idea or discovery is secured by the act of Catholic world. Twelve thousand copies publication, and, in virtue of such an act, are sold in Italy alone, though the paper is priority of the conception as regards the as remarkable for the bitterness of its hoscouversion of heat-rays into light-rays, be- tility to Italian freedom as for the fanatic longs indisputably to Dr. Akin. At the Ultramontanism of its doctrine, and the meeting of the British Association, assembled virulence, not to say the ruffianism, of its at New Castle in 1863, he proposed three style. It is of course the organ of the experiments by which he intended to solve special theology, philosophy, and ecclesiasthis question. He afterwards became asso- tical system upheld by the Society, as disciated with an accomplished man of science, tinguished not only from the liberal school Mr. Griffith, of Oxford, and jointly with of Döllinger, but also from the Orthodox him pursued the enquiry. Two out of the Catholic system taught in Louvain. This three experiments proposed at Newcastle by production, which is to strong Catholics Dr. Akin are quite impracticable. In the what the Record is to educated Calvinists, third it was proposed to concentrate by a a paper read but loathed, has just been large burning mirror the rays of the sun, to raised by Pius IX. in a solemn Brief cut off the luminous portion of the radiation addressed to the world to the position of by 'proper absorbents,' and then to operate authorized defender and exponent of the with the obscure rays. Dr. Akin employed Catholic faith. Its writers are formed into in his experiments a mirror thirty-six inches a College in perpetuity, absolutely dependin diameter, but he has hitherto failed to re-ent on the General of the Society of Jesus, alize his idea. With a mirror four inches and formally authorized to compose and in diameter, the radiant source with which his researches had rendered him familiar, and a substance which he had himself discovered to filter the beam of the electric lamp, Professor Tyndall obtained all the results above described.

From The Spectator, 21st April.
THE JESUITS IN ROME.

AN event of great importance has just occurred in Rome, which, like most Roman events, has escaped attention in Great Britain. The Civilta Cattolica, the Jesuit newspaper, has been suddenly raised by an exercise of the Pope's plenary authority to the position of an integral part in the organization of the Catholic Church. This journal was founded by the Society of Jesus in 1850, and was originally published in Naples, but its editors could not entirely conceal their belief in the great dogma of the "Company," the supremacy of the Papacy over all temporal authority; and Ferdinand, though a bigot by nature and an Ultramontane by policy, was still a Bourbon, prepared to worship the Pope as long as the Pope supported the secular authority, and to resist him if he interfered with any royal prerogative. He ordered the Society and their paper alike to quit Naples. The Civilta Cattolica was consequently removed to Rome, and the whole influence of the Society exerted to extend its circulation, which speedily became unrivalled in the

publish writings on behalf of the Holy Faith
and the Holy See. The paper in fact is to
be the Catholic Moniteur. The College is
to possess presses and a library of its own,
and to remain for the time in its present
house, but should events compel the College
to quit Rome, the Jesuit General has abso-
lute authority to select its head-quarters
a singular provision, as he may not choose
to select the same place as the Pope, and the
Journal therefore, though so nearly made
infallible, may be beyond Papal reach.
Should it, however, happen that no suitable
retreat can be found, then the property and
revenue of the institution are to be left un-
touched until Providence once more does
its duty by restoring the Jesuits to Rome.
The effect produced by this astounding de-
cree, which really makes articles in the Civ-
ilta as binding upon Catholics as Acts in the
Gazette are upon Courts of Justice, has been,
as was to be expected, very great. The
liberal Catholics are thunder-struck, for they
see in the Brief the intellectual death-war-
rant of men like Döllinger and Newman,
while the old orthodox party are disgusted
at this new proof of the ascendancy of the
Jesuits, always detested by the other Orders
and the secular clergy, both for their op-
pressiveness and their pretension to be the
only power capable of subduing the modern
spirit.

The Society in fact is at the zenith of its
influence over the Catholic organization,
and is becoming imprudent in the plenitude
of its security. Its rulers have just struck
another blow which has profoundly irritated
even the interior hierarchy of Rome.
fifteen years past the Society has been try-

For

ing to procure the condemnation of the evil infection of the times made it incumProfessors of Divinity and Philosophy in the bent to stir the people to implore that the University of Louvain. The Congregation intervention of Heaven might avert the of the Index, however, to which such mat- scourge impending. The sight to be beheld ters belong by prescriptive right, aware that day after day, as the shades of night began the desire arose not from any wish to sup- to fall on public localities, was truly painpress heresy, but to obtain the control of ful, from its grotesque caricature. Long one of the very few free Catholic Universi- files of cowled and fantastically dressed deties, and seeing nothing unorthodox in the votees, in gloomy robes, their heads and teaching of Louvain, have steadily resisted faces covered with sacks, slits in which let the demand. A few weeks ago therefore the gleam of two eyes flash through, precedthe Pope was induced to strike a coup d'état ed by monster crucifixes borne aloft, and against his own instruments, and issue a chanting at tip-top voices lugubrious hymns, decree, entirely without precedent, with- were to be seen marching along the streets drawing the Louvain question from the con- in every direction, escorting preachers to trol of the Congregation as a body, and re- the temporary stages, from which they deferring it to a special tribunal, composed livered frantic harangues to the mob by the for the occasion of the Cardinals of the In- light of torches flickering upon the convuldex and the Cardinals of the Holy Office, sive gesticulations of the ranting friars, who the latter of whom are all under Jesuit in- were flanked by a spectral array of mutes, fluence. These trusted agents met in se- glaring without motion, like spell-bound figcret, but even in such a packed tribunal it ures, through the holes in their horridly was difficult to obtain a verdict, and the shapeless masks. Of the preachers who condemnation at last pronounced was so thus performed in the streets and squares mild in tone as greatly to irritate the Soci- religious burlesques of the most spasmodic ety. It was, however, obtained, and though convulsiveness, all, with hardly an excepit is not yet published, a letter has been tion, were members of the Society of Jesus, despatched to the Belgian Episcopate so or of some body directly affiliated, such as unfavorable to the Louvain Professors that the Passionists and Lazarists. But the the chief among them, M. Houbacx, has crowning spectacle of the last night of these already resigned his chair. The Jesuits missions threw all the former exhibitions therefore have gained their point, a fact the into the shade. Then the flames of twelve more remarkable because to gain it they burning heaps cast their lurid light over had to break through the immovable system Rome at dusk on the twelve different sites of the Ecclesiastical Court. Englishmen of missionary preaching, and to the amazeare apt to imagine that the Pope is absolute ment of the bystanders the preachers, with in the way Napoleon is absolute, but though the wild action of men possessed by raving this is no doubt true in a sense, the Papacy is very strictly bound by its own rules, and the act of Pius in withdrawing the Louvain teaching from the control of the Congregation created as much surprise as the Queen's exercise of her legal veto would. It is quoted as proof positive that the Pope, who once prompted a book in defence of Clement XIV.'s order dissolving the Jesuits, and furnished materials for it from the secret archives, has now surrendered himself absolutely into their hands. They direct the schools of the University, they weigh upon the Secretary of State, they direct the consciences of the College, they provide the whole intellectual food- thin pap it is allowed to Rome, and they can affect the very Bank. They are in fact in the position which, if history teaches anything, precedes a priesthood's fall.

They are even descending into the streets. In the last half of the Lent season the Pope was induced to order missions to preach in the open streets, on the ground that the

spirits, pitched vehemently on these heaps the incarnations of wickedness, the books condemned by the Index. On the steps of San Carlo in the Corso, the fashionable Church of Rome, the Bishop of Aquile, in the spasmodic attitude of a frantic St. Michael combating the Devil, before the eyes of the astounded elite, thronging home at twilight on that spring Sunday afternoon from the Pincian, flung into the fire the literary productions of impiety, to the grotesque accompaniment of furiously gesticulated anathemas. But even this strange scene was outdone by the performance got up at two of the preaching sites, at St. Maria Maggiore and at the Church of the, Consolazione on the Forum. Here, as a Passionist - one of those weird-like figures, clothed in black, with a wounded heart in glaring white worked on the breast — after working himself into a semblance of delirious paroxysm, was devoting the Scriptures of wickedness to destruction by fire, there appeared of a sudden persons who professed

487

to have been moved to remorse by his ap- ticed. This is the difference in the forecast
peals, and who bore aloft daggers and other which Englishmen and Americans make as
weapons, which they declared to have been to their own destiny. Some cause, which is
given them by Freemasons and other secret very difficult to trace, but which is possibly
sectarians, wherewith to work out their im- the absence of hereditary anxiety in Amer-
pious ends. And then the Passionist man ica, has upon this point absolutely sep-
of God felt transported with heavenly joy arated two people of the same blood and in
at the blessing so visibly attending his spas- most aspects strangely similar. The Eng-
modic eloquence, and calling upon a smith lishman, when he thinks at all upon the sub-
who happily found himself amongst the ject, is very apt to forecast an unpleasant
loiterers and was at once recognized as future for his country, to believe the day
such, and who as happily had both hammers will come when it will be shut up in the
and anvil ready with him, caused at once ocean, or starved for want of corn, or
these weapons of the Devil to be broken to ruined by the exhaustion of its coal, or
pieces, to the edification of the staring mob. deprived of its preeminence in manufac-
One may have nothing but a shrug of dis- tures, or in some way or other thrown
gust for such a coarse pantomime in Rome, back to a secondary rank. The notion that
but the thing acquires a lurid aspect when his country has reached its zenith, and must
taken in connection with the scenes to from some cause unknown recede, has for a
which these stimulants to fanatical passion century been constantly present to the Eng-
lishman's mind. The American, on the
have led at Barletta.
contrary, believes in a boundless future al-
most visibly before him, is the happier for it
and the stronger, accepts children with
greater readiness, meets the troubles, and
especially the pecuniary troubles, of life
with greater ease and more perfect sang-
froid. Somebody, he thinks, will always be
wanting something; if he cannot grow corn
he can make Lucifer matches, and in a
short time "we shall be two hundred millions,
Sir, and the scream of the American eagle
will drown all the Te Deums of the Öld
World; and two hundred millions, Sir, will
offer a market for lucifer matches wide as
the universe, profitable as dealings in pe-
troleum oil." It is all so amazingly true,
There is no vaster dream dreamed on
too.
earth than that of these Americans, and yet
it is all within the limits of the possible, so
far within them that its realization is more
probable than its failure. Judging, as hu-
man beings are alone entitled to judge, on
the evidence, it is much more likely than
not that in 1966 the American people will
be one hundred and fifty millions, speaking
one language, and that English, and pos-
sessed of all the knowledge that language
contains, with a country of all climates and
all scenes, resources scarcely explored, and
an almost total freedom from physical dis-
tress. Every race, cultivation, and capaci-
ty will be represented in its borders, and
nearly every civilization compatible with
Republicanism and a very elastic Christi-
anity. The number of the States will be at
least fifty, and in each a marked and peculiar
society will have been formed under the
gradual operation of laws as different as the
marriage laws of Wisconsin and Vermont
now are, and of social systems as separate

The entire scene now transacting at
Rome, the strain put upon all powers, the
wild appeals to all passions, the Pope's de-
crees and the Pope's admissions, the Brief
which almost declares a newspaper inspired,
and the speech which told M. de Rohan
and the 300 French Legitimists that the
spiritual power could not perish, wears to
observant eyes the appearance that pre-
cedes revolution. Swaying between France
and the Jesuits, Voltaire and Loyola, with
a weak old man on the throne, a foreign
legion in the barracks, mad priests playing
Savonarola in the streets, Russia defiant,
Prussia peremptory, Austria powerless, and
raging Italy surging all round up to the
very gates, the Holy Chair is rocking om-
inously. If it falls, the destruction will be
due mainly to the tremendous strain the
Society of Jesus has placed upon its decay-
ing strength. It might, as Catholics affirm,
bear Peter safely, but nothing framed by
mortal hands could long carry Ignatius.
Even in Paraguay the leaden rule of the
men who think that they alone can arrest
the progress of mankind broke helplessly
down. Even a Neapolitan Bourbon was
compelled to expel them from among the
people they had helped him to enslave.

From The Spectator, April 21.
TWO NATIONAL DREAMS.

THE abiding jealousy felt in England towards the United States has many causes, some of them just, more perhaps unjust, but one of them very strong and very little no

broader, cultivations and possibilities of social life yet more multiform and great, for they may cross the Isthmus, fix a capital greater than Rome, at a spot where the President can look from the White House upon two oceans, and stretch away, pressing on in innumerable hordes, over the glorious wildernesses of Brazil and the rich alluvium of the Amazon, mine the Andes, and fill those wonderful plateaus where, as in Bogota, the apple and the pine-apple grow side by side, and so spread slowly down away to the Antarctic zone. The half of earth will then be American, and the curse of divided language done away; and the human race, rid at last of physical misery, of war, of inequality, and of the paralysis of powers produced by fears of each other, may commence a career as new as that which began when man first instituted marriage and discovered fire. It is a pleasant dream, one which makes New England farmers better, and softer, and nobler amidst their sordid cares; and it is all possible, or at least conceivable. No Englishman with an imagination denies that in his heart, or even doubts it, and it raises in him, among other things, that fierce jealousy which broke out so strangely during the recent civil war. He feels as if this structure thus visibly rising to the stars casts a shadow over England, as if his own land were lost in the haze around that coming Empire, as if he were dwarfed by the presence of his mightier descendant. He feels as a Jew might in the year 30, when, conscious that he alone of mankind recog nized the grand intellectual and moral truths, he yet saw his country nominally independent, really but a province of all-absorbing and luxurious Rome.

as those of Maryland and Massachusetts. | there will stretch before them other terriExperiments of the most gigantic character tories to possess, lands more vast, mountains will have been tried to the full, experiments more various, plains more rich, rivers still as wild as the Western one of a nearly unlimited right of divorce, or as those social schemes tried so often in Western New York, or as one idea, so precious to every Democratic mind, of dispensing with every control save that of the parish constable. A hundred and fifty millions of men of all races and all instincts will be living together on one soil under all climates and possessed of every resource, coal, and iron, and corn, and wine, coal-fields so endless that even American lavishness cannot waste them, iron-fields so vast that they will consume forests covering a continent, corn-fields which will feed the world, and vineyards which even now send their produce to the owners of Hermitage and Johannisberg. There is no science such a race may not prosecute in peace for ages, no form of literature it may not develope, no discovery possible to man it may not hope to make. It will, without an effort, raise 300,000,000l. of revenue by a taxation lower than that of England now is, and employ the whole, or nearly the whole of it, in works of peace. Distress, or tumult, or resistance to authority, or dread of freedom in its most unrestrained forms, will, says the American, be as unknown in that land as ignorance or violent crime. Every man will be secure in his home, every man equal, every man free to do whatsoever of good his hand can find, or his brain invent, or his heart conceive. So great will be the love of the people for these institutions, that the idea of attack will fade away, for what nation could dream of attacking a country in which thirty millions of armed males, capable of becoming soldiers in six weeks, will perish rather than suffer menace, and will own ships greater in number than those of the rest of the earth? Yet so great will be the content of this people that Europe will pass on its way unharmed, unimpeded, and uncontrolled, save indeed, it may be, by an extorted agreement that America shall always be left open, a secure harbour of refuge, the "shadow of a great rock" to the poor, and the miserable, and the oppressed. To South and North alike the land will be open, and while the Dane eaten out of his home may find in Maine a climate as rough and manners as kindly as his own, the Italian unable to prosper may grow Lacrima Christi on the slopes of Virginia, or renew the myrtles of Sicily by the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. There is room for all and to spare, and when the tale is complete, and Americans outnumber every white race,

The bitterness is the greater because the Englishman, almost alone among mankind, has neither past nor future, neither dwells on the glory of his forefathers nor looks forward with hope to his descendants. The Scotch peasant remembers Bannockburn as if it were yesterday, the Russian moujik be. lieves in the day when Holy Russia, mistress of Constantinople, shall give the law to mankind. The average Englishman knows nothing which happened before his father, looks forward to nothing in which his country will play a conspicuous part. He has few national traditions and no national hopes. The educated German believes always in some coming Utopia, when all men shall have leisure to enjoy, and Germany, safe in her unity, shall

plunge fearlessly into thought; and the ed-sun-baked civilizations, sowing the seeds of ucated Frenchman never wearies of the new life over half mankind, watering every past of France; but the educated English- germ as it grew to maturity, and learning, man only wonders how men endured lives as all great gardeners learn, to recognize so bad as those of his forefathers, looks for- the beauty, and the meaning, and the use ward only to the time when the greatness of things which seem to the ignorant poisonof England shall have passed away. Yet ous weeds. He might dream of an Engif he dreamed, as Americans dream, pleas- land which had reconciled the great diffiant things, and yet possible, the dream culties of mankind, absolute freedom with would not be an ignoble one. He might perfect organization, liberty with union, dream of a little kingdom in a rough but self-will with self-sacrifice, a State which healthy climate, cultivated like a garden, could act like a man, yet of which every in which a society of forty millions had been citizen felt himself a free and component organized till it was as completely an enti- part. He might finally imagine an Engty as a human being, in which the slightest land not indeed as powerful as the Union, injury to the meanest was felt as the pluck- but so devoted to independence, so scientifiing of a hair in a strong man's beard. In cally organized, so finely and strongly weldthat land, so small and so cold, might existed into a weapon, with Anglo-Saxon for a society coherent as the diamond, but with weight, Celt for edge, and Scotch for temcolours as infinitely varied, a table as bright, per, that to attack it would be simply to facets as definite and as dissimilar- a soci- strike at a rapier with a crowbar, which ety in which men rich as the old kings of might destroy, but not in time to prevent a the East realized a luxury more than Assy-mortal wound. Nothing in all that is imrian by the aid of arts more subtle than possible, once a generation is fully educated, those of Greece, yet shared every luxury and we shall educate the next. Rapid inand every art with the meanest of those tercommunication is already binding the around them; and in which workers, never nation into one great family, till a hind canpoor to pinching, cordially aided in produ- not be horsewhipped on a remote moorland cing the magnificence they freely enjoyed; without a national roar of anger, and the in which thought, for the first time really House of Commons becomes for all purfree, for the first time spread among millions, poses the conseil de famille. Let but the would strike out new literatures and novel spirit of localism, or, as we call it, self-govsciences, and add every day not only to ernment, decay a little more, as it always man's dominion over nature—it was a sav- does under education, and England will be age who first tortured earth into multiply- welded as we have described, will present ing seed corn-but to man's capacity for such an aspect of variegated, but not unhapliving noble lives; in which so infinite py life. This dream seems to us as bright would be the variety of position, and cir- as the other, though not as vast, as the cumstance, and work, that every capacity lawn may be as beautiful as a prairie, and every disposition should be able to put Windermere as Erie, a garden as a wilderout and profit by the full measure of its ness of wild flowers. The element of vastpowers; in which the latent use of all forms ness is alone wanting, and we can find that of weakness should become visible, in which in our purposes and our tropical possessions. the virtues should be able to act as motors, Palissy's life was noble, though the end of the passions be pruned down into energies. that toil and endeavour was only a pretty He might dream of an England in which enamel; and the work of Athens was vast, every man was educated and could form an though she never covered the space of the opinion for himself, every man provided Duke of Sutherland's estate. All that man with means sufficient to give his faculties knows of the ideas which should regulate huscope, and every man able to rely on the man organization was worked out by a nation aggregate force of all for aid against nature, of less than 30,000 freemen, so worked out or time, or circumstance, as he now relies that Europe has no words for policy save on it against violent evil-doers; an England those the Athenians used, and in eighteen in which Parliament should be the brain of a hundred years has invented but one new vast being, of a municipality with a con- political idea, the possibility of rule by repscious life, guiding all men, facilitating all resentation. Vastness is nothing, organizameasures, making enterprises easy which tion everything, the smallest entity with now seem impossible or absurd. He might life and potentalities greater and more imagine England thus organized, thus than the biggest, if it possesses neither. throbbing with many-coloured life, ruling Grand as the mountain is, as Kingsley puts quietly over Southern Asia, breaking up it, and oppressive to the spirit, men who