Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE IDEA OF NATIONALITY. CHAPTER III. THE FIRST EXPEDITION. The dream which eventually cost the hero of Tro- cadero his crown, and that vision which has been the redeeming feature of the restless career of the arch- agitator of Italy, though not realised, was embodied at Villafranca. The idea of nationality, shadowed forth in the suggestion of an Italian federation, grew none the less rapidly because discussed by rival emperors, though statesmen still maintained that Italians were unfit for self-government, and were induced, by their rancorous local prejudices, to insist that a dual, rather than a united Italy, was the only practical solution. The instinct of self-preservation was rapidly obliterating these local barriers, and engrafting on the minds of Southern Italians the conviction that the only healthy and permanent relief from Austrian and Papal misrule was to be sought for in Italian unity. They saw their fellow-countrymen in Lombardy and POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS CAUSES. 9 Central Italy, whose position but a few short months previous had been as wretched as their own, enjoying the fruits of annexation to Piedmont; and they yearned for the day when, by a similar expression of the national will, they might be emancipated from governments which had long since not only become a public scandal in Europe, but a manifest absurdity, and which were rendered still more impossible by the proximity of constitutional Piedmont, since that kingdom had righteously become more than ever the refuge of all that was.just and honourable in Italy. Apart from the political aspect of the movement, the desire of emancipation from priestcraft was a most powerful lever. Men had long since been asking themselves why the Italian clergy should be allowed to exercise temporal power any m…