Tradition absolutely requires that a new Pope should
disgrace the favourite of his predecessor, by way of initiating his
Papacy with a stroke of popularity.
Thus every Secretary of State is duly warned that whenever his master
takes the road heavenward, he must become lost again in the common
herd of the Sacred College. He feels, therefore, that he ought to make
the best possible use of his time.
He has, moreover, the comfortable assurance that after his disgrace,
he will not be called upon for any account of his past deeds; for the
least of the Cardinals is as inviolable as the twelve Apostles.
Surely, then, he would be a fool to refuse anything while he has the
power to take it.
This is the place to sketch, in a few pages, the portraits of the two
men,--one of whom possesses, and the other exercises, the dictatorship
over three millions of unfortunate beings.
CHAPTER X.
PIUS IX.
Old age, majesty, and misfortune have a claim to the respect of all
right-minded persons: fear not that I shall be wanting in such
respect.
But truth has also its claims: it also is old, it is majestic, it is
holy, and it is sometimes cruelly ill-treated by men.
I shall not forget that the Pope is sixty-seven years of age, that he
wears a crown officially venerated by a hundred and thirty-nine
millions of Catholics, that his private life has ever been exemplary,
that he observes the most noble disinterestedness upon a throne where
selfishness has long held sway, that he spontaneously commenced his
reign by conferring benefits, that his first acts held out the fairest
hopes to Italy and to Europe, that he has suffered the lingering
torture of exile, that he exercises a precarious and dependent royalty
under the protection of two foreign armies, and that he lives under
the control of a Cardinal.
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