The Sun.
London, England, 1859-10-15 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, SATURDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 15, 1859.

"IL MAZZINI AND TILE KING OF
SARDINIA.

The following letter has been forwarded to us for
publication :
" To VICTOR EMMANIYFL, KING OF PIEDMONT.

" Sire,—Amid the tumult of cowardly praises and servile
adulation with which mercenary busybodies, ambitious up-
starts, and the born courtiers of every power are surround-
ing you, can youlear and comprehend the words of a true
man who neither fears nor hopes in you, and who only de-
sires to live and die in peace with his own conscience ?
Are you able to lend an ear, amid the premature adhesions
of entire provinces and the insidious flatteries of diplomacy,
to the solitary voice of an individual who has no merit ex-
cept that of loving Italy with an immense and disinterested
love ; and will you say to yourself, Perhaps from that voice
I may learn the truth ?' If so, then hear me, although ad-
dressing you I can only speak truth, or that which my rea-

son and my heart tell me to be truth. Being a Republican in

faith, I should, if I regarded morely the interests of my party,
rejoice in every error which a king commits, as affording new
ground for the condemnation of monarchy. Jut, because I
love my country more than my party, andbecause you can, if
you will, powerfully aid her to arise and conquer, I write to
you. I write to you from Italian soil, where the persecu-
tion of a Government which prates of freedom while treat.
ing with old Ducal severity the exiles who have taught it
that word ; where the errors of a deluded people and the cold
desertion of men now in power, who were once my friends,
would almost compel me to believe that all feeling of a free

conscience or a free future is dead in Italy. Yet, from the

depths of that land once peopled with great souls, where
the eye wanders from Dante's Rock to the remains of the
patriotic defences erected by Michael Angelo, flows forth a
mighty torrent of life which three centuries of sacerdotal
and foreign tyranny have failed to quench, and_ which
awaits the hour to reveal itself ; the concentrated, energetic,
collective life of a people who were free and republican when
the rest of Europe lay sunk in the darkness of feudalism ;
which burst forth from time to time in volcanic outbreaks
from Procida to Masaniello, from the Genoese insurrection
of 1746 to the five days of Lombardy; and which shall one
day engulf beneath the fulness of its waves all those
wretched, emasculated, pigmy existences which now yen.
ture to ape it. It is in the name of that life—the life of a
people which is not yet but which shall be, the life, not of
any particular Italian zone, but of Italy, which has its
centre in Rome and pervades every portion of the country
from Trento to Cape Passaro—that I this day address you.
You, Sire, do not understand this life ; if you had understood
it you would not have implored foreign aid for your enter-
prise. The courtiers who surround your throne purposely
conceal it from you ; they know they would be unable to
control it. The men of mediocre talent who were or are your
ministers, and who study the secret of the third life of the
nation in the pages written by Machiavelli upon its corpse,
cannot reveal it to you. The diplomacy which has laid siege
to your mind denies, because it quails before it. I under-
stand it because, born of the people, 1 have explored this
hidden life in love, in grief, in the sacrifice of everything
most dear, and with a soul pure from all selfish aims.
" Sire, you are strong ; strong, if you only will to be so,
in that life ; strong in all the invincible power which
resides in a people of 26,000,000 united in one purpose ;
stronger than any other prince now living in Europe, since
no other could at the present time claim so much affection
from his own nation as you could awaken by one word—
Unity. You have not dared to utter that word. There-
fore you do not know what Italy can become, how much she
can give you. The latent strength which that word, reso-
lutely pronounced, would call into action is unknown to you.
"Italy is seeking for unity. She desires to constitute
herself a nation united and free. God decreed this unity
when he enclosed us between the eternal Alps and the eter-
nal sea. History has written " Unity" upon the walls of
Rome; and the unitarian idea emanating from thence was
so powerful that, overstepping the bounds of its own coun-

try, it twice reduced all Europe to unity. The. slow labour
of centuries has so much worn away those dissensions which
invasion, colonisation, snd conquest had introduced among
the families spread over our soil that, although enslaved
and dismembered, our people now, perhaps more than any
other, almost universally represents in its customs and ar-
rangements the sentiment of equality. The unity of Italy
was the ideal of our great men, from Dante to Machiavelli,

from Machiavelli to Alfieri. In the name of unity our boat
and bravest have died for the last half century with a smile
upon their faces, on the scaffold or sword in hand, from
Messina to Venice, from Mantua to Sapri. In the name if
tUnity we have—although deprived of means and influence,
persecuted, and a hundred times defeated—initiated and
maintained such a growing agitation in Italy as to make of
the Italian question a European question, and to prepare
for you and yours, Sire, the ground which now bears fruit
for you in praises and in strength. Unity is the prayer,
the passionate desire of all Italy. One country, one na-
tional banner, one single compact ; a seat among the nations
of Europe; Rome for the metropolis—such is the creed of
every Italian.
"You spoke of independence. Italy roused herself and
gave you 50,000 volunteers. But this was only half the
problem. Speak to her of freedom and unity, and she will
give you 500,000. Of what avail is independence to Naples,
to Sicily, to half the Roman provinces ? More than 12 millions
of Italians groanbeneath a local tyranny equal to that exer-
cised upon the Venetian territory by the foreigner. The
priests and the police prohibit every free development of
life. The galleys, the stick, the executioner, are the props
of Government. What matters it to the miserable Peru-
gians, what matters i t to the victims inaples and Sicily,
whether the power of Austria does or oges not extend be-
yond the Mincio ? And Venice ? And Rome ? Where is
Italy without Rome ? There remain for the last ten years,
like a wild beast couching on a noble corpse, 10,000 French-
men, also foreigners, and the Papal tyranny only exists by
their aid. You have allied yourself with them. Your in-
dependence' does not protect the sanctuary of Italy. Ah,
Sire I do not reproach Italy for having given you no more ;
rather admire her for having thrown at your feet, without
the shadow of a compact, the lives of 60,000 young men in
the face of a programme so mutilated, so contemptible, and
so illusory as that which you placed before them.
" And remember this—in spite of the poverty and the
contradictions of that programme, so great was the
faith in you, Sire, so powerful the stimulus of prolonged
suffering and prolonged hope; so deep the conviction that
Piedmont, having once unsheathed her sword, would not
be content to stop half way, that Italy was ready for much
more. But those who surround you did not desire it ; they
trembled before the people ; they feared that increased
action would give it increased consciousness of its rights,
and that you would learn to understand it. Do you know,
Sire, with what artifices, with what persistence in cowardly
teaching, they extinguished for five days every generous pas-
sion, every spark of enthusiasm, every noble self-sacrificing
impulse in that people whom they sought to call into life ?
how those who spoke in your name taught, as the only
virtue, discipline, inertia, as if nations could by means of
Jesuitical maxims educate themselves for great deeds ?
how we were systematically calumniated with the masses,
we who had taught them, in the name of unity—
aye, of Royal unity, provided you created it—the virtue of
struggles, of sacrifice, of knowing how to die-Lthe certain
pledge of life ?—how the journals who espoused your cause,
profaned by insult, if not by brutal suspicions, the bald
enterprise of the men of February, 1853, the protest of
Bentivegna, the lonely grave of Pisacane ? Do you know
that your agents refused the initiative which the people of
Milan offerred to assume a little before the commencement
of the war, when, however, the Austrians were few in
number, and might have been taken at a disadvantage?
Do you know that they said to Sicily, when she was pre-
pared to rise and uneasy about the delays during the war—
' No ; wait for the signal ;' and the signal, for secret rea-
sons, was never given. The insurrection of the South, in-
creasing the ardour of the conflict in the North, would have
established by a single blow the unity of the movement,
established in your, name the unity of Italy, and none
among the manoeuvrers who pressed around you desired or
ever dared to desire unity. Meantime this poor people was
learning not to believe in itself, to lose all initiatory power,
to expect salvation not from its own courage, but solely
from organised battalions, artillerymen, and generals-in.
chief. And we saw the effects of this. But if, from the
inertness of many, and the hesitation of all, you were to
infer, Sire, that this people had in reserve no other life
than that which it revealed during the last few months,
you would prove that you know nothing of nature or of
history, and show that you had forgotten the events of 10
or 11 years back. The manifestations of life in a people
are in strict proportion to the object they propose to them-
selves and the daring of their directing chiefs.
" Sire, you must in nowise forget this. You did not frater-
nise with the people of Italy, neither did you call upon it
to fraternise with you. Seduced by the miserable policy of
a Minister who preferred the arts of Lodovico the Moor to
the part of a regenerator,you refused the arm of our people,
and in an evil hour you invoked, without any necessity, the
weapons of a foreign tyrant as allies in the enterprise of
our liberation. I say without necessity, because if you had
desired the Lombardo-Venetians to rise suddenly, when
Austria was in Italy weak and unprepared, and had held
yourself in readiness to follow them up, they (the Lombardo -
Venetians) would, without doubt, have re-conquered their
territory between the Alps and the sea ; and nothing would
have remained for you to do in order to consummate the
war but to advance, disregarding the remnants of the hos-
tile forces concealed in the fortresses, upon the heights of
the Tyrol and of Upper Venetia. In that hour, for which
you yet owe compensation to Italy, you lost nine-tenths of
the forces which the country was prepared to give you ; you
lost those men—and they are more numerous than the
busybodies care to tell you—who, like ourselves, do not
blindly adore the idol of power and will not sacrifice their
conscience to a lie; you lost all those who when, they saw
the immense preparation for a regular war said to them-

I selves, They have no need of us.' You lost the people who
drew back in diffidence, and thought 'the King will not
have us.' You lost the consecration of that holy enthu-
' siasm, that sacred wrath, that sacred boldness which creates
victory. You lost the all-powerful aid of revolution, with-
out which unity in Italy will never be established. Finally,
Sire, when you concluded that ill-fated alliance, you
snatched from the cause of Italy that glorious halo of vir-
tue which made it dear to God end man, to associate it with
vice and egotism; you made it descend from the height
of a principle to the depth of an interest, and of the
crooked ambition of others; you committed the work of
liberty to the guardianship of despotism'; you took from
the enterprise every sanction of morality you extended
your liberating hand to the contaminating, ouch of a man
whose hand is dripping with the best blood of Rome and of
Paris ; and as to yourself, Sire, you have given to yourself
a master in the place of an ally.
"No, Sire, do not reproach Italy with coldness; do not
mistrust that' land which, although enslaved and dismem-
bered, has yet known how, through the constancy of her
endeavnurs and the pertinacity of her martyrs, to make
herself the centre of every European question—who, when
for a short time re-awakened, was able in Lombardy to ex-
terminate in five days an army of 75,000 men ; able in Rome
to resist for two months with 14,000 men, collected beneath
a national banner, more than 30,000 French soldiers; able
for 18 months in Venice, with the weapons of improvised
soldiers, to resist the ik.ustrians, aided by hunger and dis.
ease ; able to fight, as she has fought, with the arms of the
common people only, at Brescia, Bologna, Palermo, and
Messina. You never desired her aid.

" Sire, will you have her? Will you have her sublime
with enthusiasm, faith, and action ? Will you have her in
such strength that diplomacy shall stop short, terrified that
every adverse design shall be destroyed before her ?

" Then, dare.. .
" Pm:lexica is the virtue of normal times and conditions.
Audacity is the genius of strong inindii in difficult times.
The people follow it, because it affords them proofs that
they will not be betrayed in the hour of peril. Faith
begets faith. When the time is ripe for an undertak-
ing the secret of victory is in the power of the initiative.
If we are now, as if under the influence of a spell, follow-

ing the fortunes and the will of France, it is because
half a century ago Danton summed up the initiative
in the word ‘l'audace,' and an assembly constituted itself
the living incarnation of that word before all Europe in
arms. Tho inviolable unity of France dates from that
day. Sire, Italy knows you to be valiant in the field,
and ready for honour's sake to throw away your life.
Sire, the day in which you are ready to throw away your
Crown yox may assume the Crown of Italy. Italy knows
you to be valiant in the field. But, although this may be
a rare virtue in Kings, the lowest of your volunteers can
boast the same ; and life for him is sanctified by the love of
mother, sister, or friend, which is fur him as the crown of
his being. Italy must now know you to be brave in council,
powerful in will to do away with every obstacle, strong in
that moral courage, which once a duty recognised, a high
undertaking to be fulfilled, makes of it a guiding star and
follows its course bravely and unflinchingly without re-
ceding either through threats or flattery. Yen can, I be-
lieve, show yourself such, and- therefore I write to you;
still, Sire, as yet you have not thus shown yourself.
" Sire, you have accepted the Villafranca peace, and you
have refused—because the acceptance submitted to the will
of foreign Governments is forbidden—the votes of some
millions of Italians, who, believing that they were giving
themselves to unity, gave themselves to you.
"The first act threw Italy at the feet of the foreigner ;
the second destroyed Italian right for the benefit of a foreign
principle, and the man and tho principle are both incarna-
tions of despotism.

" Sire, so many flatterers dispute with each other how to
destroy the germs of good which are in you that from me,
at least, you shall hear the truth.

" The acceptance of the Villafranca peace would have
been the act of a coward had it not been yours. Praise
given to your father, Sire, can hardly sound ill in your cars,
although it Implies a reproof to you. You have yet time to
give it a solemn and glorious reply. Your father would not
have signed that peace. He also wanted in his disturbed
and fitful life energy of purpose and faith in the people of
Italy. But when, after the fatal rout of Novara, he saw
that nothing remained for him but to reign as a conquered
King, and sign his name to humiliating conditions, ho him-
self indignantly threw away his crown and turned his steps
into voluntary exile. You signed the humiliating agree-
ment, coming out victorious from three—from four battles.
You signed an agreement which will betray Venice, Italy,
your promises, and those men who upon faith of _them had
hastened from all parts of Italy to fight round you ; an
agreement that was imposed upon you, imposed by the
foreigner, imposed by him who, coning as your ally, trans-
formed himself at once into an insolent master, imposed
upon you without your being allowed to discuss it, imposed
upon you by a dirty trick from ono who held you for nothing
in the matter, and incapable of resistance ; and as if you
desired that Europe should see that you were more greedy
of booty even than the honour you accepted—oh I the in-
sult both to her and you—Lombardy, to hold her as a fief
from a foreign lord. Sire, no private gentlemen would have
borne such an insult. I know not of what temper the souls
of Kings are made ; but I know that if I were you I should
never sleep without the image of poor sainted, heroic, be-
trayed Venice appearing to tne like a reproving sister ; nor
could I ever review my troops, and see there, the volunteers
from Perugia and Rome, without a blush of shame.

" I say nothing of the conditional acceptance given to the
central provinces. It is the sad consequence of the first
act. You are no longer your own master. Having at
Villafranca become tho vassal of Imperial France, you are
obliged before you can give an answer to Italy to seek in-
spiration at Paris.
" Sire, Sire in the name of honour, in the name of Italian
pride, break the odious compact. Are you not afraid that
history will say, Ho traded with the enthusiasm of the
Italians to feed his own dominions ?'

tt sire II do not believe it. I believe you—and I wrote
it three years ago when I was condemned to death for hav-
ing endeavoured to aid with Genoese arms the attempt of
Pisacene in the south—to be better than your Ministers
and the political busybodies who surround you. I believe
that there is a spark of Italian pride and love for Italy ani-
mating you. But if this be true—if what I felt when read-
ing your simple spontaneous replies to some flattering de-
putation is not the delusion of a fond hope, have you not
sufficient energy to live your own life ? Shake off, in God's
name, the crowd of pigmy councillors of cowardice, as the
lion disperses by ono shake of his mane the insects whioh
swarm around him. Why did you assume the dictatorship
in the beginning of the year ? In order to impose silence and
petty persecutions upon men who, like me, dare to speak
the truth to you ? Our fathers assumed the dictatorship in
order to save the country from the menace of the foreigner.
Have her, provided that you are her liberator; but begin
'by liberating yourself from men who betray Italian idea into
the hands of the executioner of Rome, and from the impo-
tent crowd who imprison the thought of your soul in diplo-
matic artifices.

" Sire 1 the Italian war is not ended—it is but begun.
For you the victories of Lombardy ought to constitute only
the first campaign. It is your task, in virtue of your given
promises, to rekindle—that of Italy to maintain it to the
end.

" But it is not by gaining time that you can obtain the
object. The 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 men that you may add
to your army are nothing to what you lose by delay. Italy
is being enervated by scepticism and discomfiture ; enthu-
siasm is fast dying out, diplomacy is spreading the germs of
dissolution, questions are localising themselves, the move-
ment losing its national characteristics.
" You ought to have rejected with indignation the agree-
ment of Villafranca. You ought to have said to Louis
Napoleon, 'I do not break my promises.' You ought to
have said to Italy, ' The foreign ally abandons us ; I con-
tinue the war alone, and I ask from the country the num-
ber of men thus withdrawn by the abandonment of his
army.'

" You did not do so, but there is yet time. Fraternize
with the people—fraternize with, without fearing it, the
revolution. By so doing you will find more help than suf-
ficient for the undertaking. The 120,000 regular soldiers
which Piedmont wind the centre give to you, are a suffi-
cient nucleus to determine the general Italian insurrection,
and from Italian insurrectionyou will draw another 120,000
of regular soldiers, and awhole people in arms to strengthen
and facilitate the operations of the army, to flank in its
movements, to cause a loss to the enemy in every step that
he takes; to take from him at once both strength and cou-
rage.
"An army, and the insurrection of a whole people, you
can, Sire, you can soon have this ; but to have it one thing
is necessary—to dare. Say to Louis Napoleon, ' I mistrusted
Italy; therefore I accepted your peace, not mine. But
Italy did not mistrust me ; and I feel the obligations which
that trust imposes. I withdraw my acceptance. I will do,
freed from every bond, that which God and my country in-
spire me to attempt. I ask of you only one thing—to ab-
stain from all interference in our affairs, and to leave Italy,
as you promised, free to fulfil by her own exertions the
work which you initiated with me. On this condition you
will find me ever grateful, and Italy always the friend of
France.'

‘, Say to the European Governments, You have de-
stroyed the old treaties of 1815 in Poland, in Belgium, in
France, in the East, everywhere. The experience of the
last 40 years has shown to you—and you have confessed it
many times—that there is no peace possible in Europe
without accepting the principle that every people shall
itself settle its own internal affairs. We are preparing to
do so. In the name of Italian right I ask you to leave us
alone and free. Against Austria we ask aid only from our
own swords ; only let no one aid her ; be the keepers of the
geld, and render a tardy justice to the people from whom

sprang, in a great measure, that civilization which adorns
your own dominions.'
" Say to the Italians, ' You have hailed me as the first
soldier of your independence, and I will not betray the mis-
sion you have intrusted to me. There is no independence
for slaves, nor possible strength for those divided among
themselves. Be, then, a free and united people. Let victory
close the long series of your martyrs since 1848 ; you have
proved that the times are ripe for this. Rise now, one and
all ; overthrow the artificial barriers which separate you,
as I tear every old compact adverse to your unity. Free
yourselves from all your oppressors, and wherever you
shall see under the tricolour banner the shining blade of
the sword I now unsheath thero rally around me. With
God's help and yours I will never replace it in its sheath
until in Rome your representatives shall dictate the com-
pact of love for the 26 millions who people our Italy. But,
mark, I require from you, besides those I now count around
mc, 200,000 armed men. I require the means necessary to
maintain them in action. I require unlimited trust ; I re-
quire that you, in order to conquer, are ready, as I am, to
die. Slaves or freemen, for us there, is no middle way.'
" Sire, the Italians will be free and great. The day on
which you utter such words as these parties will be extinct
among us. Only two things will have life and name in
Italy—the people and you,
" Sire, what do you fear ? Austria P With the whole of
Italy—because the language which I propose to you gives
you Naples and Sicily—ranged under your banner ! With
Hungary ready to rise and fraternize ? Do you fear Eng-
land ? England is with you, provided you are not with
Louis Napoleon'. •Do you fear your ally ? Your ally de-

scended into Italy, fraternizing with you, to -endeavour, by
L patronising *a. noble cause, to win back a waning popula-
rity ; ho cannot now return and fight against it ; he cannot
say to France, ' Yesterday I required your gold and the
blood of your sons against Austria for Italy—to-day I re-
quire them for Austria against Italy.'
"Your ally hastened the-peace beeettie he knew that his
dominions were threatened by the German invasion ; that
invasion still hangs, a perennial menace, over his--head:
Yesterday he could, to further his own ends, play the part
of the emancipator ; that of the tyrant is, except in France,
henceforward forbidden him by Prussia, by Germany, by
England, and by the tendencies which are once again be-
ginning to manifest themselves in France itself.
"No ; the first war of Louis Napoleon will not be against
you, Sire; it will be between him, England, and Germany.
" But, Sire, why speak to you of things which are, or
which ought to be, better known to you than to me f I call
you, in the name of Italy, to a great undertaking, to one of
those undertakings in which the strong man numbers his
friends, not his enemies. I call you to ally yourself with 26
millions of Italians, masters, provided that they are united
and led, of their own destinies. I call you to put yourself at
the head of a national revolution which will find, if others
ever attempt to repress it, alliances among all these people.
who want a free country. I call you to an initiative that
may become an European initiative. The half of Europe,
Sire, will joyfully hail the uprising of Italy, as it hailed the
uprising of the United States, of Greece, of every war,
of every people, that desires to make of itself a nation, of
every great providential fact ; the other half will
draw back suspicious and fearful. Diplomacy, like the
midnight spectre, looks threatening and gigantic to
him who fears it; it dissolves itself in thin air before him
who boldly approaches it. Dare, Sire ! Dismiss all who
fear or suggest fear. Surround yourself with those whose
life speaks firmness of principle, pure love for Italy, and
strength of will. Give to the people a pledge of liberty ;
give freedom to the press; to public associations, to public
speech. The press, public associations, and meetings will
create around you an enthusiasm, a ferment, from which
you may draw a'l the strength you want. Liberty has no
dangers, save for those who intend to betray her.
"Forget fora little while that you are the King, to be
the first citizen, the first armed apostle of the nation. Be
great as the object.which God has put before you, sublime
as duty, daring as faith. Will, and declare it; you win
have all, and us among the first, with you. Go on, without
looking to the right or to the left, in the name of eternal
justice, eternal right, to the. Holy Crusade of Italy, and you
will conquer with her.
"And then, Sire, when in the midst of the applause of
Europe and the delirious joy of the Italian people, and joy-
ful in the joy of millions, and blessed in the consciousness
of having fulfilled a godlike work, you will ask the nation
what post she assigns to him who hazarded his life and
throne in order that she should be free and ono ; be it that
you may wish to pass to eternal fame with posterity as the
Life-President of the Italian Republic, or be it that the
Royal dynastic idea may possess your mind, God and the
nation will bless and accept you ; and I, a Republican, and
ready to return and die in exile, to preserve pure and intact
to the grave the faith of my youth, shall exclaim with my
brother Italians ' President or King, may God bless you.
and the nation for whom you have dared and conquered !'
" Florence, Sept. 16. " JOSEPH MAZZINI."