CHAPTER VII.

ITALIAN UNITY AND THE PARTIES.

THE events of the years 1848 and 1849 may be regarded as the exemplification and verification of two opposing programmes: 1848 displays the sources of vitality and power contained in the royal programme, its tendencies and its results; 1849 reveals the tendency, results, vitality, and power of our own Republican programme. All men may, and, for their country's sake, all men ought to study us in the events of those two years which are memorable, not only for their glories, but for their deceptions. The last were unexpected and very grievous to me. Forgetful of our teachings, and of the adoration they had themselves professed for those principles which alone could bring salvation to Italy, the best men of our party-some of them very dear personal friends of my own deserted our banner on the first appearance of a Power, or phantasm of power, in the field, and gave themselves up to a blind worship of the Force of facts.

With the exception of the very few so strongly tempered by nature as to be able not only to struggle, but, in case of failure, to endure the solitude of a life passed in the lonely world of faith and aspiration towards the future, the whole Republican party went astray; became divided in a variety of distinct parties or sects, or wandered after ideas of hypocrit

ical and inefficacious compromises and alliances between the representatives of opposite principles; alliances in which the real aim of each was to deceive the other. The country forsook the noble traditions of our true Italian life, to follow those introduced amongst us in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by foreign dominion, and by the unspeakable corruption of a church no longer either Italian or Christian. Macchiavelli prevailed over Dante. And the mischief and disgrace brought upon us by the transformations that then took place among our Republicans, still endure.

I could, many perhaps will expect that I should, write a historic chapter in order to consign to the severe judgment of posterity many an act of weakness, still unexposed, which initiated that crisis of moral dissolution; many a violation of solemn promises which has remained concealed; many an ingratitude from men who owed to us their fame and much besides, but who, nevertheless, turned against us so soon as they discovered a path by which to rise. But I shall not do this. For various reasons of import to the welfare of my country, I cannot now relate the whole with regard to all, and the truths I could tell would therefore be, in a certain sense, unjust to those I should have to select. I shall therefore be silent as to these things, and limit myself to a rapid sketch of the successive events of the period; some of which, hitherto overlooked or misunderstood, will, when placed in their true light, be of great value to that history of our National Principle which is the sole aim of my work. Moreover, to what good purpose should I expose such things? Why occupy myself with individuals? their

weakness, errors, or sins arise from moral causes; they are reënacted at the present day, and will continually be repeated so long as the causes exist. These only it is important to destroy.

Successive generations either represent ideas or interests, according to their moral education. When they are governed by the first, we are enabled to foresee their actions, and to arrange our plans by a logical calculation of the degree of capacity and constancy they are likely to display. When they are governed by the last, which, in their very nature, are variable from hour to hour, all logic is mute. The generation living and acting in 1848 had not, speaking generally any other philosophy than the philosophy of interests; personal interests in the most corrupt, the interests of party triumph, or of hatred of the enemy, in the best. Of faith in the future, or in an ideal, irrespective of the immediate advantage to be gained, they had none. We had hoped to inspire them with an enthusiastic faith in the great and beautiful, and we had deceived ourselves. (Faith and duty are one: duty necessarily implies a source, an idea superior to Humanity— God.) God was not, and, alas! is not in the heart of the century. Italy was, and-if we except the good instincts which begin to manifest themselves in the working classes, of our cities especially-still is corrupted by the materialism which the merely analytic and negative philosphy of the last century has instilled into our daily practical life, habits, and method of viewing all human things.

The daring negations of the eighteenth century were directed against a dogma henceforth inefficacious, because it has remained inferior to the ad

vanced intelligence of humanity; their error lay in confounding one of the stages through which Religion has passed, with the great religious life of the world; the form which the spirit had assumed for a time, with the spirit itself; one period of revelation, with the whole eternal progressive Revelation of God to mankind; but at least they confined their assaults to the sphere of ideas, and human life still retained somewhat of its former unity. At the present day we are governed, not by the principles, but by the consequences of that period of negation: we reduce its doctrine to practice, but have lost the warlike energy which distinguished the doctrine itself. A breath of religious fervor ran through that very rebellion against religion; the men who abjured the God of the Christian world, uttered long hymns and apostrophes to a Goddess of Nature, and raised altars to a Goddess of Reason. In our own day, few, if any, would venture, if interrogated, to assert that there is no God; but the greater number neither know nor care to know the import and bearing of belief in Him upon our human life; nor realize how solemn and inevitable the series of consequences that follow from the acceptance of that idea. They are willing enough lightly to admit it, on condition of putting it aside to lie idle and unfruitful in some obscure corner of the realm of abstractions.

The Moral Law-which is a consequence of the conception of God-the sanction of the law in the future life of the individual; the duty it imposes upon each of us; the link it forms between earth and heaven, between action and belief, are things quite indifferent to the men of the present day. They have so parceled out and dismembered the

unity of Life; so utterly lost the link which unites the ideal, defined by religion, to the external world which should be its representative and interpreter, that the empty phrase a free church in a free state has been hailed and accepted in our own day as a formula of high moral significance. That formula does in fact amount to nothing more than a declaration that our Law is Atheist; that it matters not whether religion be good or evil, false or true; it amounts to a proclamation of progress as the practice, and immobility as the theory; a perennial anarchy between thought and action; a freely educated intellect, and an enslaved conscience. It would appear as if no one had as yet obtained a glimpse of the only true solution of the problem by such a transformation of the Church as would place it in harmony with the State, and enable it progressively and without tyranny to guide it upon the path of righteousness. Mankind, thus left without a Heaven, without any religious rule or conception prescriptive of duty, and of the highest of all virtues, sacrifice; stripped of every immortal hope to sustain the individual, and of all enduring faith in the future of humanity, will always become the sport of instinct, passion, or interest, and unceasingly oscillate between them according to age or circumstance.

The generous impulses, poetic fervor, and enthusiasm natural to the young, in whom the movements of the heart are more spontaneous and less regulated by the outward world than in their elders, will urge them to rebel against all tyranny and unconsciously drive them into action. No sooner are their eager aspirations and gilded illusions about men and things destroyed by the cold prosaic realities of actual life,

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