i negherebbono
la obbedienza? Quale invidia se gli opporrebbe? Quale Italiano gli
negherebbe l'ossequio?' To fill the appointed part Victor Emmanuel
possessed the supreme qualification, which was patriotism. Though he
came of an ambitious race, not even his enemies could with any
seriousness bring to his charge personal ambition, since every step
which took him further from the Alps, his fathers' cradle, involved a
sacrifice of tastes and habits, and of most that made life congenial.
When his work was finished, though he was not old, he had the
presentiment that he should not long survive its completion. And so it
proved.

In the first days of January 1878, the King was seized with one of
those attacks on the lungs which his vigorous constitution had
hitherto enabled him to throw off. But in Rome this kind of illness is
more fatal than elsewhere, and the doctors were soon obliged to tell
him that there was no hope. 'Are we come to that?' he asked; and then
directed that the chaplain should be summoned. There was no repetition
of the scene at San Rossore; the highest authority had already
sanctioned the administration of the Sacraments to the dying King, nay,
it is said that the Pope's first impulse was to be himself the bearer
of them. At that hour the man got the better of the priest; Francis
drove out Dominic. The heart that had been made to pity and the lips
that had been formed to bless returned to their natural functions.
When the aged Pius heard that all was over, exclaimed: 'He died like a
Christian, a Sovereign and an honest man (galantuomo).' Very soon the
Pope followed the King to the grave, and so, almost together, these
two historical figures disappear.

Six years before, solitary and unsatisfied, Mazzini died at Pisa, his
heart gnawed with the desire of the extreme, as the hearts have been
of all those who aspired less to change what men do, or even what they
believe, than what they are. More deep than political regrets was the
pain with which he watched the absorption of human energies, in the
race for wealth, for ease, for material happiness; he discerned that
if the egotism of capital led to oppression, the egotism of labour
would lead to anarchy. To the end he preached the moral law of which
he had been the apostle through life. His last message to his
countrymen, written when the pen was falling from his hand, was a
warning to Italian workingmen to beware of the false gods of the new
socialism. When