The Roman Question | Page 2

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; that they more readily pardon the wretch who cuts a man's throat, than the imprudent citizen who blames an abuse.
That the Pope, and the Priests who assist him, not having been taught accounts, grossly mismanage the public finances; that whereas maladministration or malversation of the public finances might have been tolerated a hundred years ago, when the expenses of public worship