In fact, the first attacks upon the temporal power of the Pope came from the sectaries abroad. In the Congress of Paris, just after the Crimean War, the ministers of France, Sardinia and England formulated against the Papal States certain accusations, which they hastened to make public. Therein they declared the government of the Pope to be the most retrograde and perverse of the age. The Minister of Piedmont, Cavour, already dreaming of the unification of Italy, placed in the hands of the French and English ministers a verbal note in which he outlined a scheme for the expropriation of the Papal States. The note had no immediate effect, but combining with other hostile expressions against the Holy See, it was the signal of the storm which was about to burst upon the Church. [Illustration: POPE PIUS IX.] Piedmont had become a veritable hot-bed of liberalism and irreligion. The government had ceased to respect its concordats with the Holy See. It had violated the rights of the churches, and had established itself as absolute judge in matters purely religious. The Archbishop of Turin was banished and died in exile for having spoken in reproof of these unwarranted usurpations. The Bishop of Cagliari was obliged to leave his diocese. The encroachments of the civil government went from bad to worse; the property of the churches was confiscated, the religious orders persecuted, and a general reign of iniquity inaugurated. In thus abandoning itself to the spirit of revolution, Piedmont went far in the way of iniquity. Under the pretext of working for the independence of Italy, its real design was to subjugate the whole land and make all its princes tributary. In fact, the history of the formation of the Kingdom of Italy is the history of all the treasons, corruptions, and turpitudes that one can imagine. The records of Europe contain nothing more high-handed or shameful. The Piedmontese Government, at once astute and brutal, secretly arousing the people by its paid emissaries, and then invading territories with violence; shamefully dissimulating the manoeuvres of its ambition, and their unmasking its projects with cynical audacity; scorning equally the rights of the people and the anathemas of the Church; recoiling before no means of corruption, and purchasing everything even military honor; insulting after its victories those whom it had surprised and defeated, not by the superiority of courage or skill, but by the aid of lying, treason, and the force of numbers; boasting of having yielded to the will of the peoples whose territory it was invading, and whose will it was forcing by the most odious of martial laws. It was the Piedmontese, Cialdini, who gave orders to shoot without mercy those peasants who were faithful to their King, the Pope, to religion and to country. It was Pinelli who said: "We must crush the sacerdotal Vampire, the vicar, not of Christ, but of Satan." It was he who called for fire and sword, an