The Sun.
London, England, 1849-04-24 00:00:00

rJOSEPH. MAZZINI.
(From the Jersey Times of April 17.)
We desire not to rank amid the champions of
1 Joseph hlazzini, the master-spirit of the extemporised
triumvirate which for a day governs Rome—not to
say the Roman States; but to him, as to every man,
whether in the van or rear of things, we would fain
see justice rendered—and by England, and the press
of England, most especially. But by England, or at
all events by the English press, speaking generally,
justice has not been, but, rather, gross injustice has
been done to Mazzini. The Times, the powerful
' bully of every cause which falls into its line of
adoption, has from the time of the French outbreak
of February, 1848, and indeed for many years pre-
viously, made, what may be familiary styled " a
dead set" at that able and learned man of political
theories and social dreams. Even while he was
scarcely heard of beyond the circles of " Young
' Italy," and since the February eruption, even before
his name had whirled up into light from the con-
vulsed depths of the revolutionary maelstrom,
Mazzini bas been the man to whom the Times has,
now directly, now indirectly, pointed as the bead
and front of the entire destructive movement of
Europe ; at the same time blackening his name,
character, and deeds, with every kind of detractive
assertion and insinuation, as if they were those of a
designing assassin like conspirator against the human
weal of every Christian country, against the family
happiness of every Christian hearth.
The estimate of Joseph Mazzini, as a politician
and as a man, is a very false one; and the conduct
of the writers in the Times is infinitely the more
reprehensible, from the fact that they know that it is
falsehood. The cause to which Mazzini has from
early youth devoted himself, to which he has uteri-.
ficed country, family, home, all personal competence
and comfort, to which he has unflinchingly adhered
through exile and sickness and poverty, to which he
has subordinated even his intense love for the pre-
cious relics of Italian art, converting them into the
sinews of government and war, and to which he may
be destined soon to devote his last breath of life, be-
fore a musket or on a scaffold—that cause, Mazzini
has ever believed, and still believes, to be the most
greatly just one of the temporal world. The present
head of the Roman Government--if, at the moment
in which we write, Rome have a Government at all
—is a visionist, a mystic ; a believer in (at all events
for long ages yet to come) impossible systems
for the world's government and the perfectability of
human nature and happiness on this earth : all this
Mazzini is; but a dishonest man, a cunning plotter
against the welfare of men and nations, he is net.
For the rest, all human delusions—even generous
ones—bring about their own dire awakening and
punishment; and Mazzini's future promises to be as
full of disappointment and desolation as his past.
The physical forces at his command must prove as a
broken reed before either the Papal influences or the
Austrian sword ; the very people whom he has
sought to enfranchise, far beyond their material and
moral capabilities of freedom, will ere long turn upon
and trample him down ; and his best fate will be, to
die in the " harness" which he has assumed ; his

worst, to pine away the remainder of his days in a
reinflicted and hopeless exile from his once more
prostrated country.
To such a man, so intending and so doomed, the
great practical onward world of society must na-
turally be severe; but should at the same time be
merciful and just.