Part 14

For the remainder of his days he lived at Pisa. Daily, people saw the white-haired stranger taking his walks and stopping frequently to talk to children: and here he died in March, 1872. He was buried by his mother’s side in Genoa. By a unanimous vote the Italian Parliament expressed the national sorrow, and the president pronounced a eulogy on the departed patriot, who had devoted his life to his country’s freedom.

Mazzini was one of those curious independent men, of passionate sincerity and tremendous energy, who make things very uncomfortable, and who will always be detested by those easygoing people who prefer to accept things as they are so long as their own ease and comfort are not disturbed. His astonishing talents and qualities were balanced by great faults, but they were more faults of judgment than of character. He was very far from perfect. But the perfect man has yet to appear, and if he does appear he will probably be quite intolerable, because there is always something in people’s faults which endears them to us. Mazzini was a lonely figure, courageous, humble, and without personal ambition. But he could not work successfully with others, for he would never compromise. He seems to have had peculiar difficulty in translating his thoughts and ideas into action. In fact, running through his whole career, there is a strange contradiction between his lofty ideals, his deep religious beliefs, his noble ambitions, on the one hand, and his petty intrigues, his futile plots, and his false estimate of men, on the other hand. Judged by his writings, he would appear to be a great hero whose moral purpose was an inspiration to the whole world, but whose talents had never been fully developed, because they were neglected for other forms of activity. Judged by his actions, he appears a determined but perpetually misguided agitator, obstinate, impulsive, and adopting the methods of a conspirator.

He knew the religious spirit must be the foundation of any great moral movement. But his religion was broad and simple: he thought the orthodox Christian doctrine had much in it which prevented it having the power and influence it ought. He had a firm belief in democracy—that is to say, in the rule of the people as opposed to the absolute rule of kings and ministers. But he saw that advance in this direction could only be brought about through education, and that was why he devoted so much of his time to educating poor people and writing books for them.

The whole idea of nationality was, in Mazzini’s opinion, based on the will of the people. It must be remembered that in his day Europe was divided up, to a large extent, into territories formed by the interests and ambitions of royal dynasties, or in the name of the absurd principle known as “the balance of power,” which means the grouping of two sets of nations in opposition to one another—a policy which has been the cause of many wars. Nationality, Mazzini maintained, was not just a question of people of the same race, or people who spoke the same language, or even people who lived in the same country, having the right to make themselves into a separate nation. In the case of Italy, as in the case of Great Britain, the geographical area is so well defined by Nature, with its seas and mountains, that the problem presented is quite easy. But there are other territories where neither geographical formation, nor language, nor race, shows very accurately what the frontiers of the nation should be. History and tradition may form some guide, but the needs and wishes of the people concerned should always be taken into account. “Nationalities,” said Mazzini, “can be founded only for, and upon, and by the people.”

It was the fundamental truth which he always sought for. He was a patriot in the best sense of the word. But he hated sentimental bragging and showy patriotism. A man must not borrow luster from his country, but give luster to it by service and devotion. Patriotism to him was an intense regard for his country’s moral greatness. “The honor of a country,” he declared, “depends much more on removing its faults than on boasting of its qualities.”

His service to his country is difficult to measure. Although his practical part in the actual accomplishment of Italian unity cannot be compared with that of Cavour and Garibaldi, it was his bold vision which first saw that the object was attained: it was he that gave others the faith to pursue it: without him the great achievement might have been long delayed. It was Mazzini who supplied the fuel for the furnace, the impulse for the blow, and the unselfish motive which alone could stir his fellow-countrymen to noble deeds.

The services of such a man are seldom recognized at the time. But when the fight is over and the general survey is made of all the stages which led ultimately to success, people come to understand the great value and the enormous influence of the noble ideas which first set the movement going.

A. P.

X

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

1805–1879

My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.

William Lloyd Garrison was the man who more than any one else helped to abolish slavery. He was what we call a Pioneer—or one who leads the way—because, though some people had hoped for the gradual freedom of the negroes, and a few had worked for it, Garrison was the first to ask for their immediate freedom and to set to work to make this question the most living and important one of the day. For he believed that if a thing is wrong in itself it should not exist another hour. Garrison was born at Newburyport, Mass., December 10, 1805. Like Thoreau and Hans Andersen, he was of humble birth and had a very hard childhood. His mother had been deserted by his father, and he was obliged to earn money to help her keep the home together. So as quite a small boy he went about peddling apples, and later worked at shoemaking and cabinet-making and other trades; he hated them all, and on one occasion ran away to sea. There was no time for learning from books, and he had practically no schooling. But when he was thirteen he became apprenticed to the printers’ business in the office of the Newburyport _Herald_, and to this work he took like a duck to water. He showed peculiar skill at printing, and also a great gift for writing. He wrote and sent articles to different papers and he read a great deal. He liked romantic books, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Byron particularly. He wrote poetry himself which is considered good. His mother had always warned her son against being an author, as she believed the lot of all literary men was to die of starvation in a garret. Nevertheless, Garrison seemed cut out for an editor or writer. He was left alone in the world when he was eighteen, for his mother died and his only brother, a bad lot, had disappeared. His apprenticeship with the printer ended when he was twenty-one. At this time he was a very taking and charming young man, with a refined, sensitive, clean-shaven face, and always well dressed; pleasant, mildly ambitious, and social, enjoying parties and going to church regularly, he conformed outwardly to what the world thinks is the right and proper thing. But there was more in William Lloyd Garrison than met the eye. His friends, who had complete trust in him, now lent him money to start a newspaper of his own. He called it the Newburyport _Free Press_, and became the editor and proprietor of it, and wrote, too, most of the articles. But the views in them were much too independent to please the ordinary person, and it failed.

Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was not going to take anybody’s word for a thing without thinking it all out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance paper, _The National Philanthropist_, in Boston, and then again the proprietor of a newspaper called _The Journal of the Times_. Once more he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and intellect of man to brutal incapacity.

“This state of things,” he declared with vehemence, “must come to an end.” The article drew the attention to him of a much older man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison. Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy’s preaching, and equally disgusted with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.

It was almost impossible to get a church or a school for an anti-slavery meeting, and when they did succeed, on one occasion, the meeting was broken up by a clergyman who denounced the agitation against slavery as dangerous. “The moral cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbelief and cruel skepticism that were revealed,” says Garrison on that occasion, “filled me with rage,” and from that time he ceased to go to church.

Garrison was asked now by Lundy to become editor with him of a paper called _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, whose object was to suppress drink and to free the negro. Garrison joined him. He wrote most of the articles and Lundy did the lecturing. The articles were very clear and forcible. “For ourselves,” the paper declared, “we are resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost; nothing but death shall prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human depravity.” Garrison worked hard: he got subscribers to the paper and managed to start a petition against slavery, which was signed by over two thousand people, and was presented to Congress. The answer came back that agitation would make the slaves restless and difficult to manage, and would put ideas into their heads when they might be comparatively happy and contented.

You can imagine the scorn Garrison felt for his Government. What else could he feel about a Government which boasted of itself as a democratic Government, which desired all people to have equal opportunities, rich or poor, and which, while sitting in the Capitol could see every day the manacled slave driven past the door to market? Custom, as it so often does, had blunted the sensibilities of these Senators: they remained untouched and unmoved. It needed a young, fresh, open mind like that of Garrison to show them the way. He was only twenty-six, but he saw clearly what much older men did not see, that in the long run the moral point of view is the only point of view, that right or justice is the only thing to work for, and all other issues are of no account at all. But it does not, perhaps, seem to us now a very wonderful thing that Garrison should have been so shocked and horrified at what he saw and heard about slavery. What strikes us as incredible now is that there were many thousands of people, and quite humane, kind people too, who defended it. It was the custom of the country and part of the Constitution. Many people didn’t trouble to reason about it; indeed, they believed that were slavery abolished the country would be ruined—they would have no cotton, no corn, no tobacco, because there would be no laborers to till the soil or to harvest the crops. The black men and women did the work for nothing. But so short-sighted and stupid were commercial people generally, that they could not see that slavery, besides being a moral wrong, was also a mistake economically. In the long run it was more expensive, because the work was less well done; an intelligent person who takes some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly removed from the animals.

One Sunday in Baltimore, Garrison was visited by a slave who had just been whipped with a cowhide, and whose back was bleeding from twenty-seven gashes, while his head was terribly bruised. He had not loaded a wagon to his master’s liking, and this was his punishment. Garrison could hear as he passed down the street the sound of whips and cries of agony. There seemed no mercy or justice anywhere, and his country’s barbarity made Garrison’s cheeks burn with shame.

How did such a state of things arise, one may ask; how did these black men and women come to be living in such numbers on American soil? It happened in this way: the English in the past, having conquered lands in different parts of the world, needed men to work and develop these lands. They were mostly wild and uncultivated. The British, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese were chiefly responsible for the slave trade. Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, had been the first to bring negroes into Europe in the fifteenth century, capturing them on his exploring expeditions round the coast of Africa. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the traffic, and in the seventeenth century the slave trade was mostly in English hands. England made a very good business of supplying slaves to the Spanish settlements, and imported also a huge cargo of negroes to Virginia for tobacco planting, and this was the beginning of slavery in America.

This hunting of human beings to make them slaves was more barbarous than anything the negroes themselves could have imagined. These wretched black men, having been captured, their huts destroyed and whole villages burnt, were placed on ships which brought them to our colonies, to the West Indies and Jamaica; so packed and overloaded were these ships and the poor negroes were so ill-treated that many died on the way; out of a hundred only fifty would be any good for work. This was one of the prices paid for what is called expansion and having colonies. When the English came to know the real nature of this dreadful business, all the best opinion was against it; but the Quakers were the first to take any practical action against the slave trade, which they did as early as the seventeenth century, both in America and England, by turning out of their society all who should be engaged in it. Gradually the British did away with slavery in their colonies, and it was finally abolished in 1833, when Lord Grey was Prime Minister; but the honor of being the first to abolish it lies not with England but with Denmark, who forbade it in its possessions at the end of the eighteenth century. Several countries followed the example of England after she had put down slavery so far as it concerned herself, but the United States was the last to fall in.

Garrison in his campaign against slavery was not going to tolerate any half-measures; if a thing was a sin, then it should not exist another day: it was real anguish to have to think of the sufferings of these poor people, and he could not rest or be happy for a moment so long as injustice and such a barbarous state of things existed. Therefore, the immediate freedom of the negro was the only thing to strive and live for. Here he and Lundy disagreed—not as to the evil of slavery, but on the question of the best way to put an end to it. Lundy was not so extreme as Garrison. His view was that the negro should gradually be set free and sent to colonize in another country. Garrison asked for his immediate freedom on American soil. His attitude made the slave-owners very angry, and also filled them with alarm: they had heard a good deal of talk about freeing the negro in the future, but never had the demand been made for his immediate release. So Garrison now broke his partnership with Lundy and started on his campaign alone. For a so-called libel on a slave trader he was sent to prison, and being unable to pay the fine, he was forty-nine days in jail, until he was released by Arthur Tappan, of New York, a famous Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist, who paid his fine for him. Garrison was no martyr, but his anger was aroused against the slave-owners and he felt more desperately keen about his cause than ever. Once more he looked to the churches to support him, and again they failed him. In Boston they closed their doors against him, and it was a society of free-thinkers who finally gave Garrison a hall to lecture in, and some who heard him there were moved to join him and assist in his campaign.

Never did a man have more uphill work in trying to move these people out of their sloth and indifference. He visited all the principal people in Boston and urged them to think; he implored the clergy to turn to Christianity and bring it into practice. Coldheartedness and utter contempt of the negro he met with everywhere. He was disheartened but undefeated; his hatred of injustice, his loathing of cruelty, his pity, all these feelings carried him on.

In order to further his views he set up a paper of his own in Boston. He had no money nor a single subscriber, but he found a sympathetic partner, and these two printed their own paper, their only helper being a negro boy. It was called _The Liberator_, and its motto was “My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.” By this he meant that he worked for the good of the whole world, not only for that portion of it to which he himself belonged, for only by treating men of other countries as your friends and brothers will you have progress, peace, and true prosperity at home.

In the first number of _The Liberator_, Garrison had a manifesto, or address, to the public, the words of which became the whole spirit of his life. He declared that he would work for and think of nothing else but the freedom of the slave, and ended up with the words, “I am in earnest: I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” This address was signed by twelve men, all poor, but after they had met together one evening for the purpose of signing the address they stepped out into the starry night with glad hearts and an object to live for. This address of Garrison’s lost him many subscribers, because it went too far and was thought too extreme, but gradually it gained him influence and power. It was the seed of many anti-slavery societies, and it started other newspapers working with the same objects. _The Liberator_ was destined to contain President Lincoln’s declaration of emancipation.

An anti-slavery society had been started in England, supported by the great and courageous clergyman Wilberforce, who had been for years working against slavery and had helped to bring it to an end in the British possessions. Garrison was asked to go over and speak to the English society, which he did, and was received with great enthusiasm. The English were very much impressed by Garrison’s sincerity and the burning enthusiasm that lay under his quiet and modest manner. He was not the sort of man they imagined an American agitator to be. He was, of course, very greatly encouraged, but on his return to America hard times awaited him, because he had stated in England that the United States was a sham so long as it allowed the present state of things to exist. A meeting in New York to start an anti-slavery league was broken up and the hall emptied by a furious mob. Another mob also besieged and tried to destroy the offices of _The Liberator_ at Boston. There was great excitement everywhere: Garrison’s work had begun to tell. Disagreeable though violent opposition is, it is often the first step toward being heard. Now, Garrison undoubtedly criticized his country; he found fault with it, and used very strong language about the slave-owners. The commonly held view is that any criticism of one’s country is treacherous, mischievous, and unpatriotic, but Garrison said:

I speak the truth, painful, humiliating, and terrible as it is, and because I am bold and faithful to do so, am I to be branded as the calumniator and enemy of my country? If to suffer sin upon my brother be to hate him in my heart, then to suffer sin upon my country would be an evidence not of my love but hatred of her; it is because my affection for her is intense and paramount to all selfish considerations that I do not parley with her crime. I know that she can neither be truly happy nor prosperous while she continues to manacle every sixth child born on her soil.

Who, then, one may ask, is the true patriot? He who has before his eyes a high ideal for his country, who wishes it to be the best, the most civilized and the most prosperous, its people educated, far-seeing, and humane; who does not shut his eyes to his country’s faults and to the mistakes of its governments, but who strives to help as he would help a friend to remedy his faults—to show people how things might be better and how to set about improving them? Or is the patriot the man who in the face of monstrous evils cries “It is God’s will,” or “My country, right or wrong”? Where should we be now were it not for the men who obeyed their own consciences rather than the commands of the State? When we think that burning people at the stake for their religious beliefs, hanging them for sheep-stealing, putting women to death for petty thefts, or working small children in mines were considered right, when we remember that these inhuman laws were regarded by the patriot of the time as the will of God, and the people who wished to see them altered as disloyal to their rulers, we may be a little less bitter against the reformer of the present day: the man who sees that there are still many unjust laws and conditions even in his own country, and who has the courage to say so.

Garrison, however, found now enough support to start what was known as “The American Anti-slavery Society.” He called together a meeting for the purpose at Philadelphia, when he made a striking declaration of his beliefs. He spoke the most moving and inspiring words about the state of the slaves and the rights of liberty. He announced what their work would be: to organize anti-slavery societies everywhere, to hold meetings unceasingly, to circulate literature, to spare no efforts whatever to bring the nation, as he expressed it, “to a speedy repentance.”