‘You know nothing of my motive for leaving Italy,' he began, ‘except that it was for political reasons. If I had been driven to this country by the persecution of my government, I should not have kept those reasons a secret from you or from any one. I *It is only right to mention here, that I repeat Pesca's statement to me, with the careful suppressions and alterations which the serious nature of the subject and my own sense of duty to my friend demand. My first and last concealments from the reader are those which caution renders absolutely necessary in this portion of the narrative. have concealed them because no government authority has pronounced the sentence of my exile. You have heard, Walter, of the political societies that are hidden in every great city on the continent of Europe? To one of those societies I belonged in Italy -- and belong still in England. When I came to this country, I came by the direction of my chief. I was over-zealous in my younger time --
I ran the risk of compromising myself and others. For those reasons I was ordered to emigrate to England and to wait. I emigrated -- I have waited -- I wait still. Tomorrow I may be called away -- ten years hence I may be called away. It is all one to me -- I am here, I support myself by teaching, and I wait. I violate no oath (you shall hear why presently) in making my confidence complete by telling you the name of the society to which I belong. All I do is to put my life in your hands. If what I say to you now is ever known by others to have passed my lips, as certainly as we two sit here, I am a dead man.'
He whispered the next words in my ear. I keep the secret which he thus communicated. The society to which he belonged will be sufficiently individualised for the purpose of these pages, if I call it ‘The Brotherhood', on the few occasions when any reference to the subject will be needed in this place.
‘The object of the Brotherhood,' pesca went on, ‘is, briefly, the object of other political societies of the same sort -- the destruction of tyranny and the assertion of the rights of the people. The principles of the Brotherhood are two. So long as a man's life is useful, or even harmless only, he has the right to enjoy it. But, if his life inflicts injury on the well-being of his fellow-men, from that moment he forfeits the right, and it is not only no crime, but a positive merit, to deprive him of it. It is not for me to say in what frightful circumstances of oppression and suffering this society took its rise. It is not for you to say -- you Englishmen, who have conquered your freedom so long ago, that you have conveniently forgotten what blood you shed, and what extremities you proceeded to in the conquering -- it is not for you to say how far the worst of all exasperations may, or may not, carry the maddened men of an enslaved nation. The iron that has entered into our souls has gone too deep for you to find it. Leave the refugee alone! Laugh at him, distrust him, open your eyes in wonder at that secret self which smoulders in him, sometimes under the every-day respectability and tranquillity of a man like me -- sometimes under the grinding poverty, the fierce squalor, of men less lucky, less pliable, less patient than I am -- but judge us not! In the time of your first Charles you might have done us justice -- the long luxury of your own freedom has made you incapable of doing us justice now.'
All the deepest feelings of his nature seemed to force themselves to the surface in those words -- all his heart was poured out to me for the first time in our lives -- but still his voice never rose, still his dread of the terrible revelation he was making to me never left him.
‘So far,' he resumed, ‘you think the society like other societies. Its object (in your English opinion) is anarchy and revolution. It takes the life of a bad king or a bad minister, as if the one and the other were dangerous wild beasts to be shot at the first opportunity. I grant you this. But the laws of the Brotherhood are the laws of no other political society on the face of the earth. The members are not known to one another.
