Never, I think, in the world's history was the promised land entered with more of promise. When, in the old fairy tale, the sleeping princess of the slumber-bound palace awoke to light and life; when of a sudden the horses began to neigh, and the clocks to tick, and the spits to turn, the brightness and suddenness of the change could scarcely have been more complete than that through which I passed. From chill, cheerless, ceaseless rain into bright warm sun-light; from a country fever-haunted, barren, and desolate, into a land swarming with life, rich and fertile as a garden; from a gloomy priest-ridden people, kept down by force of arms, hating their rulers and hated by them, into the presence of a free people rejoicing in their freedom: such has been my change as I passed from the States of the Church into those of Victor Emmanuel. Surely the moral of these two pictures speaks for itself. Put aside abstract political considerations, put aside, too, theological questions, and look at broad facts patent to all. If anybody can see Rome and the Papal States, and still believe that the people are happy or prosperous or faring with good prospects either for this world or the next, I can say nothing more. His eyes are not my eyes, nor his judgment mine. For those to whom this ocular testimony is denied, I have written these papers. I have sought to make present to them the utter dreariness, the hopeless discontent, the abject demoralization, which strike a resident in Rome, unless he refuses wilfully to see the truth. In the dead Rome of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see only too plainly the permanent condition of the country. As to the present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain; and in the sad, sullen, hopeless demonstrations, whereby a people protest constantly that they are weary of their fate. If you look for causes, you may find them perhaps in those trials without law or justice; in that Press without liberty or truth; in those Church-sanctioned lotteries; in the presence of that multitude of priests, and in the policy which dictated the outrage of St Joseph's day, and the Bull of excommunication. How far these causes are sufficient to explain the fact, is a matter of opinion. I can understand a fervent believer in the Catholic Faith saying, that the people of the Papal States ought to be happy and prosperous under Papal rule. It may be so, but the fact is they are not; and that they are both prosperous and happy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel ever since the great Lombard campaign, when the French armies at Solferino