THE LIBERATOR OF ITALY.

Colonist, Volume III, Issue 212, 1 November 1859, Page 3

THE LIBERATOR OF ITALY.

(From the Saturday Review, July 2.) It has often been said that the real trials of an agitator begin with success. Take either a demagogue or a political philosopher at his word, and you make a fool of him when you set him to work out his closet problems or his platform professions. Messrs. Cobbett and Hunt were a long time clamouring for seats in Parliament, and we are old enough to remember what came of it. The Emperor Napoleon 111. has "now, to all appearance, very nearly attained the perilous height of success, and the consequences are coming upon him. He has thought proper to play the part of liberator and apostle of liberty, and fortune seems thus far to be taking the saviour and regenerator of Italy at his word. If the last Austrian patrol should even step out of enfranchised Lombardy his greatest embarrassments will then begin. It is utterly impossible that, were the whole board cleared next week, the Emperor could, even if he were disposed, settle north Italy under a constitutional regime —impossible, because his is not the hand from which freedom could be bestowed; nor will he be altogether master of his own policy. Suppose that he were, for his own interests, to act the Imperial Washington —to leave the Peninsula to itself—to retire gracefully when he had executed what he pretends to call a Divine Commission, and to march his laurelled army back through the Via Sacra of.liberated Italy—where would be his first difficulty ? Obviously with his own troops. A conquering army is not to be disbanded, after such an exploit as that of clearing the whole Austrian force out of Italy, like the London militia after a field day at Wormwood Scrubbs. It is not in any conquering army, still less in a French conquering army, to sheathe the sword in a melodrama of magnanimity. Having tasted blood, the Cuban bloodhound does not slink back quietly to his kennel. One Marshal's baton begets the insatiable lust for glory in every man of the mighty host of France. The eagle which has pearched on Milan, or which has screamed in , triumph over St. Mark's, is not likely to flit back to the Jardin dcs Plantes. The army of Italy must make a swoop at other prey, if not under a Napoleon, under some other soldier of fortune. Nor is it with the army alone that Napoleon the conquerer would have to deal. He woula have to give in Paris an account of his policy towards regenerated Italy. Suppose that a federation of Italian States were lo be constituted, and that the liberating legions then dispersed, themselves over France —suppose that a constitution for the Peninsula were fairly launched —under what auspices would the freedom of Italy present itself to the French people ? Nothing less substantial than a constitutional aud representative government, if not a pure republic, will satisfy the long-thwarted yearnings, of Italian patriotism, A constitutional government implies some awk~

ward things-—freedom of the Press, liberty of speech and action, entire religious equality, Ministers responsible to the people, local government in municipal matters, trial by jury, free Chambers, and the rest of it. This would be the Napoleonic policy towards Italy, if the Liberator, were to keep his word. The world would then see the phenomenon of the Imperial fountain discharging sweet water and bitter—Tiberius on one side the Alps, Trajan on the other—giving to Italy what he withholds from France; inaugurating at Milan what ,he proscribes in Paris. What a bitter satire and insult this to the French people! Why should not they be deemed worthy of tfcfe crumbs which fall from the rich banquet of Italian profusion ? Would the spectacle of an Italian Tree of Liberty, planted and watered by Imperial hands, be consoling to the better mind of France ? Of course|; jt would be the height of generosity in any nation to bestow on others blessings which they austerely deny to themselves; but a living inconsistency and an enthroned lie of this sort^would be unendurable, even in France. Napoleon 111. cannot be the liberator of Italy and the enslaver of France at one and the same time. History has never yet realised a paradox and potent so monstrous—all experience tells the other way. The first Napoleon was the liberator of Italy, and he planted Murat at Naples and set up a centralised tyranny wherever the legions of freedom marched. Rome sent out her liberating armies, and fixed grinding pronconsulates in Asia and Sicily. Ferdinand broke the Moorish yoke, but theTinquisition was the seal of Spanish freedom. Liberty has yet to be planted by a despot. The man who inaugurated Lamfoessa and Cayenne is hardly the good genius who is to redress the wrongs of Spielberg. In other words, if the Emperor is sincere in his purpose of liberating Italy, its accomplishment will be fatal to bis despotism in France —if he only exchanges one form of Italian slavery for another,, then are the Italians of all men the most miserable. The fact is, the Emperor lias been compelled by destiny to create his own Frankenstein, and he is now in danger of having to deal with his own inconvenient success. He muzzles the hound and slips the leash at the same moment. He banishes Blanc and Barbes; but he has accredited Kossuth, and Klapka, and Garibaldi, and the spirit which they represent. These are not the lieutenants of Imperialism—they are rather the missionaries of those very principles which with an iron hand, he has to keep down in France. Every success of these incendiaries in Hungary and Piedmont must sooner or later, react somehow in France. Whatever way we put it, the dangers of the future are about equal. . Liberated Italy has its dangers—enslaved Italy has its dangers—an army flushed with conquest has its dangers. An army disbanded after a successful campaign has its dangers. To advance, to retire, or to stand still ■— it is but the choice of judgments offered to David. On the whole, perhaps, the compromise of a nominal Italian federation under a Sardinian protectorate, with the real power at the Tuileries, might appear lo be the Emperor's safest solution §f the difficulty— only it would- not be found attainable The moral prestige of conquest would be I lost—it would be scarcely satisfactory ' to French ambition to register a mere dipld- i malic triumph of this unsubstantial sort. The ; French people can only understand material victories. French history, whether under ■ Louis XIV. or Napoleon 1., presents-no> instance of a great army, which had been assembled for a large scheme of ambition! ; broken up after a single successful campaign. Not that we believe for a single moment that the French Emperor ever seriously intended the liberation of Italy, in any sense of the words in which the term freedom would not be an insulting mockery. We' have only argued on the wild and impossible hypothesis of his sincerity and honesty.. We say that, if honest and sincere, he is; only on the threshold of his difficulties—not that we believe him to be honest or sincere. The tyrant of Paris will not be the liberator of Milan or Venice. False and perfidious to his own people, it cannot be that he will ; be other than false and perfidiousto the stranger. We have shown that he cannot liberate Italy even if he had the^ will; but we are not ready to concede^ that he has the will. His policy is con- . sistent enough, and it is a policy which unfortunately exactly falls in with the French, character. His destiny is to do the work, in which his uncle failed; and his actual successes—so mysteriously, or at least so ominously, identical with those of the First Emperor—might well carry off his feet even one who is not enslaved to the doctrines of fatalism and special inspiration. But precedent and policy, as well as the star, drive him forward. Those successes force him into the same future. The iron fate is upon him and his. The humiliation of Austria implies the coercion of Prussia. Another Campo Formio pledges another Tilsit. A Russian alliance was only the omen of a Russian invasion. One Alexander may be found as false, and quite as convenient, both as deceiver and deceived as his predecessor and namesake; and if only a second Borodino can be averted, another " Continental system" may leave the board open to the crowning day of destiny—the Worcester day of France —which shall avenge Waterloo. This is the vanishing point to which the long perspective of French policy leads. Short of this, nothing is done. And, at any rate, the first' act in the drama seems to be nearly played out, not without skill as well as luck. The stars fight in their courses for the Man of Destiny* It is something for us that the play has been fully rehearsed. Actors, scenery, situation, plot, and prologue—all are before us, and who can doubt about the action and the catastrophe? '