Count Montalembert on England

MONTALEMBERT ON ENGLAND.* 

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1856.]

There is nothing that we have been more accustomed to hear from our youth up than predictions of the speedy ruin and downfall of England, and some of our friends do not hesitate to say, that she has already lost the high rank which she held a few years ago, and must now be regarded as a second-rate power. In most cases the wish, we apprehend, has been father to the thought. We are as strongly opposed to British preponderance as any of our friends, but we are not able to detect at the present moment any sure signs of the approaching downfall of the British empire. In the beginning, we were foolish enough to think that she had been drawn into the eastern war by France, although we never doubted but she would be the chief gainer by it, in case the allies were successful; but later developments prove that the war is principally hers, and that she has had the address to make Napoleon fight her battles, and to pour out French blood and French treasure for the promotion of her interests. We shall be much mistaken, if the French alliance does not turn out to have been formed in British much more than in French interests; and if we do not find, providing the allies succeed in humbling Russia, England in a few years more powerful than we have ever before known her, and standing still more decidedly at the head of modern commercial and industrial nations.

Napoleon, we take it, wished to be emperor, and to establish his dynasty on the throne of France. He could accomplish this latter object only by means of an alliance either with Russia against England, or by an alliance with England against Russia, backed, or not opposed by the rest of Europe. We suspect he preferred the former, but was defeated by the coldness of Russia, and the efforts of British diplomacy; nothing then remained for him but the latter. The Derby ministry conciliated Austria, and Nicholas preferred union with England,—the last power in the world he wished to fight,—to union with France. But Great Britain desired nothing more than an alliance with France against Russia, the only European power that could endanger either her trade or eastern possessions and conquests. An alliance with France against Russia would enable her, if not to combine all Europe against the czar, at least to isolate him, and perhaps to weaken effectually his power, to destroy his navy and ports, and to prevent him from interfering with her interests and projects in Turkey and Asia. Napoleon needed the alliance, because, unless supported by Russia and continental Europe, be could not maintain himself, or if himself, not his dynasty, or the imperial throne of France against her influence and machinations. She had recently deposed Louis Philippe, because his policy in Spain and Italy was not in accordance with her plans; and if he stood alone, she could as easily depose him, or prevent his dynasty from taking root. He could not sustain himself and provide for his dynasty in failure of the continental alliance, without her consent, and the war with Russia is the price he has had to pay for that consent. He probably has secured the French throne for himself and family, which maybe a great advantage for France and continental Europe; but he ou<rht to make an addition to his title, and say: "Napoleon III., by the grace of God, the will of the nation, and the favor of Great Britain, emperor of the French.''

We know it is said, that England has lost in the present war the prestige of her old renown, and that the glory of all the successes obtained by the allies redounds to France; but we think this may be reasonably questioned. The war has given her no opportunity for any brilliant achievements on the water, her proper element; but we have never known her engaged in a European war on land, in which she has for the first two campaigns put forth more energy, or gained more credit. We are no military man, but a* far as we are capable of judging, she has deserved, in proportion to the number of troops she has employed, as much credit as the French. It the French saved the English at Inkerman, the English saved the French at Alma. In the first bombardment of Sevastopol, it was the French, not the English, that were defeated: and if they could have carried out their part of the combined attack as well as the English did theirs, it is not improbable the city would have been forced to surrender, and the losses, sufferings, labors, and expenses of the ten months' siege would have been spared. The French, indeed, sustained themselves in the Malakoff, at a loss which will never be acknowledged; but they performed no act to surpass in bravery or in brilliancy the storming of the Redan by the English. It is unjust to give all the glorv, whatever it be, of the war in the Crimea to the French. But it is probably the policy of England to let them claim it, for she is willing that they should have the empty glory, so long as she is able, to reap all the solid advantages of the war. The Englishman looks to the main chance,—gain is his idol, while glory is the Frenchman's. 'We confess, that England has surprised us by the power and energy she has displayed in the Russian war. 'We did not believe her capable of the efforts she has made. Never have we seen her stronger, more living, more energetic; we were about to say, more youthful; and never have her nobility and gentry, as well as her common soldiers, done themselves more honor. The clamors raised by Mr. Lavard and the English press about the incapacity of the British aristocracy, and for a reform which shall put "the right man in the right place," seem to us at this distance perfectly ridiculous, if not something worse.

It is a great mistake, in our judgment, to think that England has lost any thing of her real power, and to represent her as playing a part subordinate to that of France. The war is really an English war, undertaken and carried on primarily for English interests; and if successful, it will raise the power of England far higher than it ever was before, and compel France henceforth, at the peril of her internal peace, to subserve the policy of the haughty island queen. It is true, she cannot carry on alone the war against Russia: but Napoleon cannot, unless backed by the continent, withdraw from that war against her consent, without losing his throne. She, however, can withdraw from it without having anything to fear from France, or losing anything of her rank or power. As between France and England, the controlling power is on the side of the latter. The war is not popular in France; it drains her of her best blood, and is creating an enormous national debt, which tends to bring the government into subjection to the bankers and stockjobbers, whose centre of operations is London, and will be, till the mercantile system is broken up, or its seat is transferred, as it ultimately will be, to New York. Napoleon would have made peace last May, if England had consented to it; and he is perfectly willing to make peace now, and on terms which Russia can accept, but she is not, and he alone cannot force her to do so: for he is not firmly enough seated on his throne to bid defiance to her intrigues and machinations, the disturbances she could create by encouraging the, red-republicans, perhaps the Bourbons, ami the terrible embarrassments for his government which she could create by her control of the credit system, in the meshes of which she has succeeded in entangling all modern Europe, except Russia.

Napoleon is not blind to the danger for France in continuing the war, and evidently sees the necessity of breaking at the earliest moment possible the English alliance. While we are writing, negotiations for peace are proceeding at Paris. What their result will be, it is impossible for us at this moment to foresee; but we are inclined to believe that peace will be made, because we think Napoleon has succeeded in convincing Russia and Austria, that it is safer for Europe to include him in a continental alliance against Great Britain, than it is to force him into an alliance with Great Britain against the continent, which would secure British preponderance, far more to be dreaded by them than even that of France. The events of the war have proved, that Russia and Austria can defend themselves against France, and France and Austria against Russia, and prevent her from seating herself on the Bosphorus. The true policy for these three powers is, then, to form a friendly alliance, and isolate Great Britain from the continent; or to force her to acquiesce in their continental system. If the French emperor has satisfied, as we think he has, Austria. Russia, and the secondary German states of this, peace will be made, and he will have gained even more by the war than England. He will then have taken his proper place among European sovereigns: and if wise at home, have closed for a long time the era of revolutions in France. England's only continental ally, if peace now be made, will henceforth be Prussia—if even Prussia. In a certain sense, this, undoubtedly, would be a triumph over Great Britain; but she would still remain the first naval, commercial, and manufacturing nation in the world. It would rob her of none of her real power ; and would only prevent her from extending that power as much as she had hoped by engaging France to aid infighting her battles,—because her power depends on her trade in the East, with this continent, and her own colonies.

But if peace is not made, and the allies succeed in humbling Russians much as England wishes, Great Britain gains all the advantages of the war, and becomes, for a time, the mistress of the Old World, if not also of the New. If the war goes on, and terminates unsuccessfully for the allies, which nothing yet proves to be impossible, France runs a greater danger than England. France would become Cossack, but England ,would still remain the first naval, and with her American trade, the first commercial power of the world. In any contingency, we, therefore, cannot predict a speedy ruin of Great Britain; she will doubtless fall one day, but not by French policy, or continental combinations: when she falls, it will not be by a European war, but through successful competition in trade and manufactures of the United States, and the rivalry of her colonies become independent states.

We have been led to make these remarks apropos of a very significant essay on the political prospects of England, by the illustrious Count Montalembert, inserted in the Correspondant for last November and December. The distinguished academician and statesman made, during the last season, a tour of observation in Great Britain, and has embodied! in this very remarkable essay the impressions he received and the reflections he made. We need not say that the essay is written with force and elegance, that it breathes 'a noble spirit, is full of eloquence and profound thought, for such qualities we are always sure to find in every production of the noble author. We have read it with attention, with deep interest, and friendly partiality. With its political principles, its generous tone of civil and religious liberty, we heartily sympathize; and we share to a considerable extent the author's unaffected admiration of the English political constitution, and the many noble, generous, fend manly traits to be detected in the English character. We concede the greatness of England, whose queen, including her colonies, rules over a larger territory than that of Russia, and over nearly twice as many subjects as ancient Rome, in the palmiest days of the empire; we concede her prodigious industry, and her marvellous commercial enterprise and successful trade; we concede her wonderful life, activity and energy in all that pertains to the material order; but we cannot help thinking that the illustrious author has seen her in too rose-colored a light, taken too favorable a view of English society, and attributed too much of what he regards as England's prosperity to her political constitution. Inheriting the love of personal freedom and independence so characteristic of the old feudal nobility, devotedly attached to constitutional and parliamentary government, deeply afflicted at the sad termination of the struggles, revolutions, and sacrifices of his own country in behalf of civil and political freedom, and associating, during his visit, chiefly with the nobility and gentry, it is not strange that he should have been charmed with what he met, and regarded England, in the enthusiasm of the moment, as a model nation, worthy of the world's imitation. He saw her in her "Sunday's best," and was chiefly struck by the presence of those things, whose absence in his own country caused the grief of his heart, and he cither did not see or did not note the presence of other things from which his own country has hitherto happily been comparatively free. England is the land of respectability, what Carlyle calls '* gigmanity," and he who confines his observations to the "respectable class," will, for the moment, fancy that he has recovered the long-lost Eden. Yet there is a reverse of the picture, and if there is less poverty, there is more squalid wretchedness, more filth, more abject, hopeless misery, than in any other nation in Christendom.

We do not doubt that the political constitution of England retains more of what was good in mediaeval feudalism, and has taken up less of what is bad in modern politics, than that of any other European state; but we think M. de Montalembert not only forms too favorable an estimate of English society, taken as a whole, but that he attributes far too much of England's material greatness and prosperity to her political institutions, and fails to perceive that they are due to the original character of her people, to her insular position, vast internal wealth, and her restricted territory, which naturally turned her energies in the direction of trade and manufactures, and more than all, to that very foreign policy which he so unqualifiedly and so justly condemns. We are by no means indifferent to political constitutions or forms of government, and we are as sincerely attached to what in our language is called "self-government," as is any man living; but we regard it as the besetting sin of the modern world, that it attributes too much of what is good or what is evil in a nation to its government. It is the people that determines the government, rather than the government that determines the people. It is not the free government that makes the free people, but the free people that makes the free government. Every people not subjected by a foreign conquest and placed under an anti-national power, has always just as much freedom as it wills or is entitled to; for in every country left free by all others to govern itself in its own way, the government is the fair exponent of the average amount of freedom there is in the hearts and souls of its population. No monarch wfis ever yet strong enough to subject a free people to his arbitrary will,—a people, we mean, that have the internal spirit and character of freemen. Except in cases of foreign conquest, or foreign intervention, governments are not imposed on a people; they grow out of the people, and express the sentiments and convictions of the nation: and it is only on that condition that they can sustain themselves. The government may, indeed, fail to satisfy the wants and wishes of a part, and yet be able to sustain itself; but when it fails to represent, fairly, the wants and wishes of the nation as a whole, it must either submit to such modifications as are needed to adapt it to those wants and wishes, or yield to a revolution, more or less violent, according to the resistance it meets. Nations may lose their old liberties or franchises, and fall under a degrading caesarism, but never, till freedom has died out of the hearts and souls of the people,—not till they have. lost the moral qualities of freemen, and acquired the vices and passions of slaves. The old feudal nobility had lost the virtues of their order, before they were forced to succumb to the king and commons, and this fact, still more than the grasping ambition of the king, or the increasing wealth and influence of the commons, caused the downfall of feudalism. Absolute monarchy existed in the sentiments, passions, and convictions of the nation, before the king did or could establish it. Absolutism cannot be imposed on a nation against its will. Louis Napoleon was elected emperor by universal suffrage, and almost unanimously. We do not object to caesarism, that it reduces a free people to slavery, but that finding them slaves, it keeps them so, and prevents the adoption of the means, and the exercise of the moral influences, necessary to redeem them from slavery, and to elevate them to the rank, dignity, and virtues of freemen.

The present unsettled state of European nations offers no argument against this doctrine. In the greater part of European nations, the people are divided, and whatever the government, there is a disaffected party opposed to it, and which can be restrained only by physical force. The government cannot represent the will of the nation, where there is no national will, or the will of the people, where there is no people. As long as the division remains, the government is obliged to go with the stronger party, and rely on the sentiments and convictions, the .wants and wishes of that party, and through it to hold the other in subjection. This is, indeed, an evil, and during its continuance, government, in the legitimate sense of the word, does not exist. Authority dominates, but does not govern. External order is maintained only by means of armed forcej and the chief dependence is, and must be, on the army. Hence, some of our friends in France and elsewhere appear to regard the army as an essential element in the administration, and go so far as to place the soldier on the same line with the priest. This is to mistake an exceptional, for the normal state of things. In a well-ordered state, the soldier is necessary only to defend, or to vindicate the nation against foreign enemies; never to support the government at home, as an instrument of administration, or an auxiliary of the civil magistrate. That the army is necessary in most European states to support the administration, is unhappily too true, but this is because these states are unsettled, are undergoing a change from one political order to another, and their governments harmonize with the wants and wishes of only a part of the nation. But this is only a temporary state of things, and when unanimity is restored among the people, the army will not be needed as an agent of the home secretary, or minister of the interior. The moment such unanimity is effected, and the nation has an undivided will, the government will be forced to conform to and express it.

We do not, therefore, attribute those traits of the English character which the noble author points out to our admiration, to the British constitution; we rather attribute what is worthy of commendation in that constitution to those traits themselves. The English people have made the English constitution, not the English constitution the English people. They never entirely lost their old freedom, which they derived from the church, when they were converted from heathenism to Christianity. They allowed Heury VIII. to suppress the freedom of religion, to separate them from the centre of unity, and to create a national church, with himself for its head, but because they had become indifferent to the Catholic faith, because they never were overburdened with logic, and could as easily say two and two make three or five, as that they make foui>and because a royal and national church accorded with their excessive loyalty, and flattered their nationalism and their insular pride. They suffered Elizabeth to rule them with despotic authority, because she directed her policy to the maintenance of the national liberty and independence against the attacks of Spain, under Philip II., that cold-hearted tyrant, who sought, under pretext-of supporting the Catholic faith, to realize the dream of universal monarchy. But the moment all real or imaginary danger from abroad was removed, and they felt sure of preserving an English religion and an English state, as was the case under the Stuarts, they showed that absolute monarchy is a thing they detest, and to which they will never submit. Nearly a century of rebellion and revolution proved this to the world, and that the will of the nation demanded, and would have, a constitutional monarchy, and a parliamentary government. The present English constitution is, no doubt, admirably adapted to the English people,and they are admirably adapted to it; but they have made it what it is, not it has made them what they are.

If we want any proof of the impotence of this constitution to mould a people to itself, we need but cross the channel from England to Ireland, where there is a people widely different from the English. The attempts of England to bring the Irish into harmony with her civil and political order have been as unsuccessful as her attempts to convert them to her national church. The difficulty is not, and never has been, owing to the differences of religion. The English Catholic is as thorough-going an Englishman as the English Protestant, and is as devotedly attached to the English constitution. It is adapted to his genius and character. The Irishman loves liberty with a love as intense as that of the Englishman, but the Irish genius instinctively resists the English civil and political order, and you must make the Irishman an Englishman, convert the Celt into the Saxon, before you can make him love it, or sit down quietly and feel himself at his ease under it. Hence the genuine unanglo-saxonized Irish, after seven hundred years of English domination, seek only an opportunity to sever the connection with England, and to reassert their national independence. And that connection they would have severed centuries ago, if they had not been divided among themselves, or if they had really had a national will of their own. The attempts of England to impose her form of government on continental states, or the attempts of those states to copy her institutions, have in every instance been disastrous in the extreme. Look at Portugal, Spain, Sicily, Naples, to say nothing of France. All prove that a constitution must have its root in the heart and life of a people, or instead of operating beneficially it operates as a curse. It requires centuries, at least, to mould a people to a foreign constitution, and to make what expresses freedom in one country necessarily express it in another.

When we say we admire the English constitution, we mean that we admire it for England. It is a constitution adapted to the tastes, prejudices, pride, and flunkyism of the English people. But we are not prepared to admit that the industrial activity, the commercial and manufacturing prosperity of England are due to her political constitution, or to the wisdom or sagacity of her domestic policy. Her decided superiority over the continental states in these respects, is by no means coeval with her comparatively free constitution. It is, after all, only about sixty years old, and is due chiefly to the independence and prosperity of the Anglo-American colonies, now the United States, and to the French revolution and the wars which grew out of it. These wars destroyed the greater part of the commerce and manufactures of the continent, and operated as a bounty on her own; they gave her the command of the seas, enabled her to dispossess the French and Dutch of the greater part of their possessions in both Indies, and to make London the centre of the trade and commerce of the world. What had her peculiar political constitution to do with all this? She owed her success to her insular position, the maritime habits of her people, and to her adroit foreign policy. When she saw France, her old rival, torn by intestine divisions, and distracted by the efforts to reform her civil and political institutions, she stirred up the continental nations to intervene in behalf of the fallen monarchy, and she herself declared war on the French republic, without having received from it any injury, and not to restore the Bourbons, nor to avenge a plundered church, but to promote her own selfish ends. She commenced the war by despatching lur fleets to take possession of the French colonies in the East and the West, proving that whatever her pretences, she made war, not against the French revolution, but against France herself.

The independence and prosperity of this country has also been a leading cause of the growth of her trade and manufactures. Owing to identity of language, sameness of race, and old habits formed in the days of colonial dependence, our trade, after the revolution, sought, naturally, her ports, and continued to do so in spite of the illiberal policy with which, till quite recently, she treated it. It is not easy to say how much England's present greatness and prosperity are due to her trade with us. As an independent nation we have been worth far more to her than we should have been as colonies. The cultivation of cotton in our southern states has built up her cotton trade, and the raw materials we have supplied her have opened a market here for her manufactures m nearly all their several branches. One half of her foreign trade is now carried on with this country, and were she to lose our trade she would sink instantly to a second or third rate power. She cannot subsist as a great nation without the American trade. She knows it, and' hence her efforts to extend her possessions in Asia, to open markets, and to obtain a supply of cotton, rice, and tobacco, independent of us,—efforts that will have at most only a partial success. Other causes we might enumerate, but these are quite sufficient to prove that England's material greatness, the only order of greatness to which she can lay any claim,is quite independent of her political constitution. If France, as she probably hoped when she aided us to obtain our independence, had succeeded in diverting our trade from Great Britain and attracting it to her own ports; or if the war against the French republic and the French empire had been as unsuccessful on the sea as it was for the most part on land, and as it most likely would have been but for the wholesale massacre of the French naval officers at Quiberon, and for which the British government might be held responsible, the illustrious Count Montalembert would have not held up England's material prosperity in contrast to that of his own country. After all, we may doubt if Great Britain has advanced at a more rapid rate, or really made more progress in civilization during the last three centuries, than Russia,—a government we are in the habit of denouncing as a pure autocracy.

If we lock closer into English society we shall find that all is not gold that glisters. There is no doubt that the English aristocracy is the most living and vigorous aristocracy of Europe. It is wealthy, cultivated, and enlightened; its members retain a large share of the personal freedom and independence that belonged to the old feudal nobility. The gentry and the middle classes are also wealthy, and are in a condition to enjoy a good degree of well-being; but having said so much we must stop. He who would admire England must limit his observations to the respectable classes, which are, after all, a small minority of the nation. The officers of the anny and navy are all from the aristocracy or the respectable classes; so are all the members of the government, and the employes of the administration and the national church. The rural population, the peasantry proper, are the least moral, the most ignorant and brutish in the world ; the operatives have very little morality, very tittle intelligence, are to a terrible extent infidels, whose Bible is the Weekly Dispatch, and whose temple is the gin shop. They barely support themselves by their labor, and exhausted by toil, they have no heart to seek 'mental or moral cultivation,and live and die but as a better sort of brutes. Below these is another class, large in all the towns, who sell combs, toothpicks, and other small articles, and who are really thinly disguised beggars; and down still lower is a swarm of petty thieves and nondescripts, living, no one can tell how: and then in England and Wales, out of a population of some sixteen or seventeen millions, from twelve hundred thousand to two millions are, or were a few years ago, shut up in poorhouses, to say nothing of those receiving out-door relief. There may be continental states where there is more poverty than in England, but there is none, as it has been well said by the North British Review, where there is so much squalid wretchedness, so much hopeless, unmitigated misery.

We are confining our observations to Great Britain alone: but if we extended them to Ireland and British India, we should be obliged to pronounce the English government the most heartless, the most barbarous, and the most fatal to human happiness on the globe, not excepting even that of the Grand Turk. This wealth you see in England has been in great part dug out of the earth by a miserable set of wretches, who never hear the name of God except when it is blasphemed ; or plundered from the defenceless nations of India. There was no class found by Julius Caesar, when he invaded England, so degraded below the dignity of our common manhood as are the colliers and miners, if we may place the least reliance on the reports of parliamentary commissions. Slavery still exists, in fact, in some parts of the North of England, and the hinds may he found there in precisely the same condition, only worse,'in which their ancestors were seven hundred years ago. England found India badly governed, indeed, but she found it comparatively wealthy. The country was thickly inhabited and generally cultivated. Various manufactures, especially that of cotton, abounded, and the poor people, by their industry and economy, lived with a good degree of material comfort. All this is changed. The water tanks are dried up; irrigation is neglected; the roads are not repaired; the lands run to waste, and whole districts formerly cultivated, are now overgrown with jungles, and form haunts of wild beasts. The manufactures are destroyed to make way for those of England, and the upper classes, the native gentry, are plundered of their property, and excluded from all posts of honor in the army and the company's civil service. What have British freedom, British commerce, trade, and industry doue for India, for Ireland, or for any portion of Queen Victoria's subjects, except the two or three millions of English who pertain to the respectable classes, two-thirds of whom are the veriest flnnkys in Christendom? What is the value of the ease and respectability of those classes, if purchased, as it has been, at the expense of the moral and material degradation of one hundred and fifty millions of our fellow-men, who have souls as precious as those of England's gigmanity? What is the use of liberty when it is only the liberty of the few to ride the many?

If we pass from the material to the moral order, we shall have still less reason for admiring the workings of the British constitution. Great Britain is precisely that country in Europe, excepting Turkey, in which the laws are the most barbarous, and crime is most prolific, and of the blackest dye. A writer in Blackwood?8 Magazine a few years since, shows that crime during the previous sixty years had increased in England eight hundred per cent, in Scotland seventeen hundred per cent, and in Ireland five hundred per cent, while it had actually decreased in France and all the Catholic states of the continent. The proportion of criminals in England, aside from political offences, is at least ten times greater than in France. The number of prostitutes in London is thirty-three and a third per cent greater than in Paris, after making allowance for difference of population. Nothing is more frightful than the crimes daily chronicled in the English press. Where, but in England, has it ever been heard of, that mothers would murder their own children for the sake of the fee paid by burial societies? 'Where else have men, even belonging to the respectable classes, been charged with murdering their wives, their mothers-in-law, and their most intimate friends, for the sake of the insurance on their lives? A few years since books were written and circulated in England, recommending parents to murder their children, in order to get rid of the trouble and expense of maintaining them, and giving instructions how to do it in the least painful manner. A few facts like these are worth volumes of declamation in favor of English freedom and English prosperity.

We have no disposition to press the analysis of English society. Respectable England is admirable, no doubt, to the continental visitor; but there is another and a very different England below it, which more than compensates for it.— unwashed England, sweltering in filth, pining in hopeless misery, festering in vice, or revelling in crime. This England seems to have escaped the observation of the noble visitor. The English government, it strikes us, is the worst administered government, not excepting even our own, to be found in the civilized world. It is meritorious only in wiiat it lets alone; and the English have reason to congratulate themselves only on what it does not undertake to do. As regards its positive action, we do not know a more inept, Wundering, and inefficient government in Europe, or one that really effects so little for the well-being of the people. The administration of justice in England proper, we readily concede, is often deserving our esteem, and is usually impartial, unless the case be one between Protestants and Catholics. But out of England, in Ireland or India, it is for the most part utterly detestable. British officials, when elsewhere than in England, have no rivals in arrogance, ignorance, prejudice, conceit, incapacity, and stupidity. England is loved only at home, and she does little but grumble, and flcold, and fret even in her own house.

The sole merit we are able to award the British government is, that it does not attempt to govern all the actions of its subjects, but leaves a large margm to the free and unfettered activity of individuals. The citizen is not annoyed by the perpetual interference of the state, and does not fear to say what he thinks. He is not surrounded by government spies, or obliged to ask permission of the statu whether he may take this pursuit or must confine himself to that, or whether he must stay at home or may go abroad. This individual freedom, this leaving, as to the greater part of their acts, individuals to themselves, is in itself a great merit, and what charms our author, and blinds him to the real vices of English society. We prize this liberty highly; but no man can have studied the history of England, since her apostasy, without being convinced that it has not operated in favor either of moral greatness or the social wellbeing of the mass of the population. Undoubtedly, England owes what is praiseworthy in her history to this liberty, but she owes to it also what we are obliged to deplore and condemn, in her present condition.

The liberty recognized, or left to individuals by the British constitution, has not been directed to wise and noble ends; it has operated to the elevation of the few, and the depression of the many. In a Catholic state, this liberty is a great blessing; it is the condition of manliness and nobility of character; but in a Protestant state, which leaves man without moral guidance, a prey to all the violent and depraved passions of his fallen nature, it is perverted to low and selfish ends, and results in creating a nation of egotists and mammon-worshippers. In a Protestant state, the liberty which the English and American constitutions leave to the people as individuals, may favor industrial and commercial enterprise, develop the material resources of a nation, and augment its wealth for a season, but is hostile to the poorer and more numerous classes. It becomes practically only the liberty of the few to use, or to borrow a French word, to exploiter the many,—the strong to oppress the weak, and the cunning to circumvent the simple. Where Protestantism predominates, liberty operates onlv evil for the mass, and those non-Catholic states are the wisest, who allow their subjects the least of it. For in the absence of religion, the state must intervene everywhere, if it would protect the helpless, and secure the well-being of the great body of its subiects. In a Catholic state, with a people in whom the Catholic faith is living, the more freedom the better, because there the individual having a moral and spiritual guidance, and the assistance of divine grace to control his appetites and passions, is in a condition to exercise his liberty without abusing it. Hence the reason why we so frequently and so earnestly insist on the necessity of the Catholic religion to sustain our republic. With the Catholic religion our liberty is safe, and will operate in securing us a high degree of material prosperity, and a noble, elevated, and manly cbaractcr. But without that religion, we must go on abusing our liberty, till we break in pieces from our own internal rottenness, or are obliged to give it up, and substitute for our republicanism a stringent and inexorable cffisarisin. The British constitution was of Catholic origin, adapted to the wants df a Catholic people, and can operate well only on condition that the people are Catholic. The moral element, which in a Catholic state is present to supply the absence of the civil, is wanting in England. The American system is even more in accordance with Catholicity than the English, and consequently the Catholic religion is even more necessary to its salutary practical working. It was a great mistake on the part of the Catholic nations of Europe, to suppress their old mediaeval liberty, and attempt to substitute in the moral government of men, the state for the church; but it was a still greater mistake of England to attempt to combine liberty and Protestantism; because liberty without religion tends always to license, and operates only in favor of the few who have the skill or the address to turn it to their own advantage. Either liberty in England, as well as with us, will soon be lost, or both countries will abandon their Protestantism, and return to the bosom of the church.

M. de Montalembert is charmed also with the freedom of the press, but he does not appear to be aware, that the press in England, as well as in this country, is seldom free, except in name. He seems to think that when we have secured publicity, we have secured all. But this supposes that public opinion is just, and when appealed to, is sure to decide for the right. This, however, is far enough from being the case. Public opinion is never above the average virtue and wisdom of the community, and that in a nonCatholic community can never be very high. Publicity is never an infallible remedy, often no remedy at all, for injustice. In England and this country, public opinion exercises a more rigid censorship over the press, than is exercised by any continental sovereign; and all the more rigid, because the government leaves it to the people themselves. The Englishman or American, indeed, is free to write and publish what he pleases, but if his views are unpopular, or not fostered by popular prejudice, nobody reads what he writes. He loses his labor, and very possibly his social position, if he has any to lose. The press depends on the public, and it is only by pandering to public prejudice that it can obtain public support. Our journals live only by serving a party, a denomination, an ism, or something of the sort. A journal outside of the. Catholic community that undertakes to lead public opinion, to expose popular fallacies, and to form a just public sentiment, would soon in either country find itself without subscribers and without readers. The London Times claims to be independent, and it is independent of the ministry, but it is the abject slave of John-Bullism, and lives only by virtue of representing the sentiments, the passions, and the prejudices of the English business public,—at present the rnling public. It is never just, where to be just would be un-English. In proof, take notice of its hostility to the Irish and to the Catholic Church. It has never been known to be just to either; and it scruples, apparently, at no misrepresentation, perversion, or falsehood that will inflame English prejudices against them. Have we not seen it with masterly ability advocating the policy of the late Emperor Nicholas with regard to Turkey, and then turn round and grossly abuse him for having proposed it \ When have we known the English, any more than the American non-Catholic press, to permit the calumnies and falsehoods it circulates against our holy religion, to be refuted or contradicted in its columns? For a Catholic to appeal to the public sentiment of Englishmen, except when they have some party purpose to effect, would be only toi inflame it all the more against his religion. We like publicity, we like a free press; and England and the United States do well in recognizing them, because in so doing, they recognize a sound principle and a wise policy; but m a Protestant or an irreligious country, the former is worth very little to Catholics, and the latter exists only in name. Both are desirable and good in a Catholic community; but in a Protestant state, they do as much evil as good, to say the least. The only press either in Great Britain or the United States, that can pretend to any degree of freedom and independence, is the Catholic press, and even the Catholic editor is sometimes harshly treated by a portion of his brethren, for daring to exercise the freedom of thought and expression allowed by his church. Still it is comparatively mdependent, and is the only press in the, world to be uniformly counted on as the loyal defender of truth and justice, civil and religious freedom, and the rights and dignity of man as man.

But passing over all considerations of this sort, granting England to be all that our illustrious author represents, we cannot think that he has judged wisely, in holding her up as a model for the imitation of his countrymen. Every nation has a life and genius of its own, and especially is this true of France. The Frenchman is polite, is expansive, and adapts himself with a remarkable facility to the passions, prejudices, and idiosyncrasies of foreign nations, but he never ceases to be a Frenchman. He knows how to avoid offending the nationality of others, and to make himself agreeable to persons of a national character the furthest removed from his own; but no man is more intensely national. Of all men, he is the one who needs the least, and who is least disposed, to borrow from foreigners. He pertains to a nation which stands, and through all modern history has stood, at the head of European civilization. His nation is original, others are imitators. It is, therefore, idle to expect him to consent to take any other nation for his model, or to favor for any considerable length of time a movement to naturalize in his country the political constitution of another. He glories in belonging to France; and you offend him in the tenderest point, when you ask him to copy foreign nations. The genius of the Frenchman may be seen in his language. The English and German languages can borrow foreign terms, and incorporate them without change or alteration; the French accepts them only in subjecting them to its own laws, and conforming them to its own genius. Foreign names even, must be gallicized in form and pronunciation. This is only the expression of the French genius itself, which you cannot change.

The attempt has several times been made to fasten English institutions on France. It was made by the constituent of 1789; it was made again in 1814 and 1815, under the elder branch of the Bourbons, protected by nearly all Europe; and finally in 1830, under Louis Philippe; but in every case in vain. The French nation could not mould them to its own genius, and it repudiated them. The Anglomania introduced by Voltaire and his school, cost France sixty years of revolution, drenched her with her noblest blood, and brought her more than once to the brink of the precipice. She will not be anglicised; she will under all circumstances remain French. The Anglomania is a disease, a morbid humor; and she feels through all her frame, that she can have vigorous health and be herself only by expelling it. Under its influence she languishes; and from 1789 to 1856, she has shown herself living and vigorous only when she repudiated Anglicanism. The glorious epoch of the republic was, when rejecting the Anglican institutions imposed upon her by the constituent, she acted from her own French impulses, and rolled back the Cimmerian forces that dared invade her territory, and attempt to control her internal affairs. The glorious acts of the restoration were the invasion of Spain and the conquest of Algiers in spite of England and English policy; and the only spirited act of the monarchy of July, was the Spanish match in spite of English diplomacy. The French people never loved the constitutional government of Louis Philippe; French genius could not find its free scope under his reign, and nearly the whole nation rejoiced to see him depart for England. We may or may not regret it, but English constitutionalism has never taken, and never can take root in France. The cause is lost, and it is in our judgment worse than useless to attempt to galvanize it into life. We have the highest respect for Count Montalembert and his friends, and warm sympathy with them; but they seem to us to act unwisely in separating themselves from the main current of French life. We are with them heart and soul in their opposition to absolute government, whether of the one, the few, or the many; we like, as little as they do, the absolutist tendencies of the present imperial regime. But the French nation are attached to the present order, and the Frenchman who opposes it, isolates himself from his countrymen, and throws himself away. Aristocratic France was mortally wounded in the Fronde, breathed its last in the evening of the 4th of August, 1789. Its apparent resuscitation under the restoration and the monarchy of July, was no real resuscitation. France is at once monarchical and democratic, and in any permanent order, these two elements must be retained and harmonized the best they may. Our friends in France, it strikes us, should take this as a fixed fact, and with their usual frankness and wisdom, accept and conform to it. What they can never introduce, revive, or establish in France, is the aristocratic element of the English constitution, for that element does not exist in French society, or in the sentiments and convictions of the French people. An aristocracy once fallen, has fallen to rise no more.

The future of France is to be moulded, not out of foreign elements, but out of national elements already existing. Those elements are imperialism, democracy, and Catholicity. This, we think, is undeniable. The only way, then, in which a Frenchman can serve his country effectually, is to work with these elements, and content himself with such combinations of them as are practicable. He must work with the national sentiment, not against it. We do not like the politics of the Univers, for it advocates not only the imperial regime as the best for France, but a similar regime as the best for all nations. It forgets that France is not all the world, and that what may be the political duty of a Catholic in France, is by no means necessarily the political duty of a Catholic in Belgium, Holland, Prussia, England, or the United States. We have had, in the interests of our religion and of our country, to take strong ground against the absolutist doctrines, which were, in virtue of the reaction against the revolutionism of 1848, beginning to find favor with some Catholic publicists; but we have believed that the party opposed to that represented by the Univers, ought not to stand aloof from the actual government, or to assume the attitude of discontent, if not of hostility. The imperial order, whatever its defects, is eminently national; and no movement in favor of defunct constitutionalism, or of parliamentary government in imitation either of the English of the American, will, or can be successful. The true policy for patriotic Frenchmen who wish the nation to have a more direct voice in the management of its affairs, is, it seems to us, to accept the order established as the basis of their future operations, and to contemplate nothing that is not in harmony with its genius, or that may not be peaceably and legally developed from it. The worst possible way to supply the defects of existing political institutions, is to begin by exciting the jealousy, the aversion, or the fears of the government, and to compel it to act in its own defence, or in reference to its own preservation. The government should be allowed to feel that the era of revolutions is closed, and that no effort will, intentionally or unintentionally, be made, tending to render its existence insecure. The institutions founded by the emperor, should be loyally accepted as the will of the French people, and the law of the empire. These institutions must be held as inviolable, and nothing be attempted that would alter their essential character.

Count Montalembert and his friends are men whom the French nation cannot well afford to lose. They have exerted an immense influence in resuscitating Catholic France, and in promoting Catholic interests throughout the world. They have been, in a certain sense, the leaders of the Catholic movement of our times. They have been brave champions of the most holy cause; they have done knightly service; Catholic hearts everywhere thrill with grateful emotion at the bare mention of their names. Is their work done, their mission ended? Are they now to abandon us while they are still in the prime and vigor of their lives? They have long stood at the head of the Catholic party, and have directed under the hierarchy Catholic affairs. Why need they lose their position? Why can they not rise to the level of the new times, and still remain our leaders? Yet they will not lead the Catholic mind, they will not direct Catholic interests, or be followed by the Catholic people, if they have only regrets for the past, and criticisms for the present. To retain the position they have heretofore held, they must command the future; they must have a word for as now, a spirit-kindling word, that will rally all heroic minds and hearts to their standard. But with all their brilliant genius, their varied and profound erudition, their lofty eloquence, their generous sympathies and noble aspirations, they are lost to France and the world, if they can propose nothing better than the resuscitation of defunct constitutionalism or the importation of a feeble copy of aristocratic England. 

We love and esteem Count Montalembert; we admire his genius, we respect his erudition, we venerate his purity and disinterestedness of purpose, and we sympathize with his political principles; but we confess his essay on the political prospects of England disappoints and afflicts us. It is not what we had a right to expect from such a man, and is by no means worthy of his practical wisdom, or his French patriotism. It has evidently been inspired by his regrets, not by his hopes. It is a mistake, and will go far to compromise the cause he has at heart. England is a powerful and influential nation, we grant, but not even he can write her into the affection of any people on earth. Every people suffers by her contact, and those she protects, for whom she has expended her blood and treasure, hate her more than they do the powers against whom she defends them. Every people that has attempted to imitate her political system has been ruined or brought the next door to ruin. The friends of liberty in Europe may wish to use her, but they do not love her, and they despise her constitution. She represents an order of things which has had its day. The dominant element in the English order is aristocracy, and it i8 against aristocracy far more than against monarchy that our age is at war. Even in England herself there is a war raging against the aristocracy, and there are indubitable signs that it will ultimately have to give way before the accumulating forces of the democracy. The imperialism of France is daily acquiring popularity even with the English, and commands far more sympathy throughout the civilized world than British constitutionalism or parliamentarianism. Nothing, then, can be more unpopular, or more opposed to the tendencies of our age, than the attempt to make it copied by a foreign nation. We respect, perhaps we share, the aristocratic predilections of the noble author, but we should deem it a most egregious blunder, to make them, either in France or in our own country, the basis of the slightest political action. We cherish them as an heirloom transmitted from an age that has gone, never to return. No restorations are successful, and all imitations in politics are bad; but of all imitations, that of the British constitution has, in our times, the least chance of being successful. He who proposes it by that very fact throws distrust on his cause, and can hardly escape rendering himself odious to all, except the few who wear their faces on the back side of their heads.

The illustrious author seems to us, in this holding up of the English constitution in contrast with the imperial, to abandon the policy he has hitherto pursued. As an hereditary peer of France, and the son, we believe, of an emigre, his natural position was that of an adherent of the elder Bourbons; but he accepted without approving, the monarchy of July, and sought to make the best of it. A constitutional monarchist in principle, he accepted the republic of 1848, and served it with the loyalty native to his heart. Wishing to retain the republic, not because he preferred it, but because it was instituted, and because he was strongly opposed to socialism and revolutionism, he yet supported the coup d? elat of December 2d, 1851, and urged his friends to sustain Louis Napoleon as the chief of the state. Thus far his rule had been not to quarrel with the nation, but to accept the order it willed and to make the best of it, to abandon the past and march with the future. Why should he not do so now? To break from the empire, or to attempt to convert it into British constitutionalism is, it seems to us, to adopt a different rule of action, and instead of going with the nation, to place himself against it. The church is wiser than he, and, without having willed the empire, she accepts and respects it as the will of the French nation, leaving it to time and events to amend what in it may be faulty.

We have said that we did not like the imperial constitution. It does not, in our judgment, give sufficient part to the nation in the management of its own affairs, and intrusts too much to the will of the emperor. But we do not forget that a dictatorship, at the time it was formed, was in some measure necessary to save France from the horrors of civil war, if not from the greater horrors of socialism We. observe, too, that the imperial constitution provides for its own amendment, and is susceptible of a development in a liberal sense. As things settle down, as the revolutionary spirit dies out, and the dictatorship ceases to be necessary, there are many indications that the emperor is himself disposed to favor such development, nay, that he contemplates it. He has said the rock on which his uncle split, was in suffering the government to incline too much to absolutism, and his writings indicate that he himself is opposed to despotism. He has proved himself the strongest, perhaps the wisest, man in France, if not in Europe. May not more be done for political liberty in France, by accepting his leadership, and cooperating with him, than by separating from him, or setting up an independent standard? He is not merely the legal, but he is the real sovereign of France, the man who best understands her sentiments and wishes, and most fully sympathizes with them; no man living seems to us more capable of carrying into effect what he conceives to be necessary. Is he not in fact, then, not only the emperor, but the real political leader of Frenchmen? If so, it is under his drapeau they should consent to march.

We have said that the three existing elements of French society are imperialism, democracy, and Catholicity. The whole future of France is contained in these three elements, and the wisdom of the statesman consists in skilfully harmonizing them. The imperial element is provided for, and the only fear that any one need have, is in regard to the Catholic and democratic elements. Count Montalembert, if we understand him, fears that these have not sufficient guaranties. We share his fear. But we do not think that these guaranties would be strengthened by any efforts to introduce the aristocratic element in imitation of England, or by a parliamentary limitation of imperialism. The additional guaranties needed, it seems to us, should be sought in the development of the Catholic element. There is always danger in seeking guaranties for the freedom of the church in politics, for we are, in attempting it, liable to lose sight of religion, and to become engrossed in efforts to organize the state. No political guaranties will secure the freedom of the church, where the state or the great body of the nation are hostile to her existence. No government is really more hostile to the church than the parliamentary government of England, and the English people are even more anti-Catholic than the English parliament. Even the people of this country find it exceedingly hard to be faithful to the freedom of religion recognized as a fundamental principle of our institutions. Where the people are truly Catholic, popular forms of government are the most favorable to religious freedom; but where the popular sentiment is decidedly hostile to it, they afford the greatest facilities for extinguishing it. It is not in politics that we must seek guaranties for the freedom of the church, but in the church that we must seek our guaranties of political and civil freedom. What, it seems to us, our friends in France who wish more political freedom, whether by tempering the imperial element or the democratic, should make the basis of their operations, is Catholicity. They should, after making their protest, as they have done against absolutism, labor to bring France up to the highest toned Catholicity, to make her thoroughly Catholic in the Roman apostolic sense. Then they need fear nothing either for political or religious liberty.

We are afraid that our friends in France do not sufficiently appreciate the Catholic element as a guaranty against absolutism. With the best devised political constitutions, with the most nicely adjusted scheme of checks and balances, and with the most explicit recognition of the freedom of the spiritual order, there is no security for any species of liberty without religion. The temporal is never safe unless founded on a spiritual basis, and sustained by the lively faith of the people. No human contrivance is worth any thing without religion. Temporal interests, self-interests, hower pitted one against another, will never suffice even for themselves. It is, after all, to the church that we must look, and it is under the safeguard of religion we must place even our temporal interests, if we would have them secure. Our friends know this as well as we do, but we fear that they are partially forgetting it. This essay on the political prospects of England has alarmed us, and forced us to ask ourselves several unpleasant questions. When we see a Catholic, one whom we have long honored as a Catholic leader, excusing and almost praising the Anglican establishment, because he happens to find it an element in a political constitution which he admires, we fear that he is for the moment far more absorbed in the political than in the Catholic question. We cannot doubt the sincerity or the firmness of his faith, but we tremble, lest he forget to subordinate his politics to his religion, and suffer his love for constitutionalism to carry him where it would be dangerous for others to attempt to follow him. He overrates the Anglican establishment, and is, in our judgment, quite mistaken in supposing that it tends to keep alive the sense of religion in the English people. It is a part of England's respectability, and helps to sustain it; but it does less for religion than the various dissenting sects. Many men of truly religious aspirations have been found in her communion, we concede, but they owe nothing to that communion, and are obliged to leave it in order to follow up those aspirations. Gioberti was a sincere and fervent Catholic, and one of the greatest men of modern times, but his Italian patriotism and love of constitutionalism, at first cherished for the sake of religion, led him all but to renounce his faith. Poor La Mennais, anxious to relieve Catholicity of its apparent alliance with the despotic courts of Europe, and to ally it with the popular sentiment of the age, ran into heresy, and died a rebel to the church of God. These instances admonish us to be on our guard. We want the freedom of the church, not her alliance with any political order. Here we labor not to form an alliance of Catholicity with democracy; what we labor to do is, to show that the American institutions accord in principle with Catholic teaching, and that we may be good Catholics and loyal Americans, and loyal Americans without ceasing to be Catholics. We have shown that here many of the obstacles to the growth of Catholic civilization that have existed in the Old World, have been removed, but we have never dreamed of deriving aid to our religion from the democratic sentiment of the country.