Pope, cardinals, prelates, and priests of Rome,
but also the abbesses and nuns are – snipes!

A canoniser of saints, an authoriser of modern
miracles, an excommunicator of kings, an
inventor of Immaculate Conceptions, would seem
to merit a more dignified comparison; but
however high-soaring a bird of prey he may have
been in his time, however loud-crowing a cock
of the European walk, a snipe he is now, and a
snipe he intends to remain, if people will let
him, and that for excellent reasons.

There is no need for a man to be wonderfully
strong in natural history to know that the snipe,
who has a very long, slender, and soft bill, is
particularly fond of sloppy, marshy grounds, of
the tail-ends of ponds, of the banks of stagnant
waters, that is to say, of the sole spots where it
can find an ample pasturage of worms. Now,
as soon as we have acknowledged the truth of
the clear proposition which is laid down as the
principle of the lately proposed French ministerial
project, that every agricultural improvement
must begin by the drainage of a country
and the clearing out of its watercourses, the
first consequence which logic draws from it is,
that there exists a fatal antagonism between the
interests of agriculture and the interests of the
snipe. Logic also allows the long-billed bird to
refuse any compromise on such tender ground,
since the question for it is, "To be, or not to
be?"

And now for a third proposition, which
appears to be equally true with the two preceding:
All reforms are sisters, and fatally commence by
agricultural improvement. The destiny of the
snipe is written in these words. Thus, the
discovery of the compass leads to the discovery
of the New World. Christopher Columbus's
discovery soon induces us to discover that the
earth is round, and that it spins round the sun,
contrary to the opinion which had been held for
ages. Galileo's and Copernicus's discoveries
cause us to surmise that there are passages in
Holy Writ which are open to more than one
interpretation; the final consequence is a schism
which detaches from Rome three or four great
nations and fifty millions of souls. And on that
day, mark it well, Luther's heresy dealt a fearful
blow on the snipe, who suffers from it to
this very day. It robbed the snipe, as it robbed
Rome, of England, Saxony, Prussia, Holland,
and the rest, suppressing, in those countries,
monasteries, monastic vows, and indulgences to
eat meat on fast-days.

Every man who has cut his wisdom-teeth has
the right to form an opinion of the principle of
the possession of temporal wealth by those who
have taken a vow of humility and poverty. Men
may form an opinion, but snipes may not. All
the popes whom Dante encountered in his
Inferno, will avow that it was their temporalities
which placed them there. But the snipe does
not admit their testimony, recorded by a Ghibelline
pen. The snipe does not comprehend the
subtle distinctions between the temporal and
the spiritual, which pretended sages would have
prevail in the councils of the government of its
choice. The snipe is magnificently in the right,
seeing that all reforms, temporal or spiritual,
political or religious, are the same; namely, an
insurrection of some sort against an authority of
some sort, which is based upon Divine right,
and claims to be delegated by the Divinity
himself.

During the golden age of the snipe's history,
during the thousand years which began with
Clovis and ended with Luther, the double-barrelled
percussion gun, the dastardly child of progress,
was not yet invented. On the other hand,
the wise institution of meagre meals, which forbid
men to make a god of their belly, had conferred
on the carp a high economical and social
importance; and pisciculture, under the
influence of ichthyophagous ideas, became a
profitable business, which was doubly dear to the
monastic orders who are naturally inclined to the
rearing of fish, because it is compatible with
repose of mind and body. In those days, the
domain of stagnant waters, the fish-ponds and the
carperies, extended wider every week and month,
to the great delight of the snipe, whose populous
tribes had no other care than to make love and
to die fat under the protectionist laws of their
blessed country.

But Progress has come to upset pitilessly the
wild-fowl's edifice of happiness— Progress, in all
sorts of forms, under all sorts of disguises;
Religious progress, under the mask of reform, has
deadened in men's hearts all faith in the merits
of the flesh of the carp, and has smothered the
remorse of guilty stomachs. Then, political and
philosophical progress stripped the monastic
orders of their estates and their fish-ponds, to
bestow them on the nation at large. Lastly,
agricultural progress, the bitter enemy of pools and
puddles, has conceived the notion of replacing
pisciculture by a more remunerative as well as a
more salubrious form of industry. You may
remember the picturesque fashion in which an
orator of the National Convention described the
change in the situation. The phrase has
attained celebrity, and merits it. "The reign of
the carp is over," said the butcher Legendre;
"Let that of the ox begin." The time was come,
he thought, to substitute the meadow for the
pond, and herds of calves for shoals of finny fry.
The orator might have completed his description
of the state of things by another metaphor
equally in accordance with the parliamentary
style of the epoch: " The toesin of '89 is the
snipe's funeral bell." For the interests of the
carp and the snipe are the same in this religious,
political, industrial, and agricultural pond
question.

But the instant that the orator of the
Convention had discussed the contested royalty of
the ox and the carp dynasties, the snipe's opinion
on the Roman Question might have been guessed
beforehand. The snipe only obeys the
imperious prescriptions of its nature, when it sticks
to the statu quo, in opposition to the anodyne
reforms counselled by the French government.
There is one measure especially to which it
cannot in reason subscribe, and which it has even a