I said some cried “traitor,” some “imbecile,” some wept, but In the minds of all, I believe, at that time, grief was predominant.  They could no longer depend on him they had thought their best friend.  They had lost their father.

Meanwhile his people would not submit to the inaction he urged.  They saw it was not only ruinous to themselves, but base and treacherous to the rest of Italy.  They said to the Pope, “This cannot be; you must follow up the pledges you have given, or, if you will not act to redeem them, you must have a ministry that will.”  The Pope, after he had once declared to the contrary, ought to have persisted.  He should have said, “I cannot thus belie myself, I cannot put my name to acts I have just declared to be against my conscience.”

The ministers of the people ought to have seen that the position they assumed was utterly untenable; that they could not advance with an enemy in the background cutting off all supplies.  But some patriotism and some vanity exhilarated them, and, the Pope having weakly yielded, they unwisely began their impossible task.  Mamiani, their chief, I esteem a man, under all circumstances, unequal to such a position,—­a man of rhetoric merely.  But no man could have acted, unless the Pope had resigned his temporal power, the Cardinals been put under sufficient check, and the Jesuits and emissaries of Austria driven from their lurking-places.

A sad scene began.  The Pope,—­shut up more and more in his palace, the crowd of selfish and insidious advisers darkening round, enslaved by a confessor,—­he who might have been the liberator of suffering Europe permitted the most infamous treacheries to be practised in his name.  Private letters were written to the foreign powers, denying the acts he outwardly sanctioned; the hopes of the people were evaded or dallied with; the Chamber of Deputies permitted to talk and pass measures which they never could get funds to put into execution; legions to form and manoeuvre, but never to have the arms and clothing they needed.  Again and again the people went to the Pope for satisfaction.  They got only—­benediction.

Thus plotted and thus worked the scarlet men of sin, playing the hopes of Italy off and on, while their hope was of the miserable defeat consummated by a still worse traitor at Milan on the 6th of August.  But, indeed, what could be expected from the “Sword of Pius IX.,” when Pius IX. himself had thus failed in his high vocation.  The king of Naples bombarded his city, and set on the Lazzaroni to rob and murder the subjects he had deluded by his pretended gift of the Constitution.  Pius proclaimed that he longed to embrace all the princes of Italy.  He talked of peace, when all knew for a great part of the Italians there was no longer hope of peace, except in the sepulchre, or freedom.