immediately snatched away
from the bosom of their families, handcuffed and chained, thrown into
the city prisons, and distributed afterwards among the gangs of
malefactors, whose lives had been a continual series of robberies and
murders! Thirty of these unfortunate victims were marched off to Rome,
where they were locked up in a dungeon. Innocent as well as unconscious
of the crime of which they were accused, they supplicated the President
of the Sacred Consulta,--who is an anointed prelate,--asking only for
justice; not for mercy and forgiveness, but for a regular trial. All was
useless; the archbishop had neither ear nor heart, and the petition was
forgotten. Thinking that, after all, even at Rome, and even among the
high dignitaries of the Church of Sodom and Gomorrah, there might be
found a man of human feeling, they wrote a second petition, which was
this time addressed to a different personage of the Church, his
Excellency Mgr. Mertel, Minister of Grace and Justice!

The prisoners asserted to the high papal functionary the illegality of
their arrest,--their sufferings without any imputation of guilt,--the
painful condition of their families, increased still more by the famine
which now desolates the Roman States, and the want of their support. The
supplicants were brought before Mgr. Mertel, who, feigning pity and
interest for the sufferers (attention, reader!) offered them the choice
of _ten years in the chain-gang, or to be transported to the United
States_, the _refugium peccatorum_! They protested; but of what benefit
is a legal and natural protest to thirty poor defenceless and guiltless
young men, loaded with chains by a papal bureaucrat, surrounded by fifty
ruffians armed to the teeth?

On the night of the 5th of May 1853, the sepulchral silence of the
subterranean prisons of St Angelo was interrupted by the rattling of
keys and muskets. The thirty young citizens of Faenza were called out of
their dens, and one by one, bending under his fetters, was escorted to a
steamer waiting on the muddy Tiber to carry them to a distant land! The
beautiful moon of Italy, as some call it, was shining benevolently over
Rome and her iniquities; the streets, deserted by the people, were
trodden by French patrols; all was silent as the grave itself; and not a
friend was there to bid them adieu; not a relative to speak a consoling
word to the departing; and none to acquaint the unfortunates who
remained behind with their t