They were to have authority to make laws on all subjects, excepting ecclesiastical matters and the canons and discipline of the Church, but including the imposition of taxes; the Pope, however, like most monarchs, reserved to himself the right of negativing a law.  All discussions, also, of the diplomatico-religious relations of the Holy See with foreign powers were forbidden.  Money bills were to originate in the lower house, and direct taxes could be granted for only a year.  The Deputies had a right to impeach ministers, who, if they were laymen, were to be tried by the High Council; if ecclesiastics, by the Sacred College.  The unlimited right of petition to the lower house was assured and ministers were responsible for every ministerial act; they had the right of sitting and debating, but not of voting, in both Councils.  A portion of the revenue of the State, for the support of the cardinals, the ecclesiastical congregations, and generally for the transaction of purely ecclesiastical business, was to be secured to the Pope, and to be borne on the estimates every year.

The judges were to be irremovable after they had held office for three years; and all persons were declared equal in the sight of the law.  Extraordinary commissions or tribunals for the trial of offences were abolished.  All property, whether of individuals or corporations, whether civil or ecclesiastical, was to be held subject to its equal part of the burdens of the State; and to all bills imposing taxes, the Pope would annex, of his own authority, a special waiver of the ecclesiastical exemption.  The administrations of the Provinces and the communes were placed in the hands of their respective inhabitants.  The Government (or political) censorship was abolished, but the ecclesiastical censorship was retained.

Such is a general outline of the Roman Constitution spontaneously granted to his subjects by Pius IX.  Its merits, in all civil or political matters, are certainly equal, if not superior, to those of the English Constitution, from which in great part it was borrowed; its faults are precisely those which resulted necessarily from the Pope’s double character, as temporal sovereign of the Roman States and as head of the Catholic Church throughout the world.  It was not within the province or at the discretion of Pius to alter the tenure by which he held his throne, to change the fundamental principles of the Church or to abolish his ecclesiastical dominion.  He granted to his subjects all that was in his power to grant as their temporal sovereign.  His purely ecclesiastical relations and duties did not concern them, or concerned them only so far as they were members of the great body of Catholic believers in all lands.  The College of Cardinals must choose the Pope, and must choose one of their own number; this is not a law of the Roman States, but a law of the Catholic Church.  Pius could not abrogate it; and if he had been inclined to grant everything to his people by divesting himself of the last rag of his sovereignty, the only consequence would have been that the cardinals must have chosen another pope in his place, who might undo all that Pius had accomplished.