a Christian and a Catholic, and that if he had wronged anyone he sincerely repented and asked pardon of God, but the signature demanded was a political act, and if the priest wished to talk politics his ministers were in the next room.  Thither the ecclesiastic retired, but he very soon returned, and administered the rite without more ado.  What had passed was this:  General Menabrea, with a decision for which he cannot be too much praised, threatened the priest with instant arrest unless he surrendered his pretensions.  Only those who know the extraordinary terror inspired in an Italian Catholic by the prospect of dying unshriven can appreciate the merit of the King, whose faith was childlike, in standing as firm in the presence of supernatural arms as he stood before the Austrian guns.

Menabrea’s administration was then upon the eve of falling.  The cause was one of those financial crises that were symptomatic of a mischief which has been growing from then till now, when some critics think they see in it the fatal upas tree of Italy.  The process of transforming a country where everything was wanting—­roads, railways, lines of navigation, schools, water, lighting, sanitary provisions, and the other hundred thousand requirements of modern life—­into the Italy of to-day, where all these things have made leaps almost incredible to those who knew her in her former state, has proved costly without example.  During the whole period it has been necessary to spend in ever-increasing ratio on the army and navy, and this expenditure, though emphatically not the chief, has yet been a concomitant cause of financial trouble.  The point cannot be inquired into here of how far greater wisdom and higher character in Italian public servants might have limited the evil and reconciled progress with economy; but it may be said that if the path entered upon by the man who took charge of the exchequer after Menabrea’s fall, Quintino Sella, had been rigorously followed by his successors, the present situation would not be what it is.

Giovanni Lanza assumed the premiership in the government in which Sella was Minister of Finance.  Both these politicians were Piedmontese, and both were known as men of conspicuous integrity, but Lanza’s rigid conservatism made it seem unlikely that the Roman question would take a fresh turn under his administration.  In politics, however, the unlikely is what generally happens; events are stronger than men.

On the 8th of December the twenty-first Ecumenical Council assembled in Rome.  From the day of its meeting, in spite of the strenuous opposition of its most learned and illustrious members, there was no more doubt that the dogma under consideration would be voted by the partly astute and partly complaisant majority than that it would have been rejected in the twenty preceding Councils.  On the 18th of July 1870, the Pope was proclaimed Infallible.