BRITISH PREMIERS IN RELATION TO BRITISH CATHOLICS.
CONCLUDED.
Every step toward emancipation, however halting and feeble, was of great consequence, since it established a precedent—and precedents in England have often the force of law. Thus, the act fifth, George IV., chapter seventy-nine, permitted persons to hold office in the receipt of customs, without taking any oath but that of allegiance. This was a gain, trivial in itself, yet, under the circumstances, not to be despised. The same thing was true of Mr. George Bankes's bill, relieving English Catholics from penalty of double assessment of land-tax. It was introduced and passed in 1828. While recording Canning's services to the cause which Catholics had at heart, we must not forget to show how ready he was, on the other hand, to combine with his colleagues when Ireland had to be oppressed and persecuted. In 1825, they agreed, with one mind, to put down the Irish Catholic Association, because they saw how powerful an instrument it would become, in O'Connell's hands, for the attainment of freedom. The bill by which they suppressed it was called, by the Liberator, "the Algerine Bill." But in the same year an attempt was made, with very doubtful sincerity, to modify the maddening effect of this suppression by conferences with O'Connell, Sheil, and other lay Catholics of influence, by inducing them to assent to a proposal, made by way of compensation, for the pensioning of the Catholic clergy, and the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders.[187] These were to be "the two wings" of a Catholic relief bill, and to this offer O'Connell was induced to adhere. The measure was introduced by Sir Francis Burdett, in April, 1825. It passed the Commons by a considerable majority; and was then, as might have been expected, thrown out by the Lords, who were fortified in their opposition by the Duke of York. Thus the great work of emancipation was again postponed. Though there had been points in Canning's conduct which were displeasing to Catholics; though, with strange inconsistency, he resisted the repeal of the test and corporation acts, which by relieving dissenters would have relieved Catholics also; though he was sharply attacked by Brougham, and charged with pleading their cause without the smallest idea of success, and with betraying those whom he appeared to befriend, yet they listened with delight to his speech in behalf of their claims a few months before his death. They placed their confidence in him, and looked forward to his premiership as the season of their deliverance. But as Pitt had resigned office in consequence of his attachment to the Catholic cause, so it was Canning's fate also to taste the bitter fruits of befriending an oppressed and hated communion. The frowns of royalty, the fury of Tories, and the perfidy of Whigs, combined with the insidious growth of disease to bring him down to the grave harassed and worn.
A recess government followed. Lord Goderich had been a supporter of the Catholic claims; but mediocrity such as his could not be expected to hold its place long at the head of affairs, and still less to conduct a momentous and vital question to a happy issue. That question, like all others of equal magnitude, had to be settled out of parliament before it could be carried within its walls. The monster meetings assembled in Ireland at the call of O'Connell brought the matter to a crisis, and convinced all reasonable men that concession could not long be delayed. Yet the Duke of Wellington, who succeeded Lord Goderich in 1828, and Sir Robert Peel still ranged themselves on the side of the opponents of emancipation. The Lords, in the month of June, rejected a motion pledging them to a favorable consideration of the measure. Vesey Fitzgerald, however, an Irish liberal, was made president of the Board of Trade, and required, according to English law, to be reelected as member of parliament before he could hold his office in the government. It was a glorious opportunity for the Irish, and they embraced it manfully. At the suggestion of Sir David Roos, an Orangeman,[188] and of an intimate friend named Fitzpatrick, O'Connell proposed himself as a candidate for Clare, in opposition to the protégé of the government, Mr. Vesey Fitzgerald. In such a conflict the odds were all but desperate; yet O'Connell was victorious, although legally ineligible. He was declared duly returned; and he was the first Catholic elected by an Irish constituency since the reign of James II.
That election was, in effect, the triumph of emancipation. It sunk deep into the minds of the chiefs of the opposition. The greatest statesmen had long been wavering in secret. Lord Liverpool had been convinced some time before his death that the time for yielding the point was drawing nigh, and that he would soon have to support the Catholic claims, if not as a premier, at least as a peer. Sir Robert Peel had, in 1825, requested Lord Liverpool to relieve him of office on the ground that emancipation could no longer be deferred. Three years later, he announced to the Duke of Wellington his resolution to support the claims he had so long resisted, and declared that, in pursuit of that "great object," he was ready to sacrifice "consistency and friendship." Little did the majority, either of his friends or foes, imagine how deep a change his mind had really undergone.
It would hardly be too much to say the same of the duke. He was the only man in England who could carry emancipation, and the only man who did do it. He was that power in the state which the circumstance required. He accomplished in England, though with far different aims and feelings, what the lyre of Thomas Moore effected in Irish homes, and the eloquence of O'Connell on the fields of Tara and Clontarf. The test and corporation act being repealed, his way was cleared. Persons holding office under the crown were no longer obliged to qualify themselves by receiving the Lord's Supper in the Established Church. He began, therefore, by speaking on the Catholic claims with studied ambiguity. Though he declared that his opinions on this subject were as decided as those of any one in the house, he added that he should oppose emancipation until he should see a great change in the question. That change was fast coming over it. He knew that the Commons would then pass no very arbitrary laws; that they would not require candidates for a seat in parliament to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy on the hustings; that without emancipation it would be impossible to disfranchise the forty-shilling freeholders; that others would be elected besides O'Connell; and that they could not be prevented from taking their seats and representing their constituents without a civil war. The duke, though a great general, was not a man of blood. He was not an impracticable man, though a Tory. He knew how to "take occasion by the hand," and to do that of which St. Philip Neri says there is not a finer thing on earth—make a virtue of necessity. He was influenced in the matter by no abstract principle of justice, no enthusiasm in favor of the oppressed, no sympathy with a proscribed faith; but he sincerely loved his country, and he came by degrees to feel convinced that her interests were consulted best by altering the basis of her constitution in church and state. He sought, indeed, securities from those whom he proposed to relieve, and he purchased at their hands the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland; but, on the other hand, he was willing to endow the Catholic Church in the sister isle, and to apply three hundred thousand pounds per annum toward the payment of the priests. To this part of his plan Peel could not be induced to consent, and it was subsequently abandoned. Great as Wellington was in war, he was greater in peace—greater in his victory over Protestant prejudices, and as the champion of the rights of an injured people and a persecuted creed.
On the 5th of March, 1829, Sir Robert Peel (then Mr. Peel) brought forward a bill for the relief of Catholics. It was the bill long desired, clamored for, dreaded; which was to alter fundamentally the character of English law, and change the destinies both of England and Ireland. It was preceded by a bill finally suppressing the Catholic Association, at the very time when that association was being dissolved of its own accord. The mind of Peel had been long and anxiously engaged in the study of the question as regarded Ireland. Night and day he had been examining evidence, pondering the difficulties to be overcome, and the chances of success. It was the nature of his mind to work in secret, and to manifest the result only when it became absolutely necessary. During the period of transition he voted against Catholic emancipation, but did so with manifest repugnance. Whatever decision the house might come to, he said, he should give it his best acquiescence; and if the measure should be carried, he should use his earnest endeavors to reconcile Protestants to it. When it was proposed to admit Catholic lords into the upper house, he offered but slight opposition to the bill, nor did he object to granting English Catholics the same electoral rights as were enjoyed by their brethren in Ireland. His Tory friends were offended by his moderation; for they loved "the falsehood of extremes," and they could not comprehend his anxiety to promote education among the Catholic as well as among the Protestant part of the population. They would not recollect how many indications he had given of a possible change in his future conduct in reference to emancipation. They knew not, or they affected to forget, that two years before Canning died, he had expressed to Lord Liverpool his conviction that emancipation must pass, and had offered to resign. So long ago as 1821, he had declared, in reply to Plunket, that even if his own views prevailed, "their prevalence must be mingled with regret at the disappointment which he knew the success of such opinions must entail upon a great portion of his fellow-subjects." He should, he said, "cordially rejoice if his predictions proved unfounded, and his arguments groundless."
There were those who perceived the current his thoughts were taking, and among them was the Duke of Clarence, afterward William IV. One of the duke's sons told Cardinal Acton that, when he returned home one night from a very late division in the House of Commons, of which he was a member, he went to his father's dressing-room, and was asked by the duke how the division on emancipation had gone; and when he was told that the bill had been lost, the duke said,
"That rascal, Peel, will adopt emancipation, will carry it, and take the glory from us who have fought for it all our lives."[189]
No less remarkable were the words used by the Duke of Clarence when, at last, Wellington and Peel introduced, with all the weight of government recommendation, the great bill for Catholic relief. He wished, he said, that the ministers had been as united in 1825 as they proved in 1829. "It will be forty-six years next month," he added, "since I first sat in this house; and I have never given a vote of which, thank God! I have been ashamed; and never one with so much pleasure as the vote I shall give in favor of Catholic emancipation."
It would be foreign to our purpose in this place to relate the circumstances attending the passing of the bill, and the admission of O'Connell into the House of Commons. We are concerned, not so much with these events, as with the premiers who brought them about. Peel did not acquire the confidence of the Irish whom he had emancipated. O'Connell regarded him with implacable aversion, and nothing could exceed the hatred and distrust with which he was treated by the Tories who had once been his friends. It was nothing to them that the change of his politics had been the result of long and arduous study; that he had taken nothing for granted, but required proof of every statement made by those who sought to convert him to their side. They had not seen what we possess—the posthumous volumes edited by Peel's trustees, Lord Stanhope and Mr. Cardwell—and they could not, therefore, judge of the laborious and conscientious search by which he arrived at his conclusions; and even if they had seen them, it is probable that they would have reproached him for investigating the subject in a hesitating frame of mind, and for beating out for himself and many of his followers a path of apostasy.
Eighteen years passed by before any other measure of importance affecting Catholic interests was laid before the houses of parliament. The influence of emancipation in a liberal direction was felt deeply in the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, which but for that previous act of justice would have been impossible. The Duke of Wellington prepared the way for Lord Grey, just as Grey and his colleagues, by shaking the power of the aristocracy and destroying the rotten boroughs, led in the issue to the more extended reform bill carried by the late Lord Derby, to the extension of the suffrage to all householders and a large proportion of lodgers, and to the passage of the Irish Church bill. During the premierships of Lord Melbourne and of Sir Robert Peel the questions of free-trade and the abolition of the corn-laws absorbed public attention, and the Catholic topic was all but set aside. The paltry grant to Maynooth was made a yearly subject of hot debate, and a few thousands per annum were grudgingly bestowed on an Irish college for the education of priests, while the Protestant establishment in that island continued to be the most richly endowed in the world in proportion to the number of its members. The public mind, however, was attracted and agitated by a spectacle in which parliament was not concerned, and which in all the course of legislation in favor of Catholics had never been contemplated. This was the extraordinary progress of Catholic ideas, doctrines, and practices in the University of Oxford, and among the clergy of the establishment. The excitement which this produced had reached its height when, in February, 1847, a bill intended to supplement the emancipation of 1829 was introduced by Mr. Watson, Lord John Manners, and Mr. Escott. At that time Lord John Russell was premier, with Grey, Palmerston, Macaulay, and Granville among his colleagues. They were little inclined to favor Catholicity, though in matters of politics they usually adopted a liberal line; and, considering that in 1829 there had been 2521 petitions presented to the Lords against emancipation, and only 1014 in support of it—2013 to the Commons against it, and only 955 in its favor—considering that of 238 newspapers in the United Kingdom in 1829, though 107 had been in its favor, 87 had been against it and 4 neutral—it was not surprising that the relief bill of Lord John Manners did not find as many strong supporters as it deserved. The country was alarmed at the spread of "popery," and the bill in question seemed designed to quicken its pace and widen its conquests. It would, if it had been carried, have removed some remaining disabilities; but the loss of the bill did not in reality affect in any very great degree the freedom of Catholics or the progress of their religion. The premier, Lord John Russell, in the same year—1847—when discussing the question of national education, stated that, if a desire were entertained to have schools for Catholics, and for such only, he would be in favor of it; but he reminded his hearers that "of all the half-million which had been already spent under the direction of the treasury, and in accordance with the minutes of the council on education, not one shilling was given in aid of the Roman Catholic schools;" and in the issue Catholic children were excluded from all participation in the grant of £100,000 a year which formed part of the government scheme of education brought forward by the prime minister. This is enough to prove how lukewarm Lord John Russell was in his wish to promote education among Catholics; and it is enough, also, to lessen our surprise at that monstrous display of intolerance and bad statesmanship with which he signalized his ministry in 1851.
It was two months after the close of the session in 1850, that a papal rescript establishing a regular hierarchy in England, and parcelling out the country into dioceses, was published by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and produced a commotion altogether disproportioned to the cause. The document was simple and ordinary in its character, and if issued in reference to any other country but England, would probably have attracted no attention, and certainly have excited no surprise, terror, indignation, and wrath. Among the English it was received like the news of a French invasion. It was denounced as a "papal aggression," and the prime minister, instead of allaying the storm, which he might easily have done, lashed the waves to fury by his letter to the Bishop of Durham. He affected to be taken by surprise, whereas the holy father had himself shown the brief to Lord Minto, Lord John Russell's father-in-law, who had been residing in Rome in a diplomatic capacity. Lord Minto had raised no objection to the publication of the document, nor offered any suggestion as to the mode of procedure. It was Cardinal Wiseman, therefore, and the Catholics of England and Ireland, who were taken by surprise when the premier, who had spent his life in promoting "civil and religious liberty," suddenly effaced the inscription from his banner, and stood forward as the most prominent assailant of Catholics in the kingdom. It was the more inconsistent and absurd in him to act thus, because the right of the Catholic bishops to designate themselves by the titles of their sees was recognized by common usage, by the servants of the government, and in one act, at least, of parliament. Lord John's inflammatory letter to the Bishop of Durham was followed by a speech from the throne, couched in very high-flown and pompous language about the necessity of maintaining unimpaired the "religious liberty" which no one had sought to invade except the premier and his friends.
The queen's speech was followed in due time by a bill for preventing the "assumption of any title, not only from any diocese now existing, but from any territory or place in any part of the United Kingdom, and to restrain parties from obtaining by virtue of such titles any control over trust property." Never was a more foolish measure carried through parliament; firstly, because it made not the smallest change in the existing state of things—it did not prevent a single bishop from using on proper occasion the title of his see, as conferred on him by papal authority; secondly, it was not even intended to be carried into effect. Lord John Russell and his colleagues never dreamed of summoning bishop after bishop into court, and compelling them to pay the fine of £100 each, or go to prison. Such a proceeding would have enlisted popular feeling immediately on their side. All the wisest heads in parliament—men like Lord Aberdeen, Sir James Graham, and Mr. Gladstone—warned the premier of the folly he was committing in pandering to the wishes of an illiberal and panic-stricken multitude.
The opposition offered to the measure by Lord Aberdeen and Mr. Gladstone is all the more to our purpose because both these statesmen became at a late period prime ministers. Lord Aberdeen was one of those whose minds had undergone a great change on many important subjects, and there can be no doubt that he had yielded his to the plastic influence of Sir Robert Peel. Having taken part in the ministry of the Duke of Wellington, he had, in 1829, contributed to the success of the emancipation bill; and when Peel was driven from office, after abolishing the corn-laws, by the resentment of the protectionists, he had followed his master into retirement, and declined a place in the cabinet which was offered to him by Lord John Russell. It was not likely, therefore, that he would in 1851 betray the principles which he held sacred, and aid in swelling an insensate cry. He saw clearly that the ecclesiastical titles bill had the double defect of being persecutive if carried into operation, and contemptible if passed only to lie dormant. He accordingly resisted it with all the more dignity because he knew that resistance was, for the time being, fruitless.
Mr. Gladstone has not been consistent in his politico-religious career. In 1838, he appeared in print as the resolute champion of "church and state," recommending the exclusion of all persons not of the Established Church from participation in the advantage of subsidies granted for religious purposes. In 1839 and 1840, he opposed the admission of Jews into parliament, and the assistance afforded by the state to dissenters for the education of their children. He upheld that unjust establishment in Ireland which he has since overthrown; and in 1845 he resigned his place in the cabinet in order that he might be perfectly free to vote as he pleased on the grants to Maynooth and the endowment of Peel's colleges in Ireland. When out of office, he supported both these measures, and rendered himself very obnoxious to many of his supporters at Oxford by the growing affection he manifested for liberal measures. The year 1847 saw him pleading for diplomatic relations with Rome, and complaining that the government had not communicated with the holy see before establishing the queen's colleges in Ireland. In accordance with these generous and enlightened views, Mr. Gladstone saw with disgust the intemperate conduct of the premier and the parliament in the case of the ecclesiastical titles bill. He contended that the influence of the Protestant church in England could never be maintained and extended by temporal enactments; that the papal rescript for assigning sees and titles to Roman Catholic bishops did not interfere in any way with the political rights of Englishmen; and ought not to be made the occasion of a hostile, oppressive, and impotent act of parliament.
"We, the opponents of the bill," he said, "are a minority, insignificant in point of numbers. We are more insignificant, because we have no ordinary bond of union. What is it that binds us together against you but the conviction that we have on our side the principle of justice—the conviction that we shall soon have on our side the course of public opinion?"
Events have proved how completely his words were true. The ecclesiastical titles bill is now regarded with scorn, and treated with ridicule. Earl Russell has confessed his mistake, and Catholics, whom it was intended to humiliate, are quite indifferent to a prohibitory measure which was never meant to be enforced. The reform bill carried through both houses by Disraeli and Lord Derby made the disestablishment of the Irish Church possible; the nation, freely represented, pronounced in its favor; and the measure was passed. A sense of justice, if not a feeling of repentance, has come over the public mind; and a brief space of time has sufficed to dispel prejudices that were the growth of ages. Mr. Gladstone, as leader of the liberal party, has been chiefly instrumental in producing this change; but it would be unfair not to specify Mr. Bright as another most powerful agent in bringing about the result. So long ago as 1852, the former gentleman declared his opinion that if Mr. Spooner's annual motion against the Maynooth grant should ever succeed, and "the endowment were withdrawn, the parliament which withdrew it must be prepared to enter upon the whole subject of the reconstruction of the ecclesiastical arrangements in Ireland." These words were considered remarkable at the time, and appear even more so when viewed by the light of recent events. They plainly foreshadowed that sweeping measure which we have recently seen him triumphantly carry. They pointed to a radical alteration in the existing unfair and anomalous relations between the church of the many and the church of the few in the sister isle. They left it, indeed, undecided whether "levelling up" or "levelling down" should be tried; whether the several churches, Roman, Anglican, and Presbyterian, should be all reduced to the voluntary systems, as in the United States, or whether the Roman Catholic clergy should be raised by the state to equal privileges and emoluments with those enjoyed by the Protestant pastors.
In the year 1868, it became manifest that the conservative and the liberal parties alike were agreed as to the necessity of doing something with the Irish Church. It also became apparent that the leading men in each party favored respectively the two plans just alluded to—the "levelling up" and the "levelling down" process. Lord Derby, with his son Lord Stanley, Mr. Disraeli, and other conservatives, were inclined to make the Catholic clergy in Ireland stipendiaries of the state; but they did not boldly and honestly propose any such measure for the consideration of parliament. The difficulties which faced them were greater than they could hope to overcome. The Catholic bishops of Ireland had distinctly refused to close with any offer of stipend for the priests. They asked for impartial legislation, but not for pay. This difficulty amounted almost to an impossibility; for of what avail was it to vote emoluments to those who would not accept them? But there was another obstacle of almost equal magnitude, which consisted in the unwillingness of the English people to endow "popery" in any shape. One half of the electors under the new reform bill were persons not in communion with the Church of England; and these, together with many Anglicans, approved the voluntary system in preference to national state churches of any kind. Lord Mayo, therefore, the Secretary of State for Ireland, was studiedly ambiguous in setting forth the intentions of the government in regard to Irish ecclesiastical matters. They were willing to establish and endow a Catholic university in Dublin, and to do something (no one could discover exactly what) in the way of "levelling up." Mr. Gladstone instantly exposed the absurdity of these crude and vague intimations. He declared in the most emphatic manner that the Irish Church must cease to exist as an establishment, and it soon became apparent that the liberal party were determined to aid him to the utmost in accomplishing his design. It was an extraordinary climax. The most popular man in the kingdom—a Protestant representing a Protestant constituency, and the premier-to-be of a Protestant queen and a Protestant cabinet—was willing and eager, in the name of the people, to disestablish and disendow that church in Ireland which had for three centuries been the pledge of Protestant ascendency and the main support of English and Protestant landlordism in that island.
His foremost opponents were the late Lord Derby and Disraeli, each of them prime ministers at different periods. Their opposition was the less formidable because they were both men of mixed politics. Lord Derby had been by turns the friend and the foe of Catholic liberty and equality. He defended the Irish establishment against Joseph Hume in 1824; but he supported, under the régime of Earl Grey, the cause of emancipation in 1832. He aided in relieving the Irish Catholics from the payment of tithes, and he helped to strike off the chains of the negro by presenting a bill for their liberation; but, on the other hand, he resisted with all his might the appropriation clause in an Irish Church bill of 1834, and even quitted office because he would not give it his countenance. To sequestrate any part of the property of the Irish establishment and apply it to secular purposes was, in his eyes, to commit a sacrilege and to violate a common right. To this feeling he continued to adhere, and to the last opposed the Irish Church bill intended to disestablish and disendow the Protestant Church in Ireland. He intimated, however, to the peers who were of his party, that he did not think it their absolute duty to oppose the bill as he had done. For the sake of consistency he voted against it, while not a few of them did otherwise, seeing how many evils might arise from their resistance to the will of the Commons and the majority of the electors. Yet it was he and Mr. Disraeli who made the passing of this bill possible and inevitable. It was the reform bill which they introduced, and which extended the suffrage to all householders and many lodgers, that made the liberal party stronger, and the abolition of the Irish establishment necessary. It is strange, indeed, that Lord Derby, who offered so dogged a resistance to free-trade and the abolition of the corn-laws, who, with Lord George Bentinck and Mr. Disraeli, headed the forces of the protectionists, should have been the means of developing the democratic element in the British constitution to a degree previously unknown and unsought, even by the liberals. It is strange, passing strange, that he should thus have brought about indirectly the measures he most wished to avert; and the fact of his having so acted is sufficient to stamp him as a second-rate statesman, and hardly worthy of a philosopher's name.
It would, we believe, be scarcely unjust to apply the same remark to Disraeli, notwithstanding his literary fame. He is too crotchety ever to be the great leader of a great party. What Willis said of him was true: "In a great crisis, with the nation in a tempest, Disraeli would flash across the darkness very finely; but he will never do for the calm right hand of a premier." His literary reputation preceded his political celebrity, and will outlast it. His mixed politics—his dubious radical-toryism or tory-radicalism—like the plus and minus in an equation, cancelled each other, neutralized his influence, and confounded his arguments by mutual disagreement. He discarded triennial parliaments and vote by ballot, defected to the Tories after coquetting with the radicals, and thus laid himself open to O'Connell's keenest abuse. "His life," the Liberator said, "was a living lie. There were miscreants among the chosen people of God, and it must certainly have been from one of these that Disraeli descended. He possesses just the qualities of the impenitent thief who died upon the cross, whose name, I verily believe, must have been Disraeli." Certain it is, that even the friends and admirers of Mr. Disraeli repose in him little confidence. They never feel sure as to what he really is, or what he may become. He is an enigma and a sphinx. He has often embraced principles to make himself a name, and he has often sustained them in spite of unpopularity. "It is quite a mistake," he said on one occasion, "to suppose I ever hated Peel. On the contrary, he is the only man under whom I should like to have served. But I saw very clearly he was the only man it would 'make' me to attack, and I attacked him." Here is a key to Disraeli's character. The only premier he would like to have served under was one whose ruling principle was expediency; yet even this premier he was willing to oppose in order to rise in the political and social scale. So he, at the head of "Young England," denounced free trade in corn, and applied the system of protection to the state religion. He was, like Lord Derby, intensely opposed to the disestablishment and disendowment of the Protestant Church in Ireland; but he was willing to endow Catholicity in Ireland to a certain extent, and thus make the state to be, like himself, an assemblage of contradictions—a builder up at the same moment of Babylon and of Zion.
All roads, it is said, lead to Rome; and in like manner it may be affirmed that all English prime ministers since the revolution have led Rome-ward more or less. All have been employed in raising the valleys and levelling the hills, that a straight path might be made for the majestic march of the restored and ancient faith. Every thing has told in favor of the gens lucifuga, the despised and persecuted Catholics, who shunned the light of day. If one and the other premier sought to oppress them anew, as Walpole did in his day, and Lord John Russell in our own, the unrighteous attempt recoiled sooner or later on its promoters, and ample reparation was made in the long run by a sense of justice being awakened in the popular mind.
The prime ministers of England, be it remembered, have been in some sense its kings—nay, more than kings. The real king has often been a cipher; the queen—as for example, Queen Caroline—has been above her lord; and the premier—as, for instance, Sir Robert Walpole—has controlled them both. And if this was the case in the last century, much more is it so now. England is in fact a republic, though nominally a monarchy. It is an aristocratic republic; and the prime minister being responsible to parliament, and representing for the time being the voice of parliament and the popular will in the council chamber of the sovereign, is himself the chief executive in the government, and holds in his hands more real power than any one besides in the kingdom. The monarch before whom he bows, and to whom he seems to defer, is in reality a puppet of which he works the wires. King George IV. was as nothing compared to King Wellington, and King William IV. was but a middy under the command of Earl Grey. Queen Victoria at the present moment (and we say it with sincere respect for that excellent and sovereign lady) is but a shadow to the substance Gladstone, and will be but a shadow to any prime minister who may succeed him. It was not so entirely with her grandfather. He was really a king. He ruled himself, and often very unwisely; but times have changed. Political and religious emancipation has conferred on Catholics an importance in the state which is altogether new, and conversions on a large scale during a quarter of a century have been a concurrent cause of their occupying a high and honorable position in society. No prime minister, therefore, can now ignore them, much less can he molest them. In every session of parliament some obloquy cast on them in former ages is removed. The lord chancellor of Ireland is now a Catholic, and very soon the lord lieutenant of Ireland may be so too. Every office of state, even the highest, will in all probability be in a short time opened to the Catholics, and the unjust law which excludes them from the crown, and prohibits members of the royal family from marrying them, will be swept away. If a Catholic were to be made premier now, it would not be more surprising than it was that Wellington should emancipate Catholics in 1829 or that Gladstone should demolish the Irish establishment in 1869. Providence has wrought wonderfully in behalf of the church already in England, and what has been done should be taken by us as a pledge of what is yet to be. Meanwhile, it will be well to remember gratefully, where gratitude is due, the labors of Protestant prime ministers for the removal of Catholic disabilities; and in order to do so adequately, we must make every allowance for the prejudices in which they were brought up, and the obstacles which lay so thickly in their path. We must not deny them all merit because they have yielded to the force of circumstances, but believe that they probably would not thus have yielded if there had not been in them some noble and virtuous impulse, some personal attachment to truth and justice. The stronger their original repugnance to concession, the more deeply they felt convinced in earlier years of the importance of maintaining intact the Protestant constitution in church and state, the more credit assuredly is due to them for having broken the spell of their youth, admitted that their ideas were erroneous, and faced a thousand reproaches and unmeasured obloquy in their determination to place the liberties of their fellow-subjects on a broader and better basis. The day has arrived in England when the Protestant premier and the Catholic primate shake hands, not merely as private friends, but also as representative men; and when they were seen not long ago in familiar intercourse at the foot of the steps of the throne in the House of Lords, they were for the moment living signs and symbols of that vast and happy change which has come over the relations between the English government and its Catholic subjects.
FROM THE SPANISH.