The twenty years of the reign of Force, of which Napoleon was the embodiment, ended at Waterloo. Europe, exhausted, sank back into conservatism, and was ruled for thirty years by Craft, of which Metternich was the symbol.[2] The Congress of Vienna reimposed the past upon Italy. Monarchs and bureaucrats, like children who amuse themselves by “making believe” things are not as they are, would have it appear that the deluge of revolution, with all its mighty wrecks and subversions, had never been. The Pope was restored in the States of the Church; the Bourbons ruled again in Naples and Sicily; an Austrian was Archduke of Tuscany; Parma and Piacenza were assigned to Napoleon’s wife, Maria Louisa; Venetia and Lombardy went as spoils to Austria; an absolutist king reigned in Piedmont. Evidently the revolution had been but a summer thunderstorm, for the sun of despotism was shining once more. The sun shone; but what of the sultry air? What of the threatening clouds along the horizon? Were these the fringe of the dispersing storm, or the portents of another? Mutterings and rumblings, too, Carbonari plottings, and quickly extinguished flashes of insurrection,--did not these omens belie Diplomacy’s pretense that the eighteenth century had been happily resuscitated to exist forever? [2] After Metternich, we have the period of Sham-Force, under Louis Napoleon; and finally of Force again, under Bismarck. These four stages complete the cycle of European politics during the past century. It was during this interval of reaction and relapse, when hope was stifled and energy slept; when victorious despotism flattered itself with the belief that the Napoleonic episode had demonstrated the absurdity of Liberalism; when Metternich, the spider of Schönbrunn, was spinning his cobwebs of chicane across the path to liberty,--then it was that the generation which should live to see Italy free and united was getting what learning it could in the Jesuit-ridden schools. Of this generation the most romantic figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi. Joseph Garibaldi was born at Nice, July 4, 1807. His father was a fisherman, thrifty enough to have a small vessel of his own. Such stories as have come down to us of the boy’s childhood show him to have been plucky, adventurous, and tenderhearted. He cried bitterly at having broken a grasshopper’s leg; he rescued, when only seven, a laundress from drowning; he sailed off with some truant companions for Genoa, and might have vanished forever, had he not been overtaken near Monaco and brought home. His education was intrusted to two priests, from whom, he says, he learned nothing; then to a layman, Arena, who gave him a smattering of reading, arithmetic, and history. As he was quick at learning, his parents wished to make a lawyer or a priest of him; but he had the rover’s instinct and could not resist the enticements of the sea. At length, when he was fourteen, his parents yielded, and he became a sailor.