strokes;

15. Ferrandi, bookseller, thirty strokes;

16. Ernestina Galli, of Cremona, operatic singer, aged twenty,
forty strokes;

17. Maria Conti, of Florence, operatic singer, aged eighteen,
thirty strokes.

There were other sentences of imprisonment in irons and on bread and
water, but the roll of the bastinado, extracted from the official
_Gazzetta di Milano_ may be left to speak for all the rest, and to
tell, with a laconicism more eloquent than the finest rhetoric, what
the Austrian yoke in Italy really meant.

A few days after, the military commandant sent the Milanese
Municipality a bill for thirty-nine florins, the cost of rods broken
or worn-out, and of ice used to prevent gangrene, in the punishment
administered to the persons arrested on the 18th of August. Sixty
strokes with the Austrian stick were generally enough to prove fatal.
Women were flogged half-naked, together with the men, and in the
presence of the Austrian officers, who came to see the spectacle.

When the treaty of peace with Austria was signed, there arose a new
difficulty; the Sardinian Chamber of Deputies refused to approve it.
Some of the deputies asked why they should be called upon either to
accept or reject it, on which they were reminded of the 75,000,000
francs indemnity, funds for the discharge of which could not be
legally raised without a parliamentary vote. The reluctance to share
in an odious though necessary responsibility made these novices in
representative government anxious to throw away the greatest, if not
the sole guarantee of constitutional freedom. Brofferio, by far the
ablest man of the extreme radical party, who had opposed all peace
proposals as long as Rome and Venice still resisted, now advised his
friends to bow before the inevitable. But they did not comply, and the
ministers had no other alternative than to resort to a fresh appeal to
the country.

The crisis was serious, because no amount of loyalty on the part of
the head of the state can save liberty when the representatives of a
nation, taking the bit between their teeth, set themselves
deliberately to work to make government impossible. People are too
fond of talking of liberty as if it were something locked up in a box
which remains safe as long as the guardian of the box does not steal
it or sell it. Liberty is in the charge of all and at the mercy of
all. There were not wanting persons who blamed the new dissolution as