END.
There is no moral that can be drawn from my fall applicable to the present state of English politics. This may be seen indeed from the comments of the only three English papers of last Friday and Saturday that noticed it. TheMorning Advertiser, which, Tory as it is, prefers Radical-Orangeism to Tory-Popery (and beer to both), classed me along with the Tichborne claimant as a victim to the Jesuits, whereas I wasn’t a victim at all; and if I had been, should have been a victim to my own obstinacy, as I certainly could have stopped at Monaco if I had pleased to do so—either by raising a popular clamour against the priests, which wouldhave been immoral, or by accepting Père Pellico’s conditions, which would have been humiliating. TheNational Reformer, the organ of Mr. Bradlaugh, patted me on the back as an ill-used republican; and theStandardsaid that my fall showed the absolute necessity of maintaining the 25th clause of the Education Act intact, which is what I could not for the life of me see. On the contrary, so opposite are the conditions of England and of Monaco, that what would have succeeded in one would have failed in the other as a matter of course. In England you have a divided church; an increasing and active though still little numerous Catholic body; a materialistic world of fashion which goes alternately to Mr. Wilkinson and Canon Liddon, Mr. Haweis and Mr. Stopford Brooke, and does not believe a word that any of them says—unless it is Mr. Haweis, but then, doctrinally speaking, he says nothing.You have the old nonconformist bodies, able and powerful still, though less powerful than before 1868; and you have the Wesleyans, pulpy but rich. Outside of them all you have people who believe two-thirds of them in the Bible pure and simple, but with prominence given in their minds to the communistic side of the New Testament, and one-third in nothing unless it is Mr. Charles Watts, Mr. Austin Holyoake, and Mr. Bradlaugh. The most flourishing publications in your country areZadkiel’s AlmanacandReynolds’ Newspaper, belonging to the opposite poles, but equally at war with all that is most powerful and rich and respectable in your society. What resemblance is there in this state of things, full of life but wholly wanting in unity, to that at Monaco, dead, but single in faith? At Monaco all that believed—and most believed—were earnest Catholics, wieldedfor political purposes by one man. Had my parliamentary scheme been carried out the cumulative vote would have been inoperative, and Mr. Hare had he been there would have hanged himself from the castle flag-staff, for there was no minority. As in East Prussia the peasants, suddenly presented with universal suffrage by Von Bismarck and asked for whom they would vote, said with one accord, “For the King.”—“You can’t”—“Then for the Crown Prince”—so at Monaco the population would have replied “for Père Pellico.”
All the same there is a moral to be drawn from my fall, and it applies to the French Republic. I conjure my friends of the French radical party not to let radicalism in France be bound up with indecent speeches made over the graves at “civil funerals,” or with the denial of the Immortality of the Soul. In England, inspite of occasional attempts of theStandardto couple “atheists” and “republicans,” no such warning is needed; but in France it comes almost too late. No system of government can be permanent which has for its opponents all the women in the country, and for supporters only half the men; and any party will have for opponents all the women which couples the religious question with the political and the social, and raises the flag of materialism. Women are not likely to abandon the idea of a compensation in the next world for the usage which too many of them meet with in this.
As for my failure at Monaco, I went too fast. I agree with Mr. Freeman, your English historian, that a sudden breach in the continuity of national institutions is an evil, and that “the witness of history teaches us that, in changing a long established form of executive government,the more gently and warily the work is done the more likely it is to be lasting.” I could have stopped at Monaco by humbling myself, but at all events I went too fast. If they take me back, which I really think for their own sakes they had better do, I will go much slower. But I have no time to write any more, for I have been put without training into the first boat, and we are to stop up during the greater portion of the Easter “vac.,” as we have a capital chance of “keeping head.”