and
creeds; it is a battle between two kingdoms and two kings,--the Pope on
one side, and Queen Victoria on the other; and no one can become an
abettor of the pontiff without being thereby a traitor to the sovereign.

And with the fall of our religion and liberty will come all the
demoralizing and pauperizing effects which have followed the Papacy in
Italy. Mind will be systematically cramped and crushed; and everything
that could stimulate thought, or inspire a love for independence, or
recall the memory of a former liberty, will be proscribed. We cannot
have the Papacy and open tribunals. We cannot have the Papacy and free
trade: our factories will be closed, as well as our schools and
churches; our forges silenced, as well as our printing presses. Motion
even will be forbidden; or, should our railways be spared, they will
convey, in lack of merchandise, bulls, palls, dead men's bones, and
other such precious stuff. Our electric telegraph will be used for the
pious purpose of transmitting absolutions and pardons, and our express
trains for carrying the host to some dying penitent. The passport system
will very speedily cure our people of their propensity to travel; and,
instead of gadding about, and learning things which they ought not, they
will be told to stay at home and count their beads. The _Index_ will
effectually purge our libraries, and give us but tens where we have now
thousands. Alas for the great masters of British literature and song!
The censorship will make fine work with our periodic literature, pruning
the exuberance and taming the boldness of many a now free pen. Our
clubs, from Parliament downwards, will have their labours diminished, by
having their sphere contracted to matters only on which the Church has
not spoken; and our thinkers will be taught to think aright, by being
taught not to think at all. We must contract a liking for consecrated
wafers and holy water; and provide a confessor for ourselves, our wives,
and daughters. We must eat only fish on Friday, and keep the Church's
holidays, however we may spend the Sabbath. We must vote at the bidding
of the priest; and, above all, take ghostly direction as regards our
last will and testament. The Papacy will overhaul all our political
rights, all our social privileges, all our domestic and private affairs;
and will alter or abrogate as it may find it for our and the Church's
good. In short, it will dig a grave, in which to bury all our privile