Mazzini was proud of these early days when he looked back upon them later. He wrote, "We had no office, no helpers. All day, and a great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles and letters, getting information from travelers, enlisting seamen, folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to save the expense of distributing papers. We lived as equals and brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence. The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the future." It was Mazzini's period of boundless hope.
Much of this hope throbbed through the literature that the small Marseilles press scattered throughout Europe, men were in such a state of unrest that the burning words became to them a prophetic writing on the wall. In a hundred ways the contraband pamphlets were smuggled across frontiers, all classes sent assurances of support and aid to the young men in Marseilles, everywhere lodges of "Young Italy" were started, and local editors scattered Mazzini's doctrines through their immediate territories. Priests, attracted by the strong religious tenor, professional and business men, many of the nobility even joined the new movement. Garibaldi, a young officer in the Genoese merchant service, Gioberti, then a teacher at Vercelli, Ruffini, and his fellow-conspirators working under the very shadow of destruction at Genoa, enrolled under the new standard of "God and the People." The old members of the Carbonari, the followers of Buonarotti and his "veri Italiani" joined the ranks, within two years "Young Italy" counted its members by the tens of thousands. Not since the era of the great Crusades had there been any simultaneous rising to compare with it.
All men who hoped for the coming of a united Italy looked towards Piedmont as the state by which the first step must be taken. Piedmont had great military traditions. It supported an efficient army, it was so situated that it held the key of entrance into Lombardy, and had the Alps and the Apennines as a base of retreat. In Piedmont there was moreover an intense national feeling, the House of Savoy was deeply rooted in the affections of the people, and almost alone among the Italian sovereignties that House was practically indigenous to the soil. In Charles Albert Piedmont had just received a king who was an intense nationalist, to whom the name of "Italia" was sacred, and who, at certain times, seems to have felt that he was destined to drive the foreigner beyond the Alps. He was no liberal, both his nature and his priestly advisers counseled him against revolutionary measures, he had not the sanguine temper of the leader, he was more the theorist than the actor. Yet with all his temperamental defects the men of the new generation looked on him as a possible saviour, he had given countenance to the Carbonari in his youth, and had led the conspirators of 1821 to believe that he would side with them in any war for Lombard independence. He had not given such aid as they expected, but he was still the one sovereign to whom "Young Italy" could look with any measure of hope. Mazzini was never an ardent believer in monarchies, but now, when his new party was growing with tremendous leaps and bounds, he felt that even the leadership of a king was better than no leadership at all. He was ready at this time to sacrifice republicanism for nationalism; how far he would then have followed a monarchy, if successful, is a difficult question to decide. He was so much in earnest that he could not always critically balance the means and the end.