The Sun.
London, England, 1859-10-13 00:00:00

THE PAPAL STATES.

A letter from Ferrara, dated October 7, says :
I was at supper last evening in the public room of
St. Mark's Inn at Lugo. At the various tables were
seated natives from almost every part of these, his
Holiness's late dominions. The exchange of a word
or two from one table to another led to a conver-
sation, which according to the manners of these
remarkably sociable and communicative Italian
people, soon bname general. Lugo is a thriving
trading place, and its fair is renowned througout
the Legations. The men around me were chiefly
farmers or mercers, but some of them belonged to a
class whose intelligence bad received a somewhat
superior development. After a few trivial remarks
the conversation took what is now the general turn
of all talk throughout Italy—it turned ipon politics.
The confidence of all these people in their deliver-
ance from priestly rule was only commensurate
with the intense hatred which they ill expressed
against it. I thought I would tempt them, and
ventured to hint that, " happen what might," most
assuredly the Legations would secure for themselves
a separate secular administration, "even" if they
were made again to acknowledge the supremo
authority of the Pontiff. There was no anger in
their answer, no displeasure at my unwelcome
suggestion. They spoke in the voice:of deep-settled,
immoveable determination. There was to be no
even," no " happen what might." Their emane;

,ation from thepriests was 'final and irrevocable,
sot subject to any human contingency.
" You see, Sir," said one, a student from Forli,
" the population of the four Legations is above
a million. One-half of that number would
have to perish before any human power suc-
ceeded in re-establishing the Papal sway over
the other hilt: People talk very awfully about
the horrors of war, but what is that to civil
war ? The passions of these, people are pent up
and kept within control by tt e holy hope that jus-
tice may be done; but only let Austria, or any
other big, bullying Power, attempt to trample us
down, and you will see what sends would then be
unchained. I would not give two bajocchi for the
life of the merest priestling throughout the land.
The conduct of the clergy has put our patience to
the severest test. In one place the arciprete has
been made to sing a Te Dewn by quiet and pri-
vate, but positive, threats against his life. •At
Forli we laymen had to officiate ourselves. At
Bologna it was an army chaplain (a reprobate as
he is held at Rome) who exercised his sacred
ministry in defiance of excommunication. In many
a town not a mass was said last Sunday. In some
places the priests won't do it; in others we won't
let them. There is mortal enmity—silent hostility
—between us and them, sure to break out into the
most savage, bloody, open warfare, if any over-
whelming force shall take up their cause against
us. There is reason and method in all our appa-
rent calmness, in this admirable order to which we
have bound ourselves We are all of one mind.
We do not move a single step without the most
perfect understanding. We are like a pack of
hounds on the leash. Woe to those who shall dare
to let Rs loose ! Let the world judge of our stern
resolution from our present moderation and self-
control."
There was a small merchant from Ponte Lago-
Seuro, near Ferrara, seated at my elbow. He
nodded his head at every word that fell from the
young Forlivese student, and when the latter had
done he took up the subject in the following
strain :

" Is there anything we have left undone in
the way of conciliation and compromise ? Travel
over the land, and you will see at, every step
the arches and other ,monuments set up for
the reception of Pius IX during his late pro-
gress throughout these provinces, twd years ago.
We were willing to overlook the last 10 years and
to hail the mild, benevolent Pontiff, who had inau-
gurated his reion'with his holy ejaculation, Bene-
dite' o Dio, I' We were ready to renounce
the Mazzinian demagogues who had driven him
from his see ; to allow much for the terror he had
undergone, for the evil foreign influences under
which his throne had been again set up. We were
willing, Heaven knows! to throw all the blame of
his misgovernment wpon his false advisers ; we
trusted that he had only to come and see and hear
us, to be able to judge between us and our oppres-
sors. The Pope came, and saw, and what did he
do or say for us ? Why, all his political acts were
limited to the pardon of a common forger ; for the
rest, he gave us only his blessing, and what good
did his blessing do for us ? Why, the winter after
his visit the Po was frozen several feet thick—an
event for which there had been no precedent for
the last five centuries, and all our trade and inter-
course, our boats and mills were stopped ; and in
the ensuing autumn we had flood and freshets
ravaging our richest fields. Most certainly that is
the blessing these priests
would fain impart to us.
All their drift is to make us poor and ignorant. So
that we forego all industry and education we are
sure enough of their favour. The nearer you go to
Rome the plainer you perceive the state of the popu-
lation which the priests approve as the beau ideal
of a Christian nation. They want us of the Lega-
tions to be one-third beggars, like the rabble of
the Trastever and the Borgo. With God's help,
however, we have baffled them yet, and will dis-
appoint them in the end. We want to be edu-
cated and working men. Look round on these
blessed plains—the richest in God's creation—
we have rescued them from swamps and morasses.
Our Ferrarese valleys (the low marshy flats are
so called are smiling with corn and rice planta-
tions. The lands want no manure, they only
want draining and levelling, and this we have
done, and are doing, by the sweat of our
brow, and no thanks to the Pope. All we now re-
quire is progress and improvement in our agricul-
tural system. We want roads and railroads, free
intercourse with more advanced nations, an outlet
for our surplus produce. Can we get this from the
Pope or his priests ? Can we obtain it for ourselves
under their yoke ? Behold, the first railway from
Piacenza to Bologna was only opened yesterday,
when the priests were gone. As soon as they are
gone, even while we are in the throes of revolution
and war, the lines from Bologna to Ravenna,
Rimini, and Ferrara are being rapidly surveyed.
Behold what ten years' freedom has done for Pied-
mont ! In 1848 Piedmont had net four miles of
railway; now it rivals France, Belgium, and Ger-
many; and the lines made and kept up by Govern-
ment yield 20,000 or 30,000 to the public Trea-
sury. Who would not be a Pie dmontese ? Friends
and gentlemen, I say,--' Down with the priests, and
long live Italy and our King Victor Emmanuel ?' "
There was no standing the plain but stringent
eloquence of the good mercer, and I joined in the
hurrah with all my might. We parted, all great
friends, late in the evening, and I went to bed with
firm faith in the portentous re-awakening of this
down-trodden people.

We have a fog-L-a white fog—in Ferrara this
morning, a pheiomenon to which this city, owing to
the vcinity of a great river, is as frequently liable as
London itself. Dull as it must be in the finest wea-
ther, Ferrara looks perfectly dead under a lowering
atmosphere. The impression of these long, broad,
silent streets, especially in the modern or " Hercu-
lean" part of the town, is perfectly overpowering.
The Tuscan and other hoops who were quartered
here have all left ; and Ferrara, like Ravenna, is
uow inhabited by its usual blank desolation, The
very mendicants have decamped. About 20,000
souls (1,500 of them Jews) move about in an area
8 miles in circuit. There is no grass growing

in the streets, and I shrewdly suspect the -citizens,
wounded at the reputation of " grass-grown city,"
by which their town was designated, keep purposely
weeding and tearing it up by the roots ; but the
sadness which dwells on its houses and monuments
is truly heartrending. We have here, as the poet
describes it—" Una mestizia die ti piomba al core "
(" Solitude has charms in the country, for it is God-
haunted ; but a city is intolerable without man,
who made it.") Will revolutions and annexations
ever give back their former life to these spectre
cities of Lombardy and the iEmilia ? The ques-
tion is not easily answered, for the towns are the
only things that are dead in the country, and the
citizens, particularly of the better classes, the only
things that are idle. Can merely an-ricultural pur-
suits give prosperity and lustre to the place, where
landowners congregate to consume the fruits of
their labourers' toil; or will those slothful proprie-
tors take a more active interest in the soil
which
feeds them, and turn to better purposes its inex-
haustible resources ? Ravenna has been the me-
tropolis of the Western]. Empire ; Ferrara, the
residence of an ambitious, grasping, splendour-
loving dynasty. What they have been they can
Never be again ; and are all chances of a different
existence forbidden them for the
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