Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The Conservatives would not dis avow protective ideas; the Whigs would not give up the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. No statesman, therefore, could form a Government without having to count on two great parties being against him on one question or the other. All manner of delays took place. The Duke of Wellington was consulted; Lord Lansdowne was consulted. The wit of man could suggest nothing satisfactory. The conditions for extracting any satisfactory solution did not exist. There was nothing better to be done than to ask the ministers who had resigned to resume their places and muddle on as they best could. It is not enough to say that there was nothing better to be done: there was nothing else to be done. They were, at all events, still administering the affairs of the country, and no one would relieve them of the task. Ipso facto they had to stay.

The ministers returned to their places and resumed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. It was then that they made the change in its conditions which has already been mentioned, and thus created new argument against them on both sides of the House of Commons. They struck out of the bill every word that might appear like an encroachment on the Roman Church within the sphere of its own ecclesiastical operations, and made it simply an Act against the public and ostentatious assumption of illegal titles. The bill was wrangled over until the end of June, and then a large number, some seventy, of the Irish Catholic members publicly seceded from the discussion, and announced that they would take no further part in the divisions. On this some of the strongest opponents of the Papal aggression, led by Sir Frederick Thesiger, afterward Lord Chelmsford, brought in a series of resolutions intended to make the bill more stringent than it had been even as originally introduced. The object of the resolutions was principally to give the power of prosecuting and claiming a penalty to anybody, provided he obtained the consent of the law-officers of the Crown, and to make penal the introduction of bulls. The Government opposed the introduction of these amendments, and were put in the awkward position of having to act as antagonists of the party in the country who represented the strongest hostility to the Papal aggression. Thus, for the moment, the

author of the Durham letter was seemingly converted into a champion of the Roman Catholic side of the controversy. His championship was ineffective. The Irish members took no part in the controversy, and the Government were beaten by the ultra-Protestant party on every division. Lord John Russell was bitterly taunted by various of his opponents, and was asked with indignation why he did not withdraw the bill when it ceased to be any longer his own scheme. He probably thought by this time that it really made little matter what bill was passed so long as any bill was passed, and that the best thing to do was to get the controversy out of the way by any process. He did not, therefore, withdraw the bill, although Sir Frederick Thesiger carried all his stringent clauses. When the measure came on for a third reading, Lord John Russell moved the omis sion of the added clauses, but he was defeated by large majorities. The bill was done with so far as the House of Commons was concerned. After an eloquent and powerful protest from Mr. Gladstone against the measure, as one disparaging to the great principle of religious freedom, the bill was read a third time. It went up to the House of Lords, was passed there without alteration, although not without opposition, and soon after received the Royal assent.

This was practically the last the world heard about it. In the Roman Church everything went on as before. The new Cardinal Archbishop still called himself Archbishop of Westminster; some of the Irish prelates made a point of ostentatiously using their territorial titles, in letters addressed to the ministers themselves. The bitterness of feeling which the Papal aggression and the legislation against it had called up did not indeed pass away very soon. It broke out again and again, sometimes in the form of very serious riot. It turned away, at many an election, the eyes and minds of the constituencies from questions of profound and genuine public interest to dogmatic controversy and the hates of jarring sectaries. It furnished political capital for John Sadleir and his band, and kept them flourishing for awhile; and it set up in the Irish popular mind a purely imaginary figure of Lord John Russell, who became regarded as the malign enemy of the Catholic faith and of all religious liberty. But, save for the quarrels aroused at the time,

the act of the Pope and the Act of Parliament were alike dead letters. Nothing came of the Papal bull. England was not restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London retained their places and their spiritual jurisdiction as before. Cardinal Wiseman remained only a prelate of Roman Catholics. On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was never put in force. Nobody troubled about it.

Many years after, in 1871, it was quietly repealed. It died in such obscurity that the outer public hardly knew whether it was above ground or below. Certainly, if the whole agitation showed that England was thoroughly Protestant, it also showed that English Protestants had not much of the persecuting spirit. They had no inclination to molest their Catholic neighbors, and only asked to be let alone. The Pope, they believed, had insulted them; they resented the insult: that was all.

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CHAPTER XXI.

THE EXHIBITION IN HYDE PARK.

THE first of May, 1851, will always be memorable as the day on which the Great Exhibition was opened in Hyde Park. The year 1851, indeed, is generally associated in the memory of Englishmen with that first Great International Exhibition. As we look back upon it pleasant recollections come up of the great glass palace in Hyde Park, the palace upspringing from the verdant sod," which Thackeray described so gracefully and with so much poetic feeling. The strange crowds of the curious of all provinces and all nations are seen again. The marvellous and at that time wholly unprecedented collection of the products of all countries; the glitter of the Koh-i-Noor, the palm-trees beneath the glass roof, the leaping fountains, the statuary, the ores, the ingots, the huge blocks of coal, the lace-work, the loom-work, the Oriental stuffs-all these made on the mind of the ordinary inexpert a confused impression of lavishness, and profusion, and order, and fantastic beauty which was then wholly novel, and could hardly be recalled except in mere

memory. The novelty of the experiment was that which made it specially memorable. Many exhibitions of a similar kind have taken place since. Some of these far surpassed that of Hyde Park in the splendor and variety of the collections brought together. Two of them at least-those of Paris in 1867 and 1878-were infinitely superior in the array and display of the products, the dresses, the inhabitants of far-divided countries. But the impression which the Hyde Park Exhibition made upon the ordinary mind was like that of the boy's first visit to the play-an impression never to be equalled, no matter by what far superior charm of spectacle it may in after-years again and again be followed.

Golden, indeed, were the expectations with which hopeful people welcomed the Exhibition of 1851. It was the first organized to gather all the representatives of the world's industry into one great fair; and there were those who seriously expected that men who had once been prevailed upon to meet together in friendly and peaceful rivalry would never again be persuaded to meet in rivalry of a fiercer kind. It seems extraordinary now to think that any sane person can have indulged in such expectations, or can have imagined that the tremendous forces generated by the rival interests, ambitions, and passions of races could be subdued into harmonious co-operation by the good sense and good feeling born of a friendly meeting. The Hyde Park Exhibition, and all the exhibitions that followed it, have not as yet made the slightest perceptible difference in the warlike tendencies of nations. The Hyde Park Exhibition was often described as the festival to open the long reign of Peace. It might, as a mere matter of chronology, be called without any impropriety the festival to celebrate the close of the short reign of Peace. From that year, 1851, it may be said fairly enough that the world has hardly known a week of peace. The coup d'état in France closed the year. The Crimean War began almost immediately after, and was followed by the Indian Mutiny, and that by the war between France and Austria, the long civil war in the United States, the Neapolitan enterprises of Garibaldi, and the Mexican intervention, until we come to the war between Austria, Prussia, and Denmark; the short, sharp struggle for German supremacy between Austria and Prussia, the war between

France and Germany, and the war between Russia and Turkey. Such were, in brief summary, the events that quickly followed the great inaugurating Festival of Peace in 1851. Of course those who organized the Great Exhibition were in no way responsible for the exalted and extravagant expectations which were formed as to its effects on the history of the world and the elements of human nature. But there was a great deal too much of the dithyrambic about the style in which many writers and speakers thought fit to describe the Exhibition. With some of these all this was the result of genuine enthusiasm. In other instances the extravagance was indulged in by persons not habitually extravagant, but, on the contrary, very sober, methodical, and calculating, who by the very fact of their possessing eminently these qualities were led into a total misconception of the influence of such assemblages of men. These calm and wise persons assumed that because they themselves, if shown that a certain course of conduct was for their material and moral benefit, would instantly follow it and keep to it, it must therefore follow that all peoples and states were amenable to the same excellent principle of selfdiscipline. War is a foolish and improvident, not to say immoral and atrocious, way of trying to adjust our disputes, they argued; let peoples far divided in geographical situation be only brought together and induced to talk this over, and see how much more profitable and noble is the rivalry of peace in trade and commerce, and they will never think of the coarse and brutal arbitrament of battle any more. Not a few others, it must be owned, indulged in the highflown glorification of the reign of peace to come because the Exhibition was the special enterprise of the Prince Consort, and they had a natural aptitude for the production of courtly strains. But among all these classes of pæan-singers it did happen that a good deal of unmerited discredit was cast upon the results of the Great Exhibition, for the enterprise was held responsible for illusions it had of itself nothing to do with creating, and disappointments which were no consequence of any failure on its part. Even upon trade and production it is very easy to exaggerate the beneficent influences of an international exhibition. But that such enterprises have some beneficial influence is beyond doubt; and