To lie down and die, like cattle in a murrain, was base. No people are bound to starve while their soil produces food cultivated by their own hands. No other people in Europe would have submitted to such a fate. But the leader whom they were accustomed to follow had involved himself in a tangle of false doctrines by his unhappy "Peace Resolutions," and he exhorted them to endure all with patience and submission. His son had the amazing assurance to add that if they starved with complete resignation the repeal of the union was near at hand.
On the relief committees, doctors, clergymen, and country gentlemen bore the burden of the work, but a multitude of the gentry stood apart as if the transaction did not concern them. They were busy in transferring the harvest to England or clearing the population off their estates. The English officials in Ireland accused them of jobbing in public works, or quartering their relations and dependents on the Relief Fund, as overseers, and, in some extreme cases, of obtaining grants for their own families of money designed for the suffering poor on their estates. The benevolence of the minority could not counterbalance these odious offences, and deadly hatred was sown, which has since borne an abundant harvest.
The state of the country grew worse from day to day. It is difficult now to realize the condition of the western population in the autumn of 1847; but a witness of unexceptionable impartiality has painted it in permanent colors. A young Englishman representing the Society of Friends, who in that tragic time did work worthy of the Good Samaritan, reported what he saw in Mayo and Galway in language which for plain vigor rivals the narratives of Defoe. This is what he saw in Westport:
"The town of Westport was in itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-stricken look; a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poorhouse clamoring for soup tickets; our inn, the headquarters of the road-engineer and pay-clerks, beset by a crowd begging for work."
As he approached Galway, the rural population were found to be in a more miserable condition: "Some of the women and children that we saw on the road were abject cases of poverty and almost naked. The few rags they had on were with the greatest difficulty held together, and in a few weeks, as they are utterly unable to provide themselves with fresh clothes unless they be given them, they must become absolutely naked." And in another district: "As we went along our wonder was not that the people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to want in which the Irish peasant has been trained, and by that lovely, touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his starving neighbor."
The fishermen of the Cladagh, who were induced to send the Whig Attorney-General to Parliament a few months before, had to pledge the implements of their calling for a little daily bread. "Even the very nets and tackle of these poor fishermen, I heard, were pawned, and, unless they be assisted to redeem them, they will be unable to take advantage of the herring shoals, even when they approach their coast. In order to ascertain the truth of this statement, I went into two or three of the largest pawnshops, the owners of which fully confirmed it and said they had in pledge at least a thousand pounds' worth of such property and saw no likelihood of its being redeemed."
In a rural district which he revisited after an interval, he paints a scene which can scarcely be matched in the annals of a mediaeval plague: "One poor woman whose cabin I visited said, 'There will be nothing for us but to lie down and die.' I tried to give her hope of English aid, but alas! her prophecy has been too true. Out of a population of two hundred forty I found thirteen already dead from want. The survivors were like walking skeletons; the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some of the cabins too weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in the village. But now all the sheep were gone, all the cows, all the poultry killed, only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me before had disappeared; no potatoes; no oats."
The young man pointed the moral, which these horrible spectacles suggested, with laudable courage: "I would not now discuss the causes of this condition, nor attempt to apportion blame to its authors; but of this one fact there can be no question: that the result of our social system is that vast numbers of our fellow-countrymen—of the peasantry of one of the richest nations the world ever knew—have not leave to live. Surely such a social result as this is not only a national misfortune but a national sin crying loudly to every Christian citizen to do his utmost to remove it. No one of us can have a right to enjoy either riches or repose until to the extent of his ability he strive to wash himself of all share in the guilt of this fearful inequality, which will be a blot in the history of our country and make her a byword among the nations."
The weekly returns of the dead were like the bulletins of a fierce campaign. As the end of the year approached, villages and rural districts, which had been prosperous and populous a year before, were desolate. In some places the loss amounted to half the resident population. Even the poorhouses shut up, and paupers did not escape. More than one in six perished of the unaccustomed food. The people did not everywhere consent to die patiently. In Armagh and Down groups of men went from house to house in the rural districts and insisted on being fed. In Tipperary and Waterford corn stores and bakers' shops were sacked. In Donegal the people seized upon a flour-mill and pillaged it. In Limerick five thousand men assembled on Tory Hill and declared that they would not starve. A local clergyman restrained them by the promise of speedy relief. "If the Government did not act promptly, he himself would show them where food could be had." In a few cases crops were carried away from farms.
The offences which spring from suffering and fear were heard of in many districts, but they were encountered with instant resistance. There were thirty thousand men in red jackets, carefully fed, clothed, and lodged, ready to maintain the law. Four prisoners were convicted at the Galway assizes of stealing a filly, which they killed and ate to preserve their own lives. In Enniskillen two boys under twelve years of age were convicted of stealing one pint of Indian-meal cooked into "stirabout," and Chief Justice Blackburn vindicated the outraged law by transporting them for seven years. Other children committed larcenies that they might be sent to jail where there was still daily bread to be had. In Mayo the people were eating carrion wherever it could be procured, and the coroner could not keep pace with the inquests; for the law sometimes spent more to ascertain the cause of a pauper's death than would suffice to preserve his life.
The social disorganization was a spectacle as afflicting as the waste of life; it was the waste of whatever makes life worth possessing. All the institutions which civilize and elevate the people were disappearing, one after another. The churches were half empty; the temperance reading-rooms were shut up; the Mechanics' Institute no longer got support; only the jails and the poorhouses were crowded. A new generation, born in disease and reared in destitution, pitiless and imbecile, threatened to drag down the nation to hopeless slavery. Trade was paralyzed; no one bought anything which was not indispensable at the hour. The loss of the farmers in potatoes was estimated at more than twenty millions sterling; and with the potatoes the pigs, which fed on them, disappeared. The seed, procured at a high price in spring, again failed; time, money, and labor were lost, and another year of famine was certain. All who depended on the farmer had sunk with him; shopkeepers were beggared; tradesmen were starving; the priests living on voluntary offerings were sometimes in fearful distress when the people had no longer anything to offer.
The poor-rate was quite inadequate to support the burden thrown upon it by the suspension of public works, but there was another claim upon it which could not wait. When the elections were over and the Government majority secure, the Treasury called on the poor-law guardians to levy immediately a special rate for the repayment of a million and a quarter lent by the State in a previous year. They were warned that, if they refused, their boards would be dissolved and the rates levied by the authority of the Commissioners. The guardians in many districts declared that an additional rate could not be collected. All that could be got would be too little to support the distressed class. But the Treasury would listen to no excuse, and a dozen boards were dissolved and paid guardians put in their place. The Treasury had lent seven millions sterling in 1846; five millions of it had been spent in making roads which were not needed nor desired, and one million was diverted from the wages fund to purchase land for this experiment. The aid which the stronger country proposed to give to the weaker, from the Treasury to which both contributed, was the remission of one-third of this debt. A blunder in foreign policy, the escapade of an ambitious minister in India or Africa, has cost the British taxpayer more in a month than he spent to save millions of fellow-subjects beyond the Irish Sea.
When the increased mortality was pressed on the attention of the Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates. It was a perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste lands—this was not justice. TheTimes, commenting on the new policy, declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish landlords. An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium, had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not difficult to answer.
The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British colonies. They carried with them the seed of disease and death. In England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in attendance on the sick and dying. The English people clamored against such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by English law. They were ordered home again, that they might be supported on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.
More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada. The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which were effectual to a certain extent. But the emigration to Canada was left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen. Crowded and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and deaths occurred in myriads. The survivors, on their arrival in the new country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.
At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants. During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three thousand. No preparations were made by the British Government for the reception or the employment of these helpless multitudes. TheTimespronounced the neglect to be an eternal disgrace to the British name. Ships carrying German emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada at the same time in a perfectly healthy state. The Chief Secretary for Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not easily to be forgotten:
"From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled heap—no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone down to their graves!"
This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible way—but no way was visible.
(1848) MIGRATIONS OF THE MORMONS, Thomas L. Kane
Among the numerous religious bodies that have grown up in the United States, the sect of Mormons, officially called "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," is perhaps the most unique in its origin and organization, and the most singular in its history. The sect was founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, of Vermont. He declared that he had discovered one of its authoritative writings, theBook of Mormon, at Cumorah, New York. This book, he said, was found by him buried in the earth at a place revealed to him by an angel. According to the Mormons, the book, written in mystic characters on golden plates, is a record of certain ancient people—-"the long-lost tribes of Israel," Smith declared—inhabiting North America. This book is said to have been abridged by the prophet Mormon, and translated by Smith. By anti-Mormons it is supposed to be based on a manuscript romance written by Solomon Spaulding.
The Mormon Church is governed by a hierarchy with two orders of priesthood, a president, two counsellors, twelve apostles, and elders and other officers. Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved remarkably successful in the development of their church and community, notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval. They present an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill, resulting in great material prosperity. Besides their separate books, they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and rites resemble those common to the Christian sects. More than anything else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them into collision with "Gentiles" and with the United States Government.
The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in Missouri. From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded Nauvoo in Illinois. Their later experience, up to their permanent establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people. But it should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally supposed, religious persecution. The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.
Once, while ascending the upper Mississippi in the autumn, when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the rapids. My road lay through the "Half-Breed Tract," a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.
I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.
It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one: I heard no movement: though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to wake it. Plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the dust. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty ropewalks, workshops, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal-heap and ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday. No workpeople, anywhere, looked to know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—no one called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered, I found dead ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.
On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the hardly dried lettering-ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been torn down, the still smoldering embers of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away—they, sleeping too in the hazy air of autumn.
Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. In the southern suburb the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and to tell the reason why I had had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.
Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told me the story of the "dead city": that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over twenty thousand persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in the ruined suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day's bombardment.
They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Besides these, they led me to see a large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come: that here parents "went into the water" for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers: that thus the great vase came to be associated with all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree of their idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.
They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had been struck by lightning on the Sabbath before; and to look out, east and south, on wasted farms—like those I had seen near the city—extending till they were lost in the distance. Close to the scar left by the thunderbolt were fragments of food, cruses of liquor and broken drinking-vessels, with a bass-drum and a steamboat signal-bell, of which, with pain, I learned the use.
It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return. The wind had freshened since sunset and, the water beating roughly into my little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the point I had left in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering light invited me to steer. Among the rushes—sheltered only by the darkness, without roof between them and the sky—I came upon a crowd of several hundred human creatures whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber.
Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these forsaken beings. Cowed and cramped by cold and sunburn alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for the fever-stricken sufferers.
These were the Mormons, famishing, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth week of the month of September, 1846. The deserted city was Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling country around it. And those who had stopped their ploughs, who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and the wheels of their workshops; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten their food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their thousands of acres of unharvested grain—these were the keepers of their dwellings, the carousers in their temple, the noise of whose drunken rioting insulted the ears of the dying.
They were, all told, not more than six hundred forty persons who were thus lying on the river-flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its environs had been numbered the year before at over twenty thousand. Where were they? They had last been seen, carrying in mournful trains their sick and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind the western horizon, pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly anything else was known of them; and people asked with curiosity, "What had been their fate—what their fortunes?"
The party encountered by me at the river shore were the last of the Mormons that left the city. They had all of them engaged the year before that they would vacate their homes and seek some other place of refuge. It had been the condition of a truce between them and their assailants; and, as an earnest of their good faith, the chief elders, and some others of obnoxious standing, with their families, were to set out for the West in the spring of 1846. It had been stipulated in return that the rest of the Mormons might remain behind, in the peaceful enjoyment of their Illinois abode, until their leaders, with their exploring party, could, with all diligence, select for them a new place of settlement beyond the Rocky Mountains, in California, or elsewhere, and until they had opportunity to dispose to the best advantage of the property which they were then to leave.
Some renewed symptoms of hostile feeling had however determined the pioneer party to begin their work before the spring. It was of course anticipated that this would be a perilous service; but it was regarded as a matter of self-denying duty. The ardor and emulation of many, particularly the devout and the young, were stimulated by the difficulties it involved; and the ranks of the party were therefore filled up with volunteers from among the most effective and responsible members of the sect. They began their march in midwinter; and by the beginning of February nearly all of them were on the road, many of their wagons having crossed the Mississippi on the ice.
Under the most favoring circumstances, an expedition of this sort, undertaken at such a season of the year, could scarcely fail to be disastrous. But the pioneer company had to set out in haste, and were very imperfectly supplied with necessaries. The cold was intense. They moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such as sweep down the Iowa peninsula from the icebound regions of the timber-shaded Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods. Along the scattered watercourses, where they broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires had left but little firewood. To men, insufficiently furnished with tents and other appliances of shelter, wood was almost a necessary of life. After days of fatigue their nights were often passed in restless efforts to prevent themselves from freezing. Their stock of food also proved inadequate; and as their constitutions became more debilitated their suffering from cold increased. Afflicted with catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute rheumatism, some contrived for a while to get over the shortening day's march and drag along some others. But the sign of an impaired circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of all to be dreadfully frost-bitten. The hardiest and strongest became helplessly crippled. About the same time the strength of their draught animals began to fail. The small supply of provender they could carry with them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving by seeking for the "browse," as it is called, this being the green bark and tender buds and branches of the cottonwood and other stunted growths in the hollows.
To return to Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would have been to give occasion for fresh mistrust and so to bring new trouble to those they had left there behind them. They resolved at least to hold their ground, and to advance as they might, were it only by limping through the deep snows a few slow miles a day. They found a sort of comfort in comparing themselves to the exiles of Siberia, and sought consolation in earnest prayers for the spring.
The spring came at last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country, still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought its own share of troubles with it. The months with which it opened proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.
The snow and sleet and rain which fell, as it appeared to them, without intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as one vast bog of heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the horses and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or a half a mile from the place they left in the morning. The heavy rains raised all the watercourses; the most trifling streams were impassable. Wood, fit for bridging, was often not to be had, and in such cases the only resource was to halt for the freshets to subside—a matter in the case of the headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.
These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose heroic spirits had been proof against the severest cold, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer. They complained too that the health of their children suffered more. It was the fact that the damp winds of March and April brought with them more mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.
The frequent burials discouraged and depressed the hardiest spirits; but the general hopefulness of human nature was well illustrated by the fact that even the most provident were found unfurnished with burial necessaries, and as a result they were often driven to the most melancholy makeshifts.
The usual expedient adopted was to cut a log of some eight or nine feet long, and slitting the bark longitudinally, strip it off in two half-cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased and bound firmly together with withs made of alburnum, formed a rough sort of tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a little show of black crape, could follow to the hole or bit of ditch dug to receive it in the wet ground of the prairie. The name of the deceased, his age, the date of his death, and the surrounding landmarks were all registered with care. His party was then ready to move on. Such graves mark all the line of the first years of Mormon travel—dispiriting milestones to failing stragglers in the rear.
The hardships and trials which they had suffered developed a spirit of self-sacrifice among these indomitable people. Hale young men gave up their own food and shelter to the old and helpless, and worked their way back to parts of the frontier States, chiefly Missouri and Iowa where they were not recognized, and hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent there to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table-and bed-furniture and other remaining articles of personal property which a few had still retained.
In a kindred spirit of fraternity, others laid out great farms in the wilds and planted the grain saved for their own bread; that there might be harvests for those who should follow them. Two of these, in the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, included within their fences about two miles of land each, carefully planted with grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in the neighborhood of each.
Through all this the pioneers found comfort in the thought that their own suffering was the price of immunity from similar hardships their friends at home, in following their trail, would otherwise have had to pay. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they might give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited until the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.
The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed, but inside the city they maintained themselves very well for two or three months longer. Strange to say, the chief part of this respite was devoted to completing the structure of their quaintly devised but beautiful temple. Since the dispersion of Jewry, probably, history affords us no parallel to the attachment of the Mormons for this edifice. Every architectural element, every most fantastic emblem it embodied, was associated, for them, with some cherished feature of their religion. Its erection had been enjoined upon them as a most sacred duty: they were proud of the honor it conferred upon their city, when it grew up in its splendor to become the chief object of the admiration of strangers upon the upper Mississippi. Besides, they had built it as a labor of love; they could count up to half a million the value of their tithings and freewill offerings laid upon it. Hardly a Mormon woman had not given up to it some trinket or pin-money; the poorest Mormon man had at least served the tenth part of his year on its walls; and the coarsest artisan could turn to it with something of the ennobling attachment an artist has for his own creation.
Therefore, though their enemies drove on them ruthlessly, they succeeded in parrying the last sword-thrust, till they had completed even the gilding of the angel and trumpet on the summit of its lofty spire. As a closing work, they placed on the entablature of the front, like a baptismal mark on the forehead, these words:
Then, at high noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next after its completion, they consecrated it to divine service. There was a carefully studied ceremonial for the occasion. It was said the high elders of the sect travelled furtively from the camp of Israel in the wilderness, and, throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their own robes of office to give it splendor.
For that one day the temple stood resplendent in all its typical glories of sun, moon and stars, and other abounding figured and lettered signs, hieroglyphs, and symbols; but that day only. The sacred rites of consecration ended, the work of removing thesacrosanctaproceeded with the rapidity of magic. It went on through the night, and when the morning of the next day dawned all the ornaments and furniture, everything that could provoke a sneer, had been carried off; and except some fixtures that would not bear removal, the building was dismantled.
This day saw the departure of the last of the elders, and the largest band that moved in one company together. The people of Iowa have told me that from morning to night they passed westward like an endless procession. They did not seem greatly out of heart, they said; but, at the top of every hill, before they disappeared, they were to be seen looking back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes and the distant temple and its glittering spire.
After this consecration, which was construed to indicate an insincerity on the part of the Mormons as to their stipulated departure, or at least a hope of return, their foes set upon them with renewed bitterness. As many fled as were at all prepared; but by the very fact of their so decreasing the already diminished forces of the city's defenders, they encouraged the enemy to greater boldness. It soon became apparent that nothing short of an immediate emigration could save the remnant.
From this time onward the energies of those already on the road were engrossed by the duty of providing for the fugitives who came crowding in after them. At a last general meeting of the sect in Nauvoo, there had been passed a unanimous resolution that they would sustain one another, whatever their circumstances, upon the march; and this, though made in view of no such appalling exigency, they now with one accord set themselves together to carry out.
The host again moved on. The tents which had gathered on the hill summits, like white birds hesitating to venture on the long flight over the river, were struck one after another, and the dwellers in them and their wagons and their cattle hastened down to cross it at a ferry in the valley, which they made by night and day. A little beyond the landing they formed their companies and made their preparations for the last and longest stage of their journey.
Though the season was late, when they first crossed the Missouri, some of them moved forward with great hopefulness, full of the notion of viewing and choosing their new homes that year. But the van had only reached Grand Island and the Pawnee villages, when they were overtaken by more ill news from Nauvoo. Before the summer closed, their enemies set upon the last remnant of those who were left behind in Illinois. They were a few lingerers, who could not be persuaded but there might yet be time for them to gather up their worldly goods before removing. Some weakly mothers and their infants, a few delicate young girls, and many cripples and bereaved and sick people—these had remained under shelter, according to the Mormon statement at least, by virtue of an express covenant in their behalf. If there was such a covenant, it was broken. A vindictive war was waged upon them, from which the weakest fled in scattered parties, leaving the rest to make a reluctant and almost ludicrously unavailing defence, till September 17th, when one thousand six hundred twenty-five troops entered Nauvoo and drove all forth who had not retreated before that time.
Like the wounded birds of a flock fired into toward nightfall, they came straggling on with faltering steps, many of them without bag or baggage, beast or barrow, all asking shelter or burial, and forcing a fresh repartition of the already divided rations of their friends. It was plain now that every energy must be taxed to prevent the entire expedition from perishing. Further emigration for the time was out of the question, and the whole people prepared themselves for encountering another winter on the prairie.
Happily for the main body, they found themselves at this juncture among Indians who were amicably disposed. The lands on both sides of the Missouri in particular were owned by the Pottawottomis and Omahas, two tribes whom unjust treatment by our United States Government had the effect of rendering most hospitable to strangers whom they regarded as persecuted like themselves.
They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip them for their poor gypsy habits, nor conduct themselves indecently toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawottomis—especially those of nearly unmixed French descent—are singularly comely, and some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story of how they also had been ruthlessly expelled from it.
Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny le Clerc, the spoiled child of the great brave Pied Riche, interpreter of the nation, would have the paleface Miss Devine learn duets with her on the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph la Framboise, the United States interpreter for the tribe (she died of the fever that summer) welcomed all the nicest young Mormon women to a party at her father's house, which was probably the best cabin in that village. They made the Mormons at home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them leave to remain as long as suited their own good pleasure.
The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under the auspices of an officer of the United States their chiefs were summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the yard of a Mr. P.A. Sarpy's log trading-house. They came in grand costume, moving in their fantastic attire with so muchaplomband genteel measure that the stranger found it difficult not to believe them high-born gentlemen, attending a fancy-dress ball. Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too at all times very mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie of the Pottawottomi turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue, and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so variously dotted, diapered, cancelled, and arabesqued are worn by them in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From the time of their first squat upon the ground to the final breaking up of the council circle they sustained their characters with equal self-possession and address.
I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies; indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the powwow and the expected flow of turgid eloquence were both moderated probably by the conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore content myself with observing generally that the proceedings were such as in every way became the dignity of the parties interested, and the magnitude of the interests involved. When the red men had indulged to satiety in tobacco-smoke from their peace-pipes, and in what they love still better—their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which, beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downward over the grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their "Great Father," Polk, and the tenderness with which his affectionate red children regarded him. All the solemn funny fellows present, who played the part of chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their unpronounceable names.
The renowned chief Pied Riche—he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of his remarkable scholarship—then rose and said: "My Mormon brethren, the Pottawottomi came, sad and tired, into this unhealthy Missouri bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful country, beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your lodges and lands and the graves of your people. So we have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no reason he shall suffer always: I say, we may live to see all right yet. However, if we do not, our children will.Bon jour!"
And thus ended the powwow. I give this speech as a morsel of real Indian. It was recited to me after the treaty by the Pottawottomi orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance.Bon jour["good day"] is the French, Indian, and English hail, and farewell of the Pottawottomis.
Upon the Pottawotomi lands, scattered through the border regions of Missouri and Iowa, in the Sac and Fox country, a few among the Ioways, among the Poncas, in a great company upon the banks of the l'Eau qui Coulée (or Running Water) River, and at the Omaha winter quarters, the Mormons sustained themselves through the heavy winter of 1846-1847. It was the severest of their trials. This winter was the turning-point of the Mormon fortunes. Those who lived through it were spared to witness the gradual return of better times; and they now liken it to the passing of a dreary night, since which they have watched the coming of a steadily brightening day.
In the spring of 1847, a body of one hundred forty-three picked men, with seventy wagons, drawn by their best horses, left the Omaha quarters, under the command of the members of the high council who had wintered there. They carried with them little but seed and farming implements, their aim being to plant spring crops at their ultimate destination. They relied on their rifles to give them food, but rarely left their road in search of game. They made long marches, and moved as rapidly as possible.
Against the season when ordinary emigration passes the Missouri, they were already through the South Pass, and after a couple of short days' travel beyond it entered upon the more arduous part of their journey, which now lay through the Rocky Mountains. They passed Fremont's Peak, Long's Peak, The Twins, and other summits, but had great difficulties to overcome in forcing their way over other mountains of the rugged Utah range, sometimes following the stony bed of torrents, the headwaters of some of the mightiest rivers of our continent, and sometimes literally cutting their road through heavy and ragged timber. They arrived at the grand basin of the Great Salt Lake, much exhausted, but without losing a man, and in time to plant for a partial autumn harvest. Another party started after these pioneers from the Omaha winter quarters, in the summer. They had five hundred sixty-six wagons, and carried large quantities of grain, which they were able to sow before it froze.
The same season these were joined by a part of the battalion and other members of the Church who came eastward from California and the Sandwich Islands. Together they fortified themselves strongly with sun-dried brick walls and blockhouses, and, living safely through the winter, were able to reap crops that yielded ample provision for the ensuing year.
In 1848, nearly all the remaining members of the Church left the Missouri country in a succession of powerful bands, invigorated and enriched by their abundant harvests there; and that year saw fully established their commonwealth of the "New Covenant," the future State of "Deseret." [Footnote: The Mormons repeatedly tried to secure the admission of Deseret into the Union as a State under that name—said to mean "virtue and industry."]
When Utah was organized as a Territory (1850), the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, was made governor. In 1857 President Buchanan appointed a non-Mormon to succeed Young. This act led the Mormons to rebel, but after a display of military force by the Government they acknowledged allegiance. In 1896, polygamy having been prohibited by Congress, Utah was admitted to the Union. Since the settlement of the Mormons upon the Great Salt Lake there has been a large immigration into Utah. [The Mormons have spread beyond that State into Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, and other parts of the West and Southwest—ED.]
(1848) THE REFORMS OF PIUS IX, Francis Bowen
In the long roll of pontiffs the name of Pius IX stands conspicuous among those of popes, who have greatly exerted their power for effect upon the papacy itself. But the influence of Pius IX was not less marked in Italian and European politics. An account of the reforms which he undertook and of the obstacles he had to confront, cannot fail to convey, directly or by implication, matters of much importance in modern history. That a pope who signalized the beginning of his official career by a series of liberal reforms should soon have been driven from his see by revolutionists is one of the historical paradoxes for which even the "philosophy of history" finds it difficult to account. But, as one writer tells us, "The revolutionary fever of 1848 spread too fast for a reforming pope, and his refusal to make war upon the Austrians finally cost him the affections of the Romans."
Pope Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti) who at the age of fifty-four brought the power of his papal throne to advance the cause of Young Italy—led by Mazzini and other patriots—was born at Sinigaglia May 13, 1792. He was descended from a noble family, and his early education was received at the College of Volterra. Throughout the years of his youth he suffered from infirm health, but before reaching thirty he gained much in strength, and in 1827 became Archbishop of Spoleto. In 1840 he was made cardinal by Pope Gregory XVI. Gregory died June 1, 1846, and after being two days in conclave the cardinals elected their colleague Ferretti to succeed him. The cardinals felt the advisability of choosing for pope a native of the Papal States, a man not too far advanced in years, and one "who would see the necessity of correcting abuses and making some reforms."
Francis Bowen, whose review of Pope Pius's career, from his entrance upon the papal office until his temporary withdrawal from Rome, is here presented, is a well-known authority in this as also in other fields of history, and his recital is based upon the best contemporary accounts.
When Pius IX was elected Pope his course did not long remain doubtful. He limited the expenses of the court at once, dispensed alms in abundance, set aside one day of each week for giving audiences, and commanded that political inquisitions should be stopped immediately. These few steps, taken before he had had time to consult with others, afford perhaps a better indication of the mild and kind character of the new pontiff than the grave political acts which were subsequently performed. These show us the man, the others reveal only the sovereign. Just one month after his election, a manifesto of amnesty for all political offenders was published at Rome, including the exiles, those awaiting trial, and those undergoing sentence. The only conditions imposed were that the individuals pardoned should give their word of honor never to abuse the indulgence, and would fulfil every duty of a good citizen.
The news of this act flew like the wind through the Papal States, and caused everywhere a burst of exultation and gratitude toward the new sovereign. It carried joy to thousands of households, bringing back to them the long-separated brother or parent, and it was a token of future peace and contentment. In the city, says Farini, [Footnote: Luigi Carlo Farini, who is freely quoted by Bowen, was an Italian historian and statesman. His principal work isStoria dello stato Romano dall' anno 1814 al 1830.—ED.] the hosannas were countless; each citizen embraced his neighbor like a brother; thousands of torches blazed in the evening; the multitude ran to the palace of the Pope, called for him, threw themselves prostrate on the earth before him, and received his blessing in devout silence. Many of the pardoned offenders were still more extravagant in their demonstrations of joy and thankfulness. Among them was Galletti, of Bologna, afterward one of the Pope's ministers, and most active in those measures which ended in the assassination of Rossi and in driving Pius into exile. He had been sentenced to imprisonment for life, and was kept in the castle of Sant' Angelo. When released, he threw himself at the Pope's feet, and swore, by his own heart's blood and that of his children, that he would be grateful and faithful. Some of the exiles, however, among whom was Mamiani, refused to subscribe the proposed engagement, simple as it was; but they returned after a time to their homes, merely promising allegiance. Every time that the Pope left his palace he was surrounded by a sort of triumphal procession. The whole length of the Corso was decorated when he passed through it, and hundreds of likenesses of him, and of panegyrical compositions, covered the walls. Foremost in getting up these popular celebrations was Angelo Brunetti, afterward so well known by his nickname of "Ciceruacchio." "He was a person of single mind, rustic in manners, proud and at the same time generous, as is common with Romans of the lower class." By his industry he had acquired considerable property, and by his liberal use of it had become a leader of the populace, whom he now fired with his own enthusiasm for Pius IX.
The Pope would have been more than man if his head had not been a little turned with all this adulation, which came to him from many foreign lands as well as from Italy. But his simple and modest character bore the trial well; he manifested no undue elation, and formed his plans tranquilly and without hurry for the improvement of his people. Cardinal Gizzi, well known as a friend to reform, and much attached to the Pope, was named Secretary of State; and he wrote letters to the presidents of the provinces, inviting them, the municipal magistrates, ecclesiastics, and all respectable citizens, to prepare and offer schemes for promoting popular education, and especially for the moral, religious, and industrial instruction of the children of the poor. Commissions were appointed to deliberate and advise upon many subjects of proposed reform. Great, indeed, was the need of change in the institutions of the Pontifical States; but the Government had a delicate part to play in amending them, and it wisely determined not to be precipitate in its measures. "Already the Liberals had conceived boundless desires, and the Retrogradists were haunted with unreasonable fears. The Government had, to-day, to moderate on the left, circulate despatches, wellnigh to scold men for hoping too much."
But the friends of change, says Farini, were for the most part measured in their wishes and cautious in their proceedings; for all prudent men were exerting themselves strenuously to keep the impatient in hand, with excellent effect.
We cannot follow in detail the Pope's measures down to March, 1848, till which period the movement may be considered as all his own, emanating from his free choice and not from the pressure of outward circumstances or from revolutions in foreign States. He did enough during these twenty months to establish his character as a wise, humane, and liberal sovereign, eager to promote the temporal and religious interests of his people, and prompt to give political power into their hands as fast as they showed themselves capable of using, and not abusing, it. He instituted a civic guard throughout his dominions, modelled on the French National Guard, and disbanded the Gregorian Centurions and volunteers. All his court was opposed to this measure as premature and dangerous; and even Cardinal Gizzi resigned his place in consequence of it. But the Pope persevered, and Cardinal Ferretti, still more inclined to liberalism, was appointed in his place.
He conceived the idea of an Italian customs league, after the model of the German one, and pressed it with so much earnestness that in November, 1847, it was instituted for the Roman, Tuscan, and Sardinian dominions, and every effort was made to render it acceptable to the other powers of Italy. He established a municipal government for the city of Rome, which had hitherto remained without one; and he created a Council of State for all his dominions, to consist chiefly of the laity, one person being chosen for each Province by the sovereign, out of a list of three, nominated by the provincial authorities. This Council was to sit in Rome, and aid the Government with its advice in putting the various departments in order, in constituting municipalities, and in other public concerns. He created, also, a Council of Ministers, which Farini calls the most important act of his reign, "As being that by which the executive power acquired an organization worthy of a civilized state, and altogether novel in that of Rome." There were to be nine departments, and, with the exception of the president of the Council and its secretary, the ministers need not be cardinals. All those first appointed, however, were cardinals or prelates.
A body ofUditoriwas attached to this Council, consisting of twelve ecclesiastics and twelve laymen, all appointed by the sovereign. The laws respecting the censorship of the press were much relaxed, and numerous political journals were established at Rome, which before had nothing that deserved the name of a newspaper. "Our infant journalism," says Farini, "had its infant passions and caprices; instead of meditating, it gambolled, and every day it smashed its toys of the day before, as children do; it instituted a school of declamation, not of political knowledge; it ran and plunged about, blindfold; it made boast of an independent spirit, and was a mean slave to out-of-doors influence."
These measures of reform, and the enthusiasm which they created, were not without effect on surrounding nations. Considering the place whence they came, and the sovereign who conducted them, they were adapted to have a vast influence. Rome, the "Eternal City," was regenerated, and a new life bounded through her old limbs; and the August head of the Catholic Church, the greatest religious potentate of the civilized world, the infallible, the object of veneration to half Christendom, and hitherto the most despotic and conservative sovereign in Europe, was now the daring innovator, the radical, the idol of the populace. Austria looked on with distrust and dismay, and tried to pick a quarrel and thus find a pretext for invasion by ordering its troops, who had as yet only garrisoned the fortress, to occupy the city of Ferrara and patrol its streets—a measure almost sure to lead to a collision with its citizens.
The Pope protested in a firm but temperate tone, and his indignant people would fain have hurried him into a war; but he bridled their impatience and the matter ended in a compromise. Tuscany caught the generous flame of freedom; and though there was not so much to be accomplished there, as the Government had long been mild and discreet, the good Archduke [Leopold II] professed the utmost admiration for Pius, and began to imitate his measures.
The King of Sardinia was moved to enthusiasm; during the difficulty with Austria about Ferrara he offered the Pope whatever succor of ships or men he might need, and an asylum in his dominions if he should be compelled to leave Rome. He did more; he relaxed the bonds of the press, improved the administration of justice, deprived the police of their discretionary power, enlarged and amended the Council of State, emancipated the communes, and allowed their officers to be chosen by popular vote. The character and example of Pius seemed likely to effect as great and as beneficial changes out of his dominions as within them. Those of the Italian sovereigns who were not willing to follow his lead of their own accord, were obliged to yield in dismay before the spirit which he had awakened in their subjects.
The silly Duke of Lucca, a fanatic, a prodigal, and a despot, after attempting in vain to cudgel his people into submission, fled in terror from their aroused wrath, and consented to the annexation of his dominions to Tuscany, whereby they shared in the reforms instituted by Leopold.
But in Sicily and Naples were developed the most striking results of the fire which had been kindled by a reforming pope. The cruel and imbecile Bourbon who reigned there became only more harsh and obstinate, while the other princes of Italy deemed it necessary to reform their institutions and conciliate their people. His subjects petitioned him, and shouted for Pius in the streets; but the soldiery were turned against them, and the King showed himself alike inaccessible to their caresses and their prayers. "One king only," said Thiers from the tribune, speaking of Italy, "he of Naples, presented the sword's point to the people who were flocking around him, and that people fell on it." The impulsive Sicilians fixed January 12, 1848, as the day beyond which their patience would not extend. The King made no concessions, the day came, and the island was revolutionized, the troops everywhere giving way before the excited populace. Within a fortnight the inhabitants of Naples followed their example; and before the fight began, the King's heart failed him, and he granted all that they asked. The Ministry was changed, a constitution was resolved upon, and its fundamental principles were announced on January 29th, while the Administration pledged themselves to publish it complete within twelve days. The King came out to meet the crowd, who were cheering him, and intimated his purpose to surpass the other sovereigns of Italy in the magnitude of his concessions. How sincere his promises were, the lapse of a few months fully showed; but at present everything wore a cheerful aspect.
The Pope had now reached the climax of his fortunes, the furthest limit of the good which he was permitted to accomplish by his own free will, and the sky began to be overcast. The enthusiasm of his people became unmanageable, and the volcanic force of another French revolution was soon to burst and to prostrate half the governments in Europe by the explosion. Constant excitement for twenty months had made Rome noisy and turbulent, and the populace had been gratified so often that they now expected everything to succumb to their wishes. Busy agitators were in the midst of them, intent upon prosecuting the plans of Mazzini and Young Italy, and turning reform into revolution. The people were mad for a declaration of war against Austria, though the military strength of the Roman States was grossly inadequate for such a conflict, and the head of the Catholic Church was naturally reluctant to come to extremities with a Catholic power which had long been the firmest support of the papacy. Then a cry was raised to exclude all ecclesiastics from office, or at least to admit so large a portion of the laity into the Administration that Rome would be secularized and lose its distinctive character as an appanage for the head of the Church. The people would not consider, or were reckless of the fact, that Pius was a devout Catholic as well as a liberal sovereign, and could not be expected to lend his aid to a project for stripping the papacy of all temporal power, if not for razing it to its foundations. The cries of expulsion and death to the Jesuits were also raised; and as that body, however obnoxious elsewhere, had given no offence at Rome, the Pope's sense of justice inclined him to protect them and to resist the clamor of the mob.
The news from Sicily and Naples caused a great popular demonstration at Rome, the aspect of which was so threatening that Pius issued a proclamation, on February 10th, announcing that he had taken measures for reorganizing and enlarging the army, and for augmenting the lay portion of the Council of Ministers; but appealing to his people in affecting terms, by the proofs already given of his solicitude in their behalf, that they should cease from agitation and not make demands which could not be granted consistently with his duty and their own well-being. This paper caused another effusion of popular gratitude; an immense multitude collected in the Piazza del Papolo, and, accompanied by the Civic Guard and bearing banners, they set out for the Pope's palace. When they came to the Quirinal Pius showed himself at the balcony and made signs that he wished to speak. "There was a profound silence, not broken even by the trickling of the fountains, which had been stopped some days before." The Pope said:
"'Before the benediction of God descends upon you, on the rest of my people, and, I say it again, on all Italy, I pray you to be of one mind, and to keep the faith which you have sworn to me, the Pontiff.'
"At these words the silence of deep feeling was broken by a sudden thunder of acclamation, 'Yes, I swear,' and Pius proceeded:
"'I warn you, however, against the raising of certain cries, that are not of the people, but of a few individuals, and against making any such requests to me as are incompatible with the sanctity of the Church; for these I cannot, I may not, and I will not grant. This being understood, with my whole soul, I bless you.'"
Deeds followed words; the Ministry was changed; five laymen were admitted into it, and it was intimated that a constitution would be granted resembling those in other States. Then came the news of the disasters at Paris, and everything was precipitated. On March 10th the Ministry was again changed, only three ecclesiastics being now admitted into it; and on the 14th the new constitution, or "Fundamental Statute," was proclaimed. It instituted a Legislature in two branches, the High Council and the Council of Deputies, the members of the former being appointed by the Pope, and those of the latter being chosen by popular vote in the ratio, as nearly as might be, of one to every thirty thousand souls. All citizens were voters who paid twelve crowns a year in direct taxes or had property amounting to three hundred crowns; to these were added all members of colleges and honorary graduates, and all persons holding office in the communes and municipalities. The Legislature was to be convoked every year, both Councils were to choose their own officers, and their sessions were to be public, except on extraordinary occasions when they might of their own accord prefer secrecy. Freedom of debate and vote was guaranteed, and the members of both Houses were protected from arrest, even for notoriously criminal acts, during the session, except by consent of the Council to which they belonged.
They were to have authority to make laws on all subjects, excepting ecclesiastical matters and the canons and discipline of the Church, but including the imposition of taxes; the Pope, however, like most monarchs, reserved to himself the right of negativing a law. All discussions, also, of the diplomatico-religious relations of the Holy See with foreign powers were forbidden. Money bills were to originate in the lower house, and direct taxes could be granted for only a year. The Deputies had a right to impeach ministers, who, if they were laymen, were to be tried by the High Council; if ecclesiastics, by the Sacred College. The unlimited right of petition to the lower house was assured and ministers were responsible for every ministerial act; they had the right of sitting and debating, but not of voting, in both Councils. A portion of the revenue of the State, for the support of the cardinals, the ecclesiastical congregations, and generally for the transaction of purely ecclesiastical business, was to be secured to the Pope, and to be borne on the estimates every year.
The judges were to be irremovable after they had held office for three years; and all persons were declared equal in the sight of the law. Extraordinary commissions or tribunals for the trial of offences were abolished. All property, whether of individuals or corporations, whether civil or ecclesiastical, was to be held subject to its equal part of the burdens of the State; and to all bills imposing taxes, the Pope would annex, of his own authority, a special waiver of the ecclesiastical exemption. The administrations of the Provinces and the communes were placed in the hands of their respective inhabitants. The Government (or political) censorship was abolished, but the ecclesiastical censorship was retained.
Such is a general outline of the Roman Constitution spontaneously granted to his subjects by Pius IX. Its merits, in all civil or political matters, are certainly equal, if not superior, to those of the English Constitution, from which in great part it was borrowed; its faults are precisely those which resulted necessarily from the Pope's double character, as temporal sovereign of the Roman States and as head of the Catholic Church throughout the world. It was not within the province or at the discretion of Pius to alter the tenure by which he held his throne, to change the fundamental principles of the Church or to abolish his ecclesiastical dominion. He granted to his subjects all that was in his power to grant as their temporal sovereign. His purely ecclesiastical relations and duties did not concern them, or concerned them only so far as they were members of the great body of Catholic believers in all lands. The College of Cardinalsmustchoose the Pope, andmustchoose one of their own number; this is not a law of the Roman States, but a law of the Catholic Church. Pius could not abrogate it; and if he had been inclined to grant everything to his people by divesting himself of the last rag of his sovereignty, the only consequence would have been that the cardinals must have chosen another pope in his place, who might undo all that Pius had accomplished.
These are obvious and necessary considerations; and the Pope expressly recognizes them in the ordinance accompanying the grant of the constitution. "We intend," he says, "to maintain intact our authority in matters that by their nature are related to the Catholic religion and its rule of morals. And this is due from us as a guaranty to the whole of Christendom, that, in the States of the Church reorganized in this new form, nothing shall be derogated from the liberties and rights of the Church herself, and of the Holy See, nor any precedent be established for violating the sacredness of the religion which it is our duty and mission to preach to the whole world, as the only scheme of covenant between God and man, the only pledge of that heavenly benediction by which states subsist and nations flourish."
Now, it is worthy of note that neither this constitution nor any of the acts of Pius under it was ever complained of by any party among the Pope's subjects except in regard to these ecclesiastical reservations which were forced from him by the very nature of the office that he held. The constitutionalists, indeed the moderate reformers, the party of Balbo and Gioberti and D'Azeglio, which comprised most of the educated and reflecting persons in the State, seem to have been entirely satisfied with it as a whole, or as it was. So also were the unthinking populace, who received it with shouts of exultation, so long as they were not moved by the arts of a party who would not be satisfied with having a good pope, but were bent upon having no pope at all. This was the party of Mazzini, the revolutionists as distinguished from the reformers—not strong at first either in numbers or credit, as we have seen, but who made up for all deficiencies by their zeal and activity—who were determined to establish a republic, and who cared nothing for the embarrassments of the Pope's situation as head of the Church, of indeed for the Church itself. They complained—and with reason, too, upon their principles—of these ecclesiastical reservations; and they made out of them their chief weapon of attack upon the Pope's government, though they did not profit so much by the use of it as by the evident unwillingness of Pius to rush into a war with Austria for the purpose of giving the sovereignty of Lombardy to Charles Albert, a measure to which he was averse, because he thought such a conflict would be detrimental to the interests of the Church over which he presided.
The world's future judgment of Pius will depend upon its belief of the sincerity with which he acted in thus allowing nothing but his religious duties and his position as the head of the Church to limit his concessions of political privileges to his subjects. On this point, it is well to hear the opinion of Farini, who, as one of the Mamiani Ministry and as employed to mediate between them and the Pope, because much loved and trusted by him, seems peculiarly qualified to form one without undue bias on either side:
"Pius IX had applied himself to political reform, not so much for the reason that his conscience as an honorable man and a most pious sovereign enjoined it, as because his high view of the papal office prompted him to employ the temporal power for the benefit of his spiritual authority. A meek man and a benevolent prince, Pius IX was, as a pontiff, lofty even to sternness. With a soul not only devout, but mystical, he referred everything to God, and respected and venerated his own person as standing in God's place. He thought it his duty to guard with jealousy the temporal sovereignty of the Church, because he thought it essential to the safe-keeping and the apostleship of the faith.
"Aware of the numerous vices of that temporal government, and hostile to all vice and all its agents, he had sought, on mounting the throne, to effect those reforms which justice, public opinion, and the times required. He hoped to give lustre to the papacy by their means, and so to extend and to consolidate the faith. He hoped to acquire for the clergy that credit, which is a great part of the decorum of religion and an efficient cause of reverence and devotion in the people. His first efforts were successful in such a degree that no pontiff ever got greater praise.
"By this he was greatly stimulated and encouraged, and perhaps he gave in to the seduction of applause and the temptations of popularity more than is fitting for a man of decision or for a prudent prince. But when, after a little, Europe was shaken by universal revolution, the work he had commenced was, in his view, marred; he then retired within himself and took alarm.
"In his heart, the pontiff always came before the prince, the priest before the citizen; in the secret struggles of his mind, pontifical and priestly conference always outweighed the conscience of the prince and citizen. And as his conscience was a very timid one, it followed that his inward conflicts were frequent; that hesitation was a matter of course, and that he often took resolutions even about temporal affairs, more from religious intuition or impulse than from his judgment as a man. Added to this, his health was weak and susceptible of nervous excitement—the dregs of his old complaint. From this he suffered most when his mind was most troubled and uneasy; another cause of wavering and changefulness.