or corporations, whether
civil or ecclesiastical, was to be held subject to its equal part of the
burdens of the State; and to all bills imposing taxes, the Pope would
annex, of his own authority, a special waiver of the ecclesiastical
exemption. The administrations of the Provinces and the communes were
placed in the hands of their respective inhabitants. The Government (or
political) censorship was abolished, but the ecclesiastical censorship
was retained.

Such is a general outline of the Roman Constitution spontaneously
granted to his subjects by Pius IX. Its merits, in all civil or
political matters, are certainly equal, if not superior, to those of the
English Constitution, from which in great part it was borrowed; its
faults are precisely those which resulted necessarily from the Pope's
double character, as temporal sovereign of the Roman States and as head
of the Catholic Church throughout the world. It was not within the
province or at the discretion of Pius to alter the tenure by which he
held his throne, to change the fundamental principles of the Church or
to abolish his ecclesiastical dominion. He granted to his subjects all
that was in his power to grant as their temporal sovereign. His purely
ecclesiastical relations and duties did not concern them, or concerned
them only so far as they were members of the great body of Catholic
believers in all lands. The College of Cardinals _must_ choose the Pope,
and _must_ choose one of their own number; this is not a law of the
Roman States, but a law of the Catholic Church. Pius could not abrogate
it; and if he had been inclined to grant everything to his people by
divesting himself of the last rag of his sovereignty, the only
consequence would have been that the cardinals must have chosen another
pope in his place, who might undo all that Pius had accomplished.

These are obvious and necessary considerations; and the Pope expressly
recognizes them in the ordinance accompanying the grant of the
constitution. "We intend," he says, "to maintain intact our authority in
matters that by their nature are related to the Catholic religion and
its rule of morals. And this is due from us as a guaranty to the whole
of Christendom, that, in the States of the Church reorganized in this
new form, nothing shall be derogated from the liberties and rights of
the Church herself, and of the Holy See, nor any precedent be
established for violating the sacredness of the religion whic