Lord Acton's comment is a curious one. It professes to
depre- cate Mr. Gladstone's anxiety on the ground that long before the Vatican Council, Rome had been guilty of authorising, not only gross interference with the Civil power, but even the assassination of monarchs ; and that at the ' ime the Roman Catholic oath of abjuration was deliberately repealed by Parliament, the Roman claims were as strongly asserted as ever. Lord Acton asserts,—we know not on what authority,—that " Pius. V., the only Pope who has been proclaimed a saint for many- centuries," not only deposed Elizabeth, " but commissioned an assassin to take her life,"—an assertion which, whether of Pope or peasant, should surely not be lightly made. The general effect of Lord Acton's letter is, that the habit of deference to high Roman Catholic authority is a hot-bed of civil crime,—which renders it all the odder that the writer should appear to claim the Catholic name. Lord Acton's shell should certainly have been fired into the Roman camp from the outside.
