ment and Clement by dispensation of his cousin, Pope Leo X.28 Henry took jurisdiction de facto over the law of the Church and by the enactments of the English State attempted to undo, with reckless hands, the work of Julius II. A compliant Archbishop of Canterbury annulled his marriage and an obedient Parliament legislated to suit.29 Civil and religious shipwreck followed. Pope Clement continued to the end of his life the rôle of Papal matchmaker for children under the moral age of consent. He married his young relative and ward, Catherine de Medici, at the age of fourteen,30 to Prince Henry of France, and the licentious and degenerate Alessandro the Moor, who was either Pope Clement's illegitimate son or that of his kinsman, the Duke of Urbino,31 to Margaret of Parma, then fourteen years old, the illegitimate daughter of Charles V.32 On the murder of Alessandro in an adulterous intrigue, Charles V and Pope Paul III united in marrying Margaret to Ottavio Farnese, son of Pier Luigi, who was the illegitimate son of Pope Paul III.33

Certain it is that the Latin Church made sorry work when it possessed exclusive and undisputed jurisdiction over marriage. Bad as conditions may be under the exercise of jurisdiction by the modern State, it is doubtful whether even a section of Main Street in the United States surpasses in moral degradation the

28 C. E., vol. iv, p. 24.

29 Froude, History of England, vol. ii, pp. 212–215.

30 C. E., vol. iii, p. 443 a.

31 L. Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, vol. iv, part 2, p. 172, note 5. 32 E. B., vol. xvii, p. 703; G. F. Young, The Medici, vol. i, p. 499; J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, vol. i, pp. 227–229. 33 Ibid., vol. i, p. 228; L. Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. i, p. 170; Young, The Medici, vol. i, p. 512.

record we have glimpsed in a section of the sixteenth century in the royal and Papal palaces of Europe. The reflection may perhaps be indulged that the cleansing of the Augean marriage stable of modern life may be more successfully accomplished by the Church of Christ through the forum of conscience than through a legalistic jurisdiction exercised in the right of a factitious ecclesiastical sovereignty in conflict with the State.

CHAPTER XIII

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF POLITICS

If one were asked to designate the principle which might be regarded as paramount in the ancient political order and as the very foundation of human rights it would not be a great hazard to select that of prescription. It was quaintly defined in the sixteenth century as the principle "that, by the unanimous Consent of all Nations it is forbidden to change, or move the Things which have been for a long Time immoveable." It was that principle which kept the future locked in the past, and the rights of life, liberty, and happiness among men subject to a perpetual and universal law of mortmain.

Human rights were determined, not by the hopes and possibilities of the future, but by the failures and the dead certainties of the past. Not only were the countries of the earth assigned to permanent ownerships determined by prescriptive possession so immemorial that even their original causes were forgotten, but the people inhabiting those countries were made the living chattels attached to their lands, and with them they were transferred by bargain and sale among the lords of prescriptive right. Pope Adrian IV claimed sovereignty over Ireland because, as was said, the Donation of the Emperor Constantine, eight hundred years before, had given "all islands" to the Pope. In 1156 he donated Ireland to the sovereignty of Eng

land-so initiating the Irish question! It provoked no sensation in the world when Pope Clement IV, in 1265, sold millions of South Italians to Prince Charles of Anjou for a yearly tribute of eight hundred ounces of gold, and declared he would excommunicate the Prince if the first payment was deferred.2 King John was acting quite within theoretic prescriptive right as ruler of England when he agreed to become the vassal of Pope Innocent III, and surrendered that kingdom and its people to him as feudal overlord. But in the great transformation which we have glimpsed here and there in these pages, a new power and a new principle have superseded ancient prescription, and the chattels that were sold in the day of prescription have become the people who rule in the day of popular sovereignty. Everywhere, save in the theories of the Roman Church, the dead hands of prescription have relaxed their hold before that Civic Primacy of Peoples that subordinates the past to the future, makes prescriptive rights plastic to the welfare of mankind, and finds its highest expression in the declaration that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.

It is this principle of immemorial prescription that the Roman Church is still asserting today in derogation of the Civic Primacy of the Italian People. More than half a century ago the people of the States of the Church rejected the secular rule of the Pope of Rome over those States and merged them in the present King

1 C. E., vol. i, p. 158 a.

2 Janus, p. 14, citing Raynald, p. 162; consult also C. E., vol. iv, p. 19 d. 3 Ibid., vol. viii,

p.

15 c.

dom of Italy, yet the current teaching in the Church is that the act was sacrilege and that the people in asserting their Civic Primacy were usurpers; in other words, the legal and constitutional rights of the population of the States of the Church to government by consent of the governed are, even at this day, denied by the sovereignty of the Roman Church because a thousand years ago Pepin, Charlemagne and the Countess Matilda made a present of those States and their people to the Pope.5

Today Roman Catholic schools teach as follows:

"93. Does the Pope possess none but spiritual power? He also possesses temporal power in the States of

the Church.

94. Why is this power legitimate?

Because it rests on the best possible titles:

1. On the election and choice of those nations which, when abandoned by the emperors of the East, sought refuge under the protection of the Popes;

2. On the just conquests of Pepin and Charlemagne and on the free grant of the Countess Matilda;

3. On a prescription of over ten centuries. 95. Why is this power necessary?

In the present state of human affairs, this sovereignty is absolutely necessary for the good of the (Roman) Church and the free government of souls.

4 Supra, p. 214. 5 Supra, p. 76.