the presence of a free people
rejoicing in their freedom: such has been my change as I passed from the
States of the Church into those of Victor Emmanuel.

Surely the moral of these two pictures speaks for itself. Put aside
abstract political considerations, put aside, too, theological questions,
and look at broad facts patent to all. If anybody can see Rome and the
Papal States, and still believe that the people are happy or prosperous
or faring with good prospects either for this world or the next, I can
say nothing more. His eyes are not my eyes, nor his judgment mine. For
those to whom this ocular testimony is denied, I have written these
papers. I have sought to make present to them the utter dreariness, the
hopeless discontent, the abject demoralization, which strike a resident
in Rome, unless he refuses wilfully to see the truth. In the dead Rome
of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in
the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the
country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation
of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see
only too plainly the permanent condition of the country. As to the
present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on
no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn
ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain; and in the sad,
sullen, hopeless demonstrations, whereby a people protest constantly that
they are weary of their fate. If you look for causes, you may find them
perhaps in those trials without law or justice; in that Press without
liberty or truth; in those Church-sanctioned lotteries; in the presence
of that multitude of priests, and in the policy which dictated the
outrage of St Joseph's day, and the Bull of excommunication. How far
these causes are sufficient to explain the fact, is a matter of opinion.
I can understand a fervent believer in the Catholic Faith saying, that
the people of the Papal States ought to be happy and prosperous under
Papal rule. It may be so, but the fact is they are not; and that they
are both prosperous and happy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel ever
since the great Lombard campaign, when the French armies at Solferino
destroyed the Austrian power, the key-stone of the whole priest-despot
rule in Italy. I have been living, with but short intervals, in
different parts of this Italia