The schemata were printed for the use of the Fathers of the Council. The method of examining them was as follows:

(1.) The Council was to elect by secret vote within itself five commissions or deputations on: 1. Faith; 2. Discipline; 3. Missions; 4. Mixed Questions; 5. Rites.

(2.) The schemata were to be distributed to each of the members of the Council ten days at least before any discussion upon them would be opened.

(3.) The first discussion was in the general congregation of the whole Council. This first debate answered to the debate on the first and second reading of a bill in our Legislature. If the bishops accepted the principle of the schema, they next proceeded to the second discussion on the details, or clauses as we should say, paragraph by paragraph, as in a committee of the whole house.

(4.) If objections were made, the whole discussion, taken in shorthand, was referred to the respective Commissions of Faith or Discipline, and the like, as the case might be.

(5.) The whole schema was then re-examined by the commission. It was amended, or even remodelled, and then re-printed and distributed again to the bishops, and submitted once more to a general congregation by a reporter deputed by the commission out of its own number.

(6.) After renewed discussion it was then put again to the vote, which might be given in three forms:-1. Placet, or aye; 2. Non Placet, or no; 3. Placet juxta modum, or aye with modification, which is equivalent to voting for a bill on the second reading with the intention of amending it in committee. Those who voted juxta modum were required to send in their amendment in writing, which was printed, submitted to the deputation, and reported again to the general congregation for another voting.

(7.) If the schema so remodelled was further amended, the same process might be repeated. If, however, it was accepted by a majority of the Council, it was then passed by vote, and reserved for a final voting in the public session over which the Pope presided in person. The voting in Public Session, all discussion being over, was only by aye or no, by placet or non placet. This method of proceeding was published in the preliminary assembly of the Council by the Constitution Multiplices inter on the 6th of December, 1869. It underwent afterwards certain modifications by which the complete discussion of every subject was even more fully insured.

On this method we may observe that the liberty of speech was as perfectly secured as in our Parliament, and the accuracy of debate was even more completely provided for by the full and careful written amendments, and by the repeated remodelling of the schema by the commission or Select Committee before it returned to the Councilthat is, to a committee of the whole house.

5. The only other point in the method for the regulation of the Council of which we need to speak is the obligation of secrecy. In the beginning of the Council of Trent this precaution was omitted; wherefore, on the 17th of February, 1562, the legates were compelled to impose the secret upon the bishops. If this was necessary in the sixteenth century, when the press had hardly come into existence, how much more so in the nineteenth, when whatever is said to-day is published over all the world to-morrow. It is obvious that for the treatment of such matters as were before the Vatican Council a complete independence and tranquillity of mind were necessary—a thing impossible under the relentless assaults of hostile governments and an ubiquitous press, with the perpetual harassing of halfinformed friends and the incessant misrepresentations of enemies.

So much for the method and the regulations which were agreed to on the 3rd of November, 1869, by the commission, and confirmed by authority.

We now come to the last part of our narrative of the events before the assembling of Council-namely, the matters to be discussed, of which it will be enough to give a list. They were six in number.

(1.) Schema on Catholic doctrine against the manifold errors flowing from Rationalism.

(2.) Schema on the Church of Christ.

(3.) Schema on the Office of Bishops.

(4.) Schema on the Vacancy of Sees.

(5.) Schema on the Life and Manners of the Clergy.

(6.) Schema on the Little Catechism.

On these, or at least on some of these, we shall have to speak hereafter. It will therefore be enough at this time to note one fact only.

6. In preparing the schema on the Church of Christ, which consisted of fifteen chapters, after a full treatment of the body of the Church the commission inevitably came to treat of its head. Two chapters were prepared: the one on the primacy of the Roman Pontiff, the other of his temporal power. In treating of the primacy it was likewise inevitable that the commission should come to treat of the endowments of the primacy, and, among these endowments, first of the divine assistance promised to Peter and in Peter to his successors in matters of faith, or, in other words, of the infallibility. On the 14th and 21st of January, 1869, the commission treated of the nature of the primacy; on the 11th of February it reached the doctrine of infallibility. Two questions were then discussed: the one, 1. Whether the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff can be defined as an article of faith;' the other, 2. Whether it ought to be defined as an article of faith.' To the first question the whole commission unanimously answered in the affirmative; to the second all, but one only, concurred in the judgment that the subject

ought not to be proposed to the Council unless it were demanded by the bishops. The words of this judgment run as follows: Sententia commissionis est, nonnisi ad postulationem episcoporum rei hujus propositionem ab Apostolica Sede faciendam esse. (The judgment of the commission is, that this subject ought not to be proposed by the Apostolic See except at the petition of the bishops.') The one dissentient Consultor was an inopportunist. The commission, therefore, never completed the chapter relating to the infallibility.

The Commission on Doctrine sat for twenty-seven months, and held fifty-six sessions, in which time it completed three, and only three, schemata. After the opening of the Council it met once only; and so its labours ended.

Two observations may be made on these facts. The first is that now for a second time, when the subject of infallibility would, according to the adversaries of the Council, be expected to take the first place, it was deliberately set aside. The second observation is that Pius the Ninth had neither desire nor need to propose the defining of his infallibility. Like all his predecessors, he was conscious of the plenitude of his primacy. He had exercised it in the full assurance that the faith of Christendom responded to his unerring authority; he felt no need of any definition. It was not the head of the Church nor the Church at large that needed this definition. The bishops in 1854, 1862, 1867 had amply declared it. It was the small number of disputants who doubted, and the still smaller number who denied, that the head of the Church can neither err in faith and morals, nor lead into error the Church of which he is the supreme teacher, that needed an authoritative declaration of the truth.

As to the labours of the other sections, on Discipline, on Religious Orders, on Missions and the Oriental Churches, and on Rites, no comment need be made. The world has little interest in them, and takes no notice of them. The one object of its hostility is the Definition which has affirmed the divine authority of the head of the Church.

HENRY EDWARD, Cardinal Archbishop.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES.

TWELVE years ago, to a day, the Republican party in the United States had reached, as it seemed, the summit of political greatness. On the 1st of April, 1865, General Sheridan inflicted a terrible defeat on the Confederate army at Five Forks. This was a deadly blow to the hopes of the Confederacy. On the morrow Grant attacked and broke through Lee's lines. The gallant soldier of the South abandoned the defence of Richmond, and made a desperate effort to secure a retreat, a respite, and perhaps a favourable peace. But it was too late. A week after, at Appomattox Court-House, the Federal commander received from his antagonist the formal surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.' Within three weeks Johnston had surrendered the Army of North Carolina' to Sherman. The rebellion was at an end. The North was filled with passionate rejoicing, exultant pride, fervent and open-hearted gratitude. A banner hung on the walls of the Capitol at Washington spoke the thoughts of the people :—“ 'The only national debt that we can never pay is the debt we owe to the victorious Union soldiers.' The statesmen, too, who for the defence of the Union had raised money and levied armies on a scale without parallel in the history of civilised war had obtained a hold upon the affections of the people which nothing seemingly could shake. In a dozen years all this fund of political power has been wasted, or worse, and the Republican party, though it still keeps its grasp upon the executive authority, is now almost as much weaker than its opponents as it was before the Democratic schism of 1860.

At the Presidential election of 1864, before Sherman had even set out from Atlanta on his 'great march to the sea,' and several months before Grant's decisive campaign in Virginia, the Democrats were utterly routed. They had chosen a strong candidate, General M'Clellan, whose Unionist convictions could not be questioned, and who had commanded the Federal army during the darkest days of 1861 and 1862; yet they carried only three States, none of them of first-rate importance-Kentucky, New Jersey, and Delaware-and obtained only 21 electoral votes against 212. Mr. Lincoln's aggregate majority was nearly half a million. Four years later General Grant defeated Mr. Seymour, obtaining 214 electoral votes against

80, and had a popular majority of more than 300,000. In 1872. General Grant was re-elected by 300 electoral votes against 66, and his popular majority was nearly three-quarters of a million. But at the contest of the 7th of November last the Democratic candidate obtained beyond challenge 184 electoral votes out of 369, or within one vote of the absolute majority required for election. The remaining votes were claimed for the Republican candidates, but in four States the Democrats disputed the returns and asserted their right to subtract twenty-two votes from the Republican score. Counting the disputed States for the Republicans, however, the Democrats had a clear popular majority of more than a quarter of a million.

Out of these conflicting claims a controversy arose which kept society in the United States upon the rack during four months. Of the issues raised in that controversy I have something to say by-andby; but first it is proper to ask how so complete a collapse of Republican power became possible. The gratitude of the nation to the party which crushed the rebellion, emancipated the negro, and saved the Union, had not worn itself out when General Grant was elected in 1868. Democracies are not fickle when they are rooted in the steadiness' of the English character, and America is still English in all essentials of mind and morals. Why, then, was the party which triumphed in 1860, in 1864, in 1868, and in 1872, broken and discomfited in 1876? It is certain that the breach between the party which was all-powerful at the close of the war and the mass of the American people is due to no single cause. The analysis of a complex sentiment like the discontent which has been growing in the United States since the death of President Lincoln is difficult, but it must be attempted if we care to understand the significance of the present crisis in American politics.

The Republican party inherits the political ideas and relations of two-or perhaps three-extinct parties. The Federalists in the early days of the Republic claimed the allegiance of the most weighty of American statesmen, of Washington, of John Adams, of Alexander Hamilton. In the race for popular favour they were beaten by the 'Republicans' of that epoch-who afterwards assumed the name of Democrats the disciples of Jefferson, the admirers of revolutionary France, a society of slave-owners preaching the doctrines of Rousseau. The sober well-balanced wisdom of the Constitution is as characteristic of the Federalist view of public duties as the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence' are typical of the Democratic view. The mind of Jefferson is dominant in the latter, the mind of Hamilton in the former. But as the generation of statesmen which had made the Republic died out the Federalist party was weakened and broken up, and the Democratic victory when General Jackson was elected in 1829 completed its dissolution. It was only in the year 1834 or 1835 that a