ears, will have to pass before as sound books will be written again, or deeds done with as much pith and mettle in them. "The something deeper and truer" would be more easily desired than found, but the words well convey the inflation with which the Catholic revivalists were going to their work. Our age perhaps has a mistaken idea of its consequence. All its geese are swans, and every new enemy is a monster never before heard of. The Edinburgh Review and Brougham, and Mackintosh and the Reform Ministry, and Low Church philosophy and the London University were not so very terrible. But as the windmills were giants to the knight of La Mancha, so the Whigs of those days were to young Oxford apostles the forerunners of Antichrist. Infidelity was rushing in upon us. Achilles must rise from his tent, and put on his celestial armor. The Church must reassert herself in majesty to smite and drive back the proud aggressive intellect.

The excitement was unnecessary. The sun was not extinguished because a cloud was over its face. Custom, tradition, conservative nstinct, and natural reverence for the truth handed down to it would have sufficed more than amply to meet such danger as then existed. In a little while The Ediburgh became the most orthodox of journals, and Brougham an innocent apostle of natural theology. Liberalism let well alone would have subsided into its place. But it was not so to be. Achilles was roused in his wrath; and the foe whom he was to destroy was roused in turn, and has not been destroyed. The two parties were the counterparts one of the other; each was possessed with the same conceit of superiority to their fathers and grandfathers; each in its way supposed that it had a mission to reconstruct society. The Radicals believed in the rights of man, the progress of the species and intellectual emancipation. To them our ancestors were children, and the last-born generation were the ancient sages, for they had inherited the accumulated experience of all past time. Established institutions represented only ignorance. The older they were, the less fitted they were, from the nature of the case, for modern exigencies. In talk of this kind there was one part sense and nine parts nonsense. Oxford school confronted it with a position equally extravagant. In their opinion truth was to be found only in the earliest fathers of the Church; the nearer that we could reach back to them, the purer we should find the stream. The bottom of the mischief was the modern notion of liberty, the supposed right of men to think for themselves and act for themselves. Their business was to submit to authority, and the seat of authority was the Church. The false idea had made its appearance in England first under the Plantagenet kings, in the Constitutions of Clarendon--the mortmain and premunire statutes. It had produced the Reformation, it lind produced Puritanism and regicide. It now threatened the destruction of all that good men ought to value. The last century had been blind; our

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own fathers had been blind; but the terrible reality could no longer be concealed. The arch enemy was at the door. The test act was repealed. Civil disabilities were taken off Dissenters. Brougham had announced that henceforth no man was to suffer for his religious opinions. Irish bishoprics were being suppressed. Lord Gray had warned the bishops in England to set their houses in order, and was said to have declared in private that the Church was a mare's nest. Catholic emancipation was equally monstrous. Romanists, according to the theory as it then stood, might be Churchmen abroad, but they were Dissenters in England and Ireland. War was to be declared at once-war to the knife against the promoters of these enormities. History was reconstructed for us. I had learned, like other Protestant children, that the Pope was Antichrist, and that Gregory VII. had been a special revelation of that being. I was now taught that Gregory VII. was a saint. I had been told to honor the Reformers. The Reformation became the great schism, Cranmer a traitor, and Latimer a vulgar ranter. Milton was a name of horror, and Charles I. was canonized and spoken of as the holy and blessed martyr St. Charles. I asked once whether the Church of England was able properly to create a saint. St. Charles was immediately pointed out to me. Similarly we were to admire the nonjurors, to speak of James VII. instead of the Pretender, to look for Antichrist not in the Pope but in Whigs and revolutionists, and all their works. Henry of Exeter, so famous in those days, announced once in my hearing that the Court of Rome had regretted the emancipation act as a victory of latitudinarianism. I suppose he believed what he was saying.

Under the sad conditions of the modern world the Church of England was the rock of salvation. The Church, needing only to be purged of the elements of Protestantism, which had stolen into her, could then, with her apostolic succession, her bishops, her priests, and her sacraments, rise up, and claim and exercise her lawful authority over all persons in all departments. She would have but to show herself in her proper majesty, as in the great days when she fought with kings and emperors, and now, as then, the powers of darkness would spread their wings and fly away to their own place.

These were the views which we used to hear in our home-circle when the tracts were first beginning. We had been bred, all of us, Tories of the old school. This was Toryism in ecclesiastical costume. My brother was young, gifted, brilliant, and enthusiastic. No man is ever good for much who has not been carried off his feet by enthusiasm between twenty and thirty; but it needs to be bridled and bitted, and my brother did not live to be taught the difference between fact and speculation. Taught it he would have been, if time had been allowed him. No one ever recognized facts more loyally than he when once he saw them. This I am sure of, that

when the intricacies of the situation pressed upon him, when it became clear to him that if his conception of the Church and of its rights and position was true at all, it was not true of the Church of England in which he was born, and that he must renounce his theory as visionary or join another communion, he would not have "minimized" the Roman doctrines that they might be more easy for him to swallow, or have explained away propositions till they meant anything or nothing. Whether he would have swallowed them or not I cannot say; I was not eighteen when he died, and I do not so much as form an opinion about it; but his course, whatever it was, would have been direct and straightforward; he was a man far more than a theologian; and if he had gone, he would have gone with his whole heart and conscience, unassisted by subtleties and nice distinctions. It is, however, at least, equally possible that he would not have gone at all. He might have continued to believe that all authority was derived from God, that God would have His will obeyed in this world, and that the business of princes and ministers was to learn what that will was. But prophets have passed for something as well as priests in making God's will known; and Established Church priesthoods have not been generally on particularly good terms with prophets. The only occasion on which the two orders are said to have been in harmony was when the prophets prophesied lies, and the priests bore rule in their name.

The goal, however, towards which he and his friends were moving had not come in sight in my brother's life-time. He went forward, hesitating at nothing, taking the fences as they came, passing lightly over them all, and sweeping his friends along with him. He had the contempt of an intellectual aristocrat for private judgment and the rights of a man. In common things a person was a fool who preferred his own judgment to that of an expert. Why, he asked, should it be wise to follow private judgment in religion? As to rights, the right of wisdom was to rule, and the right of ignorance was to be ruled; but he belonged himself to the class whose business was to order than to obey. If his own bishop had interfered with him, his theory of episcopal authority would have been found inapplicable in that particular instance.

So the work went on. The Church was not to be witness only to religious truth; it was first to repent of its sins, disown its Protestantism, and expel the Calvinistic poison; then it was to control polities and govern all opinion. Murmurs arose from time to time amoug the disciples. If the Reformation was to be called an act of schism, were we not on the road back to Rome? Shrewd observers were heard to say that the laity would never allow the Church of England to get on stilts. The Church was grafted on upon the state, and the state would remain master; let Oxford say what it pleased. But the party of the movement were to grow and fulfill their destiny. They were to produce results of incalculable consequence, yet re

sults exactly opposite to what they designed and anticipated. They were to tear up the fibers of custom by which the Establishment as they found it was maintaining its quiet influence. They were to raise discussions round its doctrines, which degraded accepted truths into debatable opinions. They were to alienate the conservative instincts of the country, fill the clergy once more with the conceits of a priesthood, and convert them into pilot fish for the Roman missionaries. Worst of all, by their attempts to identify Christianity with the Catholic system, they provoked doubts, in those whom they failed to persuade, about Christianity itself. But for the Oxford movement, skepticism might have continued a harmless speculation of a few philosophers. By their perverse alternative, either the Church or nothing, they forced honest men to say, Let it be nothing, then, rather than what we know to be a lie. A vague misgiving now saturates our popular literature, our lecture rooms and pulpits echo with it; and the Established religion, protected no longer from irreverent questions, is driven to battle for its existence among the common subjects of secular investigation.

Truth will prevail in the end, and the trial, perhaps, must have come at one time or other. But it need not have come when it did. There might have been peace in our days, if Achilles had remained in his tent.

You shall have the story of it all in the following letters.-JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, in Good Words.

TAXATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

THERE is probably no country in the world in which the people pay their taxes more easily and more cheerfully than they do in the United States. This is as true now as it was before the war. There seems to be a general impression that since this is a free country, in which the people tax themselves, everything must be for the best. Individuals grumble sometimes, and certain cities have acquired a bad reputation, but in general the people give comparatively little attention to the subject. There are men who have made it a study, but they have not yet acquired any great influence in the country. We need a Gladstone here to make it popular. The subject is made difficult and complicated by the fact that separate taxes are assessed by the nation, the state, the county, the town, and sometimes the district. Some of these are direct, others indirect. In some towns the taxes are very small, in others they are enormous. Then again there is no general principle of valuation, and in some places personal property is not taxed at all. The common mind cannot grasp the subject in all its bearings. But few men know how much they do pay, and since the war extravagant expenditure seems to have excited little attention. I can remember when economy in the ad

ministration of the government was one of the most common party watchwords, but it seems to have gone out of fashion. The nation is proud of the reduction of the national debt, and of the financial administration at Washington. It is proud of the abounding prosperity of the country, which makes it possible to treat the subject of taxation with indifference. It looks with pity upon the overtaxed people of Europe, and fancies that because it does not waste its substance on royalty and standing armies it can afford to be careless of other things. The time is at band when it will be roused to look the question of taxation in the face; but it is not the purpose of this article to discuss the possibilities of the future, or to instruct Americans as to their true interests. I propose to do nothing more than to give as clear an idea as possible to English readers of the system of taxation and public expenditure in the United States. To avoid confusion, and to bring the article within reasonable limits, I shall confine my statement in regard to state, county, and town taxation to the single state of Massachusetts.

As this is a popular rather than a scientific review of this subject, I may be excused for calling attention at the outset to some elementary principles. A comparison is often made of the taxation in different countries by dividing the total revenue of each country by the number of its inhabitants. In this way Fuad Pacha, in the first Budget of the Turkish Empire, issued under the patronage of Sir Henry Bulwer, represented the taxation as very light and capable of indefinite increase, as it amounted to only six shillings a head, while in fact it was far more difficult for the people to pay this sum than it was for the English nation to pay fifty shillings. The power of a people to pay taxes depends not upon number but upon wealth and income. Turkey has been ruined by its system of taxation, notwithstanding the small amount per head reported by Fuad Pacha. The great principle of the right of the people to tax themselves is too well understood to need illustration, but in writing of taxation in America we cannot avoid recalling the fact that it was the attempt to tax the Colonies without their consent which led to the rebellion against George III. and the independence of the United States. "No taxation without representation was the first war-cry of America.

The right of a state to tax its citizens rests upon its sovereign power to control, within constitutional limits, all persons and things within its territory. This right must be exercised for the common good, and nothing more be taken from the people than their good demands. Frugality is as essential for a state as for an individual, and extravagant public expenditure is sure to demoralize the people, discourage industry, and diminish the wealth of the country. On the other hand, so far as public expenditure tends to encourage the industry, promote the wealth, and develop the intelligence of the people, it is a blessing, and taxation to this extent a necessity.