Yet since they could not doubt that Italy must have Rome for its capital as the seal of its political unity, the Popes had to be deprived of their temporal sovereignty. The feeling about Rome was one of historical mysticism, and seldom, if ever, have men found themselves thrown into an irreligious attitude by a sentiment of that kind. No contradiction could have been more profound, for it brought these ardent lovers of their remotest past to make use of forces that were antagonistic to the one institution that linked their present to this same past. However, there was no alternative; adopting Illuminism as one of the chief currents animating modern life, they had as their most precious support the anti-Catholic movement, to which, as a matter of fact, a great many of them belonged. Anti-Catholicism had a great weakness in that it was not a national product, but had been introduced into political life as a necessary stimulant to rouse the people from their slumbers, as will be seen later on; now that they were awake it divided the nation and prevented the welding of the new tradition to its history of twenty centuries. The statesmen of this epoch had no experience of the administration and government of a big State: they were not conscious of the problems of international relations; they knew nothing of the economic and social exigencies of a population exceeding thirty millions of souls. The people had no political education whatsoever. On the other hand, the leaders would not be retrograde and became more and more liberal, at a rate that did not allow the people to be prepared by experience for successive steps in popular government. The sequence of reforms was not historical, was not dialectical: it did not correspond with the spiritual and economic development of the people, but was introduced to make up for lost time and bring Italy up to the Western European level as fast as possible. With no tradition to make up ballast, the so-called “Right” could not be termed Conservative because it originated in a revolution, and it kept its old ideal as a target after it had been realised, and therefore had ceased to be a principle of action.