--for Italians a very remarkable thing--they not only paid
down current taxes, but they paid up arrears.

From Garibaldi's brief account, it would almost seem that the
Triumvirate and the Assembly surrendered Rome before absolute necessity
constrained them so to do. He does not tell us how, when the French had
actually entered Rome by the breach, he alone of all the civil and
military commanders refused to head the troops to attack the invaders in
possession. He gave his own reasons, very wise ones it seems to us, in
writing many years later, but in his _Memoirs_ he seems to have
forgotten them. The terrible tidings that the seventh bastion and the
curtain uniting it to the sixth had fallen into the hands of the French
spread through the city. The Triumvirate had the tocsins rung. All the
houses were opened at that sound; in the twinkling of an eye all the
inhabitants were in the streets. General Rosselli and the Minister of
War, all the officers of the staff, Mazzini himself, came to the
Janiculum.

"The people in arms massed around us," writes Garibaldi in a short
record of the siege of Rome, "clamored to drive the French off the
walls. General Rosselli and the Minister of War consented. I opposed the
attempt. I feared the confusion into which our troops would have been
thrown by those new combatants and their irregular movements, the panic
that would be likely by night to seize on troops unaccustomed to fire,
and which actually had assailed our bravest ones on the night of the
16th. I insisted on waiting for the daylight."

He here narrates the daring but unsuccessful attempt of the Lombard
students, who flung themselves on the assailants, and who had gained the
terrace of Casa Barberini, and continues: "But at daylight I had counted
the forces with which we had to contend. I realized that another June 3d
would bereave me of half of the youths left to me, whom I loved as my
sons. I had not the least hope of dislodging the French from their
positions, hence only a useless butchery could have ensued. Rome was
doomed, but after a marvellous and a splendid defence. The fall of Rome,
after such a siege, was the triumph of democracy in Europe. The idea of
preserving four or five thousand devoted combatants who knew me, who
would answer at any time to my call, prevailed. I ordered the retreat,
promising that at five in the evening they should again advance; but I
resolved that no assault should be made."

From this and