PACT OF FRATERNITY, THE. A declaration of principles for the progress of humanity drawn up in 183G by Giuseppe (Joseph) Mazzini (1805-1872) for a secret Asso ciation composed of German. French, Italian, and Polish exiles, and called " Young Europe." As a young man "Mazzini had joined the secret association in Italy called the "Carbonari " (literally " charcoal-burners " or " colliers "). In 1830 he was intrusted with a secret mission. and, having been betrayed, was imprisoned in the fortress of Savona on the western Riviera. In prison he conceived the idea of founding a new religious and republican association, to be called "Young Italy." In 1S31 he was banished to France. Here, at Marseilles, in the same year, his association was founded. The members swore to devote their lives to the mission of uniting their dismembered country into " one free, inde pendent, republican But Mazzini was not a mere politician. Republicanism with him " was a faith —the logical and necessary consequence of his religious faith in the oneness of humanity " (E. A. Venturini). A few years later he was obliged to flee to Switzerland. While he was there he founded " Young England." Banished from Switzerland towards the end of 1830, he took refuge in London. About this time he was dis tressed by religious doubts, but he succeeded in arriving at a confirmation of his first faith. " I came to my better self alone; without aid from others, through the help of a religious conception, which I verified by his tory." In London for some years he had a struggle for existence. During the whole of 1S37 and half of 1S3S he suffered " absolute poverty." But he sought to help his neighbours. He opened a school for poor Italian boys, and kept it open from 1S41-1S48. " During those seven years we gave both moral and intellectual instruc tion to several hundred youths and children who were in a state of semi-barbarism; and who, half afraid at first. and urged only by curiosity, came to our humble rooms at 5 Hatton Garden, to be gradually tamed and civilized by the gentleness and kindness of the masters; until at leugth they learned to rejoice with a certain con scious pride in the idea of returning to their country possessed of education." They attended the school between nine and ten o'clock at night, bringing their organs with them; they also met on Sunday evenings for a lecture. In 1848 he left London to take part in the Italian revolutions. In March 1849 he was appointed to form a Triumvirate with Safes and Armellini at Rome. Soon afterwards the Republic fell before the French, and he returned to London. Here he founded the " European Association," and planned other revolutions. In 1S70 he returned to Italy, and on the 10th of March, 1S72, died at Pisa. Mazzini was no ordinary political agitator. He was a prophet, and a religious force of considerable significance. He was radically opposed to Materialism. In his essays " On the Duties of Man " (1844) he says that Italy has suffered and is suffering from two great sores, Macchiavellism and Materialism. He says elsewhere (" A Letter to the Members of the (Ecumenical Council," 1870) that morally Materialism is disinherited of all criterion of right, or principle of collective education; scientifically it is based upon a periodical confusion in men's minds of the instruments of life with life itself; historically, it is inexorably, in variably representative and characteristic of a period of transition between one religious faith and another. As a matter of fact " there is no antagonism between matter and spirit." But Revelation is progressive. "Revela tion, which is, as Lessiug says, the education of the human race. descends continually from God to man; prophesied by genius, evoked by virtue and sacrifice, and accepted and proclaimed from epoch to epoch by the great religious evolutions of collective humanity." Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic, and religious expression. From time to time man will adopt a different solution of the great problem of life, but assuredly it will never be a mere negation (cp. " The Religious Side of the Italian Question," 1867). Each of these religions contains a truth destined to live for ever. " Each religion sets before mankind a new educational idea as its aim; each Is a fragment, enveloped in symbols, of eternal truth. . . . Having accomplished its mission, that religion disappears; leav ing, behind the portion of truth it contained, the unknown quantity disengaged by it from its symbol. a new, immortal star in humanity's heaven. As the discoveries of science have revealed, and will reveal, star upon star, until our kuowledge of the celestial system of which the Milky Way is zone and the earth a part, be complete, so the religious faculties of humanity have added, and will add, faith to faith, until the entire truth we are capable of comprehending be complete " (" Letter to the (Ecumen. Council," 1870). 3Iazzlni felt that he himself was living in a transition period. But a new religious faith was already dawning. " The religious synthesis, which is slowly but infallibly taking the place of the synthesis of the past, comprehends a new term—the con tinuous collective life of humanity—and this alone is sufficient to change the aim, the method, and the moral law of our existence. . . . When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elevated into a church; it will incarnate in itself a religious prin ciple, and become the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of life " (" The Religious Side of the Italian Question," 1867). Mazzini did not believe
in the miraculous as commonly understood, hut in the gradual working out of divine law. " We believe in the Uuknown: in the Mysterious—to be one day solved— which now encompasses us on every side: in the secrets of an intuition inaccessible to analysis; in the truth of our strange presentiment of an Ideal, which is the primi tive fatherland of the soul; in an unforeseen power of action granted to man in certain rare moments of faith, love, and supreme concentration of all the faculties towards a determinate and virtuous aim—deserved there fore—and analogous to the power of revelation which the increased concentration of rays in the telescope communi cates to the human eye : but we believe all these things the pre-ordained consequences of laws hitherto with held from our knowledge " (Letter of 1870, as cited above). He believed in "one heaven, in which we live, and move, and love; which embraces—as an ocean embraces the islands that stud its surface—the whole indefinite series of existences through which we pass." He believed in an indefinite series of re-incarnations of the soul, from life to life, from world to world. He believed in the slow, progressive divinisation of man, in the possibility of slowly elaborating in man the angel. True priests and counsellors are those who have proved worthy to be such by long years of tried virtue and of study of things eternal. " Prophets and guides upon the weary pilgrimage of humanity are the men upon whose brow God has set the seal of genius sanctified by virtue; but forget not that the Divine element exists also in yourselves; never yield up the liberty of your immortal souls into the bands of your brother man " (Letter of 1870). In answer to the question, What is Life? he tells us that Life is Love; Life is movement, aspiration, pro greas; Life is communion (a word, he says, taught us by Christianity)—" communion with nature and with man, wheresoever he loves, struggles, or hopes, and with God." The social Gospel of Mazzini is inseparably con nected with his religious convictions. " The first real, earnest religious Faith that shall arise upon the ruins of the old worn-out creeds, will transform the whole of our actual social organization, because every strong and earnest faith tends to apply itself to every branch of human activity; because in every epoch of its existence the earth has ever tended to conform itself to the Heaven in which it then believed: and because the whole history of Humanity is but the repetition—in form and degree varying according to the diversity of the times—of the words of the Dominical Christian Prayer : Thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven " (" On the Duties of Man," 1S44). Labour should be the basis of civil society, and the distribution of its fruits should be according to works. If a man will not labour, he should possess naught. The religious Word of the epoch is Association. " Association of labour, and the division of the fruits of labour, or rather of the profits of the sale of its product ions between the producers, in proportion to the amount and value of the work done by each—this is the social future " (" Duties," 1S44). We must strive to make of Humanity one single family. But property, though it is ill-constituted is not an evil. The principle of pro perty Is in fact eternal. " We must not seek to abolish property because at present it is the possession of the few : we must open up the paths by which the many may acquire it " (" Duties."). We must make it, how ever, the result of labour alone—labour rightly re munerated. Nor is wealth in itself an evil. " Wealth is sacred when diffused like healing balm upon the wounds both of mind and body, by which your brothers are afflicted: accursed, when employed to minister to selfish passion, pleasure, or pride " (" Letter " as cited above). It has already been said that Mazzini opened a night-school for working lads in London. He attached supreme importance to education. In his essays " On the Duties of Man " he says that his whole doctrine is included and summed up in this grand word. " The vital question in agitation at the present day is a question of Education. We do not seek to establish a new order of things through violence. Any order of things established through violence, even though in itself superior to the old, is still a tyranny. What we have to do is to propose, for the approval of the nation, an order of things which we believe to be superior to that now existing, and to educate men by every possible means to develope it and act in accordance with it." In a chapter on duties towards the family he says that the conception of the family is divine, and no human power can extinguish it. The Angel of the family is Woman. To her belong by nature equal rights with man. " Cancel from your minds every idea of superiority over Woman. You have none whatsoever. Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality and injustice, have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which has been converted into an argument of continued oppres sion. . . . In the sight of God the Father there is neither man nor woman. There is only the human being, that being in whom, whether the form be of male or female, those characteristics which distinguish humanity from the brute creation are united—namely. the social tendency, and the capacity of education and progress." In 1847 Mazzini published some very interesting " Thoughts upon Democracy in Europe." See P. A. Taylor, Joseph Mazzini: A Memoir by E. A. V., With Two Essays by Mazzini, 2nd ed. 1877; Fore shadowings of the Coming Faith by Joseph Mazzini, 1888.