If any one wishes to know what sort of statesmen such an education
makes, let him go thoughtfully over the twenty legations, prolegations,
delegations, and governments into which the twelve thousand nine hundred
and twenty square miles of the Pontifical States were still divided only
four years ago, and see how the two million nine hundred and eighty
thousand subjects of the Pope lived and throve under the care of
cardinals and prelates. Subtle negotiators, skilled in the crooks and
tangles of a wily and selfish policy, they have always been,--for they
have studied well the selfish elements of the human heart; patient, too,
and persevering and keen-eyed, as they must needs be who walk in
tortuous ways,--but cold, contracted, and arrogant, mistaking artifice
for statesmanship, unwilling to learn from the lessons of the past, and
unable to comprehend the changes that are going on around them, or to
see that every forward step of the human race is the result of causes
which man has sometimes been permitted to modify, but which he can never
hope to control.
It is from men thus educated that the Pope and his counsellors are
chosen.
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