No. 177.
Mr. Marsh
to Mr. Evarts.
Rome , May 26, 1877. (Received June 11.)
Sir: The political agitation in Italy still continues, and the Parliamentary debates are daily becoming more excited, acrimonious, and aggressive toward the ministry. Taxation and other financial matters form the principal subjects of discussion, but the impression produced by the recent political events in France, and by the continually repeated violence of the ultramontane press in Italy and elsewhere, and of the Pope himself, does not fail to manifest itself in the tone and temper of the discussions. Something of a soothing effect was produced yesterday by a declaration of the minister of foreign affairs in Parliament that satisfactory assurances, not merely of pacific intentions, but of friendly sentiments toward Italy, had been received from the chief magistrate of the French Government. In what form or language those assurances were couched did not appear, and probably something more explicit will be called for.
The financial discussions are interesting, from the distinct avowal by eminent statesmen that the interests of the laboring classes and the encouragement of home productions ought to be considered in the imposition of duties; and, in fact, something like the legislative protection of domestic industry is not unfrequently hinted at as a sound policy, although free-trade doctrines are still very generally entertained, and there is, as yet, no party which advocates a distinctively protective tariff.
The excesses of the clericals are producing their natural and legitimate effect in a feeling of dissatisfaction with the position in which Italy has placed herself toward the Papacy by the law of guaranties. A recent allocution by the Pope, in which, for acts of the German Government, Count Bismarck is likened to Attila, is much commented upon, and it is seriously asked whether Italy can protect herself against all responsibility for tolerating the use of such language in public discourses by the Pope, and its circulation through the press, under the plea that, by the seventh article of the law referred to, she has enacted that the Pope “is free to perform all the functions of his spiritual ministry, and to affix to the doors of the basilicas and churches of Rome all acts of that ministry.” Such questions are bringing more clearly into view the incongruities and inconveniences of the anomalous position in which the general sovereignty of the State and the still higher virtual sovereignty of the Papacy, admitted by the terms of the law of guaranties, are placed toward each other. The syllabus of 1864, having been promulgated before the enactment of that law, was notice to all the world of the extent of the inalienable rights claimed by the Papacy, and it is not a violent stretch of Vatican logic to maintain that, in spite of its protests, the law in question is legally a recognition of those claims. In fact, there are many occasions of collision between the two jurisdictions, [Page 331] such, for example, as the right of asylum implied in the extraterritoriality of the Vatican, which can never be avoided or reconciled without such an abandonment of the claims of one of the parties as will be yielded only to superior force; and hence a violent conflict between them is at any time probable, and at no distant day certainly inevitable.
Such occasions were expected by many to arise from the pilgrimages to Borne on the fiftieth episcopal anniversary of the present Pope. But the number of pilgrims thus far has not reached the tithe of that predicted, probably not amounting in all to ten thousand, while the garrison and municipal police have been quietly strengthened to a force abundantly able to repress any disturbance. The death of Pius IX and the election of his successor, events almost hourly expected, are looked to as probably fraught with important changes in the attitude of the Papacy toward Italy, and in the general policy of the church. For this expectation I see no ground, though the Roman Curia is at all times shrouded in such mystery that the purposes of those who administer it are very rarely foreshadowed, and no positive predictions can ever be hazarded concerning it beyond the general presumption that its future will be like its past.
I have, &c.,