[229]
Italian Unity.
Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy. Amesbury, Mass., 1st Mo., 4th, 1871.
it would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.
For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries.
I looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings.
Had I been a Catholic instead of a Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical, desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty which I prized so highly for myself.
I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic under Mazzini and Garibaldi.
From that hour it was doomed, and the expiation of its monstrous 