Had we regained Venice through a war directed as justice and the exigencies of the case required, instead of basely submitting to the humiliation of receiving it from the hands of a foreign despot, we should have dissolved two empires, and called into existence a Slavo-Magyaro-Teutonic federation along the Danube, and a Slavo-Hellenic-Rouman federation in the east of Europe. We shall not regain Rome without dissolving the Papacy, and proclaiming, for the benefit of all humanity, that inviolability of conscience which Protestantism achieved for a fraction of Europe only, and confined within Biblical limits. Great ideas make great peoples, and the sense of the enormous power which is an inseparable condition of the existence of our Italy as a nation should have sufficed to make us great. That sense, however,--God alone knows the grief with which I write it,--that sense with us is wanting. And now a word as to the amnesty. Were it my nature to allow any personal considerations to interfere where the welfare of my country is concerned, I might answer that none who know me would expect me to give the lie to the whole of my past life, and sully the few years left to me by accepting an offer of _oblivion_ and _pardon_ for having loved Italy above all earthly things, and preached and striven for her unity when all others regarded it as a dream. But my purpose in the present writing is far other than self-defence; and the sequel will show that, even were the sacrifice of the dignity of my last years possible, it would be useless. My past, present, and future labors towards the moral and political regeneration of my country have been, are, and will be governed by a religious idea. The past, present, and future of our rulers have been, are, and will be led astray by materialism. Now the religious question sums up and dominates every other. Political questions are necessarily secondary and derivative. They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority--in a religion of duty, of which politics should be the application--_cannot_, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest. Our rulers have no great ruling conception,--no belief in the supremacy of the moral law,--no just notion of life, nor of the human unity,--no belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the _duty_ of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. They are materialists, and the logical consequence of their want of all faith in God and his law are the substitution of the idea of _interest_ for the idea of _duty_,--of a paltry notion of _tactics_, for the fearless affirmation of the truth,--of opportunity, for principle.