GERMANY AND 11711. NEXT POPE.
PEINCE BISMARCK is fighting a ghost, and the fight bothers him dreadfully. He knows how to hit and to hit hard with a bludgeon, how to inflict dreadful cuts with a sabre, and how to give effective point with a rapier ; but all those methods of fighting demand that the adversary shall present a skull to be broken, a body to be slashed, or a breast to be pierced through ; and the Pope has none of those things. He is only a voice ; and Krupp, who can kill any mortal being, has not yet provided the shell which will blast away the nymph Echo. If the Pope possessed an estate, as he ignorantly wishes he did, if he had his bit of Italy for his own, with its ancient -capital and its counties administered by Cardinals, and its worm-eaten old port, he would be lost, for the German Chan- seller could effectually attack all those pleasantly useless signs of dominion. There can hardly be a doubt that if the Pope had preserved his temporal power till 1875, and had published the Encyclical of last month, and had irritated Germany as he has recently done, and if Catholic Europe had been as powerless as it is, and Protestant Europe as divided or indifferent as it is, Prince Bismarck would have landed ten
thousand men in Civita Vecchia, have entered Rome as I Philip U. did, and have compelled the King of the Papal States to have chosen between submission or flight. But being
without a kingdom, the Pope is as safe from military inter- ference as the Editor of the Times. The Home-rulers might as well try to silence the great journal by brickbats, as the Chancellor of Germany to silence the Pope with breech-loading guns. There is nothing to hit, and the speed of the firing consequently does not matter. The Chancellor sees that clearly enough, and it irritates him, and, naturally, he thinks over means of bringing physical pressure to bear. If he could only make somebody responsible who could be got at with cannon! Suppose the Pope were a subject, or were bound over not to interfere with any secular State ; then, if he con- tinued abusive, his country Gould be attacked, and as a country could be invaded, and conquered, and made to pay indemnities for the crime of not winning its battles, Berlin, which can ensure all those things, would be master of the situation. That result would so perfectly suit Prince Bismarck, that it is difficult to believe he has not striven to attain it ; that he has not asked Europe whether the next Pope should be a Sovereign ; that he has not pressed Italy to promise that during the next election the Guarantee Law should be repealed, and the nominee of the Conclave informed that unless he could come to terms with civilisation he would be considered a Bishop, and not an independent Sovereign. The denials of this story are numerous and bold, but it will be observed that they all apply to the present Pope, and not to the next election, that they are all inconsistent with the documents which came out during and before the Arnim trial, and that they are all denied in state- ments which imply that the real threat held out is one of "non-recognition," i.e., non-recognition of the Pope as a Sovereign Prince. He is to be somebody's subject, and, there- fore, amenable to a law which can be enforced by a threat against his civil superior of an appeal to arms. Such threats have before now been issued against both France and Austria, on account of attacks in the Press, and when the Continental system of repressing the Press is considered, it cannot be denied that wise or foolish, oppressive or liberal, they are, at least, recognised by international law. A State which holds the power to control its Press by executive decree must, in some measure, become responsible for its utterances, and the Pope, if a subject, would for practical purposes be just a journalist, using some paper of some sort to disseminate his views throughout the Catholic world. If he sent his Briefs in letters to foreign Bishops, he would all the same be responsible for the matter contained in them.
There is no chance, of course, of Italy making any agreement of the kind. Her statesmen, who have lived with- the Papacy for a thousand years, are not troubled by the Pope's action as England was and Germany is troubled, and have evidently come to the conclusion that an old clergyman, whom millions of Italians and tens of millions of Catholics think on certain -occasions inspired, must be allowed to say his say undisturbed by threats either of fine or imprisonment. Like Frederic the Great, they are content so long as the censor ean put no regi- ments in the field, and would as soon think of punishing a Pope for saying their laws were invalid, as we should of punish- ing Mr. Mill for saying that in certain impossible contingencies it would be his moral duty to disobey Omnipotence. The law passes on its course in either case, unaffected by any individual breath, however audacious or however authoritative it may be. The Pope's tongue cannot be controlled ; and as it cannot be controlled, the best way of renouncing -control is to acknowledge the fact, to accept its consequences in Italy and elsewhere, and to maintain the old tradition under which, with territories or without, in the Roman States, or Avignon, or the Palace of the Vatican, the Pope is an independent Sovereign Prince. But that Germany should wish Italy to yield, should think of this particular plan, should be willing to disturb the Catholic population of the world for such an end and by such a method, is one of the oddest phe- nomena conceivable. What has the Pope done, to begin with ? He has, to put it in the plainest, and therefore, as Germans will say, in the most German form, delivered a -sermon, saying that anybody who obeys the Falck laws will, unless Ire repents and makes reparation, go to hell. Well, and what then ? Surely, if the Pope is right in saying that his duty is to say it,, if he is burned alive the next minute, and to punish him is as oppressive as it would be for a pietist Govern- ment to punish Professor Strauss for saying that hell does not exist. He is not interrupting the law or the order of society, or impeding material civilisation, or doing anything which
every preacher does not do in some form or other every day,— as for instance, every Presbyterian divine, when he lectures on
the headship of Christ as forbidding Church suits before secular judges ; or every abolitionist, when he advises resist- ance to a law for the extradition of slaves ; or the religious teetotalers, when they call the issue of licences a league with hell and a covenant with damnation. If anybody under such incitement violates the law, let him be imprisoned; but surely his disobedience is no ground for punishing conscientious, even if silly, exposition of the law. Surely, if ever there were a people who, up to 1871, held to that principle, it was this very German nation. The most tremendous earthly consequences are deducible from the writings of Schopenhaaer, I or Lassalle, or Karl Marx, yet the legist who made that an argument for forcibly suppressing those writings would be con- sidered and denounced as an obscurantist oppressor. Universal Prof essordom would say, and say justly, that no moral teaching was possible, if it were to be held responsible for all the conse- quences which its opponents could imaginatively deduce as logically flowing from the assigned premisses. The doctrine of non-resistance frankly carried out would extinguish modern society, but would the Germans agree to silence a nineteenth- century Fox ? Germans would argue, and we should agree with them, that Virginia had a perfect right to hang John- Brown for carrying out his theories by invading Virginia and inciting negroes to armed revolt ; but would they also consider it right to compel a foreign Government to hang a foreign Abolitionist who proclaimed that the status of slavery in se justified armed resistance. If so, then any man anywhere who proclaims that man is not bound to submit to despotism may be assailed by any State in which an absolute Sovereign is a legal institution. If the German Liberals are prepared to go that length, they are consistent; but if they are not—and they certainly are not—what possible distinction can they draw as against the Pope ? That he is a Sovereign, and from the accident of his position beyond the reach of international as well as municipal law ? Well, so is the Emperor William, or Czar Alexander, or President Ulysses Grant, or the Emperor of China. No municipal law could punish any one of them for any speech or any interpretation of moral law, and as it happens, no international law could by possibility be enforced. They are as fully protected by their strength as he is by his weakness. Is it that the Pope has" authority" over those who believe him ? So has any other preacher who has followers who take what he says for law; so has Comte, for instance, and Mrs. Girling, and many another framer of moral and religious systems. The Pope has no power to slay, or arrest, or—the Church. being once disestablished—to fine, is merely a preacher who happens to be considered by his disciples, when preaching on certain sub- jects and in a certain way, to be incapable of committing a mistake. Five-sixths of the -Christian world believe that of the Bible, but is that a reason for suppressing the teaching of that:book ? It is suppression that all these projects aim at, the actual compelling of an important preacher by physical force to abstain from saying what he believes God orders him to say. Is that an object worthy of the nation which say.s thought should be free?
Let us turn to the method. The object of any scheme for controlling the election of a Pope by refusing to recognise the person elected must be of necessity to reduce him to the posi- tion of a subject, and what would be the result of that ? Clearly that unless held in physical durance, which would produce dangerous disturbances, he would choose the residence where he would be least fettered,—that is, either some Catholic State where his opinions had full ascendancy, or some State where for other 'reasons he would be let alone. In neither would the end sought—the suppression of his dangerous opinions as to the relation between earthly law and heavenly law—be secured for one hour. Suppose he fled to Belgium, Germany would have to conquer Belgium to step him, only to see him fly, say, to Illyria ; or if Austria were conquered, to Malta; or if England were subdued, to Milwaukee ; or if America could not resist her German settlers' vote, to, Quito, remaining in each place exactly as talkative, as powerless, and as dangerous as before. As a fugitive, he could "ban" and "bless" just as easily as he can now, and with just as much effect, while as a fugitive the chance of a combination in his favour would be indefinitely increased. Hunting a Will-of-the- wisp -Title field-pieces-would be sensible to such a course, which, oven if as successful as we have supposed, would be pure waste of German treasure and life. That is, of course, partly seen, and it is now said that the guarantees sought are to-be taken from the new Pope himself, but that alteration is only
one of seeming. The Pope will give no guarantees whatever, and then if Germany does not "recognise "him, he must either go on as before, or the country in which he lives must be held re- sponsible for his utterances, with all the ultimate consequences we have attempted to state. It all comes back to this, that if physi- cal power is to be relied on, armies must move in order that a particular teacher of Christianity may not have leave to speak his mind. We have as little sympathy with his mind as we have with Professor Tyndall's mind, but he has just as much right to express it and the effort to forbid its. expression will, as we believe, be at least equally futile. You can't blow a thought away from a Krupp gun.
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