n could neither read nor write,
infanticide was unknown, and fewer children were passed in through the
Rota yearly than are murdered in many a modern city. For the last thing
the worst mother will do is to kill her child; last only before that
will she part with it. Which was more moral, the unrestricted charity of
the Rota, or the unrestricted, legal infanticide of the old-fashioned
'baby-farm,' where superfluous children were systematically starved to
death by professional harpies?

On by the Borgo Santo Spirito, opposite the old church of the
Penitentiaries, stands the Palazzo Serristori, memorable in the
revolutionary movement of 1867. It was then the barracks of the Papal
Zouaves--the brave foreign legion enlisted under Pius the Ninth, in
which men of all nations were enrolled under officers of the best blood
in Europe, hated more especially by the revolutionaries because they
were foreigners, and because their existence, therefore, showed a
foreign sympathy with the temporal power, which was a denial of the
revolutionary theory which asserted the Papacy to be without friends in
Europe. Wholesale murder by explosives was in its infancy then as a fine
art; but the spirit was willing, and a plot was formed to blow up the
castle of Sant' Angelo and the barracks of the Zouaves. The castle
escaped because one of the conspirators lost heart and revealed the
treachery; but the Palazzo Serristori was partially destroyed. The
explosion shattered one corner of the building. It was said that the
fuse burned faster than had been intended, so that the catastrophe came
too soon. At all events, when it happened, about dark, only the
musicians of the band were destroyed, and few of the regiment were in
the building at all, so that about thirty lives were sacrificed, where
the intention had been to destroy many hundreds. In the more sane
condition of Europe today, it seems to us amazing that Pius the Ninth
should have been generally blamed for signing the death warrant of the
two atrocious villains who did the deed, and for allowing them to be
executed. The fact that he was blamed, and very bitterly, gives some
idea of the stupid and senseless prejudice against the popes which was
the result of Antonelli's narrow and reactionary policy.

[Illustration]

LEO THE THIRTEENTH

We commonly speak of the nineteenth century as an age of superior
civilization. The truth of the assertion depends on what civilization
means, but t