ope. The innate tendency of the Italian mind
always to harmonize _thought_ and _action_ confirms the prophecy of
history, and points out the _role_ of Italy in the world to be a work
of moral unification,--the utterance of the synthetic word of
civilization.

Italy is a religion.

And if we look only to the _immediate_ national aim, and the inevitable
consequences that must follow the complete constitution of Italy as a
nation, we see that to no people in Europe has been assigned a higher
office in the fulfilment of the educational design, to the evolution of
which Providence guides humanity from epoch to epoch. Our unity will be
of itself a potent _initiative_ in the world. The mere fact of our
existence as a nation will carry with it an important modification of
the external and internal life of Europe.

Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the
exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the
humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we
should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a
Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a
Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe.

We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming,
for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which
Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined
within Biblical limits.

Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power
which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a
nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however,--God
alone knows the grief with which I write it,--that sense with us is
wanting.

And now a word as to the amnesty.

Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere
where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none
who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past
life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of
_oblivion_ and _pardon_ for having loved Italy above all earthly things,
and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a
dream.

But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence;
and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of
my last years possible, it would be useless.

My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political
regeneratio