Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/42

 The opening and closing sentences of his Politica internazionale (published in 1871) may be regarded, as it were, as Mazzini's political testament. "The moral law is the criterion by which must be judged the worth of the social and political acts that constitute the life of nations." "Great ideas make great peoples. And ideas are not great for peoples save inasmuch as they pass beyond their own boundaries. A people is only great on the condition of fulfilling a great and holy mission in the world, even as the importance and worth of an individual are measured by what he accomplishes on behalf of the society in which he lives. Internal organisation represents the sum of the means and forces gathered for the fulfilment of the appointed external work. As circulation and exchange give value to production and reinvigorate it, international life gives worth and motion to the internal life of a people. National life is the means; international life is the end. The first is the work of man; the second is prescribed and pointed out by God. The prosperity, the glory, the future of a nation are in proportion to its approach to the end thus assigned" (6).

As a political idealist, a man whose lips too were touched with the prophetic fire, we associate with the name of Mazzini that of his rival, Vincenzo Gioberti. In 1843, Gioberti published his famous book, Il primato morale e civile degli Italiani. The conception, from which the work takes its title, is similar to that of Mazzini's third Rome: Italy, by her history and by her nature, is the nazione madre del genere umano, destined by Providence to exercise 30