Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/203

Rh

theory of the dagger, men who, before 1848, were active leaders of the Carboneria. But Young Italy banished the dagger, and condemned even the perjurer only to the horror of his brethren. . . . There must be law or war, and let him conquer who can. Where every bond is broken between the law and the people of the State, force is sacred wherever it undertakes, by whatever means they may be, to reconnect the one with the other. Where the equipoise is lost between the power of one and the power of all, every individual has the right and the mission to cancel, if he is able, the occasion of the mortal defect, and to restore the equipoise. Before the collective sovereignty the citizen reverently pleads his own cause ; before the tyrant rises the tyrannicide — divanti al tiranno sorge il tirannicida. . . . Is there not between the tyrant and the victim of his oppression a natural and continual war ? . . . To despatch the tyrant, if on his death depends the emancipation of a people, the welfare of millions, is an act of war, and if the slayer is free from every other thought and gives his life in exchange, an act of virtue. . . . If the malediction of a tortured people, miraculously concentrated into poison, could, instantly and without time for resistance, destroy all those who contaminate with their stupid tyranny, with the tears of mothers, with the blood of honest men, the soil that God has given us, the malediction would be sanctified before God and man.

This theory, that a tyrant is an outlaw, is an ingenious adaptation of the old doctrine of tyrannicide, which was borrowed from pagan and Jewish antiquity, and maintained of old in the schools from John of Salisbury to Mariana. The distinction between the two theories is, that whilst the divines held the tyrant condemned by actual law and implicitly sentenced by a visible tribunal, Mazzini, by means of his doctrine of popular sovereignty, invokes no higher decision than the individual subjective will. Unfortunately, guilty acts may be very easily justified by an obscure theory ; and the crimes of Clément, Ravaillac, Guy Fawkes, were as horrible as those of Milano, Pianori, or Orsini, and it is not easy for the vulgar mind to distinguish between killing and murder, between the assassination of William the Silent or of Wallenstein, and that of Henry IV. or of Rossi. The doctrine is pernicious and perilous at best ; as Mazzini defines it, it is untenable, because it is founded on the democratic principle. An outlaw may be slain ; and it may be said that a sovereign who unites the guilt of usurpation with