London on a small scale. It is a characteristic American city of the first rank, larger than any single British municipality in the provinces, but not much larger than Manchester and Salford together with the adjoining townships, and it contains over 300,000 Catholics. The next census will probably show that this figure is considerably below the mark, as the diocese con tains 400,000 Catholics, and there is no great centre of population within it outside Philadelphia.

When we find that the Roman Catholic Church can claim 10,000,000 United States citizens in a population of 60,000,000, it is difficult to over-estimate the influence which the expansion of the Church in America will have on the future of Christendom. Judging from her past progress and considering that the two races to which the majority of American Catholics belong are the two most prolific of the white races in the United States, it seems certain that she will increase her proportion with the growth of the population. But, calculating as if she will remain relatively stationary and reducing by one-third the estimated 600,000,000 which it is predicted that the United States will contain in a hundred years' time, the Roman Catholic Church will then claim nearly 70,000,000 English-speaking people in America alone. By that time Australasia, South Africa, and Canada will be thickly inhabited. Under what flag those vast regions of the earth will be governed, no one can foretell, but two things are certain-that the English language will be spoken throughout them, and that the Church of Rome will maintain the progress she has commenced this century among English-speaking peoples. If every Frenchspeaking person in the world is counted as a devout Catholic, the number of Frenchspeaking Catholics will long before that period be immeasurably below that of the English-speaking Catholics; and the same may be said regarding the Italian and Spanish languages.

Without waiting to realize the forecast that the English tongue is fated to be the chief language of the Roman Catholic Church, we may consider some of the effects already produced by the establishment of that religion among the Englishspeaking people of America. Not the least achievement of that great branch of the Church which is now celebrating the

centenary of its hierarchy is that it has saved the Roman Catholic religion from the reproach often heard in Europe that its growth is only found associated with social retrogression and reaction. In France this feeling has relegated religion to the cult of women, children, and peasants, and in Ireland alone of European countries is the Church in sympathy with democratic progress.

Some Liberal critics may object that though Cardinal Gibbons may be thoroughly imbued with the democratic spirit it is not in harmony with the unchanging policy of Rome, which is hostile to liberty; that the Church may profess the most Liberal doctrine while she is in a minority, but that if she obtained ascendency we might witness an auto da fé in Madison Square. Cardinal Gibbons approaches the subject of religious persecution from the other extreme, and is so inspired with the charity which thinketh no evil that he protects the Protestant religions as well as the Catholic from the stigma of having countenanced persecution. In "Faith of our Fathers' he writes, "From my heart I abhor and denounce every species of persecution of which the Spanish Inquisition may have been guilty ;" and again in reference to the Massacre of St. Bartholomew he says, "I have no words strong enough to express my detestation of that inhuman slaughter;" but in both instances he denies that the Church was responsible, just as in another passage referring to the proscriptive measures of Protestants against the Church of Rome he says, "I know full well that these acts of cruelty form no part of the creed of the Protestant Churches."

It is to be feared that more sceptical students of history cannot accept the Cardinal's view, and that the truth is that every Church has persecuted when it has had the power and the opportunity, so long as persecution was part of the economy of the religious and political life of the day. Even the Puritans who came to America to escape from the Anglicans who had in turn suffered at the hands of the Catholics did not leave the spirit of persecution behind in Europe, and it is well known how they put to death Quakers and burned witches alive in their New England settlements. The most enlightened Prince who ever sat on the throne of England, who moreover secured the British consti

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tution and the Protestant succession, consented to the torture and subsequent massacre of Cornelius de Witt for a political offence, just a hundred years after St. Bartholomew. It is absolutely futile to defend or to condemn the religious and political methods of the past by the milder standard of to-day. Homo homini lupus" is probably as true now as it ever was, but we live in an age of anaesthetics. The policy of the Church in Spain during the present century may perhaps be cited to show that the spirit of intolerance is not yet dead; but in answer to this it may be pointed out that in modern times churches and religious sects are often in matters of conduct strongly influenced by the atmosphere of the country in which they are placed. For example, a Scotch Presbyterian minister will denounce Sunday amusements as a deadly sin, while a Dutch predicant, holding precisely the same theological tenets, will after morning service spend his Sunday afternoon in the Bosch at the Hague listening to what his Scottish co-religionist would call godless music. Cardinal Gibbons again, in his forthcoming work Our Christian Heritage," in a chapter on "The Religious Element in our American Civilization," points with pride to the national observance of the Christian Sabbath, which his distinguished colleague in the Sacred College, Cardinal San Felice of Naples, would regard as merely local usage. The most remarkable instance, however, of public opinion moulding the policy of Christian churches used to be found in the United States, when throughout the eleven Slave States of the Union ministers of religion in their own pulpits and assembled in synods, presbyteries, and conferences, used to declare " that, as the Great Head of the Church has recognized the relation of master and slave, we conscientiously believe that slavery is not a sin against God." Slavery was abolished; public sentiment accepted the inevitable; and the clergy of the Southern States ceased to take their texts from the Epistle to Philemon.

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Cardinal Gibbons's opportunism is not of this description. His denunciation of monopolies in his memorial to the Holy See is as courageous an act in the America of to-day as the denunciation of slavery would have been in the Southern States thirty years ago. The illustrations of the influence exercised by public opinion on

religious policy were only given to show that though Spain under a certain régime might foster intolerance in the Church, a country like America could find no room for a religion of reactionary tendency, and the fact that the Catholic Church has taken root in that land and is flourishing is the best proof that in the United States she is abreast with the democratic movement and with liberal progress.

If France is the eldest daughter of the Church, America is destined to be her strongest and biggest child, and it will be interesting to watch this youngest daughter maintaining the position she has already secured in the intimate councils of the Church. If the elder branches were well advised they would look to America to provide the Church Universal with a ruler. All the best friends of the Papacy, outside the Italian ring" which fences it round, are agreed that the time has come when it would be for the highest interest of the Church to break down the tradition of the last three centuries and a half which prescribes that the occupant of St. Peter's chair shall invariably be an Italian. We have seen how the Church has gained a stronger title than ever to its claim of universality, but the constitution of the Sacred College is Italian and not cosmopolitan. The full complement of that august body consists of seventy cardinals. The present number, since the recent death of Cardinal Schiaffino, is sixty-five. Ten of them are Austrian, German, Hungarian, and Polish; seven are French; five are British subjects (of whom one is French Canadian); four are Spanish; two Portuguese; one Belgian, and one American : thirty representing all the nationalities of the world, and thirty-five being Italians.

With this Italian preponderance, the other nationalities would have less ground of complaint if at the Vatican there were a corresponding council of state, in which the non-Italian Catholics were represented even in the inadequate proportion of thirty to thirty-five, but the intimate advisers of the Sovereign Pontiff are all Italians, who, with one or two exceptions, can neither read nor speak a word of English. For charm of manner, a polished Italian prelate is unrivalled, but his knowledge of the English-speaking world is that of a little child. The most accomplished Italian priest, even if he has been occasionally employed on a mission to a Catholic court,

has no comprehension of constitutional government, still less is he capable of understanding the democratic movement of the age. The Vatican has a certain aptitude in dealing with "sovereigns and sovereigns and statesmen," to use Lord Beaconsfield's expression, but we have seen how Cardinal Gibbons reminded the Sacred Congregation, on the great authority of Cardinal Manning, that in the coming era the Church will have to treat, not with princes and parliaments, but with the masses of the people.

Although there is no immediate pros pect of a vacancy in the Holy See, predictions are constantly being made as to the successor to Leo the Thirteenth. These journalistic prophecies are of no value whatever, excepting from the significant unanimity with which they make the coming Pontiff an Italian. Sometimes the Conservative Vicar-General of the Pope, Cardinal Praocchi, is designated. Sometimes it is the Liberal Archbishop of Naples or the Liberal Patriarch of Venice. Cardinal San Felice is famous for his courageous devotion to the sufferers during the cholera at Naples, when he accompanied King Humbert through the hospitals:but I remember witnessing a more courageous act on the part of Cardinal Agostini at Venice, when he officiated at the christening by Queen Margherita of an ironclad with the significant name of "Galileo," in the official presence of Signor Crispi, who, on his recent appointment to the ministry of Signor Depretis, had been denounced by the clerical journals as an excommunicate. The election of either the Neapolitan or the Venetian Cardinal would doubtless insure a modus vivendi between the Vatican and the Italian Government, but the Church needs a ruler whose wisdom and enlightenment is capable of dealing with farther-reaching questions than those which relate to the limits of the kingdom of Italy.

It would have been a happy choice for the Church, and one the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate, if the Sacred College had in its wisdom selected as successor to Pius the Ninth the great Cardinal who is at the head of every relig. ious and social movement in this country; but what the Church Universal would have gained, England would have lost. CardiCardinal Manning occupies a unique place in English history; there is no other instance

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of an individual exercising similar power and influence in this country, who has not been aided by legislative or official rank. It is probable that the Cardinal is content with his unprecedented position, yet it is strange in these days when much is talked about strengthening the Upper House by giving it a representative character, that no Prime Minister has ever seen fit to advise the offer of a place in it to the eminent Englishman who represents not only all the Catholic population of these islands, but the entire struggling populace of our cities, of every creed, and without a creed. peerage would confer no dignity or even precedence on Cardinal Manning, as by the Queen's sign manual, he was, on the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes, with the assent of the Heir to the Throne, and the present Prime Minister, who were members of it, assigned precedence immediately after the Royal Family. It is a long drop from the chair of St. Peter to a seat in the House of Lords, and there is a certain bathos in associating a modern coronet with the venerable head which might have worn most worthily the triple tiara.

Although Cardinal Manning would have been the most powerful pontiff since Hildebrand, every one who has the slightest knowledge of feeling on the continent is aware that an English Pope would be placed in a situation of peculiar difficulty on account of his nationality. Italy might object to a French Pope; Portugal might be jealous of a Spanish Pope; but the appointment of an Englishman to the Holy See would excite the animosity and the intrigue of every government on the continent.

The United States stand in a very different relation to the powers of Europe. All the continental nations have a friendly feeling for Americans-a sentiment which Americans will retain as long as they steer clear of international complications into which Samoan and Cuban entanglements might draw them. It is to be feared that the friendliness of the continental powers for America is stimulated by the idea that America as a nation has not too much love for Great Britain. Monsignor Keane is said to have recently given at Nashville some reasons why an American should not be elevated to the Papacy. The Rector of the Catholic University at Washington is reported to have stated that" an Amer

ican, no matter how learned and how well posted in European affairs, is thoroughly unfitted to fill the Papal See. The Pope must be a thorough cosmopolitan. He must be conversant with the political and spiritual conditions of France, Germany, and Spain. No American can grasp the situation in all its details. His educational surroundings and life are totally different from that of the man who is fitted to fill the Papacy." Now, it seems to me that the learned Bishop is too modest on behalf of his countrymen. A British traveller who has taken a superficial view of America might come back and declare that the only cosmopolitans to be found in the United States are the American maidens, whose knowledge of the world is undoubt edly as profound as it is amazing. The American politician is rarely a man of the world, but America takes no pride in her politicians; the American man of business frequently looks upon Wall Street as the centre of the universe; and the American man of fashion is a maladroit travesty of an Englishman. But the manhood of America does not wholly consist of such as these. The shrewd American nature is the best foundation for knowledge of the world as soon as it is removed from the narrow horizon of American life to which the Bishop refers. What more thorough cosmopolitans are to be found in any capital of Europe than certain diplomatic representatives of the United States? They have had no advantage of training; they are taken from the lawyer's desk or the professor's chair, yet they are able to hold their own with, and win the admiration of, the most accomplished products of our old European civilization. It is the success of these men in adapting themselves to unfamiliar surroundings, and in forming confidential relations with statesmen and potentates often denied to diplomates de la carrière, which makes one believe that, from the worldly point of view, the highest position in Europe could be worthily filled by an American.

Of the ecclesiastical qualifications of Cardinal Gibbons for the most exalted honor in the Church's gift, it is not for a layman to speak. It is enough that the Holy See has seen fit to set him at the head of one of the most powerful and perhaps the most intelligent hierarchy in the world, and that the Vatican has paid unprecedented respect to his counsel. Of

his fitness as a man of affairs and of his knowledge of the world I have had some opportunity of forming a judgment. During many months of travel and residence in the United States and Canada my observation led me to the conclusion that the North American continent has produced in this generation two really great men, in the sense that the last generation accounted Lincoln and Cavour as great. One of them we have the honor of reckoning as a fellow-subject of the Queen, Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister of our Canadian Dominion. The other, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, although twenty years his junior, is his equal in marvellous knowledge of men, and, although in some respects of singularly different nature, resembles him in the possession of that lofty opportunism which is the essential of all true statesmanship. Cardinal Gibbons combines the suavity of an Italian monsignore with that ingenuous integrity and robustness which we like to think is the characteristic of our Anglo-Saxon race. If he were called to occupy the most conspicuous and most ancient throne in Christendom he would not go to Europe as a novice in European affairs. To have assisted at an Ecumenical Council at an age when most men are on the threshold of a career is an early training in cosmopolitanism rarely experienced. During the intervening twenty years the Cardinal's frequent visits to Europe have brought him into contact with some of the acutest intellects of the Old World. Moreover, since his elevation twelve years ago to the head of the hierarchy of the United States he has governed an episcopate and a priesthood which are composed of members of every European nation. His unexampled undertaking two years ago, when, the youngest member of the Sacred College, he prevailed upon the Holy See to reconsider a momentous judgment, was not the achievement of a man whose attributes are merely local and national. The installation. in the chair of St. Peter of this enlightened English-speaking Churchman would be an event of such import to human society that one dares not hope to see its accomplishment, for it seems as if it would be the first step toward bringing back to the Church the great democracies which are destined to govern the world, and as if it would hasten the time when " unum ovile fiet et unus pastor."-Nineteenth Century

THERE is always a certain fascination in beginning a subject at the wrong end and working backward: it has the charm which inevitably attaches to all evil practices; you know you oughtn't, and so you can't resist the temptation to outrage the proprieties and do it. I can't myself resist the temptation of beginning this article where it ought to break off-with Chinese money, which is not the origin, but the final outcome and sole remaining modern representative of that antique and almost prehistoric implement, the Bronze Age hatchet.

Improbable and grotesque as this affiliation sounds at first hearing, it is, nevertheless, about as certain as any other fact in anthropological science-which isn't, perhaps, saying a great deal. The familiar little brass cash, with the square hole for stringing them together on a thread in the centre, well known to the frequenter of minor provincial museums, are, strange to say, the lineal descendants, in unbroken order, of the bronze axe of remote celestial ancestors. From the regular hatchet to the modern coin one can trace a distinct, if somewhat broken, succession, so that it is impossible to say where the one leaves off and the other begins-where the implement merges into the medium of exchange, and settles down finally into the root of all evil.

Here is how this curious pedigree first worked itself out. In early times, before coin was invented, barter was usually conducted between producer and consumer with metal implements, as it still is in Central Africa at the present day with Venetian glass beads and rolls of red calico. Payments were all made in kind, and bronze was the commonest form of specie. A gentleman desirous of effecting purchases in foreign parts went about the world with a number of bronze axes in his pocket (or its substitute), which he exchanged for other goods with the native traffickers in the country where he did his primitive business. At first, the early Chinese in that unsophisticated age were content to use real hatchets for this commercial purpose; but, after a time, with the profound mercantile instinct of their race, it occurred to some of them that when a man wanted half a hatchet's worth of goods he

might as well pay for them with half a hatchet. Still, as it would be a pity to spoil a good working implement by cutting it in two, the worthy Ah Sin ingeniously compromised the matter by making thin hatchets, of the usual size and shape, but far too slender for practical usage. By so doing he invented coin: and, what is more, he invented it far earlier than the rival claimants to that proud distinction, the Lydians, whose electrum staters were first struck in the seventh century B.C. But, according to Professor Terrien de la Couperie, some of the fancy Chinese hatchets which we still retain date back as far as the year 1000 (a good round number), and are so thin that they could only have been intended to possess exchange value. And when a distinguished Sinologist gives us a date for anything Chinese, it behooves the rest of the unlearned world to open its mouth and shut its eyes, and thankfully receive whatever the distinguished Sinologist may send it.

In the seventh century, then, these mercantile axes, made in the strictest sense to sell and not to use, were stamped with an official stamp to mark their amount, and became thereby converted into true coins

that was the root of the root of all evil.' Thence the declension to the "cash" is easy; the form grew gradually more and more regular, while the square hole in the centre, once used for the handle, was retained by conservatism and practical sense as a convenient means of stringing them together.

So this was the end of the old bronze hatchet, perhaps the most wonderful civilizing agent ever invented,by human ingenuity. Let us hark back now, and from the opposite side see what was its first beginning.

"But why," you ask, "the most wonderful civilizing agency? What did the bronze axe ever do for humanity?" Well, nearly everything. I believe I have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going to do wonders for us all-to-morrow; but I don't know whether either ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze hatchet.