Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 1.djvu/305

 head-quarters of the national army. It can no more be judged by detached fragments than a stately edifice by the coping stone, but some specimens are necessary to this narrative:—

"JACTA ALEA EST.

"'We must be free!' In the name of your trampled, insulted, degraded country; in the name of all heroic virtues, of all that makes life illustrious or death divine; in the name of your starved, your exiled, your dead; by your martyrs in prison cells and felon chains; in the name of God and man; by the listening earth and the watching Heaven, lift up your right hand to heaven and swear by your undying soul, by your hopes of immortality, never to lay down your arms, never to cease hostilities, till you regenerate and save this fallen land.

"It cannot be death you fear, for you have braved the plague in the exile ship of the Atlantic, and plague in the exile's home beyond it; and famine and ruin, and a slave's life and a dog's death; and hundreds, thousands, a million of you have perished thus. Courage! You will not now belie those old traditions of humanity that tell of this divine God-gift within us.

"Opposed to us are only a hired soldiery and a paid police, who, trained machines even as they are, yet must shudder to pursue the horrible task of butchery under the blasphemed name of duty to which England summons them. Brothers many of them are of this people they are called upon to murder—sons of the same soil—fellow-countrymen of those who are heroically struggling to elevate their common country. Surely whatever humanity is left in them will shrink from being made the sad instruments of despotism and tyranny—they will blush to receive the purchase money of England which hires them for the accursed and fratricidal work. Would a Sicilian have been found in the rank of Naples? Would a Milanese have been detected in the fierce hordes of Austria? No, for the Sicilians prize honour, and the stately Milanese would strike the arm to the earth that would dare to offer them Austrian gold in payment for the blood of their own countrymen. And Heaven forbid that in