ts of the state rendered
useless. I affirm that, except in the case of three or four priests, who
had been guilty of firing upon our combatants, and who were killed by
the people during the last days of the siege, not a single act of
personal violence was committed by any fraction of the population
against another, and that if ever there was a city presenting the
spectacle of a band of brothers pursuing a common end, and bound
together by the same faith, it was Rome under the republican rule. The
city was inhabited by foreigners from all parts of the world, by the
consular agents, by many of your countrymen; let any one of them arise
and under the guarantee of his own signature deny, if he can, the truth
of what I say. Terror now reigns in Rome; the prisons are choked with
men who have been arrested and detained without trial; fifty priests are
confined in the castle of St. Angelo, whose only crime consists in their
having lent their services in our hospitals; the citizens, the best
known for their moderation, are exiled; the army is almost entirely
dissolved, the city disarmed, and the "factious" sent away even to the
last man; and yet France dares not consult in legal manner the will of
the populations, but re-establishes the papal authority by military
decree. I do not believe that since the dismemberment of Poland there
has been committed a more atrocious injustice, a more gross violation of
the eternal right which God has implanted in the peoples, that of
appreciating and defining for themselves their own life, and governing
themselves in accordance with their own appreciation of it. And I cannot
believe that it is well for you or for Europe that such things can be
accomplished in the eyes of the world, without one nation arising out of
its immobility to protest in the name of universal justice. This is to
enthrone brute force, where, by the power of reason, God alone should
reign; it is to substitute the sword and poniard for law--to decree a
ferocious war without limit of time or means between oppressors rendered
suspicious by their fears, and the oppressed abandoned to the instincts
of reaction and isolation. Let Europe ponder upon these things. For if
the light of human morality becomes but a little more obscured, in that
darkness there will arise a strife that will make those who come after
us shudder with dread.

The balance of power in Europe is destroyed. It consisted formerly in
the support given to the sm