democratic judges "with injustice and tyranny," "the offender was condemned in a fine of £7,000, with banishment for life. Probably the court of Star-chamber never pronounced a judgment in which the punishment was more disproportionate to the offence." But, as the same writer observes, the pretended English republic was, in fact, an oligarchy. "A few individuals, under the cover of a nominal parliament, ruled the kingdom with the power of the sword."* This is the use which demagogues and usurpers always make, and always have made, of the "sovereignty of the people." There is no such unscrupulous and systematic oppression as that which has its source in the vindictive passions of the unreasoning plebs. We have seen examples of it in our own day, and may expect to see more, wherever the representatives of popular Sovereignty succeed in suppressing the beneficent rule of God and the Church, and in substituting their own for it. When were the dignity and the conscience of the free citizen more impudently ignored, the expression of opinion more cynically prohibited, unfriendly journals more arrogantly suppressed, than by such loquacious dictators as a Gambetta in France and a Castelar in Spain, who professed to govern in the name of the people, and whose most intolerant acts were precisely those to which what they called the people gave their sympathy and applause? When somebody remonstrated with the execrable Raoul Rigault, the Procureur of the Paris Commune, and suggested that the atrocious tyranny of his associates was worse than any autocrat would dare to practise, the sensual demagogue replied with a sneer, that "une petite terreur" was the only effective weapon of his abominable faction, the only adequate support of its brutal and coercive rule.

There are no men of our time who have a deeper horror of such criminal excesses, nor a more intelligent apprehension of what "the false dogma of the sovereignty of the people really means, than are to be found in every city of the American Union. They may not all see with the same clearness the relation which exists between the doctrine of popular sovereignty and that of the so-called Reformation, that every individual is independent in the sphere of conscience; they may not detect the logical connection between the right of schism and the right of revolt; their habits of thought may confuse or hinder their perception of the truth that the denial of the spiritual authority involves the ruin of the temporal, which rests on the same foundation; delivers kingdoms, whatever their government may be, to inevitable chaos, and sub

* Vol. x. ch. vi.

stitutes the strife of human passions and the suggestions of human caprice for the fixed principles and unalterable code of a Divine polity; but they perfectly comprehend that the irruption of unchristianized masses into the council-chamber of nations is fatal to liberty and public order, and that their destiny will be compromised exactly in proportion to the influence which those turbulent and incoherent masses are permitted to exert. We need not fear, therefore, to wound their susceptibilities by the expression of convictions which are theirs as well as ours, and which many of them know how to proclaim with a power which we cannot command. They agree with us that folly has no right to usurp the prophetical office of wisdom, and are not surprised if its unhallowed reign is as disastrous in their own land as it has been in others. There is no mortification, they wisely feel, in confessions which have been made on our side of the ocean before they were made on theirs, and which record the experience of men in the oldest of monarchies as well as in the newest of republics. If the experiment of popular sovereignty has not been a success in America, it has been at least as ruinous a catastrophe in Europe. Democracy is not more formidable in the new world than in the old. Perhaps we may even say that its evils have been tempered in the former, not only because all explosions are more harmless in a vast than in a confined area, but on account of a certain innate reverence for law, a repugnance to the grosser forms of audacious blasphemy, and a mildness and cordiality of disposition, which are honourable characteristics of the American people. But they must not endeavour to persuade either themselves or us that institutions which, in spite of the wise intentions of the founders of their republic, tend more and more to lodge all power in the uncultivated masses, of whom large sections are still rather aliens than citizens, and have no power, even if they had the will, to contribute anything to the welfare and stability of their adopted country,-are the supreme invention of human wisdom, or the all-sufficient remedy of human evils. That is a delusion unworthy of their sagacity. Forms of government -and this, as we have said, is the only aspect of the question which we care to examine--are purely human, especially when they borrow nothing from a higher source, and share the impotence of all the works of man. We oppose none which the deliberate choice of an enlightened people has consecrated; but we do oppose the foolish notion that they represent anything more venerable than the human traditions upon which they were founded, or can do for the peace of nations what only God and the Church have the power to do. We must

also be permitted to add, with the hearty concurrence of the wisest members of the American Union, that the government which gives freest play to the absurd doctrine of popular sovereignty is radically unsound and defective, opposed to the spirit of order and obedience which Christianity was designed to foster; and that if its maintenance, where it exists, is a necessity, because it is the least of two evils, the obligation suggests gloomy rather than jubilant reflections. The only safe form of democracy the world has ever known, or ever will know, is that which is found in the Catholic Church; because there only freedom is not license, nor submission bondage; authority and liberty confirm and support each other, equality springs from a common union with God, who alone is great; and fraternity consists in the secure possession of the same gifts, the same rights, the same immunity from error, and the same inheritance of truth.

There was a time when the spurious liberty, fictitious equality, and sham fraternity which the Evil One offered to mankind at the so-called Reformation, and which many were persuaded to accept in place of the realities of which they were only dismal counterfeits, were supposed to be, in an eminent degree, the appanage of our American kinsmen. Yet it is certain that in adopting the delusions of the Reformation they have not deceived themselves more egregiously than other people. They have only made the same mistake about the true nature of liberty. The only liberty possible to the creature is that which springs from obedience, and the only obedience which does not degrade him is that which is paid to God, or to an authority recognized by Him. Even Dr. Döllinger, though himself a reformer, and the founder of the newest of human sects, says: "Nothing is more untrue than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement in favour of liberty of conscience; it was quite the contrary." It was nothing else, says Hallam, but "a change of masters"; † substituting, in fact, the coarse and capricious tyranny of absolute princes, or still more absolute preachers, for the mild rule to which the wisdom of God had subjected the human conscience, and that vigilant protection by the Church of the weak against the strong in which despots of every shape and colour, whether princes or preachers, always saw their only invincible antagonist. And for this reason any form of human government which is based in its essential principles on the doctrine of the Reformation, and admits in practice the senseless idea that

Quoted by Hergenröther, "Church and State," vol. ii. p. 334, English edition. + "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," vol. i. ch. vi. p. 382.

every man is his own Church, and à fortiori his own State, and that the only permanent and indestructible authority is the individual conscience, leads inevitably to a partial or total paralysis of true Christian liberty. Men easily detect this fact in other communities, even when they fail to see it in their own. Grote, Carlyle, and Dickens, in spite of their democratic sympathies, changed their opinion about American institutions and the dogma of popular sovereignty, without perceiving that the evils to which the latter has led are at least as visible in France and Italy as they are in the United States, and owe their devastating power not to any special form of government, except in so far as it lends itself more readily to the domination of the unthinking masses, but to the spirit of revolt against God and the Church which is often as active in monarchical as in democratic communities. Voyez la France," exclaims the great Christian philosopher M. de Bonald; "elle n'est plus"! He contends, indeed, as he had a right to do, and with a vast array of historical evidence, that there is more power of self-recovery in empires than in republics, because, in his judgment, what he calls the 'Theory of Power" is in the former more consonant with Christian philosophy, and therefore less Protestant, than in the latter. "The Christian religion," says this eminent man, "is a monarchical society, in which the representative of power, the ministry, and the subject, are persons distinct from one another,"* as they have always been in every government founded by the Most High. He adds that while "the Catholic religion adapts itself to every form of government, not every form of government adapts itself to the Catholic religion": because there are some which are founded on a principle which lodges all power with those who are incapable of exercising it, and recognizes that monstrous fiction of the sovereignty of the people which, outside the Church, means the sovereignty of evil, and of which one result is, as we see by the example of those who maintain it in Europe, that " everything is God," in the words of Bossuet, "except God Him

We hope we have made it sufficiently clear that we are not contending, and have no wish to contend, against any form of government in itself, but only against that, whatever name it may bear, which lodges power in the wrong hands, and makes what it calls "the rights of the people " the equivalent of "the rights of error." Rousseau, who refutes and contradicts himself in every page, says, in his "Contrat Social,"

* "Principe Constitutif de la Société," ch. xix.

"the people of a republic have always the right to change their laws, even the best of them; for, if they wish to injure themselves, who has a right to hinder them ?" Who indeed! since all power resides in them. It was perhaps this consideration which made Montesquieu say, "Old institutions are generally corrections, and new ones abuses."* The same writer observes, in one of those acute and brilliant summaries which are found so often in his pages,-and which we cite with the more satisfaction because it expresses our own conviction, that the spirit of a people is of incomparably greater importance than the form of their government, that the true force of nations consists in their religious traditions, and in their willingness to correct abuses which conflict with those traditions. He considers that it was the principles of Epicurus, which many would fain revive in our age, which corrupted Rome, as they had corrupted Greece, and notes the patriotic saying of Fabricius, that "he wished all the enemies of Rome would adopt them." Rome lasted so long, according to Montesquieu, "because the spirit of the people was always disposed to accept the correction of abuses. Carthage fell because it would not tolerate even the changes recommended by Hannibal. Athens because it took its own errors and corruptions for advantages. If the Italian republics boasted of their perpetuity, it was only a perpetuity of abuses. The strength of England," he adds, with partial truth, "consists in this, that she has always an eye on her defects, and is always striving to correct them." She would have more success in doing so, if her political sagacity were not too often neutralized by her religious chaos, and by the false doctrine of the independence of the individual conscience which makes that chaos permanent. It is this doctrine, which underlies the whole philosophy of revolt, and not special forms of government, with which it seems to be in closest alliance, that we desire to combat. If, indeed, it could be proved that such forms are incapable of offering any effective resistance to it, they would be self-condemned; but the only criticism which we make at present on democratic communities, which it is our purpose to estimate solely as to their ability to "guide the governed to their true destiny," is this: that they have established no claim to be regarded as models for other and differently constituted societies, and that they have more urgent need to prove their own fancied superiority, than to insist that all the world should take it for granted. "Demo

"De l'Esprit des Lois," liv. v. ch. vii.

"Grandeur et Décadence des Romains," tome i. ch. viii.