Even he almost despaired. He felt himself "accursed by all," the "scapegoat on whom all the faults of Israel will be heaped with a curse." The Piedmontese press loaded him with shameful scurrility; and there seems to have been an attempt to assassinate him. He fretted with the sense of failure, with something like remorse at the sufferings of the conspirators under the Austrians' brutal vengeance. But instead of taking the moral of the failure home, he broke into invective against the Piedmontese, and only plunged more desperately into schemes of insurrection. He had been misled into suspecting an understanding between France and Piedmont to create French protectorates in the South and Centre; and he was eager to checkmate it by forcing on the movement for unity and a revolutionary war with Austria. He had two main plans of operation. For one, the revolutionising of South Italy, he could, though anxious for immediate action, at present only sow the seed. The other was to organise guerilla fighting in the Alps and Northern Apennines and encourage the Lombard cities to revolt. He had persuaded himself that the fast-maturing Eastern question gave a favourable chance of attacking Austria. Her policy of see-saw between the Western Powers and Russia had won her the ill-will of both sides, and she had been obliged to denude her Italian garrisons to concentrate troops on the Russian frontier. Mazzini had vague hopes, too, of help from America. Kossuth's lecturing tour in the States in 1852 had excited an angry feeling against Austria. The American government was irritated by the unfriendly attitude of France and England, and perhaps had its designs on Cuba; and Mazzini hoped that it would encourage the revolutionary forces in Europe, in order to keep the Powers occupied at home. George N. Sanders, the American Consul in London, gave a dinner to him and Kossuth and Ledru Rollin, and healths were drunk to a future alliance of America with a federation of the free peoples of Europe.[25] Mazzini's hopes were high. He studied military maps with Kossuth and Ledru Rollin at St John's Wood. He went to Paris and Italy in 1854 in disguise, probably spending most of his time at Genoa, and perhaps on his way paying a visit to Giuditta Sidoli, now silver-haired, and sweet and gracious as ever. His movements worried all the police of Italy and France and Switzerland, and his secret journeys had their romance of clever disguises and audacious escapes. A popular rhyme of the time, attributed to Dall'Ongaro, said:—

Mazzini wrote home to England that the people were fretting for action, and would have risen already, "had he not been exceptionally prudent and calm"; in two months more he hoped to have sapped the influence of the royalists, and then "the field will be mine." In August he was in the Engadin, arranging for insurrection in the Valtellin and the Como hill country. But the Swiss police broke up the conspirators, and Mazzini narrowly escaped capture as he came by the Julier diligence to Chur.

His hopes of Austrian isolation were soon dashed. Austria nominally joined the Western alliance, and Piedmont followed her into it and sent a contingent to the Crimea. He was bitterly disappointed, and relieved himself in angry criticisms on English and Piedmontese policy. Against Piedmont he turned with sheer passionate bitterness. Cavour's adhesion to the alliance puzzled his own followers; and even now it is not easy to be sure as to its wisdom, still less as to its morality. But at all events everyone else recognised that the Crimea was intended to be "the road to Lombardy." Mazzini, blinded by his partisanship, saw only proof that Cavour's sympathies were more with the oppressors than the oppressed.

For the moment all seemed to him a hopeless blank. His soul was "wasting in a decline," and he longed to find mechanical work to drug the pain, or break into some desperate action. "I am dreaming of, raving, raging about action, physical action," he wrote. "I am sick of the world and all its concerns, and want to protest." "Literally," he wrote to another friend, "life weighs on me. My feeling towards my country, right or wrong, is intolerable. If I were younger, I would be on a mountain to protest, with twenty or thirty more. As I am, I can only eat myself away, and pretend to smile, to avoid torturing others." Next year (1856) his hopes suddenly revived. There seemed a chance that Cavour would secretly assist an insurrection against the Duke of Modena in the Carrara country. Through this and the two following years the premier had intermittent plans to foment a rising there, which would lead to annexation of the borderland, or be twisted into a casus belli with Austria and force Louis Napoleon to send his army across the Alps. He allowed Mazzini to visit Genoa, and carried on communications with him there. What were the details of the plot, we have no means of knowing; but at all events it was impossible to come to terms. "The Piedmontese government," Mazzini wrote to England, "are a plague. I am indirectly in contact with them and trying all sorts of concessions, but it is of no use. My own position is extremely delicate and difficult between their party and the extreme men of our own. I have now sent a sort of ultimatum to them, which will compromise them, if accepted, or leaves me free, if not." When the rupture came, he turned to his plans for revolutionising the South. For two years past he had been industriously connecting the threads of conspiracy, that Crispi and others had laid in Sicily and Naples. He had met Garibaldi in London, and discussed plans with him for an expedition to the island; and Garibaldi had promised to go, if the Sicilians revolted and Cavour was willing to cooperate. Again there seemed a hope that the premier would secretly assist. Every patriot saw the danger of Napoleon's fitful scheme to put his cousin, Lucien Murat, on the throne of Naples; and Cavour, though he dared not openly oppose, would gladly see the scheme checkmated, and he had his own plans for adding Sicily to Victor Emmanuel's kingdom. He seems to have promised funds for Mazzini's design, but again from some unexplained cause he drew back. Mazzini refused to give up his scheme, and indeed the Genoese conspirators were too impatient for action to desist, whether he wished it or not. He went to England to raise money for the project, and returned to Genoa to mature it. Carlo Pisacane, his friend and fellow-exile, a Neapolitan duke with socialist theories that little accorded with his own, was to seize a steamer plying between Genoa and Sardinia, and make for Calabria, there to join hands with the insurgents in the South and raise the country in the name of Unity. The plot was linked to a more questionable plan. It was proposed that the conspirators, who stayed behind, should seize the forts at Genoa and Leghorn and obtain munitions to send on to Pisacane. Mazzini realised the peril of the business, the risk of civil war, the certainty that the movement would be understood as one for the republic rather than for unity. But he easily allowed himself to be persuaded into it. It would, he thought, at all events prove the solidarity of North and South, force on a war with Austria, and prevent the French alliance; and he had a hardly avowed hope that the movement might after all make for a republic. So, taking careful precautions to avoid reprisals on the Genoese conservatives, and prevent if possible a conflict with the troops, he threw himself into the mad plot. Pisacane seized the Cagliari, and went to his doom. Mazzini, finding that the government had scent of the design on the forts, tried to stop it at the last moment; but it was too late, and the fatuous attempt ended in some street fighting and a little loss of life. The government struck at its fellow-conspirators of a few months back with a severity, that did little credit to its honesty. It deliberately misrepresented the movement as anarchist. Mazzini and five more, who escaped, were sentenced in contumacy to death; others were sent to long terms of imprisonment. Mazzini took refuge in the house of the Marquis Ernesto Pareto, a relative of the minister of 1848, who concealed him successfully, though the police searched his house and probed the mattresses and the Marchioness' wardrobes with their swords. The story went that Mazzini, disguised as a footman, opened the door to the police-officer who proved to be an old school-fellow and probably recognised him. Some days after he walked out of the house without disguise, arm-in-arm with a Genoese lady, asked the sentry for a light for his cigar, and drove away unsuspected to Quarto, where he remained in safe hiding, till the news of Pisacane's disaster reached him.

Chapter X
Unity Half Won
1858-1860. Aetat 53-55

The war of 1859—At Florence—Plans for the South—Garibaldi's Expedition—Projected raid into Umbria—At Naples.

Mazzini returned to England, weary and sad, but not discouraged, and convinced that success was only a question of opportunity and management. He recognised how strongly the tide was setting towards the royalists, but he still thought he had the working classes with him. Cavour's double play and the cruel repression of the Genoese plot left him bitterer than ever against the monarchy and its men. "I have never loved you," he wrote in an open letter to the premier; "now I despise you." He attacked more angrily still the fast-cementing alliance with France. The Emperor was maturing his plans to drive the Austrians out of Italy. It was not, as Mazzini thought, mere policy alone that moved him. No doubt, his waning prestige at home, and the fear that another Orsini might arise, both had their influence; but he was still true in a way to his nationalist ideals, and since he had sacrificed Poland to the Russian alliance, he was the more eager to free Italy and Hungary. Mazzini, through his private channels of information, was among the first to have an inkling of the compact between Cavour and the Emperor at Plombières, but, as usual, his information was inaccurate. He believed, quite wrongly, as we know now, that they had agreed to leave Venetia to Austria and give Central Italy to Prince Napoleon, and that Cavour had offered to surrender the parliamentary liberties of Piedmont as the price of Lombardy; he had no knowledge that Napoleon had promised that half the Pope's territory should pass to Victor Emmanuel's crown.

Events moved fast. In the spring of 1859, thanks to Cavour's unscrupulous but supremely skilful diplomacy, war was imminent, and all Italy was fretting for it. Cavour was hardy and shrewd enough to use the revolutionary elements, on whose value Mazzini had laid insistent stress. The volunteers flocked to Piedmont with Garibaldi for their general, and, except for Mazzini and Crispi and a stranded handful, the republicans declared definitely for Victor Emmanuel's leadership. Even Mazzini was sometimes carried by the tide. He told his English friends that royalists and republicans were aiming equally at Unity; he appealed to the Piedmontese statesmen to pronounce for the greater policy, and if the French alliance broke down, he was prepared to support them. But he could not reconcile himself to the hated Emperor's help. Shutting his eyes to the hard facts, he thought that Piedmont could defeat Austria with no other allies than the hesitating revolutionaries of Hungary. To ask assistance from a despot blighted the country's self-respect; to win its freedom, save by its own unaided strength, dishonoured it at the birth; and it were small gain to change the tyranny of Austria for the domineering patronage of France. "I am equally hostile to Austria and to Napoleon," he wrote; "and my double aim is to get rid, if possible, of both." When war was declared, Cavour and he both said, "the die is cast"; Cavour added, "we have made history," Mazzini "we are beaten." But when the fighting began, when, in spite of his previsions, the enthusiasm swept through the land, and for a moment Louis Napoleon was, next to the king and Garibaldi, the hero of his countrymen, he could not hold back. Be it right or wrong, the best must be made of the war; it might yet, in the end, make Italy. Modena and Parma, Romagna and Tuscany had driven out their princes and declared for Victor Emmanuel's rule. While the armies were winning Lombardy and Venetia, he wished to see the popular forces overrun all the Centre and make an end of the Temporal Power. He appealed to his friends at Naples to revolutionise the South, though he urged that they should not annex themselves to Piedmont, while the war lasted. After Solferino he was very hopeful. "The Austrian domination in Italy," he said, "is at an end."

Suddenly came the great betrayal of Villafranca. Louis Napoleon, afraid of defeat in Venetia, afraid of an attack from Prussia, repentant of his promises to Cavour, made peace with Austria, and abandoned Venetia to the enemy and Central Italy to the fugitive princes. Mazzini took credit for prophesying it; and what came of the Emperor's timidity and the real difficulties of the situation, he regarded as the pre-determined treachery of Plombières. Relying again on his imperfect private information, he thought he had discovered an understanding between France and Russia to partition Europe into spheres of influence, and that Villafranca was a prelude to a triple alliance of the three Empires. He fulminated against "the European coup d'état"; he appealed to English fears, and preached a league of England, Prussia, and the smaller states in defence of Italian freedom. At home he urged a truce to party feeling and the completing of the work in despite of France and Austria. He voiced the feeling of the country. Cavour had resigned in hot anger at the Emperor's desertion; but his influence was still very powerful, and he and the King and the men, who were at the head of affairs at Florence and Modena, were no less determined than the democrats that at least Central Italy should be saved. All through the autumn their obstinate stand baffled the Emperor's half-hearted veto, and pushed on the feeble men, who now held office at Turin. The key of the position was at Florence, and Ricasoli, the stark Tuscan baron, who was practically dictator there, believed with a faith as fearless as Mazzini's own that Italian Unity, pregnant with mighty issues for the world, was written in the decrees of God. He too detested Napoleon, and was determined not to flinch for all his threats.

Mazzini hurried to Florence, and arrived there early in August. The Piedmontese government, to its shame, had excluded the greatest of living Italians from the amnesty, which it granted at the beginning of the war; but Ricasoli allowed Mazzini to remain unmolested, on his parole that his presence at Florence should not be publicly known. There was not a little in common between the two men,—both stainless in their private lives, brave, honest, single-minded patriots. They were, indeed, too uncompromising to work together; but they sincerely respected each other, and Ricasoli had none of the narrowness, that made the Turin statesmen shrink from contact with a democrat. Mazzini's policy was the same as it had been during the war. The people must make the movement as far as possible their own. He addressed to them a rhapsodical appeal to nerve themselves for the great work. "You are called," he said, "to a task like the tasks of God, the creation of a people." The free provinces of the Centre must hold fast to their freedom. Louis Napoleon, he knew, could not enforce his veto; the Powers would accept accomplished facts; the danger of an Austrian attack he said little of. At heart, though, he knew that the perils were thicker than he publicly owned, and he confessed in private letters that "the position was more than difficult," that, if the suggested Congress of the Powers met and declared in favour of the exiled princes, Italy could only make an ineffectual "protest in action." He almost hoped that Napoleon would use force after all, and that a war with France would come to simplify the situation.

With a good deal of hesitation, he was prepared to support annexation to Piedmont. He promised to foment no republican agitation, so long as the royalists marched towards Unity; and he wrote the King an irritating but dignified appeal to have done with the subserviency to France and bid openly for the crown of Italy. "The day you speak this language," he said, "parties will disappear; there will be only two living forces in Italy,—the People and yourself." He does not seem however to have really expected to win him. "The King," he wrote privately in reference to the letter, "is wavering and weak, but on him I did not reckon." Victor Emmanuel appears, though, to have read the appeal and taken it to heart, and perhaps it had its influence on the events that followed. Mazzini's supreme aim was to spread the movement for Unity. If the government would not act, the people must do the work themselves. He wanted to make Tuscany and Romagna the base for an invasion of the Pope's remaining territory; and then—onward to Naples and the South. The hope was shared by all the democrats and many of the moderates; but with Mazzini it meant something even more than Unity. It meant the triumph of religious liberty at Rome, the downfall of "the Vicar of the Genius of Evil," the chance that on the wreck of the Papacy Rome would send forth the gospel of the new religion. "The liberty of Rome," he wrote, "is the liberty of the world. If Rome revolts, she must proclaim the victory of God over Idols, of eternal Truth over Falsehood, the inviolability of the human conscience." He urged his English and German friends to stir public opinion against the French occupation of Rome, and put pressure on Napoleon in the name of the principle of non-intervention.

Meanwhile he sent his agents to prepare a Sicilian rising, and agitated feverishly for an advance of Garibaldi and the troops of the Central States into Umbria, which the Papal volunteers had recovered from the nationalists. He had thoughts of leading the invasion himself, but he feared that his name "would frighten the mass of the people," and he humoured Garibaldi by promising to make him the hero of the movement and "abdicating my own individuality, which is the easiest part." He won Farini, the dictator of Modena, once a member of Young Italy, to countenance the raid. He tried to win Ricasoli, but Ricasoli, though he had threatened to join hands with Mazzini rather than let Tuscany lose its freedom, knew that the dangers of a forward movement were too great at present, that if the Pope were attacked, the outcry of Catholic Europe would compel Napoleon to withdraw his indispensable, however irritating, patronage, and that Italy would find herself caught in a hopeless single-handed fight with Austria. His own strong will and the King's common-sense stopped Garibaldi's projects. Mazzini, ignorant of the real position, underrated the difficulties in the way; he never realised the strength of Catholic opinion, he thought that Austria was not in a position to fight, or that, if she did, it meant an uprising of all Italy and her eventual defeat. He charged the King's veto to mere truckling to Napoleon. But he felt his own powerlessness. He was incensed by the harshness, with which the government had treated some of his friends, by the intolerance that drove himself to live in hiding. "To be a prisoner among our own people is too much to bear." "I have never," he wrote, "felt so wretched and worn out in mind and soul as at certain moments now." Ricasoli intimated that he must leave Tuscany, and hopeless of doing any good there, he left for Lugano and returned to England at the end of the year.

His ideas had passed to men more competent to execute them. In January Cavour was again prime minister, resolute to have Unity with Rome for the capital, prepared, if the Emperor deserted him, to attack Austria, rouse Hungary in her rear, and, so he hoped in sanguine moments, "go to Vienna." But he knew how heavy was the stake, and he would keep the Emperor's protection if he could. When he found that Napoleon would guarantee the annexation of the free provinces at the price of Nice and Savoy, he sadly and reluctantly consented to the humiliating bargain. Mazzini read him by his despatches, and knew nothing of his real ambitions. He thought that the premier was opposed to Unity, even to the annexation of Tuscany, that he clung to the French alliance to safeguard himself from democracy at home. He was indignant at the cession of Savoy, bartered without reference to the wishes of its people, still more at the desertion of Italian Nice. He was eager to drive from office the man, on whom depended the attainment of his hopes. He was right, however, in thinking that Cavour could not initiate the revolution in the South, that the government would only follow up what the free lances began; and he was willing to make the road easier for it, by promising, when revolution broke out in the South, to support annexation to Piedmont and leave Rome alone for the present. He was persuaded that Austria would not attack, and that the Bourbon army would dissolve or join the insurgents.

The programme seemed so simple, that he hoped to unite all the democrats upon it. But the saner men among them saw that, as usual, Mazzini had underrated the danger. They knew that it meant harder fighting than he supposed, and they dreaded a repetition of his earlier ill-starred risings. They insisted that, if the volunteers went to Sicily, Garibaldi must lead them and Cavour's moral support must be secured. Mazzini was ready to welcome Garibaldi's leadership, though there was no very cordial feeling between them; but he knew how reluctant Garibaldi was to go, and he refused to let the movement hang on any one man's action. Early in March, while Garibaldi was still hesitating,[26] he sent Rosalino Pilo, a young Sicilian noble, to lead the insurgents in the island, spending every available shilling of his own in the preparations. He was terribly overwrought and excited, for he must have realised something of the tremendous danger and responsibility; and he travelled to Lugano to be nearer the scene of action. There he learnt that his long efforts had had their fruit, that the impatience he had done so much to rouse had borne down Garibaldi's doubts, and that he and his Thousand had started for Sicily. "God be praised," he wrote, "Italy is not dead." When the news came of Garibaldi's victory at Calatafimi, "Sicily saves us," he said, "Italy will be."

On May 7, two days after Garibaldi started, he arrived at Genoa, still compelled to live in hiding, and able to see his friends only by night. Characteristically, he amused himself in leisure moments by taming sparrows, which came to him at meal-times, followed by two hens ("I have always been fond of hens," he writes), "whom I feed after dinner, sometimes with bread and wine to strengthen their constitutions against shocks and adversities." He was not welcomed by the men who had organised the expedition, and he found himself regarded as "a self-intruding man," he who was ever ready to take the risk and give others the honour, who was bracing his frail body only by sheer sense of duty. "God knows," he wrote, "that morally and physically exhausted as I am, everything I do is a real effort." But the suspicion of his motives was inevitable. Absolutely disinterested as he was, ever ready to spend and be spent, he was again playing an ill-informed and equivocal part, thrusting in his unwise projects among the well-laid schemes of shrewder men; and those who had organised Garibaldi's movement with consummate skill—Bertani and Medici and Bixio—felt that his independent action might spoil the game.[27] He clung to his insensate prejudice against Cavour, at a time when Cavour,—with whatever lapse of political morality,—was straining every nerve to back Garibaldi and win all Italy. In his persistent distrust of the government and its connections with the Emperor, he wanted to act independently of though not in hostility to the monarchy, and while he urged annexation in Sicily to checkmate the separatists in the island, he was eager to prevent it on the mainland, and reserved his freedom to preach his own doctrines there. While Garibaldi snatched victory after victory against tremendous odds in Sicily, he was planning a raid into Papal territory, more or less under his own direction; his volunteers, he hoped, would not only free the rest of Central Italy and attack the Bourbons from the North, but would create an influence, independent alike of Cavour and Garibaldi, which might perhaps in the chapter of accidents upset the monarchy, or at least compel it to break with France. He did not suspect how perilous the situation was, that it was still only Louis Napoleon's protection, that stood between Italy and a terrible conflict with Austria in the North and Bourbons in the South, with utter disaster as its almost certain sequel. Ricasoli and, it seems, the King[28] gave some countenance to the raid, for which Mazzini and Bertani were, with Garibaldi's approval, completing the preparations. But Cavour knew that it meant the forfeiture of the Emperor's friendship, and arranged with Bertani, who was throughout lukewarm for the scheme, terms which would at all events save his own credit with the Emperor. The force, which had been destined for the Papal coast, sailed to join Garibaldi in Sicily. Mazzini either did not know of the agreement or refused to be bound by it; he went to Florence, where another body of volunteers was waiting in the neighbourhood ready to cross the frontier, and intended to lead them to a desperate attack on Perugia. Cavour insisted that the men should be disbanded, and Ricasoli, tempering the premier's orders, persuaded them to go to Garibaldi.

Less than a month after, the Piedmontese declared war against the Pope, and Fanti,—Mazzini's follower once in the days of the Savoy raid,—overran such of the Pope's remaining territory as was not occupied by the French. Garibaldi, victoriously advancing from the South, had entered Naples, and save for Rome and its neighbourhood and a small district held by the remnants of the Bourbon army, all the Centre and the South were free. Austria, frightened by Napoleon's threats, had been a passive spectator, while her allies were crushed. Italian Unity was nearly won, but the splendid consummation was dashed by the dread of civil strife. Garibaldi, careless of obstacles, was impatient to march on to Rome; Cavour knew that that meant war with France and would have it at no cost. Crispi and Bertani were trying to organise the South in an opposition to Cavour and his party, that might easily take a republican colour. Mazzini went to Naples, and warmly backed them. He urged Garibaldi to go on, though by preference to Venice rather than to Rome, for he saw now almost as acutely as Cavour did the danger of a conflict with France. If Garibaldi advances, he wrote to England, "we shall have Unity within five months; if he does not, we shall have slumber, then anarchy, then—a little later—Unity." He appealed to the Neapolitans to save the principle of popular sovereignty by conditioning their annexation to Victor Emmanuel's crown with the stipulation that an Italian National Assembly should meet to draw up a new constitution. The cry was a futile and dangerous one, for the mass of the people were impatient for annexation on any terms; and with trouble threatening the young country on every side, it were madness to throw its future into the melting-pot of the constitution-mongers. It was easy to paint Mazzini as an enemy of Unity; and a Neapolitan mob shouted 'death' under the windows of the man, who had given everything for them. Pallavicino, the pro-dictator, Manin's old co-worker and Garibaldi's friend, courteously appealed to him to leave. "Even against your wish," he said, "you divide us." Mazzini refused to waive an Italian's right to live on Italian soil; and he was molested no more. Garibaldi indignantly intervened on his behalf; the King probably protected him. "Leave Mazzini alone," he had said, "if we make Italy, he is powerless; if we cannot, let him do it, and I will be Monsù Savoia and clap my hands for him." But Mazzini was bitterly pained and weary of it all. "I am worn out morally and physically," he wrote; "for myself the only really good thing would be to have unity achieved quickly through Garibaldi, and one year before dying of Walham Green[29] or Eastbourne, long silences, a few affectionate words to smooth the ways, plenty of sea-gulls, and sad dozing." Early in November, after a friendly interview with Garibaldi, at which they laid their schemes for winning Rome and Venice, he left Naples.

Chapter XI
For Venice
1861-1866. Aetat 56-61.

Policy after 1860—Disappointment in Italy—Rome and Venice—Attitude towards the monarchy—Life in England—the Greco plot—American and Irish politics—Mazzini and Garibaldi—Overtures from Victor Emmanuel—The war of 1866.

Mazzini's remaining life is one of melancholy pathos. He could not rest, till Unity was accomplished. Aged and often very ill and suffering, longing for quiet and literature, he braced his frail body and unhappy soul to the fret and weariness and disillusioning of politics. Could one be sure that it profited country or mankind, one would rest content, knowing that he had chosen the hard path and never flinched. But it was—at all events in the near results—a grievous waste. Those splendid faculties were worn, as he would sometimes own himself, in rolling the stone of Sisyphus. Had he given these years to the book on religion, that he ever kept in mind, to building up "the church of the precursors," he might perhaps have done a thing yet greater than the making of Italy. His political work henceforth was mostly thrown away; for, as he said, his star was the Dog, and his business "to bark, generally without being heard." Gloriously right in his ideals, he marred it all by ignorance of facts. His nearer vision failed in blinding partisanship, in his obdurate hatred of Louis Napoleon and suspicion of the Italian statesmen. He could not see that the royalists were aiming at Unity almost as seriously and more wisely than himself, that Louis Napoleon wished to be his country's friend, and that the Emperor's hesitations and backslidings were concessions to the relentless pressure of Catholic opinion. He could not escape from his own past, he had a feverish, unreasoned craving for a single form of action, he could not see that conspiracy and insurrection, which had their justification and chance of success twenty years ago, had neither now. It is perhaps never easy for one man to be both idealist and statesman,—for Mazzini, with his passion and inflexibility, least of all. He could not leave it to other men to achieve his ideals in their own way. He had a dangerous belief that he had "the instinct of the situation," and would never own in politics that others might have their fragment of the truth. This obstinate rebellion—covert or open—against the verdict of his countrymen,—was it the heroism of the one righteous man, or was it, as one of his old friends called it, "a huge egotistical presumption?" Or was it rather the noble error of one, who, with his mind fixed on the highest, scorns the high? Who shall say, who does best service for humanity, he who seeks the small attainable, or he who 'heaven's success finds or earth's failure?'

Mazzini knew that he had failed in the near results. He was a disappointed man. He had indeed the pride that his utopia had come so near accomplishment. But it had come by another way than that which he had marked for it, it had fallen very short of what he looked for. He had idealised his country in his mighty love, till disillusion was inevitable. "I saw," he wrote, "a great void in Europe, a void of any community of belief or of faith, and therefore of initiative and worship of duty and solemn moral principles, of great ideas and potent action for the classes which produce most and yet which are most wretched; and I thought that Italy would rise and save Europe, and, soon as it breathed its own new life, would say to itself and others, 'I will fill that void.'" "Little it matters to me," he wrote to "Daniel Stern," "that Italy, a territory of so many square leagues, eats its corn and cabbages cheaper; little I care for Rome, if a great European initiative is not to issue from it. What I do care for is that Italy shall be great and good, moral and virtuous, that she comes to fulfil a mission in the world." So he had dreamed, and woke to find it but a dream. In bitter exaggeration he reproached his countrymen for being "less than their fathers and their destinies." In his favourite phrase, new Italy had found its inspiration not in Dante but in Macchiavelli. There was no high principle, no true religion, no sense of freedom's dignity. His criticism was partly a true one. The feeble statesmen, who succeeded Cavour and Ricasoli, opportunists almost all, some of them mere tricksters, may well have roused his anger and contempt. The country had become the hunting-ground of office-hunters and speculators, who, as Giuditta Sidoli said, "have made Italy and now are eating it." The antagonism of North and South, the jealousy of Piedmont, the brigandage, the financial chaos were symptoms of a dangerous discontent. Few cared for the great moral hopes, the "living apostolate" of Italy. But Mazzini did not understand the value of the sane, wholesome patriotism, that had made Italy in its own way, or see how great the step had been, that had brought the country political and social freedom. In his absorption in the political question, he paid at this time small attention to the social changes that were going on; he never alludes to the great cooperative movement, that was beginning in Italy in these years.

But beyond all this, Unity was not complete, and its completion was the one thing necessary. The triumph of nationality, the cause of morality and religion, alike in Italy and Europe, depended, he believed, on the winning of Rome and Venice. "I have to kill myself with work," he wrote, "for Venice, for Rome, for the republic, in order to make the instrument." The winning of Rome meant the downfall of the Papacy, the triumph of liberty of conscience, the dawn of a new religion. The winning of Venetia meant the break-up of the Austrian Empire, and a great reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, in which Italy would prove her mission as the "guide of oppressed nationalities." "Providence," he said, "has written that the function of initiative is a necessary condition of the life of Italy. We cannot live without a European life; if we free ourselves, we must free others. We must be great or perish." For Rome he was willing to wait. Wiser than Garibaldi, he saw that any attempt to win it by force meant war at once with France and Austria, and he knew that that meant ruin. His Roman policy was at bottom that of the Piedmontese statesmen,—to secure the withdrawal of the French by the force of public opinion. He urged that there should be "a temperate but weighty remonstrance" from parliament, backed by half a million Italian signatures. He prompted petitions in England to ask the government to use its influence in the same direction,—a spur that Lord John Russell hardly needed. But he rightly saw that Venice must take precedence. Italy, he thought, was strong enough to fight Austria alone, and he made extravagant calculations as to their relative military strength. Only there must be no French alliance, no more paltering with the false prophet of nationality. Cavour and his successors, except for brief backslidings, were at one with him in the resolve never to call in again the dangerous help of France. But he would not believe this, and he hoped both to make the French alliance impossible and force the government into war with Austria, by fomenting a rising in Venetia or encouraging volunteers under Garibaldi to attack it. Italy's allies must be the nationalities of the East, which had a common interest with her in breaking up the Austrian Empire,—an idea which he shared with the King and Cavour and others of the Italian statesmen. If Venetia and the Balkan countries rose, Hungary would follow, and "war with Austria would dissolve the Empire in twenty days." With Austria, Turkey would go too, for the two despotisms, he held, must stand or fall together. The Polish rising of 1863 made him still more impatient. His love of "poor, sacred Poland" was strong as in the days of Young Europe. Forgetting that a resuscitated Poland was bound to add its weight to the Catholic and anti-Italian coalition, he reproached his countrymen for their indifference to the people, which had sent its sons to fight for Italy; and he tried to charter a steamer to take a cargo of arms to a Lithuanian port. He industriously encouraged the pro-Polish movement in England, and talked of organising a Hyde Park meeting.

At home, he was still for some years yet willing to suspend any open republican agitation. He indeed attacked the government with increasing acerbity; he fretted at its delays, he was irritated by the libels of the royalist press. But though he held the monarchy to be the source of all the trouble, he would not openly declare against it. He kept up a secret republican propagandism in view of future possibilities, but so long as there was any hope that the monarchy would go to Venice and Rome, he would not harass it by a barren agitation. He knew in fact, that, so long as that hope remained, the "ice-wall" of popular timidity made the republic impossible, and he was angrily attacked by the intransigents for his saner view. He was anxious for the present even to postpone any agitation for reform, though he pleaded insistently that, when the work of unity was done, a Constituent Parliament should meet to draw up a "national pact," which was apparently to be an ill-defined constitution, temporarily admitting a democratic monarchy, and defining the social duties of the country and the respective functions of state and local bodies. He had a bold domestic programme, whose chief articles were a universal volunteer system, the nationalisation of railways, mines, church lands, and "some great industrial undertakings," state encouragement for productive cooperative societies, and a reorganisation of local government on a basis of some twelve large "regions" and big, amalgamated communes.

Meanwhile, save for an occasional visit to Switzerland, he was living in England, where he returned after leaving Naples at the end of 1860. Here in new lodgings at 2 Onslow Terrace, Brompton, he returned to the old life of the fifties. The days were spent in the weary round of letter-writing, but it was often a physical torture now, and failing eyesight made it impossible to go on after dark. In the evening he had two hours' reading, then went to the Stansfelds' neighbouring house in Thurlow Square, to return home at eleven and read his letters and the Italian papers. His personal life was more and more a struggle with failing health. Earlier attacks he had conquered by force of will. "Make an effort of will and be well; I have often successfully done so," he wrote once to a friend; and again, "I hear that you are rather unwell. Don't. It is absurd to be ill, while nations are struggling for liberty." He had always scorned medicine and doctors, and had an especial detestation for "that infernal irony of homæopathy, for which Hahnemann must atone somehow, somewhere." But now he had often to succumb to an internal trouble, which brought acute pain and sometimes prostrated him. He no doubt smoked too much, and a few years after this Lloyd Garrison tried in vain to break him off the habit. Rheumatism made him "stiff like an English statesman." He could not eat his landlady's ill-cooked dinners, and hid the untouched food rather than hurt her feelings. Now and again he would feel he had "more than ever the ardour of a young man with all the obstinacy of an old one"; more often he knew that work was killing him, and he had a recurring presentiment that he would not live through each new year. He had financial troubles again to worry him. His small annuity was not enough to meet his heavy doctor's bills, and a royalty, which he had been receiving for the collected edition of his writings, failed through the unwillingness or inability to pay of his Milanese publisher. A subscription was raised for him in Italy, but it was passed on to his Venetian fund, and probably most of the £500, that were collected for him in England in 1866, went to public purposes. Serene and cheerful as ever on the outside, he had moods of great depression. "I am sick of men and things," he wrote, "and long for a desperate peace." "Morally," he writes to "Daniel Stern," with whom he began a steady correspondence at this time, "I am always the same, given up to work without enthusiasm, from a sense of duty; expecting nothing, hoping for nothing in the scrap of individual life left me; loving and recognising those I love,[30] not for the joy but for the sorrow they can give me; believing, as in early youth, in the future I have dreamed of for Italy and the world; sick at the present, but resigned and calm, if people don't talk too much of materialist pantheism or tactics or happiness or French music." When Lincoln was assassinated, he contrasted sadly with himself the man who died in the knowledge that his cause had triumphed.

His literary work at this time was unimportant, for politics and sickness used up his strength; but his longings went, as ever, to a life of study. "I should like," he wrote, "to drag myself from library to library, from one monastic archives to another, to unearth some lines of a great forgotten thinker, Joachim for instance." Mystical writers, like Joachim and Eckhart, attracted him more strongly than ever; and he seems to have joined an esoteric society in Italy, which had Dante for its spiritual chief. Modern spiritualism, however, only irritated him; "when men have ceased to believe in God," he said, "God pays them out by making them believe in Cagliostro or table-turning."

His admiration of English life was stronger than ever. He held up for Italian imitation its freedom of life and thought, notwithstanding his suspicions that his letters still ran the risk of being tampered with in the English Post-Office. He had words of praise even for the monarchy and aristocracy, but predicted that the growing power of financial magnates would prove the death of both. It was about this time that he became again a prominent figure in English politics. A Calabrian, named Greco, attempted to assassinate Louis Napoleon. Mazzini had had no part in or knowledge of the plot; but he had known Greco in the past, and letters from him were found on the assassin. The French police caught at the opportunity to bring odium on him and inculpate Stansfeld, whose name and address were found in one of his letters. Without any particle of evidence to connect the letters with the plot, the French court condemned Mazzini; and the Tories and Irish in the House of Commons gleefully used the handle given them to discredit his English friend. Stansfeld, who was a member of the government, resigned office rather than embarrass his colleagues, but the insincerity of the attack was as clear as its audacious shamelessness. The incident had its sequel of comedy, when Disraeli, who had been foremost in denouncing the imagined sympathy with assassination, was confronted with a Revolutionary Epick of his own youthful days, in which he had blessed "the regicidal steel."

Mazzini keenly watched the American Civil War. He had for many years felt intensely about slavery, and he now gave his sympathy and subscription to the London Emancipation Society, which was enlisting English sympathy for the North. "I believe," he wrote to his friend, Mr W. Malleson, who was its Secretary, "that in these times of ours there are three things, against which a man ought to protest before dying, if he wants to die in peace with his own conscience: slavery—capital punishment—and the actual either narrow or hypocritical condition of the religious question." "Abolition," he wrote to Mr Moncure Conway, "is the religious consecration of your battles." But he was not equally enthusiastic for the Union. In curious inconsistency with his usual preference for big nations, he thought that America was "wide enough for two or three eventual sisterly confederations." When the war was over, he implored the Americans not to impair their victory by refusing the vote to the negroes, though they should see that education went hand in hand with it. Again, as in 1854, he was eager that America should come into world politics, and help to build up the future Europe of nationality and the republic. "You," he said, "have become a leading nation. You may act as such. In the great battle which is fought throughout the world between right and wrong, justice and arbitrary rule, equality and privilege, duty and egotism, republic and monarchy, truth and lies, God and idols, your part is marked; you must accept it." He hoped that they would upset Napoleon's Mexican scheme, which meant "Imperialism at their own door"; at the time of the suggested Anglo-French intervention, when American feeling was bitter against England, he wrote, "war with England would be a crime and a fault; war for Mexico a holy thing." Shortly before Lincoln's assassination, he and Ledru Rollin and Karl Blind wrote to the President, urging the danger to the Union that threatened from Mexico, and suggesting a cooperation with the democrats of Europe, that would weaken or upset Napoleon. Apparently the plan was that the Americans should invade Mexico, while their unofficial allies stirred a republican movement in France or organised an attack on Rome. Lincoln seems to have listened to the suggestion not unfavourably. When the Northern army disbanded after the war, Mazzini would have liked to see the men go as volunteers to aid the Mexicans, and the government "whisper" that it would follow. "It would have done more than anything towards the fraternisation of North and South, and the negroes would have won then, undisputed, the right to the suffrage."

A few years later, he was much concerned in the fate of the Fenian prisoners. "I am feeling," he writes, "between the unhappy and the furious about the Fenians condemned. To-day, I think, is the Queen's birthday. Does she read a newspaper? Cannot she find a womanly feeling in her heart and ask the Cabinet to commute the punishment? In point of fact, the killing of these men will prove an absolute fault [mistake]. Burke will be the Robert Emmet of 1867. A feeling of revenge will rekindle the energy of the discouraged Fenians. The dream will become, through martyrdom, a sort of religion. But that is not my ground. It is the legal murder reenacted against a thought, a thought which ought to be refuted, destroyed by thought only. Burke and others are genuine believers in Irish nationality. I think they are philosophically and politically wrong; but are we to refute a philosophical error with hanging?" After their reprieve he wrote, "You have been spared the infamy of Burke's execution. I am glad of it; I have a weakness for England, and did not like the shame for her."

Mazzini's active political work in these years was given almost wholly to the winning of Venetia. Before he left Naples in 1860, he and Garibaldi had agreed to agitate for an attack on either Venetia or Rome in the following year. But the jealousy, that was always latent between the two, prevented any cordial cooperation. The fault was very little on Mazzini's side. He must have felt it, that Garibaldi, whose work for the country was so small beside his own, had eclipsed himself in the nation's imagination; but he was ever ready to let him take the honour and keep himself in the background. Once get Garibaldi with the volunteers, he said, "and he may send me to the devil the day after." But Garibaldi had always some grievance to nurse, and he had not forgotten the friction at Rome in 1849. Mazzini's theories irritated him, and he dubbed him "the great doctrinaire." The most easily led of men, "weak beyond expression," as Mazzini truly said of him, he hated it to be thought that he was under anybody's influence; and Mazzini complained with cause that "if Garibaldi has to choose between two proposals, he is sure to accept the one that isn't mine." The mischief-makers, who always clustered round the hermit of Caprera, did their best to feed his prejudices. And though the two men were both burning to free Venice and Rome, they had radical differences as to the means. Garibaldi believed in the King; Mazzini's faith in him was very limited. Garibaldi wanted to have an understanding with the government; Mazzini generally wished to act independently. He saw that the patriots must concentrate on the freeing of Venice; Garibaldi was ever running back to his cherished design of marching to Rome, or, if he temporarily abandoned it, he leaned to some knight-errant enterprise in Eastern Europe, where he could attack Austria from the rear.

Meanwhile Minghetti and the less statesmanlike section of the Moderates,—a tepid, craven, weak-principled crew,—wanted to stamp out the democratic agitation; and it was left comparatively unmolested, thanks only to the bigger outlook of Ricasoli, who had become premier after Cavour's death. Had Ricasoli remained in office, he would have amnestied Mazzini from the sentence of 1857; and the greatest of living Italians would have been no longer a felon in his own country. But Ricasoli was driven from office by a cabal; and Rattazzi, who succeeded him, was too much under bond to Louis Napoleon to pardon the Emperor's enemy. Rattazzi began a double game with Garibaldi, which ended, as Mazzini had predicted, in "a solemn mystification" and the catastrophe of Aspromonte. Mazzini was opposed to the whole foolhardy business, and among his English friends condemned it in strong language; but apparently he helped to collect funds for Garibaldi, and when once Garibaldi took up the cry of "Rome or Death," he thought it his duty to help. The day after the volunteers crossed from Sicily on the tragi-comic march for Rome, he left London to join them. He had got as far as Lugano, when he heard that Italian soldiers had fired on them, and that Garibaldi lay stricken by an Italian bullet. His anguish at the pity of it all brought on delirium. The ghosts of martyr-patriots reproached him, as they had done in 1836; he cried that Garibaldi was dead, and his friends could not quiet his ravings. He recovered quickly, but broke into passionate denunciation of the government, scourging the monarchy as impotent and unwilling to make Italy, and threatening to raise the republican flag again.

The threat was forgotten, as he regained his calmness, and he returned to his old plan of a volunteer movement on Venetia, which the government would be compelled to follow. He was "silently raging at poor, brave Poland being left alone in the field," and hoped that an attack on Austria would save her. It was at this juncture,—in the spring of 1863,—that he received strange overtures for alliance from the King. The two men had always had a certain fascination for each other. Victor Emmanuel shared Mazzini's impatience to win Venetia, his hatred of Austria; he had something of the great agitator's wish to see the nationalities of Eastern Europe free. Both were irritated by the feeble Minghetti ministry, which had come into office after Aspromonte, half-hearted in its nationalist aspirations, dreading the democratic forces, which Cavour would have taken in hand and guided. The fellow-conspirators bargained hard, but, after months of tedious negotiation, they seem to have agreed that Mazzini should foment a rising in Venetia and waive meanwhile any republican movement, that the King should make his government supply arms to the insurgents and eventually declare war, while both would encourage a rising in Hungary or Galicia. It was impossible, however, to give effect to the alliance. The fact of the negotiations leaked out more or less. The Greco plot, though probably few believed that Mazzini was an accomplice, made it difficult for the King to treat with him. The ministers, morbidly afraid of any contact with the revolutionaries, and possibly aware that Mazzini had made their dismissal a condition of his cooperation, remonstrated; and indeed it shows the King's and Mazzini's small respect for parliamentary government that the personal treaty was attempted at all. The King was irritated at Mazzini's exigencies, and began to transfer his attentions to Garibaldi. Garibaldi at this moment (April 1864) was paying a long promised visit to England, where he had a mythical prestige almost as great as in his own country. As usual he was buffeted by the various influences that sought to capture him. The English Radicals wanted to use him for a series of popular demonstrations; Palmerston laid his schemes to keep him quiet in the hands of hosts, like the Duke of Sutherland and Charles Seely, the member for Lincoln, who would be responsible for his discreet behaviour. Victor Emmanuel, while still negotiating fitfully with Mazzini, sent his agents to persuade him to head a rising in Galicia; Mazzini wanted him for the Venetian movement. The worthy, puzzled man tried to please everybody, provided that he appeared to be managed by nobody. Mazzini wrote to him to begin his tour in the provinces at once, before he went to London; and met him, soon after he arrived, at Mr Seely's house in the Isle of Wight. There was a cordial reconciliation, and Mazzini thought he had won Garibaldi to his own scheme. At a breakfast given by Alexander Herzen, the one rich man among the exiles, at his house at Teddington, Garibaldi spoke of Mazzini as the counsellor of his youth and constant friend. The incident alarmed the English government, and their contemptible and dishonorable manœuvres secured Garibaldi's departure. Mazzini still supposed that Garibaldi was faithful to his scheme, and went to Lugano to forward the preparations for the Venetian insurrection.

Garibaldi, however, though he had given Mazzini no hint of his change of mind, had accepted the King's plan. The Duke of Sutherland's yacht took him to Ischia, where he was preparing to sail to the East, when the secret was given to the world; and the King, frightened by the publicity, hastily broke from the plot. Mazzini, though he tried to persuade Garibaldi to visit England again and make his abandoned provincial tour ("Newcastle is the best place"), was justly incensed at him and the King for their want of candour. He suspected, with good reason, that the ministry had fallen in with the Galician scheme, for the sake of getting Garibaldi out of the country and perhaps sending him to his death. He was "sick at heart of the equivocal position," and determined to "go on in a clearer path." Events helped to bring him back to frank hostility towards the government. The September Convention, most dishonouring and impolitic of treaties, was concluded, and it seemed to mark, as in the letter it did, a renunciation of the claims to Rome. He passionately denounced the surrender, the "policy of subterfuge and crooked ways," which threatened to founder Italy. "I prefer half a century of slavery to a national lie," he wrote. He was hoaxed into believing that the government had offered France a large slice of Piedmont to buy her acquiescence in any winning of Venice or Rome. He had a bitter quarrel with Crispi, who was fast sliding down the decline of respectability. Crispi had attacked him in the Chamber, as dividing the country by his republicanism. Mazzini wasted words in retorting on the opportunist, who yesterday had been most intransigent of republicans, and was now parading his new-found faith in the monarchy. He was inclined to break the slender threads, that connected him with the parliamentary Left, "who had laid aside their old democratic ardour to assume the icy demeanour of English members of parliament." But he still hesitated at any complete rupture with the monarchy, so long as any hope remained that the government would attack Austria.

It was doing better than he knew. The outcry at the September Convention had wrecked Minghetti's ministry, and under the brave and honest La Marmora there was some chance of going forward. The negotiations for the Prussian alliance were pushed on, and early in April 1866 the treaty was signed. Mazzini had preached co-operation with Germany in 1851 and 1861, but now he denounced the alliance with "men who represented despotism," an alliance which, he imagined, implied the abandonment of the claims to the Tyrol. He had information, which again was almost certainly inaccurate, as to the arrangement of Biarritz, and "knew from positive information" that Italy had promised to cede Sardinia and part of Piedmont to France, as the price of Napoleon's help. Much, however, as he disliked the diplomacy, still it was a war for Venice, and he urged his followers to join the volunteers. If the war ended in victory, they could then march on to Rome. He had his plan of operations for the war,—to mask the Quadrilateral, and push on with the main body of the army to Vienna, while the volunteers landed in Istria and tried to rouse the Slavs. Whether the plan was original or not, it was almost identical with one, which had been favoured by Ricasoli, now again premier, by Cialdini, one of the two Italian commanders, and probably by Bismarck, and which was rejected, or at least mutilated, only by La Marmora's opposition.

All the world had expected to see the Italians easily victorious. But again, as in 1848, their chance was spoilt by incompetent generalship. The army was defeated at Custozza, the fleet at Lissa; Garibaldi and the volunteers had little of the spirit of 1860, and were paralysed in the Tyrol. Equally unexpectedly, the Prussians on their side had triumphed swiftly and conclusively; and Napoleon, afraid that the unforeseen events would nip his schemes, stepped in with a message that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to himself and that he would hand it over to Italy, if peace were made. It was a bitter and humiliating end,—to lay down arms under the shadow of defeat, to abandon the Tyrol and Istria, to have Venetia not by right of conquest but by the condescension of a detested patron. Mazzini did not know how unwillingly the government had bowed to a fate, which the military position made inevitable. To him it seemed mere pusillanimity, pregnant with "dishonour and ruin." "It is my lot," he sadly wrote, "to consume my last days in the grief, supreme to one who really loves, of seeing the thing, one loves most, inferior to its mission."

Chapter XII
The Last Years
1866-1872. Aetat 61-66

The Republican Alliance—Life at Lugano—Mentana—Republican movement in 1868-70—Intrigue with Bismarck—Imprisonment at Gaeta, and release—Attack on the International—Death.

In his ignorance of the facts, he charged it all to the monarchy. The nation had been sacrificed to the interests of a dynasty. Defeat and dishonour came of the equivocations, that sprang from the "primal falsehood" of royalty. The bad government and coercion (which, in fact, was mild enough), the huge army and civil service and police, the consequent financial chaos—all were its fruit. He disclaimed that it was the republic for its own sake that he wanted now, for its advent was only the question of a few years more or less, and its triumph might be left to time. But dishonour was the "gangrene of a nation," and only the republic could cure that. Only the republic could win Rome, gather Istria and the Tyrol to the fold, and stretch a hand to the struggling nationalities of the East. But, if the republic came, it must be as a great "moralising education, to change men from serfs to citizens, and make them conscious of their mission, their strength and dignity." The republic must not mean revenge, or spoliation, or repudiation of debt, or violent anti-clericalism; and he was already beginning his crusade against Bakounine and the rough socialism, which was making some headway in the country.

He had promised that if he resumed his republican agitation, he would announce it frankly beforehand, and he did so now. Henceforth he gave it all his failing strength. Hopeless as their cause probably was at the best, the republicans had a strength now, which they had not had for fifteen years. The shame of Custozza and Lissa lay heavy on the nation, and the disillusioning had shaken faith in men and institutions. The sense of national dishonour maddened; civil war was often on men's lips; the King's prestige was foundering under the load of private vice and military failure. There was a mass of sullen, unformulated discontent, ready to find its way into socialist or republican channels. And though men were slow to follow Mazzini into his conspiracies, his long years of self-sacrificing labour, the mystery that wrapped the exile and conspirator, had given him a vast, almost mythical fascination for his countrymen. Forty thousand persons had signed the petition for his amnesty. Messina elected him time after time for its deputy, to have the election quashed as often by the Moderates in the Chamber. There was an angry feeling everywhere at the senseless intolerance, and the deputies of the Left did their best to bring the majority to reason. "While you are still in time," said a recent premier of Italy, "prevent Mazzini from having to close his eyes in a foreign land."

When at last he was amnestied at the beginning of the war, he refused to accept it as an act of grace or take his seat as deputy, and returned to Lugano. Much of his time henceforth was spent there with his friends, Giuseppe Nathan and his wife Sarah, "the best Italian friend I have, one of the best women I know," who nursed him in the attacks of illness, which came with ever greater frequency. Here he would watch "the beautiful calm-lulling lake, the beautiful, solemn, hopeful-death-teaching sunsets." When he was well, he kept to the habits of his English life, writing all day, delighting his friends in the evening with his brilliant talk. His conspiracies often took him to Genoa, where he lived in hiding in the house of a working family, from whose windows in the Salita di Oregina he had a superb view of the city and the Riviera. He nearly betrayed himself once by shouting from his window at a boy who was torturing a grasshopper. He kept in close touch with his English friends and English life. At Lugano he regularly read "the good, dry Spectator and the would-be wicked, never concluding Saturday Review." He made a custom of always returning to England to spend New Year's Day with the Stansfelds or others of their family, crossing the Alps in mid-winter at the peril of his health. He had painfully aged. His face had sunk and wore a deathly pallor; the thick, black hair was thin and grey. William Lloyd Garrison, seeing him after an interval of twenty-one years, sadly noted the change, though "the same dark, lustrous eyes" remained, "the same classical features, the same grand intellect, the same lofty and indomitable spirit, the same combination of true modesty and heroic assertion, of exceeding benignity and inspirational power." Work told heavily upon him now. Writing made him giddy, and his characters begin to lose their firmness. He was "living as if in a whirlwind, something like Paolo without Francesca, tired, worn out, longing for rest." But he would not slacken. "I am bound to those, whom I have organised for a purpose. I must, before I die, proclaim the republic in Italy."

While he was organising his "Republican Alliance," losing himself in the huge work of detail which all came to so little, the impatience in Italy was breaking down the precautions of the government. Ricasoli had been driven from office by his own maladroitness and Garibaldi's wild, aimless opposition. Rattazzi, the intriguer of 1862, came back to power, and began the double play, that was only too likely to lead to another Aspromonte. There is no need here to analyse the obscure and sordid story of his balancings between the Italian democrats and France. Garibaldi was impatient to win Rome, and cared comparatively little now whether it were in the name of monarchy or republic. His plan was to lead a raid, with or without the connivance of the government, into the small territory that still belonged to the Pope, meet and defeat the Papal mercenaries, and enter Rome. With Mazzini the republic was now a more vital thing than Unity. Only from a republican Rome could Italy perform her civilising mission to the world. "If Rome is to be annexed like the rest," he wrote, "I would rather it belonged to the Pope another three years." He disliked Garibaldi's scheme; he was not sanguine of its success; if it did succeed, it meant that the monarchy would go to Rome and the Pope stay there. He wished to see the Romans rise themselves and pronounce for a republic, confident that, if they did so, Italy would echo the republican cry, and the Pope would have to go. Sometimes, however, despairing of his own party, he was willing to compromise; and when at last Garibaldi started on his raid, and the government backed him, risking hostilities with France rather than have civil war, he forgot everything else in the hope of winning Rome, and urged his followers to join the raiders. Probably, if he had not been prostrated by illness, he would have gone himself. When Garibaldi's incapacity was only too apparent, and the French troops landed again for the defence of Rome, he saw that the volunteers were advancing into a trap, and implored Garibaldi to retire to Naples, raise the flag of revolution, and collect forces for another and more hopeful attack. Garibaldi, marching obstinately to defeat, was in no temper to listen to anybody, to Mazzini least of all. The mischief-makers had persuaded him that Mazzini was tampering with his men. There was no particle of truth in it, but the conviction entered Garibaldi's mind and never left it, while Mazzini lived.

The volunteers went to their doom at Mentana. Rattazzi, who at the last rose above himself and would have marched to Rome but for the King's veto, had resigned some weeks before. Menabrea, who succeeded him, had been compelled by public opinion to occupy a part of the Pope's territory; but when the French landed, he withdrew the troops, rather than face war with France. The country writhed in its rage at the French insult, and naturally turned its resentment against the crown. Juries acquitted republican papers; the press lampooned the King. Some of the deputies gave a secret backing to the republican movement; the Friendly Societies, which had always kept more or less in touch with Mazzini, threw themselves into it. Mazzini had a following among the Freemasons, though not one himself, and among the ex-volunteers. Most ominous feature of it all, republicanism gained a large footing in the rank-and-file of the army. Mazzini pushed on impatiently for Rome and the republic. He knew that the Romans themselves were powerless to rise, now that the French were there, and that a volunteer movement had no better chance. The only plan, that could successfully defy the French and capture Rome, was to seize the government,—its army and navy and arsenals,—and make a national crusade with all the resources of the country. The royalists, he thought, would never break with France or attack the Papacy; and indeed the criticism was true of the conservative ministry, which now held office. He was equally hopeless of the middle classes, but he was confident that the people would respond. Especially he trusted to the younger generation and the women of Italy; they alone, he thought, were free from the timid opportunism, which had eaten deep into the rest.

After Mentana he left London again for Lugano to be nearer his work, and was constantly passing backwards and forwards between there and Genoa, finding time among it all to write his great religious apology, the sum of all his teaching, From the Council to God.[31] His following at Genoa was considerable now. When he came there secretly, little patrols of working men with concealed arms would watch along the streets between the station and his lodgings to guard his person from seizure by the police. The Committee sat waiting for him, each man armed with his revolver. One of them has described the meeting. "A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul, the great magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great soul. He advanced with a child's frank courtesy and a divine smile, shaking hands like an Englishman, and addressing each of us by name, as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised; he wore cloth shoes, and a capote, and with his middle, upright stature, he looked like a philosopher, straight from his study, who never dreamed of troubling any police in the world." In the spring of 1869 he was eager for action, despite the failure of a plot, discouraged by himself, among the garrison at Milan. The remonstrances of the government procured his banishment from Switzerland, but he was back again in August, going "more sadly than usual, feeling physically and intellectually weaker and unequal to the task." He was suffering continuously, and confessed to his friends that he shrank from the effort. He was obviously going on from sheer inability to stop more than from any hope of success. "My new plan," he wrote gloomily, "may prove a dream like many others."

In the spring of 1870 he came again to Genoa to arrange the details. The plot broke down like the rest, and at the moment everything was overshadowed by the coming Franco-German war. In common with the great majority of his countrymen, outside the court and government, his sympathies were with Germany. A German victory would avenge Mentana and compel the French to withdraw from Rome. In spite of his denunciation of the Prussian alliance in 1866, he had been for three years past carrying on a desultory intrigue with Bismarck. About the time of Mentana he had sent a note to Bismarck through their go-between. "I do not in the least," it said, "share Count Bismarck's political views; his method of unification does not command my sympathy; but I admire his tenacity and energy and independence towards the foreigner. I believe in German unity and desire it as much as that of my own country. I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it arrogates over Europe." He saw in the intrigue a chance of pushing his own schemes, and at the same time of preventing a Franco-Italian alliance against Germany. He asked Bismarck to send him arms and money, and promised, if he had them, to guarantee him against the hostile combination. Bismarck parleyed with him for a time, as he had parleyed with Garibaldi; and when war was imminent, and he knew that Victor Emmanuel and many of the Italian conservatives were trying again to commit the country to a French alliance, he promised that the arms and money should be sent. Mazzini hastened to accept, promising to attack Rome with the revolutionary forces, and undertaking to respect the wish of the country, should a future Constituent Assembly declare for the monarchy. But Bismarck had learnt now that the danger of the hostile alliance had passed, and the promised help never came. The intrigue marks the last stage in Mazzini's political decline. That he had asked a foreign government to assist in what meant civil war, shows how the long years of conspiracy had distorted his moral vision.

He had intended to use Bismarck's money for a new plot, this time in Sicily. It was a fool's errand, and his friends tried in vain to dissuade him. But the monomania was on him, and he started for the island in disguise. As so often before, he had a traitor in his secrets, a man who with strange inconsistency had nursed him tenderly through an illness, while he was making a living by betraying his plans to the French police.[32] When Mazzini arrived by the Naples steamer at Palermo, he was arrested. He was taken to Gaeta and treated with all possible consideration. The very gaoler took three minutes to turn the noisy keys silently, that he might soften the sense of imprisonment. Here through the loopholes of the massive fortress, where the Bourbons had made their last stand nine years before, he would watch the sea and sky, as he had done at Savona thirty-nine years ago. "The nights," he writes, "are very beautiful; the stars shine with a lustre one only sees in Italy. I love them like sisters, and link them to the future in a thousand ways. If I could choose, I should like to live in absolute solitude, working at my historical book or at some other, just from a feeling of duty, and only wishing to see—for a moment, now and then,—some one I did not know, some poor woman that I could help, some working men I could advise, the doves of Zürich, and nothing else." He smoked indifferent cigars; he read bad translations of Shakespeare and Byron from the prison library, and, for want of better, Tasso's Gerusalemme. He was planning again a book on Byron, and asks for Taine's critique of him in his Littérature anglaise. "Taine is a materialist writer, and certainly won't have an idea that squares with mine; but I am intellectually half-asleep and I reckon on the stimulus of contradiction and the irritation which I shall get out of his book. He has enough perverted intellectual power to wake me up."