the guilt of tyranny is an outlaw at war with society ; but he must be tried by public law, not by private judgment, and the act must be in acknowledged obedience to the laws by which society is bound, not to an arbitrary code. Private vengeance in a savage community is the commencement of civil law ; in a civilised society it is the inauguration of barbarism. The crime of Mazzini lies not so much in the theory of the dagger as in the principle by which that theory is applied, and he sacrifices even the speculative basis of his view by denying, with Robespierre, that society has any jurisdiction over life and death.
"Victor Emmanuel," he declares, "is protected, first by the statute, then by his insignificance — prima dallo statuto poi dalla nessuna importanza. Even mutilated and often betrayed by you, the liberty of Piedmont is protection enough for the days of the king. Where truth can make its way in speech, where even, though by sacrifices, the exercise of one's duties is possible, regicide is a crime and a folly."
He defines the difference between himself and the party of Cavour, of the monarchical revolutionists, in a manner extremely remarkable.
If life is sacred, how as to war ? . . . Did you not send forth two thousand of our soldiers' lives to be lost on the fields of the Crimea in battles not your own, solely because you discerned in that sacrifice a probability of increasing in Europe the lustre of the Sardinian Crown ? . . . So long as I behold your laws constructed to protect the life of the man who was at war with his country and with the liberty of Europe, and who reached the throne over thousands of dead, and not for the good of the slaughtered people, — so long as I see you silent and inert before every crime crowned with success, and without daring for nine years once to say to the invader of Rome, "In the name of the rights of Italy, quit this land that is not yours," — I shall deem you hypocrites, and nothing more. . . . Did they not conspire with me for ten years in the name of a regenerating faith — the men who in your Chamber quote Machiavelli to prove that politics know no principles, but only calculations of expediency and opportunity ? Do not the journalists of your party recite the daily praises of Bonaparte, the tyrant in possession, whom they contemned when he was merely a pretender ? Are not you ready to betray your country, and to cede Southern Italy to Murat, in order that the Empire may secure to you a compensation in land which is beyond your frontier ? Partisans of opportunity, you have no right
