the fallen warriors, together
with the expression of unfeigned sorrow for their loss: "Whilst we must
bestow merited praise on the general, his officers and his men, we can
scarcely restrain our tears as we remember all those brave soldiers, those
noble young men especially, who had been impelled by faith and their own
generous hearts to fly to the defence of the temporal power of the Roman
Church, and who have met with their death in this cruel and unjust
invasion. We are deeply moved by the grief of their families; and would to
God it were in our power, by any word of ours, to dry up the source of
their tears!" If anything could be worse than the savage and murderous
attack of Piedmont, it was the hypocritical pretence under which it was
undertaken. The invaders came as "the restorers of moral order and as the
preachers of tolerance and charity." The allocution concludes by
denouncing this hypocrisy, together with the diplomatic principle of
non-intervention, of which France and Piedmont set such brilliant
examples.

(M78) The King of Sardinia having violently seized Umbria and the Marches
of Ancona, must also have a mock plebiscitum, in order, no doubt, to make
it appear that these provinces were spontaneously annexed to his kingdom.
The fall of Gaeta and the conquest of Naples by Garibaldi encouraged the
ambitious monarch in these unjustifiable annexations, and although
generally condemned by the European press, he most audaciously issued a
proclamation in reply to the Papal allocution. All these nefarious acts,
together with the outrages everywhere perpetrated against all who remained
loyal to the Holy See and faithful to the sacred laws of the church,
induced the Holy Father to publish the now celebrated allocution of March
18th, 1861. This allocution is perhaps the greatest doctrinal utterance of
the Pontificate of Pius IX. But it must be considered in connection with
the _syllabus_, which will now shortly be noticed.

The Emperor Napoleon had, indeed, suspended public diplomatic relations
with the court of Turin. This was intended merely as a blind, for he
continued to negotiate secretly, through Prince Jerome Napoleon,
concerning Rome, and what yet remained to the Pope of his states. He
appeared to bind Piedmont to respect the sovereignty and independence of
the Holy See, and had no objections that the Pope should raise an army
designed only for defensive purposes. On such conditions the Emperor would
acknowle