Henry George was nominally a member of the Methodist Church, but the creed of Thomas Paine was more to his liking—"The world is my country; mankind are my friends; to do good is my religion." The young lady was a Catholic, and so the preacher compromised by reading the Episcopal service. The only witnesses were the minister's wife and Henry George's chum, Isaac Trump. "I didn't catch your friend's name," said the minister in filling out the marriage-certificate.
"I. Trump," was the reply.
"I observe you do," was the answer; "but oblige me with the gentleman's name."
There are three great epochs in life—birth, death, marriage. The first two named you can not avoid. Since life is a sequence, no one can say what would have happened had not this or that occurred. Mrs. George proved an honest, earnest, helpful wife. Her conservatism curbed the restless spirit of her husband and gave his mind time to ripen, for until his marriage the ideals of the French Revolution were strong in his heart. He saw the evils of life and was intent on changing them. The Catholic faith is an elastic one, both esoteric and exoteric, and those who are able can take the poetic view of dogma instead of the literal, if they prefer. Henry George and his wife took the spiritual or symbolic view, and moved steadily forward in the middle of the road. He was too gentle and considerate to quote Voltaire and Rousseau at inopportune times, and she sustained and encouraged his mental independence. All of which is here voiced with one foot on the soft pedal, and with no thought of putting forth an argument to the effect that young gentlemen with liberal views should marry ladies who belong to the Catholic persuasion.
The day after his marriage the bridegroom found work in a printery at twelve dollars a week, and thus was the pivotal point safely rounded.
* * * * *
Here was a man absolutely honest, with no bad habits, industrious and economical, but lacking in that peculiar something which spells success. The type is not rare. One trouble was that our Henry George stuck to no one place long enough to make himself a necessity. Men of half his ability made twice as much money.
The days went by, and Henry George wrote to Trump, "I am advance-agent for the stork." Now storks bring love and hope—and care, and anxious days and sleepless nights. Henry George's domestic affairs had steadied his bark, and while his relatives in Philadelphia thought he carried an excess of Romish ballast, it was all for the best. He read, studied, thought, and wanting little his mind did not list either to port or to starboard.
Henry George had graduated from the case into the editorial room. He worked on all the newspapers, by turn, in San Francisco and Sacramento, and had come to be regarded as one of the strongest editorial writers on the Coast. The business office was beyond his province, and as a newspaper was a business venture, and is run neither to educate the public nor for the proprietor's health, the manager did not look upon Henry George as exactly "safe." And hence the reason is plain why George was regarded as a sectional bookcase and not as a fixture.
At thirty he had evolved to a point where the New York "Tribune" asked him to write a signed editorial for them on the Chinese question. Then he wrote for the "Overland Monthly"; and when a great literary light came to San Francisco to appear on the lyceum stage, Henry George was asked to introduce him to the audience, especially if the man was believed to have heresy secreted on his person, in which case of course the local clergy took no risks of contamination, not being immune.
On the occasion of the death of a certain tramp printer, whose name is now lost to us in the hell-box of time, no clergyman being found to perform the service, Henry George officiated, and preached a sermon which rang through the city like a trumpet-call, extolling not what the man was, but what he might have been.
This custom of the laity taking charge of funerals still exists in the West, to a degree not known, say, in New England, where in certain localities people are not considered legally dead unless both an orthodox doctor and an orthodox preacher officiate.
The very poor, and the outcasts of society, in San Francisco began to look upon Henry George as the Bishop of Outsiders. Often he was called upon to go and visit the stricken, the sick and the dying. And there was a kind of poetic fitness in all this, for the man possessed that superior type of moral and intellectual fiber which makes a great physician or an excellent priest—he could "minister." And it was only division of labor that separated the offices of doctor and priest, and actually they are and should be one.
In Sacramento now lives a successful merchant, a Jew by birth, and a man of great grace of spirit, who has this superior, spiritual quality which makes his services sought after, and in response to demand he goes all over the State saying the last words over the dust of those who in their lives had lost faith in the established order, or had too much faith in God.
After his thirty-sixth year Henry George slipped by natural process into this semi-religious order—a priest after the order of Melchizedek. He was spokesman for those who had no social standing, a voice for the voiceless, a friend to the friendless, even those who were not friends to themselves.
But at thirty-seven he was up on the mountain-side where he saw to a distance that very few men could. He felt his own dignity and knew his worth. The president of the University of California, recognizing his ability as a thinker and speaker, asked him to give a course of lectures on economics.
He gave one—this was all they could digest.
California colleges have had a lot of trouble with economics—it has been a theme more fraught for them with danger than theology. How Californians make their money and how they spend it is a topic which in handling requires great subtlety of intellect, a fine delicacy of expression and much diplomacy, otherwise twenty-three petards!
Here is a passage from Henry George's lecture before the University of
California:
For the study of political economy you need no special knowledge, no extensive library, no costly laboratory. You do not even need textbooks or teachers if you will but think for yourselves. All that you need is care in reducing complex phenomena to their elements, in distinguishing the essential from the accidental, and in applying the simple laws of human action with which you are familiar. Take nobody's opinion for granted; "try all things; hold fast to that which is good." In this way, the opinions of others will help you by their suggestions, elucidations and corrections; otherwise they will be to you as words to a parrot.
All this array of professors, all this paraphernalia of learning, can not educate a man. They can but help him educate himself. Here you may obtain the tools; but they will be useful to him only who can use them. A monkey with a microscope, a mule packing a library, are fit emblems of the men—and unfortunately, they are plenty—who pass through the whole educational machinery, and come out but learned fools, crammed with knowledge which they can not use—all the more pitiable, all the more contemptible, all the more in the way of real progress, because they pass, with themselves and others, as educated men.
California is a land of extremes—everything grows big and fast, especially ideas. No country ever saw such wealth and such poverty side by side. The mansions on Nob Hill were so grand that their magnificence discouraged the owners and abashed visitors; at receptions, a keg of beer on a sawbuck in the kitchen and champagne in a washtub, with ham sandwiches in a bushel basket, were all that could be assimilated. And yet past the high iron gates of these palaces prowled want—gaunt, hungry and menacing.
Land was never so cheap nor so dear as it has been in California. We gave a railroad-company twenty-five thousand acres of land for every mile of track it built, and for years a dollar an acre was the ruling price at which you could buy to your limit. And yet there were at the same time little half-acres for which men pushed a hundred thousand dollars in gold-dust over the counter and then crowed about their bargain.
Henry George studied economics at first hand. The dignified frappe which he received in way of honorarium for his university lecture had its advantages. People in San Francisco wanted to hear what the editor had to say as well as to read his utterances. He was invited to give the Fourth of July oration at the Grand Opera House—a very great compliment.
Henry George was a reformer, and reformers have but one theme, and that theme is Liberty. We grow by expression. There is no doubt that the university lecture and the Fourth of July oration added cubits to the stature of Henry George. In these two addresses we find the kernel of his philosophy—a kernel that was to germinate into a mighty tree which would extend its welcoming shade to travelers for many a decade yet to come.
* * * * *
Like every other great book (or great man), "Progress and Poverty" was an accident—a providential accident. The book was ten years in the incubation. It began with a newspaper editorial in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-nine, and found form in a volume of five hundred pages in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine.
The editorial merely called attention to the fact that California, in spite of her vast wealth, was peopled, for the most part, with people desperately poor; and that ground in the vicinity of any city, town or place of enterprise was held at so exorbitant a figure that the poor were actually enslaved by the men who owned the land. That is to say, the men who owned the land controlled the people who had to live on it, for man is a land animal, and can not live apart from land, any more than fishes can live at a distance from water. And moreover we tax for the improvements on land, thus really placing a penalty on enterprise.
The article attracted attention, and opened the eyes of one man at least—and that was the man who wrote it. He had written better than he knew; and any writer who does not occasionally surprise himself does not write well.
Henry George had surprised himself, and he wrote another editorial to explain the first. These editorials extended themselves into a series, and hand-polished and sandpapered, were reprinted in pamphlet form in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-one, under the title of "Our Land Policy." The temerity which prompted the printing of this pamphlet was evolved through a letter from John Stuart Mill. Henry George knew he was right in his conclusions, but he felt that he needed the corroboration of a great mind that had grappled with abstruse problems; so he sent one of his editorials to Mill, the greatest living intellect of his time.
Mill showed his interest by replying in a long letter, wherein he addressed George as a man with a mind equal to his own, not as a sophomore trying his wings.
The letter from Mill was to him a white milepost. The corroboration gave him courage, confidence, poise.
The thousand copies of the pamphlet cost Henry George seventy-five dollars. The retail price was twenty-five cents each. Twenty-one copies were sold. The rest were given away to good people who promised to read them. Pamphlets are for the pamphleteer, but let the fact here be recorded that new ideas have always been issued at the author's expense—and also risk. Martin Luther, Dean Swift, John Milton, Paine, Voltaire, Sam Adams were all pamphleteers. The early Colonial "broadsides" were pamphlets issued by men with thoughts plus, and all of the men just named fired inky volleys which proved to be shots heard 'round the world.
As the years passed, Henry George was gathering gear; he was getting an education. Providence was preparing him for his work. All he expressed by tongue or pen had land, labor, production and distribution in mind. He was getting acquainted with every phase of the subject—anticipating the objections, meeting the objectors, opening up side-paths.
And so, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, when he sat down to write a magazine article on "Our Government Land Policy," the air was full of reasons. Soon the article stretched itself beyond magazine length, and in order to cover the theme he set down headings:
1 Wages 2 Capital 3 Division of Labor 4 Population 5 Subsistence 6 Rent 7 Interest 8 The Remedy for Unequal Distribution
He wrote all one night—wrote in a fever. The next day his pulse got back to normal, and on talking the matter over with his wife he decided to begin it all over and work his philosophy up into a book, writing as he could, only one or two hours a day.
He was absolutely without capital, dependent on his income from space- writing in the daily newspapers, but he began and the work grew.
It was all done on "stolen time," to use the phrase of Macaulay, and therefore vital, for things done because you have to do them—done to get rid of them—contain the red corpuscle.
On March Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, the precious bundle of manuscript was shipped to D. Appleton and Company, New York, with instructions that if the work was not accepted, to hold subject to the author's order.
In six weeks came a letter from the Appletons, gracious, complimentary, "but"—in fact, no work on political economy had ever sold sufficiently either to make money for the author or to pay the bare cost of the book to the publisher.
Here was a dampener, and if Henry George had been a trifle more astute in the laws of literary supply and demand, he could and would have anticipated the result, even in spite of the natural prejudice which an author always feels for the offspring of his brain.
A letter was now sent Thomas George, the author's brother, in Philadelphia, requesting him to go over to New York and find a market for the wares.
Thomas had the work passed on by the Harpers, by Scribner, and all "much regretted."
The next thing was to interest Professor Swinton and several New York friends, and have them go in a body and storm the castle of Barabbas. The committee called on D. Appleton and Company, and again laid the case before them.
Finally the publishers agreed that if the author would advance money for the electrotype-plates, they would undertake the publication.
But alas, the author was in the proverbial author's condition. On the offer being laid before Henry George by mail, he replied that he could make the electrotype-plates himself. He was a typesetter and he had friends who would give him the use of their printing-outfits. The offer was satisfactory to the Appletons, provided Professor Swinton would agree to take on his own account a hundred copies of the work on suspicion.
The Professor agreed. And the manuscript was sent back to San
Francisco, a trifle dog-eared and the worse for five months' wear.
The author began his typesetting with the same diligence that he had brought to bear in the writing. This was stolen time, too. He worked an hour in the morning and two hours at night. Other printers offered to help, and a genial, bum electrotyper, damnably cheerful, offered to come in and lend a hand, provided Henry George would agree to give a funeral oration over the derelict one's grave at the proper time. Henry George gleefully agreed.
So the work of making the electrotype-plates moved on apace. In the meantime some of Henry George's political friends had interviewed the Governor and Henry George was made inspector of gas-meters, at fifteen hundred dollars a year.
It was four months' work to make the plates, but early in the year Eighteen Hundred Eighty they were shipped to New York, a few proofs of the book being taken, stitched up and sent out for review.
So far as we know, there was no one in California able to read the book and intelligently review it. Leastwise they never did.
The Appletons, however, gradually awoke to the fact that they had a prize, and they made efforts to get the work into right reviewing hands. Better still, they began to inquire about what manner of man Henry George was.
Next they wrote to the author suggesting that, if he would come to New York and personally present his views, it would help in the sale of the books.
Fortunately Henry George was not hampered by the ownership of real estate, nor an excess of personal property, so he hastily packed up, transportation having been secured by John Russell Young, a capitalist who had faith in his genius from the first.
Henry George arrived in New York penniless, but Professor Swinton, E.
L. Youmans (that excellent blind man of great insight), John Russell
Young and the Appletons gave him a rich reception.
The tide had turned.
* * * * *
Henry George received all the recognition that any thinker and writer could desire, from August, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, to the day of his death, October Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Men might not agree with him in his conclusions, but few indeed dare meet him in a duel of argument, either by pen or upon the public platform.
He spoke in churches, halls and private parlors. His newspaper and magazine articles commanded a price. He met the greatest minds of America and of Europe on an equal footing.
In England his book was having a sale far beyond what it had met with at home.
And when he spoke in London and the chief cities of Great Britain, the halls were packed to suffocation. He appealed to the Messianic instinct of English workingmen, and they hailed him as the coming man —their deliverer. They stripped doors from their hinges and carried him aloft upon the improvised platform. They unhitched the horses from his carriage and drew him through the streets in triumphal state. This all meant little—it was only campaign exuberance—the glare and flare of smoky kerosene-torches, and the blare of brass.
Henry George was right in the same class with Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall and John Stuart Mills, none of whom, happily, was a college man, and therefore all were free from the handicap of dead learning and ossified opinion, and saw things as if they were new. Ignorance is a very necessary equipment in doing a great and sublime work that is to eclipse anything heretofore performed.
The mind of Henry George was a flower of slow growth. At thirty-seven he was just reaching mental manhood. According to all reasonable tables of expectancy, he should have rivaled Humboldt and been in his prime at eighty. His brain was the brain of Ricardo; but instead of sticking to his boos, he got caught in the swirl of politics, and was matched up with the cheap, the selfish, the grasping. The people who snatched Henry George out of his proper sphere as a thinker, writer and lecturer, and flung him into the turmoil of practical politics, were of exactly the class who would, if they could, have a little later ridden him on a rail.
It was all a little like that speech of a man in Indianapolis who nominated James Whitcomb Riley for the Presidency of the United States. The mob diluted the thought of Henry George and trod his proud and honest heart into the mire.
Had he been elected mayor of New York, he could have done little or nothing for reform, for a mayor has only the power delegated to him by the ward boss and the genus heeler. Beyond this he can merely apply the emergency-brake by the use of the veto.
Henry George was a racehorse hitched by spoilsmen to an overloaded jaunting-car with a drunken driver, bound for Donnybrook Fair.
And soon men said he was dead.
* * * * *
The logic of Henry George's book and its literary style are so insistent that it has been studied closely by economists of note in every country on the globe. Its argument has never been answered, and those who have sought to combat it have rested their case on the assertion that Henry George was a theorist and a dreamer, and so far as practical affairs were concerned was a failure. With equal logic we might brand the Christian religion as a failure because its founder was not a personal success, either in his social status or as a political leader.
Gradually the thinking men of the world, the statesmen and the doers, are beholding the fact that mankind is an organism, and that a country is only as rich as its poorest citizen; that an athlete with Bright's disease is not worth as much to humanity as a small, lively and healthy boy of ten with cheek of tan and freckles to spare. Health comes from right living, and living without useful effort is only existence.
People living on the pavement or in sky-scrapers soon degenerate.
Man can not thrive apart from land. Abject poverty is found only in great cities, where population is huddled like worms in a knot.
The highest average of intelligence, happiness and prosperity is found in villages, where each family owns its home, and the renter is the rare exception.
The word "renter" we used Out West as a term of contempt. The ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion can not bestow. God's acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt and mixing with the elements. "All wealth comes from the soil," says Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond given to society for good behavior.
"I am no longer an anarchist—I have bought a lot and am building a house," a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home, when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite.
It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and improve it, if they could.
The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel's thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they are even without the ground-hog's ambition to burrow. They are too sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the imagination which pictures a better condition.
They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the South—yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too pained to feel.
From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required to work a change, and this change will come through educating the children—through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods—and most of all through school-gardens. The so-called "back districts" are fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed.
Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer—and prayer is the soul's desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we elect rascals to office.
The will of the people is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets married quits work then and there, and is quite content to live the rest of her life as a slave, asking her husband for a quarter at a time and cajoling the money out of him by hook or crook, or else explorating his trousers for free coinage when opportunity offers. Fresh air is free, but the average individual does not know it; and neither would this same person use land if it were given him. Freedom is a condition of mind.
Yet apart from the "submerged tenth" is a very large class of people to whom land and a home would be a positive paradise, and who are simply forced into flats and tenements on account of present economic conditions: the land is monopolized, and held by men who neither improve it themselves nor will they allow others to. Then hold it awaiting a rise in value.
This increase in value is not on account of anything the owner may do —in fact, he is usually an absentee and does nothing. The increase comes from the enterprise and thrift of people for whom the owner has no interest, beyond contempt.
If these enterprising people who do the work of the world—making the things the world needs—want more land for their business or for homes, they have to pay the absentee for the increased value which they themselves have brought about. When you beautify and enrich the value of your own lot by improving it, you are making it impossible to buy the vacant lot next to you without bankruptcy.
Moreover, you are taxed by the State for any improvement you make on your land, and this taxation on improvements must of necessity tend toward discouragement of improvement. It is really a surer way to make money, to hang on to land and do nothing, than to improve it.
The remedy proposed by Henry George is simply the Single Tax, and this tax to be on land values and not on improvements.
That is to say, with the Single Tax, the man who owns the vacant lot covered with briars and brambles would pay the same tax that you pay on your lot next door upon which you have built a house, barn and conservatory and planted trees and flowers.
The immediate tendency of this policy would be to cause the gentleman who owned the vacant lot devoted to cockleburs to put up on it a sign, "For Sale Cheap."
Even the opponents of the Single Tax agree that its inauguration would at once throw on the market a vast acreage of unimproved land, and that is just the one reason why they oppose it. All those thousands of acres held by estates, trustees and idle heirs, in the vicinity of Boston, Philadelphia and up the Hudson, would be for sale.
The single tax would give the land back to the people, or at least make it possible for people who want it to get what they could use. Those who have the desire to improve land, and improve themselves by improving it, would no longer be blocked.
The fresh blood of the country which makes the enterprise of cities possible comes from the boys and the girls who warmed their feet on October mornings where the cows lay down; who have been brought up to work on land, to plant and hoe and harvest and look after livestock. This is all education, and very necessary education. "A sand-pile and dirt in which to dig is the divine right of every child," says Judge Lindsey.
And if it is the divine right of a child to dig in the dirt, why isn't it the divine right of the grown-up? It is, and would be so recognized were it not for the fact that we have been obsessed by a fallacy called "the divine right of property." This idea has come down to us from the Reign of the Barons, when a dozen men owned all of England, and plain and unlettered people could not legally own a foot of land. All paid tribute to the Barons, who were actually and literally robbers.
We will grant of course that what a man produces and creates is his, but the land to which he may be legal heir and which probably he has never seen, and which certainly he does not use or improve, is his only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The law is a hass."
Comparatively few people have the courage of Colonel Bumble, so they do not express themselves; but the commonsense of the world is now coming to believe that the law was made for man, and not man for the law.
The only people who oppose the single tax are the holders of land who are hanging on to it expecting to grow rich through inertia.
The problem of civilization is to eliminate the parasite. The idle person is no better than a dead one and takes up more room. The man who lives on the labor of others is a menace to himself and to society.
The taxes necessary to support the government should be paid by those who have the funds wherewith to be idle; no longer should the chief burden fall on the home-maker.
Tax the land, and the man who owns it will have to make it productive by labor, or else get out and allow some one else to have a chance.
Do not drive the landlords out—tax them out.
Let the land gravitate to the people who have the disposition and the ability to improve it—and that is just what the Single Tax will do. So this, then, is the philosophy of Henry George.
GARIBALDI
Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once
men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests
distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead.
I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church
and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in
their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their
lives in their own way, too.
—Garibaldi
[Illustration: Garibaldi]
The writer who tells the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous.
Garibaldi's personal friends and admirers always referred to him in such words as these: patriot, savior, father-noble, generous, pure- hearted, unselfish, devoted, philanthropic.
They transferred the infallibility of Pope Pius the Ninth to his enemy, Garibaldi.
The Pope was not much given to rhetorical lyddite, so when the name of Garibaldi was mentioned he simply stopped his ears and hissed. He acknowledged that in all the bright lexicon of words there was not a symbol strong enough to express his contempt for Joseph Garibaldi.
The actual fact was that Pio Nono, for whom Garibaldi named his favorite donkey, had very much in common with Garibaldi. Had they met as strangers on sea or plain, they would have delighted in each other's society. They were both kind, courteous, considerate, highly intelligent men. They were lovers of their kind.
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.
That bold and magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi crowns the heights of Rome, looking down upon the Eternal City; the dust of Mazzini rests in a village churchyard; but both live in the hearts of humanity as men who gave their lives to make men free.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was born in the city of Nice in Eighteen Hundred Seven, being one of the advance-guard of a brigade of genius, for great men come in groups. His parents were poor, and being well under the heel of the priest, were only fairly honest. The father was a waterman who plied the Riviera in a leaky schooner—poling, rowing, or sailing, as Providence provided. Once the good man was returning home after a cruise where ill luck was at the helm. The priest had blessed him when he started, and would be on hand when he came back to receive his share of the loot, for business was then, and is yet, in Italy, a kind of legalized freebooting. Then it was that the honest fisherman lapsed and lifted the nets of another between the dawn and the day.
The son, then only twelve years of age, scorned the act and declared he would steal a ship or nothing. The boy was duly punished in the interests of piety and also to relieve the pent-up emotions of the parents.
The heroic spirit of Garibaldi was not a legacy from either his father or his mother. However, they dowered him with health and great bodily strength, and this physical superiority had much, no doubt, to do in shaping his life's course.
Men fall victims to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony.
The late-lamented Brann had a felicity and a facility in the use of words that finally cost him his life. Men with pistol facility and word felicity die by the pistol. The brain of the prizefighter does not convolve: he relies more on his "jabs" than on thoughts that burn —and those who live by the hammer die by the hammer.
There is no doubt that Garibaldi's romantic career in a lifelong fight for freedom was born of a liking for the fray, to express it bluntly, with freedom as a convenient excuse. This sounds unkind, but it is not. Garibaldi loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it any day.
While yet a youth he became captain of his father's craft, and
Garibaldi Senior took the wheel and obeyed orders.
Then we hear that Garibaldi was an expert swimmer, a rather unusual accomplishment for a sailor. He was always on the lookout for an opportunity to dive overboard, disrobing in the air, and rescuing the perishing. There is even a legend of his having saved a washer-woman from drowning when he was but eight years old. A captious critic has remarked that probably the old lady fell into her washtub. Thereupon, a kinsman of the great man comes forward to give the facts, which are that the woman was doing laundry-work by the riverside, and stooping over, fell into the damp and was rescued by the boy. But it also seems on the word of Garibaldi himself that the woman would not have fallen in had not the boy suddenly appeared behind her playing bear, thus bringing about the catastrophe which he averted.
When Garibaldi was twenty-one he was in command of a small schooner bound for the Black Sea on a trading expedition. The intent of the expedition was twofold: to sell the merchandise which the ship carried, and also if possible to capture certain bands of pirates that were infesting the dank, dark waters. It is perhaps quite needless to say that pirates are often men who are engaged in the laudable undertaking of protecting the shipping from pirates, just as admission to the bar is a sort of commercial letter of marque and reprisal.
That Garibaldi was a pirate, only his enemies said. But anyway, Garibaldi and a band of twenty boys, all younger than himself, sailed away to victory or to death.
It proved to be neither; for they were captured by pirates, who took their arms, provisions, merchandise, and even their compasses and clothing, leaving only their ship and the sky overhead and the water beneath.
Garibaldi took the capture as coolly as did Caesar under similar conditions, and talked poetry and philosophy with the pirates, and the gentlemen gave back a few provisions, with apologies and regrets for having troubled so fine a gentleman.
The next day, our friends, innocent of clothing, fell in with an English ship that ministered to their wants. Captain Taylor of the English ship was so impressed with the young captain that he wrote home about him, describing his courtesy, intelligence, and poetic fervor, all made manifest as Garibaldi stood on the deck of his schooner clad only in a doormat.
At this time Garibaldi had read the history of his country; in imagination he saw the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. And better still, he had figured out in his own mind why sleep and death, and moth and dust, and rust and ruin had settled down upon the race, and mankind had endured a thousand years of theological nightmare.
He knew that save in freedom alone does the intellect flower and blossom; that joy is the legal tender of the soul; that only through liberty can men progress and grow; and that great and beautiful work can be done only by a free and happy people.
The torch that fired his intellect was Mazzini, who was publishing a little periodical of protest that voiced what its editor felt, who wrote right out of his heart, and whose cry was, "Freedom and United Italy—an Italy free from the rule of the Pope."
Mazzini, the son of a doctor, expressed what many thought and felt, but dare not say. He had stated in no mincing phrase that the rule of the priest meant mental subjugation and a gradual, creeping, insidious return of the Dark Ages. He printed it on slips of paper and passed them out upon the street when but a youth in the High School.
Thereupon, Mazzini had been duly cautioned, and on repeating his offense his little folder of ideas was suppressed, and the precious fonts and presses thrown into the sea with the street-sweepings of the town.
The next month Mazzini's magazine appeared just the same, printed by night at the office of a friend, and then its author was safely placed behind prison-bars. The authorities dare not kill him—besides, what is the use?—but they proposed to teach him a wholesome lesson and break his fiery spirit if possible, this being the policy that had continued from the time of Socrates. To hold truth secure by putting down the man of initiation—the man of insight who could see a better condition—all who were filled with a discontent that challenged the perfection of the present order—this to the many meant safety; the men in power simply taking their cue from the rabble—"Away with him!"
And Garibaldi hearing of the trouble that had come to Mazzini, whom he admired but had not yet met, hastened home and threw himself into the cause. He got together a little band of foolish youths, and planned a revolution.
He enlisted as a sailor on board the "Eurydice," a government craft, intending to revolt, steal the ship and go to the rescue of Mazzini. But about this time Mazzini was released with a warning, it being thought that a dreamy, penniless lawyer's clerk could not make much trouble anyway.
Mazzini and Garibaldi were totally different in their methods and habits of thought. Garibaldi reverenced Mazzini and called him master, and Mazzini admired the daring of Garibaldi, and no doubt was influenced and encouraged by him to continue sending out his little leaflets of liberty, which were secretly printed and circulated, read and reread, and passed along. Examined by us now, they seem innocent indeed, as harmless as pages lifted from Emerson's essay on "Nature," but actually they were the dynamite that was to rend the rocks of Italy's Gibraltar of orthodoxy.
Matters were now culminating fast. Mazzini and Garibaldi were organizing secret bands of "Young Italy." The arrangement was to secure and hold a certain point on the Swiss frontier as headquarters, and from there make open war upon Austria and the Pope. Like John Brown, these zealous revolutionaries felt sure that, at the call to arms, the subjugated provinces would cast off their shackles and join hands with the liberators. They did not realize that slavery is a condition of mind, and that as a class slaves are quite happy in their serfdom, being as unaware of their true condition as are those caught in the coils of superstition. No one sees the coils but the free man on the outside. The beauty of freedom's fight is that it frees the fighter.
The secret societies known as "Young Italy" failed in their secrecy. No secrets can be kept except for a day. Spies were duly initiated, and the report of the daily doings was handed in to the Pope and his council. To capture Garibaldi and Mazzini and hang them would have been easy; but to do this might bring about the very storm so much feared. So the word was passed that the conspirators were to be arrested; a price was placed upon their heads, and an opportunity was given them to escape.
Mazzini traveled leisurely through France, which offered him safe passage to London. Garibaldi remained on the border, and with a little band engaged in joyous guerrilla warfare, hoping for a general revolt. The time was not yet ripe, and nothing he could then do would gather up the scattered forces of freedom and crystallize them.
Fighting was then going on in South America—when are they not fighting in South America?—and Garibaldi thought he saw an opportunity to strike a blow for freedom, and so he sailed away for the equator, filled with a passion for freedom, desiring only to give himself for the benefit of humanity. Yet his heart was with "Young Italy," and that the time would come when he would return and break the fetters that the Pope had forged for the minds of men, he always knew and prophesied. Such was the firm purpose and unwavering faith of Joseph Garibaldi.
* * * * *
Arriving in South America, Garibaldi took time to investigate conditions. Then he offered his services to Don Gonzales, who had set up a republic on a side street, and was fighting the power of the Emperor of Brazil.
Don Gonzales was delighted with Garibaldi—Garibaldi won every one he desired to win. He had the rare quality which we call "personal charm."
Garibaldi was fitted out with a ship which he manned with sixteen of his countrymen—fighters of his own selection, men of his own intrepid spirit. This crew constituted the navy of the new republic, and Garibaldi was given the title, "Secretary of the Navy." He called his ship the "Mazzini," writing to the prophet and patriot in London for his blessing; but without waiting for it sailed away to victory. The first bout with the enemy secured them a prize in the way of a ship four times the size of their own, well provisioned and carrying one hundred men. Garibaldi at once scuttled his own craft, ran up his flag on board the prize, and calling all hands on deck solemnly christened her the "Mazzini," in loving token of the ship just sent to Davy Jones' locker. Then the question arose, What should be done with the prisoners?
Garibaldi gave them their choice of being sent ashore in safety, with a week's provisions and their side-arms, or re-enlisting under his own glorious banner. The men without parley, one and all cried, "We are yours to do with as you will!" Emerson says, "The work of eloquence is to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes." This being true, Garibaldi must have been eloquent, and eloquence is personality. The Corsican, in his Little Corporal's uniform, walked out before the legions sent to capture him, and before he had uttered a word, they cried, "Command us!" and threw down their arms.
The power of Garibaldi over men was superb. He won through the devotion of his soldiers. When he struck he hit quick and hard, and then he made his victory secure by magnanimity toward the defeated. It was his policy never to put prisoners in irons, or disgrace or humiliate them. He banished hate from their hearts by saying: "You are brave fighters! You are after my own heart. I need you!"
Julius Caesar had a deal of this same temperament, and if the sober, serious, spiritual and priestly quality of Mazzini could have been fused with the fighting spirit of Garibaldi we would have had the Julian soul once more with us. Possibly Rome is not yet dead, Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding.
* * * * *
Garibaldi and his gallant crew on board the "Mazzini" kept the enemy speculating. On one occasion when pursued, Garibaldi ran his ship up a narrow bay, one of the winding mouths of the Amazon. The two ships in pursuit were sure they had him in a trap and followed fast, intending to drive him so far inland that when the tide turned he would be held fast on the rocks, and then they could land a force, as they had five times as many men as he, and shoot his ship full of holes at their leisure from the shore. But Garibaldi was a sailor, and he had the true pilot's intuition for finding the channel. Suddenly, as the pursuing ships rounded a bend, from the height of a commanding precipice a deadly stream of shot and shell was poured down through the defenseless decks. And the gunners on the ships could not elevate their cannon to get the range. Garibaldi had taken his best cannon from his ship and masked this battery on shore. For two months he had worked to lure the enemy to their ruin. The scheme worked.
On shore he was equally fertile in resource, and his plan of getting his troops in the neighborhood of the enemy, and lighting long lines of campfires so as to mislead as to the number of his troops, was with him a common form of strategy. Then lo! as his campfires burned brightly, he would circle the foe and stampede them by simultaneous attacks on both flanks, making a mob of what twenty minutes before was an army.
He also had a way of retreating before the enemy, and at last making a seemingly stubborn resistance on some friendly ridge or hilltop. The enemy would then pause, re-form and charge. But a thousand yards before the hilltop would be reached, Garibaldi's men, secreted in sunken roadways or the dry beds of waterways, would rise like sprouting dragons' teeth and scatter their rain of death. His men wore bright red shirts so as to protect themselves from the danger of being shot by their own comrades. Later, the appearance of the red shirt struck terror to the foe. In Italy now, when you see a red-shirted brigade, do not imagine it is a volunteer fire-company out for a holiday—it is merely a company of militia called "The Garibaldians."
Garibaldi became a sort of superstition in South America. His appearance on land or sea, at seemingly the same time, his sudden sallies and miraculous disappearances, carried out the idea that he was the Devil incarnate. The armies sent to capture him came home with the report, "We would have killed or captured him, but alas, God ordained that he should not be found!"
Fighting along the shore with simply a few ships, by co-operating with the land forces, and having that scouted and maligned thing, "horse marines," at his quick command, he wore the enemy to a frazzle. His tactics were those of Quintus Fabius, who supplied us our word "Fabian"—opportunist. Fabius fought the combined hosts of Hannibal for ten years, as one to five, and was never captured and never defeated. When peace was declared he dictated his own terms, and was given royal honors when he rode through the streets of Rome at the head of his tattered troops, just as Christian DeWet, the valiant Boer, was tendered an ovation when he visited London, which he had first festooned with crape.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was operating in a horse country, a country, by the way, in physical features, not unlike that over which DeWet occasionally rode at the rate of one hundred miles from sunset to day-dawn. Garibaldi, although a sailor born, did not ride a horse with face toward the horse's tail, as sailormen are said to do in one of Kipling's merry tales. However, he might have done so, for he was a most daring rider, and in South America filled in the time with many excursions ashore, where he chose his companions from the ship by lot, there always being a great desire among the men to follow close to their beloved leader. He insisted that all of his men should be horsemen as well as soldiers, for no one could tell when they might have to abandon their ships and take to the land.
These wild, free excursions into the sparsely settled interior were not fraught with much danger, for the plainsmen were mostly with the republic, and Garibaldi took great pains to treat with the citizen's family. For instance, although cattle were plentiful and of little value, when he wanted fresh meat he always asked for it. The same with horses. "Treat citizens as friends, informing them that you come to protect, not to destroy," was his injunction.
One valuable possession Garibaldi secured in Brazil, however, was taken without legal permission. It seems Garibaldi on one of his journeys inland had halted with six of his band for dinner at the house of a planter and ranchman. The place was fair to look upon, the house situated in a clump of trees that lined the bank of a stream. Near at hand were orange-groves and great banks of azaleas in full bloom. On the hillside were grapes that grew in purple clusters, which made poor Garibaldi think of his far-off Italy, the home from which he was exiled, and to which return meant death.
Garibaldi reined into the yard and sat hatless on his horse, looking at this scene of peace, prosperity, and gentle, smiling beauty. A sense of loneliness swept over him. He thought of himself as a homeless outcast, without love, friendless, fighting an eternal fight for people whom he did not know, and very few of whom indeed knew him even by name.
A barking of the dogs brought several servants to the door. On seeing the red-shirted soldiers, their rifles across the pommels of their saddles, the servants hastily ran back and proceeded to bar the doors and windows. Garibaldi smiled wearily and was inwardly debating whether he would try to show the inmates of the house that he was a friend or ride away.
Just then the door opened and a woman came out on the veranda. She was a young woman, not over twenty—dark, slight, handsome and intelligent. She looked at Garibaldi, and her self-possession made the invincible fighter blush to the roots of his long yellow hair and tawny beard. She was not afraid. She walked down the steps, and in a pleasant voice said, "You are Garibaldi." And Garibaldi was on the point of denying it, for he had not heard a woman's voice in four months, and was all unnerved. His tongue refused to do its bidding, and he only bowed, and then tried to apologize for his intrusion.
"You are Garibaldi, and if you insist on remaining to dinner, I will prepare the meal for you—I can do nothing else."
She spoke in Spanish, and as Garibaldi replied, he was mindful that his Castilian was terribly broken. Then he spoke in Italian, and when she answered in very broken Latin, they both smiled. They were even. When he learned that her husband was not at home, he refused to enter the house, but sat on the veranda, and there the lady served him and his companions with her own fair hands, as the servants stood by and looked on perplexed. Garibaldi did not eat much—his appetite had vanished. He followed the frail and beautiful young woman furtively with his eyes as she moved back and forth heaping the plates of his hungry troopers. He thought she looked sad and preoccupied.
Garibaldi tried to speak, but his Spanish had suddenly taken wing. But when the lady entered the house and returned with one of Mazzini's little pamphlets on liberty, he started and then almost sobbed as he read the well-remembered words, "Do that which is right, and fear no man, for man was made to be free."
He saw that the pamphlet was one of the master's earliest productions, and how it should have preceded him four thousand miles he could only guess, and the lady's command of Italian was not sufficient to explain. But in his joy he held out his hand to her, and she responded to his grasp. There was an understanding. They were both lovers of liberty.
Garibaldi felt that he must not remain—he must hasten away ere he said or did something foolish. "You must not come back, my husband is a royalist," said the lady, "and he will be greatly displeased when he knows you have been here. But you were hungry and I have fed you—now good-by." She held out her hand and then hastily broke away before the soldier could take it. Garibaldi mounted his horse, and followed by the troopers rode slowly down the bed of the stream, and as they disappeared into the thicket of azaleas, Garibaldi looked back. The lady was standing on the veranda leaning against a pillar. She held up the Mazzini pamphlet. Garibaldi removed his hat.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was on a tour of inspection, getting a good idea of the coast-line, and patriotism and duty should have kept him steadily on the march.
But something else was tugging at his heart. He rode ten miles, halted and pitched camp. Early the next morning he rode back alone, leaving his rifle behind, but keeping his pistols in his belt. He wanted to see the husband of the beautiful young lady. The man must be a pretty good kind of man—a royalist by birth probably, but if he could be rightly informed might become a friend of the cause.
When Garibaldi reached the house, the lady was on the veranda—she seemed to be expecting him. She was sad, pale, serious, and dressed in blue. She called her husband out and introduced him, and he and Garibaldi shook hands. Garibaldi tried to talk with him about Mazzini, but as near as Garibaldi could guess the rancher had never heard the name.
The man was fully twenty years older than his wife, and Garibaldi guessed, from his looks, that his wealth was an inheritance, not an accumulation. A little further talk and the facts developed as Garibaldi had suspected—the man was a degenerate scion of Spanish aristocracy. He seemed too stupid or too indifferent to know who his visitor was, or what he stood for. He brought out strong drink and then suggested cards as a diversion.
Garibaldi did not like the looks of the man, and courteously declined his pasteboard suggestions. All the time the young woman stood a little way off and looked wistfully at the red-shirted soldier. Her lips moved in pantomime—she was trying to say something to him. Garibaldi talked about nothing, laughed aloud, and requested his host to mix him a drink. While the man was busy at the sideboard, Garibaldi moved carelessly toward the woman and caught her whispered words, "Do not drink—go at once—he has sent for help—the place will be surrounded in half an hour—go, I implore you!"
And all the time Garibaldi talked garrulously and sauntered around the room. He took up the glass the man handed him, and raising it to his lips, did not drink—but tossed the contents full into the face of the person who had prepared the mixture. The man coughed, sputtered, swore and Garibaldi backed to the door, one hand on a pistol at his belt. He reached the veranda and looked for his horse. The horse was gone! Garibaldi sprang back into the house, covering the royalist with his pistol. "My horse, or you die—order my horse brought to the door!" The man protested, begged, swore he knew nothing about the horse. "I'll fetch your horse!" called the woman, and running around the house brought the horse from a thicket, where it had evidently been led by some servant. Again Garibaldi backed out of the house, requesting the man to follow, which he obediently did at a distance of five paces, his hands high in the air, as if in blessing. With pistol still in hand Garibaldi mounted the horse, and as he did so the little lady moaned, "He may kill me for this, but I would do it again—for you!" Garibaldi kicked his right foot out of the stirrup, and held out his hand. The lady without the slightest hesitation placed her foot in the empty stirrup and leaped lightly up behind. As she did so Garibaldi fired two shots well over the head of the paralyzed husband of his late wife, and gave his horse the spurs. In a minute horse and riders, two, were more than a quarter of a mile away over the plain, the lady seated safely behind, her arms gently but surely enfolding the red shirt. As they passed over a ridge they looked back, and there stood the degenerate scion of royalty, his hands high above his head. He had forgotten to take them down.
* * * * *
But should any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, Anita, for it was she, told the tale to Madame Brabante, who in turn gave the facts to Margaret Fuller Ossoli.
We do not know Anita's last name. When she placed her foot in the stirrup of Garibaldi's saddle, she gave herself to him, body, mind and spirit, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, through evil and good report, forever. By that act she left the past behind: even the name "Anita" was a name that Garibaldi gave her, and if he ever knew the story of her life before they met, he never thought it worth while to mention it. Probably he did not care—life for both of them really dated from the day they met. He was thirty-one, she was twenty- two.
When Garibaldi rode into camp, with the lady on the crupper, the six red-shirted ones in waiting were not surprised. They were never surprised at anything their master did. They believed in him as they believed in God—only more so. And so they asked no questions—for Garibaldi was one of the men that common men never interrogated.
"Break camp!" was the order, and in ten minutes they were on the march, two men trailing a mile behind as a rear-guard. At midnight they were safely aboard the good ship "Mazzini."
Anita proved herself a worthy mate for Garibaldi. She was the first woman to wear a Garibaldi waist, although for the most part she wore men's clothes, with two pistols in her belt and a rifle in her hands, and wherever Joseph went, there went Anita. She was his servant, his slave, his comrade, his wife. Read his autobiography and you will find how lasting, loyal and tender his devotion was toward her. He was a fatalist—a man without fear—and many times when surrounded by an overwhelming foe, he simply bided his time and fought his way through to safety. "When other men are ready to surrender, I hold fast," he said. When once cut off by four soldiers of the enemy, and they approached with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed, he drew his sword and shouted, "I am Garibaldi—you are my prisoners!" and down went the rifles.
At another time he and Anita were caught by a band of forty troopers in a log cabin in a clearing. They flung open the door, and standing, one on each side, showed only the long glittering point of a spear across the doorway. The enemy demanded a parley, but finally, not knowing the number of persons inside, and realizing that a charge meant death for two of the company, they withdrew. Silence and the unknown are the only things really terrible.
And so Joseph and Anita lived and loved and fought, and incidentally studied the few books which they possessed, and at odd times wrote poetry. A year after that first ride on the back of the horse that carried double, a son was born to them. A contemporary tells of seeing Anita riding horseback, the chubby babe carried like a papoose, looking out wonderingly at the world, which for him was just six months old. In three years this baby boy was riding behind his mother on the crupper, and another baby had come to do the papoose act.
So passed eight years of adventure by land and sea, in wood and vale, on mountain and plain. Garibaldi had given Brazil all the freedom she deserved—all she knew how to use. He was crowned as "The Hero of Montevideo," and could have taken a place high in the councils of the State. But across the sea he heard the rumble of battle going on in his beloved fatherland, and the dream of a United Italy was still vivid in his mind, and of course, vivid, too, in the mind of Anita. So they sailed away, taking with them a hundred of their loyal, loving men in the red shirts, who refused to be left behind. Arriving in Italy, Garibaldi went at once to the home of his mother, who had mourned him as lost and now received him as one risen from the dead. Anita and the children appealed to the good woman, and her heart went out to them, as if, indeed, they were all her own, loved into life.
When all at once, remembering her son's indifference for the Church, she asked when and where they were married, Joseph looked at Anita, and Anita looked at Joseph, and then they acknowledged that they had only been married by a sailor, who had said the ceremony as he remembered it, adding, "And may God have mercy on your souls." Hastily the mother packed them off to a priest, who administered the right of extreme marital unction, and charged them double fee on account of their carelessness. They paid the fee, laughing inwardly, but glad to relieve the mother of her qualms.
The children were left in the care of the grandmother, and Joseph and
Anita went forth to enlist under the banner of Charles Albert of
Piedmont and make war on superstition and the Pope.
* * * * *
Charles Albert had been a staunch supporter of the very conditions against which the striplings, Joseph Mazzini and Joseph Garibaldi, had made war twenty years previous. But nations, like men, sometimes have experiences that make them grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and bounds. The writings of Mazzini had been constantly distributed and circulated, and the fact that they were tabued by the government added to the joys of the illicit. A well-defined wave of republicanism swept the land. Those sensitive to ideas awoke, like lilacs sensitive to the breath of May.
King Charles Albert, of all the Italian kinglets, alone guessed the temper of his people, and issued to them a constitution with the right of franchise. This meant war upon the Austrian protectorate and the Pope.
Volunteers from the other provinces flocked to the standard of Piedmont. And about this time it was that Garibaldi and Anita offered their services to the insurgent army. Charles Albert feared his old- time foe, for Garibaldi was of a nature that detested compromise, and the Piedmontese could not understand how he was willing to fight under the banner of a king, even a king who had forsworn tyranny and reform. But other provinces were seceding, and erelong Joseph Garibaldi found himself at the head of a thousand Neapolitans, all clad in red shirts, well armed, carrying banners upon which were sentiments like these: "Man was made to be free!" "Down with priest and Pope!" and "Let us own ourselves!"
The reformer paints things with a broom: exaggeration indeed is a necessary part of his equipment. Garibaldi could not understand that Italy was not ripe for a simple religion of love for wife, child and neighbor, paying one's debts, and earning one's daily bread by honest toil. He could not appreciate that the many really did not care for either political or mental freedom, much preferring mendicancy to work, and quite willing to delegate their thinking to a college of cardinals. And so he waged his earnest fight, with a faith as full and complete as the faith that actuated Old John Brown, whose soul goes marching on.
In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, some of the provinces had capitulated and joined forces with France and Austria, the insurgent leaders having been promised places in the excise—the compromise hastened no doubt by cold and hunger. Garibaldi's own force was much reduced and he took to the mountains, abandoning his cavalry equipment. Orders were out that he, or any of his band, caught should be shot, without trial, by fours in presence of their companions and the army. Thirty of his men and four of his best officers had been so executed.
He and Anita were surrounded and had taken refuge in a cornfield. Anita was wounded and delirious with thirst and fever. A Garibaldian had volunteered to go for water across an open field. Garibaldi watched the man and saw him shot down by French soldiers in ambush. He remained, knowing the enemy would soon come out of hiding to rob the dead. Garibaldi waited close beside the body of his dead companion, and killed with his own hands the man who had done the deed.
He got the water and carried it back to Anita in the cornfield. But she now had no need of it—she was dead. Garibaldi remained by the body until nightfall, and then carried it to the house of a peasant nearby. He made the peasant woman understand that the dead was a woman, a mother, like herself, and must be given decent burial—the woman understood.
The torches of the enemy could be seen near at hand, trailing Garibaldi from the cornfield to the house. He covered the beloved form with his scarf, and giving the peasant woman his purse, hurried forth barely in time to elude the pursuers. He made his way alone to the seashore and found refuge in Venice.
There was a price upon his head, but still there were many throughout
Italy from Milan to Sicily who spoke of him as patriot and savior.
As a diplomatic move Rome relented, and Garibaldi was allowed to move to Caprera, a rocky island ten miles from the coast. Here he lived with his mother and children, writing, studying, farming; lived as Victor Hugo lived at Guernsey, only without the wealth, but in touch with Mazzini, exiled in London.
In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Garibaldi came to New York and remained nearly two years. He went into business under an assumed name and accumulated two thousand dollars, so the little business must have prospered.
In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Naples was again in revolt, and Garibaldi heard the trumpets of battle from afar. He returned to Italy, and with his two thousand dollars bought the Island of Caprera, that his children might be insured a home, and also, possibly, to convince the government at Rome that he had come to stay.
Twice he left his beloved Caprera to work out his great dream of a United Italy. He fought with troops that had no commissary; battled with superstition; and saw his name belittled by those he sought to serve. Finally he entered Naples at the head of an army and was proclaimed Dictator. But statesmanship is business; and business is to organize and discipline, and use the forces of monotonous peace. Garibaldi expected too much: he wanted to see the Church uprooted, the princes sent on their way, and the people supreme. This was not to be. He did, however, live to see the Pope relinquish his temporal power, and a United Italy, but with Victor Emmanuel, son of Charles Albert, as king. The people still wanted a king, and they wanted their Church, even though an emasculated one.
In Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Garibaldi and his son, the firstborn of Anita, offered their services to Gambetta and enlisted with France to fight against Germany. And yet Garibaldi had nothing against Germany, and had fought France in many a tedious campaign, but he thought that France now stood opposed to papal power, while Germany sympathized with it.
After the war Garibaldi was elected to the Italian Parliament, and performed, at least, one good piece of work: he succeeded in getting an appropriation to erect a statue of Bruno upon the exact spot where this lover of truth and right was burned alive, by order of the Pope, for teaching that the earth revolved.