ignor Crispi was absolutely right, and it
is creditable to him, as an Italian statesman and an Italian patriot,
that he should have thus early and publicly declined to attach the
liberty and the independence of Italy as a bob to the tail of an
electioneering Exposition kite at Paris in 1889. To France and to the
French Republics--first, second, and third--Italy owes a good deal less
than nothing. To two rulers of France, both of them of Italian blood,
the first and third Napoleon, she owes a great deal. But her chief
political creditor, and her greatest statesman, Cavour, drew his
political doctrines, not from the muddy French pool of the 'principles
of 1789,' but from the original fountains of 1776 and 1688. Had Cavour
been living in 1887, to answer the interpellation of Signor Cavalotti,
he might, perhaps, have defined more sharply than it was given to Signor
Crispi to do, the real relations between the French Revolution of 1789
and the national developments of modern Italy. Had the French Revolution
of 1789 been left to exhaust itself within the limits of France, it
would probably have ended--as the friends of the misguided Duc d'Orleans
almost from the first expected to see it end--in the substitution of a
comparatively capable for a positively incapable French king upon a
constitutional French throne. In that event it would have interested
Europe and the world no less, and no more, than the Fronde or the
religious wars which came to a close with the coronation of Henry of
Navarre. It was the fear of this, unquestionably, which drove the
conspirators of the Gironde into forcing a foreign war upon their
unfortunate country. The legend of Republican France marching as one man
to the Rhine to liberate enslaved Europe has much less foundation in
fact than the legend of Itsatsou and the horn of Roland. It is a pity
to disturb historical fables which have flowered into immortal verse,
but really there was not the slightest occasion, so far as Europe was
concerned, for France in 1790 to 'stamp her strong foot and swear she
would be free.' M. de Bourgoing's admirable diplomatic history of those
days makes this quite clear. No power in Europe objected to her being as
free as she liked. On the contrary, England, even in 1792, was both
ready and anxious to recognise the insane French republic of that day,
and to see the French royal family sent away to Naples or to Madrid.

Pitt was too far-sighted a statesman not to be well aw