IRELAND A NATION AND UNITED ITALY. [To THE EDITOR o
THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—All through her "Risorgimento " Italy had no bitterer, more inveterate foe than the Ireland now posing as " Nationalist." The heroes of that mighty upheaval, intellectual and moral, social and political, were denounced by the said "Nationality" with a virulence and a violence to which con- temporary Europe, pro-papal and legitimist, offered no parallel either in the spoken or the written word. Not only BO, but on the stricken field at Castelfidardo (Sept. 18th, 1860) the defeated Apostolic general Lam oriciere possessed in his Irish contingent a force as to which the victorious Piedmontese Cialdini might well have repeated the French field-marshal's saying, " Thank God, there are so few of them !"—a force, moreover, which, if multiplied by ten, would have enabled the Neapolitan army to give a very different account of itself against Garibaldi's motley "Mille." Years after the fall of the Temporal Power and the culmination of Cavour's "Free Church in a Free State," Italian immigrants in North American towns were " boycotted," nay, brutally beaten, by the local Irish, the promoters and subsidizers of present-day Home Rule, whose denunciation of Mazzini and Garibaldi, of Victor Emanuel and his great Minister, only echoed the language and interpreted the spirit of their kinsmen in the mother island. Will the Ancient Order of Hibernians express contrition or even regret for Ireland's attitude in thought, word, and deed towards those pioneers of "Italy a nation "? Vix credo ! In the vie intime of papal Rome, he must be deaf indeed who fails to hear approval and praise of the said attitude, coupled with the fond aspiration that Nationalist Ireland, mistress of her own destinies, and moulding these in harmony with " Irish ideas," may one day vindicate her claim to be the "eldest daughter of the Church," with a papal nuncio on the Liffey working in concert with a "national" chargé d'affaires on the Tiber.—I am, Sir, &c.,
SCOTO-ITALIAN.
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