was for and not against them.  They could say that the only patent consequence of the change of system was that the country had been plunged in disaster, that blood and money had been wasted with no other effect than a bankrupt exchequer, a beaten army, trade at a standstill, misery stalking through the land.  This party, which was by no means weak, could reckon on the compact support of Savoy, where Italian patriotism was as scarce as true and chivalric attachment to the royal house was abundant.  Above all, it had the support of the whole power of the Church, which, through its corporations and religious orders and its army of priests, exercised an influence in Piedmont unparalleled in Austria or in Spain.  If the liberal institutions of the country were to be preserved, it was necessary to strike a blow at this party by weakening the arch on which it reposed.  Religious toleration had been proclaimed in Piedmont as one of the first reforms, the concession having been obtained from Charles Albert by the Marquis Robert d’Azeglio, a conservative and a profoundly convinced Catholic, but a lover of justice and mercy, who esteemed it the happiest day of his life when, through his interposition, the faithful Vaudois were granted the rights of free citizens.  But legislation had not yet touched the extraordinary privileges arrogated to itself by the Church.  One of these, the Foro ecclesiastico, a special court for the judgment of ecclesiastical offenders against the common law, it was now proposed to abolish.  It was a test measure—­like throwing down the gauntlet.  Cavour had been re-elected when the king dissolved Parliament by what is known as the Proclamation of Moncalieri, and in the debates on the Foro ecclesiastico for the first time he made his power felt in the Chamber.  He spoke as one who had long thought out the subject and had chosen his policy:  “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.”

At this first stage in the long struggle the Roman curia might have settled the matter in a friendly way, but it would not.  Cardinal Antonelli replied to a respectful invitation, that “the Holy Father was ready to go to the ante-chamber of the devil’s house to please the king of Sardinia, but he really could not go inside.”  Yet, at the same date, the Archbishop of Paris (Sibour) admitted to a Piedmontese visitor that the Sardinian Government had no option under the new institutions but to establish the equality of all citizens before the law, and in Austria they were laughing at the progressive monarchy in its laborious efforts to obtain reforms carried out in the despotic empire by Joseph II.  The reason that Rome refused to treat was that she thought herself strong and Sardinia weak.  Writers on this period have too readily assumed that the Church, by the law of its being, must always cry “no compromise!” Of course nothing can be more erroneous.  The Church has yielded as many times as it thought itself