528 Conversion of the Opponents of the Dioptric Light. Board is silent; but it may be presumed that he speaks through his son and successor, Mr Alan Stevenson, the Clerk of Works, when he, who declared in 1833 "that the British and Irish lights were the best in Europe," now declares, in a report to the Lighthouse Board, that the lens lights in the Isle of May Lighthouse, are more than twice as intense as the old ones, and that there is a positive saving in the expense of oil in the ratio of 17 to 24! The triumph of the dioptric lights was now complete. They were introduced into England, Ireland, and the Colonies, and whereever there were honest and intelligent administrators to appreciate their value; and the time is not distant when they will be hailed on every shore as beacons of mercy to the seafaring world. But while the philanthropist thus rejoices in the triumph of science over official incapacity and sordid interests, he cannot but deplore the resistance which was so long made to its lessons, and those worse qualities in our moral nature by which that resistance was maintained and prolonged. It will hardly be believed in another age, that men, occupying the station of judges in their respective counties, should have been the dupes of an engineer as ignorant of the subject as themselves, at a time, too, when they were daily in the society of men of science, ready to help them, and when they had in their hands the most positive evidence of the success of the dioptric system in France, and the testimony of the most distinguished men of science, engineers, and naval officers in Paris! The chronicle of the Scottish Lighthouse Commissioners, when read even in their own minutes, is to us, and doubtless will be to others, a mystery which time is not likely to disclose; but however it may be explained, there is one truth upon which our readers will set their seal, that the hundreds of lives which were lost on the Scottish coast from the imperfections of its lighthouses, during the ten years that the engineer refused to listen to Sir D. Brewster's recommendation of the lens apparatus-that these lives, we say, lie at the conscience door of the engineer; and that during the following nine years that the Scottish Commissioners refused to surrender to science their ignorance and their prejudices, the souls of the men shipwrecked from the same cause may yet rise up in judgment against them. But it is not only humanity that now lifts her feeble yet pierc We mention the names of the acting Commissioners, that the reader may judge how far they were authorities in the optics of lighthouses :-Sir W. Rae, Mr Andrew Murray, Mr L'Amy, Mr Archibald Bell, Mr Robert Bruce, Mr Clephane and Mr Macconochie, the last of whom was, we believe, always friendly to the new system. 2 Sir John Robison, writing on the 23d March 1833, says, "I heard some curious circumstances to-day from a person who was long employed in working for the lighthouses. If his evidence were taken before the House of Commons, it would afford a curious explanation of the apparent apathy and slowness of proceedings in the Lighthouse Board." Inexplicable Conduct of the Scotch Board. 529 ing voice. The Nemesis of justice summons these judges of others themselves to judgment. During the nine years in which they trifled with a subject involving domestic as well as national interests, the name of the inventor was associated with his invention; but after the curtain had fallen, and the actors were dispersed, they deliberately dissociated his name, not only from his lenses and apparatus, but from his gratuitous and unceasing labours to introduce them. In their reports to Parliament they omitted all notice of what he had done in their presence. They suppressed his name, and had the boldness to claim the merit of having themselves introduced the dioptric system! But even this lash, inflicted upon the inventor by their own hands, did not satiate the Commissioners; they either encouraged or allowed their underlings to publish pamphlets and write anonymous articles in magazines, attacking him with a violence and bitterness known only in political warfare. They strove, too, to deprive him and even Fresnel of the honour of having invented the polyzonal lens; they laboured to carry off from England the merit of the invention of the dioptric system and hand it to France, and they did all in their power to wrest from their fellow-citizen the merit of its introduction into British lighthouses, and take it to themselves. This ignoble and unpatriotic act which crowned their offences; this act of persecution against English science, is without example in its history. No Englishman ever dared to give to Leibnitz and Germany the honour of the discovery of fluxions due to Newton and to England. None ever ascribed to Napier the invention of the steam-engine due to the Marquis of Worcester or Savary. None ever placed upon the brow of Lavoisier the laurel which the discovery of the composition of water had conferred on Watt and Cavendish; and no enemy of his country and of truth ever transferred to a foreign nation the English inventions of the electric and submarine telegraphs. We trust that the Board of Trade and the Admiralty, and the new Commission for Lighthouses, who have been misled by the reports of the Scotch Commissioners, will investigate for themselves the history of an invention which it is now their duty to perfect and extend. 'The following observations on the dioptric lights were made by Lord Brougham in his address at the meeting of the Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held at Bradford:-"The security of ships and buildings by Sir William Snow Harris' lightning rods has saved many lives and much property. Still more beneficial, because the risks from shipwreck are far greater than those from lightning, has been Sir D. Brewster's happy application of the science of which he is so great a master, to the construction of the Dioptric Lighthouse. Some absurd attempts have been made to represent M. Fresnel as having anticipated Sir David Brewster. He probably was ignorant of what Sir David had done long before, and therefore his originality, as the second inventor, may be admitted, on that supposition. But Sir D. Brewster published in 1812, M. Fresnel in 1822, and as early as 1816 he pressed upon the Lighthouse Engineer in Scotland the use of his method." ART. XI.-Papers on the Italian Question, 1858-59. THE great principle at issue in the settlement of Italy, is the right of each people to choose its own rulers, and to determine its own policy. The period at which we are arrived, is one at which the spirit of national independence and the tyranny of foreign intervention have reached the height of their mutual antagonism. The question yet to be solved is, in its immediate bearing, the method by which the present abnormal state of Italy shall be terminated; but it involves, in its wider comprehension, the permanent settlement of a traditionary conflict of opinions. The precedent which shall now be laid down, either by diplomacy if it succeed, or by arms in its default, will serve probably to govern other junctures of the same description, and other nations in the same difficulty. It will be either to the decision of the Great Powers accorded now, or to the terms of a definitive peace yet to be extorted by the sword, whatever the one or the other shall be, that nations, in similar disputes of asserted right, will hereafter appeal with almost irresistible authority. Public jurisprudence, indeed, already solves the problem in favour of national freedom; but the theory of legal writers must largely depend on the future as well as on the past practice of governments. When we consider the magnitude of this issue, we rejoice in the reunion of the Liberal party under Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, which was so obvious a result, in spite of the temporary and factitious popularity of a false Conservatism during last year, that we can hardly claim much foresight for pointing out its necessity in our political articles of August 1858, November 1858, and February 1859. For the last five months there has been an end to the countenance by the British Government of a system of oppression in Italy, which has combined all the rigours of foreign military domination with all the artifices of spiritual tyranny. We are now assured that, whatever may be the differences of opinion between the Governments which shall assemble to determine the rights of Italy, the influence of this country will be unequivocally extended in favour of national freedom; neither can any man fail to perceive that the firmness and consistency with which, as a nation and a Government, we have held aloof, since the Treaty of Villa Franca until now, from any negotiation which should throw the principle of self-government into compromise, have been rewarded by a great increase of our influence and a wide extension of our views. Two distinct classes of questions, it is well known, arose out of that hasty arrangement which a hostile military demonstration As Distinct from the Treaty of Zurich. 531 on the Rhine extorted from the Emperor of the French between the Mincio and the Adige. The one related simply to a settlement of the territorial cession of a great part of Lombardy to Sardinia, with the incidental points of dispute involved in the completion of the transfer. The other comprised the fate of the three Duchies of Tuscany, Modena, and Parma, on which Austria and their de facto governments have shown equal determination— the reform of the Papal States, which Napoleon lately endeavoured to precipitate by announcing at Bordeaux the speedy withdrawal of his troops from Rome-and the scheme of an Italian Confederacy, which, though revived in the Treaty of Zurich, is probably perceived to be empirical. The former of these questions legitimately concerned the three belligerents alone, and was therefore reserved to their plenipotentiaries at Zurich. The latter was a question in the interest of Europe; and although the strength and proximity of France and Austria, if united, might possibly have decided it in the face of every other power, their opposite pledges on almost every subject of Italian reconstruction have so far neutralised their natural influence, as to impart extraordinary force to the attitude of the actual governments of Italy, as well as to that of the three disinterested Great Powers. The negotiations which have transpired between July and November have been marked by striking changes of public opinion, in reference to the character of the settlement which should at last be founded on the preliminaries of Villa Franca. The convention which bears this name-if we may really commit ourselves to the existence of a document, of which the text has never been published-was first regarded as implying just such an indissoluble alliance between France and Austria as the peace of Friedland had created in 1807 between France and Russia. Soon afterwards a violent oscillation of public judgment stigmatised the treaty of Villa Franca as an armistice more hollow and temporary than that of Campo Formio in 1797. The doubtful report of a congress has again changed the opinion of Europe; and it is now not unusual to imagine that permanent peace may yet grow out of the convention of Villa Franca and the treaty of Zurich, and place the affairs of Italy on a basis apparently as durable as that on which the peace of Paris in 1856 placed the affairs of Turkey. If the latter at present unlikely event should happily be realised, it will be due, not to the terms of the treaty of Zurich, but to a general spirit of conciliation, to the attitude of Italy, and to the policy of Great Britain. It can escape no one that the chief effect of the late campaign and of the nominal treaty of peace has been to render the Italian question harder of solution than when the war began. In spite of this treaty, the two emperors retain their an tagonistic interests beyond the Alps in undiminished force; and they have also concluded definite obligations in the same opposite directions, by which their policy had not before been trammelled. These facts are easily demonstrated. The Emperor of the French is not less pledged to a realisation of the "idea" of Italian liberty than when he first drew the sword; and his personal honour, since the war, has been involved in shielding the populations of the three Duchies, whom the entry of his troops incited to arms, against the retribution of the Austrian Government, acting in the name of their pretended sovereigns. The Emperor of Austria, on the other hand, finds the safety of his own despotic government, at any rate as it exists to the south of the Carnic Alps, dependent on the re-institution of cognate despotisms in the bordering states of Central Italy; and although he has joined with France in urging reforms upon the Pontiff, of the accomplishment of which either Government must despair, the threatened withdrawal of the French army from Rome gives unusual force to the claims of the Papacy upon the House of Austria. So desperate is this conflict of interests and obligations, that the Italian question can be settled only by a total loss, on one side or other, of imperial prestige. Whatever might be the compromise by which a congress, following the example of its predecessors, may attempt to settle disputed points of detail, the result must remain, that Central Italy will be either free or enslaved that the French "idea" will be realised, or the Austrian system of oppression will triumph. In the latter case, Napoleon will submit to a political defeat, in which Magenta and Solferino will be forgotten, and Strasburg and Boulogne will be almost revived; in the former, Austria will abandon that which has been the cardinal aim of her foreign and domestic policy for forty-five years. And while Austria has nominally undertaken to urge reforms on the Papacy, as we have said, none knows better than herself that it must be her policy either to shield the Pontifical Government against the very reforms that she professes to promote at Rome, or to revolutionise her own Government also; for Venetia, at any rate, cannot be held long in bondage if Central Italy is permanently free. This width of difference in the policy or the interests of the two great parties to the Italian contest, is a sufficient explanation of the delay which has been experienced in putting into shape the impracticable provisions of the immature convention of Villa Franca. And even now it is not easy to believe that either Power, with a great army in the field, is ready to submit to an ignominious capitulation, or is unaware that the popular estimate of an Italian settlement will not be affected by any artifices of superficial compromise. But if a congress shall really assemble, that |