says, "Obey me or die;" and the Church, speaking through
purgatory, says, "Believe me or burn." There is one comfort in this,
however,--the present system is obviously the last. When force gives
way, all gives way. The Church will stand, doubtless, because they tell
us she is founded on a rock; but what will become of the State? When men
can be awed neither by painted fiends nor real cannon, what is to awe
them? Indeed, we shrewdly suspect, that even now the fiends would count
for little, were it not for the fiends incarnate, in the shape of
Croats, by which the others are backed. The Lombards would boldly face
the gridirons, cauldrons, and stinging creatures gathered in the one
corner of the square at Milan, if they but knew how to muzzle the cannon
which are assembled in the other.

In truth, things in this part of the world are not looking up. A
universal serfdom and barbarism are slowly creeping over all men and all
systems. The Government of Austria has become more revolutionary than
the Revolution itself. By violating the rights of property, it has
indorsed the worst doctrines of Socialism. That Government has, in a
great number of instances, seized upon estates, without making out a
title to them by any regular process of law. After the attempted
outbreak at Milan in 1852, the landed property of well-nigh all the
royalist emigrants was swept away by a decree of sequestration. The
_Milan Gazette_ published a list of seventy-two political refugees whose
property has been laid under sequestration in the provinces of Milan,
Como, Mantua, Lodi, Pavia, Brescia, Cremona, Bergamo, and Sondrio. In
this list we find the names of many distinguished persons, such as
Count Arese, the two Counts Borromeo, General Lechi, Duke Litta, Count
Litta, Marquis Pallavicini, Marquis Rosales, Princess Belgioso. The
pretext for seizing their estates was, that their owners had contributed
to the revolutionary treasury; which was incredible to those who know
the difference in feeling and views which separate the royalist emigrant
nobles of Lombardy from the democratic republicans that follow Mazzini.
In truth, the Government of Vienna needs their estates; and, imitating
the example of the French Convention, and furnishing another precedent
for Socialism when it shall come into power, it seized them without any
colour of right or form of law. Another branch of the scourging tyranny
of Austria is the system of forced loans. Some of the wealth