of Austria and Spain, and a prolific source of war, disorder, and havoc throughout the eighteenth century. “A war in Italy,” he said in 1859, “is not a war in a corner. An Italian war may by possibility be an European war. The waters of the Adriatic cannot be disturbed without agitating the waters of the Rhine. The port of Trieste is not a mere Italian port. It is a port which belongs to the Italian confederation, and an attack on Trieste is not an attack on Austria alone, but also on Germany. If war springs up beyond the precincts of Italy, _England has interests not merely from ... those enlightened principles of civilisation which make her look with an adverse eye on aught that would disturb the peace of the world, but England may be interested from material considerations of the most urgent and momentous character_.” It was from England’s vantage-ground alone that he discussed these questions in public. He wished Italy to be free, but he feared the results of ineffective feeling. Italy, he held, must free herself, and her aid, if any, should be French, not English, for France heads the Latin League. In 1859 he rested on a mutual accord and disarmament between Great Britain and France. This would, he pleaded, be “a conquest far more valuable than Lombardy, or those wild dreams of a regeneration ever promised but never accomplished.” “National independence,” he urged in another speech on the same subject, “is not created by protocols, nor public liberty guaranteed by treaties. All such arrangements have been tried before, and the consequence has been a sickly and short-lived offspring. What is going on in Italy--never mind whose may have been the original fault, what the present errors--_can only be solved by the will, the energy, the sentiment, and the thought of the population themselves_.” One word before I close this chapter about Greece and Poland. Of his own feeling for Hellas there can be no question. It pervades his works. “All the great things have been done by the little peoples.” He was offered, I have heard, the kingship of that country. But Greek ambitions, he felt, outgrew her capacities. Her hereditary dream has always been Constantinople. He bade her, in a famous passage, take the advice that he would give to a youth of genius and enterprise: “_Be patient_.” But he also insisted that she should be heard at the Conference of Berlin.