to and
reverenced by humanity,--"Urbs Orbi."

Italy is a religion. And when, in my earliest years, I believed that
the _initiative_ of the third life of Europe would spring from the
heart, the action, the enthusiasm and sacrifice of our people, I heard
within me the grand voice of Rome sounding once again, hailed and
accepted with loving reverence by the peoples, and telling of moral
unity and fraternity in a faith common to all humanity. It was not the
unity of the past,--which, though sacred and conducive to civilization
for many centuries, did but emancipate _individual_ man, and reveal to
him an ideal of liberty and equality only to be realized in Heaven: it
was a new unity, emancipating _collective_ humanity, and revealing the
formula of Association, through which liberty and equality are destined
to be realized here on earth; sanctifying the earth and rendering it
what God wills it should be,--a stage upon the path of perfection, a
means given to man wherewith to deserve a higher and nobler existence
hereafter.

And I saw Rome, in the name of God and Republican Italy, substituting a
declaration of PRINCIPLES for the barren declaration of
rights,--principles the logical consequences of the parent idea,
PROGRESS,--and revealing to the nations a common aim, and the basis of a
new religion. And I saw Europe, weary of scepticism, egotism, and moral
anarchy, receive the new faith with acclamations. I saw a new pact
founded upon that faith,--a pact of united action in the work of human
perfectibility, involving none of the evils or dangers of the former
pact, because among the first consequences of a faith founded upon the
dogma of progress would be the justification of _heresy_, as either a
promise or endeavor after progress in the future.

The vision which brightened my first dream of country has vanished, so
far as concerns my own life. Even if that vision be ever fulfilled,--as
I believe it will be,--I shall be in the tomb. May the young, as yet
uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may
they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly
protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a
dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal worship
of the Ideal.

The religious question is pre-eminent over every other at the present
day, and the moral question is indissolubly linked with it. We are bound
either to solve these, or ren