Garibaldi's passion was to benefit men by giving them freedom. The
Pope's prayer was to benefit men by giving them religion.
But freedom without responsibility leads to license, and license unrestrained means slavery, and religion not safeguarded by freedom is superstition; and what is superstition but slavery?
Before Garibaldi was twenty he began to read Mazzini, whom Margaret
Fuller called the Emerson of Italy—and Margaret Fuller knew both
Emerson and Mazzini intimately and well. She lived for one and died
for the other.
Mazzini, the delicate, the esthetic, the spiritual, the subtle, was a candle whose beams burned bright for all Italy. His dream of a free and united Italy caught Garibaldi, the rugged, daring son of the sea, and fired his heart. Mazzini was a thinker; Garibaldi a fighter.
Italy had twice been queen of the world: first, when Julius Caesar ushered in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa, the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age of Michelangelo.
The third great tidal wave of reason, Garibaldi said, would live as the Age of Mazzini.
But there be those in Italy now, wise and influential, who call it the
Age of Garibaldi.
Without Mazzini, there would have been no Garibaldi. Italy would today probably be where she was when these young men conceived their patriotic dream: the Pope supreme temporal ruler of Rome, and the rest of Italy divided up into a dozen cringing provinces, each presided over by a princeling, who, on favor of some patron, Austria, Germany or France, the favor duly viseed by the Pope, was allowed to call himself king. The final authority of the Pope was undisputed in things both temporal and spiritual, and he who questioned or expressed his doubts was guilty of two crimes: heresy and treason, the two artificial papier-mache offenses which made the Dark Ages very dark.
The hope of Mazzini was to make Italy a republic. But the time was not yet ripe. They ousted the Pope, but Fate compromised with Destiny, and Victor Emmanuel, a republican monarchist from Sicily, was made king in name, but with a safety-brake in way of a ministry that could annul his edicts.
And so Mazzini and Garibaldi, each individually a failure, won— although success came not in the way they expected, nor was it their heart's desire.