total of 3,404,187 members, whose aggregate funds amount to £9,336,949. This is quite independent of societies that are unregistered, of which there are a good many in all parts of the country. It has been estimated that the number of members of unregistered societies is nearly half as many as of those belonging to registered societies; whether this be so or not, it will be within the mark if we put them down as numbering nearly a million, with funds amounting in the aggregate to two millions sterling.

(2.) The number of Loan Societies which have sent in returns is 373, of which 213 are in the metropolitan counties; the total number of members is 30,048, the accumulated funds amounting to £155,065. There are many others of this class that are not registered, the numbers and funds of which cannot be ascertained.

(3.) The number of Building Societies incorporated under the Act of 1874 is 396; the number of members is not given, but their total funds amount to £12,580,013. There are many others registered under the Limited Liability Companies Acts.

(4.) The Provident Societies number 1,163, with 420,024 members, and accumulated funds of £6,199,266. Of this class also there are others registered under the Limited Liability Companies Acts.

(5.) The number of Trade Unions registered under the Acts is 215; the total number of members is 277,115; and the funds amount to £391,595. But a great number of the largest societies are unregistered; the total of such societies cannot be less than two thousand, members over a million, and the funds at least £2,000,000. And these societies are essentially provident in the sense of providing benefits for sickness, want of work, accidents, burial of members, and other things.

In concluding his last report, the Chief Registrar says:-"Imperfect though the above figures may be, yet as representing to a great extent the results of provident habits in the working class, they deserve to be taken into account by politicians and moralists as well as statists."

(6.) The following figures from the Savings Banks returns are equally interesting and suggestive. The number of Trustees' Savings Banks is 463; the number of depositors, 1,493,401; the total of deposits, £43,283,700. Received during 1876 from 1,837,131 depositors, £8,244,555, averaging £4 108. 11d. each; the withdrawals numbered 1,042,715, amounting to £8,472,059, averaging £8 2s. 6d. each. There are 5,488 Post Office Savings Banks, 3,166,136 depositors; the total amount of deposits, including interest, £26,996,550 108. 3d. Receipts for the year 1876, £8,982,350 48. 11d.; the withdrawals were £7,761,024 88. 4d. The total number of deposits from September, 1861, to the end of 1876 was 30,274,115; the amount deposited, £90,999,151 6s. 5d.; the number of withdrawals was 10,431,977; amount withdrawn, £64,002,600 168. 2d. The fluctuations in the deposits, and the increased number of withdrawals during

certain periods of depression in trade, indicate the character of the depositors, and tell the sad tale of immediate pressure and the necessity of falling back on the small savings of previous years. In addition to the foregoing there are nine Railway Savings Banks, having 7,898 depositors, and an accumulated fund of £153,512. These are strictly confined to railway employés. The grand total of the preceding figures shows that there are about 10,121,694 deposits of one kind and another, either in societies or provident banks, and that the accumulated funds amount to no less a sum than £100,705,055. A large proportion of this vast sum belongs to the working classes, an evidence of provident habits among great numbers of them, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.

One phase of this question has hitherto been too frequently overlooked, although certainly it is by no means the least important. To the moralist and the political philosopher it is, perhaps, the aspect of all others the most deserving of attentive study, as being probably the one which is likely to exercise considerable influence, and possibly to lay the foundation for future good, the beneficial results of which will be incalculable. It is this: during the last twenty or twentyfive years there has been a vast improvement in the character of the homes of the working classes. There is an air of comfort in and about them to which formerly they could lay no pretension; their food, on the whole, is superior, their clothing better and warmer, the tone of the family is elevated beyond anything conceived of by the casual observers of these classes. If the spare money has not always been put into the Savings Bank, it has at least been used to advantage in the purchase of furniture and other necessaries for the home. Every one will admit that all this tends to exert a salutary and beneficial influence on the minds of the rising generation, which cannot fail to be productive of future good."

There is, of course, a dark side to the picture, and a sad one. There

* As an illustration of improved habits among working people my attention was recently called to the following curious facts. Some twenty-five years ago the custom was prevalent in certain trades of delaying the payment of wages until the latest possible hour on Saturday nights, and of paying the men at public-houses and beer-shops, where they were privileged to have "tick," under the authority of the master or foreman, until the wages were paid. The consequence of this state of things was that the men drank deeply, and delayed the purchase of food until very late at night or postponed it until the following day. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers, and hucksters' shops were opened on Sunday mornings for the sale of their wares just the same as on other days in the week. This is now changed; and, except in a few special cases and in isolated districts-such as Leather Lane, the New Cut, and a portion of the Jewish quarter in Whitechapel, where the law has been called in to suppress Sunday trading-it has been effected without police interference, or the exercise of legal powers or authority. There is, indeed, an absence of it in nearly all the poorer neighbourhoods of London. Again, bakehouses were by law allowed to be open during specified hours on Sundays for the purpose of baking the dinners of the labouring classes whose homes afforded no such convenience. The people flocked to these places before eleven o'clock with their dinners, and after one to fetch them. At present it is scarcely possible to find a bakehouse where the practice is followed. Increased home accommodation for cooking purposes has supplanted the bakery, and dispensed with the services of the overworked baker on Sundays.

is a large minority who seem to resist every effort to uplift them in the social scale. They neither read nor think; they are content to grovel and drink, utterly regardless of the consequences, either to themselves or their families. They appear to be devoid of all sense of shame; dead to all the finer feelings and instincts of manhood; having no ambition and no hope, they are selfish and brutish in the present, and heedless of the future. The one bright spot in this sombre picture is that the class above described is surely and steadily, if slowly, decreasing. A hopeful sign it is; and, looking to the results of primary education, the influence of school discipline, the increasing power of the Press, and the improved tone of social life, we may reasonably anticipate that our future progress will be accelerated. It is the duty of every workman with the slightest pretension to self-respect to lend his aid in helping to accomplish this, and particularly to assist in stamping out the demon of intemperance-the source of so much misery. The elevation of their class is as much in their interest as the individual increase of their own personal comfort, or the addition of a few pounds to their earnings and savings. In proportion to the extent to which the mass is improved, so will the power, influence, and moral and material weight of the whole working population be augmented and enlarged. The advancement of individual workmen is good so far as it goes, but it is not the highest good; the aim of all thoughtful men should be to develop the noblest qualities of the humblest workers, and to carry reform into the hovels of the lowest. strata of the community, for here it is that it is most needed.

The present moment is opportune for insisting on the importance of habits of economy, frugality, and thrift; the depression in trade which has already lasted so long, and produced such a severe strain upon all classes, seems to have reached its lowest level; with the dawn of the brighter days of summer, and the termination of the terrible conflict in South-eastern Europe, by the ratification of peace and the permanent settlement of the many questions involved in that prolonged struggle, we may confidently predict that there will be a revival in every department of industry, commercial and trading; and, if we can judge by previous experience, we may expect that it will probably last for some time. It is now, therefore, that the lessons of the past should be earnestly impressed on the minds of those who have had to suffer enforced idleness and endure privation, so that when another of those periodical depressions shall again occur, they will be better prepared to cope with it than they have heretofore been. GEORGE HOWELL.

CARDINAL MANNING'S TRUE STORY OF THE

VATICAN COUNCIL.

PART II.

A

FTER Dr. Manning has created the necessary foundations for his perverted history,* he resumes the record of the preparatory work for the Council without adding anything new. First, he speaks of the meeting of the Preparatory Commission and the invitation of the non-united Orientals, Protestants, and other non-Catholics (not Old Catholics, as the German translator makes it). That Manning, with his curialistic way of thinking, has nothing to object against the Pope's publishing the order of business, and his mode of doing it, is easily understood. He would have done better if he had not added any reasons, as these do not amount to anything. But if he means that this determination may be rightly called an essential law of the Church, it is only what we expect from him. We cannot, however, refrain from remarking that even Ultramontanes of Spain saw in it a "novelty" of "such magnitude" that, though it pleased them, they thought they must not speak of it owing to the restrictions placed on their writings. Much more important is the preparation of the Infallibility schema in the Dogmatic Preparatory Commission.

As if Dr. Manning had entirely forgotten all his previous discourse concerning "Janus" and what was connected with it, he tells us now, that in the Schema on the Church, in which there were two chapters on the Primacy, "it was inevitable that the Commission should come to treat of the endowments of the Primacy, and, among these endowments, first of the divine assistance promised to Peter and in Peter to his successors in matters of faith, or, in other words, of the Infallibility" (p. 82). It will now be remembered that Manning often, and

The German is "Tendenz Geschichte" for which we have no proper equivalent. It means a history with a bias.-TR.

+ See Bravo y Tudela, Concilio ecumenico, p. 287.

with the greatest emphasis, affirmed that neither the Cardinals nor the bishops in their judgments concerning the convocation of a Council, with only a few exceptions, mentioned Infallibility. It follows then that Infallibility was, either at the beginning or later on, put into the programme by the Pope, or the Congregation which guided him. Whether by his own accord or by external pressure may be left undecided. It further follows that long before the opposition to Infallibility in Germany or by "Janus," Papal Infallibility was already in the programme, which is also perfectly clear from the fact that the Archbishop of Edessa, Cardoni, had to draw up an elaborate judgment upon it. These facts also fall in with the celebrated article of the Civilta Cattolica of the 6th of February, 1869, long before the beginning of the opposition indicated by Manning, and by him falsely put down as already existing in 1868. He relates out of Cecconi ::

"On the 14th and 21st of January, 1869, the Commission treated of the nature of the Primacy; on the 11th of February it reached the doctrine of Infallibility. Two questions were then discussed: (1) Whether the Infallibility of the Roman Pontiff can be defined as an article of faith.' (2) 'Whether it ought to be defined as an article of faith.' To the first question the whole Commission unanimously answered in the affirmative; to the second all, but one only [Alzog], concurred in the judgment that the subject ought not to be proposed to the Council unless it were demanded by the bishops. The Commission, therefore, never completed the chapter relating to the Infallibility" (p. 83).

Here the last assertion is not true, owing to Manning's wilful mutilation of Cecconi's words. The latter says expressly that the Commissioners also on the 18th and 25th of February discussed Papal Infallibility," but first "the standing deputation (a subdivision of the Commission), when it prepared the Schema of the Roman bishops, took a perfect survey of the chapter of Infallibility, 'because of that prudent economy of which we have already spoken,' in the Protocol, as it is called."

The Commission, on the contrary, occupied itself further with this subject, as it is added in Cecconi, "None the less did the question continue to be agitated, not only in these three sittings, but also in that of the 18th of June, when the schema of a decree was discussed which was to be in readiness for the case mentioned (that is, if the bishops should propose the Infallibility). The Commission contemplated a multitude of modifications to this project, but the overwhelming number of other urgent questions prevented their return to the subject of Papal Infallibility, so the work remained unfinished."

For what object Manning made this mutilation of Cecconi's words appears from the following reflections, which are about as trustworthy and as true as his report, on which they are based :

"Two observations may be made on these facts. The first is that now, for a second time, when the subject of Infallibility would, according to the