ermo, if the offers sent at the same time failed to pacify
the inhabitants. These offers were refused with the comment: 'Too
late,' and the Palermitans prepared to resist to the death under the
guidance of the veteran patriot Ruggiero Settimo, Prince of Fitalia.
'Separation,' they said, 'or our English Constitution of 1812.'
Increased irritation was awakened by the discovery in the head office
of the police at Palermo of a secret room full of skeletons, which
were supposed to belong to persons privately murdered. The Neapolitans
were compelled to withdraw with a loss of 3000 men, but before they
went, the general in command let out 4000 convicts, who had been kept
without food for forty-eight hours. The convicts, however, did not
fulfil the intentions of their liberator, and did but little mischief.
Not so the Neapolitan troops, who committed horrors on the peasantry
as they retreated, which provoked acts of retaliation almost as
barbarous. In a short time all Sicily was in its own hands except the
citadel of Messina.

It is not possible to follow the Sicilians in their long struggle for
their autonomy. They stood out for some fourteen months. An English
Blue-book is full of the interminable negotiations conducted by Lord
Napier and the Earl of Minto in the hope of bringing the strife to an
end. When the parliament summoned by the revolutionary government
declared the downfall of the House of Bourbon, all the stray princes
in Europe, including Louis Napoleon, were reviewed as candidates for
the throne. The choice fell on the Duke of Genoa; it was well received
in England, and the British men-of-war were immediately ordered to
salute the Sicilian flag. But the Duke's reign never became a reality.
After an heroic struggle, the islanders were subjugated in the spring
of 1849.

So stout a fight for independence must win admiration, if not
approval. The political reasons against the course taken by the
Sicilians have been suggested in a former chapter. In separating their
lot from that of Naples, in rejecting even freedom unless it was
accompanied by disruption, they hastened the ruin of the Neapolitans
and of themselves, and surely played into the hands of the crafty
tyrant who desired nothing better than to fish in the troubled waters
of his subjects' dissensions.

In the gathering storm of January 1848, the first idea that occurred
to Ferdinand II. was the good old plan of calling in Austrian
assistance. But the Austr