The Republican Alliance

IF from the late war, and the peace now concluded, Italy should fail to learn a decisive lesson for the future, and the democratic party fail to perceive the path to be followed in pursuit of that future, we should be driven to despair of both.

War for Venice, a war to regain our own territory and our own frontier, had become a necessity, — the supreme and sole condition both of security and honor. All men felt that, until the national question was solved, and Italy secure from foreign attack, no stable internal organization of the country was possible. All felt that, if we desired to place ourselves in a condition which would enable us, in the probable case of the non-fulfilment of the September Convention, to concentrate all the forces of the country upon the solution of the Roman question, it was of the first necessity to secure ourselves against an Austrian invasion, by gaining possession of the Rhetic, None, and Carnic Alps.

The Venetians, owing to the exertions of our party, were preparing for insurrection. The ruinous state of Italian finance imperatively demanded such reforms and such economy as were impossible of realization so long as the Damoclean sword of war was suspended over our heads. It had become impossible for our monarchy to hold back any longer without serious risk. Action was decided upon. Had they really willed it, victory was certain.

The monarchy had had five years to prepare; it had had unlimited supplies of money, an obsequious parliament, and a country resigned to any amount of misgovernment, provided only the promise of action was kept. War once declared, the whole of Italy rose up in a ferment of enthusiasm, and ready for every description of sacrifice in blood or money.

The monarchy, in order to remain the sole unwatched master of the field, demanded unlimited powers, both financial and political: they were granted. Reluctantly, and only under the pressure of public opinion, it demanded twenty thousand volunteers : seventy thousand eagerly answered the call. It demanded that all parties should signify their adhesion to the war : it was done. It demanded of Garibaldi the support of his name and the aid of his genius, without conditions : he gave both.

These concessions, so blindly made to a power that had repeatedly betrayed alike the desires and the rights of the nation, were mistakes ; but our present purpose is only to show that the monarchy obtained everything it demanded, and everything that was necessary for the overthrow of every obstacle in its path. The majority of the republicans — albeit full of distrust and evil presentiment — believed that, although the national question of unity and the internal question of liberty were based upon one and the same principle, yet their field ot application was different ; they held that, by uniting with the monarchy in the endeavor to emancipate upwards of two millions of Italians from a foreign yoke, they did not for a single day abdicate their right of republican apostolate ; and they considered, that that right would be strengthened and confirmed by the fulfilment of the duty of combating Austria in aid of their Italian brothers. They remembered that the nation, although still unprepared to adopt a better system of internal government, was eagerly desirous for war; and they knew that the true method for those who sought to educate and convince the nation could never be that of holding themselves aloof. They knew that, if left alone in the field, the monarchy would in case of triumph assume the entire honor of the victory, and in case of defeat attribute the dishonor to the dualism engendered in the national camp by the separation of the republicans. They felt how grave would be the danger, and how immense the disgrace, of a Napoleonic intervention in the Italian war ; they knew that the monarchy would invoke that intervention on the slightest pretext; and they considered it their duty to deprive the monarchy of all such pretext, by affording it all the assistance and all the men required. They therefore hastened to action in the ranks of the volunteers.

The monarchy entered the field with three hundred and fifty thousand regular troops, one hundred thousand¹ mobilized national guards, thirty thousand volunteers, and the whole nation ready to act as a reserve upon territory whereon every single man was a sworn foe to the enemy.

Austria had one hundred and fifty thousand men in Italy. The war with Prussia rendered it impossible to augment that number in any case. Yet more ; on each side of the Alps, on each side of the Save, by the shores of the Danube, along the Carpathian chain, in Hungary, Galicia, and Bohemia, in Servia, — half of the population of which is under Austria, — among the Roumain race, — a large portion of which is in Transylvania,— in the Banat and other Austrian provinces, among the Southern Slavonians, — eagerly desirous of constituting a widely extended Illyria, — Italy had allies at hand ; all of them ready, nay, eager, and entreating a word of encouragement or a movement on our part. The government knew these things. Agents from those provinces were in correspondence and contact with us, and with the government at the same time.

The war, if rightly conducted, would have carried dissolution into the very heart of the Austrian empire ; it would have insured to Italy the initiative of the movement of the nations ; it would have gained for her those indissoluble alliances founded on gratitude, which would have opened up the path of Italian economic progress in the East ; it would have constituted Italy a firstclass power, and rendered her arbitress of the European question at one bound.

In this, the first war to be fought with our own forces, Heaven set before us a glorious opportunity of cancelling that stigma of vassalage which has oppressed and weighed down our languid existence since Villafranca, and of transforming that existence into vigorous lite, the life of giants, — respected as powerful, and beloved as benefactors.

In a case like ours, a national republican government would have accepted the vast and holy mission set before them, blessing and adoring the God of Italy. A national government would have felt that Italy only exists in virtue of the right of revolution ; that she had naught to do with diplomacies, naught to do with treaties and alliances, save with those peoples called, like herself, to the conquest of their own freedom ; that her banner is the banner of a principle, — the principle of nationality, — and they would have boldly raised that banner in the face of friends and foes.

A national government would have understood that, in order to preserve the country from the ruin of repeated wars, and to vanquish Austria, not once, but forever, it was necessary to dismember her ; and that this necessity for the dismemberment of the Austrian empire pointed out the Danube, Vienna, and Southern Slavonia as the objective points of the war.

A national government would have instantly convoked an Italian parliament,— had none such been already assembled, — and bade them watch over the internal security ot the country, and keep open every path through which aid might reach the holy war, saving to them, Watch also over us, and see that neither from weakness nor incapacity we fail in our sacred mission.

A national government would have issued a proclamation to the Italian people, saying, Hold yourselves in threatening readiness as our reserve force, so long as we do our duty and go forward ; and be also ready to punish ns should we offer to draw back while one inch of Italian ground remains to be conquered.

A national government would have addressed another proclamation to the peoples now subject to Austria, saying to them, “ Arise! the Italian army is your army; yours the ports along the eastern coast of the Adriatic, — beyond I stria, which we shall set free, — across which sea we will form the alliance ot freemen with you.”

A national government would have opened unlimited registers of volunteers ; would have organized the Hungarian legions, and the thousands of Poles, — sons of the last insurrection,— now wandering over Europe ; it would have placed them with their national flags in the vanguard of our army ; then, leaving two intrenched Camps behind to guard Lombardy and the extreme Po, would have sent two hundred thousand regulars to push on by way of Laybach and Udine to Vienna, would have given the command of our fleet to Garibaldi, and, when he had destroyed the enemy’s fleet, would have poured fifty thousand volunteers beyond the Adriatic into Croatia and Hungary.

Had this plan appeared too daring, — which, however, it was not, —a national government would have arranged to have an insurrectionary outbreak precede the war along the zone of the Alps, and, first occupying the Trentino to its farthest frontiers by the regular troops, would have brought the main body of the army into the field between the Quadrilateral and Venice ; in either case contriving a simultaneous movement by the volunteers in Southern Slavonia.

The monarchy, however, — as if desirous of proving to Europe that insurgent Italy would have no other allies than the agents of despotism, — chose for its sole ally Bismarck ; who, being decided to make war upon Austria for his own purposes, would have afforded Italy all the aid she required from the mere force of things, and without any effort on her part.

The monarchy — as if dreading above all things that the people should acquire the consciousness of their own strength — elevated distrust into a system ; dismissed the parliament ; sanctioned exceptional laws against the press, and against all public meetings or associations. It first refused all aid from the volunteers, and then, when compelled by the public excitement to accept them, limited their number to twenty thousand ; then, urged again by the threatening attitude of the people, agreed to accept double that number, but refused to allow either riflemen or guides (indispensable elements of every army) among them ; then, — once more compelled to yield, — stipulated that they should provide their own horses and rifles.

The monarchy purposely introduced an unworthy element among the volunteers ; gave them unpopular and incapable superior officers ; armed them with old muskets, carrying only one fourth as far as the rifles of the enemy ; and, in order to make them appear useless and incapable, first sent them to do battle amid almost inaccessible mountains, and then abruptly recalled them to occupy points already strongly defended.

The monarchy refused Garibaldi’s request when he asked the command of the fleet; refused him all access to the Adriatic ; disallowed all insurrection in Venice and the Trentino before the war ; abstained from occupying Trieste, though it was left, as the government well knew, for more than twenty days without a single soldier, in the sole keeping of the National Guard, three fourths of whom were Italians; declined the movement offered by the Southern Slavonians ; held back the fleet in absolute inaction, and then, as if in mockery of the outcry raised by the country, sent it to sea unprovided with the most necessary stores of war, and under the command of a man already notorious for his utter incapacity, to the meaningless enterprise upon Lissa, which ended in defeat.

The monarchy, rejecting the advice of Prussia and of the best military men of Italy, in order to follow suggestions from Paris, sent a portion of the army, under the command of the author of all the disasters of 1848, upon an impossible enterprise against the Quadrilateral, which, combined with the fabulous disorder of all the secondary operations, and the total want of ensemble in marches and manoeuvres, resulted in the overthrow of Custozza. After this, whether from cowardice or some unknown cause, exaggerating the importance of the defeat, the monarchy inexplicably rested on its arms, until, when already in treaty for peace, it despatched Cialdini to invade where there were no enemies, and recalled Medici — the only one of the regular generals who had attempted any serious operation — from the Trentino, when he was within a few miles of the capital.

The iniquitous flight from Milan in 1S4S, Novara, Custozza, and Lissa, — such have been the results of the only wars our monarchy has undertaken without foreign aid. Foreign rulers,— we say it with a grief that passes words, — though at times guilty of crime, have at least shrunk from dishonor.

It was natural that the peace that followed should be upon a par with the war; but the monarchy contrived even to surpass the point of disgrace already reached.

The monarchy has submitted to hear Austria declare : / do not give back this Italian territory to those who are unable and unworthy to conquer it for themselves. I fling the flow useless encumbrance at the feet of the despot who has already wrung an Italian province from your cowardice, and who still deprives you of your own metropolis. Take it as an alms profit him, if he chooses to bestow it upon you.

The monarchy has submitted to hear the usurper of Rome and Nice declare : I, a foreigner, bestow upon you as alms this Italian province which you are incapable of winning for yourselves by force of arms. You shall henceforth do homage as vassals, not to Austria, but to me.

And the monarchy has swallowed the double insult. Had it not, a few years before, upon ground yet teeming with Italian blood, swallowed the insult of a peace concluded by an ally, who, though but a few steps distant from the king, yet deigned no word to him, — I will not say to ask counsel, but not even to inform him ot the abrupt decision ?

And this peace, — though this is of small moment compared to dishonor, — this peace is ruinous to Italy. Intrenched within the Alps; master of Istria, the key of our eastern frontier; master of the poor betrayed Trentino, the key of Venetian Lombardy; master of all the passes through which he has been wont to descend into Italy, — the enemy can lie in wait to seize the favorable moment, which the embarrassed position of Italy will surely offer, to fall upon us. A peace such as the present carries with it the necessity of another war, — a war which — it is needless to deceive ourselves — will find Austria stronger than before. Rejected by Germany, she will be compelled by the force of things, and by the numerical superiority of the Slavonian element, to transform herself into a Slavonian power ; and the Southern Slavonians, despairing henceforth of Italian aid, and certain of preponderance in the Empire, will at length rally round our enemy, and become enemies in their turn.

Meanwhile, the certainty of having sooner or later to engage in a new war will compel Italy to maintain her army undiminished, place her in the necessity of making fresh preparations, and render any important reduction in her expenditure impossible. It will force upon her a progressive increase of liabilities, threatening the state with bankruptcy ; reduce her to a constant condition of commercial uncertainty, alarm, and consequent inactivity of capital; compel her to new loans, new taxes, and the indefinite interruption of every great industrial, agricultural, or commercial enterprise.

Ruin and disgrace. A monarchy which, with a people like ours, with half a million of men under arms, with an army of approved courage, with soldiers and sailors such as those who sank in the Palestro, crying,tl V iva 1 Italia ! ” coldly brings this vassalage, poverty, and dishonor upon the country, may yet exist for a briet period upon the corruption and cowardice ot others ; but, before God and man, its doom is sealed.

Why is it that Italy patiently submits to all this accumulation of disgrace and wrong ? How is it that no cry bursts forth from the army, — special guardian of a country’s honor, to whom a stain upon the banner is worse than death, — from the corps of more than thirty thousand volunteers, the majority of whom had sworn not to lay down their arms till Italy was united,— from those cities which hailed with delight the signal of an Italian war they believed destined to initiate a new era, and to be the baptism of our emancipation from direct or indirect foreign rule, — how is it that from these no cry bursts forth of Out, cowards / Be all this shame and infamy upon your heads alone. We tear asunder the unrighteous compact. IVe will ourselves carry on the war you either cannot or will not conduct.

The causes of this silence are many, both individual and collective; nor need 1 enumerate them here. But, as regards our masses, the causes may all be summed up in one,—distrust: distrust, discontent, suspicion of all things and of all men. They have met with so many delusions in a few years, that they tear a new deception in every change, and shrink from the unknown future.

This distrust, — the parent of inertia, — this want of all confidence in their own forces, this disposition to disbelief in the capacity and power of the nation to save herself, is the result of the long lessons of immorality taught the country, deliberately by some, unconsciously and from an intellectual habit nurtured in slavery, by others.

Our country, a land seeking regeneration, has been taught and retaught by a press unworthy of Italy, by the example of men whose services in the past had endeared them to the people, and by an entire governmental hierarchy apt in assuming the credit of the work done by others, and in boasting their devotion to that unity which, but a few years since, they derided as the dream of our martyrs,— You shall rule your life by a sham. Truth is not the law of the times, and the times are your masterj say nothing of your rights, for fearthe monarchies of Europe should grow suspicious of you, and turn their forces against you ; say nothing of duty, — the word is odious to those who acknowledge no duty; seek only utility, a temporary and partial UTILITY, — it matters little if achieved at the price of servility and hypocrisy; falsehood,, if successful, is but prudent statesmanship. Caress the foreign tyrant, even while abhorring him in your hearts j hail the Pope as spiritual sovereign and Vicar of Christ, although you know that he has trampled under foot and falsified all true religion through lust of dominion : from the first you will soon be freed by death; and you will overthrow the temporal power — the sole importance — of the second more easily by the help of genuflexions and imposture. Extol monarchy, even though the old republican blood of your fathers boil within you; proclaim the constitutional system an ARCANUM of science, even though its most devoted supporters confess it a fiction, and the Piedmontese STATUTO inviolable, though you know it to be a wretched creation extorted in a moment of fear. Declare the monarch sacred and unimpeachable, even when he yields tip Italian soil to the foreigner ; Europe is alarmed at the word ‘ - republic f and the king has an army. There will come a time, —• but as yet it is too soon. Substitute for the war of principles ignoble skirmishes about men; but do not attempt to strike higher than ministers. The men who, from Socrates to Jesus, have preached and fulfilled what they believed the whole truth, were but sublime dreamers, and they perished; holdfast by Machiavelli, your sole guide.

Teachings such as these have poisoned and still poison the sources of all moral and intellectual development in an infant nation, which, though full of magnificent instincts, lias but just emerged from the darkness of slavery, by depriving them of all true criteria by which to judge the true worth of men or things.

When artifice and falsehood are once admitted as means of realizing the just and true, who shall venture to condemn the minister who lies ? who shall say he did not lie for the purpose of securing their triumph ? who shall venture to condemn the writer who recants his early opinions or creed, —the deputy who swears the reverse of his former oaths,— when it may be that they are only making a sacrifice to utility, and taking a hidden and less dangerous path to the goal we are all endeavoring to attain ? Who shall venture to say to the king, when he yields up Italian territory to the foreigner, You are ■unfaithful to your mission and to the country, when it maybe that still graver dangers, which to reveal would be to increase, are hanging over the nation, and compelling him to the cession ?

In this state of perennial doubt, hesitating in the obscurity of this moral twilight, wandering through a labyrinth of personal questions, led hither and thither by the promises of each political coterie, without the escort of any principle to guide their judgment, the moral sense of the people is gradually blunted, and they become accustomed to accept as the only signs by which to direct their choice of men, first, talent, — which when unaccompanied by virtue Is a source of evil, —and then success, — which, when immediate, is too often the fugitive result of mere force or cunning.

In this alternation of delusion and deception, the mind becomes contaminated by scepticism ; and scepticism is by degrees transformed into indifference. The people, wearied and disgusted, lose all manly energy of purpose, and end by regarding the succession of events that passes them by without producing any real improvement in the state of things as a matter in which they have no concern, and by accepting as inevitable the fatal dualism that exists between their own life and that of the governing power.

When tilings reach this point, if no speedy effort be made to put an end to it by a sudden initiative, a country is lost. It will inevitably sink into egotism. that gangrene of the soul which is the destruction of the future.

Hut a few more years of the actual system, and of the theoretic and practical teachings of its supporters, and Italy will reach this point. The force of circumstances may restore us this or that fragment of our own soil, this or that limited development of material force ; but the great soul of Italy will sink once more into the sepulchre from which it strove to rise. Without morality, without the consciousness of a mission, without faith in the power ol truth, no nation can exist We shall be, not a people, but the inane, despised phantom of a people.

A people can neither be revived through Jesuitism, nor regenerated through falsehood. Jesuitism is the instrument of religions in decay; falsehood, the art of peoples condemned to slavery. Socrates and Jesus died by the hand of the executioner; but it was the death of the body only. Their souls still live immortal, and are transfused from age to age into the worthiest life of the generations. Every moral and philosophical progress which has been realized for two thousand years recalls the name of the first; an entire epoch of civilization and emancipation was informed and inspired by the sacred name of Jesus. All the science of Machiavelli did but furnish a funeral lamp to illumine the tomb of Italy’s second life ; and could that great anatomist of a period of infamy and decay see the pygmies who, standing round the cradle of lier third life at the present day, yet strive to ape his work, it would fill him with noble rage and indignation.

A nation is a conscience; — tire consciousness of a great idea to be reduced to action ; of a collective duty to be followed as authority; of an invincible force brought to bear upon the fulfilment of the duty of all, by ail. So long as this conscience remains bright, clear, and incontaminate, that people will be great; so soon as it becomes darkened, so soon as the worship of utility is substituted for the worship of the idea, the spirit of calculation and interest for that of duty, a timid, servile hope in others for a calm trust in their own strength, that people will dwindle and decay, until fate points them out as the victim of other nations.

Truth alone is fruitful. Shams are barren; they dissolve, but cannot create ; they are to truth as galvanism is to life. Our martyrs, by bearing testimony to the truth we had taught, generated the necessity which compelled others to clear the way, however incompletely, for the advance ot Italy. The policy of shams led to naught but the cession of Nice, and the series of disgraces which threatens to force her to recede upon her path.

One instinctive glimpse of this consciousness of truth and duty was enough to enable the unarmed population of Milan to drive out the Austrians, and win back their native land in five days. Shams and tactics, nice calculations made in the service of a lie, gave us back the Austrians then, as they now give us Custozza, Lissa, and A’enice flung to us as an alms — the future will reveal upon what conditions— by the foreigner.

The history of Italy is the history of all peoples and of all periods. Great initiatives and great enterprises have always sprung from movements made either by the people or by individuals in a moment of holy enthusiasm for an idea, — an idea of sacrifice and progress, a tradition recovered from the tomb of their fathers, before which they had knelt in spirit, to arise, saying, “We have faith in ourselves.” And sham has ever followed after to render the initiative barren, or to seize its fruits, — to lull into inertia, or to excite into anarchy.

The great sham for us, — we have now a double right to declare it, — the lie that falsifies the whole life of Italy, and generates an interminable series of secondary lies, — is monarchy. This is the source of our misfortunes and our impotence; nor will they cease, happen what may, until monarchy shall cease to be.

Monarchy, — all who have read our history know this, — monarchy is not a national institution in Italy. We are no Utopians; we do not condemn monarchy at all times and in all places, because, historically speaking, the republic is the better form of government. Like the Papacy, monarchy has had in certain nations an historic function, a mission. In France it aided the constitution of the national unity; in England it stood between the rising commons and the arbitrary power of the nobles, sons of the Conquest. But in Italy monarchy has never represented any element of progress, has never identified itself with the life of the country. It entered Italy with the foreigner, and foreign it has ever remained. Servile in its origin, it ever was and is servile, — formerly to France, Spain, and Austria alternately, now to France alone ; but should Louis Napoleon Fall, it would sink again under one of the others.

Nor has monarchy inscribed any of those historic pages in the records of Italy which mark some progress in the destinies of the country. Our woolcombers have played a more brilliant and useful part in our Italian life than all our kings put together. The communes which diffused the germs of Italian civilization before the clays of Rome were republics composed of heads of families. The period of Rome’s true greatness, and of her grand unifying mission, was republican; the Empire came later, and came but to usurp and dismember. It was without any aid from our princes, in spite of foreign rulers, and beneath a republican banner, that our people overmastered the feudal nobility, and it was beneath a republican banner that our arts, industry, commerce, colonial influence, and literature grew, flourished, and were diffused among the various peoples of Europe. The brave men who have, from time to time, protested by dagger, conspiracy, or pen, and handed down to us a tradition of liberty, even amid the darkness of slavery, were republicans ; and republicans are they who, in our own day, have treasured up the promise contained in that tradition.

Monarchy never achieved aught either for the liberty or unity of the country ; it has always persecuted the apostles of both ; and only when it perceived the result to be inevitable has it stepped forward to appropriate the fruits of their labors. At the present day it corrupts and destroys the lite and moral greatness that should spring from their work.

The true Utopians — stupid and ignorant Utopians — are they who, in spite of the natural law which ordains that the institutions of a people are always the issue of the national traditions, fecundated by an instinct of the future, (and this instinct is republican all over Europe at the present day,) imagine that they can work out the progress and greatness of Italy through the medium of an improvised monarchy, unsustained by a powerful aristocracy, destitute of all great memories, without a Spark of genius, without faith in its own mission or power, — in all things a mere copyist of the foreigner.

Without faith in its own mission or power. Herein lies the source of that corruption which would, were monarchy to last, destroy the very soul of our people, — and, at the same time, this is the reason why it is impossible that the monarchy should improve.

Our monarchy feels itself a foreigner in Italy; it has a sense of the fatality by which it is pursued ; it feels that it is not beloved even by those, not believers, but opportunists (the barbarous word is of their own forging), who, from lust of power, greed of gain, or fear of imperial France, pretend to revere it.

The monarchy distrusts, inevitably and irrevocably distrusts, the people. Hence the necessity it is under of begging for foreign aid, — the necessity of begging that aid from despots, that they maybe ready to step in between it and the dreaded demand for liberty; hence the necessity of servile concessions, in order to preserve that alliance, and the necessity of constituting the government as a government resistance j hence the necessity of a permanent standing army, with such leaders and a mode of organization so calculated as to render it an instrument of repression, and transform its functions into those of a machine; hence the necessity of rejecting every plan of national armament, or the organization of a militia on the Swiss or American system ; hence the necessity of creating an immense mob of employes, — a sort of civil army bound to the duty of watching over and falsifying public opinion in the interest of the government; hence the necessity of keeping all these, except the highest grades, underpaid, which creates a constant incitement to fraud and wrong ; hence the necessity of corrupting the weak by means of place, industrial concessions, public or private pensions, and of terrifying the strong by means of exceptional laws, the sequestration of newspapers, and arbitrary prosecutions ; hence the necessity of avoiding all irritation of the Catholic element, and therefore of hypocritical caresses bestowed on the Pope; hence the unwillingness to boldly cut the knot of the Roman question, and the necessity — sad lesson of immoralit}r — of hailing with applause those deserters from the opposite camp deserving only of contempt; hence the necessity of surrounding the monarchy with ministers and men devoted to its petty traditions and its foreign allies ; hence the necessity of supplying the expenses of its artificial existence by a progressive increase of loans and taxes ; hence the necessity of restrictions on the suffrage, the press, and public associations, and of impeding as much as possible the liberal education of the people, and the free expression of their will.

All these and other dire necessities are the logical consequences of a state of distrust and peril ; they are the weapons and defences inseparably belonging to a monarchy doomed to fear and resist. You may change as you will the individuals at the head of the government, the fatal idea will govern them.

The evils we have but sligluly sketched will not decrease, but always increase in intensity. It is the cause of these evils that must be destroyed.

The government must be converted into an educational institution of liberty and progress. The government must learn to regard itself as the minister ol" the nation, bound to promote every branch of individual and collective activity. It must become the application of a principle, — a principle which includes and involves the unity of the country, — association founded on the free consent of all her sons in one aim, — the moral law of duty, according to the fulfilment of which each man shall be judged, punished, or promoted to office, and the inviolable reverence for those rights which spring from duties fulfilled.

It must be a government which, by the nature of its constitution, cannot have any motives or interests different from the general aim and common welfare, and all the members of the government must be regarded, and regard themselves, as securities for the fulfilment of that aim, and consequently responsible for the acts of the government.

The name of this government is Republic.

It is the sole possible solution of the problem which now torments Italy. Most Italians are at heart convinced of this ; but, for various reasons, they conceal it

We declare it.

We declare it all the more decidedly and deliberately lor having so long kept silence. None, save the intentionally unjust, can accuse us of having shown an exclusive and intolerant spirit. We have patiently submitted to await the result of the trial the nation chose to give monarchy ; the greater number of us have even actively aided and assisted the monarchy ; none of us have interposed any obstacles in its path ; some of us have even carried our abnegation so far as to overlook the increase of vigor which success would have afforded to the institution, and to point out to the monarchy the means by which success might have been secured.

But this trial must come to an end.

A country which, after seven years of delusions and deceptions, still submits to dishonor for itself, its army, and its volunteers, deserves destruction, and must resign itself to destruction.

IVe have not deserved this dishonor, and we will not let Italy perish. We now therefore speak the severe language of truth.

The democratic party — vigilant sentinel of the country — is henceforth bound to adopt the republican banner, which we hereby raise with the deliberate determination never to lower it again. In the state to which the country is now reduced, the duty of the democratic party resolves itself Into action or education.

Facts have too clearly proved that the necessity for action is not understood. The present duty of the democratic party, then, is to educate the people, and to remember that the basis of all education is truth. Italian democracy is bound to teach the truth, trusting that it will bear fruit in time.

The friends of monarchy will tell you that the people are corrupted, degraded by the habits of a servile past; and that, before we found a republic, we must have a people possessed of republican habits and republican virtues.

Tell them that monarchical institutions will never teach republican virtues ; that only a republic can create republicans ; that the institutions of a country are precisely its most potent means of public education ; that even the sudden earnest affirmation of a great principle and solemn truth has a transforming power over the peoples who witness it; that the tendency of the mass is to look upward, to be guided by example, and to shape their own conduct upon the example set by the governing power ; that it is therefore important to reform the governing power, and to publicly teach, by the very programme of the nation, that the surest means of curing those afflicted by epidemic pestilence is to remove them at once from the infected atmosphere into a purer air, even though purified by tempest.

Tell them that peoples may be transformed and taught to act according to the character of the initiative taken, if taken by a virtuous and determined minority; that the French people were more corrupted by the depravity of the regency and the reign of Louis XV. than our own are now, and that they were so transformed by the initiative taken by a minority, and were led to perform such prodigies of valor that even yet we bow down (though wrongly at the present day) before France.

Tell them that the affirmation and the official acts of the republic in 1S49 transformed Romans and Venetians, in no way superior to the Romans and Venetians of the present day, into a population of heroes both in valor and sacrifice, and that the history of all nations and all times confirms these examples.

They will tell you that the proclamation of a republic would turn the arms of all Europe against Italy.

Tell them that all Europe was defeated by republican France, then possessing a population of twenty-five millions only; that France remained invincible by all Europe until she was reduced to a monarchy by Napoleon.

Tell them that little republican Switzerland has successfully defended her territory against Charles the Bold, the house of Austria, and every enemy by whom she has been assailed.

Tell them that, although Louis Napoleon was able to make war upon republican Rome when she stood alone, abandoned by the rest of Italy, he cannot go to war against a strong nation of twenty-five millions, able to call a million of men under arms in her defence. Tell them that imperial France has even now been compelled to recede before the refusal of Prussia to yield one inch of Rhenish soil; that England accepts every fait accompliy that Russia is wholly occupied with the Eastern question ; that the whole soil of Europe is undermined by the republican element, ready to burst forth and follow the first step taken by a strong people, able and determined to win the first battle.

Tell those who denv this last assertion, that even they would admit it if the initiative were taken by France, and that their objection, therefore, is reduced to the cowardly declaration, that Italy alone, whether powerful or not, is disinherited of all initiative in Europe.

We believe that Italy is her own mistress ; the question is wholly and solely internal. The day on which we will\ we may.

Fortified by a fraternal compact with ail the representatives of our principle in Europe, and, recently, with the best men of the United States, we have founded in Italy, upon the ruins of the monarchical delusion, a Republican Alliance.

We call upon all democratic and progressive societies ; upon the workingmen ; upon those who, as if in sign of promise, have shed their blood on the rocks of the unhappy and forsaken Trentino ; upon the young, who are still pure and free from every compact, save with the future of our common country ; upon all the thinkers who, in the study of our great Italian traditions, have learned the path of Italy’s future greatness ; upon all those who have not sold their souls for the chance of place or power dependent upon a dying institution ; upon all who do not believe Italy doomed forever to this alternation of servile delusions, who feel their brows burn with shame at the dishonor brought upon the common mother by the Italian monarchy, — to rally round our Hag, and form one vast union of active endeavor and sacrifice.

We shall be victorous.

Italy is no lie : the parent of all great beginnings and sublime resurrections, she has not raised her head from the sepulchre wherein it has lain for ages only to sink again, humiliated and derided, or to be thrust back into the tomb by a few hundred pygmy unbelievers in her great destiny, — by profaners of that intellect which was once the sun of Europe,— whose only strength lies in their own vulgar cunning and accomplished mendacity, and in our foolish fears.

For the Alliance,

JOSEPH MAZZINL

1. The official accounts stated at the commencement of the war that the government had four hundred and fifty thousand troops ready for action. They now state that they were only two hundred thousand. They lied then, as they lie now ; the first time, in order that the country, confident of success, might leave everything to them; the second time, in order to explain the fact of their having done nothing. The above are the correct figures.↩