if he was willing for money to commit murder, he
might be willing for money, or some priestly consideration, to commit
perjury,--on the single and unsupported evidence, I say, of this man, a
hired assassin according to his own confession, were these three young
men condemned? And to what? To death!--and while I was in Rome they were
actually guillotined! I saw their sentence placarded on the Piazza
Colonna on the morning after my arrival in Rome. This writing of doom
was the first thing I read in that city. It bore the names of the
accused, the alleged crime, and an abstract of the evidence, or, I
should say, volunteered statement, of the would-be assassin. It had the
terrible guillotine at the top, and the fisherman's ring at the bottom;
and though I had known nothing more of the case than the Government
account of it, as contained in that paper, I would have said that it was
enough to cover any Government with eternal infamy. Indeed, I don't
believe that there is a Government under the sun, save the Pope's, that
would have done an atrocity like it. I had some talk with our consul, Mr
Freeborn, about that case too, and he assured me that, bad as these
cases were, they were not worse than scores, aye, hundreds, that to his
knowledge had been perpetrated in Rome, and all over the Papal States,
since the return of the Pontifical Government. He added, that if Mr
Gladstone would come to Rome, and visit the prisons, and examine the
state of the country generally, he would have a more harrowing tale to
unfold than that with which he had recently thrilled the British public
on the subject of Naples: that in Naples there was still something like
trade, but in Rome there was nothing but downright grinding misery.

There are few tales in any history more harrowing than the following.
The events were posterior to my visit to Rome, and were published at the
time in the American _Crusader_. It happened that several papal
proconsuls were slain in the city of Faenza: all of them had served
under Gregory XVI., in the galleys, as felons and forgers. Being
favoured by the papal power, they tried to deserve it by becoming the
tyrants of the unhappy population. When the gloomy news of their
tragical end reached the Holy Father, the answer returned to the
governor of that city, as to what he should do in such a case, as the
true perpetrators could not be found, was, "_Arrest all the young men of
Faenza!_" and more than a hundred youths were