argument of _Kirche und Kirchen_ was, that the churches which are
without the pope drift into many troubles, and maintain themselves at a
manifest disadvantage, whereas the church which energetically preserves
the principle of unity has a vast superiority which would prevail, but
for its disabling and discrediting failure in civil government. That
government seemed to him as legitimate as any in the world, and so
needful to those for whose sake it was instituted, that if it should be
overthrown, it would, by irresistible necessity, be restored. Those for
whose sake it was instituted were, not the Roman people, but the
catholic world. That interest, while it lasted, was so sacred, that no
sacrifice was too great to preserve it, not even the exclusion of the
clerical order from secular office.

The book was an appeal to Catholics to save the papal government by the
only possible remedy, and to rescue the Roman people from falling under
what the author deemed a tyranny like that of the Convention. He had
acquired his politics in the atmosphere of 1847, from the potential
liberality of men like Radowitz, who declared that he would postpone
every political or national interest to that of the Church, Capponi, the
last Italian federalist, and Tocqueville, the minister who occupied
Rome. His object was not materially different from that of Antonelli and
Merode, but he sought it by exposing the faults of the papal government
during several centuries, and the hopelessness of all efforts to save it
from the Revolution unless reformed. He wrote to an English minister
that it could not be our policy that the head of the Catholic Church
should be subject to a foreign potentate:--

Das harte Wort, mit welchem Sie im Parlamente den Stab ueber Rom
gebrochen haben--_hopelessly incurable_, oder _incorrigible_,--kann
ich mir nicht aneignen; ich hoffe vielmehr, wie ich es in dem Buche
dargelegt habe, das Gegentheil. An die Dauerhaftigkeit eines ganz
Italien umfassenden Piemontesisch-Italiaenischen Reiches glaube ich
nicht.--Inzwischen troeste ich mich mit dem Gedanken, dass in Rom
zuletzt doch _vexatio dabit intellectum_, und dann wird noch alles
gut werden.

To these grateful vaticinations his correspondent replied:--

You have exhibited the gradual departure of the government in the
states of the church from all those conditions which made it
tolerable to the sense and reason of mankind, and have, I thi