The great success of William I. in the Franco-Prussian war appears to have so elated that monarch that he considered there was nothing which he might not successfully undertake. He had annexed to Prussia some of the lesser States of Germany, and made a German Empire. The Church in Germany enjoyed many privileges and immunities under his predecessors, who, for the most part, were, like himself, Protestants. Whether it was that he desired to show himself a better Protestant than his ancestors, or that he could not emancipate himself from the control of the minister who had so long guided, with singular success, the destinies of the empire, as well as his own career, or that he believed it to be a political necessity to act according to the views and carry out the principles of the German and European “Liberals”—the party of revolution and unbelief—he resolved to oppose no impediment to his chancellor and the liberal majority of parliament in their endeavors to destroy the Catholic Church in Germany, unless it chose to become as a mere department of the State, acting and speaking in the name of the State, receiving its appointments from the State, as well as the funds requisite for the support of its ministers, accepting all its orders and instructions, even in the most spiritual things, from the State; in fine, looking to the State as the sole source of all its authority, honor, power and influence. There was nothing like the German Empire. It had conquered in gigantic wars with two Powers that were considered the greatest in continental Europe. It had attained a degree of power and greatness, scarcely if at all inferior to that of the first Napoleon, and, like Napoleon, it aimed at more. It sought, like him, to have the Church, no less than the police courts, in every respect, in all circumstances and on all occasions, completely at its orders. This ill-judged ambition accounts for the long list of oppressive laws which were enacted at Berlin for the enslavement of the Catholic Church. They are known as the “May Laws,” all of them having been passed, although not in the same year, in the month of May. Dollinger, Hohenlohe and the rest of the anti-Catholic Bavarian _coterie_, deluded the Emperor and his minister with the idea of an independent German _alt_, or Old Catholic Church. They sold their country to the new empire, politically. But they could not sell its church. One of these _alt-Catholics_, Dr. Schulte, recommended persecution as the surest means of eradicating the ancient church. “Let his twenty thousand florins be withdrawn from such a one, his twelve thousand thalers from such another; let the salaries of the bishops and chapters be suppressed, and the result will soon be manifest. The humbler clergy will rejoice. Since 18th July, 1870, there has been neither belief in Christ nor religious conviction among the bearers of mitres and tonsures.” Thus was the Prussian minister led to imagine that he had only