CONTENTS.
“Abraham”—“Abron”—“Auburn,” [234]
Abuse of Diplomatic Authority, An, [130]
Antiquities of the Law, [69]
Appeal to Workingmen, [751]
Art, Necessity versus, [558]
Art Pilgrimage through Rome, An, [808]
Bolanden’s The Russian Idea, [27], [161]
Bolanden’s The Trowel or the Cross, [308], [473]
Bread-Winner, Woman as a, [223]
Brittany: Its People and its Poems, [252], [537]
Bruté, Memoirs of the Rt. Rev. S. G., [711]
Casgrain’s The Canadian Pioneers, [687]
Casgrain’s Picture of the Rivière Ouelle, [103]
Chapman’s The Evolution of Life, [145]
Charlevoix, Shea’s, [721]
Charities, Public, [1]
Chartres, [834]
Church and State in Germany, [513]
Civilization? What is, [486]
Conciliar Decrees on the Holy Scriptures, [195]
Country Life in England, [319]
Darwinism, More about, [641]
Dick Cranstone, [392]
Diplomatic Authority, An Abuse of, [130]
Domestic Festivities, English, [630]
Dubois’ Madame Agnes, [78], [182], [330], [446], [591], [731]
Early Marriage, [839]
Education, Home, [91]
Empire, The, [606]
England, Country Life in, [319]
English Domestic Festivities, [630]
Erckmann-Chatrian, Mme. Jeannette’s Papers, [566]
Error Rectified, An, [144]
Evening at Chamblay, An, [765]
Evolution of Life, The, [145]
Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers, [209]
For Better—For Worse, [257], [408]
Germany, Church and State in, [513]
Grapes and Thorns, [362], [498], [655], [792]
Heaven, [220]
Holy Scriptures, Conciliar Decrees on the, [195]
Home Education, [91]
Indians of Ysléta, The, [422]
Jerome Savonarola, [289], [433], [577]
Jesuits in Paris, The, [701]
John Baptist de Rossi, and his Archæological Works, [272]
Joseph in Egypt, a Type of Christ, [77]
Koche, King of Pitt, [545]
Lace, Something about, [56]
Laughing Dick Cranstone, [392]
Law, Antiquities of the, [69]
Legend of S. Christopher, A, [278]
Legend of S. Martin, A, [137]
Life, The Evolution of, [145]
Madame Agnes, [78], [182], [330], [446], [591], [731]
Madame Jeannette’s Papers, [566]
Marriage, Early, [839]
Memoirs of a Good French Priest, [711]
Middlemarch and Fleurange, [775]
More about Darwinism, [641]
My Cousin’s Introduction, [171]
Myths and Myth-Mongers, [209]
Necessity versus Art, [558]
Palais Royal, The, [113]
Paris, The Jesuits in, [701]
Peace, [157]
People and Poems of Brittany, [252], [537]
Philosophical Terminology, [463]
Picture of the Rivière Ouelle, The, [103]
Poet and Martyr, [40]
Political Principle for the Social Restoration of France, The, [348]
Present Greatness of the Papacy, The, [400]
Public Charities, [1]
Ramière’s The Political Principle of the Social Restoration of France, [348]
Records of a Ruin, The, [113]
Reminiscence of San Marco, A, [707]
Rome, An Art Pilgrimage through, [808]
Rossi, John Baptist de, and his Archæological Works, [272]
Russian Idea, The, [27], [161]
Sales, S. Francis de, [171]
San Marco: A Reminiscence, [707]
Savonarola, Jerome, [289], [433], [577]
Scholars en Déshabillé, [844]
Shakespearian Excursus, A, [234]
Shea’s Charlevoix, [721]
Something about Lace, [56]
Southwell, F. Robert, [40]
Stories of Two Worlds, The, [775]
Terminology, Philosophical, [463]
Travellers and Travelling, [676], [822]
Trowel or the Cross, The, [308], [473]
Unity, [307]
What is Civilization? [486]
Woman as a Bread-Winner, [223]
Workingmen, Appeal to, [751]
Ysléta, The Indians of, [422]
POETRY.
Angel and the Child, The, [570]
Beati qui Lugent, [271]
Christe’s Childhoode, [472]
Dante’s Purgatorio, [24], [158], [304]
Dies Iræ, [221]
Marriage Song, [462]
May Carol, A, [407]
Mother of God, [710]
Music, [807]
Sonnet: The Poetry of the Future, [399]
Sonnet: To the Pillar at S. Paul’s, Rome, [590]
Sonnet: To the Ruins of Emania, [750]
Temple, The, [764]
To a Child, [426]
To a Friend, [497]
To be Forgiven, [821]
To the Sacred Heart, [536]
Virgin Mary, The, to Christ on the Crosse, [39]
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Augustine, S., Harmony of the Evangelists, etc., [855]
Augustine, S., On the Trinity, [855]
Alcott’s Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Book, [142]
Amulet, The, [575]
Bagshawe’s Threshold of the Catholic Church, [572]
Bateman’s Ierne of Armorica, [427]
Begin’s La Primauté et l’Infaillibilité des Souveraines Pontifes, etc., [576]
Bolanden’s, The Progressionists, and Angela, [281]
Brady’s Irish Reformation, [573]
Brady’s State Papers on the Irish Church, [573]
Brann’s Truth and Error, [142]
Brothers of the Christian Schools during the War, The, [430]
Burke’s Lectures and Sermons, [718]
Caddell’s Wild Times, [284]
Catechism of the Holy Rosary, [428]
Church Defence, [280]
Conscience’s The Amulet, [575]
Conscience’s The Fisherman’s Daughter, [575]
Constance and Marion, [432]
Deaf Mute, The, [288]
Devere’s Modern Magic, [575]
Directorium Sacerdotale, [574]
Doctrine of Hell, [571]
Donnelly’s Out of Sweet Solitude, [720]
Ernscliff Hall, [288]
Elements of Philosophy, [427]
Estcourt’s Anglican Ordinations, [856]
Filiola, [288]
Fisherman’s Daughter, The, [575]
Formby’s Catechism of the Holy Rosary, [428]
Garside’s The Prophet of Carmel, [858]
Gaume’s Sign of the Cross in the XIXth Century, [429]
Gaume’s Suema, [428]
God Our Father, [143]
Greatorex’s Homes of Ober-Ammergau, [288]
Hare’s Memorials of a Quiet Life, [431]
Herbert’s Wilfulness, [285]
Hill’s Elements of Philosophy, [427]
Humphrey’s Mary magnifying God, [428]
Hundred Meditations on the Love of God, A, [574]
Ierne of Armorica, [427]
Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library, [430]
Isabelle de Verneuil, [430]
King and the Cloister, The, [430]
Laboulaye’s Poodle Prince, [431]
Landroit’s Sins of the Tongue, [719]
Landroit’s The Valiant Woman, [858]
Life and Letters of a Sister of Charity, [142]
Life of Dorié, [281]
Life of Vénard, [281]
Limerick Veteran, [719]
Lunt’s Old New England Traits, [720]
McGee’s Sketches of Irish Soldiers, [860]
Mary magnifying God, [428]
Marshall’s Church Defence, [280]
Marshall’s My Clerical Friends, [138]
Meditations on the Blessed Virgin, [860]
Meline’s Two Thousand Miles on Horseback, [286]
Meyrick’s Life of S. Walburge, [855]
Mericourt’s Vivia Perpetua, [575]
Money God, The, [282]
Mulloy’s A Visit to Louise Lateau, [574]
Munro’s Lectures on Old Testament History, [858]
Nesbits, The, [283]
Old New England Traits, [720]
Only a Pin, [574]
Out of Sweet Solitude, [720]
Palma’s Particular Examen, [860]
Peter’s Journey, etc., [285]
Potter’s Rupert Aubrey, [859]
Primauté, La, et l’Infaillibilité des Souveraines Pontifes, etc., [576]
Proceedings of the Convention of the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union, [287]
Progressionists, The, and Angela, [281]
Quinton’s The Money God, [282]
Reverse of the Medal, The, [288]
Sainte-Germaine’s Only a Pin, [574]
Sermons for all the Sundays and Festivals of the Year, [428]
Sign of the Cross in the XIXth Century, [429]
Snell’s Isabelle de Verneuil, [430]
Sœur Eugénie, [142]
Southwell’s Meditations, [574]
Stewart’s Limerick Veteran, [719]
Suema, [428]
Sunday-School Library, [430]
Sweeney’s Sermons, [428]
Taylor’s Lars, [430]
Thebaud’s The Irish Race, [432], [718]
Thompson’s Hawthorndean, [430]
Threshold of the Catholic Church, [572]
Truth and Error, [142]
Two Thousand Miles on Horseback, [286]
Valuy’s Directorium Sacerdotale, [574]
Visit to Louise Lateau, A, [574]
Walworth and Burr, Doctrine of Hell, [571]
Wild Times, [284]
Wilfulness, [285]
Winged Word, A, etc., [572]
Wiseman’s Essays, [431], [575]
Wiseman’s Lectures on the Church, [143]
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XVII., No. 97.—APRIL, 1873.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by Rev. I. T. Hecker, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
[PUBLIC CHARITIES.]
Modern civilization has no higher or more important question to deal with than that of ameliorating the condition of the poor, the unfortunate, the ignorant, and the vicious. Governments are and can be engaged in no more appalling work than that of legislating wisely in regard to these classes, and in seeing that not only are their inevitable wants provided for and the public interests protected, but also that their rights are secured in fact as well as in theory, and that the instruments employed in these exalted spheres of public administration are suited to their purpose, and are guarded against degenerating from means of amelioration into agencies of oppression, cruelty, and injustice.
There are two chief motives which lead to the care and provision for the unfortunate members of the social body—charity on the one side, and philanthropy on the other. Religion inspires every motive for this great and holy work, and of all the virtues which religion inspires, charity is the highest, purest, and best. Charity is the love of God, and of man for God’s sake. That God of charity has revealed to us that, of faith, hope, and charity, the greatest is charity; that he that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord; that he who performs works of charity to the least of the human race performs them ipso facto to the Lord, creator and ruler of the universe; and that the eternal doom of every human being at the last dread day will be decided by this great test. Christianity itself, like her divine founder, is charity. The church of God, like her Lord and Spouse, is charity. She is imbued with and reflects his divine essence, which is charity. Charity arises from no statute or arbitrary decree, which might or might not be made according to the option of the legislator; it is the essence and motive of all good. It exists in the very nature of things. And as the love of God by man is the first and necessary relation of the creature to the Creator, and as our fellow-creatures exist from God, and in and by him, it is only through God and in him that we love them. Thus charity is no human sentiment or affection, like philanthropy or the natural love of our neighbor and brother; it is a supernatural virtue, springing from God, and sustained by his grace. The man who does not love his neighbor cannot love God, but rejects his love and violates the first law of his being. Every word and act of our divine Saviour, while engaged on earth in establishing his church, proves this, if there be need of external proof. Even after his work on earth was done, and he had ascended to his Father, he speaks to us through the mouth of S. Paul: “If I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries, and all knowledge, and have all faith, so I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and should give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”[1]
Philanthropy, on the other hand, is the love of man for the sake of man; in other words, humanitarianism. It is a human affection springing from natural motives. To alleviate human sufferings, and promote human pleasures and enjoyments, are its aims. Its object is the body rather than the soul, earth rather than heaven, time rather than eternity. Its motive power is sentiment or feeling rather than reason or religion. It is a sensitiveness to all human suffering, because suffering or pain is repulsive to human nature. Philanthropy is a virtue in the natural order, springing from human motives, and not a supernatural virtue springing from religious motives and inspired by divine grace. Philanthropy is good in itself, for our human nature still remains; nature and grace are not antagonistic, and may co-exist; nature is dependent on grace to raise it to the supernatural state and transform it into charity. Charity includes philanthropy, as the greater includes the lesser. Philanthropy without charity is earthly in its aims, frequently rash and sometimes unjust in its measures, tyrannical in the exercise of power, and not unfrequently barren in its results.
Now, the church and the state are the organized representatives of these two virtues, the divine and the human. The church is a divine kingdom, and cultivates the divine virtue of charity; the state is a human kingdom, and cultivates the human virtue of philanthropy. The church is a supernatural body, and practises the supernatural virtue of charity; the state exists in the natural order, and practises the natural sentiment of philanthropy. The church is of heaven, and her greatest jewel, charity, is of heaven; the state is of earth, and the greatest of her merits is philanthropy, which is of earthly birth. The church is eternal, so is charity; the state is temporal, as is philanthropy. The church is of God, God is charity, so the church is charity; the state is of man, so is philanthropy. The rewards of the one are eternal; of the other, temporal. Charity is a Christian virtue, and can violate no other Christian virtue in adopting her measures; she cannot make the end justify the means; but philanthropy is a human virtue, and stops at no means necessary to attain its end. Abuses are not necessarily the results of philanthropy, for philanthropy, guided by even human reason, is capable of respecting the rights of God and men, and, when guided by supernatural grace, is exalted to charity.[2]
What we have chiefly to deal with in this article are institutions of benevolence, which are either wholly public property, and such as, though conducted either by private individuals or by incorporated boards of citizen managers, yet receive large shares of the public funds for their foundation, buildings, or current support, and thus become, to that extent, public institutions, and as such liable to be inquired into and criticised by the state and its citizens who pay the taxes thus expended.
The state in our times and in almost every country undertakes the restraint and custody of the persons of idiots, lunatics, drunkards, and other persons of unsound mind, for their safety; of paupers, for their maintenance; and of minors, unprovided with natural guardians, for purposes of their education, reformation, and maintenance. It is not for us to discuss at length in this article the right of the state in any country to educate and reform minors, or, in other words, to assume the place of teacher and priest; for it cannot undertake to educate without assuming the place of teacher, and still less can the state undertake the work of reformation without usurping the sacred functions of the sacerdotal office. Our faith, our reason, and our convictions teach us that such offices belong not to the state, but to the church. The state can establish places of restraint and punishment, and support and maintain them, both for the protection of the public, for the safety of the individuals themselves, and for purposes of philanthropy. Having done this, it is the duty of the state to leave free the consciences of its wards and prisoners, and to give every facility to the ministers of every church and religious persuasion to have free and unrestricted access to the children and prisoners belonging to those respective churches or persuasions. We claim this for ourselves as Catholics, and we leave the sects, the Jews, and every other society of religionists to claim the same for themselves. We are willing to make common cause with them for the attainment of our rights. That it is a charity for the state, or, more correctly speaking, a work of humanity, to assume the temporal care and provision for those unfortunate members of society who, either by their own fault, by the visitation of Providence, or by misfortune, are unable to take care of themselves, we are not disposed to deny at present, though even this belongs primarily to the religious duties of the individual, and, therefore, comes within the province of the church; and we know how well the church discharged this duty before the Reformation, and is doing it now. Yet we do not deny to the sects, to all men, and to the state, the right to perform good deeds and to practise the broadest philanthropy. Such at least seems to be one of the accepted works of government. We therefore accept such institutions and works as we find them, and we will view them in the same light in which our fellow-citizens generally regard them. As citizens, as Americans, we feel the same interest in them, experience the same pride in them, and, as a question of property and public right, we hold them as a common heritage, in which we have the same interest and authority as our fellow-citizens. We are, therefore, equally interested in their proper management and good government, and we yield to none in our desire to promote their prosperity and success. There is no part of public administration more sacred or important, no function of the state so momentous, no public responsibility so awful, as this. Accepting them, as we do, as a part of our common property and united work, we shrink not from any effort for their good government and success, and, if need be, for their improvement, reformation, and correction. When properly conducted, we have nothing but praise for them; and if, on the other hand, they are mismanaged, the funds extravagantly applied; if they are made the instruments of cruelty, perversion, or despotism; if in them or any of them religious liberty is violated, and systems of proselytizing are carried on against Catholic children, or the children of the sects, or those of the Jewish Church, we as Catholics and as American citizens will speak out freely and boldly in denouncing them. We are not disqualified from doing this, either as citizens or Catholics; not as citizens, because they belong to us as much as to other citizens; our money is there with that of others; and the Constitution gives us liberty of speech and of the press, and guarantees to us “the right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances”;[3] not as Catholics, for we have as such the experience of eighteen hundred years of the most exalted works of charity; and because we claim for ourselves no special privilege over others, but are willing to concede to all what we claim for ourselves. No clamor will deter us from the exercise of this right, or from the performance of this duty. And whilst we cannot yield our rights to any one sect of Protestantism, we are equally determined, while respecting the rights of all Protestants, not to yield our constitutional rights to all the sects of Protestantism combined under the false and deceptive name of unsectarianism. We do not believe in ex-parte and sham investigations of public abuses in respect to public institutions, and we do not belong to, and are determined not to be deluded by, whitewashing committees of investigation and amiable grand juries. We are ever ready to praise, yet we shrink not from administering censure.
The theory upon which governmental institutions are founded, and those established by private citizens or boards are assisted is, that of protecting society from a large, idle, ignorant, vicious population, by providing the means for the temporal relief and social improvement and correction of these classes, so as to bring them to the age of self-support in the case of children, to punish criminals, relieve the poor, and thus gradually return them all to society as sober, enlightened, honest, industrious, and thrifty citizens. For these purposes heavy taxes are laid on the citizens, immense piles of buildings are erected at the public expense, and such institutions are annually maintained or aided at enormous cost to the people. In our November, 1872, number, while admitting and praising the philanthropic motive which sustains these institutions, we regarded them “as really nuisances of the worst kind, so far as Catholic children are concerned, on account of their proselytizing character. Moreover,” we said, “in their actual workings they violate the rights both of parents and children, and we have evidence that these poor children are actually sold at the West, both by private sale and by auction. The horrible abuses existing in some state institutions are partly known to the public, and we have the means of disclosing even worse things than those which have recently been exposed in the public papers.” It is difficult to perceive the success of such institutions as ameliorating or reformatory agents, for our public press is loaded every day with evidences of the enormous increase of crime and pauperism, and with dissertations on the causes of such increase. The public are naturally slow in believing that such institutions, upon which so much treasure has been spent, are failures. Such a reflection is an unpalatable one; it is humiliating to our pride, and damaging to the boasted progress of the XIXth century. It crushes our self-esteem to know that, of all places needing correction, our Houses of Correction need correction most; and that, of all institutions calling for the stern hand of reform, there are none that need so much reformation as our schools of reform. A religious paper called The Christian Union has given strong proof of its dislike to have the public eyes opened to these unpalatable truths, and we do not think we should have returned so soon to this subject but for a rather disingenuous article in that paper, couched in terms not calculated to convince the public that it derived its name from the practice or spirit of the virtue of Christian union, which, while challenging us to expose these wrongs and abuses, declared but too great a willingness to believe “that these charges, so frequently made in Roman Catholic journals, have already received thorough investigation and perfect refutation.”
We complain that our Catholic children in institutions which are supported in whole or in part by public funds—funds, therefore, in which we have a common property with our fellow-citizens—instead of being allowed the instruction and practice of their Catholic religion, are taught Protestantism in its, to us, most offensive form, and are thus exposed to the almost certain loss of their faith. The facts upon which we base the charge have never been denied, but, on the contrary, they are openly admitted and announced. Protestants deny that they proselytize Catholic children so as to make them members of any distinctive sect, but they admit that Catholic teaching and practices are rigidly excluded, and yet that the children are taught a certain religion. Is it not evident that, if such religious instruction produces any result, it is to make these children cease to be Catholics, to become non-Catholics, to take the Bible as their only rule of faith, to reject the infallible teachings of their own church, and to accept the teachings of the institutions as all that is necessary for them to know? This is proselytism of the most offensive kind; our children are either made liberal Christians, or are placed in circumstances which inevitably lead to their joining one or other of the distinctive forms of Protestantism or lose all religion whatever. Wherever a chaplain is employed, he is either a Methodist minister, such as Rev. Mr. Pierce in the New York House of Refuge, or he is a Baptist, Episcopalian, or other sectarian minister. In many of these institutions, the religious instruction is under the direction of a lay superintendent, as in the Providence School of Reform. And here we beg to give a piece of testimony showing how incompetent laymen are for religious instruction in public reformatories. The witness under examination was at the time one of the trustees of the Providence Reform School:
“Q. Have you any knowledge in relation to the distribution of religious books among the pupils, and their being taken away?
“A. I don’t of my own knowledge; I furnished once one book of a religious character, and one only; I furnished it to the officer having in charge the devotional exercises on the girls’ side; I gave that to the officer for his own use; it was given to him in consequence of considerable religious feeling that there was existing among the girls at the time; the girls were holding among themselves what they called prayer-meetings; the gentleman having in charge the devotional exercises said he felt utterly incompetent to conduct the devotions in suitable words,” etc.
Religious liberty is openly and positively denied in the New York House of Refuge, as will be seen from their own “Report of Special Committee to the Managers of the House of Refuge,” 1872; from which it appears, at pp. 21, 22, that the religion of the house consists in “Christian worship in simple form, and Gospel lessons in Sunday-schools,” and that the “inmates are brought into the same chapel for public worship,” and that “the whole regimen of the house,” including of course the religious part, “is devised and pursued with careful attention to the wants of the inmates, but is not submitted to the control of themselves or their friends.” As Americans we have been taught from our infancy that liberty of conscience is the dearest right of the American citizen. We learned in our college days that even “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”; but we now learn that what the highest legislative power in the nation, and what no state legislature, can do, the managers of the New York House of Refuge have done and are now doing: they have made a law respecting the establishment of a religion in the House of Refuge, a public institution—a religion which they have called variously “Christian worship in simple form,” “Gospel lessons,” “Unsectarianism,” “The Broad Principles of Christianity”—and have forbidden the free exercise of any other religion. Even if all Christians were united in this worship and in these principles, have Jewish citizens no rights under the Constitution? As citizens of the State of New York, we have learned from the state constitution and Bill of Rights “that the free exercise and practice of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall for ever be allowed to all mankind.” Chancellor Kent, in his Commentaries on American Law, says that “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship may be considered as one of the absolute rights of individuals, recognized in our American constitutions and secured to them by law.”[4] And Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution, maintains in equally strong terms “the freedom of public worship according to the dictates of one’s conscience.”[5]
But we are now told by the Managers of the House of Refuge that “delinquency has, under the law, worked some forfeiture of rights, and that neither the delinquents nor their friends for them can justly claim, while under sentence of the courts, equal freedom with the rest of the community who have not violated the law.”[6] Such was the answer given by American citizens, constituting the Board of Managers of the New York House of Refuge, to the committee of American citizens sent by the Catholic Union to demand liberty of conscience and freedom of religious worship for the Catholic children in the Refuge! Either this answer means that the children in the House of Refuge are not a portion of mankind, or that religious freedom is one of the rights forfeited by delinquency, or the Board of Managers have proclaimed themselves guilty of the grossest violation of the rights of man and of God. We presume these gentlemen will not admit either the first or the third of these alternatives; indeed, they almost say in terms that a commitment to the House of Refuge works a forfeiture of that religious liberty guaranteed to all mankind. We know delinquency under the law suspends the civil rights of the delinquent while in prison, such as the right to hold public office or administer a private trust; but it does not work even a forfeiture of property except in the case of an outlawry of treason. These are all the forfeitures worked by the highest crimes known to the law. Religion is not a civil right; no crime can forfeit it; no power on earth can extinguish it. The greatest of public malefactors, the murderer and the traitor, enjoy it even on the scaffold: does the child whose only offence is poverty or vagrancy forfeit it? In the sacred names of Liberty and Religion, what sort of Refuge is this to stand on American soil?
The Children’s Aid Society is another New York institution largely supported by public funds. We learn from its Nineteenth Annual Report, 1871, that one of its objects is to shelter in its lodging-houses the orphan and the homeless girls and boys, and labor incessantly to give them the “foundation ideas of morals and religion” (p. 5). Alluding to the Italian School, No. 44 Franklin Street, the report says: “We have conquered the prejudices and superstition of ignorance, and converted into useful citizens hundreds of this unfortunate class.” With such a programme of unsectarian conversion, the leading feature in which is indifferentism in religion, the immediate forerunner of infidelity and agrarianism, it is no wonder that the report immediately proceeds: “So much so, indeed, that the Italian government,” that same godless government which is so ferociously waging war on Catholicity, “has taken a deep interest in our institution” (p. 28).
It is only necessary to read these reports to be convinced that the system either leads to materialism, the religion of worldly prosperity and thrifty citizenship, or to some form of Protestant sectarianism. The system of “emigration” pursued by such institutions, by which children are sent out West and placed with anybody and everybody who will take them, completes the work commenced in the East. On pages 54-56 of the report last quoted is related the case of a youth sent East, who “cannot speak of his parents with any certainty at all”; it matters not what religion they were of, the son is now preparing for the ministry of one of the sects. His letter also recites a similar case in reference to another boy “who was sent out West.” It is certain that he is not preparing for the Catholic ministry, for his impressions of a miracle are thus expressed: “To be taken from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.” The story of young “Patrick,” p. 59, whose education was obtained at the Preparatory School at Oberlin and at Cornell University, is significant. On page 60 is told the story of an Irish orphan girl sent to Connecticut, and placed with “an intelligent Christian woman, who means to do right.” On page 63 is told the history of a little boy sent to Michigan, who is well pleased with toys and new clothes, “like all other children; he has a splendid new suit of clothes just got, and he attends church and Sabbath-school.” A similar case is related at page 65, of a little girl sent to Ohio, and we shall show below what has become of little girls sent to that state. These are some of the model cases of which this unsectarian society makes a boast in its report. It is a significant fact that, of the 8,835 who came under the influences of this society in one year, 3,312 were of Irish birth, and it may be estimated with certainty that a considerable proportion of the other children of foreign, as well as many of home birth were Catholics. The number of children born in Ireland who were sent West during the year was 1,058. This institution received for the furtherance of these unsectarian objects the sum of $66,922.70 in this year from our public funds.
We have also before us the Twentieth Annual Report of the New York Juvenile Asylum, 1871, which proves the proselytizing character of this public-pap-fed unsectarian institution. “The children that are entrusted to us are at the most susceptible period of life,” etc., “when their destiny for time, if not for eternity, may be fixed” (p. 9). “They must be drilled into systematic habits of life in eating, sleeping, play, study, work, and worship” (p. 10). To “attend church” (p. 21), and “the evening worship,” and religious services generally, are frequently recurring duties of the children. In this institution the children of foreign birth during the year were 3,648, and of these 1,981 were born in Ireland. Of course we cannot say how many of the children of home birth were the children of Irish and Catholic parents. We have, alas! but too much certainty that a large proportion of the children are Catholic. We casually met recently with an interesting proof of this in Scribner’s Magazine, November, 1870, in an account given by a visitor to the Juvenile Asylum. In the evening the visitor was invited to see the girls’ dormitory as the girls were going to bed. She writes: “All the children were saying their prayers. I noticed that several of them made the sign of the cross as they rose.” Touching evidence of their traditional faith and parental teaching! a simple but sublime tribute to holy church! an earnest sign of love and hope for those sacraments which came to us through the cross, but which, like that cross itself, were not a part of the religion, worship, and practice of this unsectarian asylum.
In the list of model examples presented in the report of the Western agent will be seen the usual proselytizing influence of such institutions. The cases either show mere material or worldly advantage, or the embrace of pure sectarianism. On page 50 is related the case of a little girl, who “scarcely remembers her parents,” of whom it is related that “she is a member of the Presbyterian Church.” Two other girls are indentured to members of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The “church and Sunday-school” are prominent features in nearly every case. The amount received during the year by this unsectarian institution from our public funds was $62,065.24..
The Five Points House of Industry, which received, from 1858 to 1869, the sum of $30,731.69. from our Board of Education, states in its charter, among the objects for which it was incorporated, the following: “III. To imbue the objects of its care with the pure principles of Christianity, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures, without bias from the distinctive peculiarities of any individual sect.” This means that the children belonging to distinctive religious denominations, instead of being allowed to follow the distinctive tenets, and practise the worship, in which they were reared, are deprived of this right, and, as respects the Catholic children, they are to reject and exclude every tenet and devotion distinctively Catholic. How far even this profession of unsectarianism is carried into practice will be discovered from the Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry for April and May, 1870, p. 302, giving an account of the dedicatory exercises:
“The services consisted of an opening anthem by the children, followed by a prayer by Rev. Dr. Paxton, asking a blessing upon the House and its objects.
“This was followed by a hymn; a statement of the affairs of the institution, by Rev. S. B. Halliday; a recitative by the children; a statement as to city missions, by Rev. G. J. Mingins; a short discourse on the ‘Union of Christian Effort,’ by Rev. H. D. Ganse; a discourse on the ‘Lights and Shadows of Large Cities,’ by Rev. John Hall, D.D.; and, finally, a roundelay given by the children.”
How far the pledge given in the charter of this establishment, “without bias from the distinctive peculiarities of any individual sect,” is carried out is further seen from the following extract from a letter addressed by the president to the Rev. John Cotton Smith, a prominent minister of the Episcopalian sect: “Between your church and the institution the most kind and harmonious co-operation has ever existed. They will ever cherish a most pleasing remembrance of the relations that have subsisted between them.”[7]
We might have alluded to the “Howard Mission and Home for Little Wanderers,” founded by that arch-proselytizer, the Rev. W. C. Van Meter, which during seven years disposed of 7,580 “little wanderers” of this city, in an unsectarian manner; but want of space forbids our doing so. But the animus pervading this and other unsectarian institutions is exhibited to us now in the fact, that this reverend has transferred the field of his labors from the Five Points to the city of Rome, the centre and headquarters of Catholicity. He has there established a mission and home for the little Romans. We do not stand alone in our opinion that such institutions are nuisances for Catholic children, and we quote the closing words of a letter recently addressed to the Rev. Mr. Van Meter by the editor of the Voce della Verita, at Rome:
“Now, dear sir, excuse me if I remind you, that although a very ignorant person, ‘when I was a little boy,’ I also went to school, and learned a few things about your country. I remember to have heard it said that misery and ignorance abounded there, and that many hundreds of thousands of your compatriots knew of no other God than the almighty dollar. Why do you not go back and teach in Nebraska or Texas, and leave us alone? You might positively do some good there—now you are a—well, let me tell the truth—a nuisance. By your homeward voyage, you will benefit both your own country and ours.”[8]
Another complaint that we make against our semi-governmental charities relates to the violation of the rights of parents and children, in the sale of these children at the West. This pernicious practice of exiling and transporting children from New York to the West is still in full vigor amongst these institutions. How can we boast of our charities, when their main feature consists in shifting the burden from our own shoulders to those of others, and they are strangers? It is in vain that we claim these children as the wards and protégés of society and of our city, if we repudiate the duties and responsibilities of our guardianship. Against this cruelty and injustice we protest in the names of civilization and Christianity. The institutions whose reports we have referred to not only admit, but they boast of this outrage upon the rights of parents and of children. One of them, the Children’s Aid Society, refers to this branch of operations, “its Emigration System,” as the “crown” of all its works. The number of children thus exiled from the state by this society and transported to distant regions, during the year of the report referred to, was 3,386; the whole number since 1854 was 25,215. More than half the 3,386 were sent to Ohio, and to the distant states of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Of one little boy thus exiled, who was separated from his parents at the age of eight years, the Western agent reports: “I think his mother would scarcely know him.” He reports that the mistress to whom another was “disposed of” writes of him: “Indeed, I don’t know what I should do without him, for he saves me a great many steps. I wish we could find out about his brother and sister, he often cries about them.”
Exile and transportation of children is also practised by the Five Points House of Industry. They have obtained extraordinary powers for this purpose from the Legislature. For while the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction, a purely governmental institution, possess the power of indenturing children to citizens of the state of New York and adjoining states only, the Five Points House of Industry has received the power to send them anywhere and everywhere. But the Commissioners of Public Charities and Correction send the poor children they get into their power to the most remote states in violation of the express law of the case. For instead of confining their indentures to citizens of New York and the adjoining states, as the law directs, they send them indiscriminately to every state, even the most distant. We ask those public servants by what fiction of law they make California and Texas adjoin New York?
The New York Juvenile Asylum has also a “regular agency at Chicago, by which the work of indenturing children at the West is conducted.”[9] The total number of children sent West during fifteen years, from 1857 to 1871 inclusive, is 2,206, and the annual average, 147-1/15 (p. 47).
The extent to which this crowning cruelty of our non-sectarian institutions is carried, is appalling. We have only cited the cases of the three whose reports happened to be before us. But we have been informed, unofficially, and we think the statement can be made good, that there are in the city of New York no less than twenty-eight charitable institutions engaged in this cruel practice of transporting our New York children to the West and other remote parts, and the average number of these little exiles per week is about two hundred, making about ten thousand every year. What untold abuses and hardships must result from this barbarous practice! However noble, generous, and philanthropic may be the motives of the citizen-managers of these institutions, they cannot attend in person to the details or even the general management of their work. Not only are their houses in the city confided to the management of hired and salaried agents and servants, but the work of transporting children to the West is confided generally to the same class of agents, and we intend to show how this charitable function is discharged. They are actuated by no higher motives than usually actuate their class. The love of God, and of man for God’s sake, is not the spirit that inspires their labors and guides their steps. Corruption and infidelity to duty have stalked brazenly into the public service everywhere; what reason have we for claiming an exemption in favor of those who find profitable employment in the administration of public charities?
But, as the Christian Union demands further proof than is accessible to the public, we will produce some additional evidence, although we think we have already shown enough to condemn this system; and the tone of that journal’s article leads us to believe that if an angel from heaven disclosed to its view the same corruption and oppression which we see in this branch of public administration, it would still cling to its idols.
Now we have before us a letter, dated September 23, 1872, addressed by a clergyman at Tiffin, Ohio, to a clergyman in the East, from which we quote:
“In answer to your request concerning those children brought on some four or five years ago from the East to be disposed of, I might say with prudence, that to several counties of Ohio had been brought car-loads of children from three years on to twelve and thirteen years old, and offered to the public to take one or more; for they who offered the children said those who would take them had to pay the expenses of bringing them to the place. For some children the man said the expense would be fifteen dollars, for others more, others less. This is the way the affair was carried on for some time.”
The gentleman to whom the foregoing letter was addressed, and who sent it to us, gives also his own testimony on this public traffic in innocent human beings. His letter is dated September 25, 1872, and reads as follows:
“At that time,” some four or five years ago, “I was on a trip to Tiffin. Delayed for a short time at Clyde, I asked some questions of the baggage-master. Three little girls were near him, and I asked him: ‘Are these your daughters?’ A. ‘No, I bought them?’ ‘Bought them! how? from whom?’ A. ‘Oh! from the ministers. They bring car-loads of these little ones every few weeks, and sell them to any one who wants them. I gave $10 for this one, $12 for the next, and $15 for the oldest. I had not the money, but I borrowed it from the tavern-keeper, and paid for the girls. Lately there was another load of them. There was a very fine girl. I wanted her. But the minister said, ‘No; I have promised her to a rich man in Forrest, who will pay more than you.’ After some further conversation of a similar character, the train came in sight, and I left. The next day I was speaking of the circumstance at table. Rev. Mr.—— remarked that he knew the baggage-master well, and that what he said was true. He added, ‘Within the last month there was a sale of some thirty of these children in our Court House. One of my parishioners, Mr.——, came along as the sale was about over. A little boy was standing before the Court House crying; the German asked him, ‘What is the matter?’ He said, ‘That man wants to sell me, and no one will buy me.’ The boy was bought by the German for $10. I had heard such transactions described in one of his lectures by F. Haskins. But I scarcely realized how fearful such conduct is until I heard a description of these sales from persons who had seen them.”
Such, indeed, is the “crowning” work of some of the charitable institutions of New York! Is this the fulfilment of the Gospel of charity, or of the Sermon on the Mount, or of the broad principles of Christianity? Perhaps, rather, it is the Rev. Mr. Pierce’s elastic system of religion.[10] Compare these humiliating facts with the self-congratulatory reports on “Emigration” of the Children’s Aid Society, which in 1871 sent three hundred and seven of these little wards of the city to the same state of Ohio.[11] At page 10 we read:
“Every year we expect that the opposition of a very bigoted and ignorant class will materially lessen this the most effective of our charitable efforts. We have surpassed, however, owing to the energy of our Western agents, the results of every previous equal period, in the labors of the past year.
“Crowds of poor boys have thronged the office or have come to the lodging-houses for a ‘chance to go West’; great numbers of very destitute but honest families have appealed to us for this aid, and our agents have frequently conveyed parties of a hundred and more. The West has received these children liberally as before; and there has been less complaint the past year than usual of bad habits and perverse tempers. The larger boys are still restless as ever, and inclined to change their places where higher inducements are offered. But this characteristic they have in common with our whole laboring class.”
Again:
“Emigration.—This department has worked most successfully the past year. A larger number has been removed from the city than ever before.”
It would seem, however, that the experience of the New York Juvenile Asylum, though still persevering in this traffic as a good work, has not been as satisfactory as that of the Children’s Aid Society. We will give an extract from the Twentieth Annual Report, showing even from the mouths of those who practise it as a good work what a crying evil this is, and confirming the extracts we have given in reference to the sales of children in Ohio:
“Removing and replacing children is one of the important functions of the agency. Our children are first placed on trial, and in nearly every company some have to be replaced over and over again before they are permanently settled. But even after indentures have been executed, new developments often compel removals. Such are the weaknesses of human nature, and such the instability of human affairs, that, without provision to meet the exigencies consequent upon them, cases of extreme hardship and inhumanity would be frequent. They who have not had experience in this kind of work are not apt to realize, and it is often difficult to persuade them of, the imperative need of such provision. Children will not unfrequently get into improper hands in spite of every precaution, and in many cases success is more or less problematical. Death of employers also, and change of circumstances, are often the occasion of removals. Not a month goes by that does not furnish cases where, but for timely attention, suffering, mischief, and irreparable evil would result. A little familiarity with the field work of this agency would convince its most obdurate opponent that to leave children without recourse among strangers in a strange land is an unjustifiable procedure.”
Apart from the inhumanity of this procedure, from its unchristian character, from its proselytizing effects, we protest against it in the name of law, of right, and of human liberty. The common law of England is our heritage, and by that common law “no power on earth, except the authority of parliament, can send any subject of England out of the land against his will; no, not even a criminal. The great charter declares that no freeman shall be banished unless by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land; and by the habeas corpus act it is enacted that no subject of this realm who is an inhabitant of England, Wales, or Berwick shall be sent into Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, or other places beyond the seas.”[12] Chancellor Kent, in his Commentaries on American Law (ii. 34), claims the same proud privilege as one of the absolute rights of American citizens, and, while declaring that “no citizen can be sent abroad,” states that the constitutions of several of the states of our confederacy contain express provisions forbidding transportation beyond the state.
We come now to the last and not the least painful task, which the Christian Union insists upon our undertaking; it relates to “the horrible abuses existing in some of our state institutions.” And here, as in the preceding remarks, we must confine ourselves to a portion only of the mass of materials before us, and, in fact, confine ourselves to a single institution; for, if such things exist in a single case, this is enough to prove not only the possibility, but also the probability of the same thing in others, and to dispel the fatal blindness which can see nothing defective either in their constitution or management. We must pass over the charges recently preferred against the New York House of Refuge, relating to improper food, of excessive labor, of cruel punishments, employment of unfit and incompetent agents in the management of the institution, and of religious intolerance. While we think that the evidence produced on the trial of the boy, Justus Dunn, for killing one of the officers of the Refuge, goes far to substantiate most of the charges preferred, we have, in common with the community, but little respect for the whitewashing certificate given by the grand-jury, who made a flying visit to the institution, by invitation, on an appointed day. Of course the officers put their house in order, and failed not to put their best foot foremost, on this preconcerted occasion. The managers placed no reliance on this acquittal, for they courted another soon afterwards. The second investigation by the State Commissioners of Charity was very little better; it was ex parte on all the charges except that of religious intolerance, and the Refuge was acquitted on all the charges except this last.
We must also pass over, for want of space, the revolting case which occurred at the New York Juvenile Asylum in June last, in which one of the inmates of the asylum, a colored girl, instead of finding there an asylum from temptation and seduction, fell a victim to the lust of one of the officers of the institution, who fled precipitately on discovery of the fact.[13] We must pass over, for the same reason, the investigations recently conducted at St. Louis, which are far from showing a satisfactory result for the management and conduct of public reformatories. We must confine ourselves now to a single institution—a case in which the evidence is replete with horrible abuses, cruelties, improprieties, and wrongs. While we would be sorry to apply the maxim, ex uno disce omnes, we can but regard this case as a general warning to our people to beware of regarding as good everything in the moral order that goes under the much-abused name of reform.
The Providence School of Reform is an institution supported by funds received both from the state of Rhode Island and from the city of Providence. Its object seems to be the temporal, social, and moral reformation of juvenile delinquents of both sexes. Some time prior to 1869, it had been the subject of the gravest charges and investigation, which tended to show that, so far from having been in all its departments and workings a school of reform, it had in some instances become a school for vice and immorality. The whitewashing process, that facile and amiable way of avoiding disagreeable complications, prevented the accomplishment of any change for the better. But in 1869 the charges against the institution took a more definite form, and were signed and presented by thirty-one citizens of Providence to the corporate authorities—citizens of the first respectability and standing. The Board of Aldermen of the city of Providence, headed by the Mayor, undertook the investigation, and the evidence is contained in two large volumes in one, extending over eleven hundred and forty-two pages.[14]
The charges were the most serious ones that could be brought against an institution, especially against one professing reform, and had their origin with citizens without distinction of creed. Their true character and extent can only be understood by a perusal of them:
“First. That vices against chastity, decency, and good morals have prevailed in the school, and have been taught and practised by teachers as well as by pupils; that these vices have existed both in the male and female departments, and that the children usually leave the school more corrupt than when they entered it.
“Second. That teachers have used immodest and disgusting language in the presence of children, and have addressed females in an indecent manner by referring to their past character, and by calling them vile and unbecoming names.
“Third. That modes of punishment the most cruel and inhuman have been used in said school, such as knocking down and kicking the pupils, and whipping them when naked, and with a severity not deserved by their offences.
“Fourth. That young women are said to have been kicked, knocked down, dragged about by the hair of the head, and otherwise brutally treated, but more especially that all modesty and decency have been outraged by stripping them to the waist and lashing them on the naked back; taking them from their beds and whipping them in their night-dresses; tying their hands and feet and ducking them; and by other forms of punishment which no man should ever inflict upon a woman.
“Fifth. That names of children committed to said school have been changed and altered by the officers of the said institution.
“Sixth. That children have been apprenticed to persons living in remote sections of the country, and who have no interest in taking proper care of them, and that a needless disregard to the rights and feelings of their parents has often been evinced by the officers of the school.
“Seventh. That the goods of said school are reported to have been used dishonestly for purposes for which they were not intended, and that the state of Rhode Island is said to have been charged with the board of children who were living at service and were no expense to said school.
“Eighth. That a spirit of proselytism and of religious intolerance has prevailed in the school, as is shown in the fact that children of different creeds are compelled to attend a form of worship which is contrary to the conscientious convictions of a large majority of them; which is directly in conflict with the spirit and letter of our state constitution, which ensures to the inhabitants thereof the liberty of conscience, in the following language: ‘No man shall be compelled to frequent or to support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever, except in fulfilment of his own voluntary contract;’ and that the children of said school are denied the use of books and all religious instruction in the religion of their choice.”
Although there is evidence in the volume of Investigation before us tending to sustain the “fifth” and “seventh” charges, we yet except those two charges from our remark, when we say that the other six charges, constituting the gravamen of the prosecution, are not only sustained in whole or in part by nearly one hundred witnesses, but, with all deference to the five aldermen out of ten who found most of them not proved, we think that no unbiassed reader of the heavily laden and sad volume before us, no true philanthropist, no man of true charity, can fail to pronounce the word guilty as to all or some part of every one of the first, second, third, fourth, seventh, and eighth charges. We are sorry to be forced to the conviction that the testimony is overwhelming. There are cases of punishment cruel in the extreme—some have called them inhuman, and even brutal—inflicted on about sixty boys; and, while nearly every page shows this, we refer particularly to pages 112, 123, 172, 234, 238, 274, 279, 280, 281, 289, 290, 295, 318, 364, 366, 375, 379, 383, 387, 388, 402, 403, 410, 414, 416, 419, 421, 425, 432, 437, 440, 446. See evidences more particularly referring to the use of the loaded whip, page 378; the strap, the cat, the strings, 286, 339; the butt, 492; blood drawn, 364, 485; terrorism, 239, 269, 270, 305, 371, 418, 424, 425, 492; whipping little boys over the knuckles with a bunch of keys, 146, 147; kicking, 447, 485, 526, and 323 of vol. ii.; boys struck on the head with a hammer, 331, 379; profanity and indecency, 280, 302, and page 135 of vol. ii.; Catholic books taken away from Catholic children, 308, 309, 310; state of Rhode Island charged with board of children who had been put out of the institution, 307, which was regarded as “an error of the head and not of the heart,” 327 of vol. ii.
There are also detailed in the Investigation cases of about thirty girls punished in a cruel and revolting manner. For girls lashed, bodies striped and bruised, see pages 18, 19; a girl struck, caught by the throat, pounded, and dragged by the hair of the head, 23; a girl struck with fist, and black eye, 55; a girl stripped to the waist of all her clothes, except undergarment, and whipped with cat-o’-nine-tails, and body marked, 93; another girl dragged by the hair, 95; a girl ducked, 102; a girl boxed until her nose bled, and water dashed on her, 102; a girl chased, kicked, and held under flowing water, 108; a girl dragged by the hair, kicked, and ducked, 219, 220; another girl dragged by the hair and kicked, 228; another lashed black and blue, 229; a girl lashed on the back after she had gone to bed, 338; another girl whipped with the straps, and kicked, 344; another girl stripped to the waist, leaving only undergarment on, and whipped with a knotted strap, 360; a girl ducked, 272. A mother is refused permission to see her child, who was whipped, and refused information as to whither the child was transported. The mother said: “I will travel Rhode Island through, and I will travel Connecticut through, but what I will find her. I have not seen her for the last six or eight years, and a mother’s nature goes beyond any mortal thing in this world. A mother wants to see her child. I could not get anything from them,” 374. Another girl is stripped like the others, and lashed, marked, and scarred on the back, 395. A witness, at page 396, says: “I saw—— stripped with her dress down; she was badly bruised on the shoulder; I did not see any blood, but I saw the bruises were pretty bad bruises; there were scars clear across her shoulders; you could not see scarcely a piece of plain flesh on her shoulders.” At page 443, a former inmate testifies to the treatment received by another inmate: “I saw him shower her and strike her; he knocked her against the building with his fist, and the blood ran out of her nose and ears while she was by the fence, while he stood there punishing her.” At page 454, we read an extract from the testimony of a Mrs. Bishop: “Q. Were you ever kicked or beaten in the school by——? A. Yes, sir. I was punished up-stairs because I could not learn my lesson. I had had no schooling at that time; I could not do much reading; he punished me up-stairs; I told him I could not learn it, unless he could let a girl come up and help me; I was told to kneel down; I looked around, and he kicked me across the aisle; he pulled me by my dress, and kicked me across the aisle, and twice across the room; I was put up-stairs before devotions were to come off; I said I was going to tell my mother; he said I could not see my folks again if I did tell her; he was going to give me two hundred dollars if I had not said anything; I was sick after this kicking; he carried me home himself away from the school; I could not move nor stir; I could not move one eye; I walked on crutches after it; it affects me now; affects my gait, so I can’t walk all the time; I have to hire my work done part the time now; when there comes a storm, I can’t move, I have to sit still in the house; sometimes I have to lie in bed, because it affects me so; I was thirteen years old at that time.” A girl, a new-comer only three days in the school, is ducked, strapped, and locked up two days for laughing in school, p. 629, and further ill-treated, 639. Another girl dragged by the hair, pounded, and dreadfully bruised, 661. Girls ducked and whipped at night, 678. Girls called names of supreme contempt by teachers in allusion to their past lives, 684, 737, and 39, 71, 317, of vol. ii. A girl taken up at night, and whipped in her night-clothes by male officer, 693. A girl is pulled over the desk by the hair, for not singing, 705. A girl is imprisoned and fed on bread and water for twenty-three days, 320 of vol. ii.
For instances of girls whipped on the naked back by men, see pp. 61, 339, 630; girls kicked by men, 318, 328, 345, 348, 354, 360, 631; same proved by defence, 41 of vol. ii.; girls dragged by the hair by men, 231, 347, 348, 636; girls struck with fist by men, 347, 349; black eye given, 350; marks on bodies, 360, 367, 395, 719; girls taunted about their former lives, 86, 96, 100, 397, 687, 737, and 317 of vol. ii.; terrorism, 269, 270, 305, 371, 424, 425, and 41 of vol. ii.; girls ducked by men, 92, 94, 97, 102, and 295 of vol. ii.
The first charge, the most serious that could be brought against a school of reform—“crimes against chastity, decency, and good morals”—is fearfully sustained. One of the employees, a man of years, who had become notorious for his vulgarity and indecency in both the male and female departments, to both of which he had access, is caught flagrante delicto. The partner of his sin was one of the female inmates, who was sent there to be reformed, and they were detected by other female inmates of this school of reform (page 75). And again, horribile dictu, a teacher in the same nursery of reform lived, “month in and month out,” in criminal conversation with one of the inmates of the female department (pages 63, 76), and the appalling fact is again proved by the defence (ii. 322). But, more shocking than all this, not only were immodest and indecent conversations held by an employee with the boys and girls, but another fiend in the flesh, an officer of the Providence School of Reform, introduced among the boys and taught them habits the most immoral and disgusting, destructive at once of their souls and bodies, of their manhood, and of their temporal and eternal happiness. This fact is proved solely by the defence at page 321 of vol. ii. The offender was dismissed, but the school still exists! Where are Sodom and Gomorrah?
The evidence for the defence consists chiefly of denials and non-mi-ricordos by the officers and employees; but some of the charges are proved by the defence itself, and some of the most damning evidence against the institution came from this very quarter. The mayor and one of the aldermen declined to take any part in the decision, because they were members of the board of trustees. Three other aldermen refused to sign the decision, and gave decisions of their own, finding portions of the charges true. Five out of ten of the judges sign the decision, which, while finding most of the charges not proved, strongly inculpates the institution on several of the charges. In it is stated that two instances have occurred of offences against chastity, decency, and good morals, on the part of officers and female inmates, page 384 of vol. ii.; that knocking down was practised, though alleged to have been in self-defence; and that boys were whipped on the bare back, 384 of vol. ii.; that girls have had their dresses loosened and removed from the upper part of the back and shoulders, leaving only the undergarment on, and thus punished by the (male) superintendent; and in a very few cases during the past nine years, when they have, in violation of the rules of the school, made loud noises and disturbances in the dormitories at night, they have been punished in their night-clothes (by a male officer) in the presence of a female officer, page 385 of vol. ii.; ducking is admitted, page 385.
One of the dissenting aldermen in his decision says: “Being fully aware that the class of inmates sent to this school require a strong and efficient discipline, and not feeling competent to say what that discipline should be, yet I cannot resist the conviction that the punishments described have a tendency to degrade rather than to elevate, not only the one who receives, but the one who administers them.” “I therefore feel bound to protest against such punishments, and earnestly hope that some better mode of discipline will speedily be adopted by the managers of this institution” (p. 394, vol. ii.). The superintendent stated on oath that, in case a child sick and in extremis required a Catholic priest to be sent for, he would first go and seek the advice of three or four of the trustees before he would admit, even under such circumstances, a Catholic or any other clergyman; and on this subject the same alderman remarked: “In my view, any superintendent of this institution who would hesitate to allow the consolations of religion to be administered in the form desired by the child, under such circumstances, should be promptly relieved from duty,” page 396 of vol. ii. Another alderman says: “I am of opinion that cruel and unnecessary punishment has been inflicted. I do not suppose that striking with the clenched fist, kicking, or dragging by the hair of the head has been common, but I think it has occurred in some instances,” page 397; and he mentions the case of an “unfortunate girl who seems to have suffered every form of discipline known to this school, from being ducked to being ‘pushed under the table with the foot.’ If it be said she was vile, I would ask how she came to be? She was but six or seven years of age when she entered this institution. No one is wholly bad at that tender age. She remained under its care and influences for nine years, and, if she is vicious and dissolute, why is she so? If, on the other hand, she was insane, is it not painful to reflect that such punishments were inflicted on an irresponsible child?” (p. 399.) One of the trustees actually resigned a year before the investigation, rather than be connected with such scenes; he started an investigation, but it seems to have done no good; and such was the condition of things at the time of this first investigation that the assistant superintendent offered to give one hundred dollars to a friend to shield him from being called as a witness.
The religious instruction given in this institution is of course unsectarian; everything distinctively Episcopalian is denied to Episcopalian children, everything distinctively Baptist is denied to Baptist children, everything distinctively Methodist is denied to Methodist children, everything distinctly Presbyterian is denied to Presbyterian children, and everything distinctly Catholic is denied to Catholic children. Nothing whatever is said tending “to keep children in the faith to which they belonged when they entered the school.” “Q. Does not the system of religious instruction tend to bring the children to that form of religion which gives to each person the private judgment and interpretation of the Scriptures? A. We hope it tends to make them better. Q. Does it not tend to have them choose their own Bible and their own interpretation of it as the source and principle of religion? A. I should hope that it tends to have them accept the Bible. Q. Do you teach them the doctrine of the private interpretation of the Scripture? A. No, sir, not at all. Q. As I understand it, all the religious instruction they get is simply reading from the Bible, and no interpretation. They can interpret it just as they please. A. They can interpret it just as they please. Sometimes one speaker comes, and sometimes another” (page 234, vol. ii.) ... “Q. Now state the afternoon services on Sunday? A. One of the trustees (they all alternate except the mayor) procures a speaker for Sunday afternoon to address the scholars. Q. Of what class are those speakers—of any particular or of all classes? A. Since I have been there, I think every denomination has been represented or been invited to speak? Q. Are they particularly members of churches, or laymen, lawyers, doctors, or anybody who will give a moral address to the children? A. I could not speak with certainty of the professions. We often have clergymen, perhaps oftener than any other class, but not unfrequently men of other professions, and many times those following no profession to speak in connection with others. We often have more than one speaker—sometimes half a dozen. Q. These are business men of the city? A. Yes, sir. Q. Do you have lawyers sometimes? A. I think all professions are represented. Q. Do you have ministers if you can get them? A. Yes, sir.” And yet in this unsectarianism the most direct sectarianism prevailed. “Q. Do you know what version of the Bible is used? A. It is the common English translation. Q. (By the mayor) It is the ordinary Bible, is it not? A. Yes, sir. (By Mr. Gorman) The Douay is the ordinary one. (By Mr.——) We call that an extraordinary one” (page 62, vol. ii.).
Now, we have the Bible without comment, but ministers, lawyers, doctors, and business men are called in every Sunday, sometimes half a dozen at one time, to give the comments, each according to his own view. Every religious denomination was invited, but it does not appear that any Catholic ever accepted the invitation; for, if he accepted, he would leave his Catholicity outside until he finished his unsectarian discourse. There may be something in common with all the sects which sometimes may be called general Protestantism, though they profess to call it unsectarianism; but one thing we know is common to them all, and this something is opposition to Catholicity, and the dodge of unsectarianism is adroitly invented in order to exclude Catholics from enjoying equal rights with Protestants in matters relating to public education and public charities. The state must let religion alone, and unsectarians must desist from their disguised effort to unite church and state in this country, while it has so strenuously opposed their union in every Catholic country. They know that Catholics can take no part in unsectarian teachings, but they would like us to do so, for in proportion as we did so would we cease to be Catholics. The Catholic view was so admirably expressed by the late Bishop Fitzpatrick, of Boston, in his letter in the Eliot School difficulty, that we must give it to our readers:
“I. Catholics cannot, under any circumstances, acknowledge, receive, and use, as a complete collection and faithful version of the inspired books which compose the written Word of God, the English Protestant translation of the Bible. Still less can they so acknowledge, accept, or use it, when its enforcement as such is coupled expressly with the rejection of that version which their own church approves and adopts as being correct and authentic; and yet this is required of them by law. The law, as administered, holds forth the Protestant version to the Catholic child, and says, ‘Receive this as the Bible.’ The Catholic child answers, ‘I cannot so receive it.’ The law, as administered, says you must, or else you must be scourged and finally banished from the school.
“II. The acceptance and recital of the Decalogue, under the form and words in which Protestants clothe it, is offensive to the conscience and belief of Catholics, inasmuch as that form and those words are viewed by them, and have not unfrequently been used by their adversaries, as a means of attack upon certain tenets and practices which, under the teachings of the church, they hold as true and sacred.
“III. The chanting of the Lord’s Prayer, of psalms, of hymns addressed to God, performed by many persons in unison, being neither a scholastic exercise nor a recreation, can only be regarded as an act of public worship—indeed, it is professedly intended as such in the regulations which govern our public schools. It would seem that the principles which guide Protestants and Catholics, in relation to communion in public worship, are widely different. Protestants, however diverse may be their religious opinions—Trinitarians, who assert that Jesus Christ is true God, and Unitarians, who deny he is true God—find no difficulty to offer in brotherhood a blended and apparently harmonious worship, and in so doing they give and receive mutual satisfaction, mutual edification. The Catholic cannot act in this manner. He cannot present himself before the Divine presence in what would be for him a merely simulated union of prayer and adoration. His church expressly forbids him to do so. She considers indifference in matters of religion, indifference as to the distinction of positive doctrines in faith, as a great evil which promiscuous worship would tend to spread more widely and increase. Hence the prohibition of such worship; and the Catholic cannot join in it without doing violence to his sense of religious duty.”
Non-sectarianism is the plea upon which those public institutions justify their interference with the religious rights of their inmates. They argue that, because this system is acceptable to Protestants of every sect, therefore it must be acceptable to Catholics. Whereas, on the contrary, what is called unsectarianism is the concentration of sectarianism. Unsectarianism is made up of all those points upon which the sects concur, and is therefore pre-eminently sectarian. It is either that or simple deism; for if you take away the distinctive tenets of Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, and of all the distinct sects, there remains nothing but deism. This involves, and will inevitably lead to, the denial of revelation; and the very Scriptures themselves, which Protestantism claims as the sole source of religious teaching, must and will inevitably, if non-sectarianism long prevails, be cast away. Is the teaching of deism alone inoffensive to Christians? The teaching of a few points, even if agreed upon by all, would be, on account of its exclusiveness, as sectarian as any other religious system—indeed more so; and is subject to an objection not applicable to the others, in that it conceals its true nature, and assumes a false name: whereas the Catholic Church and the avowed sects proclaim their distinctive and exclusive character, and in this at least are truthful and honest. If religious teaching resolves itself into latitudinarianism, it then constitutes a new sect in itself. A perfect neutrality, as long as anything positive is taught, is an impossibility. This very selection, which makes up this professed unsectarianism, is an anti-Catholic principle. It proclaims the right of man to determine all things in religion by his own private judgment, and in this consists the distinctive feature of Protestantism.
We have thus shown that non-sectarianism, as a system of religious teaching, is an impossibility. We now propose to show that in our schools, asylums, reformatories, etc., it is in practice, as well as in theory, an impossibility. We will show this, too, by Protestant and unsectarian authority. At p. 264, vol. ii., Providence Reform School Investigation, we read from the testimony of a Protestant Episcopal trustee, who resigned on account, in part, of this impossibility:
“Q. Didn’t you know that no sectarian instruction was admitted inside that institution? A. I don’t know what you call sectarianism. It is pretty hard to say down in that school. We have had everything taught and preached there. Q. Was not this an Episcopal book? A. It was a book of devotions and prayers—a work by a divine of the English Church. It was an Episcopal book. Q. Do you mean to say that a book of Episcopal exercises is or is not a sectarian work? A. I am a member of the Episcopal Church; we do not call ourselves a sect. Q. Didn’t you know at the time you gave this book to the teacher that it was against the rules of the school to have the doctrines of the true church given out there, or of any church? A. I had never supposed it was against the rules of that institution, and I should have been unwilling to have sat for one hour as its trustee if I had supposed that I was myself forbidden to pray, or to advise others to pray there, through Jesus Christ, our Lord; and if the prayers I indicated, marked, and numbered in that book are prayers forbidden in the Providence Reform School or any other school, I have for the first time to learn what is sectarianism. They are prayers which every Christian, whether he belongs to any one of the various organizations of Christians in this or any other country or not, would, I think, be willing to use morning, noon, and night. Q. Didn’t you know that the by-laws place religious instruction exclusively under the care of the superintendent of the school” [who is a layman]?
The Hon. John C. Spencer, Secretary of State and Superintendent of Schools in 1840, said in his report to the New York Legislature: “There must be some degree of religious instruction, and there can be none without partaking more or less of a sectarian character. The objection itself proceeds from a sectarian principle, and assumes the power to control that which it is neither right nor practicable to subject to any denomination. Religious doctrines of vital interest will be inculcated.”
Another who has discussed this question of sectarianism with force and great plainness of speech is the Rev. Dr. Spear, of Brooklyn, in the columns of the Independent, thus:
“It is quite true that the Bible, as the foundation of religious belief, is not sectarian as between those who adopt it; but it is true that King James’ Version of the Holy Scriptures is sectarian as to the Catholic, as the Douay is to the Protestant, or as the Baptist Version would be to all Protestants but Baptists. It is equally true that the New Testament is sectarian as to the Jew, and the whole Bible is equally so as to those who reject its authority in any version.... There is no sense or candor in a mere play on words here. It is not decent in a Protestant ecclesiastic, who has no more rights than the humblest Jew, virtually to say to the latter: ‘You are nothing but a good-for-nothing Jew; you Jews have no claim to be regarded as a religious sect, or included in the law of state impartiality as between sects which Protestants monopolize for their special benefit. Away with your Jewish consciences! You pay your tax bills, and send your children to the public schools, and we will attend to their Christian education.’ It is not decent to say this to any class of citizens who dissent from what is known as Protestant Christianity. It is simply a supercilious pomposity of which Protestants ought to be ashamed. It may please the bigotry it expresses, but a sensible man must either pity or despise it. In the name of justice we protest against this summary mode of disposing of the school question in respect to any class of American citizens. It is simply an insult.”
Again, Dr. Anderson, President of the Rochester University, one of the first men in the Baptist Church in these United States, addressing the Baptist Educational Convention in the city of New York, says:
“It is impossible for an earnest teacher to avoid giving out constantly religious and moral impulses and thought. He must of necessity set forth his notions about God, the soul, conscience, sin, the future life, and Divine Revelation.
“If he promises not to do so, he will fail to keep his word”—these are true words—“or his teachings in science, or literature, or history will be miserably shallow and inadequate. Our notions of God and the moral order form, in spite of ourselves, the base line which affects all our movements and constructions of science, literature, and history. Inductions in physics, classifications in natural history, necessitate a living law eternal in the thought of God.”
These gentlemen speak of religious instruction, only inasmuch as it is connected with the education of youth, and yet their logical minds showed them the absurdity of unsectarianism. What, then, could they have said of visionary men attempting direct teaching of religion without sectarianism?
The following extract is too pertinent to our subject and too clever to be omitted, as an illustration of the impossibility of teaching religion upon the unsectarian system:
“UNSECTARIANISM.”
SOME OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF A TEACHER IN A MIXED SCHOOL.
(From the New Orleans Morning Star.)
We find the following in our San Francisco contemporary, the Pacific Churchman, taken originally from the London Church Review, an organ of the Church of England. The editor of the Churchman remarks that “with some changes it will equally apply to some of our un-sectarian schools.” As far as the Churchman goes against un-sectarian schools in this country, we are with it. This seems to be one scene taken from others. Considering that it conveys a good argument for us, our readers will excuse the term “Romanism,” thrown in as a reproach. We quote:
The schoolroom of a boarding-school. Time, the hour of religious instruction. Bible to be read and explained without inculcating the dogmas of any particular denomination. Teacher certificated, unsectarian, highly conscientious. Class consisting of children from thirteen down to six or seven, and of various grades, from respectable poor to gutter children. Schoolroom and teacher span new. Teacher a little nervous. Children—some looking curiously about them, some disposed to loll and idle, some attentive. Teacher opens the great Bible, and begins to read St. Matthew ii., as being a narrative likely to interest the auditory, and easy to explain in an undenominational sense. First, however, a little preliminary explanation is necessary.
Teacher. You must know, my dear children, that Joseph and Mary were two very good people who lived a very great many years ago in a country far away from London, and I am going to read to you about them and their son (reads slowly verse 1. of the chapter).
Ragged Arab (not accustomed to observe much ceremony). Please, sir, who’s that?
Teacher (aghast, and wishing to gain time). Whom do you mean, my boy?
Arab. That there Jesus.
Teacher (aside). [How can this question be answered in an undenominational sense? This is the religious difficulty, full blown. If I say “a good man,” that will hardly do, for I know several of the boys are the children of the church people and Romanists; and if I say “the son of God,” that won’t do, for Tommy Markham is a Unitarian, or, at any rate, his parents are; besides, such a dogmatic statement is sectarian.] (Aloud.) I will explain all about him when I have finished the chapter.
Continues to read. The class listens with various degrees of attention until the 11th verse is finished, and then—
A Boy. Please, sir, who’s Mary? The mother of the little baby, wasn’t she?
Teacher. Yes; she was his mother.
Boy. Oh! and what does “wusshupped” mean?
Teacher. It means paying great respect, kneeling down and bowing, as we should to God.
Another Boy (better taught than boy No. 1, and jumping at once to a sectarian conclusion). Then, that there baby was God, sir?
Tommy Markham (stoutly). No, that he wasn’t!
Teacher. Silence, boys, the lesson cannot go on if you talk and quarrel. (Struck by a bright idea.) You know that a great many people believe that he was God; but some do not; but we must not quarrel because we do not all think alike.
First Boy (disagreeably curious). Well, but what do you think, master?
[Terrible dilemma! Teacher hesitates. At length, desperately]—
I think he was God.
Boy. Don’t yer know it?
Teacher (aside). [Perverse youth. Pest take his questions and him too! If I’d known what “unsectarian” teaching involved, I’d sooner have swept a crossing. What will the Board say? Why, the very essence of our principle is to know nothing and think anything. But you can’t make the boys reason.] (Aloud.) My dear boy, it is very difficult to say what we know. I can only teach you what I think, and teach you how to be good and do what is right, and obey all that God tells you to do in this Holy Book.
A Boy (interrupting, sans cérémonie). Did God write that there book?
Teacher. Yes; and he tells us what we are to do to get to heaven; and his son came, as you see, as a little child, and when he grew up, he preached and told us how we ought to love one another, and all we ought to do to lead a good life.
Boy (interested). And was he a very good chap?
Teacher (a little shocked). Yes, of course; you know he was—[pauses; his haste had almost betrayed him into a dogmatic explanation, and the forbidden word “know” had actually passed his lips].
Another Boy (with vexatiously retentive memory). You said afore, master, that he was God, and the gentlemen wusshupped him—was he reelly God?
Teacher (boldly, taking the bull by the horns). Yes.
Boy. And did God’s mother wusshup him too, master?
Teacher. You must not call her the mother of—[interrupts himself; recollects that it is as sectarian to deny to the Blessed Virgin the title of Mother of God as to bestow it upon her; continues]: yes, she worshipped him too; but I want you to learn about the things that he told us to do.
Another Boy (doggedly). But we wants to know fust who he be, ‘cause we ain’t to do jist what a nobody tells us; only, if that there gentlemen be God, there’s somethin’ in it, ‘cause I’ve ‘eard parson say, at old school, where I was once, that what God said was all right.
Teacher (aside). [Certainly that poor Arab has got the root of denominational education. It is, I begin to think, a failure to attempt the teaching of morality without first making manifest what that morality is based upon, and the moment you come to that you are in for denominationalism at once. (Wipes his brow and continues)—
Of course, my boy, you must know why it is right to tell the truth and do what is right, but then if I tell you God commanded all this and read to you what his Son said about it, there is no need for troubling so much about—about—
Boy (interrupting). Oh! but I likes to ax questions, and it ain’t no sort of use you telling us it’s wrong to lie—nobody at ‘ome ever told me that—if yer don’t say who said it, ‘cause I ain’t bound to mind what you say, is I?
[Teacher checks the indignant “Indeed you are” that rises to his lips, arrested by the terrible and conscientious thought whether it be not a new and strange form of denominationalism for the teacher to make his own dictum infallible in matters of morality. Would not this be to elevate into a living, personal dogma an unsectarian teacher?—a singular clash, surely. Teacher shivers at the bare idea. Soliloquizes: How can I meet this knock-down reasoning? These Arabs are so rebellious, so perverse; why must they ask so many questions, and require to know the why and wherefore of everything? (Glances at the clock.) Ah! thank my stars, the time is almost up! but this dodge won’t do every time. I’m afraid I shall have to give up the whole thing as a bad job.] (Aloud.) We have only five minutes more to-day, lads, so you must let me finish the chapter without asking any more questions.
(Boys relapse into indifferent silence. Curtain falls.)
In conclusion, we insist that the state shall obey its own constitution, and let religion alone. In purely state institutions, the consciences must be left free, and no experiments with religion can be tried. Every child in such institutions must enjoy liberty of conscience and free access to its own ministers and sacraments.
If any sect undertakes to help the state to do its work, by establishing reformatories, protectories, and asylums for its own children, excluding all other religions and the children of other religions, we shall not object to its receiving a just per capita from the state; and under this system we claim the same and no more for purely Catholic institutions doing the work of the state in respect to Catholic children. If, however, sectarian, unsectarian, or non-Catholic institutions receive support from the state, and receive the children of the Catholic Church and of other persuasions, they must be conducted upon the same principle with state institutions, and in them “no law respecting the establishment of a religion” must be made or enforced, but the most perfect liberty of conscience must prevail. We ask no special favors for ourselves or our church; all we claim is perfect equality before the law and the state, and the full benefit of that fair play which we extend to others.
[DANTE’S PURGATORIO.]
CANTO SEVENTH.
[Still among souls, on the outside of Purgatory, who have delayed repentance, Dante, in this Canto, is conducted to those who had postponed spiritual duties from having been involved in state affairs. The persons introduced are the Emperor Rodolph, first of that Austrian house of Hapsburg, Ottocar, King of Bohemia, Philip III. of France, Henry of Navarre, Peter III. of Aragon, Charles I. of Naples, Henry III. of England, and the Marquis William of Monferrat. To know more of these men the curious reader must consult more volumes than we have space to mention in this magazine. He may spare much research, however, and find the most accessible information by turning to the interesting notes which Mr. Longfellow has appended to his translation.—Trans.]
Three times and four these greetings, glad and free,
Had been repeated, when Sordello’s shade
Drew from embrace, and said: “Now, who are ye?”
And thereupon my Guide this answer made:
“Ere to this mountain those just souls, to whom
Heavenward to climb was given, had guided been,
My bones Octavian gathered to the tomb.
Virgil I am, and for none other sin
But want of faith was I from heaven shut out.”
Like one who suddenly before him sees
Something that wakes his wonder, whence, in doubt,
He says, It is not; then believing, ’Tis!
Sordello stood, then back to him without
Lifting his eyelids, turned and clasped his knees.
“O glory of the Latin race!” he cried,
“Through whom to such a height our language rose,
Oh! of my birthplace everlasting pride,
What merit or grace on me thy sight bestows?
Tell me, unless to hear thee is denied,
Com’st thou from hell, or where hast thou repose?”
VIRGIL.
He to this answered: “Grace from heaven moved me,
And leads me still: the circles every one
Of sorrow’s kingdom have I trod to thee.
My sight is barred from that supernal Sun,
Whom I knew late, and thou desir’st to see,
Not for I did, but for I left undone.
A place below there is where no groans rise
From torment, sad alone with want of light,
Where the lament sounds not like moan, but sighs.
The little innocents whom Death’s fell bite
Snatched, ere their sin was purified, are there:
And there I dwell with guiltless ones that still
The three most holy virtues did not wear,
Though all the rest they knew, and did fulfil.
But if thou knowest, and may’st us apprise,
Tell us how we most speedily may find
Where Purgatory’s actual entrance lies.”
SORDELLO.
“We have,” he answered, “no set place assigned;
Around and upward I am free to stray;
My guidance far as I may go I lend:
But see how fast already fails the day!
And in the night none ever can ascend:
Best, then, we think of some good resting-place.
Some souls there be, removed here to the right,
Whom, if thou wilt, I’ll show thee face to face,
And thou shalt know them not without delight.”
“How, then,” said Virgil—“should a soul aspire
To climb by night, would other check be found?
Or his own weakness hinder his desire?”
And good Sordello drew along the ground
His finger, saying: “Look! not even this line
May’st thou pass over when the sun hath gone:
Not that aught else, though, would thy power confine,
Save want of light, from journeying upwards on:
Darkness makes impotent thy will. By night
One may go back again, and grope below,
And, while the horizon shuts the day from sight,
Wander about the hillside to and fro.”
My Master then, as ‘twere in wonder, spake:
“Then lead us thitherward where thou hast said,
That we in lingering shall such pleasure take.”
Nor had we forward far advanced our tread,
When I perceived that on the mountain-side
A valley opened, just like valleys here.
“We will go forward,” said our shadowy guide,
“Where on the slope yon hollow doth appear;
There let us wait the dawning of the day.”
‘Twixt steep and level went a winding path
Which led us where the vale-side dies away
Till less than half its height the margin hath.
Gold and fine silver, ceruse, cochineal,
India’s rich wood, heaven’s lucid blue serene,[15]
Or glow that emeralds freshly broke reveal,
Had all been vanquished by the varied sheen
Of this bright valley set with shrubs and flowers,
As less by greater. Nor had Nature there
Only in painting spent herself, but showers
Of odors manifold made sweet the air
With one strange mingling of confused perfume.
And there new spirits chanting I descried—
“Salve Regina!”—seated on the bloom
And verdure sheltered by the dingle side.
SORDELLO.
“Ere yon low sun shall nestle in his bed”
(Began the Mantuan who had brought us here),
“Desire not down among them to be led;
You better will observe how they appear,
Both face and action, from this bank, instead
Of mixing with them in the dale. That one
Who sits the highest, looking, ‘mid the throng,
As though some duty he had left undone,
Who moves his lips not with the rest in song,
Was Rodolph, Emperor, he who might have healed
Those wounds which Italy have so far spent
That slow relief all other helpers yield.
The other, that on soothing him seems bent,
Once ruled the region whence those waters are
Which Moldau bears to Elbe, and Elbe the sea.
His name was Ottocar, and better far,
Yea, in his very swaddling-robe, was he
Than Vincislaus, his big-bearded son
Whom luxury and ease have made so gross.
And he of slender nose, who, with the one
So bland of aspect, seems in consult close,
Died flying, and in dust his lilies laid.
Look! how he beats the breast he cannot calm:
Mark too his mate there sighing, who hath made
For his pale cheek a pillow of his palm!
One is the Father of that pest of France,
Father-in-law the other: well they know
His lewd, base life! this misery is the lance
That to the core cuts either of them so.
And he so stout of limb, in unison
Singing with him there of the manly nose,
Of every virtue put the girdle on;
And if that youth behind him in repose
Had after him reigned in his Father’s stead,
Virtue from vase to vase had been well poured,
Which of the other heirs may not be said.
Frederic and James now o’er those kingdoms lord,
In whom that better heritage lies dead.
Rarely doth human goodness rise again
Through the tree’s branches: He hath willed it so
Who gives this boon of excellence, that men
Should ask of him who can alone bestow.”
“Not more these words of mine at Peter glance
Than him he sings with (of the large nose there)
Whose death Apulia mourneth, and Provènce,
So ill the tree doth with its stock compare!
Even so much more of her good lord his wife
Constance yet vaunts herself, than Margaret may,
Or Beatrice. That king of simplest life,
Harry of England, sitting there survey
All by himself: his branches are more blest!
The one who sits there with uplifted gaze
Among the group, but lower than the rest,
Is Marquis William, in whose cause the frays
Of Alexandria have with grief oppressed
Both Monferrato and the Canavese.”
[THE RUSSIAN IDEA.]
FROM THE GERMAN OF CONRAD VON BOLANDEN.
“We must obey the emperor rather than God.”
I.
A GOOD MOTHER.
The Baroness Olga von Sempach was respected, wealthy, benevolent, and therefore loved by the poor. When, in the summer, she visited her estates in Posen, to breathe for some months the healthy country air, the poor of that place would exclaim: “Our mother has come again!”
The baroness had, however, seemed lately to be greatly depressed, and her sad countenance had excited the sympathy of every one.
“Our mother is sick,” said the poor. “Her face is pale, and her kind eyes look as though she wept often. We will pray for our benefactress, that God may preserve her to us.”
And in the hours of want and suffering, many hands were raised in supplication to heaven for their mother Olga; but the eyes of the noble lady continued to be dim with weeping, and her sorrow seemed to increase daily.
She was sitting, one morning, in a room of her palace; her hands were clasped together, and she gazed absently before her, while tear after tear streamed down her cheeks. Opposite to her on the wall hung a crucifix, upon which she would often fix her eyes; but her sufferings seemed to be those of the spirit rather than of the body. The affliction of soul, as seen in her distressed face, had something sublime and venerable in it, for it was the grief of a mother.
The sound of approaching footsteps are heard. The baroness made an effort to conceal her agitation; she wiped away her tears, and endeavored to receive with a smile the young man, who, upon entering, saluted her.
“I am rejoiced, dear Edward, that you have come to visit us at our retired summer-residence,” said she. “The invigorating air of the country will be of great service to you. Your incessant application to study is injurious to health, and you must therefore remain with us for several weeks.”
He hardly seemed to hear her words of welcome, so lost was he in astonishment at the appearance of his noble hostess.
“I must ask your pardon, gracious lady, for having disturbed your quiet household last night at such a late hour,” said he; “but the train was delayed, and I could not find a carriage to bring me here.”
“No formal excuse is necessary, Edward! Have you spoken yet with my son?”
“Only a few words. He is writing to his betrothed.”
These latter words made such an impression upon the baroness that it seemed as though a sword had pierced her heart. The emotion did not escape the observation of the young gentleman, and, together with her sad aspect, convinced him that her son was in some way the cause of her unhappiness.
“O sorrowful mother that I am!” she exclaimed, “to see my Adolph, my only child, rushing into certain misfortune, perhaps into eternal ruin, and I unable to help or save him—how it pains and terrifies me!”
Her lips trembled, and she found difficulty in preserving her self-command.
“You alarm me, dear baroness! Why should Adolph fall into such deep misery because of his marriage as you seem to predict? He loves Alexandra truly and sincerely. He praises her noble qualities, her magnificent beauty, her accomplishments, and therefore I see every prospect of a happy life for them both.”
“Alexandra is beautiful, very beautiful!” replied the baroness sadly; “but this exterior beauty, perishable and worthless as it is, unless united with nobility of mind as well as virtue, blinds my son. Alexandra’s personal loveliness prevents him from seeing the ugliness of her heart, mind, and spirit.”
The young professor seemed really perplexed. He knew that the baroness was an admirable judge of character, and he loved his friend.
“Adolph wrote to me in his last letter that Alexandra is the daughter of a Russian nobleman named Rasumowski, who fills the distinguished position of governor of a province in Poland. I should think that the daughter of a man to whom the Russian government has confided such a trust would resemble her father.”
“She is his counterpart,” replied the Baroness von Sempach; “and her father is the incorporate spirit of the Russian form of government; he is imperious, proud, tyrannical, and utterly destitute of feeling. You know the inhumanities practised by Russia upon Catholic Poland. An endless succession of oppressive laws completely crushed the unhappy Poles, from whom everything was taken—liberty, religion, property, and life. In this atmosphere of cruel tyranny and injustice Alexandra has grown up. From her childhood she has breathed an air which has stifled all the gentle emotions of the heart. In a word, Alexandra is a thorough Russian. How, then, can my son, with his respect for the rights of man, with his enthusiastic love of freedom with his studious disposition of mind, and his warm heart—how can he be happy in the possession of such a wife? Never! A terrible awakening, bitter sorrow, and lasting misfortune will soon poison the life of my child.”
“I believe you, dear madame! Why have you not expressed your fears to Adolph?”
“I have done so often and urgently; but his blind passion for Alexandra makes him deaf to all my representations.”
“If,” said Edward, after some reflection, “we could only succeed in letting Adolph have a closer insight into Alexandra’s nature and spiritual life, I am sure that he would turn with aversion from her.”
“But in this lies the difficulty, dear Edward. The Russians understand well how to conceal by an artificial gloss of refinement their real spiritual deformity.”
“Notwithstanding all this, the mask must be torn from the face of the Russian lady, in order to save Adolph. I know what to do! My plan will succeed!” exclaimed the professor.
“What do you intend doing, Edward?”
“I will enlighten my friend Adolph in regard to Russian manners. Do not question me any further, dear madame, but confide in me!” said he, with a cheerful face. “Wipe away your tears, and have courage, noble mother!”
He bowed and then sought the presence of his host. Adolph, a stately young man with a kind face and the expressive eyes of his mother, had just concluded a letter to his betrothed.
“Have you at last finished writing?” asked Edward. “You lovers never know when to stop. I wonder what you have to say to each other day after day?”
“A heart that loves is inexhaustible,” replied Adolph. “I could write ten letters a day, and not say all I wish.”
“I know it,” said Edward, nodding his head.
“What do you know?”
“The readiness of love to make sacrifices,” replied his friend.
Adolph laughed aloud.
“The idea of your understanding what it is to love! When you begin to love, the world will come to an end!” he exclaimed good-humoredly. “As the city of Metz has inscribed over her gates, so also can you write upon your forehead, ‘No one has ever conquered me.’ Although you speak with great wisdom about many things, you know nothing of love.”
“But I am of the opposite opinion,” said Edward, looking with his brilliant eyes at the laughing face of his friend. “Your love is about six months old, but mine has lasted for ten years; it commenced when I was sixteen. My love has been put to the test, and is still as enduring as it was in the beginning. Your young love of only six months’ duration must, however, be tried as yet. How will it be when ten years have passed away, and Alexandra’s beauty has faded? My beloved, on the contrary, never grows old. She is always young and beautiful, like her Father, the eternal fountain of all knowledge—like God; for my beloved is—Knowledge.”
“You malicious fellow, to remind me of Alexandra’s future wrinkles! I do not care, however, for my betrothed is at present the handsomest girl living.”
“I will not deny the fact,” said Edward. “And if you will introduce me into the much-to-be-envied atmosphere which the beautiful Russian breathes, you will oblige me and my beloved very much.”
“I do not understand you!”
“I wish, in other words, to know something of Russian affairs by means of my own observations,” replied Edward. “I would like to make a study of her government for the benefit of the Germans.”
“For the benefit of the Germans?”
“Yes, indeed; for it is a well-known fact that the Russian system of government is to be gradually introduced into the German Empire. A beginning has already been made by enacting the famous law against the Jesuits and kindred orders. Alexandra’s father is the highest official of his district. Through him I could easily obtain a peep into state matters, if you would recommend me.”
“With the greatest pleasure, my friend!” exclaimed Adolph, springing from his chair in joyful surprise. “We will go together. I will introduce you myself to the governor, and, while you labor in the interest of your ever-youthful beloved, I will devote myself to Alexandra.”
II.
THE PLETI.
Two days later, the friends were sojourning in the Rasumowski palace, a stately building, formerly the property of a noble Polish family whose only son now languished in Siberia. When the guests arrived, the governor was absent, but his daughter received them with the greatest hospitality. Edward found the youthful Russian lady very beautiful in appearance, but his keen eyes soon detected beneath the surface of her charming exterior a spirit of such moral deformity that he became really alarmed in regard to the fate which threatened his friend if he persisted in uniting himself to such a being.
“Oh! what joy! What an agreeable surprise!” exclaimed Alexandra. “It is, in truth, an imperial joy! And papa also will be imperially delighted to see you and your friend.”
“Is your father absent, Alexandra?” asked Adolph.
“Only for a few hours. He is with a distinguished gentleman from Berlin. I expect him any moment, and his surprise will be really imperial.”
The professor seemed astonished at her language. He availed himself of the first suitable opportunity to satisfy his desire for knowledge.
“Pardon me, mademoiselle; you use the word imperial in a manner which is incomprehensible to me—you speak of a really imperial joy, of a truly imperial surprise. Will you permit me to ask you why you make use of this peculiar expression?”
“If you had ever travelled through the holy Russian Empire,” she replied, with a haughty look, “you would know that we use the word imperial in the same sense as you in Germany say divine. Are you amazed at that?”
“Indeed, mademoiselle,” answered the professor calmly, “I never imagined that the words imperial and divine could be synonymous, for the reason that there is an infinite difference between the emperor and God.”
“That is your view of the subject, but we think differently in our holy empire,” replied the arrogant beauty. “In Russia, the emperor is the most exalted of beings; he is the autocrat of all Russia, and upon his dominions the sun never sets. If we wish to express the highest degree of joy, of surprise, of pleasure, or of beauty”—and she threw her head proudly back—“then we say an imperial joy, an imperial pleasure, an imperial beauty!”
“I am greatly indebted to you for this interesting explanation,” said the professor, bowing low.
At this moment, the sound of an approaching carriage was heard.
“They have arrived!” said Alexandra. “What a pity that our distinguished visitor from Berlin makes it necessary for papa to absent himself so often!”
“Your company, dear Alexandra, is a charming substitute for your father’s absence,” said Adolph von Sempach.
Two loud male voices in animated conversation resounded through the corridor. Alexandra ran to open the door of the salon.
“Papa, who do you think is here? You will be delighted.”
“Who is it? Can it be Prince von Bismarck?” replied a rough voice, and the governor entered the room. He was an elegantly dressed gentleman, of stout appearance, and wore a light mustache; but his rubicund countenance, which plainly betokened an unrestrained appetite, was almost repulsive, on account of the cruel look in his eyes. The visitor from Berlin followed him; he was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with a bald head, sharp eyes, a heavy mustache, which overshadowed an ugly mouth, and with features not less disagreeable than were those of the Russian.
“Oh, Baron von Sempach? Is it possible!” exclaimed the governor, pressing the hand of his future son-in-law. “It is really imperial!”
“My friend Edward Beck, Professor of History,” said Adolph, introducing his travelling companion.
The untitled name seemed to displease the Russian, for he looked almost with contempt at the stranger, and returned his bow with a scarcely perceptible nod of the head. Von Sempach noticed this reception of his friend, and, although very angry, hastened to pacify the ill-humor of his proud host.
“I must inform you, governor,” said he, in a whisper, “that my friend Edward Beck occupies a distinguished social position; and not only that—he is the owner of vast estates, and the possessor of two millions of guilders.”
“I feel highly honored at your presence in my house, Herr Beck,” said the now polite Russian. “Allow me to introduce to you my esteemed guest, Herr Schulze, of Berlin.”
The tall Prussian made a desperate effort to smile, and to force his rigid, military figure to return the professor’s bow.
“The visit of my friend to your country has, at the same time, a scientific object in view,” said Adolph. “He desires to learn something of Russian affairs by personal observation. You will therefore oblige me very much, Governor Rasumowski, if by means of your high official position you consent to further his wishes in this respect.”
“What a happy coincidence!” replied the governor, with a significant glance at the gentleman from Berlin. “Herr Schulze has come for the same purpose. He also seeks to inform himself in regard to the glorious administration of state and social affairs in our holy empire; but of course with a different motive from that of Herr Beck, whose researches are of a purely historical nature.”
“The knowledge of which I am in pursuit is for practical ends,” said Herr Schulze, assuming a learned air. “I wish to examine and see if the admirably constructed machinery of the Russian government cannot be introduced with advantage into the new German Empire.”
“I am rejoiced to hear you speak as you do,” replied Beck; “for your opinion in regard to the policy now in force throughout the new German Empire corresponds with mine. Since the last Diet, it has become evident to me that in future Germany must be governed as Russia now is. The map of Europe,” he added, with a meaning smile intended for Rasumowski, “would then not only have a Russian Poland, but also a German Russia.”
“Rejoice at such a beneficial change, gentlemen!” exclaimed the governor. “All nations can learn from and profit by the example of our holy Russian Empire. In no country upon earth is there a stronger government, and nowhere has the absurd idea of liberty taken less root, than in the immense territory of the czar. Of course, in Germany, some little concessions must be made at first, until an iron-bound constitution, like that of Russia, can be formed—above all, the inferior German princes must be set aside.”
“The beginning has been already made; it is only necessary to continue our efforts,” replied the Berlin gentleman.
“See with what regularity everything proceeds with us,” asserted Rasumowski. “All the wheels of state are controlled by the will of one man, of our gracious sovereign, the emperor”—and he made a reverence before the marble statue of the czar. “Whoever does not obey the will of the sovereign will be surely crushed into atoms.”
A servant announced dinner. The party entered the dining-room, where a magnificent banquet was served. The whole attention of Adolph was absorbed by Alexandra, and Edward saw with deep regret his burning passion for a creature who was unworthy of his noble-minded friend.
“As I said before, gentlemen, with us everything moves with regularity,” said Rasumowski. “We do not permit the least contradiction. The word liberty has no meaning with us; for unconditional obedience is with us the fundamental law of the empire, and whoever does not wish to obey must go to Siberia.”
“As far as I can understand, there does not exist in Russia any fundamental law of state,” said Beck. “Or am I wrong?”
“No; you are right. We know nothing about it. The sovereign law is the will of the emperor. Nothing but what the emperor commands has legal power. The meeting of Deputies, Chambers, and of Diets is unheard of in Russia. The almighty will of the czar answers instead of it. All laws and decrees, no matter how long they have existed, can be abolished by the emperor with one stroke of the pen. To him, as the sovereign, everything belongs: the country and the people, the peasants and the nobility, the church and the state. In fact, it can be said that the only fundamental law of state in the holy Russian Empire is absolute obedience to the will of the czar.”
“Excellent!” said Schulze. “If we had only made the same progress in our new German Empire!”
“It is to be questioned whether this manner of government can be introduced into Germany,” replied Beck. “There the people have a will which makes itself heard in the Chambers.”
“Bah! of what account are the Diet and the Chambers?” exclaimed Schulze contemptuously. “Acknowledge candidly, Herr Beck, what a miserable rôle our Chambers have recently played. Is not the will of the chancellor the only law? Is not everything possible to the diplomatic wisdom of Bismarck? Do the Deputies, Chambers, or Diet dare to contradict the all-powerful minister? No! They only make such laws as are pleasing to their master. Therefore I am right when I say that the people no longer have a voice in the new German Empire. Wait a little while, and the antiquated folly of Chambers and Diets will be also abolished.”
“Your view is not entirely correct,” said Adolph von Sempach. “A strong party in the Diet is opposed to the designs of Bismarck.”
“Yes, the ultramontanes!” answered Schulze. “But we are prepared for them; we will conquer this rebellious set, so hostile to the empire!” he exclaimed, with an angry flash of his eyes. “The ultramontanes in Germany form only a rapidly disappearing minority, and this rabble, so dangerous to the state, will soon be exterminated. Liberalism reigns supreme in the new German Empire; Bismarck depends upon its support. Every right-thinking man will see that in a well-organized state but one will must be paramount, and not two or even three wills. The emperor alone must rule. Therefore away with the will of the people, away with the will of the church! The form of the Russian government alone is sound; for here the emperor is the head of the state and of the church. The civil officers rule according to the command of the emperor—in a word, everything is done, as the governor has correctly remarked, with regularity. And whoever does not obey will be sent to the mines of Siberia.”
Von Sempach, whose countenance gave evidence of his disapproval, wished to reply, but, at a sign from his friend, he remained silent.
“Yes, indeed, Siberia is a splendid place!” exulted the Russian. “The new German Empire must also have a Siberia, to which her rebellious subjects can be sent.”
“If German affairs continue to shape themselves so closely after the example of Russia, we will undoubtedly have a Siberia very soon,” said the professor, with an ambiguous smile.
“Without Siberia, what would we have done with the unruly Poles?” exclaimed the charming daughter of the governor. “There in the mines, in want and misery, the wretches can do penance for their presumption, and repent for having disobeyed the Emperor of Russia.”
At hearing her remarks, all color forsook Adolph’s face; he looked with amazement at his beautiful betrothed. Beck, however, noticed with secret delight the impression she had made upon his friend.
“I am really anxious to learn,” said he, “how the people of the holy Russian Empire live, and if they are so supremely happy.”
“You shall have proofs of it this afternoon,” said the governor. “We will drive in half an hour to a village in the vicinity of the city. The village is inhabited by Roman Catholics; but even there you will find that the will of the emperor is respected.”
All now rose from the table; the guests retired to their rooms; but Adolph, who seemed greatly depressed, sought the society of his friend.
“How do you like Alexandra?”
“She is, in truth, imperially beautiful,” answered Beck.
“But you heard her cruel remarks about the poor Poles?”
“Yes, I heard what she said, and am not astonished that a Russian lady, whose father is governor, should think as he does; it is very natural,” replied the professor.
Adolph appeared to be overwhelmed with sadness.
“Will you not go with us on our tour of inspection?” asked Edward.
“After such a painful exhibition of Alexandra’s sentiments, I need something to distract my thoughts.”
“Have you noticed that the bust and portrait of the emperor, seated on his throne, is to be seen in every corridor, chamber, and salon of the palace?” remarked Edward. “He is like an idol in the house, before which even the lovely head of Alexandra bows in reverence. This fact is of the highest interest to me. Man must have a god, a sovereign being, to serve. In Russia, the emperor is this sovereign; and Almighty God in heaven is, as the Russians imagine, the vassal of the emperor; for bishops, priests, and popes can only teach and preach that which the imperial sovereign commands and permits. And such a sovereign is to sit upon the throne of the new German Empire! A glorious prospect for us!”
“Ridiculous nonsense!” exclaimed the young nobleman. “The German nation would never submit to such a yoke of tyranny. Germans will never become slaves!”
“Do not be too confident, Von Sempach! A keen observer has said that the Germans are a most servile people.”
“But they never will be the slaves of a Russian czar,” replied Von Sempach. “The German people, two years ago, gave ample proofs of what they can do. Like our imaginary Michael,[16] who for a long time allowed himself to be kicked about and abused, but who suddenly shook off his lethargy, and fought like a lion, so will it be with Germany, which seems to have fallen into a state of good-humored torpor, during which cunning men have taken advantage of her apparent indifference to deprive her gradually of her ancient privileges; but let the Germans once feel the weight of Russian despotism, and you will see with what fury they will break loose the chains that bind them.”
Ten minutes later, the carriage of the governor rolled through the streets of the city. He had given orders to be driven over a well-paved public road to a neighboring village. At a short distance from the carriage followed four Cossacks, mounted on small horses from Tartary. One of them carried in the belt of his sabre a very peculiar instrument. Attached to a strong wooden handle were nailed seven straps of leather, which terminated in hard knots. It was commonly called “the pleti,” and was, by the command of the Emperor Nicholas, used as a substitute for the notorious knout.
Just as the village became visible behind the rows of trees that bordered the public road, the governor commanded the driver to stop. In looking from the window, he had observed, upon a lately cleared space, a collection of wooden huts which were situated a short distance from the road.
“What is the meaning of this? Who has dared to build these huts?” he exclaimed, in amazement.
“They look very much like our barracks in Berlin,” said Schulze. “Some poor wretches built huts outside of the city because they could not earn enough to pay house-rent. The fact of their being permitted to remain so near Berlin is a disgrace to the intelligence of the capital of the new empire. It will be quite difficult to remove them.”
“I shall not tolerate such things in my district,” said the Russian abruptly.
The carriage proceeded on its way, and stopped before a handsome house, the residence of the mayor, who was the only person in the village who belonged to the Russian state Church. This man had very small eyes and an immense mustache; and it was evident, from the odor of his breath, that he had been imbibing freely. When summoned before the governor, he assumed a most abject appearance, and his form seemed really to shrink while in the presence of the powerful official.
“What huts are those outside of the village?” said Rasumowski, addressing him roughly.
“To reply, with your honor’s permission, they are the dwellings of some poor people who have settled there. They are very orderly, pay their taxes punctually, and support themselves by mending kettles, by grinding scissors, by making rat and mouse traps, and such means.”
“Who gave them permission to settle there?”
“The parish, your honor. The ground upon which the huts stand belongs to the parish.”
“Listen, and obey my orders!” said the governor. “These huts must be taken down without delay; for the emperor has not given this ground to peasants, that they may propagate like vermin. If the rabble cannot rent houses in the village, then they must go further, perhaps to Siberia, where there is plenty of work in the mines.”
The mayor of the village bowed most obsequiously.
Beck watched his friend Adolph, who seemed greatly revolted at the inhuman command.
Herr Schulze, of Berlin, on the contrary, looked as though he had heard something that would prove of incalculable benefit to mankind.
“On what text did the Catholic pastor preach last Sunday?” asked the governor.
“With the permission of your honor, his sermon was on redemption through Jesus Christ.”
“Did he make no mention of the emperor?”
“No, your honor.”
“Did he say nothing about the obedience due the emperor?”
“No, your honor.”
“Go at once, and bring the priest before me!”
“I beg pardon, your honor, but he has gone to visit a sick person at some distance.”
“Then send him to me in the city. To-morrow, at nine in the morning, he must appear before me, and bring his sermon with him!”
The mayor made an humble obeisance.
“Did the priest presume to say anything about the Pope?”
“No, your honor; since the Roman Catholic priests who preached about the Pope were sent to Siberia, nothing is said about him.”
“With regard to other matters, how are things progressing in the village?”
“Admirably, your honor! After the twenty Catholic families were sent to Siberia, all the inhabitants are willing to die in obedience to our good emperor. The people are all satisfied; no one wishes to go into exile.”
“In how many villages of Germany,” said the governor to his guests, “can you find the people so contented and ready to give their lives in obedience to our good emperor? The form of government in the holy Russian Empire works miracles. Now, gentlemen, follow me to the schoolhouse, so that you may see how Russia educates her subjects.”
They left the mayor’s residence, and crossed the street to the schoolhouse.
“I must tell you in advance,” observed Rasumowski, “that in Russia we do not cultivate a fancy for popular education. Our peasants are only entitled to be taught three things: to obey, to work, and to pay taxes. In this consists their knowledge; it is the axis around which revolves our national education.”
He opened the school door. About one hundred children, dirty and poorly clad, sat upon the benches. The schoolmaster, who had already espied the arrival of the governor, bowed in fear and trembling.
“How is it with the children of the emperor, teacher? Do you fulfil your duty in obedience to my orders?”
“I endeavor to do so, your honor.”
“I shall convince myself, and ask some questions from the catechism of our state religion,” said the governor.
He called up several children, and began to question them, which questions were as remarkable and as interesting to the professor as were the answers.
“Who is your sovereign lord?”
“The good emperor of holy Russia.”
“What do you owe to the emperor?”
“Unconditional obedience, love, and payment of taxes.”
“In what does the happiness of a Russian consist?”
“In being a brave soldier of the good emperor.”
“Where does the soul of man go after death?”
“To heaven or to hell.”
“What soul goes to heaven?”
“That soul which always obeys the good emperor and owes no taxes.”
“What soul goes to hell?”
“That soul which was disobedient to the emperor.”
The governor turned towards his guests.
“You have already commenced a system of compulsory education in Germany,” said he; “but when you succeed in establishing a state church, and have a catechism of state religion, then will the new German Empire, like our czar, be able to educate subjects who must obey him blindly.”
He now turned again to the children.
“Is there a pope in Rome?”
The child who was questioned looked at the teacher, who had become as pale as death.
“Answer me! Is there a pope in Rome?” repeated the governor.
“No; there is only one emperor, who is at the same time the pope of all the Russians,” replied the child.
“Schoolmaster, I am satisfied with you,” said Rasumowski approvingly.
“You know that the only things which every good Russian must do is to work diligently, to pay taxes punctually, and to blindly obey the emperor. These three things you must impress upon the minds of the children!”
The governor was about to leave the schoolroom, when he suddenly stopped, and his face became crimson with anger. He had espied the portrait of the emperor, which hung in a gilt frame on the wall. The glass that covered it was broken, and it was soiled with a few ink-stains.
“Schoolmaster, what is this?” exclaimed the governor furiously.
“Pardon, your honor!” implored the trembling teacher. “A wicked boy threw his inkstand at the picture.”
“And you, miserable wretch that you are, left it thus disfigured upon the wall! Follow me!”
The governor, with his guests and the teacher, left the room, and entered an office where the mayor held his sessions.
“Schoolmaster!” began the governor, “you deserve to be sent to Siberia, for you Roman Catholics are only fit for the mines. You refuse blind obedience, and deny the right of the emperor to command in church affairs; you are constantly rebelling against the empire, and all of you should, therefore, be sent into exile. For your insolence, however, in leaving the portrait of our holy emperor in this neglected state, you will receive ten blows with the pleti.”
He stepped forward to the window, and summoned the Cossack who carried the instrument of torture.
“Corporal, give ten heavy strokes with the pleti on this teacher’s back!”
The Cossack seized a bench, and motioned the teacher to stretch himself upon it.
Von Sempach and Beck, finding it impossible to conceal their indignation, left the room. In going down-stairs, they heard the whizzing sound of the lash and the screams of the poor teacher.
“I shall lose my senses,” said Adolph, while waiting at the threshold. “My God! has Alexandra grown up amid such scenes?”
The professor was delighted to hear this remark.
“It is, indeed, a very demoralizing atmosphere for a woman to breathe,” said he.
“Can it be that Alexandra has escaped the contaminating influence of Russian customs? Has she also lost all feeling and the delicacy of her sex? We must find out, if possible.”
Rasumowski and Schulze approached.
“Ah! gentlemen,” exclaimed the governor laughingly, “the singing of the pleti caused you to leave! Well, we Russians accustom ourselves to such things. When, with other practical institutions, the pleti is also introduced into the new German Empire, then you will learn to think it as useful an instrument as is the whip in the hands of the cartman.”
“Who drive oxen and donkeys,” added the professor.
“Our new German Empire has already introduced a punishment for the soldiers, which causes as much pain as the pleti,” said Adolph von Sempach. “I have read repeatedly in the newspapers that soldiers, while upon drill, have fallen fainting to the ground. The reason was their being compelled to carry heavy stones in their knapsacks, until their strength gave way.”
“It is a Russian invention that you have borrowed from us; we have long practised it,” asserted Rasumowski.
“And I suppose we have also adopted your severe system of military arrest, which Count von Moltke justifies by ingeniously remarking that even in time of peace the soldier owes his health to his country.”
“Yes, it is true we keep up the same strict discipline,” exclaimed the Russian; “but Moltke should have said that the soldier owes his health and life to the emperor, and not to the country. Words are useless; acts are what we insist upon.”
When leaving the house, there were a number of men, women, and children outside who awaited the governor. At seeing him, they all fell upon their knees, and lifted up their hands in supplication.
“Pardon! Mercy! Humanity!” were heard in confused accents.
“Keep quiet!” commanded Rasumowski. “Schulze, what does this mean?”
“Your honor, these are the poor people who live in the huts. They ask you, for God’s sake, not to destroy their only place of shelter.”
“Asking me to do a thing for God’s sake!” exclaimed the governor harshly. “If they had asked me to do so for the emperor’s sake, I would perhaps have granted their request. Begone! Away with you! My orders are to be obeyed!”
The people, however, did not rise, but burst forth into fresh lamentations and tears.
“Your honor,” said an old man, “graciously listen to us, as the good emperor would do, who always wishes to help his people. We built those huts by permission of the parish, and we strive to make a living in an honest way. We pay the taxes, and are not in debt to the emperor. If your honor destroys our huts, whither shall we poor people go? Must we live with the foxes and wolves in the forests? Is this the will of the emperor?”
“The emperor desires his subjects to live in comfortable houses, for which reason the huts must be removed,” answered Rasumowski.
“Your honor, we have no means to build comfortable houses,” replied the old man. “Look at the little children; they will die if the orders of your honor are executed.”
“I will hear no more: it is the emperor’s will!” exclaimed the governor.
The words “It is the emperor’s will” had the most disheartening effect upon the poor people. The haggard, wretchedly-clad assemblage gave way to despair, but a low murmur was all that was heard.
Rasumowski looked triumphantly at his guests, as if he had said in so many words: “You see what the will of the emperor can do!”
But the professor was not to be deceived. The suppressed wrath plainly visible in the faces of the men did not escape him.
A young man rose humbly from his knees, and looked with strangely glittering eyes upon the governor.
“It is not true!—the emperor does not, cannot wish us to suffer!” he exclaimed.
Rasumowski looked with astonishment at the bold youth.
“How do you know that it is not the will of the emperor?” he asked.
“The emperor is human, but what you command is inhuman!” answered the intrepid peasant.
The Russian governor absolutely trembled with anger.
“Fifteen lashes with the pleti—give it to him soundly!” he cried, and walked towards the carriage, which drove slowly through the village.
Adolph von Sempach sat depressed and silent. What he had seen and heard did not tend to elevate the character of the beautiful Alexandra in his estimation, as her remarks concerning the cruelties upon the unfortunate Poles seemed to prove that she had inherited the barbarous disposition of her father.
“Do you hear the screams of the insolent fellow?” said the governor. “The pleti is unfortunately a poor affair—it has not sufficient swing and force. The old knout was much better; for it was made of strong leather straps, intertwined with wire. The Emperor Nicholas I. introduced this new knout, however—and whatever the czar does, is well done; but if I were consulted, I would bring the old knout again into use.”
“I fear, governor,” said Beck “that even the new knout or the pleti would meet with invincible opposition in Germany.”
“You are mistaken,” answered the Russian. “The Germans can also be subdued—the German neck must bow to him who has the power. Now, gentlemen, I will show you some evidences of the industry of our farmers,” he continued, when the carriage had left the village. “Look at our abundant crops! The German farmer can hardly excel the Russian. You find everywhere signs of prudent husbandry as well as of diligence and perseverance.”
Herr Schulze gave a token of assent, the professor knew nothing about agriculture, and Von Sempach preserved a gloomy silence.
“Do you see that village?” said Rasumowski, pointing in a certain direction. “All the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, with the exception of the mayor, of course; but for ten years they have been without a priest, without divine service, without a church.”
“I think I see a church,” remarked Beck.
“Yes, the church is there, but it has been closed for ten years. The former Roman Catholic pastor, who persisted in preaching upon the dignity of man, the liberty of the children of God, and even of the pope and other dangerous things, was transported to Siberia, and the church was closed by my command.”
“I admire your eminently practical method,” observed the guest from Berlin. “We would not dare as yet to do such a thing in the new German Empire.”
“But it will be done in good time,” replied the Russian.
The carriage, in returning, had by this time reached the outskirts of the city.
“Ah!” exclaimed Herr Schulze in joyful surprise, “the huts have already disappeared. I shall write at once to my friends in Berlin, and apprise them of the expeditious manner in which the Russian government acts.”
TO BE CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT NUMBER.
[THE VIRGIN MARY TO CHRIST ON THE CROSSE.]
What mist hath dimd that glorious face? what seas of griefe my sun doth tosse?
The golden raies of heauenly grace lies now eclipsèd on the crosse.
Iesus! my loue, my Sonne, my God, behold Thy mother washt in teares:
Thy bloudie woundes be made a rod to chasten these my latter yeares.
You cruell Iewes, come worke your ire, vpon this worthlesse flesh of mine:
And kindle not eternall fire, by wounding Him which is diuine.
Thou messenger that didst impart His first descent into my wombe,
Come help me now to cleaue my heart, that there I may my Sonne intombe.
You angels all, that present were, to shew His birth with harmonie;
Why are you not now readie here, to make a mourning symphony?
The cause I know, you waile alone and shed your teares in secresie,
Lest I should mouèd be to mone, by force of heauie companie.
But waile my soul, thy comfort dies, my wofull wombe, lament thy fruit;
My heart giue teares unto my eies, let Sorrow string my heauy lute.
—Southwell.
[POET AND MARTYR.[17]
PART FIRST—MARTYR.
“Hoist up sail while gale doth last,
Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure:
Seek not time when time is past,
Sober speed is wisdom’s leisure.
After-wits are dearly bought,
Let thy fore-wit guide thy thought.”
“Time wears all his locks before,
Take thou hold upon his forehead;
When he flies, he turns no more,
And behind his scalp is naked.
Works adjourn’d have many stays;
Long demurs breed new delays.”
—Robert Southwell, 1593.[18]
Concerning the writer of these beautiful lines, the English historian, Stow, makes the following brief mention in his Chronicle: “February 20, 1594-5.—Southwell, a Jesuit, that long time had lain prisoner in the Tower of London, was arraigned at the King’s Bench bar. He was condemned, and on the next morning drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, bowelled, and quartered.” From this account we are unable to discover that the man whose judicial murder Stow thus records was put to death for any offence but that of being a Jesuit, and of having “long time lain in prison in the Tower of London.” And yet, in thus stating the case, Stow tells the simple truth; for Southwell was guilty of no more serious crime than his sacerdotal character, and of suffering the imprisonment and tortures inflicted upon him in consequence thereof. For three years previous to his death he had been in prison and in the Tower, had lain in noisome and filthy dungeons, and been subjected many times to torture and the rack. From the high social position of his family, the fame of his literary accomplishments, his admirable and saintly bearing as a missionary priest in England, for six long years carrying his life in his hand while ministering to a scattered flock, obliged to move from place to place in disguise as though he were a malefactor, and finally, from the wonderful fortitude and constancy with which he was said to have suffered torture, his case was very generally known in London, and deeply commiserated even by many Protestants. So deep and widespread, indeed, was this sympathy that, when it was determined by the officers of the crown to try and condemn him on one and the same day, and execute him the next morning, they withheld from the public all announcement of his execution, meanwhile giving notice of the hanging of a famous highwayman in another place in order to draw off the concourse of spectators. But it availed not, for there were many who kept so close a watch upon the movements at Newgate, to which prison he had been removed a few days before his trial, that, when Southwell was brought out to be drawn on a sled or hurdle to the place of execution at Tyburn, he was followed by great numbers of people, and among them many persons of distinction, who witnessed the carrying out of his dreadful sentence, which was that he should be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”
That our readers may understand that our qualification of Southwell’s execution as a judicial murder is not the result of mere personal sympathy or of religious prejudice, we will here record the judgment of several Protestant authorities, who speak out concerning it in a manner not to be misunderstood. In the valuable Cyclopædia of English Literature, by Chambers, we read concerning Southwell that, after having ministered secretly but zealously to the scattered adherents of his creed, “without, as far as is known, doing anything to disturb the peace of society, he was apprehended and committed to a dungeon in the Tower, so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out for examination, his clothes were covered with vermin. Upon this his father, a man of good family, presented a petition to Queen Elizabeth, begging that, if his son had committed anything for which, by the laws, he had deserved death, he might suffer death; if not, as he was a gentleman, he begged her majesty would be pleased to order him to be treated as a gentleman. Southwell after this was somewhat better lodged, but an imprisonment of three years, with ten inflictions of the rack, wore out his patience, and he entreated to be brought to trial. Cecil is said to have made the brutal remark that, ‘if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire.’ Being at the trial found guilty, upon his own confession, of being a Romish priest, he was condemned to death, and executed at Tyburn accordingly, with all the horrible circumstances dictated by the old treason laws of England. Throughout all these scenes he behaved with a mild fortitude which nothing but a highly regulated mind and satisfied conscience could have prompted.”
Cleveland (Compendium of English Literature, p. 88), after stating the circumstances of Southwell’s imprisonment, trial, and execution, remarks: “The whole proceeding should cover the authors of it with everlasting infamy. It is a foul stain upon the garments of the maiden queen that she can never wipe off. There was not a particle of evidence at his trial that this pious and accomplished poet meditated any evil designs against the government. He did what he had a perfect right to do; ay, what it was his duty to do, if he conscientiously thought he was right—endeavor to make converts to his faith, so far as he could without interfering with the right of others. If there be anything to be execrated, it is persecution for opinion’s sake.”
Allibone, in his Dictionary of English Literature, says that Southwell, “to the disgrace of the English government, suffered as a martyr at Tyburn, February 21, 1595, after three years’ imprisonment in the Tower, during which it is asserted he was ten times subjected to the torture. He was a good poet, a good prose writer, and a better Christian than his brutal persecutors.”
Old Fuller, in his Worthies of England, as might be expected, views Southwell with a stern English Protestant eye, and thus dismisses him: “Robert Southwell was born in this county (Norfolk), as Pitsons affirmeth, who, although often mistaken in his locality, may be believed herein, as professing himself familiarly acquainted with him at Rome. But the matter is not much where he was born, seeing, though cried up by men of his own profession for his many books in verse and prose, he was reputed a dangerous enemy by the state, for which he was imprisoned and executed March the 3d, 1595” (vol. iii. p. 187).
Robert Southwell was the third son of Richard Southwell, Esq., of Horsham, St. Faith’s, Norfolk. The curious in genealogy, while investigating family lines associated with the Southwell pedigree, have found connected with it, in degrees more or less near, the names of Paston, Sidney, Howard, Newton, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Of his early years there is but slight record, save that, when still very young, he was sent to Douai to be educated. From Douai he passed to Paris and thence to Rome, where, in 1578, before he had yet reached the age of seventeen, he was received into the order of the Society of Jesus. On completion of his novitiate and termination of the courses of philosophy and theology, he was made prefect of studies of the English College at Rome. Ordained priest in 1584, and, as appears from his letter addressed, February 20, 1585, to the general of the order, seeking the “perilous” errand wherein his future martyrdom seems rather to have been anticipated than merely referred to as a simple possibility,[19] he left Rome on the 8th of May, 1586, a missionary to his native land, or, in other words, took up his line of march for the scaffold and for heaven. We have, naturally enough, but scant record of the young priest’s journey to and arrival in England; for, as the mere landing in England by a Catholic priest was then a penal offence punishable with death, Southwell’s return to his native country was surrounded as much as possible by secrecy. Although yearning to visit his home and embrace his family, he carefully abstained from going near them—of doing that which, in his quaint phrase of the day, “maketh my presence perilous.” But he was aware that his father was in danger of losing, if he had not already lost, his faith; and these fears were almost confirmed by the facts that he had formed a marriage with a lady of the court, and that his wealth gave him entrance to court circles which were necessarily violently Protestant. Deeply solicitous for his father’s spiritual condition, he therefore addressed him a letter of admonition and advice, not less remarkable for its tone of affection than for its energy and eloquence. We cite it in another place.
HUNTED DOWN.
At a time when, as Mr. Grosart says, “it was a crime to be a Catholic: it was proof of high treason to be a priest: it was to invite ‘hunting’ as of a wild beast to be a Jesuit,” we cannot reasonably look for many recorded traces of Father Southwell’s presence and journeyings to and fro while in England. He could only move in disguise or under the darkness of night; he was liable to be thrown into prison anywhere on the merest suspicion of any irresponsible accuser. The few Catholics who were ready to give him shelter and hospitality did so with the halter around their necks; for confiscation and death were the penalty, as they well knew, for “harboring” a priest. It is nevertheless certain that his refuge in London was the mansion of the Countess of Arundel, whose husband, Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, was imprisoned in the Tower, and died there, the noblest victim to the jealous and suspicious tyranny of Elizabeth, non sine veneni suspicione, as his epitaph still testifies.
Hundreds of Southwell’s letters to his superiors still exist, but they are all from necessity written in such general terms and in so guarded a manner as to afford but little historical information. Here is one of them, as given by Bishop Challoner in his Memoirs of Missionary Priests:
1. “As yet we are alive and well, being unworthy, it seems, of prisons. We have oftener sent, than received, letters from your parts, tho’ they are not sent without difficulty; and some, we know, have been lost.”
2. “The condition of Catholic recusants here is the same as usual, deplorable and full of fears and dangers, more especially since our adversaries have look’d for wars. As many of ours as are in chains rejoice and are comforted in their prisons; and they that are at liberty set not their heart upon it, nor expect it to be of long continuance. All by the great goodness and mercy of God arm themselves to suffer anything that can come, how hard soever it may be, as it shall please our Lord; for whose greater glory, and the salvation of their souls, they are more concerned than for any temporal losses.”
3. “A little while ago, they apprehended two priests, who have suffered such cruel usages in the prison of Bridewell as can scarce be believed. What was given them to eat was so little in quantity, and, withal, so filthy and nauseous, that the very sight was enough to turn their stomachs. The labors to which they obliged them were continual and immoderate, and no less in sickness than in health; for, with hard blows and stripes, they forced them to accomplish their task how weak soever they were. Their beds were dirty straw, and their prison most filthy. Some are there hung up for whole days by the hands, in such a manner that they can but just touch the ground with the tips of their toes. This purgatory we are looking for every hour, in which Topcliffe and Young, the two executioners of the Catholics, exercise all kinds of torments. But come what pleaseth God, we hope we shall be able to bear all in him that strengthens us. I most humbly recommend myself to the holy sacrifices of your reverence and of all our friends. (January 15, 1590.)”
PURSUIT AND ESCAPE.
In a work[20] published so lately as 1871, we catch a few fugitive glances of Father Robert Southwell. Father Gerard spoke of him at the time (1585) as “excelling in the art of helping and gaining souls, being at once prudent, pious, meek, and exceedingly winning.”
A descent was made by the pursuivants upon a house in the country, where the two fathers happened to be together, and but for the devotion of the domestics the two missionaries would have been captured. They escaped, however, and journeyed away together. The peculiar danger they were then subjected to was that arising from intercourse with the gentry. Father Gerard tells of a gentleman who violently suspected him, and adds: “After a day or so he quite abandoned all mistrust, as I spoke of hunting and falconry with all the details that none but a practised person could command.” He concludes: “For many make sad blunders in attempting this, as Father Southwell, who was afterwards my companion in many journeys, was wont to complain. He frequently got me to instruct him in the technical terms of sport, and used to complain of his bad memory for such things; for on many occasions when he fell in with Protestant gentlemen he found it necessary to speak of these matters, which are the sole topics of their conversations, save when they talk obscenity or break out into blasphemies and abuse of the saints or the Catholic faith.”
With danger of possible arrest at every house and on every road, followed by swift and barbarous execution, Father Southwell for six long years carried his life in his hand.
PROTESTANT OPINION.
“Granted,” says his Protestant biographer (Grosart, xlix.), “that in our Southwell’s years 1588 is included, and that the shadow of the coming of the Armada lay across England from the very moment of his arrival; granted that, in the teeth of their instructions, there were priests and members of the Society of Jesus who deemed they did God service by ‘plotting’ for the restoration of the old ‘faith and worship’ after a worldly sort; granted that politically and civilly the nation was, in a sense, in the throes of since-achieved liberties; granted that Mary, all too sadly, even tremendously, earned her epithet of ‘Bloody’; granted that the very mysticism, not to say mystery, of the ‘higher’ sovereignty claimed for him who wore the tiara, acted as darkness does with sounds the most innocent; granted nearly all that Protestantism claims in its apology as defence—it must be regarded as a stigma on the statesmanship and a stain on the Christianity of the reformed Church of England, as well as a sorrow to all right-minded and right-hearted, that the ‘convictions’ of those who could not in conscience ‘change’ at the bidding of Henry VIII., Elizabeth, or James were not respected; that ‘opinion,’ or, if you will, ‘error,’ was put down (or attempted to be put down) by force, and that the headsman’s axe and hangman’s rope were the only instrumentalities thought of. The State Trials remain to bring a blush to every lover of his country for the brutal and ‘hard’ mockery of justice in the higher courts of law whenever a priest was concerned—as later with the Puritans and Nonconformists.”
FALSE BRETHREN AND THE MAN-HUNTER.
With malignant pursuit that never slackened, and that old peril of S. Paul, “false brethren,” Southwell’s arrest was, of course, a mere question of time. His day came at last, after six years of labor and danger in the field. The circumstances are as follows, from Turnbull, verified by other authorities. There was resident at Uxenden, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic family by the name of Bellamy, occasionally visited by Southwell for the purpose of religious instruction. One of the daughters, Ann, had in her early youth exhibited marks of the most vivid and unshakable piety; but having been committed to the gatehouse of Westminster, her faith gradually departed, and along with it her virtue: for, having formed an intrigue with the keeper of the prison, she subsequently married him, and by this step forfeited all claim which she had by law or favor upon her father. In order, therefore, to obtain some fortune, she resolved to take advantage of the act of 27 Elizabeth, which made the harboring of a priest treason, with confiscation of the offender’s goods. Accordingly she sent a messenger to Southwell, urging him to meet her on a certain day and hour at her father’s house; whither he, either in ignorance of what had happened, or under the impression that she sought his spiritual assistance through motives of penitence, went at the appointed time. In the meanwhile, having apprised her husband of this, as also the place of concealment in her father’s house and the mode of access, he conveyed the information to Topcliffe, an implacable persecutor and denouncer of the Catholics, who, with a band of his satellites, surrounded the premises, broke open the house, arrested his reverence, and carried him off in open day, exposed to the gaze of the populace. Topcliffe carried Southwell to his own (Topcliffe’s) dwelling, and there, in the course of ten weeks, tortured him with such pitiless severity that the unhappy victim, complaining of it to his judges, declared that death would have been preferable. A letter, qualified by Grosart as “fawning, cruel, and abominable,” written by this human bloodhound, Topcliffe, and addressed to no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth, reports the capture and torture of Southwell, and states, with details, how he proposes further to torture him.
The letter is dated Westminster, June 22, 1592, and advises the queen: “I have him here within my strong chamber in Westminster churchyard (i.e. the gatehouse). I have made him assured for starting or hurting of himself by putting upon his arms a pair of;[21] and so to keep him either from view or conference with any but Nicolas, the underkeeper of the gatehouse.... Upon this present taking of him it is good forthwith to enforce him to answer truly and directly; and so to prove his answers true in haste, to the end that such as he be deeply concerned in his treachery may not have time to start, or make shift to use any means in common prisons; either to stand upon or against the wall will give warning. But if your highness’ pleasure be to know anything in his heart, to stand against the wall, his feet standing upon the ground, and his hands put as high as he can reach against the wall (like a trick at Tremshemarn), will enforce him to tell all; and the truth proven by the sequel....[22] It may please your majesty to consider, I never did take so weighty a man, if he be rightly considered.”[23]
The reader will here readily recognize a partial description of one of the modes of torture then most common in use throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It seems that it was “her highness’ pleasure” to know something that was in this poor martyr’s heart, for Southwell was afterwards again repeatedly tortured. The intimate personal relations existing between the virgin queen and this man Topcliffe, whose very name was a stench in the nostrils of Protestants of respectable behavior, were maintained long after the Southwell capture, as we learn from the best authority. The cruelty of Elizabeth was only surpassed by her mendacity, as her mendacity was only exceeded by her mean parsimony, and when she travelled or made progress from one country to another it was always at the expense of her good and loyal subjects. Eventually the announcement of a visit from their good queen, received outwardly with such declarations as might naturally follow the promise of the call of a special envoy from heaven, was in reality looked upon as the coming of a terrible calamity. It was at that time considered at the English court—where, as we all know, all the civil and religious virtues had taken refuge—an excellent jest to so direct the course of the queen’s progress as to make her visits fall at the residences of well-known Catholic gentlemen. It is only necessary to say that the anniversary of all such events yet lives in the traditions of the descendants of such families as that of a day of horror. The royal retinue treated the house like a captured place, and it was well for the proprietor if confiscation or death, or both, were not the sole reward of his generous hospitality.
Mr. Topcliffe gives us valuable information on this point. On the 30th of August, 1578, he writes to the Earl of Shrewsbury: “The next good news (not in account the highest), her majesty hath served God with great zeal and comfortable examples; for by her council the two notorious papists, young Rookwood (the master of Ewston Hall, where her majesty did lie upon Sunday now a fortnight), and one Downs, a gentleman, were both committed, the one to the town prison at Norwich, the other to the county prison there, for obstinate papistry; and seven more gentlemen of worship were committed to several houses in Norwich as prisoners; two of the Lovells, another Downs, one Benings, one Parry, and two others.... Her majesty, by some means I know not, was lodged at his (Rookwood’s) house, Ewston, far unmeet for her highness, but fitter for the blackguard; nevertheless her excellent majesty gave to Rookwood ordinary thanks for his bad house, and her fair hand to kiss; after which it was braved at. But my lord chamberlain, nobly and gravely understanding that Rookwood was excommunicated for papistry, called him before him, demanded of him how he durst presume to attempt her real presence, he, unfit to accompany any Christian person; forthwith said he was fitter for a pair of stocks; commanded him out of the court, and yet to attend her council’s pleasure; and at Norwich he was committed,”[24] etc. etc. In the beginning of the letter Topcliffe “joys at her majesty’s gracious favor and affiance in your lordship—next some comfort I received of her for myself that must ever lie nearest my own heart.” Tender Topcliffe! But we must have “no scandal about Queen Elizabeth,” and our most delicate susceptibilities for the fair fame of the royal virgin may be quieted by the certainty that the comfort nearest the human bloodhound’s “own heart” was something substantial—a country house, an estate, or the like.
Lodge says that this Topcliffe was respectably connected, but that he could only find that he was distinguished as a most implacable persecutor of Roman Catholics. In a letter of Sir Anthony Standen, in which he praises the agreeable manners of the Earl of Essex, he writes: “Contrary to our Topcliffian customs, he hath won more with words than others could do with racks.” From another letter of the period it appears that Topcliffzare in the quaint language of the court signified to hunt a recusant.
But to return to Southwell. Transferred to a dungeon in the Tower, “so noisome and filthy that, when he was brought out at the end of the month, his clothes were covered with vermin,” his father wrote to her majesty Queen Elizabeth the letter we have already mentioned. This petition was to some extent regarded. A better lodging was allowed him, and leave accorded his father to supply him with “cloaths and other necessaries”; and amongst the rest, with books which he asked for, which were only the Holy Bible and the works of S. Bernard. “The selection of books,” says Mr. Grosart, “the book of books, and the father of the fathers, for a poet is very noteworthy; and through all his weary imprisonment ‘spiritual things,’ not civil or earthly, were his theme when he discoursed to his sister Mary (Mrs. Bannister) or others permitted occasionally to visit him.”
TRIAL AND EXECUTION.
We adopt mainly the relation of Southwell’s trial and execution as it is given by Bishop Challoner, supported by a Latin MS. preserved in the archives of the English College of S. Omer’s:
“After Father Southwell had been kept close prisoner for three years in the Tower, he sent an epistle to Cecil, Lord Treasurer, humbly entreating his lordship that he might either be brought upon his trial to answer for himself, or at least that his friends might have leave to come and see him. The treasurer answered that, if he was in so much haste to be hanged, he should quickly have his desire. Shortly after this orders were given that he should be removed from the Tower to Newgate, where he was put down into the dungeon called Limbo, and there kept for three days.
“On the 22d of February, without any previous warning to prepare for his trial, he was taken out of his dark lodging and hurried to Westminster, to hold up his hand there at the bar. The first news of this step towards his martyrdom filled his heart with a joy which he could not conceal. The judges before whom he was to appear were Lord Chief-Justice Popham, Justice Owen, Baron Evans, and Sergeant Daniel. As soon as Father Southwell was brought in, the lord chief-justice made a long and vehement speech against the Jesuits and seminary priests, as the authors and contrivers of all the plots and treasons which, he pretended, had been hatched during that reign. Then was read the bill of indictment against Father Southwell, drawn up by Cook, the queen’s solicitor.”
THEIR FAITH WAS THEIR GUILT.
It would be well to remark here that Protestants nowadays frequently contend that the missionary priests judicially murdered during the reign of Elizabeth were not executed on account of their religion, but because they were stirrers up of sedition and traitors, and were in every case so proven to be upon their respective trials. The good people who set up such pretext are sadly in ignorance of the history of that dark period. So far from asserting the slightest pretence of guilt on the part of such acts accused of as commonly constitute sedition and high treason, the statute of Elizabeth under which they were sent to the gallows only made it necessary to show that they were Englishmen and Catholic priests, and were arrested in England. The statute, in fact, enacted substantially that, “if any Jesuit, seminary priest, or deacon, or religious or ecclesiastical person whatever, born within the realm, shall come into, be, or remain in any part of this realm, every such offence shall be taken and adjudged to be high treason.” The indictment against Southwell was “drawn up by Cook, the queen’s solicitor,” says the S. Omer MS. Now, “Cook, the queen’s solicitor” here referred to was no less a personage than the great Coke. Here is the indictment presented by him in Southwell’s case, from which it will be seen that the prisoner was charged only with the crimes of, first, being a priest of English birth; second, of having remained in the county of Middlesex:
“The jury present, on the part of our sovereign lady the queen, that Robert Southwell, late of London, clerk, born within this kingdom of England; to wit, since the feast of S. John the Baptist, in the first year of the reign of her majesty, and before the first day of May, in the thirty-second year of the reign of our lady the queen aforesaid, made and ordained priest by authority derived and pretended from the See of Rome; not having the fear of God before his eyes, and slighting the laws and statutes of this realm of England, without any regard to the penalty therein contained, on the 20th day of June, the thirty-fourth year of the reign of our lady the queen, at Uxenden, in the county of Middlesex, traitorously, and as a false traitor to our lady the queen, was and remained, contrary to the form of the statute in such case set forth and provided, and contrary to the peace of our said lady the queen, her crown, and dignities.”
The grand jury having found the bill, Father Southwell was ordered to come up to the bar. He readily obeyed, and, bowing down his head, made a low reverence to his judges; then modestly held up his hand according to custom, and, being asked whether he was guilty or not guilty, he answered, “I confess that I was born in England, a subject to the queen’s majesty, and that, by authority derived from God, I have been promoted to the sacred order of priesthood in the Roman Church, for which I return most hearty thanks to his divine Majesty. I confess, also, that I was at Uxenden, in Middlesex, at that time, when, being sent for thither by trick and deceit, I fell into your hands, as is well known; but that I never entertained any designs or plots against the queen or kingdom, I call God to witness, the revenger of perjury; neither had I any other design in returning home to my native country than to administer the sacraments according to the rite of the Catholic Church to such as desired them.”
Here the judge interrupted him, and told him that he was to let all that alone, and plead directly guilty or not guilty. Upon which he said, he was not guilty of any treason whatsoever. And being asked by what he would be tried, he said, “By God and by you.” The judge told him he was to answer, “By God and his country,” which, at first, he refused, alleging that the laws of his country were disagreeable to the law of God, and that he was unwilling these poor harmless men of the jury, whom they obliged to represent the country, should have any share in their guilt, or any hand in his death. “But,” said he, “if through your iniquity it must be so, and I cannot help it, be it as you will; I am ready to be judged by God and my country.” When the twelve were to be sworn, he challenged none of them, saying that they were all equally strangers to him, and therefore charity did not allow him to except against any one of them more than another.
After Coke had presented the case to the jury, they went aside to consult about the verdict, and in a short time brought him in guilty. He was asked if he had anything more to say for himself why sentence should not be pronounced against him? He said: “Nothing; but from my heart I beg of Almighty God to forgive all who have been any ways accessory to my death.” The judge having pronounced sentence according to the usual form, Father Southwell made a very low bow, returning him most hearty thanks as for an unspeakable favor. The judge offered him the help of a minister to prepare him to die. Father Southwell desired he would not trouble him upon that head; that the grace of God would be more than sufficient for him. And so, being sent back to Newgate through the streets, lined with people, he discovered, all the way, the overflowing joy of his heart in his eyes, in his whole countenance, and in every gesture and motion of his body. He was again put down into limbo, at his return to Newgate, where he spent the following night, the last of his life, in prayer, full of the thoughts of the journey he was to take the next day, through the gate of martyrdom, into a happy eternity; to enjoy for ever the sovereign object of his love.
We have seen by what device and with what ill success the officials directing the execution sought, on the next morning, to draw away the crowd from Tyburn where Father Southwell was to be “hung, bowelled, and quartered.”
EXECUTIONS UNDER ELIZABETH.
The modern reader generally, and very naturally, supposes that this sentence, horrible as it is in its simplest form, would be carried out as stated, that is to say, that, when the condemned man was hung until dead, his body was then butchered as described. This probably was the intention of the law, and the latter two of the three incidents of the executions were intended more as indignities to the remains of a criminal supposed to be guilty of the greatest of human crimes than as any part of the means of procuring death. But under the reign of Elizabeth the cruelty and bestiality of the mode in which the horrible sentence was carried out had reached its height. As a general thing, the victim was butchered alive. According to the whim or the bloodthirstiness of the executioner, the condemned man was allowed to hang a short time, or he was scarcely swung off before he was cut down and the hangman was—as he is described in a well-known phrase—“grabbling among his entrails.” Sometimes the executioner would spring upon the body as it was swung off, and plunge his knife into the victim before they reached the ground in their fall together. When a young priest named Edward Genings was executed, in 1591, the butchery was superintended by Topcliffe, who adjured the victim to submit and recant and he should be pardoned. His reply was: “I know not in what I have offended my dear anointed princess; if I had, I would willingly ask forgiveness. If she be offended with me because I am a priest, and because I profess my faith and will not turn minister against my conscience, I shall be, I trust, excused and innocent before God. I must obey God, saith S. Peter, rather than men.” At this Topcliffe was enraged, and bade the hangman turn the ladder; scarcely giving him time to say a Pater Noster. Cut down by his order before he was dead, the butchery began, and, the hangman’s hand being already on his heart, Genings was heard to say, “Sancte Gregori, ora pro me!”—which the hangman hearing, he swore, “Zounds, see, his heart is in my hand, and yet Gregory is in his mouth! O egregious papist!”[25]
We return to Father Southwell, who was drawn on a hurdle or sled from Newgate to Tyburn, and resume the account of the S. Omer’s MS.: “When he was come to the place, getting up into the cart, he made the sign of the cross in the best manner that he could, his hands being pinion’d, and began to speak to the people those words of the apostle (Rom. xiv), ‘Whether we live, we live to the Lord, or whether we die, we die to the Lord; therefore, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.’ Here the sheriff would have interrupted him, but he begged leave that he might go on, assuring him that he would utter nothing that should give offence. Then he spoke as follows: ‘I am come to this place to finish my course, and to pass out of this miserable life; and I beg of my Lord Jesus Christ, in whose most precious Passion and Blood I place my hope of salvation, that he would have mercy on my soul. I confess I am a Catholic priest of the Holy Roman Church, and a religious man of the Society of Jesus; on which account I owe eternal thanks and praises to my God and Saviour.’ Here he was interrupted by a minister telling him that, if he understood what he had said in the sense of the Council of Trent, it was damnable doctrine. But the minister was silenc’d by the standers-by, and Mr. Southwell went on, saying: ‘Sir, I beg of you not to be troublesome to me for this short time that I have to live: I am a Catholic, and in whatever manner you may please to interpret my words, I hope for my salvation by the merits of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and as to the queen, I never attempted, nor contrived, or imagined any evil against her, but have always prayed for her to Our Lord, and for this short time of my life still pray, that, in his infinite mercy, he would be pleased to give her all such gifts and graces which he sees, in his divine wisdom, to be most expedient for the welfare both of her soul and body, in this life and in the next. I recommend in like manner, to the same mercy of God, my poor country, and I implore the divine bounty to favor it with his light and the knowledge of his truth, to the greater advancement of the salvation of souls, and the eternal glory of his divine Majesty. In fine, I beg of the almighty and everlasting God, that this my death may be for my own and for my country’s good, and the comfort of the Catholics my brethren.’
“Having finished these words, and looking for the cart to be immediately drove away, he again blessed himself, and, with his eyes raised to heaven, repeated with great calmness of mind and countenance, ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ with other short ejaculations, till the cart was drawn off. The unskilful hangman had not applied the noose of the rope to the proper place, so that he several times made the sign of the cross whilst he was hanging, and was some time before he was strangled, which some perceiving, drew him by the legs to put an end to his pain, and when the executioner was for cutting the rope before he was dead, the gentlemen and people that were present cried out three several times, ‘Hold, hold!’ for the behavior of the servant of God was so edifying in these his last moments, that even the Protestants who were present at the execution were much affected with the sight.” After he was dead he was cut down and the remainder of the sentence carried out. Turnbull relates that “Lord Mountjoy (Charles Blount), who happened to be present, was so struck by the martyr’s constancy that he exclaimed, ‘May my soul be with this man’s!’ and he assisted in restraining those who would have cut the rope while he was still in life.”
Father Southwell’s reverend and Protestant biographer declares, in concluding his relation of the execution: “I must regard our worthy as a ‘martyr’ in the deepest and grandest sense—a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost. I should blush for my Protestantism if I did not hold in honor, yea reverence, his stainless and beautiful memory.
‘Through this desert, day by day,
Wandered not his steps astray,
Treading still the royal way.’
—Paradisus Animæ.
“So perished Father Southwell, at thirty-three years of age, and so, unhappily, have perished many of the wise and virtuous of the earth. Conscious of suffering in the supposed best of causes, he seems to have met death without terror—to have received the crown of martyrdom not only with resignation, but with joy.”[26]
It is matter of regret that there exists no authentic portrait of Southwell. His biographer is of opinion that a genuine likeness of him would have shown an intellectual, etherealized face, and fancies that he might have sat for the portrait of the Prior in The Lady of Garaye:
“Tender his words, and eloquently wise;
Mild the pure fervor of his watchful eyes;
Meek with serenity and constant prayer,
The luminous forehead, high and broad and bare.
The thin mouth, though not passionless, yet still
With a sweet calm that speaks an angel’s will.
Resolving service to his God’s behest,
And ever musing how to serve him best,
Not old, nor young; with manhood’s gentlest grace,
Pale to transparency the pensive face,
Pale not with sickness but with studious thought,
The body tasked, the fine mind overwrought;
With something faint and fragile in the whole,
As though ‘twere but a lamp to hold a soul.”
PART SECOND.—POET.
And here, first, a few words on the prose writings of Southwell. We have already referred to the remarkable letter of admonition by him addressed to his father. It is a severe test to put the prose of any cultivated language to that of comparison with the productions of the same tongue nearly three centuries later. And yet this letter will support such comparison surprisingly well both as to substance and style. The reader will bear in mind the peculiar circumstances under which Southwell addressed this
LETTER TO HIS FATHER.
“I am not of so unnatural a kind, of so wild an education, or so unchristian a spirit, as not to remember the root out of which I have branched, or to forget my secondary maker and author of my being. It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that has made me such a stranger to my native home, and so backward in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of these days that maketh my presence perilous, and the discharge of my duties an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwilling courtesy upon any, or by seeming officious to become offensive; deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself, and to purchase their danger, whose good-will I so highly esteem. I never doubted but what the belief, which to all my friends by descent and pedigree is, in a manner, hereditary, framed in them a right persuasion of my present calling, not suffering them to measure their censures of me by the ugly terms and odious epithets wherewith heresy hath sought to discredit my functions, but rather by the reverence of so worthy a sacrament and the sacred usages of all former ages. Yet, because I might easily perceive by apparent conjectures that many were more willing to hear of me than from me, and readier to praise than to use my endeavors, I have hitherto bridled my desire to see them by the care and jealousy of their safety; and banished myself from the scene of my cradle in my own country. I have lived like a foreigner, finding among strangers that which, in my nearest blood, I presumed not to seek.”
Then, regretting that he has been barred from affording to his dearest friends that which hath been eagerly sought and beneficially attained by mere strangers, he exclaims passionately:
“Who hath more interest in the grape than he who planted the vine? Who more right to the crop than he who sowed the corn? or where can the child owe so great service as to him to whom he is indebted for his very life and being? With young Tobias I have travelled far, and brought home a freight of spiritual sustenance to enrich you, and medicinable receipts against your ghostly maladies. I have with Esau, after long toil in pursuing a long and painful chase, returned with the full prey you were wont to love, desiring thereby to ensure your blessing. I have, in this general famine of all true and Christian food, with Joseph prepared abundance of the mead of angels for the repast of your soul. And now my desire is that my drugs may cure you, my prey delight you, and my provisions feed you, by whom I have been cured, enlightened, and fed myself; that your courtesies may, in part, be counterveiled, and my duty, in some sort, performed.
“Despise not, good sire, the youth of your son, neither deem your God measureth his endowments by number of years. Hoary senses are often couched under youthful locks, and some are riper in the spring than others in the autumn of their age. God chose not Esau himself, nor his eldest son, but young David, to conquer Goliath and to rule his people; not the most aged person, but David, the most innocent youth, delivered Susannah from the iniquity of the judges. Christ, at twelve years of age, was found in the temple questioning with the greatest doctors. A true Elias can conceive that a little cloud may cast a large and abundant shower; and the Scripture teacheth us that God unveileth to little ones that which he concealeth from the wisest sages. His truth is not abashed by the minority of the speaker; for out of the mouths of infants and sucklings he can perfect his praises.... The full of your spring-tide is now fallen, and the stream of your life waneth to a low ebb; your tired bark beginneth to leak, and grateth oft upon the gravel of the grave; therefore it is high time for you to strike sail and put into harbor, lest, remaining in the scope of the winds and waves of this wicked time, some unexpected gust should dash you upon the rock of eternal ruin.”
The entire letter is given in both Walter and Turnbull’s Memoirs of Southwell, and has been extravagantly praised as being the composition of Sir Walter Raleigh, among whose Remains it is frequently reprinted. Mr. Grosart, a Protestant clergyman, says of it: “I know nothing comparable with the mingled affection and prophetlike fidelity, the wise instruction, correction, reproof, the full rich scripturalness and quaint applications, the devoutness, the insistence, the pathos of this letter.” The edition of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Remains, published in London in 1675, was the subject of an article in the Retrospective Review for 1820, in which the reviewer remarks: “‘The Dutiful Advice of a Loving Son to his Aged Father’ is supposed to be a libel on Sir Walter, written by his enemies. It will be seen, however, that it bears a strong resemblance to his style, although the metaphor is more profuse and ornamental, and seems to be rather engrafted on his thoughts than to spring up with them. That this piece should be dictated by personal hostility is strange. It contains exhortations that might with the greatest propriety be directed to any man.
“It is possible that it might be written by another in imitation of Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Advice to his Son’; yet if he was an enemy, he was of a most uncommon description. As the advice, however, is worth quoting for its own merit, and is written with great force and beauty, we shall give our readers an opportunity of judging for themselves.”
This letter is Southwell’s earliest dated prose, and was followed by a variety of treatises, epistles, and pamphlets, printed on the “private press” at his own house in London. Besides these, there remain several English and a large number of Latin prose writings still in manuscript. “Mary Magdalene’s Funerall Teares,” although prose in form, is in fact far more fervid and impassioned than the greater part of his poetry.
SOUTHWELL’S POETRY.
To the readers of poetry for its merely sensuous qualities of flowing measure, attractive imagery, and brilliant description, the poems of Southwell possess but few attractions. Their subjects are all religious, or, at least, serious; and, in reading him, we must totally forget the traditional pagan poet pictured to us as crowned with flowers, and holding in hand an overflowing anacreontic cup. Serious, indeed, his poems might well be, for they were all composed during the intervals of thirteen bodily rackings in a gloomy prison that opened only upon the scaffold. And yet we look in vain among them for expressions of the reproaches or repining such a fate might well engender, and we search with but scant result for record or trace of his own sufferings in the lines traced with fingers yet bent and smarting with the rack. The vanity of all earthly things, the trials of life, the folly and wickedness of the world, the uncertainty of life, and the consolations and glories of religion, are the constantly returning subjects of his productions, and, however treated, they always reflect the benignity and elevation of the poet’s character.
Certain it is that Southwell was largely read by the generation that immediately succeeded him. Many years ago, Ellis[27] said: “The very few copies of his works which are now known to exist are the remnant of at least seventeen different editions, of which eleven were printed between 1593 and 1600”; and at a later period, Drake, in his Shakespeare and his Times, says:[28] “Both the poetry and the prose of Southwell possess the most decided merit; the former, which is almost entirely restricted to moral and religious subjects, flows in a vein of great harmony, perspicuity, and elegance, and breathes a fascination resulting from the subject and the pathetic mode of treating it which fixes and deeply interests the reader.”
A valuable tribute of admiration to Southwell’s poetic talent is that of Ben Jonson, who said: “that Southwell was hanged; yet so he (Jonson) had written that piece of his, ‘The Burning Babe,’ he would have been content to destroy many of his.”[29] Our readers, we are sure, will thank us for giving it here, although we strongly suspect that Mr. Grosart will not approve of its modern orthography.
As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat, which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear,
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed,
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed;
Alas! quoth he, but newly born, in fiery heats I frye,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scornes;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now, on fire I am, to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to washe them in my blood:
With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.
Our limits will permit but slight citation from the body of Southwell’s poetry. He is most widely known by his chief poem “S. Peter’s Complaint,” consisting of one hundred and thirty-six stanzas (six-line). But his most attractive pieces are his shorter poems—“Times go by Turns,” “Content and Rich,”[30] “Life is but Loss,” “Look Home,” “Love’s servile Lot,” and the whole series on our Saviour and his Mother; and, making some allowance for the enthusiasm of our editor, no true lover of poetry who reads these productions of Southwell will seriously dissent from Mr. Grosart’s estimate of them. “The hastiest reader will come on ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ that are as musical as Apollo’s lute, and as fresh as a spring budding spray; and the wording of all (excepting over-alliteration and inversion occasionally), is throughout of the ‘pure well of English undefiled.’ When you take some of the Myrtæ and Mæoniæ pieces, and read and re-read them, you are struck with their condensation, their concinnity, their polish, their élan, their memorableness. Holiness is in them not as scent on love-locks, but as fragrance in the great Gardener’s flowers of fragrance. His tears are pure and white as the ‘dew of the morning.’ His smiles—for he has humor, even wit, that must have lurked in the burdened eyes and corners o’ mouth—are sunny as sunshine. As a whole, his poetry is healthy and strong, and, I think, has been more potential in our literature than appears on the surface. I do not think it would be hard to show that others of whom more is heard drew light from him, as well early as more recent, from Burns to Thomas Hood. For example, limiting as to the latter, I believe every reader who will compare the two deliberately will see in the ‘Vale of Tears’ the source of the latter’s immortal ‘Haunted House’—dim, faint, weak beside it, as the earth-hid bulb compared with the lovely blossom of hyacinth or tulip or lily, nevertheless really carrying in it the original of the mightier after-poem.”
Our warmest tribute of praise can render but scant justice to the intelligence, the industry, the erudition, the keen poetic sense, and the enthusiasm which the editor of the volume before us has devoted to what has evidently been to him a labor of love. Mr. Grosart is well known in the literary world as the editor of Crashawe and of Vaughan, as also of the forthcoming editions of Marvell, Donne, and Sidney. His laboriously corrected version of our martyr-poet’s legacy has, it may be said, restored Southwell to us, so obscured had he become by mistakes, misprints, and false readings. Indeed Mr. Grosart’s somewhat jealous love of his subject betrays him into apparently harsh judgment on the efforts of others, when, for instance, he declares himself “vexed by the travesties on editing and mere carelessness of Walter earlier (1817) and Turnbull later (1856) in their so-called editions of the poems of Father Southwell,” adding: “Turnbull said contemptuously, ‘I refrain from criticism on Mr. Walter’s text’—severe but not undeserved, only his own is scarcely one whit better, and in places worse.”
There is one passage at the close of Mr. Grosart’s interesting preface which has a special interest for us as Americans. We mean his reference to the verdict pronounced on Father Southwell’s poetry by Prof. James Russell Lowell in his charming book My Study Windows. “It seems to me,” says Mr. Grosart, “harsh to brutality on the man (meet follower of him ‘the first true gentleman that ever breathed’); while on the poetry it rests on self-evidently the most superficial acquaintance and the hastiest generalization. To pronounce ‘S. Peter’s Complaint’ a ‘drawl’ of thirty pages of ‘maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a (sic) sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus,’ shows about as much knowledge—that is, ignorance—of the poem as of the schoolman, and as another remark does of S. Peter; for, with admitted tedium, S. Peter’s complaint sounds depths of penitence and remorse, and utters out emotion that flames into passion very unforgettably, while there are felicities of metaphor, daintinesses of word-painting, brilliancies of inner-portraiture, scarcely to be matched in contemporary verse. The ‘paraphrase’ of David (to wit, ‘David’s Peccavi’) is a single short piece, and the ‘punning’ conceit, ‘fears are my feres,’ is common to some of England’s finest wits, and in the meaning of ‘fere’ not at all to be pronounced against. If we on this side of the Atlantic valued less the opinion of such a unique genius as Prof. Lowell’s, if we did not take him to our innermost love, we should less grieve over such a vulgar affront offered to a venerable name as his whole paragraph to Southwell. I shall indulge the hope of our edition reaching the ‘Study,’ and persuading to a real ‘study’ of these poems, and, if so, I do not despair of a voluntary reversal of the first judgment.”
ARIS WILMOTT
pronounced Southwell to be the Goldsmith of our early poets; and ‘Content and Rich,’ and, ‘Dyer’s phansie turned to a Sinner’s Complaint’ warrant the great praise. But beneath the manner recalling Goldsmith, there is a purity and richness of thought, a naturalness, a fineness of expression, a harmony of versification, and occasionally a tide-flow of high-toned feeling, not to be met with in him.
“Nor will Prof. Lowell deem his (I fear) hasty (mis)judgment’s reconsideration too much to count on, after the present Archbishop of Dublin’s well-weighed words in his notes to his Household Book of English Poetry (1868):
“‘Hallam thinks that Southwell has been of late praised at least as much as he deserves. This may be so; yet, taking into account the finished beauty of such poems as this (“Lewd Love is Loss”) and No. 2 (“Times go by Turns”) of this collection, poems which, as far as they go, leave nothing to be desired, he has scarcely been praised more than he deserves. How in earlier times he was rated, the fact that there were twenty-four editions of his poems will sufficiently testify; though probably the creed be professed, and the death which he died, may have had something to do with this. Robert Southwell was a seminary priest, and was executed at Tyburn in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, in conformity with a law, which even the persistent plottings of too many of these at once against the life of the sovereign and the life of the state must altogether fail to justify or excuse’ (pp. 391-392).
“To Archbishop Trench’s I add, as equally weighty and worthy, the fine and finely sympathetic yet discriminative judgment of Dr. George Macdonald in Antiphon as follows:
“‘I proceed to call up one WHO WAS A POET INDEED, although little known as such, being a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit even, and therefore, in Elizabeth’s reign, a traitor and subject to the penalties according (accruing)? Robert Southwell, thirteen times most cruelly tortured, could “not be induced to confess anything, not even the color of the horse whereon he rode on a certain day, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was,’ etc.
“I believe, then,” concludes Dr. Grosart, “I shall not appeal in vain to Prof. Lowell to give a few hours behind his ‘Study Windows’ to a reperusal of some of the poems of Southwell named by us and these sufficiently qualified critics.”
[SOMETHING ABOUT LACE.]
There is probably no article, not a necessity, which has employed so many heads and hands, and been the subject of such varied interests, as lace. The making of it has given employment to countless nunneries, where the ladies, working first and most heartily for the church, have also taught this art to their pupils as an accomplishment or a means of support. It was, indeed, so peculiarly the province of the religious that, long after it was done in the world, it still bore the name of “nun’s-work.”
In those old days when railroads were not, and when swamps and forests covered tracts of land now thick with villages and cities, country ladies made fine needle-work their chief occupation; and it was the custom in feudal times for the squires’ daughters to spend some time in the castle, in attendance on the châtelaine, where they learned to embroider and make lace. It was then a woman’s only resource, and was held in high esteem. In the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, one Catherine Sloper was laid to rest, in 1620, with the inscription on her tombstone that she was “exquisite at her needle.”
Millions of poor women, and even men and children, have earned their bread by this delicate labor; women of intelligence and fair estate have devoted their lives to it; and noble and regal ladies have been proud to excel in the art.
It is related that when Cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio went down to the palace at Bridewell to seek an interview with the repudiated wife of Henry VIII., they found her seated among her ladies embroidering, and she came to meet them with a skein of red silk around her neck. In those days they wrought and made lace with colored silk. We can imagine how the bright floss must have trembled over the tumultuous beatings of that wronged heart during the cruel interview that followed.
But the work of Catherine of Aragon was not for vanity’s sake, nor even to pass the heavy hours. In her native Spain the rarest laces were made for the church, and not only nuns, but ladies of the world, wove pious thoughts in with that fairy web. Perhaps nowhere else, save in Rome, was the church lace so rich as in Spain. Images of favorite saints and Madonnas had wardrobes of regal magnificence, changed every day, and the altars and vestments were no less regally adorned.
Beckford writes that, in 1787, the Marchioness of Cogalhudo, wife of the eldest son of the semi-regal race of Medina Cœli, was appointed Mistress of the Robes to Our Lady of La Solidad, in Madrid, and that the office was much coveted.
It is supposed that the peasantry of Bedfordshire, in England, first learned lace-making through the charity of Queen Catherine. While at Ampthill, it is recorded that, when not at her devotions, she, with her ladies, “wrought a needle-work costly and artificially, which she intended for the honor of God to bestow on some of the churches.”
The country people had the greatest love and respect for the disgraced queen; and, till lately, the lace-makers held “Cattern’s Day,” the 25th of November, as the holiday of their craft, “in memory of good Queen Catherine, who, when trade was dull, burnt all her laces, and ordered new to be made. The ladies of the court followed her example, and the fabric once more revived.” Lace was and is considered a suitable present from a king to a pontiff. These earlier gifts were, it is true, sometimes of gold and silver lace wrought with precious stones, but they were scarcely more costly than the later white-thread points. In the Exhibition of 1859 was shown a dress valued at 200,000 francs, the most costly work ever executed at Alençon. This Napoleon III. purchased for the empress, who, it is said, presented it to his Holiness the Pope as a trimming for his rochet. Also, so early as the XIIIth century, the English cut-work was so fine that, according to Matthew Paris, Pope Innocent IV. sent official letters to some of the Cistercian abbots of England to procure a certain quantity of those vestments for his own use. His Holiness had seen and admired the orfrays of the English clergy.
The finest specimens extant of this old English work (opus Anglicanum) are the cope and maniple of S. Cuthbert, taken from his coffin many years ago in the cathedral of Durham, and now preserved in the chapter library of that city. One who has seen them declares them beautiful beyond description.
This work seems to have been at first used only for ecclesiastical purposes, and the making of it to have been a secret preserved in the monasteries.
Nor have the clergy been merely the wearers of lace. We hear of monks being praised for their skill in “imbrothering”; and S. Dunstan himself did not disdain to design patterns for church lace. Pattern-books for these needle-laces were made by monks as well as laymen, and plates in them represent men seated at the embroidering frame. Some of these old pattern books of the XVIth century are preserved in the library of S. Geneviève at Paris, inherited from the monastery of that name. These books are prized and sought for as some of the earliest specimens of block-printing. But few remain, and doubtless their high price prevented them from being made in great numbers. Their place was taken by samplers, into which were copied the patterns desired. From these old lace-samplers come the later alphabetical samplers, which many now living will remember to have made in their youth.
Large quantities of rich old lace were lost in the last century, when the French Revolution brought in gauzes and blondes, and fashion tossed aside as worthless these exquisite products of the needle. In Italy, where the custom was to preserve old family lace, less was destroyed; but in England it was handed over to servants or farm people, or stowed away in attics, and afterwards burned. Some ladies gave point-laces which now they could not afford to buy, to their children to dress their dolls with. Sometimes it was thrown away as old rags.
In the church, however, fashion had no power, and old lace has been usually preserved. Some collections are exceedingly valuable. Notable among these is that of the Rohan family, who gave princes-archbishops to Strasbourg. Baroness de Oberkirck, in Memoirs of the Court of Louis XVI., writes: “We met the cardinal coming out of his chapel dressed in a soutane of scarlet moire and rochet of inestimable value. When, on great occasions, he officiates at Versailles, he wears an alb of old lace of needlepoint of such beauty that his assistants were almost afraid to touch it. His arms and device are worked in a medallion above the large flowers.” This alb is estimated at 100,000 livres.
It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which lace was used prior to the French Revolution, or the immense extravagance of the sums spent on it. Everybody wore it, even servants emulating their masters and mistresses. It trimmed everything, from the towering Fontanges, which rose like a steeple from ladies’ heads, to the boot-tops and shoe-rosettes of men. Men wore lace ruffles not only at the wrist, but at the knee, lace ruffs, cravats, collars, and garters; and bed furniture was made of lace, or trimmed with it, costly as it was. A pair of ruffles would amount to 4,000 livres, a lady’s cap to 1,200 livres. We read that Mme. du Barry gave 487 francs for lace enough to trim a pillow-case, and 77 livres for a pair of ruffles. Lace fans were made in 1668, and lace-trimmed bouquet-holders are not a new fancy. When the Doge of Venice made his annual visit to the convent Delle Vergini, the lady abbess used to meet him in the parlor, surrounded by her novices, and present him a nosegay in a gold handle trimmed with the richest lace that could be found in Venice.
Voltaire says that the mysterious Iron Mask was passionately fond of fine linen and rich lace.
So extravagant had the use of this luxury become that in England there was an outcry against it, and the Puritans laid great stress on discarding vanity in clothing.
We have a little scene illustrative, between the Princess Mary and Lady Jane Grey. The princess had given the maiden some gorgeous dresses trimmed with lace. “What shall I do with it?” asks Lady Jane. “Gentlewoman, wear it,” was the reply, a little vexed, may be. “Nay,” says Lady Jane, “that were a shame to follow my Lady Mary against God’s will, and leave my Lady Elizabeth, which followeth God’s will.”
“My Lady Elizabeth,” however, set aside her scruples before long, and, when queen, did not hesitate to adorn herself as bravely as she might, though she had no mind her fashions should be copied by the vulgar; for we read that, when the London Apprentices adopted white stitching and guards as ornaments for their collars, Queen Elizabeth forbade it, and ordered that the first transgressor should be publicly whipped in the hall of his company.
There is another incident, which, as one of the sex in whom vanity is supposed to be prominent, we take special pleasure in relating.
The Puritan nobles had not in dress conformed to Puritan rules as strictly as some desired, the foreign ambassadors dressing as richly as ever. When, therefore, the Spanish envoy accredited to the Protectorate of Cromwell arrived and was about to have an audience, Harrison begged Lord Warwick and Colonel Hutchinson to set an example by not wearing either gold or silver lace. These gentlemen did not disapprove of rich clothing, but, rather than give offence, they and their associates appeared the next day in plain black suits. But, to their astonishment, Harrison entered dressed in a scarlet coat so covered with lace and clinquant as to hide the material of which it was made. Whereupon Mrs. Hutchinson remarks that Harrison’s “godly speeches were only made that he might appear braver above the rest in the eyes of the strangers.”
Lace has frequently employed the thoughts of law-makers, and in 1698 was the subject of a legislative duel between England and Flanders. There was already in England an act prohibiting the importation of bone-lace (i.e. bobbin-lace), loom-lace, cut-work, and needle-work point; but this proving ineffectual, since everybody smuggled, another act was passed setting a penalty of twenty shillings a yard and forfeiture. We regret to learn that forfeiture meant, in some cases at least, burning, and that large quantities of the finest Flanders lace were seized and actually burned. It reminds one of the burning of Don Quixote’s library of chivalric records.
Flanders, however, with its nunneries full of lace-makers, and its thousands of people depending on the trade, had no mind to be thus crippled without retaliation. An act was immediately passed prohibiting the importation of English wool; whereupon the wool-staplers echoed with addition the groans of the lace-makers, and England was forced to repeal the act so far as the Low Countries were concerned.
As we have said, everybody in England smuggled lace in those days. Smuggling seems indeed to be everywhere looked on as the least shameful of law-breaking. But never, perhaps, were officers of the customs as incorruptible as these. Suspicious persons were searched, no matter what their rank, and no person living within miles of a seaport dared to wear a bit of foreign lace unless they could prove that it had been honestly obtained. Many were the devices by which men and women sought to elude the customs. When a deceased clergyman of the English Church was conveyed home from the Low Countries for burial, it was found that only his head, hands, and feet were in the coffin—the body had been replaced by Flanders lace of immense value. Years after, when the body of his Grace the Duke of Devonshire, who had died in France, was brought over, the custom-house officers not only searched the coffin, but poked the corpse with a stick to make sure that it was a body. The High Sheriff of Westminster was more fortunate, for he succeeded in smuggling £6,000 worth of lace in the coffin that brought over from Calais the body of Bishop Atterbury.
In the present century, Lady Ellenborough, wife of the lord chief-justice, was stopped near Dover, and a large quantity of valuable lace found secreted in the lining of her carriage.
At one period, much lace was smuggled into France from Belgium by means of dogs trained for the purpose. A dog was caressed and petted at home, then, after a while, sent across the frontier, where he was tied up, starved, and ill-treated. The skin of a larger dog was then fitted to his body, the intervening space filled with lace, and the poor animal was released. Of course he made haste to scamper back to his former home.
A propos of the customs, there is a story in which George III. had an active part, and displayed his determination to protect home manufactures.
On the marriage of his sister, Princess Augusta, to the Duke of Brunswick, the king ordered that all stuffs and laces worn should be of English manufacture. The nobility, intent on outshining each other on this grand occasion, took but little notice of the command. We may well believe that the rooms of the court milliner were gorgeous with these preparations; that there was unusual hurry and flurry lest everything should not be done in time; and that high-born and beautiful ladies were constantly besieging the doors, bringing additions to the stock. Fancy, then, the consternation of the expectant and excited dames, when, only three days before the wedding, the customs made a descent on this costly finery, and carried off in one fell swoop the silver, the gold, and the laces! There was not only the loss of these dear gewgaws to mourn, but a new toilet to be prepared in three days!
The camp, too, as well as the church and the court, has cherished lace, and the warriors of those days did not fight less gallantly because they went into battle elegantly arrayed. Lace ruffles at the wrist did not weaken the sword or sabre stroke, nor laces on the neck and bosom make faint the heart beneath. Possibly they helped to a nobler courtesy and a braver death; for slovenly dress tends to make slovenly manners, and slovenly manners often lead to careless morals.
A graceful fashion called the Steinkerk had a martial origin, and was named from the battle so-called, wherein Marshal Luxembourg won the day against William of Orange. On that day, the young princes of the blood were suddenly and unexpectedly called into battle. Hastily knotting about their necks the laced cravats then in fashion, and usually tied with great nicety, they rushed into action, and won the fight.
In honor of that event, both ladies and gentlemen wore their cravats and scarfs loosely twisted and knotted, the ends sometimes tucked through the button-hole, sometimes confined by a large oval-shaped brooch; and Steinkerks became the rage.
But evidence enough, perhaps, has been brought to prove that lace is not an entirely trivial subject of discourse. We may, however, add that Dr. Johnson condescended to define net lace in his most Johnsonian manner. It is, he says, “anything reticulated or decussated, with interstices between the intersections.” After that, ladies may wear their ruffles not only with pleasure, but with respect; for if he was so learned in defining plain net, what unimaginable erudition would have entered his definition of Honiton guipure, or the points of Alençon, Brussels, or Venice!
Spiders were probably the first creatures that made lace, though the trees held a delicate white network under the green of their leaves. After the spiders came the human race, following closely. Old Egyptian pictures and sculptures show us women engaged in twisting threads; and the Scriptures are full of allusions to “fine twined linen” and needle-work. Almost as soon as garments were worn they began to be adorned at the edges; and among savages, to whom garments were of slight consequence, tattooing was practised, which is the same idea in a different form.
The Israelites probably learned from the Egyptians, and from them the art travelled westward. One theory is that Europe learned it from the Saracens. It matters but little to us which is the real version. It is most likely that all the children of Adam and Eve had some fancy of this sort which reached greater perfection in the more cultivated tribes and nations, and was by them taught to the others. The waved or serrated edges of leaves would suggest such adornments to them, or the fur hanging over the edge of the rude skins they wore. The very waves of the sea, that curled over in snowy spray at their tips, had a suggestion of lace and ornamental bordering; and the clouds of sunrise and sunset were fringed with crimson and gold by the sun. Flower petals were finished with a variegated edge, and it was not enough that birds had wings, but they must be ornamented.
When embroidery at length became an art, the Phrygian women excelled all others. Presently close embroidery became open-worked or cut-worked, and out of cut-work grew lace.
This cut-work was made in various ways. In one kind, a network of thread was made on a frame, and under this was gummed a piece of fine cloth. Then those parts which were to remain thick were sewed round on to the cloth; and afterward the superfluous cloth was cut away.
Another kind was made entirely of thread, which was arranged on a frame in lines diverging from the centre like a spider’s web, and worked across and over with other threads, forming geometrical patterns. Later, a fabric still more like our modern lace was made. A groundwork was netted by making one stitch at the beginning, and increasing a stitch on each side till the requisite size was obtained. On this ground was worked the pattern, sometimes darned in with counted stitches, sometimes cut out of linen, and appliqué. Still another kind was drawn-work, threads being drawn from linen or muslin, and the thinned cloth worked into lace. Specimens still exist of a six-sided lace net made in this way, with sprigs worked over it.
The earlier rich laces were not made of white thread. Gold, silver, and silk were used. The Italians, who claim to have invented point lace, were the great makers of gold lace. Cyprus stretched gold into a wire, and wove it. From Cyprus the art reached Genoa, Venice, and Milan; and gradually all Europe learned to make gold lace. In England, the complaint was raised that the gold of the realm was sensibly diminishing in this way, and in 1635 an act was passed prohibiting the melting down of bullion to make gold or silver “purl.” And not only in Western and Southern Europe was this luxury fashionable. A piece of gold lace was found in a Scandinavian barrow opened in the XVIIIth century. Perhaps the lace was made by some captive woman stolen by the vikings, a later Proserpine ravished from the South, who wove the web with her pale fingers as she sat in that frozen Hades, while her piratical blue-eyed Pluto looked on marvelling, and waiting to catch a smile from her relenting eyes. Gold lace was sold by weight.
Some of the most magnificent old points of Venice were made of silk, the natural cream-color. The rose Venice point—Gros point de Venice, Punto a rilievo—was the richest and most complicated of all points. It was worked of silk, on a parchment pattern, the flowers connected by brides. The outlines of these flowers were in relief, cotton being placed inside to raise them, and countless beautiful stitches were introduced. Sometimes they were in double, sometimes in triple, relief, and each flower and leaf was edged with fine regular pearls. This point was highly prized for albs, collerettes, berthes, and costly decorations.
Another kind of Venice lace—knotted point—had a charmingly romantic origin. A young girl in one of the islands of the Lagune, a lace-worker, was betrothed to a young sailor, who brought her home from the Southern seas a bunch of pretty coralline called mermaid’s lace. Moved partly by love for the giver, and partly by admiration for the graceful nature of the seaweed, with its small white knots united by a bride, the girl tried to imitate it with her needle, and, after several unsuccessful efforts, produced a delicate guipure, which soon was admired all over Europe.
We must not, in this connection, forget that handkerchief given by Othello to Desdemona, the loss of which cost her so dear. It was wrought, he tells her, by an Egyptian sibyl, who
“In her prophetic fury sewed the work.”
And he declares that
“The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk.”
The flat points of Venice were no less exquisite than the raised, the patterns sometimes being human figures, animals, cupids, and flowers.
In the XVIth century, Barbara Uttmann invented pillow-net, a great advance in the making of lace. This lady’s father had moved from Nuremberg to the Hartz Mountains, to superintend mines there, and there the daughter married a rich master-miner, Christopher Uttmann, and lived with him in his castle of Annaberg. Seeing the mountain girls weave nets for the miners to wear over their hair, her inventive mind suggested a new and easier way of making fine netting. Her repeated failures we know not of, but we know of her success. In 1561 she set up a workshop in her own name, and this branch of industry spread so that soon 30,000 persons were employed, with a revenue of 1,000,000 thalers. In 1575, the inventress died and was laid to rest in the churchyard of Annaberg, where her tombstone records that she was the “benefactress of the Hartz Mountains.”
Honor to Barbara Uttmann!
Pillow-lace, as most people know, is made on a round or oval board stuffed so as to form a cushion. On this is fixed a stiff piece of parchment with the pattern pricked on it. The threads are wound on bobbins about the size of a pencil, with a groove at the neck. As many of the threads as will start well together are tied at the ends in a knot, and the knot fastened with a pin at the edge of the pattern; then another bunch, and so on, till the number required by the lace is completed. The lace is formed by crossing or intertwining these bobbins.
Hand-made lace is of two kinds, point and pillow. Point means a needle-work lace made on a parchment pattern, also a particular kind of stitch. The word is sometimes incorrectly applied; as, point de Malines, point de Valenciennes, both these laces being made on a pillow.
Lace consists of two parts, the ground and the flower pattern or gimp.
The plain ground is called in French entoilage, on account of its containing the ornament, which is called toilé, from the texture resembling linen, or being made of that material or of muslin.
The honeycomb network or ground—in French, fond, champ, réseau—is of various kinds: wire ground, Brussels ground, trolly ground, etc. Double ground is so called because twice the number of threads are required to make it.
Some laces, points and guipures, are not worked upon a ground, the flowers being connected by irregular threads worked over with point noué (button-hole stitch), sometimes with pearl loops (picot). Such are the points of Venice and Spain and most of the guipures. To these uniting-threads lace-makers in Italy give the name of “legs,” in England “pearl ties,” in France “brides.”
The flower is made either together with the ground, as in Valenciennes and Mechlin, or separately, and then either worked in or sewn on (applique).
The open-work stitches in the patterns are called “modes,” “jours,” or “fillings.”
The early name of lace in England and France was passement, so called because the threads were passed by each other in the making. The learned derive lace from lacina, a Latin word signifying the hem or fringe of a garment. Dentelle comes from the little toothed edge with which lace was finished after awhile. At first, it was passement dentelé, finally dentelle.
The meaning of guipure is hard to connect with the present use of the word, which is very loose and undefined. It was originally made of silk twisted round a little strip of thin parchment or vellum; and silk twisted round a thick thread or cord was called guipure, hence the name.
The modern Honiton is called guipure, also Maltese lace and its Buckingham imitations. The Italians called the old raised points of Venice and Spain guipures. It is hard to know what claim any of these have to the name.
A fine silk guipure is made in the harems of Turkey, of which specimens were shown in the International Exhibition. This point de Turquie is but little known, and is costly. It mostly represents black, white, or mixed colors, fruit, flowers, or foliage.
The lace once made in Malta was a coarse kind of Mechlin or Valenciennes of one arabesque pattern; but since 1833, when an English lady induced a Maltese woman named Ciglia to copy in white an old Greek coverlet, the Ciglia family commenced the manufacture of black and white Maltese guipure, till then unknown in the island.
It is the fineness of the thread which renders the real Brussels ground, vrai réseau, so costly. The finest is spun in dark underground rooms; for contact with the dry air causes the thread to break. The spinner works by feeling rather than sight, though a dark paper is placed to throw the thread out, and a single ray of light is admitted to fall on the work. She examines every inch drawn from her distaff, and, when any inequality occurs, stops her wheel to repair the mischief.
The réseau is made in three different ways: by hand, on the pillow, and more lately by machinery—the last a Brussels-net made of Scotch cotton. The needle ground costs three times as much as the pillow; but it is stronger and easier to repair, the pillow ground always showing the join.
There are two kinds of flowers: those made with the needle, point à l’aiguille, and those on the pillow, point plat. The best flowers are made in Brussels itself, where they excel in the relief (point brode).
Each part of Brussels lace is made by a different hand. One makes the vrai réseau; another, the footing; a third, the point flowers; a fourth works the open jours; a fifth unites the different sections of the ground together; a sixth makes the plat flowers; a seventh sews the flowers upon the ground.
The pattern is designed by the head of the fabric, who, having cut the parchment into pieces, hands it out ready pricked. In the modern lace, the work of the needle and pillow are combined.
Mechlin lace, sometimes called broderie de Malines is a pillow lace made all in one piece, its distinguishing feature being a broad, flat thread which forms the flower. It is very light and transparent, and answers very well as a summer lace. It is said that Napoleon I. admired this lace, and that, when he first saw the light Gothic tracery of the cathedral spire at Antwerp, he exclaimed: “C’est comme de la dentelle de Malines.”
Valenciennes is also a pillow lace, but the ground and gimp, or flower, are all made of the same thread.
The vrai Valenciennes, as it was at first named, that made in the city itself, was made in the XVth century, of a three-thread twisted flax, and reached its climax about the middle of the XVIIIth century, when there were from 3,000 to 4,000 lace-makers in the city alone. Then fashion began to prefer the lighter and cheaper fabrics of Arras, Lille, and Brussels, till in 1790 the number of lace-workers had diminished to 250. Napoleon I. tried unsuccessfully to revive the manufacture, and in 1851 only two lace-makers remained, both over eighty years of age. This vrai Valenciennes which, from its durability, was called les eternelles Valenciennes, could not, it was asserted, be made outside the walls of the city. It was claimed that, if a piece of lace were begun at Valenciennes and finished outside of the walls, that part not made in the city would be visibly less beautiful than the other, though continued by the same hand, with the same thread, upon the same pillow. This was attributed to some peculiarity of the atmosphere. That lace, therefore, which was made in the neighborhood of the city was called bâtarde and gausse.
The makers of this lace worked in underground cellars from four in the morning till eight at night. Young girls were the chief workers, great delicacy of touch being required, any other kind of work spoiling the hand for this. Many of the women, we are told, became blind before reaching the age of thirty. So great was the labor of making this lace that, while the Lille workers could produce from three to five ells per day, those of Valenciennes could not finish more than an inch and a half in that time. Some took a year to make twenty-four inches, and it took ten months, working fifteen hours a day, to finish a pair of men’s ruffles.
It was considered a recommendation to have a piece of lace made all by one hand.
This old Valenciennes was far superior to any now made under that name. The réseau was fine and compact, the flowers resembling cambric in their texture. The fault of the lace was its color, never a pure white, but, being so long under the hand in a damp atmosphere, of a reddish cast. In 1840, an old lady, Mlle. Ursule, gathered the few old lace-makers left in the city, and made the last piece of vrai Valenciennes of any importance which has been made in the city. It was a head-dress, and was presented by the city to the Duchesse de Nemours.
In the palmy days of Valenciennes, mothers used to hand these laces down to their children as scarcely less valuable than jewels. Even peasant women would lay by their earnings for a year to purchase a piece of vrai Valenciennes for a head-dress.
One of the finest specimens of this old lace known is a lace-bordered alb belonging to the Convent of the Visitation, at Le Puy, in Auvergne. The lace is in three breadths, twenty-eight inches wide, entirely of thread, and very fine, though thick. The ground is a clear réseau, the pattern solid, of flowers and scrolls.
There is a story of Le Puy that in 1640 a sumptuary edict was issued by the seneschal, forbidding all persons, without regard to age, sex, or rank, to wear lace of any kind. Lace-making being the chief employment of the women of this province, great distress resulted from the edict. In this time of trial, the beggared people found a comforter in the Jesuit F. Régis. He not only consoled them, but he proved the sincerity of his sympathy by acts. He went to Toulouse, and obtained a revocation of the edict; and at his suggestion the Jesuits opened to the Auvergne laces a market in the New World.
This good friend to the poor is now S. Francis Régis, and is venerated in Auvergne as the patron saint of the lace-makers.
The finest and most elaborate Valenciennes is now made at Ypres, in Flanders. Instead of the close réseau of the old lace, it has a clear wire ground, which throws the figure out well. On a piece of this Ypres lace not two inches wide, from 200 to 300 bobbins are employed, and for larger widths as many as 800 or more are used on the same pillow. There are now in Flanders 400 lace-schools, of which 157 are the property of religious communities.
We may say here that lace-makers now use Scotch cotton chiefly, instead of linen, finding it cheaper, more elastic, and brilliant. Only Alençon, some choice pieces of Brussels, and the finer qualities of Mechlin are now made of flax. The difference can scarcely be perceived by the eye, and both wash equally well, but the cotton grows yellow with age, while linen retains its whiteness.
Alençon, the only French lace now made on a pillow, was first made in France by an Italian worker, who, finding herself unable to teach the Alençon women the true Venetian stitch, struck out a new path, and, by assigning to each one a different part of the work, as Brussels did afterward, succeeded in producing the most elaborate point ever made. Early specimens show rich scroll-work connected by brides. One piece has portraits of Louis XVI. and Maria Theresa, with the crown and cipher, all entwined with flowers. The patterns were not at first beautiful, scarcely at all imitating nature; but their work was perfect.
Point Alençon is made entirely by the hand, on a parchment pattern, in small pieces afterwards united by invisible thread. This art of “fine joining” was formerly a secret confined to France and Belgium, but is now known in England and Ireland.
Each part of this work is given to a different person, who is trained from childhood to that specialty. The number formerly required was eighteen, but is now twelve.
The design, engraved on copper, is printed off in divisions upon pieces of parchment ten inches long, each piece numbered in order. This parchment, which is green, is pricked with the pattern, and sewed to a piece of very coarse linen folded double. The outline of the pattern is then made by guiding two flat threads around the edge with the left thumb, and fixing them by minute stitches passed with another thread and needle through the holes in the parchment. The work is then handed over to another to make the ground, either bride or réseau. The réseau is worked back and forward from the footing, or sewing-on-edge, to the picot, or lower pearled edge. The flowers are worked with a fine needle and long thread, in button-hole stitch, from left to right, the thread turned back when the end of the flower is reached, and worked over in the next row, making thus a strong fabric. Then come the open-work fillings and other operations, after which the lace is taken from the parchment by passing a sharp razor between the two folds of linen. The head of the fabric then joins the parts together. When finished, a steel instrument is passed into each flower to polish it.
The manufacture of Alençon was nearly extinct when Napoleon I. restored its prosperity. Among the orders executed for the emperor on his marriage with Marie Louise was a bed furniture of great richness. Tester, coverlet, curtains, and pillow-cases were all of the finest Alençon à bride. Again the manufacture languished, though efforts were made to revive it, and, in 1840, two hundred aged women—all who were left of the workers—were gathered. But the old point had been made by an hereditary set of workers, and the lace-makers they were obliged to call to their help from other districts could not learn their stitches, consequently changes crept in. But the manufacture was revived, and some fine specimens were shown in the Exhibition of 1851, among them a flounce valued at 22,000 francs, which had taken thirty-six women eighteen months to complete. This appeared afterwards in the Empress Eugénie’s corbeille de mariage.
Alençon was chiefly used in the magnificent layette prepared for the prince imperial. The cradle-curtains were Mechlin, the coverlet of Alençon lined with satin. The christening robe, mantle, and head-dress were also of Alençon, and Alençon covered the three corbeille bearing the imperial arms and cipher, and trimmed the twelve dozen embroidered frocks and the aprons of the imperial nurses.
Remembering all the magnificence which clustered around the birth of this infant, who had
“Queens at his cradle, proud and ministrant,”
one thinks with sadness of that exiled boy who now, weeping bitterly the loss of a tender father, beholds receding from his gaze, like a splendid dream, that throne he once seemed born to fill. Nowhere on the face of the earth is one who has possessed so much and lost so much as that boy; and nowhere are a mother and son around whom cling such a romantic interest and sympathy.
The specimens of Alençon in the Exhibition of 1862 maintained the reputation of the ancient fabric. Bride is but little made now, and is merely twisted threads, far inferior to the clear hexagon of the last century. This hexagon was a bride worked around with point noué.
Of late, the reapplication of Alençon flowers has been successfully practised by the peasant lace-workers in the neighborhood of Ostend, who sew them to a fine Valenciennes ground.
The Chantilly lace, which owed its foundation to Catherine de Rohan, Duchesse de Longueville, has always been rather an object of luxury than of commercial value. Being considered a royal fabric, and its production for the nobility alone, the lace-workers became the victims of revolutionary fury in ‘93, and all perished on the scaffold with their patrons. The manufacture was, however, revived, and prospered greatly during the First Empire. The white blonde was the rage in Paris in 1805. The black was especially admired in Spain and her American colonies. No other manufactories produced such beautiful scarfs, mantillas, and other large pieces. Calvados and Bayeux make a similar lace, but not so well. The real Chantilly has a very fine réseau, and the workmanship of the flowers is close, giving the lace great firmness. The so-called Chantilly shawls in the Exhibition of 1862 were made at Bayeux. Chantilly produces only the extra fine shawls, dresses, and scarfs.
Honiton owes its reputation to its sprigs. Like the Brussels, they are made separately. At first they were worked in with the pillow, afterwards appliqué, or sewed on a ground of plain pillow-net. This net was very beautiful, but very expensive. It was made of the finest thread procured from Antwerp, the market price of which, in 1790, was £70 per pound. Ninety-five guineas have been paid a pound for this thread, and, in time of war, one hundred guineas. The price of the lace was costly in proportion, the manner of fixing it peculiar. The lace ground was spread out on the counter, and the worker herself desired to cover it with shillings. The number of shillings that found a place on her work was the price of it. A Honiton veil often cost a hundred guineas. But the invention of machine-net changed all that, and destroyed not only the occupation of the makers of hand-net, but was the cause of the lace falling into disrepute.
Desirous to revive the work, Queen Adelaide ordered a dress of Honiton sprigs, on a ground of Brussels-net, the flowers to be copied from nature. The skirt of this dress was encircled with a wreath of elegantly designed sprigs, the initials of the flowers forming her majesty’s name: Amaranth, Daphne, Eglantine, Lilac, Auricula, Ivy, Dahlia, Eglantine.
Queen Victoria’s wedding lace was made at Honiton, difficulty being found in obtaining workers enough, the manufacture had been so little patronized. The dress, which cost 1,000 pounds, was entirely of Honiton sprigs connected on a pillow. The patterns were destroyed as soon as the lace was made. Several of the princesses have had their bridal dresses of Honiton.
The application of Honiton sprigs upon bobbin-net has of late almost entirely given place to guipure. The sprigs are sewed on a piece of blue paper, and then united by the pillow, by cut-works, or purlings, or else joined with the needle, button-hole stitch being the best of all, or by purling which is made by the yard. But Honiton has fallen in public esteem by neglecting the pattern of its lace, which does not well imitate nature.
A new branch of industry has lately risen there—that of restoring or remaking old lace.
When old lace revived, it became a mania. The literary ladies were the first to take this fever in England. Sidney, Lady Morgan, and Lady Stepney made collections, and the Countess of Blessington left at her death several large chests full of fine antique lace.
In Paris, the celebrated dressmaker, Madame Camille, was the first one to bring old laces into fashion.
Much lace is taken from old tombs, cleansed, and sold, usually after having been made over. All over Europe it was the custom to bury the dead in lace-trimmed garments, and in some cases these burial toilets were of immense value. In Bretagne, the bride, after her marriage, laid aside her veil and dress, and never wore it again till it was put on after she was dead. Many of these old tombs have been rifled, and the contents sold to dealers.
In Ireland, lace-making was at one time quite successful. Swift, in the last century, urged the protection of home manufactures of all kinds, and the Dublin Society, composed of a band of patriots organized in 1749, encouraged the making of lace, and passed strong resolutions against the wearing of foreign lace. Lady Arabella Demy, who died in 1792, a daughter of the Earl of Kerry, was especially active in the work, and good imitations of Brussels and Ypres lace were made. In 1829, the manufacture of Limerick lace was established. This is tambour work on Nottingham-net. But the emigration of girls to America, and the effort of the manufacturers to produce a cheap article, thus bringing it into disrepute, have prevented this lace from attaining success.
For half a century, machine-lace has been striving to imitate hand-made lace, and in some instances with such success that the difference can scarcely be perceived. In 1760 a kind of looped lace was made in England on the stocking-frame, and the fabric has been constantly improving. But hand-made lace still maintains its supremacy, and is growing in favor, and old laces are more highly prized even than old jewels, since the former cannot be imitated, or can scarcely be imitated; the latter may be. There is a delicacy and finish in needle and pillow laces which the machine can never give; besides that, the constant tendency of machine-work, when once it has attained excellence, is to deteriorate.
We are glad of this revival of lace-making; for in no other way can the luxury of the rich in dress so well benefit women and children among the poor. Most working-women have to work too hard, and they have to leave their homes to earn money. But lace-making accords admirably with feminine taste and feminine delicacy of organization, and it can be done at any time, and at home, and of every quality. It is refining, too. One can scarcely imagine a very coarse person making a very beautiful lace. It teaches the worker to observe nature and art, in the selection and working of patterns, and it stimulates inventiveness, if there be any. And more than that, by the multitudinous ticking of these little bobbins, and the myriad points of these shining needles, thousands of that tortured and terrible class called “the poor” might be able to keep at bay not only the wolf of hunger, but the lion of crime.
[ANTIQUITIES OF THE LAW.]
[We have received this article from a very distinguished and learned member of the New York bar, with an accompanying letter, in which he writes, among other things, as follows:
“Confined as I am by my infirmities to my house, and wearying of the sameness of the life I have to lead, I sometimes vary my occupation by delving into the ‘Antiquities of the Law.’
“I have lately come across an old law book published in 1711, which has been several years in my library, but entirely lost sight of by me until recently.
“From that I have been compiling some articles for one of our law journals, and began the accompanying article for the same publication.
“While writing it, it occurred to me that it might be more useful, if not more interesting, to the readers of such a journal as your Catholic World than to those of a mere law journal; and as I abhor religious intolerance in all forms, and see so much of it in this country, I concluded to send it to you, thinking perhaps you may deem it advisable to use it.”]
Abjuration.—The statute 35 Eliz. cap. 2 was made wholly against Popish Recusants convict above 16 Years of Age, enjoining them not to remove above 5 Miles from their Habitation: if they do, and not being covert (married?), nor having Land to the Value of 20 Marks per Annum or Goods worth £40, they must abjure the Kingdom. Hale’s Pl. Cr. 228.
“Likewise upon Persons who absent themselves from Church without just Cause, and refusing to conform within 3 Months after conviction.” 35 Eliz. cap. 1.
Armour.—(Recusancy was denying the Supremacy of the Queen and adhering to the Pope as Supreme Head of the Church.) “The Armour of Recusants convict shall be taken from them by Warrant from Four Justices of Peace.”
“If they conceal their Arms or give any Disturbance in the Delivery, one Justice may commit them for 3 months without Bail.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
Bail: When allowed or denied.—A Minister “depraving” the Common Prayer-Book, as fixed by Statute, was liable, for first offence, to commitment for 6 months; for second offence, for a year; and for third offence, for life.
“Being present at any other Form: First Offence, Commitment for 6 Months; Second Offence, 12 Months; Third Offence, for Life.”
Recusants. “Suspected to be a Jesuit, Seminary, or Priest, and being examined refuseth to answer, may be committed till he answer directly.”
“Impugning the Queen’s Authority in Ecclesiastical causes; perswading others to it or from coming to church; meeting at Conventicles, under Colour of Religion, or perswading others to meet there, commitment till they conform and make an open Submission and Declaration of their conformity.”
“Absenting from Church on Sunday, and no Distress to be had, Commitment till Forfeiture is paid.”
“Above the Age of 16, and absenting for a Month: Forfeiture 20s. per Month, or be committed till paid.” 23 Eliz. cap. 1.
Keeping a School Master or “any other Servant in the House, and not coming to Church for a Month, the Master of such House forfeits £10 per Month.”
Blasphemy.—By Statute 9 and 10 Will., “Any Person bred in or professing the Christian Religion, and who shall, by Writing, Printing, Teaching, or advised Speaking deny any one of the Persons in the Trinity; or assert that there are more Gods than one; or deny the Christian Religion to be true, or the Holy Scriptures to be of Divine Authority, shall be disabled to have any office,” and “if convicted a second time, he shall be disabled to sue in any court, or to be a Guardian or Executor or Administrator, and be incapable of any Legacy or Gift, or of any office, and shall be committed for Three Years without Bail.”
Church Wardens.—“By Common Law they are a corporation to take care of the Goods of the Church.”
“An Attorney cannot be made a Church Warden.” 2 Roll. Abr. 272.
“He is to see that the Parishioners come to Church every Sunday and Holiday, and to present the Names of such who are absent to the Ordinary, or to levy 12d. for every offence, per Stat. 5 and 6 Ed., 1 Eliz. cap. 1.”
“Arresting a Minister going to or returning from Church may be punished by Indictment or bound to Good Behaviour. The Offence is the same if a Layman be arrested. Quarreling in Church or Church Yard, if a Layman may be suspended ab ingressio Ecclesiæ; if a Clergyman, ab officio. But if a Weapon be drawn with intent to strike, the Party may be convicted, etc., and Judgment to lose one of his Ears by cutting it off, and if no Ears, to be marked in the Cheek with the Letter F.” 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 4.
Seats in Churches. “The Ordinary may place and displace whom he thinks fit.”
“A Man may have a Seat in a Church appendant to his House, and may prescribe for it, etc. But one cannot prescribe to a Seat in the Body of the Church generally.” Roll. Abr., 2 Pars. 288.
“The case is the same in an Isle of a Church.” 2 Cro. 367.
“Presentments” are to be made by the Church Wardens, usually twice a year, but cannot be compelled oftener than once a year, except at the Visitation of the Bishop.
The Articles commonly exhibited to them to make their Presentments may be reduced thus, viz.:
To Things which concern the Church, the Parson, the Parishioners.
And First, to those Things which concern the Church; as,
Alms, whether a Box for that Purpose; Assessments, whether made for repairs; Bells and Bell Ropes, if in Repair; Bible, whether in Folio; Canons, whether a Book thereof; Carpet; Chest, with three Locks; Church and Chancel in Repair; Creed in fair Letters; Cups and Covers for Bread, etc.; Cushion for Pulpit; Desk for Reader; Lord’s Prayer in fair Letters; Marriage, a Table of Degrees; Monuments safely kept; Parsonage House in Repair; Church Yard well Fenced; Commandments in Fair Letters; Common Prayer-Book; Communion Table; Flaggon; Font; Grave Stones well kept; Queen’s Arms, set up; Register Book in Parchment; Supplies, whether any; Table-cloth; Tombs well kept.
2. Those Things which concern the Parson:
Articles 39, if read twice a Year; Baptizing with Godfathers; Canons, if read once a Year; Catechising Children; Common Prayer, if read, etc.; Dead, if he bury them; Doctrine, if he preach good; Gown, if he preach in it; Homilies, if read or he preach; January 30th, if observed; May 29th, if observed; Marrying privately; November 5th, if observed; Preaching every Sunday; Peace Maker; Perambulation; Sacrament, if celebrated; Sedition, if vented; Sick, if visited; Sober Life; Surplice, if wear it.
3. Those Things which concern Parishioners:
Adulterers, if any; Alms Houses, if abused; Ale Houses, and in Divine Service; Answering, according to Rubrick; Baptism, neglected by Parents; Blasphemers; Church, resorting to it; Dead, if brought to be buried; Drunkards, if any; Fornicators, if any; Legacies, if any given to pious Uses; Marrying within prohibited Degrees; Marrying without Banns, Licence, or at unlawful hours; Sacraments received 3 times in a year of all above 16, whereof Easter to be one time; School, if abused; Seats, if Parishioners are placed in them without contention; Standing up; Sundays, working therein; Swearers, if any; Women, if come to be Churched.”
“A Warrant against one for not coming to Church.
“To the Constable, etc.: “Sussex, ss. Whereas Oath hath been made before me That J. O. of, etc., did not upon the Lord’s Day last past resort to any Church, Chapel, or other usual Place appointed by Common Prayers, and there hear Divine Service according to the Form of the Statute in that case made and provided.
“These are therefore to require you, etc., to bring the said J. O. before me to answer the Premises. Given, etc.”
“Any Man may build a Church or Chappel, but the Law takes no Notice of it as such till it is consecrated, and therefore, whether Church or Chappel, it must be tried by the Certificate of the Bishop.”
Clergy and Benefit of Clergy.—“Before the 20 Ed. I., the Clergy paid no Tenths to the King for their Ecclesiastical Livings, but to the Pope; but in that King’s reign, their Livings were valued all over England, and the Tenths paid to the King; and by the Statute 26 Hen. VIII. cap. 3, they were annexed to the Crown forever.”
Many of their privileges were “confirmed by Magna Carta, viz., Quod Ecclesia sit libera.”
“As to the Benefit of Clergy, it was introduced by the Canon Law, Exempting their persons from any Temporal Jurisdiction. ‘Tis a Privilege on purpose to save the Life of a Criminal in certain cases, if he was a man of learning, as accounted in those Days, for as such he might be useful to the Publick.—At first it was extended to any person who could read, he declaring that he had vowed or was resolved to enter into Orders, and the Reading was to show he was qualified.—But afterwards the reading without a Vow to enter into Orders was held good, and now ‘tis become a legal conveyance of Mercy to both Clergy and Laity.”
“But tho’ the Ordinary usually tenders the Book, the Court are the proper Judges of the Criminal’s Reading: Therefore, where the Ordinary answer Quod legit, the Court judged otherwise, fined the Ordinary, and hanged the Person.”
“Now, if a Man cannot read where Clergy is allowable, and ‘tis recorded by the Court Quod non legit: if the Offender be reprieved, the Book may be tendered to him again because ‘tis in favorem vitæ, for which Reason he may have it under the Gallows.” Dyer, 205 b.
“In those days, an offender might have his Clergy even for Murder toties quoties, but this was restrained by the statute of 4 Hen. VII. cap. 13, that he should have it but once. And for the better Observance of that Law, it was then provided That the Criminal should be marked upon the Brawn of the Left Thumb, that he might be known again upon a second Offence”—“which was not intended as any Part of the Judgment”—“It was only a Mark set upon the Offender that he might not have his Clergy a second Time.”
By the Common Law, “all Offenders, except in Treason against the Person of the Queen,” should have the Benefit of Clergy “and toties quoties; but by statute of 25 Ed. III. cap. 4, it was prohibited in Treasons; and by that of 4 Hen. VII. it is restrained to one Time, so that now (i.e. in 1711) there are but very few cases wherein the Common Law denies Clergy, but in many ‘tis taken away by several acts of Parliament.”
Among those from whom it was thus taken away, were Popish Recusants by act of 35 Eliz. cap. 1 and 2, and those who receive Priests being natives of England, and ordained by the See of Rome by act of 27 Eliz. cap. 2.
“In Anno 2 Ed. VI., the Reformers, intending to bring the Worship of God under set forms, compiled a Book of Common Prayer, which was established by Act of Parliament in that year.”
“But because several things were contained in that Book which showed a compliancy to the superstitious Humours of those times, and some Exceptions being made to it by precise Men at Home and by John Calvin abroad, therefore two years afterwards it was reviewed, in which Martin Bucer[31] was consulted and some Alterations were made, which consisted in adding some Things and leaving out others, as in the former Edition:
| The Additions were, viz.: |
| A general Confessionof sins to the daily service. |
| A general Absolutionto the truly Penitent. | ||
| The Communion tobegin with reading theCommandments, thePeople kneeling. | ||
| And a Rubrick Concerningthe Posture ofkneeling, which wasafterwards ordered to beleft out by the statute ofthe 1 Eliz., but is nowagain explained as in 2Ed. VI. | ||
| Left out: |
| The use of Oil in Confirmationand ExtreamUnction. Prayers forSouls departed. |
| And what tended to aBelief of the CorporealPresence in the Consecrationof the Eucharist.” |
“Afterwards, Anno 5 Ed. VI., a Bill was brought into the House of Lords to enjoin Conformity to this new Book with these Alterations, by which all People were to come to those Common Prayers under pain of Church Censure, which Bill passed into a Law, Anno 5 and 6 Ed. VI.; but not being observed during the reign of Queen Mary, it was again reviewed by a Committee of Learned Men (naming them), and appointed to be used by every Minister, Anno 1 Eliz., with some Additions, which were then made, viz.:
“Certain Lessons for Every Sunday in the Year, some Alterations in the Liturgy, Two Sentences added in the Delivery of the Sacrament, intimating to the Communicants that Christ is not Corporeally present in the Elements, etc. The Form of making Bishops, Priests, and Deacons was likewise added.”
“Upon these and other Statutes several Things are to be considered:
1. The Punishment of a Minister for refusing to use or depraving the Book of Common Prayer.
2. The Punishment of any other Person depraving it, and of such who shall hear or be present at any other form.
3. Who are bound to use it.
4. Who must provide it.”
The Punishment of the Minister was for 1st offence, loss of a year’s Livings and six Months’ imprisonment; 2d offence, Deprivation and Imprisonment for a Year; 3d offence, Imprisonment for Life and Deprivation.
Any other Person, for 1st Offence, six months’ Imprisonment; 2d Offence, twelve months; and 3d Offence, for Life. 5 and 6 Ed. VI. cap. 1.
“No Form of Prayer should be used in any Public Place other than according to the said Book.”
By Statute 3 Jac. cap. 4, Constables “must once a Year present to the Quarter Sessions those who absent themselves for the space of a Month from Church”; and he must levy certain forfeitures on those who keep or resort to Bowling, Dancing, Ringing, or any sport whatever on the Sabbath; and on a Butcher who shall kill or sell Flesh on that day.
Recusants “are those who refuse or deny Supremacy to the Queen by adhering to the Pope as Supreme Head of the Church.”
“Anno 24 Hen. VIII. cap. 12, Parliament prohibited Appeals to Rome, etc.”
25 Hen. VIII. “The King appointed that Convocations should be assembled by his Writ, and that no Canons or Constitutions should be contrary to his Prerogative or the Laws of the Land.”
“In the same Year an Act passed to restrain the Payment of First Fruits to the Court of Rome.”
“In the next Year, 26 Hen. VIII., An Act passed by which the First Fruits of all Spiritual Livings were given to the King.”
In the same Year, “an Act passed, prohibiting Investitures of Archbishops or Bishops by the Pope; but that in a Vacancy the King should send his Letters-missive to a Prior or Convent, Dean or Chapter, to choose another.”
“Likewise, in the same Year, all Licenses and Dispensations from the Court of Rome were prohibited, and that all Religious Houses should be under the Visitation of the King.”
And by an Act passed the same Year (viz., 1534), The King was “declared to be Supream Head of the Church.”
“But he did not exercise any act of that Power till a year afterwards, by appointing Sir Thomas Cromwell to be his Vicar General in Ecclesiastical Matters, and Visitor of all the Monasteries and other Privileged Places in the Kingdom.”
In 27 Hen. VIII. (1536) “all the lesser Monasteries, under the number of twelve Persons, and whose Revenues were not of the Value of £200 per annum, were given to the King, his Heirs and Successors; and a Court was erected on purpose for collecting the Revenues belonging to these Monasteries, which was called The Court of Augmentation of the King’s Revenue, who had full power to dispose of those Lands for the Service of the King.”
The officers of this Court had, among its other duties, that of inquiring “into the Number of Religious in the House, and what Lives they led; how many would go into other Religious Houses, and how many into the World, as they called it.”
The whole of the goods thus confiscated were valued at £100,000, and the rents of these small Monasteries came to £32,000 per annum.
“This occasioned great Discontents amongst the people,” to appease which the King sold some of the Lands “to the Gentry” at low Rates, “obliging them to keep up Hospitality.”
“This pleased both them and the ordinary Sort of People for a little time; and, to satisfy others,” the King “continued or gave back thirty-one Houses. But these, about two Years afterwards, fell under the Common Fate of the great Monasteries, and were all suppressed with them.”
“But notwithstanding he gave back some of these Houses, yet the People were still discontented, and openly rebelled in Lincolnshire, which was quieted by a Pardon: There was another Rebellion in Yorkshire and the Northern Counties, which ended also in a Pardon, only some of the chief of the Rebels were executed for this last Rebellion.”
Most of the Monasteries, “seeing their Dissolution drawing near, made voluntary Surrenders of their Houses in the 29th year of Hen. VIII., in Hopes by this means to obtain Favor of the King; and after the Rebellion, the rest of the Abbots, both great and small, did the like; for some of them had encouraged the Rebels, others were convicted by the Visitors of great Disorders, and most of them had secured all the Plate, Jewels and Furniture belonging to their Houses, to make Provision for them and Relations and then surrendered their Monasteries.”
“Afterwards, Anno 31 Hen. VIII., a Bill was brought into the House of Peers to confirm these surrenders. There were 18 Abbots[32] present at the first Reading, 20 at the second, and 17 at the third. It soon passed the Commons and the Royal Assent; and by this Act all the Houses, etc., were confirmed to the King.”
“‘Tis true, the Hospitallers, Colleges and Chanteries, etc., were not yet dissolved.... These had large endowments to support themselves and to entertain Pilgrims,” etc.
“But notwithstanding the King was declared to be the Supreme Head of the Church, yet these Hospitallers would not submit,” etc., “and therefore, Anno 32 Hen. VIII. cap. 24, The Parliament gave their lands to the King and dissolved their Corporation.”
“The Colleges and Chanteries still remained; but the Doctrine of Purgatory being then grown out of Belief[33] and some of those Fraternities having resigned in the same manner as the Monasteries, the Endowments of the rest were then thought to be for no purpose, and therefore, Anno 37 Hen. VIII., all these Colleges, Free Chapels, Chanteries, etc., were given to the King by Act of Parliament.”
“Thus in the Compass of a few years, the Power and Authority of the See of Rome was suppressed in this Kingdom. And because frequent Attempts have been made to revive it, therefore, in succeeding Times, several Laws have been made to keep them in subjection.”
Among those were the following: Recusant Convict above 16 must go to his place of Abode and not remove 5 miles without license or otherwise abjure the Realm. Not departing within the time limited by the Justices, or returning without license from the Queen, was felony without Benefit of Clergy. 35 Eliz. cap. 2.
“To absolve or to be absolved by Bulls from the Bishop of Rome was High Treason.” 13 Eliz. cap. 2.
“Bringing an Agnus Dei hither, or offering it to any Person to be used, both he and the Receiver incurs a Premunire.[34] 13 Eliz. cap. 2. All Armour shall be taken from Recusants by order of four Justices.” 7 Jac. cap. 6.
Bringing over Beads or offering them to any person, both he and the Receiver incur a Premunire. 13 Eliz. cap. 2.
“Two Justices may search Houses for Books and Relicks, and burn them.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
“Every Popish Recusant must be buried in Church or Church yard according to the Ecclesiastical Laws, or his Executor or Administrator forfeits £20.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
“Children of Recusants must be baptized by a lawful Minister, or the Parent forfeits £100.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
“Popish Recusant, if he sue any person, the Defendant may plead it in Disability.”
He “shall not be Executor, Administrator, or Guardian.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
A married woman, a Popish Recusant convict, “not conforming within 3 months after conviction, may be committed by two Justices until she conform, unless her Husband will pay to the King 10 shillings per month or a third part of his Lands.” 7 Jac. cap. 6.
“Popish Recusant marrying otherwise than according to the Forms of the Church of England shall forfeit £100. If a woman, not have her Dower or Jointure or Widow’s Estate.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
“Saying Mass forfeits 200 marks, hearing it 100 Marks.”
“Jesuits, Seminary Priests, etc., and other Ecclesiastical Persons born within the Queen’s Dominions, coming in or remaining in the said Dominions, is guilty of Treason.” 27 Eliz. cap. 2.
“Any knowing a Jesuit or Priest to be here and not within 12 days afterwards discovering him to a Justice of Peace shall be committed and fined.” 27 Eliz. cap. 2.
“Per Stat. 3 Jac. cap. 4, to move any one to promise Obedience to the See of Rome or other Prince is High Treason in the Mover and he that promiseth Obedience.”
“Recusant Convict must not practice the Art of Apothecary, Civil Law, Common Law, Physick, or be an officer in any Court or amongst Soldiers, or in a Castle, Fortress or Ship.” 3 Jac. cap. 5.
“Sending Persons beyond Sea to be instructed in Popish Religion forfeits £100, and the Persons sent are incapable to take any Inheritance.” 1 Jac. cap. 4.
“Children shall not be sent beyond Sea without License from the Queen or six of her Privy Council, whereof the Principal Secretary of State to be one.”
“Notwithstanding all these Laws, the Parliament (11 and 12 Will.) was of Opinion that Popery increased, and therefore to prevent its growth a Law was made That if any person should take one or more Popish Bishop, Jesuit or Priest, and prosecute him till he is convicted of saying Mass or exercising any other part of the Office or Function of a Popish Bishop or Priest,” he shall have a reward of £100.
“If any Popish Bishop, Priest or Jesuit, shall be convicted of saying Mass, etc., or any Papist shall Keep School, etc., he shall be adjudged to perpetual Imprisonment in such place where the Queen by Advice of her Council shall think fit.”
“Every Papist, after the 10th of April, 1700, is made incapable of purchasing Lands, etc., either in his own Name or the name of other Person, to his use.”
The Sabbath.—“Shoemaker putting Boots or Shoes to sale forfeits 3s. 4d. and the goods.” 1 Jac. I. cap. 11.
“Carriers, Drivers, Waggoners, travelling on that day forfeit 20s.” 3 Car. I. cap. 1.
“Butchers killing or selling, or causing to be killed or sold or privy or consenting to kill or sell Meat on that day, forfeit 6s. 8d.” 3 Car. I. cap. 1.
By 29 Car. II. cap. 7 “Public and private Duties of Piety are enjoined, all worldly business is prohibited, and all above the Age of 14 forfeit 5s.”
“Drovers or their servants coming to their Inns on that day forfeit 20s.”
“If the Offender is not able to pay the Forfeiture, he shall be put in the Stocks for two Hours.”
“Meeting together out of their own Parish for any Sports or Pastimes, forfeit 3s. 4d.” 1 Car. I. cap. 1.
Sacrament.—“Depraving or doing any Thing in contempt of the Sacrament must be committed.” 1 Ed. VI. cap. 1, 1 Eliz. 2, 3 Jac. 4.
Schoolmaster.—“Not coming to church or not allowed by the Bishop of the Diocese, forever disabled to teach Youth, and shall be committed for a year without bail.” 23 Eliz. cap. 1.
Tythes.—“A canon was made Anno 1585 for payment of Tythes as founded on the Law of God and the ancient Custom of the Church.”
“When Glanville wrote (about 1660), a Freeholder was allowed to make a Will, so as he gave the best Thing he had to the Lord Paramount, and the next best to the Church.”
“They are said to be Ecclesiastical Inheritances collateral to the Estate of the Land, out of which they arise, and are of their own Nature due only to Spiritual Persons.”
Certain Lands were, however, exempt. “Most orders of Monks were first exempted; but in time this was restrained to three orders—Cistertians, Hospitallers, Templars.”
Dissenters.—After the various laws against “Popish Recusants,” as they were called, had had the effect of rendering somewhat firm the establishment of the English Protestant Church, and about the time of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a new trouble arose from those who dissented from that church, in its forms and in some of its principles, and government then began to interfere with them.
In the 1st Year of the reign of William and Mary these “Dissenters” were exempted from the statutes of 1 Eliz. cap. 2, 23 Eliz. cap. 1, 3 Jac. cap. 4, above mentioned. “But they must not assemble in Places with Doors locked, barred, or bolted, nor until the place is certified to the Bishop of the Diocese or to the Arch Deacon or to the Justices at the Quarter Sessions, and registered there and they have a certificate thereof.”
Their Preachers must declare their Approbation, and subscribe the “Articles of Religion,” except the 20th, 34th, 35th, and 36th articles, and must take the oaths and subscribe the Declaration prescribed Dy certain statutes, and that at the Quarter Sessions where they live.
So that, from the reign of Elizabeth, through the reign of James I., and until the the troubles which ended in the civil war and the Protectorate of Cromwell, Dissenters were subject to many of the restrictions which had been imposed on the Roman Catholics; and even when those troubles finally ended in the flight of James II., and the elevation of William and Mary to the throne, freedom of religion was not allowed to the Dissenters, but they were permitted to enjoy their dissent from the forms and ceremonies of the Church of England only by declaring their assent to many of its most important tenets of faith or doctrine.
The oaths of allegiance and supremacy enjoined by the statutes of 1 Eliz. and 3 Jac. were abrogated by the Statute of 1 Will., and Mar. cap. 8, and the following substituted:
“I, A. B., do sincerely promise and swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance,” etc.
“I, A. B., do swear that I do from my Heart abhor, detest and abjure as Impious and Heretical, that damnable Doctrine and Position that Princes excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any authority of the See of Rome may be deposed by their subjects or any other whatsoever; and I do declare that no Foreign Prince, Person, Prelate, State or Potentate, hath or ought to have any Jurisdiction, Power, Superiority, Pre-eminence or Authority, Ecclesiastical or Spiritual, within the Realm. So help me God.”
[JOSEPH IN EGYPT A TYPE OF CHRIST.]
Look down, O Lord, holy Father, from thy sanctuary, and from thy high and heavenly dwelling, and behold this all-holy Victim, which thy great High-priest, thy holy Child Jesus, offers thee for the sins of his brethren; and have mercy on the multitude of our iniquities. Lo! the voice of the blood of Jesus our Brother cries to thee from the cross. For what is it, O Lord, that hangs on the cross? Hangs, I say; for past things are as present with thee. Own it, O Father! It is the coat of thy Joseph, thy Son; an evil wild beast hath devoured him, and hath trampled on his garment in its fury, spoiling all the beauty of this his remanent corpse, and, lo! five mournful gaping wounds are left in it. This is the garment which thy innocent holy Child Jesus, for the sins of his brethren, has left in the hands of the Egyptian harlot, thinking the loss of his robe a better thing than the loss of purity; and choosing rather to be despoiled of his coat of flesh and go down to the prison of death than to yield to the voice of the seductress for all the glory of the world.—S. Anselm.
[MADAME AGNES.]
FROM THE FRENCH OF CHARLES DUBOIS.