Surely the moral of these two pictures speaks for itself.  Put aside abstract political considerations, put aside, too, theological questions, and look at broad facts patent to all.  If anybody can see Rome and the Papal States, and still believe that the people are happy or prosperous or faring with good prospects either for this world or the next, I can say nothing more.  His eyes are not my eyes, nor his judgment mine.  For those to whom this ocular testimony is denied, I have written these papers.  I have sought to make present to them the utter dreariness, the hopeless discontent, the abject demoralization, which strike a resident in Rome, unless he refuses wilfully to see the truth.  In the dead Rome of real life; in the universal spiritless immorality of Roman society; in the decay of what once was the Roman people; in the squalid misery of the country towns, miserable even in their merriment; in the utter isolation of the Papal States, a moral lazaretto amongst European kingdoms, you see only too plainly the permanent condition of the country.  As to the present misery, you can read its signs in those pageants which impose on no one; in the Carnivals, where there are no revellers; in the solemn ceremonies, where the worshippers are sought in vain; and in the sad, sullen, hopeless demonstrations, whereby a people protest constantly that they are weary of their fate.  If you look for causes, you may find them perhaps in those trials without law or justice; in that Press without liberty or truth; in those Church-sanctioned lotteries; in the presence of that multitude of priests, and in the policy which dictated the outrage of St Joseph’s day, and the Bull of excommunication.  How far these causes are sufficient to explain the fact, is a matter of opinion.  I can understand a fervent believer in the Catholic Faith saying, that the people of the Papal States ought to be happy and prosperous under Papal rule.  It may be so, but the fact is they are not; and that they are both prosperous and happy under the rule of Victor Emmanuel ever since the great Lombard campaign, when the French armies at Solferino destroyed the Austrian power, the key-stone of the whole priest-despot rule in Italy.  I have been living, with but short intervals, in different parts of this Italian land.  Wherever the free national government has spread, I can see the growth of prosperity and happiness.  There have been, there are, and there will be partial reactions, petty disturbances; but they are but eddies in the great, deep, resistless current.  Go to Bologna, or Ferrara, or Ancona, and you will find them, as I have, passed from dead desolation into active life.  Commerce is flourishing, order prevails, and the people are free and full of life.  These are facts on which both Protestant and Catholic can judge; and Catholics, as well as Protestants, will tell you the same thing.  Then if this be so, and that it is so I assert fearlessly, in what right, human or divine, are a number of God’s creatures to be forced to live out that one short life of ours in dull, abject misery?  If you tell me that their misery is necessary to the maintenance of a religious creed, be that creed Protestant or Catholic, I reply that the sooner then that creed disappears, the better for mankind and for faith in God.