to be firmly attached to the English alliance, and I think his
course towards us has been, on almost every occasion, marked by a
friendliness perhaps greater and more conspicuous than we have
always deserved at his hands. It is most painful to me to witness
his conduct with regard to Italy.... He conferred upon her in 1859
an immense, an inestimable boon. He marred this boon in a way
which to me seemed little worthy of France by the paltry but
unkind appropriation of Nice in particular. But in the matter of
Rome he inflicts upon Italy a fearful injury. And I do not know by
what law of ethics any one is entitled to plead the having
conferred an unexpected boon, as giving a right to inflict a gross
and enduring wrong.(78)

It was in 1862 that Mr. Gladstone made his greatest speech on Italian
affairs.(79) "I am ashamed to say," he told the House, "that for a long
time, I, like many, withheld my assent and approval from Italian
yearnings." He amply atoned for his tardiness, and his exposure of Naples,
where perjury was the tradition of its kings; of the government of the
pope in the Romagna, where the common administration of law and justice
was handed over to Austrian soldiery; of the stupid and execrable
lawlessness of the Duke of Modena; of the attitude of Austria as a
dominant and conquering nation over a subject and conquered race;--all this
stamped a decisive impression on the minds of his hearers. Along with his
speech on Reform in 1864, and that on the Irish church in the spring of
1865, it secured Mr. Gladstone's hold upon all of the rising generation of
liberals who cared for the influence and the good name of Great Britain in
Europe, and who were capable of sympathising with, popular feeling and the
claims of national justice.

II

(M31) The Italian sentiment of England reached its climax in the reception
accorded to Garibaldi by the metropolis in April 1864. "I do not know what
persons in office are to do with him," Mr. Gladstone wrote to Lord
Palmerston (March 26), "but you will lead, and we shall follow suit." The
populace took the thing into their own hands. London has seldom beheld a
spectacle more extraordinary or more moving. The hero in the red shirt and
blue-grey cloak long associated in the popular mind with so many thrilling
stories of which they had been told, drove from the railway at Vauxhall to
Stafford House, the noblest of the private palaces