Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/202

 186 Pope's decease the fact can be brought to the knowledge of the antipodes, so that long before the old prescribed nine days of mourning are elapsed, every Cardinal in existence will be able to reach Rome with perfect case. It has not escaped observation, therefore, that this Conclave will assemble under physical conditions entirely different from former ones. But this does not hold equally good of the moral elements in the field. A striking analogy presents itself at once between the kinds of influence that, on the last occasion, stood, and again will stand, over against each other. In 1846 the struggle lay between the Cardinal who, during the late Pope's reign, as Secretary of State, had been the absolute distributor of patronage—the Grand Vizier, whose word had been law, and whose smile had been favour,—and all those who had been offended at his protracted greatness, and who desired to supplant him. At the coming election we may expect to see once more in the field a Cardinal who for an even longer period has been in possession of a yet more marked and more detested preponderance, and between whom and his enemies the struggle bids fair to prove