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362 has bountifully bestowed quickness, foresight, energy, strength and boldness; has two such harbours as Ancona and Civita Vecchia empty.” There was universal misery—the want of food, of clothing, of shelter. The prisons were full of state prisoners who had in any way given umbrage to the priests. There were spies at every corner; and every confessional contained a spy, who could extract from a man’s nearest relation, revelations, or suggestions which were worked to his destruction. With regard to the prisoners, sometimes their very existence was forgotten. If ever the person accused was brought to trial—we speak of political offenders—he was never confronted with the witnesses who appeared against him—the names were never revealed to him. The court which had pre-determined his ruin, assigned to him a nominal defender—his most dangerous adversary. Torture was used to extract confession, as may be seen in an edict published by Cardinal Antonelli, on the 30th of July, 1855. Besides what was done by the immediate agents of the Pope, Austria took a great share of bloody work off his hands. Papal subjects were taken in batches before the Austrian courts-martial, and dealt with according to the amenities of Austrian military law. It has been clearly established, and the English Consul at Ferrara at the time knew the facts, that in the beginning of the year 1853, political prisoners of the Pope were tortured by the Austrian jailors. They were beaten, they were starved; they were bent in the form of hoops; they were informed that a firing party was waiting for them; they were kept without sleep, and in the middle of the night their keepers would come in and shake a hook and a halter before their eyes. The country was governed by foreigners,—Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans. The collection of the common taxes cost 31 per cent; of the revenue derived from salt and tobacco, 46 per cent.; from the lotto, 62 per cent. In nine years’ time, between 1848—57, 1,000,000l. was paid to foreign troops for keeping down, and—occasion arising—butchering the Pope’s subjects. From 1814 to 1857, the sum of the papal revenues had amounted to 75,500,000l.: all of which has been wrung from the wretched inhabitants of the country, being other than priests, and the owners and holders of ecclesiastical property. There is no commerce—no trade, no manufactures in this unfortunate country; and as taxation scarcely touches the principal landed proprietors, the condition of less considerable persons may be imagined. The river Po threatens continually to overflow.

The acknowledged project of the French Ruler is to reduce the Pope to the condition of the Ecclesiastical Emperor of Japan—leaving Victor Emmanuel to be the actual Sovereign of Italy. What his real projects may be he scarcely knows himself. At the present moment it is clear that the presence of the French troops in Rome, and in the Patrimony of St. Peter’s, constitutes the chief—nay, the only obstacle to the liberation of Italy from Reggio to the Mincio. It is a fearful stab in the back from a sovereign who claims to be the Liberator of Italy. So long as the Pope is at Rome, Rome will be the centre of ecclesiastical intrigues extending throughout the Peninsula. So long as the Pope is at Rome, there will always be a pretext for foreign interference. So long as the Pope is at Rome, the spell of Italy’s long slavery is not wholly dissolved. The possession of Rome, in a moral sense, would be worth three successful battles to the Italian cause. As a temporal prince, the Pope has been found wanting, and should be numbered with things which have been, and which must be no more. When this end is achieved, we may have done with the subject; as we have done with the atrocities of the Bourbon at Naples and in Sicily. Happy will that moment be when the Pope and his successors can say with truth to their assailants—“De mortuis.”

is nothing so long-lived as an idea. Stone and marble decay—other monuments of human greatness are the inheritance of the moth and the worm, but convictions survive the assaults of Time, and of Time’s unwearied agents. A state of things was, therefore it is; it is not, therefore it should be. Circumstances may change—the billows of one moment may be the scattered spray of the next, but certain minds are so constituted that they cannot bend to the evidence of facts. We need not seek far for instances; but the singular pertinacity with which some of our Irish fellow subjects still assert that Ireland is the most oppressed and injured country under heaven, is a curious proof of indifference to the realities of life. At the present moment there is not one spot upon the earth’s surface where there is more real liberty than in Ireland—where men can more freely go where they like, write what they like, do what they like, and say what they like; but, for all that, the Irish are still a persecuted, the English a persecuting people. Until he played fast and loose with the Pope’s interests, Louis Napoleon was a demigod in the eyes of these poor Celtic sufferers. Now, Louis Napoleon would have sent the editor and the whole staff of The Nation to Cayenne, with very little ceremony or trial, within twenty-four hours after publication of one of the usual numbers of that interesting newspaper. If any Frenchman ventured to whisper to his neighbours in a corner one quarter of what any Irishman shouts out from the house-tops in the way of sedition and treason, the tranquillity of many French families would be seriously compromised. If a party of Frenchmen had come over here to present Lord Clyde with a sword on his return from India, and had done so not without some insinuations as to the superiority of England over France in all the martial virtues, and had interlarded their complimentary address with denunciations of the French Government, what kind of welcome would they have received on their return to their native country? Daniel O’Connell had much truth on his side when he was struggling for Catholic emancipation, and many true pictures he drew of Irish misery when speaking of the Irish peasant of his day. All this is changed, but the Irish cuckoo still gives forth her monotonous note when all occasion for it is gone. Tom Moore has a great deal to answer for. He it was who first invested mourning Ireland with the garb of poetry. The notion was that of a beautiful young