To crown all, no internal barrier condemns the Italians to form separate nations.
The Apennines are so easily crossed, that the people on either side can speedily join hands.

All the existing boundaries are entirely arbitrary, traced by the brutality of the Middle Ages, or the shaky hand of diplomacy, which undoes to-morrow what it does to-day.

A single race covers the soil; the same language is spoken from north to south; the people are all united in a common bond by the glory of their ancestors, and the recollections of Roman conquest, fresher and more vivid than the hatreds of the fourteenth century.
These considerations induce me to believe that the people of Italy will one day be independent of all others, and united among themselves by the force of geography and history, two powers more invincible than Austria.
But I return _a mes moutons_, and to their shepherd, the Pope.
The kingdom possessed by a few priests, covers an extent, in round numbers, of six millions of acres, according to the statistics published in 1857 by Monsignor, now Cardinal, Milesi.
No country in Europe is more richly gifted, or possesses greater advantages, whether for agriculture, manufacture, or commerce.
Traversed by the Apennines, which divide it about equally, the Papal dominions incline gently, on one side to the Adriatic, on the other to the Mediterranean.

In each of these seas they possess an excellent port: to the east, Ancona; to the west, Civita Vecchia.

If Panurge had had Ancona and Civita Vecchia in his Salmagundian kingdom, he would infallibly have built himself a navy.