France struggles on still without a government; that is to say, without a government of which six weeks of existence could be safely predicated. The changes in the ministry have been changes of men rather than of measures. The various parties are still at daggers-drawn and rather on the increase than otherwise. The Count of Chambord seems for the present to have retired from the contest—a wise and patriotic example, which if all could follow, the country might be allowed breathing time and some fair chance of arriving at a sound judgment as to what was the exact government it wanted—a problem which the French nation has seemed incapable of solving since the first Revolution. The Bonapartists have profited by the withdrawal of the Count, and displayed an earnestness, boldness, and activity which have been crowned with some success, but marked by the disregard of the nation and its submergence in the family name and fame that seem the chief characteristics of “the Napoleonic idea.” The coming of age of the son of the late emperor was marked by a theatrical display and oracular speeches worthy of the Second Empire at its zenith. There have been the usual “scenes” in the French Assembly. The “intervals of ten minutes” and “intervals of a quarter of an hour” have been alarmingly frequent, and after some sittings the air bristled with challenges from warlike deputies, which afforded excellent material for the illustrated journals; but, on the whole, few more dangerous weapons than the peaceful pocket-handkerchief were drawn, and the pocket-handkerchief, as all public orators know, is a vast relief in trying moments. M. Thiers has preferred the Apennines to the tribune, and has happily spoken more in Italy than in the Chambers. M. Gambetta, for a man of his calibre, has been singularly well behaved on the whole, and we have not had so many of those journeys to the disaffected districts of which at one time he threatened to be so fond. Sad to say, it is the soldier-president who has thus far kept the disorderly parties from flying at each other's throats by the sheer force of the army, on which he silently leans all the while. France is practically in the hands of a military dictator. She is happy in her dictator—that is all. Marshal MacMahon, on succeeding M. Thiers, promised to answer for order, and he has kept his word. More than that, he has, wisely for France, however sad it may be to say so, made the Assembly keep its word and abide by the septennate which it conferred on him. He has used his vast power with a singular discretion, a patriotism unexampled almost in the face of opportunities that would turn the head of many a greater man, and an honest single-mindedness that has clearly nothing else than the good of the whole country in view. The last symbol of a now ineffectual protection, and indeed for a long time an insincere one, of the Holy Father, has been withdrawn in the Orénoque. It is better so. It is better, perhaps, since matters have been pushed so far, that the Holy Father stand absolutely alone, powerless and defenceless, in the eyes of earth and heaven. The power of God alone can now restore to him what is his by right. To-day among all the European governments there is none so poor as to do him reverence. England has recently withdrawn even its shadow of a diplomatic representative, which possibly marks the beginning of the “little more energy in foreign policy and little less in domestic legislation” that Mr. Disraeli advised while still in opposition.
In all other respects except politics France has every reason to be congratulated. The earnest turning of the people's heart to God, the desertion of whom called down such terrible punishments, seems in no degree to diminish. The seasons have been propitious, and the vintage of 1874 has been of unexampled excellence and productiveness. The exports of the year were marvellously increased, and God's blessings would seem to be raining down again on this sorely-tried land and people. All that is needed is a good and firm government, of which, however, as yet, there seems no immediate prospect. France is as open as ever to surprises; and it is absolutely impossible to forecast its political future.
England has experienced a peaceful revolution similar to our own, and one almost as astonishing in its suddenness, though, as in our case, there were not wanting indications of the change in parties [pg 567] which has taken place, as will be found duly noted by those who care to look at The Catholic World's review for 1873. On January 22 Mr. Gladstone issued his memorable “prolix narrative,” announcing, to the surprise of all men, the immediate dissolution of Parliament. The sudden and, under the circumstances, unexampled action of the premier looked remarkably like a desire to take time by the forelock, and by the suddenness of the attack shatter and utterly discomfit the slowly-gathering forces of the opposition. If such were the real intention, it was miserably miscalculated and singularly ill-advised. The country was as much outraged as shocked, and showed its appreciation of Mr. Gladstone's skill at a coup by returning a very handsome Conservative majority, so that Mr. Disraeli, happy man! found himself, to his own surprise, no less than Mr. Gladstone's, within three weeks of the dissolution, at the head of a strong government and party, with his old rival deep in the shade. The result of the English elections may prove a lesson to popular leaders for the future not to presume too much on their popularity, not to jeopardize a powerful party, and throw an empire into sudden confusion by what looks too much like a freak that it is hoped may win by “a fluke.”
The most significant lesson of the elections, perhaps, was the instantaneous triumph of the Home Rule party in Ireland, while as yet it was to all appearance in its infancy, and almost beneath the rational notice of the English press. It had only provoked derision and calumny. We were constantly told that it had no hold on the heart of the people, that it claimed no men of note, that the nobility and gentry held aloof from it, and so forth.
The “wild adherents” of the “wild folly” have taught even the London Times to respect them; and much reason had they to be pledged to their wild folly, if the words of a man whose opinion is certainly of some value on the subject have any weight: “Ireland at this moment is governed by laws of coercion and stringent severity that do not exist in any other quarter of the globe.” Those words were spoken on the 4th of February, 1874. The speaker was Mr. Disraeli, the present Prime Minister of England. The laws that provoked the observation of so eminent an English statesman still prevail in Ireland. The appeal for amnesty for the unfortunate remnant of the Irish political prisoners has, since those words were spoken, been refused by Mr. Disraeli. And yet the Irish calendars for this year, as for many a year past, were the cleanest in the world and the freest from crime of all kinds. Such is the nation governed at this moment by laws such as Mr. Disraeli has described. The result of such government can scarcely recommend its dispensers to the nation governed, and yet their appeal for control of their own affairs, which the English Parliament confessedly does not understand, and, if it did understand, has, as it acknowledges, too much business on its hands properly to attend to, is a wild folly!
The chief piece of English legislation during the year has been what was embodied in “the bill to put down ritualism”—that is to say, the regulation of divine worship as understood in the church established by act of Parliament. Ritualism, or the “Romanizing tendency,” as it is strangely termed, in the Anglican Church, has been put down, as far as an act of Parliament can put it down. Our ritualists on this side were put down also, for their bishops followed that authority in their church known as the British Parliament, composed respectively of Anglicans, Dissenters, Jews, Quakers, and other sects, with, worst of all, a strong contingent of Roman Catholics. That hydra-head of the Anglican Church regulated for it to a nicety, pronounced upon its devotions, practices, sacraments, vestments, ornaments, postures of the body, bendings of the knee, elevations of the hands, prostrations, crossings, and so forth, as calmly and in as business-like a fashion as though it were sitting on an income tax; and the church that we are so solemnly assured by learned men like Bishop Coxe, if it dates not exactly from the Ist, certainly dates from somewhere in the neighborhood of the IVth, century, with a subsequent lamentable gap up to the XVIth, when the Apostle Henry and others of that ilk came to renovate and restore it to its pristine purity, bowed meekly to the infallible decision of the business-like assembly of Jews, infidels, Quakers, Dissenters, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. What would S. Peter and S. Paul think of it all?
Something far more serious than this, and of far deeper import to the nation, [pg 568] was the long and persistent strike of the agricultural laborers, which was carried on on a most extensive scale, and with a union that was not thought to exist in the successor of the Saxon hind. Once the ball of disaffection is set rolling, it is very hard to say where it will stop. It is clear that the unions have at last permeated the entire body of the English laboring-classes. The trades-unions are too often cousins-german to the secret societies. The mass of the English agricultural classes, in common with the vast majority of the English laboring-classes and artisans, have no religion at all. The disaffection with the present order of things in England, though less pronounced than in most modern European nations, has been long gathering, is rapidly spreading, and is beyond all doubt of a nature to excite considerable alarm. Loss of religion, it is needless to say, leaves the minds and hearts of men open to all evil, and it would be beyond stupidity to shut one's eyes to the very plain fact that the spirit of evil and of general disaffection is particularly active all the world over just at present. Banish religion, banish the guiding hand of God from your objective laws and from the heart and sight of your people, and the people will look on the powers that be, of whatsoever nature, as oppressors, on the rich as despoilers of the poor, on the employers as their tyrants.
A most important movement, and one that we welcome with all our hearts, is the bold step taken at last by the English hierarchy in founding a Catholic university in England. The want has long been felt in that country of a centre of Catholic intellect, culture, and thought, to vie with those seats of learning which the piety of their Catholic forefathers had left as priceless heirlooms to their Catholic children, but which, with all holy places and all holy things, had by the national apostasy become perverted from the purpose of their pious founders, and fallen by a too easy lapse from centres of false faith to centres of no faith at all. In England and Ireland, as with us, the means of providing higher education for students desirous of attaining it have been hitherto necessarily and lamentably deficient. The Catholic University in Ireland and this later one in England give promise that, with proper encouragement from the wealthy and intelligent laity, this long-felt want will be at length adequately supplied. These are days when the Catholic laity, to whom now all positions, or at least very important ones, are fairly open, are in duty bound to take their stand as becomes loyal children of a mother universally assailed. The laity can penetrate where the clergy have no voice. They are, as S. Peter called them, and as they have so signally proved themselves in Germany, “a kingly priesthood.” But to take a stand similar to that taken by the noble German phalanx, that “thundering legion” in the service of the pagan empire, they must be equal to their adversaries in culture, refinement, and address, all which come more by education than from nature. Many a great mind has retired within a narrow circle for which it was certainly not born, and its efforts rendered half nugatory by lack of that early association and training which a great university, an intellectual focus of the brightest minds in the galaxy of letters, is intended to and does supply. We look, then, with as much hope as expectancy to this step on the part of the English hierarchy, who have saved their children from the allurements of a Satanic culture by supplying them with men of recognized intellectual standing and acknowledged faith in Christ and in his church. Our only hope is that in our own country we soon may rival them.
Some mention will probably be looked for here of the controversy, as it is called, which has sprung up in consequence of a recent pamphlet written by Mr. Gladstone; but there is little need of such mention, inasmuch as Mr. Gladstone seems to have been sufficiently answered by the very men whom his pamphlet was intended chiefly to affect—the Protestants of England. Whether so intended or not, it was beyond all doubt an attempt altogether unworthy the high character of the distinguished author to rouse the rancor of the English Protestants against their Catholic fellow-subjects. Could we altogether rid ourselves of the respect with which Mr. Gladstone, take him all in all, has hitherto inspired us, as a man whose heart was as large and loyal as his intellect, and that intellect inspired with reverence for God and holy things, his latest exploit could only be described as a vulgar “No Popery” appeal to the worst classes and most degraded passions of English society, delivered in bad taste and worse faith, and, to crown [pg 569] the list of offences, as a political mistake, which has already failed in its object of establishing him, as Earl Russell once was, and as men of the Newdegate and Whalley type would be, as the English “No Popery” champion and leader, while it effectually alienates from him once for all a large and influential body of supporters on whom he has often counted, and on whom there was no reason to believe that a genuine change of front on his part might not have led him to count again. That his pamphlet is all this is true; that Mr. Gladstone intended it to be all this there is too much reason to believe, but of that he himself alone can tell. If the leader of the English Liberal party is pleased to be patted on the back by the men in Germany who patted on the back the orators of Exeter Hall who met to sympathize with the German persecution of Germans whose only crime was their Catholic faith, and whose only stain was and is their readiness to sacrifice life, lands, and liberty in defence of that faith, he is welcome to his ill-earned applause and doubtful honor.
The space already given to the important topics touched upon leaves little room for comment on others. And indeed the story, as far as the Catholic Church and general politics are concerned, is much the same all the world over. Austria has followed in the wake of Prussia, though its ecclesiastical laws do not seem to have been carried out with the brutal thoroughness of its neighbor. Italy continues in its downward course. The state of its finances is appalling, and yet it plies whip and spur with reckless speed into chaos. Brigandage, in the south chiefly, grows worse and worse. Civil marriage there, as in Prussia, is the law established. A new phase of the secret societies crops out from time to time. It has tried the scheme of popular election of the curés as did Switzerland and Germany, with a like result in all cases—an absurd fiasco. It has made great strides in the way of popular education, with the result pictured by the special correspondent of the London Times: “The property that is taken from some of the Capuchin convents in Tuscany, and sold at auction, is bought back at the auction by ‘pious benefactors,’ who recall the scattered fraternity to their deserted and desecrated homes, and restore monachism on conditions more favorable than those on which it stood before its suppression. The central government and the municipalities in Italy strain every nerve to supply the people with a free and good education, but their schools have to strive hard to withstand the competition which is raised against them by the Scolopii in Florence, the Barnabites in Milan, and the Ignorantins in Turin.... There are now Waldensian, Methodist, and other evangelical churches and schools in Rome, as in other Italian cities, but their success is not very encouraging, even in the opinion of their candid promoters.” And we may add, for the benefit of the ardent but foolish supporters of the Van Meter and such like schemes, a further extract from the same correspondent: “Attempts to allow the people to elect their parish priests without the permission of, and even in direct opposition to, the bishop of the diocese have been made in some Mantuan rural districts and elsewhere, but hitherto with no extensive or decisive results; and the Gavazzi, Passaglia, Andrea, and others, who would have ventured on a reforming movement within the church itself, have met with no support whatever, either on the part of the government authorities or of public opinion.”