FYFFE’S ESTIMATE OF MAZZINI
At a time not rich in intellectual or in moral power, the most striking figure among those who are justly honoured as the founders of Italian independence is perhaps that of Mazzini. Exiled during nearly the whole of his mature life, a conspirator in the eyes of all governments, a dreamer in the eyes of the world, Mazzini was a prophet or an evangelist among those whom his influence led to devote themselves to the one cause of their country’s regeneration. No firmer faith, no nobler disinterestedness, ever animated the saint or the patriot; and if in Mazzini there was also something of the visionary and the fanatic, the force with which he grasped the two vital conditions of Italian revival—the expulsion of the foreigner and the establishment of a single national government—proves him to have been a thinker of genuine political insight. Laying the foundation of his creed deep in the moral nature of man, and constructing upon this basis a fabric not of rights but of duties, he invested the political union with the immediateness, the sanctity, and the beauty of family life. With him, to live, to think, to hope, was to live, to think, to hope for Italy; and the Italy of his ideal was a republic embracing every member of the race, purged of the priestcraft and the superstition which had degraded the man to the slave, indebted to itself alone for its independence, and consolidated by the reign of equal law. The rigidity with which Mazzini adhered to his own great project in its completeness, and his impatience with any bargaining away of national rights, excluded him from the work of those practical politicians and men of expedients who in 1859 effected with foreign aid the first step towards Italian union; but the influence of his teaching and his organisation in preparing his countrymen for independence was immense; and the dynasty which has rendered to united Italy services which Mazzini thought impossible, owes to this great republican scarcely less than to its ablest friends.[k]