done precisely what my English friends
required it to do. The Italian Republicans have actually assisted and
upheld the government with an abnegation worthy of all
praise,--sacrificing even their right of Apostolate to the great idea of
Italian unity. Perceiving that the nation was determined to give
monarchy the benefit of a trial, they have--in that reverence for the
national will which is the first duty of Republicans--patiently awaited
its results, and endured every form of misgovernment rather than afford
a pretext to those in power for the non-fulfilment of their declared
intention of initiating a war to regain our own territory and true
frontier,--a war without which, as they well knew, the permanent
security and dignity of Italy were impossible, and which, had it been
conducted from a truly national point of view, would have wrought the
moral redemption of our people.

The monarchy, however, which, as I pointed out in my article on "The
Republican Alliance," had had five years to prepare, and was in a
position to take the field with thirty-five thousand regular troops,
one hundred thousand mobilized National Guards, thirty thousand
volunteers under Garibaldi, and the whole of Italy ready to act as
reserve, and make any sacrifices in blood or money, abruptly broke off
the war after the unqualifiable disasters of Custozza 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 of December.

I may be told that a people of twenty-four millions who tamely submit to
dishonor deserve it.

I admit it; but it must not be forgotten that our masses are uneducated,
and that it is the natural tendency of the uneducated to accept their
rulers as their guides, and to govern their own conduct by the example
of their _soi-disant_ superiors; and I assert that, if our people have
no consciousness of their great destiny, nor 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 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