The Roman Question | Page 2

to us
therefor. It will see that instead of cutting one another's throats about
theological questions, we have surveyed lines of railway, laid
telegraphs, constructed steam-engines, launched ships, pierced
isthmuses, created sciences, corrected laws, repressed factions, fed the
poor, civilized barbarians, drained marshes, cultivated waste lands,
without ever having a single dispute as to the infallibility of a man.
But the busiest age, the age which the best knows the value of time,
may be obliged for a moment to neglect its business. If, for instance, it
should remark around Rome and its Bishop a violent agitation, which
neither the trickery of diplomacy nor the pressure of armies can
suppress; if it perceive in a little corner of a peninsula a smouldering
fire, which may at any moment burst forth, and in twenty-four hours
envelope all Europe, this age, prudent from a sense of duty, on account
of the great things it has to accomplish, turns its attention to the
situation of Rome, and insists upon knowing what it all means.
It means that the simple princes of the middle ages, Pepin the Brief,
Charlemagne, and the Countess Matilda, behaved with great liberality
to the Pope. They gave him lands and men, according to the fashion of

the times, when men, being merely the live-stock of the land, were
thrown into the bargain. If they were generous, it was not because they
thought, with M. Thiers, that the Pope could not be independent
without being a King; they had seen him in his poverty more
independent and more commanding than almost any monarch on the
earth. They enriched him from motives of friendship, calculation,
gratitude, or it might even be to disinherit their relations, as we
sometimes see in our own time. Since the days of the Countess Matilda,
the Pope, having acquired a taste for possession, has gone on rounding
his estate. He has obtained cities by capitulation, as in the case of
Bologna; he has won others at the cannon's mouth, as Rimini; while
some he has appropriated, by treachery and stealth, as Ancona. Indeed
so well have matters been managed, that in 1859 the Bishop of Rome is
the temporal sovereign of about six millions of acres, and reigns over
three millions one hundred and twenty-four thousand six hundred and
sixty-eight men, who are all crying out loudly against him.
What do they complain of? Only listen, and you will soon learn.
They say--that the authority to which, without having either asked or
accepted it, they are subject, is the most fundamentally absolute that
was ever defined by Aristotle; that the legislative, executive, and
judicial powers are united, confounded, and jumbled together in one
and the same hand, contrary to the practice of civilized states, and to
the theory of Montesquieu; that they willingly recognize the
infallibility of the Pope upon all religious questions, but that in civil
matters it appears to them less easy to tolerate; that they do not refuse
to obey, because, all things considered, man is not placed here below to
follow the bent of his own inclinations, but that they would be glad to
obey laws; that the good pleasure of any man, however good it may be,
is not so good as the Code Napoléon; that the reigning Pope is not an
evil-disposed man, but that the arbitrary government of one man, even
admitting his infallibility, can never be anything but a bad government.
That in virtue of an ancient and hitherto ineradicable practice, the Pope
is assisted in the temporal government of his States by the spiritual
chiefs, subalterns, and spiritual employés of his Church; that Cardinals,

Bishops, Canons, Priests, forage pell-mell about the country; that one
sole and identical caste possesses the right of administering both
sacraments and provinces; of confirming little boys and the judgments
of the lower courts; of ordaining subdeacons and arrests; of despatching
parting souls and captains' commissions; that this confusion of the
spiritual and the temporal disseminates among the higher offices a
multitude of men, excellent no doubt in the sight of God, but
insupportable in that of the people; often strangers to the country,
sometimes to business, and always to those domestic ties which are the
basis of every society; without any special knowledge, unless it be of
the things of another world; without children, which renders them
indifferent to the future of the nation; without wives, which renders
them dangerous to its present; and to conclude, unwilling to hear reason,
because they believe themselves participators in the pontifical
infallibility.
That these servants of a most merciful but sometimes severe God,
simultaneously abuse both mercy and justice; that, full of indulgence
for the indifferent, for their friends, and for themselves, they treat with
extreme rigour whoever has had the misfortune to become obnoxious to
power;