Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 33, 14 December 1883, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

THE DOG'S DEATH.

MOBE, PETTY, POPES.

The latest utterance from Rome upon tbe Irish question is a pamphlet entitled Lion XIII. Vlr/ande et VAngletevre, by Count Soderini, a member of the Noble Guard. And it need noi be a subject of astonishment to Irishmen if they find themselves called upon to accept it as a Papal utterance conveying to them the will of the Holy Father as to their conduct towards Mr. Parnell and the National League. — The Irish laity had, indeed, already been called upon to accept as decisive of their attitude towards the national cause mere newspaper reports of one kind or another con. cerning a document that some people named the Enington circular — a papal letter on which the laity had received no instructions whatever from the hierarchy or clergy, the channel through which instructions from Borne invariably flow to them, and which, therefore, if it ever were written, remained for them sealed, demanding neither restraint nor action on their part. — But now, again, we are told, the Pope has certainly spoken to us strongly condemning Mr. Parnell and the National League by tlie pen of Count Soderini. And that the English party at Borne has spoken to us through this nobleman, in a manner not distinguished by its charity — but distinguished highly by its ultra-Conservative tone, and even a little by its Quixotism, as well as in other ways that, for our own part, we do not find particularly impressive, we admit. "He gives no praise to the Home Kule party, or the Land League," writes the Saturday Review from whom we take our information, " • The political and social agitators united by the adhesions of Mr. Paraell,' and insists that Mr. Parnell ' is entirely responsible for Boycottism,' and that the Land League is charged -with subsidising the Irish Invmcibles> an Association established in November, 1881, whose object is the murder of its adversaries.' He also considers Mr. Parnell partly responsible for the Phoenix Park assassinations ; he ' protested hi irresponsibility for this atrocious act, and we are bound to believe his sincerity ; but is not a grave responsibility incurred by violently exciting men's minds without taking care to hinder them from slipping down to the bottom of the abyss.' " — Without pausing, meantime, too long to lament over the fact that certain grave English diplomatists stand cheek by jowl with the Lady Florence Dixie in her impeachment of the League, and let us hope these exalted personages in this alone share anything like her ladyship's frame of mind, for it is from them no doubt the noble pamphleteer has taken his information — let us note the complete recklessness of the man who is supposed to express the opinions of the exceptionally moderate and cautious Leo XIII.— Let us note, moreover, the folly of this assumed representative of the exceptionally wise Leo XIII. in accrediting Mr. Parnell with the excitement in Ireland, a thing that existed there before Mr. Parnell or, indeed, his first Irish ancestor was born, and that may continue to exist there after Mr. Parnell and all his particular race have passed away, that is if such counsellors as Count fioderini obtain a favourable'hearing. — But what does the Saturday Review itself tell us of this excitement ? Speaking elsewhere of the Irish agitation, the Review says : it represents the " unreasoning, unreasonable, but not the less ardent and definite, anti-English feeling of a great part of the Irish people," and further on he continues, " Irrational, iniquitous, insane, inexcusable or pitiable, justified by English misconduct in days past, excusable as a form of the natural desire of national independence — these different descriptions, accept or reject ar>y>f ' rm as any given person may, do not affect the fact of the exdhtftfp. of the sentiment which they describe. . , . It is not<eartf,: h-iuger, it is still less zeal for the Pope, which makes some Irishmen labour to reduce the proceedings of Parliament to a farce, and others subscribe for the defence of the alleged murderer of oue who brought murderers to justice, and others to keep holiday iii honour of the slayers of unfortunate constables who have discharged their plain and simple duty. It is hatred of England, and the only way to meet it, next to employing the strong band of EDglish power to k«ep it down and punish its manifestat-

ions, is to foster, rally, and unite in every possible way the representatives of the friendship to England which fortunately exists." — And among the ways possible, we may remark in passing, is the excitement of Orange bigotry which the Revieiv here seeks especially to excuse, and to which we shall again refer. — It is clear, however, that, under the circumstances described by the Review, to speak o£ Mr. Parnell's being the cause of the violent excitement that exists in Ireland, as Count Soderini does, is to speak nonsense.—- And by the nonsense he talks let us make excuses for the gross unfounded charges brought by the Count against the Nati val League and Mr. Parnell A man who undertakes to write on a subject he has had no opportunity of studying correctly must needs talk nonsense, and, moreover betrays his willingness to come before the world in no very scrupulous character. Still, it will not do to be too hard on another Don Quixote, for, if the Count takes it upon himself to attack tliia monster of Irish nationality, in defence of the grand old feudal system fallen into hopeless ruins, he does so too plainly after the fashion of Don Quixote to cause us any very serious annoyance. Here, for example, is a profound argument intended to deter Irishmen from acting on the principles of 1789. — ', We must take fair reckoning of human passions, and remember that secular injustice is concerned; cut a people like the Irish people, that is to say eminently Catholic, neither can nor ought to forget that the martjrs never took up arms, and that, nevertheless, they ended by triumphing over the tyrants, by penetrating into the dwelling of the Sovereign, by dictating the law to their former conqueror, and obtaining respect for their belief, together with the recognition of their down-trodden lights. Why has a portion of the Irish people forgotten that." Bat, terily, noble Count, since the days of the martyrs there have been instances enough narrated by history in which a Catholic people ■tood up, arms in hand,, for their rights, and with all justification, to remove the example of the martyrs to some distance from the eyes of Irishmen. Nay, has not the whole Catholic world itself entered on the aggressive under the blessing of Almighty God, or has the memory of the crusades, for example, been placed under a ban ? Besides, the Irish people have emulated the example of the martyrs. Have they not had their days of the catacombs in the bogs and wilds, have they not been decimated, harratsed, and afflicted ? But yet they have risen again full of the fire of national life, and marked out by God, as it were with signs and wonders, to be a nation, and to rule in the land where thej were trampled upon. But what is this talk about the principles of 1789 and Henri Rochefoxt ? And, if the Irish party are willing to receive from even the Revolution all the aid it can give to a good cause, what of that 1 Irishmen of all others have been disciplined in a school where they well learned to choose the good and reject the evil. Their Protestant masters in Ireland, for centuries, when they offered them a benefit, qualified it by the addition of their religion, and would have given that as well. But the benefit was invariably rejected on the terms, and received without any accompaniment that could burden the conscience, or not received at all. And so it would be with whatever the Revolution might offer, and the faith of Ireland is capable of standing the test of even such a communication . In what respect, again, are the principles of '89 and Henri Rochefort more opposed to the Catholic Church than the principles of those men, and the men themselves, whom the party Count feoderini represents have now received into their alliance — that they may help the anti-Irish cause, as is most fitting, by means of their anti-Catholic mania and fury. Orangemen oppose the national cause only because they look upon it as the cause of the Church. — If they wrecked the office of a national newspaper at Belfast in honour of Sir Stafford Northcote and support of the Conservative cause, they also wrecked a convent, and, in their address at Carrickfergus to the Conservative leader they united their expressions of loyalty with those of their hatred of Catholicism. They said, for instance, " We feel it our duty to say distinctly we have no leaning towards Home Bule in any shape or form, and we hope you -will oppose the demand of the Ultramontane party for denominational education." What has the Revolution done to the Churoh that the party the' Orangemen belong to has not done ? — and the Catholics who ally themselves with the Orangemen, whether it be the English party at Rome, whose mouthpiece Count Soderini seems to be, or any others,— and all Catholics of the Conservative acti

A SOLDIER'S. TESTIMONY.

Irish party are now allied with the Orangemen— are allied with a body, and' are compromised by principles, that have assailed, and woundedj and Taged against the Church in the past as much as ever the Revolution can do in the future. Nay, they are receiving aid from the principles that have produced the Revolution, and whether it is worse to be the ally of the parent or of the offspring it might be difficult to decide. Count Soderini's pamphlet, then, is unworthy of consideration, but, were it otherwise, we should still reject with scorn the assertion that it waff the utterance of Pope Leo XIII. When the Pope speaks to his Irish children he will speak in no indirect or underhand manner ; he will bring no rash, uncharitable, and groundless accusations. He will make no Quixotic proposals, but his utterance, as it h wont, will be plain, fearless, manly, reasonable, and it will be heard with reverence, and faithfully obeyed. As for those paltry go-between popes, however,— the popes of newspapers and pamphlets— we hold them in contempt and derision, and they deserve no more. The election "of the Vicar-General of the Jesuits has been the occasion of a great deal of talk. — The newspapers have given various opinions concerning „ ,-r „ : „ . the matter, and some of them have paid the Order several of the pretty compliments that they are wont to receive alike from.the Protestant ana Atheistical world.. Others have been more moderate, ana have admitted that, according to them, the old saying being applicable here also, the devil is less black than he had been painted... The Saturday Review, for example, tells us "They are neither the angels nor the devils that they have sometimes been depicted; nor do they f possess that übiquitous^and almost omniscient capacity of action, which might be inferred from Eugene Sue. They have exhibited m .the course of their eventful history Mgh excellence s and very .grave "faults, so much so that it has been said of them with at least plausible reason", uli hene niUl melius, libi male niMl pejus. It is not, however, of the merits or demerits of the Order as such that we are here abont to speak,, but of the distinctive character of its constitution, at once' expressing and fostering in perpetuity the prcuhar. spirit impressed upon'it by its founder, of "whom it has been justly observed that he legislated at once in the spirit ofjhis early and his latter profession— as a soldier, and as a spiritual champion of the Church of Rome.' He designed his order, in fact, to be the embodiment of the idea subsequently formulate! by De Maistre, that •nothing accords so well with the religious as the military spirit.' " We have, nevertheless, no intention of following the Sat urday Review in his speculations about the constitution of the Society of Jesus.— To examine and explain it is a task that, with his prejudices and principles, he ishardly competent to perform, and though vastly less wild in drawin g oa his imagination than was Eugene Sue, when the necessity of writ, ing a disgusting and impossible romance, or nightmare, compelled bun to bring forward monsteTS unknown to humanity, and dub them Jesuits, knowing that thus he would make his filthy book a profitable, because a popular, undertaking,— the Review is not to be trusted Our chief reason, then, for borrowing the passage we hare just. quoted is that .it contains that sentence of De Maistre's with which our quotation terminates, and we have just now come across a very striking testimony to the harmony that obtains between the religious and military spirit spoken of in it. The testimony we allude to is that of a soldier— a dragoon in the French army, who has lately published some letters written by him to his friends and relations, and on which we find a paper in the Month for October.—'* The impressions," he says, •' which I hare retained from my stay in the regiment are these. It seems to me now that military virtues are simply the virtues that are needed by everybody. Respect for duty, and for the dignity of each individual, the sacrifice of personal interest for the general well-being, belief in a principle of authority, which is outside of us, and so much above us that our obedience is thereby ennobled— all these feelings, which constitute the military spirit, are they not also the foundation of any human society, which wishes to endure ? When I think of what would become of a regiment if discipline were to be in abeyance for twentyfour hours, I fancy I have a pretty exact portraiture of vchat has happened to society (i.e., French society), which has had no discipline for so long a time. . . . The soldiers who run away declare that they have"been betrayed. All who shrink from the performance of their duty also cry out about _Grqd's unequal dealings; but does that prove that they do not deserve the fate aboufc which they complain ? And- must Prqvidenpe.be arraigned because ifc does nob satisfy the desires of man according to the exact scale which he has fixed for himself ? "—Here, then, is the testimony borne from experience by one who most probably had never heard of De Maistre's idea,' or considered the constitution of the Jesuits, but which Btrikingly bears De Maistre out, and illustrates the wisdom of St. Ignatius— if , indeed, as the /Saturday Review reminds us it has been observed, "he legislated at once in the spirit of his early and of his later profession — as a soldier, and as a spiritual champion of the Church of Rome,''

CRAM AND ITS INFLUENCES.

At the Social Science Congress the other day, Dr. Clifford 1 Allbutt of the Leeds Infirmary, maintained that the children of men who had been subjected to many examinations showed traces .of nervous disease, and he predicted that, if the mothers of the f ivtare generations be subjected to a similar discipline, the effect upon those generatioaa will be disastrous. But the effects of the competition and cramming that now obtain in the educated world are already apparent. They have done their sad woik in many instances, as was iully confirmed by a long correspondence that recently appeared in the London Standard, in which several cases of injury resulting to children from the forcing system carried on in the primary schools -were given with all their circumstances, — Some of the complaints of parents, more* over, who had been compelled to witness with an aching heart the injuries inflicted on their children. — and to prevent which, the law rendered them powerless— were very piteous. — But, if many more children are not injured by the system alluded to, as the Saturday Mevieio in a very amusing article explains to us, the, reason is tha-t by their inattention they render the system abortive, and at the same time, without intending it, defend themselves from the attack Jmade upon their health. "In the times of Hilpah and Shalum," says the Heviem, "the present curriculum of our private schools would no doubt have been excellently calculated to meet the wants of au, adolescence extending over a century or so ; but the school-days of middle-class youth begin now, as a rule, at nine or tan years of age , and end at sixteen or seventean, and the attempt to into those few years the acquirement of four or five languages, dead and living, together with a respectable proficiency in mathematics, both pure and mixed, and a smattering of science is scarcely calculated to remove the reproach •which Mr. Matthew Arnold lately addressed to us as a nation on the score of lucidity. Probably every school has its mental ostriches, who can digest whatever amount of information they are crammed with ; but the schoolboy of the Dick Bultitade type (and there are many thousands of Dick Bultitudes among English schoolboys) generally finds himself, after a year or two at a private Bchool in unconscious agreement with Socrates that * nothing can be known.' It is his habit, accordingly, as his unfortunate instructors are painfully aware, to substitute for the effort to learn an attempt to guess ; and the results he arrives at are often irresistibly suggestive of mental processes analogous to those pursued by the personage who read up in the Encyclopedia the article ' China, and the article ' Metaphysics,' and combined the information thus acquired." The writer then goes on to give instances of the absurd blunders made by the pupils to whom he refers in their answeringIt would, for example, interest a catecbisfc to hear, apropos of St. Philip and the eunuch, that " Philip was a king of Macedonia, who ■was at first a heathen, but afterwards was converted to Christianity and baptised by Enoch." A historian, again, would delight to be told of the Spanish Armada, " Nothing more was seen of the Spanish fleet. Hence it has ever since been known as the Invisible Armada ; Armada meaning a fleet of ships." But, saya the Beview, the blundering school-boy is what cram has made him. "We may term him the unconscious satirist of the system, through whose month it stands condemned. For the rest, he is in. small danger of falling a victim to it. Fond mammas sometimes shudder at his description of the burden of mental toil that weighs on him, and dread its crushing him into an early grave ; but the . unfortunate instructors, whose dreary mission it is to pile mountains of information on his devoted head, know that he is as lively as an eel in wriggling out of all danger of being crushed." A system, indeed, that can only be innocuous by being avoided, and rendered useless, may well be said to stand condemned— rbut that it is invariably avoided we have good reason to doubt. In those sshools, at least, where the salaries of the teachers depend upon the answering of the pupils, such can hardly be permitted, and that it is not permitted, or that the docile children who need no coercion are rewarded by disease, wo have learned from the correspondence in the Standard already refened to. Dr. Cbarle ß Bell Taylor, moreover, who- writes to the Spectator in support of Dr. Allbutt's assertions, declares that many children have been brought to him for treatment, whose eyes had been injured by the " craze for cram under the school-board system." Such is the educational system, then, that at present obtains. One that to be harmlesf 1 1 where health is concerned must prove useless, and that in proving harmless where health is concerned does harm to the minds of the children who save themselves by avoiding it. One, again, that, when followed closely, breaks down the children's health, mentally and bodily, — that, moreover, is declared, on what should be competent authority, likely to exercise an evil influence over the descendants of those who have been subjected to it. But is our dragoon, by chance, a Jesuit from his birth? The religious and the military spirit at least seem to be combined very naturally in. bim.— Let us take, for example, the manifestation made of the combined spirit in the following account of the death of a | poor Breton lad nicknamed fi&ulahon, and who was killed by a ran*

ANNEXATION AND FEDERATION,

away horse :— ♦' A minute afterwards the major came up, followed by an infirmary corporal and three or four men carrying a stretcher. — 1 Stand aside a little — let him get some air,' said the doctor, bending over poor Houlahou, ' this looks rather serions,' and taking the pencil and the hospital ticket which the corporal handed him, he went on : 1 What's your name, my lad. . . . Corporal, give him some vinegar to sniff, to rouse him a littl?. Gome, my lad, your name ! H'm ! he's dead— certainly dead ! A fall I suppose ? ' ' Yes, sir, a fall.' 'Get his quarter-master to fill up the p\psr.' And five minutes later Houlahou left the quarters never to return. Not a prayer, not an adieu, no benediction, chaplains are eliminated from the regiments, and here, by order of our superiors, we must die like dogs.— "What has the soldier done that he is made to breathe his last breath like one of the lower animals 7 Do you pretend that he has not got a soul 1 Then why require him to believe in the noblest furniture of the soul— duty, honour, sacrifice ? You treat him like a machine, aad you want him to act like a hero 1 Are not the physical sufferings of the wounded who are dying severe enough, without adding to them by isolation, abandonment — I was going to say contempts . . . Did you ever see the great warriors of the old world, the chivalry of our old chronicles, hiding for a whole day K?wnd a fringe of trees, motionless, in the mud, their weapons idle iSrtheir hands, and decimated by a rain of shells which comes no one knows whence 1 I think it requires more courage to wait for death than to go in search of it ; at least, in the first place, it requires a peculiar kind of courage which participates more of religions abnegation than of military valour. I don't understand why it is, that at the time when you require from soldiers the virtue of martyrs, which religion alone can give, you suppress their chaplains. The idea of God keeps you company, when you are waiting for death in front of batteries which are mowing you down' from a distance of five miles."— The combination of the religious and the military spirit, then, even in the army, would' seem to be beneficial— of what the result of their separation, on which the powers that be are now determined, may prove we shall not improbably have an opportunity some time or another of judging.— Perhaps, indeed, we have already seen an earnest of 'such a result in the cruelties said to have been perpetrated the other day by the French forces at Hue. The Intercolonial Conference at Sydney has terminated, bat, owing to the exclusion of reporters for the Press, the transactions that took place there remain in comparative' obscurity. So much we learn, however, that resolutions in favour of annexations in Hew Guinea and the Pacific Islands were agreed to— that the French project of transporting to the Islands incorrigible criminals was warmly opposed, and that a certain plan of Intercolonial federation, although rather of a rudimentary kind, was adopted. — As to the question of annexation, it is one on whioh colonists who are desirous of seeing a great empire established in this hemisphere and united under the British crown, will find little to differ about.— If the undertaking could be successfully carried out, free from the danger of provoking hostility, and with all their rights assured to the native races, there could, we should say, be no dissentient voice from the advisability of prosecuting the plan with as little delay as possible.— la &ny case, there can be little difference as to the absolute desirableness of preventing the Islands f com Jbeing made the ground on which the incurable scum of the French prisons shall be turned loose. These are a class of people distinguished .only by their unspeakable vileness, but distinguished by that in a very high degree, and common humanity towards the natives of the Islands, as well as self-defence on the part of the colonies, demands that the mo6t determined resistance possible may be made to their being sent out here.— Apart, however, from the presence of the reoidivistes among them, .it may be very fairly questioned as to whether the natives would not find themselves happier, and their interests better protected under French rule than under that of England Unfortunately contact with the Anglo-Saxon has not generally proved wholesome for the native tribes of other countries, but with him has come to them oppression or contagion, and, as a consequence, decay - The Indians of Canada, for example, have fared much JJfrev than those of the States, on whose territory the early settlers were Englishmen, leaving traditions that those who came after them inherited and acted on, and from Algeria we receive no tales of hardship such as those that occasionally come to our ears from India.-— But even as it is, it is doubtful as to the advantage that 'the native races of the Pacific have derived fr im the neighbouring Anglo-Saxon settlements, and Queensland plantations, and expeditions in search of labourers might furnish some evidence in .this connection that would tell forcibly against the humane influences of the higher race.— As to the hostility to be provoked by the annexation in question, it, perhaps, may not be veiy formidable.— M. Gabriel Charmes, indeed, in the article quoted by U3 a week or two ago, speaks of the horrors of a conflict between France and England, and of the general Buffering that such an outbreak must entail.— But France has already as much on her hands as most probably it would bo wise for her to

undertake in the present state of her affairs both at home and abroad. Madagascar and China will evidently give her full occupation abroad for 6ome time, and at home the position she occupies, not only through her Internal divisions, which bid fair to increase in bitterness rather than to diminish, but with regard to the other great Powers of Europe should make her hesitate in coming into conflict with England. — As a military power, again, France has sadly fallen away ; her armies, as they are at present composed, are no longer worthy to represent those great legions whose name of old was synonymous -with all that was martial and glorious. Her regiments, in a word, are not made np of soldiers but of raw reeruitg who have not had time to catch the spirit of the seTvice, and whose hearts are absent from the calling forced upon them. But to this let us invoke the witness of a trae French soldier, whose description .of the army of his country as it now exists we find in the dragoon's letter from which we ha-ve already quoted. " To my mind," he writes, " to make military service obligatory on all is to debase it. -There is no glory and no honour in paying a tax ; it is a mere corvee^ (unpaid labour). Now, the very first day when soldiers look upon the service as a eorvie, mere unremunerative labour, the day when they are no longer proud of their uniform, proud of their labours, of their sufferings, of their discipline, proud of being exceptional men, men who can prac. tice virtues impossible to other mortals, from that day there will be no army. Now-a-days the ideal is pretty well suppresßeievery where as holding a useless place in life. . But we soldiers cannot do without it any more than horses can do without oats. If our calling is not heroic it is ridiculous. Ihera is no middle term. Will people who have only common sense risk their lives for the sake of wearing coloured cloth, or a thread of gold on their Head-gear ? Is it reason* able to undertake the hardest and the most dangerous of callings 'for a salary which a bus driver would refuse ? Beyond our officers who have never been better, you see for yourself how many men in the regiment have a military vocation 1 And even if they had it time ii wanting to make it apparent. It takes years to transform a .peasant into a soldier. They leave their hearts at home, they see only the hard side of the life, and they think of the time of their return from the very first day of joining. They count the days and the houra of their four years of service, they mark off on their almanac each day as it passes. The non-commissioned officers, 'too, have their calendais like the rest. . . . Officers and soldiers form perforce two irrecoiucileable classes. What is there in common between the mob who come to pay their personal debt with a bad grace, and the high-spirited men "who hare, entered the army from inclination ? This disagreement explains our punctilious discipline, which smacks of the gaol, and which alone can keep in transient submission the successive waves of citizens, ever ready for revolution, who are continually passing through the xanks." — He, farther, goes on to describe the joy with which the men who have served their terms give up their arms and uniforms. " They throw them on tb.3 ground like a despised livery, and put on their old blouses which they came in, with, all the satisfaction of an elector asserting his rights as a citizen."-— And this state of things is likely to become worse, for there is now on foot a project, and one which, since it also aims another blow at religion, will no doubt be carried into effect, to extend the conscription and reduce the termß of service from four yeara to three. — The enmity of Prance, then, is one that in. a just cause England need not fear, for, however formidable she might be were she la her normal condition, and however favourably situated to wound England, as M. Charrn.es says, wherever she is vulnerable, in the bands' of the revolution she has become stripped of her terrors and contemptible. — But is the annexation of the Pacific Islands "a just -cause? We think it is, so far as it is necessary to exclude the criminals" who are capable of corrupting the very savages themselves, and who would extend their corruption among us' her.s, and become a -plague spot to infect the.bemispbere. — We think, moreover, that' annexation, with the rights of the natives fully guaranteed, and their persons protected , would also be a just cause, and one conducing to the welfare, progress, and safety of these colonies. — But as for federation, even a closer scheme of it than that which seems now determined on, is tie natural measure to which countries situated as these ate tend, and, whatever may be the temporary hindrances arising from paltry intercolonial jealousies, such, for example, as that reported to be shown by New South Walea of Victoria, it must eventually obtain. — Vi is well, therefore to see that it is about to be initiated, though in a lesser degree. But the Saturday Review, however" great may be his satisfaction wilh Count Soderitii's pamphlet, and who would not be satisfied and even flattered to find hiß own utterances re -echoed -as he believed by the voice of high authority from a distance? still' has something to which be finds himself called upon to-object. Be is a little taken a-back, in fact, to find that Count Soderini appears favourable to a measure of Home Rule :—" One passage, for instance," he says, about the privilege of autonomous Government for Ireland, reads almost as if the author were in favour of Home Rule, though we aro

AN IMPORTANT ADMISSION.

by no means sure that the words are intended to bear that sense, and he ia careful to insert the proviso, ' so far as it does not directly affect the integrity of the State.' " We can sympathise with the Review in finding a passage that can by any means be interpreted as favouring Home Eule in the utterance made by a writer whom he asserts to be the mouthpiece of the Pope — and of a Pope, moreover, whom the Saturday Review has patronised in a most obliging manner from the very moment of his election. — actually putting upon niany of his deliverances a meaning that would elevate them to the level of his own lofty columns, and generally helping his Holiness over any little difficulty in which he might appear for the moment to be placed, owing to the necessity laid upon him of speaking rather as a Pope than as the enlightened editor of an English newspaper. When the Saturday Review has, as he believes, or pretends to believe, found his own most anti-Irish, baseless, and uncharitable views sent back to him from Home, under the authorisation of the Holy Father, it is hard for him to receive them tempered by an admission that would spoil all, and overthrow the very object for which he has expended a large amount of gross abuse, and unmitigated calumny. He could not afford by any means to acknowledge that the Pope had pro. nounced in favour of Home Rule. He knows too well the weight of the Holy Father's word, and the clearness of his judgment, and is fully aware that such a pronouncement would carry with it an authority which it would be vain to fight against. But let the Review be consoled ; — nothing can be more unlike any utterance that could come from the Pope than Count Soderini's intemperate and foolish document. It is in all respects the very oppoßite of those grand utterances, so full of moderation and wisdom that have won for the Holy Father the admiration even of his enemies, and of which the Catholic world is justly proud. And were the Pope to address the Irish people indirectly at all, even then, unlike his method of action as it would be to do so, we may be convinced be would choose some other medium than one who seems only capable of giving them back the screecbings that the English Press, and the English party, have carried to Rome. We have not here, indeed, the voice of the lion, but the tones of an animal that once borrowed the lion's skin are very audible. We are unable, then, to draw any conclusions from Count Soderini's pamphlet as to what may be the mind of the Holy Father on the qaestion of Home Kule. The Count is not his spokesman, and the tremors and violent prejudices of the Eaglish party at Rome cannot make us acquainted with his mind. Bat still, the utterance to which we allude is not without its significance. It does not reveal the thoughts of the Holy Father to us but it acquaints us with the position of the English party, and it is not without importance to find that they, at least, foresee that the struggle to repress the aspirations of the Irish people towards national independence is vain. There is a sense even in which this revelation is more important in its bearing on the Irish movement than almost the openly expressed approbation of the Holy Father itself would be, for it clearly betrays that the opposing party are conscious of weakness, and preparing to admit that the Irish cause has gained the day. For so much, then, we may thank Cour,t Soderini. He has, in fact, done much by his admission to encourage a continuance of the agitation he foolishly, in the character of a bnsy-bo<ly, and without many scruples, undertook to discredit.