Axona the very numerous items of alarming news that have reached us from London during the Inst month or six weeks, there is one piece of intelli~ gence which must have given rise to cere pleasure among at a friendly allinuce concluded between Grent and the Kingdom of Iuly ix, 'a matter for very cordial congratulation.
For years pnst there las been a strong feeling of matanl sympathy springing ap between the two nations, and this has grown and flour. ished unimpeded by those rnce-differences, we might almost say those race-antipathies, which are often so fruitful 1 source of political alienation, But there have never been any causes of jealousy between England and Italy, of conflicting intoreate or of ouopi of the other, such as are constantly cropping up between England and, say, Germany, or Russia, or France. As an Italian Correspondent poi the other day in these columns, Eng. land earned the gratitude and good feel ug of many friends of civil and: religious liberty in Italy in days now happily gone by, when she afforded nu asylum for the political refugee, and thereby identified herself once and for ever with the cause for which lie suffered.
That cause has now been triumphant, In Italy to-day it is true that the thi gs of Cesar are rendered unto Casar, and only the things of the Pope rendered to the Pope.
The land has been delivered from the cruel thraldom of that most despotic of despots, a priest armed with temporal power; with civil liberty line come religious toleration, and a new Italy, young and vigorous, us risen from the tomb of its predecessor. Victor Eumanuel, Garibaldi, Mozaini, Cavour, have passed away, but in their place there is a political constitution which will prove the means by which a new era of vigorous and powerful national life will spring into being, and in fifty years we shall see Italy once more taking her place among the first-class Powers of Europe. Her period of comparative decadence and retirement will prove to have been only temporary and Rome, which was a rising State a thousand years before the Christian era, which dominated the world as ils ruling Empire for nearly seven centuries, which exercised still greater power over the kings of Europe daring the Middle Ages, and which throughout all time has been the cradle and the home of art in its most perfect forme, will yot vindionto its right to the title of the Eternal City, And, to explain or in ® measure account for the stron sympathy which exists between the English avd Lintinn peoples, we need go no further than the jealous love of freedom which is characteristic of them both, Every struggle for polic tical and individual liberty, by whom. soever carried on, must appeal to the strongest and deepest feelings of every Englishman; and when that struggle is being waged by " nation descended from the freeborn Roman citizens of old—the men who made many of our English ronds, and who furnished us with the principles underlying many of our English Inws—it is difficult to seo how we can abstain from rejoicing with Chem in the triumphant issue of that struggle, and regarding Italy as the pioneer of the en uso of liberty among the nations of Southern Europe, For the intelligent and cultured travel. lor, too, Italy must always be an almost irresistible attraction. The benuly of ite Inndecapes, its eunny atmosphere, its blue sens and bluer skies, exist to-day us they existed in the days of Numa; but beyond all this, it pose scases an opulence of that which many other countries, equally endowed by natare, cannot boast, and for the lack surpassing interest, and (he relics of a mighty past, "It may said thet nations, like individuals, huve but one life, and that when the periods of youth, and manhood, and age have come and gone there remains wathing but position! death, and even disinter gration. But it would be nearer the trath to say that a nation can never actually die until it is disintegrated, The life is still there, and if it la only strong enough to fight ngninst the malign influences that are seeking to choke it—be those influences political oppression or the obscurity of superstition—there is always a hope left that it may rise from ils state of torpor. And everything is just now in favour of Italy. In spite of the horrible cor= ruption which atill festers in Rome, the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.