stable government; and a strong and stable government cannot exist, where the great body of the people fail to respect it, and a large minority are actually engaged in undermining its authority, and forming conspiracies and fomenting insurrections against it. The presumption is always in favor of the government, and against all who seek its overthrow, whether, as to its form, it is monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic. It is not for it to prove itself in the right, but for those who oppose it to prove themselves free from crime. The rebel against established and legal authority is guilty of the blackest crime of which man can be guilty against society. He is even a rebel against the church, for she enjoins obedience to such government,-a rebel against God, for all legitimate power is from God, and whoever resists it resists God, and incurs damnation. Yet the age sympathizes with every rebel. Wherever it finds a party in revolt against authority, in arms against their legitimate sovereign, it blesses them; and it has only curses and execrations for those who generously shed their blood in defence of society against them. It pronounces the traitor taken in arms against his government, and shot as he deserves, a glorious martyr; and pious journalists-pious after a satanic fashion -dip their handkerchiefs in his blood, and preserve them as sacred relics. The people rejoice over the victories of the insurrectionists, and weep over their defeats, but have not one generous tear to shed over the brave soldiers who are murdered in their heroic endeavours to preserve social order, and whatever else is dear and sacred to the unperverted human heart. Their heroes and model men are such enemies of God and man, of society and true liberty, such miscreants, as the Mazzinis, the Kossuths, the Ledru-Rollins, the Blums, the Bems, the Garibaldis,-vile criminals, deserving nothing but the extreme vengeance of the law, and the execration of every man who has a human heart. long as such is the spirit of the age, it behooves every one to take care how he embarrasses the government, or exercises even his constitutional right of opposition. The great danger now is everywhere, not in the strength, but in the weakness, of authority; and all good men are bound in conscience to labor to increase respect for it, to lessen its embarrassments, and to smooth the way for its free and beneficent action.

As

Let it not be supposed for a moment, because we thus speak, that we hold a legal, firm, and judicious opposition

to such measures of government as are believed to be contrary to the common weal to be uncatholic, or that it is uncatholic to demand a redress of grievances,-if real griev ances, not imaginary, or to labor for the melioration of society and the advancement of civilization. This, certainly, may be done, but it must be done with wisdom and discretion, with loyalty of heart, with profound respect for all legal authority, and a sincere regard for the permanence and stability of the existing government. A weak government, which is constantly assailed, which finds only enemies in its subjects, and is obliged to constant vigilance and effort, not to perform the ordinary functions of government, but to preserve its own existence, is in no condition to prove a blessing to the country; and they who constantly assail it and compel it to bend all its energies to its own preservation have no right to complain if it prove even a curse. In times like these, all loyal subjects, all good citizens, all honest men, should rally around authority, and uphold the government, even if not so wise or so perfect as they could wish it,—even if it has committed, or commits, grievous faults, and fails to secure all the good they have a right to expect from it.

We are not disposed to censure with much severity the political conduct of the Catholic party in France, or in other countries where it has found itself in the opposition, for it is suffering severely the penalty of its mistakes, and now appears to be generally aware of them, and to be doing all that can reasonably be expected to repair them. From 1830 to 1848, it yielded too much to the radical spirit of the age, and too often made common cause with the so-called liberals, whose principles are subversive of all order, and of society itself, and against whom it is now obliged to wage war to the knife. The heresy of La Mennais and his associates, who proposed a sort of alliance between Catholicity and radicalism, has not been unfruitful. It was promptly condemned at Rome, and disavowed by all who had shared it, except its unhappy author; but its subtile poison, nevertheless, contined to spread far and wide in the Catholic body. We detected it occasionally in some of the masterly speeches, before the revolution of February, of Montalembert himself, and in the writings of Father Lacordaire; and we found it in nearly all its virulence in the famous Funeral Oration on O'Connell by Padre Ventura, who even attempted to make the world believe that he was merely expressing the views of Pius IX. The terrible consequences of making,

or appearing to make, common cause in politics with the radical party throughout Europe, from which young enthusiasts hoped so much, both for society and the church, have pretty well developed themselves during the last two years, and are now apparent to all who have eyes, or who are not struck with judicial blindness. The mad attempt, it is now seen and admitted, must eventuate, as far as possible, in the destruction of both church and state.

We claim no credit for having foreseen and warned our readers of this. When a liberal, a radical, we had studied the subject, and had regarded the policy recommended by the neo-Catholics, as they were called, as highly favorable to the views we then held, and as hostile to all in church and state to which we were ourselves opposed; it was not difficult for us, when we had ceased to belong to the "movement," and had, through the mercy of God, been admitted into the church, to see that it was directly hostile to every thing we must, as a Catholic, uphold as dear and sacred. We had no new discovery to make, no new investigations to go through; we had only to oppose as a Catholic what we had approved as hostile to Catholicity when we were ourselves hostile to it; we had no new judgment to form, for the judgment we had from the first formed was its condemnation in the view of every intelligent Catholic. We need not say that events have justified our judgment, nor adduce the acknowledgments so frankly made by the illustrious leader of the Catholic political party in France, as our answer to those mistaken, but no doubt well-meaning, friends who have abused us for it. This is no time for boasting or for recrimination. Our duty as Catholics, here and elsewhere, is to break loose from any connection we may have had with radicals, and parties animated by a Jacobinical, insurrectionary, or socialistic spirit, to return to the maxims of a sound political science, and to labor to reconstruct and consolidate social order. We must call things by their right names, and bestow our sympathy, not on rebel chiefs and insurrectionary bodies, but on men of loyal hearts and firm principles, who stand, in these trying times, by authority, and are ready at any sacrifice to save society from complete shipwreck. We must look upon the praise of such journals as the New York Tribune and the Boston Chronotype as a deep disgrace.

We confess that we were obliged to draw upon our Catholic faith for relief, when we heard the whole Protestant, in

fidel, and socialistic world applauding Pius IX. to the echo, -when we saw a Horace Greeley reporting, and a New York sympathy meeting, approved by a William H. Seward and a Ben. Franklin Butler, adopting, an address to the venerable Father" of Christendom, when we found multitudes of the faithful half frantic with joy at the supposed popularity of the head of their church with the enemies of God and man; and we even breathed freer when the mob took possession of the Eternal City, and the Holy Father sought an asylum at Gaeta. Those shouts of "Long live Pius IX.!" from infidel throats, would, if any thing could, shake a Catholic's faith in the promises of our Lord to Peter. We must be traitors to God and criminals to society in order to command the sincere applause of our age; and whenever we find ourselves commended by any of the popular organs of the day, we should retire and make our examen of conscience, and ask, with fear and trembling, "O Lord, what iniquity hath thy servant committed, that the wicked praise him?" Redress of grievances, the melioration of society, and the advancement of civilization, are to be effected, if at all, through government, not by overthrowing it and resolving society into chaos. The nonsense vented about "the people," "popular governments," "democracies," "the republic democratic and social," we shall do well to despise, and to remember that our first duty is "to fear God and honor the king,"—that is, the prince, the sovereign authority of the state. We shall do well to remember, that allegiance is a duty, and disobedience-except when the prince commands what is contrary to God's law-is criminal; that loyalty is a virtue, and rebellion a crime punishable by all laws, human and divine. Wherever you see a party at war with the government, hold them for traitors, rebels, deserving your deepest execration, till you have clear and indubitable evidence to the contrary. Give no ear to the modern blasphemous absurdities of "the sacred right of insurrection,"an absurdity in keeping with the character of Sir Charles Grandison Cromwell La Fayette, as Carlyle not inaptly calls him, with whom, so far as we are informed, it originated, but which every loyal citizen and honest man hears with horror and disgust.

What will be the result of the present state of things in France we have no means of determining. We believe France is pretty thoroughly aroused to the dangers of redrepublicanism, or socialism, and we do not think that her

1

principal danger just now is to be apprehended from that quarter. Judging from such data as we have before us, we should say that her present danger is from the party represented by such men as De Tocqueville, the present minister for foreign affairs. These men are destitute of all true statesmanship; they are mere theorists, who have not the sense to perceive that a policy that might be admissible when the question is the gradual restriction of an authority too unlimited for liberty, must be wholly misplaced when the question is the reconstruction of power and the reëstablishment of order. They are not exactly socialists; they are not exactly democrats; they reject and accept a little of all parties, and pass for moderate, judicious men; but being men without any consistent principles of their own, men of compromise, neither exactly one thing nor another, and appealing to no great and commanding principle in the national mind or heart, they cannot but prove themselves utterly impotent to found a strong and stable government, such as France now needs.

We know not when we have read any thing which more disgusted us than the brief report which has appeared in the papers of De Tocqueville's speech in the great debate in the assembly on the affairs of Rome. The intervention of France in those affairs, if undertaken in good faith for the purpose of rescuing the Roman people from the oppression of the foreign rabble, miscreants, and vagabonds calling themselves the Roman republic, to put an end to the sacrilege that was daily committed, and to restore the Holy Father to the exercise of his temporal sovereignty, was noble and generous, honorable to her government, and not undeserving the gratitude of Christendom; but if undertaken merely for the purpose of establishing French influence in Italy, and of imposing restraints on an independent sovereign, as the minister asserts, it was mean, contemptible, wholly unjustifiable, and utterly disgraceful to France and her extemporary rulers. We wish to believe the French government was governed by the more honorable motives, and we would fain hope that the explanation of the minister will turn out to be as false as the motives it implies are unjust and contemptible. But even if so, it proves the weakness, the wickedness, and the blunder of the minister. France is Catholic; let men say what they will, the great majority of her people are Catholic; and no government, not administered in accordance with Catholic principles, can hope to