THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THEIR DETRACTORS.
They have said, and they say again, without taking advantage of the favorable position in which events have placed them:—Let the nation arise; let her make herself mistress of her own territory; then, the victory once gained, let her freely decide who shall reap the fruits. Monarch or People, we will submit ourselves to the power she herself shall organize. Is it possible that so moderate and rational a proposition should be the object of such false interpretations, in a country which reveres the idea of right and of self-government? Is it possible that its leaders should be the object of so much calumny?
It is time that these calumnies should cease. It matters little to us, who act as our conscience dictates, without troubling ourselves as to the personal result; and to whom faith and exile have given the habit of looking higher than the praise or blame of this earth. But it should be recognized as most important by all who believe that political questions agitated by whole nations, are questions eminently religious. For religion, to all those who see more in it than the mere materialism of forms and formulæ, is not only a thought of heaven, but the impulse which seeks to apply that thought, as far as possible to government on earth, our rule of action for the good of all, and for the moral development of humanity. Politics then are like religion—sacred; and all good men are bound to see them morally respected. Every question has a right to serious, calm, and honest discussion. Calumny should be the weapon of those only who have to defend not ideas, but crimes.
It is immoral to say to men who have preached clemency throughout the whole of their political career, who have initiated their rule by the abolition of capital punishment, who, when in power, never signed a single sentence of exile against those who had persecuted them, nor even against the known enemies of their principle.—"You are the sanguinary organizers of terror, men of vengeance and of cruelty." It is immoral to ascribe to them views which they never had, and to choose to forget that they have, through the medium of the press here and elsewhere, attracted and refuted those communistic systems and exclusive solutions which tend to suppress rather than to transform the elements of society; and to say to them, "You are communists, you desire to abolish property." It is immoral to accuse of irreligion and impiety men who have devoted their whole lives to the endeavor to reconcile the religious idea, betrayed and disinherited by the very men who pretend to be its official defenders, with the National movement. It is immoral to insinuate accusations of personal interest and of pillage, against men who have serenely endured the sufferings of poverty, and whose life, accessible to all, has never betrayed either cupidity or the desire of luxury. It is immoral continually to proclaim, as the act of a whole party, the death of a statesman killed by an unknown hand, under the influence of the irritation produced by his own acts and by the attacks of another political party, many months before the Republican party recommenced its activity.
Mr. Mazzini charges no direct treachery against Carlo Alberto. He declares him to have been himself the victim of the weakness which caused others as well as himself so much loss and misery. For the impossible political project of a Kingdom of the North he was content to surrender the grand reality of a United People which fate had placed within his hands.