The suppression of the monasteries and convents was actuated by love of gain as much as by polemical rancour, by the hunger of the newly-created kingdom, for their treasures and riches, for their rich endowments and saleable possessions. There was no sincerity about it; there could be none in a nation then almost entirely Catholic; and this insincerity is proved by the indifference with which the State allows the re-establishment of these buildings and these orders. At this moment the bare-footed Carmelites, a most bigoted order, have lately opened a new church and convent in Milan, which are endowed with three millions of money, and have been opened with great pomp by the Archbishop. Similar institutions are being re-created in all directions, possessing all the evils of those which were suppressed, without their artistic beauty, and largely without their good faith and munificent charity. Rich and lovely maidens continue to take the veil when too young to have any realisation of what they do,[17] and the Church is as enriched as of old by their dowers; whilst the monk is not the less dangerous to intellectual liberty because, when he goes out of the gates for a few hours, he wears a coat and trousers like those of the layman of the adjacent town. [Footnote 17: A few months ago the Prime Minister, then the Marquis di Rudini, was present at the taking of the veil by a young relative in Naples.] The ancient monasteries and convents were at least an education to the eye: who could daily see the Certosa of Pavia, or of the Val d'Ema, and not be purified and instructed in visual memory and artistic instinct? The new revivals of the old orders teach nothing except a base and strictly modern union of superstition and compromise. Indeed, the State forces the priest to be base; it makes it the condition of allowing his existence. If he do not succumb to the State in all things (even in those most opposed to his conscience), he is deprived of his _placet_; and Zanardelli has in these last few days desired to deprive him of it without such legal forms as have hitherto been observed. For one of the greatest of the misfortunes of Italy is that, not in the Radicals nor in the Conservatives, nor in any one of the groups into which political life is divided, is there the slightest trace of any respect for individual freedom; liberty of action and of opinion obtain no fair play whatever from any one of the parties of the State.