From great things great things are born. The dwarfish conception of the Moderates froze up all souls, and imposed an utter change of politics upon France. The Italian People was an ally more than sufficiently powerful to preserve the Republic from all danger of a foreign war; a Kingdom of the North, in the hands of princes little to be relied upon, and hostile, by long tradition, to the Republicans of France, did but add a dangerous element to the league of kings. The French nation became silent, and left its government free to exist without any foreign policy, and to leave the destinies of the republic to the impenetrable future.
The incidents described in most detail are those immediately preceding and following the fatal surrender of Milan; and it is impossible not to be struck by the contrast of the royal and the republican party, assuming the statement to be in all respects correct. But passing this ignominious period, there ought to be small difference of opinion in a free and educated country as to where the right lay in the subsequent Roman struggle. What sensible or honest Protestant would not sympathize with the indignant eloquence of this earnest Italian protesting against the flimsy oratory of a Jesuit Frenchman?
MAZZINI TO MONTALEMBERT.
"You base your argument upon the void; you discuss that which was, not that which is. The Papacy is dead, choked in blood and mire; dead, because it has betrayed its own mission of protection to the weak against the oppressor; dead, because for three centuries and a half it has prostituted itself with princes; dead, because in the name of egotism and before the palaces of all the corrupt, hypocritical, and skeptical governments, it has for the second time crucified Christ; dead, because it has uttered words of faith which it did not itself believe; dead, because it has denied human liberty and the dignity of our immortal souls; dead, because it has condemned science in Galileo, philosophy in Giordano Bruno, religious aspiration in John Huss and Jerome of Prague, political life by an anathema against the rights of the people, civil life by Jesuitism, the terrors of the inquisition, and the example of corruption, the life of the family by confession converted into a system of espionage, and by division introduced between father and son, brother and brother, husband and wife; dead, for the princes, by the treaty of Westphalia; dead, for the peoples, with Gregory XI., in 1378, and with the commencement of the schism; dead, for Italy, since 1530, when Clement VII. and Charles V., the Pope and the Emperor, signed an infamous compact, and extinguished, at Florence, the dying liberties of Italy, as to-day you have attempted to extinguish her rising liberties in Rome; dead, because the people has risen, because Pius IX. has fled, because the multitude curses him, because those very men who for fifteen years have made war upon the priests, in the name of Voltaire, now hypocritically defend them, because you and yours defend them, with intolerance and by force of arms, and declare that the Papacy and liberty cannot live side by side? You ask Victor Hugo to point out to you an idea which has been worshipped for eighteen centuries. It is that idea which you have declared irreconcilable with the Papacy, and which was breathed into humanity by God; the idea which has withdrawn from Catholicism the half of the Christian world, the idea which has snatched from you Lammennais and the flower of the intellects of Europe, the idea of Christ, that pure, holy, and sacred liberty which you invoked for Poland some years back, which Italy invokes for herself to-day, under the form, and with the guarantee of nationality, and which you cannot pretend to be good for one country and bad for another, unless you believe it a part of religion to create a pariah people in the bosom of humanity."
Very admirably, too, and nobly written, are Mr. Mazzini's later remarks on the republican and anti-papal administration of Rome, and the coldness it met with in England and elsewhere. We must admit that it is hard for a people to struggle, suffer, and bleed alone, yet hold themselves in this temperate attitude. It is not generous, as Mr. Mazzini too truly complains, in a nation having the enjoyment and the consciousness of liberty herself, to wait until the hour of victory has sounded for another nation before she stretches out a sister's hand towards her.
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.