perfection as in any Royal or Imperial Court in Europe. Byron says that one of the mildest-spoken men he ever met was Ali Pasha, whom he visited at Janina, one of the most cruel monsters that even modern Turkey has owned, and we have found in the polished and soft-spoken French and Italians, in their revolution, acts of a cold-blooded barbarity that would do no discredit to the cruelist savage tribe which has ever yet been described. Barbarism, we take it, is not simply ignorance of letters or the arts and sciences, for this ignorance is the effect of barbarism, rather than barbarism itself. Barbarism is essentially the predominance of passion over reason, brute force over moral power; and any society not based on morality and under the restraints of law is barbarous. Let such a society, or rather such a social condition continue any where for any great length of time, and the ignorance of art, literature and science will be sure to follow. We do not say that Europe has lapsed into complete barbarism; far from it; but we say it has been tending towards it, has rejected the principle and conditions of true civilization, and adopted the principle and condition of barbarism, and, if it continue its present career, it will soon present all the usual characteristics and concomitants of barbarism. In principle it has already become completely barbarous, but not all the natural consequences of the principle have as yet been developed, and, we hope, will never be.

It is well known that the revolutionary spirit is rife in nearly all the Continental states of Europe. The people, that is, the more active and influential portion of the population, have lost their reverence for authority, and no longer hold that the political constitution and organization of the state is something to be regarded as sacred and inviolable. Nearly all the populations of Europe hold what La Fayette called "the sacred right of revolution," and they who are regarded as the enlightened and advanced minds of the age maintain that the people, whenever they choose, have the right by insurrection, rebellion, and force, to dispossess their rulers, and change the constitution of

the state, simply for the sake of introducing new and, as they fancy, better institutions, without being able to allege any tyrannical or unconstitutional act on the part of the constituted authorities. The sovereignty of the people is understood not in the sense that the people in the absence of all legitimate authority have the right to meet together in convention and reconstitute authority in the way they judge best, but as a sovereignty persisting in them even under the constitution, irrespective of constituted authority, and allowing them, at any time and in any way that seems to them proper, to cashier their kings, presidents, or magistrates, and to install new sovereigns or rulers,—or that the existing authorities in any state are but mere agents, dismissible at the will of the people as simple population, or rather, the will of the unruly few, who have the impudence to call themselves the people. Hence the government, however constituted, ceases to be regarded as clothed within its sphere with sacred and inviolable authority, and becomes a mere agency existing at the mercy of the demagogues or the mob. This is the doctrine of the whole revolutionary party, or so-called party of the people every where, and with this party law is merely public opinion or public sentiment for the time being. Hence in this country scarcely a court or jury can be found with sufficient moral courage to enforce an unpopular law, to condemn or acquit an accused in opposition to the public sentiment of the time and place.

But as bad as it is with the people, it is even worse, if possible, with the sovereigns. International law and public right were violated by the sovereigns before they were by the people. The people have only imitated, at a distance, their sovereigns; and even in their wildest. frenzy they have never equalled them in the violation of public morality. The rejection of the old European system, the Christian or Papal system, was the work of the sovereigns, before it became the work of the people. All the secular sovereigns of Europe participated in it, and no one more fully than the sovereigns of France. The Ger

man Kaisers, in the Middle Ages, made war on the moral order sustained by the Church, but even the worst of the Hohenstaufen never went so far as to deny that order in principle; and they pretended that, even in warring against the Popes, they were only asserting or defending their own vested rights, rights which had been conferred, recognized, or sanctioned by the Chief of the Spiritual Society. It remained for France, under Francis I., to break openly with Christendom, and to attempt the formal inauguration of a new political system, independent alike of religion and morality. This was done by discontinuing the war of the Crusades, by making peace with the Turks, and allying himself with an infidel power against a Christian nation. The treaty of friendship and alliance, made by Francis I. with Solyman the Magnificent, against Charles V., we regard as the first formal and solemn rejection made, by a professedly Christian prince, of Christian politics, founded and supported by the Popes as Vicars of Jesus Christ, and Fathers of Christendom. For this, France is answerable. France, again, in pursuance of the same policy, in assertion of the independence of politics, of religion, and morality, leagued, under Cardinal Richelieu with Sweden and the Protestant princes of the Empire, against Catholic Germany fighting in defence of the old public right of Europe; and she consummated that independence, and consecrated the new system she had steadily pursued for more than three centuries, by the aid of Great Britain and Sardinia, and with the connivance of Austria, in the peace of Paris, 1856, which brought the Turk into the family of European nations, and placed the Crescent by the side of the Cross, if not, indeed, above it. The new system is the French system, and through France, aided by Protestantism, which she has accepted in politics, but rejected in religion, it has become European. But we exonerate no European sovereign, and all the secular sovereigns of Europe have aided in its introduction and consolidation; some more, and some less.

We conservatives speak with great horror of the popular revolutionists, and not without reason; but we are aware

of no popular revolution that has so outraged public right, or done such violence to society, as the sovereigns of Europe have done. The old French Jacobins are no favorites of ours, but they never went further against religion than went the Protestant princes of Germany, the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, and the King and Parliament of England. The Reign of Terror, under Robespierre, did not inflict greater horrors on France than those inflicted on the noble Duchy of Lorraine by the French armies under Louis XIII.; and the Democratic propagandism under the Convention, or the Directory, never effected a more wanton invasion of an unoffending nation than was the invasion of Holland by Louis XIV.; and the various annexations effected by the Republicans were not so revolting as the partition and annexation of the unhappy but noble and chivalric kingdom of Poland, by the sovereigns of Russia, Prussia and Austria. The Republican armies have never proved more cruel, more ferocious, or licentious, than had been for centuries the Royal and Imperial armies. The Republicans of 1848 proved far less hostile to public and private right, and far more respectful to the moral and religious basis of society, than has the present astute and inscrutable Emperor of the French,--inscrutable because governed by no principle. You cannot name an act of the Republicans of 1848 that was more atrocious in principle than the confiscation of the Orleans estates, the war against Russia, or the more recent war against Austria,-or more properly, against the temporal sovereignty of the Pope; and we know no republican leader, not even Joseph Mazzini or Louis Kossuth, more utterly reckless of public law or public justice than my Lord Palmerston, the prime minister of Queen Victoria on whose dominions the

sun never sets.

With this utter disregard, on the part of both sovereigns and people, of publie right and of a moral basis for political society, there can be no solidity for governments, no peace and order for modern populations. Christian politics have been exchanged for the politics of anarchy, and

the illustrious Padre Ventura, in discoursing of Christian political power, discourses of what, for some centuries, has had only a problematical existence. Christian political power is precisely what Europe needs, without which there is no return for her to civilization, and what many Catholics thought they were to have in Louis Napoleon, when he put an end to the republic he had sworn to defend, and proclaimed himself Emperor of the French. The real plague spot of modern Europe is the want of a Christian political power, or, as we say, a Christian or moral basis of political society. Till that is recovered, no changes of dynasties or constitutions will prove to be any real amelioration. The new system which severs politics from the moral order, and asserts the freedom of political power from all moral and religious restraints, has been tried, and failed,-miserably, shamefully failed. With that system no government, royal, imperial, or popular, will work well; or be able to maintain itself and social order, without an army at its command, for it must, from the nature of the case, be simply a government by physical force, and not by moral power. Padre Ventura sees and feels this, and in these learned and eloquent Discourses, preached in the Imperial Chapel before the Emperor and the principal personages of the Empire, he insists on the necessity and duties of Christian political power, with a boldness and an earnestness not unworthy. of one who is a minister of Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords. He sees, feels, deplores the evil, and seeks to remedy it by teaching authority, and them who pertain to the government, that all power is from God, has a moral origin, and is to be exercised in accordance with Divine Law, for a moral and religious end. Secular society exists for the spiritual, and secular authority should govern in the temporal order, in relation to the real end of all society, the ultimate end of man. The preacher sets forth the nature and obligations of the civil power with a force, a directness, an eloquence and a majesty that remind us of the immortal Bossuet, and with a distinctness, a freedom, a