Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is
through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It
must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made
it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French
troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal
troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained
behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the
Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power.
One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because
the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta
Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli
brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of
Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost
sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond
and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered
conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through
the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten.
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