house of Chigi has now shared the common lot. The sons of these great Roman princes will certainly not exhibit the attachment to the Papal cause by which their fathers, including the least Papal of the number, Prince Doria, were marked. They will divide their allegiance between the Vatican and the Quirinal. It may safely be predicted that on the death of Pius IX. their allegiance will be transferred to the Quirinal completely. Prince Torlonia is beyond all question the most prominent financial representative of the old Papal system. And Prince Torlonia has audiences of King Victor Emmanuel, entertains the Ministers of King Victor Emmanuel at the inauguration of his great agricultural works, and receives from the King of Italy the gold medal struck by royal command in commemoration of the same. No member of this class, by the most vigorous aid of self-deception, can hide from himself the fact that the Rome which he is now free at any moment to quit for London or New York, where he can defend his legal rights in an open court against rival interests however powerful, where every phase of public life is the daily subject of free discussion, is separated by a change of opinion far greater than any mere lapse of years from the Rome in which the Vatican Council met during the first six months of 1870, and in which, until the 20th of September of that year, every expression of opinion unwelcome to the ruling powers was kept down by the rifles of the Papal Zouaves. Even the Sacred College itself, in one of its two antagonistic currents, and precisely from the antagonistic nature of the two currents, is daily affording a marked illustration of this transition state. The character of nearly all the recent nominations has been strongly Ultramontane, and this Ultramontanism it is sought to extend and strengthen by increasing the proportion of foreign cardinals. With each successive appointment of a foreign cardinal, the Italian element in the Sacred College has by a sufficiently natural reaction gained in strength and intensity what it has lost in numbers. That strength and intensity have been clearly enough revealed in the filling up of the vacant posts in the several congregations or separate ministries of the Curia, and make themselves quite as strongly felt whenever it is necessary to accredit to foreign Governments a Papal nuncio. If this transition character in the civil and social, in the mental and moral condition of the former subjects of the Papacy in the city of Rome itself, is discernible by every calm and impartial observer, the transition character of the governing body of the Church and of the great mass of the Catholic hierarchy is not less decided, though perhaps from the different sphere of its action it may not in the same degree startle and rivet the same observer's mind. How the Papacy, from an attitude comparatively friendly and pacific, should have passed of late years into one so openly hostile and belligerent towards all civil Governments, is only intelligible when we examine much more attentively than it is the fashion to do the successive relations between Church and State in Italy. Nothing at this moment in the various phases of Italian politics and parties is more instructive than the process of continual and universal change, in a reactionary sense, in all branches of the Catholic hierarchy in Italy. Its hundred and seventy-six bishops, four thousand canons, ninety-six thousand priests, and forty thousand monks and nuns may not all obey with the same rigorous discipline the word of command issuing from the Vatican, but a very large proportion of the body act in the same direction with a consistency and unity which it would be vain to look for in any merely political party within the bounds of the Italian Peninsula. They have facilities for action such as no merely political party possesses. The object of the law which was recently submitted by the present Italian Ministry to Parliament, and which, after passing through the Chamber of Deputies, has been rejected in the Senate, was justified on the ground that in the interest of the State such facilities must be curtailed. They did not exist in the old Sardinian legislation. They were not to be found in the Leopoldine and Josephine laws, by which the relations of Church and State were regulated in the Tuscan and Lombard provinces. The policy of Tanucci had carefully removed them from the legislation of Naples. The Republic of Venice, true to the traditions of its great jurist, Paolo Sarpi, had ex cluded them with a vigilant jealousy from the body of its laws. Nor will such facilities be found in the new penal code which has already received the sanction of the Italian Senate, and which, so far as regards this branch of penal legislation, is equally certain to meet with the sanction of the Chamber of Deputies. Why, then, it may naturally be asked, should the discussion and rejection of a temporary law which, after all, only seeks to re-establish provisions which a few years ago existed, and which in a few months, perhaps even weeks, are certain to become again the general law of the land,—why, it may well be asked, should this discussion and rejection have given rise to so much excitement, and be regarded in many quarters almost as a turning-point in the relations between Church and State in Italy? If the existence of such facilities was necessary for the independence of the Catholic Church, and is so regarded by foreign States, how comes it that no voice of protest ever proceeded from those foreign States during the long term of years when the facilities were not accorded? Why was no warning voice heard from foreign Governments when the Senate discussed and approved, as a prominent feature of the entire penal legislation, the provisions which it has now discussed and condemned when presented as a special measure? The true answer to these questions will only be found when we look a little below the surface of the political stream and detect the undercurrents of party action. named the Gladstone Parliament. Nor did these charges proceed chiefly from the members of the Left. The Marquis Anselmo Guerrieri Gonzaga, Commendatore Villari, Commendatore Tommasi Crudeli, were amongst the foremost censors of the Ministry, and all three belonged to the ministerial ranks. The first of these three eminent politicians spoke with undisguised severity of the course taken by the Cabinet when dealing with the popular movements in the Mantuan and some portions of the Neapolitan provinces, which in these districts. had assumed the form of attempts to wrest from the episcopal body the nomination of the parish priests, and to revive the ancient Christian right of nomination by the parishioners. The motion originated, however, in the ranks of the Left, and found in those ranks a very learned and eloquent exponent of antiPapal views, the distinguished Neapolitan lawyer, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini. It was therefore not unnatural that with the formation of a Left Ministry, and with the presence in that Ministry of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini as Minister of Grace and Justice, a more decided anti-Papal attitude should have been announced as part of the ministerial programme. But on the actual point, whether the ancient provisions guaranteeing the State against the aggressions of the Church should be recalled into life, the Minghetti Cabinet, whatever its general tendencies, Papal or anti-Papal, had, at least in the matter of penal legislation, shown its resolution to keep a In the Parliamentary session of 1875, tight hold upon the Church. A great the relations between Church and State Piedmontese lawyer, the friend and, on occupied in a quite exceptional degree many critical occasions, the trusted conthe attention of the Italian Chamber of fidant of Count Cavour, Senator Vigliani, Deputies. The Minghetti Ministry was who had most honorably filled the office charged with exhibiting a timid, not to of Minister of Grace and Justice in the say servile bearing towards the Vatican. Minghetti Cabinet, and who now disIt was charged with yielding to Ultra- charges the functions of President of montane influences in its bearing towards the Supreme Court of Cassation, had the episcopal body, in the character of taken good care to provide ample guareducational appointments, in the lenity antees in the new penal code against the which it observed towards seditious abuse of the priestly office to the detripriests. In a word, it was accused of ment of the State. When the guaranVaticanism," and in debate after de- tees adopted on his recommendation in bate the authority of Mr. Gladstone was the Senate should likewise have received invoked to point the moral and adorn the sanction of the Chamber of Deputies, the tale of Minghettian reaction. So the State would have reoccupied-and frequently did this occur, that the Par- nothing more-the defensive positions liament was sometimes satirically nick- which, in the old legislation of the sepa rate Italian States, it held against any aggression on the part of the Vatican. But this was not enough for the present Ministry, least of all for that member of the Ministry, Mancini, on whom the task of dealing with legal and ecclesiastical affairs chiefly devolved. A good opportunity appeared to present itself of making party capital, by passing from the general and more defensive bearing of his predecessor to an immediate, special, and aggressive attitude towards the Vatican. Accordingly there was introduced into Parliament the special and temporary law, by which priests who should abuse their spiritual functions to the damage of the State, or the public outraging of its institutions, should become liable to various degrees of fines and terms of imprisonment. No step could possibly have been more welcome to the Vatican. The Roman Curia believed that it had at last found a grievance which would bear exportation. It had hoped that foreign Catholic States would have prevented the suppression of the religious orders: the hope was cruelly disappointed. It had hoped that the forced conscription of students for the Church would have prevented angry protests from the same Catholic powers: and these powers had not uttered a single syllable of sympathy or consolation. Might not the attempt to awaken the indignation of the faithful by the exhibition of this new grievance prove more successful than the previous efforts? Could anything be more monstrous than the proposal to punish the minister of religion for the conscientious discharge of his religious duties? Where, henceforth, would be the freedom of the pulpit? Where, henceforth, would be the freedom of the confessional? Was the priest, when called on to administer the last sacraments to the dying man, to be watched by gendarmes, and have his words taken down by notaries public, as a safeguard of the rights of the inviolable, infallible State? This is nothing more than an average sample of the tone in which all the Ultramontane journals, from the Alps to Syracuse, have been during the last three months discussing the provisions of the law. All this was intended for exportation, and of course for exportation chiefly to France. The French bishops were expected, invited, instructed to make themselves the organs of this great pro-Papal demonstration in their relations with Marshal Macmahon's government. Kindred instructions were transmitted to the faithful in other countries. It seems probable that, as happens with the most popular of French and Spanish wines, the instructions were variously branded, according to the tastes and palates of the populations for which they were designed. If Cardinal Cullen's language reflects with any fidelity the instructions addressed to his Eminence, the communication must be regarded as a touching tribute to the vigor of the Hibernian imagination. The Bollandists in their great collection of the Lives of the Saints thought it pru dent to put forward a special reservation on the character of their hagiology. They felt it their duty to declare that they could not guarantee the miracles of the Irish saints. The reader of Cardinal Cullen's addresses, on confronting the statement that the Italian Government intends to deal with the present or any other Pontiff after the fashion practised by Napoleon I. to his predecessor, will perhaps feel the necessity of weighing the language of his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Dublin at least as carefully as the miracles of the Irish saints were weighed by the Bollandists. The Mancini law passed the Chamber of Deputies by a large majority. It is not perhaps unfair or uncharitable to assume that amongst the members who there voted in its support, not a few were actuated quite as much by the desire to stand well with democratic constituencies as by a hearty approval founded on a careful examination of the measure. Strange to say, the principal speakers against the law were found amongst the ministerial supporters themselves, just as two years before, the chief assailants of Signor Minghetti's ecclesiastical policy had been found amongst the oldest and most consistent members of his party. The true facts are well worthy to be noted, as illustrating the altogether transitional state of public opinion in Italy on these questions. The law as passed in the Chamber of Deputies had then to meet with the approval of the Senate. And it is neither unfair nor uncharitable to affirm that, even before its provisions were made known to that body, a large proportion of the members of the Italian Upper House had almost made up their minds to reject it, for reasons which had not the most remote connection with any possible phase of Church and State legislation. In plain words the senators believed that they had been treated with disrespect by the present Depretis Cabinet in the discussions of last year on the question of free ports; they were resolved that the disrespect then shown should be resented on the first opportunity; and the first favorable opportunity that happened to occur was the Mancini law on the abuses of the clergy. Of course, not the faintest trace of this sore feeling was to be found in any speech delivered in the Senate. But in the library and reading-room of the Senate House, and in the familiar talk of the members beyond the walls of the Senate House, one heard repeated, with suggestive frequency, the threat, "Now we will pay the Government off, for its way of treating us on the question of the free ports." It would surely be a mistake to consider the adverse vote by which the discussion in the Senate, entered upon with such feelings, was at length closed, as an important indication of political tendencies in any direction whatsoever. The discussion furnished occasion for at least four remarkable discourses-that in which the Minister Mancini defended the policy of the Government, and those in which it was assailed by Senators Buon Compagni, Cadorna, and Lampertico. The most eminent, at least if we regard profound constitutional knowledge and varied literary attainments of every kind, was undoubtedly Senator Buon Compagni, who opposed the law on the ground that it possessed an arbitrary and exceptional character, that it was a direct deviation from the policy of Count Cavour, and that it ran counter to the provisions of the law on the Papal guarantees, by which full liberty was secured not only to the Pope but to all members of the Catholic clergy in the exercise of their purely spiritual functions. Some of these objections call for a word of comment. The Senate was evidently quite right in its condemnation of the measure as exceptional. In condemning it as arbitrary it not only condemned the former legislation of the different Italian States, but the new penal legislation of the kingdom to which, in its legislative character, it had given a sanction. Any deductions from the policy of Count Cavour ought, in common fairness, to be modified by the recollection of the fact that Count Cavour died in the June of 1861, and that the Roman Curia opened its new batteries against all civil Governments at the close of 1864. How far the law was a violation of that establishing the Papal guarantees, is a question which from different points of view may be differently answered, but from the point of view which it must be presumed presented itself to the Italian Senate, which swept away all the civil rights possessed by the monastic orders in connection with the Papacy, it certainly was no violation at all. But the real importance of the vote lies in the political and party results to which it has given rise. At an early stage of the discussion in the Senate, it became evident that many members of the Opposition, though at first disapproving of the course pursued by the Ministry in bringing forward such a measure, were of opinion that its absolute rejection by the Senate would be an unwise and impolitic concession to the Vatican, the various organs of which in the European press were seeking to make this question the pretext for a general crusade against Italy. Foremost amongst the statesmen who held this view was the acknowledged head of the Opposition and Chairman of the Central Constitutional Club of Rome, the ex-minister Quintino Sella. The Opinione, which on this matter was understood to reflect Signor Sella's opinions, had strongly urged upon the Senate the expediency of voting the measure. At the private meetings of the Central Constitutional Club, Signor Sella had clearly expressed his views to the same effect. When, therefore, the Senate threw out the bill by a majority of thirteen, and it became known that, amongst the senators who voted in the majority were several eminent members of the Central Constitutional Club, Signor Sella at once tendered his resignation as president. He has not indeed resigned his post as the recognized chief of the Opposition, but it is only too probable that the same differences between him and other members of his party which led him to withdraw from the one post, may cause him to resign the other. And in this last fact may be found another and not the least striking illustration of the general state of transition to which I have referred. The Commendatore Buon Compagni, and the other members of the old Cavour party sharing his views, believe that it is still possible to effect a reconciliation between the Church and the State, and that, in any case, every effort should be made to treat delicately and tenderly what the Catholic Church is pleased to call its liberty. The Commendatore Quintino Sella, the recognized head of the old Cavour party, has broken off all connection with the Central Constitutional Club, because he holds it to be the first duty of a patriotic Italian statesman to present a bold front towards Rome, and because he holds that what, in the language of the Vatican, is termed the liberty of the Church can only be regarded by thoughtful and observant men. as a continuous aggression on the liberties of the State. The question raised on these issues in the Central Constitutional Club of Rome has become more than ever the subject of keen discussion in every Italian journal, and, in truth, in every social circle throughout the peninsula. Meanwhile, within the ranks of the Church itself the transition is becoming more rapidly effected from the comparatively pacific and tranquil character of forty years back to one of openly aggressive Ultramontanism. Once a fortnight the Civilta Cattolica strikes the key-note of an air, which is repeated with endless variations in all the clerical journais of the kingdom. The Central Catholic Club of Rome gives, at the same time, its tone to all the provincial Catholic clubs with which it is in connection. This is a campaign in which the interests of other countries, as well as of Italy, are at stake; and even Englishmen, though they may no longer repeat with equal conviction the words addressed by Cromwell to one of his Parliaments, " Rome is our matter," may still hold it to be a matter not unworthy their regard.—Contemporary Review. TWENTY YEARS OF AFRICAN TRAVEL. THE marvellous way in which Africa has been explored during the last twenty years is scarcely less extraordinary than the sublying fact, that a continent so great and possessing such immense resources should have been reserved, as a terra incognita in its central regions, for the travellers of our generation. Within a century and a half almost the whole of North America has been explored, swept over, and occupied by the expanding races of Northern Europe; South America has been occupied, in great part, by offshoots of the Latin race; and yet Africa, with not greatly inferior possibilities of development, has been reserved for its own singular people and for a few adventurous explorers. It is not difficult, however, to explain how such, in the circumstances, should have been the case. The great deserts of the northern portion of Africa, its unhealthy coast-line, and thick tropical vegetation on both sides of the equator, and on both sides of the continent, together with the scanty vegetation and the Kaffir tribes of its long southern horn, presented most formidable obstacles to even an acquaintance with its elevated, temperate, and productive central regions. A quarter of a century ago our maps of Africa were almost an entire blank from ten degrees of north latitude to the tropic of Capricorn, with the exception of the coast-line, the valley of the Niger, and the central northern region. In some of our maps traces remained of older knowledge and of more recent Portuguese exploration. Livingstone's Lake Nyassa appeared as Nassa," and Tanganyika occupied an enormous, but quite indefinite, space as "Lake Uniamesi ;" but these maps were exceptions rather than the rule, and the most important parts of Central Africa were either left entirely blank, or were filled up with great deserts, montes lunæ, and figures of lions and dragons. There was, no doubt, plenty of ancient knowledge to have taught us better. Ptolemy appears to have known a good deal about the geography of Central Africa; |