PREFACEThe old figure of speech 'in the fulness of time' embodies a truth too often forgotten. History knows nothing of spontaneous generation; the chain of cause and effect is unbroken, and however modest be the scale on which an historical work is cast, the reader has a right to ask that it should give him some idea, not only of what happened, but of why it happened. A catalogue of dates and names is as meaningless as the photograph of a crowd. In the following retrospect, I have attempted to trace the principal factors that worked towards Italian unity. The Liberation of Italy is a cycle waiting to be turned into an epic.In other words, it presents the appearance of a series of detached episodes, but the parts have an intimate connection with the whole, which, as time wears on, will constantly emerge into plainer light. Every year brings with it the issue of documents, letters, memoirs, that help to unravel the tangled threads in which this subject has been enveloped, and which have made it less generally understood than the two other great struggles of the century, the American fight for the Union, and the unification of Germany.I cannot too strongly state my indebtedness to the voluminous literature which has grown up in Italy round the Risorgimento since its completion; yet it must not be supposed that the witness of contemporaries published from hour to hour, in every European tongue, while the events were going on, has become or will ever become valueless. I have had access to a collection of these older writings, formed with much care between the years 1850-1870, and some authorities that were wanting, I found in the library of Sir James Hudson, given by him to Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco after he left the British legation at Turin.