ndependence and political freedom had become,
however illogically, accustomed to consider France as their ally.[6]
They now beheld the gates of Italy closed against the French; they saw
the extinction of their ancient Guelf policy of calling French arms into
Italy. They felt that rest from strife was dearly bought at the price of
prostrate servitude beneath Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs, Spanish
Bourbons, and mongrel princelings bred by crossing these stocks with
decaying scions of Italian nobility. As a matter of fact, this was the
destiny which lay before them for nearly two centuries after the
signing of the Peace of Vervins.

[Footnote 6: See, for instance, temp. Henri IV., _Sarpi's Letters_, vol.
i. p. 233.]

Yet the cession of Saluzzo was really the first dawn of hope for Italy.
It determined the House of Savoy as an Italian dynasty, and brought for
the first time into the sphere of purely Italian interests that province
from which the future salvation of the nation was to come. From 1598
until 1870 the destinies of Italy were bound up with the advance of
Savoy from a duchy to a kingdom, with its growth in wealth, military
resources and political self-consciousness, and with its ultimate
acceptance of the task, accomplished in our days, of freeing Italy from
foreign tyranny and forming a single nation out of many component
elements. Those component elements by their diversity had conferred
luster on the race in the Middle Ages, by their jealousies had wrecked
its independence in the Renaissance, and by their weakness had left it
at the period of the Counter-Reformation a helpless prey to Papal and
Spanish despotism.

The leveling down of the component elements of the Italian race beneath
a common despotism, which began in the period I have chosen for this
work, was necessary perhaps before Italy could take her place as a
united nation gifted with constitutional self-government and
independence. Except, therefore, for the sufferings and the humiliations
inflicted on her people; except for their servitude beneath the most
degrading forms of ecclesiastical and temporal tyranny; except for the
annihilation of their beautiful Renaissance culture; except for the
depression of arts, learning, science, and literature, together with the
enfeeblement of political energy and domestic morality; except for the
loathsome domination of hypocrites and persecutors and informers; except
for the Jesuitical encouragement of every