The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 39, January, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
increasing the weight of the chains of his victims, and of adding to the
intensity and the exquisiteness of their tortures.
These solid advantages to Italy, this freedom of hers from domestic
despotism and foreign control, are the fruits of French intervention;
and they could have been obtained in no other way. There was no nation
but France to which Italy could look for aid, and to France she did not
look in vain. Of the motives of her ally it would be idle to speak, as
there is no occasion to go beyond consequences; and those consequences
are just as good as if the French Emperor were as pure-minded and
unselfish as the most perfect of those paladins of romance who went
about redressing one class of wrongs by the creation of another.
What Italy desired, what alone she needed, was freedom from foreign
intervention; and that she got through the interposition of French
armies, and that she could have got from no other human source. This
single fact is an all-sufficient answer to the myriads of sneers that
were called forth by the failure of Napoleon III. to redeem his pledge
to make Italy free from the Alps to the Adriatic. What other potentate
did anything for that country in 1859, or has done anything for it since
that memorable year? Neither prince nor people, leaving Napoleon III.
and the French aside, has so much as lifted a hand to promote the
regeneration of Italy. America has enough to do in the way of attending
to domestic slavery, without concerning herself about the freedom of
foreigners; and she has given the Italians her--sympathies, which are of
as much real worth to her as would be a treatise on the Resolutions of
'98 to a man who should happen to tumble into the Niagara, with the
Falls close upon him. England would have had Italy submit to that
Austrian rule which had been established over her by English influence
in 1814, when even the perverse, pig-headed Francis II. could see sound
objections to it; and all because want of submission on her part would
disturb the equilibrium of Europe, and might tend to the aggrandizement
of France,--two things which she by no means desired to see happen.
Russia, like America, gave Italy her sympathies; but she had a better
excuse than we had for being prudent, as her monarch was engaged in
planning at least the freedom of the serfs. If the Russians desired the
overthrow of the Austrians, it was not because they loved the Italians,
but from hatred of their oppressors; and that hatred had its origin in
the refusal of Austria to join Russia when she was so hard pressed by
France and England, Turkey and Piedmont. Prussia, us we have seen, sided
with Austria; and though it is impossible to believe in her sincerity,
her moral power, so far as it went, was adverse to the Italian cause.
The other European nations were of no account, having no will of their
own, and being influenced only by the action of the members of the
Pentarchy. Save France, Italy had no friend possessed of the disposition
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