“Rome of the CÆsars gave the Unity of Civilisation that force imposed on Europe. Rome of the Popes gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority imposed on a great part of the human race. Rome of the People will give, when you Italians are nobler than you are now, a Unity of civilisation accepted by the free consent of the nations for Humanity.” In this magnificent synthesis, written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission of Rome to the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than Lazzaretti’s, whose story is one of Life’s many plagiarisms of the Palestinian original, complete even to martyrdom and an awaited Resurrection. Yet Mazzini shared with the peasant-prophet of Monte Amiata the assurance of a not distant Millennium to be inaugurated by his followers. ’Twas a blindness due to standing in his own white light. The simplest observation of the facts reveals that humanity is only at its alphabet, that we are living in the mere infancy of our planet’s human history, in a Dark Age to which the millennial century will look back with incredulity, though a few Gissings will be anxious to live in it. The overwhelming majority of mankind to-day abides religiously in primitive autocosms, which have little resemblance to the cosmos as it is, and every variety of savagery from African cannibalism to European rubber-hunting and American negro-lynching is still in vogue. Half the land of the globe is still in undisturbed possession of our animal and insect inferiors. Canada, Australia and South America show a few human figures dotting the endless spaces—in Matto Grosso in Brazil a hundred thousand people occupy half a million square miles, in Patagonia each man may have a San Marino Republic to himself, in Alaska the population of a small English country town is spread over six hundred thousand square miles. Even the United States, which are sixty times as large as England, have only double its population. In Asia, the cradle of so-called civilisation, there are still nomad populations, and large tracts, as of Arabia and Tibet, have never been penetrated by the foot of an explorer. The bulk of Africa as of Russia—which is half Europe plus half Asia—is still given over to barbarism. One third of the whole human race is packed into China, a land where torture is still legal. Decidedly there is plenty of scope for “the mission of Rome,” nor need the lover of the picturesque yet apprehend the monotony of the Millennium, as, girdled by stars and infinities, crossed by the tails of comets, rent and seamed by earthquakes, our planet continues its amazing adventure.