their open enemies the fullest advantage which they can derive from those theories. They rely on truth to bring its own justification. They permit every superstition, and every national and political passion, free room to assert itself, and they have an entire assurance that all will go well so long as the voices of the majority prevail. He sees, on the other hand, a spiritual belief which our fathers had believed to be dead rising like a thunderstorm against the wind in the face of the spirit of this age. A united Italy may have stripped the Pope of his immediate dominions; but in every country in the civilized world the Papacy has recovered a practical power which more than compensates the loss. It divides France with the republicans. It brings to terms the imperious German statesman. It is the enemy of freedom, yet its power is greatest under the freest governments. It has delivered Ireland from Protestant ascendancy. It invades America by Irish arms. In England, if not as yet politically powerful, it has converted the Anglican Church into a training-school by the infection of its principles. Romanism unquestionably is everywhere recovering itself, putting out extraordinary energy, rousing something like the old enthusiasm, and making progress most where her enemies had been the strongest. Men of intellect may see the falsehood of her doctrines as clearly as ever they saw them. But men of intellect are not the majority. The vote of a peasant is as useful to Rome as the vote of a philosopher. The Catholic Church and the civil governments are rival claimants for the same dominion. They can be friends only when one is weak and the other strong, when one yields and the other rules. The Church was beaten upon her knees by the Reformation, and for two centuries she has been docile and submissive. She is growing again like another Antæus, and a fresh conflict is now not very far off.

When two opposing principles flourish together in the common soil of human nature, it is likely that each represents some side of truth which the other ignores. The line of human progress is the equation of the compound forces of freedom and authority. Freedom runs into anarchy; authority runs into tyranny. By the "endless jar" of these two tendencies the curve of advance is traced out. It pleases us to say that all men have a natural right to liberty. But perhaps only those have a right to liberty who deserve it, and can use it well; and, although the law may not be able to select the deserving from the undeserving, fact, nevertheless, will find out the distinction and will refuse to recognize a theory which

denies its existence. We say that all men are equal. We say it to no purpose if nature has made us unequal. We say that all men have an equal right to a voice in the government of the state. It may be that only the wise and competent ought to have a voice in it at all; that the majority are as little able to choose their ablest statesman as to choose their ablest artist, their ablest poet, their ablest philosopher, their ablest religious teacher; and as in fact contemporaries never have recognized their best men in these departments, the majority at any given time possesses not the highest discernment, but only average discernment, and the persons whom they select for honors are those who best represent the average prevailing insight. How the wisest are to be discovered, and how, when discovered, are to be raised to power, is a problem which has never been solved completely, and never will be solved completely. We have to be content with approximations to a solution-some nearer to completeness, some further from it. Universal suffrage is one method which under certain conditions answers better than any other would do; but it is no law of nature. It is a passing expedient, like the rest. It will succeed while those conditions continue; it will break down and pass away when the conditions change.

We say that every man has a right to his own opinion, whether it be true or false; that he has a right to think and act as he pleases, so long as he does not injure his neighbor, and that no one has any business to interfere with him. Doubtless no man or body of men, either by right of birth, or by state selection, or by the putting on of bishops' hands, or by any artificial title whatever, can receive authority to dictate to others what they are to do or think. It is no less true that every false opinion is a misfortune to a man; that he can not act upon it without hurting himself, and indirectly or directly hurting society; that society prospers precisely so far as the members of it can be persuaded, and in great matters, if persuasion will not serve, can be driven, to act rightly and not wrongly. We shall never see our way so long as we talk only about our rights. For rights we must read responsibilities. The rights of man are we know not what. The responsibilities of man are practical realities which find us out at every false step which we take. A state of things in which the action of government is restricted to the prevention of crime and statutable fraud, and where beyond those limits all men are left to go their own way-to be honest or dishonest, pure or profligate, wise or ignorant, to lead what lives they please, and preach what doctrines they please-may have been a necessary step

in the evolution of humanity; but as surely, if no other principle had ever been heard of, or acted on, civilization would have stood still, hardly above the level of barbarism. As surely, unless the wheel of progress is to turn backward, and we are to decline as we have risen, the natural superiority of truth to falsehood, and right to wrong, will recover in some shape or other the form of practical authority; and it is this principle of authority which Romanism has all along insisted on. That the Catholic Church is our divinely appointed guide, may be a false inference, but that there ought to be some guidance is true, and, as long as "modern civilization" continues to deny it, a growing section of mankind will support the Church in refusing to "reconcile itself" with modern civilization, and will go back into allegiance to the Church till some better authority is found. It is the fashion to say that the modern man is free; that submission to authority is mean and servile. On the contrary, it is precisely as men understand what real freedom means, that they submit to what is better than themselves; and those who clamor loudest for their rights are those who have fewest rights which deserve to be respected.

Thus the conflict will go on, and may last for some generations. Liberalism will not easily be convinced that it has been mistaken; and Romanism burdened as it is with so many spriritual incredibilities and so dark a history, could never have stood its ground, or have recovered ground which it had lost, unless it represented something most real, which the world can not afford to forget. It will not win in the long run. Very noticeable is the fact that it shows most signs of vigor in Protestant countries, where the intellectual and moral energy is the strongest. Its ranks are numerically respectable. In the Old and the New World alike Roman Catholics are an actual majority. But Spain and Portugal are not likely to affect deeply the practical fortunes of Europe. The Bonapartists are not promising allies in France, and the Austrians are the losing side in Germany. Nor will Spanish America affect the convictions of the world beyond its own limits. In England and America the Church's soldiers are the Irish; and the Irish, whatever weight their numbers may lend to the Church's immediate pretensions, may ultimately more embarrass the cause than strengthen it. The Irish are interesting for their misfortunes. No one can refuse to admire the passionate tenacity with which they cling to their faith and their country. But no cause has ever prospered as yet with which Ireland has been connected. She has never ceased to struggle, but VOL. CXXX.-NO. 278.

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her struggles have ended uniformly in failure; and there is a certain ridiculousness in the Catholic Church, which claims to represent the Almighty upon earth, being supported in its most ambitious campaign by voting regiments of Irish peasants.

Both England and the United States have something to learn from her, and the lesson may be unpleasant and humiliating. But Romanism as a theological creed can not again command the serious belief of the intelligent part of mankind. A galvanic "grammar of assent" may make the dead limbs seem to move; but the movement is artificial. The heart does not beat, the blood does not run in the veins. The life once gone does not come back again.

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

SAINTE-BEUVE.*

WHEN, in publishing some years since the small collection of letters which Sainte-Beuve had addressed to his gracious and appreciative friend the Princess Mathilde, his last secretary, M. Troubat, announced his intention of getting together and bringing to the light the general correspondence of the great critic, the thing seemed a capital piece of literary good news. After a considerable interval the editor has redeemed his promise, and we have two substantial volumes of Sainte-Beuve's letters. The result may be said, on the whole, to be a very interesting one-our prospect of high entertainment was not illusory. The letters extend from the year 1822 to the autumn of 1869, the moment of the writer's death, and are naturally most abundant during the closing years of his career-the second volume occupying entirely the period from 1865. The editor mentions that during the passage of the second volume through the press a number of letters, of whose existence he had not been aware, came into his hands. These he has reserved for a supplementary volume; the reader will have to interpolate them at their proper dates. I do not longer await the appearance of this volume -it was promised several months ago-in order to speak of its predecessors, for these are complete in themselves, and are so rich in interesting matter that I shall be able to do them but scanty justice.

Sainte-Beuve's letters do nothing but complete a portrait which was already a very vivid one. Sainte-Beuve had painted his own likeness in a myriad fine, unerring, cumulative touches; no writer was ever more personal, more certain, in the long run, to infuse into his judgments of people and things those elements out of which an image of himself might be constructed. In Sainte-Beuve the whole man was in the special work-he was all a writer, a critic, an appre*Correspondance de C. A. Sainte-Beuve (1822-'69). Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1878.