Some argue that Leo the Thirteenth's good-will may be counted upon, because he is what he is. But we answer, that the beneficial exercise of friendliness must depend on the frank interchange of information and on mutual good understanding. This may be made clear by an illustration.

Only the other day a concordat was concluded between the Holy See and Portugal, in which the presentation to archiepiscopal and episcopal sees in British India was ceded to the Portuguese crown. It is quite imaginable that such a cession might under given circumstances gravely prejudice British interests in India. Had diplomatie relations existed between England and the Vatican, it is more than probable that such a concordat would never have been signed. We are always exposed to such events, on a larger or smaller scale, where there are no official relations. And though to-day they may carry no grave results, there is no saying when and where, in the rivalry of States and the thirst for conquest, the influence of the Holy See might not be manipulated to our disadvantage, because we had, through some puerile fear or insular bigotry, stood aloof from diplomatic relations which no one else is afraid of.

Lord John Russell established formal relations with Pius the Ninth; Mr. Gladstone's Government felt the need of renewing them. The present Government is understood to recognise their importance. Both parties therefore in the State are practically agreed. Diplo. matic relations, which simply mean openly acknowledged relations, are better than relations which are secret. Relations which are forbidden and yet resorted to, denied and yet accorded, are of all forms of friendly relations the very worst. They are open to perpetual suspicion.

It would not be respectful to ignore all objections. Limited space must be my apology for brevity. Argument would be wasted on those whose opposition to diplomatic relations with the Pope is grounded on their opinion that Christianity is an effete superstition, to be eliminated as speedily as possible from public life. They are logically consistent in holding that the Pope and Christianity stand or fall together. Philosophes they may be, but not practical politicians, whose business is to recognise and deal with the actual moral forces that govern mankind. A few Catholics are unfavourably disposed to diplomatic relations, because the Church within the British Empire is not dependent for its material maintenance upon the Civil Power as in France and Germany. They seem to think the safeguarding of ecclesiastical property the chief reason for diplomatic relations. The Holy See has a higher mission and motive than this for entering into direct relations with governments: namely, the promotion of harmony and co-operation between the civil and spiritual powers, based on the observance of the Christian law and the interests of Christian society. The rendering to Cæsar the

things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's, implies a double obligation and mutual relations on the respective representatives of Cæsar and of God. These are entered upon with the greatest advantage to both parties, when friendly, though independent relations are established diplomatically. They involve no surrender of rights, not even a concordat. Of course it is always for the Supreme Head, not for its subordinates, be they bishops or archbishops, to determine the policy and conduct of the Church in matters of graver moment, and therefore in causis majoribus a direct and straight forward communication between the civil power and the Holy See is always a legitimate and normal proceeding. But the opposition of Orangemen and of certain extreme sectarians who are haunted by vague fears of Rome, picturing to themselves a nuncio in London undermining the national religion and working out a policy of aggression, ought to be disarmed when they are assured that there need be no papal nuncio or envoy in London, and that satisfactory relations may be established on the basis of those existing between Berlin and the Pope: namely, that a representative of the Crown be accredited to the Vatican, and nothing more.

But whatever counsels may eventually prevail, the Christian people of England ought to face the fact that war against the Holy See in Italy is carried on, no longer in opposition to one or other particular doctrine, but in deep and bitter hatred of the Christian religion. The aim is to overthrow the whole fabric of Christianity, to renew the face of society, and to establish the worship of humanity. To accomplish this policy its leaders and apostles have declared that the Papacy must be destroyed as the keystone of the arch-that if they begin gradually with the temporal independence, it is in order to proceed the more surely to the destruction of the spiritual power of Christianity.

The proof of this assertion, the statement of the intolerable position of the Pope under the law of guarantees, and the suggestion of a solution which may secure the real independence of the Pontiff, without injury to the Italian Kingdom, must be left to the second part of this article.

HERBERT, Bishop of Salford.

A GREAT CONFESSION.

AMONG the many distinguished men who have contributed to the world's plebiscite in favour of the Darwinian hypothesis on the origin of species, there is no one name more distinguished than that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. He has pursued the idea of development with wonderful ingenuity through not a few of its thousand ramifications. He has carried it into philosophy and metaphysics. He has clothed it in numerous and subtle forms of speech, appealing to various faculties, and offering to each its appropriate objects of recognition. He is the author of that other phrase, the survival of the fittest,' which has almost superseded Darwin's own original phrase of natural selection.' Nothing could be happier than this invention for the purpose of giving vogue to whatever it might be supposed to mean. There is a roundness, neatness, and compactness about it, which imparts to it all the qualities of a projectile with immense penetrating power. It is a signal illustration of itself. It is the fittest of all phrases to survive. There is a sense of selfevident truth about it which fills us with satisfaction. It may perhaps be suspected sometimes of being a perfect specimen of the knowledge that puffeth up, because there is a suggestion about it —not easily dismissed-that it is tautological. The survival of the fittest may be translated into the survival of that which does actually survive. But the special power of it lies in this, that it sounds as if it expressed a true physical cause. It gets rid of that detestable reference to the analogies of mind which are inseparably associated with the phrase of natural selection. It is the great object of all true science-as some think-to eliminate these, and if possible to abolish them. Survival of the fittest seems to tell us not only of that which is, but of that which must be. It breathes the very air of necessity and of demonstration. Among the influences which have tended to popularise the Darwinian hypothesis, and to give it the imposing air of a complete and satisfactory explanation of all phenomena, it may well be doubted whether anything has been more powerful than the universal currency of this simple formula of expression.

Such is the authority who has lately contributed to this Review

two papers upon 'The Factors in Organic Evolution.' The very title is significant. The survival of the fittest is a cause which after all does not stand alone. It is not so complete as it has been assumed to be. There are in organic evolution more elements than one. There is concerned in it not one cause but a plurality of causes. A 'factor' is specially a doer. It is that which works and does. It is a word appropriated to the conception of an immediate, an efficient cause. And of these causes there are more than one. Neither natural selection nor survival of the fittest is of itself a sufficient explanation. They must be supplemented. There are other factors which must be admitted and confessed.

This is the first and most notable feature of Mr. Spencer's articles. But there is another closely connected with it, and that is the emphatic testimony he bears to the fact that the existing popular conception is unconscious of any defect or failing in the all-sufficiency of the Darwinian hypothesis. He speaks of the process brought into clear view by Mr. Darwin, and of those with whom he is about to argue, as men 'who conclude that taken alone it accounts for organic evolution.' In order to make his own coming contention clearer, he devises new forms of expression for defining accurately the hypothesis of Darwin. He calls it 'the natural selection of favourable variations.' Again and again he emphasises the fact that these variations, according to the theory, were spontaneous,' and that their utility was only fortunate,' or, in other words, accidental. He speaks of them as fortuitously arising;'2 and it is of this theory, so defined and rendered precise, that he admits that it is now commonly supposed to have been the sole factor' in the origin of species.

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It is surely worth considering for a moment the wonderful state. of mind which this declaration discloses. When Mr. Herbert Spencer here speaks of the 'popular belief, he is not speaking of the mob. He is not referring to any mere superstition of the illiterate multitude. He is speaking of all ranks in the world of science. He is speaking of some overwhelming majority of those who are investigators of Nature in some one or other of her departments, and who are supposed generally, to recognise as a cardinal principle in science, that the reign of law is universal there-that nothing is fortuitous-that nothing is the result of accident. Yet Mr. Herbert Spencer represents this great mass and variety of men as believing in the preservation of accidental variations as the sole factor, and as the one adequate explanation in all the wonders of organic life.

Nor can there be any better proof of the strength of his impression upon this subject than to observe his own tone when he ventures to dissent. He speaks, if not literally with bated breath,

yet at least with a deferential reverence for the popular dogma, which is really a curious phenomenon in the history of thought. We may fitly ask,' he says, whether it accounts for' organic evolution. On critically examining the evidence,' he proceeds, we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained.' And then follows an allusion of curious significance. Omitting," says Mr. Spencer, for the present any consideration of a factor which may be distinguished as primordial— ' 3 Here we have the mind of this distinguished philosopher confessing to itself as it were in a whisper and aside that Darwin's ultimate conception of some primordial breathing of the breath of life' is a conception which can only be omitted for the present.' Meanwhile he goes on with a special, and it must be confessed a most modest, suggestion of one other 'factor' in addition to natural selection, which he thinks will remove many difficulties that remain unsolved when natural selection is taken by itself. But whilst great interest attaches to the fact that Mr. Herbert Spencer does not hold natural selection to be the sole factor in organic evolution, it is more than doubtful whether any value attaches to the new factor with which he desires to supplement it. It seems unaccountable indeed that Mr. Herbert Spencer should make so great a fuss about so small a matter as the effect of use and disuse of particular organs as a separate and a newly recognised factor in the development of varieties. That persistent disuse of any organ will occasion atrophy of the parts concerned, is surely one of the best established of physiological facts. That organs thus enfeebled are transmitted by inheritance to offspring in a like condition of functional and structural decline, is a correlated physiological doctrine not generally disputed. The converse case of increased strength and development arising out of the habitual and healthy use of special organs, and of the transmission of these to offspring-is a case illustrated by many examples in the breeding of domestic animals. I do not know to what else we can attribute the long slender legs and bodies of greyhounds so manifestly adapted to speed of foot, or the delicate powers of smell in pointers and setters, or a dozen cases of modified structure effected by artificial selection.

But the most remarkable feature in the elaborate argument of Mr. Spencer on this subject is 'its complete irrelevancy. Natural selection is an elastic formula under which this new factor' may be easily comprehended. In truth the whole argument raised in favour of structural modification arising out of functional use and disuse, is an argument which implies that Mr. Spencer has not himself entirely shaken off that interpretation of natural selection which he is disputing. He treats it as if it were the definite expression of some true physical and efficient cause, to which he only

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