They were invariably suppressed by the loyal and devoted people. So much was this the case that the Pontifical government warmly thanked the mayors and municipalities of no fewer than seven or eight cities for their good services in putting down the nascent revolution. At Bologna, the capital of the Romagnol or Æmilian provinces, a cousin of the Bonapartes, the Marquis Pepoli, whom the benevolence of Pius IX. had restored to his country, stirred up rebellion, and caused the Pontifical government to give place to revolutionary misrule. The abettors of Pepoli, in this most base and ungrateful proceeding, were his associates of the secret societies; others who were foreigners at Bologna, and a few malcontents of that city itself. But all these were far from being the citizens of Bologna, far from being the people of the Bolognese provinces. Whilst such things were done, where was the peace of Villafranca? It had become, or rather, never was anything better than, waste paper. The head of the Bonapartes was the offender, and he contrived to make France the partner of his guilt. “It is France,” the illustrious M. de Montalembert affirms, “that has allowed the temporal power of the Pope to be shaken. This is the fact, which blind men only can deny. France is not engaged alone in this path, but her overwhelming ascendancy places her at the head of the movement, and throws the great and supreme responsibility of it upon her. We know all the legitimate and crushing reproaches that are due to England and Piedmont; but if France had so willed it, Piedmont would not have dared to undertake anything against the Holy See, and England would have been condemned to her impotent hatred.... The Congress of Paris, in 1856—having solemnly declared, ‘that none of the contracting powers had the right of interfering, either collectively or individually, between a sovereign and his subjects’(4)—after having proclaimed the principle of the absolute independence of sovereigns in favor of the Turkish Sultan against his Christian subjects, thought itself justified by its protocol of April 8th, and in the absence of any representative of the august accused, in proclaiming that the situation of the Papal States was _abnormal_ and _irregular_. This accusation, developed, aggravated and exaggerated in parliament and elsewhere, by Lord Palmerston and Count Cavour, was, nevertheless, formally put forward under the presidency and on the _initiative_ of the French minister for foreign affairs. Consequently, France must be held accountable for it to the Church, and to the rest of Europe.” The war which “the skilful but guilty perseverance of Piedmontese policy” succeeded in occasioning between France and Austria facilitated not a little the work of revolution in the States of the Church. In order to dispel the fears that prevailed, the following words were addressed to the Bishops of France by the minister of the Emperor: “The prince who