The news from Italy was of a peculiar interest, letters were 
received from a number of Italian cities, amongst whom were 
Turin, Milan, Ravenna, and Girgenti. These confirmed in every 
respect the immense strides with which the Association was 
advancing in Italy. The working-classes, in the towns at least, were 
rapidly abandoning Mazzini, whose denunciations of the Interna- 
tional had no effect whatever upon the masses.* But Mazzini’s 
denunciations had produced one good effect; they had caused 
Garibaldi, not only to pronounce himself entirely in favour of our 
Association, but also, on this very question, to come to an open 
rupture with Mazzini. In a long letter addressed to M. Petroni,° a 
Sardinian lawyer, who has been since elected president of the 
Italian Working Men’s Congress,” now sitting at Rome, Garibaldi 
expresses his indignation that the Mazzinians should venture to 
speak of him as of an old fool, who always had done what ever the 
men surrounding him, his satellites and flatterers, had persuaded 
him to do. Who were these satellites, he asks? Were they the men 
of his staff that came with him from South America in 1848, those 
he found at Rome in ’49, or those of his staff of ’59 and ’60, or 
those who fought with him recently against the Prussians? ** If so, 
he maintains they were men whose names will for ever live in the 
memory of grateful Italy. But let them re-enter these satellites and 
flatterers. 

“T repeat it, you have not even the merit of originality, when you dig up again 
my satellites and flatterers have always led that grey-headed baby from Nice by the 
nose. And while you, Petroni, were suffering for eighteen years in the prisons of 
the Inquisition, the people of your sect (the Mazzinians) were the very men accused 
by the Royalists, of being my satellites and followers. Read all the dynastic trash 
published especially since 1860, and there you will find Garibaldi might be good 
for something if he had not the misfortune of being led by Mazzini, and to be 
surrounded by the Mazzinians. This is all false, and you may ask those that have 
known me more closely and more intimately, whether they ever found a man more 
obstinate than myself when I had made up my mind to do something which I had 
recognised to be right. Ask Mazzini himself, whether he has found me to be easily 
persuaded whenever he attempted to draw me over to some of his impracticable 
realities. Ask Mazzini whether the origin of our disagreement is not this, that, in 
1848, I told him he was doing wrong in holding back in the city, under one pretext 
or another, the youth of Milan, while our army was fighting the enemy on the 
Mincio. And Mazzini is a man who never forgives if any one touches his 

infallibility.” 

Garibaldi then states that Mazzini, in 1860, did everything in his 
power to frustrate and to render abortive the general’s expedition 
to Sicily, which ended in the unification of Italy; that when 
Mazzini heard of Garibaldi’s success, he insisted upon the latter 
proclaiming the Republic in Italy, a thing absurd and _ utterly 
foolish under the circumstances, and he? finally reproaches “the 
great exile, whom everybody knew to be in Italy”, with his 
meanness in bespattering the fallen of Paris,” the only men who in 
this time of tyranny, of lies, of cowardice and degradation have 
waved high, even while dying, the sacred banner of rights and 
justice. He continues, 

“You cry anathema upon Paris, because Paris destroyed the Vend6éme Column 
and the house of Thiers. Have you ever seen a whole village destroyed by the 
flames for having given shelter to a volunteer, or a franc-tireur? And that not only 
in France, the same in Lombardy, in Venetia. As to the palaces set fire to in Paris 
by petroleum, let them ask the priests who, from their intimate acquaintance with 
the hell-fire about which they preach, ought to be good judges, what difference 
there is between petroleum fire and those fires which the Austrians lit in order to 
burn down the villages in Lombardy and Venetia, when those countries were still 
under the yoke of the men who shot Ugo Bassi, Ciceruacchio and his two sons, and 
thousands of Italians who committed the sacrilege of demanding a free Rome and 
a free Italy. 

“When the light of day shall once have dispersed the darkness which covers 
Paris, I hope that you, my friend, will be more indulgent for the acts caused by the 
desperate situation of a people which, certainly, was badly led, as it generally 
happens to nations, who allow themselves to be allured by the phraseology of the 
doctrinaires, but who, in substance, fought heroically for their rights. The detractors 

of Paris may say what they like, they will never succeed in proving that a few 
miscreants and foreigners—as they said of us in Rome in 1849—have resisted for 
three months against a grand army, backed as it was by the most potent armies of 
Prussia. 

“And the International? What need is there to attack an Association almost 
without knowing it? Is that Association not an emanation of the abnormal state of 
society all over the world? A society where the many have to slave for bare 
subsistence, and where the few, by lies and by force, appropriate the greater 
portion of the produce of the many, without having earned it by the sweat of their 
brow, must not such a society excite the discontent, and the vengeance of the 
suffering masses. 

“TI wish that the International should not fare as did the people of Paris—that is 
to allow itself to be circumvented by the concoctors of doctrines which would drive 
it to exaggerations, and finally to ridicule; but that it should well study, before 
trusting them, the character of the men who are to lead it on the path of moral 
and material improvement.” 

He returns for a moment to Mazzini, 

“Mazzini and I, we are both old; but no one speaks of reconciliation between 
him and me. Infallible people die, but they do not bend. Reconciliation with 
Mazzini? there is only one possible way for it—to obey him; and of that I do not 
feel myself capable.” 

And finally the old soldier proves by referring to his past, that 
he has always been a true International, that he has fought for 
liberty everywhere and anywhere, first in South America, then 
offering his services to the Pope* (aye, even to the Pope, when he 
played the liberal), then under Victor Emmanuel, lastly in France, 
under Trochu and Jules Favre—and he concludes, 

“I and the youth of Italy are ready to serve Italy, also side by side with you, the 
Mazzinians, if it should be necessary.” 

This crowning letter of Garibaldi’s, coming as it does after a 
number of others, in which he has plainly expressed his 
sympathies for the International, but abstained from speaking 
plainly as to Mazzini, has had an immense effect in Italy, and will 
induce many recruits to rally round our banner. 

It was also announced that a full report of the working men’s 
Congress at Rome would be laid before the next meeting of the 
Council.