§ 185.4. =The Prisoner of the Vatican, A.D. 1870-1878.=--The dethroned papal king could only protest and utter denunciations. No result followed from the adoption of St. Joseph as guardian and patron of the church, nor from the solemn consecration of the whole world to the most sacred heart of Jesus, at the jubilee of June 16th, A.D. 1875. The measures of A.D. 1871, by which Cavour sought to realize his ideal of a “free church in a free state,” were pronounced absurd, cunning, deceitful, and an outrage on the apostles Peter and Paul. By these measures the rights and privileges of a sovereign for all time had been conferred on the pope: the holiness and inviolability of his person, a body-guard, a post and telegraph bureau, free ambassadorial communication with foreign powers, the _ex-territoriality_ of his palace of the Vatican, embracing fifteen large saloons, 11,500 rooms, 236 stairs, 218 corridors, two chapels, several museums, archives, libraries, large beautiful gardens, etc., as also of the Lateran and the summer palace of Castle Gandolpho, with all appurtenances, also an annual income, free from all burdens and taxes, of three and a quarter million francs, equal to the former amount of his revenue, together with unrestricted liberty in the exercise of all ecclesiastical rights of sovereignty and primacy, and the renunciation of all state interference in the disposal of bishoprics and benefices. The right of the inferior clergy to exercise the _appellatio ab abusu_ to a civil tribunal was set aside, and of all civil rights only that of the royal _exequatur_ in the election of bishops, _i.e._ the mere right of investing the nominee of the curia in the possession of the revenues of his office, was retained.--To the end of his life Pius every year returned the dotation as an insult and injury, and “the starving holy father in prison, who has not where to lay his head,” received three or four times more in Peter’s pence contributed by all Catholic Christendom. Playing the _rôle_ of a prisoner he never passed beyond the precincts of the Vatican. He reached the semi-jubilee of his papal coronation in A.D. 1871, being the first pope who falsified the old saying, _Annos Petri non videbit_. He rejected the offer of a golden throne and the title of “the great,” but he accepted a Parisian lady’s gift of a golden crown of thorns. In support of the prison myth, straws from the papal cell were sold in Belgium for half a franc per stalk, and for the same price photographs of the pope behind an iron grating. As once on a time the legend arose about the disciple whom Jesus loved that he would not die, so was it once said about the pope; and on his eighty-third birthday, in A.D. 1874, a Roman Jesuit paper, eulogising the moral purity of his life, put the words in his mouth, “Which of you convinceth me of sin?” But he himself by constantly renewed rescripts,