The list of his works fills nearly ten pages of the catalogue of the British Museum.
Under other circumstances his pen would have brought him ample subsistence, if not affluence. Much was written without payment, as a means of obtaining attention to Italy. It was thus he won his first friends in England.
No one could say of Mazzini that he was a foreigner and did not understand us, or that the case he put was defective through not understanding our language. The _Saturday Review_, which agreed with nobody, said, on reading Mazzini's "Letter to Louis Napoleon," which was written in English, "The man can write." The finest State papers seen in Europe for generations were those which Mazzini, when a Triumvir in Rome, wrote--notably those to De Tocqueville. De Tocqueville had a great name for political literature, but his icy mystifications melted away under Mazzini's fiery pen of principle, passion, and truth. This wandering, homeless, penniless, obscure refugee was a match for kings.
Some day a publisher of insight will bring out a cheap edition of the five volumes of his works, issued by S. King and Co., 1867, and "dedicated to the working classes" by P. A. Taylor, which cost him £500, few then caring for them. Mrs. Emilie Ashurst Venturi was the translator of the five volumes, which were all revised by Mazzini. The reader therefore can trust the text.
Mazzini did me the honour of presenting to me his volume on the "Duties of Man," with this inscription of reserve: "To my friend, G. J. Holyoake, with a very faint hope." Words delicate, self-respecting and suggestive. It was hard for me, with my convictions, to accept his great formula, "God and the People." It was a great regret to me that I could not use the words. They were honest on the lips of Mazzini. But I had seen that in human danger Providence procrastinates. No peril stirs it, no prayer quickens its action. Men perish as they supplicate. In danger the people must trust in themselves.
Thinking as I did, I could not say or pretend otherwise.
Mazzini one day said to me, "A public man is often bound by his past. His repute for opinions he has maintained act as a restraint upon avowing others of a converse nature." This feeling never had influence over me. Any one who has convictions ought to maintain a consistency between what he believes, and what he says and does. But to maintain to-day the opinions of former years, when you have ceased to feel them true, is a false, foolish, even a criminal consistency. To conceal the change, if it concerns others to know it, is dishonest if it is misleading any persons you may have influenced. The test, to me, of the truth of any view I hold, is that, I can state it and dare the judgment of others to confute it. Had I new views--theistical or otherwise--that I could avow with this confidence, I should have the same pleasure in stating them as I ever had in stating my former ones. When I look back upon opinions I published long years ago, I am surprised at the continuity of conviction which, without care or thought on my part, has remained with me. In stating my opinions I have made many changes. Schiller truly says that "Toleration is only possible to men of large information." As I came to know more I have been more considerate towards the views, or errors, or mistakes of others, and have striven to be more accurate in my own statement of them, and more fair towards adversaries. That is all. Mazzini understood this, and did not regard as perversity the prohibition of conscience.