t gave
133,681 votes for Victor Emmanuel's rule, and only 1507 negative
votes[53].

[Footnote 53: Countess Cesaresco, _The Liberation of Italy_, p. 411.]

Now, for the first time since the days of Napoleon I. and of the
short-lived Republic for which Mazzini and Garibaldi worked and fought
so nobly in 1849, the Eternal City began to experience the benefits of
progressive rule. The royal government soon proved to be very far from
perfect. Favouritism, the multiplication of sinecures, municipal
corruption, and the prosaic inroads of builders and speculators, soon
helped to mar the work of political reconstruction, and began to arouse
a certain amount of regret for the more picturesque times of the Papal
rule. A sentimental reaction of this kind is certain to occur in all
cases of political change, especially in a city where tradition and
emotion so long held sway.

The consciences of the faithful were also troubled when the _fiat_ of
the Pope went forth excommunicating the robber-king and all his chief
abettors in the work of sacrilege. Sons of the Church throughout Italy
were bidden to hold no intercourse with the interlopers and to take no
part in elections to the Italian Parliament which thenceforth met in
Rome. The schism between the Vatican and the King's Court and Government
was never to be bridged over; and even to-day it constitutes one of the
most perplexing problems of Italy.

Despite the fact that Rome and Italy gained little of that mental and
moral stimulus which might have resulted from the completion of the
national movement solely by the action of the people themselves, the
fact nevertheless remains that Rome needed Italy and Italy needed Rome.
The disappointment loudly expressed by idealists, sentimentalists, and
reactionaries must not blind us to the fact that the Italians, and above
all the Romans, have benefited by the advent of unity, political
freedom, and civic responsibility. It may well be that, in acting as the
leader of a constitutional people, the Eternal City will little by
little develop higher gifts than those nurtured under Papal tutelage,
and perhaps as beneficent to Humanity as those which, in the ancient
world, bestowed laws on Europe.

As Mazzini always insisted, political progress, to be sound, must be
based ultimately on moral progress. It is of its very nature slow, and
is therefore apt to escape the eyes of the moralist or cynic who dwells
on the untoward signs of the present.