The Bishop of Imola was frequently in the house of the Count and Countess Pasolini, who kept their friend well supplied with the new books on Italian affairs; thus he read not only D'Azeglio's _Cast di Romagna_, but also Cesare Balbo's _Le Speranze d'Italia,_ which propounded a plan for an Italian federation, and Gioberti's _Primato morale e civile degli Italiani_, in which this plan was elaborately developed. Gioberti indicated the Supreme Pontiff as the natural head of the Italian Union, and the King of Sardinia as Italy's natural deliverer from foreign domination. The eternal fitness of things, and the history of many centuries, proved the Pope to be the proper paramount civil authority in Italy, 'which is the capital of Europe, because Rome is the religious metropolis of the world.' An ex-member of 'Young Italy,' a Piedmontese by birth, a priest by ordination, Gioberti's profession of faith was derived from these three sources, and it attracted thousands of Italians by its apparent reconciliation of the interests of the papacy, and of the Sardinian monarchy, with the most advanced views of the newest school. History, to which Gioberti appealed, might have told him that a reversal of the law of gravity was as likely to happen as the performance by the papacy of the mission he proposed to it; but men believe what they wish to believe, and his work found, as has been said, thousands of admirers, among whom none was more sincere than Cardinal Mastai. The day on which Count Pasolini gave him a copy of _Il Primato_ he created that great, and under some aspects pathetic illusion, the reforming Pope.
The Conclave opened on the 14th of June 1846. During the Bishop of Imola's journey to Rome a white pigeon had perched several times on his carriage. The story became known; people said the same thing had occurred to a coming Pope on former occasions, and the augury was accepted with joy and satisfaction. He was, in fact, elected after the Conclave had lasted only two days, while the Conclave which elected his predecessor lasted sixty-four. The brevity of that to which Pius IX. owed the tiara was looked upon by the populace as something miraculous, but it was the result of the well-considered determination of the Italian Cardinals not to allow time for Austrian intrigues to obtain the election of a Pope who would be ruled from Vienna. When the new Pope appeared on the balcony of the Quirinal to give his first benediction, the people, carried away by his youthful yet majestic bearing, and by the hopes which already centred in him, broke into frantic cries of: 'We have a Pope! He loves us! He is our Father!' If they had cried: 'We have a new heaven and a new earth,' they would but have expressed the delirium which, starting from Rome, spread throughout Italy.