the Roman empire; it changed when Charlemagne closed the barbarous ages, and opened the way for the feudalism of the middle ages; it changed again when, through the revolution inaugurated by Luther, absolute monarchy succeeded to feudalism in Catholic hardly less than in Protestant Europe; and it may change again when order succeeds to the present revolutionary chaos. It is not likely that Christendom will be reconstructed on its old political basis, whether it is desirable that it should be or not, and, for ourselves, we think that all who hope to see it so reconstructed are sure to be disappointed. We think it not improbable that, when Christendom is reconstituted, it will be politically, on a republican and anti-monarchical basis. Pure absolutism, whether that of Cæsar or that of the people, is incompatible with the recognition of the divine sovereignty, and consequently with religion. Neither form of absolutism can form the political basis of a reconstructed Christendom; but the probabilities are that, when things settle into their places, and the new order begins to emerge, it will be based on some form of republicanism, in which the organic people will take the place of the monarch.

The present condition of things is certainly sad; but we see nothing in it that should lead us to despair of the future. Catholics in old Catholic nations have needed, and perhaps still need, to learn that the church can subsist and conquer the world without any external support of the secular government, but that secular government cannot subsist and discharge properly its duties to society without the church. We who live in Protestant countries, and see society daily dissolving before our eyes, have no need to be taught that lesson; we have already learned it by heart. But the mass of Catholics in old Catholic nations, even of the educated as well as the uneducated, as yet only imperfectly understand it, and consequently render it difficult, if not impossible, for the church to adopt fully and promptly the measures she might judge the most proper to meet the wants of the times. They do not see that the old Christendom has gone, beyond the hope of recovery. Providence, it seems to us, has permitted the present state of things as necessary to disembarrass the church of their inopportune conservatism, and to force them to learn and profit by the lesson which every day becomes more and more necessary for them to heed, if the prosperity of religion is to be promoted, the salvation of souls to be cared for, and the preservation of society assured.

The measures taken are severe-very severe, but there are scholars that can be made to learn only by the free use of the ferula. Especially do the Catholics of France need to learn this lesson, for in no other country have Catholics made their religion so dependent on the secular order.

The fall of France, notwithstanding the faith, piety, and charity of so large a portion of her people, will probably prove only a temporary injury to Catholic interests. France has fallen because she has been false to her mission as the leader of modern civilization, because she has led it in an anti-Catholic direction, and made it weak and frivolous, corrupt and corrupting. Providence is severely punishing her, but has not, we trust, cast her off for ever. She has in her bosom still millions of Catholics, and these have only to come forward in the strength of their religion, displace the enemies of God, take themselves the management of the affairs of the nation, and show the wisdom and energy they did in 1848, when they put down the red-republicans and socialists. They will then enable France, in spite of the grasp of the conqueror and the fierce opposition of the destructives, to recover, slowly and painfully, it may be, but nevertheless to recover, and to prove herself greater and more powerful than ever. When France becomes once more a really Catholic nation, the revolution will be extinguished, infidelity will lose its popularity, atheism will no longer dare show its head, and a reaction in favor of the church will take place, so strong and so irresistible that the whole world will be affected by it, and the nations that have so long been alienated from unity will be brought back within the fold.

The only obstacle to this grand result which we see is in the timidity, in the lack of energy on the part of Catholics in the assertion and defence of their religion, or in their want of courage to confide alone in God for success. Adversity, we think, can hardly fail to reform and reinvigorate them, and to direct their attention to their true source of strength as Catholics or the children of God. They will learn from it to adhere more closely to the chair of Peter, and to rely more on the internal direction of the Holy Ghost, and less on the aid of the secular order. No doubt, the present state of things imposes additional labors as well as sufferings on the bishops and clergy in old Catholic nations, and requires some modifications of the education of the priesthood now given in our seminaries. Our Levites

must be trained for a missionary world, not for an old Catholic world; but this need alarm no one; for the greater the labors and sacrifices in the service of God, the greater the merit and the reward.

EUROPEAN POLITICS.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1873.]

DURING the last eight years grave and important changes have taken place in European politics and the relative positions of European powers, the greater part of which we foresaw and predicted before the suspension of the Review; yet some of them have come sooner than we looked for, and not in precisely the form we expected. We argued against the Italian campaign of Louis Napoleon in 1859, that it would deprive the Holy Father of his temporal possessions, secularize the States of the Church, and that Italian unity would lead inevitably to German unity and the reduction of France to a second or third-rate power; but we confess we did not foresee Sadowa, or that Napoleon would be so mad or so weak as to suffer Prussia to drive Austria out of Germany, as he had at the demand of Cavour and the Italian assassins and robbers driven her out of Italy. We saw that the hegemony of Europe must pass from France to Germany, but we trusted that it would be to a Germany that included Austria with her non-Germanic provinces in which Catholicity would predominate, not a prussianized Germany which excluded her, and in which Protestantism, lapsing into infidelity, would be in the ascendency.

We foresaw that a war between France and Prussia must come, as it was set down in the Napoleonic programme, as we gave it in 1853, to follow next after the war with Austria, and prior to a war with Great Britain to avenge Waterloo and the imprisonment of the first Napoleon; but we trusted that it would come before Prussia had succeeded in strengthening herself by a military union of all Germany, except Austria, and while France might be still able to cope with her. But Napoleon, dreaming of natural boundaries, and raising up the so-called Latin nations to revolve as so many satellites around France as their central sun, suffered Prussia

by the defeat of Austria, by the annexation of some, and the forced federation of others, of the smaller German states, to become too strong for him; and when the war actually broke out in July, 1870, I tried in vain to persuade myself that she would not be worsted.

We never regarded Napoleon as a statesman of the first order; he was too much of a theorist, and a bad theorist at that, a closet dreamer, and events have proved that his earlier successes were due to abler men than himself, who had linked their fortunes with his; but we did regard him as an able diplomatist, and an adroit manipulator of parties; yet he was not even that. He as emperor managed to alienate from him all parties in France, to isolate his empire, to find himself without an ally, and though at the head of the first military power in Europe, without an efficient army or efficient generals, to lose the throne for himself and family, to prostrate France, and to sink her in more utter helplessness than that in which his greater uncle, defeated by allied Europe, had left her; and what is worse, he has rendered her recovery of the rank and power with which he found her hopeless. She cannot move against Italy, her own creature, and compel her to keep the faith of treaties with her, for Prussia has her iron heel on her neck; Austria cannot come to her assistance, without exposing herself to the attacks of Russia and sharing the fate of unhappy Poland; Russia is relieved by her prostration from a powerful obstacle to her policy in the East, and has at present no need of her as an ally; Great Britain has enough to do at home, and is not in the habit of helping gratuitously those who need her help,-she is generous only when well paid for her generosity; Spain is too distracted, too poor, and too feeble, to aid her even if she were so disposed,-besides, she must follow the line marked out for her by Prussia and Italy. With a united Italy, able to defend herself on one frontier, and the new German empire more than a match for her on another, we cannot see any chance for France to regain the rank she has lost. She owed that rank to her unity, to her central position, and to the weakness of her neighbors, to the division of Italy into several independent and frequently hostile states, and the loose constitution of the Germanic empire, which made Germany an agglomeration of sovereign states rather than a single state. These conditions no longer exist, and France cannot, humanly speaking, escape the consequences.

If Napoleon had been a French statesman, he would have

used his power to strengthen Austria, from whom he could, as long as Russia lay back of her, and menacing her with Panslavisın, have nothing to fear, in the Italian states she possessed, or whose policy she directed, and aided her to maintain her position in Germany, as a curb on the grasping ambition of Prussia, and have prevented, at all hazards, the unity or consolidation either of Italy or Germany. In the interior, instead of seeking to maintain a sort of equilibrium of parties, or preserving all so as to be able to play off one against another, he should at once have crushed out the Jacobins and socialists, sustained the Catholic party in power, in accordance with French traditions, and used all his power, if necessary, to maintain the head of the church, the vicar of Christ, in his freedom and independence, and to protect him in all his rights spiritual and temporal, especially in his sovereignty of the States of the Church. He had the opportunity when, in 1852, he became emperor, to adopt and sustain this policy; and if he had done so, he would have raised France, without any extension of her territory, to the height of human glory, confirmed his throne and dynasty, and preserved for her the hegemony of Europe and the lead of the civilization of the world. But with an infatuation, incomprehensible to us, he adopted and persevered in a contrary policy, which could not fail to deprive his empire of its rank as a great power, if it did not involve its total destruction. He seemed to verify the proverb, Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat. His power culminated in his Italian campaign, and Solferino was his last success. Every important measure he afterwards attempted, miscarried. Even that campaign itself was substantially a failure, for it failed to secure him Italy as an ally, while it incurred for him the displeasure of the pope, lost him the confidence of Catholics, which we never had, in the sincerity of his friendship for the church, without conciliating the so-called liberals. His Mexican expedition was as great a blunder as his uncle's invasion and attempted conquest of Spain for his brother Joseph, after kidnapping the crown prince at Bayonne; it proved a failure and a disgrace, and was the indirect and almost the immediate cause of his downfall; for it made Sadowa possible, and it was at Sadowa, not at Sedan, that he was conquered.

His constitutional reforms, or abdication of his personal power in January, 1870, and attempt to govern through a responsible ministry, after the English manner, so much