On this understanding, the Pope’s first duty is to say Mass at St. Peter’s for 139,000,000 of Roman Catholics; his second is to make a dignified appearance, to receive company, to wear a crown, and to take care it does not fall off his head.  But it is a matter of perfect indifference to him that his subjects brawl, rob, or murder one another, so long as they don’t attack either his Church or his government.

If we examine the question of the distribution of punishments in the Papal States from this point of view, we shall see that papal justice never strikes at random.

The most unpardonable crimes in the eyes of the clergy are those which are offensive to Heaven.  Rome punishes sins.  The tribunal of the Vicariate sends a blasphemer to the galleys, and claps into goal the silly fellow who refuses to take the Communion at Easter.  Surely nobody will charge the Head of the Church with neglecting his duty.

I have told you how the Pope defends and will continue to defend his crown, and I have no fear of your charging him with weakness.  If Europe ventured to allege that he suffers the throne on which it has placed him to be shaken, the answer would be a list of the political exiles and the prisoners of state, present and past—­the living and the dead.

But the crimes and offences of which the natives are guilty towards one another affect the Pope and his Cardinals very remotely.  What matters it to the successors of the Apostles that a few workmen and peasants should cut one another’s throats after Sunday Vespers?  There will always be enough of them left to pay the taxes.

The people of Rome have long contracted some very bad habits.  They frequent taverns and wine-shops, and they quarrel over their liquor; the word and the blow of other people is with them the word and the knife.  The rural population are as bad as the townspeople.  Quarrels between neighbours and relatives are submitted to the adjudication of cold steel.  Of course they would do better to go before the nearest magistrate; but justice is slow in the States of the Church; lawsuits cost money, and bribery is the order of the day; the judges are either fools or knaves.  So out with the knife! its decisions are swift and sure.  Giacomo is down:  ’tis clear he was in the wrong.  Nicolo is unmolested:  he must have been in the right.  This little drama is performed more than four times a day in the Papal States, as is proved by the Government statistics of 1853.  It is a great misfortune for the country, and a serious danger for Europe.  The school of the knife, founded at Rome, establishes branches in foreign lands.  We have seen the holiest interests of civilization placed under the knife, and all the honest people in the world, the Pope himself included, shuddered at the sight.

It would cost his Holiness very little trouble to snatch the knife from the hands of his subjects.  We don’t ask him to begin over again the education of his people, which would take time, or even to increase the attractions of civil justice, so as to substitute litigants for assassins.  All we require of him is, that he should allow criminal justice to dispose of some few of the worst characters who throng to these evil haunts.  But this very natural remedy would be utterly repugnant to his notions.  The tavern assassin is seldom a foe to the Government.