When Pius IX suffered himself to be betrayed into the emotional remark quoted in the last chapter--that he neither could nor would admit such modifications of the laws as the people desired--he made a fatal mistake. It placed him in direct opposition to the expulsion of the Austrians, the creation of a constitutional government, and an independent Italian nation. He must have been grossly deceived by his ecclesiastical advisers if he did not know that the popular mind had become intensely aroused by the desire to see all these things accomplished, that the revolution had no other meaning, and that everything transpiring indicated unmistakably that pacification was impossible without them. He would have known, upon a little reflection, that the true Christian faith of the Church, as taught by the apostles and "the fathers," was, in no proper sense, involved in any of these propositions; that they had the approval of millions of Roman Catholics throughout the world, and a vast majority of the Italians, and that by employing his pontifical authority to ingraft upon the faith the odious Jesuit doctrine that it was heresy to deny the temporal power and kingship of the pope, he was not only doing violence to the honest convictions of these multitudes of Christians, but was endeavoring to convert the Church, as the representative of the whole body of its members, into a machine for the perpetuation of monarchism, and the suppression of the right of popular self-government. To say to the people of Italy, as he did, that a constitutional government established by them would violate the divine law, in the face of what such governments had done elsewhere in the world--especially in the United States--was, besides being an act of weakness on his part, an arraignment of the popular intelligence of the world. Such a doctrine was only endured in the Middle Ages because the multitude were trained to servility and obedience, and held in that condition by the united authority of Church and State. But its avowal at the middle of the nineteenth century could be understood in no other sense, even at Rome, than the expression of a desire to see the period of human progress brought to an end by the permanent triumph of imperial power. It was the mapping out for the modern progressive nations such a policy as would, by destroying their constitutions, subject them to papal domination throughout the vast domain of faith and morals; for if, as he declared, the two hundred millions of Roman Catholics scattered through the world were to become subject to his summons to defend the temporal power of the pope, they would thereby become the creatures of his will and the passive instruments of his power. There were very few so ignorant as to be misled by his appeals for the continuance of his own monarchical and absolute power, and therefore his attempt, by the aid of the Austrians, to put stronger rivets in their chains, only made them the more resolute in the