hment of Vigna Pia, together with the
hospital of Tata Giovanni, from which the new Roman municipality had
meanly withdrawn the subsidy, for no other reason than that in former
times it had been a favorite institution of Pius IX. This was not all. The
Holy Pontiff maintained, by means of popular schools, a necessary warfare
against both Protestant and Atheistic propagandism. The former had been
very active ever since the occupation of Rome by the Piedmontese. The
various Protestant societies actually spent L100,000 yearly in the vain
attempt to Protestantize the Romans. By 1st January, 1875, they had
erected three churches and founded twelve missionary residences in the
interest of divers denominations--Anglicans, Methodists, American
Episcopalians, Vaudois, Baptists, Anabaptists, etc. The Italians have
little taste for Protestantism in any of its forms. So there was no danger
of discordant and jarring sects coming to prevail. It cannot be denied,
however, that the movement increased the number of free-thinkers--a result
no less calculated to afflict tho Holy Father.

When to these expenses are added those of sustaining the Sacred College,
the prelature, the guards, the museums, and bishops that were exiled for
the faith, there is shown a monthly expenditure of more than six hundred
thousand francs, which is equal to seven millions and a half yearly. These
expenses always increased as the elder bishops passed away. Pius IX.
appointed successors. But as none of these could, in conscience, ask the
royal _exequatur_, which, notwithstanding article sixteen of the notorious
guarantees, was still in force, Victor Emmanuel had no hesitation in
suppressing the revenues of the bishops. Pius IX. sent to the bishops who
were thus deprived of their legitimate incomes five hundred francs
monthly, and to archbishops from seven hundred to one thousand francs. He
also labored to establish foundations for the education of ecclesiastical
students whom a revolutionary and anti-Christian law made subject to
military service, thus rendering morally impossible the following out of
clerical vocations and the recruiting of the priesthood. From this and
such like proceedings, it can easily be seen that the revolutionary
_regime_, and the Italian government was nothing less, aimed at the
extirpation of Christianity, and that civilization, the only possible
civilization which follows in its train.

Misfortune, meanwhile, was not neglected by the