r duty undone, but to bear
in mind the singular claims on your commiseration of these most unhappy
persons, if occasion offers."

As we have already seen, it was long before he advanced to the view of the
thoroughgoing school. Like nearly all his countrymen, he was at first a
reformer, not a revolutionary. To the Marquis Dragonetti, Mr. Gladstone
wrote from Broadstairs in 1854:--

Naples has a government as bad as anarchy; Rome unites the evils
of the worst government and the most entire anarchy. In those
countries I can hardly imagine any change that would not be for
the better. But in the wild opinions of some of your political
sectaries, I see the best and most available defence of the
existing system with its hideous mischiefs. Almost every Italian
who heartily desires the removal from Italy and from the face of
the earth of the immeasurable evils which your country now suffers
through some of its governments, adopts Italian union and national
independence for his watchwords.... Do not think it presumption,
for it is the mere description of a fact, if I say, we in England
cannot bring our minds to this mode of looking at the Italian
question. All our habits, all our instincts, all our history lead
us in another direction. In our view this is not building from the
bottom upwards, but from the top downwards.... All our experience
has been to the effect that the champion of liberty should take
his ground, not upon any remote or abstract proposition, but upon
the right of man, under every law divine and human, first to good
government, and next to the institutions which are the necessary
guarantees of it.... We sympathise strongly, I believe, with the
victims of misgovernment, but the English mind is not shocked _in
limine_ at the notion of people belonging to one race and
language, yet politically incorporated or associated with another;
and of Italian unity, I think the language of this nation would
be, We shall be glad if it proves to be feasible, but the
condition of it must be gradually matured by a course of
improvement in the several states, and by the political education
of the people; if it cannot be reached by these means, it hardly
will be by any others; and certainly not by opinions which closely
link Italian reconstruction with European disorganisation and
general war.

So far