and Piedmont throbbed with suppressed excitement. Even when the King
of Sardinia, Victor Amadeus III., was waging war against the French
Republic, the men of Turin were with difficulty kept from revolt; and,
as we have seen, the Austro-Sardinian alliance was powerless to
recover Savoy and Nice from the soldiers of liberty or to guard the
Italian Riviera from invasion.

In fact, Bonaparte--for he henceforth spelt his name thus--detected
the political weakness of the Hapsburgs' position in Italy. Masters of
eleven distinct peoples north of the Alps, how could they hope
permanently to dominate a wholly alien people south of that great
mountain barrier? The many failures of the old Ghibelline or Imperial
party in face of any popular impulse which moved the Italian nature to
its depths revealed the artificiality of their rule. Might not such an
impulse be imparted by the French Revolution? And would not the hopes
of national freedom and of emancipation from feudal imposts fire these
peoples with zeal for the French cause? Evidently there were vast
possibilities in a democratic propaganda. At the outset Bonaparte's
racial sympathies were warmly aroused for the liberation of
Italy; and though his judgment was to be warped by the promptings of
ambition, he never lost sight of the welfare of the people whence he
was descended. In his "Memoirs written at St. Helena" he summed up his
convictions respecting the Peninsula in this statesmanlike utterance:
"Italy, isolated within its natural limits, separated by the sea and
by very high mountains from the rest of Europe, seems called to be a
great and powerful nation.... Unity in manners, language, literature
ought finally, in a future more or less remote, to unite its
inhabitants under a single government.... Rome is beyond doubt the
capital which the Italians will one day choose." A prophetic saying:
it came from a man who, as conqueror and organizer, awakened that
people from the torpor of centuries and breathed into it something of
his own indomitable energy.

And then again, the Austrian possessions south of the Alps were
difficult to hold for purely military reasons. They were separated
from Vienna by difficult mountain ranges through which armies
struggled with difficulty. True, Mantua was a formidable stronghold,
but no fortress could make the Milanese other than a weak and
straggling territory, the retention of which by the Court of Vienna
was a defiance to the gospel of n