Read at the great meeting in New York, January, 1871, in celebration
of the freedom of Rome and complete unity of Italy.
It would give me more than ordinary satisfaction to attend the meeting on
the 12th instant for the celebration of Italian Unity, the emancipation
of Rome, and its occupation as the permanent capital of the nation.
For many years I have watched with deep interest and sympathy the popular
movement on the Italian peninsula, and especially every effort for the
deliverance of Rome from a despotism counting its age by centuries. I
looked at these struggles of the people with little reference to their
ecclesiastical or sectarian bearings. Had I been a Catholic instead of a
Protestant, I should have hailed every symptom of Roman deliverance from
Papal rule, occupying, as I have, the standpoint of a republican radical,
desirous that all men, of all creeds, should enjoy the civil liberty
which I prized so highly for myself.
I lost all confidence in the French republic of 1849, when it forfeited
its own right to exist by crushing out the newly formed Roman republic
under Mazzini and Garibaldi. From that hour it was doomed, and the
expiation of its monstrous crime is still going on. My sympathies are
with Jules Favre and Leon Gambetta in their efforts to establish and
sustain a republic in France, but I confess that the investment of Paris
by King William seems to me the logical sequence of the bombardment of
Rome by Oudinot. And is it not a significant fact that the terrible
chassepot, which made its first bloody experiment upon the halfarmed
Italian patriots without the walls of Rome, has failed in the hands of
French republicans against the inferior needle-gun of Prussia? It was
said of a fierce actor in the old French Revolution that he demoralized
the guillotine. The massacre at Mentana demoralized the chassepot.
It is a matter of congratulation that the redemption of Rome has been
effected so easily and bloodlessly. The despotism of a thousand years
fell at a touch in noiseless rottenness. The people of Rome, fifty to
one, cast their ballots of condemnation like so many shovelfuls of earth
upon its grave. Outside of Rome there seems to be a very general
acquiescence in its downfall. No Peter the Hermit preaches a crusade in
its behalf. No one of the great Catholic powers of Europe lifts a finger
for it. Whatever may be the feelings of Isabella of Spain and the
fugitive son of King Bomba, they are in no condition to come to its
rescue. It is reserved for American ecclesiastics, loud-mouthed in
professions of democracy, to make solemn protest against what they call
an "outrage," which gives the people of Rome the right of choosing their
own government, and denies the divine right of kings in the person of Pio
Nono.
The withdrawal of the temporal power of the Pope will prove a blessing to
the Catholic Church, as well as to the world. Many of its most learned
and devout priests and laymen have long seen the necessity of such a
change, which takes from it a reproach and scandal that could no longer
be excused or tolerated. A century hence it will have as few apologists
as the Inquisition or the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
In this hour of congratulation let us not forget those whose suffering
and self-sacrifice, in the inscrutable wisdom of Providence, prepared the
way for the triumph which we celebrate. As we call the long, illustrious
roll of Italian patriotism--the young, the brave, and beautiful; the
gray-haired, saintly confessors; the scholars, poets, artists, who, shut
out from human sympathy, gave their lives for God and country in the
slow, dumb agony of prison martyrdom--let us hope that they also rejoice
with us, and, inaudible to earthly ears, unite in our thanksgiving:
"Alleluia! for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! He hath avenged the
blood of his servants!"
In the belief that the unity of Italy and the overthrow of Papal rule
will strengthen the cause of liberty throughout the civilized' world, I
am very truly thy friend.
