Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead. I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too. --_Garibaldi_ [Illustration: Garibaldi] The writer who tells the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous. Garibaldi's personal friends and admirers always referred to him in such words as these: patriot, savior, father-noble, generous, pure- hearted, unselfish, devoted, philanthropic. They transferred the infallibility of Pope Pius the Ninth to his enemy, Garibaldi. The Pope was not much given to rhetorical lyddite, so when the name of Garibaldi was mentioned he simply stopped his ears and hissed. He acknowledged that in all the bright lexicon of words there was not a symbol strong enough to express his contempt for Joseph Garibaldi. The actual fact was that Pio Nono, for whom Garibaldi named his favorite donkey, had very much in common with Garibaldi. Had they met as strangers on sea or plain, they would have delighted in each other's society. They were both kind, courteous, considerate, highly intelligent men. They were lovers of their kind. Garibaldi's passion was to benefit men by giving them freedom. The Pope's prayer was to benefit men by giving them religion. But freedom without responsibility leads to license, and license unrestrained means slavery, and religion not safeguarded by freedom is superstition; and what is superstition but slavery? Before Garibaldi was twenty he began to read Mazzini, whom Margaret Fuller called the Emerson of Italy--and Margaret Fuller knew both Emerson and Mazzini intimately and well. She lived for one and died for the other. Mazzini, the delicate, the esthetic, the spiritual, the subtle, was a candle whose beams burned bright for all Italy. His dream of a free and united Italy caught Garibaldi, the rugged, daring son of the sea, and fired his heart. Mazzini was a thinker; Garibaldi a fighter. Italy had twice been queen of the world: first, when Julius Caesar ushered in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa, the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age of Michelangelo. The third great tidal wave of reason, Garibaldi said, would live as the Age of Mazzini. But there be those in Italy now, wise and influential, who call it the Age of Garibaldi.