Before the Italians can, as a nation, be fit for what we call a free government, they must be better educated, and better fitted by their moral and social organisation to understand its nature and advantages. But in order to this, we must first of all see the education of the people taken up as a national object by the national clergy; and we must further see the morals of the people made a point of all-paramount importance by the same body of men, and brought forward into a place of greater prominence than the mere practices of devotion. Can it be any boon to confer the political rights of election and self-government on men who are still plunged in the depths of complete ignorance? Can it be of any use to call upon a nation for the exercise of public virtues, when social and domestic virtues do not exist among them? Before the Italians can be constituted as a nation of freemen, they must be formed into families of virtuous citizens, in which decency and the natural exercise of the affections may be firmly established. For if there be one political axiom more fully demonstrated by the voice of history than another, it is this, that public freedom can never exist where private vice preponderates over private virtue; and where the sacred ties of domestic virtue do not prevail, it is in vain to look for the bonds of public good. It was the domestic vices of the ancient Romans that first weakened the empire; and until their degenerate descendants shall have awakened from their moral lethargy, that empire, that national power, shall not rise again. It is, therefore, a favourable indication for Italy, that the movement should have commenced with the head of the national religion; for it may be hoped that a proper course will be adopted by the ecclesiastical authorities, and that the amelioration of all ranks and orders of men, clerical as well as lay, will precede and accompany the dawn of Italian independence. As long as the Italians remain in the state of moral weakness which, for so many centuries, they have exhibited, they need never expect to escape from the sway of the more virtuous nations of the north: they will never be able to face the Germans, whether in the cabinet or the field, until they learn to emulate them in the purity of their national character.