revolution.  In this sense all the patriots who worked for the foundation of the new kingdom were Mazzinians—­Gioberti, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi.  To be sure, our writers of the first rank, such as Manzoni and Rosmini, had no historical connection with Mazzini; but they had the same general tendency as Mazzini.  Working along diverging lines, they all came together on the essential point:  that true life is not the life which is, but also the life which ought to be.  It was a conviction essentially religious in character, essentially anti-materialistic.

III

This religious and idealistic manner of looking at life, so characteristic of the Risorgimento, prevails even beyond the heroic age of the revolution and the establishment of the Kingdom.  It survives down through Ricasoli, Lanza, Sella and Minghetti, down, that is, to the occupation of Rome and the systemization of our national finances.  The parliamentary overturn of 1876, indeed, marks not the end, but rather an interruption, on the road that Italy had been following since the beginning of the century.  The outlook then changed, and not by the capriciousness or weakness of men, but by a necessity of history which it would be idiotic in our day to deplore.  At that time the fall of the Right, which had ruled continuously between 1861 and 1876, seemed to most people the real conquest of freedom.

To be sure the Right cannot be accused of too great scruple in respecting the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution; but the real truth was that the Right conceived liberty in a sense directly opposite to the notions of the Left.  The Left moved from the individual to the State:  the Right moved from the State to the individual.  The men of the left thought of “the people” as merely the agglomerate of the citizens composing it.  They therefore made the individual the center and the point of departure of all the rights and prerogatives which a regime of freedom was bound to respect.

The men of the Right, on the contrary, were firmly set in the notion that no freedom can be conceived except within the State, that freedom can have no important content apart from a solid regime of law indisputably sovereign over the activities and the interests of individuals.  For the Right there could be no individual freedom not reconcilable with the authority of the State.  In their eyes the general interest was always paramount over private interests.  The law, therefore, should have absolute efficacy and embrace the whole life of the people.

This conception of the Right was evidently sound; but it involved great dangers when applied without regard to the motives which provoked it.  Unless we are careful, too much law leads to stasis and therefore to the annihilation of the life which it is the State’s function to regulate but which the State cannot suppress.  The State may easily become a form indifferent to its content—­something extraneous to the substance it would regulate.  If the law comes upon the individual from without, if the individual is not absorbed in the life of the State, the individual feels the law and the State as limitations on his activity, as chains which will eventually strangle him unless he can break them down.