It is for this that they protest against, without resisting, wrong,--for this that they have abandoned the straight road to wander in tortuous by-paths, fascinated by the thought of displaying _state-craft_, and forgetting that it was through such paths we first descended into slavery. It is for this that our government has reduced Italy to the condition of a French prefecture, and that our parliamentary opposition copies the wretched tactics of the _Left_ in the French Chamber, which prepared the way, during the Restoration, for the present corruption, degradation, and enslavement of their country. These things, I repeat, are _consequences_, not causes. We may change as we will the individuals at the head of the government; the system itself being based upon a false _principle_, the fatal idea will govern them. They _cannot_ righteously direct the new life of the Italian people, and redeem them from a profound unconscious immorality of ancient date. The present duty of the democratic party in Italy, then,--since they cannot serve God and Mammon,--is to educate the people; and, remembering that the basis of all education is truth, to endeavor to prove to them that the actual political impotence and corruption of Italy are derived from two causes which may be summed up in one,--we have no religion, and we have set up a negation in its place. II. On the one side we have--as our only form and semblance of religion--the Papacy. I remember to have written, more than thirty years ago, when none other dared openly to venture on the problem,--when the boldest contented themselves with whispering of reforms in Church discipline, and those writers who, like Gioberti, set themselves up as philosophers, thought proper, as a matter of tactics, to caress the Utopia of an Italian primacy, intrusted to I know not what impossible revival of Catholicism,--I remember to have written then that both the Papacy and Catholicism were things extinct, and that their death was a consequence of _quite another death_. I spoke of the dogma which was the foundation of both. Years have confirmed what I then declared. The Papacy is now a corpse beyond all power of galvanization. It is the lying mockery of a religion,--a source of perennial corruption and immorality among the nations, and most fatally such to our own, upon whose very soul weighs the incubus and example of that lie. But at the present day we either know or ought to know the cause of this.