was destined finally to constitute Italy." This "miserable government," after Garibaldi had passed the Straits, "collected all its sycophants in Naples, and while it deceived the Bourbon king with crafty intrigues, it fomented a revolution in order to overthrow him, and to paralyze the army of the people that had already won ten victories." "We firmly believe," exclaims the author of Clelia, "that a more cowardly government than the Italian cannot be found in ancient or modern history."

Not content with denouncing the Moderate party and the government, Garibaldi denounced Mazzini and his followers. In Naples, during his dictatorship, Garibaldi had spoken of Mazzini as his "friend," and during his visit to England he had toasted "Mazzini, my master." But in Cantoni he charges Mazzini with gross incompetence as virtual dictator of Rome in 1849. He was "without the capacity to command, and he would not tolerate either the commands or the advice of any one;" and with his followers was accustomed to say, "We alone are pure, we men of republican principles, for we want the republic even when it is impossible to have it." "For them, as for the priests, Marsala was a defeat and Mentana a triumph." In The Thousand, the Mazzinians are charged with having, on the eve of the battle of Mentana, induced thousands of volunteers to desert "under the pretext of returning home to proclaim the republic and to raise barricades."

Garibaldi's own gallant soldiers, who had accepted commissions in the royal army, also had their share of abuse. In Cantoni, he asks, "Where are the seventy of Cairoli, the thousand of Marsala?" and answers, 66 To-day they are making love; they are crowding the cafés and the theatres; and many of them, thinking that they are serving the country, have put on a livery and serve a perverse government." The peas8 NO. 333.

VOL. LVI. ·

antry fail to please the author of The Thousand, who says, "they do not belong to us, but to the priests," and "there is no instance of one of them having been found among the volunteers." Doctors, professors, and scientific men also fall under the ban. In The Thousand, he asks in reference to parliament, "How can one have faith in five hundred individuals, most of whom are professors?" and he adds, in a note, that while many of his friends have belonged to this class," they have hitherto proved so bad in governments and parliaments that I despair of them." In Cantoni, not only scientific men, but science itself is denounced, and Garibaldi asks, "if learning and science are really any better than idiocy?" Having thus expressed his disapproval of nearly all classes of men, the aged misanthrope denounces the whole human race collectively as a "family of apes," and exclaims, "I cover my face with shame at belonging to this race of asses." In his last years Garibaldi praised no one except the cowardly assassins who tried to kill the Emperor of Germany, the King of Spain, and the King of Italy. It was in honor of these wretches that he wrote the most shameful of his many pitiable letters.

There was but one form of government which Garibaldi approved, and that was an elective despotism. "The liberty of a nation," he informs us in Clelia, "consists in the people choosing their own government, and this government should be dictatorial or presidential; that is to say, directed by one man. . . . The dictatorship should be limited to a fixed period," and "it must be guarded by popular rights and public opinion from becoming either excessive or hereditary." In The Thousand, the same idea is expressed: The dictator should have a guard of "ten lictors," and the country should be defended in time of war by "the armed nation." There should be no "written laws," but the

dictator should administer justice "in the public piazza." Judging from Garibaldi's own writings, there was no man living in Italy, except himself, whom he could have regarded as fit to be dictator. If any other member of the "family of apes" had been made dictator, and ruled without laws, he would have been made very uncomfortable by the daily denunciations which Garibaldi would have hurled at him.

What were the causes which worked this unhappy change in the simpleminded noble leader of The Thousand? Doubtless it was due to illness and disappointment working on a mind by no means strong. Garibaldi undoubtedly had a genius for war. He was an able tactician, as his dispositions made on the field of the Volturno showed. General Manteuffel, who was assuredly a competent critic, wrote of him: "The tactics of General Garibaldi were characterized by great rapidity in movements, by wise dispositions during the heat of battle, and by an energy and brilliancy of attack that depended in part on the moral qualities of his soldiers, but that also showed that the general never forgot for a single instant the objective point of a battle, which is to dislodge the enemy from his positions by a rapid, vigorous, and resolute attack; and Manteuffel also added, speaking of the campaign in the Vosges: "The successes of the general were partial, and had no results, but had General Bourbaki followed his counsels, the campaign of the Vosges would have been the most fortunate of those fought by French armies in 1870-71." Nevertheless, Garibaldi's real greatness was moral and not intellectual, and the pitiable follies which he committed whenever he attempted to meddle in matters of administration and statesmanship sufficiently proved his total lack of judgment outside of purely military affairs.

He was bitterly disappointed when the arrival of the Sardinian army at

Naples compelled him to abandon his intended march on Rome. He was

again disappointed when the royal government in 1862 interfered to put a stop to his mad attempt to make private war on Austria at Sarnico. He was again disappointed when Pallavicini captured his band of red-shirts on the heights of Aspromonte, and his last and heaviest disappointment was the defeat of Mentana. He could not comprehend that a citizen of Italy, however popular he might be, had no right to raise armies and declare war against Austria, France, or the Papal government, and he could not but feel exasperated against the monarchy which thwarted his wild expeditions, and the sober citizens who supported it.

During the last years of his life, Garibaldi was a martyr to rheumatism. He suffered incessant pain, and was for much of the time a helpless cripple. He lay on his bed and thought of the failure of his efforts to liberate Venice and Rome, and of the later successes of diplomacy and Prussian armies, which gave to Italy the coveted cities, and opened an era of peaceful and prosaic prosperity in which no place was found for the leader whose life had been spent in the camp of enthusiastic volunteers. The old man felt that he had lived too long; that Italy no longer needed him; and that there was nothing left for him but to endure his physical tortures, and the humiliations put upon him by those members of his family who lacked the good sense and honesty of his elder son Menotti. A strong-brained man might have grown stronger and better in the furnace of pain and disappointment, but it made Garibaldi a bitter misanthrope, a furious blasphemer of God and

man.

But the splendor of a unique career cannot be marred by a brief old age embittered by pain and disappointment. The Garibaldi who led the thousand from Marsala to Naples was an ideal hero, and

As a handy compendium, full of reliable and accurate information relating to the Anglo-Russian dispute, Mr. Charles Marvin's The Russians at the Gates of Herat1 is by far the best book of its kind out of many that have been offered to the reading public. As a polemic the volume will be perused with a certain amount of caution. That its author came specially qualified to his task must be admitted at the outset. Mr. Marvin is a zealous patriot, and possesses the rare impartiality, as he reminds us himself, of being "both a Russophile and a Russophobe." He has long been convinced of the blindness of English statesmen to the real objects of the Russian advance in Central Asia, and has for years devoted himself, in a field which a unanimous if tacit consent has wholly surrendered to him, to what he calls "the sacred task of safeguarding India from the menace from the north."

At one time Mr. Marvin was little more than a voice crying in the wilderness. The English public not only declined to share his apprehensions, but even doubted their sincerity. That ungrateful period of his agitation Mr. Marvin has outlived. Thanks to the spasmodic rapidity of recent Russian expansion in Central Asia, he has obtained a hearing in the Tory press and on the Tory platform, while his followers are now numerous enough to constitute a political party of themselves, were they not already members of the Tory organization. It is, in fact, impossible to overlook the circumstance that the influence Mr. Marvin has come to wield by his books and his speeches is distinct from that felt when a great orator rallies his countrymen to com

1 The Russians at the Gates of Herat. By CHARLES MARVIN. With Maps and Portraits. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1885.

mon resistance in some hour of national danger.

It is true that Mr. Marvin has done a certain amount of positive good. His pamphlets and writings have thrown a greater flood of light on the geography and politics of Central Asia than many wars could have contributed. He has quickened the languid parliamentary interest in "our Indian empire." Beyond this his agitation has been harmful. It has tended to create a chronic distrust of each other on the part of two great powers. While in the eyes of Europe it has unduly magnified the resources of the Czar, in the eyes of Russia it has unduly dwarfed the military capacity of Great Britain. The policy, advocated by Mr. Marvin, of haggling over particular lines and swearing by frontiers hard and fast has been a virtual confession and must have been regarded as such by the Russians—that once the approaches are in the hands of the northern power, once an advantage has been gained by that power in the delimitation of the frontier, India is irretrievably lost to the English. The idleness of supposing that the mere possession of a favorable boundary line by Russia places India at the mercy of "the northern menace is obvious; yet it is upon this supposition that the alarmists found their case. Hitherto they have but poorly sustained the thesis that Russia desires the possession of India. That the Czar needs India, which is the real point, has not even been asserted.

"

To fairly judge of her aims in Central Asia, Russia's movements must be viewed as a whole, and with a due regard to the larger aspects of racial and national development. It must first be remembered that Russian expansion is no modern phenomenon, but a secular process belonging to the whole period

of the life of the empire. Originally it seemed a mere recoil from the fiscal oppressions of the central authority; in modern times it has worn the guise of a military advance. Yet that it has been a true movement of the people must be apparent to those who have noticed the rapidity with which not only Siberia, but all parts of Russia's Asian territories are being colonized from her possessions in Europe. Unprecedented in history, owing as much to the extent of the field open to it as to the remarkable virility of the forces at work, presenting itself at one time as conquest and at another as peaceful absorption, Russian development has been as altruistic in some of its results as most of its aims have been constructively self-seeking. Thus in opening up vast tracts of land to the agricultural or commercial enterprise of her people, Russia has sheltered many an oasis of human vegetation from the shifting sands of barbaric anarchy and power. Descending with a gentle and irresistible gravitation into the Central Asian desert, her civilization has connected stagnant pool and poisoned lagoon with the healthy saline flood of

human progress. A high civilization like that of the English, the Tatar races could scarcely have assimilated: Russian culture, with its Asiatic foundations, had an appropriate and natural mission among the dwellers of the steppe.

That the Tatar should first modify the Russian and ultimately come to be taught by him is one of those natural adaptations of ends to great purposes that of itself seems to justify the manner in which the problem of ethnological elevation is being carried towards solution in Central Asia.

But Russian capacity for elevating semi-barbarous tribes in no sense implies Russian fitness for completing the work of civilization in India. Hence the danger of the natives welcoming the Czar with open arms is by no means great. Mr. Marvin lays emphasis on " the dis

affected elements," and hints at the ease with which a collapse of the English rule might be brought about. Does Mr. Marvin seriously believe that the thoughtful and highly intelligent Hindus are prepared to hand over the privileges they now enjoy under British tutelage in exchange for the spy system, the passport regulations, the press censure, the secret tribunals, the "administrative processes" of the "White Czar"? If Russia, as in one place Mr. Marvin admits, apparently to save himself from an untenable position, has no intention of holding and occupying India, and the fact is as notorious as he represents it to be, what probability is there of a rising to welcome an invader who has no intention of remaining in the country? And if Russia has no intention of holding and occupying India, why does Mr. Marvin declare it (page 125) to be the express aim of Russia "to drive us [the English] out of India" by means of a large force of troops previously concentrated in trans-Caspian territory?

The possibility of an invasion of India, no one need doubt. That there are officers in the Russian army who would willingly take part in such an enterprise is indisputable. The "military tradition" of English leader-writers' commonplace, that the cost of absorbing the Khanates is to be recouped in the spoils of Delhi and Lahore, may not yet be forgotten in the wild songs of the Cossack camp-fire along the Central Asian plain. But these things do not create a fixed policy of invasion cherished for whole centuries. If the Russians are warlike, they are the most realistic nation in Europe. In this question of India they have had plenty of time in which to count the cost, and there is no doubt that they have counted it. The idea of a serious attack upon India without the intention of carrying a possible success to its logical and military conclusion is not to be entertained.