“The riots at Stuttgart, which were due, apparently at least, to the hereditary quarrel with the Jews, were paralleled at Frankfort on Monday by a great beer riot, said to be due to the high price of beer, in which sixteen breweries were wrecked, twelve persons killed, and one hundred and twenty arrested. A correspondent of yesterday’s Times, who was in Frankfort and saw the riot, regards the deeper and more remote cause as being the thorough dissatisfaction of the people with the Prussian system of government.”[152]
Our readers will remember the very serious riot which took place in Berlin at the meeting of the emprors last year right under the noses of their imperial majesties. A Herald correspondent, writing on March 23, tells of a riot in Berlin on the birthday of the emperor; of another which occurred on March 18, the anniversary of the Revolution of 1848 in Berlin; and the correspondents both of the London Times and of the Herald, describe the ferocity with which the mounted police charged upon the unarmed mob, using their drawn sabres. The Herald correspondent concludes his letter thus:
“A slight demonstration on the part of the social democrats took place at Brunswick.
“A feeling of dissatisfaction at an undefined something is constantly gaining ground in Germany. There is a yearning after the freedom promised with the united empire. ‘Germany is great, but she is not happy!’ This seems to be the condition of the empire. The revolutions that have just taken place in France and Spain, the declaration of the republic, have had a positive influence in Germany. The democratic element is again lifting its head, and a great meeting of democratic leaders is soon to be held at Frankfort-on-the-Main, unless it be prohibited by the authorities. The Catholic element of the German population is also in a state of continual excitement.”
It is with no feeling of pleasure that these extracts are given here from such a variety of non-Catholic quarters, showing the distrust and growing dislike with which the Prussian rule is regarded. It is only to show that Catholics, in battling for their religion, are only battling for freedom and the rights of man. The mailed hand, red already with the life-blood of three nations, which now smites the church, will not hesitate to crush to powder every semblance of freedom which dares stand in its path. He who attacks the rights of God will laugh at the puny rights of man, simply as man. And you who bow down before the state; you who set up this state above you, and surrender yourselves to it absolutely—you have breathed life into the statue of Frankenstein; you would rid yourselves of it if you could, but you have created that which you cannot destroy, and forged for yourselves an agent of self-destruction.
Happily, Catholics have faith in a God above it all. If it has done no other good, it has brought out to the eyes of the world, in a wonderful manner, at once the vastness and the unity of the Catholic Church. Two years ago, the cry was: Catholics will not accept infallibility. When the Jesuits were driven out from Germany, the cry was: “Catholic Germany rejoices.” When the last remnant of the Papal States was torn from the Holy Father, the world cried out: “Now is the Papacy dead.” When a few disappointed and faithless men showed their heads in Germany, with all the power of the throne at their back, men cried out: “There is to be a new schism.” What do they say now?
Part of it has been seen already. M. John Lemoine, one of the oftenest-quoted writers of the day, a Protestant, writes to the anti-Catholic Journal des Débats on the defeat of the Irish University Bill: “From the depths of that palace which he calls his prison, the now helpless old man (le vieillard désarmé), who reigns only over consciences, has just shattered the most solid government of Europe (the Gladstone ministry), and overthrown the greatest minister of England. We would remark that never was the Pope more sovereign, more a dictator, more omnipotent, than since he has relinquished the command of subjects for that of the faithful only.”
After concluding that the stars in their courses have fought against Pius IX., and that his failure is Heaven’s doom, the London Times says:
“Indoors the whole universe is at his feet, but he cannot look out of his windows without seeing a world in arms against him.... Pius IX. has done all that devotees could dream, and suffered all that the world could accomplish. He has achieved an absolute dominion over the human intelligence, and lost every inch of his temporal power.... We may concede, we may be even well content, that he still holds and rules the most impulsive, the most imaginative, and the most sentimental races of the civilized world, and that he himself is admirably adapted for that empire over souls.... We envy the Pope his Irish, French, and Peninsular subjects as little as we envy them their infallible guide.”
The Times forgets the 14,000,000 German “subjects,” as it calls them, and the other millions outside of the races it has mentioned. From all it concludes, however, that “Rome will be Rome to the end of the chapter,” and that indeed it would be a pity that it were not so, though it ought to change a little with the world.