Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/655

 Luzio : Martiri di BelHore 645 authorities for .the grim period of repression and conspiracy which intervened in the Lombardo-Veneto between the revolution of 1848 and the liberations of 1859 and 1866. Luzio obtained his most important unpublished material from privately donated documents in the museums of national history in Brescia, Padua, and particularly Mantua, from the testimony of survivors of the rigors of Austrian justice, and from documents preserved by the relatives and heirs of the "' martyrs ". Appendixes of the first volume and the entire second volume are given up to the publication of documents, of which many others are embodied in full in Luzio's narrative. They include farewell letters of condemned patriots, dated on the eve of mounting the scaffold ; many clandestine letters written amid the inhuman sufferings of fetid dungeons and menaces of torture worse than death, brutally repeated to force confessions and revelations ; fragments of autobiography and prison reminiscences; proclarnations and sentences of Austrian military tri- bunals and special courts of justice; a list of those brought to trial, with brief biographical notes; and many miscellaneous documents of varying importance relating to this same tragic phase of the Austrian domination. Some had been previously published in newspapers or in equally dispersed sources; others in a more or less fragmentary form had seen the light in pamphlets now rare. Le Ultime Lettere di Tito Speri (Rome, 1887) are here reprinted, newly edited from the originals, with the addition of three letters previously unpublished. The frag- mentary Ccnni Biografici e Scritti Vari di Anna Filippini Poma e del Dottore Carlo Poma (Mantua, 1867) are reprinted also from the originals and in full. Of the important letters of the noble priest Enrico Tazzoli, a part had been previously published by Cantii and Martini, but several hitherto unknown are here given. Such letters are of the first importance, but though generally written in perfect sincerity, they must be used with the utmost caution. The Austrian police methods of sow- ing suspicion among the accused, and the prisoners' uncertain means of communication, frequently led the latter into false statements upon whatever they did not themselves experience, or view as eye-witnesses. In the sifting of this difficult evidence Luzio has exhibited superior skill and serenity of judgment; notably in the discussion of Castellazzo's culpability as an informer he has shown much impartiality, giving careful attention to extenuating circumstances. As a whole the volumes form one of the most damning indictments ever brought against a modern government, but as Luzio himself pro- tests, the fault lies with Austria and not in a parti pris of the historian. One overwhelming conviction alone can result from an examination of the evidence presented: that a government maintained at such a cost of human debasement, brutality, and crime could by no argument justify its existence, and that if ever there were just wars, they were those of 1859 and 1866, which freed Lombardia and the Veneto from Teutonic domination and made a repetition of the political trials of Mantua im- possible. And it would seem that the Austrian government itself