from the beginning of time been only the history of individual regions,
but from that date onward there existed a united kingdom. Cavour in
making this united kingdom aimed to create a liberal state, a pros-
perous state, and a great power; and looking back after nearly a hun-
dred years it is possible for us to assess these sometimes contradictory
intentions, to appraise the methods used and the degree of success or
failure achieved.

The concluding date is 1945, with the death of Mussolini and the
end of the war in Europe, though an epilogue touches on some of the
important trends and events in more recent Italian history. Anyone
who tries to write on contemporary affairs, or even on the first decades
of the present century, will know the impossibility of being perfectly
judicial and accurate in a field where tempers have not yet cooled and
the pattern of history has not had time to set. Retrospective over-
simplification, neglect of the failures and might-have-beens, either of
these may, easily distort the picture as the price of stressing clarity and
noteworthiness and reducing every complex incident to a simple narrative.
Often the relevant facts are uncorroborated, unobtainable, or known
partly and only by word of mouth. Valuable papers are sometimes in-
accessible or missing. Even where the facts are known, they have often
not been submitted sufficiently to criticism, elaboration, and synthesis;
the true and the false exist together, the important alongside the unim-
portant, in tendentious personal memoirs, newspaper columns, and
the self-justifying chronicle of official reports.

A foreigner has only one advantage over an Italian in this field,
namely that he is less involved and so may judge with less passion, but
this is not to say that he will be any less prejudiced or opinionated, and
he will be especially liable to false perspective and the incomplete
comprehension of national character and historical tradition. At every
point summary justice must be attempted over bitter political contro-
versies which have produced an exhaustive polemical literature, and
the compulsion to take so much on trust often makes it hard to find
reliable bearings. Mussolini appointed one of the quadrumvirs of his
"march on Rome" a director general of historical research, and en-
couraged professors to earn promotion by discovering the authentic
stile fascista in the annals alike of Caesar and Garibaldi. Not only the
fascists, but the liberals also tried to justify their political faith by
historical research, and sometimes twisted the evidence in the oppo-
site direction. Some of these errors are easily exposed, but it is impos-
sible to feel sure of not reproducing a few of the subtler distortions.

This warning may serve as a check upon the sympathies and an-
tipathies which appear in this book. An even more desirable check

-vi-