the great Liberal party, on attaining
power had undertaken to bring happiness to one and all. But after a
century's experience it really seemed that liberty had failed to bring
any happiness whatever to the outcasts. In the political sphere illusions
were departing. At all events, if the reigning third estate declares
itself satisfied, the fourth estate, that of the toilers,* still suffers
and continues to demand its share of fortune. The working classes have
been proclaimed free; political equality has been granted them, but the
gift has been valueless, for economically they are still bound to
servitude, and only enjoy, as they did formerly, the liberty of dying of
hunger. All the socialist revendications have come from that; between
labour and capital rests the terrifying problem, the solution of which
threatens to sweep away society. When slavery disappeared from the olden
world to be succeeded by salaried employment the revolution was immense,
and certainly the Christian principle was one of the great factors in the
destruction of slavery. Nowadays, therefore, when the question is to
replace salaried employment by something else, possibly by the
participation of the workman in the profits of his work, why should not
Christianity again seek a new principle of action? The fatal and
proximate accession of the democracy means the beginning of another phase
in human history, the creation of the society of to-morrow. And Rome
cannot keep away from the arena; the papacy must take part in the quarrel
if it does not desire to disappear from the world like a piece of
mechanism that has become altogether useless.

* In England we call the press the fourth estate, but in France
and elsewhere the term is applied to the working classes, and
in that sense must be taken here.--Trans.

Hence it followed that Catholic socialism was legitimate. On every side
the socialist sects were battling with their various solutions for the
privilege of ensuring the happiness of the people, and the Church also
must offer her solution of the problem. Here it was that New Rome
appeared, that the evolution spread into a renewal of boundless hope.
Most certainly there was nothing contrary to democracy in the principles
of the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed she had only to return to the
evangelical traditions, to become once more the Church of the humble and
the poor, to re-establish the universal Christian community. She is
undoubtedly of d