is true, to this result, which is the case to a
degree that those who have never experienced it
will scarcely believe. This good humour may
be referred by physiologists to climate, food,
race, or whatever cause may to their wisdom
seem capable of producing it; but it is
undeniably a very valuable portion of a Tuscan man
or woman's inheritance.

Another mode, in which the fruits of the old
civic civilisation manifest themselves, is in the
fact that crimes of violence are almost wholly
unknown in Tuscany; with the exception,
perhaps, it ought to be added, of Leghorn, the
peculiar and mixed population of which, city
places it in a category apart from the rest of
Tuscany. This habitual aversion to violence
has been attributed, very unfairly, to want of
manhood, energy, and courage. But such a
taunt is out of date now. Since Curtatone,
the Tuscan Thermopylae, and the recent doings
of the Tuscan volunteers in Sicily and Naples,
we shall not hear much more of Tuscan inability
to take a good man's part in the roughest work
that may be needed. Besides, the use of the
stiletto has not generally been held to denote
manliness or courage in the bravo who makes
street corners unsafe in the dark hours. Cowards
can hate, and can find safe means of gratifying
hatred; but assassination is as entirely unknown
in Tuscany as open violence.

It is needless to insist at length on the truly
incalculable importance to the future kingdom
of Italy of this deep-dyed, ingrained civilisation
in the people of its capital. We all know how
wide and deep is the influence exercised on the
manners of a nation by those of its chief city,
especially in the case of people ruled by
representative government. In despotisms, the
capital, with an unhealthy and mischievous action,
attracts to itself and absorbs the best energies
and capabilities of the nation; and though it is
the cynosure of provincial eyes, it fails, for
want of a reflux of the tide, in exercising a
civilising influence on the provinces. In a
representative government, on the contrary, the
ebb and flow to and from the capital, healthfully
circulates the social life-blood through the
system; the civilisation of the chief city acts
powerfully on the remotest portions of the body
politic. That Italian manners and social ideas
should be assimilated to those of Florence
rather than to those of Rome, would be worth
to the nation, starting on its path of progress,
a good century of advance.

A consideration of the causes of this
superiority of the Tuscan civilisation has also an
important bearing on the question in hand. We
are told much of the grand memories and
associations connected with the great name of Rome.
If by these are meant the old classic glories of
republican and imperial Rome, the well-known
topics of the great historians and poets whose
works form the earliest and unforgotten associations
of the schoolboy days of all educated
Europe, then one has to observe simply that
those pagan times and that society are so far
removed as to exercise no sort of influence
on the Roman world of the Christian period;
—removed, not only by distance of time, and
diversity of religion and civilisation, but cut
off from all connexion with modern Rome
by the great cataclysm of the barbarian irruption.
Even were it not so—even were there
unbroken continuity of the old civilisation—
even granting that the eloquence of an honourable
member for Syracuse, or for Susa, might be
warmed by the consciousness that he was speaking
on the spot where Cicero spoke—even then
it would be questionable—or rather it would
not be a question at all—whether it would be
desirable to inspire Italy's Rè galantuomo—the
honest king—with ideas drawn from the exemplar
of Augustus; to hold up to the national
guards, the prætorian guards as a model; or to
encourage the senate to gather its precedents
from the traditions of the senators of the
empire.

But if, on the other hand, those who invoke
these "mighty memories" are thinking of any
period in the history of papal Rome, or of any
of the "glories" of the "capital of Christendom,"
it must be replied that, even admitting
it to be a moot point whether the influence of
the vast system whose centre and head were at
Rome may not have been, at certain epochs
and in certain respects, more beneficial than
harmful to Europe, it assuredly was never
anything to Italy but a fountain-head of barbarism,
and an obstacle to every principle of civilisation.
While civism at Florence was laying down the
deep foundations of the principles of modern
liberty, feudalism and sacerdotalism at Rome
were engendering and perpetuating the most
unimprovable barbarism, and educating the
people to a savagery which no after time has
yet availed wholly to efface. Turbulence and
violence were then universal throughout Italy;
but in Florence, the violence and the turbulence
were the struggles and the stumblings of a
people painfully striving to accomplish the high
and arduous feat of orderly self-government:
while the turbulence and violence at Rome were
due to the imbecility of a galling yet undisputed
despotism, and the anti-social excesses of
ruffian barons. The violences of Giano della
Bella were the throes attending the birth of
principles and ideas yet fruitful in the popular
Florentine mind. The excesses of the Orsini
and Colonna were the brutalising assertion of
the supremacy of lawless force—fruitful this
also, even to the present day, in the popular
mind at Rome.

There are several other reasons for selecting
the city of flowers, and flower of cities, as the
Florentines love to call their gentile Firenze,
to be the future capital of Italy. These, though
they may appear to many to be more weighty
grounds of choice than that which I have been
insisting on, may be stated more compendiously.
To my own mind no consideration is of greater
importance than the admitted and special
characteristics of the population.

Of all the cities on which the choice could
fall, Florence is the most central. It is true