1852.

The Reforming Period of Pius IX.

359

politics; as to the dangers of that unsettling process which they generate in the common mind, and the reacting dangers of the refluent tide of angry disappointment. To few, however, either here or elsewhere, was given the discerning eye; and Pius IX. was speedily invested, not only with every virtue, but with every talent, under heaven. The first two years of his reign present to us a continuous and brilliant political romance. The events of that time in the Roman States already seem wholly without any matter-of-fact or historical character; colour, form, and motion are all borrowed from the ideal. Ariosto or Boiardo could hardly match or paint them. A benignant visage, a majestic head, a throne looking towards both worlds, and claiming to be the link between them, the sweet yet sonorous music of a voice which blends in one the highest assumptions of religion and the plain palpable dictates of humanity and justice, the rapid succession of its utterances, each one seeming to rise higher than before, a nation dissolved in joy and tears, grown men thrown back upon the wildness of childhood by the vehemence and height of their exultation; and all this not inconveniently near, so that the curious eye should separate between the tinsel and the gold, the diamond and the paste, but at the exactest distance, not too much for interest, ample and abundant for illusion, and for that mellowing tone which conceals while it harmonises and enchants: such was the picture, as we viewed it in our simplicity, of those halcyon days; like a myth brought down from fable into fact, or like the opening of some new Apocalypse, the anticipation, in this vale of tears, of the better and higher land, into which neither cruelty nor defilement, neither fraud nor force, can enter.

'The earth and every common sight

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.'*

We may turn over the pages of the world's history in vain to find a parallel to that extraordinary time; not, however, for glory, not for power developed, not for progress achieved and realised, but for the unhappy issuing of the best intentions into wholesale harlequinade; for brilliancy of mere glitter in the scene, and impenetrability of dense delusion in the spectators.

Such was the first act of the disastrous piece, which opened out, as it proceeded, into the Year of Revolutions for Europe, and for Rome into the foul murder of Rossi, the flight or

* Wordsworth's Ode on the Recollections of Childhood.

truancy of the Pope, and the joint invasion and occupation of the country by France, Austria, Spain, and Naples. And we English have looked on with a kind of stupid and bewildered wonderment; conscious that something has gone very wrong, but not knowing exactly what; partly befooled by mendacious 'correspondents'; partly unwilling to suspect French generals and statesmen of deliberate and continued falsehood, told in the face of the world and for the purposes of despotism; partly haunted by the traces of certain dreams that we had a little while ago, about a pope, the quintessence of wisdom as well as benevolence, who, with a wave of his sceptre, had called back the golden age; partly possessed with a dim notion, that only Roman Catholic Powers have an interest in the Roman State; partly hugging, with impenetrable contentment, our own exemption from the revolutionary scourge, and satisfied on the whole to let the world wag.

All these reasons we summarily thrust aside; so far, at least, as to open a way for our pressing upon the public mind a serious consideration of the case of the Roman States. England, which vibrates to every shock that society anywhere receives, must not exempt herself from the law of sympathy and brotherhood, only because the firm tone of her system enables her to endure the pulsation under which a poorer fibre would give way. The people of the Roman States are made of bone and sinew, and nerve, and flesh and blood, like other men: and it is an absurdity, not worth argumentative confutation, to hold, that the civil and social relations and political rights, which appertain to them as men, are to be handled only by the adherents of those who stand in a particular connexion with the head of their government as Roman Catholics. In France, indeed, we have been told, with very sufficient distinctness, that the Roman subjects are elected to a perpetual martyrdom for the good of the Papal Church. All the honours of that martyrdom they are to enjoy, together with their traditions, and the gains arising from the resort of travellers to the capital: but martyrs they are to be, politically dead, shut out from those principles of government which are the vital conditions of society, according to the modern idea. Other nations may claim liberty of conscience; but this would too rudely jostle the tender susceptibilities of a Supreme Pontiff. Other nations may vote their own taxes, but the Romans are to be purely passive in that matter; other nations are to delimit for themselves the possessions and status of the clergy, but the process is to be precisely inverted for some three millions of people in central Italy, because a temporal power, conferred upon the Church by events,

1852. The Diplomatists at the Court of Rome in 1848. 361

and harmonising with the state and exigencies of society when it was acquired, is now to be maintained in defiance of all those exigencies, upon the palpably manufactured pretext, that it has grown into and become inseparable from the spiritual supremacy of the Pope.

While the Pope is the great political beggar of the world, could be deposed to-morrow by ninety-nine votes out of every hundred in a free assembly of his lay subjects, and depends from day to day upon the breath of foreign authorities, he is not content, forsooth, to hold his temporal power upon any titles, or subject to any condition, so precarious as that to which his protectors themselves submit, and which he himself recognises in their cases the consent, namely, of the governed. Let us examine the composition of the diplomatic body at the court of Pius in 1848. There are the representatives of Portugal and Spain, accredited from sovereigns themselves symbols of the popular principle, and substitutes for the rival claimants under the principle of absolute hereditary right. There is the ambassador of the French Republic, erected upon the ruins of kingship, but on the instant acknowledged by the Pope. It is true, indeed, that the royalty now prostrate in the dust was itself of revolutionary origin; but from the very hour of its birth that too had the recognition of the Court of Rome. There is the envoy of Sicily, which has broken the duress of Naples for a moment, although it is presently to be reduced, and reduced not by foreign but by domestic arms. There is the minister of Belgium, a country owing its political existence to its own exertions, which emancipated it from Holland. There is Castellani, the minister of Venice: of Venice assured to Austria by the treaty of Vienna, under which the Papal throne itself subsists; of Venice, which exists in independence solely by the right, and amidst the convulsive struggles, of revolution; of Venice, pressed at the very moment by the Austrian arms, and consoled under that pressure by the following address, in autograph, from the Pontiff:-GOD give his blessing to Venice, ' and DELIVER HER FROM THE CALAMITIES SHE APPREHENDS, in such manner as in the infinite resources of His 'Providence shall please him for the purpose. 27 June, 1848. 'PIUS, PP. IX.'

Very good: here is a Lamannais-Ventura Pope, the beauideal of theocratic revolution, owning no allegiance to things as they are, drawing no lines of division between the processes of bit-by-bit and root-and-branch, and consecrating, at every point of the compass, in the most varied and authentic forms, the principle that every nation may fix and settle for itself who

VOL. XCV. NO. CXCIV.

B B

shall be its governors, taking down the old and setting up the new at its discretion, and that none shall on that account suffer any detriment in its religious rights and privileges, or lose caste in its relations to the head and centre of the Roman Church. Nay, even in the mood of reaction, what was the language of the Pontiff: I cannot mingle in this war; you are all alike 6 my children.' That is to say, nations and communities of men are not to be called to account by spiritual, any more than by temporal, power, for the changes they may choose to make in their laws or in their rulers.

But now let the same principle which had handled, remodelled, overthrown, the ancient monarchies of Europe, not so much on account of gross outrage, or of ludicrous failure to attain the purposes of government, as on account of inadequacy to make a full reply to the demands of modern civilisation, proceed to try the same processes upon that hierocracy, which in theory is the scandal and the laughing stock of Europe, the grand lusus nature of the political creation, and which in practice is too rotten to bear the rummaging of effective reform; and how strange is the metamorphosis of the Pontifical visage! Sauce for the gander is not, it seems, to be sauce for the goose. The sanctity of the ecclesiastical power infects all it touches: and the mundane terrestrial instruments of taxation, police, soldiery, courts, gaols, and the like which it employs, must not be subjected to the rude touch of human hands. When the Romans do that very thing which so many other nations have done with the Pope's sanction, — that is to say, get rid of their old government and choose a new one, then we find we are in a new element altogether, and the very same exercise of discretion, which to others is allowed, for them is visited by excommunication, or exclusion from the kingdom of God. These things are worth looking into.

Now, let us at the outset disclaim all intention of assailing that spiritual supremacy. The question before us is a question of social and political justice. It is in our view impossible to say whether the papal supremacy will, upon the whole, be more strengthened or weakened by the withdrawal of the temporal power; but let us, above and before all things, have fair play; and do not let us conceal religious or sectarian objects under the plea of that natural and general justice, which is anterior to and independent of them. Let us inquire frankly whether the Papal power ought to stand or to fall upon these last-named grounds. Any covert purpose, giving a colour to our ideas, and a bias to our arguments, apart from the true bearings of the question, would at once be detected, and would raise a counter

1852. The Pope at present no Independent Power.

363

influence of the same illegitimate kind, and quite as effective. England said Aye to the restoration of the Pope a generation back on the grounds of justice, without fear of being told that she Romanised by so doing; in like manner let her say No to his continuance in his sovereignty now, without fear of sinister imputations, if she is convinced that justice asks it, but only with and on condition of that conviction. And let it by no means be objected, that language like this ought not to be used with regard to a foreign Power. It ought not to be used of a foreign Power, but it may and ought to be used of a foreign puppet. He that consents to hold a throne in virtue of the military occupation of his country by foreign armies, without any rational expectation that such a state of things is to terminate and give place to one more natural, is not an independent sovereign at all; he has given over his sovereignty to anybody and everybody, and has conferred upon mankind at large a right to discuss the question of its continuance with as little reserve as if every one of Adam's children had to give a separate and authoritative vote upon it.

We are not of those who proceed upon the abstract objection to clerical government, strong as it undoubtedly is. We are of those who object to uprooting any thing until after it has been well considered what is to succeed, and made reasonably certain that the contemplated change will be an improvement. We understand. and sympathise with, the feelings of persons who, without much positive admiration of the Papal Government, have, nevertheless, been so keenly alive to the great risks, both political and religious, which might follow upon its dissolution, that they have clung, beyond hope and against hope, to the desire that, in some way or other, some tolerable terms of composition between the Papal throne, with the sacerdotal apparatus about it on the one hand, and the civilisation of our time, with its political accompaniments on the other, might be devised. But the resistless teaching of experience has brought us to the conclusion that no such terms can be found. Monarchy has shown itself in many countries, and, we trust, will show itself in more, capable of such adaptation to the times, that it has, as it were, started with renovated youth upon the path of a new, yet honourable and useful existence. Such it is in England: such, as we trust, to name no more, in Belgium and Sardinia. But our belief is, first, that the Papal Government has experimentally demonstrated its incapability of receiving these adaptations; and, secondly, that, on account of that incapability, it must very speedily cease and determine. After establishing these propositions, we shall proceed to press