From details that reached him Garibaldi always maintained that there was a priest among the wreckers who secured and destroyed the treasure!  Guerrazzi’s Siege of Rome is inferior to all his other writings.  The entry of the Italian army into Rome by the breach in Porta Pia has cast the grand defence of 1849 into the background of rash attempts and futile failures.  In these brief pages we give merely the outline of the drama in which Garibaldi was one of the leading actors.  The men who desired a republic did not exist as a party in Rome previous to the flight of the Pope.  But there existed a strong national anti-Austrian party, who, as they had worshipped Pio Nono (Pius IX) when he “blessed Italy” and the banners that the Romans bore upward to the “Holy War,” now execrated him inasmuch as he had withdrawn his sanction to that war and had blessed the Croats and the Austrians who were butchering the Italians in the north.  Convinced of the impossibility of favoring the independence and unity of Italy, and remaining at the same time the supreme head of the Universal Church, Pio Nono fled for protection to the King of Naples; there he declined to accept from the King of Piedmont his repeated offers of protection or mediation, and appealed to Austria alone to restore him pope-king absolute in Rome.  Very soon afterward the Archduke of Tuscany revoked the Constituent Assembly which he had granted, and followed the saintly example of the Holy Father, so that Tuscany and Rome were alike left sheep without a shepherd.

In the Roman States an appeal was made to universal suffrage, and the people sent up deputies, known chiefly for their honesty and bravery, to decide on the form of government, to assist Piedmont in her second war against Austria.  When the Constituent Assembly met to decide on the form of government, Mamiani warned them that only two rulers were possible in Rome—­the Pope or Cola di Rienzi; the Papacy or the Republic.

Garibaldi, who had organized his legion at Rieti, was elected member of the Constituent Assembly, and on February 7th put in his appearance and in language more soldierlike than parliamentary urged the immediate proclamation of the republic.  But the debate was carried on with all due respect for the “rights of the minority.”

Finally, on February 9th, of the one hundred fifty-four Deputies present, all but five voted for the downfall of the temporal power of the Pope, all but eleven for the proclamation of the republic.  These, with the exception of General Garibaldi and General Ferrari, were all Romans.  G. Filopanti, who undertook to explain the state of affairs to the Roman people, won shouts of applause by his concluding words, “We are no longer mere Romans, but Italians.”

This sentence sums up the sentiments of all:  of Garibaldi, who, after recording his vote, returned to his troops at Rieti and drew up an admirable plan for attacking the Austrians bent on subjugating the Roman Provinces and for carrying revolution into the Kingdom of Naples; of Mazzini, who, so far from having imposed on the Romans a republic by the force of his tyrannical will, was—­during its proclamation—­in Tuscany, striving to induce Guerrazzi and his fellow-triumvirs to unite with Rome and organize a strong army for the renewal of the Lombard War.