“Italians! down with all emblems of private and partial interests.  Let us unite under one single banner, the tricolor, and if he who has carried it bravely thus far lets it fall from his hand, we will take it one from the other, twenty-four millions of us, and, till the last of us shall have perished under the banner of our redemption, the stranger shall not return into Italy.

“Viva Italy! viva the Italian people!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Close of “A Comment by Pio Angelo Fierortino on the Allocution of Pius IX. spoken in the Secret Consistory of 29th April, 1848,” dated Italy, 30th April, 1st year of the Redemption of Italy.]

These events make indeed a crisis.  The work begun by Napoleon is finished.  There will never more be really a Pope, but only the effigy or simulacrum of one.

The loss of Pius IX. is for the moment a great one.  His name had real moral weight,—­was a trumpet appeal to sentiment.  It is not the same with any man that is left.  There is not one that can be truly a leader in the Roman dominion, not one who has even great intellectual weight.

The responsibility of events now lies wholly with the people, and that wave of thought which has begun to pervade them.  Sovereigns and statesmen will go where they are carried; it is probable power will be changed continually from, hand to hand, and government become, to all intents and purposes, representative.  Italy needs now quite to throw aside her stupid king of Naples, who hangs like a dead weight on her movements.  The king of Sardinia and the Grand Duke of Tuscany will be trusted while they keep their present course; but who can feel sure of any sovereign, now that Louis Philippe has shown himself so mad and Pius IX. so blind?  It seems as if fate was at work to bewilder and cast down the dignities of the world and democratize society at a blow.

In Rome there is now no anchor except the good sense of the people.  It seems impossible that collision should not arise between him who retains the name but not the place of sovereign, and the provisional government which calls itself a ministry.  The Count Mamiani, its new head, is a man of reputation as a writer, but untried as yet as a leader or a statesman.  Should agitations arise, the Pope can no longer calm them by one of his fatherly looks.

All lies in the future; and our best hope must be that the Power which has begun so great a work will find due means to end it, and make the year 1850 a year of true jubilee to Italy; a year not merely of pomps and tributes, but of recognized rights and intelligent joys; a year of real peace,—­peace, founded not on compromise and the lying etiquettes of diplomacy, but on truth and justice.

Then this sad disappointment in Pius IX. may be forgotten, or, while all that was lovely and generous in his life is prized and reverenced, deep instruction may be drawn from his errors as to the inevitable dangers of a priestly or a princely environment, and a higher knowledge may elevate a nobler commonwealth than the world has yet known.