he Episcopal and Pontifical
allocutions, an address to Victor Emmanuel, the character of which may be
gathered from the following few words: "Sire, bishops, almost all
strangers in Italy, have proclaimed the strange doctrine that Rome is the
slave of the Catholic world. We reply to them by declaring that we are
resolved, to maintain inviolable the right of the nation and that of the
Italian metropolis, which is, at present, retained by force under a
detested yoke." It was of a piece with many other assertions of the
revolutionary party that the Romans detested the rule of the Holy Father.
It was particularly audacious to make such an assertion in face of the
enthusiastic demonstrations which had just been made in the city of the
Popes. They had forbidden the presence of the Italian bishops at Rome, and
nevertheless they dared to complain that almost all the bishops who
gathered around the Sovereign Pontiff were strangers in Italy. But what
did this avail them? Did not the Italian bishops decidedly express
complete concurrence with their brethren?

It is still more surprising that the Emperor Napoleon took no warning from
the words of the Turin parliament, and went so far as to conclude an
agreement with them for the preservation to the Pope of the Holy City.

(M91) It is difficult to understand how a people numerically so weak as
the inhabitants of that portion of the once great kingdom of Poland, which
fell to the Russian Empire at the time of the unfortunate partition, could
have undertaken a rebellion against so great a Power as Russia. But
provocation, patriotism, the sense of nationality, together with the
ardent love of liberty, set the laws of prudence at defiance. That
provocation must have been of no ordinary kind which could excite, in
Russian Poland, a third rebellion, which had no better prospect of success
than the two former, which resulted so disastrously for the unhappy Poles.
And, indeed, what could be worse or more calculated to cause insurrection
than the cruelties, crimes and sacrilegious acts which the Russian
government was guilty of throughout Poland in the years 1861 and 1862? The
churches of that ill-fated country were seized and profaned, divine
service interdicted, and the bishops arraigned before courts-martial and
cast into prison. Such atrocities, instead of crushing, only increased the
patriotism of the people. Russian policy, baffled as was to be expected,
in its design of establishing tr