ministry that will." The Pope, after he
had once declared to the contrary, ought to have persisted. He should
have said, "I cannot thus belie myself, I cannot put my name to acts I
have just declared to be against my conscience."

The ministers of the people ought to have seen that the position they
assumed was utterly untenable; that they could not advance with an
enemy in the background cutting off all supplies. But some patriotism
and some vanity exhilarated them, and, the Pope having weakly yielded,
they unwisely began their impossible task. Mamiani, their chief, I
esteem a man, under all circumstances, unequal to such a position,--a
man of rhetoric merely. But no man could have acted, unless the
Pope had resigned his temporal power, the Cardinals been put under
sufficient check, and the Jesuits and emissaries of Austria driven
from their lurking-places.

A sad scene began. The Pope,--shut up more and more in his palace, the
crowd of selfish and insidious advisers darkening round, enslaved by
a confessor,--he who might have been the liberator of suffering Europe
permitted the most infamous treacheries to be practised in his name.
Private letters were written to the foreign powers, denying the
acts he outwardly sanctioned; the hopes of the people were evaded
or dallied with; the Chamber of Deputies permitted to talk and pass
measures which they never could get funds to put into execution;
legions to form and manoeuvre, but never to have the arms and
clothing they needed. Again and again the people went to the Pope for
satisfaction. They got only--benediction.

Thus plotted and thus worked the scarlet men of sin, playing the hopes
of Italy off and on, while _their_ hope was of the miserable defeat
consummated by a still worse traitor at Milan on the 6th of August.
But, indeed, what could be expected from the "Sword of Pius IX.," when
Pius IX. himself had thus failed in his high vocation. The king of
Naples bombarded his city, and set on the Lazzaroni to rob and murder
the subjects he had deluded by his pretended gift of the Constitution.
Pius proclaimed that he longed to embrace _all_ the princes of Italy.
He talked of peace, when all knew for a great part of the Italians
there was no longer hope of peace, except in the sepulchre, or
freedom.

The taunting manifestos of Welden are a sufficient comment on the
conduct of the Pope. "As the government of his Holiness is too weak
to control his subjects,"--"As, singul