Dominican order, who
supervises the issuing of books printed at the Vatican; a chief steward;
four private secretaries, who take turns of service lasting a week for
each, and are always with the Pope, and finally the chief of the Vatican
police. Moreover, his Holiness has his private preacher, who delivers
sermons before him in Advent and Lent, and his confessor, both of whom
are always Capuchin monks, in accordance with a very ancient tradition.

It must not be supposed by the uninitiated that these few persons in any
way represent the central directive administration of the Catholic
Church. On the contrary, the only one of them who is occupied in that
larger field is Cardinal Rampolla, the Secretary of State. The others
are, strictly speaking, the chief personages of the pontifical
household, as we should say. But their offices are not sinecures. The
Pope's restless energy extracts work from the men about him as one
squeezes water from a sponge. In the days of Pius the Ninth, after the
fall of the temporal power, the Vatican was overrun and overcrowded with
useless but well-paid officials, officers and functionaries great and
small, who took refuge there against the advancing wave of change. When
Leo the Thirteenth had been on the throne only a few weeks, there was
sold everywhere a comic print representing the Pope, with a huge broom,
sweeping all the useless people pell-mell down the steps of the Vatican
into the Piazza of Saint Peter's. As often happens, the caricaturist saw
the truth. In a reign that has lasted twenty years, Leo the Thirteenth
has done away with much that was useless, worthless and old-fashioned,
and much that cumbered the narrow patch of earth on which so important a
part of the world's business is transacted. He is a great simplifier of
details, and a strong leveller of obstructions, so that his successor in
the pontificate will find it a comparatively easy thing to keep the
mechanism in order in its present state.

[Illustration: THE VATICAN FROM THE PIAZZA OF SAINT PETER'S]

The strictest economy, even to the minutest details, is practised in the
Vatican. It appears certain that the accounts of the vast household have
often been inspected by the Pope, whose prime object is to prevent any
waste of money where so much is needed for the maintenance of church
institutions in all parts of the world. In the midst of outward
magnificence the papal establishment is essentially frugal, for the
splen