se we live in; it is not new, but it will last
longer than your Holiness--provided no attempt is made to
repair it. After us the deluge; we've got no children!"

"All very true," replies the Pope.

"But the sovereign who is entreating me to do something, is
an eldest son of the Church. He has rendered us great
services. He still protects us constantly. What would become
of us if he abandoned us?"

"Don't be alarmed," says the Cardinal. "I'll arrange the matter
diplomatically." And he sits down, and writes an invariable note, in a
diplomatically tortuous style, which may thus be summed up:--

"We want your soldiers, and not your advice, seeing that we
are infallible. If you were to show any symptom of doubting
that infallibility, and if you attempted to force anything
upon us, even our preservation, we would fold our wings
around our countenances, we would raise the palms of
martyrdom, and we should become an object of compassion to
all the Catholics in the universe. You know we have in your
country forty thousand men who are at liberty to say
everything, and whom you pay with your own money to plead
our cause. They shall preach to your subjects, that you are
tyrannizing over the Holy Father, and we shall set your
country in a blaze without appearing to touch it."

CHAPTER II.

NECESSITY OF THE TEMPORAL POWER.

"For the Pontificate there is no independence but
sovereignty itself. Here is an interest of the highest
order, which ought to silence the particular interests of
nations, even as in a State the public interest silences
individual interests."

These are not my words, but the words of M. Thiers: they occur in his
report to the Legislative Assembly, in October 1849. I have no doubt
this Father of the temporal Church expressed the wishes of one hundred
and thirty-nine millions of Catholics. It was all Catholicity which
said to 3,124,668 Italians, by the lips of the honourable reporter:

"Devote yourselves as one man. Our chief can only be
venerable, August, and independent, so long as he reigns
despotically over you. If, in an evil hour, he were to cease
wearing a crown of gold; if you were to contest his right to
make and break laws; if you were to give up the wholesome
practice of laying at his feet that money which he disburses
for our edificatio