This system has succeeded (according to priestly notions) tolerably well at Home and in the Mediterranean provinces, but very badly at Bologna, and in the Apennine provinces.  In the metropolis of the country the middle class is reduced, impoverished, and submissive; in the second capital it is much more numerous, wealthy, and independent.  But evil passions, far more fatal to society than the rational resistance of parties, have progressed in an inverse direction.  They predominate but little at Bologna, where the middle class is strong enough to keep them under; they triumph at Home, where the middle class has been destroyed.  Thence it follows that Bologna is a city of opposition, and Rome a socialist city; and that the revolution will be moderate at Bologna, sanguinary at Rome.  This is what the clerical party has gained.

Nothing can equal the disdain with which the prelates the princes, the foreigners of condition, and even the footmen at Rome, judge the middle class, of mezzo ceto.

The prelate has his reasons.  If he be a minister, he sees in his offices some hundred clerks, belonging to the middle class.  He knows that these active and intelligent, but underpaid men, are for the most part obliged to eke out a livelihood by secretly following some other occupation:  one keeps the books of a land-steward, another those of a Jew.  Whose fault is it?  They well know that neither excellence of character nor length of service are carried to the credit of the civil functionary, and that, after having earned advancement, he will be obliged either to ask it himself as a favour, or to employ the intercession of his wife.  It is not these poor men whom we should despise, but the dignitaries in violet stockings who impose the burden upon them.

Should Monsignore be a judge of a superior tribunal, of the Sacra Rota for instance, he need know nothing about the law.  His secretary, or assistant, has by dint of patient study made himself an accomplished lawyer, as indeed a man must be who can thread his way through the dark labyrinths of Roman legislation.  But Monsignore, who makes use of his assistant’s ability for his own particular profit, thinks he has a right to despise him, because he is ill paid, lives humbly, and has no future to look forward to.  Which of the two is in the wrong?

If the same prelate be a Judge of Appeal, he will profess a most profound contempt for advocates.  I must confess they are to be pitied, these unfortunate Princes of the Bar, who write for the blind, and speak to the deaf, and who wear out their shoes in treading the interminable paths of Rotal procedure.  But assuredly they are not men to be despised.  They have always knowledge, often eloquence.  Marchetti, Rossi, and Lunati might no doubt have written good sermons, if they had not preferred doing something else.

Between ourselves, I think the prelates affect to despise them, in order that they may not have to fear them.  They have condemned some of them to exile, others to silence and want.  Hear what Cardinal Antonelli said to M. de Gramont:—­