But I am allied with Mazzini, with the Romans, and with the Italians; thus goes on the charge:  and these cursed Italians are enemies to the Pope.  Not to the Pope as High Priest of the Roman Catholic Church, but as despotic sovereign of Rome and his corrupted temporal government—­the worst of human inventions.  How long has it been a principle of the Roman Catholic religion, that the Romans should not be Republicans? and that the high priest of the Roman church should be a despotic sovereign over the Roman nation? and in that capacity be a devoted ally and obedient servant to the Czar of Russia, the sworn enemy and bloody persecutor of Roman Catholicism?  Why, when in 1849, the French Republic sent an army against the Roman Republic to restore the Pope, not to his spiritual authority, because that was by nobody contradicted, but to his temporal despotism, the whole danger could have been averted by the Romans by becoming, en masse, Protestants.  The idea was pronounced in Rome and not a single Roman accepted it.  They preferred to struggle without hope of victory—­they preferred to bleed and to die rather than to abandon their faith.

Now, who can dare to insult that people—­who can dare to insult the Roman Catholics of Hungary, Croatia, Italy, Germany, Poland, France—­who can dare to insult the thousands of thousands of Roman citizens of the United States—­Senators, Governors, Judges—­men of all public and private positions—­who can dare to insult them, as hostile to their own religion, because they unite to support that cause which I plead?  And because they side with republican freedom, with civil and religious liberty, against Russo-Austrian despotism?

Who can dare to affirm that he represents the Catholic religion, if three millions of Catholic Romans do not represent it?  The Reverend Father Jesuits perhaps!

I take the liberty to say in a few words:  They are that society which Clement XIV, the high priest of the Roman Catholic Church, abolished as dangerous to the Roman Catholic religion; they are those whom every Roman Catholic King excluded from his territories as dangerous to religion and social order; they are those, the ascendancy of whom has always been a period of disaster and confusion to the Roman Catholic church; they are those who now make an alliance or rather a compact of submission with the Czar of Russia, like that which evil-doers, according to the superstition of past ages, made with the evil spirit.  And here, in free republican America, they plead the cause of Russian despotism; the cause of that Czar, who is the relentless persecutor of Catholicism; who forced the United Greek Catholics, in the Polish Provinces, by every imaginable cruelty, to abjure their connection with Rome, and carried out, at a far greater expense of human life than Ferdinand and Isabella or Louis XIV, the most stupendous proselytism which violence has yet achieved.  More than a hundred thousand human beings had died of misery, or under the lash,