There are 89 speakers inscribed for the general debate, and not a third of them have yet spoken. This opens out a prospect of the debate being spun out to a great length, oppressive as the tropical heat is now become. The _Curia_ still relies on the Northerners being tamed down. If only a good many of them would emulate the example of the Bishop of Hildesheim, and go away! The plan has often succeeded with English and Irish juries, of locking them up, when they could not agree, till they found a true verdict. But that won’t answer here. On the contrary the longer the debate lasts, the more numerous the Opposition party becomes. At first many Bishops thought they might fairly gratify the good and amiable Pius, who won all hearts, even by making a new dogma, and give him the present he so greatly longed for. But Pius has completely cured his former worshippers of this disposition to make an article of faith “pour les beaux yeux du Pape.” It has no doubt happened before that Italian Bishops have been treated by the Pope like servants, hired for the day’s work and dismissed again if they did not obey the orders of the _Curia_. One need only refer to that parody on a synod, the fifth Lateran assembly, when Leo X. propounded downright forgeries and untruths to his Italian Bishops, who had to call themselves an Œcumenical Council, and dictated their votes. But even there no one ventured to treat Transalpine Bishops—Germans, French and Hungarians—with the insolent contempt now shown, to refuse even a reply to their urgent petitions and representations, and to make them drain the cup of humiliations and grievances to the very dregs. But the great task to be achieved in the first months of the Council was the kneading and manipulating the Bishops in all possible ways, so as to make them feel the immeasurable gulf between the master and the servants, that they might be more ready at last to sacrifice their episcopal dignity and ancient rights on the altar of Roman supremacy. When once they have assented to the infallibilist dogma, they neither can nor ought to be or desire to be anything else but passive and unintelligent promulgators and executors of papal commands and decrees on faith. That what is really required of them is to abdicate their office as a teaching body and themselves abolish their authority, Ketteler has lately declared without reserve in the Congregation; and he is a man who has profited much by his Roman schooling, though in a quite different sense from what his master intended. The Roman system of drill does not succeed with Germans, Hungarians and Americans.