Italy from a foreign yoke by the united exertions of her best and bravest
sons.

"A noble ambition!" interrupted Leonard, manfully. "And pardon me, my
Lord, I should not have thought that you would speak of it in a tone that
implies blame."

"The ambition in itself was noble," answered Harley; "but the cause to
which it was devoted became defiled in its dark channel through Secret
Societies. It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political
combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members
are ever mixed the most sordid interests, and the fiercest passions of
mean confederates. When those combinations act openly, and in daylight,
under the eye of Public Opinion, the healthier elements usually prevail;
where they are shrouded in mystery, where they are subjected to no censor
in the discussion of the impartial and dispassionate, where chiefs
working in the dark exact blind obedience, and every man who is at war
with law is at once admitted as a friend of freedom, the history of the
world tells us that patriotism soon passes away. Where all is in public,
public virtue, by the natural sympathies of the common mind, and by the
wholesome control of shame, is likely to obtain ascendancy; where all is
in private, and shame is but for him who refuses the abnegation of his
conscience, each man seeks the indulgence of his private vice. And hence
in Secret Societies (from which may yet proceed great danger to all
Europe) we find but foul and hateful Eleusinia, affording pretexts to the
ambition of the great, to the license of the penniless, to the passions
of the revengeful, to the anarchy of the ignorant. In a word, the
societies of these Italian Carbonari did but engender schemes in which
the abler chiefs disguised new forms of despotism, and in which the
revolutionary many looked forward to the overthrow of all the