* * * * *
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. The _Morning 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
would have been immoral, or by accepting Père Pellico’s conditions, which
would have been humiliating. The _National Reformer_, the organ of Mr.
Bradlaugh, patted me on the back as an ill-used republican; and the
_Standard_ said 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 are _Zadkiel’s Almanac_ and _Reynolds’
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,
wielded for 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, in spite of occasional attempts of
the _Standard_ to 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.”