pparent reconciliation
of the interests of the papacy, and of the Sardinian monarchy, with
the most advanced views of the newest school. History, to which
Gioberti appealed, might have told him that a reversal of the law of
gravity was as likely to happen as the performance by the papacy of
the mission he proposed to it; but men believe what they wish to
believe, and his work found, as has been said, thousands of admirers,
among whom none was more sincere than Cardinal Mastai. The day on
which Count Pasolini gave him a copy of _Il Primato_ he created that
great, and under some aspects pathetic illusion, the reforming Pope.

The Conclave opened on the 14th of June 1846. During the Bishop of
Imola's journey to Rome a white pigeon had perched several times on
his carriage. The story became known; people said the same thing had
occurred to a coming Pope on former occasions, and the augury was
accepted with joy and satisfaction. He was, in fact, elected after the
Conclave had lasted only two days, while the Conclave which elected
his predecessor lasted sixty-four. The brevity of that to which Pius
IX. owed the tiara was looked upon by the populace as something
miraculous, but it was the result of the well-considered determination
of the Italian Cardinals not to allow time for Austrian intrigues to
obtain the election of a Pope who would be ruled from Vienna. When the
new Pope appeared on the balcony of the Quirinal to give his first
benediction, the people, carried away by his youthful yet majestic
bearing, and by the hopes which already centred in him, broke into
frantic cries of: 'We have a Pope! He loves us! He is our Father!' If
they had cried: 'We have a new heaven and a new earth,' they would but
have expressed the delirium which, starting from Rome, spread
throughout Italy.

On the night of the 6th of December 1846, the whole line of the
Apennines from Liguria to Calabria was illuminated. A hundred years
before, a stone thrown by the child Balilla had given the signal for
the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa: this was the memory
flashed from height to height by countless beacons, but while
celebrating the past, they were the fiery heralds of a greater
revolution.

The upheaval of Europe did not become a fact, however, for another
year. Meantime, the Roman States attracted more attention than any
other part of the peninsula, from the curiosity awakened by the
progress of the experiment of which they were the s