existence which men imagine in evil dreams, and at length they struck, and declared for liberty or annihilation.  Perhaps they did not gain much in the way of immediate material good, but that only makes their splendid movement the more admirable.  They fought for a magnificent idea, and even now, though the populace have to bear a taxation three times as great as any known before in their history, the ordinary Italian will say, “Yes, signor—­the taxes are very heavy; we toil very hard and pay much money; but who counts money?  We are a nation now—­a real nation; Italy is united and free.”  That is the gist of the matter.  The people were bitterly ground down, and they are content to suffer privation in the present so long as they can ensure freedom from alien rule in the future.  Nothing that the most hardly-entreated Briton suffers in any circumstances could equal the agonies of degradation borne by the people of the Peninsula, and their emancipation was hailed as if it had been a personal benefaction by all that was wisest and best in European society.  The millions who turned out to welcome Garibaldi as if he had been an adored sovereign all had a true appreciation of real liberty; the masses were right in their instinct, and it was left for hysterical “thinkers” to shriek their deluded ideas in these later days.

“But surely the Irish rose for freedom in 1641?” I can almost imagine some clever correspondent asking me that question with a view to taking me in a neat trap.  It is true enough that the Irish rose; but here again we must learn to discriminate between cases.  How did the wild folk rise?  Did they go out like the Thousand of Marsala and pit themselves against odds of five and six to one?  Did they show any chivalry?  Alas for the wicked story!  The rebels behaved like cruel wild beasts; they were worse than polecats in an aviary, and they met with about the same resistance as the polecats would meet.  They stripped the Ulster farmers and their families naked, and sent them out in the bitter weather; they hung on the skirts of the agonized crowd; the men cut down the refugees wholesale, and even the little boys of the insurgent party were taught to torture and kill the unhappy children of the flying farmers.  Poor little infants fell in the rear of the doomed host, but no mother was allowed to succour her dying offspring, and the innocents expired in unimaginable suffering.  The stripped fugitives crowded into Dublin, and there the plague carried them off wholesale.  The rebels had gained liberty with a vengeance, and they had their way for ten years and more.  Their liberty was degraded by savagery; they ruled Ireland at their own sweet will; they dwelt in anarchy until the burden of their iniquity grew too grievous for the earth to bear.  Then their villainous freedom was suddenly ended by no less a person than Oliver Cromwell, and the curses, the murders, the unspeakable vileness of ten bad years all were atoned for in wild