in our own time. Since the days of the Countess Matilda, the Pope,
having acquired a taste for possession, has gone on rounding his
estate. He has obtained cities by capitulation, as in the case of
Bologna; he has won others at the cannon's mouth, as Rimini; while
some he has appropriated, by treachery and stealth, as Ancona. Indeed
so well have matters been managed, that in 1859 the Bishop of Rome is
the temporal sovereign of about six millions of acres, and reigns over
three millions one hundred and twenty-four thousand six hundred and
sixty-eight men, who are all crying out loudly against him.

What do they complain of? Only listen, and you will soon learn.

They say--that the authority to which, without having either asked or
accepted it, they are subject, is the most fundamentally absolute that
was ever defined by Aristotle; that the legislative, executive, and
judicial powers are united, confounded, and jumbled together in one
and the same hand, contrary to the practice of civilized states, and
to the theory of Montesquieu; that they willingly recognize the
infallibility of the Pope upon all religious questions, but that in
civil matters it appears to them less easy to tolerate; that they do
not refuse to obey, because, all things considered, man is not placed
here below to follow the bent of his own inclinations, but that they
would be glad to obey laws; that the good pleasure of any man, however
good it may be, is not so good as the _Code Napoléon_; that the
reigning Pope is not an evil-disposed man, but that the arbitrary
government of one man, even admitting his infallibility, can never be
anything but a bad government.

That in virtue of an ancient and hitherto ineradicable practice, the
Pope is assisted in the temporal government of his States by the