These laws demonstrate that Germany is resolved that she will no longer be dictated to nor embarrassed by a few Italian noble families; that she will be master of her own house.  She sees in the conflict, not an affair of religion or of conscience, but a struggle between the sovereignty of state legislation and the sovereignty of the Church.  She treats the papacy not in the aspect of a religious, but of a political power, and is resolved that the declaration of the Prussian Constitution shall be maintained, that “the exercise of religious freedom must not interfere with the duties of a citizen toward the community and the state.”

Dual government in Europe.  With truth it is affirmed that the papacy is administered not oecumenically, not as a universal Church, for all the nations, but for the benefit of some Italian families.  Look at its composition!  It consists of pope, cardinal bishops, cardinal deacons, who at the present moment are all Italians; cardinal priests, nearly all Italians; ministers and secretaries of the Sacred Congregation in Rome, all Italians.  France has not given a pope since the middle ages.  It is the same with Austria, Portugal, Spain.  In spite of all attempts to change this system of exclusion, to open the dignities of the Church to all Catholicism, no foreigner can reach the holy chair.  It is recognized that the Church is a domain given by God to the princely Italian families.  Of fifty-five members of the present College of Cardinals, forty are Italians—­that is, thirty-two beyond their proper share.

The stumbling-block to the progress of Europe has been its dual system of government.  So long as every nation had two sovereigns, a temporal one at home and a spiritual one in a foreign land—­there being different temporal masters in different nations, but only one foreign master for all, the pontiff at Rome—­how was it possible that history should present us with any thing more than a narrative of the strifes of these rival powers?  Whoever will reflect on this state of things will see how it is that those nations which have shaken off the dual form of government are those which have made the greatest advance.  He will discern what is the cause of the paralysis which has befallen France.  On one hand she wishes to be the leader of Europe, on the other she clings to a dead past.  For the sake of propitiating her ignorant classes, she enters upon lines of policy which her intelligence must condemn.  So evenly balanced are the two sovereignties under which she lives, that sometimes one, sometimes the other, prevails; and not unfrequently the one uses the other as an engine for the accomplishment of its ends.