losophy than by its magnificent exhibition of material improvements.
This philosophy availed itself of the exposition in order to show to what
extent it prevailed; and Paris extolled mere worldly power, luxury,
comfort and voluptuousness, whilst Rome had no praise but for humility,
poverty, self-denial, chastity. Paris applauded Alexander II., who
massacred the Poles; Rome, on the other hand, did honor to a Polish
bishop, Joseph Kunicievicz, who was cruelly murdered by Russian
fanaticism. Paris celebrated the apotheosis of free-thinking and religious
indifference; Rome, on the contrary, heaped honors on an Inquisitor, Peter
d'Arbues, who suffered martyrdom. Paris was loud in her acclamations to
the potentates and conquerors of the day, whilst Rome exalted an humble
shepherdess, Germaine Cousin, and some poor and obscure monks who were
hanged by heretics three hundred years ago, in a small town of Holland.
Yet was not Paris distinguished only by material glories, nor was Rome
altogether free from the taint of modern worldliness. There were those in
the latter city who, in the midst of an atmosphere of pious thought,
plotted deeds of diabolic wickedness, whilst Paris, which honored the
arts, was not without sympathy at Rome, and her prelates, the bishops of
France, were far from being the least among those five hundred high
dignitaries, twenty thousand priests of God's Church, and more than one
hundred and fifty thousand Christian people from all quarters of the known
world, who took part in celebrating the glorious centenary and the no less
glorious victory of more than two hundred martyrs. The display of art,
industry and modern improvements of very kind presented, indeed, in the
midst of the beautiful French capital, a magnificent and cheering sight.
It was nothing, however, to the moral spectacle afforded by the presence
of ten or twelve mighty sovereigns around the now Imperial author of the
_coup d'etat_. It was supremely worldly. Who would then have said that
William of Prussia, and Napoleon III., the Czar of Russia, and the
successor of the caliphs, who, at the exhibition _fetes_, joined hands in
apparent friendship, were so soon to be engaged in deadly strife? and that
that capital, where so many great potentates came to honor Napoleon,
should, in a year or two, know him no more, and even struggle with all the
energy of desperation to obliterate every vestige of the improvements with
which he had so enriched and bea