f others. Not
many others--a small minority! But they were numerous enough and
powerful enough to raise the question where it could be answered--in
Italian public opinion (taken in conjunction with the political
situation prevailing in the rest of Europe). They were able to
establish the doctrine that life is not a game, but a mission; that,
therefore, the individual has a law and a purpose in obedience to
which and in fulfillment of which he alone attains his true value;
that, accordingly, he must make sacrifices, now of personal comfort,
now of private interest, now of life itself.

No revolution ever possessed more markedly than did the Italian
_Risorgimento_ this characteristic of ideality, of thought preceding
action. Our revolt was not concerned with the material needs of life,
nor did it spring from elementary and widely diffused sentiments
breaking out in popular uprisings and mass disturbances. The movements
of 1847 and 1848 were demonstrations, as we would say today, of
"intellectuals"; they were efforts toward a goal on the part of
a minority of patriots who were standard bearers of an ideal
and were driving governments and peoples toward its attainment.
Idealism--understood as faith in the advent of an ideal reality, as a
manner of conceiving life not as fixed within the limits of existing
fact, but as incessant progress and transformation toward the level of a
higher law which controls men with the very force of the idea--was the
sum and substance of Mazzini's teaching; and it supplied the most
conspicuous characteristic of our great Italian revolution. In this
sense all the patriots who worked for the foundation of the new kingdom
were Mazzinians--Gioberti, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi. To be
sure, our writers of the first rank, such as Manzoni and Rosmini, had no
historical connection with Mazzini; but they had the same general
tendency as Mazzini. Working along diverging lines, they all came
together on the essential point: that true life is not the life which
is, but also the life which ought to be. It was a conviction essentially
religious in character, essentially anti-materialistic.

III

This religious and idealistic manner of looking at life, so
characteristic of the _Risorgimento_, prevails even beyond the heroic
age of the revolution and the establishment of the Kingdom. It
survives down through Ricasoli, Lanza, Sella and Minghetti, down, that
is, to the occupation of Rome and the sys