Page:History of Freedom.djvu/403

 DÖLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER 359

modern times it has been the rule that the Secretary of State should not be elected, and that the new Pope should dismiss the heads of the administration. Clement IX. \vas the first who gave up this practice, and retained almost all those who had been employed under his predecessor. The burdens of the State increased far beyond its resources from the aid which the Popes gave to the Catholic Po\vers, especially in the Turkish wars. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the debt amounted to 12,242,620 scudi, and the interest absorbed three- fourths of the whole income. In 1655 it had risen to 48,000,000 scudi. The financial administration was secret, free from the control of public accounts, and the Tesoriere, being necessarily a cardinal, was ir- responsible. There was no industry in the to\vns; they remained for the most part small and poor; almost all articles of common use were imported, and the country had little to give in exchange. All the interest of the public debt ,vent to foreign creditors. As early as 1595 the discontent was very great, and so many emigrated, in order to escape the heavy burdens, that Cardinal Sacchetti said, in 1664, that the population \vas reduced by one-half. In the year 1740 the president De Brosses found the Roman Government the most defective but the mildest in Europe. Becattini, in his panegyrical biography of Pius VI., declares that it \vas the worst after that of Turkey. There were none of those limitations which in other countries restrained the power of the monarch, no fundamental laws, no coronation oath, no binding decrees of predecessors, no provincial estates, no powerful corporations. But, in reality, this unlimited absolutism was softened by custom, and by great indulgence towards individuals. When Consalvi adopted the French institutions, he did not understand that an absolute government is intolerable, and must sink under the \"eight of its responsibility, unless it recognises the restraint of custom and tradition, and of subordinate. but not dependent forces. The unity and