With the first light of September 20 did the chambers of the Vatican begin to rattle with the sound of other artillery than the joy-guns of St. Angelo. The last time that sound had disturbed those vaults was when it came as the voice of a French republic, commanding a Roman republic to make way for the most despotic rule in Europe. Now France was learning for herself what it is to hear the guns of the stranger before the gates of the capital; and Rome was feeling what it is to hear the voice of the Fatherland bidding the stranger depart. Of the two potentates who in 1849 thundered at the weak walls of poor old Rome, he who then acted the restorer was now an exile and a captive, while he who was then an exile panting for return, now sat in the halls to which he was then restored, but sat feeling in the thud of every gun that even within those halls he too would soon call himself a captive.
While the din pained the spirit of the aged Pio Nono, forty of the Italians attacking and twenty of the foreigners defending were killed, and a hundred and fifty of the assailants and fifty of the garrison were wounded. Reports came that the heaviest fire was directed against the Porta Pia, the gate particularly connected by name with his own name, adorned and restored by his liberality, and endeared to his military recollections by the triumphal entrance of his crusaders from Mentana less than three years before. A letter is published in which the Pope ordered General Kanzler to surrender as soon as a breach should be made. But it would not appear that he had really granted him power to do so; for the Civiltá expressly says that the order to hoist the white flag was given by the Pope himself, and accounts for needless bloodshed by the delay which occurred ere that order could reach the gate that was beleaguered.[480]
Some five hours had passed since the horrid din began. No Michael with his legions of angels, no Madonna terrible as an army with banners, smote the host of the aliens. No Peter struck the barbarians with blindness. No Dominic, with a cohort of sainted Inquisitors; no Ignatius, with a celestial "Company," flashed death upon the worse than Moslems who fought for uprisen Italy. All these things had been expected. They came not, but instead of them came the news that a breach at the Porta Pia invited the Italians in. At last the poor old priest-king made up his mind to stay the futile flow of blood. He knew the temper of his zouaves. They would have stood and died like crusaders; but at last the word was given. There on the dome of proud St. Peter's was the white flag, and there did it float out upon the September breeze, and waved in the forenoon sun—waved over Pontiff and Cardinal, over the Circus of Nero and the Inquisition of the Popes. Was it real? Eyes would be wiped to see if they did not deceive. Eyes, ay, the eyes of soldiers, would be wiped from thick, hot tears. Could it be—could it ever be? Come at last! The hour for which ages had impatiently waited, for which myriads of Italians had died. Italy one! her arms outstretched from Etna and from Monte Rosa, clasping at last every one of her children, and even availing by their returning strength to lift up her poor old Rome from under the load of the priest and the stranger.
He who two brief months before had, amid deep darkness at noonday, read out, by artificial light, the Decree of his own unlimited power and irreformable law, lay down that night amid a rude and intrusive glare streaming from across the Tiber into the multitudinous windows of the Vatican. It came from the lights of Rome all ablaze with illuminations for the fall of the temporal power. In the piazza below lay the Pope's little army of foreigners, passing their last night in the Holy City under shade of the basilica in which they had consecrated their bayonets to St. Peter, and within embrace of the two arms of the glorious crescent colonnade. For true it is that stone cupolas, and stone columns, put up by the distant dead, may be of real avail as stays of a power after the hearts and hands of willing men have ceased to hold it up. The soldiers passed the next morning in confused preparations for a departure. At noon a cannon was fired, and the Pope appeared on his balcony. He could not conceal his overpowering emotion. With the retreating steps of these prisoners of war, were about to vanish mystic visions of martial feats crowned by divine miracle. The soldiers raised their old cry, Viva Pio Nono, in loud and ringing tones; which, smiting against the basilica and the palace, were from thence rolled back, and flew across the stream, till the sound of Viva Pio Nono once more floated along the neighbouring streets of the capital. Uprisen Italy, quietly sustaining her uplifted Rome, hearkened in silence to the foreign cheer. Then, for the last time, did the Pope give to his beloved soldiers what they had so often received, his benediction. As he withdrew, when the corridors opened lone and long before him, when the doors closed behind, cutting him off from the only bayonets on which he could rely, no wonder if he felt that the palace of the Pontiffs had become a prison.
The crusaders, turning to the left, passed out of the Gate Angelica; then winding round under the windows of the Vatican, close by the garden walls, and along the Janiculum, they finally reached the Gate of San Pancrazio, where Cadorna and his staff awaited them to receive the formal surrender. Proud were the men under the red, white, and green, with the cross of Savoy, as they saw the head of the approaching column. As the first men of the French legion came up they insulted the Italian staff. According to the Civiltá, Bixio was so incensed that he reproached Cadorna for having conceded to such troops the honours of war. The friendly writer extenuates their misconduct by alleging the irritation cause by affronts received from the rabble in the streets on the previous day. But when the zouaves came up led by the brave Colonel Charette, they behaved like soldiers (Civiltá, VIII. i. 212).
When the crusaders of Pio Nono passed away from the Gate of San Pancrazio, who would have dared to say that the sixty dead and the two hundred wounded of the day before were to be the last victims of war provoked by Popes abusing the name of the Prince of Peace? And who would not feel for the French crusaders, who, led by their priests, and thinking that they did God service, had for twenty years inflicted upon Italy, at the behest of the Pope, the miseries of foreign occupation, and now, in facing their own fair land, were to behold the foreigner seated in her proudest palaces.
From that day forth, when the Roman met the priest on the street, he felt that he was no longer bound, except at the dictate of his own conscience, to confess to him his sins; that, indeed, he was not even bound to purchase an Easter ticket, to be produced as evidence that he had duly presented himself in a tribunal in which, in fact, he had never set foot. From that day forth, when the friar entered the church of St. Ignatius, neither the great picture of the torments of the heretics, nor what, in his dialect, he might call the "divine" lapis lazuli, retained all its old brilliancy; for within those sacred walls the internal tribunal of the kingdom of God was no longer anything more than a voluntary confessional. From that day forth disappeared from the seats of justice on the Seven Hills the ecclesiastical magistrate, and with him the external tribunal of the Church. From that day forth appeared for the first time for long and weary ages, the civil magistrates, sitting in open court under the eye of all, to administer, with whatever shortcomings, a law which accepted the Christian principle of even-handed justice to Jew and Gentile; to those who said, We are of Cephas, and to those who only said, We are of Christ. In the eye of the Vatican this was the fall of the supernatural order, the godless triumph of naturalism; but in other eyes it was the substitution of God's good ordinance for the contrivance of priestcraft, which, conscious that it was not natural, called itself supernatural. From that day forth the Roman noble ceased to be a mere title-bearer and jewel-stand, for now a career in the government of his country opened before him. From that time forth the people ceased to be a mere populace, and entered on the dignities of a democracy. Law, letters, science, politics, diplomacy, and oratory now called upon the bright-browed child of the working man to come and grace them with his gifts, and not to sit doomed to the destiny of the incapable, unless he would put on the frock of the priest. From that day forth the double office of Despot-Pontiff, answering to the ideal of later Pagan Rome, was replaced by the mild office of the monarch, reigning at the head of an aristocracy and a democracy. The priest as a teacher of doctrines, as a celebrant of rites, or as a practitioner of charms, remained as free as ever he had been before; but as a power to impose himself upon all, and as exclusive king of men, his reign had passed away. Italy said, "For ever"; the priest replied, "Only for a very little time"!
On October 2 the Italian government took a plébiscite in the Roman States, to enable the people by a vote to record their own desire as to whether they would belong to the kingdom of Italy or to the Spiritual State. According to the Civiltá, the voting in the Holy City was 40,835 in favour of Italy, and 46 against. It must not be imagined that the total amount of dissent was represented by the 46. The partisans of the supernatural order generally abstained; but probably they would have done otherwise had they not known that, even if they all mustered, the majority would be overwhelming. They, as usual, cried out against bribery, coercion, and similar wrongs. Indeed, to read the Papal organs at this day, one might believe that ever since the national movement began, every vote and every battle has been carried against the preponderating mass of Italians by some few Freemasons, Jews, and invisible conspirators.
The Council which was to restore all things still sat. Not even a prorogation had taken place. Now, however, the Pontiff, though not intending to dissolve it, determined to suspend it until a happier time. Exactly a month after Rome had passed into the hands of Italy, appeared on October 20 the Act by which the Council was suspended. In the Bull of Convocation the Pope had spoken of his intentions for the general benefit of society. In the Bull of Suspension it appeared that the particular society which best knew him and his remedies had spewed them out of her mouth. After having for many centuries had experience of his spiritual supremacy and temporal power, Italy had mournful proofs that they were socially evil. No land in Europe could produce a record of any dynasty which had so often brought into it foreign armies, to beat its people down, and to keep them under. No land in Europe could, from times within the memory of living men, produce such lists of the executed, the exiled, the imprisoned, and of those submitted to torture. No land in Europe had a ruling class among members of which public justice, when once free, had, week after week, to deal with such vile immoralities as the Courts of Italy had to punish in members of the priesthood. Italy had made the last trial of priestly rule with a prince personally free from the social blots which in the case of many of his predecessors had complicated questions of the public weal with questions of personal vice. Under Pius IX the system stood out more fairly to be judged by its principles and by its fruits. And under Pius IX Italy had rung with accounts of moral wrongs, of crimes of power, of curses uttered by the subject, such as had long since ceased to be heard of in other countries of Europe free from Turkish rule. The monstrosity that called itself a Spiritual State, and sneered at Lay States, was carnal, and vile to the core. The wave which, as soon as the breakwater of the Second Empire had been removed, rolled in at the Porta Pia, was even more a wave of moral scorn and of social execration than of political hostility.
The Council met amid florid promises that princes generally, at least Catholic ones, would accept the Vicar of God as their supreme judge, mingled with terrible citations of them all to appear before him, in order to find at one and the same time their correction and their deliverance in his infallible sentence. All this was uttered with the haughty spirit that goes before a fall. The fall after the haughtiness did not tarry, and was strikingly indicated by a phrase under the hand of the High Priest himself, in the Bull of Suspension: "We have been brought into such a position as to be entirely under a hostile dominion and power, God in His inscrutable judgments having so permitted it." Society had already beheld its self-proffered saviour clinging to the skirts of Napoleon III, and then crying to King William to save him from his fellow-countrymen. Now the kings heard their self-proffered judge himself declare that by a judgment truly supreme the temporal power had fallen—that power which he and all his bishops had separately and unitedly assured the Church was altogether necessary to the proper exercise of his office of universal bishop.