London, Feb. 19.
Fifty years have passed since the last war between Austria and Italy. It has always been a landmark in Italian national history, and its memory has never been effaced since peace was concluded just when Italy could only show for all her preparations the defeat of Custozza on land and of Lisa at sea and the arrested advance of Garibaldi in the Trentino district, where alone Italy had made some progress: Peace was concluded as a result of international complications into which there is no need to enter here, but Italian sentiment was summed up in the statement of the late Signor Crispi, when he remarked, "If the Ministers of the day had done their duty, if the Chief of our Army had played the part expected of him, we should not have engaged in an inefficient demonstration at Custozza; we should have gone to Vienna to treat with the Emperor of Austria... The campaign of 1866 was lost because they wished to lose it."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.