secuting all independent thought, cannot be denied. Nevertheless, though it is easy to make out a formidable indictment against Austria for her treatment of her Italian subjects, more especially after the revolution of 1848, and all the modern historians do not scruple to pile up the horrors with gusto,-it cannot be denied that Austria had rights in Lombardy, rights which had been exercised for very many years.

The revolution of 1848 in Vienna gave the Lombards, and more especially the Piedmontese, the chance they had long hoped for. After five days of fighting in March, Radetzky was forced to withdraw. A provisional government in Milan called in the Savoyards, and Milan was occupied by the troops of Piedmont: by 561,000 to 68 the Lombards voted for a fusion with that State. On August 5, however, after Charles Albert had been beaten at Custozza, the Austrians reoccupied the city. The means they then took to hold their Empire together must be ascribed to a general and perhaps ineradicable incapacity for the government of subject peoples which we find through all the ages characteristically German, and which has successfully prevented for more than a thousand years the permanent establishment of a German Empire outside the Teutonic provinces. For you can only govern men, as Rome governed them, and as we have tried to do, with their consent and by making it worth their while to admit your government. When Austria entered Milan in August 1848, it was for eleven years only, and every one of those years was a year of siege. The country was taxed to within an inch of its life, and all suspected of nationalism ruthlessly suppressed. In 1855, when, under the Archduke Maximilian, a better and milder system was established, it was already too late; no one could be found to rally to the support of the established order, for all eyes were irrevocably fixed on Piedmont.

At last, on June 8, 1859, after the battle of Magenta, the Germans were once more flung back across the Alps, let us hope for ever, and Victor Emmanuel and Napoleon III. solemnly entered Milan. A month later, at Villafranca, Milan was ceded to the Piedmontese.

I

CHAPTER V

MILAN

S. AMBROGIO

SUPPOSE that in all Italy there is no other city

so essentially un-Italian as Milan: which yet at every turn continually reminds you of her Latin origin. The true explanation of this paradox might seem to be that Milan is the only town in Italy which, in the modern sense, is a great city at all: she alone is as thoroughly alive, as full of business, as miserable and as restless as the great cities of the North; she alone is wholly without a sense of ancient order and peace; she alone is inexhaustible, a monstrous confusion of old and new, of wretchedness and prosperity, of vulgar wealth and extreme poverty; she alone, in her hurried success, her astonishing movement, her bewilderment and her melancholy, has given herself without an afterthought to the modern world.

With this modern city, then, whose sound is the sound of iron upon iron, whose skies are a battlefield, and whose name everywhere in Italy is a synonym for progress," this book, and rightly, will have nothing to do. There is as little to be said of any abiding moment for the traveller concerning it, as there would be, for one who was bent on exploring England, concerning Manchester: as little and as much. For both are experiments in a new sort of life, which the best philosophers happily assure us is but a transition