of the Trades-Unions in England, at least as compared with their political aspect in this country. In England the suffrage was so long withheld from the artisans that they have formed polity an industrial, with objects, laws, and a government of its own outside the polity of the nation. Such a power can hardly fail, in this industrial age, in some way to affect the course of political progress.

On the other hand, a feature of the situation, common to England, with all the leading nations, is the critical position, which it is impossible to ignore, of the religious faith which has hitherto formed the foundation of the political as well as the social morality of the world. It may be true that the doctrine of future rewards and punishments has not operated with all the force which theologians have assumed; but assuredly the motives which have hitherto led the mass of men to keep their selfish passions in subordination to the common good, and thereby to render government other than that of mere force possible, will be found, if analyzed, to be fundamentally religious. The connection of atheism and imperialism is most marked perhaps in Hobbes, but it is visible through the whole history of political philosophy. Rationalism has not yet developed a positive side, and between the decay of the old support and the growth of the new, there may be an interval perilous to humanity. On the other hand, the influence of science is beginning to tell beneficially on politics,

by substituting observation for assumption and calm investigation for party passion. The rational study of history is also a new and beneficial influence in the case of all public men who have received a good political education.

There are, unhappily, great masses of ignorance among the people in England; and even the new possessors of wealth are a bad political class, being too commonly uneducated, not only in the first but in the second generation. But on the other hand there is a good deal of highly-trained political intellect. To this the system of class government, in other respects so injurious, has itself been conducive, by dedicating a class to political life. The comparatively secure tenure of seats in Parliament has contributed to the same result. Something is also due perhaps to the system of College Fellowships, which gives young men of ability the opportunity of carrying their self-culture beyond the limits of an ordinary university education. There is, moreover, a good deal of independence and force of political character; independence and force which are often perverse and reactionary, but stili independence and force. To these advantages may be added an immense political experience and the national habits of mind which it has formed. England will probably grapple vigorously with the tremendous problems which are forced upon her, and there is good reason for hoping that she will work out something of value, not for herself only, but for the world.

To make ice by steam; to cool one's self by lighting a fire; in a word, to convert heat into cold, is a problem that has been proposed and solved by modern science. The mere suggestion, the bare statement, of this paradoxical problem, marks an era in the history of the human mind-a revolution in human ideas. The old alchemists held that while matter is changeable so that copper and lead may be transmuted into gold and silver, the occult qualities of coldness, sharpness,

etc., are fixed and immutable. An alchemist would more readily have expected to see a mass of lead converted into pure gold than to see ice produced through the agency of fire. The modern chemist, on the other hand, relies upon the certainty that every elementary substance will always remain the same no matter how many changes may be impressed upon it, while at the same time he strongly suspects that heat and cold, electricity, magnetism, light, and even

gravity itself, are all merely conditions of matter that may be changed at will and converted the one into the other. To il lustrate a chemist takes a mass of lead, and by allowing certain chemical agents to act upon it, he causes it to pass through more changes than ever did the fabled Proteus. In his hands the solid, shining metal, which is so dense that its weight has become a proverb, loses its metallic form and becomes entirely invisible. Then it changes successively to a white chalky powder, to a dark flaky mass, or to a beautiful orange pigment. But through all these changes the eye of the chemist follows the masquerader and penetrates every disguise. Through every variation of form the lead remains lead, and at any stage of the process it may be recovered and exhibited as the same bright, heavy metal that it was originally. We cannot change it into silver, or gold, or iron. Lead it was, and lead it will remain.

But now let us take a few bars of steel to which the property known as magnetism has been imparted. They are cold and dark, and they may be handled without imparting any peculiar sensation. If, however, we arrange them a peculiar way and give them a rapid motion, we can convert this motion and magnetism into light, heat, and electricity. The steel bars were cold, but they give to two wires the property of producing a degree of heat far exceeding that of the fiercest furnace; they were dark, but by their influence a light of the most dazzling brilliancy is made to glow between the same wires; the bars give no sensation when handled, but these same wires derive from them power which it would be instant death to encounter. Here we have heat, light, and electricity produced where apparently no heat, light, or electricity existed before; and the discovery of the law upon which these wondrous manifestations depend-the law of the correlation of the forces is one of the crowning glories of the nineteenth century. By proper applications of this law, the same tempest that raises the ocean in billows may be made to illuminate the sea and give to the wandering bark a warning of sunken reefs; the action of a few pints of acid on some fragments of zinc places at our disposal a messenger that in a journey round the world can outstrip Ariel; and the combustion of a few pounds of coal under the boiler of a steam-engine will enable us to produce ice that on hot and sultry days may cool the lips of the fevered patient. As the latter is one of the

best illustrations of the practical application of the beautiful law that we have mentioned, we will describe it at length.

At an early period in the history of civilization it was known that a person wearing wet clothes became very rapidly and very powerfully chilled; but it was not until the days of Dr. Black, of Edinburgh, that the cause of this rapid chilling was discovered. He found that in order to convert one pound of water at 212° Fahr. into steam at the same temperature, it required six and a half times as much heat as is sufficient to raise one pound of water from 62° to 212°. In other words, he found that one pound of steam at 212° contained as much heat as would suffice to raise six and a half pounds of water from 62° to 212°. Taking a pound of steam at 212° and adding to it six and a half pounds of water at 62°, we get seven and a half pounds of boiling water. This was a wonderful discovery, and led to some very curious results. Those that reflected deeply on the subject saw at once that if a vessel should contain six and a half pounds of water at 62° and half a pound of this liquid should be suddenly converted into steam or vapor, this vapor would abstract so much heat from the remaining liquid that the whole would be frozen. The difficulty was to find a means of suddenly converting a sufficient amount of the water into vapor.

It is well known that on the tops of very high mountains it is very difficult to cook eggs and potatoes in the ordinary way. The water may boil and the eggs may be tumbled about in the boiling liquid during the legitimate "three minutes," but at the end of that time the eggs will be far from "done." A much longer time must be allowed, and even then the eggs will not be very hard. If, now, in order to discover the cause of all this, we examine the water with a thermometer, we will find that it is boiling, or in other words it is passing off into steam, at a temperature far below 212°. The cause of this is, at these great elevations the pressure of the atmosphere is much less than in the lower regions. But this diminished pressure we can produce by means of the air-pump, and when we do so the water gives off steam very rapidly and becomes very cold, but it does not freeze; for as soon as the air has been all removed from the glass vessel or receiver of the air-pump, the vapor of water rises and fills it, the process is brought to a close, and we cannot, as a general thing, remove the watery vapor

with sufficient rapidity by means of the pump alone. But it happens that some substances, such as very dry oat-meal, and particularly oil of vitriol, have such a powerful attraction for water that they remove it very rapidly from any confined atmosphere in which they may be placed. Indeed, oil of vitriol, or, as it is called by chemists, sulphuric acid, has such a powerful attraction for watery vapor that it condenses it, combines with it, and becomes very hot. So powerful is this affinity, that if we take a jar of cold acid and an equal jar of ice-cold water and mix them together, they will become boiling hot. If, now, we place some of this acid in the receiver along with the water, as fast as the vapor of water rises it will be absorbed by the acid and the water will continue to give off fresh vapor until its temperature has been reduced before the vaporing point. This point is never reached, however, until the water has been frozen. In this way it is easy to make ice in a warm lectureroom, and this was the method after which Leslie, the inventor of the airpump that bears his name, proposed to manufacture ice for sale. But the process is too difficult and too imperfect to allow of its being used for any thing but an experiment.

There are other liquids besides water, however, and these liquids boil at temperatures which differ between wide limits. The shining metal, mercury, requires a temperature 600° above zero to make it boil, and liquid carbonic acid boils at a temperature 80° below zero. In other words, it requires a temperature of 80° to keep it in the form of a liquid. When the temperature rises above this point, it passes off rapidly in the form of carbonic acid steam or vapor, or, as it is more generally called, carbonic acid gas. And in thus passing off into vapor, it carries off so much heat that the vessel that contained it is rendered exceedingly cold, so very cold that we have hardly any idea of the temperature that may be thus produced. Mercury exposed to such a temperature becomes solid, and we have taken it in this condition and hammered it out on an anvil, as if it had been a piece of lead or tin. When frozen in a long paper gutter, the mercury may be moulded into a slender bar that may be seized by a pair of wooden forceps and twisted and tied in a knot. And to show

that the temperature of this frozen mercury is far below any thing that occurs in ordinary experience, if we apply it to the hand, it will burn and destroy the flesh as effectually as would a red-hot iron, while a piece of common ice will melt it as quickly as a red-hot bar of iron would melt a rod of lead.

When

But liquid carbonic acid, although it is capable of producing such low temperatures, is not available for practical purposes, and consequently other liquids have been resorted to, such as ether, ammonia, and some of the products derived from the distillation of petroleum. these liquids are employed an air-pump is always used, and of course on the large scale a steam-engine is used to drive the air-pump. The process is as follows: the water to be frozen having been placed in vessels made of sheet-metal so that the heat may be rapidly conducted away, these vessels are surrounded with the freezing liquid, which may be ether, ammonia, cryogene or any other available fluid. The apparatus is so arranged that while the mouths of the freezing boxes are open to the air, the liquid that surrounds their outer surface is contained in an air-tight receiver, and from this receiver the air and vapor is exhausted by means of an air-pump. The evaporation of the liquid soon lowers the temperature so far that the water freezes, and ice is thus produced. To prevent any loss of the freezing liquid, the apparatus is so arranged that the same pump that exhausts on one side condenses on the other. The vapor of the liquid is therefore powerfully compressed and re-converted into a liquid which, after being cooled, is again passed into the refrigerator to be used over again. We say, after it has been cooled; for, after compression to the liquid form it is very hot. And thus the steam engine goes on with its ceaseless pulse, transferring the heat from one side of the machine to the other; taking it from the water in the imperceptible condition of latent heat contained in a subtle vapor, and reproducing it on the other side as sensible heat that warms up the sides of the vessel as soon as the liquid in which it was latent has been condensed. On the latter side it is dissipated, carried off, and prevented from returning to the water from which it was taken. And in this simple manner is ice manufactured by steam.

MEDIEVAL NONSENSE REVIVED.

WE should like to know how far a writer in the last Catholic World, who discusses "The Character of the Catholic," meaning the Romanist-" in the Nineteenth Century," represents the opinions of his sect in this country. He appears to have just tumbled out of some forgotten box of the Inquisition, or to have been dug up in one of the Roman catacombs. His subject is the "relations of the Catholic of to-day to his race, his country, his age, and the particular order and condition denominated progress," and he treats it as it might have been treated by a monk of the ninth or fourteenth century. His theory of his church, and of its supremacy over all other churches, all states, and all individuals, is the extreme of ultramontanism, against which not only the whole Protestant world, but the Catholic liberals, have contended, for ages. Assuming that his religion is perfect, or rather that his understanding of what religion is, is perfect; that it consists in a certain immutable organic law which nobody need mistake because an infallible expounder of it resides at Rome, he claims for it an absolute perfection, as theology, as philosophy, as morality, and as "the only rule for private, public, and political conduct." All human government, whether of patriarch, prophet, priest, king, chieftain, pope, bishop, emperor, or people in organized assembly," rests upon this organic law, which has the omnipotent God for its founder and the Roman Church for its sole and unerring interpreter. "The Catholic Church," we are told in a passage which the most grandiloquent of sophomores will envy, "The Catholic Church is the medium and channel through which the will of God is expressed. The chain of communication, composed of the triple strand of revelation, inspiration, and faith, stretches

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underneath the billows of eternity to the shore of time, from the throne of God to the chair of Peter. The finger of the Pope, like the needle in the compass, invariably points to the pole of eternal truth, and the mind of the sovereign pontiff is as certain to reflect the mind and will of God as the mirror at one end of a submarine cable to indicate the electric signal made at the other. The will of God is expressed as plainly through the church as it was through Moses and the tables of the law. It is distinct, definite, intelligible, and precise, and we are bound to execute the will thus expressed, and act in the light of the intelligence thus supplied."

Jesus Christ used to tell his disciples "to search the Scriptures," because they testified of Him, who was "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." St. Paul, too, thought that creation bore witness to the perfection and designs of Deity; and St. Peter proclaimed that God was no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him; but this new apostle changes all that. God can only be approached through a speaking-trumpet, preserved at Rome, and the glorious sunlight of the gospel is nothing to the phosphoric brilliancy of old decayed wood.

All good Catholics, especially those who are voters, are bound to act in all things according to the will of God, i. e. of the Pope, who is his only mouthpiece. Marriages even contracted without the assent of his church, are very corrupt and flimsy affairs; all science and education which is "uncatholic" is also godless; and the state or nation is in its very nature godless and material, having no rights but "by permission of superior authority," i. e. our writer's church. "The supremacy asserted for the church in matters of education implies the additional and cognate function

of the censorship of ideas, and the right to examine, and approve or disapprove. all books, publications, writings, and utterances intended for public instruction, enlightenment, or entertainment, and the supervision of places of amusement"! Not only publishers but editors, not only editors but preachers, not only preachers but peddlers, not only peddlers but actors, circus-riders, and mountebanks, must be made amenable to the Pope, who will consult Heaven through his private speaking-tube, as to the lawfulness of their callings. In fact, all the governments of the world should be modelled upon that "temporal government of the Head of the Church which is to-day the best in the world,” -that is, of a government which is upheld by spies and secret agents, and could not last a week but for foreign bayonets.

Our author, of course, longs for the day when the same "Head of the Church may again become the acknowledged head of the reunited family of Christian nations; the arbiter and judge between princes and peoples, between government and government, the exponent of supreme justice and the highest law, in all important questions affecting the rights, the interests, and the welfare of communities and individuals"! Would our readers know what these fine phrases mean? Let us quote, in order to illustrate them, Father Gratry's analysis of a Bull of Pope Paul IV. issued when the kind of legislation which the writer in the Catholic World applauds was more in vogue than it is just now. We extract it from the third of his late letters to the Bishop of Malines, in which he opposes the proposed enactment of the dogma of infallibility.

"I. Considering that the Roman Pontiff possesses the plenitude of power over every realm and every nation, that he alone upon earth judges all and is judged by no one whomsoever.

"II. We renew all sentences of excommunication which have ever been directed against heretics, of whatsoever condition, were they Bishops, Patriarchs, or Popes, were they Kings or Emperors.

"III. But since spiritual penalties are not sufficient, we, in the plenitude of the apcstolic power, sanction, establish, decree and define by the present Constitution, which shall be forever in force, that all persons, Bishops, or Cardinals, and others, Princes, Kings, or Emperors, who shall be convicted of schism or heresy, shall, over and above the aforesaid spiritual penalties, incur by the very fact, and without other judicial proceeding, the loss of all honor, of all power, of all authority, of every principality, dukedom, royalty, empire, and shall be forever deprived and incapable of resuming them. But furthermore, they are to be held as "relapsed,"* as if condemned for the second time, as if, already convicted of heresy, they had already abjured and then fallen into it again. Furthermore, they are to be given over to the secular arm in order to be punished by the penalties of the law, except that, when truly penitent, they are to be, by the clemency and benignity of the Holy See, committed to a monastery to do penance there upon bread and water for life. And they are to be otherwise regarded as relapsed heretics by all men of every grade. They are to be treated as such, shunned as such, and deprived of every consolation of humanity.

"IV. And as to ecclesiastical benefices possessed by them, they shall be conferred on others at the proper time.

"V. As to those who shall dare to receive, defend, favor the aforesaid condemned, to accord them confidence, to join in their doctrines, they themselves shall incur, ipso facto, the sentence of excommunication. They shall be declared infamous, they shall be deprived of every right, the right to testify, to convey by will, to inherit. No one owes them any thing or is held to be liable to them in aught. If they are judges, their decisions are null; advocates, their advocacy cannot be received; notaries, the acts and instruments made by them are void and

For the relapsed, the punishment was burning without pardon, even when sincere repentance was certain; but for these fictitious relapses Paul IV. here proclaims a mitigation.