What was to be expected under such conditions? The wonder is that the nation did not go to pieces, and that the work of two generations of constructive men was not destroyed by their incapacity to husband what they had created. In the face of such facts one cannot help thinking of Vico and his identification of divine Providence with the rationality of history. This people was politically at the nursery stage; it had no modern political science of its own, and therefore none of its legislative acts were based on actual and practical understanding of what were the national necessities. They were inspired by the example of foreign governments and, consequently, could not meet Italy’s peculiar necessities. What did for the others could not do for Italy. Yet it was impossible to keep back a people so well informed of modern progress. The Italian Liberals, it must be said for their immortal fame, had the clear-sightedness necessary to attain their aims, inasmuch as they had reduced them to a formula that could be accepted by all the other patriots. “Italy, one and free,” was their aim, and to this aim nobody could object. The flaw of such an aim is that it is too simple to correspond to actual reality. It sounds like an algebraical axiom, and, indeed, is just as abstract in its basis as any mathematical formula. For the Liberals the nation was exclusively constituted by its territorial expansion and by the unification of the people of the different states therein included. They could not change their aim, and when they had to administer the new realm their eagerness and singleness of purpose often blinded them to reality. As the unity they had reached was formal, if one can term it so, their legislation purposely ignored the differences between Sicilians and Tuscans; and in their haste to unify internally what was already externally one, they imposed what could at best be formal and artificial unity. Every annexation had been preceded by a local struggle, and success was not sufficient to cause equanimity in the triumphant party. All that had existed under the old régime was an object of hatred to the Liberals; and their ministers, even when they kept above such feelings, were none the less unable to discriminate between the antiquated local laws and those that were still useful and even good. They destroyed local institutions, often created to meet actual requirements, to impose, for instance, upon the people of Sicily Piedmontese laws, the inspiration of which was usually imported from France or England. They had the impression that it would be dangerous to the unity of the country to keep some of the local laws, or to make new ones to meet the particular needs of this or that province. In the minds of these passionate creators of unity, unity was a quite fragile affair, produced by them _ex tempore_; they did not see that it could only be the result of a slow elaboration, bound to go on for generations, and that the