The Political Outlook, BQR 1874

                                                              The Political Outlook

                                    [From Brownson's Quarterly Review for January, 1874]

Neither this Review nor its editor is wedded to any political party. We aim to be loyal, and always support the government when we can do so with a clear conscience, and hold that a factious or simply partisan opposition to an administration, whether of the Union or of our particular state, is incompatible with the duty of a good citizen. We hold it the duty of the citizen to support in good faith the government which Providence has established for his country, for it is always the best form of government for it, whetherthe best for all countries or not. Providence has established for the United States and their territories the federal republican form of government, and that for us is the only legitimate form, and he is wanting in fidelity to it, and is a disloyal citizen, who seeks, on the one hand, to convert it into a monarchy, or on the other, to convert it into a consolidated or centralized democracy-What we call democratic caesarism-in our judgment the worst possible form of caesarism. In 1864, we voted for the reelection of Abraham Lincoln as the least of two evils, and, as it seemed to us, necessary to bring the civil war to a successful issue and to save the Union; in 1868, we voted for General Grant, for we had more confidence in a military man for president than in a civilian or nisi prius lawyer. We did not vote for his re-election in 1872; for we had found in him neither the soldier nor the civilian, and because the party supporting him were not only fearfully corrupt, but were manifestly consolidationists, and therefore disloyal to the American constitution, and, as we could not, without abandoning all self-respect, vote for the opposing candidate, we did not vote at all, and have voted in no election since. 

But we see in the recent elections some symptoms, faint indeed, of a change for the better. The people are evidently losing confidence in the administration, and, what is more to the purpose, in the so-called Republican party, which inherits the worst features of both the old Democrat and Whig parties, with those of the Native American and Know-nothing parties in addition. We see not how any Catholic or honest and intelligent man can support, or do otherwise than oppose it by all the lawful means in his power. The aim of the party since the war, and perhaps its leaders before it, has been to use the government for the promotion of the private interests of speculators and the moneyed and business classes, and, through the negroes and unprincipled nothern adventurers, to yankeeize the South, and make it tributary to the monopolists. It is beginning now to fail in both aims. The huge credit-bubble, in a time of profound peace and plentiful crops, has burst, and panic and wide-spread ruin have followed. In all the recent state elections, unless Pennsylvania be an exception, the party has evidently met with fearful losses. In some states where it held the power, as in New York and Ohio, it has met an inglorious defeat, and in those in which it retains the power it is by greatly reduced majorities, as we see in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and the northwetern states. Virginia has asserted her independence, and indicates the course that will soon be followed by every state that seceded, and the real people of each of those states, the pars sanior, will control its administration. Even President Grant will hardly venture to repeat the scandalous federal interference in state affairs which he authorized in Louisiana. The forced enthusiasm for the negro is dying out. 

The opposition victories, coming so soon after the presidential election, would in ordinary times, be little on which to build any hopes for the future, for such victories are nothing unusual; but no one can deny that there is a widespread distrust, amon the people ofthroughout the Union, of the capacity of the administration and of the purity and integrity of the Republican party leaders. Undeniably the financial policy of the administration and of a Republican congress has broken down; the revenues of the government are insufficient to meet its ordinary expenses, and it is supporting itself by forced loans in the shape of an additional issue of legal tenders. The president and his secretary of the treasury are both profoundly ignorant of the first principles of public finance, as they are of real statesmanship, and as are nearly all our bankers and business men. Yet the people very justly blame the administration less than they do congress. We know not, indeed, what better, after all, was to be expected of congress, made up as it is of bankers, manufacturers, railroad corporators, third-rate lawyers, with a sprinkling of flashy newspaper editors. Formerly, when the southern people were represented, we had men in congress of independent character, who made of statesmanship a scientific study. But for the Calhouns, the Poindexters, the Lewises, the Pickenses, the Rhetts, you have now negroes or mulattoes, and carpet-baggers. We have now no class of men who make a study of the science of government and the art of statemanship; we have only men versed in the arts and trickeries of the politician, or men who think only of advancing their private interests, even though called Christian statesmen, like Senator Pomeroy, Parson Harlan, or the ex-Vice-President Colfax. What is to be expected of men who are immersed in business, and intent only on making their fourtunes? If there are men in the country who have really studied the science of government and mastered the mysteries of finance, they are unknown to the corner grocerymen and publicans, and could not be elected even to the lowest office in the gift of the people, were they canidates. It is a prevailing opinion that a majority of votes can supply any lack of brains of defect of moral character. 

The present crash in Wall street, which has shaken some of our heaviest and most firmly-seated industrial and mercantile houses and caused so much suffering among nearly all classes of the community, is only the natural and inevitable result of our inflated creit system, which encourages wild and reckless speculations, and renders useless any foresight or calculation on the part of business men. Take the case of that old-established house of A.& W. Sprague & Co., of Providence, R. I. With eight millions of assets over and above its liabilities, the house has been obliged to ask an extension of credit from its creditors. The Spragues may have extended their business too far, yet they were no wild or rash speculators, but honest, intelligent, and thorough business men, carrying on their carious and extensive operations with rare prudence and circum spection. It was impossible for them, with ample means and doing a profitable business, to foresee danger, or to anticipate financial trouble. The evil lies in the credit system, that makes of debt capital, and invests the wealth of the country in paper obligations, whose value is continually fluctuating, and varying ten, twenty, fifty per cent. or more from day to day. The shrinkage in calues by the late crash, we are ourselves not sufficiently informed to say, but we may judge that it is very great, when as it was judged in the case of the Spragues, twenty-two millions of assets would not more than suffice to meet fourteen millions of liabilities. This indicates a shrinkage in values of about one-third, which is probably not more than it is.

The fact is, we have no standard of value, and calues are continually fluctuating, so that a man counted rich to-day may find himself poor and in debt to-morrow. The laws of this fluctuation baffle all calculation, for it depends on causes as various as itself. It may be a rise or a fall in the markets of Shanghai or Canton, a mutiny or a famine in India, a petty war in Africa, a revolution in France, Spain, Italy, or Germany, an unprofitable railroad speculation, the failure of a mismanaged bank, or of a trust company with a defaulting cashier that has extended its loans too far, or locked up its means in unavailable and really worthless assets. The recent crash was chiefly due to the attempt to build railroads on credit where not needed, and beyond the present ability of the country to sustain, and if the consequences could be confined to the bankers and brokers, like Jay Cooke & Co., who undertook them for the sake of speculating in their stock, and getting possession of the enormous land grants so unwisely made by congress for their construction, no great harm would follow, but such is the solidarity of all classes of the community created by the credit system, that the innocent suffer as well as the guilty, and even more than the guilty. We foresaw the crash coming, and our wonder is that it did not come even sooner, and bring with it a far greater ruin than it as yet appears to have done. 

The various remedies suggested, whether by the president or by prominent merchants, traders, and bankers, are puerile, and not even palliatives. There is no remedy for a gangrenous limb, or safety for the patient, but in amputation, and not always even in that. The essence of the present system is in using debt as capital. Under it no debts are ever really paid; there is only a transfer of the debt, and all debts are mortgages on the future. A debt discharged in bank-notes becomes a debt against the bank; in greenbacks, it becomes a debt against the government, but in neither case is there any liquidation of the indebtedness. If the government credit fail-and a revolution, or gross mismanagement may cause it to fail-somebody must lose; if the bank fail-and fail it must if it overdoes its business, if its debtors fail, if it lock up its means in unavailable or worthless assets, if there is a considerable shrinkage in their market value, or if its officers are speculators, stock-gamblers, swindlers, or defaulters-its creditors necessarily lose. The bank depends on its debtors for its ability to pay its own debts, and the government would bankrupt the whole people were it to attempt to liquidate at once its entire indebtedness. It is more than it now is able to do, to meet its ordinary expenses and pay the interest on the public debt. For remedy, say some, create more banks, repeal all restrictions on their circulation, and relieve them of obligations to keep a reserve on hand. Authorize free banking, or banking by anybody that pleases, say others. Let the government issue more greenbacks or treasury notes, say others still; that is, remedy the evil by increasing it, or inflating still more our overinflated credit!

The fact is, we have been attempting to be a great business community as distinguished from an agricultural community, and have subjected agriculture itself to the laws of commerce and manufacures. We have attemped to do more business than the country required, or its capital and labor could sustain. We have been in too great a hurry, and wished to plant and reap the same day. We have been carrying out vast schemes of internal improvements, which exceed our means; and we are crippled with debt. We have operated on borrowed capital, which we have received in the shape of perishable merchandise, and which we have consumed, leaving the original loan uncanelled. These loans, being paid chiefly in goods imported, have greated stimulated the extrvagance of the people, and introduced a love of show and the habit of living beyon their income, while they are left to pay for the internal improvements, as far as paid for at all, out of their own pockets, and still taxed in one form or another to pay the interest constantly accruing to the foreign creditor, or the domestic creditor, or the domestic creditor to whom the claim has been transferred. This tax for interest on debtand to supportthe extravagance generated by our foreign loans received for the most part in the shape of perishable merchandise, is too heavy for our land and labor, productive as is the one and intense and long-continued as as the other, and the consequence is that the people are in debt, and speking generally live on credit, or draw on their capital, hitherto chiefly in land, the better portion of which has already been parted with, eaten up, or worn out.

The remedy is not easy, for the ruling classes have not either the wisdom or the virtue to apply any effectual remedy. The most that they will tolerate is such measures as will enable them to tide over the present crisis, or palliate its severity, but leave in full force all the causes that have produced it. Many of these causes are moral and social, and beyond the reach of legislative or governmental action. So far as the remedy depends on the government, it consists: 1, in thetotal repeal of the legal tender act, and making nothing a legal tender but gold and silver; and, 2, in the restriction of the banks in the issue of their notes or bills to their actual ability at any time to redeem them in the lawful money of the United States. The twenty-five per cent. reserve the banks are now required to keep in their vaults affords no adequete security either to bill-holders or to depositors, as the present crash proves. The banks must not be allowed to draw interest on their debts which exceed their means of redeeming them on demand, nor use deposits as capital. We do not disguise the fact that these two measures would cause a considerable shrinkage in values, and greatly diminish the volume of the business of the country; but they would tend to also to check wild and reckless speculation, and to place the business of the country on a safe and wholesome basis. Matters must become worse before they can become better. The volume of business we are doing is too large for the capital of the country, and it cannot be lessened without more or less suffering, for a time, to mass of individuals. We have nothing with which to extinguish our indebtedness, whether foreign or domestic, but the produce of land and labor, and till we are compelled to bring our expenses within the income from land and labor, asn so far within as to leave a surplus for a sinking-fund, we shall be afflicted with periodical panics like the present. Trade and large manufacturing establishments, as distinguished from domestic industries, are ruining us, as they ruin, in the long run, every nation that depends on them. The political economists are the most consummate fools going, for they regard man only as a producing and consuming animal, and are ignorant of the sources of real wealth. 

We do not expect either of the two measures we recommend-measures designed to put a stop to the use of debt as capital or stock-in-trade-will be adopted, nor do we expect to see any efficient remedy applied to the evils of which everybody complains. The present crisis will, after ruining thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who will be unheeded as the slain in battle, exhaust itself, and the survivors, unwarned by experience, will resume the old course, and count the battle won; till a new crisis, a new crash, or prostration of credit comes, from which the widow and orphan, people of moderate means, and the laboring classes, as usual, will be the principal sufferers. Men will not believe that the worship of Mammon is uicidal, and that political economy, to be successful, must, like virtue, be based on the principle of self-denial. The modern system of business and finance, which is that of using debt for capital, has too strong a hold on most modern nations, especially Great Britain and the United States, for any power in them to cast it off. It is rapidly becoming universal; it has triumphed over statesmanship, morality, and religion, and we suppose it must run its course, till the modern nations find their boasted civilization evaporating in smoke. "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God."

In England it would seem that Mr. Gladstone is losing popularity, and it is doubtful if his party can much longer retain their places; but though we have always sympathized with the Tories rather than with the Whigs, and regard Mr. Disraeli as the only contemporary English statesman really deserving the name, we are by no means sure that the accession of the Tories to power would be a gain, especially to Catholic interests; but so far as we have any knowledge on the subject, the Tories do retain some reminiscences of the law of nations, while the Whigs and Liberals retain none. If the Whigs are more liberal in promises to Catholics that the Tories, they fall usually even behind them in performance. To our mind the greatest danger with which England is threatened is from liberalism, or what is the same thing, secularism. England represents to-day the city of the world, and is the chief supporter of that pagan spirit against which Savonarola fought and fell in vain, and which now pervades all modern society, as even our English Catholics at length are beginning to understand. She, individuals excepted, with all her cant, hypocrisy, and philanthropy, is as thoroughly heathen as ever was ancient Greece or Rome, Egypt or Assyria. She is secular, and seeks to secularize every thing-education, religion, the church, literature, art and science. She warms upand grows poetical only in the worship of nature, and becomes enthusiastic only over classic antiquity. Her influence on other nations is most deleterious, and will continue to be so till her own godless, or "mercantile system," as Nicholas of Russia was wont to call it, fails from its own excesses. God has given her a place for repentance, and many individuals have availed themselves of it, and been reconciled to the church; and, we presume, many more noble conversions will, through grace, be effected, but we have lost all hope of her reconversion, for we see, or think we see, the same secular spirit finding its way into Catholic IReland, and by its subtle influence destroying or corrupting the faith of no small portion of the Irish youth. 

In Germany there is no change for the better, and little prospect of any immediate change in the policy of the imperial government. The persecution of the church continues without any relaxation, and the infamous laws against religious liberty, or the rights of God, are enforced with due rigor. The imperial government believes itself under the necessity of warring against the church as the only practicable means of conciliating the liberals or of averting the hostility of the secret societies. But when, to please the internationals, it has subjugated or destroyed the church within the empire, and destroyed the independence of every quasi religious oranization, its danger will be increased, not diminished. Gallicanism in France had destroyed the independence of the church in that kingdom before the French revolutionists of 1789 could overthrow the state, demolish the throne, and behead the king. When the church is gone religion is gone, and when religion is gone, civil authority, however constited, is gone, has no support, and only anarchy or a military despotism is possible. The people filled with a religion independent of them, commanding and directing them, may be relied on to support legitimate authority and maintian social order; but the people that have broken with religious tradition and have no religion, or only a sham religion, are incapable of sustaining civil society because incapable of submitting to the majesty of law. Such a people have no conscience, and can feel no moral obligation. Prince von Bismarck, warring against the church, is encouraging and strengthening the only party really dangerous to the empire. Does he not see it?

Italy, relying on Prussia for support, continues to hold the pope a prisoner in the Vatican, and to carry out its sacrilegious work of spoliation of the religious houses; and thus far with impunity. It is said, we know now how truly, that faith and zeal are reviving among the Italian people; but what can the people do without leaders and forbidden by their very religion to use any but lawful means, against an infidel and sacrilegious government, or to free themselves and to vindicate the rights of God? In Spain, the Carlists do not seem to be making much progress; indeed, if telegraphic despatches are to be relied on, they have latterly lost ground. The republic at Madrid, though it has the sympathy of the government of Washington and our minister, General Sickles, is by no means firmly established, or capable of governing the country. We see no human help for the Spanish peninsula. A portion, perhaps the numerical majority of the Spanish people, retain their Catholic faith and attachment to monarchy; but the ruling classes, there as elsewhere, the new nobility and the wealthy traders, merchants, and manufacturers, the citizens as distinguished from the peasants, have practically at least lost their faith  and with it their patriotism, and are divided between the republic, the commune, Don Carlos, and the Prince of the Asturias. They only thwart each other. Should the republic utterly fail, Prussia apparently stands ready to place a Hohenzollern on the Spanish throne. 

The restoration of monarchy in France does not seem so near at hand as it did three months ago. The monarchical movement has met with a check, if not a defeat. The secret societies, by means of which the minority, a contemptible minority indeed, contrive to control the action of the majority, are too well organized and too strong in France, perhaps throughout Europe, for the royalists or monarchists. The Right in the national assembly have won no victories in the recent elections it would seem to be on the point of making important concessions to the Left, and thereby indicating weakness, or want of courage, which is the same thing. Whenever a government or a party in place makes a concession to the opposition, it is all over with it, and if the Right yields at all, the restoration of the Bourbonic monarchy may be regarded as henceforth a vain dream. The bourbons are expiating the crimes of their fathers, especially in the suppression of the illustrious Society of Jesus. No power that took part in that suppression has since prospered. Look at Spain, Naples, Portugal, Austria. There is no doubt that the national sentiment of France is in favor of monarchy, but she is powerless against the secret societies spread as a network all over her soil, and they will suffer her to have no monarch but one in whom they can confide to do their dirty work, and they can confide in no one who while he professes to be a Catholic, will not use his power to cripple the influence of religion by denying the church her freedom and independence. 

We think the chances of the imperialists are better than those of the royalists, for they are less hampered by their traditions, hold more in common with the Left, and can promise more to the agents of the secret societies. MacMahon is an honest and a very honorable man, respectable, though not a great soldier, but he has not as yet proved himself a statesman, and we suspect, is an imperialist rather than a royalist. The Duc de Brogile, his chief minister, is an able man, a lerned and brilliant author, and we doubt not, a Catholic in his convictions, as one might be a French Catholic before the council of the Catican; but his predominant passion is for constitutional government as the only sure guaranty of liberty. He can hardly be regarded as legitimist. Thus far has proved himself but an indifferent statesman. The Right has gained nothing by displacing M. Thiers, and is probably weaker to-day than when the present government came into power. Whatever may have been the revival of relition in France, the elections prove that it has had very little if any influence on the voting population. The most that the friends of order and religion can now hope is to preserve the present republican government in the hands of those who are not republicans. Let the governement pass into the hands of avowed republicans, though conservative, it will soon pass into the hands of the radicals, for conservative republicans differ from the red-republicans only in degree, not in principle, and the inevitable tenency of things is for power to pass into the hands of the bolder, more energetic, and extreme section of a party. The reds, or extreme Left, will triumph as surely as power passes into the hands of republicans who are so from principle and conviction, and consequently the republic will become a reign of terror, and degenerate into the despotism of the mob, from which only a military despotism can rescue it.

We have a profound respect for Louis Veuillot, who, through the Univers, would seem to be the dictator of the Catholic public opinion throughout the world, but, as we have heretofore said, we think he makes a great blunder in laboring to identify the Catholic cause with that of monarchy, and in France with that of the Count de Chambord. The Catholic party in no country in the orld, even with the sovereign at its head, is strong enough, humanly speaking, to restore and sustain Catholic monarchy, or a monarchy able and disposed to maintain social order, and the freedom and independence of the church, the kingdom of God on earth. We see it in Germany, in Austria, in Italy, in France, in Spain, where Catholics are the numerical majority, no less than in countries where they are only a feeble minority. We have as little confidence in monarchy as we have in democracy. M. Veuillot cannot be more opposed to the revolutionary spirit than we are; but he knows or ought to know that it was not the people, but the sovereigns, that evoked that spirit in the eighteenth century. It now pervades the people, and kings and kaisers hold their crowns only by pandering to the worst passions it has stirred up. They can reign only by grace of the secret societies, and to secure that grace they must make direct or indirect war on the church of God. How then restore or sustain anywhere a real Catholic monarchy? Loyalty is expunged from the popular vocabulary, and without loyalty in the people, monarchs can sustain themselves only be force. 

To restore and sustain a Catholic monarchy in any country, you need either a thoroughly Catholic or a thoroughly loyal people; and in no country in Europe or America have you either. M. Venillot makes the mistake of seeking the effect as the condition of obtaining the cause. You must revive loyalty and Catholic faith in the people before a Catholic monarchy  is practicable; and when you have done that we know not that monarchy is preferable to republicanism. Monarchy cannot help us. It must obey the mandate of the secret societies or be subverted, and as no Catholic monarchy that recognizes and respects the rights of God can obey that mandate, no Catholic monarchy, even if restored, can stand or govern. A conservative republic, as things now are, is for any length of time equally impracticable. It must either become radical, or by a coup d'etat like that of the 2d of December, 1851, convert itself into a military despotism, with a carbonaro for despot, as was Louis Napoleon. We say, then, as we have heretofore said, we see nothing to hope either for society or the church from political action, political changes, or combinations. No government anywhere that is devoted to the true interests of society, and seeks to govern according to the law of God, or the traditional jus gentium, can now stand. 

For our own part we think, as we have said of our financial affairs, matters must become worse before they can become better. We look for a temporary triumph of the radicals over monarchy, and over the conservative republic. The Mazzinians and Garibaldians will supplant the monarchy in Italy, Castelar will extinguish the Carlists in Spain, the Left will triumph over the Right in France as the Mountain did over the Gironde in the old revolution, and the secret societies will, when they can no longer use it, put an end to German imperialism. Such seems to us likely to be the course of public events. There must come a complete deomolition of the old political Europe, and the total destruction of the civilization that the church has so laboriously created, and society be reduced to a more degrading barbarism, denser ignorance, and grosser superstition than the world has hitherto seen. Then either the world comes to an end or the church must begin her work over again, and create a new Christendom and a new Christian civilization. We look for the latter, which however will not come till the last vestige of the old system has been swept away. 

We do not pretend to any gift of prophecy, and we may be mistaken in our calculations, for we don not know the secret counsels of Providence, or what providential intervention there may be in behalf of the church or of Christian society; but taking a purely human view of the causes in operation, it has been our conviction for the last thirty years, and frequently expressed in our Review and in our public lectures, that christendom is broken up, and that the church finds herself in this nineteenth century in substaintially the same condition in which she was  in the first century or under the pagan Caesars, that is, face to face with revived paganism or nature-worship. She has no external power on which she can rely to protect her external interests, or to defend her rights; she is thrown back on her spiritual resources alone as the kingdom of God, as she was when she went forth, after the descent of the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, from Jerusalem to conquer the world to her Lord. The nations are hardly less pagan or hostile to her now than they were then. She has to proceed now as in the beginning, and reconvert them-a far more difficult task than that of their first conversion. Ages of persecution from all quarters may be expected, and far harder to bear than that of the so-called martyr ages. The division of the world into the Catholic world and the missionary world is obsolete; there remains only the missionary world, and in every land the church is virtually a missionary church. Such was the view we took when we sought admission into the church, and such is the view we have never ceased to take. 

In the middle ages there were, at times, more external violence to the church and hardly fewer acts of disobedience and sacrilege than now; but with this difference, the men then knew they were wrong, acted against the principles they held to be true, but now they have conformed their principles to their practice, have persuaded themselves that wrong is right, evil is good, and sacrilege is an act of piety. They therefore now commit their crimes against the church and society, and perform their evil deeds with a quiet conscience and without compunction. Even such brutal tyrants as Henry IV., king of the Germans, and the perfidious Frederic II., of Germany, had a conscience, but Kaiser Wilhelm and Prince von Bismarck have none, and both measure their right by their might. In the non-Catholic world to-day, there is actually less principle, less conscience than there was with the Greeks and Romans when Peter transferred his chair from Antioch to Rome. The reconversion of the nations that apostatized must therefore be much more difficult that their original conversion. We do not know that there is any ground of hope for their reconversion, and St. Paul (Heb. vi.) seems to teach that "it is impossible." It certainly is impossible with men, but "with God all things are possible." Protestantism is unquestionably that "falling away" apostasy of which St. Paul writes to the Thessalonians, and which was to precede the end, and its spirit is manifestly the spirit of Antichrist already in the world when St. John wrote his first Epistle. Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the end is at hand, than that these apostate nations will "be renewed unto penance," and reunited to the living body of Christ?

There are many signs of the approaching end; but there are also signs of the contrary. If the faith of many has waxed cold, there is still faith on the earth, and the words of the Lord to Elias in the deser, may be repeated to the desponding, "I have reserved me seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal." The constant prayers that ascend for the august prisoner of the Vatican, the liberal contributions of Catholics to his his support, the pilgrimages to holy shrines, especially the shrines of our Lady, that of late have become so striking a feature in France and elsewhere, prove that faith is not extinct, if they do not prove that it is reviving. It seems to us, also, that the church has not yet accomplished her work, and that not yet has the Gospel of the kingdom been preached to all nations, and the kingdoms of this world made the kingdoms of God and his Christ. The Jews have not yet been converted and brought in, and they seem as far off, as a body, as ever. They are the chief captains of the army of Antichrist. It is possible the old Catholic nations of Europe will be given up, as have been those of Asia and Africa, and the Christian empire move westward through America, and crossing the Pacific Ocean, complete its circuit by returning to Asia its birthplace. Who knows? The designs of the Lord  are unalterable and sure to be fulfilled.

Yet whether the end of the world be near or far off, no harm can come to the church or to the true people of God united to Christ by faith and love, who dwell in him and he in them. But as we know not the day or the hour, we should strive so to live as to be prepared for either event. It is with the end of the world as with death, of which some one says, "since we know we must die, but know not when,  we should so live and work as if we were to die within the hour, and also as if we were to live for ever." We may not succeed in restoring the lapsed nations, or in reviving Christian civilization, but we must earnestly and perseveringly seek to do it, and leave the event to Him whose it is to grant or withhold success. For ourselves we believe that new victories on earth await the church, and we hold it our duty and the duty of every Catholic, to labor and restore and preserve the Christian faith, the Christian family, and Christian society. We have to-day the same enemy in front of us that the apostles themselves had to war against, and like them we can rely for victory only on God. The kingdoms of this world are against us, the spirit of modern society is against us, the politics and politicians are against us, the wealth, the pretended science, learning, and philosophy of the nations are against us, and Protestants, like the old carnal Jews, are by their emissaries everywhere present stirring up the people against us; but He in whom we trust is stronger than they all, and, if such is his will, he can scatter them with his breath as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor before the wind.

The present condition of what was Christendom is due to placing in power the party which in the time of the Ligue in France, went by the name of les politiques, who were neither fish nor flesh, and who subordinated the rights of God and the interests of religion to the exigencies of state policy. These are, whether nominally Catholics or not, now the men in power, and whom even Catholics intrust with the direction of public affairs. We must use all the lawful means we possess to displace them, and to put in their place only men who will subordinate state policy to the law of the Lord. We expressed last July, some doubts in regard to the expediency of the call of the energetic and outspoken bishop of Cleveland, upon Catholics to unite and vote only for such men as will defend the rights of Catholics, especially in regard to education. We have some doubts if the doubts we expressed were well founded, and are at present disposed to retract them, and to support the policy recomended by the venerable bishop. The late elections have shown us that political parties are likely to be again in our country very nearly equally balanced, or at least the fanatical anti-Catholic, or Methodistical party, headed by President Grant and his Methodist friends and masters, has received a check, and is by no means invulnerable. The recent election in this city shows what an honest, consistent, and capable political leader, a thorough-going Catholic, bold energetic, yet prudent, can effect. The same man may do more yet. 

But we are now speaking chiefly in reference to Catholics in the old European nations, where they are, as in France, Spain, Italy, Austria, and southern Germany, by far the numerical majority. Yet in none of these countries do we find a really Catholic statesman worthy of the name in power. Count Franz de Champagny wrote, in the Correspondant, some years back, "in Alsace and Lorraine, the two most Catholic departments of France, there is scarcely a Catholic in office, national, departmental, or communal. The offices are nearly all filled by Protestants and Jews." It was pretty much the same throughout all France. Official France has never been thoroughly Catholic since the accession of Henry IV., we might say since Louis XII., surnamed the Father of his People, and, as we said years ago, if there is Protestantism in Eruope to-day, the chief responsibility rests on official France, which has never since the consolidation of the Capetian monarchy, served the church any further than it could make or hope to make her subservient to the schemes of political aggrandizement. Even Louis IX. was canonized, not for his royal virtues or his devotion to the Holy See, but for his virtues as a man, and his heroism in adversity, chiefly as a prisoner in Tunis. Perhaps, if we might say it with reverence, also as a stroke of policy, to some extent at least, of Boniface VIII., who was persecuted by his grandson, the really infamous Philip the Fair. That the pope is infallible, in the canonization of saints, is not, we believe, de fide. The Franks, after the half-pagan Charles Martel, were devoted to the Holy See, but we have yet to learn any disinterested support to the Holy Father by official France, since the accession of the Capetian race of kings.

In later times French Catholics have rarely insisted on true, thorough-going Catholics to represent them. If they have voted for Catholics, it has usually been for politicians who subordinate the church to the state. Over 1,700,000 out of 1,800,000 inhabitants of Paris profess to be Catholics; yet they made or submitted to the commune, and have not a single conservative in the national assembly. Even Cound de Remusat was not radical enough for the Parisian Catholic voters. In our own country rarely can a Catholic who subordinates his politics to his religion secure the votes even of his Catholic bretren, and when a Catholic is elected to an office, state, national, or municipal, it is usually one who cares little for his religion, and knows less of its real principles-a liberal Catholic, or one who holds that his "religion has nothhing to do with his politics.: In fact, Catholics with whom their religion is the governing principle of their lives are never office seekers, never demagogues, and seldom popular even with Catholic electors. We touch here the real discouraging fact, the fact that makes us so doubtful of the restoration of Catholic society in Europe or elsewhere. There is even among Catholics a fearful lack of Catholic principle, and it is to this lack of Catholic principle that is due the ascendency gained by the enemies of God and society. Unless this lack is supplied, and we Catholics become Catholics, heart and soul, there is no hope for the world, however many churches we may build, or pilgrimages we may make. We may have to submit to anti-Catholic governments, but never should we, by our own act, create or aid in creating them.