Mazzini probably never asked himself what was the ultimate sanction of his code; and, if he had been pushed to it, it is not easy to surmise what answer he would have given. He could hardly have found the sanction in the positive commandment of the Deity, for he held that the will of God was revealed only through humanity, and this transfers the sanction to another ground. Nor, even had he been familiar with them, would he have based the principle on evolutionary arguments,—that altruism is necessary to the race, that that community will survive, which contains the greatest number of self-sacrificing individuals. He would have assented to the facts, but he would probably have said that no theory of heredity or race selection can explain the origin of altruism, which is a personal, conscious, self-generated sense, which therefore cannot come from any 'natural,' unconscious source. Nor, again, would he have said, as a Utilitarian might say, that the life of duty is the highest form of happiness, that there is a sense in which altruism and egoism are identical, because he most tastes fruition, who loses himself in love and work for other men. There is a truth in this, that Mazzini neglected; he sometimes forgot that Christianity was an Evangel, good tidings of great joy,—that, so long as love and enthusiasm and the martyr's passion possess a man, so far as he has attained to the glorious liberty of the children of God, the life of duty is the highest happiness. But he knew only too well that gloom and depression will come, that, when the light fails, duty becomes a stern taskmaster, and that no principle of happiness (in any acceptation of the word) will keep a man always faithful to his mission. And so he would almost certainly have fallen back on the conscience, as the ultimate moral sanction. "Life," he says, "is a march onwards to Self, through collective Perfecting to the progressive realisation of an Ideal." Whether he had called it 'self-realisation' or any less ambiguous name, he would have come to the position that a man feels that he owes it to himself to strive for the best he knows, to 'do his duty for duty's sake,' that he must justify his thoughts and actions to himself—his unsophisticated self,—that, if not, he will feel remorse and guilt. The practical value of any system of ethics depends on whether it appeals to 'the sanction in the mind itself,' to feelings familiar to the mass of would-be moral men. To such the direct appeal to conscience has more weight than all the arguments of theologians or utilitarians.
In his essay on The Duties of Man and elsewhere Mazzini enumerates the various spheres of duty. A man's duties begin with himself, not from any self-regarding motive, but because as is a man's own worthiness, so is his power to help his country or mankind. Never was one more passionate for personal holiness. 'Be good, be good,' is the recurring theme that runs through all his writings and political aspirations. "There is only one end, the moral progress of man and humanity." "You must labour all your life," he wrote to a young Italian, "to make your own self a temple to the Ideal, to God." "To draw near to God, purifying our conscience as a temple, sacrificing self for love,—this is our mission. To make ourselves better,—this is the order of the day, which must be the rule and consecration of our work." All his labours for his country had the supreme end in view, that Italian men and women should lead godly lives. "Make yourselves better," he said to Italian working men in words, that show how little of the demagogue there was in him, "this must be the object of your life. Preach virtue, sacrifice, and love to the classes above you; and be yourselves virtuous and prepared for sacrifice and love. You must educate and perfect yourselves as well as educate and perfect others."
A man's next duties are to his family. Dear, very dear, to him was the life of family, which he in his self-forgetfulness had put aside. "The only pure joys, unmixed with sadness, that it is given men to enjoy on earth, are the joys of Family." Outside it "men may find brief joys and comforts, but not the supreme comfort, the calm as of a peaceful lake, the calm of trustful sleep, the child's sleep on its mother's breast." The family is an eternal element of human life, more durable even than country; and the true man will make his family the centre of his life, never wandering from it, never neglecting it. True love is "tranquil, resigned, humble," as Dante's love for Beatrice. The wife will be the equal of her husband, she who is "the reflex for the individual of the loving Providence that watches over humanity." Mazzini repudiated any artificial assimilating of the sexes; but their differing functions were equally sacred and necessary. There must be therefore no superiority of man over woman, no inequality, domestic or political. A man must make his wife his comrade, not only in his joys and sorrows, but in his thoughts and work. He must love his children with "a true, deep, severe love." "Before Humanity and God children are the most awful responsibility that a human being can have." "It depends on us," so he quoted from Lamennais, "whether our children turn out men or brutes."
But the family, that shuts itself within its own small circle, betrays its God-appointed function. It was made to be a school of service for humanity, and teach men to be citizens. The égoisme à deux, that forgets country and mankind, the "blind, nerveless, unreasoning love of children, that is selfishness in the parents and destruction for them," betray the family's glorious prerogative. "Few mothers or fathers, in this irreligious age of ours, and especially among the well-to-do classes, understand the gravity and sacredness of their educational duties." Terrible to their country are the fruits of "the selfishness taught by weak mothers and careless fathers, who let their children regard life not as a duty and mission, but as a search for pleasure and a study of their own well-being." The true parent will teach his children not only to be good, but to be patriots, loving their country, honouring its great men; will teach them "not hatred of oppressors but an earnest looking forward to fight oppression," will make them reverent to true authority, but rebels against false. There is danger, he says, in Goethe's maxim: 'do the duty that lies nearest thee.' As him, so it may lead others into a moral solitude, where the cry of humanity comes not. It is so easy in happy life of family, in absorption in one's special work, to forget the duties of a citizen, to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be "kind towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive towards the rest of the world." The true man knows that he may not decline responsibility for those, whom God has made his fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country, stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross, Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the greatest number, but because love embraces all.
The moral law and the state—Duties of the state: liberty, association, education—Sovereignty is in God—Democracy—The ideal government—The republic—The ideal state.
In politics, as for the individual, the moral law, so Mazzini taught, must reign supreme. "The end of politics is to apply the moral law to the civil organisation of a country." The state exists for the sake of morality; its one and only final object is to help the moral growth of the men and women within its borders, help it through all the countless influences that society exercises on the individual. Morality is largely determined by environment; and the state must so fashion the environment, that the moral life may ever flourish more abundantly in it. "You cannot found the brotherhood of Christ, where ignorance and misery, servility and corruption on the one side and culture, riches, power on the other prevent any mutual esteem and love. Men will not understand the virtue of sacrifice, where money is the sole foundation of individual security and independence." How can they train their children to true patriotism, when a debased conception of it rules, and all around them men and women are thinking of their private gain and pleasure? How train them to perfect honesty, "when tyranny and espionage compel men to be false or silent on two-thirds of their opinions?" How to despise money, "where gold alone buys honours, influence, respect, nay, is all that stands between them and the caprice and insults of their masters?" "Take a man, for instance," he says, writing in the worst days of working-class depression, "who labours hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to obtain the bare necessities of existence; he eats his bacon and potatoes (when indeed he can get them) in a place which might rather be called a den than a house; and then, worn out, lies down and sleeps; he is brutalised in a moral and physical point of view; he has not ideas but propensities,—not beliefs but instincts; he does not read, he cannot read. How can you come at him, how kindle the divine spark that is torpid in his soul, how give the notion of life, of sacred life, to him, who knows it only by the material labour that crushes him and by the wages that abase him? How will you give him more time and more energy to develop his faculties except by lessening the number of hours of labour and increasing his profits? How, above all, will you raise his fallen soul and give him the consciousness of his duties and his rights, except by his initiation into citizenship—in other words, the suffrage?" Some day it will be otherwise. "When there is family life and property, education and political function for all, when through them men have closer communion with one another, then family and property and country and humanity will become more sacred to them all. When Christ's arms, still stretched upon the martyr's cross, are freed to clasp humanity in one embrace, when earth has no more brahmins and pariahs, masters and servants, but only men, then shall we worship with far other faith and other love God's holy name."
There are, in the main, three ways, by which the state can foster the moral life of the citizens. First of all it must secure liberty; not that liberty is an end in itself, but because it is the necessary condition of morality. There can be no morality without responsibility, no responsibility without liberty to choose between good and evil, between social service and self-interest. Liberty is necessary to true progress, for a progress that is imposed from above and not freely accepted by the people,—the whole programme of paternal despotism,—works no change in character, and therefore is "a soulless form," which cannot live. Only the freeman, who owns no lord but God, can attain to his full spiritual stature. "Where liberty is not, life is reduced to a simple organic function. The man, who allows his liberty to be violated, betrays his own nature, and rebels against God's decrees." Thus there are certain fundamental liberties, which not even a democracy may legitimately infringe. "No majority, no force of the community may take from you what makes you men." These liberties include, save in rare exceptions, "all that is indispensable to feed life morally and materially,"—personal liberty, religious liberty, unqualified liberty of speech and press, liberty of association, liberty of trade,—all of them liberties, without which men cannot choose their sphere of duty, without which society is destined to waste or stagnation.
It will be noticed that Mazzini omits not only liberty of immoral action, however 'self-regarding,' but any liberty that has an anti-social tendency. He did not admit, for instance, any absolute right of property, and, as we shall see, limited the right of bequest, and advocated severe taxation to check great inequalities of fortune. Theoretically he believed that government should possess very wide powers. But on the whole, when we come to the details of his social programme,[39] his position is the Liberal one; and (always excepting education) he stood against any great extension of state interference. It was not from any love of individualism and free competition; he hated them as anarchical,—fatal to spiritual unity and true citizenship, fatal to the welfare of the masses. But he wished the higher order to evolve, not from compulsion, which left the moral sense untouched, not by the force of the majority or of a despotism, but through a moral growth, which carried the community willingly and consciously towards a better state. The liberty to do good would become through education the liberty of doing good. This meant, as we shall see, that he allowed no liberty in education, for moral education must be uniform and therefore removed from individual choice. But this encroachment on liberty once made for the sake of a common morality, for the sake of that same morality he desired liberty in most other spheres of civil life.
But liberty is not enough. By itself, it is a mirage for the masses of mankind. "What is liberty of trade for the man without capital or credit? What are free opportunities of education for him who has no time for study?" Only Association can make liberty a reality for the masses, or allow new elements of progress to assert themselves, or save the waste that comes of isolated or conflicting labours. Nay more, association gives the sense of brotherhood, the spiritual strength, that comes from sharing others' work, from merging individual action in a bigger cause. "Association multiplies your strength a hundred fold; it makes the ideas and progress of other men your own; it raises, betters, hallows your nature with the affections of the human family and its growing sense of unity." As Progress is the great intellectual discovery of the modern world, so Association is its new-found instrument. Thus association must be dear to the state as individual liberty; and provided that any particular association is peaceful and public, and respects elementary liberties, and has no immoral end in view, the state must allow it perfect freedom.
Thus the second duty of the state is to encourage association and harmonise it with liberty; to give society the originating power of the latter, the effective strength of the former. Both are "equally necessary to the end, which is progress," both "essential to the orderly development of society." On any sound theory, the two principles postulate one another. There can be no association except among free men, since true association implies a conscious recognition and acceptance of the object. Liberty is meaningless without association, because the individual, for all his freedom, is powerless unless he combine with others. Mazzini carefully dissociated himself alike from the laissez-faire school and a despotic state socialism. The state must encourage combination, but may do nothing to compel it. The members of an association must be unfettered as to its nature and object and methods (always provided that they are legitimate), must be free to take up or resign their membership. "Sacred to us is the individual; sacred is society. We do not mean to destroy the former for the latter and found a collective tyranny; nor do we mean to admit the rights of the individual independently of society, and consign ourselves to perpetual anarchy. We want to balance the operations of liberty and association in a noble harmony." "The republican formula is 'everything in liberty through association.'"
Mazzini did not seriously concern himself with the abstract relations of the individual and society; probably it seemed to him a meaningless dispute. His theory admitted no real antagonism between them. A man's true individuality lies not in self-assertion but in the recognition of his duty to his fellows. This recognition necessarily makes friction impossible between himself and them, and reconciles the individual and society, liberty and association, in a common national aim. Liberty then becomes the higher liberty, not the mere power of refusing evil, but "the power of choosing between the different ways that lead to good." Association becomes the economical direction of the country's forces to a known and common end. It is the function of the state,—a function it alone can execute,—to instil the sense of duty into all its members and make that sense of duty work towards a common ideal. This it must do through national education, and education thus becomes the state's third and weightiest task. In Mazzini's conception education goes far beyond the imparting of knowledge or even the drawing out of character. It is the inspiration of a national faith, the moulding of the soul to great principles of life and duty. It is, next to religion from which it derives, the great binding and harmonising element in a nation, merging individual wills in a common consensus, destroying party friction and class struggle and sectarian faction, and sweeping a united country onward to the fulfilment of its destinies. If it had been objected that the result would be destructive of independence and originality of thought, he would probably have answered that the same spirit does not prevent diversities of operations, and that true originality is better promoted by discipline than by license. Certainly, as his theory of genius shows, he set a very high value on originality. Let thought, he would have said, be free and wide as air, but without community of aim it wastes itself, and the state must prevent that waste. Thus there is no true country without a national education, compulsory and free. Voluntary education has its necessity under a political or spiritual despotism, but it leads to moral anarchy, and religious democracy cannot tolerate false teaching of its children. The country must have "the moral direction of the young." "It is ridiculous to allow every citizen the right to teach his own programme, and refuse the nation the right to transmit its." Once, when discussing the matter with a friend, the question was put to him, "If two states had arrived at an equal stage of education, the one by national and the other by voluntary schools, which would be the finer nation?" "But, my dear," he answered, "that is to be an atheist." The national education must therefore express the national faith and aim, and give "the moral unity, which is far more important than material unity." It is not at all clear how he proposed to ascertain this national faith. For England, he had a curious proposal; "you ought," he said to Jowett, "to ascertain the mind of the people by making enquiries of the clergy and others what they believed, and when you have ascertained the national mind, you should express it in education." In the future Italy he sometimes thought that it would be embodied in a national declaration of principles, drafted by a Constituent Assembly. But more generally he seems to have distrusted the capacity of the democracy to voice the full faith, and he probably reserved it to the spiritual power under the new religion to enunciate its articles.
At all events national education implied above all else moral education, the moral education which is as "a holy communion with all our brothers, with all the generations that lived, and therefore thought and wrought before us."[40] This, he laments, "is anarchy now." If it is left to the parents, it is often neglected or bad; if to the teachers, clerical or lay, it too frequently instils either superstition or materialism, or at all events it has no uniformity. Mazzini intended to write a book on education; if he had done so, we should know more of the agencies, through which he proposed to give moral teaching. Bakounine once asked him, what, if he had got his republic, he would do to make the people really free. Mazzini replied, "Establish schools, in which the duties of man, sacrifice, and devotion would be taught." He had a skeleton programme as a basis of citizen training,—"a course of nationality, including a summary picture of the progress of humanity, national history, and a popular statement of the principles which rule the country's legislation"; but one cannot think that this gave all he wanted. He probably counted more on the universities, and especially on the courses of philosophy; and this no doubt explains his strong dislike of professors, whose teaching seemed to smack of materialism, his indictment of the eclecticism, which allowed different schools to be represented in the chairs. He had a particular animus against German professors and German philosophy. He blamed the appointment of Germans at Oxford; he was very angry that Hegel was taught at the university of Naples. "One fine day," he wrote, "we will sweep out all that stuff."
What form of government was best calculated to attain these ends,—to give full play to liberty, to harmonise it with association, to supply a true national education? No form, Mazzini replied, is right per se. He held to the full, though probably not recognising it, the scholastic doctrine of government by grace. "Sovereignty is not in I nor we but God." "There is no sovereignty of right in any one; sovereignty is in the aim." A government was legitimate in proportion as it stood for righteousness. "There is no sovereignty in the individual or society, except in so far as either conforms itself to the divine plan and law. An individual is either the best interpreter of God's law and governs in his name, or he is a usurper to be overthrown. The simple vote of a majority does not constitute sovereignty, if it evidently contradicts the supreme moral precepts or deliberately shuts the road to progress." "The will of the people is sacred, when it interprets and applies the moral law; null and impotent, when it dissociates itself from the law, and only represents caprice."
The theory is of course, as in the days of the schoolmen, a tremendous instrument for reform. No institution, no branch of legislature, no church, no prerogative or prescriptive claim has any rights against the Right. Do they or not make for the country's good? By the answer they must stand or fall. The theory is supremely true, and on occasion of highest social value. Its dangers lie in the possibility of mistaken application, and in its tendency to regard the form rather than the spirit of an institution,—a danger especially present to minds like Mazzini's, which are deficient in powers of accurate analysis. An institution, so runs their reasoning, has failed; therefore it is wrong; therefore it must be swept away. Reform is impossible; therefore let there be root-and-branch revolution. It is strange that Mazzini, with his admiration of English habits and dislike of French, did not see how here his logic approximated to the latter. He did not see how plastic institutions are, how it is often better to save the great expenditure of force, that must go to destroy a rooted institution, how it is sometimes easier to change the spirit than the form. In this his political wisdom went astray, and his long profitless crusade against the monarchy is a melancholy illustration of the error.
Thus, then, there is no essential sovereignty in any form of government. But democracy is the form most likely to interpret God's law aright. We must "reverence the people," not because they are the majority, "but because they concentrate in themselves all the faculties of human nature distributed among the several individuals,—faculties of religion and politics, industry and art." In other words, the collective wisdom of the many is likely to excel the wisdom of the few; a democratic state can use the special knowledge of every citizen, and choose the most capable for its administrators; and its judgment is likely to be more four-sided and better informed than that of a state with restricted citizenship. And just as Humanity is the interpreter of God's law, so a people often has an inspiration that seldom comes to individuals, glimpses of the truth that are granted to the multitude in moments of enthusiasm, an instinct that impels it to give power to its best men. He even, inconsistently with his general position, justifies democracy on à priori grounds; it is "a potent, undeniable, European fact," and therefore must be a part of God's providential design.
But it is impossible not to feel that all through Mazzini's thought there runs a certain uneasiness about democracy. He accepted it as an inevitable fact; he recognised that at all events it was superior to any government based on privilege; it fitted in with his theory of Humanity and his own passionate sympathies. But he had an intermittent dread that democracy, like theocracy and monarchy, might forget the law of God. He feared that the French Revolution had started it on the wrong road; he had had his disappointments in Italy; in later life he felt the peril that materialist socialism might deflect it from spiritual ends. He advocated universal suffrage, not because of any absolute virtue in it, but as "the starting-point of political education," and he gravely feared that, till national education had created a national consensus, it might easily become a tyranny of the majority. He preferred a system of indirect election. Towards the end of his life he was a keen advocate of women's suffrage, but he was anxious that the agitation for it should be equally an agitation for their own moral growth, a crusade against "their perennial vanity, their worship of ridiculous fashions, their lightness of parties and conversation," their husband-hunting. And this mistrust made him turn to a strong authority, elected and deposable by the people, but with very extended powers, and charged not only to execute the popular mandate, but go in advance of it. "The supreme power in a state must not drag behind the stage of civilisation that informs it; it must rather take the lead in carrying it higher, and, by anticipating the social thought, bring the country up to its own level." It is for republics to make republicans, not republicans republics. He earnestly repudiated the Whig-American theory of government. Anxiously as he guarded personal and religious and commercial liberty, he wished to see the functions of government, at all events in education and as a stimulating and suggestive influence, as wide and not as narrow as possible. Distrust of government in itself, the whole system of checks and balances, he condemned as weakening the power of the state to promote progress. It is extremely difficult to disentangle with precision what was his ideal constitution, and it may be doubted whether he had worked it out himself. Though he probably had no very strong liking for parliamentary government, he seems to have accepted it, and to have wished to give it large executive powers. But above it, and apparently distinct from the executive, was to be the real "government," the spiritual authority, whose duty it would be to "point to the national ideal," while parliament and the executive "directed the forces of the country" in the road it indicated. But there must be no suspicion of dictatorship, and perfect trust and mutual inspiration must unite the spiritual and temporal authorities.[41]
At all events the ideal government, whatever its precise form, could, he believed, exist only under a republic. The story of his life has shown how passionately he clung to his republican faith; how for it he gave or wasted his best days, how his untamable desire for it tangled his work for Italian Unity. His condemnation of monarchy was partly a theoretical one. The republic was "the most logical form of democracy," the only corollary of liberty and equality; monarchy was founded on inequality, its dynastic interests were not the nation's, and therefore it could never give a country moral unity. Whether absolutist or constitutional, it was a sham, because in modern life it corresponded to no real belief, no essential principle; and because it was a sham, it was the fruitful parent of dishonesty. Quite late in life he somewhat changed his point of attack, and condemned it as possessing no vitality to lead, and therefore impotent to found a strong government. But his indictment, at least in his early years, was drawn mainly from the actual evidence of corruption and misrule in the monarchies of the first half of the century. It may well have seemed impossible then to reconcile monarchy with any national well-being. He made little or no exception for constitutional monarchies. Louis Philippe's rule was small argument for the principle; and as late as 1862 he condemned constitutional monarchy as "incompatible with progress," everywhere outside England. For England, in later years, he made an exception; and his judgment here shows that he could view the issue more serenely, when he escaped from his prejudices. "The struggle, which occupies English life," he said in 1870, "is not between the nation and the monarchy, but between the people and the aristocracy, the latter being the one element of the past, that retains and communicates its vitality." In Italy the facts were after 1848 much the same as in England; but here he was blinded by party feeling, and he could never see that what was the real issue in the thirties had gone into the background. His fallacy was a nominalist one. In his early days there had been a vital difference between monarchy and republic. Afterwards the classification became unreal; and the true differentiation lay in various species of parliamentary government, in various relations between parliament and the executive. In his own Italy to-day the republic becomes increasingly a factitious and academic issue, as more vital questions make the true dividing lines in politics.
However mistaken his distinction between republic and monarchy, the republic, as he conceived it, was no mere form of government. "God is my witness," he said, "that I pay no tribute to forms." He had little liking for the republic in the United States, with its weak bond of union, and its system of checks and balances. He refused his blessing to the Third Republic in France. "By the Republic," he told the Roman Assembly in 1849, "we do not mean a mere form of government, a name, a system imposed by a victorious party on its rivals. We mean a principle, a new step forward in education taken by the people, a programme of education to be carried out, a political institution calculated to produce a moral advance; we mean the system which must develop liberty, equality, association;—liberty, and consequently every peaceful development of ideas, even when they differ in part from our own;—equality, and therefore we cannot allow political castes to be substituted for the old castes that have passed away; association, that is a complete consensus of all the vital forces of the nation, a complete consensus, so far as is possible, of the entire people." For him the republic meant absolute trust between people and government, choice of the most capable and best for office, a veritable national unity, that destroyed party friction and impelled the undivided forces of the country to social legislation. The republic, and it alone, will be the ideal state, God's kingdom realised on earth, "where institutions tend primarily to the bettering of the most numerous and poorest class, where the principle of association is best developed, where the road of progress has no end, as education gradually develops and all elements that make for stagnation and immobility disappear, where, in fine, the whole community, strong, tranquil, happy, peaceful, bound in a solemn concord, stands on earth as in a temple built to virtue and liberty, to progressive civilisation, to the laws that govern the moral world." There, in the people "that knows no caste or privilege, save of genius and virtue, no proletariat or aristocracy of land or finance," in the people "united by the brotherhood of one sole faith, one sole tradition, one sole thought of love," the people that worships principles more than men, that cherishes its past but looks ever forward to its future, resolute to unlock its destinies,—there stands the city of God, "the similitude of that divine society, where all are equal, and there is one love, one happiness for all."
Importance of social questions—Their moral basis—Attack on socialism—Contrast between Mazzini's and its theories and work—Social programme—Cooperation.
Mazzini's faith in the republic came largely of his conviction that it was the only effective instrument for social legislation. He was sometimes charged with neglecting social for political reform, with preaching, as Bakounine put it, a "detestable bourgeois patriotism." The charge was true for no time of his life, least for his later years. To him the social question was "the most sacred" as it was "the most hazardous" problem of the age. He was one of the first to insist that the rise of the working classes was the great social phenomenon of the century. Political reform, so he told the Carbonari and the Chartists, had its only sufficiency and justification, when it was the instrument of social reform. This did not quite represent his thought, for he was insistent that questions of political liberty and justice intimately touched man's moral development; but he held with equal earnestness that the social question had its independent and undying importance. "There is no such thing," he wrote, "as a purely political or purely social revolution; every true revolution has its political and social character alike."
All his passionate sympathy went out to the disinherited. Compassion, says one who knew him, shone in his face and vibrated in his voice, when he spoke of the masses and their hardships. He felt intensely for a lot, which in the '40s and '50s he believed was growing steadily worse. Indignantly he spoke of the workman's "poverty-stricken, cribbed, precarious life, closing in infirm and squalid and unassisted old age." "The workman has no freedom of contract," he replied to the old economists, "he is a slave; he has no alternative but hunger or the pay, however small it be, that his employer offers him. And his pay is a wage; a wage often insufficient for his daily needs, almost always unequal to the value of his work. His hands can multiply the employer's capital three fold, four fold, but not so his own pay. Hence his incapacity to save; hence the unrelieved, irreparable misery of commercial crises." And even without crises, "his life is poisoned by a sense of uncertainty and constant dread; and old age,—brought on prematurely by heavy and often unhealthy work,—awaits him, threatening, implacable." His "destiny is that of accursed races,—to live and suffer, curse and die." "A life of poverty and a death-bed in a hospital,—that is what society in this nineteenth century provides for two-thirds of its members in almost every country, eighteen hundred years and more since a Holy One, that men hail as divine, proclaimed that all are equals and brothers and sons of God."
But he was no pessimist, at all events in later years, when he knew the workman better, and saw that, in spite of all, he was advancing and gave promise of infinite further advance. The day of deliverance was near. The workman's emancipation was inevitable, written in the decrees of Providence. The labour question was the acknowledged problem of the time, its solution "the social faith of all men now who love and know." "The upward movement of the artisan classes in our towns," he wrote towards the end of life, "dates back now for more than a century; slow but tenacious in its progress, advancing from decade to decade by a law of increasing momentum, and in these last twenty years growing, visibly for all, in intensity and expansion, and acquiring, as it goes, real power and self-consciousness." It all was "leading up to a great revolution, an impulse given by Providence, nevermore to recede, till it has reached its end." And he gloried in it. Whatever fears he may have had for the working of democracy, he had none for the labour movement. The rise of the working classes was "as a flowing tide, that the divine breath has stirred"; and he watched it "not with fear, but with the loving reverence, with which one watches a great providential fact."
But just because his faith and love were great, he was not afraid to point "the men of labour" to the heights. It was his familiar precept of the moral aim. "Material improvements," he told them, "are essential, and we will fight to win them; not because men have no other interest than to be well housed and clothed, but because your moral development is stopped, while you are, as you are to-day, engaged in a continual fight with poverty." So too in his rather scanty references to political economy, he insists that its teaching must always have reference to a moral ideal. Economics must be "the expression not of the human appetite but of man's industrial mission." Otherwise, they "substitute the problem of humanity's kitchen for the problem of humanity," and teach selfishness for individuals and classes and industrial warfare. It was not only that economic progress must aim consistently at personal morality, at making better husbands, fathers, neighbours, that it must be pure of any spirit of bitterness or revenge or aught that sins against the brotherhood of man. Besides all this, it must not be allowed to maim the working man's powers and duties as a citizen, must never be purchased by the sacrifice of political liberty or manliness. He pointed for his moral to France in 1849 and 1850, when the French artisans sold their political rights to Louis Napoleon for the promise of a labour policy. 'Bread and amusements,' he reminded them, were ever the offer of despots. Outside liberty and strenuous political interest there was no salvation, economic or other. The true man will think not only of his class but of his country, and not of his own country only, but of the sufferings and rights of men the whole world over. If the working classes forgot their political duties, thought lightly of political reform, connived at an unjust foreign policy, they sacrificed one of their nature's noblest functions, and built their own economic progress on the sand. And he believed that, France notwithstanding, the people always knew this in their hearts. The Chartists, he pointed out, with their bare, imperfect political programme, had more followers than all the French Socialists. "The last of those you call political agitators," he told the latter, "will always have more influence with the people than all your utopias; because at the root of every political question the people has at least a glimpse of something that appeals to its soul, something that gives it self-consciousness and raises its trampled dignity." "The working men of Italy fought like heroes at Milan and Brescia, in Sicily and at Rome, not for a rise of wages, but for the honour of the Italian name, for the free life of their nation. The working men of Paris fought and won in 1848, not because of a financial crisis or their own poverty, but because the monarchy dragged France's glory and duty in the mud, because it refused French citizens a free press, and free right of meeting and association."
It was from this standpoint that he attacked Socialism. We need not concern ourselves with his strictures on the expired schools of the early French Socialists, or with his very crude criticism of Louis Blanc,—criticism, which he would hardly have made in later life, and which is certainly inconsistent with his own social schemes. We can neglect, too, much of his attack on the economic side of collectivism, which he never really understood. It is more to the point to assume a greater knowledge of modern Socialism than he possessed, and see what is his essential relationship to it. He had not a few ideas in common with the Marxite school. His own industrial ideal contained, though he knew it not, the germs of the socialist community. He looked as earnestly and confidently as they do to the death of capitalism, and built his hopes on the development of association; he recognised with them the inevitable historic evolution of the workers, and that it is the march of the humble, unknown multitude, and not the hero, which determines the world's progress; he hailed the time, when classes would be no more, and all be equals in rights and opportunities, and he believed that this equality could never be reached under a capitalist system.
But in root principles he differed from the strict Marxites almost as essentially as he himself supposed. While with him moral and spiritual phenomena are the fundamental facts, Marx builds his system on material phenomena. For the collectivist, man is chiefly the product of his economic surroundings; for Mazzini, the social and industrial environment is only "the manifestation of the moral and intellectual condition of humanity at a given period, and above all of its faith." For the one, history is the sequence of economic cause and effect, and the growth of mind and morals is the secondary consequence of economic facts; with the other, the economic facts, though not neglected, are subordinated, religion is the master principle of human progress, and religious systems are the milestones that mark the road. The two schools are absolutely antagonistic in their conception of the ideal. Marx and his followers would discover it by the right interpretation of the drift of facts; if indeed we can call it an ideal, what is accepted merely as a necessary tendency, and when right and wrong are judged by the fact, not the fact by right and wrong. Mazzini understood to the full the value of facts as conditioning the ideal, as pointing out how far it was attainable at the moment, nay, as in some degree indicating the ideal itself. But to him right and wrong had no dependance on the existing fact; facts tended to approximate to the ideal, because the ideal was sovereign, and Providence guided them towards it; and it was man's free privilege and bounden duty to help the work of Providence, and be lord of facts. Mazzini did not kick against the pricks of economic evolution; he took modern industrialism as it is, and never wished to thwart the natural tendencies of industrial discovery. But he claimed that man has power to turn them to good or evil,—a good or evil that has reference not to them but to a moral end.
Hence their teaching has differed widely in its practical consequences. Marx deduced from his economic studies a confident and detailed prophecy of economic development. It was a faith, whose assurance and optimism gives it a mighty power to sway men, so long as faith stays unquestioned. But economic dogmas, especially of the prophetic kind, are apt to be shaken by the rough wind of facts; and it has been the fate of Marx' system to be line by line explained away by its commentators. If it still retains its influence,—and, indeed, it is a potent influence,—it is because it has quieted scepticism by shedding much of its founder's doctrine, and because it finds and has more or less always found expression in a political programme, such as Mazzini preached, aiming at high ends of liberty and justice. Mazzini, so confident often in his religious and political horoscopes, here chose a humbler part. He insisted indeed on one broad economic principle,—association, and he pointed to certain reforms of immediate practicability. But he resolutely refused to forecast the economic future. Humanity, he would repeat, goes on its own way, and laughs at the man, who finds "the secret of the world under his pillow." "I think," he wrote, "that our problem is not so much to define the forms of future progress, as to place the individual under such conditions as make it easy for him to understand and fulfil it." He created no great party of the proletariat; it was his as useful function to fertilise the moral soil, to inspire all classes with a deeper sense of social obligation, and thus to ease the road for social progress, whatever particular shape the circumstances of the time might counsel it to take.
The two men differ again radically in their influence on class relations. To Mazzini 'the struggle of classes,' however peaceful and legal in its form, would have been a hateful idea. It is true he sternly rebuked the short-sighted folly of the richer classes, and he would find excuses for wild acts or theories of proletariat protest. But he set his face resolutely against class hatred, against dreams of violence and revenge, against social revolutions which worked hardship to the individual. Hopeless as he was of enlisting the upper classes, at least in Italy, on the side of social reform, he set his hopes on the middle classes; and from the days of the Apostolato Popolare down to the last years of life, he preached insistently that middle and working classes must stand together in the social movement. The whole theory of Duty looked to the harmonising of motives, not to the brute struggle of opposing social forces. The collectivist takes the social discord for granted, and bids the workers trust to themselves alone and win their ends by force, however much force may be disguised behind the vote. Each principle has its time; the socialist mistake has been to elevate to a principle, what is the sad necessity of an uninspired age.
It remains to examine Mazzini's own programme of social reconstruction. He lays down certain economic axioms. First, private property must remain, however much the State should try to equalise fortunes through taxation. Mazzini endorses the familiar argument from expediency,—the necessity of property to stimulate labour and encourage invention. But his apology for it is in the main an à priori one. "Property," he says, "when it is the result of labour, represents the activity of the body, as thought represents the activity of the soul; it is the visible sign of our part in the transformation of the material world, as our ideas and our rights to liberty and inviolability of conscience are the signs of our part in the transformation of the moral world. The man who works and produces has a right to the fruits of his own labour; in this resides the right of property."[42] There is a flavour of Ricardo and Marx in this, and it is easy to see a socialist application, unintended by the writer. Next, the new social organisation must not be the work of compulsion. He saw that voluntary working-class organisation was an essential preliminary to any lasting social advance; and, as we shall see, his own schemes pivot on voluntary societies for cooperative production. And lastly, schemes of economic change must always aim at increasing productiveness. He knew that there could be no serious improvement in the workman's condition, unless the national production were increased; and he seems to have dimly realised that the two things must mutually react, any rise in the workman's income increasing the demand for commodities and thereby stimulating production, and this increase of production in its turn encouraging a further increase of the workman's pay.
When we come to the particulars of his economic programme, we find fertility and boldness of suggestion, but small attempt to work out the details. He was constitutionally unfitted to be an economist; he lacked the necessary precision of thought and accuracy of analysis. He rather despised economic study, at all events when it came from books. A real knowledge of the economic question is to be found, he says, "in the workshops and the homes of the artisans," rather than in "statistics and documents, which are sometimes erroneous, always incomplete, compiled as they are either by officials, whose tendency is to conceal the evil, or by private individuals, whose tendency is to exaggerate it." He trusted to a knowledge of the workman's thoughts and aspirations, gleaned from close and affectionate intercourse, more than to any inquiry into the outside facts of his life.
His suggestions were many. Among the more commonplace were free trade in land, legislation to protect tenants, arbitration between capital and labour, national insurance (apparently to be compulsory), the regulation by the state of "that den of robbers," the Stock Exchange. At one time he wished the state to guarantee work for everybody, but as he does not mention the proposal later than 1849, it may be assumed that he relinquished it. For Italy, he suggested a great scheme of home colonisation on her unreclaimed lands; and it is a curious instance of his want of accurate enquiry, that in his advocacy of it he took no account of the all-important factor of malaria. It is curious, too, that, like many Italians at the opposite pole of thought, he disliked emigration, and would gladly have checked what has proved to be one of the chief sources of Italian development. All these, however, were minor suggestions. His programme rested mainly on two proposals,—a radical reform of taxation, and the gradual supersession of capitalism by voluntary cooperative societies of workmen. His canons of taxation are shortly stated and may be shortly summarised. Economy in collection, free trade, no taxes on food, the smallest possible incidence on industry were his fiscal maxims; and he wished to carry them out by abolishing all indirect taxation and, apparently too, all special taxes on land, and substituting a single tax on income, to be graduated and, it would seem, severely graduated. He also proposed that in all cases of persons dying without heirs within the fourth degree, estates should lapse to the state.
He looked for more radical change to his scheme of cooperative production, a scheme which appears in its main outlines as early as 1833, but which he worked out in more detail in the last ten years of his life. It was a special application of the same principle of Association, which he had carried into other branches of social and political activity. He proposed that a great national capital should be accumulated for the purpose. Church lands, railways, mines, and "some great industrial enterprises," which he never specified, were to be nationalised, whether or not with compensation does not appear. At one time he wished to confiscate in Italy the estates of those, who fought against the nationalist cause,—a proposal strangely out of harmony with his usual tolerance. The income from these sources, from the rents of reclaimed lands and existing national and communal estates, and from properties which lapsed to the state, would form the "National Fund" or "tax of democracy." At one time he destined part of the fund to education, another part to assist any European democracy struggling for its rights. But its main, and perhaps in his later idea its only purpose was to assist the spread of voluntary societies for cooperative production, industrial and agricultural. Any such society, that could prove its members' honesty and capacity, might claim to have its capital advanced from the Fund. The loans were to be at 1 or 1½ per cent., and were to be made through special banks administered by the Communal Councils. Nothing is said as to the repayment of the loans, but as he contemplated the extension of the societies, till they ultimately covered the whole field of industry, we may assume that the loans were to be repaid and passed on to new societies. The societies were apparently to be left absolutely free as to the management of their business, the sale of produce, and the disposal of their net income. To assist their credit, they were to have the right to deposit any unsold produce in national magazines, and receive in exchange negotiable notes, which, it seems to follow, would have been legal tender. The societies were also to be admitted on equal terms with private firms to contract for government work; this latter was perhaps the first suggestion of a system, which is now working in Italy with some success.
Such were Mazzini's sketchy but suggestive economic schemes,—schemes which, he believed, would ultimately destroy both poverty and capitalism, without hardship to individuals or danger to liberty, leavening the social morality with the God-given principle of association. He seems to have never asked himself what would be the ultimate destiny of his co-operative scheme; had he done so, he must have seen that, by however different a road, it was bound to end in collectivism. It will be recognized now that his plan was in all essentials identical with latter-day socialism, as put out by its best exponents, and it may be claimed that in the world of ideas Mazzini more than Marx is its father. That his scheme would soon come into working, he had little doubt, at all events in Italy. For in his social plans, as in all else, his own Italy was ever uppermost in mind. He knew, when few others knew it, the patience and common-sense and idealism of the Italian artisan, and he proudly counted on him to let Italy lead the nations in the solution of the labour question.
Country and humanity—The marks of nationality: the will of the people; the sense of national mission—Patriotism—International solidarity—Ethics of foreign policy: non-intervention; war; the special missions of each country—The future of Europe—The Slavs—The United States of Europe—Italy's international function.
The law of Duty, man's bounden service to humanity, goes on beyond the individual and the state to be the rule of international relations. Man's end, so runs Mazzini's argument, is to serve the progress of humanity. But the individual, in his isolated impotence, would shrink from the immensity of the burden. And for most men, humanity excites no effective sense of obligation; they will give for country what they will not give for the wider and remoter circle of mankind. The cosmopolitan, who talks of duty to humanity and neglects the nation, is as one who bids men climb a ladder and takes away the rungs. Therefore Providence, once again applying the law of association, has placed the individual among men of like feelings and aspirations, that serving his country he may serve humanity, that through the nation and its common strength he may have power to help the progress of the world. Thus a nation is a God-appointed instrument for the welfare of the race, and in this alone its moral essence lies. "Nationality is sacred to me," he says, "because I see in it the instrument of labour for the good and progress of all men." "Countries are the workshops of humanity"; "a nation is a living task, her life is not her own, but a force and a function in the universal Providential scheme." "Humanity is a great army, marching to the conquest of unknown lands, against enemies both strong and cunning. The peoples are its corps, each with its special operation to carry out, and the common victory depends on the exactness, with which they execute the different operations."
This "division of European labour" is essential to the progress of Europe, and, through it, of the world. But each group of humanity's workmen, if it is to be efficient, must be organised, not by coercion, but by free acceptance of their obligations; they must be impelled by duty and the sense of a great common work to do. Each nation must be a living, homogeneous entity, with its own faith and consciousness of self. Europe, in Mazzini's lifetime, had little of this. He condemned its existing divisions as answering to no principle, since for the most part they were agglomerations of territory, made in the interests of a royal dynasty or in the name of some artificial principle, as the balance of power; and therefore they were powerless to inspire a common national effort for an intelligent and useful end. Factitious and immoral ends filled up the void; unsatisfied national yearnings burst imperiously through diplomatic schemes of peace; there was little of the burning love of independence, that alone safeguarded from designs of aggressive empire, from France in the past, from Russia in the present. The map of Europe must be drawn afresh, and states be made conterminous with nationalities.
What, then, are the inherent, essential marks of nationality? Are race and geographical features, language and literature, customs and traditions? None of these, Mazzini replied, are more than secondary elements, race least of all. Wiser and juster than Bismarck and his school, he saw that race, even if it were discoverable, has small connection with the facts of to-day. He did not investigate the dark problem of race characteristics, he did not even ask whether race affinities are among the physical causes that create a national feeling. But, none the less, his argument is indestructible against the theory that makes race the chief base of nationality. He was saved from ethnological fancies by his sensible conclusion, that races are too intimately compounded to be a cause of national character. "There is not a single spot in Europe," he declared, "where an unmixed race can be detected." "France, the most powerful nationality of the modern world, is a mixture of Germans, Celts, and Romans." There is one aspect however of the race question, that he did not sufficiently recognise. However imaginary the original ethnological basis of a country may be and generally is, yet some races have been fixed for several centuries; and this has generated a belief in a common racial origin, which, however false historically, may none the less, when supported by a common language, become an important and sometimes a dominant factor in creating a sense of nationality.
He gave his fancy play in determining the influence of geography. He loved geographical study, and as usual sought for a spiritual purpose underlying the physical facts. "By the courses of the great rivers, by the lines of the high mountains, and other geographical features God has marked the natural borders of the nations." "Nationalities," he said, "appear to me to have been traced long ago by the finger of Providence on the map of Europe"; and Italy, for instance, had her "sublime, irrefutable boundary marks." He left this transcendentalism for safer ground, when he came to language and literature, and recognised what potent factors they had been in the making of nations. The importance of language was sufficiently obvious. Literature had sometimes, as in the case of his own Italy, remained the one surviving sign of nationality, when all else was lost. He knew how great had been the influence of Dante in forming the national sense of his own country; how much the Polish poets of the century had done to feed the Slav national spirit; how intimate is the power of national melodies; what the common possession of a great poet may do to knit a people. He realised too, though perhaps insufficiently, how history has helped to form nations; how a common government draws a people together in common loyalty or common revolt; how war may be a welding influence; how men, living for generations under the same law, acquire from it common habits and customs and traditions.
All these, however, are but the formative elements of nationality; they are not its essence. Mazzini's clear democratic faith kept him from confusing the justification of the fact with its causes. Nationality was independent of any of them. Centuries of divided government had not destroyed the national sense of Italy; Switzerland was a nation for all its diversity of languages; difference of tongues did not prevent Poland and Lithuania from sharing the same national aspirations; Alsace belonged to France, however German it might be by race and history. Nationality is a sentiment, a moral phenomenon, which may be generated by material causes, but exists by virtue of moral facts. On any theory of freedom or democracy it can have no positive, meaning basis but the popular will; and it is a parody of nationality that unites by coercion. "Nationalities can be founded only for and upon and by the people"; and it follows that when the inhabitants of a territory desire to be a nation, provided that behind their desire there lies a moral purpose, they have the right to be one. This, despite slight and rare inconsistencies, he made the broad clear principle of modern, democratic nationality, a principle "invincible as conscience," whose triumph no hostility of kings or statesmen, no artificial counterfeits can permanently hinder.
Still, he held, the mere fact of the popular will is not enough. Nationality, like every political phenomenon, must have a moral aim to justify it. A mere momentary reaction against misgovernment, for instance, gave no sufficient claim to independence. "In questions of nationality, as in every other question, the end alone is sovereign"; and a true nation must have its moral intention, its clear and understood mission to accomplish for itself and for humanity, its conscious part in realising the divine idea on earth. It is only in its homage to the moral law, that a nation finds its "baptism and consecration." "A community of men drawn together by a selfish principle for a purely material purpose is not thereby a nation. To constitute a nation, its informing principle and purpose and right must be grounded on eternal bases. The purpose must be essentially a moral one, since a material interest by itself is by its nature finite, and can therefore form no basis of perpetual union." "Country is not a territory; territory is only its base; country is the idea that rises on that base, the thought of love that draws together all the sons of that territory."
This love is patriotism. "O my brothers," he says, "love your country. Country is our house, the house that God has given us, setting therein a populous family, to love us and be loved by us, to understand us and be understood by us better and more readily than others are." It was by such burning patriotism he saved his country and was first to practise it himself. But he detested the sentimental and emotional patriot. His patriotism was a silent, manly thing, that hated display and braggart talk; it was as a steady spiritual flame, that never roared to heaven and never sank to ashes. He tested it by its fruit in the individual life. No ill-living man was true patriot. "Let country," he said, "be incarnated in each one of you; each one of you feel and make himself responsible for his brothers; each of you so act that in yourselves men may respect and love your country." "Where the citizen does not know that he must give lustre to his country, not borrow lustre from it, that country may be strong but never happy." Real patriotism will not fear to speak the truth. "Flattery will never save a country, nor proud words make us less abject." "The honour of a country depends much more on removing its faults than on boasting of its qualities." One can imagine what would have been his scorn for the degenerate imperialism of latter days. The patriot's supreme desire is that his country's true honour may be untarnished; he thinks more of duty than of victory. His own Roman Republic, that glorious and illuminating example of patriotism, had small hope of success, but its honour stood entire, and therefore morally it triumphed. Success, empire, military glory may be a country's lot; so may failure and defeat and poverty; neither this nor that fate touches its real being. True national dignity and glory lie in right doing, and humiliation comes only from public dishonour and a mendacious diplomacy. "You must keep your country pure of selfishness," was his maxim of patriotism for Italian working men.
Patriotism, then, is intense regard for a country's moral greatness; and it expresses itself in that sense of national duty, which he held to be the only justification of a country's national existence. This duty has two objects, the community itself and all humanity. We have seen what he conceived to be a nation's duty to its members; there is no true country, he said, without a national education, or where men starve for want of work. Here we are more concerned with that forwardness to serve humanity, which he made the other mark of the true nation. "National life and international life should be two manifestations of the same principle, the love of good." Above the separate nations stands the European brotherhood, the late-born child of Christianity. Sir Thomas More, he says, first formulated the new law of peace; literature and trade and travel are ever drawing the nations together by "a law of moral gravitation"[43]; the French Revolution echoed through the democracies of Europe; the struggle with Napoleon renewed the common understanding of the nations. The cause of the people is the same the whole world over, and the democracies must join hands to fight the battle of them all, as he had tried to make them do, when he founded Young Europe. Humanitarian movements,—the abolition of the slave trade, the cause of Greece and Italy,—were European. "There exists then in Europe a harmony of needs and wishes, a common thought, a universal mind, which directs the nations by convergent paths to the same goal." No country may be isolated, economically or intellectually; and it is a poor and counterfeit patriotism, that despises other countries. That way lies destruction. "A nation's growth depends on the trust that other peoples place in it"; a country guided by a moral principle "finds everything open readily to it from markets to political alliances," but one that stands for an unjust policy has mistrust and jealousy for its portion.
Hence the country, that does injury to another, sins against itself. "I hate," he said, "the monopolist, usurping nation, that sees its own strength and greatness only in the weakness and poverty of others." That is a poor and stunted people, whose foreign policy is "one of aggrandisement and selfishness, whether it seeks them basely or buys glory at other men's expense." Countries, that cherish liberty at home and outrage it abroad, "are fated to expiate their error through long years of isolation and oppression and anarchy." So far he preached familiar doctrine, but he carried it into regions of his own. International duty does not stop at non-aggression. Every country has its positive duty to humanity; and while evil is enthroned, and right can hardly hold its own, and the eternal battle rages round, it may not stand aside in cowardly forgetfulness. Mazzini abhorred the doctrine of non-intervention—the principle that no country may interfere in the domestic matters of another,—a doctrine which the Americans and Canning introduced for the protection of freedom, but which less hardy statesmen in France and England had perverted to excuse their own faint-heartedness. If the principle had been generally accepted, if it had meant for instance that France could not intervene at Rome or Russia restore despotism in Hungary, it might have worked successfully. But practically it meant that "intervention was all on the wrong side," that only England observed the principle, and therefore the one Great Power, which in some degree stood for liberty, tied its own hands, while the Powers that stood for despotism worked "their unhallowed ends when, where, and how they thought fit" over three-fourths of Europe. As Mazzini pointed out, the theory took for granted a system based on nationality; and where nationality was non-existent, as in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, it had no rightful application. At the best it was a "poor and incomplete" doctrine. A country has its "bonds of international duty," obligatory in proportion to its strength. "The absolute doctrine of non-intervention in politics corresponds to indifference in religion; it is a masked atheism, a negation of all belief, of every general principle, of any mission of a nation in humanity's behalf." "Neutrality in a war of principles is mere passive existence, forgetfulness of all that makes a people sacred, the negation of the common law of nations, political atheism. On one side," he was speaking to Englishmen in 1859, "stands the flag of liberty and right, of the true and good; on the other the flag of tyranny and ambition, of the false and evil. And you, a free nation and strong, you who profess belief in truth and justice, would you say, 'Between evil and good we will remain neutral, impassive spectators'? It is the word of Cain. No people, that chooses to teach that policy, may dare to call itself Christian, for it is practically a people of atheists or cowards. Sooner or later a tremendous expiation will visit the cowardly desertion of the duty which God lays on peoples as on individuals." "Can it be that England," he wrote twelve years earlier, "the England of the Reformation, the England of Elizabeth and of Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, gives up Europe to the dictatorship of force?"
Hence he was no believer in peace at any price. Sternly, indeed, he condemned war, when it was not fought for a right principle; it was "fratricide," if not imperative in the interests of the race. But it was "sacred as peace, when the triumph of good is to be its issue." He attacked the Manchester School for perverting the sense of human solidarity. "Peace," he wrote to the Geneva Congress of 1867, "cannot become a law of human society, except by passing through the struggle, which will ground life and association on foundations of justice and liberty, on the wreck of every power which exists not for a principle but for a dynastic interest." Europe, he held, could not have lasting peace, till Austria and Turkey made way for the nationalities, which they held down; it would ever be perturbed by fears of Russian aggression, till Poland was restored to be its bulwark; and only war could free the Poles and Southern Slavs. "When you have substituted justice for tyranny, truth for falsehood, duty for selfish interests, the republic for monarchy, then you will have peace, but not till then."
Mazzini, unluckily, was not content with the broad human principle that a country must use its strength for right and freedom everywhere. He appended a theory, which has its germ of truth, but defies definition, and is easily twisted to save a special argument. Each nation had, he thought, some distinct and specialised service to render to humanity. "God has written one line of his thought on the cradle of each people." "Special interests, special aptitudes, and before all special functions, a special mission to fulfil, a special work to be done in the cause of the advancement of humanity, seem to me the true, infallible characteristics of nationalities." The theory escapes any exact precision; but it offers a rich field for poetry, and Mazzini's imagination was at home in it. England's function was "industry and colonies," Russia's was the civilisation of Asia, Poland's "the Slav initiative." Germany's mark was thought, France's was action, Italy's thought in unison with action. "While the German walks earth with his sight lost in the depths of heaven, and the Frenchman's eye rarely looks aloft but scours earth's surface with its restless penetrating glance, the Genius, that guards the destinies of Italy, has been ever wont to pass swiftly from the ideal to the real, seeking from of old how earth and heaven may be joined together." We have seen what curious use he made of this theory of special missions to rebut Irish claims.
Such were the principles of nationality, and nations built on them would make the Europe of the future. Mazzini believed that democracy would tend towards large nations. He repudiated any love of administrative centralisation and urged the widest local government; but the bigger the nation, the more perfect, he thought, would be the development of association within it, and the greater therefore its momentum on the road of progress. And, as the larger nations would be approximately equal in territory or population, a new and natural balance of power would arise to safeguard peace. This liking for large countries sometimes nearly led him into inconsistencies with his own principles, and made him question the national basis of most small states. He made a confident forecast of the future European settlement. (He was writing, of course, prior to 1870.) England and France (apart from Savoy and Nice) were the only countries, whose territory marched with their natural borders, and they alone would remain unchanged. Italy would be united, and include the border districts and islands that spoke the Italian tongue, except, apparently, the Canton of the Ticino. Germany, including the German-speaking provinces of Austria, would also achieve its unity, but be divided into two or three "great administrative sections." Spain and Portugal would form a single country. Greece would expand over all territories with a Greek-speaking population. Switzerland would be the nucleus of an Alpine Federation, embracing Savoy and the Tyrol. Holland was, apparently, to keep its independence; Belgium, on the other hand, had no future as a nation, though he does not indicate its destiny. In early life he seems to have thought that Denmark would remain a separate state; afterwards he believed that the three Scandinavian states were inevitably destined to unity.