students of the universities. From the moment of their taking degrees, nay, rather, from their entry as undergraduates, they leave the governed, and become members of the governing class. Out of them come the newspaper editors, the literary men, the professors, the ministers of state, and the heads of police. They live under different laws, and are subject to different tribunals from the rest of the people, and in them really lies all political power. A closet-bred professor, deep in theories of government, perhaps starts an idea that a constitutional government is better than a despotic one. It spreads through the whole functionary class; the leading-article writers descant upon it; the students, much be-mused with beer, sing muddled songs in its praise; the patriots of all ages think that they are about to make an epoch in the world's history. The king or reigning duke is made to understand that the will of the functionary class requires a constitutional government. The despicable potentate, to assuage the cry, makes a diet, fills it with functionaries, pays them twenty-five francs a day each for being the enlightened representatives of free and independent electors; and beyond the receipt of the money, and a great generation of rhodomontade, all goes on the same as before.

It is often supposed that functionarism is an invention of modern despotism, but erroneously. The great despotism of antiquity was introduced and supported by functionarism. One of the characteristics of a functionary government is the amazing amount of writing, which always strikes an Englishman as one of the great points of contrast between the foreign government and his own, and astonishes the minds of the simple peasants who, in the East and Russia, have the deplorable misfortune of being the subjects of bureaucratic functionarism. This writing system is a result of the individual weakness

* Cayley, European Revolutions, 1848, ii. 13, sqq.

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which characterises these governments. Authority and responsibility reside not in a few great men, each of whom takes upon himself the whole burden of an achievement, but in a mob of signing and countersigning, examining and registering officials of almost equal impotence. The system is strong; the individuals who work it are weak.

In the early ages of ancient Rome, the guild of notaries, to which no freeborn Roman belonged, was employed to record the public transactions, register the ordinances of the senate, and perform the writing duties connected with the finances. While the Romans were still of simple habits, and under an aristocratic government, this guild was of no more importance in the state than the clerks of the Treasury are now in England. "But," says Niebuhr*, "this guild, feeling itself to be an indispensable instrument of the government, and increasing in importance and wealth, as the state extended, and as partly the government and partly the financial companies which had existed long before, wanted a constantly increasing number of book-keepers and clerks, laid claim towards the end of the republic, when wealth in moveable property constituted a second and really more powerful nobility, to form a third estate as a collective body of officials; and this claim was in reality granted to it. In the days of Appius the Blind, it had not yet raised itself so high; it was not yet separated from the other libertini ; it was, consequently, without doubt, the most important mediator of the common claims, and the more so as Cn. Flavius stood at its head, who was undoubtedly one of the most distinguished men of his age. So long as the Roman empire existed, the notaries, with only the change of their name, remained a powerful corporation, although the official class became developed, and was separated from them." After this separation, the functionary class became the

*H. R. iii. 299.

really ruling body in the state, and was the stronger because it consisted not merely of the bureaucrats, but also, in consequence of the constant warfare and subjugation of provinces, of an enormous military force, which was constituted on the functionary principle.

CHAP. XXIII.

THEOCRACY IN ITS RELATION WITH PLUTOCRACY AND

DESPOTISM.

"Quand on regarde de près, on aperçoit que ce qui a fait long-temps prospérer les gouvernements absolus c'est la religion et non la crainte."-DE TOCQUEVILLE.

THE functionary system under a despot is composed of civil and military officers, who undertake the whole work of secular government. It may, or it may not, include the ecclesiastical. Why, and how it includes them, are inquiries which deserve a thoughtful consideration, and to meet them properly, we must take up from Chapter XIV. the thread of our narrative of the relation of the ecclesiastical to the secular powers.

We broke it off at the epoch when either an anarchy of religious systems, or of thought, or of both, is established in a nation. Let us first take the case of nations where equality of all religious systems, or the general tolerance of them by the established system, allows every man to worship as it pleases him.

A change from this state of active personal religion, of great vitality in private life, however little obtrusive in public life, is brought about in the following method. The material prosperity of a nation, when that is the only object of statesmen, the only care of the population, leads naturally to an indifference about the minutiae of religion; not so directly to an active or rampant infidelity, as to a carelessness about the truth, and a desire to throw the

whole responsibility upon the religious ministers. The religion of the tradesman who suffers his business to take too great possession of his mind "walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop trading all day without his religion." "What is this but the division of labour applied to a new field? new field? Every man has need of some ventilation of his religious feelings as he has of the due provision for his pabulating, and the due shelter of his cutaneous organs. In the earlier and simpler stages of society, when fear and childlike wonder predominate, men listen to priests with true "religious awe," and allow them a real and substantive power over their minds, too often abused; in an over-refined and polished aristocracy, religion is tolerated as useful for the lower classes; in a trading democracy, each man feels that he has a necessity occasionally for some pious exercises, and therefore employs a class of men who make it their business to conduct these exercises skilfully. As a man resorts to doctors to be healed, lawyers to get him justice, hosiers to clothe him, butchers to feed him, so the division of labour tells him that all his religion may be done for him by priests. As they are useful, he tolerates, without believing, all their pretensions about apostolical succession, a call to holy orders, or the other devices by which a profession is raised into a hierarchy. This state of mind, when it is spread through a nation, leads naturally to an increase of the breadth of the division between laity and priesthood, a division light and unsubstantial in staunch Protestant countries, where every man is animated by an earnest faith, and offers up his prayers from the spontaneous fervour of his heart, and employs the minister not as his intercessor or his substitute, but rather as the leader and director of his devotions.

But when once it has taken firm possession of men's minds, that it is their "interest" to be religious; when a

* Milton.