Nearly a hundred years have passed since the day when the young priest who was to be the best loved and the worst hated man in Europe said his first Mass, and Time’s heavy wings have already blurred his memory in their flight, to a fading outline for the present generation. Very few now know anything about his early years, and in the story of them the finger of God is so clear that it seems to be worth while to make a brief record of the steps by which he was prepared for the burdens and honours of his Pontificate. In reading about his childhood one seems to be carried back not one, but many centuries, so sharply does it contrast with the ideals placed before children in these latter days. It seems to be a road on which there is no returning, but there can be no harm in glancing back at it for a moment.

It was on May 13, 1792, that Pius IX was born, in the Umbrian seaport of Sinigaglia, in the Papal States. His father, Count Mastai-Ferretti, was the descendant of a long line of noblemen who had come thither from Crema in Lombardy towards the end of the fourteenth century. Home-loving but public-spirited men they had been, and for a long time their fellow-citizens had confided to them the chief interests of the town, one of the family always filling the office of Mayor, which had thereby become practically hereditary, to the advantage and convenience of all concerned. So Count Mastai was Mayor of his native city at the time that his youngest son came to make the eighth in the house already filled with the laughter and play of three sons and four daughters.

The mother of this large family was Caterina Solazzo, one of those noble ladies of whom there were yet so many in Italy when I was a child—a woman of high education and devout soul, who saw in her maternal duties the highest honour to which woman could aspire, and fulfilled them with whole-hearted joy and ardour. That meant work such as the modern woman, who thinks she is an example to toilers for the benefit of the race, would shrink from; the Countess had to rise very early so that she should be the first to approach her children’s bedsides when the rising sun woke the nursery to the frolic and laughter of a new day, and from that moment till all were tucked up and asleep at night she never let them out of her sight. The first words they had ever spoken were the Holy Names, the first conscious movement of each baby hand had been trained to make the sign of the Cross.

They were all good and happy children, and the mother-heart prayed and watched and taught, doubtless forming noble plans for all; but as the youngest grew older his sweetness and goodness filled her with the hope that he might be called to the special service of God. Even as a tiny child his charity was of the alert, all-embracing kind that generally spells saintship in the end; toys, sweets, money—the little boy always found poor children to bestow them upon, and would beg from his protÉgÉs when his own stores were exhausted. Naturally of a particularly cheerful and sociable disposition—as indeed he remained all his life—yet he pondered much on the stories he heard, and took things to heart in a way very unusual for a child of his age.

All devout and loyal subjects of the Papacy were grieving at that time over the trials inflicted by Napoleon on Pius VI, kept a prisoner far from his own dominions, and subjected to many insults and privations. The Countess one evening told her son that he must pray for the Holy Father, thus suffering at the hands of wicked men. The child was deeply impressed; he obeyed, and prayed with tears for the Pope, and then, in his young logic, proposed to pray for the prompt punishment of his persecutors. Great was the surprise of the ardent little champion when his mother pointed out that that would be wrong—he must pray for their conversion instead!

Giovanni Maria was about ten years old when, romping about the ground of his father’s country house, he fell into a pond and was nearly drowned. At first the accident seemed to have had only slight effects, but the malady which showed itself a little later, and from which he suffered so long, was, probably with reason, ascribed to that cause. It was a great sorrow to his father, who was bent upon his son’s entering the army, a desire which the boy was ready to satisfy through filial sentiment, but which went contrary to all his own wishes and to those of his mother. He was sent to an ecclesiastical school, of course—no other could be thought of then for a gentleman’s son—and, in spite of bad health, worked hard and attained much distinction. As he grew up, tall, handsome, and brilliantly intelligent, his father repeatedly applied for a commission in the Noble Guards for him, but Prince Barberini, then the chief authority in the Papal army, sternly refused to grant it, saying that an officer subject to epileptic attacks would be a danger to himself and others.[4]

By the time he was seventeen it was fairly clear to all that he could never be a soldier, a relief to him and his mother, though a terrible disappointment to the old Count. They had already brought him to Rome, and under the care of his Uncle Paulinus, a Canon of St. Peter’s, he worked assiduously at his theological studies, always hoping and praying that the strange malady which had kept him out of the army would not, in the end, keep him out of the Church.

Those early years in Rome were illuminated with the crowning joy of seeing Pius VII return in triumph to the Throne of St. Peter, an event which threw the Romans, gentle and simple, into a state of delirious joy. Pius VI had died in captivity at Valance, on August 29, 1799; his successor, Cardinal Chiaramonti, was elected at Venice (Rome being in the hands of the French) on March 16, 1800, and on July 3 of the same year, the French having been expelled from the Papal States by the Neapolitans and Austrians, the new Pope, who had taken the name of Pius VII, came back to his own. Everybody believed that once more “the Church would have peace”; Napoleon, whose genius realized that there was no governing a nation of atheists, had restored Religion to her public place, and was preparing, by the Concordat, to harmonize Church and State as far as the times would allow.

But the Napoleon whose unerring eye showed him the necessity of religion for mankind had counted without the other Napoleon, whose towering ambition demanded the sacrifice of all other claims to itself. With his coronation as Emperor, all barriers seemed to break down; the Pope was to become his submissive vassal or cease to reign. His demands became more imperious and unreasonable every day, and reached the limit of arrogance when he decided that the centre of Christendom was to be transferred to Avignon: France was to enjoy that glory instead of Italy, and the Pope, no longer an independent sovereign, was to rule the Church for the advantage and according to the caprices of the Emperor.

This proposition was first made soon after the election in Venice, when Napoleon had brought the Pope to Paris to crown him in Notre Dame. Pius VII replied, in an outburst of righteous indignation, that rather than so degrade his office he would resign it, and cause another election to be carried through; Napoleon could then do as he pleased with the obscure Benedictine monk who would be left on his hands!

Surprised at his firmness, the Emperor yielded for the moment and permitted him to return to Rome, but, amidst all the rejoicings with which he was greeted, the good Pope’s heart was heavy. He knew the character of his adversary too well. On the day of his coronation, at the foot of the altar, Napoleon had solemnly sworn to uphold and protect the Church. Immediately afterwards had come the insulting proposal to transfer the seat of her government to his own dominions. Who could say what he would do next?

That question did not long wait for its answer. The notion of having the Papacy established at Avignon was too alluring to be renounced. Again and again was it put forward, each time accompanied by some outrageous demand. The Pope was informed that he was to close all the Roman ports to British vessels; that he was to declare war (!) on Great Britain; that he was to annul the marriage of Jerome, the Emperor’s brother, with a Protestant lady in America; and so on. And always Pius VII replied by his quiet “non possumus” (“we cannot”). Then the great break came. The Emperor permitted himself an outburst of temper in which all considerations of policy and decency were thrown to the winds. On May 13, 1809, the trembling world was informed that the States of the Church had become part of the French Empire. On June 10 all the Pope’s insignia in Rome were torn down and replaced by the heraldic rÉchauffÉ which now represented the arms of France; Rome was elevated to the dignity of being proclaimed “a free French city!”

The outraged Pontiff responded by laying the usurper and his supporters under the major excommunication; and then came the crowning atrocity, the one which Napoleon, a contrite prisoner in St. Helena, called the beginning of his own downfall.

In the darkness of a soft summer night the Vatican was surrounded by French troops, and General Radet, sickly frightened at the task laid upon him, made his way with a detachment of soldiers to the Pope’s bedroom. The horrified attendants in the corridors and ante-rooms were forcibly silenced, and Pius VII was roused from his sleep by the sudden entrance of this sinister company. He was a brave man, and, although it seemed only too probable that they had come to murder him, he lost neither his nerve nor his dignity. He asked them what the errand was which caused them thus to transgress on the rules of respect. At first the general and his aides stood dumb, trembling with fear before the helpless old man. At last Radet found his tongue and delivered his master’s orders. The Pope was to rise at once and come downstairs, where a coach was waiting to take him into France. The instructions were that he was to be taken by force if he resisted, but so great was the awe inspired by his sacred person that even in pronouncing the arrest Radet could not bring himself to touch his victim.

There was no question of physical resistance. Gathering courage from the Pontiff’s calm demeanour, Radet gave him a few minutes to put on his clothes, and then hurried him downstairs surrounded by the soldiers. Only two attendants were allowed to follow him. He was hustled into the coach; mounted guards closed in on every side, and the party galloped at full speed out of the Porta del Popolo, heading for the north.

By this time the people had learnt what was happening, and they came out in crowds and ran beside the coach entreating with tears and sobs that their Father might not be taken away from them. The Pope blessed them from the carriage window as he was whirled along; soon all the mourning crowd was left behind, but at each town that he passed through in his dominions the same heart-rending scenes were renewed. His captors dared not pause—some attempt at a rescue might yet snatch him from their grasp—and it was only when they reached Grenoble that they stayed their flight. From there he was transferred to Savona, where he passed three melancholy years of captivity; when Napoleon was preparing to start on the Russian campaign he brought the Pope to Fontainebleau for safer keeping, and there Pius VII remained for nearly two years more.

The first care of the allies after the taking of Paris on March 31, 1814, was to officially reinstate the Pope in his temporal sovereignty, and secure it from future molestation, but Pius VII was even then approaching his own frontier.

After Leipsic and the train of disasters which marked the close of 1813, Napoleon had informed his prisoner that he was free to go whither he chose. But it was not until January 25 following that the preparations for his journey were sufficiently completed for the Pope to leave Fontainebleau, and then, worn out with suffering of mind and body, he had to travel by stages of only a few miles at a time and to rest for long periods on the way. He finally reached Rome in May of that year, a few weeks after Napoleon had signed his abdication at Fontainebleau. Then for Napoleon came Elba—the hundred days—the short triumph, the irrevocable eclipse, and the five years at St. Helena. “Qui mange du Pape en meurt.”

I used to have among my possessions a number of old coloured drawings, the original designs for the decorations put up in Rome for the return of Pius VII. It was a triumph not decreed by politicians, but a spontaneous outburst of overwhelming joy. For five years the entire government of the Church had been suspended; not once had the Pontiff been allowed to make his voice heard in her affairs. There is something strangely sinister in that silence, during which no Bishops were appointed, and not a single line was added to the ecclesiastical archives. The fear and depression that weighed down Catholic hearts were indescribable, and the relief when the cloud lifted almost too overwhelming to be borne. The Papal States had suffered much during those years, and the Pope’s own city worst of all. Business was at a standstill; more than a third of the population had migrated elsewhere, preferring exile to the tyranny of the French rule. Those who remained were frightfully impoverished by heavy taxation and by the general paralysis of commerce which Napoleon’s wars and blockades had brought not only on Italy, but on the whole of Europe.

The populations turned out en masse to meet their sovereign as he travelled home, and as he neared Rome many nobles who had retired to their estates came to accompany him on the last stages of his journey. Among these were Count Mastai-Ferretti and his son, Giovanni Maria, now eighteen years of age. The event made a profound impression on the young man. As a child he had wept and prayed for the Holy Father in his captivity; through the first years of his youth the thought of Pius VII, a helpless prisoner, had ever been present to his mind, and many a fervent prayer had gone up for his sovereign’s and his country’s deliverance. Now it had come, and to him, not yet illuminated with knowledge of the future, as well as to all those around him, it seemed as if all trouble were passed away, and the sun that shone so gloriously on that 24th of May, when the people took the horses from the Pope’s carriage and themselves dragged it through the rejoicing streets, were but an earnest of unbroken peace and happiness to come.

Rome had seen many festivals, but none so spontaneously, madly joyful as this. From every window floated crimson and blue silk draperies rich with gold; the thousands of balconies were wreathed in flowers, and the vast procession moved along in a rain of roses and lilies and violets showered from above; music was everywhere, but it was drowned in the shouts and hosannas of the multitude that had gone out to meet the traveller with palms in their hands and now thronged the way before, beside, behind him. The women were weeping for joy and audibly thanking God for this great day; a hundred thousand persons knelt to receive his blessing, and many, many of them must have remembered how they knelt to receive it last, as the coach was whirled along the highway in the summer’s dawn and the weeping supplicants just caught a glimpse of the pale face and the blessing hand as it flashed by.

Every town in the dominions had raised its triumphal arches, gathered all its flowers for his progress, but Rome surpassed them and all the records of herself that day. The “Te Deum” was sung in all the churches as it had never been sung before; Rome’s thousand bells rang as if they would never cease; and when darkness fell, St. Peter’s gathered the stars to itself, and the magic dome, a hive of breathing gold, glowed through the night, a beacon of joy to the dwellers in a hundred mountain towns of Sabina and Latium and all the country round.

Thirty-two years were to elapse before the youth kneeling beside his father to receive the Pope’s blessing, on that day, would himself ascend the Papal Throne, but strange to say, Pius VII himself had already foreseen the event. Pius IX had been reigning for some years when, through the merest accident, the written prophecy was discovered. Pius VII, while a prisoner at Fontainebleau, one day handed to his body-servant a sealed packet, saying that it was not to be opened until 1846. The man religiously regarded the prohibition, and put the packet away carefully. Before his own death he gave it to his son, repeating the Pope’s instructions. 1846 was still far off, and the son laid the thing aside and had forgotten all about it when the year in question came round. Having occasion, however, to look through a number of old papers, he came across this, and broke the seal. Inside, in Pius VII’s handwriting, were these words, “The prelate who fills the office of Bishop of Imola in 1846 will be elected Pope and will take the name of Pius IX.”

Another prophecy, that of the venerable servant of God, Anna Maria Taigi, uttered in 1823, is very full and clear. After describing minutely the revolution of 1848 and all the sufferings that Rome and its ruler would undergo at that time, she added, “The Pope whose destiny this is, is now a simple priest and far beyond the sea.” After minutely describing the personal appearance of Pius IX, she continued: “He will be elected in a very unusual way and contrary to his own and general expectation. He will inaugurate many wise reforms which, if gratefully and wisely accepted by the people, will bring great blessings upon them. His name will be honoured throughout the world.” She spoke much of the great trials that he was to undergo in defence of the Church, and of the special assistance Heaven would give him to sustain them, and also of the gift of miracles which would be bestowed on him during the latter years of his life. All that came to pass precisely as the Saint foretold, and the present generation seems to be seeing the beginning of the fulfilment of her closing prophecy: “At last, after many and varied trials and humiliations, the Church shall achieve, before the eyes of the world, such a glorious triumph that men will be struck silent with awe and admiration.”

The famous prophecy of St. Malachy, the Archbishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in the arms of his friend St. Bernard, in 1148, designated the title of Pius IX as “Crux de Cruce”—“Cross of a Cross”—and certainly that prediction, supposed to refer to the Cross of Savoy, was fulfilled!

Anna Maria Taigi’s mention of a “simple priest then beyond the sea” refers to the mission to Chile, undertaken by Pius IX when he was as yet only Father Mastai, the director of Tata Giovanni’s orphanage. It is an episode of his history so generally forgotten that it seems worth while to recall it briefly to the minds of Catholic readers. The Republic of Chile was just five years old—it concluded its victorious struggle with Spain for independence in 1818—when the Government sent a respected prelate, Canon Cienfuegos, to Rome, to ask Pius VII to reorganize ecclesiastical matters in Chile, where everything had been left in a very unsatisfactory condition after the separation from the Mother Country.

Pius VII gladly complied with the request. The mission would require delicate handling, and he singled out a diplomatist prelate, Monsignor Muzi, then Auditor of the Nunciatura at Vienna, for its accomplishment. In order that his rank should be consonant with its dignity Monsignor Muzi was made Archbishop of Philippi, and then appointed Vicar Apostolic of Chile. He asked that Father Mastai might accompany him as Auditor, a post corresponding to that of “Conseiller d’Ambassade” in a secular embassy; and another well-known ecclesiastic, Father Sallusti, was named as the secretary.

Long years afterwards one of the “boys” described the last evening of Father Mastai at the Asilo. He had as yet said nothing to them of his approaching departure, but at supper they noticed that he seemed very sad. When the meal was over and they were about to leave the table, he motioned to them to sit down again, as he had something to say to them. Then he told them that the next day he must leave them, to travel far away on the business of the Church. There were a hundred and twenty boys, big and little, in the hall, and there broke from them one simultaneous cry of grief. Sobbing and wailing they threw themselves upon him, the little ones climbing up into his arms and clinging to his knees, others catching at his garments as if to hold him back by force, and those who could not reach him through the press lifting up their voices in supplication that the “Caro Padre” would not leave them.

The father wept too as he caressed and embraced the piccolini, and when at last he tore himself away and shut himself up in his room, a number of the older boys broke in and insisted on staying with him all night. The dear patient man did not resent thus being robbed of his rest; he let them have their way, and talked to them long and earnestly of their present duties and their future lives. He would return some day, and how eagerly he would inquire for every one by name, how rejoiced he would be at a good report, how immeasurably grieved at a bad one.

With the dawn he had to leave them, and, as the narrator said, “We were orphans more than ever before.”

Great as was the grief of “Tata Giovanni’s” boys on losing their beloved Director, it did not equal the despair and indignation of Countess Mastai when she learnt that her son had been picked out for a journey which was full of perils and hardships so late as twenty years ago, and in those early days was veritably appalling.

To the ardent young priest, this fact had only added to the readiness he felt in carrying out the Pope’s wishes; he asked nothing better than to suffer in such a cause, but his mother, without saying anything to him, flew to Cardinal Consalvi, then Secretary of State, and implored that the appointment might be cancelled. Pius VII, however, refused to yield to her entreaties, and when Father Mastai came to receive his final blessing before departing, he told him of the Countess’s request and added “I assured her that you would return safe and sound.”

The embassy was to embark at Genoa, and it was there, while waiting for the final preparations to be made, that its members received the sad news of the death of Pius VII. This caused delay, and it was only after the election of Leo XII and his confirmation of Archbishop Muzi’s powers that the mission finally sailed from Genoa, on October 5, 1823. Ninety years ago! The world has shrunk since then; the voyage that I made in 1885 in three weeks took Monsignor Muzi and his companions three months to accomplish.

The “good barque EloÏse,” manned by “thirty experienced seamen,” had been chartered for the expedition, but one’s heart aches to think of what those three good ecclesiastics must have suffered in one way and another on board of her. Very few Italians of their class are good sailors, and all the horrors of sea-sickness were certainly theirs, combined with the unsavoury and unwholesome food that was all people had to depend upon during sea-journeys before the discovery of steam and cold storage. Storm after storm broke over the little vessel; she was nearly wrecked off Teneriffe; one dreadful night, November 5, she was waylaid by pirates, who overhauled her from stem to stern seeking for plunder, and only abandoned her—in furious disgust—when Father Mastai had shown them that there was not a single article of value on board. Then came a sad encounter with a Brazilian slave-trader, packed with unfortunate negroes, a sight most grievous and terrible to the kind-hearted priests; and then, after two long months’ sailing, a fearful storm which lasted eight days, during which the EloÏse was so beaten about that no one hoped to escape alive. It was all a searching dispensation for quiet, stay-at-home Italian gentlemen who had followed their pious way hitherto along the most familiar lines!

They reached Monte-Video on New Year’s Day, 1824, stopped a few days for repairs, and made Buenos Ayres soon after, their joy at finding themselves on terra firma much tempered by the extremely rude reception accorded to them by the civil authorities. But Buenos Ayres was merely the starting-point for the most difficult part of the journey, the crossing of the Andes. Had the good Countess Mastai-Ferretti had the slightest idea of what her cherished son was to encounter there, I believe she would have died of anxiety before his return! I only met one or two Europeans, when I was in Chile, who had accomplished the feat, and they told me that nothing would induce them to attempt it again.

I have described some of the terrors of the passes in former works,[5] and will not enlarge upon them here. Suffice it to say that for two whole months Monsignor Muzi and Fathers Sallusti and Mastai rode through those appalling solitudes, over the bridle paths cut in the face of the rock that towers thousands of feet above and sinks sheer down thousands of feet below, paths where one false step means death, and so narrow in some places that if two parties meet it is usual for them—if they are not the fighting sort—to decide on the spin of a coin which shall dismount, pitch its mules over the precipice and crawl past the winners as best they can—to continue the journey on foot!

The resting-places are even now the haunts of outlaws and robbers. The members of the Roman embassy of 1824 only escaped being murdered en masse because, through some unforeseen occurrence, they changed the time of their departure from a hamlet called Desmochadas. Had they waited till the hour first fixed upon, they would have shared the fate of a party of merchants who, on that day, were massacred, to a man, by a band of robbers. It was Father Mastai who discovered—and stayed behind to take care of—a sick English officer named Miller, forsaken in a wayside inn; and it was Father Mastai, the others said, who had during the whole journey sustained their courage by his unfailing fun and good humour. It seems to me that this is not the least glorious note in all his wonderful record, and because few, even of those who most loved and venerated him in his later years, have ever heard of it I have written it here. The whole thing, somehow, is so absolutely Pius IX!

Very sore and weary, the travellers reached Santiago on March 17, only to encounter every kind of obstacle and annoyance in the attempt to carry out the object of their mission. The Government had changed, and the party in power had no desire to come to an understanding with the Holy See. The people, indeed, received the envoys most enthusiastically, but Chile in 1824 was apparently much what I found it in 1885—a country of ardent believers ruled by atheists. Let some expert explain the problem; I cannot! For seven months Monsignor Muzi remained in Santiago, perseveringly trying to clear matters up and reach some modus vivendi between Church and State. But his efforts were nullified by the hostility of the President and his supporters, and at last he had to acknowledge his defeat and withdraw from the conflict.

The EloÏse meanwhile had successfully rounded Cape Horn and reached Valparaiso, and on October 19 the Archbishop and his party embarked once more on the gallant little vessel and started for home. Of course no sailing vessel can pass through the twisting narrows and rocks of the Straits of Magellan, so for three weeks—surely the most miserable of their lives—those poor priests, children of Italy and the sun, shivered in the awful cold of those frozen regions, where the sea is the colour of cold steel, and the sailors, as they have often told me, come down from the deck at night with their garments frozen stiff, and have to work their way into them, still frozen stiff as boards in the morning.

My own travelling in that part of the world did not include the rounding of Cape Horn, but even the passage of the Straits in a big liner, with the water smooth as glass, was such a freezingly wretched experience that, having made it once, the prospect of its repetition took something away from my eagerness to go home. But outside the Horn, with the Antarctic Ocean, unbroken from the South Pole, flinging its icy rollers against a little sailing vessel that took three weeks to beat up on the other side—that, the skippers have told me, furnishes merchant seamen with their best nightmares to their dying day! Most of the coal supply for the West Coast is carried by this route, and by the time it has reached the Horn, the coal, loaded under the damp English skies, has ignited, and the remainder of the trip is made with hatches battened down and the pleasing knowledge that a puff of air finding its way into the hold will send the whole mass into a blaze!

Yet, there is a little English colony that lives and flourishes in these cold seas some two hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Horn, and we in England wear its wool and eat its mutton quite habitually. I never could learn my geography properly until I began to travel round the world. From that time maps became a special recreation of mine, and I had, when travelling through the Straits of Magellan, thought with both curiosity and pity of the handful of islands, so much more exposed than even we were in those comfortless days. I was told the place was a purgatory—that it was just possible to carry on life, and that no one stayed there who could help it.

Some time afterwards, when we were established in Santiago, a card was brought up and I gazed at it for a moment in some bewilderment. “The Governor of the Falkland Islands!” Then it was true! Our indomitable fellow-countrymen had really added another mesh to the net of empire which Great Britain has cast over the world. My reflections were interrupted by the entrance of a big handsome man who looked as if he had just come out of Yorkshire. His clear blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and joyful bearing belied the sad tales I had heard, and when, in the course of conversation, I asked some timid questions about his frozen place of exile, he laughed in a way that was good to hear. Frozen? Exile? Why, he would not live anywhere else for the world! A grand climate, pleasant society, and better pasturage for sheep than could be found anywhere else!

“Pasturage!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that anything will grow in that latitude?”

“Grow? I should think so!” he replied. “We get the back wash of the Gulf Stream down there, and our sheep can graze all winter in the open. Why, I have three trees, real trees, on Stanley Island! I wish you and Mr. Fraser would come and pay me a visit there. My wife and daughters would be so delighted to see you.” Then, turning to my husband, he continued, “Our flocks are getting too big for their feeding-grounds, so I have come to ask the Chilean Government to rent us five hundred thousand acres in Patagonia for a supplementary run. The pasturage is not as good as that in the Falklands, but it will be better than nothing.”

Of course we instantly invited our visitor to dine. An English face was always a joy to look at where one saw so few, and this man brought the very atmosphere of the North Country with him. He told us many interesting details about his little domain, the management of which he took very seriously and evidently accomplished with much success. “Of course I could do more,” he said regretfully, “if it were not for the blind hostility of the Opposition.”

“Does it reach so far?” I asked politely. “I should have thought there was quite enough to keep it busy at home.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the little crowd at Westminster,” he replied indignantly. “Please understand, Mrs. Fraser, that I have an Opposition of my own!”

“I do congratulate you,” I said; “that is certainly a triumph! What Britisher could ask more?”

There is a little plant of which every Englishman carries the seeds about with him. It is called Love-of-the-soil. Give him a bit of land anywhere—the best or the worst, a vast fertile tract or a few miles of desert island; tell him it is his very own to do as he likes with; and before you can turn round every grain of its dust is sprouting with Love-of-the-soil. He sees, knows, loves, only that spot. He will fight for it, work for it, cheat for it if need be, perhaps even slay; for to him it has taken on the sacred character of the mother country; it is his piece of England, and woe to any one who tries to take it away from him! That is why English colonies succeed. And it is the lack of this passion for the land which makes bad colonists of men of other nationalities.

The Americans are simply brutal about their possessions. Out here in the North-west one is horrified at the general callousness. I have watched people making what we should call a home, breaking new land, building a charming house, working hard to make everything within and without as perfect as they know how. A cloud of dust shows up on the road, a motor car full of “land grabbers” kicks and coughs and stinks at the gate; the next minute the hard-eyed hucksters are being shown into all the sacred arena of airy rooms and flowering garden, are fingering, valuing, depreciating; there follows an hour or two of hard bargaining, and then your neighbour’s wife flies across lots to tell you, with shining eyes, “We’ve sold the place!” “Sold the place?” I cry. “Why, I thought it was to be your home!” “What does that matter?” she retorts, huffed. “I got my price! We can easily build another house that we shall like just as much.”

I suppose it is a form of the disease now diagnosed as Americanitis, the feverish restlessness that would rather “trek” anywhere than stay put for more than a year or two. But it is a terrible disqualification for building a State. Since I have seen it at close quarters, I have often thought of the contrast presented by that handful of North Country shepherds and their descendants in the Falklands,[6] so proud of doing their best with the best they could get, pleased with their drizzly climate (it rains two hundred and fifty days in the year) because it is so English, proud of their thriving little community, sending out their pelts and mutton by the once-a-month steamer, actually growing their pelargoniums and fuchsias in the open air, and so furiously interested in their miniature politics that the Government and the Opposition are ready to knock each other forty ways from Sunday every time they meet! Good luck and long life to you, my incorrigible brothers! The secret of success is certainly yours, and it all comes from the little plant called Love-of-the-soil.