ROME, May, 1877. THE very natural interest felt by all Englishmen in the issues of the great war now raging on the banks of the Danube should not lead them to overlook the importance of another conflict which is now taking place on the banks of the Tiber. The organs of public opinion in England have, for some time past, appeared too apt to concentrate their attention on certain eventualities more or less distant in the general relations between Church and State in Italy, to the comparative disregard of present occur rences of real moment. No doubt the change which may be effected in the conditions of the Papacy by the decease of the present Pope and the personal character of his successor, is a matter of much concern for the common interests of Christendom; and it is equally a matter of curious speculation to forecast the probable tendencies of the next Conclave as foreshadowed in the habits and opinions of the present members of the NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVI., No. 2

Sacred College. But notwithstanding the great term of years to which the life of the present Pontiff has already been prolonged, there is nothing improbable, when we take into account the marvellous longevity by which many members of the Mastai Ferretti family have been marked, in the prospect of his living eight or ten years more; whilst the conjectures on the probable character of the next Conclave, based on the known characters of the present Cardinals, may be rendered utterly worthless by a variety of causes

by the different attitude which the same individuals may unexpectedly assume when called upon to act in an independent character, by the different relations in which the Sacred College may only a few years hence stand to the nation and to other European Governments, and by the changes of political opinion which the events of even a few years may bring about in the policy of those Governments themselves. The result of the next Conclave is, perhaps, too hastily assumed to

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be necessarily one that must greatly modify the present relations between the Catholic Church and all civil powers. It may, indeed, elevate to the Papal chair an ambitious and aggressive priest who will seek to revive in his own personal career the memories of the Gregories and the Innocents. It may, small as the chances now seem of such an event taking place, furnish a successor to Pius IX. who shall attempt to give again to the world the spectacle of a reforming and liberal Papacy. But if we may judge from the data at present in our possession, it is more probable that when there shall sink into the grave a Pope so far enfeebled by age as to have become incapable of any vigorous personal initiative, he will be succeeded by another Pope as little likely to disturb by the force of his personal character and the energy of his individual action the calculations and the strategy of the real rulers of the Church. It is far more important to keep steadily in mind that whether the occupant of St. Peter's chair be called Pius IX. or Pius X., a great war of aggression by the Roman Catholic Church against all civil Governments has already been proclaimed, and is now actually carried on, and that one of the first campaigns is at this very moment marked by varying fortunes in the capital of Italy. What is now taking place in that country, what especially is taking place in the city of Rome, has an importance for other lands quite as great as any that now attaches to the successes of Russian or Turkish strategy. But its chief importance is of a delicate and subtle character, and it is to be found mainly in the delicate and subtle transformations of national thought and feeling which mark here a state of political affairs eminently transitional in its character.

"Italy in Transition" was the title of a well-known and most instructive work published seventeen years ago, and which may be read with much profit at the present moment. The character of transition which the author then sought to depict in the year when Garibaldi invaded Naples, and Fanti and Cialdini tore Umbria and the Marches from the Pope, was chiefly of a territorial and political nature. The great social, moral, and religious consequences of the Italian Revolution were only dawning upon the

national mind; with advancing day they are now seen in something like their true outline and proportions. But it is still, and will long remain, an Italy in Transition with which native statesmen have to deal, and of which foreign statesmen must calculate the forces. If this be true of all important questions, it has a quite exceptional degree of truth in reference to all matters relating to the religious condition of Italy. The transition is universal. Every day one has occasion to witness some manifestation of it in the minds of the laity. Laymen past middle age, or advanced in years, seem often to feel a positive difficulty in realizing the fact that they are the same men who thirty years ago in the Sardinian States, seventeen years ago in Lombardy, Central Italy, and the kingdom. of the Two Sicilies, eleven years ago in the Venetian provinces, and not even seven years ago in Rome and the patrimony of St. Peter, were liable at any moment to heavy penalties, to the choice between exile and imprisonment, if they dared to express in public the opinions which are now the recognized and official creed of the Italian State. Legally, as regards all outward acts, these men are free; but can it be matter of wonder if the iron of a lifelong servitude has eaten so deeply into their minds and hearts that at every moment we recognize the traces of a mental bondage? Nevertheless the transition from an antinational and despotic past to a patriotic, free, and independent future, is steadily going on amongst the Italian laity. progress is most observable amongst the peasantry, and for that progress the organization and discipline of the army are mainly to be thanked. The Italian officer has been the untiring and thoughtful teacher of the Italian soldier, and in teaching the Italian soldier he has been the best educator of the Italian people. From official data which will shortly be published by the Ministry of War, but of which the more important results have already been made known to me, it appears that, since the year 1859, when the old Sardinian army began to receive the conscripts from the first of the new provinces successively annexed, not less than a million and a half of common soldiers have received in the Italian army the educational train

Its

ing imparted to them by the younger officers. It would be difficult to estimate too highly the effect of this process on the national mind. Raw Sicilian and Neapolitan youths, whose entire stock of knowledge until the day of their joining the army has consisted in their acquaintance with strange provincial customs, or their traditionary belief in crass local superstitions, have found themselves four times a week, during two hours each day for a period of three years, in mental contact with a class of as highly educated and public-spirited men as Italy can boast of. The mere elementary work of teaching the young recruit to read and to write has been quite secondary to the contemporaneous work of eradicating the prejudices with which his mind was overgrown. And this educational process has been marvellously aided by another, of all processes that best fitted to incarnate in the young soldier's mind the idea of Italian unity — his successive transference from Italian cities and provinces, speaking various idioms, and marked by very different customs, but all agreeing in the recognition of that common country, which, had the illiterate peasant remained in his village, would never have been to him more than a myth. The Neapolitan conscript who has been trained up in the faith of St. Januarius finds, when quartered in Padua, that St. Januarius is there regarded as a very insignificant saint when compared with St. Anthony, and on his removal to his Bologna barrack, learns that neither St. Januarius nor St. Anthony is held fit to be mentioned in the same breath with St. Petronius. What deductions he may draw from the comparison will depend partly on his natural intelligence, partly on the tone of conversation which he holds with his superior officers, partly on the character of the works in the perusal of which he exercises his new sense of intellectual power. One thing is certain, the million and a half of Italian peasants who have passed, or are passing, through this course of training, are a million and a half Italian minds in a most decided state of transition, and one cannot feel surprised at the undoubted fact that amongst this class are found many individuals who subject to a searching criticism, and end.

by rejecting, the doctrines of the Romish Church, and who in consequence join the Waldensian or other anti-Papal İtalian communions.

If the Italian peasant is in a transition state, and if this fact is chiefly promoted by the experience of the peasant-soldier, a change equally great is taking place in another class of the laity and their name is legion. I mean those who were in direct contact with, and immediate subjection to, the power of the Church, wherever that power was indirectly dominant, and, of course, far more where it was directly and wholly supreme—at the seat and centre of the Papacy, in Rome itself. Here the process of mental emancipation is commonly ignored, and often stoutly denied, by the very persons who in their hearts rejoice at the blessings it has conferred. The mental is the necessary though gradual and noiseless result of the civil and political liberation. In that memorable Syllabus. of 1864, which formed the starting-point of a new and aggressive epoch in the history of the Church of Rome, the Papal State, as then governed by the clerical oligarchy, is virtually represented as the one true model for all civil societies, as that which, whilst approaching the nearest to perfection, exhibits in its grand outlines that relation between virtuous rulers and a happy people which all other countries should reverently and zealously endeavor to reproduce. Far different has been the actual experience of the dwellers in this happy valley, for most of whom escape was made almost as difficult as for the heroes of Johnson's tale! The spiritual control which the State claims to exercise over all the forms of domestic and social life did not suggest the idea of an easy yoke or a light burden. It was, in truth, a monstrous aggregate of tyrannies, covering the whole land with one enormous network of espionage, and rendered only tolerable by a mitigation tenfold worse than the evil itself,-a deadening of the human con-science so complete and general that the worst features of the administration were not perceived in their full extent or felt in their real horror. The most popular of Roman satirists of the present century,. Belli, has condensed in one of his sonnets the feelings with which the Papal. Government was regarded by every

Roman citizen not utterly destitute of intelligence and self-respect. He represents the brow-beating and bullying practised on all around him by one of the lowest menials of the Vatican; and how, by the simple announcement that he is such, his victims are cowed and scared as effectually as the poor plebeians in Macaulay's lay, when the client Marcus declares that he serves Appius Claudius. Rome contains within its walls many miracle-working relics, but neither in cloister nor basilica can it show a treasure so truly associated with beneficent effects as the least splinter of the cannon-balls employed by General Cadorna on the 20th September, 1870, to batter in the wall at the Porta Pia. Twenty years of previous negotiations between France and the Vatican, Sardinia and the Vatican, and not unfrequently England and the Vatican, had not procured the removal of one abuse, the introduction of one reform, in the dominions subject to the Pope. General Cadorna's cannon-balls brought with them representative institutions, trial by jury, equality before the law, free discussion on every subject affecting man's state here or hereafter, the sweeping away of the system which had made the father a spy on the son, the wife a spy on the husband, the servant a spy on the master, the confessor a spy on the penitent. But the cannon-balls of General Cadorna demolished in great part, if not altogether, something more. They demolished the long-established prestige of the so-called theocratic Government, against which they were levelled. One must have lived in Rome before and after September, 1870, and had the opportunity of comparing the tone of scornful incredulity with which the mere notion of an Italian occupation was scouted in the higher clerical circles with the mingled astonishment and terror that came over the same circles when the event actually occurred, to realize the true character of that transition state into which even the most devoted partisans of the Papacy felt themselves gradually drawn. The mere force of circumstances imparted with each successive day a less pro-Papal character to Roman society. There exists a vast amount of misapprehension in foreign countries, which it is the object of the Ultramontane organs to

uphold, on the character and strength of the Papal tendencies in the population of Rome. No doubt a large proportion of the higher clerical aristocracy hated and still continue to hate a change by which they have been deprived at once of political power and the prospect of great pecuniary gain. But the relatives of these very persons amongst the Roman laity, and, in not a few cases, even the higher clerical dignitaries themselves, have become suddenly so much enriched by the augmented value of all real property in Rome and its neighborhood, that their aversion to the constitutional Government of Italy is not without its tempering influences. Men do not hate violently, very violently, revolutions which have had the immediate effect of trebling their income. Then the attachment of the higher Roman nobility, and, indeed, of all classes sharing their feelings, to the Papacy, has in a great measure a merely personal character. It is not an attachment to the institution but to the person of the reigning Pontiff. It would indeed be strange if during a Pontificate that has now extended over the long term of thirty-one years a Pope who at the commencement of his reign entered on a liberal path, who was compelled to leave that path rather by the inexorable laws of his office than by his own inclinations, who has been singularly kind and affable to all with whom he came in contact, who has been eminently free from that vice of nepotism by which so many of his predecessors were stained, and who, whilst never availing himself of "his countless opportunities to enrich himself or his family, has lavished countless benefits on those around him, and in many cases been the chief creator of their fortunes,-it would indeed be strange if such a prince had not fostered in the minds of the many recipients of his bounty and the many objects of his kindness, feelings of gratitude and goodwill. But those feelings, I repeat, cluster solely around the person of the Pope. The individuals in whom they are strongest are day by day dying off. One after another the great Roman princes personally attached to Pius IX. descend into the tomb. A Massimo has been followed by an Orsini; an Orsini has been followed by a Doria; not many weeks ago there occurred the death of Prince Ruspoli; and the head of the