Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini Author:Giuseppe Mazzini Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: aimless Cosmopolitanism—to dash to pieces the ladder by which humanity is destined to ascend to the ideal,—is to attempt the impossible. All labour directed to t... more »hat aim would be but labour lost, and impotent to transform or falsify the character of the epoch, the mission of which is to harmonise the idea of fatherland and nationality with the idea of humanity ; but it might retard the accomplishment of that mission. " The Pact of humanity cannot be signed by individuals, but only by free and equal peoples, possessing a name, a banner, and the consciousness of a distinct individual existence. If you desire that the peoples should become such, you must speak to them of country and nationality, and impress in vivid characters upon the brow of each the sign of their existence and baptism as a nation. " The peoples will never take a definite initiative until they have a definite part to play. You must assign this definite part to each. You cannot complete the work by breaking the instrument: you cannot apply a lever if the fulcrum be withdrawn. " Nations do not die before they have fulfilled their mission. You cannot destroy them by denying that mission ; but you may retard their organisation and activity." Such were the ideas by which I believed our work should be directed, and they were confirmedby my method of understanding and interpreting history. I looked upon the long series of epochs throughout the course of which the progress of humanity is gradually evolved, as an equation containing many unknown quantities, and saw that every epoch disengages one of these quantities in order—to use the expression of the algebraist— to transfer it to the number of known quantities contained in the other member of the equation. The unknown quantity of the Christian epoch, conclu...« less