stitution to the turbid and disastrous period of 1848, Piedmont has clasped closely to her bosom the child that was born to her amidst such dark omens; for while the storms of war raged around her, the very soil was mined beneath her feet by civil dissension. The tempered liberty which exists in Piedmont owes nothing to the mercy or forbearance of the parties in either extreme. It seems, indeed, to be characteristic in a peculiar degree of Italian politics, that both those parties, hating one another not less bitterly than elsewhere, hate more bitterly the mean that occupies the ground between them, that reproaches by its own calmer attitude the violence of each, and that alone commands any considerable share of English sympathy or respect. Even while the country was engaged in war, a war which it did not become them at least to decry or paralyse, the democratic party were weakening the hands of the king and government of Piedmont by their murmurs and their plots. What sort of treatment the Sardinian state has received from the other side, the voice of Rome herself shall tell us. But whatever the obstacles in her path, Piedmont has met, and we trust that we may add, has overcome them. A distant view is an insecure one, and we would therefore be understood to speak with caution; but the general features of the case are such as can hardly be mistaken. It is by no mere happy accident that Piedmont has gained, and still enjoys her institutions, while so many other states have lost the substance or the hope of freedom which they had previously possessed. Surrounded by alien influences, pressed, above all, by that Power which, through the medium of religious sympathies and caste, has its base of hostile operations in the very heart of every state with which it quarrels, still, instead of being driven to desperation by her difficulties, she has never for a moment lost her self-command, or ceased to exhibit to the world the dignified deportment that peculiarly befits a free, settled, and temperate constitution. Remarkable, indeed, as have been the results of her domestic policy, still more remarkable is the manner in which she has attained them. Through every variety of fortune, amidst the wild and Bacchanalian enthusiasm of 1848, amidst the depression of the reaction which too naturally followed in its train, we have seen a king and a people walking hand in hand, without rashness and without fear, intuitively detecting the snares which anarchy or absolutism set thick about their path, with an eye set steadily on the mark of civil improvement, and a foot never wavering in the march towards it. Their history, during these last eventful seven years, has borne in abundance the marks of a national character at once bold and masculine, circumspect and solid; and the inward shocks

of

Sardinia and Rome.

of those years, the first of the freedom of Sardinia, have scarcely been greater than might have attended the ordinary working of the oldest and best-adjusted constitutional government. Under these circumstances her vocation has assumed not merely a domestic but an Italian, and not merely an Italian but an European, importance; and nothing seems requisite to enable her to fulfil a destiny of no common elevation, but that the same spirit which has been moulding so successfully her internal laws and institutions should in all future emergencies be strong enough to assert its claim to preside alike over her domestic and her foreign policy.

On the other hand, what shall we say of Rome-her assailant? It might be supposed that the advisers of the Pope would find enough for themselves and for him to do at home, since they present to us the extraordinary and perhaps unexampled spectacle of a sovereign and a government not only sustained by foreign arms, but without a party or a friend (except those immediately interested in the existing order) among their own subjects. The vain dreams that followed the accession of the kindly but ill-judging and unstable Pius IX. have been miserably dispelled. The impossibility of associating civil freedom with the temporal rule of the Popedom has been exhibited in the way of experiment. The doom of the Pope's temporal power is to all appearance sealed, and its date can be no later than the day when the galling yoke of foreign domination is removed. Even the financial disorders of the Roman State are such as, in the ordinary course of things, would insure its overthrow; but other and more deeply seated causes are, we fear, from day to day swelling a long account of unheeded wrongs, the settlement of which will only be the more sure and sweeping, in proportion as it is longer delayed. Yet the volcanic soil on which the court of Rome treads seems to be firm enough to afford it standingground from which to hurl against offenders every weapon that the armoury of the past can supply, except that of actual force; with respect to which it can hardly be uncharitable to say, that Rome does not in these times use it, simply because she does not happen to possess it.

*

According to figures which we have every reason to rely on, the Roman Pontiff shares with us the unhappy distinction of spending the greater part of his revenue in paying the interest of his debt; and this although his very small army, so far as it is anything at all, is a mere police. His revenue appears to be about ten millions of crowns: the charge of the debt nearly six. But the total annual expenditure seems to exceed the first-named sum by above 30 per cent., and, accordingly, he has contracted loans amounting to nearly fifteen million crowns since his restoration in 1849; that is to say, he has defrayed from a fifth to a fourth of his expenses by means of borrowed money.

There

There is something characteristic, too, in the rather peculiar manner in which the case comes before us. The Papal court tell its own story, in an Allocution dated the 22nd January, 1855, with a detailed Explanation, and an ample collection of documents appended to it, on which of course it relies to prove its case. The Allocution, the Exposition, and the Documents, are simply reprinted in Turin, without a word of comment, under the eye, if not by the care, of a Government which has learned to confide in the simple strength of justice, and to permit its adversaries to tell its story as well as their own.

The Allocution begins by employing those sounding phrases descriptive of acute suffering on the part of the Pope, and of the Church beneath his rule, which, to our minds at least, have lost much, if not all, their dignity and force through relentless repetition, and through their indiscriminate application to all causes, good and bad. The person of the King is carefully spared; but the Sardinian Government is declared to have inflicted, with an ever-increasing malignity, amidst the extreme grief and indignation of all reputable men, the most grievous wrongs upon the clergy, the bishops, the religious orders, the immunities of the Church, and the Roman See. By their recent bill respecting the convents, the benefices without cure,* the right of lay patronage, and the collegiate churches, they have not only violated all right divine and natural, but have favoured the extremest doctrines of Communism and Socialism. Such is the indictment, only shorn of most of its sesquipedalian words. Next comes the sentence; and here the Roman Pontiff authoritatively declares all laws whatever of the Sardinian State which are detrimental to religion, the Church, or the Papal See, to be absolutely null and void. He charges all those who in any manner favour or approve any these laws to remember the canonical punishments to which they are liable; and he expresses the wish that, moved by this paternal admonition, they may make haste to repair the wellnigh irremediable mischiefs they have done, and may thus save him from the painful necessity he will otherwise have to encounter, of acting against them with those arms, which God has commissioned him to wield.

of

We will now endeavour, following the case through the explanatory statement which the Court of Rome has appended to the Allocution of the Pope, and through the mass of documents which make up the volume, to set forth the nature and amount of the grievances on the strength of which his Holiness has been induced to venture on this exorbitant, though very far from unexampled stretch of power.

* Beneficia simplicia.

First,

First, then, we find that, even before the epoch of the Sardinian constitution, a law was promulgated, which purported to establish the liberty of the press. Under this law, books imported from abroad might be admitted without the ordeal of a previous ecclesiastical censorship; and only a licence of the civil government was required for the printing of books and journals within the kingdom. In what spirit this authority has been exercised it needs but a passing glance at the Piedmontese papers, with their large freedom of opinion and language, or at the contents of any book-shop in Turin or in Genoa, to show. On the one side, we have ourselves purchased there the works of Mazzini; while the volume now before us affords the best proof that an equal licence is conceded on the other. But an ecclesiastical censorship means, in a Roman Catholic country, simply a censorship directed under the supreme control of the Pope. To the idea of a free press, therefore, it was simply a contradiction in terms; and to pass a law for a free press without abolishing it would have been to palm a gross delusion upon the people. It is, accordingly, neither more nor less than the establishment of a free press which constitutes the first grievance of the Court of Rome. Nor is it the protection of the great verities of religion against blasphemy that the Court of Rome seems to have principally in view. No blasphemy appears in her eyes to exceed the blasphemy of Gallican sentiments: the attacks which most alarm her (for she probably knows that the truths of religion are best defended in times like these by the Christian feeling of the people) are, as we infer from her own language, those upon the Clergy and the Pope. And here the point most worthy of note is, not that the Court of Rome should disapprove of a free press, but that its views of what constitutes an independent sovereignty, and the legitimate province of the civil power, should at this era of the world's history be so crude and narrow as to embolden it to view this exercise of a right so plain and elementary by the civil government of Piedmont as an excess and an outrage committed against itself. This proceeding, even if it stood alone, plainly demonstrates the hazards attendant upon all dealings between an independent state and the Roman Pontiff; it shows that, although such a power may hold the Court of Rome bound, even as it would a savage, by the motives of interest and fear, it cannot, when dealing with matter either ecclesiastical or pretended to be such, rely upon finding in that Court any clear or broad notions of political equity and mutual rights, but on the contrary it must be prepared to grapple with claims that involve the virtual subjugation of the civil power to the spiritual

*Docum., No. LX., p. 223.

as

as effectively, if not quite as directly, as the Bull Unam Sanctam. But if these transactions present so discouraging an aspect when read with reference to the part borne in them by the Roman See, they are not, as we may venture to remark by anticipation, less cheering when we consider the undeniable proof which they likewise supply, that a state and people of the Roman Catholic communion can, even in these days, vindicate civil rights against their most formidable enemy, in no spirit of irreligion or of faction, yet with the same energy and decision which so often and so beneficially marked the history of our own and of other countries in the centuries that preceded the Reformation.

The law on the press was made in October 1847; the constitution followed early in 1848; and almost immediately after, so runs the Roman complaint, a new injury was inflicted on the Church. On the 25th of April a law appeared, which set forth that, under the enactments of the Statuto or Constitution, the provision formerly in use for regulating the grant of the Exequatur had become inapplicable, and proceeded to direct as follows:

Instruments from Rome, which, under the existing concordats, or by established usage, require before they can take effect to be furnished with the Exequatur, will continue to be submitted to the respective advocate-generals of the judges of appeal.'-p. 36.

And it then describes the course in which these instruments are to go forward for the Royal sanction. It will be observed that, according to the words of the law, it affected only such instruments as already, under concordat or established usage, required the exequatur. Hear the Roman answer:

'But the established usages, or, to speak more truly, the abuses of lay authority under this head, have been constantly and repeatedly condeinned by the supreme authority of the Church, and are essentially null.'-p. 8.

The first part of this assertion it proceeds very sufficiently to support by citing a declaration equivalent to this law published by the Senate of Turin in 1719, and followed by a Brief of Clement XI. in condemnation of it; in which, with an overpowering copiousness of language, that Pope first declares the enactment to be void ab initio, and then ad majorem cautelam, or in English phrase, for fear of accidents, proceeds :

Illa omnia et singula. . ... damnamus, reprobamus, revocamus, cassamus, irritamus, annullamus, abolemus, viribusque et effectu penitus. et omnino vacuamus, ac pro damnatis, reprobatis, revocatis, cassatis, irritis, nullis, invalidis, et abolitis, viribusque et effectu penitus et omnino vacuis, semper habere volumus et mandamus.'

Since