The State
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."
FOOTNOTES:
[39] See below, pp. 292-294.
[40] In the letter referred to on p. 246 note, he calls it "religious
education," but it is clear that he did not intend the expression in
its usual sense.
[41] Mazzini's views are perhaps most clearly stated in his speech to
the Roman Assembly of March 9, 1849 (before he became Triumvir). See
also _Scritti editi e inediti_, XVI. 14. In the second and perhaps the
first of these passages _popolo_ seems used as equivalent to
parliament. In the second, _governo_ is obviously not the executive.
See also above, p. 247.