the whole of Italy-as facts have proved -ready for every description of sacrifice in blood, or money.

What has been the result? Our monarchy, which had taken the field with 350,000 regular troops, 100,000 mobilized National Guards, 30,000 volunteers under Garibaldi, and the whole nation ready to act as reserve, abruptly broke off the war-after the unqualified disasters of Custoza and Lissa-at a signal from France; basely abandoning our true frontier, the heroic Trentino, and accepted Venice as an alms scornfully flung to us by the man of the 2d December.

I may be told that the people which tamely submits to dishonor for itself, its army, and its volunteers, deserves it. I admit it: but it is the nature of the mass to look upward, and to rule their own conduct by the example set by the governing power, and I assert that if our people have no consciousness of their great destiny, no sense of their true power and mission; if, while twenty-four millions of Italians are at the present day grouped around-I will not say the conception of unity, but the unity,—but mere unstable fact of union-the great soul of Italy still lies prostrate in the tomb dug for her three centuries ago by the Papacy and the Empire-the cause is to be found in the immorality and corruption of our rulers.

The true life of a people must be sought in the ruling idea or conception by which it is governed and directed.

The true idea of a nation implies the consciousness of a common aim, and the fraternal association and concentration of all the vital forces of the country toward the realization of that aim.

The national aim is indicated by the past tradition, and confirmed by the present conscience of the country. The national aim once ascertained, it becomes the basis of the sovereign power, and the criterium of judgment with regard to the acts of the citizens.

Every act tending to promote the national aim is good; every act tending to a departure from that aim is evil.

The moral law is supreme. The religion of duty forms the link between the nation and humanity, the source of its right, and the sign of its place and value in humanity.

Such are the essential characteristics of what we term a nation at the present day. Where these are wanting, there exists but an aggregate of families, temporarily united for the purpose of diminishing the ills of life, and loosely bound together by past habits or interests, which are destined sooner or later to clash. All intellectual or economic development among them-unregulated by a great conception, supreme over every selfish interest-instead of being equally diffused over the various members of the national family, leads to the gradual formation of educated or financiary castes; but obtains for the nation itself neither recognized function, position, dignity, nor glory among foreign peoples.

These things, which are true of all peoples, are still more markedly so of a people emerging from a prolonged and death-like stupor into new life. Other nations earnestly watch its every step. If its advance is illumined by the signs of a high mission, and its first manifestations sanctified by the baptism of a great principle, other nations will surround the new collective being with affection and hope, and be ready to follow it upon the path assigned to it by God. If they discover in it no signs of any noble inspiration, ruling moral conception, or potent future, they will learn to despise it, and to regard its territory as a new field for a predatory policy and direct or indirect domination.

Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone among the nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action, confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the role of Italy in the world to be a work of moral UNIFICATION; the utterance of the synthetic WORD of civilization.

guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be of itself a potent initiative in the world. The mere fact of our existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification both of the external and internal life of Europe. Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we should have dissolved two Empires, and called into existence a Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.

We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming for the benefit of all humanity that inviolability of conscience which Protestantism did but achieve for a fraction of Europe, and confined within biblical limits. Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a nation, should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however-God alone knows the grief with which I write it—that sense with us is wanting.

And now a word as to the amnesty. Were it in my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of oblivion and pardon for having loved Italy above all earthly things, and preached and striven for her unity, as when all others regarded it as a dream.

But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence, and the sequel will show that even were the sacrifice of the dignity of my last years possible, it would be useless.

My past, present, and future labors toward the moral and political regeneration of my country, have been, are, and will be, governed by a religious idea.

The past, present, and future of our rulers, has been, is, and will be, led astray by materialism.

Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political questions are, necessarily, secondary and derivative.

They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority, in a religion of duty, of which politics are the application, cannot, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a Government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest.

Our rulers have no great ruling conception; no belief in the supremacy of the moral law; no just notion of life nor of the human unity; no belief in a divinely-appointed goal, which it is the duty of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the logical consequences of their want of all faith in God and his law, are their substitution of the idea of interest for the idea of duty; of a paltry notion of tactics for the fearless affirmation of the truth; of opportunity for principle.

It is for this that they protest against, without resisting wrong; for this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous by-paths, fascinated by the thougtht of displaying statescraft, and forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into slavery. It is for this that our Government has reduced Italy to the condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition copies the wretched tactics of the left in the French Chamber, which prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the present corruption, degradation, and enslavement of their country.

These things, I repeat, are consequences, not causes. We may change as we will the individuals at the head of the Government-the system itself being based upon a false principle, the fatal idea will govern them. They cannot righteously direct the new life of the Italian people, and redeem them from a profound unconscious immorality of ancient date.

The present duty of the democratic party in Italy then-since they cannot serve God and Mammon-is to educate the people, and, remembering that the basis of all education is truth, to endeavor to prove to them that the actual political impotence and corruption of Italy is derived from two causes, which may be summed up in one:

We have no religion, and we have set up a negation in its place.

II.

On the one side we have-as our only form and semblance of religion-the Рарасу.

I remember to have written more than thirty years ago, when none other dared openly to venture on the problem; when the boldest contented themselves with whispering of reforms in church discipline, and those writers who like Gioberti set themselves up as philosophers, thought proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian primacy entrusted to I know not what impossible revival of Catholicism -I remember to have written then, that both the Papacy and Catholicism were things extinct; and that their death was a consequence of A QUITE OTHER DEATH. I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both.

Years have confirmed what I then declared the Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion; a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But, at the present day, we either do know, or ought to know, the cause of this. All contact with the Papacy is contact with death, carrying the taint of its corruption over rising Italy, and educating her masses in falsehood-not because cardinals, bishops, and monks traded in indulgences three centuries ago;-not because this or that pope trafficked in cowardly concessions to princes, or in the matrimony of his own bastards with the bastards of dukes, petty tyrants, or kings, to obtain some patch of territory, or temporal dominion;-not because they have governed and persecuted men according to their arbitrary will-but because they cannot do other, even if they would.

These evils and these sins are not causes, but consequences. Even admitting the impossible hypothesis that the guilty individuals should be converted, that the Jansenists or other reformers should recall the misguided popes to the charity and humility of their ancient way of life, they could only cause the Papacy to die with greater dignity; it can never again be what once it was the ruler and director of the conscience of the peoples.

The mission of the Papacy-a great and holy mission, whatever the fanatics of rebellion at the present day, falsifying history and calumniating the soul and mind of humanity in the past, may say to the contrary-is fulfilled. It was fulfilled six centuries ago; and no power of genius nor miracle of will can avail to revive it. Innocent III. was the last true Pope. He was the last who endeavored to make the supremacy of the moral law of the epoch over the brute force of the temporal governments, of the spirit over matter, of God over Cæsar, an organic social fact.

And such was, in truth, the mission of the Papacy, the secret of its power, and of the willing adherence and submission yielded to it by humanity for eight hundred years. That mission was incarnated in one of the greatest of Italians in genius, virtue, and iron strength of will, Gregory VII., and yet he failed to prolong it. One hundred and fifty years afterward the gigantic attempt had become but the dim record of a past never to return. With the successors of Innocent III. began the initiative power of the Papacy; it ceased to infuse life into humanity. A hundred years later, and the Church had become scandalously corrupt in the higher spheres of its hierarchy, persecuting and superstitious in the lower. A hundred years later it was the ally, and in one hundred more the servant of Cæsar, and had lost one-half of Europe.

From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to the thing we now behold it; disinherited of all power of inspiration over civilization, the impotent negation of all movement, of all liberty, of all development of science or life, destitute of all sense of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by foreign bayonets, trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken by humanity which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.

The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed; from a notion of life since proved imperfect; from a conception of the moral law, inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation; from a solution of the eternal

problem of the relation between man and God, since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition. The dogma itself, which the Church once represented, is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race. The dawn of a new dogma is approaching, which will relink earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is a duty to declare this, with out hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve, the problem; because the future cannot be fully re vealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.

The formulæ of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission, was that of the fall of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were

The doctrine of the necessity of mediation between man and God:

The belief in a direct, immediate, and immutable revelation, and hence, in a privileged class-naturally destined to centralize in one individual-the office of which it was to preserve that revelation inviolate:

The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited faith in the Mediator for works; hence grace and predestination, more or less explicitly substituted for free-will, the separation of the human race into the elect and the non-elect, the salvation of the one, and the eternal damnation of the other; and, above all, the duality between earth and heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.

In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more

than the individual, it offered the individual a means of salvation in despite of the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him-the world is adverse to thee: renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ, this will lead thee to heaven.

The new formula of life and its lawunknown at that day, but revealed to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity, confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of genius, and the grand results of scientific research-may be summed up in the single word PROGRESS,* which we now know to be, by Divine decree, the inherent tendency of human nature, whether manifested in the individual or the collective being, and destined, more or less speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.

The logical consequences of the new formula, are: The substitution of the idea of a law for the idea of a mediator, of a continuous educational revelation for that of an immediate, arbitrary revelation, of the apostolate of genius and virtue, and the grand collective intuitions of the peoples when roused to enthusiastic action in the service of truth, for the privilege of a priestly class; the sanctity of tradition as the depository of the progress already achieved, and the sanctity of individual conscience, as alike the pledge and the means of all future progress; works sanctified by faith, substituted for mere faith alone, as the criterion of merit and means of salvation.

The new formula of life cancels the dogma of grace, which is the negation of that capacity of perfectibility granted to all men, as well as that of predestination, which is the negation of free-will;

and that of eternity of punishment, which is the negation of the divine element existing in every human soul.

The new formula substitutes the conception of the slow continuous progress of the human ego, throughout an indefinite series of existences, for the idea of an impossible perfection to be achieved in the course of one brief existence; it presents an absolutely new view of the inission of man upon earth, and puts an end to the antagonism between earth and heaven, by teaching us that this world is an abode given to man wherein he is bound to merit salvation by his own works; and hence enforces the necessity of endeavoring, both by thought, action, and sacrifice, to transform the world; the duty of realizing our ideal here below, as far as in us lies, for the benefit of future generations, and of reducing to an earthly fact, as much as may be of the kingdom-the conception-of God.

The religious synthesis, which is slowly but infallibly taking the place of the synthesis of the past, comprehends a new term-the continuous collective life of humanity; and this alone is sufficient to change the aim, the method, and the moral law of our existence.

All link with heaven broken, useless to the earth, which is ready to hail the dawn of a new dogma, the Papacy has no longer any raison d'être. Once useful and holy, it is now a lie, a source only of corruption and immorality.

Once useful and holy, I say; because, had it not been for the unity of moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the Papacy, we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we should not now have been prepared to proclaim the dogma of human equality on earth. And I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at the present day, because every great Institution becomes such, if it seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. The substitution of the enslavement for the slaughter of the conquered foe was a step toward progress, as was the substitution of servitude for slavery; the formation of the bourgeoise class was a progress from servitude; but he who at the present day should

attempt to recede toward slavery or servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization past and future, and a teacher of immorality. It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to win the city of the future, and the triumph of truth, to make war not only upon the temporal power-who should dare deny that to the admitted representative of God on earth ?-but upon the Papacy itself. It is therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient, unequal to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity.

They who at the present day attack the Prince of Rome, and yet profess to venerate the Pope and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.

They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of a free Church in a free State, are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or destitute of every spark of moral conviction.

The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy of the name. It is-like all the programmes of mere liberty-an implicit declaration that the institution against which we are compelled to evoke either our individual or collective rights, is corrupt and destined to perish.

Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it, you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure; to look forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the positive organic principle destined to govern that normal state. By keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the moral from the political, theory from practice; the ideal from the real; heaven from earth.

When once all belief in the past