"The history of Italy during the last forty years is nothing but a record of groans, of evergrowing hatred and discontent, of ever- recurring commotions, conspiracies, revolts and revolutions, of scaffolds soaked in the blood of patriots, of the horrors of Spielberg and Mantua, and of the chafing anger with which the words, 'Out with the Austrians,' tremble on the lips of every Italian. These forty years are recorded in history as a standing protest against those impious treaties. The robbed have all the time loudly protested, by words, deeds, sufferings, and sacrifice of their lives, against the compact of the robbers. Yet, forsooth, we are still told that the treaties of 1815 are inviolable. Why, I have heard it reported that England rang with a merry peal when the stern inward judge, conscience, led the hand of Castlereagh to suicide; and shall we, in 1859, be offered the sight of England plunging into the incalculable calamities of a great war for no better purpose than to uphold the accursed work of the Castlereaghs, and from no better motive than to keep the House of Austria safe? "Inviolable treaties, indeed. Why, my lord, the forty-four years that have since passed have riddled those treaties like a sieve. The Bourbons, whom they restored to the throne of France, have vanished, and the Bonapartes, whom they proscribed, occupy the place of the Bourbons on the throne of France. And how many changes have not been made in the state of Europe, in spite of those 'inviolable treaties'? Two of these changes--the transformation of Switzerland from a confederation of states into a confederated state, and the independence of Belgium--have been accomplished to the profit of liberty. But for the rest, the distinctive features through which those treaties have passed is this, that every poor plant of freedom which they had spared has been uprooted by the unsparing hand of despotism. From the republic of Cracow, poor remnant of Poland, swallowed by Austria, down to the freedom of the press guaranteed to Germany, but reduced to such a condition that, in the native land of Guttenberg, not one square yard of soil is left to set a free press upon, everything that was not evil in those inviolable treaties has been trampled down, to the profit of despotism, of concordats, of Jesuits, and of benighting darkness. And all these violations of the inviolable treaties were accomplished without England's once shaking her mighty trident to forbid them. And shall it be recorded in history that when the question is how to drive Austria from Italy, when the natural logic of this undertaking might present my own native country with a chance for that deliverance to which England bade God-speed with a mighty outcry of sympathy rolling like thunder from John O'Groat's to Land's End,--that deliverance for which prayers have ascended, and are ascending still, to the Father of mankind from millions of British hearts,--shall it be recorded in