to form a noticeable feature in the condition of the place. For ostensible morality the streets will compare favourably with the Boulevards of Paris, and for security they may generally challenge the thoroughfares of London. We cite a few words from a very recent and dispassionate account:

....

"The police of Rome is far better than the old Papal police; order is better kept, and outrages in the streets are of rare occurrence. Crime is promptly repressed. . . . . The theatres are not much frequented, and are neither worse nor better than such places elsewhere. The city is clean and well kept. There are not half the number of priests or friars in the streets, and mendicancy is not a tenth part of what it was formerly."

We are entitled, indeed, to waive entering upon any more minute particulars until the charges have been lodged, with some decent attention to presumptions of credibility. But it has been our care to obtain from Rome itself some figures, on which reliance may be placed. They indicate the comparative state of Roman crime in the two last full years of the Papal rule (1868, 1869), and the three full years (1871, 1872, 1873), of the Italian rule:

In 1870, which was a mixed year, and does not

assist the comparison, and which was also a year of crisis, the total was 2118, and the crimes of violence (reati di sangue) were no less than 1175. It will be observed that these figures confute the statements of the Pope. The two first of the Italian years were affected by the cause to which we have referred; but still their average is lower than that of the last two years in which Rome was still the "holy" city, and in which devils did not walk the streets of it. The average of the three years is 1665 against 1723 in the last Papal year. The year 1873, in which alone we may consider that the special cause of disturbance had ceased to operate, shows a reduction of 391, or more than 22 per cent., on the last year of the Pope. Yet more remarkable is the comparison if we strike out the category of thefts, the least serious of the three in kind. We then obtain the following figures: for the last Papal year, 1869, 1009; for 1873, 634; or a diminution of nearly 40 per cent.

But while the accusations are thus shown to be utterly at variance with the facts, still they are intelligible. The cursing vocabulary, so to call it, which has been given, exhibits their character, though in a wild and wholly reckless manner. Where the passion shown is rather less overbearing, there is more of the daylight of ideas. And the idea everywhere conveyed is briefly this; that a state of violence prevails. There is no liberty for honest men or for Catholics (11. 25): matters go from bad to worse. What is wanted is that. God should liberate His Church, give her the triumph (this is the favourite phrase) which is her due, and re-establish public order (1. 44); it is to escape from this state of violence and oppression,

Rome.

17

which, in simple truth (davvero) is insupportable and impossible for human nature (II. 54). As for the Pope himself, who does not know, so far as Ultramontane organs all over the world can convey knowledge, that he is a prisoner? Although, it must be confessed, that a new sense of the word has had to be invented, to serve his turn: for, as he himself has explained, his prison is a prison with only moral walls and bars, since he admits there are neither locks nor keepers (1. 298). How, with his sense of humour, how, in making these statements, must he inwardly have smiled the smile of the Haruspex at the gross credulity of his hearers! He cannot go out; and he will not (1. 72). He would be insulted in the streets (1. 298); and here, fortunately, he has a case in point to adduce, for once upon a day it happened that a priest had actually been pelted; and somewhere else (1. 467) it appears that an urchin or two had been heard to shout "morte ai preti," down with the priests: though in no instance does he show that, even if a stone was thrown, the public authority had refused or tampered with its duty to afford protection to layman and priest alike.

However, as we have seen, the Pope's allegations of oppression and violence are in terms very grave. But his own lips, and his own volumes, unconsciously supply the confutation; and this in two ways. For first, it is clear, if we accept the statements of this curious and daring work, that the people of Rome are almost wholly on his side against the Government, not on the side of the Government and the nation against him. A careful computation of the editor (11. 187, reckons, certainly to the full satis

faction of all Ultramontane readers, that seventy-one thousand of the inhabitants of Rome (in a city of some two hundred thousand, old and young, men and women, all told) have given their names to addresses against the suppression of the religious orders (II. 187), a certain sign of Papalism. But there is yet more conclusive evidence. On January 16, 1873, the whole College of the Parish Priests of Rome presented an address, in which they state that, notwithstanding the influence of intruded foreigners, almost the whole of their former parishioners (nella quasi totalità), whom they know by name, still keep the right faith, send their children to the right schools, and remain, subject to but few exceptions, "with the Pope, and for the Pope." "I thank Thee, my God, for the spirit that Thou impartest to this excellent People: I thank Thee for the constancy that Thou givest to the People of Rome" (I. 352, also 229). And yet an urchin, or perhaps two, or even three, cry, "morte ai preti," and the Pope dare not go out of the Vatican, although he has seventy-one thousand Romans declared by their signatures, and "almost the entire body of parishioners," except the new-come foreigners, for his fast allies and loyal defenders! It is really idle to talk of dark ages. There never was, until the nineteenth century and the Council of the Vatican, an age so deeply plunged in darkness worthy of Erebus and Styx, as could alone render it a safe enterprise to palm statements like these on the credulity even of the most blear-eyed partisanship.

But then, it may be said, in vain are the people with the Pope; a tyrannical government, supported by hordes of sbirri and a brutal soldiery, represses the

manifestations of their loyalty by intimidation. But this allegation is cut to pieces, and if possible rendered even more preposterous than the other, by the evidence of the volumes themselves. One exception there appears to have been to the good order of Rome: one single form, in which a kind of anarchy certainly has been permitted. This flagrant exception, however, has been made not against, but in favour of, the Pope. For, strange and almost incredible as it may appear, his partisans are allowed to gather in the face of day, and proceed to the Vatican for the purpose of presenting addresses to the Pontiff known to be almost invariably rife with the most flagrant sedition, and this in numbers not only of a few tens or even hundreds, but even up to 1500, 2000 (1. 242, 258, 353), 2600 (1. 362, 411), 3000 (II. 92), who shouted all at once, and even (II. 94) 5000 persons; and again (1. 438), a crowd impossible to count. may be asked with surprise, has the Pope then at any rate a presentable train of five thousand adherents in Rome? Far be it from us to express an implicit belief in each of our friend Don Pasquale's figures, at the least until they are affirmed by a declaration ex cathedrâ or a Conciliary Decree. But in Rome, where the vast body of secular and regular clergy have held so large a proportion of the real property, where all the public establishments were closely associated with the clerical interest and class, where even the numerous functionaries of the civil departments, and where the aristocracy, including families of great wealth, have been, and continue to be, of the Papal party, a long train of dependents must necessarily be found on the same side, and judging from what we

It