The bomb outrage perpetrated at Milan on Thursday, the 12th of April, is one of a long series of crimes which have gained for the fair name of Italy an unenviable notoriety.

Bombs have been exploded in other countries, revolvers and daggers have been used by other nationals, but statistics are there to prove that for the last century Italians both in and outside their country have been the authors of the greater number of these horrible political assassinations. One has to go back to the early second half of last century to find a parallel to what has recently occurred at Milan : to 1858 when Orsini made the attempt upon the life of Napoleon III, or 1867 when Monti and Tognetti blew up the Serristori Barracks in Rome. On both occasions, as at Milan, the result was a veritable and indiscriminate slaughter of innocent persons. Agesilao Milano, Luccheni, Angiolillo, Carserio, Oberdank, Passanante, Acciarito, Bresci, Crispi, Gallenga and others more recent all belong to that infamous class of Italians who have dishonoured their Mother Country before the civilised world.

The Italians are a warm-hearted, generous and chivalrous people, they belong to a highly civilised and cultured race; their family ties are intense, their respect for women and children borders the romantic. How comes it then that sweet and gentle Italy is responsible for this brood of monsters called political assassins? An exhaustive answer can only be given when a true and real history of Modern Italy is written.

The writings that Baron von Hugel gave himself to the public were, no doubt, more important, but they were surely in many ways less interesting, than the volume which has been made up by others from his private letters. The short memoir of sixty pages prefixed to them by the late Mr. Bernard Holland is interesting enough, but it is a commonplace that a man is best known from his letters, and certainly the Baron’s letters here given reveal the man, and the revelation is of absorbing interest.

It is interesting, first of all, for the view it gives of his limitations, both the limitations he outgrew and the limitations that limited him to the end. The letters begin in December, 1896, when he was forty-four years old, and the last one is dated December 29th, 1924-he died at the end of January, 1925. Most of the letters of the first half of this period are addressed to his Modernist friends, and are concerned, more or less, with the Modernist movement. And how sadly out of proportion he saw both the men and the movement! One gets the impression that for him the group to which he belonged were the only hope for the future of Catholicism. What he says in 1899 of Tyrrell-and to Tyrrell-in England he would have said of a few others on the Continent.

‘HAVE you never heard of Cupid and Pish!’ exclaimed once, with a contralto’s disdain, the English Alboni, Madame Patey (nee Whytock), when General Clark Kennedy ventured to inquire why she called her favourite dog Pish? The Dog Pish could well be the Patron Dog of the Rationalist Press, of blatant atheists like Sir Leslie Stephen : they turn on the orthodox or would-be orthodox believers and exclaim : ‘ Have you never heard of Cupid and Pish, of physical pain and moral deformity, of avoidable suffering, of Torquemada and Galileo and Voltaire and Calas and Noah and the morbid imagination of diseased nuns, of Cupid and Pish?’ Saint and theologian and ignorant Catholic know what can be known concerning Pish. . . .

On a top shelf Leslie Stephen’s Essays on free thinking and plain speaking gathers dust between Buchner’s crass Kraft und Stoff and Pétrone (that Manon Lescaut of antiquity for precocious schoolboys) close to poor George Tyrrell’s later volumes, Swedenborg’s Conjugial Love and Spiritual Diary, and the Scottish Criminal Trials.

In my boyhood I devoured plain atheistic cake like Buchner and Leslie Stephen: without bread, what was I to eat?

‘ The ecstasy of evolution over,’ (ecstasy: did I not startle my mother when I declared I would not care to live unless I believed in Darwinism; but ecstasy soon over!) I accepted the magic lantern theory of life. Fantasmagoria, yes, but I did not worship, I had no cosmic emotions, still less admiration for moralism. I did not brood or regret, I had so much to expect, I had to grow up.

In the course of two interesting articles in the April

and May numbers of Blackfriars, Fr. Aelred Whitacre has developed a view of Bd. Robert Bellarmine which would have gladdened the heart of the ‘Advocatus Diaboli.’ Blessed Robert, we are to believe, was a man torn between two loyalties, that to truth and conviction on the one hand, and that to his own Order and its Superiors on the other. In the event, it was the latter which prevailed. Arnica veritas, sed magis arnica Societas is in substance Fr. Whitacre’s verdict. Such a view of one whom the Church has been pleased to honour with beatification is piquant, and, could it be sustained, might well cause grief to those who respect the Church’s decisions. Fortunately, however, for a great man’s reputation, Fr. Whitacre would appear, from the manner in which he has endeavoured to prove his point, not to have had access to the findings of recent research on the life of Bellarmine. His reading, it would seem, has been in the main confined to Serry’s eighteenth-century Historia Congregationum de Auxiliis Divinae Gratiae, a partisan document, long since discredited, and known to all students of the subject as utterly untrustworthy.

This History, besides having been, according to general belief, edited and prepared for the press by the arch-Jansenist Pasquier Quesnel, was based to a very large extent on documents about which Pope Innocent X ruled as follows in a decree against the Jansenists issued in 1654 :