she
will be master of her own house. She sees in the conflict, not an affair
of religion or of conscience, but a struggle between the sovereignty
of state legislation and the sovereignty of the Church. She treats the
papacy not in the aspect of a religious, but of a political power, and
is resolved that the declaration of the Prussian Constitution shall be
maintained, that "the exercise of religious freedom must not interfere
with the duties of a citizen toward the community and the state."

DUAL GOVERNMENT IN EUROPE. With truth it is affirmed that the papacy is
administered not oecumenically, not as a universal Church, for all
the nations, but for the benefit of some Italian families. Look at its
composition! It consists of pope, cardinal bishops, cardinal deacons,
who at the present moment are all Italians; cardinal priests, nearly all
Italians; ministers and secretaries of the Sacred Congregation in Rome,
all Italians. France has not given a pope since the middle ages. It
is the same with Austria, Portugal, Spain. In spite of all attempts to
change this system of exclusion, to open the dignities of the Church to
all Catholicism, no foreigner can reach the holy chair. It is recognized
that the Church is a domain given by God to the princely Italian
families. Of fifty-five members of the present College of Cardinals,
forty are Italians--that is, thirty-two beyond their proper share.

The stumbling-block to the progress of Europe has been its dual system
of government. So long as every nation had two sovereigns, a temporal
one at home and a spiritual one in a foreign land--there being different
temporal masters in different nations, but only one foreign master
for all, the pontiff at Rome--how was it possible that history should
present us with any thing more than a narrative of the strifes of these
rival powers? Whoever will reflect on this state of things will see
how it is that those nations which have shaken off the dual form of
government are those which have made the greatest advance. He will
discern what is the cause of the paralysis which has befallen France. On
one hand she wishes to be the leader of Europe, on the other she clings
to a dead past. For the sake of propitiating her ignorant classes, she
enters upon lines of policy which her intelligence must condemn. So
evenly balanced are the two sovereignties under which she lives, that
sometimes one, sometimes the other, prevails; and not unfrequently the
on