OF THE DUTIES OF MAN.

BY JOSEPH MAZZINI,

IV.

DUTIES TOWARD HUMANITY.

YOUR first duties, not as to time, but in importance, are toward Humanity. You have duties as citizens, as sons, as husbands, and as fathers: sacred and inviolable duties, upon which we shall enlarge: but what renders those duties sacred and inviolable is the mission, the Duty, which your nature as men commands you. You are Fathers to educate men in the worship and development of the Law of God. You are Citizens, you have a Country, to enable you, easily, in a limited sphere, with the concurrence of a race already bound to you by language, by tendency, by habits, to work for the benefit of all men who are and will be; which you could ill do, alone and weak, lost in the immense number of your fellow-creatures! They who in teaching you morality limit the notion of your duties to the family or the country, teach you a more or less restricted selfishness, and lead you into harm both for others and for yourselves. Country and Family are as two circles set within a larger one; as two rounds of a ladder without which you cannot climb higher, but upon which you are not permitted to stop.

You are men, that is, reasonable, sociable, and capable of a progress to which none can assign limits. These are the characteristics constituting human nature, which distinguish you from all other beings that surround you, and which are confided to each of you, as seed to produce fruit. All your life ought to tend to the exercise and ordained development of these fundamental faculties of your nature. Whenever you suppress or suffer to be suppressed any one of these faculties, wholly or in part, you descend from the rank of men to that of the inferior animals, and you violate the law of your life, the Law of God.

You descend to the rank of the brute and violate the Law of God whenever you suppress or allow to be suppressed any one of the faculties that constitute human nature in yourselves or in others. God wills not that his Law should be fulfilled in you alone,—if God had willed this only, he would have created you to be alone, but that it should be fulfilled on earth among men, by all the beings whom he created in his own image. What He wills is, that the Thought of perfection and of love by him set in the world should reveal itself, and shine, more and more adored and realized. Your earthly individual existence, limited both by time and faculty, cannot realize it but most imperfectly and by flashes. Humanity alone, continued through generations, and through the intellect which is nourished by that of all its members, can at once unfold that divine thought, and apply and glorify it. God has therefore given you life, that you may employ

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it for the benefit of Humanity,-that you may direct your individual faculties towards the development of the faculties of your brethren,—that you may add by your work some element to the collective work of improvement, and of the discovery of Truth, which the generations slowly but continually promote. ought to educate yourselves and to educate others, to perfect yourselves and to perfect others. God is in you,-doubt it not: but God is likewise in all men who with you people this earth; God is in the life of all the generations which were, are, and shall be, which have improved, and will progressively improve the conception that Humanity is composed of Him, of his law, and of our Duties. You ought to worship and glorify him wherever He is. The universe is his Temple. And every unwithstood, unexpiated profanation of the Temple of God, recoils upon all who believe in him. Little matters it that you may call yourselves pure: for should you even-by isolating yourselves—remain so, you still betray your duties, if at two steps from you is corruption and you do not seek to combat it. Little matters it that in your soul you worship Truth: you still betray your duties if error governs your brethren in another corner of this earth which is our common mother; and you desire not, nor attempt by every effort in your power, to overthrow it. The image of God has been disfigured in the immortal souls of your fellow-creatures. God would be worshipped in his Law, and his Law is misunderstood, violated, denied around you. Human nature has been falsified in millions of men, to whom as to you, God confided the harmonious accomplishment of his design. And you, remaining inert, still dare to call yourselves believers ?—

A People-the Greek, the Pole, the Circassian-rises, under the banner of country and independence; fights, conquers, or dies for it. What is it that makes your heart beat at the story of their battles, that uplifts it with joy at their victories, that saddens it at their fall?-A man, a countryman or a foreigner, lifts himself up in the midst of the general silence, in some corner of the earth; he gives utterance to certain ideas which he believes to be true, maintains them through persecution and in chains, and dies on the scaffold, without having abjured them. Why do you honour him with the name of a Saint, and of a Martyr? Why do you respect and cause your children to respect his memory? Why do you read with avidity the miracles of patriotism registered in Grecian Stories, and repeat them to your children with a sense of pride, as if they were the stories of your own country? Those Grecian facts are two thousand years old, and belong to an uncivilized epoch, which neither is nor ever will be yours. That man whom you call Martyr died perhaps for ideas which are not yours, and by his death cut off every path leading to his own individual progress. That People you admire in its victory and in its fall is a People foreign to you, and perhaps almost unknown, speaking a different language, and its mode of existence not visibly influencing yours: what matters it then to you who rules it, whether the Sultan, or the King of Bavaria, the Russian, or a government issuing from the consent of the nation? But in your heart is a voice crying: Those men who lived two thousand years before you, those populations which now fight far distant from you, that martyr for ideas for which you die not, were and are your brethren: brethren not only by community of

origin and nature, but by communion of work and object. Those antique Greeks have passed away: but their work has not passed, and without it you would not have that grade of intellectual and moral development to which you now have reached. Those populations consecrated with their blood an idea of national liberty for which you still are combating. That martyr taught by dying that men ought to sacrifice every thing, and, if necessary, life itself, for what they believe to be the Truth. It matters little that he and many others signed their faith with their blood, thus cutting off their own individual development upon earth: God provides elsewhere for them. It is the development of Humanity which is of importance. It matters that the coming generation should rise, instructed by your struggles and sacrifices, higher and more mighty than yourselves, in the knowledge of the Law, in the adoration of the Truth. It matters, that, fortified by examples, human nature should improve, and verify more and more the design of God on earth. And in whatever place human nature improves, wherever a truth is conquered, wherever one step in advance on the path of education, of progress, of morality, is made, it is a step, a conquest, which will sooner or later benefit the whole of Humanity. You are all soldiers of one army that moves on different roads, divided into different corps, toward the conquest of one single object. At present you look only to your immediate chiefs; the different uniforms, the diverse watchwords, the distances which separate the corps of operation from each other, the mountains which conceal the one from the other, often cause you to deny that truth, and exclusively concentrate your attention upon the object which is next to you. But he among you who can embrace the whole, and direct the general movement, is superior to you all. The secret of the battle is with God, and he-will know when to assemble you all in one camp, and under one banner.

What a space between that faith which agitates our souls, and which will be the basis of the morals of the Epoch about to rise, and that on which the generations we now call ancient based their Morality! And how close the tie existing between the idea we ourselves formed of the Divine Principle, and that which we have formed of our duties! The first men had a sentiment of God, but without understanding him, without even seeking to understand him in his Law they perceived him in his power, not in his love: they confusedly conceived a sort of relation between him and each individual;—nothing more. Little apt to detach themselves from the sphere of sensible objects, they substantiated Him in one of them in the tree which they had seen struck by a thunder-bolt,—in the stone near which they had pitched a tent,-in the first animal that presented itself to their view. It was the worship which the history of religion distinguishes by the name of fetichism. And then men knew but the family, the reproduction in a manner of their own individuality: beyond the circle of the family, were none but strangers, or, more commonly, enemies: to help themselves and their family was the only basis of their morality. Afterwards, the idea of God became enlarged. From sensible objects man timidly ascended to abstraction: he generalized. God was no more only the protector of the family, but of the association of many families, of the city, of the race. To fetichism succeeded polytheism, the worship of many Gods. Then also morality widened its round of

action. Men acknowledged the existence of more extended duties than those of the family, and laboured for the growth of the race, of the nation. Nevertheless they were ignorant of Humanity. Every nation called the foreigners barbarians, treated them as such, and sought by force or cunning their conquest or abasement. Every nation had foreigners and barbarians in its borders: men, millions of men, not admitted into the religious rites of the citizens,—believed to be of a different nature,-slaves among the free. The unity of mankind could only be admitted as the consequence of the unity of God; and the unity of God, divined only by some rare thinkers of antiquity, proclaimed by Moses, but with the fatal restriction-that one single People was the elect of God, was recognized only toward the dissolution of the Roman Empire through the work of Christianity. Christ placed at the head of his faith those two inseparable truths-You have but one God and all men are the Sons of God; and the promulgation of those two truths changed the aspect of the world, and extended the circle of morals to the very confines of the inhabited earth. To the duties toward the family and the country, were added the duties toward Humanity. Then man learned that, wherever he met with one like unto himself, there was his brother, a brother endowed with a soul immortal as his own, destined to rejoin its Creator, and that he owed him love, association of faith, and assistance both by advice and deed wherever it might be needed. Then, as a presentiment of other truths contained germ-like in Christianity, words sublime, unintelligible to antiquity, wrongly understood or interpreted by those who succeeded,—were heard from the lips of the Apostles: For, as many members are in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being many, are one body, and every one members of one another. And there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. And now, after eighteen centuries of study and experience and fatigue, the question is to give development to those germs: the question is to promulgate not only that Humanity is one single body, and ought to be governed by one single law, but also that the first article of that Law is Progress; progress here on earth, where we are to verify as much as possible the design of God, and prepare ourselves by education for better destinies. The question is to teach men, that if Humanity is one single body, we all, as members of that body, ought to labour at its development, and to render it more harmonious, and its life more active and vigorous. The question is to convince ourselves that we cannot climb toward God except by means of the souls of our brethren, and that we ought to improve and purify them even where they do not ask it. The question is that only the whole of Humanity is able to acermplish that part of the design of God which he would have accomplished here below, to substitute for the exercise of charity toward individuals, a work of association tending to ameliorate all together, and to direct toward that object both the family and the country Other and vaster duties will reveal themselves to us in future, according as we acquire an idea less imperfect and more clear of our Law of life. Thus God, the Father, by means of

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Paul to the Romans. Chap. xii. 4, 5.

John's Gospel. Chap. 1. 15.

a slow but continual religious education, guides Humanity toward an improve ment in which our individuality likewise improves.

It improves in that improvement, and without a common improvement you cannot hope to ameliorate the material or moral conditions of the individual. Generally speaking, should you even wish to do so, you cannot separate your life from that of Humanity. You live in it, from it, and by it. Your soul, save the exception of some very few extraordinarily mighty ones, cannot free itself from the influence of the elements through which it exerts itself; as the body, however robust its constitution, cannot withdraw itself from the action of a corrupted atmosphere that surrounds it. How many of you wish, with surety of not driving them into persecution, to educate your sons to unlimited sincerity, where tyranny and espionage impose the necessity of concealing or dissembling two thirds of your opinions? How many of you would educate them to contempt of riches, in a society in which gold is the only power that obtains honour, influence, respect, or protects them against the arbitrariness and insult of the masters and their agents? Where is he among you, who loving, and with the best intentions in the world, has not whispered to his beloved in Italy: Mistrust men,—every honest man should retire within himself, and shun public life,-Charity begins at home,'-and other such maxims, evidently immoral, but suggested by the general aspect of society? Which is the mother who, although belonging to a faith that adores the cross of Christ, the willing martyr of Humanity, has not thrown her arms around the neck of her son, endeavouring to dissuade him from perilous attempts for the good of his brethren? And should you even find in yourselves the courage to teach the contrary, would not all society with its thousand voices, by its thousands of bad examples, destroy the effect of your words? Can you purify yourselves, or exalt yourselves, amidst an atmosphere of contamination and corruption? And to descend to your material conditions, do you think you could durably improve them by any other way but that of common improvement? Here in England, where we write, to the new tax, imposed upon every income exceeding one hundred and fifty pounds a year, the rich manufacturers replied by announcing to their workmen the diminution of their wages. with an ill-ordered government, in a society in which the condition of the workmen is left to the arbitrariness of their employers, will there ever be any taxes imposed without the latter revenging themselves by the reduction of your wages? Millions of pounds are spent yearly in England in private charity, for the relief of individuals fallen into misery; and misery yearly increases, and individual charity is proved insufficient to stay the plague, and the necessity of collective organic remedies is more than ever universally felt.-Where the country is continually threatened,-in consequence of the unjust laws of those who govern,-with a violent conflict between the oppressors and the oppressed, do you suppose that capital can flow freely, and that vast, lengthy and costly, enterprizes can abound? Where tolls and prohibitions depend upon the caprice of an absolute government, which nothing modifies, and whose expenses for army, spies, functionaries, and pensioners, increase with the needs of its own safety, do you believe that the activity of industry and of manufactures can acquire an uninterrupted and progressive development? You may answer that it will suffice to better organize

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