The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-29 00:00:00

The number of the Correspondant which has
just appeared contains the following letter from
M. de Montalembert to M. Cavour :
M. Le Comte,—l read in the report of the pro-
ceedings of the Turin Parliament of the 12th of
October these words, spoken by you :
" I believe that the solution of the Roman ques-
tion must be arrived at by the conviction, which
will spread more and more in modern society, and
even in the great Catholic society, that liberty is
highly favourable to the development of the true re-
ligious sentiment. My feeling is that this will soon
triumph. We have already seen it admitted by the
most impassioned defenders of Catholic ideas. We
have seen an illustrious writer, in a lucid moment,
demonstrate it to Europe, in a book which has made
great noise, that liberty had been very useful in
exalting the religious spirit."
I am assured that you intended this allusion for
me. If your words implied merely praise, I should
not permit myself to take them for me ; but they
contain also an insult, and my modesty cannot put
up with them.
You call upon me before the public ; you, there-
fore, give me the right to reply to you in the same
manner. Yet Ido so with a repugnance which I
can hardly surmount. French blood has been spilt
by-your orders. Catholic honour has been insulted
by yoar lieutenants. The ancient seat, the last
shelter of the common father of the faithful, is
menaced by your words. Not one of your acts but
wounds and revolts me, and now you strike a fresh
blow on all I love by masking your perverse designs
under the veil of a false accord between religion
and liberty, and in support of your assertion you
invoke my testimony. I owe it to myself to protest
that on no point am I with you. Thank God your
policy is not mine.
You are for great centralised States ; I am for
small independent States. You despise local tradi-
tions in Italy; I love them everywhere.
You are for Italian unity ; I am fox' federative
Italy.
You violate treaties and international law; I re-
spect them because they are between States what
contracts and probity are between men.
You sacrifice your object, engagements, promises,
oaths; I answer you with the noble maxim, "Means
which the moral sense reproves, even though they
should be materially useful, kill morally. No victory
deserves to be put in the balance with the contempt
of oneself."
You destroy the temporal power of the Sovereign
Pontiff; I defend him with all the energy of my
reason and my affection.
You denounce the policy which produced the
French expedition to Rome in 1849, and I consider
it a glory to have supported it. In spite of the
cruel and inexcusable contradictions it has since
met with, I am still thankful for it, for it is the
last and vacillating consequence of that expedition
which even at this day forces France and Piedmont
to meet face to face before the Capitol.
You give to the heroes of Garibaldi the praises
which I reserve for the mercenaries of the immortal
Pimodan.
You are with Cialdini • lam with Lamoriciere.
You are with Father davazzi ; I am with the
Bishops of Orleans, Poitiers, Tours, Nantes—with
all those Catholic voices which in the two worlds
have protested, and will still protest, against you.
Above all I am with Pius IX., who was the first
friend of the independence of Italy till the day
when that cause passed to the hands of ingratitude,
violence, and imposture.
On our side, I dare to say it, is conscience. On
your side, I believe, it is success. Piedmont dares
everything, France permits everything, Italy ac-
cepts everything, and Europe undergoes everything.
Your success, I repeat it, appears to. me certain.
Two obstacles, however, rise still before you—
Rome and Venice ; at Rome is France, at' Venice
Germany. They are strangers, to be sure, but they
are strong. At Naples the Italians have not ar-
rested you. At Castelfidardo you were ten against
one. You had, without doubt, to overcome rights,
treaties, engagements, honour, justice, weakness;
but these are abstract things, which cannot resist
grape shot. At Rome there are some French bat-
talions, and at Venice rifled cannon. You disre-
garded right and passed on, but you hesitate before
force.

This force, I admit, does not cover causes that
are equal.
At Venice you support a cause which is just.
Venice was odiously betrayed by us in 1797 ; sadly
delivered up by you in 1849, unjustly abandoned
by you, and by us, in 1859. Her deliverance is just.
At Rome you support a cause which is unjust in
every point of view, and even, as you well know,
in an Italian point of view. We Frenchmen, we
Catholics of the entire world, we make a great
sacrifice to the independence of the Pontifical
Power by accepting that, placed in Italy, it be
habitually served by Italian hands. But you,
Italians--and you have been told so a hundred
times—what would your country be without the
Papacy ? What sort of figure would your petty
Piedmontese Majesties cut in the centre of Catho-
licity turned into your Ministerial offices ? Do
you imagine that mankind would continue their
pilgrimage to the foot of your Sovereigns' thrones ?
You have the incomparable glory of possessing the
capital of 200,000,000 of souls, and all your ambition
is to reduce it to be the ehef lieu of the last comer
of the kingdoms of the earth.
You pretend to conquer Venice by persuading
Austria and Europe. We shall see. I sincerely
wish you success. It is thus by persuasion, by the
example of her prosperity under the shadow of free
institutions, that Piedmont since 1847 should have
and might have secured the triumph and the
honour of her policy. And it is this which, of all
the criminals among whom has to be divided the
responsibility of the evil which is worked in Italy,
makes you the greatest. For you had all that was
necessary to carry out your work well, with the
sympathy of honest men in all parts of the world.
Neither patriotism, nor eloquence, nor audacity,
nor perseverance, nor skill was wanting to you.
One thing only you had not, and that was (con-
science, and respect for other men's consciences.
You now pretend to resolve the Roman question
by proving to the world the benefits of the alliance
between liberty and religion. What do you mean ?
I have served this alliance for 30 years. I believe
its triumph to be indispensable to the salvation of
society, and it is for this I combat you, for no policy
has ever rendered this triumph more difficult than
yours. Your words, which I accept, are absolutely
belied by your acts, which I reprove.
I remain more than ever faithful to the convic-
tion that you have remarked in my writings. All
the civil and political liberties which constitute the
natural regime of civilised society, far from being
injurious to the Church, aid its progress and its
glory. It finds rivalry, but at the same time rights,
struggles but arms,and those which suit it more than
any other, language, association, charity. Liberty,
however, is not suited to the Church, except on
one condition—that is, that she herself enjoys
liberty. I speak here in my name, without mis-
sion, without authority founded solely on a long
experience singularly enlightened by the state of
France for the last ten years. But I say without
hesitation—a free Church in a free State is my
ideal. I add that in modern society the Church
cannot be free except where everybody is free.
That, in my eyes, is a great blessing and a great
.progress. In any case it is a fact. Let not any-
body reproach the Church with not accepting all
the liberties granted by the State. In all countries
she accepts them, and, what is more, she makes
use of them—in England as in the United States,
in Prussia as in Holland, everywhere, in a word,
where she is not gagged nor impeded by fetters
Specially invented for her,
The accord would be complete if in their turn
Governments would accept all the liberties of
which the Church has need, instead of cheapening
them by obsolete laws as in France, confiscating
them them by odious annoyances as in Russia, ory
as
in
trampling them under foot by brutal iniquity
Italy.
Now the in dependence of the Church reposes,above
all, on the absolute liberty of its chief doctor and
guardian of the faith, and that liberty has had for
its shield during ten centuries a temporal
sove-
reignty constituted independently of all States. It
reposes, moreover, in the
interior
of each State on
th
the liberty of association,
rights
which no sensible
man can pretend to r
liberty of instruction,
the liberty of charity;
ve for the Church alone,
but which are not rights
reserve
they are met with pre-
ventive obstacles instead of being simply subjected
to repression in cases defined by the laws, and de-
cided by independent tribunals with publicity and
the power of appeal.
These are the guarantees for the liberty of the
Church. Now, you violate them all at the same
time—first, by suppressing the temporal power of
the Pope; second, by dispersing communities; third,