Mazzini, the great radical thinker of Italy, was, on the contrary, persuaded that unity, not union, was necessary to this country.  He had taken for his motto, GOD AND THE PEOPLE, and believed in no other powers.  He wished an Italian Constitutional Assembly, selected directly by the people, and furnished with an unlimited mandate to decide what form was now required by the needs of the Peninsula.  His own wishes, certainly, aimed at a republic; but the decision remained with the representatives of the people.

The thought of Gioberti had been at first the popular one, as he, in fact, was the seer of the so-called Moderate party.  For myself, I always looked upon him as entirely a charlatan, who covered his want of all real force by the thickest embroidered mantle of words.  Still, for a time, he corresponded with the wants of the Italian mind.  He assailed the Jesuits, and was of real use by embodying the distrust and aversion that brooded in the minds of men against these most insidious and inveterate foes of liberty and progress.  This triumph, at least, he may boast:  that sect has been obliged to yield; its extinction seems impossible, of such life-giving power was the fiery will of Loyola.  In the Primate he had embodied the lingering hope of the Catholic Church; Pius IX. had answered to the appeal, had answered only to show its futility.  He had run through Italy as courier for Charles Albert, when the so falsely styled Magnanimous entered, pretending to save her from the stranger, really hoping to take her for himself.  His own cowardice and treachery neutralized the hope, and Charles Albert, abject in his disgrace, took a retrograde ministry.  This the country would not suffer, and obliged him after a while to reassume at least the position of the previous year, by taking Gioberti for his premier.  But it soon became evident that the ministry of Charles Albert was in the same position as had been that of Pius IX.  The hand was powerless when the head was indisposed.  Meantime the name of Mazzini had echoed through Tuscany from the revered lips of Montanelli; it reached the Roman States, and though at first propagated by foreign impulse, yet, as soon as understood, was welcomed as congenial.  Montanelli had nobly said, addressing Florence:  “We could not regret that the realization of this project should take place in a sister city, still more illustrious than ours.”  The Romans took him at his word; the Constitutional Assembly for the Roman States was elected with a double mandate, that the deputies might sit in the Constitutional Assembly for all Italy whenever the other provinces could send theirs.  They were elected by universal suffrage.  Those who listened to Jesuits and Moderates predicted that the project would fail of itself.  The people were too ignorant to make use of the liberty of suffrage.