Tuscany in 1849 and in 1859

Front matter

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Chapter I. The Hand-writing On The Wall

The Law. — "After me the deluge." — Leopoldine Jaws. — A tranquil people. — Giusti's poems.- — -Niccolini. — The voice of Austria in 1809.— That of England. — The voice of Austria in 1847. — The standing relationship of Austria to Italy .....

Chapter II. Amabilis Insania

Gregory the Sixteenth.— The Conclave. — Austria too late, as ever. — A reforming Pope ! ! — The Amnesty. — "Hopes too bright to last." — Gioberti's dreams. — His opinion that new wine may be put into old bottles. — Lesson learned from the bursting of them. 16

Chapter III. The Tuscan People, And The Tuscan Duke

The new Pope's parable. — Prosperity of Tuscany. — Tuscan national character. — The teaching of ten years.- — Leopold the Second — his capabilities — and disqualifications. — Things best as they are. — Recent tendencies of the Grand-Ducal government. — Renzi the refugee. — Montanelli. — Genoese anniversary ... 26 riii CONTENTS.

CHAPTEE IV.

THE HAND OF AUSTRIA, VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE.

PAGE

Policy at Naples — in Rome — in Tuscany. — The " Buon Governo." — The real ailment of Italy — Royal perjuries. — Riots in Tuscany. — The Tuscan peasantry. — Austrian intrigues. — Accusation against Metternich. — Affair of Giribaldi. — Proofs of the infamous treachery of Austria. — Net result of the year 1847 . . .46

CHAPTEE V.

THE PACE BECOMES FAST IN TUSCANY.

The Consulta.— The National Guard.— "Te Deum" the first. —Prince Canino at Leghorn — and at Florence. — The " uniform question." — Explanation of the Grand-Duke's conduct. — The last of the sbirri. — Merrily goes the boat with Niagara ahead . . .66

CHAPTEE VI.

BRITANNIA'S MILD ESSAY AT RULING THE WAVES.

The lottery and tobacco rebellion. — Lord Minto's mission. — England's counsel. — Lord Normanby and the Nuncio. — More concessions.— Charles Albert's early history. — Leopold the Second's measure of sincerity ........ 82

CHAPTEE VII.

THE RISING OF THE CURTAIN.

Revolution in France. — At Vienna. —Charles Albert crosses the Ticino. — Difficulties of his position. — News of the invasion of Lombardy reaches Florence. — Leopold the Second sends troops to assist the Piedmontese. — Assertions of his treachery at this time. — Circumstances then deemed favourable to the Italian cause, in truth were the reverse .... 95

CONTENTS. ix

CHAPTEE VIII.

THE TUSCAN THERMOPILE.

PAGE

Pius the Ninth finds out his mistake.— The Crusaders. — The Pope's a Pope for a' that. — The Encyclic.— Its consequences. — Tuscan soldiership. — Calumnies. — Curtatone and Montanara. — The Tuscan forces. — Radetzky's judgment of them. — The news of the battle at Florence. — The bronze tablets .... 110

CHAPTEE IX.

FROM BAD TO WORSE.

The progress of the war. — Republican Intrigues. — Murder of Colonel Giovannetti. — Weakness of the Tuscan government. — Elections for the chambers. — Guerrazzi. — Going down hill. — Agitation in Florence. — Alarming condition of Leghorn. — Guerrazzi at Leghorn. — Guerrazzi minister. — The " Costituente." — Guerrazzi and the Duke 127

CHAPTEE X.

CONCESSIONS.

Ungovernable children. — The terrible "Costituente." — Montanelli and Guerrazzi with the Grand-Duke. — Difficulties of Leopold the Second. — The Duke yields. — "Te Deum" wanted and no Archbishop !— Salutary lessons . . . . . .146

CHAPTEE XI.

"WHO'S THE DUPE?"

A FARCE BY His SEKENE HIGHNESS THE D — E OF F E.

Radetzky's letter to the Duke. — The Pope will have none of the " Costituente." — The Duke retires to Siena.- — Montanelli's interview with him there. — Guerrazzi's loyalty. — The Duke's flight. — His letters. — Santo Stefano. — News of the Duke's flight at Florence. — Scene in the Chambers. — Triumvirate appointed. — Military mutiny. — Riots . . . . . 154

b x CONTENTS.

CHAPTEE XU.

NAPOLEON GUERRAZZI.

MOB

All lost at Novara. — Illusions. — Leopold the Second at San Stefano, — De Laugier on the frontiers. — Mazzini in Florence. — Trees of Liberty. — Guerrazzi as Captain-General. — Montanelli's rival expedition, — The "Contadini" at the gates. — A reign of terror in Tuscan fashion. — Meeting of the Chambers. — Guerrazzi Dictator 174

CHAPTEE XIII.

END OF THE FIRST ACT.

Visions of restoration. — The demagogues continue, but the people give up the game. — The Livornese in Florence. — Municipal hatreds. — Bloodshed in Florence. — The demagogues frightened into hiding. — Fall of Dictator Guerrazzi. — Provisional Government.— Tumult in the Piazza. — End of the first revolution . 194

CHAPTEE XIV.

"TOSCANA E AUSTRIA."

Overtures to the Grand-Duke. — Austrian effrontery. — The Austrian occupation. — Very tedious treason. — Austria, Italy's best teacher 210

CHAPTEE XV.

THE TEN YEARS' INTERLUDE.

The events of ten years. — How to sit with safety on a steam-boiler, — The anniversary of Montanara. — The bronze tablets. — Scene in Santa Croce. — Repeal of the " Statuto." — Concordat. — Austrianising of the Army. — Outbreak at Leghorn. — Policy of the liberal party. — Conduct of Piedmont. 222

CONTENTS. xi

CHAPTER XVI.

PfiEPARATIONS FOR TRYING AGAIN.

MM

Opening of 1859. — Attempts to enlighten the Grand-Duke as to the state of the country. — Loyal conduct of Piedmont. — Duke's visit to Naples — Illegal violence towards the publisher Barbara.— Exodus of volunteers. — Lord Noraanby and the Marchese Bartoloinmei. — Disposition of the Tuscan army. — Signor Landrini's visit to the Grand-Duke. — Piedmont's offer of alliance. — Further attempts to make the Duke comprehend the situation of affairs. — His visit to the fortresses . . . . 236

CHAPTER XVII.

"WHEN UNIFORM SLEEVES LINKED WITH FUSTIAN ARE

SEEN, THEN WILL HIGHNESSES SHORTLY BECOME LESS SERENE". "

Ancient Prophecy.

The " Tombola " — Understanding between the military and civilians. — Revolutionary readings in the streets of Florence. — The Porto San Gallo — Fraternisation of the army and people. — Unity of the national wish. — Letter of the Marchese Ridolfi to the Grand-Duke. — Proofs of the honesty of Piedmont . .253

CHAPTER XVIII.

NEGOTIATIONS.

Meeting in the Squar$ of Barbano. — Under the fortress guns. — The troops hoist the tricolor. — Was the Tuscan army bribed ! — The Grand-Duke sends for the Marchese Lajatico. — His perfect loyalty to the sovereign. — Conditions proposed to the Grand- Duke. — The Marchese's courtiership. — Mot of the French Minister 267

CHAPTER XIX.

NO TROOPS TO FIRE ON THE PEOPLE ! ! !— " E NOI ! " Conduct of the populace. — Their forbearance. — People in front of

CONTENTS.

PAGE

the Pitti Palace. — Errors of Lord Normanby. — The witness called by him. — The plan for firing on the people. — Visit of the Ducal family to Belvedere — Position of the fortress. — Fears of the Ducal family, though groundless, not improbably genuine. — The Archduke Carlo at Belvedere. — The troops decline to fire on the people. — What then can become of the Sovereign ? — The Grand-Duke's "mildness." — Adieu to Florence. , 282

CHAPTER XX.

QUITS! OR DOUBLE!

The morrow of the Revolution. — Organising. — Tuscany at the bar of European opinion.— What has she deserved ?— What will she get? 299

Chapter I. The Hand-wkiting On The Wall

The Law. — " After me the deluge." — Leopoldine laws. — A tranquil people. — Giusti's poems. — Niccolini. — The voice of Austria in 1809. — That of England. — The Toice of Austria in 1847. — The standing relationship of Austria to Italy.

IF there be one point more than another on which we are entitled to assume that we know with certainty the plan of the Divine government of this world, it is that human free-agency is the appointed means and condition of human development and progress. Universal history, which, in its more comprehensive lessons, is but the manifestation of the Divine laws working to their ordained results athwart the impediments opposed to their slow but certain evolution by human error and unintelligence, has no more unmistakeable teaching. In never failing proportion to the degree in which individual free-agency has been secured to the members of bodies social, have these become prosperous, powerful, noble, progressive. The measure of success which has attended efforts to suppress the influences of this key-stone of the Divine Architect has, with that absolute certainty of recurrence that marks and declares the existence of a law, been also the measure of the rapidity with which nations have retrograded towards barbarism, and eventual dissolution into their primal elements.

The mighty despotisms and splendid cities of the East, where human free-will was crushed more effectually and more absolutely than it has ever been elsewhere, have paid the penalty, declare the law, and manifest the phenomenon in its completion. Doubtless there were wise men of the East, who loudly declared, that the maintenance of Babylon was absolutely necessary to some Asiatic balance of power. No doubt Palmyra was in its day an indispensable member of some political system, and its existence "guaranteed by the faith of treaties." But these cities controvened the higher law, and the law moved on in its course, and obliterated them.

But human intelligence, even when awakened to such palpable manifestation of the Divine governance in its entirety and completion, is slow to analyse, admit, and apply the principle involved in it to less extremely marked cases, especially when the admission would thwart strong passions.

Granted that the utmost excess of despotism be proved to be unquestionably deadly ; does it follow that all advance in the same direction is proportionably baneful 1 History is ready with its answer. Europe has exhibited very many gradations of despotism. That exercise of free-agency which the Creator has decreed to be necessary to the perfect development of the human creature, has been in different times and countries more or less compressed in very various degrees. And all these experiments have resulted in unvarying manifestation of the law. Each state has been seen to be durable and each society prosperous, happy, and improving, in exact correspondence with the degree of its freedom.

The statement, thus simply enunciated, wears in this nineteenth century, Heaven be thanked, an air of the tritest truism. Yet the truth of it has not availed to induce statesmen in their cabinets to act in obedience to it. He who should urge on them to act as if its eternal provisions were of more import and more binding than all the parchments that all congresses since the world began ever set seal to, would be deemed a " mere sentimentalist," a dreamer of the most Utopian dreams. It is abundantly clear, that the statesmen of Europe, however aware they may be that national freedom makes national prosperity, are not yet veritably persuaded that the Divine law, which appoints this, works out penalties for its contravention, which

B 2 must unfailingly bring their balance of power, calculations, and their attempts to educe strength out the elements of decay, to nought.

There may be here and there some one among them, whose clear-sightedness on this point, while it fails to induce their allegiance to the Divine law, yet forces them to the impious cynicism of trusting that the retribution for breaking it may fall on other heads than their own. There may be more than one who, well aware of the hopelessness of his fight against God's laws, yet trusts to the slowness of their operation ; and determines to persevere in acting in defiance of them in the admitted hope that the deluge which must be the penalty of such conduct, may fall out after his day. The hand-writing on the wall has been legible elsewhere than in doomed Babylon.

But it may be fairly hoped, that the majority of those who suppose themselves to be guiding the destinies of Europe, are innocent of such clear-sightedness, and guiltless of this Titanic defiance of the Omnipotent. They have no real belief in any laws more powerful than those elaborated by their own processes. They have a potent belief in wax and parchment, in ratifications and recognitions ; a lively faith in the saving power of congresses ; and do really hope by dint of clever diplomacy, and much profession of respect for bargains made between each other, to perpetuate and render durable for the purposes of their own favourite balance -of-power game, a social condition which the eternal law has decreed to be necessarily short-lived, and inherently tending to dissolution.

Yet the hand- writing on the wall has been, one would think, clear enough. If no portion of Europe has yet manifested the working of the curse, that is, the heritage of despotism, to the full extent to which its operations are visible in the desolated countries of the East, there are not wanting districts which have been smitten with very palpable symptoms of an approach to that condition. Wide regions gifted prodigally by nature with all that could best adapt them to become the prosperous home of an industrious and thickly-packed population, have been reduced by Roman and Neapolitan misgovernment to sparsely inhabited tracts of almost uncultivated wilderness, where the wolf and the wild boar gain ground on man in his ill-sustained competition for the possession of the soil. And if in Tuscany the Austrian blight has less remarkably settled on the material aspects of the country, it is because these were to a certain degree protected by the beneficent influences of laws bestowed on the Duchy by the exceptional wisdom of Peter Leopold. And if its moral condition has not altogether sunk to the level of a people, among whom compression has already destroyed the germ of life, it must be attributed to the wonderful vigour fostered in the race by the old republican freedom, which has lived through the systematic efforts of more than three hundred years todestroy it.

A distinguished visitor at the Tuscan Court, some few years before the '48, was complimenting the Grand Duke upon some occasion, on the evident prosperity, the apparent contentment, and the intelligence of his people. " They are tranquil," was the Sovereign's reply ; and it spoke volumes on the Grand-ducal theories of social life and his beau-ideal of civil government. It summed up in a word all that he recognised as most desirable in a people, as regarded from the Sovereign's point of view : and it was in some sense, and in a certain degree, true ; for the Tuscans were, in fact, enjoying an amount of prosperity unknown in other parts of Italy. Their fiscal burdens, though much heavier than from the circumstances of the case they ought to have been, were yet light in proportion to those borne by their neighbours. Nature was prolincally generous of corn, wine, and oil; and the people, sober and frugal by the inherited habits of successive generations, worked little, dozed, chatted, and sang much, and were to all appearance, as the Duke said, tranquil. Yet it was amid this boasted tranquillity that Giuseppe Giusti, the great satiric poet of modern Tuscany, wrote his tremendous lines on the fallen fortunes of Italy, entitled " The Boot ; " and the perhaps yet more stinging satire on the occasion of the coronation of the Emperor of Austria, who is represented as attended by all his Italian vassal sovereigns. It was amid this so perfect-seeming tranquillity that his almost awful poem, " The Land of the Dead," was passed from eager hand to hand, despite the prohibition of censors and the vigilance of the police.

It is in this thrilling trumpet-call that, after some bitter stanzas, in which the Austrian is taunted with the " forest of bayonets " found necessary to keep down this nation so loudly proclaimed to be dead ; he continues : * —

' ' But due receipts and payments

The books of Nature give ; — Our time is come for burial,

As theirs is come to live.

And truly, if you ask me,

We've had our time on earth ; Why Gino, f we were full-grown men

Long years before their birth.

" Ye city walls, that round us,

Ye tombs in grand array, Our true apotheosis

We see in your decay.

Eestless barbarian, raze them,

The very graves efface, Whose bones may dare to savour yet

Of this their burial-place.

" Instead of funeral torches, The sun above our tomb Keeps watch in changeless radiance ; There rose and violet bloom,

* The translation in the text is taken from an article on Giusti in the Athenaeum, No. 1484.

t Gino Capponi, the venerable Tuscan constitutionalist, to whom the poem is dedicated.

With vine and olive mingled, To twine a mourning wreath, —

Oh, lovely graveyard that might make The living covet death !

" In fine then, brother corpses,

Let men sing out their stave !

Wait we, and see what ending

This living death may have.

There is a Dies irce

In the service for the tomb !

Shall there not be, however far,

A Judgment Day to come ? "

The eagerness with which a volume of such verses was printed and reprinted clandestinely, and the deep impression they produced on the national mind, did not speak, to such at least as could read the signs of the times, very favourably of the tranquillity which the Grand-Duke, and his masters and his servants flattered themselves was lulling his people to their lethargic slumber. In truth, of such tranquillity as can alone effectually serve the purposes of a paternal government, there had been little or none even in Tuscany, and much less in the other parts of the peninsula, since the French Revolution; and more potently still the first Napoleon had roused the sleepers with a trumpet blast, whose echoes are still reverberating in the Italian sky. It was from this time forth that the old " panem-et-circenses " receipt lost its efficacy on the nations. They had become afflicted with the malady of thought, and aspired to grow to the stature of men. The old so beautiful Areadian metaphors and ideas of human flocks with mitred and sceptred pastors had not only lost their charm, but had become loathsome to mankind. Already Niccolini in his magnificent tragedy on " Arnold of Brescia," — which was but a most eloquent application of the aspirations and circumstances of five or six centuries ago to the present needs and position of Italy, and which was felt to be so by the rulers as well as by the people, — had exclaimed, " e stanea lumana stirpe di chiarmarsi gregge ! " (" The human race is aweary of being termed a herd ! ") Already the words had stirred men's pulses, and brought down sympathetic shouts in crowded theatres in a manner that might have warned those in high places of the tendency of the popular mind. It might have warned them, that their own falsehood and hypocrisy had helped to call forth the spirit that they were thenceforth powerless to quench.

"Italians," the Archduke John had cried in 1809, "Italians, is it the wish of your hearts to become once again Italians ? If, taking the better part, already taken by your liberator (Francis of Austria), you are victorious together with him, Italy returning to a new life will once more have

her rank among the nations of the earth !

Italians, It is needed only to will it, for you to be again Italians ! " *

* Toscana e Austria. Cenni, Storico-politici. Firenzi, 1859, p. 20.

"Italians," cried Nugent, the commander of the Austrian forces, in a proclamation published at Ravenna on the 10th of December, 1812, and entitled "The Independent Kingdom of Italy," — "Italians, you' are to become, all of you, an independent nation ! " The incalculable effect produced by the mighty conjuring words, " Nationality ! " " Independence ! " " Resurrection ! " which the great magician Napoleon had, with whatever more or less of sincere intent, spoken to the nations, had been witnessed by the dismayed despots ; and they, with no less rashness than ineffable treachery, sought to wield the mighty spell for their own behoof. And the national heart, whose generous impulses, as ever, showed themselves in the usual imprudent but generous credulity, gave faith to the professions of the sceptred impostors.

Alas, alas, that it should be for evermore impossible to forget, that the voice of England was added to the perfidious invitations which practised on a trusting people's faith to lure them to their ruin! "Italians," proclaimed Bentinck in 1814, " stand no longer in doubt ! Be Italians ! Our united forces shall cause Italy to become what she was in her best times ! "

And now ! now that England, — if she can never more wipe out the bitter shame which England's

* Cited from the Italian in the above-mentioned work.

THE HAND-WKITING ON THE WALL. 11

dealings with Italy from Castlereagh to Derby have made to weigh painfully on many an honest English heart, — now that she might at least manifest repentance for her blind and tame acquiescence in the shrouded iniquities of those who are permitted to act in her name ; — now ! must it be, that a mean dog-in-the-manger jealousy of a rival nation, which has had the nobleness or the sagacity to choose the better part, shall lead the English people into permitting a further load of infamy to be cast on the national fame, for the sake of gratifying certain dynastic sympathies, with which England has no sympathy, or of carrying out the instinctive policy of those who dread the inevitable progress of national liberties !

No sooner was the object of these false and hypocritical lures attained, than disguise was with the most cynic shamelessness laid aside, and the wolf once again showed himself in his own appearance. Bellegarde proclaimed to the people of Lombardy that their provinces " were definitively incorporated with the Austrian empire ! " The bare whispering of the very name of Italy roused the watchful suspicions of those who had so recently made profit of the spell inherent in the sound of it. To rouse Italian echoes with the dangerous word was a crime to be on the instant extinguished in blood. And in the fulness of time it was announced by Metternich, in a dispatch of the second of August, 1847, that " Italy is but a geographical denomination ! " No more unlucky word ever escaped the lips of arrogant power in the insolent conviction, that its foot was securely placed on the neck of its slave ! It burned into the heart of every Italian the henceforth ineradicable conviction, that every most righteous Italian hope is for ever incompatible with the presence of Austria on the soil of the peninsula. It has merged all internal jealousies, differences, and rivalries in the one intense longing to be free from the rule of the foreigner.

The desire of a nation to govern itself, to be free from foreign tutelage, to be in reality a nation, even if the yoke from which it sought to escape be a beneficent one, is more than a permissible desire. It is a laudable one. But what reasons, of a by no means merely sentimental sort, Lombardy has had to wish itself free from the intolerable tyranny of Austria, the English public are in part aware, despite the inconceivable effrontery of English statesmen, who assure the world from their places in parliament, that in reality the Lombards have no cause to complain of the government of their masters.* Again, that kindred peoples of like language, literature, blood, and lineage should be moved by really fraternal feelings, and should consider the miserable position

* See the debate on the Address in February, 1859 ; alas, almost pastim.

THE HAND-WKITING ON THE WALL. 13

of one among them as the common misfortune of all, is in no wise other than admirable. But the other nations of Italy may plead to statesmen, who do not believe in, or cannot tolerate fraternal sentiment among the nations, reasons of the most material sort, intelligible even to the most red-tapebound intellect, for making common cause with Lombardy against Austria.

" On the day on which Austria declared Lombardy definitively incorporated with the empire," writes an elegant Tuscan author,* "she placed herself in a state of war with the Italians ; she created for herself the necessity of violating the sovereignty of the other states of Italy, and drove their princes into a false and dangerous position. During all these long years to oppress and to repress, was the whole programme of her government ; — a government necessarily therefore provocative of insurrections, exciting incurable hatreds ; — a government always opposed openly or covertly, according to the occasions and opportunities, and therefore a constant disturber of the peace of Europe by the reaction it excited against its blind resistance to the progress of civilisation."

"When Francis of Austria, on hearing of the constitutions that were being established in sundry states of Europe, exclaimed that " the world was going mad ! " — and when, on the Professors in the

* Toscana e Austria, p. 21.

University of Pavia going in a body to pay their compliments to him, he said to them, " Remember always, gentlemen, that your duty is to form not learned men, but obedient subjects ! " he declared plainly enough that thenceforth improvement, civilisation, hope was on one side, and Austria ever immutably on the other ; and, as ' an Italian writer well remarks, he was using language in truth more revolutionary than ever did Danton when speaking of the necessity of terrifying the aristocrats.

The overt acts of illegal violence ; the insidious snares spread to seduce the people into insurrectionary movements, which might justify the sovereign in calling in Austrian aid to put them down ; the slavery inflicted fully as much on the weak, ignorant, and unfortunate princes as on their subjects, which go to prove how justly every state in Italy deemed itself in 1847 as much the enemy of Austria as Lombardy was ; belong to the period which elapsed between 1814 and the beginning of the story which these pages have undertaken to tell. It must suffice to have indicated thus summarily why, when a ray of hope suddenly gleamed out of the darkness in 184 7, the great need, desire, and aspiration of Tuscany, as well as of every other part of the peninsula, ought to have been — then as now — war against Austria ! And any more detailed statement of the wrongs inflicted by the oppressor before that period is the less needed, in that his subsequent conduct will sufficiently indicate the abiding and unchanging nature of his policy ; and will most abundantly show that in 1859, at all events, Tuscany has rightly understood her interest and her duty.

Chapter II. Amabilis Insania

Gregory the Sixteenth. — The Conclave. — Austria too late, as ever. — A reforming Pope ! ! — The Amnesty. — " Hopes too bright to last." — Gioberti's dreams. —His opinion that new wine may be put into old bottles. — Lesson learned from the bursting of them.

GREGORY THE SIXTEENTH died on the 1st of June, 1846. That well-meaning but disastrously misplaced old monk, with his not inconsiderable stores of ecclesiastical learning, of a sort that could serve but to shut out from his mind any useful views of the real world he was called on to rule, and with his profound ignorance of all that could not be learned within. the walls of an Italian cloister, had shown the world how heavy a curse to mankind an inoffensive and helpless old man could be made by the inherent absurdities and iniquities of the papal system. Amid continually increasing difficulties and obstructions, — athwart constantly recurring conspiracies, insurrections, and rebellions, — by means of executions, imprisonments, banishments, confiscations, police despotism, and domestic espionnage, — at the price of ever-spreading misery and pauperisation, and in the face of advancing bankruptcy, the Papal machine had with much ado, by the support of Austrian bayonets, staggered along thus far.

Yet it was the hope and aim of a great number of the cardinals, and of their allies in sundry of the cabinets of Europe, to choose a new Pope of such a sort as should ensure a continuance, only more energetic, in the same path. And the truly wonderful and instructive part of the fact is, that these men were the ablest and the most far-seeing among them ! Lambruschini, certainly of all the College of Cardinals, the man most like a statesman (such as the statesmen of paternal governments are), the most energetic, and the least of a mere ignorant priest, was the leader, and the favourite candidate of this party. And the programme of these leaders would have been No reforms ! No concessions! Hold on, and trust in the brute force of Austria ! These were the views of the most clear-sighted ! — men who knew much better the nature and condition of the materials they had to deal with, and of the system they had to uphold, than does Lord John Russell, and other English statesmen, who talk about " persuading the pope to introduce reforms into his administration ! " They knew and know right well that no rotten stone can be removed from the arch of their system without bringing down the whole fabric in ruin.

They are perfectly aware that the first proposition of reform would lay violent hands on some abomination absolutely necessary to the propping up of some vital part of the system. They thoroughly understand that for them reform means destruction. And if it might have been excusable in a lookeron from a distance to have shared in the Utopian dreams of Gioberti and his school before the attempt made by the present pontiff, surely the result of that tentative, should have been sufficient to extinguish for ever on the northern side of the Alps, as it has most effectually on the southern, all notion of the possibility of a reformed Papal government.