The Carson Daily Appeal

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY IN ITALY

Whether it be true or not that it has been left to a vote of the people of Rome and the adjacent provinces and towns to decide upon their relations toward the Government thereof, the matter having been mooted and the idea that such a thing as "popular sovereignty" is possible having once taken possession of their minds, a long step forward has already been taken by the Italian people; and should Garibaldi's movement prove a failure, enough of the deeds of republicanism have been sown to awaken such a revolution as will ultimately bring about what he has been so long contending for. It would certainly be a remarkable occurrence should the question of their future relations as a nation and the extent and nature of their form of government be left to the citizens of Italy. Beyond any question, it ought to be. But the promptness with which Napoleon's organs have denied his having given assent to submit the Roman question to the arbitration of the ballot box is hardly needed to prove his unwillingness to sanction such a popular procedure. Everybody but the people, if he succeeds in having his way, will be consulted. "The voice of the people is the voice of God," says the old Latin proverb; but, as may be argued on behalf of the Pontificate, the Pope being God's Vice Gerent on Earth, will save "the people" the trouble of uttering the divine voice, and will, through the French Emperor, perform that sacred office himself. But it is a good thing that the Italians have had the idea presented to them that their one great question might by possibility be settled at the polls; for it may set them to thinking of the vastness of that Pretence, which, under the name of religion, and as the self-elected champion of that first and purest and best of democrats, Jesus Christ, seeks to perpetuate the most offensive of all tyrannies, the sordid hierarchy which misgoverns the city and the dependencies of Rome. It is a squalid thing which, pretending to the office of Jehovah's deputy, is only saved from being driven into exile or the Mediterranean by the bloody bayonets of that infidel power whose other Emperor muzzled a Pope of Rome and led him captive to Paris!