A
government thus supported, by keeping its Hungarian regiments in Italy
and its Italian in Hungary, can long continue to rule in both places
with the iron rod of foreign conquerors.
If it be said that so broadly marked a distinction between what is
due to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely to a human
creature is more worthy of savages than of civilised beings, and
ought, with the utmost energy, to be contended against, no one holds
that opinion more strongly than myself. But this object, one of the
worthiest to which human endeavour can be directed, can never, in
the present state of civilisation, be promoted by keeping different
nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same
government. In a barbarous state of society the case is sometimes
different. The government may then be interested in softening the
antipathies of the races that peace may be preserved and the country
more easily governed. But when there are either free institutions or a
desire for them, in any of the peoples artificially tied together, the
interest of the government lies in an exactly opposite direction. It
is then interested in keeping up and envenoming their antipathies that
they may be prevented from coalescing, and it may be enabled to use
some of them as tools for the enslavement of others. The Austrian
Court has now for a whole generation made these tactics its
principal means of government; with what fatal success, at the time of
the Vienna insurrection and the Hungarian contest, the world knows too
well.
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