Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

E >> Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9

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When Garibaldi reached the house, the lady was on the veranda--she
seemed to be expecting him. She was sad, pale, serious, and dressed in
blue. She called her husband out and introduced him, and he and
Garibaldi shook hands. Garibaldi tried to talk with him about Mazzini,
but as near as Garibaldi could guess the rancher had never heard the
name.

The man was fully twenty years older than his wife, and Garibaldi
guessed, from his looks, that his wealth was an inheritance, not an
accumulation. A little further talk and the facts developed as
Garibaldi had suspected--the man was a degenerate scion of Spanish
aristocracy. He seemed too stupid or too indifferent to know who his
visitor was, or what he stood for. He brought out strong drink and
then suggested cards as a diversion.

Garibaldi did not like the looks of the man, and courteously declined
his pasteboard suggestions. All the time the young woman stood a
little way off and looked wistfully at the red-shirted soldier. Her
lips moved in pantomime--she was trying to say something to him.
Garibaldi talked about nothing, laughed aloud, and requested his host
to mix him a drink. While the man was busy at the sideboard, Garibaldi
moved carelessly toward the woman and caught her whispered words, "Do
not drink--go at once--he has sent for help--the place will be
surrounded in half an hour--go, I implore you!"

And all the time Garibaldi talked garrulously and sauntered around the
room. He took up the glass the man handed him, and raising it to his
lips, did not drink--but tossed the contents full into the face of the
person who had prepared the mixture. The man coughed, sputtered, swore
and Garibaldi backed to the door, one hand on a pistol at his belt. He
reached the veranda and looked for his horse. The horse was gone!
Garibaldi sprang back into the house, covering the royalist with his
pistol. "My horse, or you die--order my horse brought to the door!"
The man protested, begged, swore he knew nothing about the horse.
"I'll fetch your horse!" called the woman, and running around the
house brought the horse from a thicket, where it had evidently been
led by some servant. Again Garibaldi backed out of the house,
requesting the man to follow, which he obediently did at a distance of
five paces, his hands high in the air, as if in blessing. With pistol
still in hand Garibaldi mounted the horse, and as he did so the little
lady moaned, "He may kill me for this, but I would do it again--for
you!" Garibaldi kicked his right foot out of the stirrup, and held out
his hand. The lady without the slightest hesitation placed her foot in
the empty stirrup and leaped lightly up behind. As she did so
Garibaldi fired two shots well over the head of the paralyzed husband
of his late wife, and gave his horse the spurs. In a minute horse and
riders, two, were more than a quarter of a mile away over the plain,
the lady seated safely behind, her arms gently but surely enfolding
the red shirt. As they passed over a ridge they looked back, and there
stood the degenerate scion of royalty, his hands high above his head.
He had forgotten to take them down.

* * * * *

But should any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too
melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the
Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written
by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, Anita, for it was she, told the tale
to Madame Brabante, who in turn gave the facts to Margaret Fuller
Ossoli.

We do not know Anita's last name. When she placed her foot in the
stirrup of Garibaldi's saddle, she gave herself to him, body, mind and
spirit, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, through evil
and good report, forever. By that act she left the past behind: even
the name "Anita" was a name that Garibaldi gave her, and if he ever
knew the story of her life before they met, he never thought it worth
while to mention it. Probably he did not care--life for both of them
really dated from the day they met. He was thirty-one, she was twenty-
two.

When Garibaldi rode into camp, with the lady on the crupper, the six
red-shirted ones in waiting were not surprised. They were never
surprised at anything their master did. They believed in him as they
believed in God--only more so. And so they asked no questions--for
Garibaldi was one of the men that common men never interrogated.

"Break camp!" was the order, and in ten minutes they were on the
march, two men trailing a mile behind as a rear-guard. At midnight
they were safely aboard the good ship "Mazzini."

Anita proved herself a worthy mate for Garibaldi. She was the first
woman to wear a Garibaldi waist, although for the most part she wore
men's clothes, with two pistols in her belt and a rifle in her hands,
and wherever Joseph went, there went Anita. She was his servant, his
slave, his comrade, his wife. Read his autobiography and you will find
how lasting, loyal and tender his devotion was toward her. He was a
fatalist--a man without fear--and many times when surrounded by an
overwhelming foe, he simply bided his time and fought his way through
to safety. "When other men are ready to surrender, I hold fast," he
said. When once cut off by four soldiers of the enemy, and they
approached with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed, he drew his sword
and shouted, "I am Garibaldi--you are my prisoners!" and down went the
rifles.

At another time he and Anita were caught by a band of forty troopers
in a log cabin in a clearing. They flung open the door, and standing,
one on each side, showed only the long glittering point of a spear
across the doorway. The enemy demanded a parley, but finally, not
knowing the number of persons inside, and realizing that a charge
meant death for two of the company, they withdrew. Silence and the
unknown are the only things really terrible.

And so Joseph and Anita lived and loved and fought, and incidentally
studied the few books which they possessed, and at odd times wrote
poetry. A year after that first ride on the back of the horse that
carried double, a son was born to them. A contemporary tells of seeing
Anita riding horseback, the chubby babe carried like a papoose,
looking out wonderingly at the world, which for him was just six
months old. In three years this baby boy was riding behind his mother
on the crupper, and another baby had come to do the papoose act.

So passed eight years of adventure by land and sea, in wood and vale,
on mountain and plain. Garibaldi had given Brazil all the freedom she
deserved--all she knew how to use. He was crowned as "The Hero of
Montevideo," and could have taken a place high in the councils of the
State. But across the sea he heard the rumble of battle going on in
his beloved fatherland, and the dream of a United Italy was still
vivid in his mind, and of course, vivid, too, in the mind of Anita. So
they sailed away, taking with them a hundred of their loyal, loving
men in the red shirts, who refused to be left behind. Arriving in
Italy, Garibaldi went at once to the home of his mother, who had
mourned him as lost and now received him as one risen from the dead.
Anita and the children appealed to the good woman, and her heart went
out to them, as if, indeed, they were all her own, loved into life.

When all at once, remembering her son's indifference for the Church,
she asked when and where they were married, Joseph looked at Anita,
and Anita looked at Joseph, and then they acknowledged that they had
only been married by a sailor, who had said the ceremony as he
remembered it, adding, "And may God have mercy on your souls." Hastily
the mother packed them off to a priest, who administered the right of
extreme marital unction, and charged them double fee on account of
their carelessness. They paid the fee, laughing inwardly, but glad to
relieve the mother of her qualms.

The children were left in the care of the grandmother, and Joseph and
Anita went forth to enlist under the banner of Charles Albert of
Piedmont and make war on superstition and the Pope.

* * * * *

Charles Albert had been a staunch supporter of the very conditions
against which the striplings, Joseph Mazzini and Joseph Garibaldi, had
made war twenty years previous. But nations, like men, sometimes have
experiences that make them grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and
bounds. The writings of Mazzini had been constantly distributed and
circulated, and the fact that they were tabued by the government added
to the joys of the illicit. A well-defined wave of republicanism swept
the land. Those sensitive to ideas awoke, like lilacs sensitive to the
breath of May.

King Charles Albert, of all the Italian kinglets, alone guessed the
temper of his people, and issued to them a constitution with the right
of franchise. This meant war upon the Austrian protectorate and the
Pope.

Volunteers from the other provinces flocked to the standard of
Piedmont. And about this time it was that Garibaldi and Anita offered
their services to the insurgent army. Charles Albert feared his old-
time foe, for Garibaldi was of a nature that detested compromise, and
the Piedmontese could not understand how he was willing to fight under
the banner of a king, even a king who had forsworn tyranny and reform.
But other provinces were seceding, and erelong Joseph Garibaldi found
himself at the head of a thousand Neapolitans, all clad in red shirts,
well armed, carrying banners upon which were sentiments like these:
"Man was made to be free!" "Down with priest and Pope!" and "Let us
own ourselves!"

The reformer paints things with a broom: exaggeration indeed is a
necessary part of his equipment. Garibaldi could not understand that
Italy was not ripe for a simple religion of love for wife, child and
neighbor, paying one's debts, and earning one's daily bread by honest
toil. He could not appreciate that the many really did not care for
either political or mental freedom, much preferring mendicancy to
work, and quite willing to delegate their thinking to a college of
cardinals. And so he waged his earnest fight, with a faith as full and
complete as the faith that actuated Old John Brown, whose soul goes
marching on.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, some of the provinces had capitulated
and joined forces with France and Austria, the insurgent leaders
having been promised places in the excise--the compromise hastened no
doubt by cold and hunger. Garibaldi's own force was much reduced and
he took to the mountains, abandoning his cavalry equipment. Orders
were out that he, or any of his band, caught should be shot, without
trial, by fours in presence of their companions and the army. Thirty
of his men and four of his best officers had been so executed.

He and Anita were surrounded and had taken refuge in a cornfield.
Anita was wounded and delirious with thirst and fever. A Garibaldian
had volunteered to go for water across an open field. Garibaldi
watched the man and saw him shot down by French soldiers in ambush. He
remained, knowing the enemy would soon come out of hiding to rob the
dead. Garibaldi waited close beside the body of his dead companion,
and killed with his own hands the man who had done the deed.

He got the water and carried it back to Anita in the cornfield. But
she now had no need of it--she was dead. Garibaldi remained by the
body until nightfall, and then carried it to the house of a peasant
nearby. He made the peasant woman understand that the dead was a
woman, a mother, like herself, and must be given decent burial--the
woman understood.

The torches of the enemy could be seen near at hand, trailing
Garibaldi from the cornfield to the house. He covered the beloved form
with his scarf, and giving the peasant woman his purse, hurried forth
barely in time to elude the pursuers. He made his way alone to the
seashore and found refuge in Venice.

There was a price upon his head, but still there were many throughout
Italy from Milan to Sicily who spoke of him as patriot and savior.

As a diplomatic move Rome relented, and Garibaldi was allowed to move
to Caprera, a rocky island ten miles from the coast. Here he lived
with his mother and children, writing, studying, farming; lived as
Victor Hugo lived at Guernsey, only without the wealth, but in touch
with Mazzini, exiled in London.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Garibaldi came to New York and
remained nearly two years. He went into business under an assumed name
and accumulated two thousand dollars, so the little business must have
prospered.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Naples was again in revolt, and
Garibaldi heard the trumpets of battle from afar. He returned to
Italy, and with his two thousand dollars bought the Island of Caprera,
that his children might be insured a home, and also, possibly, to
convince the government at Rome that he had come to stay.

Twice he left his beloved Caprera to work out his great dream of a
United Italy. He fought with troops that had no commissary; battled
with superstition; and saw his name belittled by those he sought to
serve. Finally he entered Naples at the head of an army and was
proclaimed Dictator. But statesmanship is business; and business is to
organize and discipline, and use the forces of monotonous peace.
Garibaldi expected too much: he wanted to see the Church uprooted, the
princes sent on their way, and the people supreme. This was not to be.
He did, however, live to see the Pope relinquish his temporal power,
and a United Italy, but with Victor Emmanuel, son of Charles Albert,
as king. The people still wanted a king, and they wanted their Church,
even though an emasculated one.

In Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Garibaldi and his son, the firstborn of
Anita, offered their services to Gambetta and enlisted with France to
fight against Germany. And yet Garibaldi had nothing against Germany,
and had fought France in many a tedious campaign, but he thought that
France now stood opposed to papal power, while Germany sympathized
with it.

After the war Garibaldi was elected to the Italian Parliament, and
performed, at least, one good piece of work: he succeeded in getting
an appropriation to erect a statue of Bruno upon the exact spot where
this lover of truth and right was burned alive, by order of the Pope,
for teaching that the earth revolved.

In September, Nineteen Hundred Four, the World's Free-Thought
Convention was held in Rome, and a committee was appointed to decorate
the statue of Bruno and hold at its base a memorial meeting. The
principal address was by Ernst Haeckel. In the course of his remarks
Haeckel said:

We meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of
truth. We need to express, each in his own way, unfettered and
unvexed by coercion and fear of suppression, the things we believe
are right and just and beautiful, and should be said. We know but
little, but in this we are agreed--that there is no final, arbitrary
and dogmatic truth. Truth is a point of view; as we know more and
comprehend more, we will express more. Man has today freedom to
breathe, freedom to study, freedom to grow, such as he never before
had since time began. Man has today more faith than he ever had
before--more faith in himself, more faith in his fellows. Thinking,
like the physical act of walking, is a matter of faith. For the
privilege of being here today, in this place, expressing what we
think, we are under special obligations to one man, and the entire
world of progress is under obligation to this man--and that man is
Garibaldi.

Garibaldi passed peacefully away at his beloved Caprera in Eighteen
Hundred Eighty-two, aged seventy-five, gently ministered to by his
children and grandchildren. The insurance-company that might have
insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the
transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven
battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal
encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played
their part. Behold the irony of Fate!

No man was ever more detested, hated, feared--no man was ever better
loved. That he was a sternly honest, sincere man, singularly pure in
motive and abstemious in habit, even his bitterest enemies do not
dispute. If Savonarola was God-intoxicated, Garibaldi was freedom-
mad.

He refused bribes, declined honors, put aside titles, and died as
penniless as he was born, and as he had lived. His life was
consecrated to one thing--Liberty.

RICHARD COBDEN

What I contend is that England is today so situated in every
particular of her domestic and foreign circumstances that, by
leaving other governments to settle their own business and fight out
their own quarrels, and by attending to the vast and difficult
affairs of her own enormous realm, and the condition of her people,
she will not only be setting the world an example of noble morality,
which no other nation is so happily free to set, but she will be
following the very course which the maintenance of her own greatness
most imperatively demands. It is precisely because Great Britain is
so strong in resources, in courage, in institutions, in geographical
position, that she can, before all other European powers, afford to
be moral, and to set the example of a mighty nation walking in the
paths of justice and peace.
--_Cobden_

[Illustration: Richard Cobden]

Richard Cobden never had any chance in life. He was born in an obscure
hamlet of West Sussex, England, in Eighteen Hundred Four. His father
was a poor farmer, who lost his freehold and died at the top, whipped
out, discouraged, when the lad was ten years old. Richard Cobden
became a porter, a clerk, a traveling salesman, a mill-owner, a member
of parliament, an economist, a humanitarian, a statesman, a reformer.
Up to his thirteenth year he was chiefly interested in the laudable
task of making a living--getting on in the world. During that year,
and seemingly all at once and nothing first, just as bubbles do when
they burst, he beheld the problem of business from the broad vantage-
ground of humanitarianism. But he did not burst, for his dreams were
spun out of life's realities, and today are coming true; in fact, many
of them came true in his own time. Richard Cobden ceased to be
provincial and became universal.

He saw that commerce, instead of being merely a clutch for personal
gain, was the chief factor in civilization. He realized that we are
educated through our efforts to get food and clothing; and therefore
the man who ministers to the material wants of humanity is really the
true priest. The development of every animal has come about through
its love-emotions and its struggle to exist.

A factory in a town changes every person in the town, mentally and
physically. This being true, does not the management of this factory
call for men of heart and soul--broad-minded, generous, firm in the
right? Then every factory is influenced by the laws of the land, and
each country is influenced by the laws of other countries, since most
countries that are engaged in manufacturing find a market abroad.

Cobden set himself to inquire into the causes of discontent and
failure, of progress and prosperity. And not content merely to
philosophize, he carried his theories into his own enterprises.

Many of our modern business betterments seem to have had their rise in
the restless, prophetic brain of Richard Cobden. He of all men sought
to make commerce a science, and business a fine art. The world moves
slowly.

It is only a few years ago that we in America thought to have in our
President's Cabinet a Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

Listen to what Cobden wrote in Eighteen Hundred Forty-three:

In the close council of every king, or president, or prince, should
be a man of affairs whose life is devoted to commerce and labor, and
the needs and requirements of peace. His work is of far greater
moment than that of men-of-war. Battleships ever form a suggestion
for their use, and as long as we have armies, men will kill, fight
and destroy. Soldiers who do not want to fight are not of this
earth. Prepare for war and war will come. When government gives to
the arts of peace the same thought and attention that it gives to
the arts of war, we will have peace on earth and good-will among
men. But so long as the soldier takes precedence of the businessman
in the political courts of the world, famine, death, disease and
want will crouch at our doors. Commerce is production, war is
destruction. The laws of production and distribution must and will
be made a science; and then and not until then will happiness come
to mankind and this earth serve as a pattern for the paradise of
another life, instead of being a pandemonium.

* * * * *

Emerson defines commerce as carrying things from where they are
plentiful to where they are needed. Business is that field of human
endeavor which undertakes to supply the materials to humanity that
life demands.

The clergy are our spiritual advisers, preparing us for a pleasant and
easy place in another world. The lawyers advise us on legal themes--
showing us how to obey the law, or else evade it, and they protect us
from lawyers. The doctors look after us when disease attacks our
bodies--or when we think it does.

We used to talk about "The Three Learned Professions"; if we use the
phrase now, it is only in a Pickwickian sense, for we realize that
there are at present fifty-seven varieties of learned men.

The greatest and most important of all the professions is that of
Commerce, or Business. Medicine and law have their specialties--a
dozen each--but business has ten thousand specialties, or divisions.

So important do we now recognize business, or this ministering to the
material wants of humanity, that theology has shifted its ground, and
within a few years has declared that to eat rightly, dress rightly,
and work rightly are the fittest preparation for a life to come.

The best lawyers now are businessmen, and their work is to keep the
commercial craft in a safe channel, where it will not split on the
rocks of litigation nor founder in the shallows of misunderstanding.
Every lawyer will tell you this, "To make money you must satisfy your
customers."

The greatest change in business came with the one-price system.

The old idea was for the seller to get as much as he possibly could
for everything he sold. Short weight, short count, and inferiority in
quality were considered quite proper and right, and when you bought a
dressed turkey from a farmer, if you did not discover the stone inside
the turkey when you weighed it and paid for it, there was no redress.
The laugh was on you. And moreover a legal maxim--caveat emptor, "Let
the buyer beware"--made cheating legally safe.

Dealers in clothing guaranteed neither fit nor quality, and anything
you paid for, once wrapped up and in your hands, was yours beyond
recall--"Business is business," was a maxim that covered many sins.

A few hundred years ago business was transacted mostly through fairs
and ships, and by pedlers. Your merchant of that time was a
peripatetic rogue who reduced prevarication to a system.

The booth gradually evolved into a store, with the methods and customs
of the irresponsible keeper intact: the men cheated their neighbors
and chuckled in glee until their neighbors cheated them, which, of
course, they did. Then they cursed each other, began again, and did it
all over. John Quincy Adams tells of a certain deacon who kept a store
near Boston, who always added in the year 1775, at the top of the
column, as seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents.

The amount of misery, grief, disappointment, shame, distress, woe,
suspicion and hate caused by a system which wrapped up one thing when
the buyer expected another, and took advantage of his innocence and
ignorance as to quality and value, can not be computed in figures.
Suffice it to say that duplicity in trade has had to go. The self-
preservation of the race demanded honesty, square dealing, one price
to all. The change came only after a struggle, and we are not quite
sure of the one-price deal yet.

But we have gotten thus far: that the man who cheats in trade is tabu.
Honesty as a business asset is fully recognized. If you would succeed
in business you can not afford to sell a man something he does not
want; neither can you afford to disappoint him in quality, any more
than in count. Other things being equal, the merchant who has the most
friends will make the most money. Our enemies will not deal with us.
To make a sale and acquire an enemy is poor policy. To a pedler or a
man who ran a booth at a bazaar or fair, it was "get your money now or
never." Buyer and seller were at war. One transaction and they never
met again. The air was full of hate and suspicion, and the savage
propensity of physical destruction was refined to a point where
hypocrisy and untruth took the place of violence--the buyer was as bad
as the seller: if he could buy below cost he boasted of it. To catch a
merchant who had to have money was glorious--we smote him hip and
thigh! Later, we discovered that being strangers he took us in.

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