might be
expected in a few weeks--which proved incorrect, but only as to date.
Mazzini forbade his agents to agitate in favour of a republic; unity
was the sole object to be aimed at; unity in whatever form and at
whatever cost.

In March 1860 he had an interview in London with the man who was to
become the actual initiator of the revolutionary movement in South
Italy. This was Rosalino Pilo, son of the Count di Capaci, and
descended through his mother from the royal house of Anjou, whose
name, Italianised into Gioeni, is still borne by several noble
families in Sicily. Rosalino Pilo, who was now in his fortieth year,
had devoted all his life to his country's liberties. After 1849, when
he was obliged to leave Sicily, he sold his ancestral acres to supply
the wants of his fellow exiles, and help the work of revolutionary
propaganda. Handsome in person, cultivated in mind, ready to give his
life, as he had already given most of what makes life tolerable, to
the Italian cause, he won the affection of all with whom he was
brought in contact, and especially of Mazzini, from whom he parted
after that last interview radiant with hope, and yet with a touch of
sadness in his smile, as if in prevision that the place allotted to
him in the ranks of men was among the sowers, not among the reapers.

Rosalino Pilo believed, as Mazzini believed, that Sicily was ripe for
revolution, but he realised the fact that under existing circumstances
there was an exceeding probability of a Sicilian revolution being
rapidly crushed. It was the tendency of Mazzini's mind to think the
contrary; to put more faith in the people themselves than in any
leader or leaders; to imagine that the blast of the trumpet of an
angered population was sufficient to bring down the walls of all the
citadels of despotism, however well furnished with heavy artillery.
Pilo saw that there was only one man who could give a real chance of
success to a rising in his native island, and that man was Garibaldi.
As early as February he began to write to Caprera, urging the general
to give his co-operation to the projected movement. It is notorious
that the scheme, until almost the last moment, did not find favour
with Garibaldi. In spite of his perilous enterprises, the chief had
never been a courtier of failure, and he understood more clearly than
his correspondent what failure at that particular juncture would have
meant. The ventures of the Bandieras and of Pisacane, sim