the area of the single Burgundian Dukedom previous, aye, and subsequent to the rashness of Charles the Bold, contained more wealth and more freemen, more private comfort, a more thriving population, and not only

Stately dames, like queens attended,

Knights, who bore the fleece of gold,"

than five times a similar area in the most prosperous regions of the Roman Empire under Tiberius or Vespasian.

To quote again from Professor Périn: "If we study the material aspects of the Pagan societies of antiquity, it will be found that at the time of their greatest prosperity, there was among them concentration of riches rather than real increase of the general wealth. The pleasures of the opulent were indeed developed far beyond anything known to modern experience; but true wealth, the wealth of the general body, so far from increasing in the ancient world with the general progress of society, on the contrary, became diminished and exhausted with rapidity."

And, by the way, in referring to an author whom I would so strongly recommend to students of economic science, I have much pleasure in being able to subjoin the distinguished testimony of the first of living German economists to the eminent merits of Professor Périn: "No work of conservative economy,' says Roscher, in his just published Geschichte der National-Oekonomik in Deutchland, "has been produced by any German author of recent times, which can compare for thorough, moderate, and practical spirit, with Le Play's Reforme Sociale in France, or, in harmony and system, with Périn's essay to catholicize the entire doctrine of public economy." So true is this, that I could give no better advice to the young man, no matter of what profession, who desires to qualify himself for the judicious acquisition of political experience, than that he should pass from the study of Stuart Mill to the study of Périn. If the former's "Principles of Political Economy" contain almost the last word of rationalistic science, the latter's "De la Richesse dans les Societés Chrêtiennes" will demonstrate the facile superiority of reason enlightened by faith. The knowledge of the one and the other could only demand the easy labour of a few weeks, and this is a sacrifice, or, more properly, a duty which, especially in these days, no Catholic, be he doctor, lawyer, or engineer, merchant, manufacturer, or agriculturalist, layman or cleric, statesman or private citizen, should permit himself to shirk. The public weal concerns everybody. Homo sacra res homini. And the science of good citizenship can be called the parent of the civic virtues.

To return from this digression, however, it is sufficiently

tion of the habit of self-interest well understood, which rationalist economists would substitute for the self abnegation inculcated by the Christian law. If ever there were societies which the spur of material appetites should have carried to the very summits of material prosperity, the Pagan societies of antiquity should have exhibited the perfection and culmination of material progress. Loaded with all the bounties of nature, living under the fairest heaven of the earth, inhabiting regions the most amply provided with all the productive forces, seated around that basin of the Mediterranean, which lends so many facilities to the exchanges and communications of international trade, endowed with an intellectual and practical genius seldom rivalled and never surpassed, ought not these favoured and gifted races to have far outstripped at least those northern nations of modern times who find in their climate and soil such serious hindrances to the productiveness of labour and skill? Yet what were Tyre and Sidon, and Athens and Rome, Magna Graecia in her glory, and Carthage in her noon of pride; what were all these famous empires and dominions, taken even in the collectivity of their united wealth, when compared with a single Christian power-I will not say of the present day—but of modern times. The Germany of Charles V., previous to the desolating outbreak of sectarian revolution, could have crumpled up the Augustan Cæsarism in a fortnight. The France of Lous XIV., before purposeless ambition had squandered the inheritance of Richelieu and Colbert, would have outshone, and not merely outshone, but eclipsed in every constituent of public wealth and individual happiness, the accumulated capacities of half-a-dozen antique monarchies or republics. It is not the exceptional luxury of an ex-governor, who in his term of office had picked Sicilia or Hispania to the bone, of an ex-farmer general of the taxes, who had contrived to rob both the state and the tributaries, which can blind us to the real character of ancient prosperity. For what is this boasted wealth of the Greeks and Romans when we remember that it was exclusively concentrated in the hands of a restricted caste of privileged oligarchs, and that beneath the few thousands of the wealthy and the free, there moaned and suffered the infinite multitude of the miserable and enslaved. Böckh's account of the public economy of Athens, or Champagny's account of the society under the Cæsars, both which works have been commended by the authorities of the Catholic University to the perusal of the students, will furnish the most ample corroboration of the essential and unspeakable difference between the public wealth of Christian and of Pagan civilizations, It is probable, and more than probable, that

the area of the single Burgundian Dukedom previous, aye, and subsequent to the rashness of Charles the Bold, contained more wealth and more freemen, more private comfort, a more thriving population, and not only

Stately dames, like queens attended,

Knights, who bore the fleece of gold,"

than five times a similar area in the most prosperous regions of the Roman Empire under Tiberius or Vespasian.

To quote again from Professor Périn: "If we study the material aspects of the Pagan societies of antiquity, it will be found that at the time of their greatest prosperity, there was among them concentration of riches rather than real increase of the general wealth. The pleasures of the opulent were indeed developed far beyond anything known to modern experience; but true wealth, the wealth of the general body, so far from increasing in the ancient world with the general progress of society, on the contrary, became diminished and exhausted with rapidity."

And, by the way, in referring to an author whom I would so strongly recommend to students of economic science, I have much pleasure in being able to subjoin the distinguished testimony of the first of living German economists to the eminent merits of Professor Périn: "No work of conservative economy," says Roscher, in his just published Geschichte der National-Oekonomik in Deutchland, "has been produced by any German author of recent times, which can compare for thorough, moderate, and practical spirit, with Le Play's Reforme Sociale in France, or, in harmony and system, with Périn's essay to catholicize the entire doctrine of public economy." So true is this, that I could give no better advice to the young man, no matter of what profession, who desires to qualify himself for the judicious acquisition of political experience, than that he should pass from the study of Stuart Mill to the study of Périn. If the former's "Principles of Political Economy" contain almost the last word of rationalistic science, the latter's "De la Richesse dans les Societés Chrétiennes" will demonstrate the facile superiority of reason enlightened by faith. The knowledge of the one and the other could only demand the easy labour of a few weeks, and this is a sacrifice, or, more properly, a duty which, especially in these days, no Catholic, be he doctor, lawyer, or engineer, merchant, manufacturer, or agriculturalist, layman or cleric, statesman or private citizen, should permit himself to shirk. The public weal concerns everybody. Homo sacra res homini. And the science of good citizenship can be called the parent of the civic virtues.

To return from this digression, however, it is sufficiently

evident that the prosperity of the ancient world is not the prosperity which Christianity encourages, and humanity approves. In that Roman society, indeed, where perhaps less than ten millions of freemen disposed of the liberty and natural rights of a hundred and twenty millions of slaves, we can quite conceive, in the words of Chateaubriand's Etudes Historiques, "the facility which the diverse cupidities" of the ruling caste "had for satisfying themselves." The wealthy Roman was the voluptuous oligarch of a servile realm. All beneath him was, in the expressive phrase of the Roman law, not so much vile, merely as absolutely null-non tam vilis quam nullus. The slave was said to be an animated implement, and an implement was said to be an inanimate slave, and these animated implements, these "hands," to use the kindred term of Neo-Pagan capitalism, outnumbered the possessing classes in the proportion of ten to one. Vast accumulations of private wealth could thus exist at the expense of general and appalling misery; but when multitudes of human beings are thrown in as paltry chattels to swell the dominion of a few individuals, all that is thereby acquired for the proprietors is subtracted from the slaves. When a man has his value absorbed by another man, he ceases to have value for himself, and the luxury of the monopolist is purchased by the plunder of mankind.

In such a state of society, the establishment of Christianity meant not only a religious and moral, but a material and economic revolution-a revolution, however, which, in the spirit of its Divine Author, built up and renovated as sedulously as it cast down and abolished. Paganism had proceeded from the enslavement of men's souls to the enslavement of their bodies. Christianity proceeded from the mental and moral emancipation of men to their enfranchisement in the physical and material sphere. The Divine invitation-" Come to me all you who labour and are heavy burthened and I will refresh you"-was the God-speed and evangel of a new world-movement of civilization as well as salvation. The duty and dignity of the industry of all, not for the selfish gratification of the few, but for the temperate and cheerful maintenance of all, from being promulgated as first principles of charity and virtue, insensibly took root and assumed body in the economic relations of a regenerated world. On the gloomy portals of the Pagan ergastula, the Divine words of mercy and wisdom, "Do unto others as thou wouldst be done by," sufficed to convert the workhouse prison of the wretched millions who ministered to Rome's epicureanism, sensualism, "and self-interest well-understood," into the smiling villages, the thriving towns, the bold peasantry, the independent artizans of free and Christian Europe.

And, forsooth, the Church of the Redeemer and Deliverer of mankind is hostile to the happiness of the masses, to save whom, to regenerate whom, temporally and spiritually, in this world. and for the next, that Saviour taught, and suffered, and died! "The book of modern history will remain closed to you," says, truly, the Count de Chateaubriand, "unless you consider Christianity as a Divine revolution which has worked a social revolution, or in a sense as a natural progress of the soul towards a high civilization. As theocratic system, or as philosophical system, or as both at once, it alone can initiate you into the secret of the new order of society." And, forsooth, it is by banishing Christianity from the public instruction, that we can be educated in the understanding of the science of humanity!

But, perhaps it is retorted, the condition of the mass of mankind, even in Christian communities, seems to be touching again on what it was under the Senate and the Cæsarism. In the foremost countries of Europe wealth is accumulating, and, indeed, "by leaps and bounds," but it is accumulating in the ownership and enjoyment of individuals. If legal servitude be abolished, there is the real servitude produced by the lash of helplessness and hunger, and if millions of men are no longer the personal slaves of other men, they seem to have descended to be the slaves of baser things, of cogs and wheels and all manner of machines. Between a thousand operatives working for bare subsistence from morning to night in a damp and grimy factory, and herding, or rather pigging, from night to morning in the slums and stenches of the workman's quarter in a modern manufacturing town, and a thousand bondsmen of a Crassus or a Claudius, there seems less distinction than might be supposed. Between the conversion of the farms of an evicted population into sheep-walks and bullock-runs, and the proceedings which changed the country parts of ancient Italy into the solitudes which Pliny deplored, there appears to be no difference whatever. If Cato thought that slaves had no need of religion, some modern philosophers rejoin, "nor employers either." The Proletariate has sprung again into degraded and menacing existence. For the Servile War, we have the Commune-for the Contubernium even, we have civil marriage.

Yes; and it might be added, that instead of the Christian commonwealth we have State religions and race hates; instead of the Christian law of peaceful industry, we have millions of men devoted to mutual slaughter and destructive arts; instead of Christian concord, co-operation, and co-help, we have "self interest well understood," competitive individualism, and the rules of supply and demand; instead of the Christian priest, the Materialist sophist; instead of the Christian monas