nineteenth century. If posterity does us justice, it will be grateful
to us therefor. It will see that instead of cutting one another's
throats about theological questions, we have surveyed lines of
railway, laid telegraphs, constructed steam-engines, launched ships,
pierced isthmuses, created sciences, corrected laws, repressed
factions, fed the poor, civilized barbarians, drained marshes,
cultivated waste lands, without ever having a single dispute as to the
infallibility of a man.

But the busiest age, the age which the best knows the value of time,
may be obliged for a moment to neglect its business. If, for instance,
it should remark around Rome and its Bishop a violent agitation, which
neither the trickery of diplomacy nor the pressure of armies can
suppress; if it perceive in a little corner of a peninsula a
smouldering fire, which may at any moment burst forth, and in
twenty-four hours envelope all Europe, this age, prudent from a sense
of duty, on account of the great things it has to accomplish, turns
its attention to the situation of Rome, and insists upon knowing what
it all means.

It means that the simple princes of the middle ages, Pepin the Brief,
Charlemagne, and the Countess Matilda, behaved with great liberality
to the Pope. They gave him lands and men, according to the fashion of
the times, when men, being merely the live-stock of the land, were
thrown into the bargain. If they were generous, it was not because
they thought, with M. Thiers, that the Pope could not be independent
without being a King; they had seen him in his poverty more
independent and more commanding than almost any monarch on the earth.
They enriched him from motives of friendship, calculation, gratitude,
or it might even be to disinherit their relations, as we sometimes see