of the Marquis Gustavo Cavour, who evoked Padre Cristoforo from Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi to plead for his fellow friars; but there was no destroying the force, so far as it went, of Count Solaro’s question, Were they Catholics, or were they not?  To endorse a policy not approved by the Church was to cease, ipso facto, to be a Catholic.  The reasoning might not be true, but it was clear.  Charles Albert’s old minister drew a beautiful picture of the country in the good old times before the Statute.  Then the people did not lack bread.  Life and property and the good name of citizens were safeguarded.  The finances were not exhausted; the taxes were not excessive; the revenue was not diminishing; treaties were observed; Piedmont possessed that consideration of foreign courts which a wise government can always command, even without the prestige of force:—­a picture drawn in a fine artistic free-hand, not slavishly subservient to fact; but as to the taxes, at least, its correctness was not to be gainsaid.  Seen from this point of view, the progress of all modern States means retrogression, a paradox which has passed now from the friends of the old order, few of whom have still the courage to sustain it, to the socialists, the sum of whose contentions it exactly formulates.  Count Solaro enlarged on the dreadful evils that would result from the Bill were it to become law, not to the religious corporations, which a wiser generation and renewed endowments would restore to more than their pristine prosperity, but to the country which suffered the perpetration of a sin so enormous that words were powerless to describe it.

After the war dances of Brofferio and Solaro de la Margherita, Cavour made a temperate speech, in which he said that he agreed with Brofferio in placing moral expediency above a question of finance, but that if this were granted, the Government could not be indifferent, in the present state of the finances, to a saving of nearly a million francs a year (it being proposed to defray out of the confiscated ecclesiastical property a grant to that amount which the State paid to the poorer clergy).  He defended the expropriation of a convent called Santa Croce to meet the need of a hospital for the military cholera patients.  Passing on to larger considerations, he recognised the great services rendered by religious orders in past times, when Europe was emerging from barbarism, and was still a prey to the violence and ignorance of feudal society.  Had the religious communities not met a want, they would not have taken root.  Civilisation, literature, agriculture, and above all the poor, neglected and oppressed by the secular power, owed them an immense debt.  But coming down to the present day, Cavour argued that the original part played by monks and friars was now filled, and of necessity more efficaciously filled, by laymen.  Their presence in superabundant numbers in the modern State was an anachronism.  It was only needful to compare the countries where they abounded in number and in influence, as in Spain and the kingdom of Naples, with England, Prussia, or France, to see whether it was possible to allege that they tended to enlightenment and prosperity.