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 Italian 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.
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