generally been preferred upon such occasions, and not without good political reasons. A form of religion in which the division between priest and layman, or the governing and governed in ecclesiastical matters is most broadly drawn, coincides best with social systems in which the civil distinction of governing and governed is marked with the same broad line. Religions which relieve the layman from the greater part of the trouble of religious duties and impose it upon the priests,-religions which strive more to insure the happiness and amusement of mankind on earth than their welfare hereafter,-religions which are not exacting and ascetic,-suit a population devoted either to ease and material gratifications, or to business divided into minute tracks, each of which engrosses the whole mind of the artisan. Consequently, a religion like the Roman Catholic accords with the social conditions of an absolute despotism better than any other form of religion*, and these considerations explain their frequent alliance.

According to some witnesses t, there is now in America a craving for one universal and comprehensive religion which shall put an end to the troublesome and disastrous war of sects, and the disgraceful means they take to attract a crowd of worshippers. Such a feeling is the natural result of the too great license of sectarianism, for in the same way as out of political anarchy and license rises a desire for one strong government to insure tranquillity and order, so an anarchy of creeds, when abused, produces a tedium of sectarian quarrels, which finds its only refuge in one comprehensive and intolerant religion. The time for Roman Catholicism in America is not yet come, nor will it, so long as the Whig Federalists, who are naturally Protestant, retain a considerable portion of their power. But Catholicism has two supporters in the United States :

*Confer, however, the relation of the Protestant Church with the kingdom of Prussia, and mark the Minister of Public Worship at Berlin.

Maurice, Kingdom of Christ, 2nd ed. i. 208.

the incipient plutocracy (for ceremonial religions always suit plutocracies* as much as Calvinism suits poorer citizens), and the despotic centralisation, which will certainly establish itself in America when all public virtue has departed from their statesmen. The Roman Catholics in America at the present day are among the most urgent for the establishment of perfect equality; and equality is the common foundation of their own religious system and of centralised despotisms. When a centralised and despotic system of religion is imposed upon a lively and thoughtful race, hitherto habituated to a multitude of creeds and no very strong devotion to any one of them, it is long before they quietly subside in orthodoxy. This was shown in the Greek Church of the Constantinopolitan empire. The heresies which sprung from the East (and scarcely any arose in the West, then in the stage of primitive theocracy), were caused by the active minds of the Greeks, then fond of novelty and thought. Four centuries have worked a change. We hear now of no more heresies in the East. The dissent and the thought are in the West. The great boldness of the Venetian merchants who joined the crusades in their dealings with the Pope and his legates, excited the astonishment and almost distrust of the French knights, who were accustomed in all things to yield to their theocracy; and this is one among the many curious contrasts that nations in such different stages of existence as were in the twelfth century Venice on the one hand, and France and Germany on the other, present. So the Venetians liked ceremonial piety. "Why are the Vene

*It is worthy of note that Puseyitism, the most ceremonial form of Protestantism, thrives most among the rich idle classes of England, who have no country estates or duties, but live almost entirely at watering-places. Nowhere is it more rife than in Belgravia, which these plutocrats haunt in the season, because the old noblesse is there to be met; unless it is in Brighton, a favourite abode of those who have wealth without duties.

† Michaud, Hist. des Croisades, iii. 124.

tians Roman Catholics? Because the state likes the religion. All the world knows they care not threepence for the Pope." The plutocratic Anti-Orange party in Holland were in like manner the most opposed to the doctrines of Calvin.

Selden, Table Talk, tit. Religion.

CHAP. XXIV.

INAPPROPRIATE DESPOTISM.

SCARCE anything is more common at the present day than to hear mooted on the platform and in the saloon the startling questions, Can Hungary, Poland, Spain, be free? The answer is usually prompted rather by generous hope than cool reflection.

Now I apprehend that in order to settle that point in every instance with scientific precision (an achievement I certainly do not undertake here), the proper method to be pursued is of this kind. First, to recall the general rule that all forms of government have certain social condi tions with which they harmonise, and that where these conditions and the appropriate form of government meet in the same nation, that government will naturally endure so long as the conditions remain; and next, to remember that each form of government is liable to be misplaced, for constitutional monarchy is not the only government which vanity or dishonesty have imposed upon nations unfitted to receive it, though the incongruity is, in that case, more apparent and striking, because, without a nobility and a free commonalty constitutional monarchy cannot work, whereas other governments, such, for instance, as a centralised despotism, may retain a firm sway for centuries over populations fitted for better rulers and a higher destiny.

Despotism may be imposed upon nations unfitted for it. The discussion in Chapter XXII. was an attempt to fix the characteristics which mark the stage when despotism becomes the natural, if not the necessary government. If we desire to ascertain, in respect of any particular nation, whether despotism is natural or necessary to it, we have only to observe the characteristics of that nation and the characteristics of despotism, and in proportion as they are incongruous and dissimilar is despotism unfitted for that nation.

Despotism is naturally the government of a late stage of society, it suits the characteristics of that late stage, and, for reasons before stated, it succeeds in the course of nature to plutocracy and democracy. But despotism may be found misapplied to nearly every stage of social development. There are many instances in which this system of complicated minuteness and watchfulness has been imposed upon a people whose life is simple, whose character is honest. If we wish to find an example of the earliest and simplest state of society, where a shepherd population, scarcely settled upon the land, lives in primitive simplicity without wants, without the knowledge of, or the desire for luxury; if we wish to see set over a people whose wealth is in their herds and their strong arms, and who carry in the ornaments of their own or their wives' persons all the precious metals they possess, a class of ingenious functionaries prepared to patent a new invention in the steam-engine, or an improved polish for their French leather boots, or a stronger lavender dye for their kid gloves, with an education which has made them fit to report upon designs for sewers and to establish gas companies, to regulate the tendency of newspaper articles and to license the drama,—if this is our wish, we shall be gratified by a tour through the outlying districts of the Turkish empire, where despatch-writing functionaries, brought up at Constantinople, rule the amazed tribesmen