THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

A

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

OF

General Literature and Science.

VOL. XXIII.
APRIL, 1876, TO SEPTEMBER, 1876.

NEW YORK:
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE
9 Warren Street.

1876.

CONTENTS.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 133.—APRIL, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1876.

HOW WE ARE MISREPRESENTED ABROAD.

Following the example of older nations, the United States has been accustomed to keep at foreign courts and capitals certain diplomatic agents whose presence there seems to be considered necessary for the protection of our national interests, as well as a pledge of mutual friendship and comity. Under the more modest title of envoys or ministers these gentlemen exercise the powers and enjoy the immunities of ambassadors, and to their supposed wisdom, tact, and judgment are entrusted all difficult negotiations and the settlement of doubtful questions of international law.

In view of the increased facilities for communication between independent governments afforded by railroads and telegraphs, the general diffusion of accurate geographical and commercial knowledge, and the almost total disuse of the secret diplomacy of former times, it has been seriously considered whether this class of rather expensive officials might not be dispensed with altogether. Many persons, also, are inclined to believe that the public welfare would suffer little, if at all, by

such a measure, on the principle that bad or incompetent representatives are worse than none. But if the custom, as appears probable, is still to be adhered to, it is becoming more and more apparent that the personnel of our diplomatic corps must speedily undergo a radical change for the better, if we would not bring our country into lasting disrepute and contempt in the eyes of all just and discerning men.

In Europe diplomacy is practically as much a profession as law or medicine. Its students begin their allotted course at an early age in the capacity of attachés or secretaries of legation. As they gain in experience they are moved from one court to another, in regular order of promotion, until finally, after years of practical observation and laborious study, they develop into accomplished diplomatists and ripe statesmen, whose services are invaluable to their country, at home and abroad. Not so in America; with us the post of minister resident or envoy extraordinary, is usually the reward of some obscure partisan, the solace of a disappointed Congressional

aspirant, or the asylum in which superannuated cabinet officers can find dignified obscurity. Occasionally accomplished international lawyers like the late Mr. Wheaton or Reverdy Johnson are selected, but these rare cases are in sad contrast with the generality of persons chosen, every few years, to represent in foreign countries the power, dignity, and intelligence of the republic. They are almost invariably men of mediocre ability, contracted views, and defective education; unaccustomed to any high degree of social refinement, and sometimes ignorant of the very language of the country to which they are accredited, while not necessarily masters of their own. From a perusal of some volumes of state documents[1] we are led to conclude that the principal duty of our diplomats is to write long, prosy letters to the Secretary of State, and to encumber the archives of his office with copious extracts from foreign newspapers of no value or public interest whatever. In this mass of correspondence we look in vain for the keen, accurate criticism of men and manners, or the profound views of statesmanship which characterized the despatches of the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the French and English emissaries of a later period.

On the contrary, we find these letters exhibiting a remarkable feebleness and crudity of mind, and, where matters relating to religion or morals are discussed, a purblind prejudice unworthy of any rational American, but especially reprehensible in an exalted official of our government. This latter blemish is so prominent, and withal so repeatedly displayed, as to be painfully suggestive

of a desire on the part of the writers to win, by unworthy means, the favor of the appointing power at the federal capital. We also observe with regret that they are accustomed to use, with the greatest deliberation and upon the slightest occasion, the terms reactionist, Romanist, ultramontane, and other nicknames—all of which are inaccurate and most of them offensive—when describing the supporters of the Catholic Church, who, in various parts of the Christian world, are battling for the rights of conscience and the freedom of their religion; while eulogistic adjectives are lavished on all parties and measures, no matter how tyrannical or arbitrary, provided they are directed against the church and her priesthood. Just here we may as well ask at the start, Is there not occupation enough for our diplomatic service in attending to the great commercial and other secular interests of the republic, but that they must turn aside to devote their chief attention to the cultivation and spread of anti-Catholic bigotry?

One of the most glaring examples of this indecent partisanship is to be found in the records of our diplomatic relations with Mexico—our nearest neighbor and the most populous of the Spanish-American republics. Formerly the greatest care was exercised in filling this important mission, only gentlemen of sound discretion and liberal views being selected; but since the advent of Mr. Fish as Secretary of State, this wise precaution has been neglected, and, as a consequence, we have had at the Mexican capital, for several years, a deputy named John W. Foster, whose total misapprehension of the duties of his office is painfully apparent, even from his own reports. It will be remembered that in 1859 the partisans of Juarez,

assembled at Vera Cruz, proclaimed war on the Catholic Church, abolished all religious communities, confiscated their property, and expelled their members of both sexes. They also declared marriage a civil contract, to be entered into only before a magistrate, abolished religious oaths, and attempted other “reforms” equally impertinent and detrimental to the public good. During the short reign of Maximilian these attempts on the liberty of the church were of course discontinued; but when Juarez assumed absolute control of the government they were renewed, and on the 25th of September, 1873, were declared by his successor, Lerdo de Tejada, a part of the constitution. This effort to make religious proscription the fundamental law of the republic seemed so judicious and praiseworthy to Mr. Foster that he immediately transmitted to Washington a full copy of Lerdo’s proclamation, with the remark: “Their incorporation into the federal constitution may be regarded as the crowning act of triumph of the liberal government in its long contest with the conservative or church party.”

Knowing something of the antecedents of Mr. Foster, we are not surprised at his sympathy with what may be called the illiberal or anti-church party; but the reply of our Secretary of State is simply inexplicable. On October 22 he writes:

“The Mexican government deserves congratulation upon the adoption of the amendments of its constitution to which the despatch relates. It may be regarded as a great step in advance, especially for a republic in name. We have had ample experience of the advantage of similar measures—an experience, too, which has fully shown that, while they have materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity, they have by no means tended to weaken the just interests

of religion or the due influence of clergymen in the body politic.”

How a gentleman of Mr. Fish’s acknowledged intelligence could permit himself to write such a document is incomprehensible. He knows well that “we”—meaning the United States—have not had “ample experience,” or any experience whatever, “of the advantage of similar measures.” “We” have had our moments of fanaticism, our church-burnings and convent-sackings, it is true; but neither the municipal law nor the Constitution has presumed to control the spiritual affairs of the church in this republic. Our seminaries, colleges, convents, and schools are yet untouched by the civil magistrate; our priests can administer the sacraments without the risk of police interference; and our Sisters of Mercy and Charity can pursue their holy avocations and not incur the risk of perpetual banishment. What has contributed to enlarge and to secure to us general freedom and prosperity is not such anti-Catholic legislation as that upon which Mr. Fish congratulates the “republic in name,” but the very contrary.

It would seem, however, that some of those entrusted with the highest offices of state regret this happy condition of things. Evidence crops out everywhere to strengthen the suspicion that our government, not finding interests at home of sufficient magnitude to occupy its attention, is drifting more and more into sympathy with the conspiracy now prevalent in Europe against the rights of the Catholic Church and that birthright of every American citizen—freedom of conscience.

But, however unsustained by fact, the moral sympathy thus tendered by the mouth-piece of our

government to the Mexican president was highly valuable to his party at that juncture. The laws against the clergy and nuns were exceedingly unpopular with the great mass of the Mexicans, and it was necessary that the endorsement of the powerful and prosperous republic of the north should be secured in their favor. If such measures had “materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity” in one country, as Mr. Fish solemnly asserted, why should they not have the same salutary effect in another? There is no reason for surprise, therefore, to find that when the elated Mr. Foster transmitted Mr. Fish’s letter, with his own felicitations, to Mr. Lafragua, the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, he was answered in the following complimentary phrase:

“The president of the republic has received with special gratification the expression of the kind sentiments which animate the people and government of the United States respecting the people and government of Mexico, which sentiments could not have been interpreted by a more estimable person than your excellency. The president is sincerely thankful, as well for the cordial congratulation which his excellency the Secretary of State has had the kindness to address to you on account of the proclamation of the amendments to the federal constitution, as for the ardent wishes which your excellency manifests for the consolidation of the republican institutions and of peace, and for the prosperity and material development of the United Mexican States.”

It will thus be seen that by the wilfulness—or indiscretion, let us call it—of Mr. Fish “the people and government of the United States” are credited with a sympathy for, and approval of, what their conscience, their spirit, and their whole history up to this time repudiate—a legislation

of tyranny and religious proscription. Mr. Fish—and no man better—knows that such sympathy has no foundation in the hearts of the American people or in the real policy of its government. He knows that the people abhor the sentiment expressed in the “amendments to the federal constitution” of Mexico. What are we to think, then, of a statesman who, actuated by whatever motive, shows himself so ready to play fast and loose with the solemn trusts confided to him? Is the vast power that he must exercise safe in the hands of one who is ready to veer with every wind that blows, especially when it blows against Rome? Is this the true expression of the policy of which we have lately heard so much—“Let the church and the state be for ever separate”? Our American feelings rise with indignation against so grave a misrepresentation of the principles and policy of our government, especially by one so familiar with them as Mr. Fish. There is no excuse for this.

Mr. Fish’s faux pas was too precious to the anti-Catholic faction not to receive the widest publicity. “This correspondence,” writes Mr. Foster to his principal, “was yesterday read in the national Congress by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by direction of the president of the republic, and after its reading the president of Congress, in the name of that body, expressed the gratification with which the assembly had received the intelligence, and by a vote of Congress the correspondence was entered upon its journal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has also caused its publication in the official newspaper, and it has appeared in all the periodicals of this capital.”

A year had scarcely passed away, during which every effort had been

made thus to mislead and pervert public opinion, when De Tejada’s government found itself strong enough to pass additional “laws of reform” infringing still farther on the rights of conscience. On the 15th of December, 1874, the Sisters of Charity, the last remnant of the Catholic orders in Mexico, were also rudely expelled from their institutions and ordered to quit for ever the scenes of their pious and untiring labors. And in this connection, a curious comment on Mr. Fish’s congratulatory despatch was offered by the people of the city of San Francisco. The Sisters expelled by virtue of the constitution which met with such marked approval from Mr. Fish, were received with open arms and welcomed by our fellow-citizens in California. Surely, this was giving the lie direct to Mr. Fish by his own countrymen, whose conscience naturally revolted from a system of government which, as its chief claim to the sympathy and fellowship of foreign peoples, set up its power and willingness to banish from its jurisdiction all that was purest and holiest. Yet Mexico is as far from “general freedom and prosperity” as ever, and Messrs. Fish and Foster, the instigators of this last outrage on humanity, continue to be high and trusted officials of our freedom-loving republic.

Still, the faction that controls Mexican politics was not content with constitutional and statutory “reforms.” As long as the heart of the country remained Catholic its hold on power was feeble and uncertain. It therefore aimed at nothing less than a general conversion of the people, at a new Reformation, and selected what it considered the most fitting instruments for that purpose. These were itinerant Protestant missionaries of

all sects, kindly furnished to order by the Boston American Board of Missions and the Pacific Theological Seminary of California, who soon overspread the promised land and began their labors of conversion. The states of Mexico, Vera Cruz, Guerrero, Puebla, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi were especially favored by their presence, where, from their method of proceeding, their foul abuse of the religion of the populace, and the rank blasphemy that characterized their preaching, it was plain that they considered they had fallen among barbarians and idolaters. Going from place to place, and surrounded by armed guards, they not only fulminated the heresy of Protestantism, but scattered broadcast printed travesties of the Commandments and of the prayers and ritual of the church, some copies of which they had the hardihood to nail to the cathedrals and other places of Catholic worship. To make matters still more offensive, they frequently interspersed their harangues with laudations of the “liberal” party who patronized them, and direct attacks on all who opposed its iniquitous policy.

One of those zealots, a Rev. Mr. Stephens, after a nine months’ journey through several towns, found his way to Ahualulco, where, relying on the countenance of the government officials, he commenced a series of bitter assaults on Catholicity. A popular tumult was the result, during which the unfortunate man was killed, March 2, 1874. When news of this cruel, though not unprovoked, murder reached Mr. Foster, he waited on the Mexican minister, who informed him that “the principal assassins and two priests had been arrested, and that

a judge had been despatched to the district with an extra corps of clerks to ensure a speedy investigation and trial.” This promise was faithfully and promptly kept, as we find by a despatch dated April 15, in which the minister says:

“Up to the present date seven of the guilty parties have been tried and condemned to death, from which sentence they have appealed to the supreme court. Twelve or fifteen more persons charged with complicity in the crime are under arrest awaiting trial, including the cura of the parish of Ahualulco.”

Yet this summary vengeance, nor even the indignity offered to the venerable cura, who had had no participation whatever in the disturbance, did not satisfy the insatiable soul of Mr. Foster. From his subsequent letter to Lafragua, and several despatches to our government, we infer that the condign punishment of the priest, innocent or guilty, was to him the most desirable of objects. To inaugurate the new Reformation by the execution of a Catholic clergyman appears to have been considered by him as a master-stroke of policy. But even the Lerdistas were not prepared for so desperate a step, and Foster was doomed to find his hopes blighted. Alluding to a conversation with Minister Lafragua in September, he writes to Mr. Fish, bemoaning his hard fate:

“I thanked him for communicating the intelligence in relation to the trials of the assassins of Rev. Mr. Stephens, the receipt of which I had anxiously awaited, but expressed my disappointment in finding no mention of the proceedings had in the trial of the cura of Ahualulco, to whom the published accounts attributed the responsibility of the assassination.…”

This information, and the fact that the appeal of the seven condemned

persons had not been determined, drew forth one of Mr. Fish’s unaccountable diplomatic missives. “You may farther inform him orally,” says our Secretary, alluding to Lafragua, “but confidentially, if need be, that this must necessarily become an international affair, unless it shall be satisfactorily disposed of and without unreasonable delay.” Now, why should the information be given orally and confidentially if there was not some desire, some trick, to avoid responsibility for a doubtful act tending to intimidate a friendly power? and wherefore should the killing of the man Stephens be made an international affair—i.e., a just cause of war—when so many American citizens had been already murdered in Mexico with impunity? Foster had repeatedly complained that during the short time he had been in charge of the legation thirteen “murders of the most horrid character and revolting to our common civilization” had been committed on his countrymen, for which there had not been a single punishment; yet we hear of no intimation of making them international affairs. Were the lives of these persons, presumably following legitimate callings, collectively of less value than that of a mendacious preacher of a gospel of violence?

Emboldened by the words of Mr. Fish, Foster again returned to the attack in a note to Lafragua, in which he directly, and on his own responsibility, charges the cura with having been the instigator of the crime. The first intimation that the cura had had any participation in exciting the mob against Stephens was contained in a letter from a brother preacher named Watkins, who was stationed at Guadalajara, more than sixty miles from the scene of the disturbance. On this

suspicious and slender foundation Foster had been in the habit of building up a mass of insinuations and charges against the priest, referring to “general” and “printed” reports as his authority. When after a searching investigation the cura was honorably discharged, and the minister again complained to Lafragua, that official replied rather tartly in the following unequivocal terms:

“In relation to the acquittal of those who were charged with being instigators of the crime, it is the result of a judicial act, which has taken place after the due process had been completed for the investigation of the truth, which is not always in accord with the prejudices of the public.”

If the minister had added: “and of Mr. Foster and the Board of Missions,” the sentence would have been more complete. Having failed to accomplish his grand design—the chastisement of the cura—the ultimate fate of the convicted laymen became a matter of little importance to our assiduous representative.

Another opportunity soon presented itself for Mr. Foster’s official interference. On the night of January 26, 1875, a riot occurred in Acapulco, in which five persons were killed and eleven wounded on both sides. Of the former, one was claimed to be an American. It appears that a Rev. M. N. Hutchinson, supported by the United States consul, J. A. Sutter, and a few native officials, had commenced his evangelical labors in that city by personally insulting the parish priest, Father J. P. Nava, and by openly abusing everything considered holy and venerable by Catholics. This method of preaching Christ’s Gospel so exasperated the populace that an attack was made on the building

used as a Protestant church, and a street fight, with fatal results, followed. Hutchinson, the cause of the fray, escaped and found refuge on board a ship; while Sutter, who seems to have been as cowardly as he was vicious, threatened to abandon the consulate and follow his example. As in the case at Ahualulco, the “liberal” authorities at once arrested the cura, but so indignant were the citizens, and even some of the federal employees, at the act that he was at once set at liberty.

Here was a rare chance for Mr. Foster to display his reformatory energy, and on this occasion he had a most efficient associate in the gallant consul. That truthful gentleman writes to his chief, January 27, three days after the riot:

“All the Indians are under arms, and threaten to attack the town if the parish priest—who, in my opinion, is the prime mover of these heinous crimes—should be arrested. So he is still at large, and laughing, probably, at the impotence of the authorities.… Everybody in town is afraid of the Indians, who, incited by a fanatical priest, would perpetrate the most atrocious crimes.”

All this Mr. Foster believed, or appeared to believe; for we find him embodying it in his official communications to Lafragua, with some additional remarks of his own to give the calumny greater point and force. Supported by the American minister, Sutter now looms up as the defender of Protestant rights in general. Addressing personages of no less distinction than the governor of the state and the district judge, he requests them to “promptly take the necessary measures within your power to procure the speedy punishment, according to the law, of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocious massacre of Protestants,” etc. There is no limitation

here, it will be observed, to American citizens; the peremptory consul, “in obedience to instructions received yesterday from the Hon. John W. Foster, envoy extraordinary, etc.,” had assumed a protectorate over the entire evangelical body of Acapulco, and felt himself at liberty to insult the executive and judiciary of the state of Guerrero.

The people of Acapulco, however, differed materially in opinion from the consul. Not only did they not fear the Indians or regard their priest as an abettor of riot and murder, but, on the contrary, five or six hundred of them waited on Governor Alvarez, and, in the name of the rest, assured him that the disturbance was wholly caused by Hutchinson and his handful of Protestants, requesting him at the same time to remove the disturbers from their city, as he had the power to do under the laws of the state. Even the Minister of Foreign Affairs—though, like so many of his party, deadly opposed to the church—could not help but ascribe the riot to something like its proper cause. Annoyed, doubtless, by the impertinence of Sutter and the importunities of Foster, he writes to the latter in a vein of delicate irony:

“The consul in Acapulco cannot be ignorant of the fact that Protestant worship was a new propaganda among a people who, unfortunately, have not been able to attain to that degree of civilization to enable them to accept without aversion religious tenets which they disown, and it is well known that the religious sentiment is one of the most sensitive, and that, when attacked, it is all the more irritable.”

The logical position of the Mexican minister is unassailable. But what a humiliating predicament for our government to be placed in by her diplomatists abroad! Such is the natural result of selecting the

kind of men for important posts, or indeed for any posts at all, complained of at the beginning of the article. It is clear that this Mr. Foster has missed his vocation. He would be more at home in a Protestant board of missions, or as a “worker” in “revivals,” than standing before a people as the representative of the truth, worth, and genius of a great nation.

Mr. Foster was not satisfied with the explanation. He had lost one priest, and he was not going to let another slip through his fingers without a struggle. He reminds Lafragua of Mr. Fish’s “congratulations,” and appeals to his gratitude. “While it is very natural that I,” he writes, “as the representative of a government which has officially congratulated that of Mexico on the constitutional triumph and recognition of the principles of religious liberty, should watch with deep interest the practical enforcement of these principles, I have made the outbreaks of fanatical mobs the subject of diplomatic intervention only when American citizens have been assassinated.” But the plea was in vain; even the government of Lerdo de Tejada dared not molest the cura of Acapulco, who, strong in his innocence and in the affection of his flock, continued to exercise the duties of his sacred office, regardless alike of native “reformers” and officious diplomats. Up to the latest dates Mr. Foster had not yet caught a cura, and the people of Mexico seem as far as ever from the enjoyment of the blessings of a new Reformation, so happily and characteristically begun.

The Central American States include Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, each of which holds an undivided fifth interest in the official attention

of Mr. George Williamson, our worthy minister peripatetic. When not involved in domestic brawls—which seldom happens—these miniature commonwealths have a habit of varying the monotony of peaceful life by a descent on one of their neighbors, and even a civil and a foreign war have been known to rage at the same time and place. Having such a vivacious people to look after, the attention of our representative might reasonably be considered fully occupied; yet we learn that he has ample leisure to devote himself to theological and educational speculations, and particularly to the subject of marriage. On this important social relation he not only becomes eloquent, though occasionally obscure, in his despatches, but is evidently looked upon as an authority by the “liberal” party on the Isthmus. Having been asked his opinion by President Barrios of Guatemala, who contemplated extending civil marriage to his people, “I replied,” he says, “it would in all probability soon come; … that in our country we considered the civil law supreme, and would neither furnish a hierarchy of Romanists nor Protestants, to assert its sanction was necessary to give validity to a contract which the law pronounced good.” It may be objected that this passage is not well constructed; so, in justice not only to the liberal views, but to the erudition of Mr. Williamson, we quote the following descriptive extract from a despatch on the condition of the Central American population:

“Intelligence is more generally diffused; people are slowly learning republican habits and adopting republican ideas; a monarchical hierarchy that fostered superstitions, that only allowed education in a certain direction, and

which ‘gathered gear’ unto itself ‘by every wile,’ has been dethroned; agriculture now has the aid of the numerous laborers who were employed in the erection of large edifices for monks and nuns and religious exercises.”

A subsequent communication on the state of public education furnishes a rather strange commentary on the above:

“The present attempt at organizing a public-school system is, in my judgment, one of the most laudable acts of the present government, for which it should be entitled to credit, whether there be success or failure. My opinion is that there are too many obstacles to be overcome for the plan to be successful, and that the government is undertaking a grave experiment which is likely to create great dissatisfaction, and may result in revolution. But having driven out most of the priests and nuns, who were heretofore the instructors of the people, it seemed necessary the government should try to supply their place.”

The same latitude of opinion and ill-concealed hostility to the Catholic Church, the same desire to take advantage of every trifling circumstance to misrepresent and malign the motives of her supporters, pervade the correspondence of our other representatives in South America, almost without exception. Thus Mr. Thomas Russell has no scruple in lauding the usurping government of Venezuela, which, in 1870, first imprisoned and then banished perpetually the Archbishop of Caracas and Venezuela, suppressed the seminaries, confiscated the property of the monasteries, and expelled the nuns. Still less has Mr. Rumsey Wing in assuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in writing about an alleged desecration of a grave in Quito, that the news “of those outrages on the bodies of Protestants” “would create an intense feeling not only in my own country

but throughout Europe”; while, having nothing else to send, we suppose, the same officious gentleman forwards to Washington copies of two decrees of Congress, one granting a tithe of the church revenues to his Holiness the Pope, and the other placing Ecuador under the protection of the Sacred Heart, “to show the intense Catholicism prevailing in this country.”

Then Mr. C. A. Logan, some time of Chili, appears to have interested himself very much in local politics, and it is not difficult to discover upon which side his sympathy rests. In a despatch to Secretary Fish, November 2, 1874, he has the hardihood to charge the Archbishop of Santiago with bribing congressmen, pending the passage of a bill for the partial repeal of a penal law against the clergy. He writes:

“The day arrived for the vote, and a large crowd gathered about the building, awaiting the result with the most breathless anxiety; among these was the archbishop himself, in full clerical robes. Much to the chagrin of the liberals, a two-third vote was gained by the church party under the spur and lash of the clericals, and, as it is freely asserted, by the liberal use of money. The senate is composed of only twenty members, which is not a large body to handle, if they take kindly to handling.”

Mr. Francis Thomas, of Lima, goes even farther than his confrère, and deliberately asserts the complicity of the Catholics, as a body, in the recent attempt to assassinate President Pardo.

“The conspirators,” he says, “had calculated upon the co-operation of all that class of the population of this country who have become hostile to the president of Peru on account of his proceedings, in which high dignitaries of the Catholic Church were concerned. The congress of Peru at its last session passed

a law forbidding members of the order of Jesuits to reside within the jurisdiction of Peru. In violation of this law, members of that order who had been expelled from other Spanish republics took possession of a convent in the interior of Peru, and took measures to organize their society. President Pardo, in conformity to the law, issued a proclamation requiring them to leave the country, which has caused some degree of excitement.”

This fact, and the attempts of the government to introduce irreligious books and periodicals into the schools, were sufficient, in the opinion of our impartial minister, to provoke the Catholics of Peru to the foulest crimes.

The Emperor of Brazil, in his open war on the church, also finds an advocate and eulogist in Mr. Richard Cutts Shannon, the American chargé at his court, who employs his vicarious pen in justifying the arrest, trial, and condemnation of the Bishop of Olinda to four years’ imprisonment with hard labor. But he is surpassed by minister James R. Partridge, who, in alluding to the determined intention of the government to prosecute to the bitter end the various vicars who were named to take the place of those successively cast into prison, emphatically declares: “From present appearances, the ministerial party are going on and are determined to carry it through. It is to be hoped that their courage may not fail, neither by reason of the long list of those who are thus declared ready to become martyrs, nor by any political move of the ecclesiastical party.”

Such, in brief, are the views of the men sent to represent this country on American soil. If we turn to Europe—though we may acknowledge a higher order of ability in our diplomatic agents there—we

discover prejudice as strong and partisanship equally conspicuous. Referring to the German Empire, we are pained to find so profound a student of the past as Mr. Bancroft our late minister at Berlin, so easily deceived in contemporary history. Nothing, certainly, can be more untrue than the following statement of the position of affairs in Prussia in 1873:

“The effect of the correspondence [between the Pope and Emperor William] has been only to increase the popularity and European reputation of the emperor, and to depress the influence of the clerical party, thus confirming the accounts, which I have always given you, that the ultramontane political influence can never become vitally dangerous to this empire. The Catholic clergy are obviously beginning to regret having commenced with the state a contest in which it is not possible for them to gain the advantage. The intelligent Catholics themselves for the most part support the government, and so have received from the ultramontanes the nickname of state Catholics.”

There is not a single sentence in the above which is not a misapprehension of facts. How far Mr. Bancroft’s easy assertions and confident predictions, made scarcely two years ago, have been justified by the event is a matter that happily needs no inquiry, while comment on our part would be almost cruel. Mr. Bancroft, however, was not content with supplying information to the State Department on matters exclusively pertaining to his mission. His wide range of vision took in all Europe, past and present. Of the old Helvetian republic he writes:

“Switzerland shows no sign of receding from its comprehensive measures against the ultramontane usurpations; and the spirit and courage of these republicans have something of the same effect on the population of Germany that was exercised

by their forefathers in the time of the Reformation.”

And again:

“How widely the movement is extending in Europe is seen by what is passing in England, where choice has been made of a ministry disinclined to further concessions to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy, and where the archbishops of the Anglican Church are proposing measures to drive all Romanizing tendencies out of the forms of public worship in the Establishment. Here in Germany, where the question takes the form of a conflict between the authority of the state at home within its own precincts, and the influence of an alien ecclesiastical power, it is certain that the party of the state is consolidating its strength; and I see nothing, either in the history of the country, or in the present state of public opinion, or the development of public legislation, that can raise a doubt as to the persistency of the German government in the course upon which it has entered.”

What the “comprehensive measures” in Switzerland “against the ultramontane usurpations” mean readers of The Catholic World already know. They are simply a rather aggravated form of the Falck laws—a form so aggravated that it is only within the past year M. Loyson himself warned the world that the “comprehensive measures against ultramontane usurpations,” which Mr. Bancroft finds such reasons to commend, were aimed, through Catholicity, at all Christianity. And yet a high official of our free government, a man of universal reputation and great authority in the world of letters, finds in this elaborate system of proscription and intolerance food for congratulation. One would suppose from the spirit so plainly animating Mr. Bancroft that he is a member of the O. A. U., and that he was chosen rather to represent that delectable society in Berlin than the American Government. It is to be presumed, from his own

despatches, that he would have our government follow the tyrannical attempt of Prussia and Switzerland to “stamp out” freedom of conscience. Mr. Bancroft’s diplomatic experience, under the influence of the court of Prussia, seems destined to reverse his principles and maxims as an American historian. He has, we fear, remained too long abroad for the good of his native truth, character, and sense of right. It is to be hoped that this baneful influence of foreign courts does not pursue him on his return to his own country and people.

Mr. John Jay, who formerly acted as our envoy at Vienna, though not so pronounced or diffusive in his despatches, is not far behind Mr. Bancroft in expressing his entire concurrence with the restrictive policy recently adopted by the government of Austria towards the church; while Mr. George P. Marsh, our representative in Italy, is so great an admirer of Garibaldi that he is never tired of chanting his praises in grandiloquent prose. Those familiar with the life of that notorious bandit will be surprised to learn from so high an authority as the American minister that “he has never through life encouraged any appeal to popular passion or any resistance to governments, except by legal measures or in the way of organized and orderly attempts at revolution; and, from the moment of his arrival at Rome, he exerted himself to the utmost to restrain every manifestation of excitement.”

In marked contrast to the unfair and ungenerous spirit displayed in the despatches of those ministers are the letters from France, Spain, and England. The stirring political events which occupy the entire attention of the two former countries leave no room, perhaps, for the discussion

of penal laws and judicial decrees against Catholicity; while the latter, having carried out Protestantism to its logical conclusion, and found it a sham, is more inclined to profit by the blunders and crimes of its neighbors, so as to push its commercial interests, than to imitate them and begin anew the rôle of persecutor for conscience’ sake.

In explanation of the erroneous views so frequently put forth by so many of our diplomatic officials, we are assured that most of those sent to Mexico and Central and South America have been members of secret societies, and, having been accustomed to affiliate with the lodges of those Freemason-ridden countries, have had whatever little sense of equity they originally possessed perverted by the sophisms of their new associates. Possibly; but let us consider how much harm may be done by following such a short-sighted course. All the independent countries south of us on this continent are largely Catholic, and, with the exception of Brazil, claim to be republican. They are bound to us by strong ties, political as well as commercial, and are naturally inclined to look upon the United States as their exemplar and guide, and, if need be, their protector. When they shall have shaken off the incubus of military dictation that now weighs upon them, and, restoring to the church its rights—as will eventually be done—have entered on a new career of freedom and material prosperity, how will they be disposed to feel towards a power which they have known only through its agents, and those the advocates and supporters of everything that is illiberal in politics and degrading in polemics?

In Europe the influence of incapable and unworthy representatives is likely to be even more deleterious

to our national character. The affections of the people of the Old World are strongly inclined toward the free institutions of the New. But if we continue to permit our delegated authority to be used only in favor and encouragement of such enemies of human liberty as the usurper at the Eternal City, the tyrant at Berlin, and the communists of Geneva, the popular sympathy born of our protestations of liberality will soon fade away, to give place to feelings of mistrust, if not of positive aversion.

In calling public attention to the incapacity and perversity of the majority of our diplomatists—men who do not hesitate to put into their correspondence with foreign governments, and their private home despatches, sentiments they dare not utter publicly in the forum or through the press—we by no means desire to restrict proper expressions of opinion or limit the just criticisms of the agents of the Department of State. We only insist that these shall not be indulged in at the expense of a very large and respectable portion of this community. Neither do we require that they shall take sides with Catholics,

as such, anywhere, no matter how harsh or unjust may be their grievances. This country is not Catholic, it is true, neither is it Protestant; and, indeed, it is questionable if, in any strict sense, it can be called Christian. But it is a country civilly and religiously free, by custom, statute, and Constitution, and we have a right to demand that whoever undertakes to act for it, as part and parcel of the machinery of our government, among foreigners, shall represent it as it is, in spirit as well as in fact—the opponent of all proscription for conscience’ sake, the enemy of tyranny whether exercised by the mob or the state. Is it not the true policy of our government to send abroad as representatives of our interests men who, while they are not hostile to the prevailing religious beliefs of the country to which they are accredited, are, at the same time, true and stanch Americans? If such men cannot be found, let us, in the name of common sense, have none at all. Some minor interests may perhaps suffer by the omission, but the honor and reputation of the republic will remain unsullied and unimpaired.

[1] Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, etc., for 1874-5.

LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S
“VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”

Maternal lady with the virgin grace,

Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,

And thou a virgin pure.

Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face

Men look upon, they wish to be

A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.

Charles Lamb.

A POET AMONG THE POETS.

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.

Mr. James Russell Lowell[2] has applied Mr. Matthew Arnold’s rule with rare fidelity in his essays, just published, on Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. His estimate of the two greatest of modern poets, especially the paper on Dante, is calculated to attract general attention, and to arouse, we apprehend, some acrid sentiment in a certain class of literary butterflies who are accustomed to sip or decline according to the theological character of the garden. It requires considerable courage to place Dante above all his rivals and salute him as

“The loftiest of poets!”

in an hour when poetry has lost the qualities that made Dante lofty and Milton grand, and when the epithet “Catholic,” which Dante loved and Milton hated, has become again a reproach. Lowell’s consideration of both is characterized by disinterestedness as to time, religion, politics, and literature; and the sincere student who casts aside his prejudices, like his hat, when he approaches the temples that enshrine so much of divinity as God deposited in the souls of the Florentine and the Puritan, will find it difficult to dissent from the judgment of Lowell upon their individuality, their inspiration, or their art. Lowell is peculiarly adapted to the form of literature, semi-critical, semi-creative, in which he has recently distinguished himself. We believe his essay on Dante to be the

most successfully-accomplished task which he has yet undertaken; and the cultivated American public should thank one who has amused and diverted it as well as he has done for the solid instruction which this volume conveys in a style at once scholarly, fresh, and refined. Lowell’s mental temperament is admirably adapted for the mirroring of poets’ minds. Himself a genuine poet, without ambition above his capacity, his agile fancy discerns the quicker and appreciates more intensely the imagination of epic souls; while his critical faculty, naturally acute, has the additional advantage of a keen sense of humor, which enables him to discover more readily the incongruous, and is, therefore, an invaluable assistant in literary discrimination.

It is the trade of criticism to expose blemishes; it is genius in criticism to appreciate the subject. The journeyman critic of the last two centuries has been so busy making authors miserable without felicitating mankind that when we read through an essay like Lowell’s on Dante, on Wordsworth, or on Spenser, we cheerfully recognize a man where experience has taught us to look only for an ingenious carper or spiteful ferret. However, critics are no worse than they used to be. Swift, who had excellent opportunity of forming an opinion, both in his own practice and in the observation of that of others, has left this dramatic picture, the truthfulness of which there is no reason yet to question:

“The malignant deity Criticism dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; Momus found her extended in her den upon the spoils of numberless volumes half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners.” Such is reckless and conscienceless criticism even to this day; and we turn from it, in grateful delight, to the reverential commentary which Lowell has produced upon one of the saddest of all human creatures—the great Catholic poet of the middle ages.

Dante, little understood by those who have the largest title to his legacies, is, after all, the universal poet—the poet of the soul. Homer chants the blood-red glories of war, and is the poet of a period; Virgil charms by the grace of his lines, and is the poet of an episode; Milton awes with the mighty sweeps of his rhetoric, and is the poet of the grandiose; Shakspeare astounds with his knowledge of human nature and enchains with his wit, and is the poet of the passions; Dante, when read aright, is found to be the poet of the Soul. The line that divides him from Shakspeare lies between the subjective and the objective—Shakspeare’s themes are men and women; Dante’s sole subject is Man—man within himself, as he is related to God, to religion, to eternity. As Lowell felicitously writes it, “Arma virumque cano; that is the motto of classic song. Dante says, Subjectum est

homo, not vir—my theme is man, not a man.”

Why, then, do we not read him more and value him as he deserves? For two reasons: first, the difficulty of adequate translation; next, the mysterious richness of his thought, whose pearls are not strung across the door of the lines to warn us, as later poetry so candidly does, that within there is nothing but barrenness. The proper understanding of Dante has been a growth, beginning in Italy as soon as he was dead, extending gradually over Europe, into England, and now westward, gaining in clearness and glory as time recedes and space enlarges.

Within a century after the poet’s death lectures on his works were delivered in the churches, and, as soon as the invention of printing enabled, numerous editions were edited and circulated. The first translation was into Spanish; then into French; next into German; and a copy of a Latin translation of the Divine Comedy by a bishop was made at the request of two English bishops in the early part of the fifteenth century, and was sent to England. Spenser and Milton were familiar with the poet’s works, but the first complete English translation did not appear until 1802. Of the English translations since then, the most familiar are Cary’s and Longfellow’s; and to this catalogue Mr. Lowell adds: “A translation of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, truthfulness, and elegance”—praise which will be cordially endorsed by those who have profited by Mr. Parsons’ labor.

We propose to discuss Dante the man and Mr. Lowell’s estimate of him, as exhibited in his writings, and shall touch upon the latter only

as they may be necessary to the clearer revelation of their author’s character. For Dante, like Milton, was not of common mould; in whatever aspect we view him he proves extraordinary to a degree which frequently becomes incomprehensible. It is natural to wish to throw the two under the same light, although the result of the experiment is only to magnify their points of difference and diminish those of comparison. The sum of the results appears to be that only in the accidents of life are they comparable; in the essentials of character, with a single exception—that of intense faith—they were radically unlike. Widely apart as their names appear—Dante dying in 1321 and Milton entering life in 1608—men were engaged during the lives of both in civil revolution, and each had his own theory of government and exercised the functions of political power. Both were men of sorrow, both were unappreciated in their day and generation, and the light and joy which each experienced emanated from within and supplied the fire of their genius. The noblest work of each was written in the gloomiest period of his life. Here the possibility of parallel ends.

There is a close relation—a much closer one than may at first be suspected—between Dante and the instant condition of American society and politics. Nearly six hundred years have passed away, and we have to go back to Dante to learn personal virtue in political life, as well as religion in social affairs. Lowell has escaped the poison of the time. He perceives the essence as well as the necessity of virtue, and fully realizes its absence in our own state.

“Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern

theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society—personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution—weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante, indeed, saw clearly enough that the divine justice did at length overtake society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. ‘It is Thou,’ he says sternly, ‘who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of the universal Nature, from before the beginning of the world.’… He believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly-trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever or whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God’s law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.… It would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago; but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante’s opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.”

In this Dante strikingly differed

from Milton, who was a revengeful and intensely-bigoted fanatic of his own faction, and he admitted to his companionship no man, high or low, who presumed to differ from him. Dante was a politician by principle, placing his country first, and setting a high value on himself as her servant. Milton was a politician by bigotry, placing himself first, and setting a high value on his country because he was her servant. But the manliness of Dante in demanding that the severe precepts of religion should be inflexibly applied to political administration in an age whose corruption was only less shocking than that of our own, is the particular lesson which this vigorous extract from Lowell conveys. If society in this era should esteem political wire-pullers, convention-packers, and politicians who deem patriotism the science of personal exigencies, as Dante esteemed and treated them, should we be any the worse off? Dante looked upon a thief as a thief, and the knave who conspired to defraud the government as fit only to “begone among the other dogs.” Would there not be a healthier tone in our political affairs if these classes of criminals were not met, as is usually the case, by justice daintily gloved and the bandage removed from her eyes, lest she should make a mistake as to persons?

The inspiration of Dante was strictly religious. So was Milton’s; but with this distinction: that Dante’s religiousness was real and beneficent, while Milton’s was unreal and malignant—as Lowell says, Milton’s “God was a Calvinistic Zeus.”

A brief and succinct analysis of the Divine Comedy will be found serviceable by those who have not analyzed it for themselves, and at the same time will make manifest

the dependence of Dante’s inspiration upon Catholic doctrine:

“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly muse.”

Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.

No fact in the history of poetry is

more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The Iliad and Odyssey acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The Æneid would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, Jerusalem Delivered, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the Æneid, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to Paradise Lost out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been

neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm.

Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce.

Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?

Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the Divine Comedy; and we can find space only for the closing period:

“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:

‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”

Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his

conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.

The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at

the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the Life and Works—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that his biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”

Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.”

This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.

Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of Paradise Lost is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”

When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton

“High on a throne of royal state,”

and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage.

In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic,

abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.

He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and

woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to

“Dear, beauteous Death.”

For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.

[2] Among my Books. Second Series.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE EPISODE EXPLAINED.

The night closed in—night, that is so cruel, yet so merciful; intensifying every pain in the long dark watch, or lulling it in blessed sleep.

There was very little sleep for Raymond that night, and none at all for his two nurses. They sat by his bed while the slow hours dragged on, watching his feverish restlessness, that was occasionally soothed by broken snatches of rest, thanks to a potion that was administered at intervals. Franceline’s anxiety gradually returned as she sat there observing every sound and symptom. She could not but see that there was something far more serious in this sudden attack than an ordinary fainting fit. Raymond was so troubled and excited in his sleep that she almost wished him to awake; and then again she longed for unconsciousness to soothe his feverish terrors. He clutched her hand; he could not bear her to move from him. At last the dawn came, and like a bright-winged angel scattered the darkness and scared away the ghostly phantoms of the night, and Raymond fell into a slumber long and deep enough to be refreshing.

Some days passed without bringing any change; but he was no worse, which, the doctor said, meant that he was better. His condition, however, continued extremely critical.

It was wonderful both to Angélique and to herself how Franceline

bore up under the strain; for both her mental and physical powers were severely taxed. She had hardly closed her eyes since her father had fallen ill; and she took scarcely any food. But anxiety, so long as it does not utterly break us down, buoys us up.

The few neighbors who were intimate were kind and sympathizing. Lady Anwyll had driven over and made anxious inquiries, and would gladly be of use in any way, if she could. Miss Bulpit also came to offer her services in any way they could be available. Miss Merrywig called every day. So far Franceline had seen none of them; she was always with her father when they called, and Angélique would not disturb her for visitors.

Father Henwick came constantly to inquire, but did not always ask to see the young girl. Franceline wondered why her father had not before this expressed a wish to see him; it seemed so natural that such a wish should have manifested itself the moment Raymond was able to receive any one. She dared not take the initiative and suggest it, but she could not help feeling that it would be an immense relief to the sufferer if he could disburden his mind of the weight that was upon it, and speak to Father Henwick as to a tried and affectionate friend, if even he did not as yet seek spiritual help and guidance from him. It had

long since been borne in on Franceline that the horrible suspicion which had so mysteriously fallen on Raymond was in some way or other connected with his sudden illness; she brooded over the thought until it became a fixed idea and haunted her day and night. How was it that he did not instinctively turn for comfort to the Source where he was sure to find it? Father Henwick himself must feel pained and surprised at not having been summoned to the sick-room before this. Franceline was thinking over it all one morning, sitting near Raymond’s bedside, when Angélique put in her head and announced in a loud whisper that M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father Henwick, was down-stairs, and would be glad if she could speak to him a moment. Franceline rose softly, and was leaving the room, when her father, who was not dozing, as she fancied, said:

“Why does he not come up and see me? I should be glad to see him; it would do me good.”

Father Henwick came up without delay, and Franceline soon made a pretext for leaving him alone with the invalid. It was with a beating heart that she closed the door on them and went down-stairs to wait till she was recalled. She could hear only the full, clear tones of Father Henwick’s voice at first; after a while these grew lower, and then she heard the murmur of Raymond’s voice; then there seemed to follow a silence. She was too agitated to pray in words, but her heart prayed silently with intense fervor. The conference lasted a full half-hour, and then Father Henwick’s cheerful voice sounded on the stairs.

“How do you think he looks, father?” she said, meeting him at

the study door with another question in her eyes that Father Henwick thought he understood.

“Much better than I expected!” he answered promptly and with a heartiness of conviction that was music to her ears; “and you will find that from this out he will improve steadily, and rapidly, I hope, too.”

A stifled “Thank God!” was Franceline’s answer.

“And now how about you?” said the priest, with something of the old blunt grumble that was so much more reassuring than the tenderness called forth by pity. “I heard a very bad account of you this morning—no sleep, and no food, and no air; you mean to fret yourself into an illness before your father is up and able to attend on you, do you? That would be one way of showing your dutiful affection for him. Humph! Are those the eyes for a young lady to have in her head on a fine sunny morning like this? Did you go to bed at all last night?”

“Yes, but I could not sleep; I was too anxious, too unhappy.”

“Too unbelieving, too mistrustful. Go up-stairs this minute, you child of little faith, and lie down and lay your head upon the pillow of divine Providence, and be asleep in five minutes!”

He left her with this peremptory injunction, and Franceline, with a lightened heart, went up-stairs determined to obey it. It was as yet, of course, a matter of pure conjecture what had passed between the priest and her father; but when, an hour later, after obediently taking that refreshing sleep on the pillow of divine Providence which had been commanded her, she came into Raymond’s room, there was a marked change in his whole

demeanor. He had not passed the interval in the listless apathy that had now become habitual to him. He had made Angélique bring over a little celestial globe and set it on the bed for him, and had amused himself with it awhile; and then he had taken up the book Franceline had left on the chair beside him when she stole out of the room. It was The Imitation of Christ. He was reading it when she entered, and there was an expression on his features that made her happier than she had been for a long time. He looked more peaceful, more life-like than she had seen him for weeks even before he had fallen ill.

“You are feeling better, petit père?” she said, kissing him, and taking the dear face between her hands to look into it more closely.

“Yes, my clair de lune, much better,” he replied, with a smile that had all its wonted sweetness and something of the old brightness. “I think I shall be able to get down-stairs in a day or two.”

“I see you have been at your old tricks again,” she said, shaking her finger at him and pointing to the globe; “you know you are forbidden to do anything that gives you the least fatigue.”

“It was not a fatigue, my little one—it amused me; but I will not do it again, if you don’t wish it.”

Franceline hugged his head to her cheek, and said she would let him do anything so long as it amused him.

“I was thinking of you last night, petit père,” she said, making the globe revolve slowly on its axis; “the sky was so beautiful at twelve o’clock when I happened to look out of my window that I longed for you to see it.”

“Ha! Then probably it will be

the same to-night,” said Raymond. “I will keep my curtain drawn, so that I may see it, if it is.”

“Yes; and let the moon keep you awake whether you will or not! I should like to hear what Angélique would say to that proposal! No; but I will tell you what we’ll do: I will be on the watch to-night, and if the stars are like last night I will steal in and see if you are awake, and if you are I will draw the curtain so that you may see them from your bed. We shall be like two savants making our ‘observations’ in the night-time, shall we not? And—who knows?—we may discover a new star!”

Raymond pinched her cheek and laughed gently. His hopes in this respect were limited by facts—or rather negatives—that Franceline did not stop to inquire into; she had not gone deeply into the science of astronomy.

“There is no saying what I might not discover with those bright eyes of thine for a telescope,” said M. de la Bourbonais.

Angélique rejoiced in her own fashion at the decided turn for the better that her master had suddenly taken. She saw that he spoke a good deal during the evening, and ate with a nearer approach to appetite than he had yet shown; so she settled him for the night, and went to bed with a lighter heart than for many past nights, and soon slept soundly.

Franceline did not follow her example. It was not anxiety that kept her awake, but happiness; she could not bring herself to part with it so quickly, and lose it for a time in unconsciousness. There was a presence, too, in the ecstatic silence of the night, that answered to this sense of joy and appealed

to her for responsive watch. Joys are more intense when we dwell on them in the night-time, because they are more separate, farther lifted from the jarring discord of our daily lives, where pain cries around us in so many multiform tongues. It is as if the world grew wider in spiritual space, and that senses and fibres, too delicate to vibrate in the glare of daylight, woke up in the solemn hush when the world of man is out of sight and God comes nearer to us.

Franceline stood at the window and gazed at the beautiful scene that spread itself before her. The moon was at her full; the landscape, diluted in the moonlight, floated in mystic, illimitable space, still and hushed as if the world were holding its breath to hear the stars tingling in the sapphire dome; every tree and blade of grass were listening to the silence; the river sped stealthily along like a silver snake between its banks where the gray poplars stood looking down, frighted by the vibration of their own shadows, dyeing themselves black in the water.

“If he were awake, how he would enjoy this!” murmured Franceline to herself; and then, unable to resist the temptation, she stole softly through Angélique’s room and across the landing into Raymond’s. The doors were all open, partly to admit more air, partly that they might hear the least tinkle of his little hand-bell, if he sounded it.

“Is that my Franceline?” asked a voice from the bed. The night light threw her shadow on the floor, and Raymond, who was not asleep, saw it.

“Yes, petit père,” she answered in a whisper; “the sky is so lovely I thought I must come and see if

you were awake. Shall I draw the curtain?”

“Yes.”

She did so, and then crept back and knelt down beside him. Raymond laid his cheek against her head, and clasped her hand in his, and they remained for some moments gazing at the beauty of the heavens in silence. Then he said, making long pauses, as if he were thinking aloud rather than speaking to her:

“How wonderful is the splendor of God as he reveals it to us in his works!… Who can measure his power, his glory?… Think what it means, the creation of one of those stars! And there are myriads and myriads of them spangling millions of miles of blue sky! There are no steppes, no barren spots, there where the stars cannot grow. They are not like flowers, those stars of our world; they never perish or fade—they only draw behind the light for a while; always harmonious, moving in their appointed places like the notes of a divine symphony; they make no discord. The great stars are not scornful of the little ones; the little stars are not jealous of the great; each is content to be as it is and where it is, and to stay where the great Star-Maker has fixed it.… My clair de lune, let us try and be content like the stars.”

Franceline raised his hand to her lips, and murmured the strophe of her favorite hymn of S. Francis: “Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, which he has set clear and lovely in the heavens.…”

The next morning Father Henwick came and was once more closeted with Raymond. Nothing had been said about it, but, when the door-bell sounded, M. de la

Bourbonais glanced quickly at the clock, and exclaimed in a tone of surprise: “Already half-past twelve! I did not think it was so late. Thou wilt show him up at once, my child, and then leave us alone for a little.”

No further explanation was necessary. Franceline kissed him in silence, placed a chair close by his pillow, and then, in a happy flutter, went down to meet Father Henwick.

Two days after this there was great joy at The Lilies. The little cottage was decked out as for a bridal. Franceline had stayed up late to have it all finished for the early morning; she would do everything with her own hands. The stairs were wreathed with garlands of green leaves and ferns; every vase and cup she could find was filled with the sweet spring flowers—cowslips, primroses, anemones, and wild violets—and placed in the tiny entrance and on the landing opposite Raymond’s room. The room itself was transformed into a chapel. At the foot of the bed stood a small table covered with Franceline’s snowiest muslin, joyously sacrificed for the occasion. Lights were burning on either side of a large crucifix; there were lights and flowers on the mantelpiece, where she had placed her statue of the Madonna and other precious ornaments; the thin curtains were drawn and filled the little room with a soft golden twilight. Franceline was kneeling beside the bed, reciting some litany aloud, which Raymond answered from a book in timid, reverential under-tones.

But now a sudden hush falls upon the faintly-broken silence. There is a sound of footsteps without; a dear and awful Presence is

approaching. No need to ring; the door stands open to its widest, and Angélique, kneeling on the threshold, adores and welcomes the divine Guest; a little bell goes tinkling up amidst the flowers, and ceases as it enters the illuminated room.…

*  *  *  *  *

The sudden improvement in Raymond’s state was not followed by a proportionately rapid progress. He still continued extremely weak, and was not able to come down-stairs until several days later. Dr. Blink was puzzled; he had been very sanguine when the rally took place, and now he hardly knew what to think. He was convinced from the first that the attack had been in a great measure caused by some mental shock; but that seemed at one moment to have righted itself, and he thought his patient was safe. This was apparently a mistake. The pressure may have been unexpectedly lightened, but it was clearly not removed; and until this was done medicine could do very little.

“There is something on his mind,” said the doctor to Mr. Langrove one morning, on coming out from his daily visit; “there is some trouble weighing on him, and he will not recover until something is done toward removing it.”

The vicar understood perfectly the drift of this remark. It was an appeal from the medical man to the friend of the patient for help or light. Mr. Langrove could give neither. He observed that the count had been seriously anxious about Franceline’s health; but Dr. Blink shook his head. He knew how to discriminate between the effect of heartache and a pressure on the mind. In this case the mind was oppressed by some secret burden, or he was very much mistaken;

it might be some painful apprehension in the future, or something distressing in the past; but whatever the cause was, past or future, the present effect was unmistakable, and, unless some friend who had the full confidence of the patient could afford some relief, the worst might still be apprehended. Mr. Langrove answered by some irrelevant expression of sympathy and regret, but volunteered no opinion of his own. He went home and sat down and wrote to Sir Simon Harness. This was all he could think of. If Sir Simon could not help, he believed no one else could.

It so happened that the baronet was just now absent in the South of Italy, in dutiful attendance on Lady Rebecca; and as he had been called off suddenly, and left no orders about his letters being sent after him, those directed to his bankers lay there unopened. There was another besides Mr. Langrove’s lying there, which, if it had reached him, would have rejoiced the baronet’s heart and provoked a quick response.

The fears which Raymond’s tardy progress raised in the mind of his medical man were not shared by Franceline. Hope still triumphed over alarm, and she felt confident that, since the great weight on her father’s mind had been removed, his complete recovery must ultimately follow. This certainty made the delay easy to bear. It was wonderful how her own strength bore up. She had quite lost her cough—a fact which confirmed the doctor’s previous opinion that the nerves had more to do with this symptom than the lungs—she kept well, and was altogether in better health than for some months previously. Her spirits raised to elation

after that happy morning’s episode, continued excellent—at times as joyous as a child’s.

The moment M. de la Bourbonais was able to get down-stairs Angélique insisted on Franceline going every day for a walk while the sun was shining. One morning, when he had come down and was comfortably established on the sofa in his study, propped up so that he could see out of the window, Franceline said she was going to gather him a bouquet. She smoothed and changed the cushions, put another shawl over his feet, moved the sofa a little bit nearer the window, and then back again a little bit nearer the fire, until, finding there was absolutely nothing more to fuss over, except to kiss him for the tenth time with “Au revoir, petit père!” as if they were separating for a journey, she sallied forth for her constitutional.

The weather was mild and beautiful; spring was intoning the first bars of its idyl, striking bright emerald notes from the tips of the trees, and drawing low, pink whispers from the blackthorn in the hedges; the birds were beginning to tune their lutes and make ready for the great concert that was at hand. Franceline’s heart bounded in unison with the pulse of joy and universal awakening; she began to warble a duet with the skylark as she went along, stopping every now and then to make a nosegay of the pink and white anemones and violets and torch-like king-cups that grew in wild luxuriance in the woods and fields. Dullerton was famous for its wild flowers. Half an hour passed quickly while thus engaged, and then she turned homewards. The doves were on the watch for her, “sunning their milk-white bosoms on the thatch,” as she came

in sight, and swelling the sweet harmony of earth and sky with a tender, well-contented coo. But hark! Could that be the cuckoo that was already calling from the woods? She paused with her hand on the latch to listen. No: it was only the voice of the sunshine echoing through her own happy heart. She pushed open the gate and walked quickly on; but again her step was arrested. Some one was coming round by the park entrance. It was no doubt Mr. Langrove; no one else came that way—no one but Sir Simon Harness, and there he stood. Franceline had nearly uttered a cry, when a quick sign from the baronet checked it and made her walk leisurely on without doing anything to attract attention. She cast a furtive glance towards the casement, to see if by chance her father had changed his place and come to sit by the window; but he was still on the sofa where she had left him.

Sir Simon opened his arms and clasped her with a warmth of emotion that did not surprise Franceline.

“You heard that he was ill! You are come to see him!” she exclaimed.

“I have only heard it this minute from my people at the house. Why did you not write to me, child? Ah! he would not let you, I suppose? My poor Raymond! And now how is he? Can I see him? Will he see me?”

“Why should he not see you, dear Sir Simon?” said Franceline, raising her large, soft glance to him, full of wondering reproach.

“Of course, of course,” said the baronet; “but is he strong enough to see me? They tell me he has been terribly shaken by this illness. It might cause him a shock if he saw me too suddenly.”

“Shall I tell him that you are expected down to-day? That would break it to him,” suggested Franceline. “Or you might write a line and send it in first to say you were here; would that do?”

Before Sir Simon could decide for either alternative, fate, in the shape of Angélique, decided for him. She had seen Franceline enter the garden, and wondered why she loitered outside instead of coming in; so she came out to see, and, on beholding Sir Simon, threw up her arms with a shout of astonishment.

Franceline cried out “Hush!” and shook her hand at the old woman, but it was too late; Raymond had seen and heard her from his sofa.

“Go in at once,” said Sir Simon, much excited—“go and tell him I am come to kiss his feet; to ask his forgiveness on my knees. Tell him I know everything.” And he pushed her gently from him. Franceline did not stop to ask what the strange message could mean, but ran in, thinking only how best she could deliver it so as to avoid too sudden a shock to her father.

Raymond was sitting up on the sofa, his face slightly flushed.

“What is the matter? Who is there?” he cried.

“Dear father, nothing is the matter; only something you will be glad to hear,…” she began.

“Ha! it is Simon! What has he come for? What does he want?”

“He wants to embrace you; and, father, he bade me say that he knows everything, and has come to ask you to forgive him and let him kiss your feet. He is waiting; may he come in?”

But Raymond did not answer; he was murmuring some words to himself, with hands lifted reverently as in prayer, while a smile of unearthly joy diffused itself on his

whole countenance. The emotion was too much for him; he fell back exhausted on his pillow.

Franceline thought he had fainted and screamed out for help. Sir Simon was beside her in an instant.

“Raymond! my friend, my brother, can you ever forgive me?” he cried, kneeling beside M. de la Bourbonais and taking his hand in both his.

“You know the truth, then? You got his letter?”

“Whose letter? I got no letter; but I found the ring. Look at it!”

He drew an enamelled snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and held up the diamond, that flashed in the sun like a little star.

“Thank Heaven! I shall now be justified before all men!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais with trembling emotion. “This is more than I dared to hope. My God! I give thee thanks for this great mercy.”

No one spoke for a moment. Franceline had signed to Angélique to leave the room, but remained herself, a silent spectator of the strange scene.

“Who had it? How was it found?” said M. de la Bourbonais, taking the ring and examining it with an expression of mistrust, as if it were some uncanny thing that he half expected to see melt in his fingers.

“It has been in my possession, locked up at the Court, all this time!” replied Sir Simon. “You may remember I used this snuff-box that night, and sent it round the table. Someone dropped the ring into it unawares; it was not opened afterwards, and it never entered into my stupid brain to think of looking into it. I went away in a great hurry next morning, and

threw the snuff-box into a safe in my room where I keep papers and the loose jewelry I have in use. I came down this afternoon to get a deed out of the safe, saw the snuff-box, and by the merest chance opened it and found the ring.”

“Mon Dieu!” murmured Raymond, after hearing this simple explanation of the mistake that had very nearly cost him his life.

“Bourbonais, can you ever forgive me?” said Sir Simon.

Raymond opened his arms without speaking. Sir Simon flung himself with a sob upon his breast, and the two clung together and wept.

Franceline felt as if even she had no right to be present; that she was intruding in a sacred place where some mystery, not intended for her eyes, was being unfolded. She was moving softly toward the door when her father called her back.

“Come hither, my child; come and embrace me. I can have no happiness that thou dost not share.”

“Franceline,” said Sir Simon, rising from his knees and taking her hand with an expression of humility that was very touching in the grand, white-haired gentleman, “I have been guilty of a great act of disloyalty towards your father. I cannot tell you what it was; perhaps he will. Meantime, he has forgiven me for the sake of our long friendship, and because his soul is too noble, too generous, to bear malice, even against an unfaithful friend. Will you do as he has done, and say you forgive me too?”

His voice was full of trembling, his eyes were still moist. Franceline did as he had done to her father: she flung her arms round his neck and wept.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

III.

The keen relish which we all have for other people’s sins is proverbial. As those who think with us are right, so are they virtuous who have only our own vices. Prodigality, which, to the miser’s thinking, is the worst of sins, is, in the eyes of the spendthrift, merely an evidence of a generous nature. Men who wish to be thought gentlemen have a weakness for what are called gentlemanly vices; but from the coarser though less depraved wickedness of the vulgar they turn with loathing. This bias of our common nature is not confined in its action to individuals; it affects classes, nations, races. The rich are shocked by the vices of the poor, and the poor, in turn, no less by those of the rich; masters hate the sins of servants, and are repaid in their own coin.

When the free-born Briton sings, “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,” he means that faults, if only they be English, are after all not so bad. Wrapt up in the precious bundle of our self-love are all our pet sins and weaknesses. The universal hatred which existed between the nations of antiquity must be attributed in great part to the fact that their vices were unlike, and therefore repellant. The national contempt for foreigners is, in Christian times, strong in proportion to the barbarism of the people by whom it is felt; but in Greece and Rome such civilization as was then possible seemed to have no power over this prejudice. Not to be a Greek was to have been created for vile uses, and not to be a Roman was to be nobody.

The French, as seen by the English, are giddy and lack dignity; the English appear to French eyes, sulky and wanting in good nature; the Turk thinks both struck with madness, because they walk about and stretch their legs when they might sit still; and though he is at their mercy, yet he cannot persuade himself that they are anything but Christian dogs. The negro is quite sure the first man must have been black, and in this he is in accord with Mr. Darwin. The North American Indian will vanish from the earth through the golden portals of the western world still believing that he is the superior of the “pale face.” The power of national prejudice is almost incredible. “Our country, right or wrong” is, we believe, an American phrase; but it expresses a sentiment which is almost universally held to be right and proper. In international disputes men nearly always take sides with their own country, without stopping to inquire into the merits of the quarrel, which, indeed, the strong feeling that at once masters them would prevent them from being able to do. They act instinctively like children who always think that in difficulties with neighbors their own parents are in the right. We Americans are certainly not paragons of virtue, and in this centennial year it is probably wise to discuss almost anything rather than our morals; yet we cannot but think that M. Louis Veuillot was somewhat under the influence of national prejudice when he wrote that, if we

were sunk in the bottom of the ocean, civilization would have lost nothing. Our form of government, it is true, does not lead us to look for salvation, either in church or state, from a king by divine right; still, he might just as well have let us alone, especially as he is at no loss for quarrels at home. Nor can we think that the Germans who have raised such a storm of indignation over the crime in Bremerhaven, committed, as it is supposed, by an American, would have held the whole German people and their civilization responsible for the offence had they known its author to be native there and to the manner born.

As no passion takes hold of the human heart with such sovereign power as that of religion, it follows that no bias of judgment is more fatal to truth than religious prejudice; and now let us gently descend again to M. Emile de Laveleye and his pamphlet:

“It is agreed on all sides,” he says (p. 25), “that the power of nations depends on their morality. Everywhere is found the maxim, which is almost become an axiom of political science, that where morals are corrupted the state is lost. Now, it appears to be an established fact that the moral level is higher among Protestant than among Catholic populations. Religious writers confess this themselves, and explain it by the fact that the former remain more faithful to their religion than the latter, which explanation I believe to be the true one.”

Here is fairness surely. The soft impeachment could not have been made in a more moderate or subdued tone. Catholics are notoriously more immoral than Protestants; but the subject is a painful one, and M. de Laveleye does not wish to emphasize the unpleasant truth by giving proof—which, indeed, would be superfluous, since

Catholics themselves, we are assured, admit the fact and are concerned only about its explanation; and, strange to say, they have found the key to the mystery in the greater fidelity of Protestants to their religion: so M. de Laveleye and the Catholics shake hands and the dispute is at an end.

The position of Protestants with regard to this question is peculiar. The very life of their religion is intimately associated with a fixed belief in the preternatural wickedness of popes, priests, nuns, and Catholics generally. The sole justification of Protestantism was found in the abominable corruptions of Rome, and its only defence is that it is a purer worship, capable of creating a higher morality. The history of the Reformation, as written by Protestants, traces its origin to an awful and heaven-inspired indignation at the sight of papal iniquity, which resulted in a divine Protest against sin. It is this feeling, indeed, which is the living human magnetism in the words of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. They all felt that in so far as they protested against open and patent evil they were right, and therefore strong. Leo X., with God’s eternal truth, but encircled by all the Graces and Muses, was at a disadvantage with those strong and plain-spoken men. In fact, the eternal ally of human error is human truth. It is because men who are right do wrong that men who are wrong seem right; and if men in general were fit to be priests of God, there would be on earth no power to oppose the Catholic Church. St. Paul had protested, St. John Chrysostom had protested, St. Peter Damian had protested, St. Bernard had protested, St. Catherine of Sienna had protested, and yet there was no Protestantism.

To protest was well and is well, but to seek to found a religion upon a protest is madness; and this is Protestantism. With Protestants purity of dogma is out of the question; and nothing, therefore, remains to them but purity of morals. To this they must cling like drowning men to straws. Protestantism, if considered from a doctrinal point of view, is nihilism. Gather up the hundred sects which, taken collectively, are called Protestantism, and we will find every positive religious dogma excluded; not even the personal existence of God remains. Mr. Matthew Arnold is a true Bible-Protestant, who has a little sect of his own, and all that he holds is that there is “a Power in us, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”; and this he has discovered to be the sum and substance of all Scripture teaching. Doctrinal Protestantism is like the wrong side of a piece of tapestry with its fag-ends hanging in patches, twisted and jumbled; and yet they are the very substance out of which has been wrought a work of divine beauty. The dogmatic weakness of Protestantism throws its whole energy upon the moral side of religion. Its utter falseness, when we accept the fact that Christ has established a divine system of faith, is so manifest that no impartial thinker would hesitate to give his full assent to the sentiment of Rousseau: “Show me that in religious matters I must accept authority, and I shall become a Catholic at once.” Supposing the Christian religion to be what it is commonly held to be by both Catholics and Protestants, it necessarily follows that the Catholic Church is the only logical as it is the only historical Christianity. This, we believe, is the almost universally-received opinion of non-Christian

writers in our own day, in which, for the first time since the Reformation, a considerable number of learned men who are neither Catholic nor Protestant have been able to view this subject dispassionately. We do not mean to say that these writers prefer the church to the sects; on the contrary, they are partial to these because in their workings they perceive, as they think, the breaking-up and dissolution of the whole Christian system. Protestantism is valuable in their eyes as a stage in what Herbert Spencer calls “the universal religious thaw” which is going on around us. If there has been no divine revelation, then whatever tends to weaken the claim of the church to be the depository of such revelation is good, especially as her claim is the only one which rests upon a valid historical basis. And it is because a very large number of men more than half suspect there never has been a revelation that Protestantism meets with so much favor from the unbelieving and pagan world, as serving the purpose of an easy stepping-stone from the strong and pronounced supernaturalism of the church to the nature-worship of Darwin and Spencer or the German Culturists.

Macaulay was struck and puzzled by what his keen eye could not fail to perceive to be so universal a phenomenon as to have the force of a law of history.

“It is surely remarkable,” says this brilliant writer, “that neither the moral revolution of the eighteenth century nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth should have in any perceptible degree added to the domain of Protestantism. During the former period whatever was lost to Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter whatever was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by

Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were maintained at the little supper-parties of the Baron Holbach, there is a vast interval in which the human mind, it should seem, might find for itself some resting-place more satisfactory than either of the two extremes; and at the time of the Reformation millions found such a resting-place. Whole nations then renounced popery without ceasing to believe in a First Cause, in a future life, or in the divine authority of Christianity. In the last century, on the contrary, when a Catholic renounced his belief in the Real Presence, it was a thousand to one that he renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and when the reaction took place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the Real Presence. We by no means venture to deduce from these phenomena any general law; but we think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have since that time become infidel and become Catholic again, but none has become Protestant.”

There could not be a more satisfactory proof of the transitional and accidental nature of Protestantism. Like all human revolutions, it grew out of antecedent circumstances; and these were primarily political and social and only incidentally religious. The faith in the divine authority of the Christian religion was at that time absolute, and not at all affected by the tendency to scepticism observable among a few of the Humanists. The political power of the pope, however, together with his peculiar temporal relations to the German Empire, had gradually created throughout Germany a very strong national prejudice against his authority, which, upon the slightest provocation, was ready to break out

into downright hatred of the Papacy. The worldly lives and ways of some of the popes had been as fuel for the conflagration which was to burst forth. Men, unconsciously it may be, grew accustomed to look upon the Christian religion and the Papacy as distinct and separable; and the temper of the public mind, while remaining reverential toward Christ and his religion, was embittered against his vicar. When, from amidst the social abuses and political antagonisms of Germany, Luther, in the name of Christ, denounced the pope, his voice struck precisely the note for which the public ear was listening, and, as Macaulay says, whole nations renounced allegiance to the pope without giving up faith in God and his Christ. This was done in the excitement of revolutionary enthusiasm, when passion and madness made deliberation impossible, and when a thoughtful and analytical study of the constitution of the church was out of the question. The Reformers imagined that they could abolish the pope and yet save Christianity, just as in France, two centuries and a half later, it was thought possible to abolish God and yet save the principle of authority, without which society cannot exist. And, indeed, it is as reasonable to suppose that this world, with its universal evidence of design and adaption of means to ends, could have come into existence without the action of a supreme and intelligent Being, as to think that the system of religious truths taught by Christ can have either unity or authority amongst men without a living centre and visible representative of both. Protestants, by rejecting the primacy of the pope, were forced to accept as fundamental to their faith a principle

of so purgative and drastic a nature that, in the general process of sloughing of religious thought which it brings on, it is itself finally carried away into the vacuum of nihilism.

This became evident as soon as the attempt was made to agree upon articles of belief. New heresies sprang up day after day, and complete chaos would have ensued from the beginning had not the different states taken hold of one or other of the sects and “established” it, thus, by the aid of the temporal power, giving to it a kind of consistency, but at the same time depriving it of vitality. Thus what Macaulay regarded as so remarkable—that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them—and he might as well have made the proposition universal, since there was no reason why he should limit it to Christian nations, since it is well known that in nothing has Protestantism given more striking proof of its impotence than in its utter failure to convert the heathen,—this, we say, far from surprising us, seems so natural that we cannot understand how an observant mind should think it strange.

Protestantism was, in the main, the product of the peculiar political and social condition of Europe during the last period of the middle ages, and to expect Catholic nations, or indeed individual Catholics of any intellectual or moral character, to become Protestant in our day argues a total want of power to grasp this subject. As well might one hope to see the pterodactyls and ichthyosauri of a past geologic era swimming in our rivers. Catholics there are, indeed, now, as in the eighteenth century, who become sceptics, who abandon all belief in

Christianity, but none who become Protestants; for we cannot consider such persons as Achilli or Edith O’Gorman as instances of conversion of any kind. A very limited acquaintance with Catholics and Catholic thought will suffice to convince any reflecting mind that for us there is no alternative but to accept the doctrine of the church or to renounce faith in Christ. Was there ever fairer field for heresy to flourish in than that which opened up before Old Catholicism at its birth? But it was still-born. To this day its sponsors have not dared define its relation to the pope; and until this is done it remains without character. At any rate, it does not claim to be Protestant.

Turning to view the present condition of Protestantism, we are struck by the contrast. The very word “Protestant” is without meaning when applied to two-thirds of the non-Catholics of Germany, England, and the United States. Their mental state is one of disbelief in, or indifference to, all forms of positive religion; and if occasionally they are roused to some feeling against the church, it is through an association of ideas, traditional with them, which places her in antagonism with their political theories and national prejudices. Among earnest and reflecting Protestants who are united with one or other of the sects, there are two opposite currents of religious thought of a strongly-marked and well-defined character. Those who are borne on the one are being carried farther and farther away from the historic teachings of Christ, and are busied in trying to dress out in Biblical phraseology some of the various cosmic or pantheistic philosophies of the day. They very generally assume that religion has nothing to do with

theology, nor, consequently, with doctrines and dogmas. As its home is the heart, its realm is the world of sentiment; and so it matters not what we believe, provided only we feel good. Opposed to this current, which is bearing with it all the distinctive landmarks of the Christian religion, is another which is carrying men back to the church. In fact, all great minds among Protestants who have been strongly impressed by the objective character of Christian truth have been drawn towards the Catholic Church. Who can have failed to perceive, for instance—to mention only the three greatest who have occupied themselves with religious questions—how Leibnitz, Bacon, and Bishop Butler, in their intellectual apprehension of the Christian system, were, in spite of themselves, attracted to the church? Or who that is acquainted with the English Catholic literature of our own day is ignorant of the divine illumination which many of the most intellectual and reverent natures from the sects of Protestantism have found in the teachings of the one Catholic Church? In this way, by a process of supernatural or natural selection, the fragments of Protestantism are being assimilated to the church or are disappearing in the sea of unbelief in which even now they are seen only as barren islands in the wild waste of waters.

These considerations must be borne in mind by whoever would take a comprehensive view of the question which we propose now to discuss. In the first place, by reflecting upon them we shall find no difficulty in accounting for the marked difference in tone and character between Catholic and Protestant controversy, by which no attentive observer can have failed to be struck. Taking for granted the existence

of God and the divinity of Christ, as admitted by the earlier Protestant sects, the logical position of the church is unassailable, which, as we have already stated, is generally conceded by impartial non-Christian thinkers.

As a consequence, Catholic controversialists, assured of the absolute coherence of their whole system with the fundamental dogma of the divine mission of Christ, have been chiefly concerned with showing the logical viciousness of the essential principles of Protestantism. They have, indeed, not omitted to remark upon the moral unfitness of such men as Henry VIII., Luther, Knox, and Zwingli to be the divinely-chosen agents of a reformation in the religion of Christ; but such observations have been incidental to the main course of the argument, and this is alike true of our more learned discussions and of our popular controversies.

Catholic writers—allowing for individual exceptions—have not felt that, to show the falsity of Protestantism, it was necessary to denounce Protestants or to stamp upon them any mark of infamy. They have treated them as men who were wrong, not as men who were wicked. Protestant controversy, on the other hand, presents for our consideration characteristics of a very different nature. In the consciousness of their inability to settle upon a fixed creed, which has been shown by history, and from the necessarily feeble manner in which articles of faith could be held by them, on account of the disagreement and conflict of opinion among themselves, Protestant writers were forced to treat their religion, not as a doctrine, but as a tendency; and for this reason,

together with the natural hatred which men entertain for a church or government against which they have rebelled, they were led to draw contrasts between the results of Protestantism and Catholicity; so that it became customary to attribute all the enlightenment, morality, progress, and liberty of the world to Protestantism, and to represent Catholics as cruel, ignorant, corrupt, and in every way depraved. Luther, as we should naturally expect, led the way in this style of controversy.

“The Papists,” he said, “are for the most part mere gross blockheads.… The pope and his crew are mere worshippers of idols and servants of the devil.… Pope, cardinals, bishops, not a soul of them has read the Bible; ‘tis a book unknown to them. They are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches, rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness.… Seeing the pope is Antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate.… The pope is the last blaze in the lamp which will go out and ere long be extinguished—the last instrument of the devil, that thunders and lightens with sword and bull;… but the Spirit of God’s mouth has seized upon that shameless strumpet.… Antichrist is the Pope and the Turk together.… The pope is not God’s image, but his ape.… Popedom is founded on mere lies and fables.… A friar is evil every way; the preaching friars are proud buzzards; all who serve the pope are damned; the Papists are devoid of shame and Christianity.”[3]

This is the style of Protestant controversy which, except in form, still lingers in this nineteenth century. Protestant devotion, it may be said

without sarcasm or exaggeration, consists essentially in a holy horror of popery. Were it possible to eliminate the Catholic Church from human society, Protestantism would at once fatally assume an attitude towards the world wholly different from that in which it now stands. At present, when attacked by evolutionistic pantheism—which means all the sophistries of the day—it takes refuge behind the historic fortress of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and, when encountered by the church, it makes an alliance with cosmism or anything else. Were the Catholic Church not in existence, it would be forced at once to build a fortress of its own; for the Bible is only a breastwork, which must be in charge of a commander-in-chief if we hope to hold it for the sovereign Lord. From the beginning, then, Protestants branded Catholics with a mark of infamy; they were idolaters, worse than pagans, for the most part gross blockheads, who fall an easy prey to the designing arts of priests and monks, who are only knaves and rogues, whose chief aim is to carry out the fiendish purposes of the pope, the arch-enemy, Antichrist, the devil in the flesh; and thus the church becomes the Woman of Babylon, flaming in scarlet, and alluring the nations to debauch.

No evidence, therefore, is needed to show that Catholics are immoral, depraved, thoroughly corrupt. To doubt it would be to question the truth of Protestantism and to believe that something good might come out of Nazareth. In good sooth, do not the Catholics, as M. de Laveleye says, admit the fact themselves?

We often hear persons express surprise that intelligent and honest Protestants should still, after such sad experience, be so eager to believe

the “awful disclosures” of “escaped nuns,” and to patronize that kind of lecture—of which, thank God! Protestants have the monopoly—delivered to men or women only, in which the abominations of the confessional are revealed and the general preternatural wickedness of priests, monks, and nuns is made fully manifest. This, to us, we must say, has never seemed strange. The doctrine of total depravity is an article of Protestant faith, and, when applied to Catholics, to none other have Protestants ever clung with such unwavering firmness and perfect unanimity. When disagreeing about everything else, they have never failed to find a point of union in this. Even after having lived and dealt with Catholics who are kind-hearted, pure, and fair-minded, in the true Protestant there still lurks a vague kind of suspicion that there must be some mysterious and secret diabolism in them which eludes his observation; that after all they may be only “as mild-mannered men as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat”; and after his reason has been fully convinced that the Catholic Church is the only historical Christianity, he is still able to remain a strong Protestant by falling back upon the undoubted total depravity of Papists. Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, the most careful and instructive self-analysis which has been written in this century, or probably in any other, declares that after he had become thoroughly persuaded of the truth of the Catholic Church his former belief that the pope was Antichrist still remained like a stain upon his imagination; and yet he had never been an ultra-Protestant. Many a Protestant has ceased to believe in Christ, without giving up his faith in the pope as Antichrist.

It is not surprising, in view of all this, that Protestants should have habitually held the church responsible for the evil deeds of Catholics.

When quite recently the excited Germans charged the dynamite plot of Thomassen upon our American civilization, we replied, with perfect justice, that such crimes are anomalies, the guilt of which ought not to be laid upon any nation, and all reasonable men admitted the evident good sense of our answer; but Protestants the world over have been unanimous in seeking to hold up the church to the execration of mankind as responsible for the St. Bartholomew massacre. Is Protestantism answerable for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford? Religious fanaticism, no doubt, had much to do in urging him to butcher idolaters and slaves of Satan; but we should blush for shame were we capable of thinking for a moment that such inhumanities are either produced or approved by the real spirit of the Protestant religion.

We know of nothing in the Catholic Church which in any way corresponds with Protestant anti-popery literature; indeed, we doubt whether in the whole history of literature anything so disgraceful and disreputable as this can be found, unless, possibly, it be that which is professedly obscene, but which has nowhere ever had a recognized existence; and we question whether even this is as discreditable to human nature as the “awful disclosures” and “lectures to men or women only” of Protestants.

In discussing the comparative morality of Catholic and Protestant nations it would be more satisfactory, even though it should not be more conclusive, to consider their

respective virtues rather than their vices. There would seem to be neither good sense nor logic in taking the individuals and classes that are least brought under religious influences of any kind, in order to use their depravity as an argument for or against the church or Protestantism. In the apostolic body one out of twelve was a thief and traitor, yet neither Catholics nor Protestants are in the habit of concluding from this that they must all have been rogues and hypocrites. The amount of crime, one would think, is but a poor test of the amount of virtue. As the greatest sinners have made the greatest saints, so in the church depravity may co-exist with the most heroic virtue, though, of course, not in the same individual. Our divine Saviour plainly declares that in his church the good shall be mingled with the bad; that the cockle shall grow with the wheat till the harvest time; that some shall call him Lord and Master, and yet do not the will of his Father; that even, with regard to those who sit in the chair of Moses—and, let us add, of Peter—though their authority must ever be acknowledged, yet are not their lives always to be imitated, nor approved of even. It is manifestly contrary to the teaching of Christ to make the note of sanctity in his church consist in the individual holiness of each and every member. He is no Puritan, though he is the all-holy God. A puristic religion is essentially narrow, self-conscious, and unsympathetic; it draws a line here on earth between the elect and the reprobate; its disciples eat not with sinners, nor enter into their abodes, nor hold out to them the pleading hands of large-hearted charity. Such a faith does not grow upon men; it

does not win and convert them to God.

If, instead of comparing the crimes, we should consider the respective virtues of Catholic and Protestant nations, we should at once be struck by the difference in their standards of morality. The most practical way of determining the real standard of morality of any religion is to study the character of its saints. There we find religious ideals made tangible and fully discernible. Here at once we perceive that there is an essential difference between the Catholic and the Protestant standard of morality. The lives of our saints, even when understood by Protestants, generally repel them. They are, in their eyes, useless lives, idle lives, superstitious lives, unnatural and inhuman. We take the words of Christ, “If thou wouldst be perfect, go sell what thou hast, give it to the poor, and come and follow me,” in their full and complete literal meaning. The highest life is to leave father and mother, to have nor wife nor children, nor temporal goods except what barely suffices, and to cleave to Christ only with all one’s soul in poverty, chastity, and obedience. Now, this life of prayer in poverty, chastity, and obedience is an offence to Protestants. They do not believe in perfect chastity, they hold religious obedience to be a slavery, and poverty, in their eyes, is ridiculous. Inasmuch as the monks tilled the earth, transcribed books, and taught school, they receive a partial recognition from the Protestant world; but inasmuch as they were bound by religious vows they excite disgust. We should say, then, that the distinctive trait of Catholic morality is ascetic, while the Protestant is utilitarian. The one primarily regards the world that is to be, the

other that which already is. The one inclines us to look upon this as a worthless world to lose or win; the other is shrewd and calculating—this is the best we have any practical experience of; it is the part of wisdom to make the most of it. The one seems to be more certain of the future life, the other of the present. It is needless to prolong the contrast, and we shall simply confess that we have always been inclined to the opinion of those who hold that Protestantism, in its aims and direct tendencies, is more favorable to what is called material progress than Catholicism. In fact, one cannot realize the personal survival of the soul through eternity, and at the same time be supremely interested in stocks or the price of cotton.

Not that the church discourages efforts which have as their object the material interests of mankind; but, in her view, our duties to God are of the first importance, and to these all others are subordinate. What doth it profit? she is always asking, whereas Protestantism is busy trying to show us how very profitable and pleasant the Reformation has made this world—and virtuous, too, since honesty is the best policy and enlightened self-interest the standard of morals. It is the old story—God and the world, the supernatural and the natural, progress from above and progress from below.

But we feel that it is time we should give our readers proof that we have no desire to avoid direct issue with M. de Laveleye. We flatly deny, then, his assertion that the Catholic nations are more immoral than the Protestant; and when he further affirms that Catholic writers themselves—for his words can have no other meaning—admit this, he lies under a mistake for which there

can be no possible excuse. In the statement of facts, however, which we propose now to give, we make no use whatever of the testimony of Catholics, but rely exclusively upon the authority of Protestants and of statistics; and that our readers may have the benefit of observations extending over considerable time as well as space, we will not confine ourselves to the most recent writers or statistics on the subject under discussion. Laing, a Scotch Presbyterian and a most conscientious and observant traveller, who wrote some thirty-five years ago, says of the French: “They are, I believe, a more honest people than the British.… It is a fine distinction of the French national character and social economy that practical morality is more generally taught through manners among and by the people themselves than in any country in Europe.”[4] Alison, the historian, writing about the same time, but referring to the early part of this century, says that the proportion of crime to the inhabitants was twelve times greater in Prussia than in France.[5] To this may be added the testimony of John Stuart Mill, in his Autobiography, published since his death, who passed a considerable portion of his life in France. Referring to his sojourn there when quite a young man, he says:

“Having so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew being mostly such as had public objects of a large and personally disinterested kind at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of what in England is called society: the habit of, not indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of implication that conduct is of course always directed towards low and petty objects; the absence of high feelings,

which manifests itself by sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from professing any high principles of action at all, except in those preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or estimate the difference between this manner of existence and that of a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all events different; among whom sentiments which, by comparison at least, may be called elevated are the current coin of human intercourse, both in books and in private life, and, though often evaporating in profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant exercise and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and active part of the existence of a great number of persons, and to be recognized and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the intellect on questions of right and wrong.”[6]

This is strong testimony when we consider that it comes from an Englishman. In speaking of the elder Austin the same writer says: “He had a strong distaste for the general meanness of English life, the absence of enlarged thoughts and unselfish desires, the low objects on which the faculties of all classes of the English are intent.”[7] Mill’s opinion of the French is confirmed by Lecky, who writes: “No other nation has so habitual and vivid a sympathy for great struggles for freedom beyond its border. No other literature exhibits so expansive and œcumenical a genius, or expounds so skilfully or appreciates so

generously foreign ideas. In no other land would a disinterested war for the support of a suffering nationality find so large an amount of support.”[8]

Much has been said and written of the licentiousness of the French, which may, in part at least, be due to the fact that they, more than any other people, have known how to make vice attractive by taking from it something of the repulsive coarseness which naturally belongs to it, but must also be ascribed to the feeling that they are Catholic, and therefore sensual. But let us examine the facts on this subject. We again bring Laing forward as a witness.

“Of all the virtues,” he says, “that which the domestic family education of both the sexes most obviously influences—that which marks more clearly than any other the moral condition of a society, the home state of moral and religious principles, the efficiency of those principles in it, and the amount of that moral restraint upon passions and impulses which it is the object of education and knowledge to attain—is undoubtedly female chastity. Will any traveller, will any Prussian, say that this index-virtue of the moral condition of a people is not lower in Prussia than in almost any part of Europe?”[9]

Acts which in other countries would affect the respectability and happiness of a whole family for generations are in Prussia looked upon as mere youthful indiscretions. But let us take the statistics of illegitimacy, which is a method of discussing the question made popular among Protestants by the Rev. Hobart Seymour in his Evenings with the Romanists.

The number of illegitimate births in France for every hundred was, in 1858, 7.8; in the same year in Protestant

Saxony it was 16; in Protestant Prussia, 9.3; in Würtemberg (Prot.), 16.1; in Iceland (Prot.) (1838-47), 14; in Denmark (1855), 11.5; Scotland (1871), 10.1; Hanover (1855), 9.9; Sweden (1855), 9.5; Norway (1855), 9.3.

Catholic France, then, judged by this test, stands higher than any Protestant country of which we have statistical reports, except England and Wales, where the percentage was, in 1859, 6.5; but England and Wales are below other Catholic countries, and notably far below Ireland. The rate of illegitimacy in the kingdom of Sardinia (1828-37) was 2.1; in Ireland (1865-66), 3.8; in Spain (1859), 5.6; in Tuscany, 6; in Catholic Prussia, 6.1.

In Scotland there are, in proportion to population, more than three times as many illegitimate births as in Ireland; and in England and Wales there are more than twice as many, and in Protestant Prussia the percentage is a third greater than in Catholic Prussia.[10]

If chastity, to use Laing’s expression, is the index-virtue, the question as to the comparative morality of Protestant and Catholic nations may be considered at an end. Lecky’s words on the Irish people have often been quoted, to his own regret we believe.

“Had the Irish peasants been less chaste,” he says, “they would have been more prosperous. Had that fearful famine which in the present century desolated the land fallen upon a people who thought more of accumulating subsistence than of avoiding sin, multitudes might now be living who perished by literal starvation on the dreary hills of Limerick or Skibbereen.”[11]

There is not in all Europe a more

thoroughly Protestant country than Sweden. For three hundred years its people have been wholly withdrawn from Catholic influences. During all this time Protestantism, upheld by the state, undisturbed by dissent, with the education of the people in the hands of the clergy, and a population almost entirely rural, has had the fairest possible opportunity to show what it is capable of doing to elevate the moral character of a nation. What is the result? In 1838 Laing visited Sweden and made a careful study of the moral and social condition of the people; and he declares that they are at the very bottom of the scale of European morality. In 1836 one person out of every 112—women, infants, sick, all included—had been accused of crime, and one out of every 134 convicted and punished. In 1838 there were born in Stockholm 2,714 children, of whom 1,577 were legitimate and 1,137 illegitimate, leaving a balance of only 440 chaste mothers out of 2,714.

Drunkenness, too, was more common there than in any other country of Europe or of the world. Nearly 40,000,000 gallons of liquor were consumed in 1850 by a population of only 3,000,000, which gives thirteen gallons of intoxicating drink to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom.

If these things could be said of any Catholic nation, the whole Protestant world would stand aghast, nor need other proof of the absolutely diabolical nature of popery. Compare this agricultural and pastoral population with the Catholic Swiss mountaineers—who to this day claim to have descended from a Swedish stock, and whose climate is not greatly different from that of Sweden—and we find that the Catholic Swiss are as moral and sober

as the Protestant Swedes are corrupt and besotted. Or compare them with the Tyrolese, than whom there is no more Catholic and liberty-loving people on earth.

“Honesty may be regarded as a leading feature in the character of the Tyrolese,” says Alison.… “In no part of the world are the domestic or conjugal duties more strictly or faithfully observed, and in none do the parish priests exercise a stricter or more conscientious control over their flocks.… Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the character of the Tyrolese is their uniform piety—a feeling which is nowhere so universally diffused as among their sequestered valleys.… On Sunday the whole people flock to church in their neatest and gayest attire; and so great is the number who thus frequent these places of worship that it is not unfrequent to see the peasants kneeling on the turf in the church-yard where Mass is performed, from being unable to find a place within its walls. Regularly in the evening prayers are read in every family; and the traveller who passes through the villages at the hour of twilight often sees through their latticed windows the young and the old kneeling together round their humble fire, or is warned of his approach to human habitation by hearing their evening hymns stealing through the silence and solitude of the forest.… In one great virtue the peasants in this country (in common, it must be owned, with most Catholic states) are particularly worthy of imitation. The virtue of charity, which is too much overlooked in many Protestant kingdoms, is there practised to the greatest degree and by all classes of people.”[12]

With true Protestant condescension Alison adds: “Debased as their religion is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic form of worship, and mixed up as it is with innumerable legends and visionary tales, it yet preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine origin to influence in a great measure the conduct of their private lives.”

Among rural populations more than elsewhere the divine power of the Christian religion is made manifest. To the poor, the frugal, and the single-hearted those heavenly truths which have changed the world, but which were first listened to and received by fishermen and shepherds, appeal with a force and directness which the mere worldling and comfort-lover cannot even realize. In the presence of nature so silent and awful, yet so vocal, everything inclines the heart of man to hearken to the voice of God. Mountains and rivers; the long, withdrawing vales and deep-sounding cataracts; winter’s snows, and spring, over whose heaving bosom the unseen hand weaves the tapestry that mortal fingers never made; summer’s warm breath, and autumn, when the strong year first feels the chill of death, and “tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather to the eyes”—all speak of the higher world which they foreshadow and symbolize. But in the hurry and noise of the city, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, of indulgence and want, of pride and degradation, the pleading voice of religion is not heard at all, or is heard only as a call from the shore is heard by men who are madly hurrying down some rapid stream. It is evident, therefore, that the easiest and surest way of getting at the relative moral influence of the Catholic and Protestant religions is to study their action upon rural populations. We have already established on the best authority the incalculable moral elevation of the Catholic rural populations of Switzerland and the Tyrol over the Protestants of the same class in Sweden. Let us now turn to Great Britain.

Kay, after having given a table

of criminal statistics for England and Wales for the years 1841 and 1847, makes the following remarks upon the facts there presented:

“This table well deserves study. It shows that the proportional amount of crime to population calculated in two years, 1841 and 1847, was greater in both years in almost all the agricultural counties of England than it was in the manufacturing and mining districts.… With what terrible significance do these statistics plead the cause of the poor of our rural districts! Notwithstanding that a town life necessarily presents so many more opportunities for, and temptations to, vice than a rural life; notwithstanding that the associations of the latter are naturally so much purer and so much more moral than those of the former; notwithstanding the wonderfully crowded state of the great manufacturing cities of Lancashire; notwithstanding the constant influx of Irish, sailors, vagrants, beggars, and starving natives of agricultural districts of England and Wales; and notwithstanding the miserable state of most of the primary schools of those districts and the great ignorance of the majority of the inhabitants, still, in the face of all these and other equally significant facts, the criminality of the manufacturing districts of Lancashire is LESS in proportion to the population than that of most of the rural districts of England and Wales!”[13]

In Scotland illegitimacy is more common in the country than in the towns and cities. In 1870 the rate of illegitimacy for the whole country was 9.4 per cent., or 1 in every 10.6; whereas in the rural districts alone it was 10.5, or 1 in every 9.5. In 1871 it was for the whole country 10.1, or 1 in every 9.8, and in the rural districts 11.2, or 1 in every 8.9.[14] In England also the rate of illegitimacy is much larger in the rural districts than in the cities, whereas in Catholic France it is just the reverse. In the country

districts of England we have the following rate:

Thus in the most Catholic rural districts of France there are only one or two illegitimate births in every hundred.

This is also true of Prussia, whose most strongly Catholic provinces are Westphalia and the Rhineland. In Westphalia there are only three and a half illegitimate births in every hundred, and in the Rhineland only three and a third; but in thoroughly Protestant Pomerania and Brandenburg there are ten and twelve illegitimate births in the hundred.[15] In Ireland, again, we find the same state of things. The rate of illegitimate births for all Ireland is 3.8 per cent.; but the lowest proportion is in Connaught, nineteen-twentieths of whose people are Catholics, and the greatest is in Ulster, half of whose population is Protestant. “The sum of the whole matter,” says the Scotsman (June, 1869), a leading organ of Presbyterian Scotland, “is that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly popish and wholly Irish Connaught—which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland as a whole is three times more immoral than Ireland as a whole.” There is no reason why further proof should be given of what is a

manifest truth: that rural populations—let us say, rather, the people—in proportion as they are Catholic, are also chaste; and consequently that the Catholic Church, as every man who is competent to judge must know, is the mother of purity, which is the soul of Christian life, and without which we cannot draw near to the heart of the Saviour and supreme Lover of men. Protestants, however, will be at no loss for arguments. Should the worst come to the worst, illegitimacy, like the gallows, may be declared an evidence of civilization, and then it needs must follow, as the night the day, that it is more common in Protestant than in Catholic countries.

Let us now turn to the vice of intemperance. “I am sure,” says Hill, “that I am within the truth when I state, as the result of minute and extensive inquiry, that, in four cases out of five, when an offence is committed intoxicating drink has been one of the causes.”[16]

In an attempt, then, to form an estimate of the relative morality of nations, we should not omit to consider the vice of drunkenness, which is the cause of half the crime and misery in the world. Were it in our power to obtain accurate statistics on this subject, as on that of illegitimacy, the superior sobriety of the Catholic nations would be shown even more strikingly than their superior chastity. The Spaniards, it is universally acknowledged, are the soberest people in Europe, as the Swedes are the most intemperate. Their respective geographical positions suggest at once what is often assigned as a sufficient explanation of this fact—the great difference of climate. It was long

supposed that the southern nations were more sensual than the northern, because it was thought a warm climate must necessarily develop a greater violence of passion. We know now, however, that this is not the case. Though climate has an undoubted influence on morality, its action is yet so modified or controlled among Christian and civilized nations that generalizations founded upon its supposed effects are unreliable. The Swedes and the Scotch are intemperate, the Spaniards and the Italians are sober. The former are Protestant, the latter Catholic; it is therefore at once evident that religion has nothing to do with this matter, which can only be accounted for by the difference of climate. These are the tactics of our opponents: those virtues in which the Catholic nations excel must be attributed to natural causes; but when some of them are found to lack the enterprise and industrial spirit of the English or the Americans, it would be altogether unreasonable to ascribe this to anything else than their religion.

Scotch statistics show a greater amount of intemperance in summer than in winter, which would seem to indicate that a high temperature does not tend to destroy the passion for intoxicating drink. But we do not propose to enter into a discussion of causes, which, however, we are perfectly willing to take up at the proper time. Our controversy with M. de Laveleye turns upon facts.

We have already cited the testimony of Laing to show that the Swedes, after they had been under the exclusive influence of Protestantism for three hundred years, were the most drunken people in Europe. Laing was in Venice on

the occasion of a festival, when the whole population had turned out for pleasure, and he did not see a single case of intoxication; not a single instance, even among the boys, of rudeness; and yet all were singing, talking, and enjoying themselves. He gives the following account of a popular merry-making which he saw at Florence:

“It happened that the 9th of May was kept here as a great holiday by the lower class, as May-day with us, and they assembled in a kind of park about a mile from the city, where booths, tents, and carts, with wine and eatables for sale, were in crowds and clusters, as at our village wakes and race-courses. The multitude from town and country round could not be less than twenty thousand people, grouped in small parties, dancing, singing, talking, dining on the grass, and enjoying themselves. I did not see a single instance of inebriety, ill-temper, or unruly, boisterous conduct; yet the people were gay and joyous.”[17]

Robert Dale Owen, writing from Naples, said: “I have not seen a man even partially intoxicated since I have been in the city, of 420,000 inhabitants, and they say one may live here for four years without seeing one.”

Let us now turn to Protestant lands. St. Cuthbert’s parish, Edinburgh, had in 1861 a population somewhat exceeding 90,000 souls. Of these, 1,953 were “drunk and incapable,” 3,935 were “drunk and discharged”; making in all 5,888, or nearly 1 in 15.

In Salford jail (England), in 1870, the proportion of commitments for drunkenness was, as compared with commitments for all offences, 37 per cent.[18]

We have it upon the authority of the English government that in 1874 no fewer than 285,730 Britons

were proceeded against for being drunk and disorderly, or drunk and not disorderly; and, of course, to this must be added the probably greater number who escaped arrest. Mr. Granville, one of the secretaries of the Church of England Society in the Diocese of Durham, estimates that there is an aggregate of 700,000 habitual drunkards in England. “It is a melancholy but undeniable fact,” says the Alliance News,” that, notwithstanding vast agencies of improvement, intemperance, crime, pauperism, insanity, and brutality are more rampant than ever; and, if we except pauperism, these evils have more than doubled in the last forty years.” We have not been able to get the statistics of drunkenness for Ireland, and can therefore institute no comparison between England and that country with regard to intemperance;[19] but we have before us the criminal statistics of both countries for 1854, the population of England and Wales in that year being about three times as great as that of Ireland. The following table of convictions will enable us to form an estimate of the comparative honesty of the two nations:

On the other hand, the following crimes are proportionately more numerous in Ireland:

Convictions for manslaughter in 1854:

We cannot think, however, that these returns are reliable, for the Statistical Journal of 1867 gives the following criminal tables for England in 1865:

And in Ireland from 1865 to 1871, a period of six years, only 21 persons were sentenced to death, of whom 13 were executed.

It is greatly to be regretted that criminal statistics give us no information upon the religious character of the persons accused or convicted of offences against the law. Many persons have been baptized in infancy, and are called Catholics, though they have never been brought under the influence of the church. In the absence of official statistics, Dr. Descuret, who, in his capacity of legal physician in Paris, had abundant opportunity to obtain data relative to this subject, made, about thirty years ago, a careful study of the religious views and sentiments of French criminals. The conclusion which he reached was that, in every hundred persons accused of crime, fifty are indifferentists in religion, forty are infidels, and the remaining ten sincere believers. In a hundred suicides he found only four persons of known piety, three of whom were women subject to melancholia, and the other had been for some time mentally deranged.[21]

[3] The Table-Talk of Martin Luther, pp. 200, 206, 213, et passim.

[4] Notes of a Traveller, pp. 79, 80.

[5] History of Europe, vol. iii. chap. xxvii. 10, 11.

[6] Autobiography, pp. 58, 59.

[7] Ibid. p. 177.

[8] History of European Morals, p. 160.

[9] Notes of a Traveller, p. 172.

[10] For the full discussion of the statistics of this subject see The Catholic World, vol. ix. pp. 52 and 845.

[11] European Morals, p. 153.

[12] Alison’s Miscellaneous Essays, p. 119.

[13] Kay’s Social Condition of the People, vol. ii. p. 392.

[14] See London Statistical Journal, 1870, 1871.

[15] Historische Politische Blätter, 1867.

[16] Crime: its Amount, Causes, and Remedies. By Frederick Hill, Barrister-at-law, late Inspector of Prisons. London, p. 65.

[17] Notes of a Traveller pp. 418-19.

[18] See London Statistical Journal, 1871.

[19] In 1871, 14,501,983 gallons of spirits were distilled in Scotland. What proportion of this was consumed at home we do not know. For the same year the number of gallons entered for home consumption in Ireland was 5,212,746. The population of Scotland is nearly three millions and a half, and that of Ireland about five millions and a half.

[20] England and Wales, with not quite three times the population of Ireland, had fifty times as many cases of dishonesty among servants, which clearly accounts for those newspaper advertisements in which English housekeepers are careful to state that “no Irish need apply.”

[21] La Médecine des Passions, p. 116.

PRIMEVAL GERMANS.

Urdeutsch (which we have translated Primeval Germans) is a historical novel, the scene of which is laid in the Black Forest towards the second half of the fourth century. The author, Conrad von Bolanden,[22] says in his preface that he intends it to be the first of a series of three illustrating the action of Christianity on the German people: the state in which it found them, that to which it brought them, and that to which he says they are likely to be reduced by modern infidelity. The story—which is mainly put together from facts of the biography of St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, and from descriptions of ancient German life drawn from Roman and German historians—is interesting as the record of a time utterly gone by, and of a state of barbarism incident to the childhood of nations. Very nearly the same characteristics appear in the earliest chapters of the history of all uncivilized tribes, and a special likeness can be traced between the Teutons of the ninth century and the American Indians of the sixteenth and seventeenth. Sprung from widely different races, and experiencing the effects of Christianity in a very different manner, there is yet a striking likeness in some of the manners and customs, the industries, the opinions, and the few moral axioms of both peoples with which Christian missionaries have made us familiar.

The plot of the story is slight, and has the advantage of not being confused and complicated, as is the case in many modern novels. St. Martin, yet a deacon, is travelling to Strassburg with his servant Eustace (one of the best characters in the book), and stumbles upon a sleeping barbarian, whom he awakens from a bad nightmare by the strains of his harp or lyre. He then asks of the gigantic German what is his errand, and the Buffalo (such names were common among the Teutons) tells him that he is on his return from the famous grove of Helygenforst, where he had been sent by Bissula, the only daughter of the last king of the Suevi, to consult an oracle on the issue of a blood-feud between the two noble families of the Walen and the Billing. She and her youngest brother Hermanric are the only representatives left of the former family, her father and her eleven brothers having all fallen victims to the enmity of the Billing. St. Martin remonstrates with the German (a freedman of the Suevi), and tells him that the true God abhors blood-feuds, and, availing himself of the German belief in one Supreme God, the All-Father, whose reign is to be made manifest after the end of the world and the destruction of the gods Odin, Thor, Freya, Loki, etc., tells Buffalo that he is the messenger of the All-Father, and will save the last of the Walen from their danger and dilemma. The German, by his word and his hand (as was also the custom later in the vowing of feudal homage), constitutes himself the Muntwaldo, or protector, of

the deacon, and they set off to the land of the Suevi. Eustace, formerly a soldier under Martin when the latter was a centurion, strongly objects to this arrangement, and grimly reiterates his certainty that nothing will ever transform the hopelessly barbaric Germans. On their way the party are attacked by four Chatti, a tribe opposed to the Suevi, and Martin forbids Buffalo to fight in his behalf, saying that he will willingly go with the strangers, but in six days will not fail to visit the Suevi. Buffalo goes on his way, and the two Romans are taken to the village of Duke Fraomar, the leader of the Chatti.

Here follows an interesting description of the dress and domestic arrangements of the early German tribes. The duke is not an hereditary chieftain, but a leader chosen by the tribe for his valor and strength, who has collected round himself a personal following or guard, a sort of freebooter’s company—the original, perhaps, of the roving bands of “Free Companions” who played such a conspicuous part in the wars of the middle ages. The dress of the freemen of the tribe consisted mostly of skins and furs, with the head of the animal, whether buffalo, stag, wolf, or bear, drawn like a hood over the head, and the front paws tied under the chin or crossed on the breast. The women wore long, rather tight-fitting garments of coarse linen, with short sleeves and bands of gaudy colors sewed round the hem; the feet were bare. Both men and women wore long hair; it was a sign of free or noble birth, and was plentifully greased with butter, as were also, on some occasions, the bodies of the warriors. The children and the slaves were for the most part naked or only provided with leathern

aprons. The house had but one apartment, which served all purposes: the fire was in the middle, while to one side were bundles of straw and skins, the primitive beds, and to the other a slightly-raised platform, the primitive table and chairs. The men sat or lay on this and ate off their shields, or sometimes off wooden platters. The women served them at meals and filled the drinking-horns with beer and mead. Besides these horns, human skulls—those of enemies slain in battle—were used as goblets, and these, together with the skulls of sacred horses and the horns of stags, adorned the walls of the dwelling. There was also generally a wooden chest, clumsily fashioned, containing the clothes of the family. The women, children, and slaves ate round the hearth after their lords, and while these were gambling with dice. The passion of gambling seems to have been an inveterate one, and a man would often stake his all, including wife, children, and slaves—sometimes even himself. If he lost, he was reduced to the condition of a slave. The walls of the house were black and glistening with the smoke of the mighty and continuous fires, and there is no mention of even a hole in the roof as an outlet. St. Martin and his servant are introduced into this wild interior just after the Duke Fraomar has been winning house, lands, slaves, cattle, and even his wife, from a freeman of the “hundred.” The strangers are made welcome and become the guests of the duke, which implies that henceforth their persons are sacred, as nothing was more shameful in the eyes of the Germans than to break their word or infringe the rights of hospitality. Eustace, however, looks ruefully on the evidences

of good-will tendered him in the shape of a kind of oat-broth, seasoned with the primitive German preparation of salt, which (Pliny is responsible for the statement) consisted of charcoal made of oak or hazel, impregnated when hot with the water of salt springs; the black morsels giving the same odor to the broth with which they were mixed.

Duke Fraomar, who has a promise from Odin’s oracle to help him in a foray against the neighboring Suevi, provided he does not attack them before the “ninth full moon,” is rather uneasy at having these strangers, who are under the protection of his enemies, brought to him, in case anything untoward should happen to them, and the Suevi fall upon him to avenge them, before the charmed time. The next day one of the freemen takes the saint and his servant round the settlement; and the author here introduces an account of the old German division of property in a “hundred,” or community of one hundred freemen, each possessing the same quantity of ground, and each obliged to render military service to the head of the tribe. The agricultural economy was by no means contemptible. Ploughed land and land overgrown with bushes alternated in lots, and each was cultivated during six years, then allowed to lie fallow six more. Manuring was unknown, chiefly because the animal manure was used as a safe and warm covering to the earth caves where the grain was stored in winter, and where not seldom the owner and his family also took refuge from the cold. Each freeman had his stables, his slave-huts, and his brewery, the latter being generally a cave in a rock furnished with one or two mighty caldrons.

At the end of this inspection of the “hundred” (such a division exists still in England, though far enough in spirit from the ideal of the free Teutons) the strangers come upon a terrible scene of cruelty and superstition.

The “journey to Walhalla” was the poetical title given to the immolation of aged and wealthy persons of both sexes, who, instead of being allowed to die a natural death, were, according to the ancient custom, first killed and then burned with their possessions, with an accompaniment of religious ceremonies. A pile of wood was raised, and the victims, stupefied with beer, laid thereon, with one or two slaves who were to wait upon them in the halls of Odin; for the Germans believed that no one who died a natural death went to Walhalla, but endured torments and shame in hell. Men and women, therefore, willingly allowed themselves to be killed, and often committed suicide as another means of reaching Walhalla. On this occasion two old men and a woman were to be immolated. A ludicrous dispute occurs here between one of the men and his son, who grudges him two slaves as his servants in Odin’s hall, whereupon the father announces his determination to live rather than go to the other world with so paltry a following. This settles the question, and the son gives up the second slave. A great deal of drinking and a sacred chant by the priest of Odin precede the butchery, and the victims are each killed by one blow of “Thor’s hammer,” wielded by a freeman deputed to this office by the heathen priest. The worst part follows. Just as the pile has been set on fire an infant is thrown on, the child of the woman whom the duke won the

night before at dice. The indifference of the mother at the order for this barbarous execution seems to us rather overdrawn. Human nature is human nature the world over; and if there is one feeling more obstinately ineradicable than any other, it is the feeling of a mother for her child—or, say, in the very lowest possible scale of civilization, of a female for her young. Even though infanticide is common among most heathen nations, and was certainly not unknown among the early Germans, it is rather an exaggeration on the part of the author to represent the mother herself in this case as utterly and absolutely indifferent to the child’s fate. While their guide is busy drinking among the spectators of this scene, Martin and Eustace penetrate the sacred grove, round which is drawn a cord, which no German would have passed with unbound hands. Unknowing of this custom, the strangers enter the wood and gaze on the human skulls and skeletons, the bloody skins and the sacred horse-skulls, hung on the branches of the trees. The priest soon discovers their presence in the holy grove, and threatens to kill them on the spot, but is restrained by the duke’s messenger, their guide. He afterwards goes to the duke and demands that the law shall be carried out, which, for such a sacrilege, decrees that the profaner of the holy grove should lose his right hand and his left foot. Fraomar, thinking of his plan for attacking the Suevi at the ninth moon, and not before, hesitates to consent to the priest’s demand and seeks to protect his guests.

Meanwhile, the story goes on to follow Buffalo to the house of the Walen princess Bissula, who, though a heathen, has been in Gaul and had some intercourse with the Romans

and a German Christian sovereign family called the Tribboki. Her dress and dwelling are described as much embellished by Roman arts and many degrees removed from the ancient German simplicity. But, though outwardly less a German, she is at heart an uncompromising adherent of the old customs of her fathers, particularly of the blood-feud. She lives for the sole purpose of avenging the death of her father and brothers; and, indeed, her stern determination is the only circumstance of the book which can be called a “plot.” Withimer, the son of the king of the Tribboki, is her lover and her suitor, and comes to her house to offer himself as her husband. He is a Christian and hopes to convert her also, but the terrible blood-feud stands between them. She loves him as passionately as he loves her, but refuses to marry him unless he will swear to take upon himself the duty of revenge against her enemies, the Billing. This, as a Christian, he cannot do, and hence ensues a hard struggle between his love and his conscience, in which the “baptized heathen,” as the author calls him, very nearly breaks down and forswears the faith. Bissula, on her side, is still more determined, and once even attempts suicide by throwing herself in the way of a wild beast while out hunting, saying, as she does so, that she can more easily give up her life than her love, but that her honor is yet dearer to her than her love. Various devices are resorted to by Katuwald, the young chief of the Billing, the hostile family, to end the blood-feud by marrying Bissula, with whom he is in love; and the author now introduces the “Thing,” or assembly of the people, the primeval parliament. This took place

in a circle surrounded by trees, on which the freemen hung their shields and helmets. A rock, sacred as a kind of tribunal, stood in the centre, and round this stone benches were ranged, on which sat the representatives of the several hundreds. The oracle which Buffalo had been sent to consult had returned the answer, “Let the Thing judge the cause,” the priest who represented the deity having been bribed by the Billing prince to send this answer. Bissula, with her lover, appears at the assembly; but before their coming a lesser court of justice is held for the adjustment of local claims, which gives us an opportunity of reviewing some curious customs of the ancient Germans.

For instance, the value of human life in the case of a slave is shown in two “cases” which come up for arbitration. A slave—but the son of a free father, and a freeman himself by birth—secretly marries a freewoman, and, on her father’s discovering the connection, the choice is given her of killing her husband with her own hand or of being herself degraded to slavery. A sword and a distaff were offered her; if she chose the former, she was free, but was forced to plunge it in the man’s breast; if the latter, she became a slave. There were two other possible means of settling the question: the father had the right to kill her, and the owner of the slave might give him his freedom. In the case in point this last was the happy solution of the problem. Another difficulty arose in the case of damages claimed by a freeman whose neighbor’s tame stag, trained for hunting purposes, had broken into his fields, killed a dozen head of cattle and two slaves, in return for

which he himself had shot the stag. The latter was declared by law to be of a greater value than the two slaves, and a fixed rate of compensation was adjudged, which completely satisfied both parties. From a heathen point of view, considering that both men and stags were “chattels,” it cannot be wondered at that the latter were thought most valuable; for the market was over-stocked with slaves, who might be had any day during a foray, while “domestic” stags were very hard to train, and required to be taught some years before they could be of any use to their owners.

When Bissula makes her appearance, the gathering of the people resolves itself into a “Thing,” and she and her enemies, the five sons of the noble Billing Brenno, take their place by the rock. Hermanric’s absence causes some wonder and annoyance, but Marcomir, the umpire, nevertheless begins the session. Katuwald boldly proposes to end the feud by marrying Bissula, who openly and contemptuously refuses his suit, whereupon a great tumult arises and Hermanric rides into the circle, a bloody head dangling at his saddle-bow. He recounts his exploit—how he, though not yet invested with a man’s weapons (as the rule was to entrust neither sword nor spear to a youth under nineteen), forced the aged Brenno, who had stayed at home, to fight him in single combat, the Billing armed with sword and shield, and himself only with a club. The trembling slave who follows him corroborates his story, and Katuwald, already sore from Bissula’s proud refusal of his love, looks upon the youth with a significant and angry eye, and at last leaves the council, having publicly asked to be told the law of compensation for

carrying off another man’s wife or betrothed. Affairs stand thus with the Suevi, while the story returns to Martin in the hands of the Chatti.

An assembly of the freemen of this tribe is held to discuss the question raised by the priest, as to Martin’s punishment for invading the sacred grove. This takes place the same day that Buffalo goes in quest of his friend, and he arrives in time to be present at the gathering. Duke Fraomar is anxious to save the strangers—not for their own sakes, but for fear of precipitating the attack on the Suevi before the propitious time appointed by the oracle. At last Martin proposes an ordeal such as, since the days of Elijah, has often been resorted to to decide rival claims to truth. A few chosen representatives are to accompany him and the priest to the shrine of the heathen gods in the forest, and the Christian and the priest are both to call upon their gods to show themselves. Here follows a description of the shrine—a building of wood beneath a gigantic oak-tree. Within are kept “Thor’s hammer” and “Tyr’s sword,” and the car of the goddess Hertha, the Cybele of Teutonic mythology, or simply the Earth-mother. Into this car she was at times supposed to descend, when a yoke of cows was harnessed to it, and it was covered with a white cloth, and thus drawn solemnly through the “hundred.” After these processions, the car and cloth were washed by slaves in a pond, into which the latter were afterwards thrown and drowned. The statue or figure of the goddess was erected in a huge crack of the sacred tree, and her grim, enormous head, with staring eyes and yawning mouth, black with clotted blood, crowned

a clumsily-carved block, without either arms or legs.[23] Horse-skulls and white horse-skins (the priest was also clad in such skins), human skulls and skeletons, dogs’ heads and skins of wild beasts, hung from the branches of the sacred tree, which might have sheltered a regiment. Near the sacred car stood a stone altar encrusted with blood. The priest carefully placed the Christian stranger within easy reach of his arm, and distributed the others, the duke, the Sueve Buffalo, and the wise men of the hundred, where they could not see his movements. After his prayer, he was preparing to swing the hammer so as to reach the saint’s head, when Buffalo, suspecting foul play, stole quietly forward and called to Martin to shift his position. Martin simply bade his companions, who, like himself, had their hands securely bound, rise up and lift their hands free from the cords. The fastenings fell off and the heathens stood in awe, waiting for his words. This, says the author, is word for word from St. Martin’s biographer, Sulpicius Severus. Then came a crashing noise, and the lightning fell on the priest, killing him instantly, while the mighty tree was rent in pieces and fell to the earth, carrying in its fall the idol, temple, altar, and car, which disappeared under its burning branches. With awe and terror Fraomar and the Chatti besought the stranger, as a terrible magician, to leave them and not work them any more mischief. The saint sorrowfully complies, grieving that the true God had not yet conquered their hearts, though his might had been shown in such a way, and goes his way with Buffalo to the Suevian settlement. Here

he takes up his abode in a cave, in front of which is a spring called Odin’s Spring, and in which the Germans bathe their new-born children and give them names. Meanwhile, Withimer, the Christian, struggles with his love, and Bissula, the proud, beautiful heathen princess, still refuses to marry him unless he will undertake the duty of avenging her murdered father and brothers. St. Martin reasons with both, and at last prevails with the former to give up his love for the sake of his conscience; but having painted the evils of ingratitude to God and of eternal damnation in vain, he at last conquers the youth by reminding him that, as a German, it would be an indelible disgrace to him to forswear himself by breaking his baptismal vows. Bissula mourns his sudden departure, which she attributes to a messenger having recalled him during her absence, and turns her attention to preserving her last remaining brother from the hatred of the Billing. This she does by resorting to the charms of the Abruna woman Velleda, a priestess said to be hundreds of years old, and to possess marvellous powers, as Circe of old, to change men into stones, trees, and animals. She is, however, not a witch, but the enemy of witches; and here follows a terrible account of the cruelties and absurdities to which the belief in witches led in those times, and, indeed, in all times. Châteaubriand’s[24] beautiful Gallic Velleda is a very different character from this hideous old hag of the Black Forest. Though not a witch, she has, in Bolanden’s book, all the conventional “properties” of one in the shape of a talking raven and two snakes entwined round her

neck and arms. She promises Katuwald to give Bissula a love-drink, to turn her heart from Withimer to himself; and by a charm, consisting of a piece of skin inscribed with mystic characters, she promises to Hermanric invulnerability against “sword and spear.”

St. Martin, in the meanwhile, has managed to gather an audience of children, whom he instructs in the truths of Christianity and teaches to behave according to Christian morality, not forgetting also to induce them to clothe and wash themselves regularly every day. Some of the parents also join his catechumens, but the greater part still look upon him as an impious contemner of the gods and a powerful magician The priest of this “hundred” once tries to entrap him at the head of a crowd of infuriated Germans, but the saint mildly and logically drives him into contradictions which are evident even to his unlearned hearers. On this occasion the two accounts of the creation, the Biblical and the Teutonic, are set side by side. The defeated priest retires, but only to plot further mischief; and the scene changes to a German wedding, which forms a very interesting chapter. Girls of an age and willing to be married usually wore several little bells in their girdle, and it was allowed to any freeman to carry them off, provided he afterwards loyally paid the stipulated price—two fat oxen, a caparisoned horse, two slaves, a sword, a spear, and a shield—to the bride’s father. The bridegroom’s dress was that usually worn by freemen on state occasions, and of course the full complement of weapons was indispensable. Falk, the bridegroom, is represented as wearing a magnificent bear-skin, with the head drawn over his own as a hood. The bride, besides

her linen tunic or undergarment; wore also a cloak of Roman manufacture and of gaudy colors. The whole kindred of the bridegroom accompanied him with horns, pipes, and a kind of cymbals to his father-in-law’s house, and the oxen, etc., were led by the slaves. The father performed the ceremony, and Falk swore by “sword and spear” to hold his wife in all honor and truth. The father put a ring on the bride’s finger and bade her remember that, although her husband would be allowed by ancient custom to take other wives if he pleased, she herself would nevertheless be bound to the most unswerving fidelity; and, giving her two yoked oxen as a wedding present, told her that as these two drew one car, so husband and wife were bound to share and carry together the burdens of life.[25] The shrill music of the horns and clashing together of weapons accompanied the approving hurrahs of the two families, and Falk now led his wife home. From the door of his house hung a naked sword—the “marriage sword”—a warning of the doom that follows the least infidelity; and on going in the bridegroom led the bride three times round the hearth, saying: “Here shalt thou stay and watch as housemistress in chastity, prudence, and industry.” A free-woman of the husband’s kindred then brought a bowl of water and washed the bride’s feet, after which the bride’s father dipped a linden-branch in the same water and sprinkled the bed, the domestic utensils, and the relations of the bridegroom. A wooden platter full of honey was then handed to him, and, as he anointed the bride’s mouth with honey, he said these words: “Let thy mouth always

speak sweet words to thy husband, but no bitter ones.” After this ceremony the bride’s head was wrapped in a cloth, and she was led to the closed door of the dwelling, and in succession to those of the stables, the grain-store, and the slave-huts, each of which she struck with her right foot, while the women showered handfuls of wheat, oats, barley, and beans on her head, during which rite the father said to her: “As long as thou governest thy house with industry, so long shalt thou not lack the fruits of the earth.” Falk now took the cloth off his wife’s head and kissed her, and all the family followed with their congratulations.

The expected presence of Bissula at the banquet had led to a departure from the ordinary German usage, and a table had been prepared for such as would sit at it during the bridal feast. The king’s daughter, when she came, brought a much-valued present, one which German housewives of the present day rate as highly as their gigantic ancestresses of the days of old—a store of home-spun linen. After the banquet, a wild dance was performed in honor of the young couple. Tacitus gives an account of it: The young men assembled in a crooked double line, half of them holding naked swords and the other half spears, held forward, crossing each other. Four or five youths, entirely naked, now began a skilful dance, threading their way with incredible quickness between the shining weapons. The Scotch sword-dance is thought sufficiently clever nowadays, but what is it compared to the real danger, and the opportunity of showing dexterity as well as courage, which this ancient German custom offered? This game was accompanied by the shrill blast of horns

and pipes and the hoarse shouting of the excited spectators. Another drinking bout followed this exploit, when, as the day began to fade, the priestess Velleda made her appearance. And now a natural phenomenon was added to the strange scene—a partial eclipse of the moon, which the Germans explained as the struggle between the moon and the giant wolf Managarm, a half-divine creature, who feeds on the bodies of the dead and now and then hunts and pursues the heavenly bodies. As the shadow grew less and the moon’s light broke forth again, the guests clamored and clashed their arms together, crying out, “The moon wins! the moon wins!” as if encouraging human combatants. During this confusion Katuwald, the Billing chief, emboldened by the love-potion which Velleda has given Bissula to drink, attempts to carry her off; but the maiden, strong as the women of giant growth of old Germany ever were, wrestles with him and overcomes him, bearing him in her arms into the midst of the assembled guests. Most of the authorities quoted by Bolanden go to confirm the facts of the extraordinary strength of the women of that time, their stature of six and often seven feet, and of the custom prevalent among the Germans of teaching young girls to wrestle and throw the spear like the men.

The next scene of primitive life in the Black Forest is the doom of the adulteress, a wretched, guilty woman being driven naked through the “hundred,” pursued by all the free-women, each armed with long whips and small knives. This was the common punishment decreed for such offences. A human sacrifice to the gods of Walhalla is also portrayed in vivid colors: the Chatti

immolate a slave and two oxen as a propitiatory offering before their foray against the Suevi; and one more example of German manners and customs is afforded by the funeral of Hermanric, Bissula’s brother, whom the Billing Katuwald has slain with an arrow. This is gorgeously described: the car, drawn by six horses, contained the corpse and was adorned with endless plate, jewels, rare stuffs, and articles of Roman workmanship of great value; the horses’ heads were wreathed in oak and ash garlands; three fully caparisoned horses and eight gorgeously-arrayed slaves, the special servants and companions of the deceased, followed the car and were destined to be struck dead and burned with their master. Marcomir, the umpire, pronounced a funeral oration, and the priest’s deputy had lifted the sacred hammer to kill the first slave, when a strange whirlwind began to shake the forest around the funeral pile. Trees were uprooted, the wind tore and howled through the branches, thunder and lightning added their terrors, and the Suevi stood rooted to the ground in awe and amazement. St. Martin is seen in the distance advancing towards them at a miraculously quick pace, and as he comes nearer the storm-cloud is just seen passing away, while the sun breaks forth again. The cry of “The sorcerer!” is raised, but Buffalo cries out, “He is no sorcerer, but a holy man,” and, breathless, they all watch the saint.

Here the author again draws on Sulpicius Severus for a signal miracle—nothing short of a raising from the dead. St. Martin commands the dead Hermanric to arise and live; the youth starts up and clings to the saint’s mantle, while the bystanders are dumb with fear and awe.

He comes forth, and, mounting one of his horses, seats his deliverer on another and rides away with him, bidding his sister believe in the almighty and only God of the Christians, and telling his slaves that as they were to have followed him into Walhalla, so he expects them the next day at the saint’s abode, to follow him in the new way of life he has at last discovered. The end is easy to see: Bissula becomes a Christian, renounces her hatred against the Billing, and receives baptism with hundreds of her relations and slaves, to all the latter of whom she and her brother give their freedom and certain necessary possessions—in fact, almost portioning out their estate between them. Bissula then marries Withimer, and they spend their lives in trying to spread the light of the Gospel among their fellow-countrymen, while Hermanric follows St. Martin and becomes a monk in one of the first Frankish monasteries.

Among the most natural characters in the book are Eustace and Buffalo, who delight the reader with their various shrewd sayings and their dog-like fidelity to St. Martin. One or two curious facts have an incidental place in the story; for instance, the derivation of the modern German word for grandson—Enkel—vouched for by Simrock, and which is a survival of the old custom of reckoning the two nearest degrees of relationship by the two joints of the leg; the knee signifying the son, and the ankle the grandson.

A very good point is also made in Withimer’s spiritual probation, his penance in the cave with St. Martin, and his meekly submitting, after a terrible struggle with his own pride and passions, to receive a scourging from the saint, and to cut off his

golden, flowing hair, the outward badge of his sovereignty. His victory over himself and his true humility are very beautiful. In the baptism scene it is interesting to be reminded of the old formula of the questions addressed to the catechumens, of which the following are specimens:

“Forsachis [renouncest] tu diabolæ? … End ec [and I] for sacho allum diaboles workum [works] en wordum [words] Thunaer ende woten ende [and] allein them unholdum [unclean] the ira genotes [companions] sint.… Gelobis tu [believest thou] in got alamehtigan [Almighty] Fadaer [Father]?”

We meant to have spoken more at length of the mythology of the Teutonic races, but have no space for the subject. The authorities Bolanden has followed are Tacitus, Grimm, and Arnkiel. Concerning history, manners, and customs he quotes Julius Cæsar, Tacitus, Procopius, Strabo, Pliny, Schmidt, Simrock, Wirth, Heber, Cantù, Ozanam, and Arnkiel. For the traditions of St. Martin’s life Sulpicius Severus, his deacon, friend, and biographer, is the authority. We should like to give an example of the poetry of the ancient Germans; but as the Nibelungenlied is accessible to every scholar and widely known even to the ordinary reading public, no specimen of inferior war-hymns would be worth drawing attention to. We will conclude by a beautiful description of the simplicity and humble appearance of a holy bishop of the fourth century, Justinus of Strassburg, and who, as well as St. Martin, had a high opinion of the grand “raw material,” ready to the hand of Christian workers, in the brave, truthful, loyal, hospitable, even if cruel and uncivilized, Germans of the “forest primeval.”

Bolanden says: “The simplicity of the bishop reminded one of the apostolic age. He bore no outward sign of his high rank, and his only garments were two tunics of white wool, one long with long sleeves, and another, sleeveless and short, over it, while over all hung a cloak of Roman make. His feet were shod with sandals. His black beard hung low over his breast, while a ring of whitening hair encircled his bald head. His features were thin, as if with fasting and mortification, his glance calm, and his demeanor humble; while his hands, used to toil, were extraordinarily strong, for he followed the example of St. Paul, who refused to be a burden upon any one.… For precisely the most pious and holy of the bishops of the Frankish country gave themselves to manual labor, to give a good example to the Franks, who shrank from work as from a shameful occupation,… and this, too, by no means to the prejudice of the vineyard of the Lord. On the contrary, those self-denying men, indifferent to life, seeking no earthly honors or distinctions, thinking only of the service of God, were the pillars of the

church and the most fruitful signs of her progress. Neither did they acknowledge the golden fetters of kings, which hinder the working of Christ’s messengers. They were free in their sacred ministry, and God’s protection accompanied them in their hallowed work.”

Bolanden’s book has, of course, an arrière-pensée, which is so evident through the story that it rather spoils the mere literary value of the book, as “a purpose” more or less cramps any literary production. But, as a clever contemporary says, “In the hot theological controversies of the present day it is hard to treat any subject, even remotely connected with ecclesiastical history, without betraying a ‘tendency.’” Bolanden is outspoken enough as to his, which has for object the present Prussian laws against religious freedom. But we think we may safely say that the first book of the series will be the most original and interesting, illustrating as it does a period so little known and not yet become, like the middle ages, the hackneyed theme of every novelist, from first to fifth rate, of every civilized and literary European nationality.

[22] Conrad von Bolanden, a brief sketch of whose life has already appeared in these pages, requires no introduction to the readers of The Catholic World, who will know him best as the author of The Progressionists, Angela, The Trowel or the Cross, etc.

[23] This reminds one of the Aztec war-god Quatzacoatl.

[24] Les Martyrs, Châteaubriand.

[25] Tacitus, Germania.

SACERDOS ALTER CHRISTUS.[26]

The priest, “another Christ” is he,

And plights the church his marriage-vows;

Thenceforth in every soul to see

A daughter, sister, spouse.

Then let him wear the triple cord

Of father’s, brother’s, husband’s care;

In this partaking with his Lord

What angels cannot share.

O sweet new love! O strong new wine!

O taste of Pentecostal fire!

Inebriate me, draught divine,

With Calvary’s desire!

“I thirst!” He cried. The dregs were drained:

But still “I thirst!” his dying cry.

While one ungarnered soul remained,

The cup too soon was dry.

And shall not I be crucified?

What though the fiends, when all is done,

Make darkness round me, and deride

That not a soul is won?

God reaps from very loss a gain,

And darkness here is light above.

Nor ever did and died in vain

Who did and died for love.

1871

[26] St. Bernard.

LABOR IN EUROPE AND AMERICA.[27]

There was a time, not far distant, when men thought they had found in the United States of America the sovereignty of labor. It was the boast of its people that there were no American paupers. The working classes looked with something like contempt upon the condition of their fellow-laborers in Europe. Here was the land where every man’s independence rested in his own hands and his willingness to labor. No day should come when an honest day’s work would not earn, not bread alone, but a home—an American home. This was the time when the followers of Boone were disclosing to wondering eyes the virgin richness of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys; when, later, adventurous spirits led the way over the Rocky Mountains to a new western empire; when, close succeeding, California opened its Aladdin’s caves, not to the lash of kings or tyrants over toiling slaves, but to the picks and pans of free labor. Yes, here at last was found what the poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome had only dreamed of—the ideal commonwealth, a golden age. Thus had a free republic, established in the richest and grandest territory the sun shone on, conquered at last the problem of ages, and labor stood the peer of capital—nay, aspired to be its master.

It was claimed not only that a particular form of government had achieved those economic results, but that it was capable of maintaining them indefinitely. Politics bade defiance to political economy.

Is this state of things true of to-day? In part, yes, it may be answered. Looking at the comparative independence and comfort of the great masses of the working classes of this country, noting that intelligent zeal for personal liberty which pervades them, much reason for congratulation still remains. But the pressure of those social conditions affecting labor in other countries is beginning to be seriously felt. The reserve forces of capital are coming up. The “salad days” of the nation are over. It has grown to manhood, and, growing thus, has met the harsh experiences inseparable from national as from individual life. It begins to feel the burdens of maturity, and to be harassed by its anxieties. Labor has met war, its wild fever, its deadly collapse; labor has met debt, the second and costlier price of war, sucking out the life-blood after the wounds of battle have been stanched; and, lastly, labor has met capital, which, like one of those genii described in the Arabian tales, rises portentous to its full strength and stature out of the smoke of war and the shadow of debt. These two forces, labor and capital—which, to borrow an image from the ancient myths, Ἀνάγκη or Necessitas seems to have linked together in iron bonds—mutually hostile

yet inseparable co-laborers in the work of human progress, are preparing to try their strength in the New World as they have done in the Old. The first murmurs of that contest which it was deemed republican institutions could for ever avert are plainly heard. Daily observation shows that the laws governing the accumulation of wealth elsewhere—increase stimulating increase in a geometrical ratio—are not suspended here. “The rich are growing richer, the poor poorer.” Any of the great daily newspapers need only to be looked at from week to week and month to month to find the growing record of strikes, the agitation of labor, the increase of pauperism. The glory of the country, its greatest source of prosperity, has had in it an element of weakness. That rich and wide domain, which invited immigration, postponed, but has not been able eventually to stay, the aggregation of surplus labor—especially on the two seaboards—which everywhere becomes the bond-slave of capital, and fights its battles against free labor. In a word, politics, the barriers of merely political pronunciamientos, have yielded in the United States, as elsewhere, to those primal laws of supply and demand which govern the wages of labor. We are assimilating to the economic conditions of Europe. A revolution has taken place during the course of the last quarter of a century in the industrial features of this country. The flux and reflux both of labor and capital between America and Europe are instant and inevitable. Henceforward the contest between them will be fought out on the old conditions, little or not at all affected by political or—what is the same thing—sentimental considerations.

Here, then, is a problem for the statesmen of this age widely differing from that which engaged the attention of the fathers of the Constitution, yet like it in this: that the successful solution of each aims at the amelioration of the condition of mankind. One was political; the other is, and will be, social, and may be regarded as a sequel to, and complement of, the first.

Must we sink into the old ruts along which labor has slowly and painfully dragged its burdens for ages in Europe? Is there no help for this Sisyphus? Must the stone roll down the hill again, after having mounted so near the top? Or is it possible that the light which the founders of this republic set up as a beacon for the political regeneration of mankind one hundred years ago may be rekindled in the same land in a succeeding age to lead the way to the regeneration of labor? It is a task for the highest, the most Christian, the most Catholic statesmanship. The church, faithful to its great rôle of emancipator or manumitter, which it took up, in advance of the age, in the darkest eclipse of the declension of the Roman Empire, and has never since abandoned, will be found again in the van of this movement. Labor and capital, which, left to themselves, would rend each other, may find in its arbitrament a truce—peace—harmonious working.

Is the hope that this republic shall be the first to utter to Europe and the world some grand maxims in social economy, as one hundred years ago it did in politics, chimerical? By its realization we shall be able to avert from this country the atheistic commune which is threatening to ravage Europe, or to meet it and defeat it should it come.

Wise action must be the result

of good information. Such a work, therefore, as this of Dr. Young’s on Labor in Europe and America is a valuable auxiliary to those who like to know what they have to deal with before moving in any matter. It is a bulky volume of over eight hundred pages octavo of closely-printed matter; but it is not so appalling as it looks, the number of countries surveyed and the diversity of the conditions of labor presented making it interesting even to the general reader. Dr. Young’s position as chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics has given him exceptional advantages and facilities for obtaining information in the preparation of such a work, and it is fair to say that he appears to have availed himself of them with great industry and ability. It is, in fact, the work of a specialist who is devoted to his subject, and is therefore primâ facie worthy of attentive consideration. Nor does it fail in great part to make good its pretensions. Yet it has all the faults of the current works of the infant science of statistics. It jams everything into columns of tabular statements, and seeks to draw infallible averages and wide-sweeping deductions from them which cannot be always sustained on closer scrutiny. Observation is everywhere too limited, the conditions of society and of individual existence and labor too minutely diversified and shifting, to be toted up like a sum in addition by a calculating machine. Were we to listen to the statisticians, however, we would displace the Pope and put them in his chair. They would feel quite at ease there, and the infallibility they shake their heads at in Pio Nono would fit them to a charm. Like the jailer in Monte Christo, they would blot out all individuality and number every one and everything

1, 2, 3. But man is too stubbornly self-willed ever to be made the term of an equation.

How different, how inferior, such a work as this, for instance, of Dr. Young’s—comprehensive and well digested as it truly is—to any one of his great namesake’s in the last century, Arthur Young, who, more justly than M. Adolphe Quetelet, deserves the title of the “father of modern statistics.” One is like the Turkey carpet that Macaulay speaks of in his criticism on Montgomery, which contains indeed all the colors that are to be found in a masterpiece of painting, but is fit only for its own uses; the other is a picture instinct with life. The old method of personal, detailed, and necessarily limited observation, while it excelled in picturesqueness, gave at the same time solid, accurate, special information which the hasty generalizations of the present day too often miss. The latter confuse the mind by their immense array of figures.

Again, Dr. Young has given, we think, a disproportionate share of attention to Europe, Asia, and even Africa—occupying in all over seven hundred pages with his account of labor in those countries, while he handles the subject in the United States and Canada in just one hundred pages. His explanation is that his work is intended chiefly for circulation in the United States, but this explanation is unsatisfactory. His long introductory history of labor from the remotest times, compiled, as it plainly is, from the works of European scholars within everybody’s reach, and his view, chiefly at second hand, from the reports of American consuls, of the state of labor in Europe, are manifestly inferior, both in interest and authority, to the copious original works of the

statisticians of particular foreign countries; while his history of American labor and presentation of its existing conditions, which ought to have given its real value to his work, are extremely meagre and superficial. His own tour through the manufacturing centres of England and the Continent appears from his statements to have been of too flying a nature to yield any very authoritative results. But we wish it to be distinctly understood that while the plan of Dr. Young’s work, and, in some respects, its execution, appear to us defective, we are by no means disposed to undervalue the great utility of what he has accomplished in thus presenting to the American reader in compact form a survey of the history of labor down to our own times. It is only from a study of the subject in its widest aspects that an intelligent comprehension of the factors of the problems before us in America can be arrived at.

Dr. Young begins by a review of the origin of slavery and gradual development of wage labor, following its thread through the rise and decline of the ancient empires of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The conquest and carrying off of alien races for the uses of manual labor, while their conquerors followed the profession of arms, was the most fruitful source of slavery in ancient times. This species of slavery is still found in Africa. It was long ago extinguished in Europe. It was crippled in America by the suppression of the slave trade, and has finally disappeared in the United States by the emancipation of the negro race. On the other hand, we have never had in this country the predial slavery which is bound to the soil and digs the ground it originally sprang from, of which the last

great example is vanishing from Russia under the benignant edicts of Alexander II. But there is no doubt that that form would have developed itself in the United States from negro slavery if the distinction of color could have been annihilated. It was already tending in that direction when the war intervened.

We must pass over Dr. Young’s account of labor under the feudal system, but we cannot help noting the prejudice he seems to share with the vulgar against the monks. To read his pages, one would necessarily be led to infer that the clergy were among the worst oppressors of the poor; that they ground their unhappy serfs, and were the allies of the nobles and military commanders in keeping down the working classes. That all this farrago of calumny is directly the reverse of the truth is now so universally admitted by students of those ages that it is needless to enter into the question, nor would our space permit us to do so. It will suffice to quote Hallam, who, while opposed to the principles upon which monasteries are founded, calls those of the middle ages “green spots in the wilderness where the feeble and the persecuted could find refuge.”[28] And again, speaking of the devastation of immense tracts by war, he says: “We owe the agricultural restoration of the great part of Europe to the monks.”[29] It is singular that such testimony is omitted by Dr. Young. It would be still more singular if it had escaped his observation. His admissions are as ridiculous as his omissions. In a foot-note of a single line, which is lost in the midst of two chapters on the subject, he says: “It is admitted that the abbots

were most indulgent landlords.” This is as if a writer on the woollen manufacture of the present day should devote a hundred pages to the knitting-needles of the old women in our country towns, and inform his readers in a one-line footnote: “Steam machinery was also used in this age in the manufacture of woollens.” The monastery was as distinctively the economic feature of the civilization of the middle ages as the steam-engine is of our times. Each played the same part in its development. It is just as easy to be blind to one as to the other.

Passing over the period included between Elizabeth and George III., and the early days of what Dr. Young aptly terms the “era of machinery,” we come down to the consideration of the organization and prices of labor, the rates of wages and cost of subsistence, and the habits of the working classes in England at the present day. These are fruitful themes, and are treated of in detail. We will endeavor to present a few items of comparison, from the statistics given in connection with them, with those afforded later in the case of the United States.

What we have said about the change that has taken place in the conditions of labor in the United States is shown by Dr. Young’s account of the trades-unions of the United Kingdom. Instead of, as formerly, maintaining their position on a totally different and higher plane than European workmen, American mechanics now take the law, in many cases, from English organizations. For instance, the “Amalgamated Society of Engineers,” a union including machinists, millwrights, smiths, and pattern-makers, and numbering at the close

of 1874 about 45,000 members, had 30 branches in the United States at the end of 1873, with an aggregate membership of 1,405. These branches were spread over every manufacturing city of the first or second class in the Union. Five branches were established in Canada. Some idea of the power of such a society, apart from its mere roll of membership, may be gathered from its annual statements of the account of its accumulated fund. Its balance on hand at the close of 1873 amounted to £200,923 1s. 6¾d. Its expenditure during the same year amounted to £67,199 17s., 5½d., including such items as telegrams, banking expenses, delegations, grants to other trades, parliamentary committees, gas-stokers defence fund—disclosing, in fact, all the incidents of a powerful and active organization.

The “Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners” has 265 branches, 14 of which are in the United States. The membership, however, appears to be small in this country, numbering only 445 men. The governmental organization of societies of this class is very elaborate and centralizing in character. Monthly reports are received from all the branches, including those in the United States. For instance, the monthly reports of the Amalgamated Carpenters’ Society for January, 1875, from the United States, represent the state of trade as “bad,” “dull,” or “slack,” with the exception of San Francisco, where it is reported “good,” and Newark as “improving.” Although no data are here given, it is not to be doubted that this system of reports will be, or has already been, extended to such organizations as the “Miners’ National Association,” numbering 140,000, and the National

Agricultural Laborers’ Union, numbering 60,000, thus seriously affecting the immigration not only of skilled but of agricultural labor. In fact, we are already aware that personal reports have been made by Joseph Arch and others, some of them not favorable. The formidable character of the trades-unions of Great Britain is seen by the mere statement of their aggregate membership, which Dr. Young estimates, with all deductions, at 800,000 in January, 1875.

The question of strikes in England is too large a one to be entered into here. Dr. Young gives a brief history of the great Preston strike of 1836, of the Nottingham, the Staffordshire Colliery, the Pottery, and the Yorkshire strikes, all of which proved unsuccessful after terrible suffering on the part of the workmen and great loss on both sides had been endured. A short account is also given of the unsuccessful “Amalgamated Engineers’” strike of 1851-52, and the protracted engineers’ strike on the Tyne, 1871-72, for the nine hours’ system, which resulted in a compromise. Experience has demonstrated of strikes, 1st, that they are usually unsuccessful; 2d, that they lessen the employer’s ability to maintain even the wages paid before the strike, by giving an advantage to his competitor in other countries which he cannot always recover; 3d, that where they are fought out to the end they cause suffering and develop disease in the weak, and in women and children, which no wages can pay for or cure; 4th, that they deteriorate the character of the men engaged in them by promoting a feeling of lawlessness and desire for stimulation even among the best disposed; 5th, that, even if successful, there is a greater dead loss in money spent than is

recouped by the advance gained in wages. These conclusions are now beginning to be so well understood in England—where, from more perfect organization, strikes are larger and cost more to both parties than in the United States—that the chairman of the Trades-Union Congress of the United Kingdom, held at Liverpool in January, 1875, in his opening address referred to strikes as a mode of settling differences with employers which ought to be avoided by all practicable means, and resorted to only in the most extreme cases—an opinion afterwards embodied in a resolution which was adopted by the Congress. The principle of arbitration has already been tried successfully in several important instances.

Dr. Young illustrates the rates of wages in the United Kingdom by tables. He accompanies the tables with the explanation that “in a very large number of occupations the hands are paid by the piece or by weight, and the actual rate of wages would not indicate the sum an operative would take home with him at the end of the week as the price of his labor. The sums stated in all these tables are therefore the average sums earned per week, whether the labor be paid by the day or the piece.” The same explanation holds good for the United States. Of these tabular statements our space will only permit us to give two or three, to which we shall subjoin the rates of wages in the United States in the same occupations by way of comparison. The British pound sterling is computed at $4 84, and the shilling at 24 cents.

WAGES IN COTTON-MILLS.

The reduction in the hours of labor and the increase in the rates of wages in English cotton-mills are shown in the following table:

Statement showing the average weekly earnings of operatives in cotton-mills during the years 1839, 1849, 1859, and 1873.

“Other branches show the same ratio of advance.”

The following statement was furnished to Dr. Young by the proprietors of the cotton-mills of Messrs. Shaw, Jardin & Co., of Manchester, operating 250,000 spindles, and producing yarns from No. 60 to 220, sewing cottons, lace yarn, crape yarn, and two-fold warp yarns:

Average wages (per week of 59 hours) of persons employed in 1872.

These tables will be found on pp. 330-31. Now let us compare the wages there given with those paid to the same class of operatives in the United States. On pages 750-51, Dr. Young gives a table showing the average weekly wages paid in American cotton-mills in various States in 1869 and 1874. We select

Rhode Island, for the reason that the rate of wages there appears to be a good average, being lower than is paid in Massachusetts and higher than in New York.

Wages in cotton-mills (weekly average).

[A] Boys.

[B] Females.

[C] Part females.

It will appear, therefore, from an examination of the tables that the average weekly wages in Rhode Island cotton-mills (which fairly represent those of the rest of the country) are in most cases from a third to nearly double those paid in Manchester. But it will also be observed that, whereas English wages appear to have increased steadily in every grade, the American rates show a decided tendency downwards. The highest skilled American labor holds its own with difficulty, but in the lower grades cheaper labor has been extensively employed since 1869. Dr. Young’s explanation must also be borne in mind in reading these tables—viz., that the labor is frequently piece-work. In some instances the English operatives also employ their own helpers.

But do these figures really represent the present rate of wages? Doubtless the average given is a fair one. But any one whose attention was directed to the strike at the Lonsdale Mills, R. I., January, 1875, must have noticed that wages are in reality much lower than here given. Into the merits of that controversy we do not enter—we wish merely to arrive at the figures. The company would appear to have done everything they could for the comfort and improvement of the condition of their hands, and the reduction complained of probably could not be avoided in the then depressed state of the market. The special correspondent of the New York Herald of that date gives the statement of the superintendent, who said that the weavers before the reduction were receiving fifty cents per cut (wide goods), and with the reduction of 10 per cent. the price paid would be forty-five cents per cut; or, in other words, they would earn about $1 a day. Taking the statements

of the operatives, it was claimed that many of the men were making only ninety-six cents a day before the strike, and the women sixty-five cents. Those figures, therefore, in the case of one of the largest companies, represent labor as already reduced below English rates. This strike also afforded an illustration of the statement, made in the beginning of this article, of the instant ebb and flow of labor, as well as capital, which now characterizes industry in the United States. The operatives were about half English and half Irish (the overseers alone being American), and the first movement of those who had enough money to do so was to return to England or Ireland.

Notwithstanding the readiness of operatives to strike the moment the opportunity offers—a readiness perfectly well known and appreciated by their employers—and notwithstanding also, it may be said, the determination of employers to regulate wages by the laws of trade, it is nevertheless one of the most noble and encouraging features of the industrial pursuits of this age that the employers in many instances—and those generally the chief—show that they intend that their minds shall not be diverted from the purpose of improving the condition of their workmen, both mentally and materially. It is well that the mild voice of Christian charity should still be able to make itself heard in the midst of this whir of iron machinery.

In the condition of no kind of labor does the United States compare more favorably with England and the Continent of Europe than in agriculture. Here the respective wages paid hardly admit of comparison. But it is not to be lost

sight of that, wretched as the condition of the English agricultural laborer may appear to us, his way of viewing things is not ours. The rough, arduous, irregular, exposed labor of the Western backwoodsman, or even farmer, appears to him more terrible than the dull, stated servitude, with its beer in the present and its work-house in the future, that shock our free thought. The report of the delegates of the Agricultural Union was decidedly unfavorable in the case of Canada, where the conditions of labor do not essentially vary from those of the Northwestern States. This question of agricultural labor is, however, too vast a one to be treated of here. Dr. Young’s reports are very valuable, but take, perhaps, the American view of the question too much for granted.[30]

WAGES OF MECHANICS AND SKILLED ARTISANS IN GREAT BRITAIN.

This branch of his subject is copiously treated by Dr. Young in connection with his tour through the chief manufacturing cities of the United Kingdom in 1872. From the numerous tables presented we select one under the head of “Skilled trades in London, weekly wages in 1871” (page 242) as being the most comprehensive.

The average daily wages of persons employed in the same trades in the United States in 1874 was from $2 25 for shoemakers to $3 33 for bricklayers or masons (pp. 745-747); or, in other words, from 50 per cent. to 100 per cent. more than in England.

Statement showing the established rates of wages obtained by members of the various trades societies of the metropolis, in summer and winter, compiled under the supervision of Alsager Hay Hill, LL.B.

[D] Per hour.

[E] Piece-work.

[F] Uncertain.

PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES.

But we cannot stop at the mere figures in dollars and cents. In this connection we must consider what those wages will buy in each country—what is their purchasing power:

“If a workman in Birmingham” says Dr. Young, “receive for fifty-four hours’ labor 30s., or about $8 33 in United States currency, and another, of the same occupation, in Philadelphia earn $12 50, it would be inaccurate to say that the earnings of the latter were 50 per cent. more than those of the former. The question is not what is the United States equivalent of the thirty British shillings, but what is the purchasing power of the wages of the

one workman in England and of the other in the United States? In other words, how much food, clothing, and shelter will the earnings of the one purchase as compared with the other?”

For the solution of this question Dr. Young enters into an elaborate analysis of the price of provisions, clothing, house-rent, etc., in each country. In this we are unable to follow him. But taking the amount paid for board by single men and women employed in mechanical labor in the great cities of both countries, the average price paid by men in Great Britain ranges from $2 50 to $3 50 per week; in the United States, from $4 50 to $5 50. For women, in manufacturing cities in England, from $1 50 to $2 50 per week; in the United States, from $2 50 to $3 50. In the great American manufacturing centre, Philadelphia, the average price of mechanics’ board is, for men, $5 per week; for women, $3. But this does not mean a single room for each; in most cases two, in some three, four, and even five, sleep in the same chamber. British workmen probably eat as much meat as American workmen, but they have not the same variety of dishes. House-rent is cheaper in most English cities even than in Philadelphia, where great and commendable efforts have always been made to provide good and cheap houses for working-men. Clothing Dr. Young estimates at less than half the price in England for the laboring classes compared with the United States; partly from cheaper rates, and partly from the inferior kind British workmen consent to wear—fustian or corduroy being the most common material.

We would wish to follow Dr. Young, if it were possible, into a comparison of the rates of wages

and cost of living in the great iron and steel works on the Tyne, at Essen, Prussia, and in Philadelphia, but our space is already exceeded. The highest wages earned at the works of Fried. Krupp, Essen, which Dr. Young personally visited in 1872, were $1 80 for 11 hours’ piece-work. At the same establishment dinner (meat and vegetables and coffee) and lodging are supplied to unmarried men at $1 18 per week. Bread is an extra charge. Large bakeries are attached to the works.

In the comparison of the general rates of wages and cost of living in Great Britain and the United States, so many and so great diversities exist in both countries that it is a hazardous matter to draw general conclusions. Stated broadly, it would appear that the rate of wages in Great Britain since 1865 has shown a steady tendency to advance, with some fluctuations, while the cost of living is nearly stationary; in the United States, within the same period of ten years, wages have remained stationary or shown a tendency to decline, allowing for the fluctuations caused by a depreciated currency, while the cost of living has increased. The commercial depression existing since 1873 has affected labor in both countries, but more sensibly in the United States. The great falling off in immigration since 1873 is a remarkable and sensitive test of the depreciation of the labor market in the United States and the simultaneous rise of wages in Europe. From the recent report of the New York Emigration Commissioners it appears that there were landed at Castle Garden during 1875 84,560 immigrants, against 140,041 for 1874 and 294,581 for 1873. The falling off has been equally divided among

all nationalities. Nor does this tell the whole story; for the steamship companies show a very large return of laborers to Europe during the past year. It is not intended to convey the impression by these figures that European emigration has finally stayed its course towards these shores, but it is evident that it has received a serious temporary check. It is not the purpose of this paper to investigate what the remedy for this state of things may be. But it may be stated as the conviction of the writer that a mere return to specie payments, though beneficial, will not do all for the country that its advocates claim. Something more will be required—that is, economy, curtailment of expenses, national and individual—before we can reach bottom. Like youth sometimes, we have temporarily outgrown our strength. We have no vast deposits of wealth, the hoardings of centuries, to fall back upon like some European countries. We have always lived right up to our income, and have not yet adjusted ourselves to our sudden plunge into national debt. Hope has all along buoyed us up to over-production and consequent over-expenditure. The supply of labor must equalize itself to the

necessary, not speculative, work to be done before it can be established on a sound basis. Fresh enterprises, promoting renewed inflation and over-production, will lead to another collapse. In the effort to recuperate, and before a new start can be made on a safe road of prosperity (which it is not doubted will be opened again), those who are already poor will suffer the most, as always has been and will be the case. The American working classes will have eventually to abandon most of those habits of personal expense which now seem to them a matter of course, but which European working-men would regard as extravagant, and to approach nearer to the old-country standard of living.

We are not able to follow Dr. Young in his researches into the rate of wages and cost of subsistence in the various countries of continental Europe which he visited. None of them approach so near the American standard as Great Britain. In most of them labor is poorly paid and the working classes live meanly according to our notions, yet contrive, withal, to enjoy a degree of comfort, and even happiness, which to us seems hard to understand under the circumstances.

[27] Labor in Europe and America: A Special Report on the Rates of Wages, the Cost of Subsistence, and the Condition of the Working Classes in Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the other Countries of Europe, and in the United States and British America. By Edward Young, Ph.D., Chief of the United States Bureau of Statistics. 1875.

[28] Hallam’s Middle Ages, ch. ix. part i.

[29] Id. ch. ix. part ii.

[30] $1 a day for laborers was offered by public advertisement in February of this year, by the superintendent of the Centennial grounds, and men were glad to take it. How strange the spectacle in free America—how fruitless and disheartening the struggle it portends—when legislation is invoked at Albany, in the great State of New York, to keep up a fictitious price of labor!

SIR THOMAS MORE.

A HISTORICAL ROMANCE.

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.

VI.

There was a castle in Yorkshire whose tall, majestic towers commanded a view of the country for miles around, rising far above the sombre depths of the ancient forest-trees that covered the hills on which the castle was seated.

A silence like the grave reigned within and around this princely habitation. Merry young pages no longer bounded over balustrades and the walks winding from the drawbridge. The Gothic arches no more re-echoed with the noisy clamor of the hounds nor the loud cheering of the young hunters. Rank weeds covered the lofty ramparts and clusters of wild flowers swung between their solitary battlements, as though nature had struggled to conceal the eternal mourning which they seemed for ever condemned to wear.

A traveller approached the castle and examined with great attention the arches bearing the arms of the earls of Northumberland. He held by the bridle a beautiful horse, covered with sweat and dust, whose drooping head and trembling limbs attested his extreme fatigue.

“This is certainly the place!” he exclaimed, still looking around him. “I recognize the crouching lion of Northumberland!” He knocked loudly and waited a long time.

At length the door opened and an old man appeared before him.

“What do you want?” he demanded brusquely of the traveller. “If you ask hospitality, you will not be refused; but if you ask to see my master, the Earl of Northumberland, you cannot see him.”

“It is he whom I wish to see,” replied the stranger.

The old domestic contracted his white eyebrows. “That cannot be. Since the death of his father he sees nobody.”

“The old Count of Northumberland dead!” replied Sir Walsh (for it was he).

“Alas! yes, for an entire year. We buried him at Alnwick,” answered the old servant, wiping away a tear.

“Go to your master,” replied Sir Walsh,” and tell him that some one asks to see him on the part of the king. I will wait for you here.”

“On the part of the king!” replied the old servant. “On the part of the king! That will make a difference, I think, and I do not want you to stay here. Follow me.”

After fastening the horse to one of the iron rings which were fixed in the wall of the inner court, he led Sir Walsh into the castle. They crossed long courts, then entered magnificent galleries, where they saw arranged, between the Gothic arches which separated the vast and deeply-embrasured windows, the richest armorial trophies of all ages.

Lances, longbows, and javelins filled up the interstices. Shields and bucklers, borne in battle by the ancestors of the noble earl, were eating away with rust, and the festoons of spider-webs which hung from the huge antlers of stag and deer bore witness to the neglect and indifference of the master of the castle.

Sir Walsh, as he passed along, regarded all these things with an admiration mingled with astonishment. He could not understand the state of abandonment in which he found a habitation that he had always heard described as being one of the most magnificent in all England. The delicately-sculptured wainscoting, the costly paintings, the rich gilding of the rafters and ceilings, were renowned among artists and considered as models which they labored to imitate.

“How singular all this is!” he said to himself. “How can Lord Percy, whom I have known at court, so brilliant and accomplished, content himself in a place like this, magnificent without doubt, but abandoned, desolate, especially since the death of his father? And why has he not returned to court, where his tastes and habits naturally call him?”

While absorbed in these reflections Sir Walsh, preceded by his aged conductor, entered a large octagonal saloon, gilded all over and pierced with crosslets on every side, through which poured floods of brilliantly-colored light, reflected from the stained glass with which they were ornamented.

The view extended very far, and a large river, like a broad belt of silver, wound through the beautiful fields, interspersed with clumps of trees that increased still more the beauty of the landscape.

Walsh paused, enraptured with the

prospect that met his gaze, and his conductor made a sign to him to remain there until he had informed his master of his arrival.

The old domestic noiselessly entered Lord Percy’s chamber, and paused near the door in order to observe him; then an expression of profound sadness stole over his features and he advanced still more slowly.

Seated in the embrasure of a large window, and always dressed in the deepest mourning, Lord Percy scarcely ever left his room. Surrounded by a great number of books and papers, he appeared to be absorbed in reading, and the messenger was quite near before he was aware of his presence.

“My lord!” he said in a very low and gentle voice, “there is a stranger here who wishes to speak to you.”

“You know very well that I receive nobody, Henry,” said the Earl of Northumberland without turning his head. “Have you asked him his business?”

“Most assuredly,” replied Henry with a lofty and important air. “I know it, too. He comes here on the part of the king—of the king himself,” he repeated.

“On the part of the king!” cried Northumberland, turning pale. “Of the king! What does he want with me? Have I not done enough for him? Is he not satisfied with having destroyed all my hopes, all my happiness, all my future? Of what consequence to him now is my existence?”

And, overwhelmed with the weight of his afflictions, he folded his arms on his breast and forgot to give his servant an answer.

“My dear son,” murmured the old man softly, after a moment of silent attention, “are you going now

to torment yourself again, and may be, after all, without any cause?” For he dreaded beyond expression anything that might arouse or excite what he termed his master’s “manias.”

“No, my old foster-father, do not be alarmed!” replied Northumberland, who knew very well what was passing in his mind. “Go, and bring in this stranger.”

He then arose, in a state of agitation he was unable to control.

Henry soon returned, bringing Sir Walsh.

On entering, the latter was prepared to give Northumberland a joyful surprise and fold him in his arms; but on being suddenly ushered into his presence he recoiled in astonishment. Could this be the gay and brilliant young man he had known, always cheerful, always affable, whose handsome face and charming manner attracted all around him? Dressed in the deepest mourning, which by contrast increased the pallor of his face, his expression anxious and haggard, a painful constraint was observable in all his movements.

“You do not recognize me, Lord Percy,” said Sir Walsh at last. “There was a time when you called me your friend, and I was proud to bear the title!”

“Oh! no, my dear Walsh,” replied Northumberland, “I could not have forgotten you. Rather say you no longer recognize me; for time has passed like a dream. Since you saw me last I have been transformed into another person. But tell me, why does the name of him who sends you come to invade my solitude? What have I done to him to bring him here again to disturb my ashes? For am I not already dead? Does this castle not strike you as being strangely like a

tomb, to which no one any more finds entrance?”

“But I think,” said Sir Walsh, astonished at this outburst and forcing a smile, “that some young girl, descended from her palace of clouds to the midst of your abode, draws around her crowds of your astonished vassals. They admire her snowy robes and crown of stars.”

“No,” replied Northumberland gloomily; “no, never! No female inhabits this place. She who ought to have ruled here will never come, and she who did rule would not remain!”

“What do you mean by that riddle?” inquired Walsh. “What! is the Countess of Northumberland no longer here?”

“No, she is no longer here,” replied Lord Percy. And he passed his hand over his eyes, unable to conceal the emotion all these questions excited; for, in spite of himself, the sight of an old friend had agitated him to the depths of his soul. Man was not made for solitude; he is a social being; he has need of his fellow-men to love them, or even to complain of and to them; and for many long, weary months no human being had knocked at his door or come to offer a word of consolation.

Walsh regarded him with increasing solicitude; at length, unable to restrain his feelings, he threw his arms around his neck.

“My dear Percy,” he exclaimed, “what has happened to you? You seem overwhelmed with sorrow. I felt so happy in anticipation of surprising you by this visit, and again seeing you at the head of all the young nobles of the north, loved as you were among us, the life of the chase and of all those sports in which you excelled! Alas! my

friend, what misfortune has befallen you? Tell me; for I swear I will never more leave you.”

“What misfortune has befallen me, do you ask, my dear old friend?” replied Northumberland, deeply moved. “Yes, you are ignorant of all. And what does it matter? It was irreparable. But tell me the cause that brought you to me. Why has the king sent you hither?”

“For nothing that need give you the least uneasiness,” replied Walsh—“a commission readily executed, and in which you must assist me. We will return to this later. Tell me first of yourself—of yourself alone, my friend—and of your father.”

“My father? He died in my arms more than a year ago without suffering. I have done what he wished,” continued Northumberland, his eyes filling with tears. “I have nothing with which to reproach myself on that account. I have obeyed him. Yes,” he added, fixing his eyes on the floor, “that is the only thought that ever comes to console me.”

“I do not understand you!” replied Walsh. “Speak more explicitly; explain what you mean.”

“Well, know, then,” replied Northumberland in an altered voice, and making a violent effort to control himself—“know that for a long time I loved Anne Boleyn—yes, Anne Boleyn! We were betrothed. The day, the hour, for our marriage were fixed, when the king tore her from me for ever! In his jealous hatred he commanded Cardinal Wolsey, to whose household I belonged, to summon me before him, and forbid me in his name dreaming, for an instant, of marrying her; but on my refusing to obey he appealed to my father, who ordered

me to marry immediately a daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, under penalty of visiting upon me all the weight of his indignation if I hesitated for one moment. In vain I tried to resist; my father was furious and threatened me with his curse. I at length submitted, and you have all assisted at the festivities of my marriage, and, seeing my new bride, have pierced my heart with your congratulations and assurances of my future happiness. I then left the court. I brought her here; and that young wife, justly wounded by my melancholy, absurd and ridiculous in her eyes, wearied of the retired life I compelled her to lead, left me very soon after my father’s death and returned to her family. And—shall I acknowledge it?—sensible of the wrong I have done her, I am quite reconciled to being forgotten and finding myself abandoned and alone. I have dismissed successively all my pages and valets, retaining only the oldest servants belonging to my house. Henry, my old foster-father, takes entire charge and control of everything. Misfortune and sorrow have made me prematurely old; I need the companionship of the aged, and not of youth. I love to hear around me the slow and faltering step of a man ready to sink into the grave; he seems to hasten the hour for me. His soul, cold and subdued, soothes and refreshes mine. He never laughs; never comes to tell me of a thousand chimerical projects, a thousand vain hopes, recalling those in which I have indulged in days past. His presence alone would be sufficient to expel them! And yet, notwithstanding all this, the sorrow that slumbers in my soul is often suddenly aroused, more wild and insupportable than ever. Wearied by long vigils and sleepless nights, I

sometimes imagine I see Queen Catherine enter my chamber; the reflection of her gold-embroidered robes sheds a dazzling light around her. Her ladies follow. I hear the rustling of their heavy trains; I hear them laugh and converse together about the tournament of the day before. Then all becomes dark! Anne Boleyn turns her eyes away from me; she is envious of the queen; pride, ambition, stifle in her heart every sentiment of affection. Then my agony is renewed. I weep, I sigh, and the shadows vanish into nothingness.

“What happiness can any one expect to find in the honors of a usurped rank? Ah! my friend, I have seen, and felt, and suffered everything. Our faults are the sole cause of all our afflictions. Therefore, far from feeling incensed at the injustice of men, I no more recognize an enemy among them. My heart goes out with deepest pity toward the suffering ones of earth, and I would gladly be able to console them all.”

Saying this, Northumberland paused, overcome by emotion.

“Ah!” at length replied Walsh, who had listened with rapt attention, “how limited are our judgments! Had I been asked the name of the happiest mortal living, I should have given yours without a moment’s hesitation.”

“I know it, and have been told it a hundred times,” replied Northumberland earnestly. “Many men have had their marriage relations dissolved, their fortunes changed, and have still borne up courageously under their misfortunes; but with me it cannot be thus. If Anne Boleyn had married another lord of the court—well, I might have been reconciled. I should at least have been spared the outrage of her dishonor;

for her dishonor is mine! I had so taken her heart into my own, united my life so entirely with hers, in order not to suffer the slightest stain to touch it, that there is no torture equal to that which I now endure. Every moment I feel, I suffer; I hear the whisperings of this infamous and widespread report which her foolish vanity alone prevents her from discovering around her.”

“Dear Percy,” replied Walsh, “you cannot imagine how much you exaggerate all this! The solitude in which you live has excited you to such a degree that you almost imagine she bears the name of Countess of Northumberland.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed excitedly, “she bears it in my heart; and there, at least, no one can dispute her right!”

“And poor Lady Shrewsbury?” replied Walsh.

“Lady Shrewsbury,” cried Northumberland, “is the victim, like myself, of compulsion! Never have I regarded her as my wife. If the king had demanded my head, I should not have been bound to obey; but a father’s curse is a weight that cannot be supported! My obstinacy would have brought upon his tottering old age the bitterness of poverty and want. No, no; that is my only excuse, and Lady Shrewsbury herself would have forgiven me had she known my sorrow.”

“My dear Percy,” interrupted Walsh anxiously, “I am deeply grieved to find you in this condition; your heart misleads you, and I perceive the commission with which I am charged will be anything but agreeable. However, what can I do? Here,” he added, unfolding a letter and a roll of written parchment, from which hung the king’s seals, “take and read.”

He preferred giving him the order to read rather than have the unpleasant task of verbally announcing what he now foresaw would cause him such extreme grief. Northumberland had no sooner glanced over it than the parchment fell from his hands.

“Who? I?” he cried. “I go to arrest the archbishop at the very moment when all the nobility of these parts are assembled to assist at the ceremony of his installation! I, formerly of his household, who have spent all the happiest years of my youth with him—charge me with such a commission? The king wishes, then, to have me regarded with horror and detestation by all the inhabitants of this country! Know, my friend,” continued Percy, fixing his flashing eyes upon Walsh, “that since Wolsey came here he has made himself universally loved and cherished. He is no longer the vain, imperious man whom you knew; adversity has entirely changed him. He occupies himself only in doing good, reconciling family differences, and relieving the distressed. And this gorgeous entry, which causes the king so much uneasiness, he was to have made on foot with the utmost possible simplicity.

“For a long time Wolsey hesitated, entirely for fear of seeing his enemies array themselves against him; but his clergy seemed so wounded at conduct contrary to the usage of all his predecessors that he at length consented. But see how they deceive the king, and endeavor to excite him against those who least of all merit his displeasure!”

“What shall I say to you, my dear Northumberland?” replied Walsh. “When the king issues an order, how can its execution be avoided? All that you say is

true beyond doubt, but neither you nor I can do anything; it only remains for us to try and accomplish this disagreeable commission with as little noise as possible.”

“Ah!” replied Northumberland, “why has he imposed such a commission on me? See if even the slightest pleasure of my life is not instantly extinguished. I was rejoicing at seeing you, and immediately I am made to pay for it.”

He continued for a long time talking in this manner, when, Walsh having expressed a desire to go through the castle, Northumberland consented. They found everything in a state of extreme disorder. In many places no care was taken even to open the house to admit the light of day. As old Henry successively opened to them each new hall of the immense castle, the dust, collected in heaps like piles of down, arose and flew away to collect again further on in the apartment upon some more valuable piece of furniture.

Walsh could not avoid expressing to the earl his surprise at seeing him so neglect the magnificent abode of his ancestors. “It is wrong,” replied Percy, “but I prize nothing any more. Of what consequence is it to me whether the roof that shelters me is handsome or plain? When our hearts are crushed by sorrow, we become oblivious to all outward surroundings.”

*  *  *  *  *

When night came on, his host retired and left him to that repose of which, after the fatigue of his journey, he stood so much in need. Northumberland ordered old Henry to retire and leave him alone as usual; but Henry had decided otherwise, and continued for a

long time to come and go and pass the chamber slowly under various pretexts, as his solicitude on account of his master was more and more increased on remarking that his habitual sadness had been redoubled since the advent of his visitor.

“Accursed stranger!” he said to himself, “bird of ill-omen, what has brought him here? That famished maw of his would have been very well able to carry him far from the moats of our castle! It is the king who sends him here; but is not our son king of these parts?” And thus muttering to himself, old Henry walked on. Not being able to determine on leaving his master, he stopped and peered through the door in order to observe Lord Percy. The latter sat leaning on the table before him, his eyes closed, his head resting on his hands, and seemingly oblivious to everything around him.

“There he sits still, to take a cold with this trouble!” continued Henry. “However, I must go and leave him.” And the old domestic, still turning his palsied head to look back, passed slowly under the heavy tapestry screen, that fell rustling behind him.

“He is gone,” said Northumberland to himself—“gone, perhaps, for ever; for who knows how long Henry has yet to live? What happiness to think we must die! When weary with suffering, the soul reposes with a bitter joy upon the brink of that tomb which alone can deliver her from her woes! How the certainty of seeing them end sweetens the sorrows we endure! Here where I stand” (he arose to his feet), “beside this hearth, each one of my sires has taken his place, and each has successively passed away. Their armor hangs here

empty; their names alone remain inscribed upon them. Why have not I the courage, then, to endure this time of trial they call ‘life,’ which I have wished to consider the end, but which is only a road leading to the end—a road perilous, rough, and wearing? The shortest is the one I consider the best; and he who travels over it most rapidly, has he not found true happiness?

“Have you not sometimes seen, in the midst of a violent storm, a poor bird wildly struggling with winds and waves? You behold it for a moment in the whirlpool, and suddenly it disappears. Just so I have passed through the midst of the world; I had hoped to shine there, because I was dazzled with it. To-day it becomes necessary to forget it. O my soul! I wish thee, I command thee, to forget.”

At this moment a slight noise was heard. Northumberland started.

“What do you want, Henry?” he asked, seeing the old man standing like a shadow at the end of the apartment.

“Nothing!” he replied impatiently.

“But truly,” said Lord Percy, “why have you returned?”

“To see if you were asleep,” brusquely answered the old servant, approaching him. “It was scarcely worth the trouble,” he continued, elevating his voice, “of harboring so carefully this new-comer, if he must pay his reckoning in this way.”

“Ah!” replied Northumberland, regarding his old foster-father with a suppliant expression.” Tell me, Henry, have you never known what it was to grieve for one whom you loved?”

“Ay, in sooth,” replied Henry, “unfortunately I have known it;

but we are not able to live, like you, in idleness, and have hardly time to be unhappy. When I lost my poor Alice, your foster-mother, what anguish did I not feel in the depths of my soul! Well, if I had stopped to think of her, I should have heard immediately my name resounding through all the turrets of the castle: ‘Henry! my lord—my lord goes hunting; hurry! make haste! my lord gives a ball this evening to all the ladies of the country.’ And away I had to go, to come, to run; otherwise my lord your father would fly into a passion. How would you find time to weep if somebody was always calling after you? Besides, I—poor Henry—if they had seen me sitting, like you, all the day in silence, with tears in my eyes and my arms folded, they would have laughed at me, and the pages would have called me a fool.”

“That is true; you are right,” replied Northumberland in an abstracted manner. “You say, then they gave balls here?”

“And superb ones, too!” replied Henry, who liked, above all things, to talk about the old times. “In those days you were not here; they educated you with Monseigneur the Cardinal, our good archbishop at present.”

On hearing these words Northumberland became violently agitated, and his old servant, perceiving his countenance change and his features contract, stopped suddenly in great alarm.

“You are ill, my lord?” he exclaimed.

“No, no,” replied Northumberland; “be calm. Leave me, Henry; I want to be alone. Go to your bed—I command you.”

Henry, forced to leave his master, as he went reproached himself

for having spoken of the fêtes the Countess of Northumberland had given in the castle; he imagined it was the recollection of his mother that had so affected Lord Percy.

“The archbishop! the archbishop!” repeated Northumberland. “Oh! let me banish the name, in mercy—for a few hours, at least! He said, I believe, that they gave balls here! What did he say? Yes, that must be it: my mother loved them. Yes,” he continued, looking round at the large and magnificent panels of his chamber, “here they hung garlands and baskets of flowers; a thousand lamps reflected their brilliant colors; delicious music floated on the perfumed air; crowds of people of every age, sex, and rank eagerly gathered here. Time has very soon reduced them to an equality; the sound of their footsteps is heard no more; their voices are mute; they have all passed away. I alone still exist.”

The entire night was spent in these reflections, and when day began to dawn the heavy tramp of horses was heard in the courtyard, and soon, in the cold fog of morning, there issued from the castle gate a troop of armed men wearing long cloth cloaks and caps. It was the earl’s retainers, whom he had assembled during the night from all the surrounding country. He rode in the midst of them in profound silence; even Sir Walsh, reading in his countenance the melancholy dejection under which he labored, had simply pressed his hand without daring to address him a word.

As to the followers of Northumberland, they were astonished at this sudden departure; they were completely ignorant of whither their master was carrying them, having learned nothing from old Henry himself, to whom Lord Percy had

deemed it inexpedient to reveal the destination, and still less the object, of this expedition. The old man felt singularly anxious on the subject, as he was every day becoming more and more accustomed to regard himself as the guardian and adviser of him whom he called his son. Therefore, after having closed the gate of the castle upon the travellers, he went sadly and took his station on the highest tower, to see in what direction his master was going.

A few moments only he followed them with his eyes; for, the valley once crossed, their route conducted them into the depths of the forest, and the cavalcade was soon lost to view.

TO BE CONTINUED.

VAGO ANGELLETTO CHE CANTANAS VAI.

FROM PETRARCH.

Sweet bird, that, singing under altered skies,

Art mourning for thy season of delight—

For lo! the cheerful months forsake thee quite,

And all thy sunshine into shadow dies—

O thou who art acquainted with unrest!

Could thy poor wit my kindred mood divine,

How wouldst thou fold thy wings upon my breast,

And blend thy melancholy plaint with mine!

I know not if with thine my songs would rhyme,

For haply she thou mournest is not dead:

Less kind are death and heaven unto me;

But the chill twilight, and the sullen time,

And thinking of the sweet years and the sad,

Move me, wild warbler, to discourse with thee.

ITALIAN COMMERCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

“Your mind is tossing on the ocean;

There, where your argosies with portly sail,

Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,

Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,

Do overpeer the petty traffickers,

That curt’sy to them, do them reverence,

As they fly by them with their woven wings.”

Merchant of Venice, act i. sc. i.

Thucydides, in the introduction to his history, remarks that one of the principal causes that raised some of the Greek cities to such a high degree of prosperity and power was their engagement in mercantile pursuits. All the great peoples of antiquity by whom the shores of the Mediterranean were occupied—Phœnicians, Carthaginians, Etruscans, Ionians of Asia Minor—rose to wealth and importance by the same means. The Romans alone despised it.

After the subversion of the Western Empire and the last inroads of the barbarians, the natives of Italy were the first to emerge from the ruins of the ancient world. Except religion, they found no worthier or more potent element of civilization than commerce, which procures, to use the words of a celebrated writer, what is of far greater value than mere money—“the reciprocation of the peculiar advantages of different countries”; and throughout the middle ages, until the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope and the discovery of America, Italy was the most forward nation in Christendom for wealth, refinement of manners, and intellectual culture.

Italian commerce reached its greatest development between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries—that is, between the ages when Marco Polo travelled to Tartary, China, and the Indies and Christopher

Columbus discovered America. In these two men, representatives of Venice and Genoa, are embodied the geniuses of trade and navigation; and as though Florence, seated between the rival cities and engaged rather in reaping the fruits than in sowing the seeds of enterprise, were destined to unite in herself the glory of both Italian shores, one of her citizens—Americus Vespucius—gives his name to the New World. This commerce began slowly but progressed rapidly, and attained its noblest proportions during the fourteenth century, when for a hundred years it spread over every sea and land then known in the eager search after riches, bringing back to its votaries whatever luxury Europe, Asia, and Africa produced or man’s invention had evolved out of the necessities of his nature. Next, it gradually fell away and almost disappeared in the sixteenth century, leaving behind it only the cold consolation that there was no reason why it alone should be excepted from the common doom of human affairs, which, when they have enjoyed a certain measure of success, must surely decline and fall.

When the Goths, Longobards, and Carlovingians had conquered Italy, although most of the arts and sciences were lost or hidden in cloisters, neither trade nor commerce was quite neglected; but, despite the

dangers from pirates, the ignorance of the sea, and the exactions of the lawless on land, the Adriatic and Mediterranean were timidly attempted by the inhabitants of the coast, while in the interior of the country an interchange of commodities was carried on between neighboring districts at places set apart for the purpose. These places were generally the large square or principal street of a town, or under the walls of a monastery, and the interchange took place on certain days appointed by public authority.

The assemblies of the people were usually held on the Saturday, and were at first called markets; but afterwards the rarer and more important ones, which were held annually and for several consecutive days, were termed fairs, from the Latin word feria, because they always took place on the feast of some saint. Many rights and privileges were granted at an early period to the merchants who exhibited wares at these yearly gatherings; for without such inducements few cared to undertake a journey with a part, or perhaps the whole, of their earthly substance about them, along roads and across ferries beset by robber-nobles, who levied toll from passers-by and sometimes seized goods and persons for their own use.

The Venetians began earlier to sail on distant seas, and maintained themselves longer on the water, than did the natives of any other parts of Italy. Cassiodorus represents them in the sixth century as occupied solely in salt-works, from which they derived their only profit; but in course of time they issued from their lagoons to become the most industrious and venturesome traffickers in the world. At the beginning of the ninth century they had already introduced into Italy

some of the delicacies of the East, but drew odium on themselves for conniving with pirates and men-stealers to capture people and sell them into slavery in distant quarters of Europe and Asia. On the opposite shore of Italy the inhabitants of Amalfi showed themselves the most successful navigators during the early middle ages, trading with Sicily and Tarentum, and even with Egypt, Syria, and Constantinople. Their city is described by the poet-historian William of Apulia, in the eleventh century, as the great mart for Eastern goods, and the enterprise of its sailors as extending to all the ports of the Mediterranean. Flavio Gioja, a citizen of Amalfi, if he did not invent the mariner’s compass, as is somewhere asserted, certainly improved it about the year 1302, either by its mode of suspension or by the attachment of the card to the needle itself. This discovery gave such an impulse to navigation that what had been for ages hardly more than a skilful art became at once a science, and vessels no longer crept along the shore or slipped from island to island, but attempted “the vasty deep” and crossed over the ocean to the New World.

Another rich emporium at an early period, on the same side of Italy, was Pisa. The city was four or five miles from the sea, but had a port formed by a natural bay to the southward of the old mouth of the Arno at a place called Calambrone. The Pisans at first traded principally with Sicily and Africa. They fitted out expeditions against the Saracens,[31] seized several islands

in the Mediterranean, and with both land-troops and seamen took an important part in the first Crusade, being careful, before returning from the East, to establish factories at Antioch and Constantinople. They also sent fleets to humble the Mohammedan cities of Northern Africa. Through commercial jealousy and political reasons they became involved in bitter wars with the Genoese for the possession of Corsica, and with the Amalfitans, who had sided against the emperor. The Pisans, as auxiliaries of the Emperor Lothaire, sent a strong squadron to Amalfi, which was held by the Normans, and, after a rigorous blockade, took it by storm in 1137. It was on this occasion that a copy of the long-lost Pandects of Justinian was found, which is said to be the original from which all subsequent copies in Italy were made, thus reviving the study of Roman law. It was taken from its captors by the Florentines in 1411, and is now preserved in the Laurentian Library at Florence. The monk Donizo, in his metrical life of the Countess Matilda, being annoyed that the mother of the countess should have been buried in Pisa, describes the city somewhat contemptuously as a flourishing emporium whose port was filled with large ships and frequented by many different races of people, even by swarthy Moors.

To the north of Pisa rose her haughty rival, Genoa, surnamed the Superb from her pride and magnificent natural position. After four sanguinary wars with the Pisans, the Genoese swept their fleets from the sea, destroyed their port, and ruined their foreign commerce. The city never recovered from that blow, and the population, which once exceeded 100,000, has fallen to a fifth of that number.

The Genoese had at first been the allies of the Pisans, and united with them to drive the Saracens out of several important islands. They also ravaged the coast of Northern Africa in the eleventh century, and, taking part in the first Crusade, obtained settlements on the shore of Palestine, particularly at Acre. Owing to their secure position at home and their foothold in the East and the islands of the West, their city became one of the two great maritime powers of Italy and the only noteworthy rival of Venice. The power of the Genoese and Venetians was immensely increased by the Crusades, and at one time so feared were they in the Levant that they were able to draw pensions and exact tribute from the pusillanimous emperor at Constantinople. The Venetians were especially favored by Alexius Comnenus, through whom they acquired convenient establishments along the Bosphorus and at Durazzo in Albania. Their doge was honored with the pompous title of Protosebaste. In the meanwhile intestine disturbances and wars with neighboring republics had reduced several of those cities which had lately been most flourishing, and none could compete successfully in the fourteenth century with Venice and Genoa, to which the foreign trade of Italy was left, and to whose marts the produce of the Levant and the countries bordering on the lower Mediterranean was brought, and either there or at the great cities of the interior exchanged for domestic manufactures and the industries of Central and Northern Europe. The carrying trade was almost exclusively their own, but the home or inland business was shared by many other cities—principally by Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Lucca, and Milan.

At that period the Atlantic ocean and northern coasts of Europe were but rarely navigated by Italian merchants. The Venetians alone despatched annually a large fleet, which—taking its name, the Flanders fleet, from its destination—carried on an enterprising and lucrative traffic with the Low Countries, and, in connection with the Hanseatic League or directly, spread over England, Scotland, and the nations lying on the North Sea and the Baltic, the spices, gums, silks, pearls, diamonds, and numerous other articles of oriental origin which they had procured from the Levant and further Indies. The Genoese furnished the same things to the French, Spaniards, and Moors of Andalusia; but Portugal was served by their rivals.

A maritime power had risen before this time which disputed with the Genoese and Venetians the ascendency on the Mediterranean. This was Barcelona, whose sailors were among the best on the sea, and whose merchants were largely engaged in commerce. Many bold encounters took place between the Catalans and Italians, through jealousies of trade, but the former finally succumbed.

The products of the more distant East reached Italy in Genoese and Venetian ships, through Armenian merchants at Trebizond, and through Arabs by way of Alexandria and Damascus. Those of the north, so necessary for a seafaring people, were brought from the mouth of the Don, the merchandise being floated down that great river in boats from the interior. The Mongols were the masters of all the region thereabouts; but the insinuating Italians, aware of the interest of this branch of commerce, played upon their barbarous pride with so

much dexterity that they succeeded in making treaties with them by which they were allowed to occupy certain trading posts where the goods ordered might accumulate and their own wares be exchanged for the productions of Russia, Tartary, and Persia. The wily Genoese had bought from a Tartar prince, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a small piece of land on the south-eastern shore of the Crimea on which to build a factory. Only a few rude cabins were raised at first, for stores and the dwellings of their agents; but the traffic soon brought together a large population, sumptuous palaces were erected, a strong and lofty wall was built around, and Kaffa[32] became one of the most opulent colonies of the republic, with a population at one time of 80,000.

The rival Venetians had their great deposit at the city of Azov, on the banks of the Don, twenty miles from its mouth. They were not the proprietors, and, although they received numerous favors from the Tartar governor, they were obliged to share them with the Genoese, Florentines, and others, who also did a flourishing business. The amount of goods collected there was so immense and the value so considerable, that when, as sometimes happened, a destructive fire broke out or the place was plundered, the loss was felt as a shock to commerce throughout the whole of Europe.

All along the coast of the Black Sea the Italians plied a profitable trade, and many merchants were settled at Trebizond, from which

vantage-ground they had an important communication open with Armenia, whose people, being united by religion to the Latins, granted them very valuable commercial privileges. The Venetians were favored above the rest. They had churches, magazines, and inns, coined money, and in all matters in dispute were tried by judges chosen among their countrymen, or rather their own fellow-citizens. They could introduce their goods without paying duty, freely traverse the kingdom, and monopolize the exportation of camel’s hair, which was an important article of traffic. The Genoese were no less enterprising than their rivals, and restored in the port of Trebizond a mole that had been built by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Large quantities of India goods, and especially spiceries, were stored by Italian merchants in the warehouses of Trebizond, Damascus, and Alexandria. There were several overland routes by which this merchandise was transported, but none of them was safe, on account of the frequent revolutions in the countries through which they ran. Some of the caravans that brought the commodities of India and China passed through Balkh, the Baetria of the ancients and at one time the commercial centre of eastern Asia, then up to Bokhara, whence they descended the Oxus for a distance, touched at Khiva, and, traversing the Caspian Sea, ascended the river Kour (the Cyrus of Strabo, xi. p. 509) for seventy miles to its junction with the Aras (the Araxes of Herodotus, iv. 40), from which they crossed by a journey of four or five days into the historical Phasis at Sharapan and down to the Euxine. Another beaten track entered Syria by the Tigris and the Euphrates, and diverged towards the several

ports of Palestine and Asia Minor. It passed through Bagdad, which was a great commercial emporium during the middle ages and an entrepôt for the commodities of eastern and western Asia. A memorial of those days when Frank merchants, mingling with Persians, Arabs, Turks, Hindoos, Koords, and Armenians, ransacked her splendid bazaars, remains in our language in the word Baldachin, because canopies made of costly stuff interwoven with gold thread were manufactured in this city, which was known to the Italians as Baldacca, and in the adjective form Baldacchino. Much trade was also done by way of the Red Sea, Cairo, and Alexandria.

In all the ports of the Euxine and Mediterranean the Italians had shops and warehouses, and every rich company kept a number of factors, who despatched goods as they got orders and maintained the interests of their principals. An officer called a consul, who was appointed by the government at home, resided in each of these foreign sea-ports, to defend the rights of his countrymen, and decide differences among themselves, or between them and strangers. Consuls were recognized as official personages by the sovereign in whose territory they resided, and were honored as public magistrates by their own people, from whom they received certain fees for their support, according to the quality and amount of business they were called upon to perform.

The maritime republics of Italy were very fortunate in having transported the Crusaders to the Holy Land in their ships, for by this they acquired many rich establishments in the Levant, and it was not long before the dissolute and degraded

Greeks, who would neither take counsel in peace nor could defend themselves in war, became subject to the imperious will of the Italians.

The Venetians obtained in 1204 the fertile island of Candia, which became the centre of their extensive Egyptian and Asiatic trade. They also had a quarter in Constantinople, which they surrounded by a wall, the gates of which were guarded by their own soldiers, and a distinct anchorage for their own vessels in the Golden Horn. A senate and bailiff representing the doge held authority in this settlement, and exercised jurisdiction over the minor establishments of the republic in Roumelia.

The Genoese were still more powerful at the capital, and the Emperor Michael Palæologus, who was indebted to them for his return to the throne, had given them the beautiful suburbs of Pera and Galata, on an elevated plateau, which they made still more secure, under the elder Andronicus, by a moat and triple row of walls. To these places they transferred their stores and stock; nor was it long before the churches, palaces, warehouses, and public buildings of Pera vied in magnificence with those of the metropolis itself. The island of Chios, where gum-mastic was collected and the finest wine produced, was another of their colonies. These were all ruled by a podestà annually sent from Genoa. The Genoese and Venetians had also factories in Barbary, through which they drove a brisk trade with the interior of Africa. To them more than to any others was it due that for three hundred years the commerce of Italy was famous from the Straits of Gibraltar to the remotest gulf in the Euxine.

The maritime strength of the

Italian republics, especially of Genoa and Venice, corresponded to their vast commercial interests and the number of colonies they were expected to enlarge and defend. Thus, the Pisans in 1114 sent an armament, consisting of 300 vessels of various sizes, carrying 35,000 men and 900 horses, to the conquest of the Balearic Islands, which had become a nest of Moorish pirates. A great part of these troops were mercenaries procured from all parts of the world, and contingents drawn from their possessions in Sardinia. In 1293 the Genoese fitted out in a single month, against the Venetians, 200 galleys, each of which bore from 220 to 300 combatants recruited within the continental limits of the republic; and in the vast arsenal of Venice during the fourteenth century 800 men were continually at work, and 200 galleys, not to count the smaller craft, were kept ready in port for any emergency that might arise. Such formidable fleets were manned either by voluntary enlistments or impressment; the hope of heavy plunder, according to the barbarous war-system of those days, which the church strove against but could not wholly change, appealing to young men to serve as sailors or soldiers. The furious rivalry between Genoa and Venice began to show itself soon after the taking of Constantinople by the Franks in 1244, each desiring to reap alone the profits of the Levant trade. After many bloody encounters a peace was patched up in 1298, by which the latter was excluded for thirteen years from the Black Sea, along whose shores the former had colonies, forts, and factories, and was forbidden to send armed vessels to Syria. Terms so propitious raised the pride and influence of Genoa to

the utmost; and feared by all, and claiming to be mistress of the seas, she upheld the honor of her flag with extravagant solicitude. In 1332 she wasted the coast of Catalonia with a force of 200 galleys, and inflicted great injury on the commerce of Barcelona; and two years later, having captured twelve ships of the enemy, heavily freighted with merchandise, in the waters of Sicily, Cyprus, and Sardinia, with an example of ferocious cruelty which only the “accursed greed of gold” and a determination to exclude the Catalans from any share in Eastern commerce could prompt, six hundred prisoners were hanged at a single execution. She was resolved to command the seas, and consequently the trade of the world; but her rival, although crippled, was not prostrate, and the fourth war broke out between them in 1372 for possession of the classical island of Tenedos, so valuable as a naval station and renowned for its wheat and excellent red wine. The Genoese actually got into the lagoons of Venice, vowing to reduce her to the stagnant level of the waters, and approached so near to the city that their admiral could shout to the affrighted people on the quays, Delenda est Carthago! but by a singular freak of fortune they were themselves totally defeated, and glad to accept the mediation of Amadeus VI., Duke of Savoy. It was agreed that neither party should have the island in dispute, but that the duke should hold it at their common expense for two years and then dismantle the fortress.

During this war, called the War of Chioggia, which lasted until 1381, an unusually large number of corsairs roved the seas; but the Italians had long practised piracy, and whole communities were corsairs by

profession, just as on land condottieri could be hired to sack cities and castles and desolate whole provinces. The little town of Monaco was notorious during the middle ages for its pirates, as it still is for its ravenous land-sharks. There were two sorts of corsairs. Some were private individuals who went to sea through lust of gain, or because driven from their homes during the fights of faction, and seized whatever they could. These robberies and depredations marked piracy in its original form. Nevertheless during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries many otherwise honorable characters, who were often unjustly despoiled of their patrimony and driven as outcasts from their native cities, took to this occupation not entirely from inclination, but impelled by the brutality of their countrymen. We may recall as an extenuating circumstance what that grave judge, Lord Stowell, observed (2 Dods. 374) of the buccaneers, whose spirit at one time approached to that of chivalry in point of adventure, and whose manner of life was thought to reflect no disgrace upon distinguished Englishmen who engaged in it.

Other corsairs were patriotic citizens who armed their ships to injure the enemy during lawful hostilities; and although there was abuse in the system, they were not pirates, but privateersmen. Foreign nations used to buy ships from the Italians to increase their own armaments, or engage them to harass their opponents. It is curious, considering how completely maritime supremacy has deserted the Mediterranean for northern seas, to know that the poet Chaucer was sent by King Edward III. in November, 1372, as envoy to the republic of

Genoa to hire vessels for his navy; and Tytler says (Hist. of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 261) that in the same century many of the privateers employed by the Scots against England appear to have been vessels of larger dimensions and more formidable equipment than those of England, probably from their being foreign built, and furnished by the Genoese or the Venetians, for the purposes both of trade and piracy.

It was now that the word Jane came into the language—Chaucer and Spenser use it—for a small coin so-called from Janua (Genoa). It is termed in the old English statutes a galley half-pence.

The Florentines had originally no seaboard, and were obliged to charter ships wherever they could. In 1362, having taken into the service of the republic Pierin Grimaldi of Genoa, with two galleys, and hired two more vessels, their little fleet took the island of Giglio from the Pisans, and the following year, having broken into the port of Pisa itself, they took away the chains that protected it and hung them as trophies on the porphyry columns of their Baptistery.

The foreign commerce for which the maritime cities of Italy, and particularly Genoa and Venice, so savagely disputed, to the scandal of the Christian name among the infidels, as the old English traveller Sir John de Mandeville shows, was certainly very considerable, and a source of almost fabulous profit to those engaged in it who were fortunate in their ventures. Commerce was the foundation of Italy’s prosperity, which was greater than that of any other European country from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. The Italian merchants got cottons, silken goods, brocades, Cashmere shawls, spices, rhubarb

and other medicines, amber, indigo, pearls, and diamonds from India and Central Asia. From Persia there came silks, carpets, skins, and manufactured articles used by the great for clothing or for the comfort of their homes. Tartary and Russia furnished hemp, canvas, ship-timber, tar, wax, caviare, raw-hides, and peltries. From the ports of Syria and Asia Minor, and particularly from Smyrna, were shipped to Italy hare-skins, leather, camel’s hair, valonia, cotton stuffs, damasks, dried fruits, beeswax, drugs and electuaries, arms, armor, and cutlery; and many articles of Asiatic luxury and magnificence found their way thence through Italian merchants to the courts and castles of England, Scotland, France, Germany, and other northern nations. Greece sent fine wines, raisins, currants, filbert-nuts, silk, and alum. A large quantity of grain was brought into Italy from Egypt and the Barbary States; but the supply to the colonies in the Levant came mostly from the Black Sea. Wool, wax, sheep-skins, and morocco came from the Moorish provinces of Africa. These were the principal imports, and were exchanged for the products and manufactures of Italy and the countries to the north, for which the Italians acted as agents. The Genoese exported immense quantities of woven fabrics from the looms of Lombardy and Florence, fine linens from Bologna, and cloths of a coarser make from France, for which a ready market was found in the East and among the Italians settled in the Archipelago and Levant. The oils of Provence and the Riviera of Genoa, soaps, saffron, and coral, were also largely exported. Quicksilver was a valuable article in the hands of the Venetians, who got it

from Istria and sold it in Spain and the Levant; they also extracted a great amount of salt from Istria and Dalmatia, which was sold at a good profit in Lombardy and other parts of Italy. Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples also did a large foreign business; the last city importing cargoes of delicate Greek and Oriental wines, such as the famous Cyprian, Malmsey, and Muscatel, much of which was sent to different parts of Italy, and into England and the Netherlands. Spain, Portugal, and Flanders were supplied with the products of the Indies and Levant principally by Genoese and Venetian merchants. The latter especially had many privileges and fiscal exemptions in Flanders, and in returning from the North loaded their ships in Portugal with tin, silver bars, wines, and raisins; while the former had the greater part of the trade with the Moors of Africa and southern Spain, from whom, in return for spiceries and other Eastern products, they got gold, cordovans, and merino wool, which were sold to advantage in France and Italy.

The Italians were the best cloth-weavers in Europe in the fourteenth century, although the Flemings were not contemptible rivals. The manufacture of cloth was industriously carried on in many of their cities; in those of Tuscany particularly, the finest kind of work being done in Lucca. When this city was taken by Uguccione della Faggiuola, in 1314, the factories and goods were destroyed, and many citizens emigrated to other parts of Italy, and even into France, Germany, and England. Yet long before this Italian operatives had introduced, or at least improved, the art in the northern countries. Crapes, taffetas, velvets, silks, camelots, and

serges were extensively made in Italy, the richest quality being sold at Florence, where the home industries seemed to centre, and only the most skilled artisans were employed. The art of weaving wool was practised by thousands of citizens, and, nominally at least, by some of the noblest families of the city and contado (commune), since there was a law that no one could aspire to public office unless he were a member of one of the trades-corporations of the republic. The citizens of Florence were classed from 1266 into twelve companies of trades or professions, seven of which were called arti maggiori, viz., 1. lawyers and attorneys; 2. dealers in foreign stuffs; 3. bankers and money-changers; 4. woollen manufacturers and drapers; 5. physicians and apothecaries; 6. silk manufacturers and mercers; 7. furriers. The lower trades were called arti minori. The records of these corporations are now preserved in a part of the Uffizi palace devoted to the public archives of Florence. They range from A.D. 1300 to the end of the eighteenth century. Around the hall, which was fitted up a few years ago to receive them, are the portraits of some of the distinguished men who belonged to these guilds: Dante, Cosimo de’ Medici, Francesco Guicciardini, and others. Balmes gives an interesting account, after Capmany, in his European Civilization, p. 476, of “the trades-unions and other associations which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, commonly placed themselves under the patronage of some saint, and had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.” Although his long note refers principally to the industrial organization

of the city of Barcelona, it is acknowledged that Catalonia borrowed many of its customs and usages in this matter from the towns of Italy.

Before the middle of the fourteenth century there were over two hundred drapers’ shops in Florence, in which from seventy to eighty thousand pieces of cloth were made every year, to the value of 1,200,000 gold florins, and employing more than thirty thousand people. The historian John Villani says that the trade had been still more flourishing, when there were three hundred shops open and one hundred thousand pieces were made yearly, but that they were of a coarser quality and consequently did not bring as much money into the city, although more people got work. The art of dyeing cloths and other stuffs was cultivated by the Italians during the middle ages with considerable success. Alum, which is much used for this purpose, was eagerly sought after, and the Genoese obtained from Michael Palæologus, on payment of an annual sum, the exclusive right of extracting it from a certain mine in the Morea that had previously been worked by Arabs, Catalans, and others. The lessees began operations with a force of fifty men, and soon built a castle to protect themselves, and finally a town, which was destroyed by the Turks in 1455. The Florentines were so expert in dyeing wool that the material was sent to them for the purpose from other parts of Italy, and even from Germany and the Netherlands. It was only in 1858 that an immense wooden building for stretching and drying cloth in the sun, called Il tiratoio della lana, which had been used for over five hundred years, was torn down as too liable to catch fire.

The cloths of France and other northern countries found a sale in Florence, not so much for home use as for exportation through the Genoese and Venetians. An exception, however, must be made for a rich article called say, manufactured in Ireland, and esteemed so beautiful as to be worn by the ladies of that refined city.[33] John Villani, already mentioned, says that there was a quarter of Florence called Calimala, containing twenty stores of the coarser cloths of the North, of which thirty thousand pieces, of the value of three hundred thousand gold florins, were yearly imported.

Florence in the middle ages had a territory extending only a few miles round its walls; but the industry and speculative spirit of its citizens wonderfully enriched them, and, since “all things obey money” (Ecclesiastes x. 19), they soon became the predominant power, and finally the masters in Tuscany. They were money-changers, moneylenders, jewellers, and goldsmiths for the whole of Europe and no little part of the East. The elements of a business education were given to its youth in numerous schools, attended by some twelve hundred boys, who were taught arithmetic and book-keeping. A great deal of money circulated within the city itself, and a large amount was necessary, particularly before the introduction of bills of exchange, to accommodate merchants in their visits to other countries. The public mint coined annually during the fourteenth century from three hundred and fifty thousand to four hundred thousand gold florins, and about twenty thousand pounds weight of coppers, called danari da quattro, or half-farthings; and eighty private

banks assisted the circulation. The beautiful golden florins were first coined in the year 1252, bearing on one side the impression of St. John Baptist, the patron, and on the other that of a lily, the device of the city. This was considered the finest coin in the world, and so much admired that many princes and governments began to imitate it while preserving its original name, and consequently perpetuating the monetary renown of Florence. It was current in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The workmanship of the Florentines was so superior that they were often called upon to conduct or superintend the coinage in foreign countries. During the reign of King David II., in the first half of the thirteenth century, he appointed a Florentine one of the two keepers of the exchange for all Scotland, and masters of the mint; and under King Robert III. (1390-1424) gold was minted for that kingdom by Bonaccio of Florence.[34] In 1278 the Exchange at London was under the direction of some Lucca merchants; and it seems to be directly from the Italian that we get our English word cash, derived from cassa, the chest in which Italian merchants kept their money. We may have some idea of what a money-centre Florence was in that age from the fact that the notorious French adventurer, the Duke of Athens, who was elected Lord of Florence in 1342, contrived in the course of only ten months to draw four hundred thousand golden florins out of the city. The Florentines, who had the reputation of being the smartest people in Italy, were extremely fond of banking in all its branches. While the middle and lower orders of society were mostly engaged in mechanical occupations,

the higher classes handled the money, and would appear to have taken lessons of the Jews. The great feudal nobles of the north, with more land than gold, would often ask their chaplains to reprove them with some holy text of Scripture—Ecclesiasticus x. 10 being a favorite one—when interest was demanded or mortgages were forfeited. They were not by any means the only Italians who publicly courted the queen Regina Pecunia; the ancient name in England for a banker, which was Lombard, and the street in London called Lombard Street, preserving the memory of the Milanese and others out of Lombardy who took up their first residence there before the year 1274, and were great moneychangers and usurers. The stupendous fortunes of the Chigi, who gave Pope Alexander VII. to the church and are now Roman princes, and before them of the Medici family, which became royal, were amassed chiefly in the banking business; but it is a popular error that the well-known sign of the pawnbrokers’ three gilt balls is derived from the armorial bearings of the latter, which their agents in England and other countries placed over the doors of their loan-shops. The arms of the Medici were or, six torteaux gules except the one in chief, which was azure charged with three fleurs-de-lis or. Whether these roundlets had any allusion, as has been suggested, to doctors’ pills and the professional origin whence the family name is supposed to be derived, we cannot determine; but the gold pieces called bezants because coined at Constantinople—Byzantium—and so common at an early period in Italy that the saying Aver buoni Bisanzi was a proverbial expression of one

who had plenty of money, seem to have been early the distinguishing sign of money-lenders and changers, and are the true origin of the pawnbrokers’ balls.

The shrewdness of the Italians in money matters did not always save them from disastrous failures and bankruptcies caused by wars, breach of faith in persons too high to be reached, loss of goods and bullion by fire, piracy, shipwreck, and other accidents. The first great failure of this kind was that of a mercantile company in 1296, which had existed for one hundred and twenty years, and became insolvent for 400,000 gold florins, due to citizens and strangers. It was felt throughout the republic of Florence like the loss of a battle. Even worse was the failure of the Bardi and Peruzzi in 1347. They were both merchants and bankers, and stood at the head of their class in Italy. Loans to the kings of England and Sicily brought them down. The first owed them 900,000 and the second 450,000 gold florins. These were unavailable assets when the 550,000 florins they owed their fellow-citizens and others began to be called for, and therefore they broke. This downfall carried with it a large number of smaller houses, and among them that of Corsini, of the since princely family of that name, which gave St. Andrew and Pope Clement XII. to the church. The celebrated historian John Villani was a great loser by this failure, and was even imprisoned in the Stinche in consequence of it as an insolvent. The law punished fraudulent failures very severely; but if it could be proved that the failures resulted from unavoidable accidents, the debtors were allowed to go free, after surrendering all they possessed to their creditors.

For the convenience of customers, the bank-offices used to be on the ground-floor of the houses—sometimes palaces—the masters living above. The rate of discount on exchange was from one and one-half to two per cent., and four per cent. on sums advanced. Jacques Savary, in his Parfait Négociant, says that the invention of bills of exchange is due to French Jews who were driven out of France by Philip the Fair in 1316, and took refuge in Lombardy. By means of such bills they were able to get the value of the property they had left in the hands of friends. They were imitated by certain Ghibellines who, being exiled, went to Amsterdam and saved some of their goods left in Italy. In negotiating these bills and effecting the sale of goods, persons called sensali (brokers) were employed.

No duties were levied on exports, but imported goods had to be stored in government buildings called dogane—i.e., custom-houses, or, perhaps more accurately, bonded warehouses—from which, although they might be hypothecated, they could be withdrawn only after payment of a certain sum. There was a chamber of commerce called Mercanzia at Florence, and all the other commercial cities had their merchants’ exchange for the transaction of business, the sordid use to which they were put being often disguised by the beauties of architecture, painting, and sculpture. Thus, the Sala del Cambio at Perugia was decorated with frescoes by the celebrated Pietro Perugino, assisted by his immortal pupil Raphael of Urbino.

In all seaports there were certain judges, elected by and from among the merchants, who composed a tribunal called Consolato di Mare. They settled disputes between traders

and ship-owners, gave assistance in distress, and watched over the interests of commerce. The origin of such boards of trade was very ancient among the Italians, for as early as the year 1129 one was established at Messina. It is said that the Pisans were the first to make laws regulating navigation, and that their code was approved in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII.[35] There was no appeal from the decisions of these admiralty courts, and in cases of fraud or other misdemeanor the guilty party was punished by public authority.

Sericulture began in Italy in the fourteenth century, and was practised with success, especially in Lombardy. The statutes of Modena obliged the peasants to plant a large number of mulberry-trees, in order to promote it.

The wide extent of Italian commerce and the industrial prosperity of Italy, which was a consequence of it, greatly enriched her higher classes and led to the most extravagant luxury during the latter part of the middle ages. Nations now reckoned highly civilized, and where the comforts of life are within the reach of all, were then badly clothed and poorly fed. The effeminacy of the wealthier Italians during the fourteenth century, when commerce was most extended, caused them to despise, amidst the delicacies of the East and the fruits of their own intelligence, the rude simplicity of their more northern neighbors. Even the lower classes among them felt a desire for greater convenience and refinement. Dante, Boccaccio, the chroniclers, and other writers of this period portray or lament the ever-increasing luxury of the age, and we can gather from them an accurate idea of the style of living and

magnificence of the patricians in their provisions, furniture, and dress during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nuptial entertainments and civic festivals were the occasions of most display; and Chaucer, who had partaken of such, writes probably as much from recollection as after Petrarch, whom he has imitated, when he describes the preparations for Griselda’s wedding to the young Marquis of Saluce.

The women were particularly dainty, and many sumptuary laws were enacted to restrain the excess of refinement in houses, furniture, and apparel. A very fine sort of thin, transparent linen, made in Cyprus, was much worn by the female sex. It resembled, but was not quite so indecent as the Coa vestis of the ancients. They also carried much jewelry, and were clothed in garments worked in silver and gold stuff. Their minds naturally ran on money:

“Julia. What thinkest thou of the rich Mercutio?

Lucetta. Well of his wealth; but of himself, so, so.”

—Two Gentlemen of Verona, act i. sc. 2.

The habits and head-dress of the men were often bespangled with precious stones, and their whole attire answered to their haughty bearing, which bespoke successful foreign ventures and a splendid style maintained at home. In innumerable ways they exemplified Dr. Johnson’s observation: “With what munificence a great merchant will spend his money, both from his having it at command and from his enlarged views by calculation of a good effect upon the whole.” Few of them would have dared to say with Bassanio:

“Gentle lady,

When I did first impart my love to you,

I freely told you all the wealth I had

Ran in my veins; I was a gentleman.”

—Merchant of Venice, act iii. sc. 2.

When Shakspere uses the expression “royal merchant” in the play from which we have just quoted, it is, as Warburton remarks, no ranting epithet; for several Italian merchant families obtained principalities in the Archipelago and elsewhere, which their descendants enjoyed for many generations, and others of their class made sovereign alliances. For instance, James, King of Cyprus, married Catherine Cornaro, daughter of a Venetian merchant, who gave her a dowry of 100,000 golden ducats.[36]

[31] The Cathedral of Pisa, one of the most remarkable monuments of the middle ages, owes its origin to such an expedition; for it was built with part of the rich booty taken from the Saracens at Palermo in the year 1063.

[32] This city was taken from the Genoese by the Turks in 1474, but the Christians were not all driven out. The late Father Theiner has published an interesting letter from the Papal Nuncio in Poland in 1579, in which he mentions having met some Kaffa people at Wilna and tells of their strange manner of obtaining a priest, reminding one a little of Michas and the Levite in Judges xvii.

[33] McPherson’s Annals of Commerce, vol. i. p. 562.

[34] Innes, Scotland in the Middle Ages, p. 309.

[35] Muratori, Ant. Ital., tom. ii. p. 54.

[36] The ducat was the great money of Venice, as the florin was of Florence, and bears in its name a proof of the more aristocratic government of the former city. The first gold ducats were coined by the Doge John Dandolo in 1280, and are inscribed I0. DANDVL. DVX.

A DAUGHTER OF THE PURITANS.

Rose Standish Howson—that was her name, and very proud she was of it. Back of the Mayflower, she knew little about her ancestors; but certain it was that in that well-filled vessel one of her forefathers had come to America, and, marrying a distant connection of the veritable Standish family, had handed this name down to all succeeding generations. Rose boasted, so far as it is proper for a well-bred New England girl to boast, that, however it might have been outside of her own country, here at least her lineage was most democratically noble; she belonged—and could prove it, too, out of a little book compiled by her grandfather—thoroughly to the old Puritan race. In all her books the name was written in full—Rose Standish Howson; and it was her unfailing source of regret that her only brother had not been called Miles. John Howson laughed good-naturedly at his sister’s foible, but was really quite as proud as she, though in a more passive way.

Their home was not in Boston. Let this important fact receive our

prompt attention. But, since it could not be there, it was in the next best place—an old academic town; in which New England State matters little to our story. There for thirty years Rose Howson’s father had been the academy’s honored principal. His wife had died young, leaving only this son and daughter. John fitted for Harvard at the academy; Rose went steadily through grammar-school and high-school in her native place, then went to Boston with hopes of at least a two years’ added course of study there. It resolved itself into one brilliant winter and spring of hard work and exhausting pleasure, symphony concerts, Shakspere clubs, Parker Fraternity lectures, abstruse reading, and keenly exciting conversation; one merry June, one gay class-day, one delightful commencement, when Dr. Howson came to Cambridge to meet old pupils and friends, and see his son bear off the highest honors; then they went home for vacation, and before it was over Dr. Howson sickened and died.

The whole town was in a fervor

of excitement; there was a funeral, to which people came from far and near; resolutions were passed, and in the flush of enthusiasm John Howson, young as he was and just out of college, was elected on trial to fill his father’s place. So the brother and sister still lived on in their old home, but into it they infused a new manner of living. Fresh from the intellectual arena, they sought to shape society about them into some likeness to that they loved so well, and they found their old friends and playmates more than ready to meet them half-way. A book club was started, into which the current literature of the day was crowded, and from which, it was placidly affirmed, all “trash” was excluded; but Mill was there, and Darwin, and a strange mixture of German philosophy, which the young men, but more especially the young women, read, or fancied they read, and about which they talked much, after a fashion revealing more ideas than thought. There were “musicals” too, and a Shakspere club, and German and French conversations and readings, and the second winter after Dr. Howson’s death there were dramatic entertainments and concerts; and it came to pass that almost every afternoon and evening of Rose’s life was filled with some sort of intellectual work or pleasure. She was a capital housekeeper, and so her early mornings were occupied with household cares; but, later, she was always ready for a walk or talk, and her reading was done in snatches by day and by long hours of steady work late at night.

About religion “experimentally” she knew little. The old meeting-house, which the Puritan settlers had built, was still standing, but it had been enlarged and made over, though not beautified. There Rose

had been accustomed to go Sunday after Sunday as a matter of course, and sometimes to the Friday evening prayer-meeting; but she was not “a Christian.” Once there had been a revival, when she tried to be converted, but she had failed. Then in Boston she had been taken to hear preachers who were not “orthodox” at all; she had almost feared them at first, because of strange names she had heard applied to them—they had German tendencies, rationalistic tendencies, were free-thinkers. But when she came under the spell of their presence and their eloquence she was fascinated. They appealed to what she thought the highest faculties of her nature—her intellect, her love for the beautiful, her reason. She missed it when she came home and she did more than miss it: she began to doubt. Was old Mr. Gray wiser than the cultured men she had been hearing? He claimed that they were wrong; how did he know that? How could she tell that he was not mistaken? In this one small town, originally occupied by orthodox Congregationalists only, there were now Orthodox Unitarians, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Universalists. A Roman Catholic priest was serving there too, in a dingy hall in a back street, but “society” rarely noticed him or his work; he and his alike were out of its pale, anomalies, hardly worth mentioning except with pitying wonder or idle jest and scorn. What made Mr. Gray superior to any or all of these in his power of discerning truth?

And while Rose queried thus on Sunday mornings, sitting wearily in her accustomed place at the right of the pulpit, sometimes trying to find out how to be good, but oftener losing herself in memories of the

feasts of reason she had known for so brief and bright a while, some one came to town who was to influence her life greatly. Looking up suddenly from one of these reveries, she found herself still in the meeting-house, but opposite her was a new face, a lady’s, thin and pale, with searching eyes fixed upon hers, and after service the lady came straight to her pew and held out her hand.

“I am sure you are Miss Howson,” she said. “Your friend Grace Roland has told me much of you. I am Ellen Lawton.”

Rose’s heart leaped up. In those happy Boston days she had often heard Ellen Lawton spoken of as one of the most elegant and cultured women of her time, and she had read her writings with delight, but she had hardly hoped to meet her. It took her breath away with joy when she learned that Miss Lawton had come to live for a while in this quiet country place.

It was a season of keen delight. Rose had thought she knew what it was to revel in intellectual pleasure, but it was something new to meet one so superior to herself, yet so loving; always ready to listen to her ideas, to help her unfold them, and yet so calm and tranquil. Miss Lawton was an invalid, and, after that first Sunday, Rose never saw her at church again. Once, when Rose stopped on her way thither to leave her some flowers, Miss Lawton said that she was going to sit in the sunshine; would not Rose stay with her? And when Rose demurred, Miss Lawton said gently, “Shall we not please God as well in the beauty of his sunshine as in that bare and cheerless house where you know you do not like to go?”

This was the beginning of Rose’s first knowledge of Ellen Lawton’s

so-called religious life; they sat and talked all that morning about it. With a sweet smile upon her calm face, the invalid said quietly that she believed there might be a God; she was not sure, of course; but if there was one, he was kind and good, and loved to see her happy. She made life as bright and beautiful as she possibly could always; it was given her to enjoy. Books and music and art and flowers were parts of her religion; beyond this world she did not look; what came after death she knew not and cared not; if there was a God, he was good and would be good to her; if there was not, the thought of annihilation did not distress her. Rose watched her closely after this; she never heard an impatient word or saw a hasty movement; the life was an exposition of what a great many people would call “the beautiful,” and Rose found in it more and more satisfaction for her extreme intellectual cravings.

One morning a servant ran in with blanched face to tell her that Miss Lawton was dead. Rose had known that heart-disease was the fatal malady which was surely sapping at her friend’s life, yet this blow fell upon her with an awful suddenness. She went to the house, where they left her to do as she would, for she was the nearest friend Miss Lawton had there; she went up to the silent room, and shut herself in alone with the silent dead. Ellen Lawton lay as they had found her; she must have risen in the morning and dressed with her usual dainty care; then, perhaps feeling some acute pang of the pain to which she was subject, she had sunk upon the couch by the window. Her face was, as in life, calm and noble; about her lay her books that she had loved, her rare pictures looked

down upon her, her flowers scented the room; outside the sun shone brightly on the grand hills she had been used to watch, finding in them food for heart and soul both, she said. None of these moved her now at all.

Rose went close to her and looked at her, and looked, and looked, as if she would waken her by the very fixedness of her gaze. What was this thing lying there, this beautiful clay, this voiceless, motionless, tenantless body? Yesterday it spoke to her, kissed her, loved her; what had changed it, gone out of it? The spirit? The soul? Where was that soul then?

She knelt down trembling, and put her hand where the heart had beat not five short hours ago. There was no movement now; and the silence in the room grew terrible. Where was that which yesterday she spoke with? Nowhere? Then to-morrow she herself might be nowhere and nothing.

Suddenly there came to her a memory which she had striven for years to banish. A stranger had preached at the time of that unforgotten revival; he had painted vividly and unsparingly the torments of the lost. Often in the night Rose had wakened from a dream of it, and found herself cold with horror, and cried out, “I never will believe it.” Now like a painting she seemed to see it all again, and through her mind rang the words with which the sermon had ended, “Doubt on as you will, O unbeliever, O careless soul, O faithless Christian! Laugh on as you will, forget as you will. But suppose that you wake up after death and find this true! What then?”

John Howson, hearing the news at school, hurried home at noon to comfort Rose, but she was gone.

He found her in that room of death, rocking to and fro upon her knees, her hands held out over the dead, while she was whispering in hoarse tones: “Ellen, is it true? Tell me it is not true.” And no one answered.

John lifted her tenderly, and she clung to him like a little child. “Take me home!” she cried, quivering all over. She could not walk; he had to carry her, and all the way she clung to him as if the very touch of something that lived and loved was comfort. “O John! I am so glad you are alive,” she sobbed. “Dear John, do not die, do not die!”

He could hardly bear to leave her for afternoon school, and when he came home she was crouching by his arm-chair, while Abby, their old servant, sat looking at her with pitying horror. “You’d best do what you can for her, Master John,” she said, “or she’ll kill herself going on in this way.”

“No, no! not kill myself,” Rose answered hysterically. “It is awful to live, but it is worse to die.”

John sat down near her, and she took his hand and held it tightly. “I want to feel that you are here, and warm and well,” she said. “O John! tell me what is true.”

“What is true?” he repeated. “Why, I am, I hope; and you, dear child.”

“Oh! no,” she exclaimed, as if his tender lightness were unbearable. “Is God true? Is there a God? What comes after death?”

He answered her honestly; he had even less faith than she, but his doubts did not trouble him. He lived a life as upright and fair as his neighbors; whether there was a God or not, what difference did it make, so long as he behaved himself? This was John Howson’s

creed, if such a title could be applied to it.

How strong and kind he looked, how honorable he always was! Why should Rose worry, if he did not? Either there was no God, and what they did made no difference—they could live as they liked and get all the pleasure possible—or, if there was a God, he was too good to be ever angry with them. It was a consoling belief; she would take the comfort of it. But alone at night the horror returned. Suppose there was a God who demanded something—she knew not what—from his creatures; she could only express it by the vague term, “to be Christians.” She held her head between her hands and tried to think what that meant. Yes, she must be converted, and be sorry for all her sins, and join the church. How were people converted, and what church should she join? Perhaps she had better say a prayer. “O God!” she began, then paused. Her brain was reeling with the doubt whether there was any God at all; and even if there were, what was the use of prayer?

The next morning she went to Mr. Gray. With nerves unstrung by intense feeling, she had little thought left for ordinary greetings or for ceremony. The old man was jarred and hurt by what he thought her rudeness, never dreaming that he was dealing with a soul which was fast losing all care for earthly joys or pains, or for any earthly thing at all, in the one absorbing fear of eternal things. For forty years he had labored in this place in a calm routine, hearing something but comprehending little of the doubts through which the world without was passing. It filled him with horror to hear Rose talk; he had never imagined what thoughts

had been working in the mind of his old friend’s child.

“What must one do to be a Christian?” she had asked abruptly.

He had not expected such a question, and looked surprised, but he answered simply enough: “You must believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, my child, and come to him in repentance.”

“And where is he?” Rose cried, “and who is he, and what does he want of me?”

Mr. Gray stared at her in amazement and sorrow. “My dear,” he said, “who is he? He is God, and he is everywhere, and he wants your heart.”

“How do you know that?” Rose exclaimed. “Tell me how you know it.

The old man laid his hand upon his Bible. “Where should I know it but here?” he asked.

“But other people think differently,” Rose said. “I have read it myself, and I don’t find what you preach. The Baptists read the Bible, and so do the Methodists, and so do the Episcopalians, and you cannot agree to be one. How do you know the Bible is true?”

It was of no avail to tell her of internal evidence, or of spiritual conviction, or of visible effects. Quickly enough it became clear that Rose Howson had no faith left in the Lord Jesus Christ as God. She did believe as an historical fact that he had lived once upon earth, and was man, and possibly something more than man; that was all. To everything Mr. Gray said she returned the answer, “How do you know it? Is not the Baptist minister a Christian?—and yet you differ. Is not the Unitarian minister a scholar, and does not he pray to God?—and yet you say he is mistaken.” And

when Mr. Gray reminded her of her father, and asked how he would have felt to hear her speak thus, she cried out that she was a woman grown, and it was her own soul she was talking of, and her father could not save that; fathers made very little difference when it was heaven and hell you were thinking about.

“All Christians agree on the vital points,” Mr. Gray said; “at least, all evangelical Protestants.”

“And what about the unevangelical Protestants and the poor Catholics? and who decides what are the vital points? and why cannot you and the Baptists commune together, then?” The eager questions were poured forth, overwhelming the listener.

Mr. Gray shook his head sadly. “I do not think you are in a fit state to speak of such matters, Rose,” he said. “The Lord Jesus Christ died for you. Pray to him that he will himself teach you.”

Rose stood up. “Good-by, Mr. Gray,” she said gently. “I am afraid I have troubled you. Perhaps you will say a prayer for me sometimes.”

“I will indeed, my child,” he answered her, with a very troubled look upon his face; “but you must pray too.”

“Pray?” she repeated to herself mechanically as she went out of the room. “I wonder how they do it, and what they mean by it, and what good it ever does? Pray? Oh! if I only could.”

After this Rose was never seen inside the old meeting-house again. Everybody learned that she was in some religious difficulty; most persons never mentioned the subject to her; some told her not to worry, but to trust; others that it made no manner of difference what

she believed, so long as she was sincere. To the one she answered that the only belief she was sincere in was that she did not know what to believe; to the other she made no reply. But to John once she answered wearily: “If you sat here studying, and I told you the house was on fire, and you could smell it burning, would you keep still at your books, and trust and not worry, because other people said it was not your house?”

On one occasion she took up a Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer which she found in her father’s library, and, turning its pages, came to the Apostles’ Creed. It comforted her to read it; she thought it must be a blessed thing to be brought up always with that impressed upon one, and never to know anything else. She had some Protestant Episcopal friends; they seemed very content. But, still idly turning the leaves, she came to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and her eye lighted on the words, “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred; so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” So then even they could not be sure and settled in their belief, she said to herself; for if Rome and Jerusalem and Antioch had erred, why not the Protestant Episcopal Church of America? It was the closing drop of bitterness. John found her that noon in as terrible a state as on the day of Ellen Lawton’s death.

“Rose,” he said gravely, “for some time, as you know, I have doubted the existence of a God; but I will tell you now that my doubts on that point are settled. Wherever and whatever he may be, there surely is one; for I am convinced

that no one could suffer as you do without some reality to cause it.”

The unexpected words brought a ray of comfort; she lifted her poor pale face to his with a look of pitiful longing. “Then, John,” she said, “don’t you think he must know how dreadful the suffering is, and that he will tell me some day where to find him?”

The tears—a man’s rare tears—sprang to John Howson’s eyes. “I surely think he will, Rose,” he answered; and he stooped and kissed her with great compassion. His love was the only comfort Rose had now, and at times she found no comfort even in that.

Fanny Mason came to see her in the afternoon. People did not come to the house as freely as they used to come; Rose showed too plainly that she did not care to see them. But Fanny had been an intimate family friend always; the affection between the two girls was more like that of relatives than of friends. Fanny was not at all intellectual, had never known a shadow of doubt; she ran in to chat and gossip, not waiting for replies, and brought a sense of refreshment, or at least of change, to Rose’s burdened mind.

“To-morrow is Ascension Day,” she said. “The Episcopalians are going to have service and trim their church beautifully—white lilacs and wistaria and lilies of the valley and bunches of forget-me-not. It will be lovely; wouldn’t you like to see it?”

“I am tired and sick of prettiness and pettiness,” Rose said.

“Rose Howson! What next? You used to say that the beautiful satisfied you entirely.”

“I thought it did,” Rose answered sadly. “But where is it? All

at once it failed me. Now I see a death’s-head behind all.”

“Rose! Not really?”

Rose almost smiled at Fanny’s scared face. “No, Fanny; not literally, at least. Once, though, I did really see it in the very centre of loveliness, and I cannot forget.”

“I wish you could forget,” Fanny said pityingly. “I wish we could be little girls once more, Rose.”

“No, no!” Rose answered, shuddering. “Not to live all these years over again. But, O Fanny! if I only could forget for ever so short a while!”

The strained, wild passion of her look and manner frightened Fanny; she tried to return to her former chatty lightness. “I’ll tell you what you had better do,” she said, “since you are tired of the beautiful. The Catholics are going to keep Ascension Day too. What a queer set they are! Do you know that they call this the month of Mary, and in their hall her image is dressed in lace and flowers, with candles burning around it all day long? It is not so pretty there, I assure you. Suppose you try that.” Then laughing as if she had suggested the most absurd of absurdities, Fanny went away.

The dark cloud of depression which had come upon Rose that morning, and had lifted slightly at John’s words, shadowed her now more densely than ever. She looked about the room which John’s taste and hers had made so fair. How everything palled upon her! What good was it to try to make life as beautiful as possible, if even in life she ceased to care for the beautiful? The strong, the true, the lasting, was what she needed now.

It seemed to her that there was no hope anywhere. She fled out

into the open air, and walked fast to escape her haunting thoughts; but there was no escape from self. Passing the hall where the Catholics had services, she saw an old woman climbing the steps, remembered Fanny’s words, and followed her. “Since the beautiful fails me,” she thought with a bitter smile, “I will look at what is not beautiful.”

It was a very dingy hall, and uninviting. On the side walls were poor wood-cuts representing the scenes of the Passion. On a plain white wood altar a lamp was burning. Near by hung a colored print of the Saviour, but as Rose had never seen him portrayed before—with his Heart exposed upon his breast, and great blood-drops falling from it. Rose shrank from the sight; it displeased her. Close by the altar-rail was a highly-colored and gaudily-decorated statue of the Blessed Virgin, with flowers distastefully arranged about it. The old woman had fallen on her knees before it, and was praying. Rose wondered at her.

But she was strangely conscious of a peculiar quiet in the place; it soothed her. She sat down on one of the benches, and took up a book lying there. The Key of Heaven it was called; a very soiled and worn book it was; she hardly liked to touch it. It opened at the Apostles’ Creed. “He ascended into heaven,” she read.

Who was “he”? Jesus Christ—God! So Catholics believed as well as Mr. Gray; in this they were agreed. But, oh! what difference did it make? God and heaven were so very far away—if indeed there were a heaven anywhere—that who on earth could tell anything about them? She looked up wearily from the book; again her eyes met the poor print of the Sacred

Heart, the poor statue of the holy Mother. Like a flash the thought came into her mind, “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.”

It was not as if she were uttering a belief—whether Jesus Christ was God she did not know; she was not even thinking about it then. But it was as if she had grasped a link in a mighty chain, which, if one other link could be supplied, would solve and settle all doubt for ever. Over and over she said the words, fearing to lose or forget them: “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.” If this was true, how God in heaven must pity her, how he must love her!

And suddenly the tears were falling on Rose’s cheeks. When she had wept last she could not tell; certainly not since Ellen Lawton’s death, though she had often craved the relief of tears. Now they fell softly and plenteously, while she kept repeating the strange formula with a keen sense that it soothed her and she was resting; and oh! she had been so tired. A mother, a mother—how very sweet it must be to have a mother! And a God with a heart like ours, a heart that could be wounded and bleed and suffer sorely; oh! how one must love a God like that.

“John,” she said abruptly, when they were sitting by the study-lamp after tea, “what are Catholics? I mean, what do you know about them?”

“Not much of anything,” he answered in some surprise, “except as one is always coming upon them in history and the papers. Why?”

“What makes them different from Protestants? Aren’t you always coming upon them too?”

“Not in the same way, child. You know that Protestants are not so—so obtrusive.”

“But why, John? I want to know about them.”

There was an animation in her manner which reminded him of old times; he saw that she was really in earnest, and set himself to answer her in his straightforward, kindly way, glad to notice any change for the better in her tone of mind.

“I have never thought very much about them, Rose,” he said; “but every general reader must come in contact with them somehow, even if, like me, he has not had personal acquaintance with them in society. Of course you know the distinguishing features of confession and transubstantiation, the papacy, the worship of saints and relics, prayer for the dead.”

“Are you sure they are all wrong?”

“Not at all. We were brought up to think them wrong, but I have never looked so deeply into the matter as to make such an assertion on my own judgment; it never has seemed worth while. However, if you care for my opinion, I will tell you what, from all I have read and heard, presents itself to my mind as the peculiar and fatal mark of Catholicism. It is its claim of absolute authority over the bodies and minds and souls of men—a claim which reached its height of tyranny in the declaration of the infallibility of the pope.”

“What does that mean, John?”

“Why, that whatever the pope may say—no matter who he is, remember, if he is only a pope—that thing you and I and every one must believe to be right. However, I mean to be just to all sects. If I have the idea rightly, their exact claim is this: that the pope, as pope,

speaking to the whole church as the Head of the Church, cannot be mistaken, simply because God will not permit him to be. Do you understand?”

She was sitting in the full light of the lamp. He noticed the quiet, thoughtful look upon her face; it made him very happy to see it there.

“John,” she said after a minute’s pause, “why should it not be?”

“What, Rose?”

“I mean, if there is a God Almighty, why could he not keep a man from error in teaching, just as easily as he could make a man in the first place?”

“Really,” said John with an amused smile at what he thought her brightness, “I don’t see but that he could; that is, if you give up the idea that we are free agents.”

“But do they say he is not generally a free agent?” Rose asked, like one thinking out a problem. “Only, when God wants to use him to teach the church, he will not let him teach a lie. Why should not an Almighty God do that? O John! look here.”

She hurried to the bookcase, brought back and opened the Book of Common Prayer. “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church,” she read. “Then there are those who do really believe it; who really think that now—to-day—there is a church where God speaks plainly and unmistakably, and always will speak so, and there can be no error?”

“Yes, Rose.”

Was it only the glow of the lamplight shining upon her face? Did his eyes deceive him, or was that creature, radiant with happiness and a bloom of beauty never witnessed there before—was this his poor and fading Rose of that very noon? Once in his life he had heard a

child laugh who had been suddenly and entirely released from excruciating pain—a low, sweet laugh most exquisite to hear in the sense it gave of indescribable relief. Such a laugh he heard now from Rose’s lips, which he had almost feared would never so much as smile again.

“John,” she said exultingly, “I have it! There is a Heavenly Father—God—and he made us all. And there is Jesus Christ—God—who ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother. And there is a Holy Ghost—God—who is with the church, and so she cannot lie. And how those three are one, and how the blood of Christ saves us, we may never be able to explain; but, if there is a God, he will never let his church tell lies or err or make mistakes, and whatever his church says that we ought to believe, whether we understand it or not. And only Catholics claim an infallible voice. John, I am going to try it. I shall speak to the priest to-morrow.”

“You are your own mistress, Rose,” he said gravely. “You can do as you please. I only warn you that after that one act of your own choice, you must give up your reason and will to another.”

The color flashed more brightly in her cheeks. He was amazed as he looked at her; once again the fire was in her eyes, and the brilliant intellect shone in the face that had been dulled so long.

“I shall give up my reason and my will to God,” she said. “It is he who will speak to me, without erring and without lying. I do not expect to be as wise as my Creator, and I am sure I shall be none the worse for it when he who is wisdom itself teaches me. It is God that I am talking about, John, and

not a mere man that can make mistakes. I am quite content to yield my intellect and my will to him.”

And then, as suddenly as it had come, the glow faded from her face; she was kneeling down beside him with that look of anguish in her eyes which for so many long weeks had wrung his heart with pity. “You know I have suffered,” she said, “but, John, it is only the outside you have seen; you can’t tell what it has been within. And now a great light is coming—I am sure of it. It is not the love of beauty or anything I used to crave. It is the thing I need and we all need; something stronger than we are: something that cannot by any possibility teach us a lie; something that cannot by any possibility err; something plain to hear and plain to see—infallible! I have not got it yet; I am only on my way to it. If it was in your power to stop me, would you do it?”

“I do not understand you, Rose,” he answered thoughtfully, “nor do I entirely follow your train of reasoning. Still, I grant that for a temperament such as yours has of late disclosed itself to be there is comfort in what you think you see. No, I would not say a word to stop you, my poor child! It goes against the grain to think of one of us becoming a Catholic; but if anything will help you, I shall bless the hand that brings relief.”

She looked full in his face with a look of grave surprise. “I did not think that of you,” she said; “you always have seemed so honest. Don’t you know that nothing in heaven or earth can satisfy me, unless it is the truth? No shams, no half-way things, but something like rock that will never fail. I did not think that of you, John!”

John sat alone and puzzled over

her words that night. “I always have to puzzle things out,” he said. “They never come to me like a flash, as they do to Rose. Stop, though! I am wrong there. She has been months in getting at it, and they were months that almost killed her. Why was it?”

Plainly enough he saw at last why it was. God, the soul, eternity—those things which are invisible—were more real to Rose than the visible things. And should they not be? He knew very well that he would be stung to the quick to be told that his body—his material, tangible, lower nature—had the upper hand in his life. No, his reason, his intellect—something intangible and invisible anyhow, by whatever name you named it—was the governing power. And if so, then why should not One invisible and intangible be the ruler of that, and claim from him more than a merely blameless life and an honest fame; demand submission of his will and reason and thought? John shook his head ruefully; the idea struck home; he did not like it, but there it was.

The next day Rose quietly laid before him her little Catechism, open at the very first section, and John read this:

“Question. Who made you?

“Answer. GOD.

“Q. Why did he make you?

“A. That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next.

“Q. To whose likeness did he make you?

“A. To his own image and likeness.

“Q. Is this likeness in your body or in your soul?

“A. In my soul.

“Q. In what is your soul like to God?

“A. Because my soul is a spirit endowed with understanding and free will, and is immortal—that is to say, can never die.

“Q. In what else is your soul like to God?

“A. Because as in God there are three persons and one God, so in man there is one soul and three powers.

“Q. Which are the three powers?

“A. Will, memory, and understanding.

“Q. Which must we take most care of, our body or our soul?

“A. Of our soul.

“Q. Why so?

“A. Because, ‘What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’

“Q. What must we do to save our soul?

“A. We must worship God by faith, hope, and charity; that is, we must believe in him, hope in him, and love him with all our heart.

“Q. How shall we know the things which we are to believe?

“A. From the Catholic Church of God, which he has established by innumerable miracles, and illustrated by the lives and deaths of innumerable saints.”

“John,” said Rose steadily, “be honest with God.”

*  *  *  *  *

Professor Howson is a name which no one hears now, though it was once supposed that it would rank among those of New England’s noblest scholars. But John Howson teaches still. People had often said of him that he would never marry; that his books and his sister were enough for him. He never did marry; but it was God and the church of God that satisfied him. Once, in a great city, an old friend of his collegiate days, who had not heard of him for years, met him face to face in his dress of a religious, and stopped him in utter amazement.

“John Howson! You are unmistakable, but how is this? I was told of your change, but did not know it had gone so far. Are not your Puritan ancestors groaning in their shrouds, man, because of such doings?”

The priest returned a courteous answer, and would have turned to other themes, but his friend persisted. Then, not with the old outspoken frankness as of one who feared none, but instead, thoughtfully and humbly as in the very fear of God, there came this reply:

“Once I matched my mind with the mind of God, and judged him, and thought his will to be of no account. It was a great sin, and he saved me from it. After that I could only say, as another in like case once said, ‘I cannot give God less than all.’”

“A great sin?” his friend repeated. “I do not understand that.”

He saw a shade of peculiar awe creep over the countenance before him. “And is it no sin,” John Howson asked in a deep voice, “to hear said in the face of God that there is no God? to have counted your own judgment superior to his? to have given God the lie? One who is now of the mightiest saints thought that he did God service while he fought against him, and afterward he named himself the chief of sinners. But I did not so much as think of the service of God at all in matters of belief.”

“I can’t see the fault in that,” his friend said wonderingly. “If it was murder you had on your conscience, I might sympathize with you; but this!”

“You are fresh from Massachusetts,” said Father Howson, “and it is years since I was there. Do they still count the mind as nobler than the body, and the intellect as among their highest gifts?”

“Yes,” was the proud reply.

“Some time,” returned Father Howson with deep meaning in his tone, “we all shall have to learn that God judges sin of the mind by as terrible a judgment as sin of the body, and that he demands his gifts with usury. Believe me, it is better to forestall that judgment, and to meet that demand here than hereafter.”

And Rose? Long since she learned to say, “I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house; and the place where thy glory dwelleth.” Long since she learned that there is One invisible who is fairer than any child of man, and to him she gave the heart which a wealth of intellectual and earthly loveliness had failed to satisfy. She has learned that there is a nobler Blood than any that the world can boast; His place is with the nobility of an eternal kingdom, whose peculiar marks of honor are poverty, and self-renunciation, and an utter lowliness of obedience, whereby every faculty of one’s nature is brought with a glad free-will into the obedience of Christ. One day the daughter of the Puritans heard another voice than theirs call her by that tender name: “Hearken, O daughter, and see, and incline thy ear: and forget thy people and thy father’s house. And the King shall greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord God.” Once before, but after sore struggle and heartrending suffering, she had heard that voice. Hearing it again, she rose up joyfully and followed it, as then, without delay.

PRUSSIA AND THE CHURCH.

III.

We have already alluded to that feature in the recent ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia which gives to the people the right to choose their pastors, and we have also seen how nobly the Catholics of Germany have thwarted this unholy attempt to create dissension and discord in the church. When it could no longer be doubted that the German bishops were immovable in their allegiance to the pope, Prussia sought, by holding out every possible inducement to apostasy, to create disunion between the priests and the bishops; but in this, too, she met with signal defeat. Nothing, therefore, remained to be done, but to devise measures whereby the administration of ecclesiastical affairs would be placed exclusively in the hands of the laity; since the breaking of the bonds which unite church and state would not have as a result that weakening of ecclesiastical power which is so ardently desired. This Professor Friedberg, in his German Empire and the Catholic Church, expressly states in the following words:

“If the government were to adhere to the plan of a total separation of church and state, what would be the consequence? Would the bishops lose their authority because the state no longer recognized it? Would the parochial system be broken up if unsupported by the state? In a word, would the church lose any of her power? It would argue an absolute want of perception and a total ignorance of Catholic history to affirm that she would. The stream which for centuries has flowed in its own channel does not run dry because its course is obstructed. It only overflows and

floods the country. To continue the metaphor, we must first seek with all care to draw off the waters, and to lead them into pools and reservoirs, where what remains will readily evaporate.”

The Protestants of Prussia are opposed to the separation of church and state, because they are well aware that in the present condition of religious opinion in Germany the rationalists and socialists would at once get control of most of the parishes of the Evangelical church, if it were deprived of the support of the government; and, on the other hand, both they and the infidels are persuaded that the Catholic Church is quite able to maintain herself, and even to wax strong, without any help from the temporal power.

“One thing,” says the Edinburgh Review, “the state is quite at liberty to do. The state is not bound to pay or maintain churches or sects which it does not approve. Indeed, if these conditions are annexed to the acceptance of state payment, the church herself would do well to reject the terms. But will Prince Bismarck withdraw the stipend and set the church free? Nothing of the kind. There is no freedom of religious orders or communities in Prussia. The whole spirit of these laws is to make every form of religious belief and organization as subservient to the state as a Prussian recruit is to the rattan of a corporal. That we abhor and denounce as an intolerable oppression; and it is only by the strangest perversion of judgment that any Englishman can have imagined that the cause of true religious liberty was identical with the policy of Prince Bismarck.”[37]

To consent to a separation of

church and state would be a recognition of the independent existence of the church, which Prussia holds to be contrary to the true theory of the constitution of human society in relation to government and religion. This theory is that man exists for the state, to which he owes his supreme and undivided allegiance; whose duty it is to train and govern him for its own service alike in peace and war. All the interests of society, therefore, material, political, educational, and religious, must be subjected to the state, independently of which no organization of any kind ought to be permitted to exist. And in fact the whole spirit of the recent ecclesiastical legislation of Prussia is in perfect consonance with this theory. The Falck Laws deny to the church the right to educate her priests, to decide as to their fitness for the care of souls, to appoint them to or remove them from office; in a word, the right to administer her own affairs, and consequently to exist at all as an organization separate from the state.

It can hardly surprise us that the attempt should have been made to prove that this is in accordance with the teachings of the New Testament.

“The New Testament,” says the British Quarterly, “requires that the Christian shall be a loyal subject of the government under which he lives. ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God: whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God.’”[38]

After quoting several texts from the Epistles of St. Paul, of the same general import, the writer in the British Quarterly continues:

“Now, it is impossible to find in the

New Testament any injunctions of obedience to organized ecclesiastical power, like those here given of obedience to the civil government. It is not ecclesiastical authority, nor a corporate ecclesiastical institution, but the personal God, and the individual conscience in its direct personal relations with God, which is set over against an unrighteous demand of the civil authority in the crucial motto of Peter, ‘We ought to obey God rather than men,’ and in the teaching of Christ, ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s.’ Of conscience as an ecclesiastical corporation, or of conscience as an imputed or vicarious faculty, determined and exercised by one for another, the ethics of the New Testament have no knowledge.”[39]

It is hard to realize the ignorance or the bad faith of a man who is capable of making such statements as these. Let us take the last words of the gospel of St. Matthew: “And Jesus coming, spoke to them, saying: All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations,… teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and, behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.” Here surely is an organized body of men, receiving from Christ himself the divine command to teach all the nations of the earth their religious faith and duties, which necessarily carries with it the right to exact obedience. But, lest there be any room for doubt, let us hear Christ himself: “He that heareth you, heareth me: and he that despiseth you despiseth me. And he that despiseth me, despiseth him that sent me.”[40]

Again: “And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican. Amen I say to you, whatsoever you shall

bind upon earth, shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth, shall be loosed also in heaven.”[41]

When Peter and John were brought into court and “charged not to speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus,” they should have submitted at once, upon the theory that the state has the right to exact supreme and undivided allegiance; but they appealed to their divine commission, just as the bishops of Germany do to-day, and answered, “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.”[42]

And in the council at Jerusalem, “an ecclesiastical corporation” surely, the apostles say: “For it hath seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay no further burden upon you than these necessary things”;[43] plainly indicating and using their right to impose commands and exact obedience. But enough of this. The persecutors of the church to-day are not at all concerned about the teachings of the New Testament. The attempt, however, to make it appear that only Catholics protest against the doctrine of absolute and undivided allegiance to the state is wholly unjustifiable. There is no Protestant sect in England or the United States which would submit to the intervention of the government in its spiritual life and internal discipline. Would the Methodists, or the Baptists, or the Presbyterians permit the state to decide what kind of education their ministers are to receive, or to determine whether they are capable of properly discharging their spiritual duties, or to keep in office by force those whom the church had cast off?

They would go out to pray on the hillside and by the river banks rather than submit to such tyranny.

Is not the right of revolution, which in our day, especially outside of the Catholic Church, is held to be divine, based upon the principle of divided allegiance? Practically it is impossible to distinguish between loyalty to the government and loyalty to the state; and no man in this age thinks of questioning the right of rebellion against a tyrannical government. This divided allegiance marks the radical difference between Christian and pagan civilization. Before Christ there was no divided allegiance, because the individual was absorbed by the state, and nothing could have wrested mankind from this bondage but a great spiritual organization such as the Catholic Church; and this, we believe, is generally admitted by our adversaries. They fail to perceive, however, that there is no other institution than the Catholic Church which has the power to prevent the state from again absorbing the individual and destroying all civil and political liberty. If the church could be broken up into national establishments, and the entire control of education handed over to the state, the bringing all men to the servile temper which characterizes the Russians and Protestant Prussians would be only a question of time. Many will be inclined to hold that the general freedom, and even license, of thought of our time would be a sufficient protection against any such danger.

A little reflection, however, will suffice to dispel this illusion. No number of individuals, unless they are organized, can successfully oppose tyranny; and mere speculations or opinions as to the abstract

right of resistance can not stop the march of the state toward absolutism. The most despotic states have often encouraged the most unbounded freedom of thought, and we need not go beyond Prussia for an example. In no country in the world has there been more of what is called free-thinking, nor has any government been more tolerant of wild theories and extravagant speculations; and yet the free-thinkers and illuminati have done nothing to promote the growth of free institutions or to encourage civil or religious liberty. They are without unity or organization or programme. Many of them to-day are the strongest supporters of Bismarckian despotism. Even in 1848 they succeeded only in getting up a mob and evaporating in wild talk.

The divine right of resistance to tyranny would have no sanction or efficacy if it were not kept living in the hearts of men by supernatural religion.

This is thoroughly understood by the advocates of absolutism, who do not trouble themselves about doctrines of any kind, except when they are upheld by organizations, and for this reason all their efforts are directed to the destruction of the organic unity of the church. Had Prince Bismarck succeeded in his attempt to get the Catholic congregations which have been deprived of their priests to elect pastors for themselves, there would have been but another step to open schism, which would have inevitably resulted in favor of Old Catholicism. But, as we have seen, out of more than a hundred parishes, not one has lent itself to the iniquitous designs of the enemies of the church.

Another striking example of the perfect unanimity of thought and action which in Prussia exists between

priests and people was given last year when the so-called State-Catholics tried to get up a protest against the encyclical letter of the Pope, in which he declared that the May Laws were not binding upon the consciences of Catholics. All the liberal papers of Germany were loud in praise of this project, which presented the fairest opportunity to Catholic government officials to curry favor by showing their acceptance of the Falck laws; and yet, in spite of every effort that was made, only about a thousand signatures were obtained, most of which were found outside of the eight millions of Prussian Catholics.

Mr. Gladstone, in his article on the “Speeches of Pope Pius IX.,”[44] says of the Catholic clergy that they “are more and more an army, a police, a caste; further and further from the Christian Commons, but nearer to one another and in closer subservience to the pope.” However near the Catholic clergy may be to one another, it certainly shows a great lack of power to see things as they are to maintain that they are losing the hold which more than any other class of men they have always had on the hearts of the people. The persecution in Germany has shown there that inseparable union of priest and people which is to-day as universal as the life of the church. Had there existed any seed of discord, it certainly would have sprung up and flourished in Prussia during the last four or five years.

What circumstances could have been more favorable to such development than those created by the Old Catholics in league with Bismarck? The unprecedented victories over Austria and France had set all

Germany wild with enthusiasm. “Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt,” was the refrain of every song. On the other hand, many Catholics, especially in Germany, had been prejudiced and somewhat soured by the false interpretations which were everywhere put on the dogma of papal infallibility. Just at this moment Dr. Döllinger, whose reputation was greater than that of any other German theologian, announced his separation from the church, and at once there gathered around him a party of dissatisfied or suspended priests and rationalistic laymen. Reinkens was made bishop, and the Emperor of Germany publicly prayed that the “certainly correct conviction of the Hochwürdiger Herr Bischof might win ground more and more.” Fortune smiled upon the new religion and everything seemed to promise it the brightest future. What has been the result? In a population of eight millions of Catholics this sect, with the aid of the state, German enthusiasm, and the whole liberal press, has been able to gather only about six thousand adherents; and they are without zeal, without doctrinal or moral unity, having as yet not even dared to define their position towards the Pope. Dr. Döllinger himself has lost interest in the movement, and its most sanguine friends have yielded to despondency. Old Catholicism was, in fact, impossible from the beginning. But two roads open before those who to-day go forth from the fold of the church: the one leads to the Babel and decomposition of Protestant sectarianism, the other to the unbelief of scientific naturalism.

To declare that Christianity is lying disjointed, in shattered fragments, and yet to pretend that human

hands, with paste and glue, out of these broken pieces can remake the heavenly vase once filled with God’s spirit of faith, hope, and love, is an idle fancy. Into this patchwork no divine life will come; men will not believe in it, nor will it inspire enthusiasm or the heroic courage of martyrdom. Therefore they who leave the church, their native soil, have indeed all the world before them, and yet no place where they can find rest for their souls.

What the religious policy of the Prussian Liberals is, Herr von Kirchmann, to whom in a previous article we introduced our readers, informs us in the following words:

“The majority of the Liberal representatives are highly-educated men who have fallen out with the Christian churches, because they no longer accept their creed, and therefore hold as a principle that freedom of conscience for the individual is abundantly sufficient to satisfy the religious wants of the people. At best, they would consent to the existence of congregations; any organization beyond this they consider not only unnecessary but hurtful.”

This, then, is the Liberal programme: the individual shall have perfect freedom to believe, as he pleases, in God or the devil; but there shall be no ecclesiastical organization, unless a kind of congregationalism, which, having neither unity nor strength, can be easily rendered harmless by being placed under police supervision. These men of culture, as Herr von Kirchmann says, have fallen out with all the churches; and they are liberal enough to be willing to do everything in their power to make it impossible that any of them should exist at all, since without organic unity of some kind there can be no church, as there can be no state.

But let us hear what Herr von Kirchmann has to remark upon this subject.

“This view,” he says, “may satisfy those who have reached the high degree of culture of the Liberals; but those who take it utterly ignore the religious wants of the middle and lower classes, and fail to perceive the yearning, inseparable from all religious feeling, for association with persons of like sentiments, in order, through public worship, to obtain the strength and contentment after which this fundamental craving of the human heart longs.”

To the existence of this feeling, and its yearning for the largest possible association, the history of all Christian peoples, down even to the present day, bears witness; for this reason nowhere have men been satisfied with the freedom of the individual, but have ever demanded a church with acknowledged rights and the privilege of free intercommunion.

“To the dangers which would threaten society if religious associations should be broken up, and faith left to the whim of individuals, these highly cultivated men give no heed, because they do not themselves feel the need of such support; but they forget that their security, the very possibility, indeed, of reaching the point at which they stand, rests upon the power of the church over the masses; and should they destroy this by allowing the congregations to break up into atoms, leaving the Christian creed to be fashioned by passion and ever-varying interests, according to the fancy of each and every one, nothing would remain but the brute force of the state, which, without the aid of the internal dispositions of the people, cannot save society from complete dissolution.”[45]

Herr von Kirchmann, then, adds his testimony to that of many other observers who, though they do not believe in the divine origin and truth of the Christian religion, yet hold that its acceptance by the

masses as a system of belief, received on the authority of a church, is essential to the preservation and permanence of our civilization. This is a subject to which we Americans might with great profit give our thoughts.

As Emerson, who is probably our most characteristic thinker, has declared that he would write over the portal of the Temple of Philosophy WHIM, American Protestantism seems more and more inclined to accept this as the only satisfactory, or indeed possible, shibboleth in religion. The multiplication of sects holding conflicting creeds, while it has weakened faith in all religious doctrines, has helped on the natural tendency of Protestantism to throw men back upon their own feelings or fancies for their faith. This, of course, results in the breaking up even of congregations into atoms of individualism, and will, if not counteracted, necessarily destroy our character as a Christian people; and for us it is needless to say Christianity is the only possible religion.

Our statesmen—politicians may be the more proper word—though not irreligious, lack grasp of mind and depth of view, else they could not fail to perceive, however little they may sympathize with the doctrines or what they conceive to be the social tendencies of the Catholic Church, that just such a strong and conservative Christian organism as she is, is for us an indispensable political requirement. That none of the leading minds of the country should have taken this view is a sad evidence of want of intellectual power or of moral courage. The most that any of them feel authorized in saying in our favor is that a country which tolerates free-love, Mormonism, and the joss-house of

the Chinaman ought not, if consistency be a virtue, to persecute Catholics. In spite of appearances which mislead superficial observers, we are the most secular people in the world. No other people is so ready to sacrifice religious to material interests; no other people has ever to an equal extent banished all religious instruction from its national education; no other people has ever taken such a worldly view of its religion. The supernatural in religion is lost sight of by us, and we value it chiefly for its social and æsthetic power. The popular creed is that religion is something which favors republicanism, promotes the exploitation of the material resources of the globe, softens manners, and makes life comfortable.

The proposition to tax church property shows that a large portion of the American people have ceased to believe in religion as a moral and social power. A church is like a bank or theatre or coal-mine—something which concerns only those who have stock in it, and has nothing whatever to do with the public welfare. The school-house occupies quite other ground. The country is interested in having all its citizens intelligent; this is for the general good; but whether they believe in God or the soul is a matter of profound indifference, unless, possibly, to themselves, since this can in no way affect the progress or civilization of the American people. This is evidently the only possible philosophy for those who would tax church property. The popular contempt for theology encouraged by nearly all Protestant ministers is another evidence of the tendency to religious disintegration. There is but little danger that any church will ever get a controlling influence in the national

life of this country; our peril lies in the opposite direction; and that so few of those who think should see this is to us the saddest sign of the times; but those who do recognize it cannot help knowing that the Catholic Church is the strongest bulwark against this flood-tide.

The social dangers of an open persecution of the Catholic Church are most clearly seen in Prussia to-day. Since the German chancellor entered upon his present course of violence five bishops and fifteen thousand priests have been imprisoned or fined, and about the same number of laymen have suffered for daring to speak unfavorably of these proceedings. Never before, probably, have the police been so generally or constantly employed in arresting men who are loved and venerated by the people, and whose only crime is fidelity to conscience. The inevitable consequence of this is that the officers of the government come to be looked upon, not as the ministers of justice, but as the agents of tyranny and oppression, which must, of course, weaken respect for authority. These coercive measures, from the nature of things, tend only to confirm the Catholics in their conscientious convictions, and the government is thereby instigated to harsher methods of dealing with this passive resistance. The number of confessors of the faith increases, the enthusiasm and devotion of the people are heightened, and it becomes an honor and a glory to be made a victim of tyranny. The feeling of disgrace which is attached to the penalties for violation of law is more efficacious in repressing crime than the suffering which is inflicted; but this feeling is destroyed, or rather changed, into one of an opposite character in the minds of the people when they behold their venerated bishops

and much-loved priests dragged to prison for saying Mass or administering the sacraments. No amount of reasoning, no refinement of logic, can ever convince them that there can be anything criminal in the performance of these sacred functions. In this way the ignominy which in the public mind follows conviction for crime is wiped away, and the sacredness of the law itself endangered.

This alone is sufficient to show how blind and thoughtless Prince Bismarck has been in making war upon the Catholic Church just at the moment when wise counsels would have led him to seek to add the strength of reverence and respect to the enthusiasm with which the creation of the new empire had been hailed. The spoilt child of success, wounded pride made him mad. How serviceable he might have found the moral support of the Catholic clergy Herr von Kirchmann has informed him.

“I myself,” he says, “from 1849 to 1866, with the exception of some intervals, lived in Upper Silesia, a wholly Catholic province, and, as the president of the Criminal Senate of a Court of Appeals, had the fullest opportunity to study the moral and religious state of the people, which in nothing is so truly seen as in those circumstances out of which spring offences against the law. Now, although this province of more than a million of men was thoroughly Catholic and entirely in the hands of the clergy; although the school system was still very imperfect, and the population, with the exception of the landowners and the inhabitants of the large cities, not speaking the German language, was thereby deprived of culture and of intercourse with the German provinces, yet can I unhesitatingly affirm that the moral condition of the people was in no way worse than in Saxony or the Margravate where formerly I held similar official positions. The number of crimes was rather less, the security of person and

of property greater, and the relations between the different classes of society far more peaceable and friendly than in the provinces to which I have just made allusion. The socage and heavy taxes pressed hard upon the peasantry; nevertheless in 1848 insurrections against the landlords were not more frequent here than elsewhere. It was unquestionably the powerful influence of the clergy which, in spite of so many obstacles, gave to the people their moral character, and produced the general contentment and obedience which reflected the greatest honor upon the whole population. The vice of drunkenness, through the agency of temperance societies established solely by the priests, had been in an almost marvellous manner rooted out from among the people, and the general welfare made manifest progress. By means of my official and political position I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a large number of the pastors and curates, and still to-day I recall with pleasure my intercourse with these men, for the most part cultivated, but above all distinguished by their thorough gentleness of character. They were firm in maintaining the rights of their church, they were filled with the excellence of their mission, but they never thought of thwarting the civil authorities; on the contrary, they found in the clergy a great and efficacious support, so that this province needed fewer protective and executive officials than others.”[46]

No enlightened and fair government has anything to fear from the influence of men who are as firm in upholding the authority of the state as they are in asserting their own liberty of conscience; who will neither do wrong nor tamely submit to it. If, in the social, religious, and political crisis through which the nations of Christendom are passing, sound reason is ultimately to prevail and civilization is to be preserved, the necessity of an institution like the Catholic Church will come to be recognized by all who are capable of serious thought.

The divided allegiance, the maintenance of the supremacy of conscience, is essential to the preservation of the principle of authority in society. If it were possible to nationalize religion by placing all churches under state control, the authority of the state would necessarily become that of brute force, and would in consequence be deprived of its sacredness. The respect of Christian nations for the civil power is a religious sentiment; and if the church could cease to be, there would be a radical revolution in the attitude of the people toward the state. In Europe even now, in consequence of the progress of unbelief, respect for authority and the duty of obedience have been so far destroyed in the minds and hearts of the masses that government is possible only with the support of immense standing armies, which help on the social dissolution; and with us things would be in a still worse condition, were it not that the vast undeveloped resources of the country draw off the energies which else would be fatal to public order. Our strength and security are rather in our physical surroundings than in our moral resources. Our greatest moral force, during the century of our existence, has been the universal veneration of the people for the Constitution, which was regarded with a kind of religious reverence; but this element of strength is fast wasting away and will not pass over as a vital power into the second century of our life. The criticisms, the amendments, the patchings, which the Constitution has been made to suffer, have, more than civil strife, debased it to the common level of profane parchments and robbed it of the consecration which it had received in the hearts of the people

The change which has taken place, though it have something of the nature of growth and development, is yet, unquestionably, more a breaking down and dissevering. The Catholic Church, by the reverence which she inspires for institutions, is, and in the future will be yet more, the powerful ally of those who will stand by the Constitution as our fathers made it.

Our statesmen, we know, are in the habit of looking elsewhere for the means which are to give permanence to our free institutions. The theory now most in favor is that universal education is the surest safeguard of liberty, and it is upon this more than upon anything else that we, as a people, rely for the perpetuity of our form of government. This hope, we cannot but think, is based upon an erroneous opinion of the necessary tendency of intellectual culture; which is to increase the spirit of criticism, and consequently, by dissatisfying the mind with what is, to direct it continually to new experiments, with the hope of finding something better. Now, though this may be well enough in the realms of speculation, and may be a great help to the progress of science, it most assuredly does not tend either to beget or to foster reverence for existing institutions of any kind; and this same mental habit which has already made American Protestantism so fragmentary and contradictory will beyond doubt weaken and, unless counteracted, destroy the unity of our political life. This is a question which does not concern us alone; with it is bound up the future of the human race. If the American experiment of government by the people fails, all hope of such government perishes. If we allow our personal prejudices to

warp our judgment in a matter so catholic and all-important, no further evidence of our unfitness for the great mission which God seems to have assigned us is needed. Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of politicians for whom all other questions than the present success of party have no interest, and who therefore flatter the passions of the people instead of seeking to enlighten them; and the insane hatred and fear of the church which the Protestant masses have inherited from the Old World prevents them from seeing what a source of strength and bond of union is her strong and firmly-knit organism in a social state like ours, in which there are so many elements of dissolution and disintegration.

Herr von Kirchmann, though, as we have seen, not a Catholic nor a Christian, is yet too profound a statesman not to recognize the supreme social importance of the church to the modern world.

“Human society,” he says, “cannot do without the principle of authority, of obedience, of respect for law, any more than it can do without the principle of individual freedom; and now that the family has been shoved into the background, there remains to uphold this principle of authority only one great institution, and that is the Christian churches, and, above all, the Catholic Church.

“The Reformation has so filled the Evangelical Church with the principle of self-examination and self-determination that she cannot at all take upon herself the mission of protectress of authority, of respect for law, as law; which is essential to modern society. She is also too far removed from the laity, and lacks those special institutions which would enable her energetically to uphold this principle.

“The same is true of all reform parties within the church, and must be applied to the Old Catholics, should they succeed in acquiring any importance. The Roman Catholic Church alone must be considered the true mother of respect for

authority. She does not permit the individual to decide in matters of faith and discipline; and she most perfectly realizes the essence of religion, which cannot proceed from the individual, but must have its source in the commandments of God. In the bishops, in the councils, in the pope, the individual finds authorities who announce to him religious truth, and by the administration of the sacraments bring him nearer to God. Changes in faith and worship which, with the progress of science and of general culture, become necessary, are here withdrawn from the disputes of the learned and the criticism of individuals; in the councils and in their head, the pope, an institution is found by which modifications may be permitted without shaking faith in the teachings of the church.

“In the position of the priest toward the laity this relation of the individual to the church becomes most intimate, and numerous special ordinances cultivate the spirit of obedience and respect for the commands of ecclesiastical superiors, while they also serve the ends of Christian charity and benevolence. It ought not, indeed, to be denied that this repression of individual self-determination and this fostering of obedience may be carried too far, and to some extent has, in the Catholic Church, been exaggerated, as in civil society the cultivation of individual freedom and the repression of authority have produced an opposite excess; but precisely through the interaction of these extremes will the true mean be obtained; and therefore ought the state to seek in the Catholic Church that powerful institution which alone, by virtue of her whole organization, is able to ward off the dangers which threaten society from the exaggeration of the principle of individual freedom. But to do this the church must be left in the possession of her constitution as it has hitherto existed, and the state, consequently, should not interfere with her external power any further than its own existence demands. In this respect the principle of individual freedom which pervades all modern life is so powerful an auxiliary of the state that no fear of the influence of the church need be felt, of which a little too much is far less dangerous to society than too little.

“These are considerations, indeed, which are not in harmony with the programme

of modern liberalism, and will therefore have but little weight with those who swim with the current of the time; nevertheless, if we look around us, we perceive many evidences of the instinctive feeling of human society that in the Catholic Church may be found a protection for the harmony of social life which now no longer exists elsewhere. Only in this way can we explain the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in her strictly hierarchical constitution in America, and the increasing Catholic movement in England, together with the efforts of the Established Church to draw nearer to the Catholic; and this tendency would be far more pronounced had it not to contend against historical reminiscences which in England are more vivid than elsewhere. Similar reasons influence the government of France to seek rather to strengthen than to weaken the power of the church; and in this matter the unbelieving Thiers has not acted otherwise than the religious MacMahon.

“After the principle of authority had been shaken by revolutions and an unhappy war in France more than in any other country, the people knew not where to seek help, except in the fostering of religion and the support of the Catholic Church. Like grounds prevent Italy and Austria from coming to an open rupture with the church; they prefer to yield somewhat in the execution of the laws rather than suffer themselves to be deprived of her indispensable aid. Similar tendencies exist in the other German governments, and also among the rich and powerful families of Germany and Prussia. Everywhere, even where these families are not adherents of the Catholic faith, they feel that this church is a fortress against the anarchy of individual freedom which should be defended and not destroyed. The members of these families are not blind to the defects of the church; but they know that in the present age these are the least to be feared, while her power against the self-exaltation of the individual is indispensable to modern society. It is altogether a mistake to attribute this bearing of the wealthy classes of all civilized nations towards the church to selfish motives or to the cunning of priests; these motives may, as in all great things, slip in in isolated cases; but this whole movement in Europe and America springs from deeper causes—from causes

which lie at the very bottom of our common nature, which can neither suffer the loss of freedom nor yet do without order and authority.

“About every ten years we are assured that, if only this or that is reached, the Catholic Church will of herself fall to pieces. Never has the attempt to bring about this consummation been made with more spirit and energy than in the literature and political constitutions of the last century; and yet this church lives still in our day, and what she has lost in temporal sovereignty is doubly and trebly made up to her in the growing number of her children and the gradually-increasing insight into the significance of her mission for human society.

“For this reason the present conflict with the church in Prussia ought not to be pushed so far as to bring her power as low as the state has brought that of the Evangelical Church. If the Catholic Church is to fulfil the great social mission which we have just described, and which consists essentially in her maintaining an equilibrium between freedom and obedience, which is indispensable to society and the state, her external power and internal organization must not be interfered with in a way to render the accomplishment of this exalted mission impossible.”[47]

Herr Joerg, the editor of one of the first reviews of Germany, has said that Prince Bismarck has done more to strengthen and make popular the Catholic cause in the empire than the two hundred Jesuits whom he has exiled could have done in half a century. This, we believe, is coming to be generally recognized. The war on the church was begun with loud boastings. Men of high position declared that in two years not a Catholic would be left in Germany. The prince chancellor disdained to treat with the Pope or the bishops, and defiantly entered upon his course of draconic legislation to compel to his stubborn will the consciences of eight millions of Prussian subjects. He is not able to

conceal his disappointment. With glory enough to satisfy the most ambitious he could not rest content, but must court defeat. All his hopes have fallen to the ground. The Old Catholics who were to have been his most powerful allies have sunk into the oblivion of contempt; the priests whom he expected to throw off the authority of their bishops have not been found; the uprising of the laity against their pastors has not taken place; the bishop who was to have put himself at the head of a German Catholic Church has not appeared; the Falck laws have not served the purpose for which they were enacted, nor have the numerous supplementary bills met with better success. He has indeed made his victims personally most uncomfortable; bishops and priests he has cast into dungeons, monks and nuns he has driven forth from their homes and their country to beg the bread of exile; laymen he has sent to jail for speaking and writing the truth; but with all this he has not advanced one step towards the end he aims at. He has not made a breach in the serried Catholic phalanx. His legislation has nearly doubled the number of Catholic representatives in the parliament; it has given new life and wider influence to the Catholic press; it has welded the union of bishops, priests, and people, and bound all closer to the Pope. From their dungeons the bishops and priests come forth and are received in triumph like conquering heroes; imprisonments and fines of Catholic editors serve only to increase the circulation of their journals. In the meantime the radicals and revolutionists are gaining strength, crime is becoming more common, and the laws aimed at the church are beginning to tell

upon the feebler organizations of Protestantism. Since the law on civil marriage has been passed comparatively few contract matrimony in the presence of the Protestant ministers; great numbers refuse to have their children baptized or to have the preachers assist at the burial of the dead. The government has become alarmed, and quite recently circulars have been sent to the officials charged with carrying out the law on civil marriage, in which they are instructed to inform the contracting parties that the law does not abrogate the hitherto existing regulation concerning ecclesiastical marriage, and that they are still bound to present themselves before the clergyman and to have their children baptized as formerly. The service of the police, we need scarcely say, is not required to induce the Catholics to seek the blessing of the church upon their marriage contracts or to have their children baptized.

The result of all this is that many wise and large-minded men, like Von Hoffmann, Von Gerlach, and Von Kirchmann, have lost all sympathy with the policy of Bismarck towards the Catholic Church, as well as confidence in its success. They now thoroughly understand that, were it possible to destroy the church, this would be an irreparable misfortune for the fatherland. The state needs the church more than the church the state. She can live with Hottentots and Esquimaux, but without her neither liberty nor culture can be permanent. It must also be humiliating to Prince Bismarck to see with what little success those who have sought to ape him have met. Mr. Gladstone, from faith in the chancellor, thought to bolster up a falling party by “expostulating” with the Pope, and he has succeeded only in finding himself

in the company of Newdegate and Whalley. President Grant has been made to believe that the Pope is such a monstrous man that by means of him even a third term might become possible; and he will retire to the obscurity of private life with the stigma of having sought to stir up religious strife for the furtherance of his own private interest.

[37] April, 1874, p. 195.

[38] Romans xiii. 1, 2.]

[39] The British Quarterly, January, 1875, p. 17.

[40] Luke x. 16.

[41] Matthew xviii.. 17, 18.

[42] Acts iv. 20.

[43] Acts xv. 28.

[44] The London Quarterly Review, January, 1875, p. 160.

[45] Der Culturkampf, § 28, 29.

[46] Culturkampf, pp. 33, 34.

[47] Culturkampf pp. 44-47.

NOTRE DAME DE PITIE.

“Was ever sorrow like, unto my sorrow?”

There is in the Imperial Library at Paris an old copy of the gospels written on parchment, evidently of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, with the arms of Colbert on the cover. It once belonged to the church of Albi. At the end of the gospels is the Planctus, or Complainte de Notre Dame in the langue d’Oc—the old language of Southern France—full of naïve piety and charming simplicity. No one could hear unmoved the touching tone of reproach and grief it breathes throughout. It is in thirty-two stanzas, the lines of which, monotonous and melancholy, are like the repeated tollings of a funeral bell. The last words of each verse are an expression of exhausted grief—the dying away of a voice drowned in tears.…

It is entitled: “Here begins the Plaint in honor of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and the sorrow of his most holy Mother.”

“Planh sobre planh! dolor sobre dolor!

Cel e terra an perdut lor senhor,

E yeu mon filh, el solelh sa clardor;

Jusieus lan mort an grande desonor.

Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!”[48]

The cry of Ay filh!—“Alas! my

Son”—at the end of every verse is like a sob that breaks the plaint. This long wail of maternal grief, which no translation fully renders, was doubtless sung round many an effigy of the dead Christ in the dim old churches of Languedoc centuries ago, just as the people of the Pyrenees at this day gather around their dead to weep and improvise a dirge of sorrow. We were particularly touched at coming across this ancient document; for it seemed to echo the devotion to the Mother of Sorrows which we had found written all over southwestern France. Everywhere in this Terra Mariæ are churches and oratories in honor of Notre Dame de Pitié, most of which are monuments of an age as sorrowful as the holy mystery they commemorate.

It is remarkable how popular devotion turned to the Mater Dolorosa in the sixteenth century, when Christ seemed bleeding anew in this land of altars ruined and priests slaughtered by the Huguenots. Numberless are the legends of the apparitions of Our Lady of Sorrows in those sad days, which led to the erection of a great number of churches wherein she is represented holding her divine Son taken down from the cross—one of the

most affecting appeals that can be made to the human heart. For the long, sad procession of mourners who go weeping and groaning through this valley of tears—gementes et flentes in hac lacrymarum valle—constitutes the greater part of the human race. The widow, the orphan, the friendless, the infirm, the needy, and the laborer with little or no joy in life, when they turn towards Mary, love to find her at the foot of the cross in mute sorrow over the inanimate form of her Son, or with the wheel of swords in her bleeding heart, or some other attribute of human infirmity. Hence the names given to these mountain chapels by the sorrowful as a mark of their trust in this sweet type of grief: Notre Dame des Larmes, Notre Dame des Souffrances, de la Consolation, de l’Espérance—names which have balm in their very sound. Above all is the title which seems to include all other sorrows—Notre Dame de Pitié—the most common among the perils of the mountain streams and on the broad moors of the Landes. There are innumerable Pietàs, or Pitiés, all through this region—on the sands of the seashore below Bayonne, where the sailors go to pray before embarking on the perfidious waves of the Bay of Biscay; in dangerous mountain passes, as in the oratory of Pène-Taillade beyond Arreau; among country groves, as in the lone sanctuary near Lannemezan to which the husbandman resorts to be spared the ravages of hail among his vines and wheat-fields; in the valleys of Bigorre; on the Calvary of Betharam; on the heights near Pau; and at Goudosse, where the poor goîtreux of the mountains go to pray. Yes, the shadow of this great type of sorrow extends over all the land.

There are several chapels of Notre Dame de Pitié in the ecclesiastical province of Auch that are particularly renowned. One of these is the beautiful chapel of Notre Dame de Garaison, in the Diocese of Tarbes, dear to every Catholic heart in the land, embosomed among the hills of the Hautes Pyrénées like a lily in the green valley, whose Madonna was solemnly crowned in 1865, by the authorization of Pope Pius IX., in the presence of forty thousand people. At the very entrance is a Pietà, melting the heart with the sight of the pale, inanimate Christ and Mary’s incomparable woe.

“Ay filh, tan mortal dolor!”

Within are dim Gothic arches, large gilt statues of the twelve apostles, and the holy image of the Mère des Douleurs, before which we went to pray amid devout pilgrims. At one side is the fountain of healing waters; behind is a garden of roses; and on the other side are cloisters shaded with acacias, in the centre of which is the white Madonna standing serene and holy in the peaceful solitude with outstretched arms, as if calling on all:

“Dites, dites une oraison

A la Vierge de Garaison

Vous qui en ces lieux amène la souffrance,

Bon pèlerins,

Accablés de chagrins,

Pour que vos cœurs s’ouvrent à l’espérance.

Dans ce séjour,

Dites avec amour,

Dites, dites une oraison,

A la Vierge de Garaison!”[49]

Near Gimont, in the department of Gers, is Notre Dame de Cahuzac,

in a pleasant valley on the left bank of a stream that bathes the walls of the church. Like all places of pilgrimage in this land of favored sanctuaries, it has its old legend, which is associated with a venerable elm, the relic of past ages. It was in the sixteenth century when a young shepherd, leading his flock at an early hour to a distant pasture, saw an elm in a garden by the wayside surrounded by an extraordinary light. The amazed youth fell on his knees—a spontaneous act in those days when the heart turned naturally to God at the moment of terror—stammered a prayer, and, unable to turn his eyes away, saw through the branches aflame, but not consumed, the wondrous form of Our Lady of Pity. As soon as he recovered his self-possession he ran to the Cistercian abbey at Gimont, and the monks, going to the tree, found the sacred, image of Mary, which they bore in procession to their church with songs of praise. The next day it was gone, and they found it again in the favored elm. Three times they bore it to their church: three times it returned to the tree. It was no use to contend with divine Providence. The garden was then purchased and an oratory built on the spot—a graceful monument of rural piety, to which one generation after another has resorted for spiritual favors and physical aid. It has its silver lamps and vessels; its walls are hung with golden hearts, valuable medals, and other offerings from the grateful votary. There is great devotion among Catholics to the one leper who returned to give thanks.

Cahuzac became renowned throughout the kingdom and attracted pilgrims of the highest distinction—lords, bishops, and cardinals.

The archbishops of Auch, who bore the high title of Primate of the two Navarres, when they took possession of their see, came to place themselves under the protection of Our Lady of Cahuzac. Popes granted indulgences to the chapel, which thousands of pilgrims came annually to win—not only peasants from the neighboring fields, but the nobles of the land in penitential garb, with bare feet bleeding from the roughness of the way.

This holy sanctuary was saved, as it were, by a miracle from the Huguenots who came to lay it waste three centuries ago, the leader being struck down, as by an invisible hand, at the very door, to the consternation of his followers. It was closed at the Revolution, but again spared; and when better days arrived, it was reopened to popular devotion. The Abbé de Cahuzac, a young nobleman who had renounced the honors of the world and received holy orders at Rome, became chaplain of the church that bore his name. He served it with zeal and affection for more than thirty years, and at his death bequeathed a part of his fortune for its support, leaving behind him a holy memory still dear to the people.

A confraternity of Notre Dame de Pitié was founded in this chapel by Dom Bidos, abbot of Gimont, under the patronage of Cardinal de Polignac, which became celebrated in the province and included all ranks of society. Men of illustrious birth, beside the man of humblest condition, bore the lighted torch before the revered image of Cahuzac in the public processions.

The arches and walls of the church were, under Henry IV., covered with rich paintings, which

in time became half effaced. The church has been recently restored, and attracts great numbers of pilgrims from the neighboring departments. It consists of a nave and five chapels. Over the main altar is the revered statue, full of sweet, sad grace, at the feet of which so many have sought consolation. On one of the capitals in the nave is sculptured an episode from the old Roman du Renard, in which the fox takes the guise of a preacher to a barnyard auditory, who do not perceive the store of provisions already accumulated in the hood thrown back on his shoulders. This species of satire was one of the liberties of former times of which artists largely availed themselves.

Another chapel of Notre Dame de Pitié is at Sainte-Gemme, built against the walls of an old feudal castle—a cave-like oratory of the thirteenth century, beneath a square tower, simple, antique, severe. Its gilt statue of the Mother of Sorrows and a few old frescos of the Passion are the sole ornaments, unless we except the arms of the old lords of Sainte-Gemme, carved among the arches. When the castle was besieged by the Protestants in the sixteenth century, the châtelaine and her attendants betook themselves to the foot of the altar, where they prayed with fervor while the lord of the place defended it against the attacks of the enemy. A superhuman power seemed to aid him. After a few days the siege was raised, and he came, with his handful of brave followers, to ascribe the deliverance to Our Lady of Pity. The chapel became celebrated, and so great at times was the affluence of the pilgrims that services were held in the court of the castle before an altar set up beneath a venerable elm. Every Friday,

in the good old times, the chaplain piously read the Passion according to St. John in this chapel, and then sang on his knees the Stabat Mater with the verse,

“Quando corpus morietur,

Fac ut animæ donetur

Paradisi gloria,”

to obtain a happy end for the dying.

In the middle of the sixteenth century Dominique de Cuilhens was appointed chaplain of Sainte-Gemme. He was born in the vicinity—in the old manor-house of Cuilhens, which falling into his possession in the year 1569, he at once drew up a will in which he founded the little hospital of St. Blaise for the poor, and bequeathed to the needy of the parish the annual sum of forty-five livres, which the magistrates of the place, who were the executors, continued to pay till 1789.

In 1648 the lord of Sainte-Gemme, about to join the royal army in Catalonia, made a will, in which, in order to encourage morality in the town, greatly weakened by the troubles of the times, he gave the interest of a thousand livres, to be distributed annually by the rector and consuls of the place to girls of irreproachable morals about to marry—a legacy regularly paid till 1792.