nd the opulent cities, of Scotland
and England. Our country will again become what it was before the
Reformation,--a land of moors, and swamps, and forests, with a few
patches of indifferent cultivation around our convents and abbacies.
Vagabondism, lay and sacerdotal, will flourish once more in Britain;
trade and commerce will be put down, as savouring of independence and
intelligence; indolence and beggary will be sanctified; and troops of
friars, with wallets on their backs, impudence on their brows, and
profanity and filthiness on their tongues, will scour the country,
demanding that every threshold and every purse shall be open to them.
This result will come as surely as to-morrow will come, provided we
permit the Papacy to raise its head once more among us.

Let no one imagine that this terrible wreck of man, and of all his
interests,--of civilization, of industry, of trade and commerce,--has
happened of chance, and that there is no connection between this
deplorable state of matters and the system which has prevailed in Italy.
On the contrary, it is the direct, the necessary, and the uniform result
of that system. The barbarian hates art because he does not understand
its uses, and dreads its power. But the hatred the Pope bears to the
useful arts is not that of the barbarian. It is the intelligent, the
consistent hatred of a man who knows what he is about. It is the hatred
of a man who comprehends both the character of his own system, and the
tendency of modern improvements, and who sees right well, that if these
improvements are introduced, the Papacy must fall. Self-preservation is
the first law of systems, as of individuals; and the Papacy, feeling the
antagonism between itself and these things, ever has and ever will
resist them. It cannot tolerate them though it would. Speculatists and
sentimentalists may talk as they please; but the destruction of that
system is the first requisite to the regeneration of Italy.

Such, then, is the condition of Italy at this day. Were we to find a
state of things like this in the centre of Africa, or in some barbarous
region thousands and thousands of miles away from European literature,
arts, and influences, where the plough and the loom had yet to be
invented, it would by no means surprise us. But to find a state of
matters like this in the centre of Europe,--in Italy, once the head of
civilization and influence, the birthplace of modern art and
letters,--is certainly wo