Chapter 3 No.3

I have of late frequently been asked by my English friends why it is that I decline to return to my country, and to associate my own efforts for the moral and political advancement of Italy with those of her governing classes. "The amnesty has opened up a path for the legal dissemination of your ideas," they tell me. "By taking the place already repeatedly offered you among the representatives of the people, you would secure to those who hold the helm of the state the support of the whole Republican party.

Do you not, by throwing the weight of your name and influence on the side of the malcontents, increase the difficulties of the government, and prolong the fatal want of moral and political unity, without which the mere material fact of union is barren, and unproductive of benefit to the people?"

The question is asked by serious men, who wish my country well, and is therefore deserving of a serious answer.

Before treating the personal matter, however, let me say that, since 1859, the Republican party has done precisely what my English friends required it to do. The Italian Republicans have actually assisted and upheld the government with an abnegation worthy of all praise,-sacrificing even their right of Apostolate to the great idea of Italian unity. Perceiving that the nation was determined to give monarchy the benefit of a trial, they have-in that reverence for the national will which is the first duty of Republicans-patiently awaited its results, and endured every form of misgovernment rather than afford a pretext to those in power for the non-fulfilment of their declared intention of initiating a war to regain our own territory and true frontier,-a war without which, as they well knew, the permanent security and dignity of Italy were impossible, and which, had it been conducted from a truly national point of view, would have wrought the moral redemption of our people.

The monarchy, however, which, as I pointed out in my article on "The Republican Alliance," had had five years to prepare, and was in a position to take the field with thirty-five thousand regular troops, one hundred thousand mobilized National Guards, thirty thousand volunteers under Garibaldi, and the whole of Italy ready to act as reserve, and make any sacrifices in blood or money, abruptly broke off the war after the unqualifiable disasters of Custozza and Lissa, at a signal from France,-basely abandoning our true frontier, the heroic Trentino,-and accepted Venice as an alms scornfully flung to us by the man of the 2d of December.

I may be told that a people of twenty-four millions who tamely submit to dishonor deserve it.

I admit it; but it must not be forgotten that our masses are uneducated, and that it is the natural tendency of the uneducated to accept their rulers as their guides, and to govern their own conduct by the example of their soi-disant superiors; and I assert that, if our people have no consciousness of their great destiny, nor sense of their true power and mission,-if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the present day grouped around, I will not say the conception of unity, but the mere unstable fact of union, the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire,-the cause is to be found in the immorality and corruption of our rulers.

The true life of a people must be sought in the ruling idea or conception by which it is governed and directed.

The true idea of a nation implies the consciousness of a common aim, and the fraternal association and concentration of all the vital forces of the country towards the realization of that aim.

The national aim is indicated by the past tradition, and confirmed by the present conscience, of the country.

The national aim once ascertained, it becomes the basis of the sovereign power, and the criterion of judgment with regard to the acts of the citizens.

Every act tending to promote the national aim is good; every act tending to a departure from that aim is evil.

The moral law is supreme. The religion of duty forms the link between the nation and humanity; the source of its right, and the sign of its place and value in humanity.

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Such are the essential characteristics of what we term a nation at the present day. Where these are wanting, there exists but an aggregate of families, temporarily united for the purpose of diminishing the ills of life, and loosely bound together by past habits or interests, which are destined, sooner or later, to clash. All intellectual or economic development among them,-unregulated by a great conception supreme over every selfish interest,-instead of being equally diffused over the various members of the national family, leads to the gradual formation of educated or financial castes, but obtains for the nation itself neither recognized function, position, dignity, nor glory among foreign peoples.

These things, which are true of all peoples, are still more markedly so of a people emerging from a prolonged and deathlike stupor into new life. Other nations earnestly watch its every step. If its advance is illumined by the signs of a high mission, and its first manifestations sanctified by the baptism of a great principle, other nations will surround the new collective being with affection and hope, and be ready to follow it upon the path assigned to it by God. If they discover in it no signs of any noble inspiration, ruling moral conception, or potent future, they will learn to despise it, and to regard its territory as a new field for a predatory policy, and direct or indirect domination.

Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone, among the nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the r?le of Italy in the world to be a work of moral unification,-the utterance of the synthetic word of civilization.

Italy is a religion.

And if we look only to the immediate national aim, and the inevitable consequences that must follow the complete constitution of Italy as a nation, we see that to no people in Europe has been assigned a higher office in the fulfilment of the educational design, to the evolution of which Providence guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be of itself a potent initiative in the world. The mere fact of our existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification of the external and internal life of Europe.

Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.

We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming, for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined within Biblical limits.

Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however,-God alone knows the grief with which I write it,-that sense with us is wanting.

And now a word as to the amnesty.

Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of oblivion and pardon for having loved Italy above all earthly things, and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a dream.

But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence; and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of my last years possible, it would be useless.

My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political regeneration of my country have been, are, and will be governed by a religious idea.

The past, present, and future of our rulers have been, are, and will be led astray by materialism.

Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political questions are necessarily secondary and derivative.

They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority-in a religion of duty, of which politics should be the application-cannot, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest.

Our rulers have no great ruling conception,-no belief in the supremacy of the moral law,-no just notion of life, nor of the human unity,-no belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the duty of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the logical consequence of their want of all faith in God and his law are the substitution of the idea of interest for the idea of duty,-of a paltry notion of tactics, for the fearless affirmation of the truth,-of opportunity, for principle.

It is for this that they protest against, without resisting, wrong,-for this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous by-paths, fascinated by the thought of displaying state-craft, and forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into slavery. It is for this that our government has reduced Italy to the condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition copies the wretched tactics of the Left in the French Chamber, which prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the present corruption, degradation, and enslavement of their country.

These things, I repeat, are consequences, not causes. We may change as we will the individuals at the head of the government; the system itself being based upon a false principle, the fatal idea will govern them. They cannot righteously direct the new life of the Italian people, and redeem them from a profound unconscious immorality of ancient date.

The present duty of the democratic party in Italy, then,-since they cannot serve God and Mammon,-is to educate the people; and, remembering that the basis of all education is truth, to endeavor to prove to them that the actual political impotence and corruption of Italy are derived from two causes which may be summed up in one,-we have no religion, and we have set up a negation in its place.