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.

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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 (ii. 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 (i. 44); it is to escape from this state of violence and oppression, 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 (i. 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 (i. 72). He would be insulted in the streets (i. 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 (i. 467) 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.

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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 (ii. 187) reckons, certainly to the full satisfaction 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

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 up to 1500, 2000 (i. 242, 258, 353), 2600 (i. 362, 411), 3000 (ii. 92), who shouted all at once, and even (ii. 94) 5000 persons; and again (i. 438), a crowd impossible to count. It 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

what we have seen and known, we deem it quite possible that in the entire city a minority of Papalini numbering as many as, or even more than, five thousand might be reckoned, though of independent citizens we doubt whether there are five hundred. To these civic adherents would add themselves foreigners, whose zeal or curiosity may have carried them to Rome for the purpose. We have, indeed, learned from an authoritative source that on June 16, 1871, when there were no less than eight Deputations, the Pope received at the Vatican in all about 6200 persons. We find also that the total number of those who waited on him in 1871, on only fourteen separate days (which however certainly included all the occasions of crowded gatherings), were estimated carefully at 13,893; and in 1872, on the same number of occasions, at 17,477. In the two following years the numbers have been much less, namely, 8295 and 9129 respectively. It is quite plain that large crowds-crowds sufficient to give ample ground for interference on the score of order to any Government looking for or willing to use them-again and again have filled the vast halls of the Vatican, as Don Pasquale assures us. That they went there to stir up or prepare (as far as it depended upon them) war, either immediate or eventual, against the Italian Government, is established by every page of these volumes. Going in such numbers, and for such a purpose, it is not disputed that they have gone and returned freely, safely, boastfully, under the protection of the laws they were breaking, and of the Government they reviled.

It may perhaps seem strange that, while the Italian Government is treated as if the Pope were a Power in actual war with it, yet the Curia apparently can stoop to communicate with it for certain purposes, which it will be interesting to observe. We have, for instance, in the Appendix (ii. 419) a letter of the Cardinal Vicar to the Minister Lanza, complaining, as the Pope in his Speeches complains, of the immorality of the Roman theatres.

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It complains also that the clerical orders are not spared in the exhibitions of the stage. This is a subject on which the Curia has always been very much in earnest; and some day it may necessary to bring before the modern public the almost incredible, but yet indubitable, history of the negotiations and arrangements which were made by the State of Florence with the See of Rome in relation to the Decameron of Boccaccio. But for the present let us take only the point of immorality. The broadest accusations on this subject are lodged by the Cardinal Vicar, without one single point or particular of places, pieces, persons, or times which would have enabled the Italian Government to put

put their justice to the proof. The Minister, in his reply, could not do more than he has actually done. He declares that the Italian censorship is remarkable for strictness; and that in Italy, and particularly in Rome, many pieces are prohibited which are permitted in France and in Belgium. And of this there is no denial. With a thorough shabbiness of spirit, the complaint is neither justified nor retracted, but is sent forth to the world with the full knowledge that the good (i buoni) will take it as a demonstration that the Italian Government is wholly indifferent to morals (vol. ii. 419-24).

Again, we have a complaint of the non-observance of Sundays and feast-days; but the effort of this kind which most deserves notice is one relating to blasphemy. It appears that the newspaper La Capitale' had been publishing piecemeal a Life of our Lord, written in the Unitarian sense. The Cardinal-Vicar represented to the Procurator-General (ii. 520) that this ought to be prosecuted as blasphemous and heretical. It is not stated that he founded himself on the manner of the writer's argument, and therefore it may be presumed that the charge lay against his conclusions only. The Procurator-General replied that the law granted liberty of religious discussion, and that accordingly he could not interfere. The Advocate Caucino of Turin-whose Address to the Pope is almost the only one in the whole work that does not contain direct incentives to sedition (ii. 313) gave a professional opinion to a contrary effect. He pointed out that the Roman Catholic religion was by the Constitutional Statute the religion of the State, and that other laws actually in force provided punishments for offences against religion. Consequently, as he reasoned, these writings are illegal. Over nine hundred of the Italian lawyers have countersigned this opinion. One of his arguments is, to British eyes, somewhat curious. The laws, he says, declare the person of the Pontiff sacred and inviolable. 'But if you take away the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Pontiff is reduced to a nonentity (il Pontefice non è più nulla).' It is difficult to avoid saying, one wishes that were the only consequence.

It would, perhaps, be uncharitable to suggest that this wellarranged endeavour was nothing else than a trap carefully laid for the Italian Government. But it certainly would have served the purpose of a trap. Had the denial of our Lord's Divinity been repressed by law, by reason of its contrariety to the religion of the State, the next step would of course have been to require the Government to proceed in like manner against anyone who denied the Infallibility of the Pope. Under the Vatican Decrees this is as essentially and imperatively a part Vol. 138.-No. 275.

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