The Sun. — 1849-02-13 (London, England)

LONDON, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1349.  Another of -the most liberal and enlightened Sovereigns of Christendom has just been compelled to fly from the capital of his dominions, and to seek shelter in an obscure seaport, from the ingratitude of the very people upon whom he has squandered his benefactions. If Pius IX. has been driven by the insensate passions of his children from Rome to Gaeta, LEOPOLD lrbas been obliged to fly for his life from Florence- to Piombino. And while these paternal Monarchs are expiating in banishment the crime of their benevolence, the tyrant of Naples remains upon his throne unmolested, the charlatan of Prussia continues in the plenitude of his royal authority, and the stripling upholder of Austrian Absolutism wields his sceptre with unrelenting power over his enormous and incongruous territories, Those potentates, to employ the language of Holy Writ, are wise in their own generation. They see that by denying their holiest rights to the masses, and by acting according to the ruthless principles'of despotism, they can better preserve to themselves the pomps and riches of their dignity. They see that the very men who summon their people to the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom are those who are repaid for their generosity by being hurled down from their temporary elevation by the ignorant and fanatical races they have emancipated. In all this there is bitter reason for the friends of liberty to weep over the. destinies of Italy, over those destinies which dawned so gloriously immediately .upon the accession of JOHN Masier FERRETTI to the chair of the Sovereign Pontificate, but which has since been overclouded by the ultra-democratic madness which has seized upon the unfortunate Italians themselves. The crime which has conduced to the downfal of the Grand Duke of TUSCANY is the crime of his liberal enlightenment. Like the POPE, he had voluntarily bestowed a Free Constitution on the multitude. Recently he had gone even further; be had signed with his own hand the decree, ordaining that thirty-seven Tuscan deputies should participate in the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly. The beneficence of his policy has, however, only elicited the ingratitude of the population. An insurrectionary movement in the capital has compelled him to escape furtively from Florence—to hasten from Sienna, where three of his faithful adherents were massacred under his very windows, and to take refuge in Piombino, whence it is conjectured that he may have subsequently proceeded to Porto Ferrago, in that island of Elba which is celebrated as the place of the Great Emperor's first captivity. In the case of Pies IX. the popular outbreak is more comprehensible than in that of LEOPOLD IL lhe accusation levelled against the Porseier, the cause of the assassination of his Prime Minister, the reason for the sudden oblivion of the glorious acts which had one, by one: emanated from the heart, and been achieved by the hand of Pio Noxo, was the fact that the PONTIFF refused to declare war against Austria. In consequence of that refusal the rational Guard turned those arms, which he himself had given them, against his palace, and tee National A2aeulbly, which he himself heed ;lite existence continued their sittings with the most da.'Laielly apathy, while a foul murder was being perp trated upon their very threshold. Not: esithstancliag thie, notwithstanding the Bone:labs sung to the poignard which had slain Count ROSSI, there was a plain and appreciable reason for the outbreak of .the Roman populace. The Pore had refused to declare war against Austria—and although the fault of "tbat refusal lay not with Pius IX., but on the coritary redoundel infinitely to his glory as one who believes himself to be a priest of the GOD of  Peace—the Romans, in the delirium of their patriotic ardour, did not charge the fault of the refusal upon the incongruity of his duties as:an ecclesiastical Monarch, as a Pope andas a Prince, but raised their infuriated and undiscerning hands against the noblest of their benefactors. The fault of the Romans, moreover, was not their determination at all costs to join the patriotic war against the alien oppressors of their country—that determination being honourable to them as freemen and as lovers of their fatherland—but it was in those frightful excesses into which they were hurried by a blind and indiscriminating fury. It was in such extravagances of atrocity as prompted them to chaunt a derisive De profundis under the windows of the weeping relatives of Rossi, and to deposit the dagger which had penetrated his heart in a golden box placed between two lighted wax-candles. " The heart of MARAT," says