Private concerns magnify themselves into mountains, and larger city interests are too often neglected. Individuals grow rich and build immense houses and establish a business of world-wide name, or adorn professions with uncommon brilliancy and usefulness; but when it comes to creating a distinctively Philadelphia literary spirit, or supporting a distinctively Philadelphia literary journal, or working together and with unison and good-will for a public, common purpose, they—well, they rarely do it. Our city has hundreds of powerful, wealthy, public-spirited men, whose whole lives are given up to doing work for others, and whose money is continually pouring out for this and that generous purpose of public welfare; but they are unsupported, and they cannot find strength or courage enough to be always working alone. The rest of the city stands apart and gives little or no assistance. Let us show more public enthusiasm and pride in our city, and endeavor to make our institutions more useful and prosperous. Here is an excellent object to start on. The Medical School of the University has instituted an entirely new system of education, a most excellent one, but perilous financially. It needs well-wishers and endowments. Here is an opportunity to do something for the common good, for the welfare of interests most closely bound up with our own private, household matters. Let our citizens make a beginning. Let them do something in the right direction. Here are the Scientific and Academic Departments in want of funds immediately. Can anything be much dearer to our citizens than the lasting prosperity of the alma mater that was once their own instructress, and now is bringing up their sons in paths of usefulness and knowledge? Let them be generous! Let them open their purses and help her. Another thing the University needs, and needs indispensably, the united, intelligent, enthusiastic, prevailing support of her graduates-through evil report and through good report they must stick by her and work for her. Who shall fight her battles better than they, or who than they have larger share in her victories? As the Alumni of Harvard and Yale and Princeton have done, so let them also do. Let them form Alumni Associations in all the various cities wherever two or three of the graduates are gathered together. Let them take a deep, living, enduring interest in the welfare of the College; always speak a good word for her; help her with money, with advice, with hard work in her behalf. Let them talk and write of her favorably to others. Let them do all in their power to increase her facilities for instruction, to help the Provost to fill up the classes. Let her be the centre of their helpful thoughts, the recipient of all their good wishes. It will seem wonderful how much good can thus be done, and done in a comparatively short time. A light ought never to be hid under a bushel basket, particularly in these upstart times, when so many false beacons are daily held up only as lures to misfortune and shipwreck. By thus working and thus hoping, the University will at length enter upon a new path of improvement in the sphere of highest art and science. Her classes will grow larger; her facilities will be increased; her literary tone will be strengthened; her name will travel over the earth: she will become a centre of "sweetness and light," drawing all men towards her; the hands of her Provost and Faculty and Trustees will be held up; her standard of education will be vastly improved; her sphere of usefulness grow and spread among all classes. OLLEGE Prize Essays are not an attractive species of literature. COL ve could be induced to read many of them, and the amount of genuine literature thus produced is not very large. Mr. Bryce's "Holy Roman Empire," therefore, must be classed among the curiosities of literature. It is a College Prize Essay, written for the Arnold prize at Oxford, which, since its publication in 1865, has found so many readers that in twelve years it has reached the seventh edition, besides being translated into German, and has taken high rank among the standard historical treatises of our literature. 1 THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. By James Bryce, B. C. L., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. A new edition, revised. Pp. xxvii. 465. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento. Macmillan & Co., London, 1866. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. By James Bryce, D. C. L., Fellow of Oriel College, and Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford. Seventh edition; Pp. xxvii., 479. New York, Macmillan & Co., 1877. It was all but new The theme of the essay was happily chosen. to English readers, though quite familiar to German historians. Mr. Freeman and some other English historians had already shown their familiarity with it, but the nature of their special subjects had prevented more than a passing reference to it. And then it was one which enabled a qualified author to sketch the broad outlines of mediæval history with a unity and an effectiveness not possible from any other standpoint. Above all, it enabled him to cast light upon what was obscure, to disentangle what was confused, and to correct much which was erroneous in the statements of innumerable authors, upon whom the public had relied for its information in regard to the period when modern Europe was emerging out of the cosmopolitan confusion of the earlier Middle Ages. And it must be said that Mr. Bryce was fully equal to the task. For his learning he had gone to headquarters, delving into the original sources, while comparing his interpretation of their statements with that of the most trustworthy historians. He had not shrunk from searching through the folios of the Monumenta Germaniæ Historica of Pertz, the Scriptores of Muratori, the Cursus Patrologicus of Migne. And he is never overburdened by his erudition. He walks with the elastic, English step. He writes as a scholar, but not for scholars. His every sentence is clear, limpid English. His sketches are vivid and vigorous; his details well chosen and effective. He has produced a book more useful than any other in our language to the student of history, who wishes to master the great outlines of the process by which our modern world came to be the world it is. And it is surprising how little he has found necessary to change in the different editions of his work. We have compared the second with the seventh (which is a reprint of the sixth), and in spite of the slight touches here and there, the new notes and the enlargements of old ones, and the supplementary chapter, tracing the rise of the new "German Empire," the two books are substantially the same. The phrase "Holy Roman Empire" is probably no older than Frederick Barbarossa. The thing it designates is one of those historical realities, to which no exact beginning and no exact end can be assigned. The Roman Empire itself began before the Emperors. It was the domination of the imperial city over the vast net-work of cities around the Mediterranean, which Rome, the Republic, had brought under her control. That domination seems to We have every evi us odious both in its nature and its methods. We have dence that it was regarded by the great majority of its subject peoples as a nearly unmixed blessing. The testimony of ancient inscriptions is uniform and emphatic in this regard. Rome had inaugurated a new era in the world's political history, and they honestly looked back upon the preceding era of civic insulation, as a period of darkness, weakness and barbarism. They were relatively right. Unable, in the absence of the principle of representation, to effect any free unity larger than that of the city, with its agora or forum for the assembly of all free citizens, they could not be raised to any larger unity except by the strong hand of a master. Rome furnished the strong hand. She made the human race conscious of larger sympathies and more universal bonds, and the price she exacted seemed none too large to pay. Christianity accepted the Roman Empire as a divine order for the world. It had prepared in the desert a highway for God and his Gospel. It had made the universal proclamation of the Gospel possible, by breaking down the old lines of division and isolation. One God in Heaven, one Emperor on earth, was the Christian feeling before the Papacy put forward its claim to the universal headship of the Church. The overthrow of the Empire by the barbarians was a shock to the traditional conception of the world's order. The fact might be shattered; the idea clung to men's minds, and waited only for some favorable opportunity to embody itself. For a time the powerless and degenerate East was accepted as the best available representative of the idea. But when the truly imperial race of the Franks came forward in European history, breaking the invading flood of the Saracens at Tours, liberating the Papacy from the Lombard terror, setting Eastern Iconoclasts at defiance, extending the sway of the Church and of Civil Order over nations that had never bowed to Pagan Rome, and bidding fair to put all the known world under its feet, it was hailed by the clerical leaders and thinkers of Italy as the providential heir to the Empire, and on the last Christmas day of the eighth century Charles the Great was crowned Imperator at Rome. This was the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which differed in one very essential respect from that of the earlier Christian emperors, and of those who in Constantinople claimed to be their successors. It was the counterpart of a similar, a parallel organization of the Church. Ever since the beginning of the Church, her organization had been slowly and steadily assimilated to that of the State. The simpler arrangements borrowed from the Jewish Synagogue had given place to a new order, in which Patriarchs, Archbishops, and Prelatical Bishops held place which corresponded in local extent of jurisdiction and in official dignity to the great offices of the imperial administration. And at last the Papacy was "crowning the edifice" by setting up an ecclesiastical Emperor, such as the early Church and the first Emperors had never dreamed of. The Pope and the Emperor were to stand henceforth side by side, as the civil and the ecclesiastical heads of Christendom, with jurisdiction equally absolute, equally extensive, equally divine. The kings and sovereigns of Christendom were to stand in the same relations to the Empire that its metropolitans did to the Pope. Each was to be the supreme judge of all cases and causes in his own sphere, while each was to exercise a special and particular jurisdiction over that portion of Christendom which belonged to him as bishop or as king. It needed no prophet to foresee the arisal of conflicts and collisions between two powers whose separate jurisdictions were so loosely defined. “When two ride a horse one must ride behind." In our days the result would be the subjection of the Church to the State. "We will not go to Canosa," Bismarck tells the Ultramontanes; but Henry IV. did go to Canosa. In the long run the Church had the better of it. The signs of conflict began in the days of Karl's children, but it did not break out in its force till long after his death. The Papacy stood too low in men's respect throughout the ninth and the beginning of the tenth centuries for its champions to venture on such a struggle. For a time the Popes were the tools and victims of petty Italian despots, and were maltreated and even put to cruel and shameful deaths with impunity. The popular assemblies for their election degenerated into bloody brawls; thirty-seven corpses were taken out of a Roman church after one election. It was the Emperors themselves who reformed the Papacy, and gave it the social position which enabled it to resist Emperors. The Empire of Charles had indeed been broken up; France and Germany parted in 843 by the compact of Verdun, and the Carlings of Laon had no authority over the great dukedoms and margravates beyond the Rhine. One German dynasty after another was taken from among the great houses, and German Kings descended the |