the _prima tonsura_ till they have
ascertained how much their chances will be bettered by taking the final
and irrevocable step. Yet, although they now and then bring somewhat
more of worldly leaven into their intellectual and moral training, they
well know that there is but one road to the red hat and the tiara, and
that they who give themselves up to this ambition must give themselves
up to it with undivided hearts. Thus the models which they set before
themselves, the ideals after which they strive, are all taken from
successful aspirants to the honors of the Church. And the interests of
that great body, as a body independent of laymen, and which can preserve
its immunities only by preserving its independence, and its independence
only by a rigid exclusion of foreign elements,[A] become as dear to them
as if they already enjoyed all its privileges and had assumed all its
obligations.

If any one wishes to know what sort of statesmen such an education
makes, let him go thoughtfully over the twenty legations, prolegations,
delegations, and governments into which the twelve thousand nine hundred
and twenty square miles of the Pontifical States were still divided only
four years ago, and see how the two million nine hundred and eighty
thousand subjects of the Pope lived and throve under the care of
cardinals and prelates. Subtle negotiators, skilled in the crooks and
tangles of a wily and selfish policy, they have always been,--for they
have studied well the selfish elements of the human heart; patient, too,
and persevering and keen-eyed, as they must needs be who walk in
tortuous ways,--but cold, contracted, and arrogant, mistaking artifice
for statesmanship, unwilling to learn from the lessons of the past, and
unable to comprehend the changes that are going on around them, or to
see that every forward step of the human race is the result of causes
which man has sometimes been permitted to modify, but which he can never
hope to control.

It is from men thus educated that the Pope and his counsellors are
chosen.

As far as theoretical origin goes, the Pope is the most democratic of
sovereigns; for there is nothing to prevent his being taken from any
rank or order of the faithful. The sons of peasants and mechanics have
sat upon the Papal throne, and the thunderbolts of the Vatican have been
launched by hands familiar with the pruning-knife and the plough. But in
practice these bounds were effectually narrowed, when th