Deity.  He was a seer, not a philosopher.  Emancipation from ignorance will never be complete, and ignorance and even superstition have their divine uses as infancy has.  Once the idea of evolution as the law of life is accepted, the logical conclusion is the reign of law and the rejection of all miraculous interposition, and the perception of this fact by the clever schemers at the Vatican underlies the implacable hostility they show to science and evolution.  If they could, they would have burned Darwin as they burned Giordano Bruno.  They are, and they must ever be, as the condition of keeping up the existence and power of the Vatican and its peculiar institutions, the enemies of mental emancipation.  It is not ignorance which is the enemy of wisdom, but the passion of domination.

The Roman Catholic Church with its hypothetical succession of Peter will exist forever, because the necessity of seeing through forms and of obedience to authority will endure as long as humanity endures, for certain orders of mind and certain temperaments; but the political problem of the existence of the Vatican in a free and united Italy, progressive and maintaining her place amongst the European powers, is one the solution of which I shall await with great interest, not regarding the triumph of the Vatican as possible according to its hopes, but not sure that the internecine struggle may not end in the ruin of both contestants, since the Italians have not the courage or the patriotism to accept the only safe measure, formal and complete suppression of all civic privileges for the Pope and his bishops—­the relegation of religion to a place outside the organization of government.

CHAPTER XL

ADOWAH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The dolorous history of the defeat at Adowah, the decisive event in the decline of Italy, is an epitome of all the tendencies and weaknesses of the Italian nation; and, as I was more or less intimately informed of all the causes of it, the intrigues and treachery which made it possible, and as no Italian who knows the story will, for very shame, tell it, I will leave the record of what I learned and what I believe to be the indisputable facts.

When Lord Salisbury came to power in 1895, he renewed a compact with Italy and Austria which had been made when Crispi was in office in his first premiership, about 1888, for a common action in all questions concerning the Turkish Empire; and on the occasion of the Armenian massacres he called for the execution of its provisions, sending the English fleet to Turkish waters and making a requisition on Austria and Italy for the support of their fleets.  Crispi, who saw in the measure the longed-for opportunity of action in league with England, ordered the fleet to follow that of England, and prepared the mobilization of an army corps to coöperate by land.  He had already revived the ancient hostility of France by the rejection of an