inseparability of the two powers, the French government, in its present
reactionary march, has felt that the keystone of despotism is at
Rome--that the ruin of the spiritual authority of the middle ages would
be the ruin of its own projects--and that the only method of securing to
it a few more years of existence was to rebuild for it a temporal
domination.

England has understood nothing of this. She has not understood what
there was of sublime and prophetic in this cry of emancipation, in this
protestation in favor of human liberty, issuing from the very heart of
ancient Rome, in the face of the Vatican. She has not felt that the
struggle in Rome was to cut the Gordian knot of moral servitude against
which she has long and vainly opposed her Bible Societies, her Christian
and Evangelical Alliances; and that there was being opened, had she but
extended a sisterly hand to the movement, a mighty pathway for the human
mind. She has not understood that one bold word, "respect for the
liberty of thought," opposed to the hypocritical language of the French
government, would have been sufficient to have inaugurated the era of a
new religious policy, and to have conquered for herself a decisive
ascendency upon the continent.

The writer of such passages as these may nevertheless be of good heart.
Though we may not think him exactly qualified to conduct to a successful
issue practical political movements in the existing state of Italian
society, we think him qualified for something far higher and nobler.
Like Knox and Wicliffe, Huss and Luther, Mr. Mazzini is no maker of
ephemeral arrangements and compromises; but like them he is the
uncompromising asserter of principles, and the creator of a national
sentiment, that will in time give law to the makers of such
arrangements. Looking to the yet weak and timid condition of public
opinion in Italy--looking to the narrow provincial views which still
hamper general society--above all, looking to the limited power of its
princes and prelates, and to the imbecile and demoralized characters of
its Pio Nonos and Antonellis, we must confess that we see no hope of any
immediate political settlement, the attainment of which need make it
worth while for Mr. Mazzini to compromise or abandon for a moment his
most extreme political opinions. Nothing is to be accomplished at
present; and he is therefore more usefully employed in rallying his
party by fervent reiteration of his principles, and