunning, and of fearful
dangers to Europe ; who drew imaginary pictures
of universal war, reproduced in anticipation the
confusions and conflicts of the early part of the cen-
tury, and spoke of the Continent as on the eve of
blazing from one end to the other—we, gallant
creatures who did and uttered all these foolish
things, what have we done to prevent them ? We,
who predicted all these terrors, what is to become
of us now that all are falsified ? Who can console
the Saturday _Review? who resuscitate the faith of
its admirers in journalism ? How Europe must stare
at us ! The servants of David, with their beards
shorn and their garments cut somewhat shorter than
a Highlandman's kilt, presented a better figure
than we do, and had not half so much reason to be
ashamed.

The Government of Lord Derby must be held
primarily responsible for our present humiliation.
True, the Press is answerable for much ; the un-
thinking public, who likes to be led by a newspaper,
while strongly asserting nevertheless an entire supe-
riority to any influence exercised by it, is answer-
able for much ; but those who represented England
on the Continent, who were charged with [the re-
sponsibility of upholding her place among the
Great Powers, whose duty it was to read the signs
of the times, to discern and to embrace the oppor-
tunities before them—these are the men on whom
rests the lasting odium of our present position.
These are the men who denounced the war that
they might have prevented, and who, we presume,
are prepared now inconsistently to rejoice in a
peace which they contributed mainly to destroy.
A reference to the published correspondence in re-
lation to France and Italy will show that there was
a period when, if England had shown any real
sympathy with Italian grievances, any proper trust
in the Emperor of the French. and any firmness in
her representations to the Court of Vienna, the
whole affair would have been prevented, and the
Italian question have been solved without the loss
of a single life or the firing of a single shot. Had
our Government acted up to the spirit of the French
alliance, instead of strengthening the obstinacy of
Austria and encouraging her hope that she had
something more to expect from us than empty
complimentary sympathy, there would certainly
have been a Congress on the affairs of Italy which
thatwould
whichhave
theset the
lastpeninsulareser t
has h
free,been
edo rapidly and
brilliantly of s andhFave settled
dd
brilliantly determined by the swords
Sardinia. But an in excusable indifference
France
tcoe anlta-
lian • wrongs, and a distrust of the good faith of
Napoleon, who, judged by his public acts and his
behaviour towards this country, has every claim to
confidence and cordiality ; these were the leading
considerations that held back from asserting her
rightful influence.
Deserted by. England, France took up Italy single-