Yet, for all this, each of us is conscious of some
vast and inestimable difference in the nation.
It is instructive, if it is not ennobling, to be moved by great and
noble impulses, to feel one's self part of a people, and to recognize
country for once as the supreme interest; and these were the
privileges the French revolution gave the Italians. It shed their
blood, and wasted their treasure, and stole their statues and
pictures, but it bade them believe themselves men; it forced them to
think of Italy as a nation, and the very tyranny in which it ended was
a realization of unity, and more to be desired a thousand times
than the shameless tranquillity in which it had found them. It is
imaginable that when the revolution advanced upon Milan it did not
seem the greatest and finest thing in life to serve a lady; when the
battles of Marengo and Lodi were fought, and Mantua was lost and won,
to court one's neighbor's wife must have appeared to some gentlemen
rather a waste of time; when the youth of the Italian legion in
Napoleon's campaign perished amidst the snows of Russia, their
brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers, must have found
intrigues and operas and fashions but a poor sort of distraction. By
these terrible means the old forces of society were destroyed, not
quickly, but irreparably.
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