Workingmen’s Benevolent Society of Naples
[Translation.]
Citizen Consul: The Workingmen’s Benevolent Society of Naples, in the midst of its exultation at the news of the triumph of a holy and benevolent [Page 455] cause, were suddenly struck with horror at the announcement of the cruel death of your excellent President, Abraham Lincoln.
Our grief is beyond expression; for he who can tell the anguish of his sorrow does not feel it deeply.
Deign to be the interpreter of our sentiments, citizen consul, to the noble and generous people whose welfare is so much desired by us. Tell them the sad tidings of their loss was brought to us upon the wings of the wind, and left us petrified with horror and indignation. Our only comfort was the thought that grand ideas, by the inscrutable commands of Providence, make their way through a thousand obstacles, and only gain their goal by passing through a sea of martyrdom and blood.
Liberty has grown and flourished in your land; and we are sure it has taken root so deeply in your soil, it will never be in want of generous souls to inherit the legacy of love for poor suffering human beings, an inheritance left to them by one who was their apostle and a martyr for them. They have been redeemed from the ignominious yoke of slavery—those poor men who were fastened to the sod, deprived of half the spirit that God had given them entire at their birth. The earth has now no race to till its soil with grievous sighs, and water it with servile sweat; but the men who mourned in their labors now work with joyous songs that sweeter toil and render the fruits of their labor more abundant.
Tell them we rejoice in this change—we who believe in progress and the indefinite development of benevolence, thanks to union and mutual assistance—and hope to see the working classes elevated to a more cheerful and respectable condition. We are glad that so much glory falls to the lot of a people who jealously guarded the light-house of liberty, a divinity banished from the Old World to find a refuge II the New, whose once vast, solitudes are now filled with inhabitants. Our eye have long been turned to that beacon, and are bent on it now, hoping to see that torrent of light shed its blessings upon this old and corrupt hemisphere.
We beg you, citizen consul, to convey these sentiments of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Society of Napes to the American people, and accept our sincere expressions of reverence and esteem.
The society committee:
{Liberty, labor,
and
Progress.}