All this gave umbrage to Garibaldi, but no hypocrisy and much wisdom inspired these acts.  In the first place, the Triumvirate, and especially Mazzini, the most religious man we have ever known, were well aware that, while the temporal power of the papacy might be destroyed by fire and sword, the spiritual power of the Roman Catholic hierarchy could be extinguished only in the name of a moral law recognized and accepted as being higher and more authoritative than any other intermediary between God and the people—­they knew that ideas can be vanquished only by ideas.  Again, as the responsible heads of the Roman Republic, the Triumvirs were wisely careful not to offend the hearts and consciences of Catholics abroad.  Finally, the very fact that, with four armies at their gates, life, its feasts and fasts, its workdays and holidays, could go on as usual, was one highly calculated to strengthen the Romans’ faith in and affection for the new Government.  No crimes were committed; the people came to the Triumvirs as children to their fathers, and—­for Italians a very remarkable thing—­they not only paid down current taxes, but they paid up arrears.

From Garibaldi’s brief account, it would almost seem that the Triumvirate and the Assembly surrendered Rome before absolute necessity constrained them so to do.  He does not tell us how, when the French had actually entered Rome by the breach, he alone of all the civil and military commanders refused to head the troops to attack the invaders in possession.  He gave his own reasons, very wise ones it seems to us, in writing many years later, but in his Memoirs he seems to have forgotten them.  The terrible tidings that the seventh bastion and the curtain uniting it to the sixth had fallen into the hands of the French spread through the city.  The Triumvirate had the tocsins rung.  All the houses were opened at that sound; in the twinkling of an eye all the inhabitants were in the streets.  General Rosselli and the Minister of War, all the officers of the staff, Mazzini himself, came to the Janiculum.

“The people in arms massed around us,” writes Garibaldi in a short record of the siege of Rome, “clamored to drive the French off the walls.  General Rosselli and the Minister of War consented.  I opposed the attempt.  I feared the confusion into which our troops would have been thrown by those new combatants and their irregular movements, the panic that would be likely by night to seize on troops unaccustomed to fire, and which actually had assailed our bravest ones on the night of the 16th.  I insisted on waiting for the daylight.”