The King Is Dead | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 17, 1878

The King Is Dead.

“WHILE all the world has been waiting for news of the death of the pope, few thought that the days of Victor Emmanuel, his life-long antagonist, were numbered, and that the strong, hearty, rough-riding, honest man was nearer to death than his illustrious ‘prisoner of the Vatican.’ The King of Italy is dead, of fever, and his death is of as great importance to the Catholic world, almost, as that of the pope will be; for it will seat upon the throne of Italy a king who is of even more determined will than his father, and whose hostility to the church is of a far more pronounced character. . . .

‘In Victor Emmanuel a great figure in contemporaneous history passes away. He was one of the mighty few destined to lead the great events of this liberty-developing epoch, and his name will live as that of a consummate statesman, an able warrior, and a liberty-loving, constitutional king. From the time he snatched up the scepter which fell from the weak hands of his father, Charles Albert, on the bloody field of Novaro (1849), till the day in which he marched in triumph into Rome, he was animated by the central motive of the unification of his country, and her delivery from the hateful oppression of Austria, the influence of the papal temporality, and the brutality of the Neapolitan Bourbons. Watching, working, and waiting, knowing how to bide his time, and how to strike when the time had come, by continual effort and steady determination, he accomplished his great end, and, like Gustavus Vasa, completed his life-task by making his people as free as the freest of the earth,”

The foregoing we clip from a lengthy article in the Detroit Evening News. Victor Emmanuel’s son Humbert, under the title of Humbert I., now takes the throne of Italy.