1815, then, the Romagnolese have merely demanded their old patent rights when they spoke of "liberties, and guarantees;" they were Catholics under the supremacy of the Pope, when they governed themselves during four hundred years: they revolted, not as Catholics, but as citizens, and ought not to have been tried by the dogma, but by the law of nations and history. The Papal government, however, broke its word and treaties, and placed itself beyond the pale of the law.

When the French republic burst victoriously into Italy, and when Bonaparte had crushed the Austrians at Arcole, Rivoli, and La Favorita, Pope Pius VI. hurried to moderate the wrath of the victor by the peace of Tolentino; he surrendered Avignon and the country of the Venaissin in France, gave up Bologna, Ferrara, &c., paid 30,000,000 lire, and sacrificed many invaluable objects of art. The republic "retroceded" the Legations to the Trans-padane republic, and all this took place without the slightest opposition. At that day Catholicism was not asked to pray for the temporal power, for it was felt that a pope who wages war must endure all the chances of that war, just as a pope who is a temporal prince must struggle with revolutions and constitutions. In the winter of 1798 republican disturbances took place in Rome against Papal oppression, during which General Duphot was killed. On this, Berthier entered the city, deprived the Pope of all temporal power, and established a Roman republic, with consuls, senators, and tribunes. Pius VI. was carried off to France, the cardinals were compelled to quit the country, and Berthier was hailed as restitutor urbis. The Roman republic did not endure long: Pius VII., successor of Pius VI., who died a prisoner, in 1798, in the citadel of Valence, returned to the Vatican in the following year, after the defeat of the French, but only to experience worse changes of fortune. In 1808, the Pope refused to close his ports against English traders, whereupon Napoleon threatened to strip him of his possessions, and demanded concessions which his nephew will hardly obtain: a patriarch for France, introduction of the Code Napoléon in the States of the Church, religious liberty for all persuasions, reform of the episcopate, and abolition of the monastic orders and celibacy. When Pius VII. refused his assent, Napoleon tore away from him Ancona, Urbino, and other towns, and annexed them to the kingdom of Italy. Lastly, he decreed, at Schönbrunn, on May 16, 1809, that the States of the Church had ceased to exist, carried off the Pope to France, and divided his territory into two French departments. Rome became a free imperial city, and the future Emperor of the French took his title from it.

The allied powers certainly restored the Pope in 1815, but this forced restoration was not a religious but a political act, for among the victors were the three heretic monarchs of England, Prussia, and Russia. In 1799 even the malignant Turks had aided in the restoration of the Pope! Austria, who has recently become the champion of legitimacy, acts wisely in not drawing public attention to her policy at that day in 1798 she did not protest against the Roman republic, and when the Directory entered into conferences with Austria on the Italian question, the imperial court proposed at Seltz that Naples should receive Benevent and Pontecorvo; Austria govern from the Adige to the Adda; the Cisalpine republic, which was obliged to give up this strip, should be compensated by a slice of Sardinia; Savoy and Nice would fall to France; Tuscany

receive the island of Sardinia; the Cispadane republic would surrender the Legations, which, with Rome, would be handed over to Sardinia : but not a word was said about the Pope-he might remain in the Tuscan monastery, where he was at the moment. In all the official and non

official projects of our day has ever a stranger solution been proposed, or one more subversive of traditional rights, than this very Austrian arrangement ?

In 1814, when the Restoration was before the gates, Austria negotiated with Murat, and promised him a few slices of the Papal States : her own troops were stationed in the Legations, and showed as little willingness to leave them as they did Moldo-Wallachia in 1856. Austria with every step displayed her longing for the Papal possessions, which we are now told belong to the whole of Catholic Christianity; and the heretic congress of Vienna was obliged formally to compel orthodox Austria to surrender the Romagna to the Pope.

For fifteen years the Romagna had existed under French laws, when the Restoration arrived, and not only abolished all notions of equality, but restored none of the old privileges of the Legations to which we have referred. At one stroke priests were placed in all offices, and the ecclesiastical courts decided private disputes and political crimes. The inquisition was introduced; mortmain stretched its long bony fingers over the land, priestly culprits crawled into their refuges again, and mercenaries acted as the police of the district. The Bolognese advocate Berni degli Antonii soon learned how political culprits would be dealt with: he wished, namely, to appeal to the old privileges which the country had enjoyed since the reign of Nicholas V.; he desired to print that the Roman state was a revolutionary usurpation, and that only the defenders of the municipal rights could lay claim to the title of Conservatives. But Cardinal Consalvi threatened him that he should "rot in St. Angelo" if he dared to print a syllable about 1447 and the Capitoli di Nicolo V. In Italy the French revolution had certainly effected its task of destroying all mediæval recollections.

Austria was compelled to keep down the growing restlessness in the Roman provinces, which grew to such a pitch that Pius VIII. found it advisable, on May 6, 1816, to issue a motu proprio, in which he promised reform. But that was not what the people wanted: they claimed their historical rights. Such a motu proprio was a very favourite, because harmless, concession, which could be let fall through or be withdrawn when the time arrived. In fact, Leo XII., the real Austrian pope, protested, in 1823, against the promises of his predecessor. This Leo, in truth, filled the measure to overflowing: as pope, he might be infallible, but as temporal prince he paved the way for the present state of things. He abolished the few remaining provincial and communal administrations, introduced Latin as the language of the courts, recalled the musty old canon law into force, raised double taxes, and organised the police on the Modenese system, the worst in Europe. He also abolished the vaccinating commissions as revolutionary institutions, and during his reign the lavish outlay of money went beyond all bounds.

Cardinal Rivarola, as legate of Ravenna, condemned, on August 21, 1825, 568 persons for political reasons: 7 to death, 13 to the galleys for life, 6 to twenty years, 4 to fifteen years, 17 to ten years, and 100 to the

celebrated precetto politico, a fearful punishment, by which the persons placed under police inspection were compelled to be at home before sunset, attend mass regularly, confess at least once a month, and, in fact, find life a martyrdom.

After every imaginable act of oppression, the French revolution of 1830 produced the celebrated insurrection in the Romagna, specially celebrated by the part played in it by two Bonapartes, the sons of Hortense, one of whom is now Emperor of the French. At that day the object was to overthrow the temporal power, and probably to establish an Italian empire in favour of one of the Napoleons; and at that day, too, it was Austria alone who sustained the authority of the Pope. The present French emperor was obliged to hide himself from the terrors of martial law in Ancona, and escape in the disguise of one of his mother's footmen. As political author, he presently condemned the Roman government, for we read in the third volume of his works, "it is unnecessary to conspire against the priests at Rome, for their own weapons, their own actions, turn against them."

In 1831, Gregory XVI. summoned the Austrians to his aid, and this was followed by a memorandum of the five great powers on the condition of the Papal States. Austria subscribed this at the very moment she was preparing to restore peace and order in those states after her own fashion. The Romagnolese wrote to the great powers that they had not even the right of petitioning the Roman court, and every complaint was regarded as high treason. They were good Catholics at heart, but they could not endure longer the temporal power of the Holy Father and his prelates. Their proposition for secularisation was extremely moderate, and yet Papal soldiers, partially recruited from the bagno, were set upon them. The most authoritative witness about the condition of the Papal States is assuredly conservative Austria herself, who maintained a number of highly intelligent agents in Central Italy. The reports of these agents were discovered during the revolution of 1848 at Milan and Venice, and they were published under the title of "Carte Segrete et Atti Uffiziali della Polizia Austriaca in Italia." In these we read:

The courts where justice is supposed to be dealt out are one mass of corruption. Rome, where the Pope governs, the see of St. Peter, which should be the purest and most living source of virtue, and the mirror of morality, is, from all Í have seen, in clerical matters, the source of demoralisation; in secular, that of disorder and corruption. Trade is depressed, the sciences are decaying, the arts, excepting sculpture and painting, receive no encouragement, agriculture is neglected. Politics are constantly drifting between Phariseeism and Machiavellism; the administration is as complicated as it is disordered, and justice a Babylonian, scandalous, and intriguing labyrinth.

We will not here allude to personalities, but any one fond of scandal should read the first volume of the "Carte Segrete." He will find there, for instance, how Pius VII. left his relations a fortune of one and a half million scudi, and the amiable qualities of the whole of Leo XII.'s ministry:

Religion is practised by means of incessant exercises-missions and sermons -from which it derives no benefit. The clergy consist far more of selfish persons than of true apostolic servants: hypocrisy and simony are prevalent. We may be assured, that if we estimate the number of priests who are really devoted to the faith at one-tenth, it is much too favourable. The arch-priests,

or parish priests, are all chiefs of the spies, and woe to the parishioners who offend them in any way they cannot escape the efforts of their secret blows, which announce themselves through the inquisition, police imprisonment, or severer punishment. The dissatisfaction throughout the Roman States has, I believe, attained such a pitch, that were not the people wonderfully patient, or if they possessed a little more electricity, a revolution, the result of the desperation produced by ill government, might be apprehended.

This reporter is really an honest man, and he justifies all the excitement and rebellion that have occurred in the Papal States since 1831. Why does Austria, then, protest against the separation of the Romagna ? A government cannot always hear from its secret reporters what is pleasant to it; but if the tendency of many years' reports is constantly to the same point, the government was evidently glad to hear all that was told it. As, further, it would have been a very easy matter to lead her Roman protégés to a different system, it follows that Austria, while supporting legitimacy in the Romagna, still fostered her ideas of 1815, and hoped eventually to derive some advantage from the desperation of the popula

tion.

On June 16, 1846, a good pope was decorated with the tiara: after Leo XII. and Gregory XVI. this last trial was needed. The good pope was to attempt reforming Rome and Italy, an idea which the less good popes had constantly resisted. If Pio Nono, after his first start, has waded deeper into the morass of tyranny and cruelty than his predecessors, it is plain that there must be a radical and incurable evil in the Papal government, and that a pope with the best will in the world can never become a reigning prince, in the modern acceptation of the term. It appears to us a great mistake to make the radical tendencies of 1848, or Mazzinism, responsible for the ill success of Pio Nono's peaceful reforms. This Mazzinism was neither born in 1848 nor buried in 1849 under the walls of Rome. It still lived in 1859, at the outbreak of the Italian war; and if unable to attain a prominent position, this resulted solely from the active interference of Piedmont and the fulfilment of the most earnest wishes of the Italians by Victor Emmanuel. The king and the ministers simply outstripped that desperation which the Austrian agents described, and the Romagnolese were thus enabled to listen to the seductions from two sides-from Austria and Mazzini. But Pio Nono, from 1846 to 1848, with the best will in the world, did little more than talk. He brought Rome and the world into a state of excitement for two years, and daily increased the expectation about what was going to happen; but when the moment for action arrived, he proved himself thoroughly weak, and Papal progress suddenly changed into jesuitic perfidy.

What did the Romans and the Romagnolese want? With what would they have declared themselves satisfied, and what would have stopped all excesses at once? Constitutional liberty in the Papal States, and a serious participation in the national war against Austria. In both points the Pope was dishonest, and the distrust felt in him from an early period was justified. The "Statuto Fondamentale del Governo Temporale" of March 14, 1848, was sanctioned by the College of Cardinals and the Pope, and published with the signature "Pio Papa." This important document, it was expressly stated, would be incorporated in a bull, but this solemn legalisation was omitted, and the Roman constitution never

figured in the archives. The reason was plain enough: the Papal government wished to reserve the opportunity of evading a formal abrogation of this “statuto" by the argument that it never really existed. In fact, the Roman constitution has never been withdrawn, and the publication of the Gaëta motu proprio proved plainly enough that no older engagements were recognised. It is true, however, that this motu proprio also remained for ten long years a dead letter, like the one issued by Pius VII.

Further, the same pope, who had a momentary desire to place himself at the head of the Italian Confederation, declared, in 1848, that he could not wage war on the Austrians, because he was also the ecclesiastical sovereign of the Austrian Catholics, and it would be a fraternal war. When, in 1849, the French brothers marched against Rome; when the Austrian brothers occupied the legations; when Garibaldi defeated the Neapolitan brothers; and even Spanish brothers marched against their Roman brothers, Pio Nono saw no fraternal war in this. This time the object was to maintain the absolute Papal supremacy, while the national fraternal war would infallibly have resulted in favour of political liberty. This confusion between spiritual and temporal fraternity certainly for a while served the reactionary party, but the prophecy of Father Ventura has clung like a curse to the restoration. This remarkable man wrote from Civita Vecchia, on June 12, 1849:

Every cannon-ball that strikes the walls of Rome destroys more and more the belief in the heart of the Romans. What folly to bombard Rome in the name of the Pope! All the youths, all the men of any education, say, "The Pope wishes to rule over us by force. He desires for the Church and the priesthood the Sovereignty which belongs to the people alone, and he believes-indeed, he says so that it is his duty to act thus, because we are Catholics, and because Rome is the centre of Catholicism. Very well, then; who can prevent us putting an end to our Catholicism, and, if it must be so, becoming Protestants? What right will he then have over us? For, is it not fearful to think that, because we are Catholics and sons of the Church, we must surrender all our rights, expect from the liberality of the priests as a present what belongs to us by right, and be condemned to the fate of the most wretched nations p

If diplomacy ever made a sport of the happiness of nations it did so in Italy, and especially in the Papal States. Since 1815, it has always been allowed that something must be done. In 1821, Austria drew attention to "disorders which required speedy relief;" in 1831, the five great powers were of one opinion on the subject; in 1849, Austria again gave good advice, and the letter of Louis Napoleon to Edgar Ney is not yet forgotten by contemporaries. Pio Nono promised from Gaëta all sorts of reforms, but not the slightest attention was ever paid to these warnings and promises; the reforms in the Papal States were a diplomatic ball which Austria and France threw to each other. Both governments found the condition of Rome good or bad, according as it suited their plans of the hour. Thus, Count Rayneval, the imperial envoy, wrote in his celebrated memorial of May 14, 1856, to Count Walewski, that the Papal States were in the best possible condition, but at that time Louis Napoleon wished to get into the good graces of the Pope, and was angling for a coronation at Notre-Dame. Edmond About had not yet been let loose, and "Le Pape et le Congrès" not yet written;