And if we look only to the immediate national aim, and the inevitable consequences that must follow the complete constitution of Italy as a nation, we see that to no people in Europe has been assigned a higher office in the fulfilment of the educational design, to the evolution of which Providence guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be of itself a potent initiative in the world. The mere fact of our existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification of the external and internal life of Europe.
Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.
We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming, for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined within Biblical limits.
Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however,—God alone knows the grief with which I write it,—that sense with us is wanting.
And now a word as to the amnesty.
Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of oblivion and pardon for having loved Italy above all earthly things, and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a dream.
But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence; and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of my last years possible, it would be useless.
My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political regeneration of my country have been, are, and will be governed by a religious idea.
The past, present, and future of our rulers have been, are, and will be led astray by materialism.
Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political questions are necessarily secondary and derivative.