Lamartine, the eloquent advocate and partially successful hero of popular rights, has admitted that there can be no progress unless "many interests are injured," and that "such transformations are not operated without great resistance, without an infinity of anguish and private misfortune." This, however, is no place to raise the question, how far the benefit of so much political liberty was balanced by the inadequate guarantee of person and property, inherent in such a state of things, or whether the security of domestic peace would have been too dearly purchased by a partial sacrifice of popular power. Yet few who argue these points will deny that whatever influence the republican constitutions of Italy may have had upon the individual happiness of their own citizens, they sowed the seeds of that intelligence, that freedom of thought, that ardent aspiration for the amelioration of mankind, which have ever since so beneficially acted upon European civilisation. The liberty of Italian republics has been frequently misapprehended, and will disappoint those who seek in it such safeguards of life and property as freedom in its modern sense is understood to afford. Under no form of civilised government were those guarantees more feeble or ineffective than where tyranny of the wayward and irresponsible many was substituted for domination by one. The philosophic Guizot has even condemned these republics as "utterly irreconcilable with security for life (that first ingredient in social existence) and with progress;" as "incapable of developing freedom or extending the scope of institutions;" as tending to "limit their range and concentrate authority in a few individuals." To these conclusions we must demur, and they appear inconsistent with the just tribute he gracefully pays to the intelligence, wealth, and brilliancy of Italian democracies; to the courage, activity, genius, and general prosperity of their denizens. But the argument and inferences of this French historian are easily reconcilable with a political creed largely prevailing among his countrymen, who find in centralisation the triumph of our age, the panacea for social anomalies. To that end has doubtless tended the progress of Europe during the last four centuries, and more especially the present rapid career of events, whether for ultimate weal or woe must be hereafter seen. Yet whilst we hesitate to paint the Ausonian republics in the utopian colours of Sismondi, we cannot adopt the narrow proportions ascribed to them by his less enthusiastic countryman. They filled the Peninsula with separate aims and paltry interests at a time when union was its sole security, yet they trained men to self-government, the first step towards that constitutional freedom without which nationality itself is a questionable boon.