"As to the position of Italy, monsieur le comte, you must read with caution what will be written to you from Rome or elsewhere. It is, unhappily, but too true that the Government of the Two Sicilies has fallen into the last stage of contempt. The manner in which the Court lives in the midst of its guards, for ever trembling, for ever pursued by the phantoms of fear, presenting the sole spectacle of ruinous hunting-parties and gibbets, contributes more and more to debase royalty in this country. Yet they take for _conspiracies_ what is only the general uneasiness, the product of the century, the struggle of the old society with the new, the contest between the decrepitude of the old institutions and the energy of the young generations: in fine, the comparison which everybody makes of that which is with that which might be. Let us not blind our eyes to this fact: the great spectacle of a powerful, free and happy France, that great spectacle which strikes the eyes of the nations which have remained or relapsed under the yoke, excites regrets or feeds hopes. The medley of representative governments and absolute governments cannot long continue; one or the other must go under, and politics must return to an even level, as in the time of Gothic Europe. The custom-house on a frontier can henceforth not separate liberty from slavery; a man can no longer be hung on this side of a brook for principles reputed sacred on the other side of that brook. It is in this sense, monsieur le comte, and in this sense alone, that there is any _conspiracy_ in Italy; it is in this sense too that Italy is _French._ On the day when she shall enter on the enjoyment of the rights which her intelligence perceives and which the progressive march of time is carrying to her, on that day she will be peaceful and purely Italian. It is not a few poor devils of _Carbonari_, stirred up by the manœuvres of the police and mercilessly hanged, that will rouse the country to revolt. Governments are given the falsest ideas of the true state of things; they are prevented from doing what they ought to do to ensure their safety by always having pointed out to them as the private conspiracies of a handful of Jacobins what is really the effect of a permanent and general cause.