WHAT THE REPUBLICANS DID AND ENGLAND MIGHT HAVE DONE.
I affirm that with the exception of Ancona, where the triumvirate were obliged energetically to repress certain criminal acts of political vengeance, the republican cause was never sullied by the slightest excess; that no censorship was assumed over the press before the siege, and that no occasion arose for exercising it during the siege. Not a single condemnation to death or exile bore witness to a severity which it would have been our right to have exercised, but which the perfect unanimity which reigned amongst all the elements of the state rendered useless. I affirm that, except in the case of three or four priests, who had been guilty of firing upon our combatants, and who were killed by the people during the last days of the siege, not a single act of personal violence was committed by any fraction of the population against another, and that if ever there was a city presenting the spectacle of a band of brothers pursuing a common end, and bound together by the same faith, it was Rome under the republican rule. The city was inhabited by foreigners from all parts of the world, by the consular agents, by many of your countrymen; let any one of them arise and under the guarantee of his own signature deny, if he can, the truth of what I say. Terror now reigns in Rome; the prisons are choked with men who have been arrested and detained without trial; fifty priests are confined in the castle of St. Angelo, whose only crime consists in their having lent their services in our hospitals; the citizens, the best known for their moderation, are exiled; the army is almost entirely dissolved, the city disarmed, and the "factious" sent away even to the last man; and yet France dares not consult in legal manner the will of the populations, but re-establishes the papal authority by military decree. I do not believe that since the dismemberment of Poland there has been committed a more atrocious injustice, a more gross violation of the eternal right which God has implanted in the peoples, that of appreciating and defining for themselves their own life, and governing themselves in accordance with their own appreciation of it. And I cannot believe that it is well for you or for Europe that such things can be accomplished in the eyes of the world, without one nation arising out of its immobility to protest in the name of universal justice. This is to enthrone brute force, where, by the power of reason, God alone should reign; it is to substitute the sword and poniard for law—to decree a ferocious war without limit of time or means between oppressors rendered suspicious by their fears, and the oppressed abandoned to the instincts of reaction and isolation. Let Europe ponder upon these things. For if the light of human morality becomes but a little more obscured, in that darkness there will arise a strife that will make those who come after us shudder with dread.
The balance of power in Europe is destroyed. It consisted formerly in the support given to the smaller states by the great powers: now they are abandoned. France in Italy, Russia in Hungary, Prussia in Germany, a little later perhaps in Switzerland; these are now the masters of the continent. England is thus made a nullity; the "celsa sedet in Eolus in arce," which Canning delighted to quote, to express the moderating function which he wished to reserve for his country, is now a meaningless phrase. Let not your preachers of the theory of material interests, your speculators upon extended markets deceive themselves; there is history to teach them that political influence and commercial influence are closely bound together. Political sympathies hold the key of the markets; the tariff of the Roman Republic will appear to you, if you study it, to be a declaration of sympathy towards England to which your government did not think it necessary to respond.
And yet, above the question of right, above the question of political interest, both of which were of a nature to excite early the attention of England, there is, as I have said, another question being agitated at Rome of a very different kind of importance, and which ought to have aroused all those who believe in the vital principle of religious reformation—it is that of liberty of conscience. The religious question which broods at the root of all political questions showed itself there great and visible in all its European importance. The Pope at Gaeta was the theory of absolute infallible authority exiled from Rome for ever; and exiled from Rome was to be exiled from the world. The abolition of the temporal power evidently drew with it, in the minds of all those who understood the secret of the papal authority, the emancipation of men's minds from the spiritual authority. The principle of liberty and of free consent, elevated by the Constituent Assembly into a living active right, tended rapidly to destroy the absolutist dogma which from Rome aims more than ever to enchain the universe. The high aristocracy of the Roman Catholic clergy well know the impossibility of retaining the soul in darkness, in the midst of light inundating the intelligence of men; for this reason they carried off their Pope to Gaeta; for this reason they now refuse all compromise. They know that any compromise would be fatal to them; that they must re-enter as conquerors, or not at all. And in the same way that the aristocracy of the clergy felt this inseparability of the two powers, the French government, in its present reactionary march, has felt that the keystone of despotism is at Rome—that the ruin of the spiritual authority of the middle ages would be the ruin of its own projects—and that the only method of securing to it a few more years of existence was to rebuild for it a temporal domination.
England has understood nothing of this. She has not understood what there was of sublime and prophetic in this cry of emancipation, in this protestation in favor of human liberty, issuing from the very heart of ancient Rome, in the face of the Vatican. She has not felt that the struggle in Rome was to cut the Gordian knot of moral servitude against which she has long and vainly opposed her Bible Societies, her Christian and Evangelical Alliances; and that there was being opened, had she but extended a sisterly hand to the movement, a mighty pathway for the human mind. She has not understood that one bold word, "respect for the liberty of thought," opposed to the hypocritical language of the French government, would have been sufficient to have inaugurated the era of a new religious policy, and to have conquered for herself a decisive ascendency upon the continent.
The writer of such passages as these may nevertheless be of good heart. Though we may not think him exactly qualified to conduct to a successful issue practical political movements in the existing state of Italian society, we think him qualified for something far higher and nobler. Like Knox and Wicliffe, Huss and Luther, Mr. Mazzini is no maker of ephemeral arrangements and compromises; but like them he is the uncompromising asserter of principles, and the creator of a national sentiment, that will in time give law to the makers of such arrangements. Looking to the yet weak and timid condition of public opinion in Italy—looking to the narrow provincial views which still hamper general society—above all, looking to the limited power of its princes and prelates, and to the imbecile and demoralized characters of its Pio Nonos and Antonellis, we must confess that we see no hope of any immediate political settlement, the attainment of which need make it worth while for Mr. Mazzini to compromise or abandon for a moment his most extreme political opinions. Nothing is to be accomplished at present; and he is therefore more usefully employed in rallying his party by fervent reiteration of his principles, and in forming a pure and elevated public sentiment alike by his precepts and his example.
How masterly is this sketch of the career of