Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Duties of Man, by Giuseppe Mazzini

The Duties of Man (Doveri dell’uomo) is a book written by Giuseppe Mazzini in 1860, which presents his theory of natural law as a complement to the theory of human rights. Mazzini argues that while individual rights are important, their proclamation has led to the atomization of society, depriving individuals of the protections that social constraints provided, and reducing the enjoyment of rights to a law of the strongest. Instead, Mazzini proposes a new principle of duty, which guides individuals to act not for their own happiness, but to procure better conditions for their neighbor, in the pursuit of progress for all humanity.

According to Mazzini, this principle of duty will help to form individuals who are not selfish, but rather dedicated to making themselves and others better. By fighting against injustice and error, individuals can fulfill their duty to help their brothers, which is not only a right but also a necessary duty for all of life. Mazzini’s ideas in The Duties of Man influenced many post-colonial leaders, including Gandhi, Golda Meir, and Nehru, who considered the book to be their moral, ethical, and political Bible.

To Italian workers

To you, sons and daughters of the people, I dedicate this booklet, in which I have briefly mentioned the principles in the name and by virtue of which you will fulfill, if you wish, your mission in Italy: the mission of republican progress for all and emancipation for yourselves. Those who, by special favor of circumstances or talent, can more easily delve into the understanding of those principles, explain and comment on them to others, with the love with which I thought, writing to you, to your pains, your virgin aspirations, and the new life that – having overcome the unjust fatal inequality to your faculties – you will infuse into the Italian homeland.

I loved you since my early years. The republican instincts of my mother taught me to seek in my fellow man, not the rich or the powerful: and the unconscious simple paternal virtue prepared me to admire, more than the haughty attitude of half-wisdom, the silent and unnoticed virtue of sacrifice that is often in you. Later, from our history, I gathered how the true life of Italy is the life of the people; how the slow work of the centuries has always aimed to raise, amid the clash of different races and the superficial and transitory changes of usurpations and conquests, the great National democratic Unity. And so, thirty years ago, I turned to you.

I saw that the homeland, the One homeland of equals and free people, would not emerge from an aristocracy that never had a collective and initiating life among us, nor from the Monarchy that insinuated itself, in the sixteenth century, on the footsteps of the stranger and without its own mission, among us, without the thought of Unity or emancipation: but only from the people of Italy, – and I said it. I saw that you needed to free yourselves from the yoke of wages and gradually, through free association, become the masters of the work of the land and capital of Italy – and, before the socialism of the French sects came to muddy the question, I said it. I saw that Italy, as our souls present it, would not exist except when a Moral Law, recognized and superior to all those who place themselves as intermediaries between God and the People, would have overturned the basis of every tyrannical authority, the Papacy – and I said it. I never betrayed you and your cause, nor deserted the banner of the future, even when you yourselves, swept away by the teachings of men more than believers, idolaters, abandoned me for those who, after trafficking in your blood, turned their gaze away from you. The vigorous, sincere handshake of some of the best among you, sons and daughters of the people, comforted me for the abandonment of others and for many bitter disappointments poured on my soul by men whom I also loved and who had professed to love me. I have a few years of life left, but the pact made by those few with me will not be violated for anything until my last day, and perhaps it will survive me.

Think of me as I think of you. Let us brotherly love the homeland. You, in particular, are the element of its future. But this future of the homeland and yours, you will not establish it unless you free yourselves from two plagues that today, unfortunately for a short time, contaminate the more affluent classes and threaten to divert Italian progress: Machiavellianism and Materialism. The first, a mean disguise of the science of a Great unhappy person, distances you from the frank and boldly loyal love and adoration of Truth: the second inevitably drags you, with the cult of interests, towards selfishness and anarchy.

You must worship God in order to escape the arbitrary and oppressive nature of men. And in the war that is fought in the world between Good and Evil, you must give your name to the banner of Good and oppose Evil relentlessly, rejecting every doubtful emblem, every cowardly compromise, every hypocrisy of leaders who try to manipulate between the two. On the path of the former, you will have me, as long as I live, as your companion.

And because those two Lies are often presented to you with seductive appearances and with a charm of hopes that only the worship of God and Truth can translate into actions for you, I believed it was my duty to write this booklet to warn you. I love you too much to flatter your passions or to indulge in the golden dreams with which others try to win favor from you. My voice may seem severe and too insistent in teaching you the necessity of sacrifice and virtue for others. But I know, and you, good and not corrupted by false science or wealth, will understand shortly, that every one of your rights can only be the fruit of a fulfilled duty.

Goodbye. Have me now and always as your brother.

April 23, 1860

Giuseppe Mazzini.

I. Introduction

I want to talk to you about your duties. I want to talk to you, as our heart dictates, about the holiest things we know: God, Humanity, Country, and Family. Listen to me with love, as I will speak to you with love. My words are words of conviction matured by years of pain, observation, and study. The duties I will point out to you, I seek and will seek, as long as I live, to fulfill them to the best of my abilities. I may err, but not in my heart. I may deceive myself, but not deceive you. Therefore, listen to me fraternally; judge freely among yourselves if it seems to you that I speak the truth; abandon me if it seems that I preach error; but follow me and act according to my teachings if you find me an apostle of the truth. Error is a misfortune to be pitied, but to know the truth and not conform your actions to it is a crime that heaven and earth condemn.

Why am I speaking to you about your duties before speaking to you about your rights ? Because in a society where everyone, voluntarily or involuntarily, oppresses you, where all unhappiness is for you and what is called happiness is for men of other classes, I speak to you about sacrifice, not conquest, about virtue, moral improvement, education, and not material well-being. This is a question that I must make clear before going any further, because this is precisely the difference between our school and many others that are preaching in Europe today; then, because this is a question that easily arises in the irritated soul of the suffering worker.

“We are poor, slaves, unhappy: talk to us about material improvements, freedom, happiness. Tell us if we are condemned to always suffer or if we should also enjoy. Preach Duty to our masters, to the classes above us who treat us like machines, monopolizing the goods that belong to all. Speak to us of rights: speak to us of ways to reclaim them; speak to us of our power. Let us have our existence recognized; then you can talk to us about duties and sacrifice.” This is what many of our workers say, and they follow doctrines and associations corresponding to their desire; not forgetting that one thing, which is: that the language invoked by them has been used for fifty years or more without yielding the slightest material improvement to the condition of the workers.

For fifty years or more, everything that has been done for progress and good against absolute governments, against the aristocracy of blood, has been done in the name of the Rights of man, in the name of freedom as a means and well-being as the goal of life. All the acts of the French Revolution and of the others that followed and imitated it were the consequence of a Declaration of the Rights of man. All the work of the Philosophers who prepared it was based on a theory of freedom, on teaching every individual their rights. All revolutionary schools preached to man that he is born for happiness, that he has the right to seek it with all his means, that no one has the right to prevent him in this pursuit, and that he has the right to overthrow the obstacles encountered on his way. And the obstacles were overturned: freedom was conquered; it lasted for years in many countries; in some it still lasts. Has the condition of the people improved? Have the millions who live day by day on the work of their hands gained even a small part of the expected, promised well-being ?

No; the condition of the people has not improved; on the contrary, it has worsened and is worsening in almost all countries, and especially where I am writing from, the price of the necessities of life has progressively increased, the wages of workers in many industries have progressively decreased, and the population is multiplying. In almost all countries, the fate of working people has become more uncertain, more precarious; crises that condemn thousands of workers to inactivity for a certain period of time have become more frequent. The annual increase in emigration from country to country, from Europe to other parts of the world, and the constantly growing number of charities, taxes for the poor, and measures for begging, are enough to prove it. These latter also prove that public attention is increasingly waking up to the problems of the people; but their inefficacy in visibly reducing those problems demonstrates an equally progressive increase in misery in the classes they attempt to provide for.

And yet, in the last fifty years, the sources of social wealth and the mass of material goods have continued to grow. Production has doubled. Trade, through continuous crises inevitable in the absolute absence of organization, has gained more activity and a wider sphere of operations. Communications have become almost everywhere safe and rapid, and thus reduced the price of transportation and the price of commodities. And on the other hand, the idea of the rights inherent in human nature is now more generally accepted: accepted in words and hypocritically even by those who try to evade it in practice. So why hasn’t the condition of the people improved? Why has the consumption of products, instead of being distributed equally among all members of European societies, concentrated in the hands of a few men belonging to a new aristocracy? Why has the new impulse given to industry and trade created, not the well-being of the majority, but the luxury of a few?

The answer is clear for those who want to delve a little into things. Men are creatures of education and only operate according to the principle of education that is given to them. The men who promoted the previous revolutions were founded on the idea of the individual’s rights: the revolutions conquered freedom: individual freedom, freedom of education, freedom of beliefs, freedom of trade, freedom in everything and for everyone. But what did the recognized rights matter to those who had no means to exercise them? What did the freedom of education matter to those who had neither time nor means to benefit from it? What did the freedom of trade matter to those who had nothing to trade, neither capital nor credit? The society was composed, in all countries where those principles were proclaimed, of a small number of individuals owning land, credit, and capital, and vast multitudes of men having only their own arms, forced to give them, as tools of labor, to those first and on any terms, to live: forced to spend their entire day in material and monotonous labor: what was freedom for them, forced to fight with hunger, if not an illusion, a bitter irony? For it not to be so, it would have been necessary for men of privileged classes to consent to reduce the time of labor, to increase its compensation, to provide uniform free education to the masses, to make labor instruments accessible to all, to establish credit for the worker endowed with faculties and good intentions. Why would they have done it? Wasn’t well-being the supreme goal of life? Weren’t material goods desirable above all else? Why diminish their enjoyment for the benefit of others? So let those who can help. When society assures everyone that they can exercise freely the rights belonging to human nature, it does what is required to do. If there is anyone who, by the fatal condition of their situation, cannot exercise any of them, they should resign themselves and not blame anyone.

Certainly, there are rights, but where an individual’s rights come into conflict with those of another, how can they be reconciled or harmonized without resorting to something superior to all rights? And where the rights of an individual or many individuals come into conflict with the rights of the country, which court should be turned to? If the right to well-being, to the greatest possible well-being, belongs to all living beings, who will resolve the question between the worker and the manufacturer? If the right to existence is the first inviolable right of every man, who can command the sacrifice of existence for the improvement of other men? Will you command it in the name of the Fatherland, of Society, of the multitude of your brothers? What is the Fatherland, according to the opinion that I speak of, if not that place where our individual rights are more secure? What is Society, if not a gathering of men who have agreed to put the force of many in support of the rights of each individual? And you, after teaching the individual for fifty years that Society is constituted to ensure the exercise of his rights, will you ask him to sacrifice them all to Society, to submit, if necessary, to continuous labor, to prison, to exile, to improve it? After preaching to him in every way that the purpose of life is well-being, will you suddenly order him to lose well-being and life itself to free his country from the foreigner or to procure better conditions for a class that is not his? After speaking to him for years in the name of material interests, will you expect him, finding wealth and power before him, not to reach out to seize them, even at the expense of his brothers?

Italian workers, this is not an opinion formed without factual support in our minds; it is history, the history of our times, a history whose pages are soaked in the blood of the people. Ask all those who turned the revolution of 1830 into a mere substitution of one set of people for another, and who, for example, turned the corpses of your French comrades who died fighting in the three days into a stepping stone to their own power: all their doctrines, before 1830, were based on the old idea of “rights,” not on the belief in the “duties” of man. Today, you call them traitors and apostates, but they were only consistent with their doctrine. They sincerely fought against the government of Charles X because that government was directly hostile to the class from which they emerged, and violated and tended to suppress their rights. They fought in the name of the “well-being” that they did not possess, but which seemed to them they deserved. Some were persecuted for their freedom of thought; others, powerful minds, were neglected and kept away from positions that were occupied by men of lesser ability than theirs. At that time, even the sufferings of the people irritated them. They wrote boldly and in good faith about the rights that belong to every man. Then, when “their” political and intellectual rights were secured, when the way to employment was opened to them, when they had achieved the “well-being” they sought, they forgot the people, forgot that the millions, inferior to them in education and desires, sought the exercise of other “rights” and the conquest of another “well-being,” put their minds at ease, and cared only for themselves. Why do you call them traitors? Why do you not call their doctrine treacherous instead? In France at the same time, there lived and wrote a man whom you should not forget, more powerful in intellect than they all were: he was then our enemy, but he believed in Duty: in the duty of sacrificing one’s entire existence for the common good, for the search and triumph of Truth. He studied men and times carefully, was not seduced by applause or discouraged by disappointment. If one path failed, he would try another to improve the situation for the majority. And when the changing times showed him a single element capable of doing it, when the people showed themselves on the arena more virtuous and believing than all those who had claimed to represent their cause, he, Lamennais, the author of the “Words of a Believer,” which you all have read, became the best apostle of the cause in which we are brothers. In him and the men I have spoken of, you have represented the difference between men of “rights” and those of “Duty.” For the former, the conquest of their individual rights, removing every stimulus, is enough to make them stop; the work of the latter does not stop here on earth until their death.

Among peoples who are entirely enslaved, where the struggle involves much greater risks, where every step taken towards good is marked by the blood of a martyr, where the work against dominant injustice is necessarily secret and lacking the comforts of publicity and praise, what obligation, what stimulus to perseverance can keep men who reduce the holy social war we support to a fight for their own rights, on the path of good? I speak, of course, of the majority, and not of the exceptions that exist in all doctrines. After the turmoil of spirits and the reaction against tyranny, which naturally leads youth to struggle, has subsided, after years of efforts and inevitable disappointments in such an undertaking, why would those men not tire? Why would they not prefer rest to a restless life full of conflicts and dangers, which may one day end in imprisonment, on the scaffold, or in exile? It is all too often the sad story of many Italians today, who are steeped in old French ideas: a very sad story. But how can it be interrupted except by changing the principle from which they start to direct themselves? How, and in whose name, can they be convinced that dangers and disappointments should make them stronger; that they must fight not for a few years, but for their whole life? Who can say to a man “keep fighting for your rights,” when fighting for them costs him more than abandoning them?

And who can, even in a society founded on more just principles than the current ones, convince a man who is solely based on the theory of “rights” to stay on the common path and work to develop social thought? Suppose he rebels; suppose he feels strong and says to you: “I break the social contract: my tendencies, my faculties call me elsewhere: I have a sacred, inviolable right to develop them, and I declare war on everyone”: what answer can you give him based on his doctrine? What right do you have, as the majority, to impose obedience to laws that do not match his desires or individual aspirations? What right do you have to punish him when he violates them? Rights belong equally to every individual: social coexistence cannot create only one right. Society has more power, but not more rights than the individual. So how will you prove to the individual that he must merge his will with the will of his brothers in the homeland or in humanity? With the executioner, with prisons? Existing societies have done this. But this is war, and we want peace; it is tyrannical repression, and we want education.

Education, we have said; and it is the great word that encompasses our entire doctrine. The vital issue that is debated in our century is an issue of education. It is not about “establishing a new order of things with violence”: an order of things established with violence is always tyrannical, even if it is better than the old one. It is about “overturning with force the brutal force that opposes any attempt at improvement today,” proposing to the consent of the nation, freed to express its will, the order that seems best, and “educating” men with all possible means to develop it and to act accordingly. With the theory of “rights” we can rise up and overthrow obstacles, but we cannot build strong and lasting harmony among all the elements that make up the nation. With the theory of happiness, of “well-being” given as the first goal of life, we will create selfish men, worshipers of material things, who will bring old passions into the new order and corrupt it a few months later. Therefore, it is a matter of finding an educational principle superior to such a theory that guides men to the best, teaches them constancy in sacrifice, and binds them to their brothers without making them dependent on the idea of one or the strength of all. And this principle is “Duty.” We must convince men that they, all children of the same God, must be the executors of a single Law here on earth – that each of them must live, not for themselves, but for others – that the purpose of their life is not to be more or less happy, but to make themselves and others better – that fighting injustice and error for the benefit of their brothers, wherever it is found, is not only a “right,” but a “duty” that should not be neglected without fault – a duty for life.

Italian workers, my brothers! Understand me well. When I say that knowledge of your rights is not enough for men to achieve important and lasting improvement, I am not asking you to give up these rights; I am only saying that they are only a consequence of duties fulfilled, and that we must start with these to reach those. And when I say that proposing happiness, well-being, and material interests as the goal of life risks creating selfishness, I do not mean that you should not concern yourselves with these; I mean that material interests, sought alone, proposed not as means but as ends, always lead to that saddest result.

When, under the emperors, the ancient Romans limited themselves to asking for bread and circuses, they were the most abject race imaginable, and after suffering the foolish and ferocious tyranny of the emperors, they cowardly fell slaves to the barbarians who invaded. In France and elsewhere, the enemies of any social progress have sown corruption and try to divert minds from the idea of change by seeking development in material activity. And would we help the enemy with our own hands? Material improvements are essential, and we will fight to conquer them; but not because it matters only for men to be well-nourished and housed; rather, because the consciousness of your dignity and your moral development cannot come to you while you are, as you are today, in constant conflict with poverty.

You work ten or twelve hours a day: how can you find time to educate yourselves? Most of you earn barely enough to support themselves and their families: how can you find means to educate yourselves? The precariousness and interruptions of your work make you pass from excessive activity to the habits of the idle: how could you acquire tendencies towards order, regularity, and assiduity? The scantiness of your earnings suppresses any hope of effective savings that could one day benefit your children or your old age: how could you educate yourselves in habits of economy? Many of you are forced by poverty to separate their children, not to mention the care – what kind of education can the poor wives of workers give their children? – but by love and the gaze of mothers, pushing them, for a few coins, into the harmful work of manufacturing: how can, in such a condition, the sentiments of family develop and become refined? You have no rights as citizens, no participation in the election or voting on laws that regulate your actions and your life: how could you have a sense of citizenship and zeal for the state and sincere affection for the laws? Justice is unequally distributed among you and the other classes: where could you learn respect and love for justice? Society treats you without any shadow of sympathy: where could you learn to sympathize with society?

Therefore, you need your material conditions to change so that you can develop morally: you need to work less to be able to consecrate some hours of your day to the progress of your soul; you need a work remuneration that puts you in a position to accumulate savings, to calm your mind about the future, to purify yourself above all from any feeling of revenge, from any impulse of injustice towards those who are unjust to you. You must, therefore, seek and obtain this change; but you must seek it as a means, not as an end: seek it out of a sense of duty, not solely out of a right: seek it to make yourselves better, not solely to make yourselves materially happy. Otherwise, what difference would there be between you and your tyrants? They are precisely so because they only look at well-being, pleasures, and power.

Become better: this must be the purpose of your life. You cannot make yourselves permanently less unhappy if you do not improve. Tyrants would arise among you if you only fought in the name of material interests or a certain organization. It doesn’t matter if you change the organizations if you leave yourselves and others with the passions and selfishness of today: organizations are like certain plants that give poison or remedies depending on the actions of those who administer them. Good people make bad organizations good, and evil people make good organizations sad. The task is to make the classes that oppress you today, voluntarily or involuntarily, better and convinced of their duties; and you cannot succeed if you do not begin by making yourselves as good as possible.

Therefore, when you hear from people who preach the necessity of social change that they will produce it by invoking solely your rights, be grateful for their good intentions but distrust their success. The poor’s sufferings are partly known to the affluent classes, but they are not felt. In the general indifference born of the lack of a common faith and the selfishness, an inevitable consequence of the continued preaching for so many years of material well-being, those who do not suffer have gradually become accustomed to considering those sufferings as a sad necessity of the social order or to leaving the care of the remedies to future generations. The difficulty is not in convincing them; it is in recovering them from inertia, in persuading them, convinced as they are, to act, to associate, to band together with you to conquer the social organization that will put an end, as far as the conditions of Humanity allow, to your sufferings and their terrors. Now, this is the work of faith, faith in the mission that God has given to the human creature here on Earth, in the responsibility that weighs on all those who do not fulfill it, in the Duty that imposes on each one to work continuously and sacrificially according to the Truth. All possible doctrines of rights and material well-being can only lead you to attempts that, if they remain isolated and supported solely on your own strength, will not succeed; they can only prepare the most serious of social crimes: a civil war between class and class.

Italian workers! My brothers! When Christ came and changed the face of the world, he did not speak of rights to the rich, who did not need to conquer them; to the poor, who might have abused them, imitating the rich: he did not speak of usefulness or interests to a people whose interests and usefulness had corrupted them: he spoke of Duty: he spoke of Love, of Sacrifice; of Faith: he said that “he alone would be the first among all who would have benefited everyone with his work”. And those whispered words to a society that had no spark of life left, revived it, conquered millions, conquered the world and made a step forward in the education of mankind. Italian workers! we live in an era similar to that of Christ. We live in the midst of a society as dead as that of the Roman Empire, with the need to revive it, to transform it; to associate all its members and works in one faith, under one law, towards one goal: the free and progressive development of all the faculties that God has put in seed in His creature. Let us seek that God reigns on earth as in Heaven, or rather that the earth be a preparation for Heaven, and Society an attempt at progressive approximation to the Divine thought.

But every act of Christ represented the faith he preached, and around him there were apostles who embodied in their actions the faith they had accepted. Be like them, and you will win. Preach Duty to the men of the classes above you, and fulfill your own duties as much as possible: preach virtue, sacrifice, love; and be virtuous, ready for sacrifice and love. Express your needs and your ideas courageously, but without anger, without violence, without threat: the most powerful threat, if anyone needs it, is firmness, not the irritation of language. While propagating among your comrades the idea of their future destinies, the idea of a Nation that will give them name, education, work and proportionate compensation, and conscience and mission as men – while instilling in them the feeling of the inevitable struggle, to which they must prepare to conquer against the forces of our sad governments and the foreigner – seek to educate yourselves, to improve yourselves, to educate yourselves to the full knowledge and practice of your duties. This is a largely impossible task in many parts of Italy for the masses: no plan of popular education can be carried out among us without a change in the material condition of the people, and without a political revolution: those who hope and preach it as an indispensable preparation for any attempt at emancipation preach inertia, nothing else. But the few among you, to whom circumstances are a little better and staying in foreign countries allows for freer means of education; they can, therefore they must. And the few among you, once imbued with the true principles on which the education of a People depends, will be enough to spread them among thousands, to direct them on the way, and to protect them from the sophisms and false doctrines that will come to undermine them.

II. God

The origin of your duties lies in God. The definition of your duties lies in His law. The progressive discovery and application of His law belong to humanity.

God exists. We do not need to, nor do we want to, prove it to you. Attempting to do so would seem blasphemous, while denying it would be madness. God exists because we exist. He lives in our consciousness, in the consciousness of humanity, in the universe that surrounds us. Our consciousness invokes Him in the most solemn moments of pain and joy. Humanity has been able to transform and corrupt Him, but never to eliminate His holy name. The universe manifests Him through order, harmony, and the intelligence of its movements and laws. There are no atheists among you; if there were, they would be worthy not of curse, but of pity. He who can deny God before a starry night, before the grave of his loved ones, before martyrdom, is greatly unhappy or greatly guilty. The first atheist was undoubtedly a man who had hidden a crime from other men and, by denying God, sought to free himself from the only witness to whom he could not hide it and to smother the remorse that tormented him. Perhaps he was a tyrant who had stolen half the soul of his brothers with freedom and tried to replace the worship of brutal force with faith in immortal Duty and Right. After him, men came here and there, from century to century, who, by aberration of philosophy, insinuated atheism; but very few and shameful: there were, in moments not far from us, multitudes who, out of irritation against a false and foolish idea of God, devised for their own benefit by a caste or a tyrannical power, denied God Himself; but it was a moment, and in that moment they worshiped, as they needed God, the goddess Reason, the goddess Nature. Today, there are men who abhor every religion because they see corruption in current beliefs and do not guess the purity of those of the future; but none of them dares to call himself an atheist: there are priests who prostitute the name of God to the calculations of venality, or to the terror of the powerful: there are tyrants who counterfeit it by invoking it as the protector of their tyrannies; but because the light of the sun is often clouded and spoiled by filthy vapors, will we deny the sun or the vivifying power of its rays on the universe? because from freedom the wicked can sometimes cause anarchy, will we curse freedom? Faith in God shines with an immortal light through all the impostures and corruptions that men gather around that name. The impostures and corruptions pass, as the tyrannies pass: God remains, as the People remain, the image of God on earth. Just as the People, through slavery, suffering, and misery, gradually conquers consciousness, strength, and emancipation. The holy name of God rises from the ruins of corrupt cults to shine surrounded by a more pure, fervent, and reasonable worship.

Therefore, I do not speak to you of God to prove His existence or to tell you that you must adore Him: you adore Him, even without naming Him, whenever you feel your life and the life of the beings around you. But to tell you how you must adore Him, to warn you about an error that dominates the minds of many among the men of the classes that direct you or, by their example, of many among you: an error as serious or ruinous as atheism.

This error is the separation, more or less declared, of God from His work, from the Earth on which you have to spend a period of your life.

On the one hand, you have people who tell you: “It’s fine: God exists; but you can only admit it and worship Him. The relationship between Him and men, no one can understand or declare it. It’s a matter to be debated between God Himself and your conscience. Think whatever you want about this, but don’t propose your belief to your fellow human beings; don’t try to apply it to the things of this earth. Politics is one thing, religion is another. Don’t confuse them. Leave the things of Heaven to the established spiritual power, whoever it may be, except for you not to believe him if you think he betrays his mission: let everyone think and believe in his own way; you should only deal with common earthly matters. Materialists or spiritualists, do you believe in freedom and equality of men? Do you want well-being for the majority? Do you want universal suffrage? Unite to achieve this goal; you don’t need to agree on issues related to Heaven for this.”

On the other hand, you have people who tell you: “God exists; but He is so great, too superior to all created things, that you cannot hope to reach Him through human works. The earth is mud. Life is a day. Detach yourself from the former as much as you can; don’t give more value than it deserves to the latter. What are all earthly interests compared to the immortal life of your soul? Think about this: look at Heaven. What does it matter if you live down here one way or another? You are destined to die, and God will judge you according to the thoughts you have given, not to the earth, but to Him. Do you suffer? Bless the Lord who sends you those sufferings. Earthly existence is a trial. Yours is a land of exile. Waste it and rise. From amidst sufferings, misery, and slavery, you can turn to God and sanctify yourself in the worship of Him, prayer, faith in a future that will compensate you generously, and in contempt of worldly things.”

Of those who speak to you like this, the first do not love God; the second do not know Him.

“You will say that man is one,” but you cannot divide him in two, and make him agree with you on the principles that should govern the organization of society, when he differs regarding his origin, his destiny, and his law of life here below. Religions govern the world. When the men of India believed that they were born from the head, arms, or feet of their deity, Brahma, they ordered society according to the division of men into castes, assigning intellectual work hereditarily to some, military work to others, and menial work to still others, and they condemned themselves to an immobility that still persists and will persist until belief in that principle falls. When Christians declared to the world that all men were children of God and brothers in Him, all the doctrines of ancient lawmakers and philosophers that established the existence of two natures in men could not prevent the abolition of slavery and, therefore, a radically different social order.

At every progress of religious beliefs, we can show you a corresponding one in the history of mankind, a social progress. Your doctrine of indifference in matters of religion can show us no other consequence than anarchy. You have been able to destroy, but never to found. Disprove this if you can. By exaggerating a principle contained in Protestantism, which today Protestantism feels the need to abandon, and by deriving all your ideas solely from the independence of the individual, you have arrived at what? Anarchy, that is, the oppression of the weak in commerce; freedom, that is, the derision of the weak who have no means, no time, no education to exercise their own rights, in political organization; selfishness, that is, the isolation and ruin of the weak who cannot help themselves, in morality.

But we want Association: how can we obtain it safely if not from brothers who believe in the same regulatory principles, who unite in the same faith, who swear in the same name? We want education: how can we give or receive it, if not by virtue of a principle that contains the expression of our beliefs about the origin, the end, and the law of life of man on this earth? Common education: how can we give or receive it without a common faith? We want to form a Nation: how can we succeed in doing so, if not by believing in a common purpose, in a common duty? And where can we derive a common duty, if not from the idea we form of God and His relationship with us? Certainly, universal suffrage is an excellent thing; it is the only legal means by which a country can govern itself without violent crises from time to time, but universal suffrage in a country dominated by a faith will give expression to the national tendency, the national will; in a country devoid of common beliefs, what can it express other than the numerically stronger interest and the oppression of all others? All political reforms in any irreligious or non-religious country will last only as long as the caprice or interest of individuals allows them to do so. Our experience over the last fifty years has taught us enough on this point.

To those who speak to you of the “Heaven” while separating it from the “Earth,” you will say that heaven and earth are, like the path and the end of the path, one and the same thing. Do not say that the earth is mud: the earth belongs to God, and God created it so that we may ascend to Him through it. The earth is not a dwelling of expiation or temptation: it is the place of our work for the purpose of improvement, of our development towards a higher degree of existence. God did not create us for contemplation, but for action. He created us in His image, and He is Thought and Action. In fact, there is no “thought” in Him that is not translated into “action”. You must despise many worldly things and trample earthly life to occupy yourselves with the celestial, but what is earthly life if not a prelude to the celestial, a launching towards it? Do you not realize that by blessing the last step of the ladder we must all climb and cursing the first, you cut off the way? The life of a soul is sacred in every period: in the earthly period as in the others that will follow. However, each period must be a preparation for the other, each temporary development must help towards the continuous ascending development of the immortal life that God has infused in each of us and in the collective humanity that grows with the work of each of us. Now, God has placed you here on earth. He has placed around you millions of beings similar to you, whose thought feeds on your thought, whose improvement progresses with yours, whose life is fertilized by yours. He has given you needs that you cannot satisfy alone to save you from the dangers of isolation, and dominant social instincts that sleep in the beasts and distinguish you from them. He has spread around you that world that you call “Matter”, magnificent in beauty, full of life, of a life that, you must not forget, shows itself everywhere to the extent that you see the sign of God in it, but still waits for your work, depends on you for its manifestations, and multiplies in power as your activity multiplies. He has placed within you inexhaustible sympathies, pity for those who suffer, joy for those who smile, anger against those who oppress creatures, the incessant desire for truth, admiration for the Genius who discovers more of the truth, enthusiasm for those who translate it into beneficial action for all, religious veneration for those who, unable to make it triumph, die as martyrs, bearing witness to it with their own blood—and you deny, despise these signs of your mission that God has poured around you, rather you cast anathema on His signs, calling us to concentrate all our forces on an internal purification work, which is imperfect, impossible when it is solitary! Does God not punish those who attempt this? Does He not degrade the shy? Does He not immerse half the soul of the poor daily laborer, forced to consume, without the light of education, in a series of physical acts, the divine life, in sensual appetites and blind instincts of what you call “matter”? Do you find a more fervent religious faith in the Russian “servant” than in the Polish fighter of the battles for his homeland and freedom? Do you find a greater love for God in the abased subject of a Pope and a tyrant King than in the Lombard Republican of the twelfth century and the Florentine Republican of the fourteenth? Where the spirit of God is, there is freedom, says one of the most powerful Apostles we know, and the religion he preached decreed the abolition of slavery. Who can properly understand and worship God by groveling at the feet of his creation? Yours is not a religion, it is a sect of men who have forgotten their origins, the battles their fathers fought against a decaying society, and the victories they won that transformed the earthly world that you, observers, now disdain. Any strong belief that arises among the ruins of the exhausted old will transform the existing social order, because every strong belief seeks to apply itself to all branches of human activity. The earth has always sought to conform to the heavens in which it believed, in every era. The entire history of Humanity repeats, in different forms and to varying degrees depending on the times, the words recorded in the Lord’s Prayer of Christianity: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

May the kingdom of God come on earth, as it is in heaven. Let this, my brothers, be better understood and applied than it has been in the past, your word of faith, your prayer: repeat it and act so that it may come true. Let others try to persuade you to passive resignation, indifference to earthly things, submission to every temporal power, even unjust, repeating to you, misunderstood, that other word: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’ Can they tell you anything that is not of God? Nothing belongs to Caesar except what is in accordance with the Divine Law. Caesar, that is, temporal power, civil government, is only the representative, the executor, as far as his forces and times allow, of God’s plan: where he betrays his mandate, it is your, not to say right, but duty to change it. Why are you here if not to work to develop with your own means and in your own sphere the concept of God? Why profess to believe in the unity of the human race, the inevitable consequence of the Unity of God, if you do not work to bring it to life, fighting arbitrary divisions, the enmities that still separate the different tribes forming Humanity? Why believe in human freedom, the basis of human responsibility, if we do not strive to destroy all the obstacles that prevent the first and taint the second? Why talk about Brotherhood, even granting that our brothers are every day trampled, debased, despised? The earth is our workshop: we must not curse it; we must sanctify it. The material forces that surround us are our tools, we must not reject them, we must direct them to good.

But this, you, without God, cannot do. I have spoken to you about Duties: I have taught you that the mere knowledge of your rights is not enough to guide us durably on the paths of good, nor is it enough to give you that progressive, continuous improvement in your condition that you seek: now, without God, where is Duty? Without God, no matter what civil system you want to cling to, you can find no other basis than blind, brutal, tyrannical force. There is no way out of this. Either the development of human affairs depends on a law of Providence that we are all entrusted to discover and apply, or it is left to chance, to the circumstances of the moment, to the man who knows best how to use them. Either we must obey God or serve men, one or more, it doesn’t matter. If there is no supreme Mind ruling over all human minds, who can save us from the arbitrariness of our fellow men when they are more powerful than us? If there is no holy, inviolable Law, not created by men, what norm will we have to judge whether an act is right or not? In whose name, in the name of what will we protest against oppression and inequality? Without God, there is no other ruler than Fact: the Fact in front of which materialists always bow, whether it is called Revolution or Bonaparte: the Fact which materialists today, in Italy and elsewhere, use as a shield to justify inertia, even where they theoretically agree with our principles. Will we command them to sacrifice, martyrdom in the name of our individual opinions? Will we change, based solely on our interests, theory into practice, abstract principle into action? Disabuse yourselves. As long as we speak as individuals, in the name of what our individual intellect suggests to us, we will have what we have today: adherence to words, not deeds. The cry that sounded in all the great revolutions, the cry “God wills it, God wills it” of the Crusades, can only convert the inert into the active, give courage to the fearful, enthusiasm for sacrifice to the calculators, and faith to those who reject every human concept with doubt. Show men that the work of emancipation and progressive development to which you call them is in the design of God; no one will rebel. Show them that the earthly work to be done down here is essentially connected with their immortal life: all calculations of the moment will disappear in the face of the importance of the future. Without God, you can impose, not persuade: you can be tyrants towards yourselves, not educators and Apostles.

God wills it, God wills it! It is the cry of the people, brothers; it is the cry of your people, the Italian national cry. Do not be deceived, those of you who work with sincere love for your nation, by those who may tell you that the Italian tendency is only political and that the religious spirit has departed from it. The religious spirit has never departed from Italy, as long as Italy, however divided, was great and active; it departed when in the sixteenth century, after Florence fell under the foreign arms of Charles V and under the deceits of the popes, every Italian way of life lost its freedom, and we began to live like Spaniards, Germans, and French. Then our writers began to act as jesters to the princes and to indulge the laziness of their masters, laughing at everything and everyone. Then our priests, seeing that every application of religious truth was impossible, began to turn the cult into a shop and to think of themselves, not of the people they were supposed to enlighten and protect. And then, the people, despised by the writers, betrayed and fleeced by the priests, exiled from every influence in public affairs, began to take revenge by laughing at the writers, distrusting the priests, and rebelling against all beliefs, since they saw that the old ones were corrupted and could not foresee any further. From that time on, we have been dragging ourselves between superstitions commanded by habit or by governments and cowardice and powerlessness. But we want to rise again great and honored. And we will remember the National tradition. We will remember that with the name of God on their lips and with the emblems of their faith in the center of the battle, our Lombard brothers won, in the twelfth century, against the German invaders, and reconquered their oppressed liberties. We will remember that the republicans of the Tuscan cities gathered in parliament in the temples. We will remember the Florentine artisans who, rejecting the party that sought to subject their democratic freedom to the empire of the Medici family, elected, by solemn vote, Christ as the head of the Republic – and the friar Savonarola preaching at the same time the dogma of God and that of the people – and the Genoese of 1746, liberators, with stones and the name of Mary, protector of their city from the German army that occupied it – and a chain of other similar facts in which the religious thought protected and fertilized the Italian popular thought. And the religious thought sleeps, waiting for development, in our people: whoever can arouse it will have done more for the nation than with twenty-seven political plans. Perhaps the absence of this thought in the imitators of the foreign monarchic constitutions and tactics that led past insurrection attempts in Italy is responsible, as much as the absence of an openly popular purpose, for the coolness with which the people has looked at those attempts so far. Therefore, preach, brothers, in the name of God. Those with an Italian heart will follow you.

In the name of God, the literati will smile: ask the literati what they have done for their country. The priests will excommunicate you: tell the priests that you know God more than they do, and that you do not need intermediaries between God and his Law. The people will understand you and repeat with you: We believe in God the Father, Intelligence and Love, Creator and Educator of Humanity.

And in that word, you and the people will triumph.

III. The Law

You have life; therefore, you have a law of life. There is no life without law. Whatever exists, exists in a certain way, according to certain conditions, with a certain law. A law of aggregation governs minerals; a law of development governs plants; a law of motion governs the stars; a law governs you and your life: a law as noble and high as you are superior to all created things on earth. Developing yourselves, acting, and living according to your law is your first, indeed your only duty.

God has given you life; therefore, God has given you the law. God is the only Legislator of the human race. His law is the only one to which you must obey. Human laws are not valid and good unless they conform to it, explaining and applying it; they are sad whenever they contradict or depart from it; and it is not only your right, but your duty to disobey and abolish them. Whoever better explains and applies the law of God to human cases is your legitimate leader: love and follow him. But beyond God, you have no master, nor can you, without betraying and rebelling against Him, have a master.

In the consciousness of your law of life, of God’s Law, lies the foundation of Morality, the rule of your actions and duties, the measure of your responsibility: in it also lies your defense against unjust laws that the arbitrary power of one man or several men may try to impose on you. You cannot pretend to be called or have the rights of “men” without knowing it. All rights have their origin in a law, and you, whenever you cannot invoke it, can be tyrants or slaves, nothing else: tyrants if you are strong, slaves of others’ strength if you are weak. To be “men,” you must know the law that distinguishes human nature from that of animals, plants, minerals, and conform your actions to it.

Now, how to know it?

This is the question that humanity has addressed to all those who have uttered the word “duties” in all times, and the answers are still different today.

Some have answered by showing a Code, a book, and saying: “here is all the moral law.” Others have said: “every man should question his own heart; therein lies the definition of good and evil.” Still, others, rejecting the judgment of the individual, have invoked universal consent and declared that “where humanity agrees on a belief, that is the truth.”

They all erred. And the history of mankind declared them powerless, with irrefutable facts, all these answers.

Those who affirm that all the moral law is found in a book or on the lips of one man forget that there is no code from which Humanity, after a belief of centuries, has not departed to seek and inspire a better one, and that there is no reason, especially today, to believe that humanity will change its method.

To those who argue that only the conscience of the individual is the norm of the “true” and the “false,” that is, of good and evil, it suffices to recall that no religion, however holy it may be, has been without heretics, without convinced dissidents ready to face martyrdom in the name of their conscience. Today, Protestantism is divided and subdivided into a thousand sects, all founded on the rights of the “conscience” of the “individual”; all fierce in making war on each other, and perpetuating the anarchy of beliefs, the true and only source of the discord that socially and politically torments the peoples of Europe.

On the other hand, to men who deny the testimony of individual conscience in favor of relying solely on the consensus of humanity in a belief, it is enough to remember that all the great ideas that improve humanity began to manifest themselves in opposition to beliefs that humanity consented to, and were preached by individuals whom humanity ridiculed, persecuted, and crucified.

Each of these rules is therefore insufficient to obtain knowledge of God’s Law, of Truth! And yet, the individual’s conscience is holy: the common consensus of humanity is holy: and whoever renounces questioning this or that, deprives themselves of an essential means of knowing the truth. The general mistake so far has been to try to reach it with only one of these means exclusively: a decisive and most disastrous mistake in its consequences, because the conscience of the individual, the only rule in truth, cannot be established without falling into anarchy, and the general consensus cannot be invoked as unappealable at a given moment without stifling human freedom and ruining into tyranny.

So – and I cite these examples to show how everything in the social structure depends, more generally than is believed, on these first foundations – thus, men, serving the same mistake, have ordered political society, some based solely on the respect of individual rights, completely forgetting the educational mission of society; others solely on social rights, sacrificing the freedom and action of the individual.1 And France after its great revolution, and England in particular, taught us how the first system only leads to inequality and oppression of the many; Communism, among others, would show us, if it could ever become a reality, how the second condemns society to petrify, removing any movement and any possibility of progress.

Thus, some, considering that the supposed rights of the individual have ordered, or rather, disordered the economic system, give as the sole basis the theory of unlimited free competition; while others, only considering social unity, would trust the government with the monopoly of all productive forces of the State: two concepts, the first of which has given us all the evils of anarchy, the second would give us immobility and all the evils of tyranny.

God has given you the consent of your brothers and your conscience, like two wings to raise you as high as possible to Him. Why do you insist on cutting off one? Why isolate yourself, absorb yourself in the world? Why do you want to stifle the voice of humanity? Both are sacred: God speaks in both. Wherever they meet, wherever the cry of your conscience is ratified by the consensus of humanity, there is God, there you are certain to have the truth in your grasp: one is the verification of the other.

If your duties were only negative, if they consisted solely in “not doing evil,” in not harming your brothers, perhaps in the state of development in which even the least educated are today, the cry of your conscience would be enough to guide you. You were born for good, and whenever you directly act against the Law, whenever you commit what men call “crime,” there is something in you that accuses you, like a voice of reproach that you can hide from others, but not from yourself. But your most important duties are positive. It is not enough to “not do”: you must “do”. It is not enough to simply refrain from acting against the Law: you must act in accordance with the Law. It is not enough to “not harm,” you must “benefit” your brothers. Unfortunately, morality has presented itself to most men in a more negative than affirmative form. The interpreters of the Law have said, “thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill”; few or none have taught the obligations that belong to man, and how he should benefit his fellow creatures and God’s design in creation. This is the primary purpose of Morality, and the individual, consulting only his own conscience, can never reach it.

The conscience of an individual speaks according to their education, tendencies, habits, and passions. The conscience of a wild Iroquois speaks a different language than that of a civilized European of the 19th century. The conscience of a free man suggests duties that the conscience of a slave does not even suspect. Ask a poor Neapolitan or Lombard daily laborer, to whom a bad priest was the only apostle of morality and for whom, even if he knows how to read, the Austrian catechism was the only reading material allowed. He will tell you that his duties are to work hard at any cost to support his family, to submit without examination to laws, whatever they may be, and to not harm others. To someone who speaks to him of duties that bind him to his country and humanity, who tells him, “You harm our brothers by accepting to work for a lower price than the work is worth. You sin against God and your soul by obeying unjust laws,” he would reply, as one who does not understand, by furrowing his brows. Ask an Italian worker, whom better circumstances or contact with more educated individuals have taught the greater part of the truth; he will tell you that his country is enslaved, that his brothers are unjustly condemned to live in material and moral misery, and that he feels duty-bound to protest, if he can, against this injustice. Why such a disparity between the suggestions of conscience in two individuals of the same time and country? Why do we find ten different convictions among ten individuals who belong, in substance, to the same belief, which imposes the development and progress of the human race, about the ways to apply this belief to actions, i.e., about duties? Clearly, the cry of an individual’s conscience is not enough, in every situation and without any other norm, to reveal the law to them. The conscience is enough only to teach that a law exists, not what these duties are. That is why martyrdom has never been exiled from humanity, and no matter how much selfishness prevails, but how many martyrs did not sacrifice their existence for presumed duties, to the benefit of errors that are now evident to everyone!

Therefore, there is a need for a supply to your conscience, a light that breaks the darkness around it, a norm that verifies and directs your instincts. And this norm is the Intellect and Humanity.

God has given intellect to each of you so that you may educate yourselves about His law. Today, poverty, deep-rooted errors of centuries, and the will of your masters hinder you even from the possibility of educating it. Therefore, it is necessary to overthrow those obstacles by force. But even when the obstacles are removed, each of your intellects will be insufficient to know God’s law without relying on humanity’s intellect. Your life is short; your individual faculties are weak, uncertain, and require a point of support. But God has placed near you a being whose life is continuous, and whose faculties are the sum of all the individual faculties that have been exercised for perhaps four centuries; a being that improves in wisdom and morality through the errors and faults of individuals; a being in whose development God has written and continues to write a line of His Law at every epoch.

This being is Humanity.

Humanity, said a philosopher of the last century, is a man who always learns. Individuals die, but the true things they have thought, the good things they have done, are not lost with them; Humanity collects them, and the men who walk on their graves make them their own. Each of us is born today in an atmosphere of ideas and beliefs elaborated by all the previous Humanity. Each of us carries, without knowing it, a more or less important element for the life of future Humanity. The education of Humanity progresses as those pyramids rise in the East to which every traveler adds a stone. We pass, travelers of a day, called to complete our individual education elsewhere; the education of Humanity flashes in each of us, reveals itself slowly, progressively, continuously in Humanity. Humanity is the living Word of God. The spirit of God fertilizes it and manifests itself always purer, always more active from epoch to epoch in it, one day through an individual, another through a people. From work to work, from belief to belief, Humanity gradually gains a clearer notion of its life, its mission, God, and His Law.

God incarnates subsequently in humanity. The law of God is one, just as God is one, but we discover it article by article, line by line, as the educating experience of preceding generations accumulates, and as the association between races, peoples, and individuals grows in breadth and intensity. No man, no people, no century can presume to discover it in its entirety: the moral law, the law of life of Humanity can only be discovered in its entirety by all of Humanity gathered in association, when all the forces, all the faculties that constitute human nature will be developed and in action. But in the meantime, that part of humanity which is more advanced in education teaches us, through its development, a part of the law that we seek. In its history, we read the design of God; in its needs, our duties: duties that change or, rather, grow with the needs, because our first duty is to contribute to the prompt ascent of Humanity to the degree of improvement and education to which God and the times have prepared it.

Therefore, to know God’s law, you need to question not only your own conscience, but also the conscience and consent of humanity. To know your duties, you need to question the current needs of humanity. Morality is progressive, just like the education of humankind and yourselves. The morality of Christianity was not the same as that of pagan times, and the morality of our century is not the same as that of eighteen centuries ago. Today, your masters, through segregation from other classes, by prohibiting any association, and by imposing double censorship on the press, seek to conceal your duties with the needs of humanity. However, even before the time when the nation will teach you the history of humanity in the past and its current needs for free from general education schools, you can, if you wish, learn at least partially the former and guess the latter. The current needs of humanity emerge in more or less violent, more or less imperfect expressions from the facts that occur every day in countries where the immobility of silence is not an absolute law. Who forbids you, brothers of the enslaved lands, to know them? What force of suspicious tyranny can long prevent millions of men, many of whom travel outside Italy and return home, from knowing European facts? If public associations are forbidden in almost all of Italy, who can prevent secret ones, when they flee symbols and complicated organizations, and consist only of a fraternal chain extended from country to country until it touches one of the infinite points of the border? Will you not find, above every point of the terrestrial and maritime border, men of yours, men whom your masters have driven out of the homeland for wanting to benefit you, who will be apostles of truth, who will tell you with love what studies and the sad ease of exile have taught them about present aspirations and the tradition of humanity? Who can prevent you, provided you wish, from receiving any of the writings that your brothers print here in exile for you? Read and burn them, so that the day after your masters’ inquisition does not find them in your hands and does not make them a reason for guilt for your families; but still read them and repeat as much as you can remember to your most trusted friends. Help us with your donations to expand the scope of the Apostolate, to compile, to print manuals of general and national history for you. Help us, by multiplying communications, to spread them. Convince yourself that without education, you cannot know your duties; convince yourself that if, where society contests every teaching for you, the responsibility for every fault is not yours, but hers; yours begins on the day when any way to teaching is open to you and you neglect it: from the day when means are shown to you to change a society that condemns you to ignorance, and you do not think of using them. You are not guilty because you are ignorant; you are guilty because you resign yourself to ignorance – because while your conscience warns you that God has not given you faculties without imposing on you to develop them, you let all the faculties of your thinking sleep in your soul – because, while you know that God cannot have given you the love of truth without giving you the means to achieve it, you despair, renounce to search for it, and accept, without examination, as truth, the assertion of the powerful and the priest sold to the powerful.

God, the Father and educator of humanity, reveals His law to humanity in space and time. Consult the tradition of humanity, the counsel of your brothers, not in the narrow circle of a century or a sect, but in all centuries and in the majority of past and present men. Every time the voice of your conscience corresponds to that consensus, you are certain of the truth, certain to have a line of God’s law.

We believe in humanity, the only interpreter of God’s law on earth; and from the consensus of humanity in harmony with our conscience, we deduce what we will gradually tell you about your duties.

IV. Duties towards Humanity.

Your first duties, first not in time but in importance, and because without fulfilling them you cannot adequately perform the others, are towards Humanity. You have duties as citizens, children, spouses, and parents, sacred and inviolable duties, which I will discuss at length shortly. But what makes these duties sacred and inviolable is the mission, the Duty that your nature as human beings commands of you. You are parents in order to educate human beings in the worship and development of God’s Law. You are citizens, you have a homeland, so that you can easily, in a limited sphere, with the help of people already bound to you by language, tendencies, and habits, work for the benefit of all the human beings who are and will be, which you could not do if you were lost, alone and weak, in the immense number of your fellow humans. Those who teach you morality, limiting the notion of your duties to the family or to the homeland, teach you, in a more or less limited way, egoism, and lead you to do harm to others and to yourselves. Homeland and Family are like two circles marked within a larger circle that contains them; like two steps of a ladder without which you could not climb higher, but on which it is not allowed to stop.

You are human beings: that is, rational, sociable, and capable creatures, solely through association, of a progress to which no limits can be assigned; and this is all that we know today from the Law of life given to Humanity. These characteristics constitute the human nature that distinguishes you from the other beings that surround you and that each of you is entrusted with as a seed to be made fruitful. Your whole life must tend towards the ordinary exercise and development of these fundamental faculties of your nature. Whenever you suppress or allow to be suppressed, in whole or in part, one of these faculties, you fall from the rank of human beings among the lower animals and violate the law of your life, the Law of God.

You fall among the wicked and violate the Law of God every time you suppress or allow the suppression of any of the faculties that make up human nature in yourself or in others. What God wants is not that His Law be fulfilled in you as individuals – if God had wanted this, He would have created you alone – but that it be fulfilled throughout the whole earth, among all the beings He created in His image. What He wants is that the Thought of perfection and love that He placed in the world be revealed and shine forth more and more, adored and represented. Your earthly existence, individual, and limited as it is in time and ability, can only imperfectly represent it and in flashes. Humanity alone, continuous for generations and with an intellect that feeds on the intellect of all its members, can gradually unfold that divine thought, apply it, and glorify it. Life was given to you by God so that you may use it for the benefit of humanity, so that you may direct your individual faculties towards the development of the faculties of your brothers, so that you may add with your work any element to the collective work of improvement and discovery of the Truth, which generations slowly but continuously promote. You must educate yourselves and educate, perfect yourselves and perfect. God is in you, there is no doubt about it; but God is also in all the men who inhabit this earth with you; God is in the life of all the generations that were, are, and will be, and that progressively improved and will improve the concept that Humanity forms of Him, His Law, and our Duties. You must adore and glorify Him wherever He is. The Universe is His Temple. And every profanation not fought, not expiated, of the Temple of God falls on all believers. It matters little whether you can call yourselves pure: even if you could remain so, isolating yourselves, if corruption is just a stone’s throw away and you do not seek to fight it, you betray your duties. It matters little whether you worship Truth in your souls: if Error rules your brothers in another corner of this earth that is our common mother, and you do not desire and do not attempt, as far as your strength allows, to overthrow it, you betray your duties. The image of God is distorted in the immortal souls of your fellow men. God wants to be worshiped in His Law, and His Law is misunderstood, violated, and denied all around you. Human nature is falsified in the millions of men to whom, like you, God has entrusted the harmonious fulfillment of His design. And if you remain inactive, could you still dare to call yourselves believers?

A people, the Greeks, the Poles, the Circassians, rise up with a flag of homeland and independence, fight, win, or die for it. What makes your heart beat to the story of battles, lifts it in joy at its victories, and saddens it at its fall? A man, whether your own or a stranger, rises, in the common silence, in a corner of the earth, he prefers certain ideas that he believes to be true, he maintains them in persecution and among chains, and dies without renouncing them on the scaffold. Why do you honor him with the name of Saint and Martyr? Why do you respect and make your children respect his memory? And why do you eagerly read the miracles of patriotic love recorded in Greek history and repeat them to your children with a sense of pride as if they were the stories of your own fathers? Those Greek facts are two thousand years old and belong to a civilization that is not yours, nor will it ever be. That man you call a Martyr may have died for ideas that are not yours, and in any case, he cut off any way to his individual progress down here with death. That people you admire in victory and defeat is a foreign people to you, perhaps almost unknown: they speak a different language, and the way of their existence does not visibly influence yours: what does it matter to you if they are ruled by the Sultan or the King of Bavaria, the Russian or a government that has emerged from the consensus of the nation? But in your heart there is a voice that cries out: “Those men of two thousand years ago, those populations that fight far from you today, that martyr for whose ideas you would not die, were, and are your brothers: brothers not only in the communion of origin and nature, but in the communion of work and purpose. Those ancient Greeks passed; but their work did not pass, and without it, you would not have reached the degree of intellectual and moral development that you have today. Those populations consecrated an idea of national freedom with their blood for which you fight. That martyr taught by dying that man must sacrifice everything and, if necessary, life for what he believes to be the Truth. It matters little that he and how many others mark their faith with their blood, truncating their individual development here on earth: God provides elsewhere for them. What matters is the development of Humanity. It matters that the future generation will rise, taught by your struggles and sacrifices, higher and more powerful than you are in the intelligence of the Law, in the worship of Truth. It matters that, fortified by examples, human nature improves and more often verifies God’s plan on earth. And wherever nature improves, wherever truth is won, wherever a step is taken on the path of education, progress, and morality, it is a step, a conquest that will soon or late benefit all of Humanity. You are all soldiers of an army that moves along different paths, divided into different nuclei, towards the conquest of a single intent. Today, you only look at your immediate leaders; the different assemblies, the different watchwords, the distances that separate the operational bodies, the mountains that hide them from each other, often make you forget this truth and concentrate exclusively on the goal that is closest to you. But there is someone higher than all of you who embraces the whole and directs the movements. God alone has the secret of the battle and will know how to gather you all in one field and under one flag.”

What distance is there between this belief fermenting in our souls and which will be the basis for the morality of the Era that is about to arise, and the one that the generations we now call ancient used as the basis for their Morality! And how close is the connection between the idea we form of the Divine Principate and the idea we form of our duties! The first men felt God, but without understanding Him, without even seeking to understand Him in His Law: they felt Him in His power, not in love: they vaguely conceived any relationship between Him and their own individual; nothing more. Little able to detach themselves from the sphere of sensory objects, they substantiated Him in one of those, in the tree they had seen struck by lightning, in the stone next to which they had raised their tent, in the animal that had first offered itself to their eyes. It was the cult that in the history of religion is distinguished by the name of fetishism. And then men knew only the family, in a certain way, a reproduction of their individual: beyond the circle of the family, there were only strangers, or more generally enemies; to benefit oneself and one’s family was the only basis for morality. Later on, the idea of God expanded. From sensory objects, man timidly ascended to abstraction: he generalized. God was no longer the protector of the family, but of the association of several families, of the city, of the people. Polytheism followed fetishism, the cult of many gods. Then morality also expanded its circle of action. Men recognized the existence of duties broader than the family and worked for the growth of the people, of the nation. Nevertheless, Humanity was ignorant. Every nation called strangers “barbarians”, treated them as such, and sought their conquest or subjugation by force and skill. Every nation had strangers or barbarians in its midst, men, millions of men, not admitted to the religious rites of citizens, believed to be of a different nature, and slaves among the free. The unity of the human race could only be recognized as a consequence of the unity of God. And the unity of God, guessed by some rare thinkers of antiquity, manifestly by Moses, but with the fatal restriction that only one people was chosen by God, was not recognized until the dissolution of the Roman Empire, by the work of Christianity. Christ placed these inseparable truths at the forefront of His belief: “There is only one God, all men are children of God”; and the promulgation of these two truths changed the world and expanded morality to the borders of the inhabited lands. To the duties towards the family and towards the homeland were added the duties towards humanity. Then man learned that wherever he found his fellow man, there was a brother to him, a brother endowed with an immortal soul like his own, called to be reunited with the Creator, and that he owed him love, participation in faith, and help of advice and work where he needed it. Then, a presentiment of other truths contained in germ in Christianity, sublime and incomprehensible words were heard on the lips of the Apostles, misunderstood or even betrayed by their successors: “as in one body there are many members, and each member performs a different function, so, though many, we are one body, and members of one another.(Romans 12:4–5) And there shall be one fold and one shepherd.” There will be one flock and one shepherd.(John 10:16) And today, after eighteen centuries of studies, experiences, and hard work, the task at hand is to develop those seeds: to apply that truth not only to each individual but to all those present and future human faculties and forces that we call Humanity. The goal is to proclaim not only that Humanity is one body and must be governed by one law, but that the first article of this Law is Progress, progress here on earth where we must verify as much as we can of God’s design and educate ourselves towards better destinies. The goal is to teach men that if Humanity is one body, we all, as members of that body, must work towards its development and towards making its life more harmonious, active, and powerful. The task at hand is to convince ourselves that we cannot ascend to God except through the souls of our brothers, and that we must improve and purify them even when they do not ask for it. The task at hand, since only the entire Humanity can accomplish that part of God’s design that He wanted to be fulfilled down here, is to substitute the exercise of charity towards individuals with an association work aimed at improving the whole, to order the family and the homeland to that end. Other broader duties will be revealed to us in the future, as we acquire a less imperfect and clearer idea of our Law of life. Thus God the Father, through a slow but continuous religious education, guides Humanity for the best, and in that best, our individual also improves.

Improve in that which is better, because without a common improvement, you cannot hope for moral or material conditions to improve for yourself. Generally speaking, you cannot separate your life from that of humanity, you live in it, of it, for it. Your soul, with few exceptions of the extraordinarily powerful, cannot separate itself from the influence of the elements in which it operates, just as the body, no matter how robustly constituted, cannot escape the action of the corrupt air that surrounds it. How many of you will, with the certainty of facing persecution, teach your children unlimited sincerity, where tyranny and spying force them to remain silent or lie about two-thirds of their opinions? How many will educate them to despise wealth in a society where gold is the only power that obtains honors, influence, respect, and even protects from the arbitrary and insulting actions of employers and their agents? Who among you, out of love and with the best intentions, has not whispered to their loved ones in Italy, “beware of men; an honest man must focus on himself and flee public life; charity begins at home,” and other such maxims that are evidently immoral, but suggested by the general appearance of society? Which mother, even though belonging to a faith that adores the Cross of Christ, a voluntary martyr for humanity, has not thrown her arms around her son’s neck and attempted dangerous attempts for the good of her brothers? And even if you found the strength in yourselves to teach the opposite, would not society as a whole destroy the effect of your words with its thousands of voices and sad examples? Can you purify and elevate your soul in an atmosphere of contamination and degradation? And when it comes to your material conditions, do you think they can be permanently improved by any means other than common improvement? Millions of pounds are spent annually here in England, where I write, by private charity to alleviate the misery of individuals who have fallen into poverty, and yet poverty increases every year, and charity towards individuals is proven powerless to heal wounds, and the need for collective, organic remedies is more universally felt than ever before. Where the country is constantly threatened by unjust laws that govern it, by violent struggle between oppressors and oppressed, do you think that capital can flow back and that vast, long, and expensive projects can flourish? Where tariffs and prohibitions are subject to the whims of an absolute government that has no moderating force, and whose expenses for armies of spies, officials, or pensioners increase with its security needs, do you think that industry and manufacturing can receive progressive and continuous development? You may answer that it is enough to improve the government and social conditions in your own country, but it is not enough. No people today live solely on their own products. You live on trade, imports, and exports. A foreign nation that becomes impoverished, in which the number of consumers decreases, is one less market for you. Foreign trade that suffers from crises or ruin as a result of poor regulations produces crises or ruin in yours. Failures in England or America drag Italian failures. Credit is now a European institution, not a national one. And moreover, any attempt at national improvement that you make will have enemies, by virtue of the leagues contracted by the rulers, the first to realize that the question is now general to all governments. There is no hope for you except in universal improvement, in brotherhood among all the peoples of Europe and, for Europe, of humanity.

Therefore, brothers, for your duty and benefit, you will never forget that your first duties, duties without which you cannot hope to fulfill what the homeland and family command, are towards Humanity. Let your words and actions be for everyone, just as God is for everyone, in his love and in his Law. Wherever you are, wherever a man fights for right, for justice, for truth, there is your brother; wherever a man suffers, tormented by error, injustice, tyranny, there is your brother; you are all brothers, free and enslaved. Your origin is one, the law is one, the goal is one for all of you. Let your belief be one, your action be one, and let there be one flag under which you fight. Do not say, “the language we speak is different.” Tears, action, and martyrdom form a common language for all men, and you all understand it. Do not say, “Humanity is too vast, and we are too weak.” God does not measure strength, but intentions. Love Humanity. With every work you do in the circle of the homeland or family, ask yourself, “If what I am doing were done by everyone and for everyone, would it benefit or harm Humanity?” and if your conscience answers, “It would harm,” then desist; desist even if it seems that your action would bring immediate benefit to the Homeland and the Family. Be apostles of this faith, apostles of the brotherhood of nations and of unity, acknowledged in principle today, but denied in fact by mankind. Be it where and how you can. Neither God nor men can demand more from you. But I tell you that by making yourselves such – making yourselves such, where you cannot be anything else, within yourselves – you will benefit Humanity. God measures the degrees of education that He makes rise in mankind by the number and purity of believers. When you are pure and numerous, God, who counts you, will open the way for your action.

V. Duties towards the Homeland

Your first duties, at least the most important ones, are, as I told you, towards humanity. You are humans first, before being citizens or fathers. If you do not embrace with all your love the whole human family – if you do not confess faith in its humanity, a consequence of the unity of God, and in the brotherhood of peoples who must make it a reality – if you are not ready, when you can, to help the poor and the oppressed wherever they suffer, or if you do not feel called, when you can, to fight to raise up the deceived and the oppressed – you would betray your law of life and not understand the religion that will bless the future.

But what can each of you, with your isolated strength, do for the moral improvement and progress of humanity? You can express your beliefs from time to time, but that is sterile; you can perform an act of charity towards a brother who does not belong to your land, but that is rare. Charity is not the word of faith in the future. The word of faith in the future is association, fraternal cooperation towards a common goal, as superior to charity as the work of many of you who join together to raise a building to live in together is superior to what you would do by each building a separate hut and limiting yourselves to exchanging help with each other in stones, bricks, and lime. But you, divided by language, tendencies, habits, and abilities, cannot undertake this common work. The individual is too weak and humanity is too vast. “My God,” prays the sailor from Brittany as he sets sail, “protect me: my boat is so small and your ocean so big!” And that prayer summarizes the condition of each of you, if a means of indefinitely multiplying your strength and power of action is not found.

God found this means for you when he gave you a homeland, when, like a wise construction manager who distributes different parts according to the capabilities, he divided humanity into distinct groups, into distinct nuclei on the face of our globe, and planted the germ of nations. The sad governments have ruined God’s plan, which you can clearly see marked, at least as far as our Europe is concerned, by the courses of the great rivers, the curves of the high mountains, and other geographical conditions: they have ruined it through conquest, greed, and jealousy of others’ just power; ruined it to the extent that today, apart from England and France, there is perhaps no nation whose borders correspond to that plan. They did not and do not know the homeland except as their own family, dynasty, and caste egoism. But the divine plan will be fulfilled without fail. The natural divisions, the innate spontaneous tendencies of peoples, will replace the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by sad governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn. The homeland of the people will be reborn delimited by the vote of the free, on the ruins of the homeland of kings and privileged castes. Among those homelands, there will be harmony and brotherhood. And then, the work of humanity towards common improvement, towards the discovery and application of its own law of life, distributed according to local capacities and associated, can be accomplished through progressive, peaceful development. Then, each of you, strong with the effects and means of many millions of people speaking the same language, endowed with uniform tendencies, educated by the same historical tradition, can hope to contribute with your own work to the whole of humanity.

To you, men born in Italy, God assigned, almost favoring you, the best defined Homeland in Europe. In other lands, marked by more uncertain or interrupted boundaries, issues may arise that the peaceful vote of all will someday resolve, but which have cost and may still cost tears and blood: not on yours. God has stretched sublime, undeniable boundary lines around you: on one side, the highest mountains in Europe: the Alps; on the other: the Sea, the immense Sea. Open a compass: place one point in the north of Italy, in Parma; fix the other at the mouth of the Var and mark with it, in the direction of the Alps, a semicircle: that point that, having completed the semicircle, will fall on the mouth of the Isonzo, will have marked the border that God gave you. Within that border, your language is spoken and understood: beyond it, you have no rights. Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the smaller islands located between them and the Italian mainland are undeniably yours. Brutal force may still for a little while challenge those boundaries, but the secret consensus of the peoples recognizes them as ancient, and the day when, unanimous in the ultimate test, you will raise your tricolor flag on that border, the entire Europe will acclaim Italy, arisen and accepted in the consortium of Nations. To this ultimate test, you must strive with all your efforts.

Without a Homeland, you have no name, no sign, no vote, no rights, no baptism of brothers among peoples. You are the bastards of humanity. Soldiers without a flag, Israelites of the Nations, you will not obtain faith or protection: you will have no guarantors. Do not delude yourself into achieving your emancipation from an unjust social condition if you do not first conquer a Homeland: where there is no Homeland, there is no common Pact to which you can appeal: only the egoism of interests reigns, and whoever has predominance keeps it, since there is no common protection to protect one’s own. Do not be seduced by the idea of improving your material conditions without first solving the National question: you will not succeed. Your industrial associations, mutual aid consortia are good as an educational work, as an economic fact: they will remain sterile until you have an Italy. The economic problem primarily requires an increase in capital and production, and as long as your country is fragmented into fractions – as long as, separated by customs lines and artificial difficulties of all kinds, you have only restricted markets before you – you cannot hope for that increase. Today – do not delude yourself – you are not the working class of Italy, you are a fraction of that class: powerless, unequal to the great purpose you propose. Your emancipation cannot practically begin unless a National Government, understanding the signs of the times, has inserted from Rome in the Declaration of Principles, which will be the norm for the development of Italian life, the words: “work is sacred and is the source of Italy’s wealth.”

Therefore, do not be swayed by hopes of material progress that, in your present conditions, are illusions. Only the Homeland, the vast and rich Italian Homeland, which extends from the Alps to the last land of Sicily, can fulfill those hopes. You cannot obtain what is your right unless you obey what Duty commands you. Deserve and you will have.

Oh my brothers! Love your Country. The Country is our home: the home that God has given us, placing within it a large family that loves us and that we love, with whom we can communicate better and more rapidly than with others, and that, through the concentration on a specific terrain and the homogenous nature of the elements it possesses, is called to a special kind of action. The Country is our workshop: the products of our activity should extend from there for the benefit of the entire earth; but the tools of labor that we can better and more effectively manage are there and we cannot renounce them without betraying God’s intention and diminishing our strength. By working for the Country according to true principles, we work for Humanity: the country is the point of leverage that we must direct for the common good. Losing that point of leverage, we run the risk of becoming useless to the Country and to Humanity. Before associating with the Nations that make up Humanity, it is necessary to exist as a Nation. There is no association between unequals; and you do not have a recognized collective existence.

Humanity is a great army, moving to conquer unknown lands, against powerful and astute enemies. Peoples are different bodies, the divisions of that army. Each has a place entrusted to it: each has a particular operation to perform; and the common victory depends on the exactness with which the different operations will be completed. Do not disturb the order of battle. Do not abandon the flag that God gave you. Wherever you are, in the bosom of whatever people circumstances may thrust you, fight for the freedom of that people, if the moment requires it; but fight as Italians, so that the blood you shed yields honor and love, not only to you, but to your Country. And let the continuous thought of your souls be Italian: let the acts of your life be Italian: let the signs under which you are ordered to work for Humanity be Italian. Do not say: I, say: we. The Country is embodied in each of you. Let each of you feel, become the guarantor of his brothers: let each of you learn to ensure that the Country is respected and loved within him.

The Country is one, indivisible. Just as the members of a family do not have joy in the common table if one of them is far away, snatched from fraternal affection, so you do not have joy and rest until a fraction of the territory on which your language is spoken is torn from the Nation.

The Homeland is the symbol of the mission that God has given you to fulfill in humanity. The faculties and forces of all its children must be associated for the fulfillment of that mission. A certain amount of common duties and rights belong to every man who answers the “who are you?” of other peoples: “I am Italian.” Those duties and rights can only be represented by a single power that comes from your vote. The homeland must therefore have a single government. The politicians who call themselves federalists and who would like to make Italy a brotherhood of different states, are breaking up the homeland and do not understand its unity. The states into which Italy is divided today are not creations of our people: they came from the ambition of princes or foreign conquerors, and they only serve to flatter the vanity of local aristocracies, who need a smaller sphere than the great Homeland. What you, the people, created, embellished, and consecrated with your affections, joys, sorrows, and blood, is the City, the Municipality, not the Province or the State. In the City, in the municipality where your fathers sleep and where those born of you will live, your individual faculties and rights are exercised, and your life as an individual unfolds. It is of your City that each of you can say what the Venetians sing of theirs: “Venice is ours: we made it ourselves.” In it, you need freedom, as in the common homeland, you need association. Liberty of the Municipality and Unity of the homeland, therefore, be your faith. Do not say “Rome” and “Tuscany,” “Rome” and “Lombardy,” “Rome” and “Sicily,” say “ROME” and “Florence, ROME” and “Siena, ROME” and “Livorno,” and so on for all the municipalities of Italy: Rome for everything that represents Italian life, the life of the Nation; your municipality for what represents individual life. All other divisions are artificial and do not rest on your national tradition.

The Homeland is a communion of free and equal brothers united in harmony of work towards a single end. You must make it and keep it that way. The Homeland is not an aggregate, it is an association. There is therefore no true Homeland without a uniform Law. There is no Homeland where the uniformity of that Law is violated by the existence of castes, privileges, inequalities – where the activity of a portion of individual forces and faculties is cancelled or suppressed – where there is no common principle accepted, recognized, and developed by all; there is no Nation, no people, but a multitude, a fortuitous agglomeration of men whom circumstances brought together, whom different circumstances will separate. In the name of your love for the Homeland, you will fight tirelessly against the existence of every privilege, every inequality on the soil that gave you life. Only one privilege is legitimate: the privilege of genius, when Genius shows itself united with Virtue; but it is a privilege granted by God and not by men – and when you recognize it by following its inspirations, you will recognize it freely by exercising your reason, your choice. Any privilege that demands submission from you by virtue of strength, inheritance, a right that is not a common right, is usurpation, it is tyranny; and you must fight and extinguish it. The Homeland must be your Temple. God at the top, a People of equals at the bottom: have no other formula, no other moral law, if you do not want to dishonor the Homeland and yourselves. The secondary laws that must progressively regulate your life are the progressive application of that supreme Law.

And for them to be so, it is necessary that everyone contributes to making them. Laws made by a single fraction of citizens cannot, by the nature of things and of men, reflect only the thought, aspirations, and desires of that fraction: they represent not the Fatherland, but a third, a quarter, a class, a zone of the fatherland. The law must express the general aspiration, promote the good of all, respond to a beat of the heart of the Nation. The entire Nation must therefore be, directly or indirectly, a legislator. By entrusting that mission to a few men, you substitute the selfishness of one class for the Fatherland, which is the union of all.

The Fatherland is not a territory; the territory is not its foundation. The Fatherland is the idea that arises on that; it is the thought of love, the sense of communion that binds all the children of that territory into one. As long as even one of your brothers is not represented by their own vote in the development of national life—as long as even one uneducated person languishes among the educated—as long as even one capable and willing worker languishes in poverty due to a lack of work—you will not have the Fatherland as you should have it, the Fatherland of all, the Fatherland for all. Vote, education, work, these are the three fundamental pillars of the Nation; do not rest until you have solidly erected them by your own efforts.

And when they are—when you have assured everyone the bread of the body and that of the soul—when free, united, intertwining your right hands like brothers around a beloved mother, you move in beautiful and holy harmony toward the development of your faculties and the Italian mission—remember that that mission is the moral unity of Europe: remember the immense duties that it imposes upon you. Italy is the only land that has twice thrown the great unifying word to the disjointed nations. The life of Italy was the life of all. Twice Rome was the metropolis, the temple of the European world: the first time when our eagles, as conquerors, traversed the known lands from one point to another and prepared them for unity with civil institutions; the second time when, tamed by the power of nature, by great memories, and by religious inspiration, the northern conquerors, the genius of Italy incarnated itself in the Papacy and fulfilled from Rome the solemn mission, ceased for four centuries, of spreading the word of Unity in the soul of the peoples of the Christian world. A third mission dawns today for our Italy: all the more vast as the Italian People, the One and Free Fatherland that you must found, will be greater and more powerful than the Caesars and the Popes. The presentiment of this mission agitates Europe and keeps Italy’s eye and thought bound to the Nations.

Your duties to the homeland are proportional to the magnitude of this mission. You must keep it free from selfishness, uncontaminated by lies, and the tactics of that political Jesuitism known as diplomacy.

The politics of the homeland will be based by your actions on adoration of principles, not idolatry of interest or opportunity. In Europe, there are countries where freedom is sacred within, but systematically violated outside: peoples who say, “what is true is not always useful,” where theory and practice are two different things. Those countries will inevitably suffer the consequences of their guilt through isolation, oppression, and anarchy. But you know the mission of our homeland and will follow a different path. For you, Italy will have one truth, one faith, and one political norm of life on earth, like one God in heaven. On the edifice that the people of Italy will raise higher than the Capitol and the Vatican, you will plant the flag of liberty and association, so that it shines in the eyes of all nations and is never veiled by the fear of despots or the lust for interests of a day. You will have audacity as well as faith. You will boldly confess the thoughts that ferment in Italy’s heart before the world and those who claim to be masters of the world. You will never deny sister nations. The life of the homeland will unfold beautifully and strongly for you, free of servile fears and skeptical hesitations, preserving the people as the foundation, the consequences of its principles logically deduced and energetically applied as the norm, the strength of all as the force, the improvement of all as the result, and the completion of the mission that God gave it as the end. And because you will be ready to die for humanity, the life of the homeland will be immortal.

VI. Duties towards the family.

The family is the homeland of the heart. There is an Angel in the Family who, with a mysterious influence of grace, sweetness, and love, makes the fulfillment of duties less dry and pains less bitter. The only pure joys that man can enjoy on earth, without any mixture of sadness, are the joys of the Family, thanks to that Angel. Whoever has not been able, due to the fatal circumstances, to live under the wings of the Angel the serene life of the family, has a shadow of sadness spread over their soul, a void that nothing fills in their heart! And I, who am writing these pages for you, know it. Bless God who created that Angel, or you who have the joys and consolations of the Family. Do not underestimate it, because you think you can find more fervent joys or quicker consolations elsewhere for your sorrows. The family has a rare element of goodness that is hard to find elsewhere, which is durability. The affections that surround you in the family extend slowly and imperceptibly, but they are tenacious and lasting like the ivy around the plant: they follow you from hour to hour and silently identify with your life. You often do not discern them, since they are part of you, but when you lose them, you feel as if something intimate, necessary to live, is missing. You wander restlessly and uncomfortably! You can still procure brief joys or comforts; not the supreme comfort, the calm, the calm of the lake’s wave, the calm of the sleep of trust, the sleep that a baby sleeps on its mother’s breast.

The Angel of the Family is the Woman. Mother, wife, sister, the Woman is the caress of life, the sweetness of affection spread over her labors, a reflection on the individual of the loving Providence that watches over humanity: there are consoling treasures of sweetness in her that are enough to assuage any pain. And she is also for each of us the initiator of the future. The first maternal kiss teaches the child love. The first holy kiss of a friend teaches man hope, faith in life; and love and faith create the desire for the better, the power to reach it gradually, the future in short, whose living symbol is the child, the link between us and future generations. Through her, the Family, with its divine mystery of reproduction, hints at eternity.

Therefore, my brothers, have the Family as holy. Have it as an inseparable condition of life, and reject every assault that could be launched against it by men imbued with false and brutal philosophies, or by the rash who, irritated to see it often a nest of selfishness and caste spirit, believe, like the barbarian, that the remedy for evil is to suppress it.

The Family is a concept of God, not yours. Human power cannot suppress it. Like the Homeland, even more than the Homeland, the Family is an element of life.

I said even more than the Homeland. The sacred Homeland today may disappear one day when every man reflects the moral law of Humanity in his conscience; the Family will last as long as man does. It is the cradle of Humanity. Like every element of human life, it must be open to progress, improving its tendencies and aspirations from age to age, but no one can erase it.

For the family, always the most holy and always linked to the homeland, this is your mission. What the homeland is to humanity, the family must be to the homeland. Just as I have told you that the role of the homeland is to educate people, so the role of the family is to educate citizens: family and homeland are the two extreme points of a single line. And where it is not so, the family becomes selfishness, all the more disgusting and brutal the more it prostitutes, diverting it from the true purpose, the holiest thing: affections.

Today, unfortunately, selfishness often reigns in the family, generated by sad social institutions. In a society founded on spies, thugs, prisons, and gallows, the poor mother, trembling at every noble aspiration of her son, is urged to teach him distrust, to tell him: watch out! the man who speaks to you of homeland, of freedom, of a future, and whom you would like to embrace, may be a traitor. In a society where merit is dangerous, and wealth is the only basis for power, security, defense against persecution and abuse, the father is driven by affection to tell the young man yearning for truth: watch out! wealth is your protection: truth alone cannot shield you against others’ strength, against others’ corruption. But I speak to you of a time when, with your sweat and your blood, you will have founded for your children a homeland of free people, based on merit, on the good that each of you will have done for your brothers. Until that time, unfortunately, you have only one way to improve, one supreme duty to perform: to organize yourselves, prepare yourselves, choose the opportune moment, and fight to conquer your Italy with insurrection. Only then will you be able to satisfy your other duties without serious and continuous obstacles. And then, while I am probably underground, reread these pages of mine: the few fraternal counsels they contain come from a heart that loves you and are written with the conscience of truth.

Love and respect women. Don’t just seek comfort from them, but also strength, inspiration, and a doubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Erase from your mind any idea of superiority, because you have none. Long-standing prejudice, unequal education, and perpetual oppression by laws have created the apparent intellectual inferiority of women, which is used today to justify their continued oppression. But doesn’t the history of oppression teach us that oppressors always rely on something they themselves created? Feudal castes have contested with you, children of the people, over education until almost our own time; then, from the lack of education, they argued and continue to argue today to exclude you from the sanctuary of the city, from the realm where laws are made, and from the right to vote that begins your social mission. The masters of the Blacks in America declare the race to be fundamentally inferior and incapable of education, and persecute anyone who tries to educate them. For half a century, advocates of families have claimed that we Italians are ill-suited for freedom, and meanwhile with laws and the brutal force of hired armies they keep every path closed to us, as if tyranny could ever be education for freedom. We are all guilty of a similar crime against women. Banish from yourselves even the shadow of that guilt, for there is no greater crime in the eyes of God than the one that divides the human family into two classes and imposes or accepts that one should submit to the other. Before God the One and Father, there is no “man” or “woman,” but the “human being,” the being in whom, whether male or female, all the characteristics that distinguish “Humanity” from the animal order are found: social tendencies, the capacity for education, and the faculty of progress. Wherever these characteristics are revealed, human nature exists, and therefore equality of rights and duties. Like two branches that move separately from the same trunk, man and woman move in different ways from a common base, which is “humanity.” There is no inequality between them; but as often happens between two men, there are differences in tendencies and special vocations. They are two notes of a musical chord, unequal or of a different nature! Woman and man are two notes without which the “human” chord is not possible. Like two peoples called by their special tendencies or the conditions in which they live, one to spread the idea of human association through colonies, the other to preach it through the production of universally admired works of art or literature, both those peoples are apostles, conscious or not, of the same divine concept: equal and fraternal in it. Man and woman have, like those two peoples, distinct functions in humanity; but those functions are equally sacred, necessary for common development; both represent the Thought that God placed, as soul, in the universe. Therefore, have woman as a companion and participant, not only in your joys and sorrows, but also in your aspirations, thoughts, studies, and attempts at social improvement. Make her equal in your civil and political life. Be the two wings of the human soul toward the ideal that we must achieve. The Mosaic Bible said, “God created man and from man woman,” but your Bible, the Bible of the future, will say, “God created humanity, manifested in woman and man.”

Love the children that Providence sends you, but love them with true, deep, and stern love, not with weak, irrational, and blind love that is selfish for you and ruinous for them. In the name of what is most sacred, never forget that you have the most tremendous responsibility that a human being can know: you have in your care the future generations, the souls entrusted to you, humanity, and God. You must initiate them, not into the joys or the desires of life, but into life itself, its duties, and the moral law that governs it.

Few mothers and fathers in this irreligious century, particularly in the affluent classes, understand the gravity and sanctity of the educational mission. Few mothers and fathers think that the many victims, the incessant struggles, and the long martyrdom of our times are largely the result of the selfishness implanted thirty years ago in weak mothers or reckless fathers, who allowed their children to get used to considering life not as a duty and a mission, but as a search for pleasure and the study of their own well-being.

For you, working men, the dangers are lesser; most of your offspring learn life all too well from deprivation. And on the other hand, the possibilities of educating as it would matter are also fewer for you, forced by poor social conditions to continuous toil. Nevertheless, you can also partly fulfill the arduous mission. You can do it by example and by word.

You can do it by example.

“Your children are like you, corrupted or virtuous, according to whether you yourselves are virtuous or corrupted.

“How could they be honest, compassionate, humane if you lack honesty, if you are without compassion for your brothers? How could they restrain their coarse appetites if they see you abandoned to intemperance? How could they keep their native innocence intact if you do not hesitate to offend modesty in front of them with indecent acts or obscene words?

“You are the living model on which their pliable nature will be formed. It depends on you whether your children will become men or brutes.” (Lamennais, Book of the People, XII)

And you can educate with words. Speak to them of the homeland, of what it was, of what it should be. When, in the evening, you forget, amidst the mother’s smile and the innocent babbling of children sitting on your knees, the labors of the day, recount to them the great deeds of the common people of our ancient republics; teach them the names of the good people who loved Italy and its people and who, through a path of misfortune, slander, and persecution, tried to improve their destinies. Instill in their young hearts not hatred against the oppressors, but the energy of purpose against oppression. Teach them from your lips and the peaceful maternal assent, how beautiful it is to follow the paths of Virtue, how great it is to become apostles of Truth, how holy it is to sacrifice oneself, when necessary, for one’s brothers. Infuse in their tender minds, together with the seeds of rebellion against every usurped authority supported by force, reverence for the true and only Authority, the authority of Virtue crowned by Genius. Make them grow, equally averse to tyranny and anarchy, in the religion of inspired conscience, not chained by tradition. The Nation must help you in this work. And you have, on behalf of your children, the right to demand it. Without National Education, there is no real Nation.

Love your relatives. Let the family that comes from you never make you forget the family from which you come. Too often, new ties loosen the old ones, while they should only be a new link in the chain of love that must tie together three generations of the family. Surround the gray heads of mother and father with tender and respectful affection until their last day. Adorn their path to the grave with flowers. Continuously spread over their tired souls a fragrance of faith and immortality with love. And the affection you keep inviolate for your relatives will be a pledge of what the ones born from you will keep for you.

Relatives, sisters and brothers, spouse, children, should be for you like branches placed in a different order on the same tree. Sanctify the family in the unity of love. Make it like a temple from which, united, you can sacrifice to the homeland. I do not know if you will be happy, but by doing so, even amidst possible adversity, a sense of serene peace will arise for you, a rest of tranquil conscience that will give you strength against every trial, and will keep a blue ray of sky open for you in every storm.

VII. Duties towards oneself.

Preliminaries.

I have told you: “you have life; therefore, you have a law of life… to develop oneself, to act, to live according to the law of life is your first, indeed, your only duty.” I have told you that to know what is the law of your life, God has given you two means: your conscience and the conscience of Humanity, the consent of your brothers. I have told you that whenever, by questioning your conscience, you find its voice in harmony with the great voice of humanity transmitted to you by history, you are certain to have eternal truth, immutable in your grasp.

Today, you can hardly properly question the great voice that humanity transmits to you through history: you still lack truly good and popularly written books, and you lack time; but the men who, by intellect and conscience, have best represented historical studies and the science of humanity for over half a century, have gathered from that voice some characteristics of our Law of Life; they have gathered that human nature is essentially educable, essentially social: they have gathered that, just as there is and can only be one God, there is and can only be one Law for the individual man and for collective humanity, they have gathered that the fundamental, universal character of this Law is PROGRESS. From these now undeniable truths, because confirmed by all branches of human knowledge, come all your duties towards yourselves, and also all your rights, which amount to one: the right not to be even slightly impeded and to be, within certain limits, aided in the fulfillment of your duties.

You are and feel free. All the sophisms of a miserable philosophy, which would like to substitute a doctrine of I don’t know what fatalism for the cry of human conscience, cannot erase two invincible testimonies in favor of freedom: remorse and Martyrdom. From Socrates to Jesus, from Jesus to the men who die occasionally for their country, the Martyrs of a Faith protest against that servile doctrine, shouting at you: “we loved life; we loved beings who made it dear to us and who begged us to yield: all the impulses of our heart said ‘live!’ to each of us, but for the sake of future generations, we ‘chose’ to die.” From Cain to the common spy of our days, the traitors of their brothers, the men who have set themselves on the path of evil, feel in the depths of their soul a condemnation, a restlessness, a reproach that says to each of them: “why did you stray from the paths of good?” You are free and therefore responsible. From this moral freedom comes your right to political freedom, your duty to conquer it and keep it inviolate, the duty of others not to diminish it.

You are educable. Within each of you, there is a sum of faculties, intellectual abilities, and moral tendencies that only education can give motion and life to. Without it, they would remain sterile, inert, revealing themselves only in flashes, without regular development.

Education is the bread of the soul. Just as organic physical life cannot grow and develop without nutrients, moral and intellectual life needs external influences to expand and manifest itself, and to assimilate at least some of the ideas, effects, and tendencies of others. The life of the individual rises, like a plant, a variety endowed with its own existence and special characteristics, on common ground, nourished by the elements of common life. The individual is a shoot of humanity and feeds and renews its own strength in it. This nourishing and renewing work is accomplished through education, which directly or indirectly transmits to the individual the results of the progress of all humanity. Therefore, you must acquire education, not only as a necessity of your life, but as a holy communion with all your brothers and all the generations that lived before you: that is, who thought and acted before you. You must acquire moral and intellectual education that embraces and fertilizes all the faculties that God gave you as a deposit to make fruitful, and that establishes and maintains a connection between your individual life and that of collective humanity.

And because this educational work should be accomplished more quickly, so that your individual life would be more intimately and certainly linked with the collective life of all, with the life of humanity, God made you essentially social beings. Every being below you can live by itself, without any other communion than with nature, with the elements of the physical world: you cannot. At every step, you need your brothers and sisters, and you cannot satisfy even the simplest needs of life without using their work. Superior to every other being by association with your peers, if isolated, you are weaker in strength than many animals and weak and incapable of development and full life. All the noblest aspirations of your heart, such as love of country, and even the less virtuous ones such as the desire for glory and the praise of others, indicate the innate tendency in you to share your life with the lives of the millions who live around you. You are therefore called to “association.” It multiplies your strength a hundredfold: it makes other people’s ideas yours, their progress yours; and it elevates, improves, and sanctifies your nature with affections and the growing sentiment of the unity of the human family. The more extensive your association with your brothers and sisters, the more intimate and comprehensive, the further you will be on the path of your improvement. The Law of Life cannot be fully realized except through the collective work of all. And for every great progress, for every discovery of a fragment of that Law, there corresponds in history an expansion of human association, a broader contact between peoples and nations. When the first Christians came to proclaim the unity of human nature in the face of pagan philosophy, which admitted two natures, masters and slaves, the Roman people had brought their eagles to walk among all the known peoples of Europe. Before the Papacy – harmful today, useful in the early centuries of its institution – came to say: “spiritual power is superior to temporal power,” the invaders called Barbarians had put the Germanic world into violent contact with the Latin world. Before the idea of freedom applied to peoples promoted the concept of nationality that now agitates Europe and will triumph, the wars of the Revolution and the Empire had aroused and called into action an element that had hitherto been apart, the Slavic element.

You are, finally, progressive beings.

This word “Progress,” unknown to antiquity, will henceforth be a sacred word for humanity. It encompasses a whole social, political, and religious transformation.

In ancient times, the people of the old Eastern religions and paganism believed in fate, chance, an arcane power that was unintelligible and arbitrarily controlled human affairs, alternately creating and destroying without man being able to understand, promote, or accelerate its needs. They believed that man was powerless to establish anything lasting or permanent on our earth. They believed that peoples, condemned to wander in the circle described by individuals below, would rise to power, then turn to old age, and inevitably, irreversibly perish. With a narrow horizon of ideas and facts before them and no knowledge of history except for their own nation and often their own city, they looked at mankind solely as an aggregate of men, without life or law of its own, and derived their thoughts solely from the contemplation of the individual. The consequence of such doctrines was a tendency to accept prevailing facts without caring or hoping to change them. Where circumstances had established a republican form, the men of those times were republicans; where despotism prevailed, they were slaves indifferent to progress and submissive. But everywhere, under the republican form as under tyranny, they found the human family divided into four castes, as in the East, or into two, of free citizens and slaves, as in Greece, they accepted the division of castes or the belief in two different natures of men; and the most powerful minds in the Greek world, Plato and Aristotle, accepted it. The emancipation of your class was, among such men, an impossibility.

The men who founded, on the word of Jesus, a religion superior to all the beliefs of the old East and paganism, glimpsed, but did not conquer, the holy idea contained in this word: “Progress.” They understood the unity of the human race, they understood the unity of the law, they understood the duty of perfection in man: they did not understand the power given by God to man to accomplish it, nor the “way” by which it is accomplished. They too limited themselves to deriving the norms of life from the contemplation of the “individual”; humanity as a collective body remained unknown to them. They knew Providence and replaced it with the blind Fatalism of the ancients; but they knew it as a protector of the “individual,” not as the Law of Humanity. Placed between the immensity of the goal of perfection they glimpsed and the short, poor life of the individual, they felt the need for an intermediate term between the two, between Man and God, and not possessing the idea of collective Humanity, they resorted to a divine incarnation: they declared that faith in it was the unique source of salvation, strength, and grace for man.

Not suspecting the continuous revelation that descends from God to humanity, they believed in an immediate, unique revelation, descended at a determined time and by a special favor of God. They saw the bond that ties men in God, but did not see what ties them here on earth in humanity. The series of generations was of little importance to those who did not feel how one acted on the other; therefore, they got used to not contemplating them and endeavored to detach man from the earth, from things concerning humanity as a whole, and ended up opposing the earth, which they abandoned to every actual power and which they called a place of expiation, and the heaven to which man could ascend by virtue of grace and faith, and from which they exiled forever those who lacked it. Since the revelation was immediate and unique in a given period, they deduced that nothing could be added to it, and that the custodians of that revelation were infallible. They forgot that the founder of their religion had come “not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, adding to it.” They forgot that at a solemn moment and with sublime instinct for the future, Jesus had said: “I tell you the things that you can understand and practice today, but after me will come the spirit of truth, and he will speak to you by his own authority, but gathering inspiration from all,” the collective inspiration. (cf. Gospel of John, ch. 16) In those words is the prophecy of the idea of Progress and the continuous revelation of Truth through Humanity: there is the justification of the formula that Rome proposed to Italy with the words “God and the People,” written on the front of its republican decrees. But the men of medieval beliefs could not understand it. The times were not ripe.

The entire structure of beliefs that followed Paganism, in any case, rested on the aforementioned foundations. It is clear that even on these foundations, your emancipation on this earth could not be based.

About thirteen hundred years after the words of Jesus quoted earlier, an Italian man, the greatest among Italians that I know, wrote the following truths: “God is one; the Universe is a thought of God; the Universe is therefore one too. All things participate, more or less, in the divine nature, depending on the purpose for which they are created. Man is the noblest among all things: God has poured more of His nature into him than into others. Everything that comes from God tends towards perfection for which it is capable. The capacity for improvement in man is indefinite. Humanity is One. God has not made anything useless; and since there is humanity, there must be a unique purpose for all men, a task to be accomplished by all of them. Therefore, the human race should work together, so that all the intellectual forces within it achieve the highest possible development in the sphere of thought and action. Therefore, there is a universal religion of human nature.”

That man added that this universal religion, this unity of the world, must have someone to represent it: and he referred to Rome, the Holy City, whose stones, he said, were worthy of reverence.

The man who wrote those ideas was named Dante. Every city in Italy, when Italy is free and united, should erect a statue to him, because those ideas contain the Religion of the Future in germ. He wrote them in Latin and Italian books titled “Della Monarchia” and “Convivio,” which are difficult to understand and now neglected even by those who call themselves “literati.” But ideas, once they are in the world of intellect, never die. Others collect them, even forgetting their source. People admire the oak tree: who thinks of the seed from which it grew?

The germ that Dante sowed bore fruit. Collected and fertilized from time to time by some powerful intellect, it developed into a plant at the end of the last century. The idea of Progress as a Law of Life accepted, developed, verified by history, confirmed by science, became the banner of the future. Today there is no severe mind that does not place it as the cornerstone of its work.

Today we know that the law of life is PROGRESS. Progress for the individual, progress for humanity. Humanity fulfills that law on earth; the individual on earth and elsewhere. One God, one law. That law is fulfilled slowly, inevitably, in humanity from its first birth. Truth has never been fully or suddenly manifested. It is a continuous revelation, manifested from age to age, a fragment of Truth, a word of the Law. Each of those words profoundly modifies human life on the path to the better and constitutes a belief, a Faith. Therefore, the development of the religious Idea is indefinitely progressive; and like columns of a Temple, successive beliefs, by unfolding and purifying that idea, will one day constitute the Pantheon, the great unique religion of our Earth. Men blessed by God with Genius and singular Virtue are its Apostles: the People, the collective sense of humanity, is its interpreter; it accepts that revelation of Truth, transmits it from one generation to the next, and makes it practical by applying it to the different branches, the different manifestations of human life. Humanity is like a man who lives indefinitely and always learns. There is, therefore, no privileged caste of depositaries and interpreters of the Law: there is, and there can be no need for intermediaries between God and man, apart from humanity. God, prefiguring a providential plan of progressive education for humanity, placing the instinct of progress in the heart of every man, has also put in human nature the faculties and forces necessary to accomplish it. The individual man, a free and responsible creature, can use and abuse them depending on whether he stays on the path of Duty or yields to the blind seductions of Egoism; he can delay or accelerate his own progress, but the Providential design cannot be cancelled by human force. The Education of Humanity must be completed; therefore, we see emerging from the barbarian invasions that seemed to extinguish civilization, a new and superior civilization than the ancient one and spread over a wider area of land: we see from tyranny exercised by individuals, a more rapid development of freedom immediately afterwards. The Law, Progress, must be fulfilled, as elsewhere, here on earth. There is no opposition between earth and heaven; and it is blasphemy to suppose that God’s work, the house He has given us, can, without sin, be despised, abandoned to Powers as they may be, to the influences of Evil, Egoism, and Tyranny. The Earth is not a place of expiation; it is a place of work for the ideal, the True and the Just that each of us has in seed in our soul; a step towards an improvement that we cannot achieve except by glorifying God in Humanity with our works, and dedicating ourselves to translating as much of His design into action as we can. The judgment that will be fulfilled on each of us, and that will either make us advance on the scale of Perfection or condemn us to drag ourselves again through the sadly and sterilely traveled stage, will be based on the good we have done to our brothers, on the degree of progress we have helped others to ascend. The more intimate and wider our association with our fellow human beings, the more our forces multiply, the field on which our Duties are performed, the way to reduce Progress into action. We must strive to make the entire humanity a Family, each member of which represents in himself, for the benefit of others, the moral Law. And just as the perfection of humanity is achieved from age to age, from generation to generation, the perfection of the individual is achieved from existence to existence, more or less rapidly depending on our works.

These are some of the truths contained in that word “Progress,” from which the Religion of the Future will emerge. Only in it can your emancipation be accomplished.

VIII. Liberty.

You are alive. The life within you is not the result of chance; the word “chance” has no meaning and was only invented to express the ignorance of men about certain things. The life within you comes from God and reveals in its progressive development an intelligent design. Your life therefore necessarily has a “purpose,” a goal.

The “ultimate” goal for which we were created is still unknown to us and cannot be otherwise; nor should we deny it for this reason. Does a child know the purpose to which he must strive in the family, in the homeland, in humanity? No: but the purpose exists, and we begin to know it for him. Humanity is the child of God: does He know the goal towards which it must develop? Humanity is only now beginning to understand that the law is Progress: it is only beginning to understand uncertainly something of the Universe that surrounds it; and the majority of the individuals who make it up are still unsuited, through barbarism, servitude, or absolute lack of education, to the study of that Law, to the examination of the Universe, which must be understood before we can understand ourselves. A minority of the men who populate our small Europe alone is capable of developing its intellectual faculties towards the goal of knowledge. In yourselves, most of you lacking in education and all subjugated by the fatalism of badly organized physical labor, lies mute, unable to bring its tribute to the pyramid of science. How can we, then, claim to know today what requires the combined work of all? How can we rebel against our not having yet achieved what would constitute the last step of our earthly Progress, when we are only beginning to stammer, few and unassociated, that sacred and fruitful word? Let us resign ourselves, then, to ignorance about things that are still inaccessible to us for a long time to come, and let us not abandon, childishly irritated, the study of those that we can discover. The discovery of Truth requires as much modesty and temperance of desire as it requires constancy. Impatience, human pride, have lost or diverted from the straight path more souls than deliberate sadness. And this truth that Antiquity wanted to teach us, when it told us that the Despot who wanted to reach the sky only succeeded in building a Tower of confusion, and that the Giant assailants of Olympus lie, thunderstruck, under our volcanic mountains.

What we must live with is this: whatever the goal we strive towards, we cannot discover and achieve it except through progressive development and the exercise of our intellectual faculties. Our faculties are the tools of work that God gave us. It is therefore necessary that their development be promoted and aided; their exercise protected and free. Without freedom, you cannot perform any of your duties. You have therefore the “right” to Liberty, and the “duty” to conquer it in every way against any Power that denies it.

Without “liberty,” there is no Morality, because without free choice between good and evil, between devotion to common progress and the spirit of egoism, there is no responsibility. Without freedom, there is no true society, because between free men and slaves there can be no “association”; only “domination” of some over others. Liberty is sacred like the “individual,” of which it represents the life. Where there is no freedom, life is reduced to a mere organic function. By allowing his freedom to be violated, man betrays his own nature and rebels against the decrees of God.

There is no freedom where a caste, a family, or a person assumes dominion over others by virtue of a supposed divine right, birth privilege, or wealth. Freedom must be for all and before all. God does not delegate sovereignty to any individual; that part of sovereignty that can be represented on our earth is entrusted by God to humanity, nations, and society. And even that ceases and abandons those collective fractions of humanity when they do not direct it towards good, towards the fulfillment of the providential design. There is therefore no sovereignty by right in anyone; there is a sovereignty of purpose and the actions that approach it. The actions and purpose towards which we are moving must be subject to the judgment of all. There is therefore no permanent sovereignty. That institution called Government is nothing but Direction; a mission entrusted to some to more expeditiously achieve the goal of the Nation; and if that mission is betrayed, the power of direction entrusted to those few must cease. Every man called to Government is an administrator of common thought; he must be elected, and subject to revocation whenever he misunderstands it or deliberately fights against it. There can be no caste or family that obtains Power by its own right, without violating your freedom. How could you call yourselves free in front of men who had the power of command without your consent? The Republic is the only legitimate and logical form of Government.

You shall have no master except God in heaven and the People on earth. When you have discovered a line of the Law, the will of God, you must, blessing it, execute it. When the People, the collective union of your brothers, declare that such is their belief, you must bow your head and refrain from any act of rebellion.

But there are things that constitute your individual and are essential to human life. And on these, even the people have no dominion. No majority, no collective force can take away what makes you human. No majority can decree tyranny and extinguish or alienate its own freedom. Against the suicidal people who do this, you cannot use force, but the right to protest will live forever in each of you in the ways that circumstances will suggest.

You must have freedom in everything that is indispensable to nourish, morally and materially, life.

Personal freedom: freedom of movement: freedom of religious belief: freedom of opinion on all things: freedom to express your thoughts with the press or in any other peaceful way: freedom of association to fertilize it with contact in other people’s thoughts: freedom of traffic for its products – these are all things that no one can take away from you, except for some rare exceptions, which it does not matter to say, without grave injustice, without causing in you the duty to protest.

No one has the right, in the name of society, to imprison you or subject you to personal restrictions or surveillance without telling you why, without telling you as soon as possible, and without promptly bringing you before the judicial authorities of the country. No one has the right to obstruct your movement from one part of your homeland to another with passport restrictions or otherwise. No one has the right to persecute, show intolerance, or create exclusive legislation regarding your religious beliefs. Only the great peaceful voice of humanity has the right to stand between God and your conscience. God has given you thought: no one has the right to constrain or suppress its expression, which is the communion of your soul with your brothers and the only way of progress we have. The press must be completely free: the rights of the intellect are inviolable, and any preventive censorship is tyranny. Society can only punish press offenses, such as preaching crime or openly teaching immorality; punishment through a solemn judgment is a consequence of human responsibility, whereas any prior intervention is a negation of freedom. Peaceful association is as sacred as thought: God instilled in you the tendency towards it as a perpetual starting point for progress and a pledge of the unity that the human family must one day achieve. Each of you has the duty to use the life that God gave you, preserve it, and develop it; therefore, each of you has the obligation to work, the only means of material support. Work is sacred: no one has the right to prohibit it, obstruct it, or make it impossible with arbitrary regulations; no one has the right to restrict the free flow of its products: the land that is your homeland is your market, and no one can limit it.

But when you have obtained that these freedoms are sacred—when you have finally constituted the State on the vote of all and in such a way that the individual has before him all the paths that can lead to the development of his faculties—then remember that above each one of you is the purpose that it is your duty to achieve: your own and others’ moral perfection, a more intimate and vast communion among all the members of the human family, so that one day it recognizes only one Law.

“You must form the universal family, build the City of God, progressively translate His work into humanity through continuous labor.

“When, loving one another as brothers, you treat each other as such, and each one, seeking his own good in the good of all, his own interests in the interests of all, always ready to sacrifice himself for all the members of the common family, equally ready to sacrifice themselves for him, the most of the evils that weigh on the human race today will disappear, like the vapors that condense on the horizon disappear at sunrise: and what God wants will be accomplished: because it is His decree that love, by ever more closely uniting the dispersed elements of humanity and ordering them into one body, it will be one as He is one.” (Lamennais, Book of the People III.)

The words or quotes of a man who lived and died in a saintly manner and loved the people and their future with immense love should never leave your mind, my brothers. Freedom is nothing but a means; woe to you and your future if you ever get accustomed to seeing it as an end! Your individual has duties and rights that cannot be abandoned to anyone; but woe to you and your future if the respect you owe for what constitutes your individual life could ever degenerate into fatal egoism! Your freedom is not the negation of all authority; it is the negation of any authority that does not represent the collective purpose of the nation, and that presumes to establish and maintain itself on any other basis than that of your free spontaneous consent. Doctrines of sophists have perverted the sacred concept of Liberty in recent times: some have reduced it to a narrow, immoral individualism, saying that the self is everything and that human labor and social organization should only tend to the satisfaction of its desires; others have declared that every government, every authority is an inevitable evil, but to be restricted and restrained as much as possible, that freedom has no limits; that the purpose of every society is solely to promote it indefinitely; that a person has the right to use and abuse freedom, provided that it does not directly harm others, and that a government has no mission other than to prevent an individual from harming another. Reject, my brothers, these false doctrines: they are the ones that still delay Italy today on the paths of its future greatness. The first ones have generated class egoism, the second ones make a society that, if well ordered, must represent your collective purpose and life, nothing but a policeman or a police soldier tasked with maintaining an apparent peace; all of them drag freedom into anarchy: they erase the idea of collective moral improvement; they erase the educative mission, the mission of Progress that society must undertake. If you can understand freedom in this way, you would deserve to lose it, and sooner or later, you would lose it.

Your freedom will be sacred because it will develop under the dominance of the Idea of Duty, of Faith in common perfection. Your freedom will flourish protected by God and men, because it will not be the right to use and abuse your faculties in the direction you choose, but because it will be the right to freely choose the means to do good according to your tendencies.

IX. Education.

God has made you educable. Therefore, you have the duty to educate yourselves as much as you can, and the right to not be hindered by the society you belong to in your educational efforts. You also have the right to be helped and supported by society when you lack the means for education.

Your freedom, your rights, your emancipation from unjust social conditions, and the mission that each one of you must accomplish on Earth depend on the level of education you can achieve. Without education, you cannot choose between right and wrong, you cannot acquire awareness of your rights, you cannot obtain the participation in political life without which you cannot emancipate yourselves, and you cannot define your mission. Education is the bread of your souls. Without it, your faculties sleep frozen and barren, like the power of life that lies dormant in a seed planted in unprepared soil without irrigation and the care of a diligent cultivator.

Today, either you lack education, or you receive it from men and powers that represent nothing but themselves and, not serving a regulating principle, are essentially condemned to mutilate or distort it. The least tragic among your educators believe they have fulfilled their duty when they unequally open a certain number of schools in the territory they govern, where your children can receive some elementary level of education. This education mainly consists of reading, writing, and arithmetic.

This type of education is called “instruction,” and it differs from “education” as our organs differ from our “life.” Our organs are not life; they are only simple instruments and means to manifest it; they do not rule it, they do not direct it; they can translate into facts the holiest and most corrupt life. Likewise, “instruction” provides the means to practice what “education” teaches, but it cannot replace “education.”

“Education” addresses the “moral” faculties; “instruction” the “intellectual” ones. The former develops in man the knowledge of his duties; the latter makes man capable of practicing them. Without “instruction,” “education” would often be ineffective; without “education,” “instruction” would be like a lever without a fulcrum. You know how to read: what does it matter if you do not know in which books to find error and truth? You know how to communicate your thoughts to your brothers by writing: what does it matter if your thoughts only point to egoism? “Instruction,” like wealth, can be a source of good or evil depending on the intentions with which it is used: dedicated to the progress of all, it is a means of civilization and freedom; directed to one’s own benefit, it becomes a means of tyranny and corruption. Today, in Europe, “instruction” without a corresponding degree of “moral education” is a serious wound that maintains inequality between classes of the same people and inclines minds towards calculation, egoism, transactions between what is just and unjust, and false doctrines.

The distinction between men who offer you more or less “instruction” and those who preach “education” is more serious than you think, and deserves some words from me.

Two doctrines, two schools, divide the field of those who fight for freedom against despotism. The first declares that sovereignty resides in the individual, while the second maintains that it exists solely in society and is based on the consent expressed by the majority. The first believes it has fulfilled its mission when it has proclaimed the rights believed to be inherent in human nature and protected freedom, while the second focuses almost exclusively on association and deduces from the pact that constitutes it the duties of every individual. The first sees no further than what I called education, because education tends to provide a general rule-free development of individual faculties, while the second recognizes the need for a social program, which it sees as expressed in education.

The first inevitably leads to moral anarchy, while the second, if it forgets the rights of freedom, risks falling into the despotism of the majority.

The first was made up of the entire generation of men known in France as doctrinaires, who betrayed the hopes of the people after the revolution of 1830, perpetuating governmental monopolies in the bourgeois class that has more means to develop its individual faculties, by shouting “freedom of education” and nothing else. The second is unfortunately only represented today by groups and powers belonging to old beliefs, hostile to the dogma of the future, Progress.

Both those schools suffer from narrow, exclusive tendencies.

The truth is this:

Sovereignty is in God, in the moral law, in the providential design that governs the world and is progressively revealed by the inspirations of virtuous genius and the tendencies of humanity in different epochs of its life, and in the purpose that must be achieved, in the mission that must be fulfilled. Sovereignty is not in the individual, nor in society, except insofar as one conforms to that design, to that law, and directs oneself to that purpose. An individual is either the best interpreter of the moral law and governs in its name, or he is an usurper to be overthrown. The simple vote of a majority does not constitute sovereignty if it is evidently opposed to supreme moral norms or deliberately closes the way to future progress. Social good, freedom, progress: outside of these three terms, sovereignty cannot exist.

Education teaches what social good is.

Instruction ensures the individual’s free choice of means to achieve progressive improvement in the concept of good.

It is important above all else that your children learn what set of principles and beliefs guide the lives of their brothers in the time they are called to live and in the land that has been assigned to them, what the moral, social, and political program of their nation is, what the spirit of the legislation from which their works must be judged is, and what the degree of progress achieved by humanity is and what must be achieved. And it is important that they feel, from their early years, bound together by a spirit of equality and love for a common purpose with the millions of brothers given to them by God.

Education, which must give your children such teaching, can only come from the nation.

Today, moral education is anarchic. Left solely to fathers, it is nullified where poverty and the need for almost constant material work deprive them of time to educate and means to replace educators for themselves: it is sad if selfishness and corruption have perverted and contaminated the family. Children are given to superstitious or materialistic tendencies, of freedom or cowardly resignation, of aristocracy or reactionary against it, depending on whether the priest or lay teacher, which paternal tendencies choose where means exist. How can they, grown up in youth, come together in harmony of works and represent in themselves the unity of the country? Society calls on them to promote the development of a common idea to which they have never been initiated. Society punishes them for violations of laws that are sometimes unknown, and whose spirit and purpose are never taught by society to the citizen. Society desires from them cooperation and sacrifice for a purpose that no school develops for them at the opening of their civic life. Strange to say: the men of the doctrine, to which I referred earlier, recognize in each individual the right to instruct young people: they do not recognize it in the association of all, in the Nation. Their cry, freedom of teaching, dispossesses the Fatherland of all moral direction. They declare the unity of the monetary system and weights to be extremely important; the unity of the principles on which national life must be founded and developed is nothing to them. You must not be deceived by that cry that almost all modern supporters of Constitutions repeat one after the other.

Without National Education, there is no Nation morally. National consciousness can only come from that.

Without a National Education common to all citizens: equality of duties and rights is an empty formula, the knowledge of duties, the possibility of exercising rights, are left to chance and the whim of the educator.

The men who declare themselves opposed to the unity of education invoke freedom. Freedom of whom? Of fathers or children? The freedom of the children is violated in their system by paternal despotism: the freedom of the young generations sacrificed to the old: the freedom of progress becomes an illusion. Individual beliefs, false perhaps and adverse to progress, are transmitted alone and authoritative, from father to son, at an age when examination is impossible: later, in the conditions of most of you, the fate of material work of all hours will prevent the young soul, in which those beliefs will be imprinted, from comparing them with others and modifying them. In the name of that lying freedom, the anarchic system of which I speak to you tends to found and perpetuate the worst of despotisms, the moral caste.

What that system protects is called arbitrariness, not freedom. True freedom does not exist without equality, and equality cannot exist among those who do not start from a common basis, from a common principle, from a uniform conscience of Duty. Freedom is only exercised beyond that consciousness. I told you a few pages back that true freedom does not consist in the right to choose evil, but in the right to choose among the paths that lead to good. The freedom that those false philosophers invoke is the arbitrariness given to the father to choose evil for his son. What? If a father threatened to mutilate or damage his child’s body in any way, society would intervene when called upon by all; and the soul, the mind of that being, is less than the body? Society will not be able to protect it from the mutilation of faculties, ignorance from the deviation of moral sense, superstition?

What cry of freedom in teaching arose beneficial once and still arises beneficial wherever moral education is a monopoly of a despotic government, a retrograde caste, an adverse priesthood, naturally dogmatic against Progress: it was a weapon against tyranny; an imperfect but indispensable word of emancipation. Make use of it wherever you are slaves. But I speak to you of a time when religious faith will have written the word Progress on the doors of the temple and all institutions will repeat that word in various forms, and National Education will say at the end of its teaching to the student: “To you, destined to live under a common Pact among us; we have laid down the fundamental foundations of that Pact, the principles in which your Nation believes today; but remember that the first among those principles is Progress; remember that your mission as a man and citizen is to improve, wherever you can, the minds and hearts of your brothers: go, examine, compare; and if you discover a truth superior to the one we believe to possess, proclaim it boldly and you will have the blessing of your country.” Then, not before, reject that cry of “freedom in teaching” as unequal to your needs and harmful to the Unity of the Nation; demand, require, the establishment of a system of national education that is free and compulsory for all.

The Nation owes every citizen the transmission of its program. Every citizen must receive in schools the moral education – a course in nationality comprising a brief overview of the progress of Humanity, the national history and the popular exposition of the principles that govern the legislation of the country – and the elementary education around which there is no dissent. Every citizen must learn in them equality and love.

After that program is transmitted, freedom regains its rights. Not only the teaching of the family, but every other is sacred. Every man has an unlimited right to communicate his ideas to others: every man has the right to listen to them. Society must protect, encourage the free expression of Thought, in every form; and open every way for the social program to develop and modify itself for the good.

X. Association – Progress.

God made you social and progressive. Therefore, you have the duty to associate and progress as much as is required within the sphere of activity in which circumstances have placed you. You have the right to expect that the society to which you belong will not hinder you in your efforts to associate and progress, but rather will help you and provide for you when the means of association and progress are lacking.

Freedom gives you the ability to choose between good and evil, that is, between duty and selfishness. Education must teach you how to make the choice, and association must give you the strength to translate the choice into action. Progress is the goal you must aim for when making the choice, and it is also the proof that you did not make a mistake in your choice when it is visibly achieved. When any of these conditions is betrayed or neglected, a person, whether citizen or not, does not exist or exists imperfectly or hindered in their development.

Therefore, you must fight for all of them, and especially for the right of Association, without which Freedom and Education are useless.

The right of Association is sacred, like Religion, which is the association of souls. You are all children of God, and therefore brothers and sisters. Who can without guilt limit the association and communion among brothers and sisters?

This word “communion,” which I have uttered intentionally, was spoken to you by Christianity, which men declared in the past to be an unchanging religion, and it is only a step on the ladder of religious manifestations of humanity. And it is a holy word. It told men that they were one family of equals in God, and it united the lord and the servant in a single thought of salvation, hope, and love for Heaven.

It was an immense progress over earlier times, when people and philosophers believed that the souls of citizens and slaves were of different natures. And Christianity had that mission. Communion was the symbol of the equality and brotherhood of souls, and it was up to humanity to expand and develop the truth hidden in that symbol.

The Church could not and did not do that. Timid and uncertain at first, allied with the lords and the temporal power closer and imbued, even for its own benefit, with a tendency towards aristocracy that was not in the spirit of the founder, it lost so much of its way that it diminished, regressing, the value of Communion, limiting it for the laity to communion in bread alone and reserving to the priests communion under both species.

From then on, the cry of those who felt entitled to unlimited communion, without distinction between clergy and laity, for the entire human family, was: “communion under both species for the people: the chalice for the people!” In the 15th century, that cry was the cry of multitudes raised in rebellion, a prelude to the religious Reformation sanctified by martyrdom. A holy man, Jan Hus of Bohemia, leader of that movement, perished in the flames ignited by the Inquisition. Today, most of you are unaware of the history of those struggles and believe them to be the struggles of fanatics over simply theological matters. But when History, made popular by National education, has taught you how every progress in religious matters leads to a corresponding progress in civil life, you will understand the true value of those disputes, and you will honor the memory of those martyrs as your benefactors.

We owe to these martyrs and to those who preceded them the knowledge that there is no privileged caste between God and men; that the best in virtue and wisdom of divine and human things can and must advise and direct us on the path of good, but without a monopoly of power or supremacy of class; and that the right to communion is equal for all. What is holy in Heaven is holy on Earth. And the communion of men in God brings with it the association of men in earthly life. The religious association of souls generates the right of association in the faculties and works that make “reality” of “thought.”

Therefore, let association be your duty and right.

Some will tell you that association is the State, the Nation, and that you are and must be all members of it, and that therefore, every partial association among you is either adverse to the State or superfluous.

But the State, the Nation represents only the association of citizens in those things, in those tendencies that are common to “all” the men who are part of it. There are tendencies and “ends” that do not embrace “all” citizens but only a certain number of them. And just as the tendencies and the common end generate the Nation, the tendencies and the common end among several citizens must generate the “special” association.

Then – and this is a fundamental basis for the right of association – association is the guarantee of Progress. The State represents a certain sum, a certain set of “principles” in which the universality of citizens agrees in the period when the State is founded. Suppose that a new and true principle, a new and reasonable development of the truths that give life to the State, arises to some citizens: how can they spread knowledge of it without associating? Suppose that as a result of scientific discoveries, new communications opened up between peoples and peoples or for another reason, a new interest is manifested for a certain number of men belonging to the State: how can those who understand it first conquer a place among the “interests” that have long existed if not by brotherhood in their means, their forces? Inertia, rest in the existing condition sanctioned by common consent, is too natural to the minds so that a single individual can shake and overcome them with his words. The association of a growing minority day by day can do so. Association is the method of the future. Without it, the State would remain immobile, chained to the degree of civilization reached.

The association must be progressive in its goals, not opposed to the truths that have been forever established by the universal consent of humanity and the nation. An association that is established to facilitate the theft of other people’s property, an association that obligates its members to practice polygamy, an association that declares the dissolution of the nation or preaches the establishment of despotism would be illegal. The nation has the right to say to its members: “We cannot tolerate the spread among us of doctrines that violate what constitutes human nature, morality, and the homeland. Go out and establish the association that your tendencies suggest among yourselves beyond our borders.”

The association must be peaceful. It cannot have any other weapons than the apostolate of the word: it must aim to persuade, not to coerce.

The association must be public. Secret associations, legitimate weapons of war where there is neither homeland nor freedom, are illegal and can be dissolved by the nation when freedom is a recognized right, when the homeland protects the development and inviolability of thought. If the association is to open the way to progress, it must be subject to the examination and judgment of all.

And finally, the association must respect in others the rights that arise from the essential conditions of human nature. An association that violated, like the medieval corporations, the freedom of labor or directly aimed to restrict freedom of conscience could be rejected, governmentally, by the nation.

Beyond these limits, the freedom of association among citizens is sacred, inviolable, like the progress that has life in it. Any government that would attempt to restrict it would betray the social mission: the people should first warn it, then, after exhausting peaceful means, overthrow it.

And these, my brothers, are the main principles on which your duties rest, the sources from which your rights flow. There are countless special issues that may arise in your civil life, but it is not part of this work to anticipate them and help you solve them. The sole purpose of my work was to point out to you, as torches on the way, the principles that must prevail in all and in the strict application of which you will always find a way to solve them. And it seems to me that I have done so.

I have pointed out God as the source of duty and the guarantee of equality among men – moral law as the source of all civil law and the basis of every judgment you make about the conduct of those who make the law – the people, you, us, the universality of citizens who form the nation, as the only legitimate interpreter of the law and the source of all political power.

I have told you that the fundamental character of the law is progress: indefinite, continuous progress from age to age; progress in every branch of human activity, in every manifestation of thought, from religion to industry, to the distribution of wealth.

I have mentioned to you what your duties are towards Humanity, towards your Country, towards your Family, and towards yourselves. And I have deduced those duties from the conditions that constitute the human creature, which it is your obligation to develop. Those conditions, inviolable in every person, are freedom, capacity for development, sociality, ability, and the need for progress. And from those characteristics, without which there is no human or citizen, I have deduced your rights and the general conditions of the Government that you must seek for your country.

Never forget those principles. Watch over them so that they are never violated. Embody them in yourselves. You will be free and improve.

The task I have undertaken for you would, therefore, be achievable if a tremendous objection did not arise from the bowels of society as it is currently organized against the possibility of fulfilling those duties, of exercising those rights: the inequality of means.

To fulfill duties, to exercise rights, time, intellectual development, and certainty of physical life are necessary.

However, many of you do not have these elements of progress today. Their lives are a continuous uncertain battle to conquer the means to sustain their material existence. It is not a matter of progressing for them; it is a matter of surviving.

There is, therefore, a radical, profound vice in society as it is currently organized. And my work would be useless if I did not define that vice and point out the way to correct it.

The economic question will, therefore, be the subject of a final part of my work.

XI. Economic Question.

§. 1.

Many, too many among you, are poor. For at least three-quarters of men belonging to the working class, whether agricultural or industrial, life is a daily struggle to obtain the essential means of existence. They work with their hands for ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and from this arduous, monotonous, and painful work, they barely extract what is necessary for their physical life. Teaching them the duty to progress, speaking to them about intellectual and moral life, political rights, education, is, in the current social order, a true irony. They do not have the time or the means to progress. Exhausted, broken, almost stupefied by a life spent in a circle of a few mechanical operations, they learn a mute, powerless, often unjust resentment against the class of men who employ them; they seek oblivion of present pain and uncertainty about the future in the stimuli of strong drinks, and they go to sleep in places better suited to the name of a den than a room, only to wake up to the same exercise of physical strength.

This is a very sad condition and it must be changed.

You are men, and as such you have faculties not only physical but also intellectual and moral, which it is your duty to develop; you must be citizens, and as such, you must exercise, for the good of all, rights that require a certain level of education and a certain amount of time.

It is clear that you must work less and earn more than you do today.

All children of God and brothers in Him and among us, we are called to form one big family. In this family, there may be inequalities generated by different habits, abilities, or desires for work, but one principle must reign: anyone who is willing to give what he can in work for the good of all must receive compensation that makes him capable of developing his life in all its aspects as much as possible.

This is the ideal that we must all strive to approach more and more from century to century. Any change, any revolution that does not come one step closer to this goal, that does not correspond to political progress with social progress, that does not promote material improvement of the poorest classes by one degree, violates God’s plan, reduces itself to a war of factions against factions seeking illegitimate domination: it is a lie and an evil.

But to what extent can we achieve the goal today? And how, by what means can we achieve it?

Some of your shyest friends have sought a remedy in the morality of the worker. By founding savings banks or other similar institutions, they have told workers: “bring your money here: save: refrain from excess in drinking or anything else: emancipate yourself from poverty through deprivation”. These are excellent pieces of advice because they aim at the moralization of the worker, without which all reforms are useless. However, they do not solve the question of poverty that I am talking about, nor do they take into account any social duty. Very few of you can save that money. And those very few can, by accumulating slowly, partly provide for their old age, while the economic question must aim to provide for the virile years, the development, the possible expansion of life when it is active and powerful and can effectively contribute to the progress of the Homeland and Humanity. Therefore, as far as material goods are concerned, the question is how to increase wealth, production; and those pieces of advice do not even mention it. Moreover, Society, which lives on labor and demands, whenever threatened, tribute of blood from the children of the people, has sacred debts to them.

Others, not enemies, but little concerned about the people and the cry of pain that rises from the bowels of working men, fearful of any powerful innovation, and tied to a school called the “economists”, which fought with merit and advantage all the battles of freedom, industry, but without paying attention to the need for progress and association, also inseparable from human nature, maintained and maintain, like the “philanthropists” of whom I spoke earlier, that each person can, even in the current situation, build their own independence with their own activity; that any change in the constitution of labor would be superfluous or harmful; and that the formula “each for oneself, freedom for all” is sufficient to create an approximate balance of comfort between the classes that make up Society. Freedom of internal trade, freedom of trade between nations, progressive reduction of customs duties, especially on raw materials, encouragement given generally to large industrial enterprises, to the multiplication of communication routes, to machines that make production more active: this is what, according to economists, can be done by Society: any intervention beyond that is, for them, a source of evil.

If this were true, the plague of poverty would be incurable; and God forbid, my brothers, that I could ever throw, convinced, as an answer to your sufferings and aspirations, this desperate, atheistic, immoral answer. God has established a better future for you than that contained in the remedies of the economists.

These remedies aim not to make the distribution of wealth more equal, but rather to possibly increase its production for a certain period of time. While philanthropists only contemplate human beings and strive to make them more moral without taking on the task of increasing common wealth to give them room to improve, economists only seek to fertilize the sources of production without concerning themselves with human beings. Under the exclusive regime of freedom they preach, which has more or less regulated the economic world in recent times, the most undeniable documents show an increase in productive activity and capital, not in universally spread prosperity. The misery of the working classes remains the same. The freedom to compete for those who own nothing, who cannot save for the day and have nothing to start the competition with, is a lie, just as political freedom is a lie for those who, lacking education, instruction, means, and time, cannot exercise their rights. The growth of the ease of trading, the progress in communication methods, would gradually emancipate labor from the tyranny of the middle class in between production and consumers, but would not free it from the tyranny of capital, nor provide the means of labor to those who do not have them. And due to the lack of equal distribution of wealth, of a more just distribution of products, of a progressive increase in the number of consumers, capital itself deviates from its true economic purpose, immobilizes itself in the hands of a few instead of spreading throughout circulation, and directs itself towards the production of superfluous objects, luxury goods, fictitious needs, instead of concentrating on the production of basic necessities for life, or ventures into dangerous and often immoral speculation.

Today, capital – and this is the scourge of the current economic society – is the despot of labor. Of the three classes that now economically form society – capitalists, holders of the means or instruments of labor, land, farms, cash, raw materials; entrepreneurs, intellectual labor, merchants, who represent or should represent intellect; and workers who represent manual labor – the first, and only one, is the master of the field, the master of promoting, delaying, and accelerating labor towards certain goals. And its part in the profits of labor, in the labor of production, is comparatively determined: the rental of tools of labor does not vary except between known and restricted limits; and time, to a certain extent at least, is in its hands, not at the mercy of absolute need. The part of the second is uncertain, dependent on their intellect, their activity, but especially on circumstances, on the greater or lesser development of competition and on the inflow or withdrawal, as a result of unpredictable events, of capital. The part of the last, the workers, is the wage, determined beforehand by work and without regard to the greater or lesser profits that will emerge from the enterprise. And the limits within which the wage ranges are determined by the relationship between the labor offered and the labor demanded, in other words, between the population of workers and capital. Now, the former, tending towards an increase, and an increase that generally exceeds, if only slightly, the increase of the latter, the wage tends, if other causes do not intervene, to fall. And time is not in the hands of the worker: financial and political crises, the sudden application of new machines in various branches of industrial activity, irregularities in production and its frequent overaccumulation in one direction inseparable from a poorly informed competition, the unequal distribution of the working population in certain areas or in certain branches of activity, and ten other causes that interrupt work, do not leave the worker with the free choice of their conditions. On one side lies absolute poverty, on the other the acceptance of any terms that may be proposed to them.

Such a state of affairs, I repeat, has its germ in a wound that must be cured. The remedies proposed by the economists are ineffective for this.

And yet, there is progress in the condition of the class to which you belong: historical progress, continuous, that has overcome much greater difficulties. You were slaves, you were servants, you are now wage earners. You emancipated yourselves from slavery, from serfdom; why not emancipate yourselves from the yoke of wages to become free producers, masters of the entirety of the production labor that comes from you? Why would not the greatest and most beautiful revolution that could be imagined, peacefully accomplishing the equilibrium between production and consumption without distinction of classes, without tyrannical dominance of one element of labor over the other, gathering under one law all the children of the same mother, the country, giving as economic basis to human society the work, and as the basis for property the fruits of labor?

§. 2.

The sense of social duty towards the working men, to which I have so far alluded, was growing in people’s minds, mainly thanks to republican preaching, ensuring the popular future of revolutions, when in the last thirty years, in France especially, some schools of good men, generally friendly to the people, but driven by excessive love of systems and individual vanity, proposed doctrines under the name of socialism that were exclusive, exaggerated, often adverse to the wealth already conquered by other classes, and economically impossible, frightening the multitude of small bourgeois and arousing distrust among orders and orders of citizens, dividing the republican field in two. In France, the first effect of that distrust and terror was the easiest coup d’état.

I cannot examine with you one by one those different systems, which were called Saint-Simonism, Fourierism, Communism, or by another name. Almost all based on good ideas in themselves and accepted by those who belong to the Faith of Progress, they corrupted or erased them with the means of application they proposed, false or tyrannical. And it is necessary for me to briefly mention how they sinned, because the promises made to the people by those systems are so splendid that they could easily seduce you, and you would risk delaying an infallible and not distant future of emancipation by embracing them. It is true — and this should be enough to awaken a powerful doubt in your mind — that when circumstances called some of those men to power, they did not even attempt the practical application of their doctrines: giants of audacity in their pages, they retreated before the reality of things.

If one day you examine those systems carefully, remembering the fundamental ideas that I have been indicating to you so far, and the inseparable characteristics of human nature, you will find that they all violate the Law of Progress, the way in which it is achieved in humanity, and one or another of the faculties that constitute Man.

Progress is made by a law that no human power can break, step by step, through the perpetual modification of the elements that manifest the activity of life. At certain times, in certain countries, and under the influence of certain prejudices and errors, men have often given the name of elements or conditions of social life to things that have no roots in nature, but only in the conventional habits of a corrupt society, and which disappear after that era or beyond the limits of those countries. But you can discover what are truly the inseparable elements of human nature by interrogating, as I have told you elsewhere, the instincts of your own soul and verifying, in the tradition of all times and all countries, whether those instincts have always been the instincts of humanity. And those that an innate voice in you (it is the great voice of humanity) designates as constitutive elements of life must be modified and developed from era to era, but they can never be abolished.

Among these elements of human life, in addition to Religion, Liberty, Association, and others mentioned in the course of this work, there is also Property. The principle, the origin of Property, lies in human nature and represents the necessity of the individual’s material life that he has a duty to maintain. Just as through religion, science, and liberty, the individual is called upon to transform, improve, and master the moral and intellectual world, he is also called upon to transform, improve, and master, through material labor, the physical world. And property is the sign, the representation of the fulfillment of that mission, of the amount of work with which the individual has transformed, developed, and increased the productive forces of nature.

Property is therefore eternal in its principle, and you find it existing and protected throughout the entire existence of humanity. But the ways in which property is governed are changeable, destined to undergo, like all other manifestations of human life, the law of Progress. Those who, finding property constituted in a certain way, declare that mode inviolable and fight against anyone who intends to transform it, thus deny Progress. It is enough to open two volumes of history belonging to two different epochs to find a change in the constitution of Property. And those who, finding it poorly constituted at a certain time, declare that it must be abolished, erased from society, denying an element of human nature, if they could ever succeed, would retard Progress, mutilating Life: property would inevitably reappear shortly thereafter, and probably in the form it had at the time of its abolition.

Property is poorly constituted today because the origin of the current distribution generally lies in the conquest, in the violence with which, in times far from us, certain invading peoples and classes seized the lands and fruits of labor not yet completed by them. Property is poorly constituted because the basis of the distribution of the fruits of labor completed by the owner and the worker is not founded on a fair proportionality to the work itself. Property is poorly constituted because, by conferring political and legislative rights on the owner that the worker lacks, it tends to be a monopoly of the few and inaccessible to the many. Property is poorly constituted because the tax system is poorly constituted and tends to maintain a privilege of wealth in the owner, burdening the poor classes and depriving them of any possibility of saving. But if, instead of correcting flaws and slowly modifying the constitution of Property, you wanted to abolish it, you would suppress a source of wealth, emulation, and activity, and resemble the savage who cut down the tree to pick the fruit.

We should not abolish property because it is owned by a few today; we should open up the way so that many can acquire it. We should call it back to the principle that makes it legitimate, ensuring that only labor can produce it. We should move society towards more equitable bases of remuneration between the owner or capitalist and the worker. We must change the tax system so that it does not affect the amount necessary for life and leaves the people the ability for productive savings to gradually acquire property.

And for this to happen, we must suppress the political privileges granted to property and ensure that everyone contributes to legislative work. All these things are possible and right. By educating yourselves, organizing yourselves to insist on them, and then wanting them, you could achieve them. Whereas, by seeking the abolition of property, you would be seeking an impossibility, doing injustice to those who have conquered it with their own work and decreasing production instead of increasing it.

§. 3.

The abolition of individual property, however, is the remedy proposed by several socialist systems, which I am talking about, and notably communism. Others go further and, finding the religious concept and the concept of the fatherland distorted by religious errors, privileged men, and the selfishness of dynasties, demand the abolition of every religion, every government, and every nationality. It is the behavior of children or barbarians. Why not try to suppress every breathable gas in the name of diseases generated by corrupted air?

The idea of those who would, in the name of freedom, establish anarchy and erase society to leave only the individual with his rights needs no refutation from me; all my work fights against that guilty dream that denies progress, duties, human brotherhood, solidarity of nations, everything that you and I revere. But the dream of those who, limiting themselves to the economic question, demand the abolition of individual property and the organization of communism, touches the opposite extreme, denies the individual, denies freedom, closes the way to progress and, so to speak, turns society to stone.

The general formula for communism is as follows: the property of everything that produces land, capital, movable property, and tools of work must be concentrated in the state. The state assigns its share of work to everyone; the state assigns each person a remuneration, according to some, with absolute equality, and according to others, according to their needs.

If this were possible, it would be the life of beavers, not of humans.

Freedom, dignity, and individual consciousness disappear in a system of producing machines. Physical life can be satisfied, but moral and intellectual life are erased, along with emulation, free choice of work, free association, incentives to produce, the joys of property, and all the causes that induce progress. In that system, the human family is like a herd that just needs to be led to sufficient pasture. Who among you would resign yourself to such a program?

Equality is achieved, they say. Which one?

Equality in the distribution of work? It’s impossible. Jobs are of different nature, not calculable based on the duration or amount of work completed in an hour, but on the difficulty, the greater or lesser unpleasantness of the work, the expenditure of vitality that it entails, and the usefulness it confers on society. How to calculate the equality of an hour of work spent in a mine or purifying the corrupted water of a swamp, with an hour spent in a spinning mill? The impossibility of such a calculation is such that it has suggested to some of the founders of systems the idea of making everyone perform a certain amount of work in each branch of useful activity in turn: an absurd remedy that would make the quality of the products impossible without suppressing the inequality between the weak and the strong, between the capable and the slow-witted, between the person of lymphatic temperament and the person of nervous temperament. The work that is easy and pleasing to one is heavy and difficult to the other.

Equality in the distribution of products? It’s impossible. Either equality would be absolute and constitute immense injustice, not distinguishing between different needs, the result of the organism, or between the forces and the capacity acquired through a sense of duty and the forces and capacity received, without any merit, from nature. Or equality would be relative and calculated on different needs; and not taking into account individual production would violate the rights of property that the worker should have for the fruits of their labor.

Then, who would be the arbiter to decide about the needs of every individual? The State?

Workers, my brothers, are you willing to accept a hierarchy of boss owners in common property, owners of the mind through exclusive education, owners of bodies through the determination of work, capacity, and needs? Is this not the renewal of ancient slavery? Wouldn’t those bosses, driven by the theory of “interest” that they represent and seduced by the immense power concentrated in their hands, be the founders of the hereditary dictatorship of the ancient castes?

No, Communism does not achieve equality among working people, nor does it increase production, which is the great necessity of today. Once the basic needs of life are secured, human nature, as it is found in most people, becomes satisfied, and the incentive for increased production to benefit all members of society becomes so small that it is not enough to stimulate the faculties.2 Communism does not improve products, encourage progress in inventions, nor can it be aided by the uncertain and ignorant collective direction of the organization. The only remedy that Communism has for the ills that afflict the working people is to protect them from hunger. But this cannot be done without overturning the entire social order, sterilizing production, hindering progress, erasing individual freedom, and chaining individuals in a tyrannical military system.

§ 4.

The remedy for your conditions cannot be found in general, arbitrary organizations, designed by one or another intellect, contradicting the universal bases adopted in civil life and implanted suddenly by decrees. We are not here to create humanity, but to continue it: we can and must modify and better order the constituent elements, but we cannot suppress them. Humanity is and will always be rebellious to such designs. The time you would spend around those illusions would therefore be wasted time.

It cannot be found in salary increases imposed by government authority, without other changes that increase capital: the increase in wage expenses, that is, the increase in production costs, would lead to an increase in product prices, a decrease in consumption, and therefore a decrease in work for the workers.

It cannot be found in anything that cancels freedom, the consecration and stimulus of work: nor in anything that reduces capital, the instruments of work and production.

The remedy for your conditions is the union of capital and labor in the same hands.

When society knows no distinction other than that of producers and consumers, or rather when every person is a producer and consumer – when the fruits of labor, instead of being divided among that series of intermediaries who, starting from the capitalist and descending to the retail seller, often increase the product price by fifty percent, remain entirely with labor – the permanent causes of misery will disappear for you. Your future lies in your emancipation from the demands of an arbitrary capital in a production to which it remains a stranger.

Your material and moral future. Look around you. Wherever you find capital and labor united in the same hands – wherever the fruits of labor are, at the very least, divided among those who work, in proportion to their increase, in proportion to their benefits to the collective work – you find a decrease in misery and at the same time an increase in morality. In the Canton of Zurich, in the Engadine, in many other parts of Switzerland where the peasant is the owner, and land, capital, and labor are combined in a single individual – in Norway, in Flanders, in East Frisia, in Holstein, in the German Palatinate, in Belgium, on the island of Guernsey off the English coast – a prosperity comparatively superior to that of all other parts of Europe where the cultivator lacks ownership of the land is visible. A race of farmers populates those regions notable for their honesty, dignity, independence, and straightforwardly loyal ways. The habits of workers in the mines of Cornwall in England, like those of American navigators who trade with China and are engaged in whale fishing, among whom profit sharing is in force, are recognized by official documents as better than those of workers subject solely to the predetermined salary law.

Associated labor, the distribution of the fruits of labor, that is, the proceeds from the sale of products, among workers in proportion to the work done and the value of that work: this is the social future. In this lies the secret of your emancipation. You were slaves once, then servants, then wage earners, and soon, if you want, you will be free producers and brothers in association.

Free association, voluntary, organized on certain bases by yourselves, among men who know and love and respect each other, not forced, not imposed by government authority, not ordered without regard to individual affections and ties, among men considered not as free and spontaneous beings, but as figures and producing machines.

Association administered with republican fraternity by your delegates, and from which you can withdraw if you wish: not subject to the despotism of the State and an arbitrarily constituted hierarchy ignorant of your needs and abilities.

Association of nuclei formed according to your tendencies, not as the authors of the systems I mentioned would have it, of all the men belonging to a given industrial or agricultural branch.

The concentration of all individuals employed, in the State or even in a single city, in an art in a single producing society, would lead back to the ancient tyrannical monopoly of the Guilds, make producers arbiters of prices to the detriment of consumers; it would give legal form to the oppression of minorities; it would exile the dissatisfied worker from any possibility of work, and suppress any need for progress by extinguishing all rivalry of work, every stimulus to inventions.

The Association timidly attempted and in unfavorable circumstances in France in the last twenty years, then in England and Belgium, and crowned with success wherever it was attempted with firm will and spirit of sacrifice, contains the secret of a whole social transformation that should, by virtue of your traditions and the initiative of social progress that has always been in you, be accomplished in Italy. And this transformation, emancipating you from the slavery of wages, would enliven at the same time, for the benefit of all classes, production and improve the economic status of the country. Today, the capitalist generally tends to earn as much as he can to withdraw from the arena of work: under the organization of the Association, you would only tend to ensure the continuity of work, that is, production. Today, the boss, the director of the work, made such not by a special aptitude but by his possession of capital, is often imprudent, impulsive, incapable: an association, directed by delegates, supervised by all its members, would not run such risks. Today, work is often directed towards the production of “superfluous,” unnecessary objects: thanks to the capricious and unjust inequality of remuneration, workers abound in one branch, are deficient in another; the worker, limited to a “determined” wage, has no reason to devote all the zeal of which he is capable, all the activity with which he could multiply or improve the products to his work. And the Association would obviously remedy these and other causes of disturbance or inferiority in production.

Freedom to withdraw, without harming the association – equality of the partners in the election of administrators for a limited time or better subject to revocation – admission, after the foundation, without the requirement of capital to be paid in and the establishment of a levy, for the common fund, on the benefits of the early days – indivisibility, perpetuity of collective capital – remuneration for all, equal to the “necessities” of life – sharing of profits according to the quantity and quality of each person’s work – these are the general bases that you, if you want to work for the future of the element to which you belong, must give to your associations. Each of these bases, especially the one concerning the perpetuity of collective capital, a bond and a pledge of emancipation between you and future generations, deserves a chapter. But a special work on “workers’ associations” is not within the scope of this writing. Perhaps, if God grants me a few more years of life, I will do it separately and with love for you. In the meantime, be assured that the indication of those rules is the result of my meditated and severe examination and deserves your careful consideration.

But what about the capital? The first capital with which the association can start? Where can it be obtained?

This is a serious issue, and I cannot address it here as I would like. But I will briefly mention your duty and that of others.

The first source of that capital is within you, in your savings, in your spirit of sacrifice. I know the situation of most of you, but some of you may have the possibility, perhaps through uninterrupted or better-paid work, to save a small sum that would be enough to start your own work. And your conscience of fulfilling a solemn duty and deserving the desired emancipation should support you in this economy. I could cite industrial associations, now powerful in means, that began in England with the payment of one penny per day from a certain number of workers. I could repeat several stories of sacrifices heroically endured in France and elsewhere by groups of workers, now owners of considerable capital, similar to the one you will find some details about at the end of this booklet. There is hardly any difficulty that a firm will supported by the conscience of doing good cannot overcome. You can contribute with your savings and give the small initial fund some monetary or material help or some tools for work. You can, through a conduct that earns respect, collect small loans from relatives or companions, who would simply become shareholders in the association and would only receive the amount of their loan from the profits of the enterprise. For many of your industries, in which the price of raw materials is low, the capital required to start independent work is a small thing. You can have it if you want it. And it will be better for you if the formation of that small capital is all yours, the fruit of your hard work or the credit you have acquired by working well. As Nations better preserve the freedom they won with their blood, your associations will find better and more prudent profit from the capital raised through vigilance and economy than from that given from another source. It is the law of things. The Workers’ Associations that, in Paris in 1848, received government subsidies when they were founded, prospered much less than those that formed their initial capital through sacrifice.

But because I truly love you and do not servilely flatter weaknesses that exist or may exist in you, I advise you to make sacrifices; the duty towards others does not diminish. Men who circumstances have provided with wealth should understand this: they should understand that your emancipation is part of a plan of Providence, and that it will inevitably be accomplished either with them or against them. Many among those men, particularly those of Republican faith, understand this already; and among them, if you give them evidence of will and honest intellect, you will find help for the undertaking. They may – and will – pave the way for you to credit, either by making advances, or by founding banks that accredit future work; the collective strength of the workers, by admitting you to participate in the benefits of their enterprises, an intermediate stage between the present and the future, from which you would probably gather the small capital required for independent association. In Belgium more than elsewhere, institutions already exist under the names of Banks of Anticipation or People’s Banks. In Scotland, several banks provide credit to any man of noted probity who pledges his honor and presents another individual of equally mirrored honesty as a guarantor. And the admission of workers to participation in profits is a successful practice adopted by several masters of the craft.3

XII. Conclusion.

§. 1.

But the State, the Government – a legitimate institution only when founded upon a mission of education and progress, still misunderstood today – has a solemn duty towards you that it can easily fulfill if it becomes a truly National Government, of a free and united People. A vast series of aids could then descend from the Government to the People, which would solve the social problem without stripping, without violence, without tampering with the wealth previously acquired by citizens, without arousing that class antagonism that is unjust, immoral, fatal to the Nation and that visibly delays French progress today.

And powerful aids would be:

The moral influence exercised in favor of associations with publicly expressed approval by government agents, with frequent discussion of their fundamental principle in the Assembly, with legalization given to all voluntary associations formed on the bases mentioned above:

Improvements in communication routes and abolition of what now hinders the transport of products:

Establishment of public warehouses or storage places, from which, after the approximate value of the goods delivered has been ascertained, an association would be issued a document or bond similar to a banknote, admitted to circulation and discount, enough to make the association capable of continuing in its work and not being strangled by the need for immediate and any-sale:

Granting of works needed by the State, given equal terms, to associations:

Simplification of legal procedures, now ruinous and often inaccessible to the poor:

Legislative facilities given to the mobilization of landed property:

Radical change in the system of public taxes: replacement of a single income tax for the current, complex, expensive, system of direct and indirect taxes; and sanction given to the principle that “life is sacred” – that without life, since work, progress, and duties are not possible, the tax can only begin where income exceeds the amount of money “necessary” for life:

But there is more. The confiscation or appropriation of ecclesiastical property – an act that is not worth discussing now, but that is inevitable whenever the Nation assumes a mission of collective education and progress – will place in the hands of the State a greater amount of wealth than anyone thinks. Now suppose that to this is added the value represented by the dissociable and highly fertile lands still uncultivated – the value represented by the profits of railways and other public enterprises, whose administration must be concentrated in the State – the value represented by the territorial properties belonging to the Municipalities,4 the value represented by collateral successions, which beyond the fourth degree should fall back into the State – and others, which are unnecessary to enumerate. Suppose that from this immense pile of wealth a National Fund is formed dedicated to the intellectual and economic progress of the whole country. Why would not a considerable part of that fund, with the precautions required to prevent waste, be transformed into a credit fund to be distributed, with an interest of one and a half or two percent, to voluntary workers’ associations, constituted on the principles indicated above, and which would offer guarantees of “morality” and “capability”? That capital should be sacred to the work of the future and not of a single generation. But the vast scale of the operations would ensure compensation for losses, which from time to time are inevitable.

The distribution of that credit should not be done by the government, nor by a National Central Bank; but, with the National Power overseeing, by local banks managed by elected Municipal Councils. Without taking away from the current wealth of various classes, without attributing to a single group the proceeds of taxes that, collected from all citizens, must be disbursed for the benefit of all, the set of actions suggested here, by spreading credit everywhere, improving production, forcing the interest on money to gradually decrease, entrusting the progress and continuity of work to the zeal and usefulness of all producers, would replace a sum of wealth, concentrated in a few hands and imperfectly directed, with a rich nation, managing its own production and consumption.5

§. 2.

And this, Italian workers, is your future. You can hasten it. Conquer the homeland. Conquer a popular government that represents its collective life, mission, and concept. Organize yourselves into a vast universal People’s League, so that your voice is the voice of millions and not of a few individuals. You have Truth and Justice on your side; the Nation will listen to you.

But beware, and believe the word of a man who has been studying the course of things in Europe for thirty years and has seen the holiest and most useful enterprises fail due to the immorality of men: you will not succeed unless you improve. You will not conquer unless you deserve it, with sacrifice, activity, and love. By seeking a duty to be performed, you will obtain it; by seeking selfishness, or some sort of right to well-being that the men of materialism teach you, you will only obtain triumphs of an hour followed by tremendous disappointments. Those who speak to you in the name of well-being, of material happiness, will betray you. They also seek their own well-being: they will fraternize with you, as an element of strength, as long as they have obstacles to overcome to conquer it; as soon as they have it, thanks to you, they will abandon you to enjoy their conquest tranquilly. It is the history of the last half-century and the name of this half-century is materialism.

A history of pain and blood. I have seen men who denied God, religion, virtue, duty, and sacrifice, and spoke in the name of the right to happiness, to enjoyment, fight boldly, with the words of the people and freedom on their lips, and mix with us men of the new faith, who imprudently welcomed them into our ranks. When the way was opened to them, with a victory or a cowardly compromise, to enjoy, they deserted us and became bitter enemies the next day. A few years of endured dangers and persecutions had been enough to tire them out. Because without a conscience of a Law of duty, without faith in a mission imposed on man by a supreme Power over all, would they have persisted in sacrifice until the last breath? And with deeper sorrow, I saw the sons of the people educated by those men, by those philosophers, in materialism, betray their mission, betray the future, betray their homeland and themselves, behind the foolish immoral hope that they would perhaps find material well-being in the caprices and interests of tyranny. I saw the workers of France remain indifferent spectators of December 2nd, because for them all the issues had been reduced to a question of material prosperity, and they deluded themselves into believing that the promises artfully spread among them by those who had extinguished the freedom of the homeland might perhaps become reality. Today they lament the loss of freedom without having conquered well-being. No, without God, without a conscience of law, without morality, without the power of sacrifice, lost behind men who have neither faith, nor worship of truth, nor apostolic life, nor anything except the vanity of their systems, I say it with deep conviction, you will not succeed. You will have riots, not the true, great Revolution that you and I invoke. That Revolution, if it is not an illusion of egoists spurred on by revenge, is a religious work.

Improving oneself and others; this is the first intention and the supreme hope of every reform, every social change. The fortunes of man cannot be changed by plastering and beautifying the house where he lives: where there is not a human soul but a body of slaves, all reforms are useless; the refurbished and adorned house with luxury is a whitewashed sepulcher, and nothing more. You will never induce the society to which you belong to replace the system of association with that of salary, unless you prove to it that association will be an instrument of improved production and collective prosperity among you. And you will not prove this unless you show yourselves capable of founding and maintaining association with honesty, mutual love, sacrifice, and affection for work. To progress, you must show yourselves capable of progress.

Three things are sacred; Tradition, Progress, and Association. “I believe” – (I wrote these things twenty years ago) – “in the immense voice of God that the centuries send me through the universal tradition of Humanity; and it tells me that the Family, the Nation, Humanity are the three spheres within which the human individual must work towards the common goal, the moral perfection of himself and others, or rather of himself through others and for others: it tells me that property is destined to manifest the material activity of the individual, the part he has in the transformation of the physical world, as the right to vote must manifest the part he has in the administration of the political world; it tells me that precisely from the more or less good use of these rights in those spheres of activity depends before God and men the merit or demerit of individuals; it tells me that all these things, elements of human nature, have been transformed, modified continuously approaching the ideal which we have in our soul but can never be destroyed; and that the dreams of communism, abolition, confusion of the individual in the social whole, were only passing accidents in the life of mankind, visible in every great intellectual and moral crisis, but incapable of reality except on a smaller scale like Christian convents. I believe in the eternal progress of life in God’s creature, in the progress of Thought and Association, not only in man of the past but in man of the future; I believe that it is important not so much to determine the form of future progress as to open, with a truly religious education, the paths of every progress to men and to make them capable of achieving it; and I believe that man is not made better, more loving, more noble, more divine – which is our goal on earth – by filling him with physical pleasures, proposing to him as the purpose of life that irony called happiness. I believe in Association as the only means we possess to achieve Progress, not only because it multiplies the action of productive forces but because it brings together all the different manifestations of the human soul and makes it so that the life of the individual has communion with the collective life; and I know that association cannot be fruitful if it does not exist among free individuals, among free nations, capable of consciousness of their mission. I believe that man must eat and live and not have every hour of existence absorbed by material work, in order to have room to develop the higher faculties that are in him; but he listens with terror to the voices that tell men: “Nourishing yourself is your purpose; enjoying is your right,” because I know that that word can create only egoists, and it was in France, and elsewhere, and begins to be all too much in Italy, the condemnation of every noble idea, every martyrdom, every pledge of future greatness.”

“What takes away from humanity in today’s life is the lack of a common faith, a shared belief that reconnects Earth and Heaven, Universe and God. Without such faith, humans have prostrated themselves before dead matter and have become worshipers of the idol ‘Interest.’ The first priests of that fatal cult were kings, princes, and the sad governments of today. They invented the horrible formula ‘everyone for themselves’; they knew that with it, they would create selfishness, and they knew that there was only one step between the selfish and the slave.”

“Italian workers, my brothers, avoid that step. In avoiding it, lies your future. You have a solemn mission to prove that we are all children of God and brothers in Him. You will not accomplish this without improving yourselves and fulfilling your duty.”

“I have pointed out to you, as best I could, what your duty is. And the primary, most essential duty of all is the one you have towards your homeland. It is your duty to establish it, and it is also a necessity. The encouragement and means that I have spoken to you about can only come from a united and free homeland. The improvement of your social conditions can only come from your participation in the political life of the nation. Without the right to vote, you will never have true representatives of your aspirations and needs. Without a popular government that writes and implements the Italian Pact from Rome, founded on consensus and aimed at the progress of all citizens of the State, there is no hope for you. That day when, following the example of the French socialists, you separate the ‘social’ question from the ‘political’ question and say, ‘we can emancipate ourselves, whatever the form of government that rules the homeland may be,’ you would mark the perpetuity of your servitude.”

“And as I bid you farewell, I will point out another duty to you, no less solemn than the one that binds us to establish a free and united homeland. Your emancipation can only be based on the triumph of a principle: the unity of the human family. Today, half of the human family, the half to which we seek inspiration and comfort, the half that has the care of our children’s first education, is, by a singular contradiction, declared unequal, excluded from that unity, both civilly and politically. It is up to you, who seek your emancipation in the name of a religious truth, to protest in every way, on every occasion, against that denial of unity.”

“The emancipation of women should be continually linked with the emancipation of the worker, thus giving your work the consecration of a universal truth.”

  1. I am speaking naturally of countries where an organization of society has been attempted through the constitutional monarchy system: in countries governed despotically, there is no society: the rights of the individual are equally sacrificed.↩

  2. It was calculated that if, out of one hundred workers, one worker produced “one hundred” francs more than the average production in a year, he would earn one thousandth of a franc per year, three hundredths of a franc every three years. Who can call this an incentive for production?↩

  3. In Paris, for example, the painting establishment of Mr. Leclaire, founded on that principle, is notable for the prosperity it enjoys.↩

  4. These properties belong legally to the municipalities, morally to the needy of the municipality. It is not a question of robbing them from the municipalities, but of dedicating them to the poor of every municipality, making them, under the high direction of the elective Municipal Councils, the inalienable capital of agricultural associations.↩

  5. The need for a large capital for the establishment of a piano manufacturing plant led, in 1848, the delegates of several hundred workers, gathered to found a large association, to request a subsidy of 300,000 francs from the government in its name. The government commission refused. The association dissolved, but 14 workers decided to overcome every obstacle and rebuild it with their own means. They had no money or credit; they had faith. Some of them brought to the fledgling society, in materials and work tools, a value of about 2,000 francs. But circulating capital was indispensable. Each associate contributed, not without difficulty, 10 francs. Some workers, who had no direct interest in the society, added their small offerings to that small capital. And on March 10, 1849, when the sum of 229 francs and 50 centimes was reached, the association was declared established. That social fund was insufficient for the establishment and the indispensable minute expenses, necessary day by day for a workshop. With nothing left for salaries, more than two months passed without the workers receiving a single cent of wages. How did they live in that time of crisis? How do workers live during work stoppages, helped by the worker who happens to be working, selling or pledging their belongings one by one? Some work had been done. And the price was paid on May 4, 1849. That day was for the association what the beginning of a war is for a victory: and it was celebrated. After paying debts and collecting receivables, there remained for each member a sum of 6 francs and 61 centimes. It was agreed that, considering 5 francs as part of the salary, the excess of each would be devoted to a fraternal feast. The 14 members, most of whom had not tasted wine for a year, gathered together with their families at a common table, and the expense was 32 cents per family. Still, for a whole month, wages were only five francs per week. In June, a baker who was a music lover or speculator proposed buying a piano to be paid for with bread. The proposal was accepted, and the price was agreed at 480 francs. It was fortunate for the association, which was certain to have at least the essentials. The value of the bread was not included in the salaries. Each person received what they needed and, for married people, what their family needed. Meanwhile, the association, composed of highly skilled workers, gradually overcame all the obstacles and hardships it had encountered in the early period. Its cash books presented the best evidence of the progress made. From August 1849, the weekly income rose to 10, 15, 20 francs per person, and that amount did not represent all the earnings: each member contributed a sum to the common fund that was higher than what he retained.

    The social inventory of December 30, 1850, gave the following results:
    At that time, there were 32 members. The establishment paid 2,000 francs in rent and was already cramped for work.
    The work instruments amounted to a value of 5,922.60 francs.
    The goods and raw materials represented 22,972.28 francs. The Society’s wallet contained notes worth 3,540 francs.
    The debtor account, which was paid by almost all, amounted to 5,861 francs and 90 centimes.
    Therefore, the asset was 39,317 francs and 88 centimes.
    On this asset, the Society owed only 4,737 francs and 80 centimes to some creditors and 1,650 francs and 80 centimes to 80 worker members of the profession who had loaned the association in the early period.
    Real assets: 32,930.02 francs.
    The association continued to flourish from then on.

    From a writing by A. Cochut.↩

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