I see the same system adopted in my own country, whose prosperity, up to the breaking out of the late civil war, was due to three principal causes-the large tracts of fertile land, easily accessible, and cheap; to southern slavery, which stimulated the production of cotton; and the mighty influx into the non-slaveholding states of foreign laborers. To these, and not to our democratic institutions, nor to any wise legislation, state or national, which has from the first been about as unwise, as shortsighted, and as blundering as it well could be, do we owe our prosperity. Slavery is abolished, the public lands are remote from the great centres of population, and the best and richest of them have been given away to great corporations, and the British system, before the war confined mostly to the northern states, and against which the confederate states waged their disastrous war, can now spread over the whole Union, and produce, in time, more fatal results than in England, for it meets here no counterpoise in a landed aristocracy, and the government operates simply as its agent or instrument.

We declaim against feudalism, under which the great vassals of the crown were more powerful than the crown itself, and often reduced the central authority to a legal fiction. How much better is it with us, where the effective power is vested in huge railroad and other corporations? The government, both state and national, is only the factor of these corporations, which, though its own creations, it cannot control but must obey.

These and other considerations make it impossible for me to say the priest was wrong; and yet, a man of the nineteenth century, I hardly dare hint, even to myself, the possibility of his being right. It is true, I have an aversion to trade, and never find any music in the clack of the cottonmill, but I have not the courage to think that what almost every man I meet boasts as a miracle of progress, can possibly be no progress at all.

IV. THE Conversation was interrupted, as the priest made his last remark on the modern industrial or mercantile system, by an unexpected arrival, at our quiet watering-place, of a fashionable lady, with two marketable-I beg pardon, two marriageable daughters, and was not resumed for several days. The lady had been misinformed, and was much disappointed in not finding our mountain spa a fashionable watering-place. It is true, the guests were all

gentlemen, but unhappily, all except the priest and myself were married. The priest was old, and besides was bound, as a priest, to celibacy, and I was, for reasons of my own, no marrying man. The mother was pleasant, amiable, chatty, and the daughters were charming, and we were sorry to have them leave us. But they concluded the waters would not agree with them, and on the morning of the third day after their arrival, they left us for Saratoga. Their departure took from us a ray of sunshine, and cast a sombre hue for a little while over our lonely village, and indisposed us to listen to the grave discussions between the priest and the progressive journalist.

But several days after the departure of our lady guests, the editor and priest resumed their conversations in the usual place. As I drew near, I heard the priest say:

"After all, my dear Journalist, what in modern civilization, that is manifestly a progress, do you pretend the church opposes and condemns?"

"She condemns the very ideas and principles on which modern civilization is based, such as the dignity and worth of human nature, the perfectibility of the species, the inalienable right of every man to think for himself and to be exempt from all obligation in religion, morals, or politics, to obey, or even to consult any authority but his own reason and judgment, and the doctrine that no one is bound to obey any government but such as claims no powers not derived from the consent of the governed."

"With regard to the dignity and worth of human nature, she probably rates them somewhat higher than you do, for she teaches that God assumed human nature into hypostatic union with himself, and made it his own nature, without its ceasing to be distinctively and properly human nature. With regard to the perfectibility of the species, I will only say that she teaches that man can be regenerated and supernaturalized, and that he is not only perfectible, but by grace can attain to perfection, to the actualization of all the possibilities of his nature. With regard to reason and authority, she requires every man to retain and exercise his reason to the fullest extent, and she demands obedience to no authority that is not reasonable. As to government or power, she teaches with St. Paul and all sound philosophy, that non est potestas nisi a Deo, there is no power but from God. Do you not agree with St. Paul?"

"I hold with the American congress of 1776, and the immortal Jefferson."

"Jefferson was, I doubt not, a sincere and earnest American patriot, a skillful diplomatist, and a very distinguished man; but I hardly think you would be willing to publish in your journal that you hold the author of the Declaration of American Independence to be higher authority than the great doctor of the gentiles and author of the Epistle to the Romans. The American congress of 1776 was, I have always understood, a highly respectable body of men, deserving to be held in high honor by their countrymen. As a naturalized American citizen, I respect their act, but in case they put forth doctrines that conflict with the teachings of St. Paul, I must beg leave to consider the apostle, who taught by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, as the higher authority."

"You then differ from the American congress?"

"I must obey God rather than men, and the authority of the apostle overrides any and every human authority. The opinions or theories put forth in the Declaration of Independence, form no part of the American constitution, or of American law, and I can reject them, if I see reason for so doing, without committing any act of disloyalty to the American state. The principles asserted in the preamble to the Declaration, I presume, are to be interpreted by the act they are intended to justify, and I see no right that you or I have to give them a broader sense than the occasion demanded. The congress were about to declare the AngloAmerican colonies they represented absolved from their allegiance to the British crown, and to be free and independent states, and all they needed to affirm was, that every government derives its just powers from the consent of the people who are to be governed, or to live under it, not from the will or might of a foreign nation, prince, or potentate. This I do not deny; for I hold, with the great body of Catholic theologians, that power is under God a trust from the people or nation; but if you understand the congress to mean that no government has any power to govern any individual except by his personal consent, or that the government derives its just powers from the people in their individual and personal capacity, I must differ widely from it. The law derives its force as law from the law-giver, and from the people only in the sense in which they make the law, which certainly is not in their personal and individual. capacity. The court will hardly permit the murderer to plead that he has never consented to the law under which

he is to be tried or that declares murder a crime, and that he refuses his assent to the penalty it requires to be inflicted on those who commit it. Such a plea, if admitted, would very soon put an end to all courts of criminal jurisdiction, to all government, indeed, and leave every man to live as he lists. I cannot, however, believe that the American congress ever meant any thing so anti-social and absurd. As I understand it, there is no conflict between it and St. Paul."

"I want no better proof than this, that the church opposes the essential principle of modern civilization. She denies, as you virtually concede, that government derives all its just powers from the governed, and therefore asserts its right to govern me without my consent. She therefore denies the sovereignty of the people."

In

"The sovereignty of the individual, or of the people as individuals, most certainly; of the people collectively understood, or the people as the community, by no means. this latter sense, the sovereignty of the people, the political people, is nothing peculiar to modern civilization, but has always been asserted by all civilized nations, and is, as we have seen, the distinctive principle of civilization itself; the former, which is, in principle, only a phase of despotism, has never been asserted or submitted to by any civilized people on earth. That there is in most modern states a party more or less numerous that plead it in justification of their conspiracies, insurrections, rebellions, or revolutionary movements against legally existing governments, I do not deny; but this doctrine forms the basis of no modern state, and even these, when they attain to power, are forced to abandon it. You mistake as the actual basis of modern civilization, the principle which a party is everywhere struggling to make its basis, but which is as yet not so made.'

"The state with us is confessedly founded on these principles on the sacred right of insurrection, rebellion, revolution."

"I think not; I find no such right recognized or provided for in the constitution. I find treason recognized as a high crime, and generally punishable with death. That even the American people do not practically hold the principles you allege, is evident from their recent war in vindication of the Union against armed secession. Whether the secession of states is rebellion or not, depends on the fact whether American sovereignty vests in the states severally, or in the states united. If the former be the fact, secession

is no rebellion, is only the exercise, saving the breach of faith, of a right inherent in each of the several states, and never surrendered to the Union; if in the states united, the confederates, in making war on the Union, were rebels. In which vests the sovereignty I am not the authority to decide. The church gave her sacraments to men on either side alike; but the American people, as represented by the government, called secession rebellion, and put it down by armed force, and thus proved that they are very far from conceding, in any practical sense, that government can rightfully exercise no power not derived from the consent of the governed. On the principle you contend for, not only states but individuals may secede or withdraw themselves from the government whenever they please, or find it convenient. If your interpretation of the Declaration of Independence is the true one, the war against secession was wholly indefensible. But I am aware of no government that does not assert its right of self-preservation against any and every class of assailants, whether from within or from without."

"I do not deny the right of self-defence to the government, or its right to put down rebellion, or suppress revolt." "Therefore, you concede the authority of the nation, and deny that of the individual citizen, or of any combination of individual citizens, to rebel against it or to resist it, and abandon, very properly, the principle that government has no just powers not derived from the personal consent of the individuals governed; for it cannot be pretended that they who resist or rebel against the government consent to it."

"Modern civilization is not so much the civilization that actually obtains, as that to which the modern world is tending, or that is struggling to be the civilization of the future. There is much of the leaven of the past still retained in the present, which must be cast out, before it can become actual."

"It is no insignificant fact that the party which wars against the church is always the party of the future, and never attains, but is always just a-going to attain to the good it seeks. Your modern civilization is something that is just a-going to be effected."

That is because men and society are infinitely progressive. They pursue and struggle to realize an ideal that is always just above and before them, and which recedes as they advance. No individual ever overtakes his ideal. The individual is finite, the ideal is infinite. The greatness, the