The facts I have stated are sad enough; but the more harrowing picture of the working of the papal system has yet to be shown. CHAPTER XXVI. JUSTICE AND LIBERTY IN THE PAPAL STATES. Justice the Pillar of the State--Claim implied in being God's Vicar, namely, that the Pope governs the World as God would govern it, were He personally present in it--No Civil Code in the Papal States--Citizens have no Rights save as Church Members--No Lay Judges--The Pontifical Government simply the Embodiment of the Papacy--Courts of Justice visited--Papal Tribunals--The Rota--Signatura--Cassation--Exceptional Tribunals--Apostolical Chamber--House of Peter--Justice bought and sold at Rome--POLITICAL JUSTICE--Gregorian Code--Case of Pietro Leoni--Accession of Pius IX.--His Popularity at first--Re-action--Case of Colonel Calendrelli--The Three Citizens of Macarata--The Hundred Young Men of Faenza--Butchery at Sinigaglia--Horrible Executions at Ancona--Estimated Number of Political Prisoners 30,000--Pope's Prisons described--Horrible Treatment of Prisoners--The Sbirri--The Spies--Domiciliary Restraint--Expulsions from Rome--Imprisonment without reason assigned--Manner in which Apprehensions are made--Condemnations without Evidence or Trial--Misery of Rome--The Pope's Jubilee. We turn now to the JUSTICE of the Papal States. Alas! if in the preceding chapters on _Trade_ we were discoursing on what does not exist, we are now emphatically to speak of what is but a shadow, a mockery. To say that in the Papal States Justice is not,--that it is a negation,--is only to state half the truth. Were that all, thankful indeed would the Romans be. But, alas! in the seat of Justice there sits a stern, irresponsible, lawless power, before which virtue is confounded and dumb, and wickedness only can stand erect. On the importance of justice to the welfare of society I need not enlarge. It is the main pillar of the State. But where are you to look for justice,--justice in its unmixed, eternal purity,--if not at Rome? Rome is the seat of the Vicar of God. Ponder, I pray you, all that this title imports. The Vicar of God is just God on earth; and the government of God's Vicar is just the government of God. It is the possession and exercise of the same authority, the same attributes, the same moral infallibility, and the same moral omnipotence, in the government of mankind, which God possesses and exercises in the government of the universe. The government of the Pope is a model set up on the earth, before kings and nations, of God's righteous and holy government in the heavens. As I, the Vicar of Christ, govern men, so would Christ himself, were he here in the Vatican, govern them. If the claim advanced by the Pope, when he takes to himself the title of God's Vicar, amounts to anything, it amounts to this,--to all this, and nothing less than this.