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He bowed his head and asked pardon of God because he had dared to sacrifice in that last effort the lives of many others. Mazzini rose again, resolved to do without friends and kindred, if duty should forbid those consolations. He thought of the lives of Juvenal, urging the Roman to ask for "the soul that has no fear of death and that endures life's pain and labour calmly."
The revolutionist of one generation is, like Garibaldi or Mazzini, the hero of the next; and the verdict of posterity applauds those who, even in his own day, were able to discern the justice of the cause under the errors or faults of its champion.
I found all my youth again in your pages, all the wild hope of my twenty-fifth year, the new religion of a humanitarian Christ, the pacification of the world effected by the Gospel! Are you aware that, long before your time, Mazzini desired the renovation of Christianity? He set dogma and discipline on one side and only retained morals.
In vain Mazzini promised assistance; in vain Garibaldi, in his red shirt and cap, defended the ramparts. On the 21st of June the French effected a breach in the city wall and planted their batteries, and on the 30th of June they made their final assault.
Official, legal, parliamentary Italy, the Italy that was anti-Mazzinian and anti-idealistic, stood against all this, finding its leader in a man of unfailing political intuition, and master as well of the political mechanism of the country, a man sceptical of all high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical, cold, hard-headed, practical what Mazzini would have called a "shrewd materialist."
An incident which stands out clearly in my mind as an exciting suggestion of the great world of moral enterprise and serious undertakings must have occurred earlier than this, for in 1872, when I was not yet twelve years old, I came into my father's room one morning to find him sitting beside the fire with a newspaper in his hand, looking very solemn; and upon my eager inquiry what had happened, he told me that Joseph Mazzini was dead.
CONDITION OF ITALY. Charles Albert, the king of Piedmont, or Sardinia, disliked the preponderance of the Austrians, and desired to give his people good government, but was disinclined to enter into the schemes of "Young Italy," composed of the ardent republicans of whom Mazzini was the chief. On this account they were exasperated with him.
He had been known to have once been intimately associated with Mazzini, and that gentleman was supposed to be implicated in the Orsini affair when an attempt was made against Napoleon's life in the Place d'Opera; so, as Parole d'Honneur had likewise been heard to speak rather unguardedly at a political club of patriots to which he belonged, the prefectorial mind "putting that and that together," very reasonably presumed that our friend must have some connection with the bomb conspirators.
Mazzini lost the friend of his youth, Jacopo Ruffini, and the loss bowed him with a sense of calamity too heavy to be borne. He had to remind himself that sacrifice was needful, and advance the preparations for a new attack under General Ramolino, who had served Napoleon. He was in exile at Geneva, and chose Savoy as the base of operations.
I have had the great good fortune and honour and privilege to have known some of the great Liberals of my time, and there was not one of those great men, Gambetta, Bright, Gladstone, Mazzini, who would have accepted for one single moment the doctrine on which my hon. friend really bases his visionary proposition for a Duma.
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