But against them were drawn up the battalions of heresy, free thought, political insurgence in the modern world.

The _Zeitgeist_ that has made us what we are, had begun to organize stern opposition to the Church.

It was natural enough that both the Spanish autocrat and the successor of S.Peter should at this crisis have regarded Italian affairs as subordinate in importance to wider matters which demanded their attention.

Yet if we shift our point of view from this high vantage-ground of Imperial and Papal anxieties, and place ourselves in the center of Italy as our post of observation, it will be apparent that nothing more ruinous for the prosperity of the Italian people could have been devised than the joint autocracy accorded at Bologna to two cosmopolitan but non-national forces in their midst.
An alien monarchy greedy for gold, a panic-stricken hierarchy in terror for its life, warped the tendencies and throttled the energies of the most artistically sensitive, the most heroically innovating of the existing races.

However we may judge the merits of the Spaniards, they were assuredly not those which had brought Italy into the first rank of European nations.