The time had come when men who lived in contact with the Italy outside the walls of Rome, in contact with the ideas which were the conquest of the nineteenth century, could not admit that the governed had only duties and the ruler only rights, or reconcile with the modern ideal of civil life the notion of a prince-bishop governing a subject people in virtue of a theocratic idea, the abstract idea that certain temporal rights fell--_mal gre bon gre_ of all concerned--to the vicar of Jehovah on earth. The time will come when the existence of such a pretension, the existence of such a government one moment after it responded to the universal sentiment, will appear the strangest fable. Will they be better or worse times? The future alone knows what it has in store, but we can only say that they cannot ever be worse times than some of those which the papacy created for the Romans. This consideration would have sufficed at any time to make the tenure of temporal power on the part of the Roman bishops, precarious--but it did not by any means stand alone. We have to add to it the rise of Italian patriotism, the passionate call for a united Italy, for the country to issue once and for all from the tyrannies, the immoralities, the crushing canker of pettiness which clung to the princely and ducal governments, and rise to its place among the nations. Thus in September 1870 the feeling was very mixed in Rome. A large part of the population had helped to prepare the _denouement_, knew its advent was only a question of time; others, members of faithful Roman houses, had used voice and influence to induce the Pope to institute necessary reforms and had fallen into despondency when Pius on his return from Gaeta issued his _non possumus_ and settled down to a morose implacable reactionism. There remained the large army of priests, of papal functionaries and retainers, the cardinals and their numerous personnel, the religious orders and congregations of both sexes and the hundreds upon hundreds of persons dependent on them, the papal police and soldiery with their families. There were the great families which owed their titles and their fortunes to the popes, those whom common gratitude or honour kept at his side. And lastly there was the _popolino_, the ignorant poor, untouched by modern aspirations, by socialistic theories, living from day to day, from hand to mouth in the strictest sense, with no ambitions, no "standard of comfort" or of human dignity--ready to fall on their knees at any hour of the day when the Pope "_Dio in terra_" passed, agape at the latest royal visitor to the palace of their pontiff, content to encounter injustice with cunning fraud, to sweeten the hard buffets of life by the _finesse_ required for some small scheme of peculation, some dastardly scheme of revenge. Such human passions as lay outside the gratification of hunger and the greed for spectacles were satisfied by the periodical uprising and savage disloyalty habitual to