The Sun.
London, England, 1865-12-13 00:00:00

Mazzini on the Negro Question in America.

yours,

(From the Boston Commonwealth.)
" OCT. 80, 1865.
"Dear Conway,—You ask my opinion about the
coloured-men suffrage question. Can you doubt it?
" You havo abolished slavery. You have as a crowning
to your glorious struggle, as a religious consecration to
battles which otherwise would have only been deplorable
events, decreed that the sun of the republic shines on all,
that he who breathes the air of the Republic is free, that
as God is one, so, on the blessed soil where liberty is not
a mere hap-and-hazard fact, but a faith and a gospel, the
stamp of mankind is one. Can you mutilate this great
principle ? Can you cut it down to the monarchical half-
freedom standard ? proclaim the existence of the half-man?
enthrone a dogma of half-responsibility ? constitute on the
Republican American land a middle-ages class of political
serfs ? Is there liberty without the vote ? Is not political
liberty the sanctum, the guarantee of civil•liberty ? Is not
the vote the stamp of self-asserting human nature through
the moral world, as the right of 'labor and property is its
self,asserting stamp through the physical world ? Will
you turn, by denying that, your democracy to an incipient
aristocracy ? Will you decree that color is moral subal-
ternity ? Ignorance is, indeed ; but you did not choose
educated intellect as a test for the electoral right. Had
you done so, objections might arise on a different ground,
but you could not be accused of betraying the very prin-
ciple you have been proclaiming, of applying a different
rule to two sections of God's children ; of saying—' Those
colored men will be called on to be the armed apostles of
national union, and to give their life for it, but their life
will not be represented in the councils of the nation.' And
after all, is not the vote the first initiating stop to educa-
tion ? Does not the very consciousness of a function to
perform prompt the man to progress ? Is not the raising
of the national being in his own estimation the best educa-
tional beginning both for the child and for the ignorant
man ? And what do you fear ? Blunders ? Have your
whites never blundered ? Is it not invariably through
blundering that we reach truth T Give the vote and edu-
cation with it ; shorten for them the blundering period ;
but do not put on a level the good you will achieve for
all mankind by proclaiming the sacredness of a great prin-
ciple and the little evil which may come from the few
transient blunders of a minority. One thing is practically
sure ; these colored men will undoubtedly vote for those
who have called them into political existence, while, if dis-
inherited of it, they will be a tool of extra-legal agitation
in the hands of any man.who will promise it. These things
have been, will be, said to you far more forcibly than by
mine, by American voices. But there is one which is not,
as far as I know, touched upon by your countrymen, and
still is, it seems to me, of a prominent vital importance to
us all and to yourselves.
"It is that your task has changed, that you have a
sacred duty to fulfil, and that you shall not, until you have
manfully fronted and solved the difficulty before which
you appear now to hesitate, be able to fulfil it.
" There are, for every great nation, two stages of life.
The first may be devoted to self-constitution, to inward
organisation, to the fitting-up, so to say, of the implements
and activities through which a nation can undertake the
work appointed, and. proceed to fulfil the task which has
been ordained for her by God for the good of all mankind.
For a nation is a living task; her life is not her own,
but a force and a function in the universal providential
scheme.

" The second begins when, after having secured and
asserted her own self, after having collected and shown to
all the strength and the capability which breathes in her
for the task, the nation enters the lists of humanity and
links herself, by noble deeds, with the general aim. You
have triumphantly gone through the first stage ; you are
on the threshold of the second ono, and you must either
betray your national duty or step beyond.
"Through the almost fabulous amount of energies, un-
known to our old rotten monarchies, which you have dis-
played ; the constant devotedness of your mon and women ;
the all-enduring courage of your improvised soldiers ; and
mainly—do not forget it—the cancelling of the only black
spot, slavery, which was sullying your glorious Republican
flag ; you have struck deep in the heart of Europe a con-
viction that there is in you a strong, almost incalculable
power to bo reckoned with in the onward march of man-
kind. All the numerous and ever-increasing Republican
elements in Europe have discovered in you their represen-
tative. You have become a leading nation. You must act
as such. In the great battle which is fought throughout
the world between right and wrong, justice and arbitrary
rule, equality and privilege, duty and egotism, republic and
monarchy, truth and lies, God and idols, your part is
marked; you must accept it. Workers of humanity, you
must feel that to stand aloof would be a sin ; that indiffer-
ence, when the cry of God's creation is claiming you,
would be atheism. You must first sweep off the American
continent the enemy who has availed himself of your
troubles and dangers to skulk into your frontier and estab-
lish there an outpost of Ctusarism ; then help, mainly
morally,- materially, if needed, your republican brothers
wherever the sacred battle is fought, and you can usefully
encourage and strengthen those who toil and bleed for
truth and justice. There lies your mission— there your
glory and safety—there your future. The fathers of your
Republic would now speak the same language. They
taught the child, not the giant.
"But to fulfil that duty, to accomplish that mission, you
must have no threatening agitation at home ; and this
suffrage question, unsettled just now, will be to you a

source of a perennial agitation. A sacred programme nob
to De deserted, to those amongst you who stand by religion
and logic—a weapon to your enemies Damocles' sword
in the hands of the four millions of political serfs, it will
unavoidably absorb you, weaken you, keep you powerless
and inert abroad, until it is solved.
" Think of it, dear Conway, and speak of it. You may,
of course, make any use of what I write ; but su& thoughts
as these will be more listened to if coming front an Ame-
rican. A foreigner is always suspected of pleading his
own cause, which God knows I am not.—Ever faithfully
" JOSEPH MAZZINI."