Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI VILLAFRANCA AND AFTER Peace, peace, peace, do yon say ? What I With the enemy's guns in our ears ? With the countryls wrong not rendered back ? What! While Austria stands at bay In Mantua, and our Venice wears The cursed flag of the yellow and black ? Mrs. Browning, First News from Villafrancai Napoleon III. cannot justly be blamed for making peace after the battle of Solferino. If, indeed, the whole strength of France and Piedmont could have been devoted to the expulsion of the Austrian armies from the Venetian Quadrilateral, there would have been a good prospect of success after a bloody and protracted campaign. But whatever odds might be taken as to the result of a fair fight there was grave reason to fear that the ring would not be kept. Prussia was considering whether she should seize her opportunity and invade the Rhine frontier of France. Russia, whose friendship to France had hitherto held Prussia .in check, had been alienated by the popular risings in Tuscany and the Romagna, which gave the war a revolutionary character, and by the conspiracy of Napoleon, Cavour and Kossuth to raise the Hungarian nation in arms. For the fortunes of Hungary, which the troops of the Czar had helped Austria to suppress in 1849, always affected the political barometer in Poland. The clerical party in France were growing openly restive at the course of events in Italy, particularly at the encouragement given to the rebellion of the Pope's subjects in the Romagna. The French soldiers were discontented with the small amount of assistance obtainable from the newly liberated provinces of VILLAFRANCA 1n Italy. Napoleon knew that he might hose his throne as the result of a single defeat, and even if he had been ready to risk that personal loss, he surely had no rig...