ed on the Napoleonic back, and
nothing fitted? Wasn't he to crush Piedmontese institutions like so many
egg-shells? Was he ever going away with his army, and hadn't he occupied
houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? Didn't he keep
troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to come down on us with
a Grand Duke at best, or otherwise with a swamping Kingdom of Etruria
and Plon-Plon to rule it? and wouldn't he give back Bologna to the Pope
bound by seven devils fiercer than the first, and prove Austria bettered
by Solferino? Also, were not Cipriani, Farini, and other patriots, his
'mere creatures' in treacherous correspondence with the Tuileries;
'doing his dirty work,' 'keeping things in suspense' till destruction
should arrange itself on falsehood? Have I not read and heard from the
most intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English
politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true
things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the
Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from which they were born?

So I would rather have a rounded, complete injustice, as we can't have
the complete justice. After all, the thing done is only a nation saved.
Hurry up the men who did it on the same cord! Ought not Cavour to be
there?

And if the Savoy cession is a crime, he is criminal, he, who undeniably
from the beginning contemplated it, not as the price of the war, but as
the condition of a newly constituted Italy. And the condition implies
more than is understood, more than the consenting parties dare to
confess--can at present afford to confess--unless I am deceived by
information, which has hitherto justified itself in the event. Be
patient with me one moment--for if I differ from you, I seem to have
access to another class of facts than you see. If Italy, for instance,
expands itself to a nation of twenty-six millions, would you blame the
Emperor who 'did it all' (Cavour's own phrase) for providing an answer
to his own people in some small foresight about the frontier, when in
the course of fifty or a hundred years they may reproach his memory with
the existence of an oppressive rival or enemy next door? Mr. Russell
said to me last January 'Everything that comes out proves the Emperor to
have acted towards Italy like an Italian rather than a Frenchman.' At
which we applaud; that is, you, and Mr. R., and I, and the Italians
generally applaud. But--let us be just--_th