Take that question so dear to the country; the question of Italia Irredenta. Where could it be discussed in public without 'authority' intervening and silencing the speakers? Professor Sergi forgets, or avoids, to say that in Italy the first conditions of a 'movement on new lines' are wanting; civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free acts are forbidden. Who can walk out into the country when barriers block up the end of every street? On the man, as on the dog, under pretence of public safety, the muzzle is fastened, and by its enforced use all health is destroyed. The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon, wears the rosette in his button-hole when he should put crape round his arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and of his friends. To form a virile character there is no education so good as the exercise of political and civil liberty; this education is but little given anywhere; it is not given at all between Monte Rosa and Mount Etna. The Italian is by nature too ready to be over-anxious and over-distressed at trifles; he thinks too much of trifling difficulties and the petty troubles of the hour; he is quickly discouraged, he is soon overwhelmed with despair, he has small faith in his own star, and he has not the elasticity and rebound of the Gaulois temper. Nothing therefore can possibly be worse for him than the kind of galling public tutelage and the perpetual molestation in which he is condemned to live; always esteemed guilty, or likely to be guilty, however harmless he may be. It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to dwell, destroys its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought, speech, and action. Let us take for instance that uninteresting person, a small tradesman, native and citizen of any Italian town; in all his smallest actions relative to his little shop, such, for instance, as altering or re-painting his signboard, he must obtain the permission of his Municipality. If he venture to clean or refurbish his board without authorisation, he will receive a summons and be compelled to pay a fine. The same kind of torment occurs in a dozen other daily trifles, magnified into crimes and visited with condign punishment; and, inevitably, the worried citizen becomes timid, nervous, and either afraid or incapable of judging or acting for himself. You cannot keep a man in the swaddling clothes of infancy and expect him to walk erect and well. A shopkeeper, a tailor in Florence, known to me, cut the cord with which a municipal dog-catcher had throttled his dog; he did no more; he was immediately arrested, dragged off to prison, and kept there for months without trial: when tried he was condemned to four months of prison and a heavy fine.