y of a state of peace. And as a soldier in a campaign is
not at liberty to criticise openly the cause for which he is fighting;
as no general, on his army going into action, can permit a subordinate
to decline from his duty in the moment of danger, on the plea that he is
dissatisfied with the grounds of the quarrel, and that his conscience
forbids him to take part in it; so there are times when whole nations
are in a position analogous to that of an army so circumstanced; when
the safety of the State depends upon unity of purpose, and when private
persons must be compelled to reserve their opinions to themselves; when
they must be compelled neither to express them in words, nor to act upon
them in their capacity of citizens, except at their utmost peril. At
such times the _salus populi_ overrides all other considerations; and
the maxims and laws of calmer periods for awhile consent to be
suspended. The circumstances of the year 1848 will enable us, if we
reflect, not upon what those circumstances actually were, but on what
they easily might have been, to understand the position of Henry VIII.'s
government at the moment of the separation from Rome. If the danger in
1848 had ceased to be imaginary,--if Ireland had broken into a real
insurrection,--if half the population of England had been Socialist, and
had been in secret league with the leaders of the Revolution in Paris
for a combined attack upon the State by insurrection and invasion,--the
mere passing of a law, making the use of seditious language an act of
treason, would not have been adequate to the danger. Influential persons
would have been justly submitted to question on their allegiance, and
insufficient answers would have been interpreted as justifying
suspicion. Not the expression only, of opinions subversive of society,
but the holding such opinions, however discovered, would have been
regarded and treated as a crime, with the full consent of what is
called the common sense and educated judgment of the nation.[401]

[Sidenote: The Romanism of the sixteenth century not the Romanism of the
nineteenth.]

If for "opinions subversive of society," we substitute allegiance to the
papacy, the parallel is complete between the year 1848, as it would then
have been, and the time when the penal laws which are considered the
reproach of the Tudor governments were passed against the Roman
Catholics. I assume that the Reformation was in itself right; that the
claims of th