solve. We see, then, again, no way in which Austrian Italy can be liberated, without war with Austria, and the Austrian question, complicated by the treaty of Paris, is, after all, no less a difficulty than the papal difficulty.

The imperial pamphlet, written chiefly to enlist the antipapal prejudices of England and Prussia against Austria, and on the side of France and Sardinia, represents the great difficulty as lying not in upper but in central Italy. This is a fine stroke of policy, no doubt, but either is a difficulty not easy to get over. The papal government is undoubtedly an insurmountable obstacle to the French and Sardinian policy. The French emperor proposes to solve this difficulty by leaving the pope his sovereignty, by secularizing the administration of his government, and assimilating it to that of France. This will amount to nothing, and there is no reason to suppose that it would soothe the disaffection of the pope's temporal subjects. What they demand is the secularization of the government itself, and the entire abdication by the pope of his temporal sovereignty. The pamphlet itself maintains that the difficulty is in reconciling the duties of the Italian prince with those of the sovereign pontiff, or common father of the faithful. As an Italian prince the pope might be disposed to encourage the national movement, when as pontiff, he must remain inactive or oppose it. But if the pope remains sovereign, he remains an Italian prince, and the difficulty or contradiction is the same, whether the administration be in the hands of seculars or of ecclesiastics. If there really be the difficulty alleged, and it is necessary to remove it in order to establish a free and independent Italy, then a free and independent Italy is possible only by secularizing the papal government itself, and stripping the pope of all temporal sovereignty,-. the conclusion to which the whole argument of the pamphlet, and the whole French and Sardinian policy for Italy necessarily lead.

We do not understand by what right France, even if Austria consents, proposes to interfere in the internal administration of the papal government. The pope is either an independent sovereign or he is not. If he is, Louis Napoleon has no more right to insist on his placing the administration of his government in the hands of seculars than he has to insist on our placing the administration of ours in the hands of ecclesiastics. There is an impertinence, an inconsistency on the emperor's part that is ad

mirable, and worthy of a prince who holds himself bound by no law but his own will. While he acknowledges the independence of the pope as an Italian prince, he undertakes to dictate to him how he shall govern his subjects, attempts by external pressure to force him to accept the policy dictated, and goes so far as to complain of Austria, and to make it all but a casus belli against her, that she will not add her pressure to his, and render it impossible for the pope longer to resist. If the pope is sovereign, whether his states are great or small, he is as a prince the equal of the emperor of the French or the emperor of Austria, and neither has any right to interfere in his administration of his government. The emperor of the French tells us in his pamphlet the measures he wants adopted in the papal states, and that they were signified to the pope as long ago as 1857, and he arraigns Austria before Europe for not joining her influence to his in forcing the pontifical government to adopt them. Is this treating the pope as an independent sovereign? The measures may be good or bad, but what sovereign that respects himself and wishes to maintain his independence will adopt even good measures when dictated by a foreign power? Who made France or Austria the pope's superior, or his overseer and guardian? In the name of consistency, either recognize the pope's sovereignty and independence, respect his rights as a sovereign prince, and leave him to govern his subjects in his own way; or deny his temporal sovereignty altogether, and forcibly secularize his states. You can never succeed in the policy of recognizing him as a sovereign and independent prince, supreme in his own dominions, and then treating him as your dependent, and forcing him to govern in the way you think best. The world will not tolerate such glaring inconsistency. Napoleon I. tried it, and found that it would not work; that he must either abandon his Italian and continental policy, "the agglomeration of nations," or suppress the papal government. He chose the latter alternative, dragged the pope from his throne, and detained him for years imprisoned at Savona and Fontainebleau,-and went himself to die a prisoner on the barren rock of St. Helena, with Sir Hudson Lowe for jailer. Napoleon III., if he chooses, may follow the same policy, and meet perhaps a similar fate. No nation having any considerable number of Catholic subjects, whether itself Catholic or non-Catholic, will consent" that the spiritual head of the Catholic world shall be the pension

er of Sardinia, France, Austria, or even of federated Italia. Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and even the United States, as well as France and Austria, have an interest in the independence of the pope, and even a stronger interest in his not being the subject of any temporal prince; and they were non-Catholic states, chiefly Great Britain and Russia, that in the congress of Vienna, effected the restoration of the papal states, then held by Austria and Naples, to the pope, in their integrity. If you will not take from the pope his temporal sovereignty or his independence as a temporal sovereign guarantied to him by all the European powers who were parties to the treaties of 1815, then leave him to govern as an independent temporal sovereign; withdraw your pressure and leave him to act motu proprio, as you claim to do in your own empire; do so and he will win back the affection of his temporal subjects, and put an end to the disaffection you complain of. But he can never do it, as you well know, whatever the measures he adopts, so long as you stand between him and them, or stand over him, and compel him to do your bidding. It is your unauthorized interference that destroys his influence, that makes him appear a puppet in your hands and prevents the respect his subjects would otherwise have for him, and the correction of those abuses which he sees as well as you, and is as much disposed to correct as you are. The Austrian policy of leaving the pope to act in the matter, motu proprio, would secure the reform of abuses and a redress of grievances much sooner than the French and British policy of forcing him by external pressure to change his mode of government. Materially weak, the pontifical government can preserve its independence only by opposing to the pressure brought to bear on it, simply passive resistance, and that it will oppose, because to yield would be to surrender its rights as an independent state. Leave it free, as it has not been since 1848, and it is not likely to govern less wisely than Louis Napoleon. Under no point of view, therefore, can we approve Louis Napoleon's Italian policy, which is against the faith of treaties, the independence of sovereigns, and the rights both of the pope and the emperor of Austria, and we see no hope at the present, of national independence or even of a federal union for Italy. We see nothing that is likely to be done that will not make matters worse, and perhaps, in point of fact, matters all over Europe must become worse before they can become better. Europe is now buffeted

backwards and forwards between absolute monarchy and absolute democracy, and we fear it will reach a permanent settlement only by passing through the terrible ordeal of democratic despotism. Liberty will be founded only amid the ruins of the Mazzinian republic. Pagan Rome has been resuscitated, and modern society seems destined to run through cæsarism in both its phases.

The only ground for hope to the contrary is in Great Britain, who as yet retains something of her old Germanic and Catholic constitution, and in civil liberty and material civilization may be said to stand at the head of the modern world. Her progress in all the elements of material strength and the extraordinary energy she has displayed in war and diplomacy, prove that her constitution is still sound and vigorous, and that she is, as to this world, the most living and robust nation now on the earth. The greater, the more numerous, and the more complicated the difficulties she has to contend with, the more strength and energy she puts forth, and the more easily does she appear to surmount them. Hardly come out from the Crimean war, she finds herself involved in a new war with Persia, soon with China, and then forced to suppress a rebellion in India, and reconquer an empire of a hundred and eighty millions of souls. Yet during all this time she has in no instance lowered her tone, or abated a point in her diplomacy. On every point she has maintained her pretensions and her influence, falsifying at every moment all sinister predictions, and refuting those who allege that her power has culminated. One of the oldest nations in Europe, her face is unwrinkled, and there is not gray hair in her head. She appears even more youthful, vigorous, active, and buoyant than our own republic, so much her junior. Say what you will of Great Britain, she has a wondrous activity, and a marvellous vitality. She seems with each generation to renew her youth and her force. She does not know her own vitality and strength, and other nations entirely mistake them. Her own as well as foreign writers are perpetually deceived in their speculations as to the magnitude and stability of her power. She has her faults, her weaknesses, her vices, and her crimes, but no one can say with truth that her power has reached its culminating point, or that she has reached anywhere near the commencement of her decline. Her greatness, it is true, lies in the material, or more properly speaking, in the natural order, but in that order it is greatness, and greatness

VOL. XVI-36

equalled by no nation since the palmiest days of all-conquering Rome.

We attribute not this to any superiority of race, to her Saxon or her Celtic blood, but to the grand fact that her people have never become thoroughly romanized; have never fallen as to the political and civil order under the Roman Cæsars, and have never been subdued by resuscitated pagan Romanism. Separated from the continent by her insular position, she to a great extent, escaped the reaction of pagan Rome, represented in the middle ages by the German kaisers and the civil lawyers, and in later times by Philip II., of Spain, and Louis XIV., of France. Her princes of the Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart families, may not have escaped the contagion, but they never succeeded in communicating it to the English nation. The nation, unhappily, has broken from Catholic unity, but it did not do so till its episcopacy became the advocates of exaggerated royalty, nor till it seemed to her that the pope had deserted the Germanic monarchy, and accepted Roman cæsarism. We speak of the nation, not of the king and court. Though she has lost the unity of faith, her people have remained truer to the old Germanic order of civilization developed and matured under the fostering care of the papacy, and so well represented by the Anglo-Saxon Alfred, than the people of any other nation. We are guilty as Catholics of no infidelity to religion in praising her civil and political order, for it is the order that once prevailed throughout Catholic Europe, for which the popes struggled against the German emperors, which they defended as long as they could, and which is the order that better accords with Catholicity than that which prevails in the Catholic states themselves.

Much of the marvellous energy displayed by the British government during the last twenty-five years is no doubt. due to the Catholic relief bill, which became a law in 1829, and to the reform of parliament in 1832. The working of the latter measure has not confirmed the predictions of its opponents, or our own expectations. It has added to the stability as well as to the energy of the government by giving a larger portion of its subjects a direct interest in supporting it, and has not given, as we feared it would, an undue preponderance to the business classes. There is now on foot a new project of parliamentary reform, and all parties, conservatives as well as Whigs and radicals, agree that some further amendment of the representation is desirable