n land. Wherever the free national
government has spread, I can see the growth of prosperity and happiness.
There have been, there are, and there will be partial reactions, petty
disturbances; but they are but eddies in the great, deep, resistless
current. Go to Bologna, or Ferrara, or Ancona, and you will find them,
as I have, passed from dead desolation into active life. Commerce is
flourishing, order prevails, and the people are free and full of life.
These are facts on which both Protestant and Catholic can judge; and
Catholics, as well as Protestants, will tell you the same thing. Then if
this be so, and that it is so I assert fearlessly, in what right, human
or divine, are a number of God's creatures to be forced to live out that
one short life of ours in dull, abject misery? If you tell me that their
misery is necessary to the maintenance of a religious creed, be that
creed Protestant or Catholic, I reply that the sooner then that creed
disappears, the better for mankind and for faith in God.

And now, a few words in parting about the future. The end I believe is
coming on so rapidly, has indeed advanced so far, since first I began to
write these letters, little more than a year ago, that I hesitate to make
prophecies which to-morrow may render vain. The whole Italian revolution
is eminently a political one, not a religious one. It is possible a
religious change, whether reformation-like or otherwise, may follow in
its steps, but that time is not come. There is no wish in the Italian
people, unless I err much, to alter the national faith, or to dispense
with the Pope, as a spiritual potentate. Before long Pius IX., having
caused as much misery as one man can well cause in one lifetime, must
depart from this world; and then, if not sooner, some arrangement must be
come to between the Pope and the Italian people, if the Papacy is to last
at all. In some form or other I hold that the compromise will be of the
nature of the "Napoleonic Solution," to which I have therefore given a
place amongst these papers. Whether it is possible for a Pope to remain
permanently at Rome as a spiritual prince in a free city, time alone can
show, but ere long the experiment will be made.

If in these letters I have said aught to wound the faith of either
Protestant or Catholic, I have said it unwillingly, and regret that it
should be so. This however I believe, and would have others believe it
too, that the misery of the R