Some have affirmed this of France. They were mistaken. France—if we except the single moment when the Revolution and Napoleon summed up the achievements of the epoch of individuality—has never had any external mission, other than, occasionally, as an arm of the Church, the instrument of an idea emanating from Papal Rome.

But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious.

The essence of every religion lies in a power, unknown to mere science, of compelling man to reduce thought to action, and harmonize his practical life with his moral conception. The genius of our nation, whenever it has been spontaneously revealed, and exercised independently of all foreign inspiration, has always evinced the religious character, the unifying power to which I allude. Every conception of the Italian mind sought its incarnation in action,—strove to assume a form in the political sphere. The ideal and the real, elsewhere divided, have always tended to be united in our land. Sabines and Etruscans alike derived their civil organization and way of life from their conception of Heaven. The Pythagoreans founded their philosophy, religious associations, and political institutions at one and the same time. The source of the vitality and power of Rome lay in a religious sense of a collective mission, of an aim to be achieved, in the contemplation of which the individual was submerged. Our democratic republics were all religious. Our early philosophical thinkers were all tormented by the idea of translating their ideal conceptions into practical rules of government.

And as to our external mission.

We alone have twice given moral unity to Europe, to the known world. The voice that issued from Rome in the past was addressed to and reverenced by humanity,—"Urbs Orbi."

Italy is a religion. And when, in my earliest years, I believed that the initiative of the third life of Europe would spring from the heart, the action, the enthusiasm and sacrifice of our people, I heard within me the grand voice of Rome sounding once again, hailed and accepted with loving reverence by the peoples, and telling of moral unity and fraternity in a faith common to all humanity. It was not the unity of the past,—which, though sacred and conducive to civilization for many centuries, did but emancipate individual man, and reveal to him an ideal of liberty and equality only to be realized in Heaven: it was a new unity, emancipating collective humanity, and revealing the formula of Association, through which liberty and equality are destined to be realized here on earth; sanctifying the earth and rendering it what God wills it should be,—a stage upon the path of perfection, a means given to man wherewith to deserve a higher and nobler existence hereafter.

And I saw Rome, in the name of God and Republican Italy, substituting a declaration of principles for the barren declaration of rights,—principles the logical consequences of the parent idea, progress,—and revealing to the nations a common aim, and the basis of a new religion. And I saw Europe, weary of scepticism, egotism, and moral anarchy, receive the new faith with acclamations. I saw a new pact founded upon that faith,—a pact of united action in the work of human perfectibility, involving none of the evils or dangers of the former pact, because among the first consequences of a faith founded upon the dogma of progress would be the justification of heresy, as either a promise or endeavor after progress in the future.

The vision which brightened my first dream of country has vanished, so far as concerns my own life. Even if that vision be ever fulfilled,—as I believe it will be,—I shall be in the tomb. May the young, as yet uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal worship of the Ideal.

The religious question is pre-eminent over every other at the present day, and the moral question is indissolubly linked with it. We are bound either to solve these, or renounce all idea of an Italian mission in the world.

Joseph Mazzini.