THE
RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906

Nihil Obstat:
JOSEPH WILHELM, S. T. D.,
Censor Deputatus.

Imprimi potest
✠ GULIELMUS,
Episcopus Arindelensis,
Vicarius Generalis.

Westmonasterii,
Die 6 Aprilis, 1907.

THE RELIGIOUS
PERSECUTION
IN FRANCE
1900-1906

BY
J. NAPIER BRODHEAD
AUTHOR OF “SLAV AND MOSLEM”
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., Ltd.
43 GERRARD STREET, SOHO, W.
1907

PREFACE

THESE Considerations, written during the last six years’ residence in France, have already appeared in the Press of the United States. They were written from year to year without any thought of republication, which seems justified to-day by the acuity of the conflict between the Church and the French atheocracy, a conflict which cannot but interest Christians everywhere.

J. N. B.

CONTENTS

THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Lyon, March 17th, 1900.

THERE seems to be considerable misapprehension in the United States as to the status of the Catholic Church in France. “One iniquitous arrangement in France,” writes the Central Baptist, “is the support of the priesthood out of public funds.” In receiving stipends from the State the French clergy, however, are no more its debtors, nor its functionaries, than holders of French 3 per cents who receive the interest of their bonds. When that essentially satanic movement, known as the French Revolution, swept over this fair land, deluging it in blood, the wealth of the Church, the accumulation of centuries, was all confiscated by the hordes who pillaged and devastated, and killed in the name of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, until Napoleon restored order with an iron hand. A born ruler of men, this Corsican understood that the principal feature of the work of restoration must be the reorganization of the Catholic Church in France. Accordingly he concluded with the Pope the convention known as the Concordat. It was not possible in the dilapidated state of the country to restore the millions that had been stolen by those “champions of liberty who,” according to Macaulay, “compressed into twelve months more crimes than the kings of France had committed in twelve centuries.” Still less was it possible to rebuild many noble structures, and recover works of art sold by sordid harpies or destroyed by impious vandals. It was accordingly agreed (Arts. 13 and 14, Concordat) that in lieu of this restitution the State should henceforth pay to the Church, annually, the stipends of so many archbishops, bishops, curates, etc.

The Concordat constitutes an organic law of the State. The clergy receive their stipends, not as a salary, but as the payment of a debt due to them by the State. It is in vain, therefore, that efforts are made now to represent the Catholic clergy as salaried functionaries of the State. The act by which Waldeck Rousseau recently decreed the suppression of the stipends of certain bishops was wholly arbitrary, and, moreover, the violation of an organic law. It was the partial repudiation of a public debt, quite as dishonourable as if the payment of interest of three per cent bonds were withheld from certain bondholders.

The position of Protestant and Jewish ministers in France is entirely different. They do receive salaries which are purely gratuitous. The Revolutionists did not trouble them, and they had no part in the Concordat of 1801. We may say that the French Revolution was appeased, but it is not over by any means. No nation less well founded and grounded could have withstood as France has done the shocks and upheavals of a century.

To this day France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the millions of public money expended in so-called non-sectarian primary schools and colleges. Travellers stroll into French churches, in summer, at High Mass on Sundays at 9.30 or 10.30 generally, and because they find a very small congregation at this service they report that the churches are deserted and religion fast dying out. They ignore the fact that in these churches low masses have been said hourly since 5 a.m., so that people may comply with their duty, and then go off on their outing. Lyon has many large beautiful old churches, and many handsome new ones. Yet not one of them could contain all their parishioners if they wished to attend the same service.

For nearly twenty-five years the Government has been running its educational machine at immense cost, compelling the French to support schools they will not patronize, as well as those of their own choice. Nevertheless, State colleges and primary schools are so neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed. This is the Government’s programme. There is nothing so bad as the corruption of that which is best. France is still profoundly Catholic, and it is only natural that the struggle between good and evil should be sharp here. The forces of reaction and action are always proportionate. Hence it is that France has always been “the centre of Masonic history,” and of the Goddess Reason’s supreme efforts against Christianity. Her temperament, too, makes her a choice field for experiments.

We can therefore understand M. Waldeck Rousseau’s indignation when so many bishops openly expressed their sympathy with and admiration for the Assumptionist Fathers who were condemned recently—and condemned for what crime? For being an unauthorized association of more than twenty persons, when there are hundreds of other similar associations at the present moment.

Briefly stated, the present phase of the Church in France is simply the nineteenth-century phase of the struggles of Investiture in the Middle Ages; the secular power seeking to have and to dominate a national Church, whose ministers are to be nothing but state functionaries, bound to serve and to support the Government. This was the old pagan ideal, and every portion of the Church that has renounced allegiance to Rome has fallen into this condition. In England, in Russia, in the Byzantine Empire, in Turkey, in Africa—wherever there is a national Church—it is little better than a department of State. The Gallican Church narrowly escaped a similar fate in the days of Louis XIV. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was another desperate and abortive attempt to nationalize and secularize the Church in France. Gloriously, too, her clergy expiated their momentary Gallican insubordination. All over France they were guillotined, drowned, and exiled, and imprisoned, en masse, rather than submit to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. There is nothing more admirable in the history of Christianity than the conduct of the victims massacred in the convent of the Carmelites, converted into a prison by the Jacobins. Martyrs and confessors were as numerous as in the first centuries of the Church, and from their ashes arose a new French Church purified by poverty and suffering.

Never have institutions of learning and charity under religious direction been so numerous. No country has a clergy more zealous, more learned, more united with the Holy See than that of France to-day. No wonder then that the powers of darkness are devising means to destroy the new structure, so zealously and so laboriously raised on the ruins accumulated by the Revolution of 1790.

“Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.” Violent measures would rouse French Catholics from their political apathy. The Government cannot afford to do this. Religious liberty must be destroyed by degrees—and herein lies the danger.

THE TWO CAMPS

May 25th, 1900.

TO the thoughtful and sympathetic observer, France presents a singular spectacle of duality—two camps and two standards are confronting each other, neo-paganism and Christianity. By Christianity I mean, of course, Catholicism, for though there may be good Protestants, who adhere to some of the truths of revealed religion, such a thing as a good pervert French Protestant is a lusus naturæ, practically non-existent. It is a notorious fact that Protestants in France as elsewhere in Europe are, as a rule, absolutely indifferent in religious matters since they have ceased to be persecuted, and in many cases they have become the enemies of revealed religion.

All civilization, all redemption from barbarism, is fostered and developed around a sanctuary. Consecrated hands have, in every instance, laid the corner stone of the social edifice. The Church, the school-house, the university, the courts of justice—these are the normal steps by which societies, cities, and nations have advanced in the Old World out of barbarism and chaos since the overthrow of the Roman Empire. Of France this is pre-eminently true. Hundreds of villages and towns bear the names of holy missionary monks who built first a cell, and then a monastery around a chapel, which became the centre of a village, that grew in time to be a city. We see the same thing all over Europe and in the British Isles. Gibbon says that the French bishops made the French monarchy as bees construct a honeycomb. Like every institution that bears a religious imprint, this monarchy was long-lived. Those who descant so volubly on the flightiness of the French people, always overturning their government and never satisfied with the one they have, would do well to reflect that the French monarchy lasted some fourteen centuries. When this monarchy was overthrown by the assassination of Louis XVI there was formed a vortex in which were engulfed millions of human lives. Not that I consider a monarchical or any special form of government indispensable to France’s prosperity. There is, however, one essential condition. The generating principle of the French nation was the Catholic Faith. Without it, France would no longer be herself. She would disintegrate interiorly, and dismemberment and decadence would follow. France is still profoundly Catholic, in spite of the prodigious efforts made since the days of Voltaire and Tom Paine by numerous native and alien religious vandals, whose prostituted intellects were garnished from the storehouse of centuries of Christian culture. She will always be this or nothing. For any one who knows France, historically and psychologically, it is preposterous to think of a substitute creed, corresponding to any of the various shreds of Christianity, which do duty for religion under the name of some one or other of the multitudinous Protestant sects.

France, I repeat, will always be Catholic or nothing. But the Government is on the verge of apostasy. For the first time in French history the usual religious observances on Good Friday were suppressed in all the naval ports. “What thou doest do quickly,” and on this occasion the order was sent by telegraph on Thursday evening. As I stated in my last letter, irreligious education is doing its work, and the increase of juvenile criminals is appalling.[1]

If the projected law regarding religious associations is voted, it will be tantamount to the abolition of all religious teaching, as the existence of these congregations will be rendered impracticable. England and the United States will be the gainers, as they were when the Revolution dispersed the priesthood in 1790.

The French Government is on the verge of apostasy, as I have said. Is this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three, I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the government they merit and they are punished for the evil doings of their rulers. “I gave them a king in my wrath,” it was written. Is there sufficient vitality left in the French constitution to reject the poison that is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign? The assertion I make that the greatness of the French people and their very national existence is bound up with the Christian Faith is unquestioned by every thinker in France, even by those who, for diverse reasons, do not practise their religion, though they all bank on the last sacraments and would be very sorry to see their wives and children neglect their religious duties.

The governments which have succeeded each other since 1880 have flattered themselves that they could govern without the Church and against the Church. Bismarck tried it and failed. The Catholic party triumphed. It still holds the balance of power in Germany, and the nation is growing daily more powerful and prosperous. In France, alas! it is quite the contrary. In order to crush what they are pleased to call the “clerical” party, the Government has allied itself with Socialists of the reddest streak. Indeed, we may say that anarchy and socialism, or collectivism as it is called, are sitting in high places.

Any president or minister who dared to stem the tide would fall. They must temporize, resign, or die. Carnot was assassinated. Casimir-Perier resigned; Faure, who steadily opposed the revision of the Dreyfus case, was poisoned, I am told—at any rate, it is said that he died almost immediately after swallowing a cup of tea at a soirée. Though the public has no means of forming a correct judgment regarding the guilt of the notorious Dreyfus, the most important evidence having been secret, I have never doubted that he was justly condemned. At any rate, he accepted the Presidential pardon, and withdrew his appeal, a strange thing for an innocent man to do. This alone, it would seem, ought to estop him from a new trial. But unfortunately the whole thing is to be gone over again, though it is a perfect nightmare for four-fifths of the French nation.

I know France intimately since thirty years, and it is with infinite sorrow that I diagnose her present condition and its perils.

According to custom, the Imperial Court of Russia retired to Moscow for Holy Week, and while the Czar, laying aside court etiquette, was kneeling humbly on the bare floor among his peasant subjects, holding his lighted candle like them, his allies, the rulers of France, were desecrating Easter Vigil by inaugurating the Paris Exhibition with speeches, which seemed to have been compiled from those made by Robespierre and his companions on that very Champs de Mars a century ago, when they inaugurated their theo-philanthropy and the worship of the Goddess of Reason.

I presume Holy Saturday was selected because it is a high festival among the Jews; otherwise Easter Monday would surely have been more appropriate in a country where there are thirty-five million Catholics. This was on the 9th April, and the Exposition they were in such a hurry to inaugurate on that particular day is far from ready even now.

THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL

May 4th, 1901.

A YEAR ago I wrote in these columns as follows: “For twenty years the Government has been running its educational machine at immense loss, compelling the French to support their own schools as well as those they will not patronize. Nevertheless, State schools and colleges are so neglected that laws are being devised to compel parents to send their children to them. If all other means fail, the congregations of both sexes occupied in teaching will be suppressed.”

Now this is the true object of the Associations Bill; all the rest is merely padding. Liberty of association for Freemasons, Socialists, and all friends of the Third Republic will be untrammelled as heretofore. The blow aimed at religious teachers is of peculiar interest at this hour, when Christians, all over the world, are recognizing the immense importance of the religious education of the young, if we would preserve the structure of Western civilization, so laboriously built up during 2000 years, and save its deep foundations from being sapped by the returning tide of barbarism and paganism. For the revolutionary spirit of to-day is simply another version of that renaissance of paganism which culminated in the Protestant revolt. As in the past, it will be met by a great Catholic revival like that of the sixteenth century, which Macaulay has so eloquently described in his Essay on Ranke’s Papacy. This is the counter-revolution against which the self-styled government of “Défense Republicaine” is dressing its batteries. Already the effects of this revival are felt and, as Macaulay has pointed out, revivals of the religious spirit, this everlasting factor in the history of humanity which our pseudo-scientists so unscientifically ignore, always redound to the benefit of Catholicism. When men like Brunetière, Bourget, Lemaître, François Coppée, become standard-bearers of truth, we are consoled for the vociferations of any number of Vivianis, Trouillots, etc., in and outside the French Chambers, for whom “the eternal decalogue” is but an antiquated superstition that must be swept away.

The law against the Congregations has been opposed in the Chambers by many Republicans who have no religious scruples, and one may safely affirm that there is not a respectable Frenchman, outside the coterie in power, who does not condemn the Bill.

A few days before its passage, a mass meeting of many trade unions, presided over by Leroy Beaulieu, was held in Paris to protest against the projected suppression of the Congregations. The eminent economist declared that the proposed legislation was one of “national suicide.” If the law is so repugnant to the French in general, how is it that the Government always obtains a majority? it may be asked.

The explanation lies in the fact that while honest Frenchmen have been attending to their business and leaving politics strictly alone, this anti-religious campaign has been carefully prepared since many years by the enemies of Christianity. Like all notable persecutions, it is the work of secret societies. The Boxers of China are a congeries of these societies. In the days of Julian the chief instigators and abettors of persecution were the secret societies of Mithra, whom Renan declared to have been “veritable Masonic lodges with their initiations, passwords,” etc.

Since 1875 the “Grand Orient,” in which the Jewish element predominates, has gradually been gathering into its hands all the reins of government; not a very difficult task, seeing that as a rule respectable, industrious Frenchmen will not touch politics, while the emissaries of the lodges go out into the slums of mining and industrial centres, and organize primaries and Socialist clubs that defeat any respectable candidate who dares to enter the lists against the candidate of the Government. Jules Lemaître, in the Echo de Paris, states that there are 400 deputies and 10 ministers who are Freemasons. As these latter number about 25,000 in France, it follows that there is one representative in Parliament for every 50 Freemason electors, whereas there is only one representative for every 1800 votes who are not affiliated to the “Grand Orient.” With a house packed in this way, any legislation is possible. Madame Sorgues, lately sub-editor of Jaurès’ Socialist organ, La Petite Republique, has published some interesting revelations, showing how the Judeo Freemasons have made tools of the Socialists in order to seize the reins of government. “In combating the combats of Dreyfus,” she writes, “Jaurès and his friends brought about a singular rapprochement of the two most irreconcilable camps ... the presents of the kings of capital were accepted. The first service rendered was to restore the tottering Socialist Press.... All the advanced [meaning anti-clerical Socialist] dailies have passed into the hands of the great barons of finance; they are their journals now, not the journals of the workers.... Then they cast their eyes on Waldeck Rousseau, the clever rescuer of the Panamists.... The agent of the Dreyfus politics had the happy thought of introducing into the Cabinet, Millerand, the Socialist leader, with the consent of his party. Socialism become ministerial would be domestiqué, and rendered inoffensive against capital,” etc. Last fall, the President, Loubet, when at Lyons, dared to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, in spite of the Socialist mayor, Augagneur, and his gang. Immediately, the Aurore, a Socialist organ of Paris, clamoured for his suppression in these terms: “As he is not subject to the same accidents as Felix Faure, we must defend ourselves without waiting for the good offices of Judith.” M. Faure, M. Loubet’s predecessor, it will be remembered, is said to have died suddenly after a cup of tea at a soirée given by a rich Jewess, and the present ministry of the Dreyfus revision, to which he had been steadfastly opposed, came into power almost before the country knew what had happened, bringing in their political wallet another Dreyfus trial and this notorious Associations Bill.

If I insist, it is because I wish that it may be clearly understood that the French people are not guilty of the criminal legislation of which they are the victims, owing to their incurable reluctance to touch the mire of politics, left, as a rule, to the most unworthy and unscrupulous.

M. Waldeck Rousseau is a smart, wily politician; so was Camille Desmoulins, an obscure, ambitious lawyer, who saw in the Revolution of 1790 a grand opportunity of reaching a proud eminence. This accomplished, he had no further use for Revolutionists. “The Revolution is over,” he said; but it went on and on, until his own head rolled into the fatal basket.

How long will all this last? How long will the mad dogs of Socialist anarchy be held in leash?

THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL

3rd April, 1901.

FEW persons in the United States have the leisure or the means of following the debates of the French Chambers, and appreciating the Law on Associations, of which many garbled and falsified versions appear in metropolitan and other dailies.

It is pre-eminently a project of tyranny and religious persecution. The sympathy of sectarian antagonism with anti-Catholic measures, in any part of the world, is always a foregone conclusion. It does not concern itself with the arbitrary tyranny involved, alleging, perhaps, that now the tables are turned, and thirty-five millions of Catholics are being treated as were the Huguenots from 1685 to 1790. But when former governments strove to maintain national unity, founded on “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism,” their position was that of a man defending his own house against assailants, while the position of this Government is that of a small armed band who have taken forcible possession, and mean to coerce and outlaw the owners by imprescriptible right. But neither Elizabeth nor Louis XIV ever invoked liberty to palliate their coercive policy in order to establish, or maintain unity or uniformity.

As Bodley says in his excellent work on France (1898): “The intolerant system under the Third Republic differs from all persecutions known to history in that it is not only practised in the name of liberty, but is aimed against an established religion”—in possession since fifteen centuries.

It is a curious fact that the Huguenots, so clamorous for toleration and the rights of conscience in the past, have during a century of absolute liberty and equality, 1793-1900, dwindled from 2,000,000 in a population of 27,000,000 to 600,000 in a population of 38,000,000. They have evolved, in the usual process of Protestant disintegration, into the deistical and atheistical minority who, with the Jews, are now so determined to restore national unity in national infidelity. For it is a notorious fact that France is ruled and oppressed by a small coalition of Freemasons, chiefly Protestants and Jews, who are using the Socialists as cats’ paws.

Waldeck Rousseau clearly stated the Government’s programme in his political speech at Toulouse, and its scope is unmistakable, no matter what affectation of tolerance and amity for the secular clergy may accompany it. He is an astute lawyer, and his unruly band of Socialist henchmen in the Chambers often try his patience sorely by calling a spade a spade.

The suppression of religious orders and the confiscation of their property is no new thing. St. Paul reminds the Hebrews of their neophyte fervour, and how they accepted being despoiled with joy. Rapinam is the word used in the Vulgate; modern euphemism eschews the unsavoury word robbery, and says “secularization,” “liquidation.” Julian the Apostate, like the Rousseaus and the Trouillots of to-day, was also of opinion that the “Clericals” must be impoverished and discredited in order to crush out Christianity. Henry VIII robbed and suppressed English monasteries simply because he saw no other means of replenishing the empty treasury he had inherited. Moreover the religious orders were not likely to sustain him in his new character of supreme head of the Anglican Church. Suffering, crime, and ignorance reached unprecedented proportions in the century that followed, as we learn from Strype’s Chronicles. Lecky asserts that 75,000 vagrant beggars were hanged in Henry’s reign.

Suppressions and confiscations have always been a prominent feature in all revolutions, and they have been numerous in the nineteenth century. The reason is twofold. Everything that has a religious stamp is essentially and very properly conservative. It requires infinite pains, patience, and wisdom to build up or to reconstruct. Any fool or madman can tear down. Quieta non movere. The religious congregations, therefore, were always the last to abandon the mother country or the regime under which they had existed for centuries. On the other hand, revolutionists always have a crying need for money to furnish the sinews of rebellion, and also, incidentally, to feather the nests of patriots. What can be more handy, too, than church property, and the untold wealth of the religious orders! It is true that these gold mines are sometimes found to be ‘salted,’ as they are in the fantastical statistics put forth by the Rousseau ministry.[2] They seldom justify the brilliant expectations of the populace lured by the perspective of rich spoils, as they are to-day—pensions for the veterans of toil, etc.

These spoliations have always been followed by an immense recrudescence of popular misery. It was so in France, in Italy, in Spain—everywhere.

The twofold motive that instigated these spoliations does not excuse them, but it explains and perhaps palliates to some extent. In France, to-day, there is no extenuating circumstance. The Holy See loyally lent its support to the Third Republic when the second president, M. Grévy, humbly solicited it at a precarious moment. Leo XIII distinctly requested the clergy and the faithful to rally to the Republic in the interest of peace. With very few exceptions the regular and the secular clergy have strictly abstained from politics. The inquisition of which the Assumption Fathers were recently the object only succeeded in incriminating two or three members of the order.

Of course the regular and secular clergy cannot urge their flocks and their pupils to embrace the atheistical and pagan ideals of the coalition in power. If this be disloyalty they are all disloyal.

Considering that since 1888 not less than 20,000,000 have been added every year to the public expenditure, one might suppose that the Government would think twice before depriving itself of this army of some 180,000 self-sacrificing men and women who minister to the poor, the sick, the maimed, the blind, the insane, the orphan, and the outcast. Recently the Prefect of the Department of Bouches du Rhone was summoned by the anti-clericals to secularize all the hospitals. He refused to accede to their request, alleging that the budget of charity was totally inadequate already, and that many indigent sufferers were turned away from lack of accommodation. This is only one item; what will it be when the Government has to pay an army of hirelings to minister to the poor all over the land? But the Congregations do not concern themselves with bodily wants only. Many of them are devoted to the education of all classes. This is the head and front of their offending, and the true reason of their taking off. Every one knows that the godless scholastic institutions devised by Paul Bert, Ferry, and Jules Simon are repugnant to the nation, and have been a complete failure. In spite of the millions of public money lavished upon them, they have never been able to hold their own against the religious schools of the Congregations, which are supported entirely by private initiative, and at the cost of great pecuniary sacrifices on the part of Catholic parents, who support two sets of schools—those they patronize and those for which they have no use. Not content with imposing these sacrifices, as in the United States, the Third Republic now proposes to crush out all competition by suppressing the teaching congregations, and indeed all congregations, with the proviso of retaining for the present such as shall be deemed of public utility—meaning, of course, those who bring surcease to the straining budget by rendering gratuitous service to thousands, who would be a burden to the State, in a country already taxed to its utmost capacity. The tyrannical and arbitrary character of a measure which declares all conventual institutions “against public order” on account of their vows, which are likened to “personal servitude,” and yet utilizing some of them, does not trouble these modern Dracos. Still less are they concerned with the iniquity of depriving thousands of citizens of the right to dispose of their lives as they see fit, and of preventing millions of parents from educating their children as they choose.

About the middle of the last century, representative men like Montalembert, Lacordaire, Berryer, Dupanloup, entered the political arena to fight the battle of free education against the tyranny of the State University. They won the day, and freedom in educational matters seemed henceforth the inalienable appanage of France and of all communities boasting of Western civilization.

The aim of the projected Law of Associations is to crush out this liberty. It is no question of Church and State, but of Christianity and liberty against atheism and tyranny. All the rest is mere padding. It is a reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny and an odious anachronism. No wonder, then, that the present Dreyfus-Rousseau ministry should seek to throw dust in the eyes of the public, even subsidizing press syndicates to mislead public opinion abroad.

In a nutshell, the Trouillot Bill amounts to just this: No association can exist without government authorization, which will never be given to any religious congregation formed for educational purposes. None need apply but those who work with the Government. “We will give our money only to those who please us,” said the Socialist mayor of Lyons recently. “Our money,” forsooth—considering that the taxpaying portion of the community of Lyons is strongly Catholic and Conservative. Yet this municipal autocrat declared that destitute children, who went to any but state schools, should not be assisted by civic funds.

It is the true Jacobin spirit that permeates this Republican organism. The stamping out of religious education is itself but a means to an end. That arch-traitor Renan declared “that religion would die hard; primary education and the substitution of scientific for literary studies were the only means of killing it.”

The final purpose of this Republic is to establish national unity in national atheism, with perhaps a creedless church administered by servile state functionaries—a modified form of the worship of the Goddess of Reason. In saying this I do not calumniate the Republic, as Waldeck Rousseau himself clearly stated the governmental programme at Toulouse. A small coalition of Jews, Protestants, and other Freemasons have gained control of the country by capturing the Socialist vote. The latter do not yet see that they are being used as cats’ paws. For what fellowship can there be between Jew capitalists and collectivists? All honest, industrious Frenchmen despise politics as a rule. The great mining and industrial centres and the slums of large cities furnish practically all the voters, and this proletariat is lured on by brilliant prospects of the collectivist Utopia that is coming, when the Congregations and the Church have been abolished. Respectable Frenchmen, who do try to serve their country by taking a hand in politics, usually withdraw in disgust, and thus the scum comes to the top and is utilized by unscrupulous ambition. If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic pen-picture of French politics, let him read Les morts qui parlent, by M. de Vogué.

The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life. “Few greater calamities can befall a nation,” wrote Lecky, “than to cut herself off as France has done from her own past in her great Revolution.” To consummate this calamity is the avowed purpose of this Government. A hue and cry is raised by its Socialist henchmen at papal ingérence in French affairs, though the Concordat surely gives the Pope a right to protest against the ostracism and proposed suppression of the Congregations, as being a violation of Article I of the Concordat, which guarantees the “free exercise of the Catholic religion in France.”

Meanwhile “The Jewish Alliance” and the “Internationale” operate freely and openly, causing strikes in every direction, and disorganizing the industrial conditions here for the benefit of other countries. During the last few months immense sums are being taken out of the country, not by the Congregations only by any means. The boom in the New York Stock Market, which redounds to the credit of the McKinley administration, may be connected with this migration of personal property from France.

It has been France’s glory and misfortune to be a great purveyor of ideas, ideals, and fashions. She is essentially missionary, and was in the vanguard of Christianity from the beginning. In the early centuries of the Church, her monastic missionaries peopled the islands that lie around this beautiful Riviera. St. Vincent de Lerins, St. Tropez, St. Aygulf, St. Maxim, have left indelible footprints in these regions. In her terrible Revolution France was an object-lesson to the nations, whose intervention saved her from self-extermination. Foreign war was a boon and a safety-valve. The Commune of 1870 was another warning to the nations. Again to-day she is being made a spectacle to men and angels—to men who are, with secret rejoicing, applauding the Waldeck Rousseau ministry, and all for which it stands. They known full well that decadence and doom are near. There will be another Sedan, another Commune. The colonies, Indo-China in particular, will be the first to fall away in the general dismemberment.

I know France intimately since more than thirty years, and it is with infinite sorrow that I diagnose her condition. Her recuperative powers are very great. I fear, however, that they will prove inadequate after the next great shock.

But France’s admirable gift of apostleship, her lofty idealism, which no number of Voltaires could abase or abate, will not perish with her territorial integrity, nor even with her national life. Like the deathless masterpieces of Greece and Rome, her immortal genius will inform and inspire countless unborn generations, long after France herself shall have become a mere geographical reminiscence. “I will move thy candlestick,” it is written—not extinguish.

ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY

16th February, 1901.

THE attitude of the Jacobin government in France towards the religion professed by nine-tenths of the inhabitants is truly instructive. After prating about liberty, fraternity, and equality, and the rights of man for a hundred years, the successors of the revolutionary Constituante are preparing to deal a deathblow at the most sacred rights of the individual, to overstep the most arbitrary acts of any regime, nay of the Inquisition itself. These, at least, only concerned themselves with outward manifestations of personal idiosyncrasies tending to disturb the social order. But the successors of the Jacobins of the Constituante, so proud of their blood-stained origin, direct their attacks, to-day, against that most intangible thing the Vow, which has no existence except in the inner conscience of the individual, seeing that monastic vows which involved “civil death” were abolished by law in 1790, and all religious are, to-day, free to exercise the rights of citizens—to buy, sell, contract, or vote. The vow cannot even be considered a convention or a contract binding together the members of a religious association.

The ground on which it is proposed to declare religious congregations illegal without interfering with Masonic and other associations is, said Waldeck Rousseau, that “our public right [droit public] and that of other States proscribes all that constitutes an abdication of the rights of the individual, right to marry, to possess, all, in fact, that resembles personal servitude.”

Thus in the name of liberty and the famous rights of man, I am denied the right to exercise my freewill by electing to remain single, because not to marry would be an abdication of one of the rights of the individual, and resemble “personal servitude.” Anything more grotesquely inconsistent cannot well be imagined, and this project of law has been in process of elaboration in the lodges since twenty years! In 1880, when the decree against the Jesuits and all congregations of men was promulgated, it was declared illicit and unconstitutional by 1500 jurists, and 400 of the higher magistrates, who refused their connivence, were removed from office. One of my best friends was among these victims. The decree was enforced manu militari, but the current of public opinion was so strong that, ere long, these establishments were reopened and continued their good works unmolested.

It was next proposed to crush out the Congregations by fiscal measures. This also has proved inadequate, and the present project of law is the supreme effort of a most paternal and absolute Republic to secure the liberty of thousands of unappreciative subjects, by preventing them from exercising it in the choice of a mode of life. Truly a strange aberration of liberty, equality, and fraternity!

Of course it is an open secret that what is aimed at is the destruction of the Catholic Church in France, and the establishment, if possible, of a national church with a “civil constitution of the clergy” as was attempted in 1792.

Before attacking the citadel it is proposed to demolish the two great ramparts of the Church, Christian education and Christian charity, by disbanding the noble men and women who man these ramparts.

It is a notorious fact, well established by Taine, that the French Revolution, with all its saturnalia of carnage and nameless tyranny, was the work of a handful, some ten thousand in all, and even many of these were foreigners. They carried all before them, and I fear that history will repeat itself.

The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the “Sois mon frère ou je te tue.” It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored, Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the Constituante, stated their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a century of complete liberty and equality, the Agenda Protestant of Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000. In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots, erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago.

The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

A PAGAN RENAISSANCE

10th August, 1901.

IN a previous article I asserted that the revolutionary spirit so rampant to-day is a new version of that renaissance of Paganism in the fourteenth century which culminated in the Protestant revolt. I find the same view expressed in Goldwin Smith’s recently published work on the United Kingdom. In a chapter on the Renaissance he writes as follows: “Our generation may look upon this period with interest, since it is itself threatened with an interregnum between Christian morality and the morality of science.”

“Much learning maketh thee mad” might be said to our generation, that seems to be science mad and blissfully unconscious of the paradoxes of its programme. We are promised a scientific religion or a religion of science, meaning probably a religion worthy of men of science, unmindful of the fact that men of the highest attainments have been nurtured in the Church in every century, and that the supernatural must always be an indispensable element of religion.

Now Mr. Goldwin Smith raises our expectations to a future era in which “the morality of science” is to succeed to the hiatus or interregnum with which we are threatened to-day, as in the fifteenth century, when the Church was “drugged,” he says.

In his excellent work on Social Evolution, Kidd accentuates the fact that our Western civilization, the highest yet attained, has been wholly religious and not scientific; that in intellectual capacity and attainments we are, even now, far below the average Greek mind of centuries ago. This civilization of ours, marvellous in spite of all its shortcomings and blots, is founded on abnegation and self-sacrifice which are wholly irrational, scientifically speaking. It is indeed scientifically impossible for science to have any other morality than the law of brute force and the survival of the strongest, whether it be on the battlefield, the mart, or on ’change. The law of supply and demand is a corollary of this law.

Complacency for the weak and the lowly, that characterized Christianity from the beginning, and found expression in the legend of the Holy Grail, is all folly, the sublime folly of the Cross. The equality and brotherhood of man is also part of this “foolishness,” so repulsive to the cultured Greek mind. Nay, all our much-vaunted “free institutions” have grown out of this mustard seed, to which our Lord compared His kingdom on earth. “When the tree falls the shadow will depart,” as Tennyson wrote in another connexion. Nothing will be left to our poor science-ridden humanity but the cruel glare of human egoisms, passions, and ambitions.

In one of those sonorous paradoxes which his soul loved, J. J. Rousseau assures us that “all men are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.” That all men are born free is as false as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. It is an incontrovertible fact that before Christ slavery was the normal status of the masses in every age and clime, and Lucanus only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he cynically declared that the human race only existed for a few: Humanum paucis vivit genus.

The doom of slavery was sealed when Peter began his memorable discourse, saying “Men and brethren” to circumcised and uncircumcised alike. On that day the Church began her mission of liberation by subjugation to the Christian law.

But so ancient and deeply-rooted an institution as slavery could not wisely nor safely be felled suddenly. It was not till 1167 that Pope Alexander III published the charter of Christian liberty. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire (Essai sur les mœurs, chap. LXXXIII), “should render his memory precious to all people, as his efforts on behalf of liberty for Italy should endear him to Italians.”

Wherever Christianity permeates, even in an emaciated form, slavery must disappear, and wherever Christianity has not penetrated slavery is and always will be a standing institution, with its concomitant degradation of women.

Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and disappear, tantum quantum.

The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the law of Suspects. From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of 1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government, but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings. Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according to Macaulay, “crowded into a few months more crimes than had been committed by the French kings in as many centuries.”

Lyons succumbed after a gallant resistance of ten months. This quarter, where stands the monument to the victims, was then swampy ground, and it was literally soaked that year, not with the overflow of the Rhône, but with human gore. On the beautiful Place Bellecour two guillotines functioned day and night, but they were inadequate to the bloody task, and the citizens were mown down in batches on the Place des Jacobins. The successors of these Freemason Jacobins control the destinies of France to-day, by means of a Socialist parliamentary majority, obtained by the means I described in a previous article. They lost no time in ostracising tens of thousands of France’s noblest sons and daughters, who may not live as they see fit, nor exercise a profession which is open to all by law. The law Falloux of 1852 confers on all citizens duly qualified the right to teach or open schools, and it is still unrepealed. Millions of parents are deprived of the right to educate their children as they see fit in their native land. Exile is the price of liberty. This is the beginning of that diminution of liberty which must always accompany the elimination of the Christian principle on which our civilization reposes.

With stupendous cynicism Waldeck Rousseau calls the Associations Bill a “law of liberty and of appeasement.” One or two passages will exemplify the character of this infamous Act.

ART. I

All associations can be formed freely and without authorization.

ART. XIII

No religious association can be formed without authorization given by a law which will determine how it is to function.

One of M. Waldeck Rousseau’s henchmen stated the truth squarely, a few days ago, when he said “the enemy is God,” improving on Gambetta’s maxim, “Le clericalisme voilà l’ennemi.”

Already there are symptoms that the Premier is being carried away by his Socialist advance guard. When they now demand the suppression of the Concordat he no longer protests as earnestly as he did, affirming his devotion to the secular clergy, whose interests, he used to declare, were the main object of the Trouillot or Associations Bill.

The trial of Comte Lur Saluce by a so-called “High Court,” composed of senators, was a most peculiar episode. Accused of plotting to restore the monarchy, his defence was one long, incisive, itemized arraignment of the Third Republic and all its works and ways. His judges listened with much interest, fascinated, no doubt, by the truth of his statements, after which they found him guilty with extenuating circumstances—a tacit admission apparently that his enmity to the Third Republic was justified. Meanwhile, poor France is threatened with all the horrors of another revolution, if the same elements compose the next parliament, as they most certainly will, if opposition candidates are not even allowed to hold meetings unmolested, as at Toulouse and Lyons recently.

Religious liberty has however found a new home in a most unexpected quarter, none other than the realm of the Grand Llama of Tibet, who is sending a special embassy to the Czar. The latter may follow the good example and proclaim religious liberty in all the Russias, at the same time as the Calendar reforms which are being prepared. The two questions are not as irrelevant to each other as one might suppose at first sight.

INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM

11th November, 1901.

IN 1894, 1895, and 1896 I contributed several papers on the Eastern Question to the Progress. At that time public opinion was much excited and indignant over the massacres in Armenia, but none of the Powers who signed the Berlin Treaty thought fit to interfere. Massacres on a small scale were renewed from time to time, and a few months ago they reached considerable proportions; but nothing was done to punish the culprits, or to protect the victims of Turkish barbarity.

This week a mild surprise has been caused by the sending of the French fleet to Turkish waters. The callous lethargy, which a sense of duty, a chivalrous sympathy with the weak and the oppressed, could not dispel, has yielded to a financial exigency. Two naturalized citizens are creditors of the Sultan for a large sum. It is true they have been receiving most usurious interest these last fifteen years, but now Lorando and Turbini wish to recover their capital; and lo! the might of France is put forth on their behalf! It is said that M. Waldeck Rousseau, the Premier, is professionally interested in the matter, and will receive a fee even bigger than the one he earned when he saved his clients in the Panama scandal, who are now in the seats of the mighty. The long-suffering French taxpayer will grudgingly pay the expenses of this naval demonstration, and the Porte will promptly pay up in order to be rid of his unwelcome visitors. But France does not mean to be a simple collector for MM. Lorando and Turbini.

The elections of 1902 are at hand, and the semi-Jacobins in power are anxious to obtain the suffrages of the better element, and not be entirely carried away captive by their Socialist and ultra-Jacobin supporters, through whom they have seized the reins of government.

The Crimean war, as I have shown in Slav and Moslem, was partly brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III, who had just made himself emperor by an infamous coup d’état. Voltairean France had allowed her protectorate over the Eastern Christians to fall into desuetude, and Russia supplanted her. But when the latter exercised her treaty-acquired rights, France and England combined against her.

To-day with impudent inconsistency the Third Republic, which has done its utmost, these thirty years, to dechristianize France, sees fit to exact from the Porte that French religious schools be allowed to multiply freely, and that its protectorate over Eastern Christians be distinctly recognized.

What is more, the Republic demands that the Catholic University of Beyruth deliver diplomas entitling the recipients to practise medicine in all parts of the Turkish empire. Now, considering that the Third Republic has just made a most iniquitous law against religious congregations, depriving French parents of the means of educating their children in accordance with their faith, it is a grotesque incongruity that the Turks should be compelled to harbour these congregations and their schools, which are being closed in France with a latent view to establishing a Government monopoly of education.

This university of Beirut, and practically all the French schools and hospitals in Turkey, are under the direction of Jesuits, Dominicans, Assumptionists, etc., and they are of great importance to French influence, as they implant this language and the love of a nation that has such admirable sons and daughters.

I have no doubt that railroad concessions will also be demanded, and that all details were discussed during the Czar’s recent visit to Paris. Russia is using France to checkmate Germany in her Bagdad railway scheme, and to undermine her influence with the Sultan.

The deaths of Abdul Hamid and the Emperor of Austria may at any moment precipitate the European crisis which all expect and fear.

Meanwhile, neither China nor the Moslems have said their last word. In the heart of China, Tung-fu-Siang and Prince Tuan may, even now, be engaged in founding a new Mohammedan power. A China galvanized by that dangerous vitality of Islam would mean the extinction of Europe in China. And if any great Moslem chief should succeed in combining the interests of the faithful in Africa and Turkey, the European nations may all look to their laurels.

The self-conceit and self-complacency of the white races are simply immense. This self-complacency is unparalleled, except perhaps by that which distinguished the Jewish people. Because Providence had chosen them for the accomplishment of certain designs which were to embrace the whole human race in their ultimate scope, the Hebrews flattered themselves that the Gentiles only existed for their benefit, as the yellows, browns, and blacks do for us to-day. When the chosen people had filled their cup of iniquity, heedless of that last pathetic appeal, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” etc., there came that terrible siege (A.D. 70) which made them henceforth a people without an altar, without a country.

Another proud empire arose, intoxicated with material and military greatness, and we all know how the barbarians, our forefathers, overthrew the mighty empire of the Cæsars.

We, their descendants, flatter ourselves that because we wield the sceptre of civilization and science, we do so in virtue of some inherent race-qualities, and that our candlestick can never be moved, whatever may have happened to the rushlights of antiquity. But if we have been in the vanguard of civilization and science since many centuries, it is merely because we were Christendom. To-day Protestantism has devoured, one by one, all the vital truths of Christianity, till it is strictly true to say of many so-called Christian peoples and individuals, “Thou hast a name”—for Christian beliefs with their practical sides have been almost eliminated.

When the apostasy of the governments of Christian peoples shall have been consummated, when unlimited divorce, which is successive polygamy, shall be generalized; when monogamy shall vanish from our codes, which forms, with freedom from slavery, the line of demarcation between Western and Eastern civilization—then indeed shall we be ready for the burning.

The modern barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst. Godless education and the peculiar political methods of unscrupulous, educated proletariat are rapidly preparing what may be termed government by anarchy.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at Nice, and was waiting for a tramway to return home, when a youth of about fifteen, with a candid, ingenuous countenance, waved his newspapers just out with the cry: “Voilà la lutte sociale. Buy La lutte sociale.” I took the extended copy, asking the youth if he believed in the lutte sociale.

“Oh yes, of course I do,” he replied with a most convinced air.

“What is this lutte sociale?” I inquired. This he “did not know.”

Glancing through the leading article, I read a virulent denunciation of the clergy, and a most contemptuous diatribe against the masses, à la Voltaire. “They [the masses] are formed of vicious, ignorant, covetous individuals.... What writers call ‘the soul’ of the multitude is in general nothing but an immense horrible cry of wild beasts, an accumulation of the lowest instincts of the human brute ... they do not reason, they howl and they strike.”

It is these masses that unscrupulous politicians and secret societies are preparing to hurl against organized society as in 1789, after having destroyed in them from infancy all reverence for God or man: Ni Dieu ni maître—neither God nor master.

In self-defence, society will be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery—or perish.

UNAUTHORIZED CONGREGATIONS

25th April, 1902.

I HESITATE to write anything more on religious conditions at the present time, because I shall have to repeat what I have written in these columns since two years. My worst previsions have been realized. The Budget of Cults which I had hoped would be thrown as another sop to Cerberus, has been voted by a compact Ministerial majority.

If the clergy of France, with the Holy See, do not themselves reject all connexion with a distinctly pagan government, and hold their own as the Church did in the first three centuries, I fear this fair land may revive the experiences of the Byzantine or Bas Empire, as it is aptly called, for there is a distinct determination to enslave or to destroy the Church.

The French are an optimistic people. From year to year they keep repeating that matters will soon improve, that the next elections will make everything right and restore liberty.

France’s great misfortune is, I repeat, that respectable people will not, as a rule, touch politics, or soon give them up in disgust, while denaturalized Frenchmen and naturalized foreigners do nothing else for a living.

In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish a representative government in Southern Gaul. “But,” writes Guizot, “no one would send representatives, no one would go to Arles.” This same state of mind is working the ruin of France to-day.

On March 17th, 1900, I wrote: “Thus the bad element captures the votes of the labouring masses by the circulation of vile newspapers and brilliant promises of the Social Utopia that is coming. Consequently both Houses are packed with this element, whose war cry is Vive la Sociale, and whose emblem is the red flag of anarchy which was waved under the very nose of President Loubet at a recent Republican fête. With a parliament and a ministry like this any legislation is possible. If other means fail, all the Congregations engaged in teaching will be suppressed.... But Waldeck Rousseau is no fool,” I added. “He and his Freemason employers know that there are some thirty odd millions of French Catholics.... The Government cannot afford to rouse them from their political lethargy by violent measures.... Religious liberty must be destroyed by degrees.”

Two years have elapsed since the notorious Associations or Trouillot Bill has been passed; and the law Falloux (1850), which guarantees liberty of teaching, may already be considered as abrogated in favour of a state monopoly of education.

Never since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), strongly reproved by Pope Innocent, has so great a blow been dealt at liberty of conscience and the rights of free citizens. The pendulum of progress has been set back at least two hundred years; nay, we witness an odious reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny. And this crime against liberty, this liberticide, is committed in the twentieth century, amid the plaudits of all sectarian haters of the Catholic Church, and in a country which unceasingly flaunts its catchwords of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

The general elections of May, 1902, will not, I fear, modify the situation. I doubt, indeed, if any efforts, however earnest and well-concerted, could now retrieve the political situation.

Waldeck Rousseau, whose wily effrontery is something more than human, knows this, and begins to throw off his mask of Liberalism.

His recent political speech in the mining centres near Lyons was bold enough, judging by a stenographic report, for the Officiel and Havas toned it down somewhat.

He gave it to be understood that only those congregations who relieved the State in caring for the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the insane were to be tolerated. In other words, the souls of her children are to become the prey of a pagan State, but their diseased bodies are to be left to the care of the Church!

Eight Jesuits are being prosecuted for preaching Advent sermons, though they have closed their establishments and dispersed. The proper course, apparently, would be to arraign the bishops and curés who had invited these Jesuits to occupy their pulpits. Waldeck Rousseau is too wily for that. His policy is to make a fine distinction between the secular and regular clergy—to divide and conquer.

Three other Jesuits, who profess theology at the Institut Catholique, obtained from Rome dispensation of their vows, in order to be able to retain their chairs at the Institut. They, too, are being prosecuted for alleged violation of the Associations Bill.

I think the situation is clear, and that if any Catholics here or elsewhere still misapprehend the true purport and scope of this law of 1901, their purblindness is no longer admissible.

A COMBES COUP DE MAIN

23rd August, 1902.

THE elections of May, 1902, have not improved the situation in France. No efforts, as I said, however earnest, could now retrieve the political situation. For twenty-five years the “Grand Orient” has been gathering into its hands all the threads of power; ministers, presidents, cabinets are made, unmade, remade, as it suits the well-conceived plans of this band of sectarian Jacobins, who differ from other Freemasons in that with them God is both non-existent and l’ennemi to be vanquished, while at the same time they are strictly a political organization, whose object is to control the country and conform it to their own image.

The Associations Bill, or to speak more accurately, the law against all Christian education, was decreed by the lodges in 1877. An abortive attempt was made to carry it through in 1880. That attempt was premature, because the “Grand Orient” had not yet gained complete control over the judiciary. To-day very nearly every part of the administration is in their power.

People wondered why Waldeck Rousseau resigned immediately after the elections, which seemed a tribute to the success of his administration. The reason of this shuffling of the cards is evident. It had been resolved, as soon as the elections were assured, to make a coup de main, and close, summarily, 3000 primary schools, frequented by hundreds of thousands of children of the poorer classes, and this a few weeks before the holidays, without the slightest regard to the fact that state lay schools were already inadequate, while in many places there were none but congregational schools.

Now Waldeck Rousseau, speaking for the Government, had most formally declared that these schools were in no wise affected by the law of 1901 (Associations Bill), and continued to be regulated by the law of 1885 on primary education. It was by making this solemn declaration that Waldeck Rousseau obtained votes enough to carry Art. XIII of the Associations Bill, which is now being flagrantly violated by the closing of these 3000 primary schools.

Many of these schools were conducted by a few Sisters in buildings owned by private individuals, and the sealing up of these premises was a distinct violation of property rights. In one instance, the proprietor resorted to the use of a ladder to go in and out of his house; in another the local tribunal removed the seals and restored the house to the owner; but the Government had the premises sealed again. I cannot say who had the last word, but it is certain that there is open conflict between the judiciary and the executive. The tribunals have not yet been sufficiently épurés, nor the magistrates sufficiently domestiqués. It is consoling to think that there are still a few magistrates in France who have not “bowed the kneel to Baal, nor kissed his image.”

But a complete épuration of the army and of the judiciary is going on. All the “suspects” are being displaced, from the humblest garde champêtre to the highest prefect and magistrate. It will then be smooth sailing for the coalition in power.

The coup de main against the primary schools having been resolved upon, it is easy to understand how desirable it was that Waldeck Rousseau should not be on the Ministerial bench to undergo interpellations and eat his own words. A quondam Seminarist was put in his place, and bore the brunt of the interpellations. He contented himself with saying that “M. Waldeck Rousseau had made a mistake”—voilà tout! The Left meanwhile came to his assistance by banging their desks and vociferating against the deputies of the Right and Centre. A free fight was taking place in the hemicycle, when M. Combes produced the decree, closing the session, and so ended this disgraceful scene at two o’clock in the morning.

Of course it is pretended by Ministerialists that all these primary schools of the poor were closed in virtue of Art. XIII of the law of 1901. This is absolutely false. Jules Laroche, a Liberal who cannot even be suspected of “clericalism,” in his public letter, announcing to M. Combes an interpellation, expressed himself as follows, quoting M. Waldeck Rousseau’s own words, consigned in the Officiel of March 19th, 1901:—

“As to the right to open private schools, the Chamber knows that this is regulated by a special law; a simple declaration is enough, the school is then under the State Inspector. Art. XIII [Associations Bill] has absolutely nothing to do with the legislation on education, and the new law does not touch it at all.”

“Thus spoke Waldeck Rousseau,” continues M. Laroche. “It was on this formal, categoric, and solemn declaration that we voted Art. XIII. You, M. le President [Combes], are not applying Art. XIII. You are violating it, you are transforming the law of 1901 into a trap, and the loyal and categorical declaration of M. Waldeck Rousseau into the act of a traitor” (en œuvre de trahison).

This is enough for any one who cares to know the truth. It is thus that the French people are fooled and led on, step by step, to their destruction.

Nevertheless, many admirers of these sectarian persecutors prefer to believe that all these primary schools and infant asylums were closed because they refused to comply with the Associations Bill! Many of these teachers belonged to amply authorized Congregations. Those of Savoy and the county of Nice had letters patent from the King of Savoy and Piedmont, and the treaty of annexation to France, 1860, distinctly stipulated that the religious congregations and ecclesiastical properties should never be molested; it was one of the conditions on which the inhabitants consented to be annexed. Of all this the Third Republic makes litter.

The amusing part of M. Combes’ coup de main is that his minions even went around expelling small groups of three to five sisters employed by the Government in the infirmaries of State Lyceums! In these instances, however, they neglected to seal up the premises, as they did in the case of private owners—a fine Jacobin distinction between mine and thine.

The Socialist Mayor of Reims recently took upon himself to laicize the civil hospital, which, strange to say, had been served uninterruptedly for two hundred years by a congregation called “Sœurs de l’hôpital,” whom even the Revolutionists of 1793 had spared.

Ministerial organs like the Matin are now busy assuring the public that the sick, the blind, the insane, are not all to be cast into the streets like the children of the poor, until the Government finds time and money to build schools for them.

If the Congregations devoted to the sick, the maimed, and the blind could make common cause with the teaching Congregations, if all refused to demand authorization, which is merely a trap and a noose, the Government, I think, would be checkmated. But, of course, Christian charity will not allow them all to go on strike and throw their poor and sick and halt upon the hands of the Government. It will be their turn soon, and meanwhile they are holding the clothes of those who stone Stephen. No concessions, no pliancy on the part of the persecuted, will disarm or arrest the Government—the “Grand Orient,” I mean.

The final purpose of these Freemasons is to crush out Christianity by means of anti-religious education of all classes, and have, if possible, a national, Republican institution, to be known as the Church of France. It is said that M. Combes is preparing a formula of the oath to be taken by the clergy of this institution; it is a revival of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of 1793, and we may also look for a renewal of the persecution of the non-assermentés or non-jurors of that epoch.

Decidedly these modern Jacobins have no imagination; all their proceedings have a twang of ancient history. Read in Taine’s Ancien Régime, “La conquête Jacobine,” and it will seem like current history. You will read how prefects and maires and gens d’armes often knocked in the dead of night at the doors of peaceful sisters and ordered them to disperse. At Avignon, recently, the police had to barricade the streets to prevent thousands of indignant men and women from manifesting before the Prefecture. Lyons is preparing to resist. The speech pronounced by the Socialist mayor, M. Augagneur, at the political banquet on 14th July, would certainly warrant retaliation.

After the usual stereotyped glorification of that disgraceful performance known as La Prise de la Bastille, M. Augagneur said: “The new Bastille we must take to-day is that power, far more dangerous, of the spirit of the past incarnated in the Church, acting by its priests, its preachers, its monks, its professors, by all its lay accomplices. It is this Bastille we must destroy, if we do not wish to see wasted the immense efforts of 113 years ... thus, gentlemen, I invite you to drink to the success of the campaign being waged by the Government.” This is clear speaking. “No greater misfortune can befall a nation,” wrote Lecky, “than to cut itself away from its own past as France has done.” It is this misfortune that these blinded sectarians are seeking to consummate in hatred of the Catholic Faith, which is so bound up with the fibres of the nation that they can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life.

LEGALIZED DESPOTISM

15th February, 1903.

A CURIOUS feature in the case of the doomed Congregations in France is that more than nine hundred awards were made to them for educational work during the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Leroy Beaulieu, who presided over this international jury, has written several articles, and a most scathing letter to M. Combes, on the subject of his malicious official calumnies. He, Brunetière, Paul Bourget, and many other distinguished Frenchmen have countersigned a Defence, presented by the Salesian Fathers, in which not less than thirty-four misstatements made by M. Combes are rectified. In general, it may said that all these official statements are as unreliable as those made by the Commissioners of Henry VIII. The Chambers were supposed by the law of 1901 to decide what Congregations were to be granted authorization. They really were allowed no voice in the matter. M. Combes presented only the names of four or five, Les frères de St. Jean de Dieu and some others, who are to be spared for the present. The remaining sixty-four were condemned without a hearing.

Parents of the richer classes will soon be compelled, like the poor, to send their children to government schools, keep them at home, or send them to foreign lands to be educated.

The true character of the Jacobin policy is becoming every day more apparent.

The social body, like our own, has its periods of adolescence and senility, its maladies and critical periods, while the axiom that nations have the government they deserve is attested by the fact that governments correspond to the national pathology.

The individuals too who dominate in turbulent times are like straws on an impetuous stream. They merely serve to show the direction of the current and its force.

Danton and Robespierre did not make the Revolution. It made them. A popular fallacy exists that the Revolution ended with the fall of Robespierre, or at any rate when Napoleon planted his artillery before the doors of the National Assembly. It is not over yet, and the men in power to-day are but straws on the surface.

The French Revolution was an avatar of the revolution of the sixteenth century, or rather one of the periodical renaissances or revolts of Paganism against Christianity. No doubt many economical causes were at work in 1789 and there was an urgent need for readjustment.

The corvéable, or what we call to-day the taxpayer, then as now, groaned and repined against the excessive burdens laid upon him. Proportion guarded, it is even true to say to-day that all tradesmen, agriculturists, and shopkeepers, all except the vendors of alcohol, are as much crushed by taxes now as the corvéables were in 1789.

The moving spirit, the genius and soul of the Revolution were the Jacobin Clubs. There were organized the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, theo-philanthropy, the worship of the prostitute as Goddess of Reason, the noyades and the fusillades which made France a vast charnel-house.

To-day the Jacobin Clubs have changed their signboards, they are now Lodges of the Grand Orient. But the spirit is unchanged. The ideal is always the same—the destruction of all revealed religion, and with it the noblest fruit of Christianity, Liberty.

The Jacobin mind, served by organs of political administration, is to constitute the Omnipotent and Infallible State, the golden image before which all must bow down and worship and sacrifice—for is not sacrifice the soul of worship? They must sacrifice all preconceived, congenital, and inherited notions of honour, morality, and religion, and acquiesce humbly in those edicted by the Omnipotent Infallible State; for de facto infallibility is always a concomitant of supremacy. A necessary corollary of moral unity, established by an omnipotent State, is an evening up of social and financial conditions. No man may possess more learning, more wealth, or more prestige than his neighbour. Thus after having preluded by the assault on personal liberty, depriving thousands of men and women of the right to live in communities, the Jacobin Omnipotent State is itself to constitute one vast Congregation in which all, nolens volens, must live and practise Poverty by submitting to fiscal confiscations for the laudable purpose of equalizing fortunes, Chastity or unchastity according to new Government formulæ regarding divorce and free love, etc., with a view to procreation under governmental supervision, and above all Obedience perinde ut cadaver—Obedience to the Omnipotent Infallible State, henceforth the only regulator of their own and their children’s morality.

Since twenty-five years every law, every constitutional and electoral manipulation, has been elaborated at the lodges. To-day sixteen Commissions composed of their most trusted members are masticating the execution of the Associations Bill, or rather the wholesale executions of this guillotine sèche which are imminent. No congregation of men engaged in preaching or teaching is to be tolerated, or its members allowed to exercise these functions even individually. The same rule will be applied to the congregations of women. Those engaged in primary schools have nearly all been dispersed by decree, and in violation of the law, as I have shown. The suppression of those who teach the children of the rich is only a question of a short lapse of time.

The rulings of these Commissions will be presented to the Chambers, and the “bloc” will vote as one man. It is an admirable means of eliminating all useless discussion on the part of the opposition minority, which every day grows lesser, and still more less, and will soon reach the vanishing point. Thus after being governed by decrees and ministerial circulars, France will be governed by Commissions as under the Constituante, and the ideal of the Omnipotent State, universal teacher, preacher, and general purveyor, may be realized ere long. Surely a strange outcome of a century of Liberalism!

From whatever point of view we consider the suppression of all religious Congregations and of educational liberty, we must admit that a grave violation of personal and civil liberty has been committed and will soon be consummated.

The Moslems for a long time levied on the Spaniards and the Venetians a tax of so many boys and girls a year, but no Government of a free people has yet called on all parents to stand and deliver, not their purse, but the souls of their children, that it may sow therein the tares of a hideous state materialism. The right free citizens have to follow their inclination and conscience by living in community and practising the counsels of evangelical perfection to which they feel called is a most sacred part of personal liberty.

“Liberalism,” writes Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State exists, it is to prevent all intrusion into the private life, the beliefs, the conscience, the property of the individual. When the State does this, it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these intrusions itself, it is the greatest of malefactors.”

Curiously similar was the judgment of an old Spanish peasant with whom Montalembert conversed during his travels in Spain after one of its nineteenth-century anti-clerical revolutions and the usual accompaniment, the suppression of religious Congregations. Pointing with her bare and scraggy arm to some deserted monastery buildings, she pronounced these two eloquent words, “Suma tyrania,” acme of tyranny!

DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE

6th June, 1903.

THE true character and scope of the Associations Bill can no longer be dissimulated. It should have been labelled “An Act for the suppression of religious congregations and Christian education preparatory to the suppression of Catholicism in France.”

Nor is this all. It looks as if this Trouillot or Associations Bill, with its numerous articles, was merely a vulgar trap set by the Government to extract from the doomed unauthorized Congregations accurate information regarding their property and members, in order to seize the former and see to it that the latter are for ever debarred from teaching. These inventories were a necessary part of all demands for authorization, without which no Congregation could henceforth exist. I say “seize,” for every one knows that “liquidation” means purely and simply spoliation and confiscation.

I have in previous articles dwelt on the bad faith of the Combes ministry in closing by simple decree some three thousand free parochial schools, in spite of the solemn assurance given by M. Waldeck Rousseau, on behalf of the State, that these schools were in no wise affected by the new law of 1901 (Associations Bill). At the last session of the Chambers a more monstrous illegality was committed.

“Both the letter and the spirit of the law of 1901 were violated.” These are the words pronounced at Bordeaux recently by M. Decrais, an ex-minister, who was thereupon elected senator by an imposing majority.

The law distinctly provided that the demand for authorization of each religious order be submitted to the vote of the Chambers, but M. Combes just bunched them all into three categories—preaching, teaching, contemplative—and they were sent to execution by cartloads, like the victims of 1793.

In vain the Right protested against the illegality of this proceeding. “What do we care for legality? We have the majority,” were some of the cynical utterances of the Left, who banged their desks, stamped their feet, and vociferated to drown the voices of speakers of the Right. Worst of all, M. Combes produced, and used with much effect, a document purporting to bear the signature of many Superiors of Congregations, urging all to sell out their government bonds.

In vain the Right demanded that the authenticity of this document be proven before taking the final vote. This act of M. Combes speaks for itself.

The wholesale suppression of all preaching and teaching orders is, moreover, a distinct violation of Art. I of the Concordat, which is an organic law of the French State. This article provides, “that the Catholic religion shall be freely exercised in France.”

The allegation that this Concordat does not mention religious Congregations is a mere quibble.

“No church,” declares Guizot, “is free that may not develop according to its genius and history,” and every one knows that preaching and teaching Congregations have always formed an integral part of the Catholic Church, her most important organs of expansion in fact.

This wholesale suppression of preaching and teaching Congregations is a violation not only of the law of 1901 and of the Concordat, but also of the law Falloux, 1850, which entitles all persons duly qualified to teach and open schools. It was then that the great preacher and teacher, the Dominican Lacordaire, speaking in the Chambers as deputy, pointed to his white robe, exclaiming, “I am a liberty.”

The Charter of 1830 (under the Monarchie de Juillet, as the reign of Louis Philippe of Orleans was called) conferred this liberty, in theory; but it remained ineffective until the law Falloux finally abolished the state monopoly of education, which Napoleon had centred in the University of Paris.

But the Third Republic brushes aside Art. I of the Concordat, the loi Falloux, 1850, the scholar laws of 1885, and its own new-fledged law of 1901, all with the utmost unconcern.

“What do we care for liberty,” as the Left cynically exclaimed. Quite as little as they care for the wishes of the whole country, expressed by innumerable petitions, and the votes of 1500 Municipal Councils of Communes, whom the Government condescended to consult. One thousand and seventy-five of these voted for the Congregations; about four hundred voted against them; the others abstained. The attitude of the people in every place where Congregations were dispersed, with the aid of the regular army and the police, leaves not the slightest doubt that if a referendum had been taken as in Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the nation would have voted for Liberty and the Congregations.

With the astute hypocrisy that characterizes him, Waldeck Rousseau professed intense devotion to the secular clergy and declared that the law of 1901 (Associations Bill) was devised to protect them from the encroachments of the regular clergy or monks. He thought to divide and conquer. Now that seventy-two bishops have sent a combined petition to Parliament on behalf of the Congregations, and the whole secular clergy have openly identified their cause with that of the Congregations, this ministerial fiction can no longer be upheld.

The Left or “bloc” are clamouring already for the suppression of the secular or parochial clergy, who they say “are all in connivance with the Congréganists.”

M. Combes has sent a circular to the bishops requiring that all churches and chapels non concordataires be closed, and threatening to close even the parish churches which existed already in 1808, if any member of a dispersed Congregation preached in it.

Only four bishops, I am happy to say, “had the courage to submit,” to use the words of a ministerial organ.

The language in which the French prelates have expressed their non possumus is worthy of the best traditions of the Church, and when these sectarian persecutors shall have completely thrown off the mask, another glorious page will be added to her history, I trust.

Jealous, no doubt, of M. Trouillot’s laurels, M. de Pressensé, son of a Protestant pastor, and some others have attached their names to projects of law for what is mendaciously and hypocritically called “the Separation of Church and State,” meaning a law for the complete shackling of the Church in France in view to its suppression.

I think it is very desirable that the lodges should do their worst here and now. But it is just possible that Waldeck Rousseau may return and a halt be called.

M. Combes and his employers the “Grand Orient” must see that they have gone a little too far. Civil war on a small scale has been raging on many points of France for two or three weeks; and they would be running blood if French Catholics carried concealed weapons as people do in South Carolina and Kentucky. As it is, there have only been innumerable broken limbs and heads and no end of arrests. M. de Dion, a deputy wearing his insignia of office, which offered him no immunity, appeared handcuffed before the police court, and was there and then condemned to three days’ imprisonment for “manifesting.” A young lady of twenty was condemned to eight days’ imprisonment for having cried “Capon” to a justice of the peace, who beat a hasty retreat when he found himself confronted by a few hundred men in the hall of a convent into which he had forced an entrance with the aid of state locksmiths, or crocheteurs. Here on my boulevard, Cimiez Nice, two squadrons of cavalry and numerous infantry were called out to aid the police at 4 a.m. in beating back the crowds who were “manifesting” against the expulsion of the Franciscans. At Marseilles, Avignon, etc., the main streets had to be barricaded, and cavalry charged the crowds, wounding great numbers. Of course all these grand manifestations of popular indignation are carefully belittled or suppressed by foreign correspondents of English and American papers. In the Evening Post, August 25th, M. Othon Guerlac, with lofty affectation of impartiality, echoes all the commonplaces of ministerial calumnies against the Congregations, but he has not one word to say about the monstrous illegalities committed by the Government from first to last.

The indignant protestations of the foreign colony have suspended for a time the closing of churches and convents on this Riviera.

The Ministerials have not even the courage to do evil logically and consistently, with equal injustice to all.

Two years ago Waldeck Rousseau, in his famous political speech at Toulouse, declared religious vows to be contrary to public law; and in the same breath he introduced the law of 1901, inviting all Congregations to apply for authorization. His colleague, M. Brisson, at the session in which fifty-four Congregations of men were executed in globo, loftily declared “that the Republic would never put its signature to an act alienating human liberty.” And at that very moment, three or four of these Congregations were nestling, securely, under the protecting wing of M. Combes. That of St. Jean de Dieu has a first-rate establishment for men in need of surgical treatment, similar to the one conducted by Augustine nuns, at which Madame Waldeck Rousseau was operated on recently. None of these will be interfered with, no matter how heinous their vows may be.

It would be foolish, I repeat, for Catholics to rejoice at the possible return of Waldeck Rousseau, or at any machine en arrière policy.

M. Combes has been hired to do an odious job, when it is done he, too, will retire or fall. But the well-matured plans of the Grand Orient will be carried out with long-drawn, unrelenting, satanic astuteness. This is the peril I noted in my first article from France, March 17th, 1900.

UNCHANGING JACOBINISM

6th May, 1903.

LAST August I described the true spirit and scope of the Associations Bill, as it is called, and which many supposed was a mere matter of domestic economy. It should have been called an act for the suppression of all religious associations preparatory to the elimination of Christianity in France. L’ennemi c’est Dieu. It is evident to-day that the law of 1901 was a mere trap set by the Government to obtain from the Congregations accurate information regarding their pecuniary resources, in order to seize their property (for the term “liquidation” is only an euphemism); and regarding their members, so that they may be marked men and women, for ever debarred from preaching or teaching. The law required that demands for authorization of each religious order or association be submitted to the Chambers. M. Combes just bunched them all into three categories: preaching, teaching, and contemplative. At the request of the Government, the majority or “bloc” then sent them to execution by cartloads, as in 1793. Then the categories were labelled royalists, emigrés, and Catholic priests.

It is much to the credit of these fifty-four Congregations of men that their lives were so free from reproach that three times the Government had recourse to the same incident of a certain Superior, said to have been condemned to hard labour in the year 1868! As another instance, the case of the Frère Duvain was alleged. Like the Frère Flamidien, the former had been recently arrested and imprisoned on false charges. For since then, only a week or so ago, Frère Duvain too was acquitted as wholly innocent!

These wholesale executions have been committed not only illegally, but in spite of the fact that out of 1600 municipal councils consulted on the subject, 1200 voted for the maintenance of the Congregations. About 100 abstained, and the others voted against. The prefects, being mere satraps of the Government, were nearly all opposed to the Congregations.

The Government has been profuse in its protestations that its object in suppressing the religious Congregations was to protect the secular clergy against their encroachments. But since seventy-two bishops signed a petition to the Chambers on behalf of the Congregations, and are daily raising their voices to denounce the tyranny which has ostracized them, this mask also falls. The right to preach and to teach are corollaries of the right of free speech and free thinking. All liberties, indeed, are inseparably connected, and must stand or fall together.

Meanwhile the loi Falloux, 1850, is still extant; nevertheless thousands of citizens are placed hors la loi, because they live and dress in a certain way.

The Concordat, a solemn pact and contract between the Holy See and the French Government in 1801, is still supposed to be in vigour, and one of its most important clauses provides for the “free exercise of the Catholic religion in France,” and Guizot affirms that no Church is free that may not develop and function according to its genius and traditions. Teaching and preaching religious associations have, from the beginning, formed an integral part of the Catholic Church. The suppression of her schools was one of the first means resorted to by Julian the Apostate when he undertook to restore paganism. The Third Republic invents nothing. Its next step will be to attack the secular clergy and establish a department of State known as the National Church, ministered to by servile state functionaries, recruited among apostate excommunicated priests, of whom there are always a few lying around. It is erroneously supposed that the Catholic Church in France is an established or state Church; that the clergy receive a salary and are functionaries. This is absolutely false. Two decisions of the Court of Cassation have decided that they are not functionaries.

To understand their position we must recall that the Convention confiscated all Church property and lands, the pious donations of kings and people which had accumulated during fifteen centuries of national progress and prosperity. Not satisfied with this act of spoliation, they threw these lands on the market with the precipitation and greed that characterize all revolutionary iconoclasts, fondly believing that the whole nation had sloughed off Christian superstitions regarding ipso facto excommunications of all, who seized or even acquired Church lands. They were mistaken. These holdings became a drug on the market. From common prudence and honesty, if not from higher motives, few could be found willing to traffic in the pious gifts and foundations of their ancestors. Ten years of massacres, of civil and foreign wars, and anarchy, did not improve matters. Two classes of landed proprietors, two standards of valuation were created, and civil and religious discord was perpetuated in this material form. When Napoleon undertook the work of reconstruction, his first care was to restore normal conditions in the real estate market by obtaining a clear title to the confiscated lands of the Church. There was but one person who could give this clear title. To him Napoleon appealed, and the Concordat was signed.

Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This was the consideration [the do ut des] for which the Pope, as supreme chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment of interest on state bonds.

The suppression, at the present moment, of these subsidies in the case of the Bishop of Nice and many other bishops and hundreds of parish priests is a partial repudiation of this part of the public debt. And there is nothing to prevent the repudiation of the whole. “What do we care for legality?” “We have the majority,” were utterances which passed unrebuked in the Chambers recently. They can imprison and kill the Roman Catholic clergy. The First Republic did both most freely. So did Nero and Bismarck. It also tried the experiment of a national schismatic Church and failed. The Third Republic openly proclaims its intention of renewing the experiment in which Abbé Gregoire, with carte blanche from the Republic, so signally failed a hundred years ago.

To understand the abnormal conditions prevailing in France, we must remember that France is in revolution since a century or more. The Revolution of 1793 was essentially a religious movement, born of the monstrous alliance of the French ruling classes with the spirit of libertinage and infidelity. It destroyed the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, merely because they were associated with the Catholic Church, whose destruction was their main object—a means to an end. The final purpose was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, liberty. The ideal, then as now, is the omnipotent State, sole purveyor, teacher, and preacher. This may seem exaggerated, but it is strictly the spirit and the tendency of the Revolution since 1789. Napoleon was the offspring and the incarnation of the Revolution. After Austerlitz, he threw off the mask, and clearly showed his intention of establishing state despotism on the ruins of all civil and religious liberty. There was but one will in Europe that resisted him. Alone of all the sovereigns of Europe, the aged, defenceless Sovereign Pontiff refused to enter into his continental blocus against England, declaring that all Christians were his children, and we know the story of his long martyrdom at Fontainebleau. Capefigue, in the third of his ten volumes on the Consulate and the Empire, comments on the singular fact that the First Republic always bitterly antagonized the United States, and he explains this “singular phenomenon” by the reason that the former was a government of tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Republic of Washington was one of law and liberty.

What was true then is equally so to-day. The United States owe their independence to his most Christian Majesty, the murdered Louis XVI, and not to any pagan French Republic. Louisiana was ceded by the Emperor Napoleon, and not by any French Republic, first, second, or third. There can be no sympathy between the two republics other than that of sectarian sympathy with persecutors of the Catholic Church. I speak of the Government, not of the French people, whose genius and high qualities we must always admire.

Methods have greatly altered in all departments, but the generating principle, the inner mind of Jacobinism, is unchanged. We hear no more about the worship of the Goddess of Reason and theo-philanthropy. Jacobin clubs have changed their signboards; they are now called Lodges of the “Grand Orient,” but they rule France with an iron hand by means of the Socialist vote. When the day of reckoning comes with the Socialist masses, who are now being used as cats’ paws, the Revolution will again enter into one of its acute phases. Millerand and Jaurès are merely politicians who fall into line with the Government quite gracefully. But, as Lincoln said, you cannot fool all the people all the time. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will reap the benefits of persecution. The Congregations will carry on their work elsewhere, and she will more than recuperate her losses on this little point of earth called France. Unhappy country that is committing “national suicide,” to use the expression of Leroy Beaulieu.

DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU

August, 1904.

I REFER my readers to what I wrote on May 4th, 1901, regarding the advent of the Waldeck Rousseau Cabinet, and its policy after the sudden and suspicious death of M. Felix Faure, rapidly replaced by M. Loubet. I then related how Socialist revolutionists were skilfully used to obtain a majority with which both Houses were packed to carry through the odious legislation of the last few years.

The laws of 1901 (Associations Bill), and of July 7th, 1904, suppressing all teaching religious orders, are measures which represent the closing of some twenty-seven thousand Christian schools!

Two days after the law was voted some 3000 authorized institutions were ordered to close their doors, and almost immediately was inaugurated the long series of liquidations, a genteel euphemism for wholesale spoliation of the victims, deprived of their homes, and of their only means of earning a living, as they may no longer teach.

There is nothing more tragically pathetic than the last appearance in the Senate of M. Wallon. This veteran republican, called the “Father of the Constitution,” and now a hoary octogenarian, raised his quavering voice in one last eloquent denunciation of the laws of 1901, 1902, and 1904. Condemning the shameless violation of property rights, he boldly applied to the Government the Article of the Code which debars the assassin of the testator from inheriting his property. “Messieurs,” he cried, “on n’hérite pas de ceux qu’on a assassinés.” “Gentlemen, it is not permitted to inherit from those we have destroyed.”

Equally tragical was the last appearance in the Senate of M. Waldeck Rousseau, so near his last hour.

He had risen from his bed of sickness to unburden his conscience by protesting against the anti-clerical fury of his ci-devant supporters and instruments. In vain he denounced the violations of his law of 1901, travestied by that of 1904 suppressing even authorized Congregations. The verve of the great tribune had abandoned him. His speech was but a hollow echo of its former eloquence. Twice he reeled and was forced to steady himself by clinging to the railing. When he rose for the second time, to reply to the sarcasms of M. Combes, he suddenly lost the thread of his discourse, and before he had ended, many benches were vacated; the forum, where his words had so often been greeted with wild applause, was almost empty.

“He threw down the thirty pieces of silver, saying, I have sinned. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to it. And he went forth.”

It is needless to inquire whether the story of attempted suicide be true or not; to-day he is no more. The last two years of his life were a long agony, of which the last two hours were passed on the operating table. While he was dying under the surgeon’s knife the minions of his successor, M. Combes, were invading a convent of Notre Dame Sisters. They even insisted on going into the infirmary to inventory beds and blankets. A sick nun was so shaken by the emotion caused by this unwonted intrusion, that she had a seizure and died before the minions of the law had left the convent.

And thus persecutor and persecuted met on the threshold of eternity.

This sister is only one of the many hundreds of infirm and aged who have been literally killed by this infamous legislation of 1901 and 1904, and only one of the thousands who are dying of hardships and privations. Many of them are living on four sous a day.

The Government wanted to give M. Waldeck Rousseau a national funeral, strictly pagan and masonic of course; but he had left instructions to the contrary, and is to be buried from his parish church, Ste. Clothilde. Whether he received the last Sacraments of the Church or not is still a matter of conjecture. The death of Waldeck Rousseau will not in any way affect the trend of politics. The recent municipal elections are proclaimed a victory for the Government. As usual not one-third of those inscribed voted. A quoi bon? Before the law of 1901 was voted, the immense majority of the municipalities consulted pronounced in favour of the Congregations. This made no difference.

Before the law of 1904 suppressing authorized Congregations was voted, the Right demanded that the municipal councils be consulted again. The Government peremptorily refused. As I have said before, nothing can restrain Jacobin tyranny but a national cataclysm which would bring about a violent reaction. “We have the majority, what do we care for legality?” as the Left proclaimed recently at the Palais Bourbon.

They have no other rule of conduct but the “fist right,” now known as “the majority.”

LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE

July, 1904.

MODERN democracy, which flatters itself that it has shaken off all the shackles of authority, is itself but an evolution of what it so loftily contemns. If we are free to-day, it is because our fathers have borne the yoke of Christ.

In one of his sonorous paradoxes, Rousseau declared that “men are born free and everywhere they are in chains.”

That all men are born free is as false a statement as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. Men are not born free. Our rights and liberties are secured by laws which are a circumscription of the sphere of individual independence for the benefit of the community, and this in virtue of a divine “thou shalt not,” written on the tablets of the heart, or on tables of stone. Human laws have no sanction except in divine law, and no man has a right to command his fellow-men, except within the limits of natural and of divine law.

The sum of liberty in every community is the sum of its amenity to law, both divine and natural. Hence Plato’s remark that “republics cannot exist without virtue in the people,” and Montesquieu’s assertion that “the vital principle of democratic government is virtue.” All human laws deriving their sanction from divine and natural laws, it follows that liberty must diminish when these laws are violated with impunity.

Plutarch, referring to the Golden Age, which, according to all writers, even Voltaire, came first, writes that “in the days of Saturn all men were free.” Our data regarding this period are not numerous, unfortunately; but we learn from the traditions of all peoples, as well as by revelation, that something momentous happened, which abolished the Golden Age. Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was chained to a rock. Sisyphus was compelled to roll a stone uphill all his days. Adam was condemned to labour in the sweat of his brow, etc. The myths are various, but the central idea is always the same—a crime punished by a penalty involving the loss of liberty.

What the nature of the act of disobedience committed by Adam when he ate the forbidden fruit we do not know. Probably we should not understand even if we were told; for the magnitude of a crime is always commensurate with the intellect of the criminal, and knowledge has considerably diminished among the sons of men. To name anything as Adam, or whoever is thereby designated, named all the creatures in the Garden implies that his knowledge of them was adequate, while the great trouble with all our up-to-date science is, that back of every phenomenon, of every fact, stands an inexorable X, an unknown quantity that baffles research.

If we could wrest her secret from the Sphinx in any one instance, it is probable that the whole book of nature would stand revealed. But the angel with the flaming sword guards the portal.

With the passing away of the Golden Age, or “the days of Saturn, in which all men were free,” there came a diminution of light, and above all of liberty. What justice does in individual cases, when malefactors are incarcerated, seems to have been accomplished on a large scale, when the masses of a race, nay of the whole species, were reduced to slavery. For though our data regarding the “days of Saturn when all men were free” are scant, we do know, beyond a peradventure, that before Christ slavery was the normal condition of the masses in every age, in every clime; not alone among barbarous and predatory tribes, who reduced their captives to this condition, but also among the most stable and cultured communities—in Assyria, in Babylon, Egypt, Idumea, Rome, Greece, everywhere. Nor was there found one sage, one legislator, to raise his voice against an inveterate institution, which one and all deemed a sine quâ non of any society, of any government. Lucanus only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he wrote that “the human race only existed for a few”—Humanum paucis vivit genus. Towards the end of the Republic, when Rome numbered a million and a half inhabitants, there were only some 20,000 proprietors; all the rest were slaves.

Sages and legislators of antiquity who considered slavery a sine quâ non of government were not wrong. Vast numbers of human wills cannot be left in freedom without a restraint of some kind. “Christianity alone,” writes the Rationalist Lecky, “could affect the profound change of character which rendered the abolition of slavery possible” (History of Rationalism, II, 258).

When Peter the Fisherman proclaimed the brotherhood of man, saying “Men, brethren” to all alike, the Church began her perennial mission of liberty by sanctification. Individually, men must be delivered from the yoke of evil passions by Christianity, so that the masses might be delivered from servitude.

The powers of darkness, that are now waging fierce warfare on the Christian Church, understand perfectly what the legislators of antiquity understood and practised. Being resolved to uproot Christianity and its moral teaching, which alone have rendered freedom and government compatible, they are casting about for some new kind of slavery, which apparently is to take the form of State Socialism. A coterie is to concentrate in its hands all the power, all the wealth, all the natural resources of the country. This coterie will be named the State; the others, the cringing, crouching millions yclept the Sovereign People, will have nothing left but to obey the edicts of the Omnipotent Infallible State, only teacher, preacher, and general purveyor. Humanum paucis vivit genus.

This reversion to the pagan regime from which Christianity delivered us will be the just penalty of apostasy from Christianity.

If, and when, and where Christianity is crushed out, liberty both civil and personal, which are bound up with and inseparable from it, will disappear in exact proportion tantum quantum.

We need only turn a few pages of contemporary history and read the lessons taught by the French Revolution. The most illustrious of nations, in the zenith of its civilization, allowed the government to pass into the hands of a band of neo-pagans prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured; its temples were desecrated; at Notre Dame a prostitute, posing as the Goddess of Reason, was worshipped; on the Champ de Mars the new religion of theo-philanthropy was inaugurated.

What was the immediate consequence? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the Law of Suspects, a time to which Camille Pelletan, ministre de la marine, actually referred, yesterday, as “an hour when under the influence necessary, but somewhat enervating, of Thermidor, the Republic was in danger.”

Without going so far back as 1793, we have but to read the records of the Commune in 1870, which was a phase of the Revolution that is still marching on. One of the moving spirits of this time was Raul Ripault. M. Clemenceau was only Mayor of Montmartre, and M. Barrère, now ambassador at Rome, was an active member.

To Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, one of the hostages taken and shot by the Commune, Raul Ripault said, “Ta liberté n’est pas ma liberté, aussi je te fait fusiller” (“Thy liberty is not my liberty, so I have you shot”).

Liberty, I repeat, is bound up with and inseparable from Christianity. To-day, as in 1793, a coterie of atheists or neo-pagans have captured all the avenues of power by means of godless schools and the Socialist vote, and even by hobnobbing with the red flag of anarchy, which waved unrebuked around M. Loubet at that famous fête called Triomphe de la République.

They have worked, steadily and intelligently, to this end since twenty-five years, while two-thirds of the country have been absolutely indifferent to politics. Some even affect to ignore the name of the President. Laborious, honest Frenchmen as a rule despise politics, and cannot be induced to take part in them or be candidates for office. One has but to consult the electoral returns to see how many hundreds of thousands abstain from voting. Thus the Government has passed into the hands of the Judeo-Masonic coterie.[3]

As in 1793, the first result is the diminution of liberty. It was long sought to represent the Associations Bill (1901) as a mere measure of domestic economy. It was the entering wedge of tyranny. The object to be attained is the suppression of all Christian education, by the suppression of all religious teachers, preparatory to a state monopoly of education.

The indignant protestations and the tumultuous manifestations of men and women who fill the streets with cries of “Vive la liberté!” “Vivent les sœurs!” are wholesome signs; but I think it is just as well that the Jacobins should go on and do their worst. Overvaulting tyranny, like ambition, doth overleap itself. At the Gare St. Lazare, recently, some ten thousand people accompanied the expulsed sisters of St. Vincent to the train with cries of “Liberty! Liberty!” The police were powerless.

In another place the population unharnessed the horses of the omnibus that was taking some other sisters to the station. They dragged the conveyance back and broke down the doors of the convent which had been sealed by the Government.

In Paris at least 50,000 children of the poor have been thrown into the streets; for the state schools were already inadequate, and 30,000 or more children were waiting for a chance to comply with the law of compulsory education.[4] In a mining town, a crèche, or infant asylum, where 150 babies from six months to four years of age were cared for while their mothers worked, was closed suddenly.

When we think of all the suffering and inconvenience caused by these executions, we are amazed that more blood has not flowed.

The right parents have to educate their children as they see fit, and the right all citizens have to live as they see fit, and teach when duly qualified, are primordial, inalienable rights that cannot be violated without crime, and a crime which must find its repercussion in all civilized countries. In general it may be said that every Government has a right to administer its own affairs as it sees fit. This is precisely what the Turks assumed when they were massacring the Bulgarians and the Armenians. But Europe thought differently in 1877. The Jacobins of 1793, who had conquered France then, as to-day, by cleverly combined manœuvres in which fear played a large part, also thought it was nobody’s business, if they saw fit to drown, proscribe, and guillotine by tens of thousands, in order to enforce their peculiar views of liberty. But every act of tyranny, every crime against liberty, offends all Christendom. It cannot be circumscribed by national frontiers. Soon all Europe was weltering in blood. The First Consul marched rough-shod over Europe, imposing French liberty on unappreciative nations. And we all know how the allied armies occupied Paris in 1815 and curbed the Revolution for a season. History repeats itself.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

27th June, 1904.

THE Associations Bill, pre-eminently an act of oppression and religious persecution, has been rendered doubly odious by the many illegalities by which it has been surrounded, some of which I enumerated in my letter in the Evening Post of May 6th. Not long since, M. Decrais, ex-Minister of the Waldeck-Rousseau Cabinet, was elected by a large majority at Bordeaux, after he had branded the wholesale execution of the religious orders as “a violation of the spirit and the letter of the law of 1901,” and assured his electors that he had not voted with the Government on that occasion. Indeed, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for its own sake, and cannot even respect their own enactments.

Civil war on a small scale has been raging since nearly two months in various parts of France. It became quite monotonous to read the recital of all these expulsions manu militari which filled the columns of the daily Press. The programme was almost the same in every case. The crowds varied from three hundred to many thousands, according to the locality, and were more or less violent in their denunciations of the Government; the police and the regular army, employed to surround the convents and disperse the crowds of manifestants, were also more or less numerous, and acted more or less brutally. The troops as a rule left their barracks at night, arrived on the scene at 2 or 3 a.m., and awaited daybreak before surrounding the house. Then, the Commissaires ringing in vain, the doors are battered down, police and soldiers enter the breach and find a few old monks in the chapel, for as a rule the communities had dispersed. The delinquents are marched off between two rows of soldiers, the crowds break out in seditious cries of “Vive la liberté, à bas les tyrans,” numerous arrests of both sexes are made, and the country is informed that, fanaticized by the monks, men and women have assailed the representatives of the law.

It was on one of these occasions that Mlle. de Lambert cried “Capon” to a justice of the peace because he had beaten a hasty retreat when he found, in a cloister, two or three hundred angry men instead of a few old monks. She was condemned to be imprisoned for eight days. On the expiration of her term some five thousand persons went to the prison to give her an ovation, but found that she had been removed.

At Nice there was a small community of Franciscans on the Boulevard Carabacel. Their chapel was very popular with the humbler classes of Niçois, as well as with visitors, and manifestations like those that occurred at the church of La Croix de Marbre, much frequented by American sailors, were expected. Several companies of infantry and cavalry were sent to surround the building at 3 a.m.; but hundreds of persons had spent all night on the premises, and the usual manifestations and arrests occurred. Even after the premises had been sealed up, police agents were detailed to guard them night and day. This was very amusing, considering that policemen are so scarce in Nice that people are robbed in broad daylight in the most-frequented quarters.

All these grotesque executions manu militari represent one of the most recent violations of the law, wholly gratuitous in this instance, seeing that the Government had itself traced the method of procedure. On November 28th, 1902, M. Valle, Minister of Justice, said:—

“We have to examine if, after refusal of authorization and a decree closing an establishment, we should continue to have recourse to armed force, or whether it is not preferable to have recourse to the tribunals. M. Chamaillard himself recognizes that it is better to substitute judicial sanction to the sanction of force, always brutal. It is this substitution we ask you to vote” (Officiel, November 29th).

Again, December 2nd, the Minister said:—

“The Government abandons the right to have recourse to force, and asks you to substitute judicial for administrative sanction. This is the object of the proposed law” (Officiel, December 3rd, p. 1221, col. 2).

On December 4th this law was passed. Therefore all these executions manu militari, before the tribunals had pronounced, were another flagrant violation of law. But, as I said, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for its own sake. Meanwhile the tribunals, civil and military, have been kept busy condemning officers who refused to take part in these degrading, unsoldierlike expeditions, as well as men and women guilty of manifesting in favour of liberty.

The fate of the Congregations of women engaged in teaching is a foregone conclusion. Nay, M. Combes is closing many of these establishments even before the demands for authorization have been submitted to the Chambers to be refused in globo. I was in Lyons recently when two establishments of the Society of the Sacred Heart were dispersed in the middle of the school year, without the slightest regard to the convenience of the pupils or their teachers. More than three thousand persons invaded the railway station at 7 a.m. for the departure of the first group of exiles. An enthusiastic ovation was given them, in which all the passengers took part, and the bouquets were so numerous that they had to be piled into a vacant car. In the afternoon there was a second departure for Turin. This time the police took timely precautions. The avenues leading to the vast square were barricaded against all but travellers. These ladies have educated several generations of Lyonnaises, and were greatly esteemed.

It would be too long to relate the exploits of the Government’s henchmen, who have distinguished themselves at Paris and elsewhere. It is simply astounding that such things should happen in any civilized country and in a century so proud of its progress, liberty, and enlightenment. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was an offence against liberty and justice, but it occurred two hundred and fifty years ago—almost in the Dark Ages. Some time ago, Mr. Bodley, in his excellent work on France, commented on the extraordinary phenomenon of a republic persecuting, in the name of liberty, a religion professed by more than two-thirds of the nation and officially represented in the State as the dominant religion of the country. To understand this phenomenon we must bear in mind that French republicanism is not a form of government, but merely the modus operandi of a secret society. The Grand Orient has openly proclaimed that there would be no republic but for them. And all the laws have been elaborated at their convents since two decades.

Above all we must remember that France is in revolution since a hundred years and more. There have been intervals of calm which resembled convalescence, but these have been followed by new paroxysms, as in 1830, 1848, 1870, and to-day. Madame de Staël’s clever saying that Napoleon was “Robespierre à cheval” is by no means as flippant as might appear. The genius of the Jacobin Revolution was embodied in the Convention and the Comités de Salut Public, and the representative of this dictatorial tyranny was Robespierre. When Napoleon substituted himself for the Convention and the Directory he abated none of the pretensions of the Revolution. On the contrary, he consolidated them and enlarged immensely their field of operation by riding rough-shod, not over France alone, but over all Europe; hence the happy expression of Madame de Staël, “Robespierre à cheval.”

Unlike the upheaval known as the Reformation, the French Revolution was essentially a religious movement, a vast renaissance of paganism prepared by the atheistic philosophy of the eighteenth century, with which the ruling classes became so largely imbued. It is a great mistake to suppose that these philosophers were seeking the welfare of the masses or the reign of the people, whom no one so thoroughly despised as did Voltaire. The true object of the Revolution, prepared by the encyclopedists, was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, freedom, in order to establish on the ruins of both the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, the statue of gold before which all must fall down and worship or perish. “Sois mon frère, ou je te tue.” For it has always been a peculiarity of French free-thinkers that they could never tolerate any free-thinking but their own. If the revolutionists of 1793 inflamed the passions of the masses against the clergy and the nobles, it was merely to use the arms of this Briareus to batter down the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, just as the Jacobin Republicans of to-day are using the Socialists to accomplish the work begun by their predecessors a century ago. The final purpose of all is the destruction of Christianity.

We have but to turn the pages of any reputable French history (Taine, Capefigue, Guizot) to see that liberty was the last preoccupation of the Jacobin conquerors. One of the worst Roman emperors is said to have wished that the people had but one head that he might cut it off. This also seems to have been the idea of the Revolution, for by abolishing all social hierarchy, all intermediate classes, all guilds and associations, provincial parliaments, and local institutions, nothing was left standing but a defenceless people and the omnipotent State, which was a coterie composed sometimes of five hundred, sometimes of four, and finally of one, the first Consul and Emperor.

Never had the tyranny of the omnipotent State been more completely realized than by the Jacobins, and their heir-at-law, Napoleon. In the heyday of his power this great despot found but one opponent. There was but one force that measured itself with him and vanquished. When Holland, Prussia, Denmark, all Europe in fact, became tributary to Napoleon and entered into his continental scheme, in the blockade of all European seaports, Pius VII alone refused to close Ancona, Ostia, and Civita Vecchia against British commerce, and to prevent any Englishman from entering the Papal States. When cabinets and rulers all succumbed to “Robespierre on horseback,” and the inhabitants of every land became the prey of the victor, the Spanish people alone found, in their religious faith, the nobility and the energy of a free people, that rose in their weakness to shake off the octopus that was fastening itself on their vitals. Napoleon had seized, by guile and treachery, the persons of the Royal Family of Spain, and had nominated a new tributary king, his brother Joseph, to the throne of Spain, when the monks, the clergy, and the peasantry organized that wonderful guerilla war, which is so little known, and is, nevertheless, one of the most glorious episodes in the history of liberty. Two signal defeats of the French army destroyed the prestige of Napoleon and his motley armies, composed of conscripts from many vassal nations, who now began to ask themselves why they could not do what Spanish peasants had done in spite of Manuel Godin, the Prime Minister, who had sold them to the enemy.

After the restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 it seemed as if the Revolution were over, but in 1830 it broke out anew. Charles X barely escaped with his life. The “Monarchy of July,” as the reign of Philippe d’Orléans is called, was merely a phase of the Revolution. In 1848 the revolutionary fever again seized the nation in an acute form and was not limited to France.

It was at this time, strange to say, that a group of resolute Catholics entered the political arena and fought the battle of liberty in educational matters against the monopoly of the University. Montalembert, Dupanloup, Berryer, Lacordaire conquered, inch by inch, a liberty inscribed in the Charter of 1830, but ineffective so far. La loi Falloux was not passed till 1850 but long before, Guizot, with unerring statesmanship, had proclaimed “liberty in teaching to be the only wise solution,” and declared that “the State must accept the free competition of its rivals, both lay and religious, individuals and corporations” (Memoirs, t. III, 102). St. Marc Girardin, reporter of the Educational Commission (1847), expressed himself thus:—

“Even before the Charter, experience and the interest of studies required and obtained liberty in teaching. Here certainly we may say that liberty was ancient and arbitrary despotism new. I do not need to defend the principle of this liberty, for it is in the Charter. I only wish to show that it has always existed in some form. Emulation is good for studies. Formerly the emulation was between the University and the Congregations, and studies were benefited. In 1763 Voltaire himself deplored the dispersion of the Jesuits because of the beneficial rivalry that existed between them and the University.... A monopoly of education given to priests would be an anachronism in our day. But to exclude them would be a not less deplorable anachronism.”

Thus spoke a representative Liberal fifty years ago. Napoleon had established a state monopoly of education in the hands of the University of Paris. Villemain and Cousin were educational Jacobins. There was a state rhetoric, a state history, and a state philosophy, which was, of course, Cousin’s eclecticism. Any professor with leanings to Kant or Comte was sent to Coventry. This state monopoly was abolished by the loi Falloux (1850), and its reestablishment is the true purpose of the law of 1901. During the last fifty years congregational schools multiplied in proportion to the great demand, i.e. to such an extent that government schools could not compete with them successfully. Hence the Trouillot Bill (Associations).

In 1870 the Revolution again triumphed. This time it was not “Robespierre on horseback,” but Robespierre draped in toga and ermine; the reign of despotism in the name of law and liberty; prætors and quæstors dilapidating public funds, and giving and promising largesses. At one time it seemed as if the Republic would be overthrown. It was then that M. Grévy appealed to Rome, and Leo XIII, while reproving certain laws, advised the clergy and the Catholics to rally to the Republic in the interest of peace. They did so. But no sooner did the Republic feel secure than it began to enact a series of laws offensive to Catholics. I refer to the divorce and scholar laws, and unjust fiscal laws against Congregations.

Foreigners wonder why thirty million French Catholics allow themselves to be thus tyrannized over by a handful of Freemasons. I fear it is a hopeless case of atavism, which will prove the undoing of France, under the representative system. In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish this system of government in Southern Gaul, but, writes Guizot, “the provinces and towns refused the benefit; no one would nominate representatives, no one would go to Arles” (History of Civilization). This same tendency is operating the ruin of France to-day. Honest, laborious Frenchmen have an invincible repugnance to politics and this periodical electioneering scramble. Moreover, it would mean ruin and famine for hundreds of thousands of functionaries if they dared to vote against the Government.

Meanwhile the anti-clericals or lodges of the Grand Orient, largely composed of Jews, Protestants, and naturalized foreigners, have been hard at work these twenty years preparing the election of their candidates and abusing the minds of the working classes by immoral, irreligious printed stuff, and above all by the multiplication of drinking-places where adulterated strong drinks are sold for the merest trifle. The number of these licensed places is simply appalling. Nearly every grocery, every little vegetable store, and even many tobacco stores where stamps are sold, have a drinking stand. It is needless to say that neither Chartreuse nor any decent liqueur is ever sold at such places. These drink stands supplement the innumerable cabarets and cafés, in town and country, where elections are engineered.

Leroy Beaulieu recently related the following incident of his encounter with one of the habitués of these political institutions.

In Easter week I was coming out of the chapel of the Barnabites one morning when I met a workman somewhat the worse for liquor, shaking his fist against the grated convent window. “Ah! you haven’t skedaddled yet, you dirty skunks.”

And when I asked him why he was so anxious to see them expelled, he drew himself up proudly and replied: “Because they are not up to the level of our century!” (“Ils ne sont pas à la hauteur de notre siècle!”)

Meanwhile a crime has been committed against liberty, humanity, and justice, and it seems to move the world no more than the passing of a summer cloud, because no blood has been shed. The right which men and women have to dress and dispose of their lives as they choose is a most sacred part of personal freedom.

“Liberalism,” says Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State exists it is to prevent all intrusions into private life, the beliefs, the conscience, the property.... When the State does this it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these intrusions itself it is the greatest of malefactors.” The young and the strong can begin life anew elsewhere, in the cloister or out of it, but what shall we say of those tens of thousands aged and infirm, who, after having passed thirty to fifty years in teaching or in other good works, find themselves suddenly thrown into the streets, homeless and penniless? The Associations Bill entitles them “to apply” for indemnity. But this is merely illusory. Years will elapse before “the liquidation” is accomplished, and there will be no assets except for the Government and its friends. Public subscriptions are being opened all over France for these victims of Jacobin tyranny.