Chapter XV
The State
The moral law and the state—Duties of the state: liberty, association, education—Sovereignty is in God—Democracy—The ideal government—The republic—The ideal state.
In politics, as for the individual, the moral law, so Mazzini taught, must reign supreme. "The end of politics is to apply the moral law to the civil organisation of a country." The state exists for the sake of morality; its one and only final object is to help the moral growth of the men and women within its borders, help it through all the countless influences that society exercises on the individual. Morality is largely determined by environment; and the state must so fashion the environment, that the moral life may ever flourish more abundantly in it. "You cannot found the brotherhood of Christ, where ignorance and misery, servility and corruption on the one side and culture, riches, power on the other prevent any mutual esteem and love. Men will not understand the virtue of sacrifice, where money is the sole foundation of individual security and independence." How can they train their children to true patriotism, when a debased conception of it rules, and all around them men and women are thinking of their private gain and pleasure? How train them to perfect honesty, "when tyranny and espionage compel men to be false or silent on two-thirds of their opinions?" How to despise money, "where gold alone buys honours, influence, respect, nay, is all that stands between them and the caprice and insults of their masters?" "Take a man, for instance," he says, writing in the worst days of working-class depression, "who labours hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessities of existence; he eats his bacon and potatoes (when indeed he can get them) in a place which might rather be called a den than a house; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps; he is brutalised in a moral and physical point of view; he has not ideas but propensities,—not beliefs but instincts; he does not read, he cannot read. How can you come at him, how kindle the divine spark that is torpid in his soul, how give the notion of life, of sacred life, to him, who knows it only by the material labour that crushes him and by the wages that abase him? How will you give him more time and more energy to develop his faculties except by lessening the number of hours of labour and increasing his profits? How, above all, will you raise his fallen soul and give him the consciousness of his duties and his rights, except by his initiation into citizenship—in other words, the suffrage?" Some day it will be otherwise. "When there is family life and property, education and political function for all, when through them men have closer communion with one another, then family and property and country and humanity will become more sacred to them all. When Christ's arms, still stretched upon the martyr's cross, are freed to clasp humanity in one embrace, when earth has no more brahmins and pariahs, masters and servants, but only men, then shall we worship with far other faith and other love God's holy name."
There are, in the main, three ways, by which the state can foster the moral life of the citizens. First of all it must secure liberty; not that liberty is an end in itself, but because it is the necessary condition of morality. There can be no morality without responsibility, no responsibility without liberty to choose between good and evil, between social service and self-interest. Liberty is necessary to true progress, for a progress that is imposed from above and not freely accepted by the people,—the whole programme of paternal despotism,—works no change in character, and therefore is "a soulless form," which cannot live. Only the freeman, who owns no lord but God, can attain to his full spiritual stature. "Where liberty is not, life is reduced to a simple organic function. The man, who allows his liberty to be violated, betrays his own nature, and rebels against God's decrees." Thus there are certain fundamental liberties, which not even a democracy may legitimately infringe. "No majority, no force of the community may take from you what makes you men." These liberties include, save in rare exceptions, "all that is indispensable to feed life morally and materially,"—personal liberty, religious liberty, unqualified liberty of speech and press, liberty of association, liberty of trade,—all of them liberties, without which men cannot choose their sphere of duty, without which society is destined to waste or stagnation.
It will be noticed that Mazzini omits not only liberty of immoral action, however 'self-regarding,' but any liberty that has an anti-social tendency. He did not admit, for instance, any absolute right of property, and, as we shall see, limited the right of bequest, and advocated severe taxation to check great inequalities of fortune. Theoretically he believed that government should possess very wide powers. But on the whole, when we come to the details of his social programme,[39] his position is the Liberal one; and (always excepting education) he stood against any great extension of state interference. It was not from any love of individualism and free competition; he hated them as anarchical,—fatal to spiritual unity and true citizenship, fatal to the welfare of the masses. But he wished the higher order to evolve, not from compulsion, which left the moral sense untouched, not by the force of the majority or of a despotism, but through a moral growth, which carried the community willingly and consciously towards a better state. The liberty to do good would become through education the liberty of doing good. This meant, as we shall see, that he allowed no liberty in education, for moral education must be uniform and therefore removed from individual choice. But this encroachment on liberty once made for the sake of a common morality, for the sake of that same morality he desired liberty in most other spheres of civil life.
But liberty is not enough. By itself, it is a mirage for the masses of mankind. "What is liberty of trade for the man without capital or credit? What are free opportunities of education for him who has no time for study?" Only Association can make liberty a reality for the masses, or allow new elements of progress to assert themselves, or save the waste that comes of isolated or conflicting labours. Nay more, association gives the sense of brotherhood, the spiritual strength, that comes from sharing others' work, from merging individual action in a bigger cause. "Association multiplies your strength a hundred fold; it makes the ideas and progress of other men your own; it raises, betters, hallows your nature with the affections of the human family and its growing sense of unity." As Progress is the great intellectual discovery of the modern world, so Association is its new-found instrument. Thus association must be dear to the state as individual liberty; and provided that any particular association is peaceful and public, and respects elementary liberties, and has no immoral end in view, the state must allow it perfect freedom.
Thus the second duty of the state is to encourage association and harmonise it with liberty; to give society the originating power of the latter, the effective strength of the former. Both are "equally necessary to the end, which is progress," both "essential to the orderly development of society." On any sound theory, the two principles postulate one another. There can be no association except among free men, since true association implies a conscious recognition and acceptance of the object. Liberty is meaningless without association, because the individual, for all his freedom, is powerless unless he combine with others. Mazzini carefully dissociated himself alike from the laissez-faire school and a despotic state socialism. The state must encourage combination, but may do nothing to compel it. The members of an association must be unfettered as to its nature and object and methods (always provided that they are legitimate), must be free to take up or resign their membership. "Sacred to us is the individual; sacred is society. We do not mean to destroy the former for the latter and found a collective tyranny; nor do we mean to admit the rights of the individual independently of society, and consign ourselves to perpetual anarchy. We want to balance the operations of liberty and association in a noble harmony." "The republican formula is 'everything in liberty through association.'"
Mazzini did not seriously concern himself with the abstract relations of the individual and society; probably it seemed to him a meaningless dispute. His theory admitted no real antagonism between them. A man's true individuality lies not in self-assertion but in the recognition of his duty to his fellows. This recognition necessarily makes friction impossible between himself and them, and reconciles the individual and society, liberty and association, in a common national aim. Liberty then becomes the higher liberty, not the mere power of refusing evil, but "the power of choosing between the different ways that lead to good." Association becomes the economical direction of the country's forces to a known and common end. It is the function of the state,—a function it alone can execute,—to instil the sense of duty into all its members and make that sense of duty work towards a common ideal. This it must do through national education, and education thus becomes the state's third and weightiest task. In Mazzini's conception education goes far beyond the imparting of knowledge or even the drawing out of character. It is the inspiration of a national faith, the moulding of the soul to great principles of life and duty. It is, next to religion from which it derives, the great binding and harmonising element in a nation, merging individual wills in a common consensus, destroying party friction and class struggle and sectarian faction, and sweeping a united country onward to the fulfilment of its destinies. If it had been objected that the result would be destructive of independence and originality of thought, he would probably have answered that the same spirit does not prevent diversities of operations, and that true originality is better promoted by discipline than by license. Certainly, as his theory of genius shows, he set a very high value on originality. Let thought, he would have said, be free and wide as air, but without community of aim it wastes itself, and the state must prevent that waste. Thus there is no true country without a national education, compulsory and free. Voluntary education has its necessity under a political or spiritual despotism, but it leads to moral anarchy, and religious democracy cannot tolerate false teaching of its children. The country must have "the moral direction of the young." "It is ridiculous to allow every citizen the right to teach his own programme, and refuse the nation the right to transmit its." Once, when discussing the matter with a friend, the question was put to him, "If two states had arrived at an equal stage of education, the one by national and the other by voluntary schools, which would be the finer nation?" "But, my dear," he answered, "that is to be an atheist." The national education must therefore express the national faith and aim, and give "the moral unity, which is far more important than material unity." It is not at all clear how he proposed to ascertain this national faith. For England, he had a curious proposal; "you ought," he said to Jowett, "to ascertain the mind of the people by making enquiries of the clergy and others what they believed, and when you have ascertained the national mind, you should express it in education." In the future Italy he sometimes thought that it would be embodied in a national declaration of principles, drafted by a Constituent Assembly. But more generally he seems to have distrusted the capacity of the democracy to voice the full faith, and he probably reserved it to the spiritual power under the new religion to enunciate its articles.
At all events national education implied above all else moral education, the moral education which is as "a holy communion with all our brothers, with all the generations that lived, and therefore thought and wrought before us."[40] This, he laments, "is anarchy now." If it is left to the parents, it is often neglected or bad; if to the teachers, clerical or lay, it too frequently instils either superstition or materialism, or at all events it has no uniformity. Mazzini intended to write a book on education; if he had done so, we should know more of the agencies, through which he proposed to give moral teaching. Bakounine once asked him, what, if he had got his republic, he would do to make the people really free. Mazzini replied, "Establish schools, in which the duties of man, sacrifice, and devotion would be taught." He had a skeleton programme as a basis of citizen training,—"a course of nationality, including a summary picture of the progress of humanity, national history, and a popular statement of the principles which rule the country's legislation"; but one cannot think that this gave all he wanted. He probably counted more on the universities, and especially on the courses of philosophy; and this no doubt explains his strong dislike of professors, whose teaching seemed to smack of materialism, his indictment of the eclecticism, which allowed different schools to be represented in the chairs. He had a particular animus against German professors and German philosophy. He blamed the appointment of Germans at Oxford; he was very angry that Hegel was taught at the university of Naples. "One fine day," he wrote, "we will sweep out all that stuff."