468 The King's Speech — [[^Nov 



of equal laws to Russia, and secure the subject from the caprice of the 

 sovereign, will have no less fortunate effect in securing the personal 

 safety of the King. 



An amnesty has been declared in Poland, and it will probably be 

 observed with reference to the inferior soldiery and the common people. 

 But many are excepted, and the higher orders will long have reason 

 to dread the grasp of a power so sensitive to popular discontent, and 

 with such fearful means of exerting its revenge as Russia. With a 

 prison, reaching from St. Petersburg to the arctic circle, and the Chinese 

 sea, the emperor's resentment must have terrors, unknown in the 

 narrower limits of continental vengeance. But the time is coming 

 when all those freaks or frenzies of power shall meet their reward, and 

 even the Russian mind shaU feel the value of a wise, intelligent, and 

 well-regulated freedom. 



Italy is again disturbed. The retreat of the Austrian troops has left 

 the popular feeling room to rise again ; and in every province of the 

 peninsula, the seeds of revolution are rapidly sowing. Who can wonder 

 that this seed should be sown, or that in the harvest which must arise 

 from it, the whole gross oppression of the land should be overwhelmed ! 

 Of all the lands of Europe, Italy is the most palpably intended by na- 

 ture for power, productiveness, and general human enjoyment; yet, for 

 centuries, Italy has been the toy or the drudge of foreigners : her fine 

 countiy the common field of blood and plunder to the Austrian, the 

 Spaniard, the Swiss, and the Frenchman ; her cities, foreign garrisons, 

 or the residences of petty sovereigns, too feeble to protect their inde- 

 pendence, but too powerful for their liberties ; meagre stipendiaries of 

 foreign courts, haughty plunderers of the industry of their peopley 

 useless in peace, contemptible in war, hostile to commerce, literature, 

 and all the great instruments of public strength and personal distinc- 

 tion. All the Italian cities are at this hour verging rapidly to decay ; 

 or, where that decay is partially checked, their remnant of seeming pros- 

 perity is due to the two cankers of the land — the extravagance of some 

 little court, or the presence of an Austrian garrison. 



But this too will have an end. The popular spirit, defeated often as 

 it has been, is not extinct. Every account from the British travellers, 

 and even the paragraphs of the little Italian gazettes, timid as they are, 

 combine in describing an eagerness for insurrection as universal ; and 

 though that impulse may be restrained for a time by the fear of an 

 Austrian invasion, yet, let a Leader but arise in Italy — a man of popular 

 habits, vigorous determination, and established name — and we shall see 

 Italy, languid as she is, overspread with a living deluge of the sword. 



One striking characttjristic distinguished the Italian insurrections of 

 last year from all that went before. They were not for the priesthood, 

 but totally against it. In the little towns in the heart of the peninsula, 

 where, in the absence of other authority, the priest was once all-power- 

 ful, the sudden outcry was " down with the monks, friars, and parish 

 clergy, in a body." In the Papal states, the Cardinal governors were 

 put to flight by mobs denouncing all allegiance to the Pope. The mobs 

 were Italian, but the cries were French ; the spirit, the banners, the 

 half-naked women brandishing knives and axes, and singing songs al- 

 ternately blasphemous and sanguinary, were of the genuine school of 

 Jacobinism. Nothing can be more alarming for the hopes of Italian 

 freedom than this spirit. Out of a Jacobin revolution nothing but 



