The death of his mother in 1852 came as a great blow to him. He had
seen her in Milan and had always kept in close correspondence with
her. “I have now no mother on earth except my country,” he wrote, “and
I shall be true to her as my mother has been true to me.” She left
him a small annuity, so that although he was poor, he was not in the
desperate state of want he had been in formerly. He had to live very
simply, however, his cigars being his only luxury. His most constant
companions were his tame linnets and canaries, which perched about
on his head and shoulders and hopped about among his papers in the
thick, smoky atmosphere of his one room. He was very much appreciated
and respected by many prominent men of the time, and his endeavor to
enlist English sympathy for his political schemes was not unsuccessful.
It was perhaps a pity that Mazzini did not devote the remainder of
his days to literary work, for as a writer he would certainly have
made a great mark. His work as an agitator ceased to be useful or
even helpful. The course of events showed that if Italian Unity was
to be won it must be under the leadership of Victor Emmanuel, who
had succeeded Charles Albert as King of Piedmont and Sardinia, and
was prepared to come forward as the leader of the movement. Gallant
little Piedmont continued to be the leading spirit of the States of
Italy. Cavour, the statesman, a man of very different stamp from
Mazzini, worked slowly and patiently in the one direction in which
he saw success was possible. He despised Mazzini and his doctrines,
and probably regarded him as a nuisance. The practical, capable,
hard-headed man of affairs found no use for the enthusiast and the
agitator, and did not even recognize the great services which the
idealist had rendered in preparing and educating the mind of the
people. Mazzini, on the other hand, suspected Cavour and mistrusted
him, and doggedly refused to abandon his hope of a republican form of
government. He thought a united Italy would succeed best if monarchy
were abolished; and in this belief perhaps he may only have been rather
in advance of his times. All the time he overestimated the strength
of his own following and ignored the true state of affairs. This was
partly due to his enforced exile, which kept him out of contact with
the movements in Italy. With Garibaldi, the great man of action, his
relations were also strained. They never saw eye to eye, and constantly
differed as to the best course to take. Garibaldi believed in the
King. Mazzini could never get over his engrained prejudice against
monarchy. Garibaldi was irritated with Mazzini and called him “the
great doctrinaire.” But although they so often found it impossible to
act together, they became reconciled in the end, and each recognized
the other’s great talents and services.
Mazzini was accused of encouraging political assassination. Many
charges were brought against him which were absolutely false, and he
was wrongly suspected of being at the back of various plots which were
discovered for the assassination of Victor Emmanuel and Louis Napoleon.
He had indeed said that exceptional moments might arise when the
killing of a tyrant might be the only means of putting an end to the
intolerable oppression. In his early days, too, a young man came to him
with a plan for the assassination of the King, Charles Albert. Mazzini,
having failed to dissuade him, helped him on his journey and sent him
a dagger. But in late life he not only vigorously discouraged plots of
this sort, but actually stopped them. It is true, however, that his
attempts to justify violence on certain occasions, and the arguments
he used, came sadly below the noble ideas he held as to the sacredness
of human life.
Napoleon III he hated as much as he did the Austrians. For a moment he
was hopeful, after the French victory of Solferino in 1859, and thought
the Austrian domination of Italy was at an end. But when the peace of
Villafranca came, by which Venetia was abandoned to the enemy, and
Cavour resigned, he voiced the feeling of his country when he denounced
the betrayal and treachery of the French Emperor. He hurried out to
Florence, but the people dreaded any repetition of his unsuccessful
risings, and he found he was powerless. Cavour became chief minister
again, and Garibaldi began to lay his plans for the action which was
to be eventually the determining factor in the liberation of Italy.
Mazzini welcomed Garibaldi’s leadership, and was ready to keep himself
in the background. But his suspicion of Cavour, his want of proper
information, and his occasional untimely interference made him useless
at this period of the struggle. He kept on dividing opinion at a time
when united action was the one obvious means of achieving success.
“Even against your wish you divide us,” said one of Garibaldi’s
followers to him at Naples, where he was trying to make the people
insist on an Italian National Assembly drawing up a new Constitution
under the King. At last, worn out in mind and body, he left Naples
after having a friendly interview with Garibaldi. It was not his
jealousy of successful rivals that made Mazzini so difficult to work
with in these critical times. It was his fear that others could not
carry out the great object in view unless they worked on his lines
and shared his distrust of the rule of kings and the intrigues of
statesmen. He refused to see that the royalists were as seriously bent
on unity as he was himself. He became a broken and disappointed man,
believing he had failed, and despondent as to the future.
Unity was not yet complete: Rome and Venetia were still to be won.
On his return to England in 1860, Mazzini was content to suspend
any open republican agitation, but he kept up a good deal of secret
correspondence. His health began to break down, but his will-power
was still very strong. “It is absurd to be ill,” he said, “while
nations are struggling for liberty.” Victor Emmanuel had some private
communications with him, for, curiously enough, the two men had
a certain fascination for each other. The King shared the great
agitator’s hatred of Austria and his impatient desire to see the
nationalities of Eastern Europe set free. But nothing came of this.
Victor Emmanuel, who was now the figurehead of the whole movement, was
a rough, good-natured, rather stupid man, who by his qualities as a
soldier won the loyalty and devotion of his people. He was essentially
a man of action, and military fame attracted him more than anything
else. When Garibaldi visited England he had an enthusiastic reception
from the public. Mazzini conferred with him, collected money for him,
and went as far as Lugano with the intention of supporting him when the
volunteers crossed from Sicily for the march on Rome. But he went no
further.
There was fighting again in 1866. The Italians were defeated, and
Napoleon III concluded a peace by which the Austrians ceded Venetia
to him, and he handed it over to Italy. This was rather a humiliating
conclusion of this part of the struggle, and Mazzini resented it. In
spite of the failure of so many of his efforts, he appeared to many
of his fellow-countrymen as a distant and rather wonderful figure,
surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, with the one thought of his
beloved country ever in his mind. Their confidence and respect for him
were shown by the fact that forty thousand people signed the petition
for his amnesty—that is to say, his return to Italy; but when at last
it was granted he refused to take his seat as a deputy in Parliament,
for although he had been duly elected by Messina he would not take the
oath of allegiance to the monarchy.
The republic now came to be a more important object to him than unity.
He plotted and schemed, and went so far as to intrigue with Bismarck
in order to get the help of Germany in what would have been a civil
war. He admired Bismarck’s tremendous determination, and he believed in
German unity, but he added, “I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it
arrogates over Europe.”
Here is a description of the Italian political idealist by one of the
secret committee of Genoa, where each man came to the meeting armed
with a revolver: “A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was
in body and soul, the great Magician, who struck the fancy of the
people like a mythical hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently
to meet that great soul. He advanced with a child’s frank courtesy
and a divine smile, shaking hands like an Englishman and addressing
each one of us by name, as if our names were written on our foreheads.
He was not disguised; he wore cloth shoes and a capote, and with his
middle, upright stature he looked like a philosopher straight from his
study, who never dreamed of troubling any police in the world.”
All his plots broke down, and again he was imprisoned at Palermo. Here
he read a great deal, smoked incessantly bad cigars, and laid the
schemes of fresh books. When Rome was captured he was released. Italian
unity was accomplished, but because Italy was not republican, Mazzini
felt his dream was spoilt.
For the remainder of his days he lived at Pisa. Daily, people saw the
white-haired stranger taking his walks and stopping frequently to talk
to children: and here he died in March, 1872. He was buried by his
mother’s side in Genoa. By a unanimous vote the Italian Parliament
expressed the national sorrow, and the president pronounced a eulogy
on the departed patriot, who had devoted his life to his country’s
freedom.
Mazzini was one of those curious independent men, of passionate
sincerity and tremendous energy, who make things very uncomfortable,
and who will always be detested by those easygoing people who prefer
to accept things as they are so long as their own ease and comfort are
not disturbed. His astonishing talents and qualities were balanced by
great faults, but they were more faults of judgment than of character.
He was very far from perfect. But the perfect man has yet to appear,
and if he does appear he will probably be quite intolerable, because
there is always something in people’s faults which endears them to
us. Mazzini was a lonely figure, courageous, humble, and without
personal ambition. But he could not work successfully with others, for
he would never compromise. He seems to have had peculiar difficulty
in translating his thoughts and ideas into action. In fact, running
through his whole career, there is a strange contradiction between his
lofty ideals, his deep religious beliefs, his noble ambitions, on the
one hand, and his petty intrigues, his futile plots, and his false
estimate of men, on the other hand. Judged by his writings, he would
appear to be a great hero whose moral purpose was an inspiration to the
whole world, but whose talents had never been fully developed, because
they were neglected for other forms of activity. Judged by his actions,
he appears a determined but perpetually misguided agitator, obstinate,
impulsive, and adopting the methods of a conspirator.
He knew the religious spirit must be the foundation of any great
moral movement. But his religion was broad and simple: he thought
the orthodox Christian doctrine had much in it which prevented it
having the power and influence it ought. He had a firm belief in
democracy—that is to say, in the rule of the people as opposed to the
absolute rule of kings and ministers. But he saw that advance in this
direction could only be brought about through education, and that was
why he devoted so much of his time to educating poor people and writing
books for them.
The whole idea of nationality was, in Mazzini’s opinion, based on the
will of the people. It must be remembered that in his day Europe was
divided up, to a large extent, into territories formed by the interests
and ambitions of royal dynasties, or in the name of the absurd
principle known as “the balance of power,” which means the grouping of
two sets of nations in opposition to one another—a policy which has
been the cause of many wars. Nationality, Mazzini maintained, was not
just a question of people of the same race, or people who spoke the
same language, or even people who lived in the same country, having
the right to make themselves into a separate nation. In the case of
Italy, as in the case of Great Britain, the geographical area is so
well defined by Nature, with its seas and mountains, that the problem
presented is quite easy. But there are other territories where neither
geographical formation, nor language, nor race, shows very accurately
what the frontiers of the nation should be. History and tradition may
form some guide, but the needs and wishes of the people concerned
should always be taken into account. “Nationalities,” said Mazzini,
“can be founded only for, and upon, and by the people.”
It was the fundamental truth which he always sought for. He was a
patriot in the best sense of the word. But he hated sentimental
bragging and showy patriotism. A man must not borrow luster from his
country, but give luster to it by service and devotion. Patriotism to
him was an intense regard for his country’s moral greatness. “The honor
of a country,” he declared, “depends much more on removing its faults
than on boasting of its qualities.”
His service to his country is difficult to measure. Although his
practical part in the actual accomplishment of Italian unity cannot
be compared with that of Cavour and Garibaldi, it was his bold vision
which first saw that the object was attained: it was he that gave
others the faith to pursue it: without him the great achievement might
have been long delayed. It was Mazzini who supplied the fuel for the
furnace, the impulse for the blow, and the unselfish motive which alone
could stir his fellow-countrymen to noble deeds.
The services of such a man are seldom recognized at the time. But when
the fight is over and the general survey is made of all the stages
which led ultimately to success, people come to understand the great
value and the enormous influence of the noble ideas which first set the
movement going.
A. P.
X
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
1805–1879
My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.
William Lloyd Garrison was the man who more than any one else helped
to abolish slavery. He was what we call a Pioneer—or one who leads
the way—because, though some people had hoped for the gradual freedom
of the negroes, and a few had worked for it, Garrison was the first
to ask for their immediate freedom and to set to work to make this
question the most living and important one of the day. For he believed
that if a thing is wrong in itself it should not exist another hour.
Garrison was born at Newburyport, Mass., December 10, 1805. Like
Thoreau and Hans Andersen, he was of humble birth and had a very
hard childhood. His mother had been deserted by his father, and he
was obliged to earn money to help her keep the home together. So as
quite a small boy he went about peddling apples, and later worked at
shoemaking and cabinet-making and other trades; he hated them all,
and on one occasion ran away to sea. There was no time for learning
from books, and he had practically no schooling. But when he was
thirteen he became apprenticed to the printers’ business in the office
of the Newburyport _Herald_, and to this work he took like a duck to
water. He showed peculiar skill at printing, and also a great gift for
writing. He wrote and sent articles to different papers and he read a
great deal. He liked romantic books, the novels of Sir Walter Scott
and the poems of Byron particularly. He wrote poetry himself which is
considered good. His mother had always warned her son against being
an author, as she believed the lot of all literary men was to die of
starvation in a garret. Nevertheless, Garrison seemed cut out for an
editor or writer. He was left alone in the world when he was eighteen,
for his mother died and his only brother, a bad lot, had disappeared.
His apprenticeship with the printer ended when he was twenty-one. At
this time he was a very taking and charming young man, with a refined,
sensitive, clean-shaven face, and always well dressed; pleasant, mildly
ambitious, and social, enjoying parties and going to church regularly,
he conformed outwardly to what the world thinks is the right and proper
thing. But there was more in William Lloyd Garrison than met the eye.
His friends, who had complete trust in him, now lent him money to start
a newspaper of his own. He called it the Newburyport _Free Press_, and
became the editor and proprietor of it, and wrote, too, most of the
articles. But the views in them were much too independent to please
the ordinary person, and it failed.
Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was
not going to take anybody’s word for a thing without thinking it all
out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever
it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks
to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search
of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance
paper, _The National Philanthropist_, in Boston, and then again the
proprietor of a newspaper called _The Journal of the Times_. Once more
he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In
a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had
been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks
to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and
intellect of man to brutal incapacity.
[Illustration: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON]
“This state of things,” he declared with vehemence, “must come to
an end.” The article drew the attention to him of a much older
man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been
agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison.
Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy’s preaching, and equally disgusted
with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.
It was almost impossible to get a church or a school for an
anti-slavery meeting, and when they did succeed, on one occasion,
the meeting was broken up by a clergyman who denounced the agitation
against slavery as dangerous. “The moral cowardice, the chilling
apathy, the criminal unbelief and cruel skepticism that were revealed,”
says Garrison on that occasion, “filled me with rage,” and from that
time he ceased to go to church.
Garrison was asked now by Lundy to become editor with him of a paper
called _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, whose object was to
suppress drink and to free the negro. Garrison joined him. He wrote
most of the articles and Lundy did the lecturing. The articles were
very clear and forcible. “For ourselves,” the paper declared, “we are
resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost; nothing but death shall
prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human
depravity.” Garrison worked hard: he got subscribers to the paper
and managed to start a petition against slavery, which was signed by
over two thousand people, and was presented to Congress. The answer
came back that agitation would make the slaves restless and difficult
to manage, and would put ideas into their heads when they might be
comparatively happy and contented.
You can imagine the scorn Garrison felt for his Government. What
else could he feel about a Government which boasted of itself as
a democratic Government, which desired all people to have equal
opportunities, rich or poor, and which, while sitting in the Capitol
could see every day the manacled slave driven past the door to market?
Custom, as it so often does, had blunted the sensibilities of these
Senators: they remained untouched and unmoved. It needed a young,
fresh, open mind like that of Garrison to show them the way. He was
only twenty-six, but he saw clearly what much older men did not see,
that in the long run the moral point of view is the only point of view,
that right or justice is the only thing to work for, and all other
issues are of no account at all. But it does not, perhaps, seem to us
now a very wonderful thing that Garrison should have been so shocked
and horrified at what he saw and heard about slavery. What strikes us
as incredible now is that there were many thousands of people, and
quite humane, kind people too, who defended it. It was the custom of
the country and part of the Constitution. Many people didn’t trouble
to reason about it; indeed, they believed that were slavery abolished
the country would be ruined—they would have no cotton, no corn, no
tobacco, because there would be no laborers to till the soil or to
harvest the crops. The black men and women did the work for nothing.
But so short-sighted and stupid were commercial people generally, that
they could not see that slavery, besides being a moral wrong, was
also a mistake economically. In the long run it was more expensive,
because the work was less well done; an intelligent person who takes
some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly
removed from the animals.
One Sunday in Baltimore, Garrison was visited by a slave who had
just been whipped with a cowhide, and whose back was bleeding from
twenty-seven gashes, while his head was terribly bruised. He had not
loaded a wagon to his master’s liking, and this was his punishment.
Garrison could hear as he passed down the street the sound of whips
and cries of agony. There seemed no mercy or justice anywhere, and his
country’s barbarity made Garrison’s cheeks burn with shame.
How did such a state of things arise, one may ask; how did these black
men and women come to be living in such numbers on American soil?
It happened in this way: the English in the past, having conquered
lands in different parts of the world, needed men to work and develop
these lands. They were mostly wild and uncultivated. The British, the
Spaniards, and the Portuguese were chiefly responsible for the slave
trade. Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, had been the first
to bring negroes into Europe in the fifteenth century, capturing them
on his exploring expeditions round the coast of Africa. Sir John
Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the traffic, and in
the seventeenth century the slave trade was mostly in English hands.
England made a very good business of supplying slaves to the Spanish
settlements, and imported also a huge cargo of negroes to Virginia for
tobacco planting, and this was the beginning of slavery in America.
This hunting of human beings to make them slaves was more barbarous
than anything the negroes themselves could have imagined. These
wretched black men, having been captured, their huts destroyed and
whole villages burnt, were placed on ships which brought them to our
colonies, to the West Indies and Jamaica; so packed and overloaded
were these ships and the poor negroes were so ill-treated that many
died on the way; out of a hundred only fifty would be any good for
work. This was one of the prices paid for what is called expansion and
having colonies. When the English came to know the real nature of this
dreadful business, all the best opinion was against it; but the Quakers
were the first to take any practical action against the slave trade,
which they did as early as the seventeenth century, both in America and
England, by turning out of their society all who should be engaged in
it. Gradually the British did away with slavery in their colonies, and
it was finally abolished in 1833, when Lord Grey was Prime Minister;
but the honor of being the first to abolish it lies not with England
but with Denmark, who forbade it in its possessions at the end of the
eighteenth century. Several countries followed the example of England
after she had put down slavery so far as it concerned herself, but the
United States was the last to fall in.