Nature, which has done everything for the Italians, has taken care to
surround their country with magnificent barriers. The Alps and the sea
protect it on all sides, isolate it, bind it together as a distinct
body, and seem to design it for an individual existence. To crown all,
no internal barrier condemns the Italians to form separate nations.
The Apennines are so easily crossed, that the people on either side
can speedily join hands. All the existing boundaries are entirely
arbitrary, traced by the brutality of the Middle Ages, or the shaky
hand of diplomacy, which undoes to-morrow what it does to-day. A
single race covers the soil; the same language is spoken from north to
south; the people are all united in a common bond by the glory of
their ancestors, and the recollections of Roman conquest, fresher and
more vivid than the hatreds of the fourteenth century.

These considerations induce me to believe that the people of Italy
will one day be independent of all others, and united among themselves
by the force of geography and history, two powers more invincible than
Austria.

But I return _à mes moutons_, and to their shepherd, the Pope.

The kingdom possessed by a few priests, covers an extent, in round
numbers, of six millions of acres, according to the statistics
published in 1857 by Monsignor, now Cardinal, Milesi.

No country in Europe is more richly gifted, or possesses greater
advantages, whether for agriculture, manufacture, or commerce.

Traversed by the Apennines, which divide it about equally, the Papal