The Sun.
London, England, 1867-08-26 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIME;S.—Even in the dulness of the present season,
a Spanish insurrection excites only a very languid
interest. However sorely the world may
.be suffer-
ing from the dearth of stirring news, it is impossible I
to dignify any disturbance in the Peninsula into an
event. A great general convulsion, or, as they call
it, a " cataclysm," is one of those contingencies to
which people in Madrid, cr people attaching import-
ance to Madrid politics, have been looking for ward
to for years. It has been so long a time " inevitably
corning" that we may almost begin to doubt
whether it will ever come. An inroad, we are told,
has been made by old rebel chiefs into Spain.
Pierrard, Pajol, Contreras, and other Progresista
Generals are reported to be at the head of armed
bands. Catalonia is said to be on fire ; and the
conflagration is described as spreading all over the
mountainous districts of Aragon, Navarre, and the
Basque Provinces. In sympathy with the North,
Valencia and Andalusia are said to be heaving con-
vulsively, and the thrill of revolutionary excitement
to have reached the borders of Estremadura. Some-
how we fancy there is nothing in all this we have
not often heard before. It strikes us as the old
story told over and over again. Such are the
usual " things of Spain," and, together with the
intelligence of the revolt, we are prepared to hear of
rails torn up, wires cut down, mails not arriving,
and the Government at Madrid proclaiming the
state of siege in the same breath as it assures us
that "the whole kingdom is in the enjoyment of
the most profound tranquillity." As we know, too,
beforehand the whole plot and denouement of the
sorry drama, we know the contrast between the
broad farce and the deep tragedy of its various
episodes. We can, for instance, appreciate the
humour of Don Antonio Maria Garrigo,
Governor of Vitoria, who brags of his " energetic
strength of will" to put :down riots, of which, as
we learn from himself, " his loyal Basques
are incapable," or that of Don Pedro Estevan, Go-
vernor of Gerona, who describes his province as
" overrun by two bands ten men strong, and the
army in eager pursuit." We cannot, however, help
looking upon these broad jokes as the prelude to that
wholesale shooting and transportation of prisoners
amid which the curtain generally falls on the Spanish
political stage. We can hardly say whether we
should hope or fear the success of such attempts as
the one which has just now apparently failed.
We do not know of any change at all likely to
benefit such a country as Spain. That the Govern-
ment of Queen Isabella could not be worse is uni-
versally admitted, but this does not imply that any
other possible Government would be better. Prim,
with his faithful and gallant Milans del Bosch, is
said to be hovering on the frontier, ready to head
the movement on the first turn of luck. O'Donnell,
Serrano, Zabala, and Echague pre at Biarritz,
watching events—i.e., waiting to see if others will
get the chestnuts for. them out of the fire. But,
with the exception of Prim, there is no candidate for
power in Spain who has not been tried—long and
repeatedly tried—and he must be a very sanguin e
Spaniardindeed who would risk life or limb, or pro-
perty.or personal freedom, for the mere chance of
substituting the men of O'Donnell's Union Liberal
for Narvaez's Moderadoes or Nocedal's Neo-Cat o -
licos. Fifty years' unavailing and disastrous expe-
riment must wear out even a Spaniard's proverbial
constancy, and shake his faith in the use of revolu-
tions. The trade of getting up and pulling down
Governments ends by being left to the few adven-
turers who know how to turn it to good purpose for
themselves ; and it is now impossible, if, indeed, it
was not so at all times, to get the mass of the Spanish
people to take half as much interest in a pronuncia-
mzento as they would in a bull fight or in the lottery.
There are t wo maxims which the vicissitudes of the last
half century have deeply rivited in the hearts of Sancho
Panza's shrewd and prudent countrymen ; the one
that they must not hope for good government; the
other, that any 'Government is good enough for
those who do not meddle with it. It is this con-
viction on the part of the multitude of the danger,
no less than of the inutility, of interference in
public affairs, which makes political change in Spaiin
so frequent., and yet deprives it of allresults.
community is a m.:re theatre, with millions of pas-
sive, silent, and, on the whole, unsympathising
spectators in the pit, and scores of more or less
unprincipled actors and mountebanks on the stage.
But ho.vever wretched the condition of Spain
may appear to us, no consciousness of its misery or
degradation afflicts the Spaniards. Great content-
ment may be found compatible with very little well-
being ; and a long spell of peace and even such
order as those truculent Captains-General and their
Civil Guards are able to enforce is not without its
influence on the material prosperity of the nation.
Good, had, or indifferent as the, condition of the
masses may be, its improvement has hitherto never
been th 6 object, we will not say of the endeavours,
but even of the professions of any man in Spain.
Party names and party leaders there are, but
hardly a party measure. The insurgent bands now
in the field shout " Viva Prim 1" but we have not
forgotten how Prim himself eighteen months ago
crossed the. country from end to end without gain-
ing a single recruit. It was only " Prim instead of
O'Donnell," as it was before O'Donnell instead
of Narvaez, or O'Donnell instead of Espartero.
" The good things of- the State for self and friends",
is the flag round which Spanish politicians, .
or military, are ready to rally. The man in power
has batons and grand crosses and titles to bestow,
and he has on. his side general* and colonel*—the

would-be marshals and dukes. His opponent
has to seek his partisans among sergeants and
corporals, and to dazzle them with the promise of a
sub-lieutenant's epaulettes. Marshals and dukes
have possession on their side ; corporals and
sergeants have numbers. Sometimes it is the Ins,
sometimes the Outs that have it ; it is a game of
endless vicissitude, but, whoever may be the
winner, it is on the nation that the costs invariably
fall. There are bold innovators, indeed, who are
supposed to harbour in their hearts anti-dynastic
tendencies; and every one feels that little good can
come of a Duke of Tetuan, of a Duke of Valencia,
or even of a Marquis de los Castillejos, so long as
the Court is a prey to the intrigues of nuns and
confessors, under whose influence the sturdiest
Minister must bend or break. Choose any three
honest and intelligent Spaniards, no matter of
what party, and they will be unanimous in their
assertion that there can be no chance for their
country so long as the present Sovereign or any of
her family is allowed to occupy the throne. " Long
live the Queen !" however, is the motto hitherto
invariably borne aloft on every insurgent banner ;
whether sincerely or hypocritilally, every party
leader takes his start upon a great flourish of
loyalty. Nor can we wonder at this, for among the
lower classes, whatever opinion they may entertain,
and also openly express, as to the public and private
virtues of the Queen, the mere fact that she is
as they believe, " very Spanish and very Catholic"
overrules all other considerations. Anxious as all
feeling men must be to see the end of the misrule
which has so long weighed upon Spain, it is very
-difficult to point out the means by which the nation
may be made aware of the evil, and almost impcs-
sible to name the men at all able or willing to work
out the remedy.

THE " WESTMINSTER GAZETTE" ON NEWDEGATE
REDIVIVITS. On Friday evening Mr. Newdegate
made a long speech without motion, by way of
" calling the attention of the House to ertain cir-
cumstances connected with" the Committee on
the Ecclesiastical Titles and Roman Catholic
Relief Acts. It was the first appearance for two
years of the hon. gentleman on any subject con-
nected with Catholic affairs, and he spoke with
modest pride of the self-restraint he had practised
in order to achieve so long an abstinence from
what has been the main pursuit of his life. We
could give him more credit for his moderation if
we did not retain quite so lively a recollection of
his past favours towards us, and especially of his
last performances, which, it will be remembered,
were in the character of an assailant of convents
and monasteries. We cannot quite forget his blind
fury against the harmless nuns of Colwich, nor his
persistence in attributingto them practices of secret
cruelty and wickedness, charges in support of which
he was unable to adduce even the faintest scintilla
of proof ; nor lastly, his dogged refusal to accept
the invitation of the Bishop of Birmingham and
other gentlemen to inspect for himself the secret
dungeons and torture chambers. After that crucial
test of his fidelity to the delusions which he pro-
fessed to hold as the sacred dogma of his No-
Popery persuasion, we should have thought that,
satis sibi, sails glorix, might thenceforward hAve
been his motto ; and that, having reaped so little
credit on the field he had claimed as his own, he
might have quitted for ever the arena, and allowed
the mantle of his Protestant zealotry to descend
gently on the shoulders of his Liberal colleague
and successor, the member for Peterborough. As
he has reappeared, however, though at the eleventh
hour of the session, we will pay a tribute of such
respect as we can render to an old and indomitable
(we wish we could say a fair and honourable)
opponent. We will give some account of his
speech. Mr. Newdegate is, it seems, dissatisfied
both with the report the committee and with the
conduct of the Government in relation to it. He
thinks that the Government pressed the matter on
unduly, in spite of the lateness of the session, and
in spite of the indifference of the House. He
says it was not without repeated efforts and sundry
" counts out," that a committee could be appointed
at all. " It was only owing to the perseverance of
the hon. member for Meath (Mr. M'Evoy), and one
or two other Roman Catholic members, supported
by the hon. member for Louth (Mr. Fortescue),
and countenanced by the Government, that the motion
was agreed to." Now, if the Government did
countenance the measure, it must have been be-
cause they were so profoundly convinced of its
urgent necessity that the extreme inconvenience
of the time, and the opposition of their own party
were outweighed by a. sense of their duty to the
country. It is, then, with a very ill grace that Mr.
Newdegate, who is a Conservative himself, attacks
his own party on this score. He was, however,
contradicted by Mr. Whalley, whci asserted, in op-
position to his leader, that the Government did not
countenance the Bill, as, indeed, was self-evident;
for had it done so the Attorney-General for Ireland,
who was on the committee, would not have absented
himself from the division, and so have allowed the
finding of the committee to be partially neutralized
by au equality of votes on either side. Mr. New-
degate endeavoured to disprove the statement of
Mr. Hope Scott and the other witnesses, that the
jurisdiction claimed and exercised by the Catholic
bishops is purely spiritual ; but his reasoning on the
point was so circuitous (not to say unintelligible)
that we despair of following it. He read volu-
minous extracts from the evidence before the Com-
mittee • statements which we can quite believe may
have been irritating to his own prejudices, but
which had no perceptible bearing on the point he
undertook to prove. The replies of Bishop Mo-
riarty, cited by Mr. Newdegate, went to show that
in countries where the Catholic Church is the
State religion the authorities thereof are seconded
by the secular arm, and that where the Church
possesses no secular power, there (as in England
or Ireland), her power is purely spiritual. The
propositions are identical or convertible, and in-
disputable ; but their bearing on the proposed re-
peal of the Titles Act is not apparent. What is but
too apparent is, the animus of Mr. Newdegate. He
lets everybody see, through the gaps or chinks in
his logic, that his real grievance is that the Catholics
cannot be forced penally into a recognition of, and
submission to, the " Church as bylaw Established."
He is indignant that we will not bow the rn knee
before the golden image of Anglican supremacy.
Well, no more do the Dissenters, and he is not an
assailant of theirs. True, but the Dissenters are
stationary ; they do not grow ; they have within
their body the seeds of weakness and of dissolution
by their endless and self-reproducing divisions.
But Catholiciim is progressive, whenever it is not
persecuted, and even when it is. It shows signs of
life. It gets on. It is united. It is consistent and
unalterable. So Mr. Newdegate read to the
House of Commons an address by their predeces-
sors of 1621, to the " British Solomon," in which
those characteristics of " Popery" are stated as
an enemy would state them, and evidently point
at the adoption of fresh penal measures, in addition
to those already in action, which deluged the cen-
tury with the blood of English and Irish Catholics.
But Mr. Newdegate reminds us of the sleepers who
slept into another generation. He has lost his
reckoning. He needs to be awakened and reminded
that the times are altered. When that address
was presented to James 1., all non-conformity
with, or non-recognition of, the established
hierarchy and the royal supremacy Was a crime at
law, partaking both of heresy and of treason, and
was actually visited with the severest penalties of
both offences. Now, liberty of conscience is firmly
established. Now, milder principles prevail ; con-
formity is no longer a loyal duty, and Catholic
liberty is as firmly established by law as is Anglican
supremacy. It is, then, futile to quote the obsolete
ravings of effete bigotry. ehey have no bearing
on the question now asked—" Shall Catholics, or
shall they not, be allowed to have their bishops
legally, after it has been proved by sixteen years
'of ineffective but irritating legislation in the op-
posite sense that, anyhow, they must have them ?
In the latter part of his discursive remarks, Mr.
Newdegate quoted largely from a recent article in
the Dublin Review, upon the Spanish Inquisition.
The writer appears to argue that the Holy See is
not answerable for the severities of the Spanish
Inquisition, which he seems to admit to have been
excessive. He says (as quoted by Mr. Newdegate)
—" The only check upon its cruelty was the de-
termined perseverance with which the Sovereign
Pontiffs interfered on behalf of mercy,
.and by
remonstrances, mandates of grace, and even
excommunication, moderated its excessive rigour."
The quotation made by Mr. Newdegate goes so far
as to say that " the despotism of the Inquisition,
from the time of its founda.idon until its existence
ended, aimed-at crushing time influence of Rome in
Spain." All this Mr. Newdegate calls " a mere
quibble arising from the differences between the
Papacy and the Dominican Order." The differences
were rather with the Spanish Monarchy and Go-
vernment, which were. at open war with the Pope.
But what is all this to the purpose ? Mr. N ewde-
gate's notion seems to be that the atrocities alleged
to have been committed, by the Inquisition have,
in some way, a connectio.a. -with the report to which
he was calling the attention of the House. He
did not exhibit very clearly that connection ; he
only said (as reported) that " The Roman Catholic
Church, while aiming at spiritual jurisdiction, would
bear no limit with patience.-to its temporal exten-
sion, and he thought there was a spirit in those
men which it would be u nsafe to loose." This,
however, is-an argument n of against the repeal of
the Titles Act, but against the repeal of the Penal
Laws and the Catholic Disf,bilities. Mr. Newdegate
seemed sensible of the we akness of his , arguents,
and of the anachronism an. 3 ill iberality of his posi-
tion. He said that he " most deeply lamented the
existence of religions aerenci3s, and sometimes he

felt bitterly when he was compelled by a sense of
duty to resist the encroachments proposed in that
House by the Roman Catholics." We believe Mr.
Newdegate to be, after all, a man of the nineteenth
century, like the rest of us ' • but he is committed
to a party and to a line of political action which
compel him to talk of encroachments that he well
knows have no sort of actuality, about which he
cannot even plausibly argue that they exist. There
are (as every one knows) no encroachments on the
part of Catholics. If there were, the resistance to
them would not be left to Parliamentary oddities
representing nobody but themselves, and the few
other crotchetty individuals, the score or two of
fussy parsons, and the hundred or two of good
-hearted, but credulous old ladies who make uP
the,rank and file of the No-Popery party. If there
were any real danger of "Papal Aggression "in
the sense that they mean it, no doubt the strength
of England would soon be aroused to sterner
action, the intellectual vigour, the moral energy,
and the physical stamina of the country would
bristle in battle array. Mr. Newdegate stands
pretty nearly alone when he professes to see such
a danger nigh at hand. Catholicism will shortly,
he thinks, unless his counsels are adopted, bring
about the state of things that existed in Spain
in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles
V. and of Philip 11. But that is a state of things
which did not exist at all universally, even in the
most palmy days of Catholicism, and notably never
in England, Scotland, or in Ireland, for even in
Queen Mary's reign the bishops were but the un-
willing agents of the lay government in the perse-
cution of Protestants. There is plenty of docw
mentary evidence that Gardiner and Bonner -were
coerced by the Marquis of Winchester and the
Council to do what they did; and that they did 35,
little as possible. Those who can read history with
any superiority to the merest sectarian prejudices
know that the proceedings of Mary's reign exhibit
not the normal action of ecclesiastical authority,
but that which is of all things most opposite to it,
namely, the "wild justice" of a triumphant faction
which had itself suffered the extremity of cruelty",
injustice, and persecution in the two preceding
reigns. Cranmer suffered neither more nor less
than just what Ire had himself inflicted on both
Protestants and Catholics under Henry VIII., and
what he was preparing, by a more formal and
effective ordinance, to inflict on Catholics, when
his tenure of power was interrupted by the death
of Edward. VI. The circumstances of the time
were altogether exceptional. Before what gr'
Newdegate affects to fear could become a realitY,
in England, before the nation could be subjected
to the exercise of temporal power on the part ° f
the Church, the majority of Englishmen must, 0
course, have embraced cordially and enthusiasti-
cally the Catholic faith. That would be the pr d
mary and indispenSable condition. But Nvol-",,
that be all that would be necessary ? By „11"
means, for there are nations heartily and loyally
Catholic where the Church exercises no temper
power whatever. Wherever the Church has po.!;
sessed temporal rule, it has been brought about
such a singular combination of political circus"
stances and peculiarities of national character
.0-7,
do not exist anywhere now, and can hardly be
expected to exist in this country at any Ma'
,
period. We assert, then, that all these fears and
complaints about Catholic encroachment are the'
roughly insincere. They are nothing else but the
thin veil which sectarian jealousy assumes when
it desires to crush—or, if it cannot crush, to coerce'
impede, and annoy, a rival system with which I.r
feels it hopeless to compete in the field of f3ll,
argument, and in the comparative estimate whit
the public is forming upon what that public se%
for itself when it looks first on Establishmentariav
and then on Catholics.