The Portuguese ensign for her vessels of war and also for the merchant service bears the shield and crown, but instead of the {113} scarlet field we find the groundwork of the flag half blue, and half white, as shown in Fig. 196. The choice of these special colours, no doubt, arose from the arms on the original shield, the five blue escutcheons on the white ground. The Portuguese Jack has the national arms and royal crown in the centre of a white field, the whole being surrounded by the broad border of blue. Italy, for centuries a geographical expression, is now one and indivisible. Within the recollection of many of our readers the peninsula was composed of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies, the Pontifical States, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchies of Parma and Modena. There was also in the north the Kingdom of Sardinia, while Lombardy and Venetia were in the grip of Austria. It is somewhat beside our present purpose to go into the wonderful story of how Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, aided by Cavour, Garibaldi, and many another noble patriot, by diplomacy, by lives freely laid down on the Tchernaya, on the fields of Magenta and Solferino, by the disaster at Sedan, by bold audacity at one time, by patient waiting at another, was finally installed in Rome, the Capital of United Italy, as king of a great and free nation of over thirty millions of people. Suffice it now to say that this Kingdom of Italy, as we now know it, did not achieve until the year 1870 this full unity under one flag that had been for centuries the dream of patriots who freely shed their blood on the battlefield or the scaffold, or perished in the dungeons of Papal Rome, or Naples, or Austria for this ideal. On the downfall in 1861 of the Bourbon Government in the Kingdom of the two Sicilies before the onslaught of the Volunteers of Garibaldi, the first National Parliament met in Turin, and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel King of Italy. The title was at once acknowledged by Great Britain, and, later on, by the other Powers, and the capital of the rising State was transferred to Florence. The Papal States were still under the protection of France, "the eldest Son of the Church"; and the young Kingdom, unable to wrest Rome from the French, had to wait with such patience as it could command for the consummation of its hopes. The long-looked-for day at last arrived, when amidst the tremendous defeats inflicted in 1870 by Germany on France, the French garrison in Rome was withdrawn, and the Italians, after a short, sharp conflict with the Papal troops, entered into possession of the Eternal City, and at once made it the Capital of a State at last free throughout its length and breadth--no longer a geographical expression, but a potent factor to be reckoned with and fully recognised.