jamais pour nous, et c’est toujours la faute de celui qui meurt.” The finance minister has had the bad condition of the papal treasury communicated to the Bishops; a standing annual deficit of 30 million francs, and the Peter’s pence decreasing! Some new means of supply must be discovered, and the extremest extension of ecclesiastical centralization and papal absolutism has always been recognised at Rome as the most productive source of revenue. Every one here believes that the new dogma will prove very lucrative and draw money to Rome by a magnetic attraction. It will make the Pope _de jure_ supreme lord and master of all Christian lands and their resources. The ultramontane jurists and theologians have long maintained that he can compel States as well as individuals to pay in to him such sums as are required for Church purposes. And there is no more urgent need for the Church now, than that an end should be put to the deficit of the Roman Government. And if it should be impossible or unadvisable to put in force these supreme monetary rights of the Papacy at once, still, when the temporal supremacy of the Pope is made an article of faith, Rome possesses the key which may be used at the right moment for opening the coffers and money-bags. And therefore the opponents of the dogma are regarded as enemies of the Roman State economy and the wealth of the Roman clergy; and the variance between the two parties is embittered. Meanwhile the Pope is never weary of carrying on his personal solicitations for the votes of the Bishops; he has the right of being a persevering beggar. But one hears less of conversions to the majority than of men going over to the Opposition; and the effluences from the Tomb of the Apostles close to the Council Hall, of which such great expectations were formed, seem to act in the opposite direction. A new system of tactics has been for some time adopted, in France principally, and is now to be introduced into Germany. The clergy in the dioceses of Opposition Bishops are to be seduced into signing addresses expressing strongly their belief in papal infallibility and desire for its speedy promulgation. This device has been pursued with great success through means of the Paris nunciature and the _Univers_. The French parish priests who, since the Concordat, have been removeable at the will of the Bishops and have suffered sufficiently from their arbitrary caprice in transferring or depriving them, see their only resource in the _Curia_, and the notion has lately been disseminated among them that the infallibilist dogma will procure their complete emancipation from episcopal authority. Accordingly almost every number of the _Univers_ contains enthusiastic addresses, which might be tripled by making all the nuns subscribe, as they would do with the greatest pleasure.