The Revolutionary Movement Of 1848 9 In Italy PDF Download

The following book is the result of many years' work. It aims at showing the links which connected together the various movements in Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire in 1848-9. Many as are the books which have been written on the various parts of that struggle, I do not know of any attempt to link them together. How adventurous this effort is I am most painfully aware, and none the less so because I happen to know that the task was undertaken and abandoned by at least one writer who has many qualifications for it to which I can lay no claim. I allude to my friend Dr. Eugene Oswald, who has most generously assisted me in carrying out the work for which he was unable to spare the time. But I may say without arrogance that however deficient my history may be in the learning and ability which Dr. Oswald's would have shown, as well as in that lifelikeness which his personal share in the important rising in Baden would have enabled him to give to the descriptions; yet I shall at least have no temptation to any one-sided estimate of the merits of the various races concerned in the struggle, a temptation from which the most candid German could hardly escape. My only danger in that matter would be that I might be tempted to speak too favourably of all the movements of those various races; seeing that during my investigations in the cities affected by these movements, I received the most extreme courtesy and kindness from German and Bohemian, Magyar and Szekler, Saxon and Roumanian, Serb, Croat, and Italian; and I feel nothing but pain at any word of criticism I have uttered in these pages that may jar on the susceptibilities of any of those races.