power. And both men, Cardinal and patriot, so
hostile in their beliefs, were instinct with the same fierce and
despairing grandeur.

"As I told you, however, on the first day," continued Orlando, "we only
sought to accomplish logical and inevitable things. As for Rome, with her
past history of splendour and domination which weighs so heavily upon us,
we could not do otherwise than take her for capital, for she alone was
the bond, the living symbol of our unity at the same time as the promise
of eternity, the renewal offered to our great dream of resurrection and
glory."

He went on, recognising the disastrous conditions under which Rome
laboured as a capital. She was a purely decorative city with exhausted
soil, she had remained apart from modern life, she was unhealthy, she
offered no possibility of commerce or industry, she was invincibly preyed
upon by death, standing as she did amidst that sterile desert of the
Campagna. Then he compared her with the other cities which are jealous of
her; first Florence, which, however, has become so indifferent and so
sceptical, impregnated with a happy heedlessness which seems inexplicable
when one remembers the frantic passions, and the torrents of blood
rolling through her history; next Naples, which yet remains content with
her bright sun, and whose childish people enjoy their ignorance and
wretchedness so indolently that one knows not whether one ought to pity
them; next Venice, which has resigned herself to remaining a marvel of
ancient art, which one ought to put under glass so as to preserve her
intact, slumbering amid the sovereign pomp of her annals; next Genoa,
which is absorbed in trade, still active and bustling, one of the last
queens of that Mediterranean, that insignificant lake which was once the
opulent central sea, whose waters carried the wealth of the world; and
then particularly Turin and Milan, those industrial and commercial
centres, which are so full of life and so modernised that tourists
disdain them as not being "Italian" cities, both of them having saved
themselves from ruin by entering into that Western evolution which is
preparing the next century. Ah! that old land of Italy, ought one to
leave it all as a dusty museum for the pleasure of artistic souls, leave
it to crumble away, even as its little towns of Magna Graecia, Umbria,
and Tuscany are already crumbling, like exquisite _bibelots_ which one
dares not repair for fear that one might spoil thei