“Dear friends!--dear children!” she said, and in her tone there was the tenderness of a great compassion, almost bordering on tears,--“What is it, think you all, that makes the age in which we live so sad, so colourless, so restless and devoid of hope and peace? It is not that we are the inhabitants of a less wonderful or less beautiful world,--it is not as if the sun had ceased to shine, or the birds had forgotten how to sing! Triumphs of science,--triumphs of learning and discovery, these are all on the increase for our help and furtherance. With so much gain in evident advancement, what is it we have lost?--what is it we miss?--whence come the dreariness and emptiness and satiety,--the intolerable sense of the futility of life, even when life has most to offer? Dear children, you are all so sad!--many of you so broken-hearted!--why is it?--how is it? Poverty alone is not the cause,--for it is quite possible to be poor, yet happy! True enough it is that in these days you are ground down by the imposition of taxes, which try all the strength of your earnings to pay; but even this is an evil you could mitigate for yourselves, by strong and united public protest. How is it that you do not realise your own strength? You are not like the poor brutes of the field and forest, who lack the reason which would show them how superior in physical force alone they are to the insignificant biped who commands them. Could the ox understand his own strength, he would never be led to the slaughter-house;--he and his kind would become a terror instead of a provision. You are not oxen,--yet often you are as patient, as dull, as blind and reasonless as they! You form clubs, societies, and trades-unions;--but in how many cases do you not enter upon small and querulous differences which so weaken your unity that presently it falls to pieces and has no more power in it? This is what your tyrants in trade rely on and hope for; the constant recurrence of quarrels and dissensions among yourselves. No Society lasts which tolerates conflicting argument or differing sentiments in itself. Why is it that the Jesuits,--whom you are all unanimous in hating,--are still the strongest political Brotherhood on the face of the earth? Because they are bound to maintain in every particular the tenets of their Order. No matter how vile, or how reprehensibly false their theories, they are compelled to carry on the work and propaganda of their Union, despite all loss and sacrifice to themselves. This is the secret of their force. Expelled from one land, they take root in another. Suppressed entirely by Pope Clement XIV., in 1773, they virtually ignored suppression, and took up their headquarters in Russia. The influence they exerted there still lies on the serf population, like one of the many chains fastened to a Siberian exile’s body. Yet they were driven from Russia in 1820,--from Holland in 1816,--from Switzerland in 1847, and from Germany in 1872. Latterly they