The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873

by Various

Sayings.

“We serve God by climbing up to heaven from virtue to virtue; we serve Satan by descending into hell from vice to vice.”—S. Bonaventura.

He who reflects upon death has already cut short the evil habit of talkativeness; and he who has received the gift of inward and spiritual tears, shuns it as he would fire.—S. John Climacus.

Spiritual blessings attained by much prayer and labor are solid and durable.—Ibid.

The first degree of interior peace is to banish from us all the noise and commotion created by the passions, which disturb the profound tranquillity of the heart. The last and most excellent degree is to stand in no fear of this disturbance, and to be perfectly insensible to its excitement.—Ibid.

The heart of the meek is the throne on which the Lord reposes.—Ibid.

The day will belong to him who is first in possession.—Ibid.

Prince Von Bismarck And The Interview Of The Three Emperors.

By M. Adolphe Dechamps, Min. D'état

From La Revue Générale De Bruxelles.

My Dear Friend: You question me about the events which during the past two years have been subverting Europe, and you in particular ask me what I think of the meeting of the three emperors at Berlin, and of the policy of von Bismarck.

Your first inquiry is too general for me to take up in a letter which I wish to avoid making too long, but in a work which I am writing at present I will endeavor to do so to the extent of my ability. About the year 1849, I went to work on an Étude sur la France, out of which, during the second Empire, I put forth three separate publications.[189] In these I followed the course of Napoleon III., both in the successes and in the blunders which brought about his fall; and now in the midst of the obscurity of general politics which thickens more and more from day to day, and wherein the attentive observer perceives more sinister flashes than gleams of sunshine, I am about to complete the main work which I began more than twenty years ago.

In 1859, I sent my first publication on the Second Empire to the aged Prince von Metternich, who honored me with his friendship, and asked him for his views about the condition of Europe, which was then on the eve of being profoundly changed by the war in Italy.

The following is an extract from the interesting reply which I received from him only a short time before his death: “After having been a witness and spectator of the catastrophes which burst forth between the years 1789 and 1795, in the latter one I made my first entry into the higher walks of the political world, and 1801 was the first year of my diplomatic career. I consequently cannot be in ignorance of anything that has taken place since the two remote epochs above mentioned. Now, am I thereby in advance of other living men? Can I consider myself capable of drawing up a prognostication of what will happen even so far only as regards the most immediate future? Certainly not! But, nevertheless, one thing I know I can do, I can venture to affirm that not during the course of the last seven decades has there been a single moment when the elements which make up social existence have found themselves plunged in so general a struggle as they are now.”

Since the prince thus wrote me, we have had the campaign of Italy against Austria in 1859; the war in Germany which ended in Sadowa; the civil war in the United States of N. A.; the colossal war of 1870; the astounding fall of the second French Empire; the rule of the Commune, and the conflagration in Paris; a Republican government in France; the setting up of the Empire of Germany; [pg 475] the Italian Revolution in Rome, which keeps the Pope a captive in the Vatican and all the church in mourning; we have had Spain contended for by three dynasties and a prey to anarchy and civil war; and we have a socialistic revolution stirring up everywhere the laboring masses and unsettling the deepest foundations of the society of our day!

What would old Prince von Metternich say if, having before him the immense upheaving of which we are witnesses, he could be now called upon to reply to the general inquiry which you have put to me? He would decline giving an opinion; he would refuse to make any predictions; he would confine himself to the expression of deeper fears, because of the general and formidable struggle now raging between all the elements which make up the very life of society. I will do just as he would, and for a hundredfold more reasons than he could have. I feel, as do all those who have any political instinct, that decisive and dreadful events are drawing nigh; though I cannot yet distinctly perceive them, I feel them, as one does the approach of a storm, from the heaviness of the air before seeing the lightning flash or hearing the thunder roll.

I lay aside, then, your general inquiry, and take up the second one, which is more precise, and which relates to the meeting at Berlin and to the policy of von Bismarck.

It is almost needless for me to mention that, retired as I have been for a long time from politics, any opinions which I may express are merely individual ones, that I alone am responsible for them, and that nobody can claim a right to extend that responsibility to my friends, and still less to the political party which I have had the honor of serving. I make this express reservation.

What is, then, the meaning, the character, and the bearing of the meeting of the three emperors? Is it a congress? Is it an alliance?

It is neither one nor the other, and this has been carefully proclaimed. It is not an European congress, since England and France were not present at it, the one having been left aside, and the other naturally excluded. It is not a congress, since no treaty will sanction its views and results. But, besides, Prince von Bismarck wants neither congress nor treaty. He attached great importance to signing the treaty of Prague alone with Austria and the treaty of Frankfort alone with France; he refused, with a certain hauteur, to allow any interference of the other European powers in those treaties, although they brought about a fundamental change in the status and equilibrium of Europe.

In times past, after a great war, Europe has always intervened through a solemn congress in which it dictated the terms of a general peace, thereby securing for it solidity and duration. Thus the treaty of Westphalia brought with it its consequent peace, the treaty of Vienna the peace of 1815, and more recently the treaty of the Congress of Paris in 1856 followed upon the war in the Crimea. Heretofore Europe has been subject to a system of equilibrium: Bismarck has done away with the latter, and broken up the former.

But he perceived the danger of this attitude and this situation. Germany had vanquished Austria, crushed France, and had won European supremacy, but she stood alone. Austria, forced out first from Italy, afterwards from Germany, could not, without feeling a deep and natural jealousy, see the German Empire rise to the first rank while she sank to the second. Russia cannot see the German [pg 476] Empire extend from the Danube to the Baltic, and overtop the Slavic Empire, without becoming also jealous. England cannot look upon this state of things, which leaves her nothing to do but to keep quiet and silent, without feeling somewhat as Austria and Russia do. There is felt, then, at St. Petersburg, as at Vienna, and perhaps at London, an invincible distrust of the predominance of Germany and of the rupture, for her benefit, of the equilibrium of Europe. There are deep and opposing interests which are incompatible with a true alliance between the three emperors, and, albeit they have at Berlin shaken hands, toasted, and fraternally embraced one another and exchanged certain general ideas, they have not allied themselves on settled political views.

M. von Bismarck has himself pretty accurately defined the meeting at Berlin: “It is of importance that no one should suppose that the meeting of the three emperors has for its object any special political projects. Beyond a doubt, this meeting amounts to a signal recognition of the new German Empire, but no political design has directed it.”

It amounts to this or very nearly this: M. von Bismarck wanted neither a congress nor a treaty, nor did he seek an alliance which was impossible of attainment just now; but he was determined to put an end to his present isolation, and he sought in particular to cut short the dream of retaliation in which France might indulge from a hoped-for alliance with Russia or with Austria.

The government of Berlin has in the meeting of the three emperors sought two and perhaps three ends: I. To bring about the recognition of the German Empire by the two great military powers of the North, and in that way deprive France of all hope of finding an ally, with a view to war, either at St. Petersburg or at Vienna. II. To discourage at the same time the particularism[190] of Bavaria and of South Germany, which has always looked for a support in the direction of Vienna. The third end may be to disarm the resistance of Catholics to the absurd and odious persecutions organized against them, by intimating to them that their cause has been abandoned by the Apostolic Emperor, the head of the House of Hapsburg.

The remarkable letter published in Der Wanderer of Vienna, under the heading of “The Order of Battle,” sets forth very cleverly each of these two hopes aforesaid of the Berlin diplomats.

“Those diplomats,” says Der Wanderer, “are rather barefacedly making game of Austria's good-nature. They calculate that this good-nature will have the effect of paralyzing two (as M. von Bismarck considers them) implacable enemies of the empire, but heretofore friends of the Hapsburg dynasty; I mean the particularism of the minor states and the Catholic opposition. ‘Thanks to the house of Austria,’ say they, ‘we are going to disarm those reptiles, and pull out their venomous fangs.’ At the same time, those diplomats do not conceal their joy (premature, I hope) at what they call the Canossa[191] of Berlin and the retaliation of Olmutz. ‘We will get the old seal of the empire’ (I quote their words textually) ‘affixed to our heritage by the House of Austria.’ ”

It would seem, then, that the Emperor of Austria, by appearing at Berlin, [pg 477] meant to say to particularism and perhaps to the Catholic body: You need no longer count on me. And the Emperor of Russia went there to offer a toast to the German army and to signify to France: Do not count on any alliance with me for a war hereafter.

This would indeed be the crowning of M. von Bismarck's policy. Since the two great wars against Austria and against France which by their prodigious results assuredly far surpassed his hopes and previsions, he has but one solicitude and one thought—to isolate France, to secure her military and political impotence, to file down the old lion's teeth and to muzzle him.

To this end, he needed strong and impenetrable frontiers, which he got by the acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. Prince von Bismarck cannot fail to perceive that the annexation of these two provinces to Germany constitutes for it, in a political point of view, a source of weakness rather than of strength; that it is an additional embarrassment to the difficulties following the organization of German unity; that Alsace and Lorraine will be, for a long time to come, another bleeding Poland on the flanks of the new empire; nevertheless, the conquest of these two provinces seemed to him, in a military point of view, indispensable as a first material guarantee against the possibility of retaliation on the part of France. By the possession of those provinces, he turns against France the formidable triple line of defence of the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Vosges; at Strasbourg and at Metz he holds the strategical keys of France; these two strongholds are, so to speak, iron gates of which the bolts are kept at Berlin. The other Rhenish frontiers are defended by the armed neutrality of Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Switzerland. Seated behind its impassable frontiers, and relying upon its powerful military organization and the remembrance of its recent triumphs, the German Empire appears perfectly secure from attack.

But even all this was not enough for Prince von Bismarck. He has just been repeating the policy which turned out so well for him in the war of 1866 against Austria. Then, through the guilty and senseless connivance of Napoleon III., he allied himself to Italy; he compelled Austria to divide her forces, to have two armies, one at Verona, the other in Bohemia—which was making sure beforehand of the defeat of Austria. M. von Bismarck has just begun a second time this skilful manœuvre. He has formed an offensive and defensive alliance with Italy which owes its political life to France, and repays the boon by treachery. By means of this alliance he would compel France, in the event of a war, to have an army of the Alps and an army of the Rhine, which would be equivalent to certain defeat.

Any war of retaliation is consequently for a long time to come rendered impossible.

There would be left to France only one resource, and that a distant one, viz., an alliance with a great military power, such as Austria, or, in particular, Russia, whose secret jealousies she would turn to her account.

But such an alliance presupposes France raised up, in a political, military, and moral sense, from her present ruin, and in possession of a settled government, stable within and influential without. Can a republic, even a conservative one, and even if it always had at its head as capable a statesman as M. Thiers, so raise France? Can a republic which is a [pg 478] good enough raft to take refuge on for a while, a so to speak narrow bed, which will do for France, wounded and ailing, to lie on during the period of convalescence—can it, in a country which lacks manly habits and historical institutions, unite enough solidity, security, wise liberty, strength, and grandeur to become the ally of so great an empire as Russia? To my mind, the idea of an alliance between a French republic and one of the two empires of the North against the German Empire is one of those impossibilities which need but to be asserted, not to be argued. If France could succeed in reuniting the separated links of her history, in reconciling her present with her past, if she were to again become a traditional, representative, and free monarchy, one holding itself equidistant from the abuses of the old régime and the errors of the Revolution—oh! then her situation would indeed be changed, and great alliances at present impossible might become possible soon thereafter. But such alliances would not have for their object never-ending retaliations and new wars; they would bear their fruits through social peace, through the restoration of authority and order, and through that true, prudent, and measured liberty which, now that they have it not, they talk so much about. The greatness of France depends less on the extent of her frontiers than on her political, social, and religious renovation.

It is because M. von Bismarck understands perfectly that an alliance between one of the great military empires of the North and republican France is a chimerical project, that he encourages the adherents of the republic at Versailles to sustain their work.

Anyhow, M. von Bismarck, having in view the nature of contingencies, has sought to shut France out from hopes or temptations in this direction; after, having in her folly dreamt of getting a frontier on the Rhine, she has wretchedly lost, through the folly of her emperor, her eastern frontier; after, having sworn to tear in pieces the treaty of 1815, to which she had submitted with detestation, she has had to sign at Frankfort the treaty in virtue of which she was invaded and dismembered.

The new Empire of Germany, resting on its formidable army, protected by impenetrable frontiers, certain of an alliance with Italy which renders the undertaking of war against it almost impossible for France, sustained by the official friendship of Austria and of Russia, compels France to be resigned and peaceful; condemns her to political and military impotence, or, what may sound better, to walk in the ways of prudence. M. Thiers, in words which the French press has published, has recently made a resolute profession of this policy of prudence, by proclaiming that he desires peace—peace to build up and fructify; and that France, at all events, will not seek to break it.

When, from the balcony of the Imperial Palace at Berlin, it is proclaimed that the object and result of the meeting of three emperors is to sanction the statu quo of Europe, and to consolidate a general peace, we believe that they mean what they proclaim; but what is the signification of the proclamation? Why, that they have thereby accepted the actual state of things which has grown out of the recent wars; that is to say, the European supremacy of the German Empire, founded on the powerlessness or the cautious prudence of France; and that they think to have extinguished the centre of combustion from which the firebrand of war might be again hurled over Europe.

This is assuredly a clever policy, one in which Prince von Bismarck might allow himself to take a certain pride.

But in this serene sky there is one dark cloud, and we may well suppose that this cloud has disturbed the optimism of the diplomats assembled at Berlin. This cloud is that dreaded unknown future when France will be no longer governed by M. Thiers.

Salvation is not to come to France from the republic; in France there is neither a republic nor a monarchy; the forces which tend to a monarchy are disunited, and consequently powerless, and those which tend to a republic are still more divided; the nation is living under an administration ad interim; there is an absence of settled government and settled institutions, and an impossibility of establishing either, because of the wide divisions of irreconcilable parties, of anarchy in principles and ideas. The salvation of France for the time being is one man, a leader whose hand is pliable, firm, and commanding enough to hold political parties in submission and keep down the rivalries which would give France over to another civil war. M. Thiers believes that any present attempt to set up a monarchy would light up a civil war; while the conviction of the majority of the Assembly at Versailles is just as strong that, if the republic lasts, this civil war will break out on the morrow of the day when France will have lost M. Thiers. Probably both are right; it is rather to the condition itself of France than to the men that lead her that this lamentable state of affairs is to be attributed which finds its expression in the government of a provisional republic having nothing to look forward to in the future but unfathomable darkness and mystery.

M. Thiers is the embodiment of the conservative republic, which will last just so long as he lives, and I desire that his needed dictatorship be prolonged for a long while yet; but can we reasonably entertain such a hope? He has undertaken the admirable work of saving France; he has in Paris fought and won the great battle against anarchy; he has carried the loans through, reorganized the army and finances of France; he is pushing forward the evacuation of her territory; he maintains order. All this is very fine and grand; he is indeed acting the part of the saviour of his country; but let him not seek to do more; let him not be ambitious to become the founder of a government; let him rather be content with merely playing the first part at the head of affairs.

I thoroughly appreciate the work M. Thiers is engaged in; he directs his policy by the light of present events, the only ones he can control; he is going through the reparative period, but what is he preparing? What is he founding for the future? What heritage will he leave after him, and who will be his heir? Such are the questions which must come up to every reflecting mind, and in particular to his, so remarkably clear, perspicacious, and penetrating.

The weak side of his policy is that it leaves France on a political terra incognita. The creation of a few additional institutions will not suffice to raise France out of the provisional status in which she lies since her fall; I mean such as a vice-presidency, the establishing of a lower house, all which would be adding shadows to shadows. It would never amount to anything more than an administration ad interim, and a period of expectation of a definite, stable, regular government having influence abroad, such an one as France feels that she does not but should possess. The question for M. Thiers, as well as for [pg 480] France and for Europe, remains the same: What is being prepared, what will the future bring?

As we know the tree by its fruits, so do we judge a policy by its results, and so will M. Thiers be judged.

If he leaves after him the heritage of a traditional and representative monarchy, or if, like a second Washington, he leaves as his successor to France a second John Adams or Thomas Jefferson who will enter upon the work of consolidating a republic really conservative, free, Christian, and powerful, he will indeed be a great man; but, if he is to be followed in power by a Gambetta who will be the predecessor of the socialist commune of Paris, he will, notwithstanding the immense services he has rendered, be severely judged by history. No one assuredly ought to understand this better than he.

Is the second President of the fourth or fifth French Republic to be a now unforeseen Jefferson or a Gambetta?

Such is the dreaded question now before us. These threatening eventualities have doubtless been attentively considered at the conference in Berlin. M. von Bismarck may have developed thereat the political plan which I have endeavored to analyze, and which has for its object the founding of the peace of Europe on France's inability to undertake another war; but revolutionary and demagogical France, bearing incendiarism from Paris to Madrid, to Rome, and perhaps elsewhere, must be opposed in some other way than by the establishment of impenetrable frontiers and the formation of alliances; and on these other means of opposition the three emperors must have seriously conferred at Berlin, and I doubt much whether waging war against the Catholic Church has seemed to them the best way to avert the danger aforesaid.

II.

I have sought in this letter to set forth the character and import of the meeting at Berlin, and to show the policy which Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to inaugurate there. I have not been eaves-dropping at the doors of the chambers in which the three emperors and their chancellors held their deliberations; but there is no difficulty in conjecturing what was talked about, and, I may add, what was thought therein.

We must not overestimate the importance of these conversations; the meeting at Berlin will no more bring about positive results for the solution of pending questions in Europe than did the numerous interviews which Napoleon III. had with the Emperor of Austria, the ministers of Great Britain, and the czar. As we have stated before, it is not a congress; it forms no alliances, and no treaty determining the new European equilibrium will come out of it. What M. von Bismarck wished particularly to bring about was the presence of the two emperors with their counsellors in the capital of the new empire. Their mere presence signified, in the eyes of the prince chancellor:

The recognition of the German Empire; the sanction of the treaties of Prague and Frankfort, which were to form the basis of the new equilibrium of Europe.

The impossibility for France to find a powerful ally that would enable her to attempt a war of retaliation.

On the part of Austria, the abandonment of all idea of returning to her old German policy, and the repudiation of all connivance with the particularistic resistance of the lesser states of Germany.

I will presently examine whether [pg 481] the presence at Berlin of the head of the dynasty of Hapsburg signifies also the repudiation of the Catholic movement which the persecutions directed against the church have stirred up throughout entire Germany.

Assuredly this policy of M. von Bismarck shows, I will not say grandeur, but skill and audacity; and it has been crowned by wonderful success. When I saw Prince von Bismarck raise Prussia, that a few years ago could hardly rank among the great powers, to the height of the Empire of Germany through the victories of 1866 and 1871—when I contemplated these astounding results, I was for a moment tempted to consider him as a great minister, as one of the rare successors of Richelieu or of Stein.

I was the more inclined to this judgment because, as a Belgian, I was grateful for the honest and upright policy which he had followed as regards Napoleon III. before the last war. There is no longer any room for doubt, now that the diplomatic documents are known, that Napoleon III., in order to redeem the unpardonable blunder which he had committed by favoring the war of 1861 between Prussia and Austria, endeavored to obtain in Luxemburg and in Belgium the compensations which he considered needful for him in view of the aggrandizement of Prussia. We know about the rough draft of the Benedetti treaty, which no amount of equivocation and timid denial can do away with.

I had, in my work published in 1865, clearly denounced the plot; and from the Belgian tribune, because I had pointed out these perils to its government, I have been called a political visionary and almost a traitor to my country. Subsequent events have justified my allegations, and now every one knows that the dangers which we ran for a time were more real, nearer at hand, and greater than even I imagined them to be.

The war of 1870 was the consequence of the refusal of the government of Berlin to yield to the guilty covetousness of Napoleon III. I ascribe the honor of the former to M. von Bismarck and to the integrity of William IV. I had proclaimed the existence of two eminent perils: a diplomatic peril, viz., an alliance of France with Prussia, of which Belgium would have been the stakes and the victim; the chance of a war between those two nations, in which France might have been victorious. We have, almost by a miracle, escaped those two perils; through the war of 1870, Belgium has been preserved from diplomatic conspiracies, and as a Belgian I can never forget it.[192]

Belgium, since the late war, finds herself in a new position which has not attracted the attention it deserves.

Belgium, for a long time back coveted by France, particularly by France under the Empire and under the Republic, had, above all, to fear an alliance between France and Prussia, which latter might sacrifice her to the political combinations growing out of such an alliance. That is what Napoleon III. attempted in the Benedetti negotiation, and it was this peril which before the recent war alarmed my patriotism.

Now this peril has vanished. An alliance between the German Empire and France is now put off for a long time. But there is another motive still more powerful, and which constitutes our complete security, which is this: that the existence of a neutral and strong Belgium has become henceforward for the German Empire a necessity of the highest order. Since the government of Berlin has thought it indispensable for strategic purposes to hold Metz and the lines of the Meuse and of the Vosges, it cannot allow, under any consideration, independent Belgium to disappear and France to occupy that territory of Belgium which is watered by the Meuse and the Scheldt. Our neutrality protects the Rhine on the side of the gap between the Sambre and the Meuse, but can afford this protection only provided our neutrality is politically and militarily strong to such an extent as our financial resources will warrant.

Our neutrality, in order to be one of the supports of the peace of Europe, must be ever an honest one; it must stand as a barrier against aggression whether from the east or from the south; it must be hostile to no power. On the other hand, it is plain that, in order to fill this position of barrier and guarantee, Belgium must remain always armed and able to repel an attack at the outset; otherwise, she would become politically useless, and, in the event of a war, the occupation of her territory would follow as the fatal result of such omission.

This was true before the late war, and on this point my views have not changed; but, since the new European situation created by the war, this truth is twice as plain, and our duties to Europe have increased twofold. It is important that all our political men, without distinction of party, and that the entire nation, understand well the position to which we have been brought by recent events.

Far from being hostile to the German Empire, I find in it a new guarantee for the independence of my country. Our neutrality now rests on all the powers and on all the treaties that have been made: it had become a habit, after the advent of the Napoleonic Empire, to consider England as the special protector of our national independence, but now that Germany has a particular and powerful interest in that independence, instead of one special support only, we now have two.

It is proper that I should make this statement, as I am about to submit M. von Bismarck's policy to a severe criticism. In this page of history which I have been rapidly writing, I have not been wanting in praise; and, if these lines are ever read by M. von Bismarck, he cannot complain of the appreciation which I have so far expressed [pg 483] of his policy. In the pages that follow, I shall not spare criticism. Much as I have admired the policy which prepared the war, in equal degree does my mind fail to comprehend the policy followed at Berlin since the peace, and which appears to me to be a perfect antithesis of the former one.

This latter policy appears to me so incomprehensible that I ask myself whether Prince von Bismarck, instead of being a political genius like Stein, is not entering upon the path of error in which Napoleon III. came to his ruin.

Napoleon III. has also been the ruler of Europe; the second Empire for many years enjoyed preponderance in Europe, and might have retained it much longer but for the accumulated blunders of imperial policy. Napoleon III., who had begun his reign isolated from other monarchs, and to whom the appellation of my cousin had been disdainfully denied, found himself, immediately after the war in the Crimea and after the Congress of Paris, at the head of a great Western alliance formed with England and Austria and by isolating Russia and annulling Prussia. He had reached the zenith of power in Europe; he had a star in which he and every one besides believed; kings and emperors came to Fontainebleau and to the Tuileries to pay their court to the parvenu sovereign who had been transformed into a Louis XIV., just as has happened at Berlin.

When I saw Napoleon III., at the summit of such a situation, break with his own hands, like a hot-brained child, this magnificent Western alliance to which he was indebted for his high fortune; conspire at the Congress of Paris with M. de Cavour to bring about that fatal war in Italy against Austria which was the first cause of his disasters; turn out of the straight path of conservative principles which he had sworn to follow, and then lose himself in the tortuous and obscure ways of revolution, my judgment of him was definitively made. A man who could commit such a folly was neither a statesman nor a political genius; he was merely a lucky adventurer who had been helped on and spoiled by events, but who did not know enough to turn them to account.

It was just then, in 1859, on the eve of the war in Italy, that I wrote my first work on Le Second Empire, in which I did not hesitate to predict that this war, no matter how much glory it might make for the emperor, would nevertheless amount to a political defeat which would lead to the fall of the Empire. “The heads of even the wisest men,” I said, “are liable to turn when they have reached such an elevation as he has arrived at.” And I selected as the epigraph of my work, the words which old Prince von Metternich had uttered when speaking of the extreme good-fortune of the Emperor of the French: “He is successful,” said the prince to me; “he has excellent cards in his hands, and he plays his game well, but he will be lost as a revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.” This remarkable prediction, made long before the war in Italy, has been verified to the letter, and my book, written in 1859, was merely a commentary upon it which subsequent events have confirmed.

M. von Bismarck is also at the acme of his triumph; he is presiding at his Congress of Paris. Behold Prussia, which but a few years ago had hardly any voice in the councils of Europe, now become the German Empire, and behold the Emperor of Germany getting the czar and the Emperor Francis Joseph to sanction [pg 484] at Berlin his victories, his conquests, and his political supremacy, by leaving France isolated, and making of no account England, which had kept herself aloof in her policy of forbearance.

Well, I do not hesitate to select this hour of triumph, when M. von Bismarck's policy has been crowned at Berlin, in the midst of festivities the splendor of which is talked of far and wide, to predict its failure in the end if he does not change it. My reason for asserting this in presence of a state of things so contrary to my prediction is that M. von Bismarck is committing one of those blunders, I dare not say one of those political follies, which astonish reason, and which form the premises of a syllogism having for its conclusion an inevitable failure. The blunder is precisely similar to that perpetrated by Napoleon III., who, in consequence of having allied himself with revolutionary Italy, was led from Mexico to Sadowa, and from Sedan to Chiselhurst. This blunder on the part of M. von Bismarck, and of which he will yet repent, is his alliance with revolutionary Italy, which drags him into a war against the Catholic Church, which has always proved fatal to those who have attempted it, and which destroys the work of German unity which he had associated with his name. The epigraph of my work on Le Second Empire, borrowed from Prince von Metternich, might serve for this letter as well, if applied to the Emperor of Germany and his chancellor; if the head of the dynasty of the Hohenzollerns continues in the path of revolution in which M. von Bismarck has led him, “he will also perish, like the revolutionary emperor on the Italian reef.”

Is it rashness on my part to point out to Prince von Bismarck and to the German Emperor the Tarpeian rock so nigh to the capitol to which they have ascended? Am I unjust towards the prince chancellor?

No one had a higher opinion of his political merit than I, and in appreciating, as I have done in this letter, his astounding successes, I have not been sparing of praise nor indeed of admiration. If, then, I am compelled to draw a comparison between Napoleon III. and him, and to measure by the blunder committed by the Emperor of the French in 1859 that which he is now committing, I must ask his pardon, for I make a great difference between those two contemporary personages. In the same degree that Napoleon III. was irresolute, beset by somnolent indolence and continual hesitation, so does, on the other hand, Prince von Bismarck know how to show a tenacious persistence and audacity in the carrying out of his designs; but this very tenacity may be a source of additional danger, if he enters upon a road which leads to an abyss; he will go forward in it quicker and more irremediably than another would, because he knows neither how to stop nor to draw back.

Let us, then, study the policy of M. von Bismarck.

And, in the first place, without wishing in the least to belittle the share which evidently belongs to him in the triumphs of Prussia, we must, nevertheless, admit that another important share falls to Count von Moltke, the greatest warrior of our day; and an equally considerable part is due to the blunders of his adversaries, Austria and Imperial France.

If, for example, Napoleon III. had not betrayed Austria in 1866 by allowing and favoring the alliance between Prussia and Italy, a war against Austria would have been impossible, and the victory of Sadowa [pg 485] would not have taken place; the senseless war of 1870, which grew out of the victory of Sadowa, would have been without either cause or pretext; France would be now erect, Austria would have maintained its influential position in Germany, and the German Empire would not have been established for the profit of Prussian unitarisme.

With the foundation of German unity, of the German Empire, Napoleon has had almost as much to do as M. von Bismarck. The great chancellor has found ready for him two instruments which he did not invent: the military genius of von Moltke, and the folly of Napoleon. To complete the expression of my thought, I will add that the German Emperor has only been, as he himself proclaimed after his victories, a mere instrument in the hands of Divine Providence for the chastisement of France. France has been unfaithful to her past history, from which she has severed herself; she has been unfaithful to the monarchical form of government which has rendered her glorious, and to the church which has made her great; she has lost, by a twofold apostasy, her political faith and her Catholic faith; she no longer possesses her institutions, which have been, one after the other, destroyed either by the old régime or by the Revolution; she no longer knows how to restore the monarchy, the elements of which have been scattered in the tempests of revolution; she knows not how to keep up a republic of which she has neither the habits, the historical conditions, nor the conditions social and political; she is in that state through which nations, condemned to perish, fall and decay, and out of which those nations which God wishes to save can get, only through punishment by fire or by the sword. M. von Bismarck has been, and may become again, that fire and that sword; which may perhaps be an honor, but does not justify pride.

The political work, then, which has produced the German Empire undoubtedly deserves praise, and assuredly does honor to the political merits of Prince von Bismarck, but does not facilitate the forming of a definitive judgment in his regard. It is in the work of peace that the statesman shows himself, and I must say it, that in this respect I do not find M. von Bismarck as great as events seemed to have made him out to be; just as he has been seen to be intelligent, fortunate, almost great during the period of warfare, so in like degree do I incline to consider him, in the period of present organization, improvident and blind.

This work of organization is a difficult one; it requires wisdom and time. M. von Bismarck has recourse to precipitation, to force, and to wrath.

German unity, inuring to the benefit of Prussia, could not, before the war of 1866, have been foreseen. When, in 1863, the Emperor of Austria made his triumphal entry into Frankfort, bearing in his hand federal reform, he was surrounded by all the princes of Germany. Prussia stood alone, abandoned by all Germany; and, if Napoleon had not foolishly thwarted the plans of the Emperor Francis Joseph, the Emperor of Germany would have been crowned, not at Berlin, but at Vienna.

After the war of 1866, Prusso-Germanic unitarism had not yet been accomplished. Saxony and the states of the South which had fought by the side of Austria were defeated; they submitted to, rather than accepted, the terms which Prussia forced on them as the consequence [pg 486] of their defeat. Northern Germany was bounded by the Main, and the minor states ever felt themselves drawn towards Vienna, their old centre of attraction.

It was the war of 1870, declared by Napoleon against the whole of Germany, notwithstanding the patriotic protest of M. Thiers, which all at once created this unity; this unity, which brought all the Germans together under one flag, received thus the baptism of glory and of blood.

But the Prusso-German unitarism, extemporized and rough-cast by the war, was not consolidated; many difficulties remained to be overcome.

M. von Bismarck saw before him two formidable adversaries: the particularism of the middle states, and socialist democracy, which claims to abolish unity for its own gain, by substituting the German Republic for the German Empire.

Several symptoms go to show that the particularist movement, which had been stopped by the war, is reviving, and certainly the hostile action directed against the Catholics assists powerfully towards giving it new life. The symptoms of the awakening of this movement are numerous; it is needless that I should enumerate them; they are perfectly known at Berlin, and have assuredly become aggravated since the religious war undertaken by M. von Bismarck.

The particularism of the states, then, is not dead, and red democracy is full of life. These are the two great difficulties which M. von Bismarck's policy finds in its way. To these must be added a third one: the assimilation of the two conquered provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French by the ties of history, of religion, of habits, and of interests.

To overcome these obstacles, to organize unity, the basis of the new empire, to accomplish his great work, M. von Bismarck needs prudence, time, and the hand of a true statesman.

Now, what does the Prince von Bismarck do? To the three considerable existing obstacles he adds another one, greater and more dangerous than the former, a difficulty which did not exist, which he of his own accord created, which he wantonly got up, and which will crush him; I mean the religious difficulty, the brutal war, the veritable persecution which he is organizing against the Catholics. He had to fight against particularist opposition and radical opposition; he himself, with deliberate purpose, needlessly and without reason, raises up a third one—the opposition of sixteen millions of Catholics united with their bishops; that is to say, almost half of the new empire which he thus unsettles and, so to speak, dissolves with his own hand.

Can anything be imagined more incomprehensible or more thoroughly preposterous?

What end is M. von Bismarck pursuing? By what thought and what views is he guided? The prince chancellor is neither mad nor blind; he has given abundant evidence of this; and yet, is it not folly, is it not blindness, to thus throw, without any appreciable motive, and with a heart as light as that of M. Emile Ollivier, sixteen millions of Catholics, including all their clergy and all their bishops, into a resistance which will be all the more obstinate and formidable because it will derive its strength from the oppression of conscience, from the suppression of liberty, the rending of the constitution, from the violation of justice and of rights? I have put these questions to eminent Germans of all parties, but have never got clear and satisfactory answers.

The Catholic Germans behaved [pg 487] admirably during the war; the Bavarian, Westphalian, and Rhenish troops were everywhere foremost under fire and in earning honor and glory. The priests and religious, both men and women, have shown a heroic devotedness on the battlefields, in the ambulances, and in the hospitals, so that M. Windthorst was enabled to say in the parliament at Berlin that many of those religious would go into exile wearing on their breasts the iron cross which they had earned during the last campaign.[193] The old antipathies against Prussia which prevailed along the Rhine and beyond the Main among Catholic populations were dying out; the establishment of religious liberty in Prussia on a more generous basis than in the lesser states had won the Catholics over to unity under Prussian hegemony; and the illustrious Bishop of Mayence, Mgr. de Ketteler, in an address which made a great noise in Germany and throughout Europe, raised the standard of rallying and unity.

The German Empire was consequently very near being established. M. von Bismarck stirs up a religious war which divides it in two and breaks it asunder. The war had brought together under the same flag Germans of all nationalities and all religious beliefs. Should not, then, all manner of pains have been taken to keep them united in the mutual work of the organization of the empire? Should not the first thought of a politician, after having achieved such wonderful success, and having before him the obstacles which still remained to be overcome, have been to begin by establishing peace in religious matters?

But I must repeat the question, What did M. von Bismarck do? He repulses the Westphalians and people of the Rhine who had become reconciled; he revives in Bavaria and in the South that particularism which was dying out; and on the political grievance he grafts a religious one; he doubles the obstacles of all kinds which lie in the way of his plans for Germanizing Alsace and Lorraine, so thoroughly French and Catholic; into their bleeding wounds he, as it were, introduces gangrene, by entering upon an unheard-of religious persecution, and without any pretext that he dare avow; he compromises in the most serious manner the work of unity, towards the founding of which he had aided so much; he acts as would the greatest adversary of that unity who could not contrive any better means for its destruction than to do just what Prince von Bismarck is doing—he drives into the ranks of opposition nearly half of the soundest population of the empire; he sets against himself the two hundred million Catholics spread throughout the world, and who are everywhere protesting against his oppression; he will also turn against him the old conservatives, who have been deeply hurt by the enactment of the law in regard to schools, as well as all sincere friends of religious and political liberty, so audaciously ignored by him. These friends of liberty are becoming scarce; they maintain, in the face of this odious violation of their principles, a shameful silence which they will have to break, if they wish to avoid making liberalism synonymous with hypocrisy.

Have I erred in comparing the policy of M. von Bismarck with that of Napoleon III., and his present blunder with that committed by the ex-emperor when, after the Congress [pg 488] of Paris, he broke up the splendid Western alliance?

When I endeavor to interpret M. von Bismarck's conduct, I can find but one motive which can serve for its explanation, and that is his alliance with Italy. That alliance, which he conceived necessary in order to keep the forces of France divided, and to render a war of retaliation impossible, has drawn him into a fatal hostility against the Catholic Church.

His ally, Victor Emanuel, has conquered the Roman States by stratagem and by violence; he has usurped in Rome the throne of the pontiff king, who among the monarchs of Europe possesses assuredly the most ancient and most venerated titles to sovereignty; he holds the Pope captive in the Vatican, until such time as he can compel him to set out on the road to exile; he deprives the Sovereign Pontiff of the church of that sovereignty on which his independence rests, and thus throws the universal church into alarm and mourning.

This outrage against the church, perpetrated at Rome by the Italian government, has had its counterpart in Berlin. No doubt the condition which Victor Emanuel set upon alliance with him has been to make the German Empire enter into the vast plot got up against the independence and liberty of Catholicity.

Well! without being a prophet, it is not difficult to predict that the Italian alliance will prove as fatal to the German Empire as it has been to the second Napoleonic Empire, and that on the Italian rock M. von Bismarck's work will be dashed to pieces, if he allows it to remain in the evil path in which it is now so deeply sunk.

III.

Prince Bismarck considers himself to be the successor of Stein, to whom he has caused a statue to be erected, and whose great policy he claims that he is continuing. In this respect, he is profoundly mistaken; and, very far from following that policy, he abandons and betrays it.

Stein and all his school have, like Burke and Pitt, combated the principles of the French Revolution. French ideas had, at the close of the last century, invaded Germany, and the armies of the first Republic had no difficulty in conquering by their arms a country which they had before overrun with their ideas.

Baron von Stein, that restorer of the German Vaterland and liberty, was a mortal foe of the French Revolution. His mission and his work were to withdraw Germany from the fatal path into which, following France, she had strayed, and to bring her back into the path laid out for her by her history.

He could not save Prussia from the defeat at Jena, but he trained her, by his thorough and excellent reforms, for revenge at Waterloo and Sedan. He it was who formed Scharnhorst, the organizer of military Prussia, and whose system Count von Moltke perfected; he, probably, who became the soul of the patriotic movement in 1813; he it was who, together with Scharnhorst, Stadion, and Gagern, gave to Germany that powerful impulse out of which came the great present situation; he it was who stood the distinguished protector of the German historical school, that real antithesis of the French revolutionary school, which former had as its influential organs Niebuhr, Eichhorn, Schlegel, Görres, the two Grimms, de Savigny, etc., and which M. de Sybel represents still in our day.

Stein was a conservative, a patriot, and a Christian. What he fought against in the French Revolution was [pg 489] that philosophic and abstract method that France had adopted, destructive of all national tradition; that spirit of exclusive and narrow equality which influenced her course, and in the pursuit of which, according to M. de Tocqueville, she has lost liberty; that absolutism, whether in democracy or in Cæsarism, that obliteration of the individual, that indifference to rights, that worship of brute force, that extinguishment of all local, provincial, and autonomous life, that exaggerated idea of the state, that oppression of religious liberty, of Christian teaching, and of the Catholic Church, all of which characterized the French Revolution.

Stein wanted a Germany united, but federal, Christian, liberal, traditional, and historical; he wanted her, as Burke did England, to be the reverse of revolutionary France.

Now, is it not Stein's work, that Germany born of his reforming genius, that M. von Bismarck is destroying? The liberal national party, on which he leans, is merely a doctrinaire French party, anti-historic, ideological, and anti-religious, the harbinger of levelling and radical democracy; a party which inclines to absolutism and Cæsarism, adores centralization, unconditional unification, and the omnipotence of the state, and which is the adversary of all proud and free consciences, and of any independent church. It is not the Protestant idea, but the Masonic and Hegelian one which this party represents.

Stein was a Christian, a conservative, and a German; the Prince von Bismarck is sceptical, revolutionary, and belongs to the French school. Stein sought to found German unity on federal liberties, in the alliance of the church with the school, and on peace between religious denominations; M. von Bismarck overturns that basis, substitutes in its place absolutist and Prussian unification, secularized teaching, and religious discord.

It is surprising that, when in France the ideas which inspired the French Revolution have been abandoned even by the most intelligent part of the school of liberalism; by such men as Tocqueville, Thierry, and Guizot, who are discouraged, and talk more openly of their disappointments than of their hopes; when M. Renan asserts that the French Revolution “is an experimental failure”; when the Revue des Deux Mondes, through the pen of M. Montégut, proclaims “that the Revolution is politically bankrupt”; on the very morrow of the final miscarriage of that Revolution under its two forms of government, the Empire fallen at Sedan, and the social Republic fallen under the ruins of the Paris Commune—it is at that very time that Prince von Bismarck thinks it skilful and profound to import that French revolutionary system into Germany! M. Renan has cause for rejoicing; he has given utterance to a wish which M. von Bismarck has set about to fulfil. “France,” he said, “need not be considered lost if we can believe that Germany will be in her turn drawn into that witches' dance in which all our virtue has been lost.”

To sum up: German unity, the great German Empire, which such an extraordinary concurrence of circumstances had created, is being dissolved and ruined by Prince von Bismarck through the most inconceivable of political blunders. He throws sixteen millions of Catholics, once friendly to the Empire, into opposition to it; he gives a new food and new strength to the particularism of the Southern States, and to the Polonism of Posen; he makes twofold [pg 490] the difficulties of accomplishing the assimilation of Alsace and Lorraine; to political grievances he superadds religious grievances, far more to be dreaded than the former; he enkindles an implacable religious war upon the ruins of that denominational peace which King Frederic William III. had happily established, and by aid of which the present emperor and the empress Augusta had, in the opening period of their reign, won the hearts of the Catholics of the Rhine. To cover this blunder, M. von Bismarck enters into the Italian alliance which destroyed the second Napoleonic Empire, and will destroy the German Empire; and he abandons the historic German policy restored by Stein, to rush into the retinue of the national liberal party, into the paths of the French Revolution, into that witches' dance to which M. Renan refers; and he inoculates his own country with the poison which has killed France!

IV.

But there is one final consequence of the policy of Prince von Bismarck to which I wish to call attention, and which is not least in gravity.

Austria, after having lost Italy, had, by the treaty of Prague, been excluded from Germany. Nevertheless, the German Empire, under the hegemony of Prussia, had not been set up; there existed only a Northern Germany, having the Main as its boundary; the Southern States, and even Saxony, preserved a certain autonomy; and Austria might hope by a wise policy to draw little by little into the sphere of her influence and attraction those countries which had been accustomed to look upon Vienna as their political pole.

The war of 1871 against France, which had united all the Germans under one flag, established German unity and the German Empire. The boundaries of the Empire were moved from the Main to the Danube, and all hope for Austria to regain her old German position was gone.

Austria accepted this situation; the Emperor Francis Joseph and his two counsellors, Count von Beust and Count Andràssy, worked together to bring about a sincere reconciliation between Austria and the German Empire.

They gave up the idea of bringing back the Southern States into the circle of Austrian influence; they feared, on the contrary, lest the German provinces of Austria, detaching themselves little by little from the weakened rule of the Hapsburgs, might be irresistibly drawn towards Berlin, the powerful and glorious centre of the German Vaterland.

Those fears may at present be entirely set at rest. There has been a complete reversal in the position of things. The people, for the most part so Catholic, of the Tyrol, of Lower Austria, and of Bohemia, will lose all inclination to draw nearer to the German Empire, where a bitter persecution is being waged against their religious faith. The bonds which unite them to Austria will be drawn the tighter. On the other hand, will not the Catholics of the Rhine, of Westphalia, of Poland, of Suabia, of Franconia, of Würtemberg, of Bavaria, of Alsace, and of Lorraine, driven from the bosom of the German Empire, in which they are no longer citizens, but pariahs, be tempted to look again in the direction of Austria, the centre of their older sympathies? All Austria has to do is not to interfere; M. von Bismarck is working for her.

The prince chancellor, notwithstanding the elated confidence which he has in his strength, has understood the danger of the situation.

In order to change it, he had but one easy thing to do, and that was to modify his policy, to give up persecuting the Catholics, to admit that he had gone astray, and to return to a calmer and wiser policy; but this he would not do; he has preferred to keep on, and to try to drag Austria into the same road.

Last year, at Gastein, he tried to induce Count von Beust to join in the campaign which he wished to begin against the internationale rouge and the internationale noire, but the Emperor Francis Joseph baffled the attempt. The prince chancellor renewed it the same year with the emperor himself at Salzburg, but he failed a second time.

Has he met with more success at Berlin, upon the occasion of the meeting of the three emperors? Has he tried to get Russia and Austria to recognize not only the German Empire, but to sanction by their adhesion to it his home policy against “Romanism,” that is to say, against the Catholic Church, or has he at least succeeded in inducing the belief that he had not tried in vain? Has he sought to drag them into the war which he is carrying on against the Jesuits, against the religious orders, against denominational liberty, against Catholic teaching, against the clergy and the bishops, until such time as he can make it break forth at Rome, by laying, in the next conclave, an audacious and sacrilegious hand on the pontifical tiara?

We shall find this out before long. If Austria follows the policy of the centralist party of the German professors at Vienna and at Prague, to which Count von Beust has already yielded too much, and which is identical with the policy of the national liberal party of Berlin, she will have advanced the interests of Prince von Bismarck, and not her own; she will have labored for him and against herself; she will have turned aside the danger imminent to the German Empire through M. von Bismarck's blunders, and of which the Austro-Hungarian Empire should have profited; she will have, with her historical good-nature, served the views of Prussia to the detriment of her own; and Francis Joseph, the Apostolic Emperor, unfaithful to his traditions and to the arms of his house, will have made his policy subordinate to that of a Lutheran emperor!

I positively refuse to believe that any such result can come out of the interview at Berlin, albeit that our generation is accustomed to the realization of political impossibilities. I would fain persuade myself that, if the Prince von Bismarck has endeavored to draw Austria into his war against the Catholics and against Rome, he will have failed at Berlin as he did at Salzburg through the good sense of the Emperor Francis Joseph.

V.

The more I study M. von Bismarck's policy, the less I understand it. If he were a sectarian pietist, I could account to myself for the idea of perfecting the political and military unity of Germany by a religious unity, of creating a Protestant state: it would indeed be a sorry Utopia, and to attempt it would be to make the mistake of being three centuries behind his time.

But M. von Bismarck is neither a sectarian nor a fanatic; he is rather, I believe, a sceptic who has little care for religious controversies, and who probably understands very little about the question of the Papal Infallibility which he is wielding as a warlike weapon against the church. M. von Bismarck is a politician; politics he aims at and should be [pg 492] busied in; his mission is to help found an empire and not a schism or a sect. Now, it is the Empire, the political work, which he gravely compromises by disturbing so profoundly through a denominational conflict the religious quiet which that work needed for its consolidation. Instead of the German state founded on unity and general assent, it is the Protestant state founded on the deepest and most incurable divisions that he seems to aim at creating. There is no difficulty in predicting that he will lose the political unity in the pursuit of a religious unity which is but a chimerical and impossible anachronism.

This political course which the prince chancellor has inspired the Emperor William to follow, whose past one makes such a striking contrast with it, is to me an insoluble enigma, and raises doubts in my mind of M. von Bismarck's transcendent ability.

I will nevertheless try to make out this political enigma, by studying the pretexts on which the government of Berlin relies to justify itself, the circumstances by which it has been enticed, and the temptation to which it has yielded.

The pretext which it puts forward is the decision of the Vatican Council in regard to the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff in matters of doctrine.

The circumstances by which it was carried away are the Italian alliance abroad and the alliance with the national liberal party at home.

The temptation that misleads it is the hope, fortunately disappointed, which the stand of the inopportunist bishops of Germany and of Austria caused it to form, which stand the Berlin government had mistaken for a real dissent from doctrine, and destined to become the foundation of a national church separated from Rome by that dissent.

I call the question of Papal Infallibility a pretext, and, in fact, it is a groundless quarrel without any importance or earnest meaning.

I am not called upon to enter here into a theological dissertation upon the dogma of the infallibility of the church and of its sovereign magistracy, etc. I refer my readers to the excellent works which have been published on the subject, and I trust to be excused for mentioning in particular those written by my brother the Archbishop of Mechlin.

I will say but one word en passant on the question. For every Catholic, there is no longer any open question. Before the council, discussion was allowable; since the definition proclaimed by an œcumenical council united to the Pope, all discussion is closed.

Every one knows of the conversation between a very intelligent lady of great faith and the Count de Montalembert, shortly before the death of that illustrious friend, in which she asked him what he would do if the council together with the Pope should define infallibility. “Well, I will quietly believe it,” replied the great orator, with the firm accent of the Christian who knows his catechism, and who recites his act of faith.

In fact, no father nor doctor of the church, from Origen and S. Cyprian down to S. Thomas and Bossuet, no council, no theologian, no Catholic, has ever doubted the doctrinal infallibility of the church. The controversy lay with the Gallicans, who claimed that the words of the Pope addressed to the church ex cathedrâ needed the assent of a council or of the church throughout the world to acquire the character of infallibility.

All the old Catholics of all the schools, Gallican even included, were agreed to accord to the definitions of a council united with the Pope, that is to say, the church, the divine privilege of infallibility set forth in Holy Scriptures and in all tradition. On this point Bossuet holds the same doctrine as Fénelon and Count de Maistre.

Now, in the present instance we have a council united to the Pope, and no council, from that of Trent back to that of Nicæa, has been more numerously attended, more solemn, freer, or more œcumenical, than that of the Vatican. To deny this is downright nonsense, in which those take refuge who seek to hide their apostasy from their own eyes. If the Council of the Vatican has not been œcumenical and free, then manifestly no council in the past has ever been.

To reject the doctrinal definition of the Council of the Vatican, in which the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops of all the world, whether opportunist or inopportunist, have agreed, would undoubtedly be to abandon the church of Christ, and to renounce the Catholic faith; it would be going beyond Gallicanism, which never thought of calling in question the decisions of a council united to a pope; even beyond the Jansenism of Port Royal, which would perhaps have accepted the Bull of Innocent X. if sanctioned by a council; it would be going beyond 1682, back to Luther; that is to say, to open heresy, and to the entire abandonment of the church, our mother.

How can M. Döllinger not see this? He who in 1832, at Munich, where the encyclical of Gregory XVI. reached M. de Lamennais, insisted with the latter, with all his force as a theologian, that he should submit to the pontifical encyclical, which, in the doctor's eyes, was binding on conscience, although no council had adhered to it—how can he now, in his own case, resist the decisions of Pius IX. and the Council of the Vatican? He who has written so many works of grave learning, and in particular that one on The Church and the Churches, how comes it that he does not see that he is no longer in the church, and that he is seeking a shelter for his revolt in the smallest, the poorest, and the most dilapidated of those churches of a day which, in the name of history, he has so severely condemned? How can he find himself at ease and his soul tranquil in those ridiculous conventicles of Munich and of Cologne, by the side of Michelis, of Reinkens, Friedrich, Schulte, the ex-abbé Michaud, the ex-father Hyacinthe, and surrounded by Jansenist and Anglican bishops, by Protestant and schismatic ministers, by rationalists of all colors? How comes it that his faith and his learning are not shocked when brought into the midst of that confusion of doctrines and of tongues, and of ignorance of all kinds, which rendered the Congress of Cologne so notorious; that congress whereat the question was discussed “of the reunion of the old Catholics with the other churches having affinity of faith,” which means with all the sects separated from Rome, to the exclusion of the great universal church of S. Augustine, S. Thomas, Pascal, Descartes, Bossuet, Fénelon, de Maistre, Lacordaire, of the eight hundred bishops of the council, and of the sainted Pontiff Pius IX.? How can he, a man of learning, a priest, advanced in years, on the brink of eternity, prefer to put himself under the pastoral crook and the jurisdiction of the Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, or of a schismatic Armenian bishop, and fraternize with the Anglican bishops of Lincoln, Ely, and Maryland, [pg 494] rather than remain an humble priest, but proud of that Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church whose admirable unity bursts forth in the midst of the vast persecution which is being begun and prepared for her, and of which the Provost of Munich consents to be the guilty instrument?

This closes my parenthetical remarks on Dr. Döllinger and the Old Catholics, who are in reality merely old Jansenists and very old Protestants, and I come back to M. von Bismarck and to his policy.

Prince von Bismarck and the governments of Germany have no occasion to trouble themselves about the question of settling whether infallibility attaches to the Pope speaking ex cathedrâ, or to the Pope united to the council; these are all dogmatic theses with which they have no concern. The pretext got up by politics for trespassing on the domain of religious faith is the following: The politicians allege that the declaration of the council has conferred upon the Pope a new authority, that this authority is absolute and unlimited, and that this state of things affects the relations between the church and the state, which is thereby thrown upon its defence against possible usurpation. The Emperor of Germany, in a conversation which he recently had at Ems with M. Contzen, the courageous Burgomaster of Aix-la-Chapelle, brought out this singular idea of the politicians when he alleged “that the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, had declared war to the state.”

How can this be? In what respect does the question of the infallibility of the church touch the relations between the church and the state?

The declaration of the Vatican Council is not new; it belongs almost textually to the Council of Florence when it proclaimed the faith which had existed for centuries; it is ancient; all, or nearly all, the bishops at the late council were agreed, and are now all agreed, as to the ground of the doctrine; they were only divided on the question of opportuneness, and Mgr. the Bishop of Orléans, in his pastoral letter of assent, declared that he has always professed the doctrine which had been proclaimed.

Nothing, then, has been changed, and church and state remain in precisely the same situation of reciprocal independence in their distinct spheres, and of harmony in their relations, in which they were before the council.

Some either imagine, through most admirable ignorance, or hypocritically make show of believing, that the pontifical infallibility is a personal privilege, in this sense, that it is conferred on a person who cannot err in anything, that the Pope is infallible in all that he says and in everything; that he could lay upon the faithful the obligation of believing any decision that he might proclaim whether in the exclusive domain of science or in the exclusive domain of politics, where faith is not at all involved.

The object of infallibility is the doctrine of the faith and of the revealed law. The church has the deposit of revelation, of the Holy Scriptures, and of tradition; the Pope is its supreme guardian; the evangelical promise of infallibility is nothing else than the promise of fidelity in the custody of this sacred deposit! When the Pope or the council united to the Pope declares that a truth is contained in the deposit of revelation, they do not invent matter, they repeat and discern; they do not create a new truth, they confirm an old one, and cause new light to beam from it.

Infallibility is, then, not personal in the absurd sense in which the word [pg 495] is used; neither is it absolute and without limits; its domain, which is that of faith and morals, is clearly marked out by the constitution of the Vatican Council. “According to the perfectly clear text of the decree,” say the Prussian bishops who met at Fulda in 1871, “all allusion to the domain of politics is completely excluded from the definition of this dogma.” His Eminence Cardinal Antonelli, in his despatch of the 19th of March, 1870, to the Nuncio at Paris, is even more precise. “Political affairs belong,” he says, “according to the order of God and the teachings of the church, to the province of the secular authority, without any dependence whatever on any other.”

But, as between the secular power and the church, relations are necessary, these are settled by the two authorities through arrangements or concordats.

I allow myself to call Prince von Bismarck's attention to this point. Positive relations between the church and states have been settled by concordats only; always, at all periods of history, the popes alone have negotiated concordats with the states; pontifical infallibility has absolutely no connection with concordats, and the Pope when he signs them does not speak ex cathedrâ and as supreme doctor of the church. How, then, can the declaration of the council have changed the relations between the church and governments, and how can the church, by proclaiming the dogma of infallibility, be said to have declared war to the state?

It is, then, a mere matter of pretext. In point of fact, it is the German Empire which is laying claim to absolute and unlimited power in the domain of religion as well as in the domain of politics; it examines and judges dogmas, intrudes itself into ecclesiastical discipline; it closes the priest's mouth in his pulpit—by the lex Lutziana; it closes Catholic colleges and schools; it forbids religious to preach, to hear confessions, and even to celebrate Mass; it forbids the bishops to canonically exclude from the bosom of the church those who openly separate themselves therefrom; it banishes, for no crime, without trial and in bodies, the religious orders, in the same way that Louis XIV. (though he could give better reasons) drove the Huguenots from the soil of France; it favors schism, and aims at establishing a national church. It is, then, the German state which is declaring war to the church, and which is raising claim to political and religious infallibility by founding a veritable civil theocracy.

Let us put aside the pretext, which can in no wise serve either for the justification or for the explanation of the conduct of the government of Berlin. Let us examine the real motives which governed that conduct, the circumstances by which the emperor was carried away, and the fatal temptations which deluded him.

VI.

Foremost among these reasons and temptations has been, as I have said before, the alliance with Italy. It was the first cause, and was the signal for the sudden change which took place in the interior policy of the German Empire. This is evident from the fact that the political storm burst forth during the last session of Parliament precisely upon the occasion of a paragraph in the draft of the address got up by the national liberal party, and which was a stone hurled at the papacy. This was taking place at Berlin at the very hour when the Italo-German alliance [pg 496] had been concluded at Rome; the coincidence is striking, and proves that war against the Catholic Church and her head has been made a condition of this alliance.

The next temptation, the second blunder of Prince von Bismarck, has been his exclusive alliance with the national liberal party, whose character I have defined above. This alliance with pseudo-liberalism is the corollary of his alliance with Italy; both rest within and without on the revolutionary and anti-Christian principle. War on Rome and the papacy has been the condition of the alliance with Italy; war on the Catholics in Germany has been the condition of the alliance with the national liberal party.

Prince von Bismarck had, for several years, met a keen resistance to his plans from the national liberal party, while during the same period he found a support in the conservative section of the Prussian chambers, with whom were joined the few Catholics of note who happened to be members of them.

To-day he turns away from this weakened but still powerful conservative section, and he wages the bitterest war against the centre section, which is made up of Catholics. These two sections watch over the deposit of old German traditions; they wish to preserve the federal and constitutional character of the Empire, to maintain the Christian and denominational character of the schools, and throughout the nation, religious peace. Latterly the conservative section has become weak; it has yielded to M. von Bismarck's policy; but sooner or later its traditions will bring it to the side of the section of the centre, in order that both may unite in sustaining the historic principles of the Germanic race against the centralizing anti-religious policy of the national liberal party, which represents above all else the idea of the French Revolution.

The section of the centre, which, in 1870, in point of numbers amounted in the parliament to but very little, has seen its power increase proportionately with the development of the pseudo-liberal party of centralization, of omnipotence of the state, of political levelling, and of anti-Christian reaction. The outrage committed on the papacy by the Italian government gave increased energy to the Catholic movement, and the section of the centre, which, at the time it was first organized, consisted of fifty members only, saw its numbers increase after the elections to more than sixty, all united together by strong convictions; it can count to-day nearly eighty, and it is safe to predict that, unless the government sends into the interior, or into exile, or puts in prison the leaders of the Catholic movement, the party of the centre will, after the next elections, thanks to the war begun against the church, have gained a force of more than one hundred votes, which will thus counterbalance those of the national liberal party.

It is this growing power of the party of the centre, the fruit of M. von Bismarck's policy, which has impelled him to his policy of violence and anger against the Catholic Church; he means to make the clergy, the Jesuits, the religious orders, and the bishops pay for the political loss of rest occasioned to him by this phalanx which is growing into a legion, and at whose head stand such powerful leaders as Reichensperger, Mallinckrodt, and Windthorst. The eloquent words of these orators, as in former times those of O'Connell in England, and Montalembert in France, spread beyond the boundaries [pg 497] of Germany, to arouse and stir up everywhere all lovers of right, justice, true liberty, and the church of Jesus Christ.

The third temptation of the German government has been the stand taken in the Vatican Council by nearly all the bishops of Germany and of Austria. These pious and learned prelates were all agreed, along with those of the entire world, as to the mere ground of the doctrine; all or nearly all were infallibilists; Josephism, Fébronianism, had been for a long time dying, if not dead; but these same bishops were nearly all inopportunists. This M. von Bismarck misapprehended, he believed that there was, among the bishops in council, a real dissent as to doctrine; he imagined that the majority of the German and Austrian bishops would separate from Rome to follow M. Döllinger in the path of defection or of schism, through which he is moving to his ruin. The Italian alliance and the alliance with the national liberal party carried M. von Bismarck into hostile action against Rome; the difference of opinion among the bishops on the question of the opportuneness of the decision by the council led him to hope that he would find therein the elements for a Janist[194] and national church.

In this he has been entirely mistaken. “He had left the Holy Spirit out of his reckoning,” said recently to me a learned ecclesiastic of Berlin, and I add that he had also not reckoned on the faith and virtue of the episcopate.

Observe what is going on and how the Catholic tide is rising and resisting. M. von Bismarck met at Sedan a splendid, courageous French army, which, badly led and crushed by the fire of the German artillery, was forced to capitulate; he will henceforth find in opposition to him the Catholic populations, with their clergy and their bishops at their head, who will rise, in the name of God and of the liberty of the church, who will resist and never surrender.

M. von Bismarck is about to have experience of what the Catholic bishops are and of what they can do. They will not conspire; they will not sow rebellion and revolution; they will not join themselves to the red international party, but they will resist and will not yield. “In this present sad condition of things,” said the bishops met together at Fulda in April, 1872, “we will fulfil our duty by not disturbing the peace between the church and the state.” “As Christians,” said the learned Bishop of Paderborn, in his touching address to the exiled Jesuits—“as Christians, we can oppose neither force nor overt resistance to the measures of governmental authority. Albeit such measures seem to us iniquitous and unjustifiable, we may only meet them by that passive resistance which our divine Master Jesus Christ has taught us by his words and example; that silence, calm and full of dignity; that patience, tranquil and resigned, but abounding in hope; that loving prayer which heaps burning coals on the heads of our persecutors.”

Such is the admirable language of the German bishops, as it fell from the lips of the Archbishop of Cologne, Mgr. von Droste-Vischering, on the very day preceding that on which he was led captive by a guard of soldiers to the fortress of Minden. The calm and intrepid Bishop of Ermeland is deprived of his salary and injured in his authority; he is marked out for punishment, and he [pg 498] awaits the coming of the soldiers with the fetters to bind him.

I cannot recall the venerated name of Mgr. Krementz without adding to it the illustrious one of Mgr. Mermillod, whom all Europe will continue to address as Bishop of Hebron and Geneva, despite that decision of the council of state which forbids him to exercise any function whatever, whether as bishop or as curate, and which cuts him off from all salary. Here, then, we have this republican and liberal Switzerland suppressing the Jesuits and all cognate religious orders, the brothers of the schools, the sisters of charity; closing seminaries, as at Soleure, because the moral theology of S. Liguori was taught there; unseating bishops, as at Geneva; and the people that do these things are yet shameless enough to talk of liberty, while all the speech-makers of liberalism, whose hair stands erect at the mention of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who dinned the world with their clamors in the young Mortara case, cannot find a single word of liberality, not a single protest, not a single expression of indignation, to stigmatize these unheard-of outrages against all liberties at once, and against all the rights of human conscience.

I have just been adverting to the passive resistance of the bishops in Germany; but the lay movement, which is kept strictly within the law, is less passive, less resigned, and is somewhat inflamed by politics. The reaction against the unwarranted persecution set on foot a year ago is breaking out everywhere. A committee of direction has been formed at Mainz, whose business is to centralize the legal resistance of German Catholics for the defence of religious liberty thus threatened and assailed. This committee, in their address dated in July last, call upon the Catholics of Germany to a crusade in opposition to the aggressions of the government. “We claim,” says this address, “for our creed that liberty and independence guaranteed to it by the constitution; and under the device, For God and our Country, we will fight to the last for the maintenance of our rights.” This address is signed by some of the most illustrious names of Germany, foremost among which I may mention those of Count Felix de Löe, of Baron de Frankenberg, of Count C. de Stolberg, and of the Prince of Isenburg.

A numerous meeting of Catholics voted to send the Archbishop of Munich an address praising him for his firmness and encouraging him in the contest which he is maintaining. At Breslau, a Catholic Congress has just assembled with great éclat. All the Catholic men of note in Germany were present at it. Vent was therein given to the most energetic complaints and the most indignant protests, resolutions of great firmness were adopted, a new impulse was given to all those associations which, like that of S. Boniface, of S. Charles Borromeo, and of Pius IX., have multiplied on German soil works of teaching and of charity; powerful preparations were in this congress made for resistance, while confiding in their rights and in God.

While the Catholic laity were thus meeting and organizing at Breslau and at Mainz, the bishops were quietly deliberating at Fulda, presided over by the Archbishop of Cologne, who is mindful of his illustrious predecessor, Clement Augustus. There, as the apostles of old in the cenaculum, they tarry in prayer, and they will come forth with a confidence and a courage such as have overcome adversaries far more powerful than the Prince von Bismarck.

VII.

The old régime, before it died out, made trial of rebellion against the church. Frederick the Great was certainly as able as M. von Bismarck; he had the world at his feet, and the church in Germany, infected with the doctrines of Fébronius, was apparently in the pangs of death. The last act recorded in history of the then three ecclesiastical electors of Mayence, Cologne, and Trèves had been to meet with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Primate of Germany, for the purpose of drawing up the Punctuations of Ems (1786), which were a code of rebellion against the Holy See. What a contrast with the present assembling of the German bishops at Fulda! These servile Punctuations of Ems were beginning to be carried out, when the armies of the French Republic came down and inflicted upon the authors of them the punishment they deserved.

Every one knows about Pombal, Choiseul, and Charles III., who confined the Jesuits within certain territorial limits, drove them away, cast them into prison, or sent them into exile, pretty much in the same way as M. von Bismarck is doing.

The power which did all this was swallowed up by the French Revolution.

This revolution, satanic, to use M. de Maistre's term, out and out anti-Christian, as M. de Tocqueville calls it, in its turn drove out, exiled, put to death, whether in the massacre of September, the drownings of the Loire, by the axe of the guillotine or the dagger of ruffians, the priests, Jesuits, and religious whom the old régime had spared.

But this sanguinary revolution went down in the slough of the Directory, and Napoleon put an end to it.

That extraordinary man perceived that persecution wounds the hand which uses it; he sought to make peace with the church; he reopened the churches, recalled the priests and the bishops, and signed the concordat. This was the great epoch of his reign: Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena.

But the potent emperor, intoxicated by glory and by pride, having become master of the world, thought he would be master of the church as well; his rule was over bodies, he sought to extend it over souls; which is the dream of all founders of empire. He stretched out his hand to the States of the Church, and annexed them to the French Empire; for which he was excommunicated by that gentle Pope Pius VII. He seized the pope, bore him away from Rome into exile at Savona and at Fontainebleau, and he found that under the lamb-like exterior of his victim there beat the heart of a lion. He summoned together the council of 1811, thinking that it would be an easy matter to form a national church of which he would be Supreme Pontiff.

This took place in 1811. The next year brought the campaign of 1812, to be followed by the events of 1813 and 1814; Leipsic, Elba, Waterloo, and the rock of St. Helena last of all.

There is another example nearer to our times, upon which I have looked as a witness, and which I submit for the meditations of the Emperor of Germany.

King William I. of Orange fell into precisely the same blunder which William IV. is now repeating. He ruled over the beautiful kingdom of the Netherlands, so easy for him to maintain, and which through his mistakes was broken up. He, too, sought to constitute national unity through unity of language and of religion. So he suppressed, in 1825, the Catholic schools and colleges in [pg 500] Belgium, drove out the Jesuits and the brothers of the Christian schools, founded at Louvain the Philosophic College in which the clergy of the future national church were to be trained, violated the right to teach and of association, prosecuted the Bishop of Ghent, Mgr. de Broglie, got him condemned, and he was pilloried, in effigy, on a public square of Ghent, between two felons. This reckless and blind policy excited in Belgium a movement of resistance similar to that which we remark at the present moment in Germany. Five years later, in 1830, the Catholic liberal union was brought about, and every one knows the events to which it gave birth.

This much is matter of history. The German persecution is a trial for the church and for Catholics, but it will also bear with it the salvation which a trial properly borne always brings. Two results will come out of this trial: the Catholic Church, which they mean to weaken or prostrate, will, as always heretofore, come out of the contest more united and more powerful; Protestantism, in whose name the persecution is set on foot, will be mortally wounded by it, and will see its dissolution hastened; pseudo-liberalism, which will have played the part of intolerance and persecution, will be unmasked, and all the friends of a prudent and sincere liberty will make their reconciliation with the persecuted, one with that great Catholic Church, ever militant, ever attacked, sometimes a martyr, but which ever in the end comes out triumphant over these trials which temper her anew, purify her, and add to her greatness. The world will understand that in trials such as she is now going through in Germany she is fighting for the liberty of the conscience of the human race.

Governments, and in particular great empires founded on force, look upon the independence of the universal church with feelings of jealousy and impatience; the idea of a national church has always been a favorite and a pleasing one with despotisms, because it promises them a servile instrument to carry out their designs. But when the church is subject to the state, there can be no church. The high level of the consciences of the people sinks as freedom disappears. The true and divine church can be contained within no boundaries and in no nationality; it is the spiritual kingdom of consciences and of souls; from the independence of the church, the independence of consciences and souls derives its life. If the church is under the yoke of the state, all consciences must suffer like subjection. The world will at last comprehend that national churches, that is, churches in subjection, can have only enslaved souls as followers, and that there can be no freedom for the conscience of man, except upon the sole condition of the independence of a church, accountable, not to any human power, but to God.

Will the persecution which has been begun be kept up with the same tenacity and violence which the Prince von Bismarck now displays? I fear less from it for the church than for himself and the German emperor, whose good sense, uprightness, and religious conscience must feel out of place in the midst of a policy so outrée, revolutionary, anti-Christian, and anti-constitutional, so contrary to his instincts, his natural disposition, and his antecedents. “It cannot be,” said M. A. Reichensperger, “that a monarch, crowned with the laurels of victory, after having achieved external peace through the courage and the fidelity of the entire German nation, will authorize the persecution [pg 501] of millions of Germans on account of their faith, and consent to destroy internal peace—that peace which in particular is the work of his royal brother, whose memory is still blessed by all Catholics.”

I add my prayer and my hope to the prayer and the hope of the great German patriot and orator, but I confess that his fears, which are greater than his hopes, are felt by me also, and to like extent. The times are gloomy. “The deluge is drawing nigh; but on the waters I see the ark of the church,” said Count de Montalembert. “She will ride it out, she will live, and will preside at the funeral of the very powers that thought to have prepared her own.”

Let Prince Bismarck not forget the words recently uttered by Pius IX. at one of those allocutions so sublimely eloquent and touchingly holy in spirit, which, from his prison in the Vatican he addresses to the world. He was addressing German Catholics, and he told them: “Be confident, be united; for a stone will fall from the mountain, and will shatter the feet of the Colossus. If God wills that other persecutions arise, the church does not fear them; on the contrary, she becomes stronger thereby, and she purifies herself, because even in the church there are things that need to be purified, and nothing contributes more thereto than the persecutions exercised on her by the great ones of the earth.”

Prince von Bismarck may perhaps have smiled on reading these words fallen from the lips of the Pontiff Pius IX.; if so, he is sadly mistaken; those old popes who are imprisoned and exiled, but who, to use the profound expression of the Count de Maistre, always come back, are also gifted with the command of words which are “as burning coals heaped upon the heads of their persecutors.” The Emperor Napoleon I., too, smiled at the excommunication hurled at him by Pope Pius VII., then weak and disarmed, and his complete ruin followed shortly after. I advise the prince chancellor to bear in mind the stone falling from the mountain and breaking the feet of the Colossus. I had myself, in my book published in 1860, ventured to refer to that same passage of Scripture: “That splendid figure,” I said, “which Daniel sets before us of kingdoms with feet part of iron and part of clay, and of the church, that stone, cut out of a mountain, without hands, which broke in pieces the kingdoms, and became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth—that figure has its application in every age, and should stand for all Christians as a hope amid trials and a teaching to all the proud.”

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