Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/461

 to me the secret of a revolutionary enterprise which he had in hand and which, as he said, promised great results. There was to be a new uprising in Lombardy. With his glowing eloquence he pictured to me how the Italian soldiers of liberty would crowd the Austrians into the Alps, and how then similar movements would spring from this victorious insurrection in all other countries of the European Continent, and that then such young men as I should be on the spot to help carry on the work so prosperously begun. “All this will happen,” he said, “before you will reach America, or shortly after. How you will wish not to have left us! You will take the next ship to return to Europe. Save yourself this unnecessary voyage.” I had to confess to him that my hopes were not so sanguine as his; that I did not see in the condition of things on the Continent any prospect of a change soon to come, which might call me back to the Fatherland and to a fruitful activity; that, if in the remote future such changes should come they would shape themselves in ways different from those that we now imagined, and that then there would be other people to carry them through. Mazzini shook his head, but he saw that he could not persuade me. Thus we parted, and I never saw him again.

A short time after my arrival in America I did indeed hear of the outbreak of the revolutionary enterprise which Mazzini had predicted to me. It consisted of an insurrectionary attempt in Milan, which was easily suppressed by the Austrian troops and resulted only in the imprisonment of a number of Italian patriots. And Mazzini's cause, the unity of Italy under a free government, seemed then to be more hopeless than ever.

Kossuth returned from America a sorely disappointed man. He had been greeted by the American people with unbounded enthusiasm. Countless multitudes had listened to his