It is the material difficulties of the situation alone I desire to consider, and I return to them. Florence is about to receive the population which will be withdrawn from Turin, and she prepares for the task in a most suitable spirit by doubling the price of everything. It is not, then, merely that the Turinese has to quit his home and his friends, but he has to take up his abode in a city rendered doubly costly by the very news of his coming. This, of course, must be submitted to. Political economy has demand, and there is its maxims about supply and no help for the hardship. But there is, besides this, another, and, I think, a most unfair grievance. The Florentines are not content with the immense boon that has befallen them, but go about complaining loudly of the hardship of the invasion that awaits them, how life will be rendered dear, and, above all, what competition they will have to encounter with the Turinese traders and shopkeepers, who are certain to open houses in Florence, and contest with them the traffic of their own city. Already such complaints are rife, and even in ranks of the community where one might have thought a more liberal and just spirit would have prevailed. The very bankers of Florence are in arms at the thought that Turinese capital should seek employment in the new metropolis, and Piedmontese enterprise demand a sphere for its exercise beyond the walls of their now deserted city. It is not merely, then, that you have to change house, remove your properties and penates, desert the pleasant familiar places you had grown to; but you have to remove to a land where you are not loved, and will not be welcomed. This makes the task much harder. The change is a charming thing for your neighbours: they will make fortunes by itbecome richer, and greater, and more influential than ever they dreamed of being—and yet your presence amongst them detracts terribly from the enjoyment. They want the offices you filled-not you who filled them. They want that rich population of foreign Ministers and their followings; they want that Court you were so proud of, and the King you loved so well; and they are quite ready to tell you that their claim to them all lies in their superior civilisation, and in the higher culture of "gentle Tuscany." Of all the daily difficulties, the hourly embarrassments, the plan is to entail, it is needless to speak. Let any one imagine the condition of an ordinary family, with half its baggage at its late residence, and one-third of the other half on the road, with all the losses and damage of the way, with the discomforts of a new abode, and the not over-civil disposition of the new neighbourhood;-let him magnify this to the size of a nation, and he will have to own that these are not slight nor fanciful grievances. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has to refer to a despatch, and he is told it is with the archives waiting to be shipped at Genoa. His colleague of Home Affairs is in the midst of a correspondence with the prefects, and finds, for want of the early part, that he has been contradicting himself most flatly. He of Grace and Justice is unable to remember without his notes, that are not to be found, whether a certain brigand was protected or not by the French at Rome, and is consequently in doubt whether he should be shot or pensioned. All is confusion, disorder, and chaos. Nobody can answer any question, and, what is worse, none can be called to account for his insufficiency. It is a bill of indemnity with regard to every official's shortcoming; and just as you would be slow to arraign the cook for the burnt sirloin, or the butler for the dingy look of the silver, on the first days of your déménagement, so must Ministers bear with patience every indiscipline around them, on the plea that everything has to be done for "the best," which, in plain English, means in the very worst of all imaginable ways. How Florence is suddenly to dilate itself to the proportions the exigency calls for-how the Post is to receive and transmit the increased correspondence -how Government officials are to know at once how to find each other-how all that work of executive rule, which requires both exactitude and despatch, is to go on in a new place, as though it were a mere clock which had been transferred from one town to another-is not easy to see. Let a man take his own case. How soon, after the turmoil and disturbance of a change of abode, does he resume the ordinary business of his daily life? Can he continue with the unbroken thread of any occupation he has been engaged in? Is he able, in the midst of the disturbing elements of a new home, to sit down calmly to any work that demands deep thought and consideration? Think, then, what these difficulties become where the labour is not only vast but complicated-where each department has to depend on some other, and co-operation is all-essential-where the delay of an answer or the want of clearness in an order might be the cause of great disaster; and then imagine what are the difficulties which await the Italian executive, at a moment, too, when it is called on to confront the perils of an embarrassed exchequer and a dissatisfied population. They say Florence is but the first stage on the way to Rome. My impression is that the present experi |