the march even of history. The old-fashioned splendours in which, to the end, its destinies wrapped themselves up, handed on the pale image of a beautiful dream; the dream of Christianity,' the dream of an Imperator pacificus, smoothing over diversity among the peoples, bringing_concord among them, and uniting them.

For the last time, in 1849, shortly before the accession of Francis Joseph, ecclesiastical lips had formulated the beautiful dream; the bishops, gathered together in Vienna, in a solemn letter defined for the sovereign his lofty mission, to strengthen, revive, reunite in a real fraternal league the different peoples grouped around his throne.' That was the programme mapped out by the Church. Immediately the principle of the Hapsburg Government was announced by the Emperor Francis II:

My peoples,' he said,' are strangers to one another so much the better. They do not suffer from the same maladies at the same time. I place Hungarians in Italy, Italians in Hungary, each one watches his neighbour. They do not understand one another, they detest one another. From their antipathies arises order, from their reciprocal hatred general peace.'

Under Francis Joseph Count Taaffe laid down that 'no one must be content. By organizing and regularizing internal war between the different peoples, by accepting the arm of Croatia against the Magyar revolt and then by laying the Magyar yoke on Croatian shoulders, and by inciting the Italian against the Slav and the Slav against the Italian, and, even among the Slavs, the Croatian Catholic against the Serb Orthodox; by fostering hatred wisely and methodically; it was in this way the Hapsburg dynasty meant to live. In 1832 Montalembert had styled it 'the high priestess of oppression.' Under the auspices of the imperial sceptre order and peace, as they were recognized in Vienna, had hatred as their foundation. With her different nationalities long and faithfully devoted to the same prince, Austria could have been an experimental field in which the old maxims of Christianity might have assumed again a new virtue; of this old Christian Europe, one and diverse, she was all that remained; but, thanks to the government methods of the Hapsburgs this relic looked like a caricature.

In June, 1867, the cross was carried before the Hapsburg in the streets of Budapest; and when the young sovereign, who came to be crowned with the crown of

St. Stephen, dashing on horseback over the mound where fifty clods of earth symbolized the fifty divisions of the Kingdom, had cleft the air with his sword north, south, east and west, this brisk and solemn flourish had awakened the glories of a Hungary ere long a thousand years old, the rampart of Europe against Islam. But ten years later these same Magyars, who had surrounded with almost priestly pomp this method of renewing the vows of Hungary, were let loose in favour of the Turk against the Christian Slavs of the Balkans. In 1877 an extraordinary fund was organized in Budapest to arm with a sword of honour the general of Islam who had vanquished Prince Milan. Less than forty years had passed and one of the ends of the war imposed on Francis Joseph by William II was to confirm the check to the crusades by maintaining the Grand Turk in possession of the Holy Places.

In ecclesiastical circles some still dreamed of an ideal Austria quite the opposite to the real Austria; and the Austria of Francis Joseph still benefited by the long attachment that they fostered for this fabric of their mind, baptized by the name of Austria. The Government of Vienna knew how to profit by this vacillation; by trickery and by a pleasing exterior it tried to win the official compliments of the Church at a very small cost, and sometimes it obtained them. It gave her a dazzling place in the forefront of the State; it gave her a place in its pomps, but very little in its works. For, in its works, the Austrian State, in spite of the sincere efforts of Metternich to bring about repentance, was always inspired with the principles of Josephism; it was more religious in its toilet, if we may say so, than in its policy. But the toilet no more makes the State than the habit does the

man.

Of old, Joseph II thought to dupe his subjects and foreign Catholics when he forced Pius VI to insert into the text of a Pontifical discourse a phrase expressing the wonderful devotion of the Emperor to the Holy See, and when he immediately had the discourse translated into several languages. In the secret audience he spoke to the Pope of suppressing the temporal power, or of causing a schism in Lombardy, or of convincing his people that one might be a Catholic without being a Roman. Bernis stated that there remained for the Pope no other alternative than that of obeying with the least possible humiliation the law of

the stronger and the more skilful.' But Joseph II, philosopher as he was, wished the Pope to point to him as a devout Emperor. Thus he wished to borrow the Church's

influence so that he might use it to fight her.

The Josephist bureaucracy continued, and in 1844 Metternich wrote to his sovereign that whilst Austria' was in a state of war against the Revolution' she was engaged in a secret war against the Church and the Holy See.' In 1849 a layman (Ignaz Beidtel), under cover of the revolutionary disturbance that at last allowed to Catholic thought in the Hapsburg States some liberty of speech, published Recherches sur la situation religieuse. It was the first time for a hundred years that a formal claim for the autonomy of the Church had appeared in Austrian territory. The Emperor Rudolph had said in the sixteenth century: 'In my country I mean to be Pope, archbishop, bishop and dean.' And in 1792 Leopold II had decreed : 'We must consider the priest not only as a priest and as a citizen, but also as an official of the State in the Church.' The Josephist spirit day by day sanctioned and systematized these august maxims. Its secret opposition, then its external show, paralysed the effects of the Concordat that in 1855 Francis Joseph signed with Pius IX, and of which he finally obtained the brutal abrogation.

Austrian diplomacy, busying itself about the Holy See, murmured in the ears of Gregory XVI or in those of Pius IX, whilst pointing out tottering Italy at their hand: 'We are united, Most Holy Father; I shall protect you.' If Rome had given way, the protection would soon have become a protectorate. In 1831 the representative to Gregory XVI received from Metternich this message:

The more benevolent, sincere, and firm are the intentions of the Emperor towards the Pontifical Government, the more we have the right to make ourselves heard in Rome with regard to the undertakings for which it relies on our support, and which affect interests of the most delicate nature and of the most far-reaching importance.

The first acts of Pius IX called forth from the Chancellor of Vienna many other trickeries. No concessions,' he cried out to the Pope. You have no right to them; they would only lead to a diminution of the rights of the sovereign authority.' Then he learned that Pius IX, as Lacordaire afterwards said, 'stirred up from the tomb of Paul IV, after three hundred years, the buried sparks of Italian liberty, and enkindled from end to end of the

Peninsula hope and ardour.' A Pope then 'trifles with liberalism.' With rage Metternich repeated these words. "The Pope and his entourage,' he groaned, 'are at the bidding of factionism. It is the democratic element that gains the day and that proclaims Pius IX as its guiding spirit. The holocausts to Pius IX are a mood that will pass like all moods. The enthusiasm of the day overleaps all that it touches, beginning with the name that it has taken as its sign and its banner.'

The Italian revolution, to quote Lacordaire again, soon had no longer any need of this Washington whom Providence had given to Italy.' Then the astute Austria, exploiting this tragic repudiation, made up its mind to weigh on Italy with an unjust and oppressive load and to weigh also on the Church by preventing the Papacy from preserving in Italy the character that it had always had, and that rendered it dear to the inhabitants.' 'This house of Austria,' said Joseph de Maistre, is a great enemy of the human race, and especially of her allies.'

But it was not Pius IX alone that trifled with liberalism,' it was all the Catholics who in Belgium, France, and later in Germany, conceived the idea of binding themselves together so as better to defend the Church. This Vereine displeased Metternich immensely. Rome let him talk and then she blessed the new associations; and when later in Rhenish Prussia, in Westphalia, in Silesia, these associations inflicted on Bismarck, in the name of the Church, the only defeat that Bismarck had ever suffered, Rome could rejoice for having of old refused to listen to the reactionary suspicions that were formulated in Vienna and that periodically expressed to His Holiness the alarms of his Apostolic Majesty.

Pius IX, in 1850, sanctioned in Great Britain, by the establishment of an episcopal hierarchy, the magnificent progress of the Catholic faith; there was one statesman in Europe who refused to understand, who regretted this 'risky step.' It was Metternich. In another set of circumstances another pen, that of Mélanie de Metternich, reflected his thought, we must rather think of raising up new defenders of the Church; as to converting unbelievers, in my opinion it is a useless and even dangerous task. In fact, says M. Goyau, if the Kingdom of God can be looked upon chiefly as a magnificent, hieratic garment for the Kingdom of the Hapsburgs, and if the Hapsburgs,

through a natural fear of revolutions, are especially desirous to remain stationary, what need is there of conversions, missions, conquests? The Austrian State gently cradled her Church and sometimes crippled it; thus we see to-day a great Catholic country in which the life of souls was never spent in any serious missionary activity, and this country is Austria.

II THE CHURCH AND THE OLD DANUBE NATIONALITIES

The Spirit that breathes where it wills breathed even in Austria. Three centuries of Germanic oppression, strengthened in our days by the alliance of the Magyar oppression, could not stifle in a great many Catholic souls the sentiment of national liberty and the aspirations towards the expansion of the Church. Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania at the beginning of the eighteenth century were about to forget the Latin ancestors who by their blood, by their ploughshares, by their tombs had made of these lands Roumanian' lands. In the Transylvanian plain which the treaties of Carlowitz had placed under the domination of Vienna, Saxon Lutherans and Magyar Calvinists were the masters; the timid orthodox Church did not inconvenience them. But in the face of these oppressors a voice was raised to recall the ancientness of the Roumanians and what this soil owed them, their superiority in number and their gifts of government. This voice that demanded that they be recognized in Transylvania as 'political nation' was that of the Catholic bishop, Jean Innocent Micu-Bishop Klein as they called him in the bureaus of Vienna, where his name was Germanized when they could not Germanize his spirit. Before the Transylvanian Diet he pleaded for the Roumanian nation in the name of natural right. Some denied that there was such a thing as a Roumanian nation. Micu, one day in the year 1744, solemnly gathering together the immense crowds, baptized them a nation. Vienna was angry and proposed to bring him to trial. He fled to Rome where he died. For a long time afterwards the Transylvanians who visited Rome ascended the hundred and odd steps that lead to the Church of Ara Coeli to pray before the tomb of this mitred tribune.

Moreover, Rome became for them a home of national awakening. When the Government of Vienna sent to the Propaganda College clerics from Transylvania it intended them merely to study theology. But they learned other