If those better days are returning, without what was bad or exceptionable in them, the glory is due entirely to your Holiness. You have restored to Italy hope and happiness; to the rest of the world hope only. But a single word from your prophetic lips, a single motion of your earth-embracing arm, will overturn the firmest seats of iniquity and oppression. The word must be spoken; the arm must wave. What do we see before us? If we take the best of rulers under our survey, we find selfishness and frivolity; if we extend the view, ingratitude, disregard of honour, contempt of honesty, breach of promises; one step yet beyond, and there is cold-blooded idiocy, stabbing the nobles at home, spurning the people everywhere, and voiding its corrosive slaver in the fair face of Italy. It is better to look no farther, else our eyes must be riveted on frozen seas of blood superfused with blood fresh flowing. The same ferocious animal leaves the impression of its broad and heavy foot on the snow of the Arctic Circle and of the Caucasus. And is this indeed all that Europe has brought forth, after such long and painful throes? Has she endured her Marats, her Robespierres, her Buonapartes, for this? God inflicted on the latter of these wretches his two greatest curses-uncontrolled power and perverted intellect; and they were twisted together to make a scourge for a nation which revelled in every crime, but above all in cruelty. It was insufficient. She is now undergoing from a weaker hand a more ignominious punishment, pursued by the derision of Europe. To save her honour, she pretended to admire the courage that decimated her children: to save her honour, she now pretends to admire the wisdom that imprisons them. Cunning is not wisdom; prevarication is not policy; and (novel as the notion is, it is equally true) armies are not strength: Acre and Waterloo show it, and the flames of the Kremlin and the solitudes of Fontainebleau. One honest man, one wise man, one peaceful man, commands a hundred millions, without a baton and without a charger. He wants no fortress to protect him; he stands higher than any citadel can raise him, brightly conspicuous to the most distant nations, God's servant by election, God's image by beneficence. |