The true and enlightened believer in a god-governance, and no devil-governance, of the world, will of course answer unhesitatingly, No! But to answer from the conscience, No!—with faith still as firm as when the nineteenth century was young and proud with chimerical hopes—to answer with convictions still undefeated by the defeats of '48, for ever No!—requires, it must be admitted, a strong and clear belief in the immutability of the causes that result in human good and evil; a lively perception of the truth that no faults of a nation's life can best be remedied by national death; and such a whole-hearted persuasion of the universality of God's law of progress as can cast out all doubt of the fact, that every nation on earth's surface must either advance to improved civilisation, or else prepare to quit the scene, as some little improvable peoples have done and are doing, and leave the valuable space they occupy to more highly-gifted races. The Italian writers of every age, from the sixteenth century to the present day, are naturally inclined to attribute all the misfortunes of their country to foreign wrong-doing and aggression. And they date the sunset of Italian prosperity, as Guicciardini does in the passage previously referred to, from the French invasion in the last years of the fifteenth century. But not even the dangers to be anticipated from the pretensions of the French monarch, nor the actual presence of foreign troops on the soil of Italy, could avail to check, even for a time, the deadly hatred of city against city. This had blazed out fatally between Florence and Pisa in 1496, and was still raging in the early months of 1499. Pisa was assisted by the Venetians; and the strength of the two maritime republics seems to have tried the resources of the Florentines severely. Like the other second-rate princes of Italy, our "Madama di Forlì" drove a considerable and important trade in hireling troops. This species of business was in every respect profitable to the rulers of these petty states. They thus, besides pocketing considerable sums, maintained bodies of troops owing allegiance to them and fighting under their flag, which their own resources would have been wholly insufficient to support. And the power of hiring out these to either of two contending powers caused their alliance to be bid for by their more powerful neighbours, and gave them an importance in the political calculations of the time disproportioned to the size of their little territories.