cannot pay in poorer countries. During 1860, eighty-five divorce suits were commenced in San Francisco, and in sixty-one of these, or three-fourths of the cases, the wives were the plaintiffs. *

We need add no comment. Such being the tone and condition of society, of what inestimable value must not good Catholic colleges be to the whole country! They are highly appreciated by many who are not Catholics: for they send their children to Santa Clara, and to the convents of Notre Dame, being fully persuaded that they will not only be educated in the soundest principles of morality, and be fenced in from evil, but will receive a higher intellectual training than they could elsewhere. Society, indeed, must modify any particular system of education; and the Jesuits have had to depart from their traditional practice of a thorough classical training, in favour of positive sciences, especially chemistry and mineralogy, and to adopt the utilitarian line of instruction, rather than that which is the habit in Europe. Their colleges in Santa Clara and in San Francisco, and the schools of Notre Dame, must be marked as the principal educational establishments in California; and they are telling steadily upon the people.

The Archbishop has also opened another college in behalf of the middle classes, which no doubt will bear its fruit. All are thus amply provided for; and no one points a finger of scorn towards the Catholic Church for ignorance and neglect of education; rather she is looked upon as preeminent in her training, and men external to her communion send their children to learn wisdom at her establishments.

The sand-hills in the midst of which the college and Church of S. Ignatius were placed, have long since been carried away by the vigorous application of steam power, and these religious buildings stand out prominent upon the widest street in California.

A brief allusion to the work carried on in this Church, and we come to a conclusion. We have already referred at some length to the sermon and lecture-going habit of the Americans, and to the conquests which the Catholic Church alone has the power to make among them, by addressing herself to their good qualities, and thus leading them to God by the cords of Adam. Long ago the Archbishop perceived this and acted promptly by planting in the capital, in addition to the busy, active secular clergy, this community of St. Ignatius, with its leisure, talent, and training, to meet

* P. 368.

VOL. VI. NO. XI. [New Series.]

D

special requirements; and statistics would show with what success his Grace's plans have been crowned. But we must pass on, and confine our notice to a particular industry of the society, which at San Francisco has received a special blessing. Or rather it is not a specialty of the Society, but a common arm in the armoury of the Church; we refer to the system of sodalities and confraternities. The idea was first introduced by S. Francis and S. Dominic in their third orders, and was perfected and practically applied to various devout ends by S. Charles, S. Ignatius, and S. Philip, in the sixteenth century. S. Charles covered his diocese with Confraternities as with so many nets. S. Philip organized the Little Oratory, and the Jesuits wherever they establish themselves are careful to found the Sodality of the B. Virgin, and that of S. Joseph as the Patron of the Bona Mors, in their colleges or among the frequenters of their public churches. Nothing can exceed the importance of these sodalities and confraternities, and we dwell on the subject all the more willingly, because of our own need of their more perfect development and spread among ourselves. It strikes us that such associations are more than ever desirable in countries like England and America, where external dangers and seductions are SO numerous and insidious, and ecclesiastical influence so limited.

In Catholic countries the population is studded with religious houses, convents, and communities, and the priesthood is numerous, visible to the eye of the public, clothed in its own dress, affecting all classes of society, and holding a political and national status of its own. Their influence, therefore, is strong and ever present. It is otherwise with the English clergy, who have not one of the advantages alluded to, but are absorbed in begging and building with one hand, while with the other they hastily baptize, absolve, and anoint the newborn, the viator, and the dying. Now well-organized sodalities of laymen supply the absence of those more powerful influences, of which we daily lament the loss. They are a security to each member against himself, and they quicken him with a new zeal and activity for his neighbour. In San Francisco there is a sodality for men, and one for women. They hold their respective meetings, sing the Office of the Blessed Virgin, receive instructions, and frequent the Sacraments on appointed days they have also their library. The object is purely spiritual, and we believe there is no kind of obligatory subscription. Is a youth being led away, or in the midst of dangers, his friend induces him to join him in the sodality. It is a spiritual citadel into which all may enter, and find a new

armour and strength against self and the world. Those newly born to the faith are gradually and easily edified and perfected in their new religion, by contact with the more fervent members whom they find in the sodality. Such a system cannot be too widely spread. Why should not a sodality be established in every considerable parish? After a time, all would loudly proclaim that they had built up a tower of strength within the Church. But we may not dwell longer on these topics.

The great spiritual dangers in California are rank infidelity and unblushing naturalism: the one and only promise of religion, the one hope of salvation, is in the attitude and position of the Catholic Church. Mr. Hittel sums up the relative numbers thus about fourteen per cent. of the male population frequent some place of worship; of the remaining eighty-six per cent., one-third occasionally go to church, according to the attraction there, and two-thirds never go near a church, and are not to be counted as Christians. He estimates the Protestants at 10,000, of whom the Episcopalians are numbered at only 600 communicants, with twenty churches and eighteen clergymen; the Jews at 2,000. The Catholic priests, he adds, claim 80,000 communicants in their Church, and they are more attentive to the forms of their faith than are the Protestants. In a word, Catholicity is in the ascendant, the sects are in the decline, and the battle is between paganism with a mythology of dollars, and the Church of God with her precepts of self-denial and her promises of eternal life.

36

ART. II. THE VICEROYS OF IRELAND.

History of the Viceroys of Ireland; with Notices of the Castle of Dublin and its chief Occupants in Former Times. By J. T. GILBERT, Esq. Dublin: Duffy. 1865.

ONE

NE of Strafford's correspondents, professing to describe the Irish "out of long experience," declared that he had "found them to be a nation as ready to take the bit in their teeth upon all advantages, although they pay for it, as any people living." The description, contemptuous as it is, is in one sense a summary of the history of Ireland for six centuries after the invasion. That history, if we except a very limited and variable district in which the forms of a settled conquest were commonly maintained, is but the record of a series of struggles in which force alternated with intrigue, and in which, while the conquered never laid aside the hope of recovering his independence, the conqueror too commonly felt that his conquest was but nominal.

According to the theory of the old historians, the history of a country was little more than the record of the fortunes of its rulers. Of a dependency this was especially true; and there are few dependencies regarding which it is so literally verified as regarding Ireland. The story of Ireland in its relations to England, is often a mere sequence of names, hardly wrought into a connected web of narrative; its occasional picturesqueness frittered away or lost in a maze of petty, even though striking, episodes; its interest unpointed by any of those more comprehensive lessons which give value to history; exhibiting no principle of government but force -no economic theory but the creation of revenue-no policy but subjugation, to be accomplished by any means and at any cost. Such a history as this can hardly be told, except in the lives of the successive rulers, by whose personal will, rather than by a fixed or settled rule of government, it was directed.

Mr. Gilbert, therefore, has done wisely for the practical interest of his book upon Ireland in throwing it into the form of a history of the Viceroys. It is a subject for which the studies arising out of his popular and interesting "History of Dublin" had prepared him; and the portion of his task comprised in the goodly volume now before us, although it

s the part in which he will have derived least assistance from his earlier inquiries, bears in every page the evidence of exact and laborious investigation of every source, whether printed or manuscript, of the general history of the country, as well as of the personal history of the individual governors. The volume now completed comprises certainly the more difficult, as well as the less interesting, portion of the series: but it exhibits so much learning; such a familiarity with the original records, as well as with the historians whether ancient or modern; such a power of constructing an attractive story out of a mass of obscure and apparently uninteresting facts and authorities;-that his book will go far to redeem even the earlier period of the post-invasion history of Ireland from its traditional character of dulness and monotony. And when we recall the liveliness and brilliancy of the sketches of Dublin life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with which his "History of Dublin" abounds, we cannot help anticipating for the present work, when it shall have been completed by the addition of the Viceroyalties of the sixteenth and later centuries, a popularity and a success new indeed in the annals of the historical literature of Ireland.

com

The present volume (which, with its appendix of annotations, contains above six hundred octavo pages) brings the history only to the close of the reign of Henry VII., mencing with Hugh de Lacy,* and ending with that famous Earl of Kildare, of whom, when his accusers told the king, Henry VII., that "all Ireland could not rule this earl," the king replied, "Then in good faith this earl shall rule all Ireland."

As to this early period, considerable obscurity exists, as well regarding the title, as the nature and extent of the authority, of the king's representative in Ireland; and Mr. Gilbert has done well in selecting the name of Viceroy, which, while it may appear to have been official, yet may not only cover by its generality the various titles which were borne at different periods by the English governors, but may also be consistent with every form of commission and every degree of authority with which they were at any time invested. The earliest title which the English representative in Ireland bore appears to have been that of "Custos,"

* Mr. Gilbert, writes Hugues de Lasci, following in this and in many other names, as De Curci, Fitz-Estevene, Mont-Marreis, Lorcan O'Tuatheil (Lawrence O'Toole), &c., the old Norman or Celtic orthography. We shall retain, except in extracts, the popular modernized forms of the several

names.