The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906
Date: 2013-03-29T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Catholic Church -- France; Church and state -- France

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Title: The Religious Persecution in France 1900-1906

Author: J. Napier Brodhead

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE 1900-1906 ***

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

PAGE
First Impressions | 1
The Two Camps | 7
The Associations Bill | 13
The Associations Bill | 18
Arbitrary Inconsistency | 29
A Pagan Renaissance | 33
Inconsistent Jacobinism | 40
Unauthorized Congregations | 46
A Combes coup de main | 50
Legalized Despotism | 57
Despotism Plus Guile | 63
Unchanging Jacobinism | 71
Death of Waldeck Rousseau | 78
Liberty and State Servitude | 82
The French Revolution | 91
A Papal Note | 105
Freemasonry | 112
Freemasonry | 118
Part Second | 125
Alcoholism in France | 131
The Law of Separation | 135
Catholicism in Germany | 144
Pseudo-Separation | 147
The Progress of Anarchy | 160
The Abolition of the Concordat | 170
The Inventories | 177
Duc in Altum | 185
The Latest Phase of Separation | 197
Liberty and Christianity | 211
Christianity and Civilization | 233
Appendix | 249

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.

Moreover, the right which parents have to give their children teachers of their own choice is also an inalienable right. The Lacedæmonian State imposed physical training on all its sons. The Turks for centuries levied a tax of so many boys and girls a year on the Spaniards and the Venetians, but no Government has yet called on every parent to “stand and deliver,” not the purse, but the souls of their children, that it may sow therein, from tenderest infancy, the tares of a hideous state materialism. With cynical hypocrisy this Government protests that liberty of teaching is intact, while parents see all the teachers of their own choice proscribed. The rich can send their sons to be educated across the border, but the law of stage scolaire is intended to meet this alternative. Those who have not frequented state schools are to be made pariahs, ineligible for the army, the navy, or any civil function—truly a singular application of the words “Compel them to come in,” which should be inscribed on all the scholar institutions of France to-day.

A PAPAL NOTE

13th June, 1904.

THE storm of words aroused the world over by a Papal diplomatic Note is another proof that the Papacy has lost none of its power and prestige, and is still, on this threshold of the twentieth century, the incarnation of moral power opposed to mere brute force, the right of the strongest. In reading the many silly comments on this Note in different parts of the globe, we are reminded of the brick thrown into the frog-pond and the emotion it caused.

Long before M. Loubet went to Rome it was well known that he would not be received by the Vatican, and the Papal Note is practically the same as the one drawn up by Leo XIII on a previous occasion, when it was sought to obtain a deviation from the policy of the Vatican in favour of a predecessor of M. Loubet. The protest itself contained nothing new, and was merely a reiteration of Papal claims to sovereignty in Rome, and a notice to rulers of other Catholic countries that there was no change in the policy of the Vatican, that declined to receive the visit of any such ruler who came to Rome as the guest of Victor Emmanuel.

The long session devoted to the discussion of the incident was merely a little anti-clerical diversion to kill time; otherwise the Papal Note would have remained pigeon-holed in M. Delcassé’s desk, where it had lain unheeded for weeks, when suddenly, at the psychical moment, M. Jaurès’ new Ministerial organ, l’Humanité (commanditée by the Jews), published the copy of the Note which had been addressed, it is said, to the King of Portugal. Then the little comedy was enacted at the Palais Bourbon, and the whole Socialist Ministerial Press clamoured, hysterically, for condign punishment of the Vatican and the vindication of the national honour. But nothing was done. M. Delcassé declined to state clearly if the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, had really been recalled, while M. Combes loftily sneered at “the superannuated claims of a sovereignty dispossessed since thirty-five years.” Yet he must have learned at the Seminary that the Papacy was exiled from Rome for eighty years once upon a time.[5] But all these ferocious Radicals declined to take advantage of this opportunity to denounce the Concordat, and M. Combes’ best friend, The Lantern, is now denouncing him as a traitor and a fraud. History is repeating itself: La Montagne (the Extreme Left of 1793) is getting ready to execute the Girondins called Radicals to-day. No efforts of opportunism will save them from the guillotine sèche which awaits them.

The silly talk of some of the great dailies who represent the Pope as “greatly worried” and confronted with the necessity of making an apology, can only be excused on the ground of ignorance of the whole situation. Personally I desire to see the Concordat denounced. The letter and the spirit of its first and most important article, which provided for liberty and the free exercise of the Catholic religion, have been flagrantly violated by the laws of 1901 and 1904, and by the illegalities committed by the executors of these laws.

All that remains of the Concordat is the indemnity paid yearly to the Catholic Church, as a very slight compensation for the millions stolen by the revolutionary government of 1792, known as the First Republic. Though it must be said to the credit of those Jacobins that when they instituted the budget of cults they recognized that they had taken the property of the Church, and that the payment of these yearly subsidies was part of the National Debt.

The Jacobins of to-day, less scrupulous than their forefathers of 1790, are craving for the repudiation of this portion of the National Debt.

The untold wealth of the Congregations, the billions held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg for retraîtes ouvrières, having melted into thin air “the bloc” or Ministerial majority must be held together by the prospect of some new quarry. Those, who for years past made a fine distinction between the secular clergy and the regular or congréganist clergy are now convinced that there is no distinction to be made between them. When New York dailies kindly advise the French clergy and Catholics to give up what their editors are pleased to call “their salaries” and adopt the American system, they merely proclaim their ignorance of the situation.

The French would gladly sacrifice everything, even to the noble church edifices built and endowed by their ancestors during long centuries, if thereby they could secure liberty and separation from the State, as they are understood in the United States. But all the alleged projects of “Separation” are merely projects of strangulation. The articles of all these projects of law are as unacceptable as were those of the Trouillot Associations Bill, even if it had not been superseded by the table rase of the law of 1904 suppressing all teaching orders whatsoever.

The carrying into execution of any of these projects of “Separation,” even the least Jacobin, would render the normal existence of the Catholic Church in France impossible. This has been the aim and purpose of the Third Republic ever since its advent. For, once again, I repeat that Republicanism in France is not a form of government; it is the modus operandi of a secret society, of the same secret society which established a monarchy in Italy, in order to have a pretext for seizing Rome and destroying, if possible, the prestige of the Papacy. In both cases the object was the same, the weakening and the destruction of the Church.

The Freemasons in France openly proclaim that they founded the Republic. The scholar and anti-clerical laws since twenty-five years, all the laws, in fact, have been prepared in the lodges. Of this, too, they make no secret. To suppose that the Chambers in any way represent the French nation is an egregious mistake. The lodges prepare the elections; their candidates people both Houses. In my first letter to the Review in 1900 I showed how the abstention of honest laborious Frenchmen from politics had thrown the power into the hands of the Freemasons, who are chiefly Jews, Protestants, and infidels. To-day this coterie of about twenty-five thousand reigns supreme.

A few resolute, capable, bigoted Freemasons are the master minds of the coterie; the others, “the bloc,” just follow suit. If a current of reaction set in to-morrow they would glide with it most gracefully.

It is simply impossible to retrieve the situation in France to-day by any ordinary legal means. To suppose that the people are in sympathy with the Government because they do not overthrow it implies total ignorance of the situation. The voting machinery of the country is falsified, and can no more be relied on than a clock out of gear, which rings out the hours haphazard. Even if every Frenchman inscribed as a voter did his duty and went to the polls, which they do not, it would make no difference to-day.

If death had not cut short Waldeck Rousseau’s career we might witness a machine en arrière policy. It is even possible, now, that a moderate Rouvier-Ribot ministry may succeed the Combes despotism.

But I have no confidence in any palliatives. The evil is too deep-seated. Only by blood and anguish can France be redeemed, and the sooner the crisis comes the better; a few years later it may be too late. This is why I desire the denunciation of the Concordat, for with Gambetta, and all his anti-clerical successors, I think it may be the ruin of the Third Republic.

Excommunications and interdicts are no longer published as in former days, but they operate nevertheless. And, as in the past, there is always some ruler ready to execute the mandate; though this, too, is not done in the same way. There is not, necessarily, any invasion of territory.

Germany and Italy (yes, and England too) are keenly awaiting the moment when they may seize France’s birthright. Both are assiduous in their marks of deference to the Holy See. Victor Emmanuel would gladly evacuate Rome to-morrow if he dared. Thirty-five years are the mere twinkling of an eye in the lives of nations. Yet there are simple-minded people who look upon the Piedmontese occupation of Rome as an immutable fact.

FREEMASONRY

December, 1904.

WE cannot adequately appreciate the religious and politico-social conditions of countries like Italy, France, Spain, Austria, Belgium, unless we take into account the action of Freemasonry in all its ramifications—Carbonari, Grand Orient, Mafia, etc.

There is eternal enmity between them and Christianity. It was said in the beginning: “I will put enmity between thy seed and the seed of the Woman,” etc. The Catholic Church being the largest, strongest, most accredited and influential Christian Society, it is against her, naturally, that all attacks are directed. In Protestant countries people shrug their shoulders and sneer at the idea of Freemasons militating against Christianity, or any political order. This is not surprising. A distinguished atheist of the eighteenth century used to say that “England was the country where Christianity did the least harm because it was divided into so many rivulets.” Here we have the explanation of the different attitude of Freemasons in Protestant countries, split up into innumerable sects, and in Catholic countries, where “One holy Catholic Church” still holds sway over the whole nation practically.

The great purpose of the French Revolution in 1792 was to break up the Church in France. For this purpose the throne and all the institutions of the ancient regime, some of them very excellent, were all overthrown.

The revolutions of Italy in the nineteenth century had no other purpose. The destruction of the Papacy was considered a means of disrupting the Catholic Church, not in Italy only. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Crispi, Cavour, etc., were all fierce republican anarchists; the last thing they wanted was an Italian monarchy. But they were Freemasons, and the “Order” imposed its will. An Italian monarchy demanded Rome as its capital, whereas a republican system would, no doubt, have left the Papacy in its ancient city. “A schism,” wrote Renan in 1870, “seems to me more than probable, or rather it already exists; from latent it will become effective.... It seems to me inevitable that there will soon be two Popes, and even three.... The schism being made in the papal person, the decomposition of Catholicism will follow; a quantity of reforms will then be possible.”

Napoleon III, a dignitary of the order, entered into the plot, and received Savoy and the county of Nice. Rome was seized 20 September, and the Franco-Prussian war brought swift and condign punishment on Napoleon for his complicity.

Simultaneously with the establishment of a monarchy in Italy, the Grand Orient established a republic in France, always with the same purpose, the disruption of the Church. During the last four years of residence in Europe I have repeated in the Press of the United States that Republicanism is not a form of government here, but the modus operandi of a secret society. The manifesto issued by the Grand Orient (3 November, 1904) is an irrefutable proof of my allegation. It is the most astounding document ever made public. They evidently consider that France is a conquered country which can never shake off their domination. “Without the Freemasons,” says the document, “the Republic would not exist.” The elaborate spy system they had established at the Ministry of War is defended on the ground that “the head partner, or commanditaire, of a great industrial enterprise in which he has placed his capital has the right to denounce to the manager the peculations of his employees.”

Thus France is an industrial company; the ministers are managers appointed by the head partner, the Grand Orient! But the most revolting part of this manifesto is the manner in which the deputies of the “bloc” are whipped into line like a pack of disorderly hounds under the lash of their keeper. “We denounce to our lodges and to all masons present and future the votes of fear, defaillance, cowardice, of a certain number.... We shall have our eyes on them ... and they will find themselves treated as they would have treated those to whom they were bound by interest if not by loyalty.”

The revolutions which have convulsed Spain during the last century, down to the recent Republican riots in Madrid and Brussels, are all traceable to the “Order” which issued this manifesto. Among the rioters killed were Frenchmen. The visit of M. Chaumié, Minister of Public Instruction, to Italy, and the famous Congrés de Libre Pensée, are all manifestations of the Grand Orient, which will never rest until it has destroyed the stability and peace of other Catholic countries, as it has done in France. When I arrived at Innsbruck in July last, I saw many students with bandaged heads and arms. An Italian student had knocked the book out of the German professor’s hand with his cane. This was the origin of that last riot. What has occurred recently at Innsbruck is far more serious, and was undoubtedly prepared at Rome in September.[6] A band of Italian anarchist students were sent to the University of Innsbruck to cause trouble. One hundred and thirty-eight of them were arrested, yesterday, with revolvers and other weapons on their persons.

Two years ago I was in Venice when there was a monster international gathering of students. The Marseillaise and the Hymn of Garibaldi were vociferated by these thousands on the Place of St. Mark. Why the national anthems of other nations were not given is clear. The whole was a Freemason demonstration of the Grand Orient like the Congrès de Libre Pensée at Rome, presided over by M. Brisson, the President of the French Chambers.

The revolutionary strikes at Milan, Genoa, Venice, etc., which were made to coincide with the birth of the heir of the House of Savoy, are symptomatic. The Grand Orient undoubtedly find that they have been marking time long enough in Italy. They have not been able to carry their divorce law there yet.

There is a Socialist party in Italy which is not anarchist and Freemason as in France, but sincerely desires the good of Italy. One of its leaders declared, recently, that they would lend their aid even to the Papacy for the common weal. Between this party and the secret societies and their henchmen, the position of Victor Emmanuel is not enviable. Ere long, therefore, we may see the aid of the Pope and of the Catholic vote, now in abeyance to a great extent, solicited both by the monarchy and the reforming Socialists.

There is really no insuperable difficulty in reconciling the independence of the Papacy and the integrity of the Italian kingdom. The Principality of Monaco has surely never been considered an obstacle to the integrity of France, nor the Republic of San Marino to that of Italy. Why should not the Pope be left in peaceful possession of the Trastevere and the port of Ostia, for instance? There is no difficulty except with the Grand Orient, this imperium in imperio.

All through the centuries, “the Papacy has had to negotiate, simultaneously, with each of the republican cities of Italy, with Naples, Germany, France, England, and Spain. They all had contests (démêlés) with the Popes, and these latter always had the advantage” (Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, II, 87).

In the same work, page 81, Voltaire relates the Congress held at Venice, where Barbarossa made his submission. “The Holy Father,” he says, “exclaimed: ‘God has willed that an aged man and priest triumph without fighting over a terrible and powerful emperor.’” The triumph over the machinations of the Grand Orient will be no less striking.

FREEMASONRY

21st January, 1905.

IN these columns (The Progress, December 10th, 1904), I referred to the recently published Manifesto of the Grand Orient of France (November 4th, 1904), defending its attitude with regard to the elaborate spy system, a veritable régime des suspects which they had established, not in the War Office only, but in every Department of State. The Press, both in England and in the United Sates, has been singularly reticent regarding this most remarkable document, whose authenticity cannot be gainsaid.

It is, however, the key to the whole politico-religious situation in France, and more or less in other Catholic countries.

Republicanism in Catholic countries will always be the modus operandi of this secret society in some one or other of its ramifications. The Carbonari, who engineered all the Italian revolutions in the nineteenth century, sent their emissary, Orsini, to remind Napoleon III of his obligations and duties. The gentle reminder was a bomb, and Orsini paid the death penalty, but not without leaving a letter with certain behests which were soon complied with. The Italian campaign against Austria was undertaken ere long.

In the Evening Post, November 8th, 1904, I find in a review of Count Hubner’s Memoirs the following extract: “The Emperor of the French, placed at the summit of greatness, had forgotten the pledges made in his youth to those who dispose of the unknown dark powers. Orsini’s bomb came to remind him. A ray of light suddenly struck his mind. He must have understood that his former associates never forgot or forgave, and that their implacable hatred would be appeased only when the renegade returned to the bosom of the sect.”

An example of the power wielded by these secret societies is the case of the ex-Minister of Public Instruction in Italy. Prosecuted for misdemeanour and extensive peculations while in office, the Freemasons compassed his escape to Geneva. He was condemned by default, when, lo and behold, he quietly returns to Italy in triumph and is elected deputy.[7]

Since eight weeks the French papers (non-Ministerial of course) are daily printing fiches or spy documents stolen from the Grand Orient. No end of duels and prosecutions for slander have been the result. Nor were army officers the only victims. Even Monsieur and Madame Loubet have come in for their share! In some cases the spies of the Grand Orient have denied the authenticity of these documents. Thereupon M. de Villeneuve has printed photographed copies of the letters in question.

Brother Bedderide, an advocate of the bar at Marseilles, an active spy on magistrates and other civil functionaries, has been expelled from the Order of Advocates. The Grand Orient will no doubt amply compensate him, for they are as generous to their friends as they are implacable to their foes.

Read this passage from the Manifesto of the Grand Orient, 4th November, 1904: “All our workshops know the campaign waged against us by the reaction, nationalist, monarchical, and clerical. They seek to travesty acts in which we justly glory and thanks to which, we have saved the Republic. A traitor, a felon, bribed by the Congregations [poor congregations recently shorn of all] lived in our midst since ten years.... As sub-secretary he gained the confidence of our very dear brother Vadecard [Secretary of G. O.] and became the confidant of all our secrets. He projected to steal from our archives documents confided to us ... new Judas, he sold them to the irreconcilable enemies of our brethren. Brother Bidegain is in flight like a malefactor. We signal him to Masons all over the world. In waiting the just punishment of his crime, the Council of the Order summons him before masonic justice, and until the final sentence is rendered, we suspend all his titles and prerogatives.... And now we declare to the whole Freemason body that in furnishing these documents [spy denunciations] the Grand Orient has accomplished only a strict duty. We have dearly conquered the Republic and claim the honour of having procured its triumph.... Without the Freemasons the Republic would not be in existence.... Pius X would be reigning in France.”

Then follows the menace quoted in my last to the tricky, cowardly deputies who voted against the Government, which was saved by two votes more than once. The memorable slap administered by M. Syveton to General André compelled M. Combes to throw the Minister of War overboard, though the latter protested to the last, “They want my skin, but they shall not have it.” The Minister of Public Instruction also nearly succumbed. He declared that if a certain ordre de jour were not voted he would throw down his portfolio there and then. The votes were not forthcoming but he clung to his portfolio and contented himself with another ordre de jour.

All the performances at the Palais Bourbon are indeed a most amazing comedy.

Meanwhile M. Syveton, who negotiated the purchase of the purloined documents from the Grand Orient, and slapped General André on the ministers’ bench, got his quietus in a very mysterious way on the very day on which he was to have retaken his seat in the Chambers (after his thirty days’ punitive exclusion), and on the eve of his appearance before the Cours d’Assise for that famous slap. His defence, carefully prepared by himself, was published in the papers next day. It is a long incisive arraignment of the Government in imitation of Cicero’s Catalina. All the witnesses, who were to have appeared in his defence, were also witnesses against the Government. In fact the trial was to have been a great political manifestation, and the Government had every interest in its not taking place. Since two weeks public opinion is on tenter-hooks regarding the death of M. Syveton. It was declared at first to be a vulgar accident by the Ministerial organs. While M. Jaurès, strange to say, published in Humanity a most remarkable brief, establishing clearly the guilt of Madame Syveton, and, still more strange, the latter did not prosecute him for it. Then the suicide theory was adopted, and the most odious, baseless, and unproven calumnies were launched against the memory of the dead man. His widow even accused him of having stolen funds of the Nationalist party. All this in order to explain his suicide on the eve of what was expected to be a great political triumph of the Nationalists, and for which M. Syveton was preparing with the ardour of a fighter by temperament, just forty years old.

The autopsy, made before the twenty-four legal hours had elapsed, revealed seventeen per cent of oxide of carbon in the blood. The lungs, brain, and viscera, strange to say, were not examined at all, but placed under seals for eleven days! They are now to be examined. Meanwhile the last person who must have seen M. Syveton alive, must have been the emissary of the Government, who, according to custom, served the writ on the dead man, commanding his presence in court in twenty-four hours. Who was he, and why was he never heard of again?

No one believes seriously that M. Syveton committed suicide. His father and brother-in-law have begun a prosecution for murder against X, in which the Mutual Life is also interested.

As to Brother Bidegain, the traitor, he was at Salonica when last heard of. His sudden death there was announced; but I think the rumour is false. It would be very imprudent, coming so soon after the other. But he will have to make his peace with the G. O. or beware. He cannot be prosecuted for stealing these documents, as they represent no monetary value, and, moreover, the Grand Orient has no legal existence or civil personality. They are said to have millions of main morte, but they simply ignore the Associations Bill.

In conclusion, I hope it will be understood that I do not accuse many honest Freemasons of England and the United States of being particeps criminis in all or any of the doings of the Grand Orient, Carbonari, Mafia, Cimorra, Senuisi, or the secret societies of Islam or in China.

Freemasonry assumes different aspects in different circumstances, but it is the eternal enemy of militant organized Christianity. It does not trouble itself with Christianity “divided into many rivulets,” and consequently harmless, according to the saying of Lord Shaftesbury, who was of opinion that “England was the country in which Christianity did the least harm because it was divided into so many rivulets.”

The Catholic Church alone is an enemy worthy of its steel, and wherever these two foes meet there must be war—latent or overt.

This war is on in France, and must be fought to the finish.

PART SECOND

October, 1904.

M. COMBES, who proclaimed at the Chambers two years ago that he had taken office only to wage war on Clericalism, enumerated his deeds of prowess recently in a political speech at Auxerre. Fifteen thousand scholar establishments, strongholds of the ghostly enemy, had been demolished! “Gentlemen, you will grant that this is a great deal for a ministry obliged to fight at every instant for its own existence,” he exclaimed.

We are now coming to the second part of the Jacobin programme. As I wrote last year in the Evening Post (June 27th), the true object of the Revolution in 1790, as to-day, is the destruction of Christianity and its offspring, Liberty, in order to establish on the ruins of both, the reign of the Omnipotent Infallible State, before which all must fall down and worship or disappear. To-day the State is M. Combes and his “bloc,” a very poor avatar of the Titanic Corsican who measured himself with all Europe. There was but one force that resisted him, and against this obstacle M. Combes stumbled when he demanded, peremptorily, that the Vatican withdraw letters addressed to two bishops needing to be disciplined. The Holy See was acting in the plenitude of its spiritual jurisdiction. M. Combes curtly demanded that Pius X send in his resignation, as “the political system of the Republic consists in the subordination of all institutions, whatever they may be, to the supremacy of the State.”

This is the latest phase of a very old struggle which began in the days of the Apostles. In the history of all the nations of antiquity, the problem of Church and State and their correlations existed, and was solved, easily and summarily, by the system proclaimed by M. Combes. The ruler of each nation was the Pontifex Maximus of his realm. This system, with its necessary concomitant of national religions, reached its culminating point in the worship of the “divine Cæsars,” the acme of human servitude.

Now Christianity was a profound and radical innovation. Never had the supremacy of the ruler or the State been questioned before the Apostles proclaimed the Creed in “One Holy Catholic Church,” destined to transcend all natural and political boundaries, without distinction of class or colour. Not less radical was the second innovation, a necessary corollary of the first, viz. the ecclesiastical autonomy and independence of the new spiritual society or Church, one, Catholic. “Never,” writes J. B. Martineau, “until the Church arose did faith undertake the conquest alone, and triumph over diversities of speech and antipathies of race.”

But Paganism, with its system of state absolutism in spiritual as well as in temporal matters, has never accepted its defeat by the Catholic Church, a spiritual, autonomous society, distinct from the State. The tale of Byzantine heresies, from the fourth to the eighth century, were all efforts of each successive Emperor of Constantinople to shake off the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and be again the Pontifex Maximus of his dominions. The long struggle of the Investitures, the Constitutions of Clarendon, statutes of Præmunire, State Gallicanism, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 1792, Josephism in Austria, the Kultur-Kampf laws in Germany and Switzerland, 1870-76 were all episodes of this struggle, between the new dispensation and the ancient system of national religions under state supremacy. In the sixteenth century there was a vast renaissance of this latter system in a new dress called Erastianism. Lord Clarendon declared that this spiritual supremacy of rulers was “the better moiety of their sovereignty.” The old pagan, or Erastian system, triumphed in the eastern empire with the Schism of Photius, in Russia under Peter the Great, in England under Elizabeth, in all the Protestant States of northern Europe.

The well-defined purpose of the Revolution and of Napoleon, its heir-at-law, was to establish this system in France. After long and arduous negotiations the Concordat of 1801 was concluded with Pius VII. It was a bilateral contract between two sovereignties, the French Republic, as party of the first part, and the Holy See as party of the second part. It contains seventeen articles. To these, Napoleon, without the knowledge of the Pope, added seventy-six articles, and published both documents, in conjunction, as the law of Germinal l’an X. Great was the indignation, and loud were the protestations of the party of the second part, as we may well suppose. Nor is this surprising when we consider that one of these “organic articles” (24th) requires that all professors in ecclesiastical seminaries shall “submit to teach the doctrine of the Declaration of 1682, and the bishops shall send act of this submission to the Council of State.” In other words, the Catholic Church in France was to turn Protestant. Even Louis XIV, who had had this famous Declaration drawn up to spite Pope Innocent, who alone in Europe had dared to oppose him, never exacted that it should be taught, and had practically suppressed it before he died. Since the Council of the Vatican the subscribing to and teaching the Declaration of 1682 would be an act of formal heresy and apostasy. The fifty-sixth of the organic articles renders obligatory the use of the Republican calendar to the exclusion of the Gregorian. There are other articles equally absurd, which have never been observed.

Now M. Combes declares that “in deliberately separating the diplomatic convention (Concordat) from the organic articles, Pius VII and his successors have destroyed its efficacy.” Napoleon himself understood this and, for seven years, he held Pius VII a close prisoner, hoping to break his spirit and wring from him another Concordat which would be an abdication. Fortunately, the tide of war turned against Napoleon, and the new Concordat was never ratified. M. Combes recognizes that no Government since a century has been able to enforce the “organic articles,” and that the only course left is “divorce,” and by this unstatesmanlike term he means the repudiation of thirty or forty million francs of the national debt. The payment in perpetuity of suitable subsidies to the Catholic clergy is stipulated for by Article 14 of the Concordat. It is a quid pro quo of Article 13, by which the Holy See consented to give a clear title to all the Church property confiscated by the Revolution. The payment of these subsidies was inscribed on the national debt by the spoliators themselves, the Conventionals of 1792, and it was solemnly recognized as part of this debt in 1816, 1828, 1830, and 1848. The salaries paid to Jewish and Protestant clergymen are purely gratuitous. Their property was not stolen by the Revolution in 1792. They had no part in the Concordat.

But the projected spoliation of the Catholic clergy is a mere detail, and would be an insignificant ransom, if at this price the French Catholics could have liberty such as we enjoy in England and the United States. “Separation” means strangulation in Jacobin parlance. They would infinitely prefer Erastianism. But the defection of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, on whom they counted, and the spontaneous and unanimous adhesion of the episcopate to the Holy See, which provoked the thunders of M. Combes against the Vatican in July, have shown the impossibility of a schism. It was tried for four years a century ago and failed. The “Separation” plan was also tried in 1795 for two or three years, and was an epoch of virulent persecution. History will repeat itself, though not exactly in the same words.

ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE

July 10th, 1905.

THE Chambers continue the discussion of the Bill of alleged separation in a perfunctory, apathetic way, and it is curious that M. Rouvier, the successor of M. Combes, has never once condescended to speak or even to be present at these sessions.

The utter lack of interest in these debates is misinterpreted to mean indifference on the part of the French public. This is not correct. It is, as I have often repeated, the great misfortune of France that people will not concern themselves with politics, and they only begin to interest themselves in a law when it is applied.

Even I, who have followed the phases of the religious persecution with keen interest since four or five years, can hardly wade through these tedious, irksome columns, in which ambiguity reigns supreme. Even M. Briand, the reporter of the law and spokesman of the Government, being questioned closely as to the sense of certain passages, replied “It is” and “It is not” in the same breath. He is evidently of the opinion that language is a convenient means of disguising thought.

This Bill is, I repeat, a law of guile, spoliation, and tyranny from first to last. There is a general impression that it will never be executed entirely. They will content themselves with spoliation, for the present at least. It is hard to persuade a people who have had religious worship gratis for fifteen centuries, that they must now pay for the privilege of attending Mass, while their Government subsidizes opera dancers and singers, of whose services not one in a million ever avails himself.

While the Socialist majority, or bloc, are revelling over perspective spoliation and sacrilegious confiscations, the handwriting on the wall is dimly perceived. The enemy is at the gates—nay, within the walls—while legislators are discussing “with what sauce they will eat the curés,” though they have not yet digested their copious repast of congregations.

Yesterday the reports of the Chambers on Separation were unusually tedious, and the rendu compte ended with this phrase: “To-morrow amnesty for the bouilleurs de cru and wine frauders.” This heartless Government, that flings aged and infirm congréganists out of their homes without mercy for age or sex, has, at least, one tender spot in its make-up. It is for the liquor traffic in all its forms. Falsification of wine is carried on to such an extent that it is impossible for grape growers to make a living. I dilated recently in these columns on the anti-clerical propaganda by means of an immoral, irreligious Press, and the multiplication of these drink-stands to an extent which is simply appalling.[8]

New York, with three millions, has 10,000 liquor saloons. Paris, with two-and-a-half millions, has 30,000 debits de boissons.

The Gaulois recently published some figures which I think are accurate.

Fifty years ago 735 hectolitres of absinthe were consumed in France; to-day 133,000 are consumed.

Fifty years ago 600,000 hectolitres of alcohol were consumed; to-day 2,000,000 hectolitres are consumed.

The intermediate figures show that the increase has been in almost geometric progression in recent years.

In 1880 the consumption had increased from 735 hectolitres of absinthe to 13,000. In 1885 it was still only 112,000.

In 1905 it was 133,000.

Sixty years ago there were only 10,000 demented in France. To-day there are more than 80,000.

Belgium has just made a law prohibiting not only the manufacture, but all traffic in absinthe, which cannot even be transported through the country. In this admirably governed commonwealth there is, it is said, but one saloon brasserie to every two thousand inhabitants. Formerly the number of drinking-places was limited and restricted in France; to-day the highest of high licence prevails.

Recently I counted not less than fourteen places where alcoholic drinks were sold in a charming little seaside village of four or five hundred inhabitants.

THE LAW OF SEPARATION

June 3rd, 1905.

THERE is still a persistent tendency in the Press to believe or make-believe that the Bill of alleged Separation, still pending in the French Chambers, means Separation as it is understood in England and the United States, and that the whole question is only one of dollars and cents, or of the suppression of the Budget of Cults. It is true that there is to be a partial repudiation of the National Debt by the suppression of the few paltry millions paid yearly to the French clergy as a slight indemnity for the vast amount of property confiscated by the Jacobins of 1792, but this is a mere detail, and would be considered but a small ransom, if, thereby, the Church could enjoy the same liberty as in the United States.

The Associations Bill was proclaimed to be a “law of liberty,” and we know to-day that it was only a vulgar trap set by the Government to betray the Congregations into furnishing exact inventories of all their property so that it might be more easily confiscated.

The Separation Bill is also a law of perfidious tyranny aimed at the very existence of the Church in France. M. Briand caused great hilarity in the Chambers when, by a slip of the tongue, he declared that in every part of it “could be seen the hand of our spirit of Liberalism.”[9] What is evident throughout is the hand of the secret society which has governed France since twenty-five years, and in whose lodges and convents all the anti-religious laws have been elaborated.

The Chambers are merely its bureaux d’enregistrement, and not even that. Under the ancien régime the Parliament could and often did refuse to enregister royal acts and decrees.

It was two years before the Parliament of Paris consented to enregister the Concordat of 1516. But the Chambers to-day are merely the executive of the Grand Orient. This is the plain unvarnished truth, which is corroborated by all who have any knowledge of French politics.

I have repeated many times in the Press of the United States that Republicanism in France is not a form of government, but the modus operandi of a secret society. Before me are verbatim reports of their assemblies and the speeches made at their political banquets in 1902. At that time only unauthorized Congregations had been suppressed. This, it was declared, “was not enough.... The Congregations must be operated on with a vigorous scalpel, and all this suppuration must be thrown out of the country; only thus will the social body, still very sick with acute clericalism, be cured.” In July, 1904, all the authorized Congregations, too, were suppressed, as we know. Even this was not enough.

At the general “convent” of the Grand Orient, January, 1904, it was said: “We have yet a great effort to make.... The separation of Church and State will be in the order of the day in the Chambers in January, 1905.... The Cabinet and the Republican Parliament will end the conflict between the two contracting parties of the Concordat. The destruction of the Church will open a new era of justice and goodness.”

M. Combes, then in power, was notified of the wishes of the Grand Orient, and he telegraphed back that he would conform thereto.

The sensation caused by the publication of the spy documents, or fiches, stolen from the Grand Orient by M. Syveton and de Villeneuve nearly overthrew the Republic last November. The assassination of M. Syveton saved the Government and struck terror into the Nationalist camp. The publication of the spy documents ceased, and the lodges continued their work with a new figure-head, M. Rouvier instead of M. Combes.

On 4th November, 1904, the Grand Orient published a political manifesto which is a most important document from an historical and sociological standpoint.

It is simply amazing that the government of a once great nation should have passed into the hands of a secret society which, though it has no legal standing, treats France as if it were a great business concern of which the Freemasons are the commanditaires, the ministers “the managers,” and the deputies and functionaries the employees.

Already in 1902, at the closing banquet of the “convent,” Brother Blatin, a “venerable,” had declared:

“The Government must not forget that Masonry is its most solid support....

“But for our Order neither the Combes Cabinet nor the Republic itself would exist. M. and Mme. Loubet would still be simple little bourgeois in the little town of Montélimar.... But the Government must remember that we are only at the opening of hostilities. Until we have destroyed every congregation, denounced the Concordat, and broken with Rome, nothing is done.” In conclusion, these remarkable words were pronounced, of which the manifesto of 4th November, 1904, is only an echo: “In drinking to French Freemasonry I really drink to the Republic, because the Republic is Freemasonry operating outside its temples; and Freemasonry is the Republic under cover of our traditions and symbols.” Is this clear enough?

The Revolution of 1790 was undoubtedly due to Freemasonry, which about that time began to appear openly for the first time, and almost simultaneously, in France, Great Britain and America, etc. The Palladian Rite, established in France in 1769, found a congenial field of operation in the corrupt society of the Régence and Louis XV.

Its aim then, as to-day, is the same—the destruction of Christianity. The Jacobin Clubs of 1792 were simply Masonic lodges. M. Waite, an eloquent apologist of the fraternity, makes the following statement in Devil Worship in France, page 322: “There is no doubt that it [Masonry] exercised an immense influence upon France during the century of quakings which gave birth to the great Revolution. Without being a political society, it was an instrument eminently adaptable to the subsurface determination of political movements.... At a later period it contributed to the formation of Germany, as it did to the creation of Italy. But the point and centre of masonic history is France in the eighteenth century.”

This explains the outbreak of Kulturkampf in Germany and Switzerland soon after 1870, and the wave of anti-religious furor which swept over Italy at the same period. To-day Catholicism has repulsed Freemasonry in Germany, and the victory is not far distant in Italy. The Liberal Socialist party is waning, and it is always with these elements of socialistic anarchy that Freemasonry operates under a guise of liberty.

The efforts being made to break up the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empire are undoubtedly traceable to these Judeo-Masonic secret societies. But France remains the great battlefield. Christianity and Freemasonry are about to fight a decisive duel. One or the other must perish. “Si nous ne tuons pas l’Eglise, elle nous tuera,” said a prominent Mason recently. The suppression of the Congregations and their 27,000 schools was, as they said, “only the opening of hostilities.” The battle must be fought to the finish. I have repeatedly affirmed that France was held firmly in the coils of the Grand Orient, which has packed both Houses with its creatures, thanks to the political apathy of respectable Frenchmen.

The Separation Bill is merely a blind, a slip-knot which can be drawn at any moment to strangle the victim around whose neck it is cast. When his Socialist accomplices of the Left reproached M. Briand with being too liberal, he replied, “If necessary we can always amend the law or make another.” Only two short years ago M. Combes openly pronounced against any project of separation. M. Rouvier was of the same opinion, but the masters of France have spoken!

In vain it was pleaded that the country be consulted before taking so important a step. The perfidious feature of the Bill is just this—that nothing will be changed until two years (1907) hence, when the “bloc” will probably have gained a new lease of life by this manœuvre; for in May, 1906 they will be able to say to their electors, “You see the law is voted, and nothing is changed.”

Article I sounds sweetly liberal: “The Republic assures liberty of conscience and guarantees the free exercise of worship under the following restrictions” (contained in some forty more articles). In my opinion these numerous little “restrictions” will render the normal existence of the Church in France impracticable. Of course she will continue to exist, as she existed during the Terror, and under the Directoire and Diocletian.

Another article, not yet voted, provides for the final disposition of church buildings twelve years hence. That, apparently, is the allotted span of life meted out to us by Masonic Jacobins.

Article II with sweet inconsistency declares that “the Republic neither recognizes nor subsidizes any cult,” and immediately after it inscribes on the Public Budget the service of aumôniers of state lyceums and colleges.

Peasants and poor struggling tradesmen and artisans must pay for the luxury of religious worship or go without, but the sons of the rich, who frequent these state schools, are to be provided for, gratis, by this liberal Republic, which neither “recognizes nor subsidizes any worship,” except, of course, Islamism in Algeria, which is now, ipso facto, the religion of the State.

It is very pitiful to see so momentous a question treated with such flippancy and indecent haste.

All their utterances in the Chambers and in their Press show that the Freemasons are convinced that they would be defeated if the next elections were made on this issue. Therefore they must “do quickly.”

Alone of all the nations of Christendom, France totally disregarded Good Friday this year. The Stock Exchange remained open and the Chambers met as usual. The apostasy of the State will soon be complete.

In Spain, where I spent Holy Week, the young king has taken a decided stand against the Revolution. He has caused vehement enthusiasm by reviving Christian customs fallen into desuetude during a century of revolutions. On Holy Thursday he washed and kissed the feet of twelve poor men whom he afterwards served at table, aided by the grandees of Spain. On Friday he returned from church alone and on foot, and was wildly acclaimed. We are so accustomed to see the menus of the banquets of the rich, that it was refreshing to read, for once in the daily papers, the menu of a banquet of some poor old men served by a king.

This is the counter-revolution, and M. Salmeron and his Republican Socialist Freemasons, French and Spanish, who recently caused riots in many cities, might as well suspend operations. Only the assassination of Alphonse XIII can prevent Spain from recuperating steadily. In Italy, too, the counter-revolution is setting in. The Socialists, alias Freemasons, are succumbing to the Conservative or clerical party. The Quirinal is steering for Canossa. France must bear the brunt till she, too, can have her counter-revolution.

CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY

Germany, August, 1905.

WHILE Freemasonry in France seems on the point of triumphing over Christianity by the destruction of all religious education and a law of alleged Separation of Church and State, it is interesting to recall that only thirty-five years ago Catholicism in Germany was as much menaced as it is in France to-day. Churches were closed, prisons were full of priests, bishops, and archbishops, and Bismarck, like M. Briand of France, swore he would never, never go to Canossa.

In 1871 there were only fifty-eight Catholics in the Reichstag, representing 720,000 electors; in 1903 there were more than a hundred, representing 1,800,000 electors; and to-day this Catholic Centre forms the ruling majority in the country. The Emperor understands this perfectly, and hence his amenities towards the Church and the Holy See.

I have no doubt that the great Catholic Congress was held recently at Strasburg with his knowledge and approval, not to say at his suggestion. The event is significant coming so soon after his own investiture, at Metz, with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, conferred upon him by the papal legate in the presence of the German cardinals and archbishops, and the highest military dignitaries of the empire.

At this Catholic Congress of Strasburg, forty thousand delegates of the federated societies of Germany paraded the streets with banners and music. The whole city was decorated, papal colours being most conspicuous. These popular federated societies count half a million members, grouped in nine hundred associations, that have 350 press organs of their own.

What makes the strength of these Catholic organizations in Germany is that they represent all classes of society—princes, peasants, artisans, nobles, and bourgeois—whereas Socialism finds its recruits almost exclusively, amongst the proletariat, cultured and uncultured, chiefly the latter.

At the Congress, Prince d’Arenberg renewed the usual protestations against the Piedmontese occupation of Rome, and the Bishop of Strasburg rejoiced that, “in spite of the devastations of the French Revolution, the ancient faith was still flourishing in Alsace, whence he hoped it might soon extend its salutary influence.”

These events are significant following the diplomatic humiliation inflicted on France when M. Delcassé, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was peremptorily dismissed at the behest of Germany.

Not long since the Socialist Bebel saucily told M. Jaurès the French would never have a pension for old age until the Germans gave it to them. Nothing, too, would please William more than to play the rôle of a paladin of religious liberty to the oppressed French Catholics.

Nor is there anything to prevent the resuscitation of the Germanic Confederation as it existed in the Middle Ages. The Habsburgs and the Austrian Empire might never have arisen, and the Hohenstauffens might still be reigning, if they had had sense enough to keep their hands off the Papacy. Napoleon, too, might have founded a dynasty as long-lived as that of the Bourbons, had he not also fallen into the same evil ways, and sought to dominate the whole Church by enslaving the Sovereign Pontiff. His nephew, the third Napoleon, in his youth, unfortunately became the bondsman of secret societies, whom he aided and abetted in the spoliations of 1870 which preluded his fall.

The Third Republic, too, will be shattered on the same rock, though not before having caused irretrievable wrong to France, I fear.

PSEUDO-SEPARATION

19th August, 1905.

IN the past, marauding kings and robber barons bound to themselves their fighting lieges by investing them with vast tracts of stolen lands which they, in turn, distributed among their leal followers.

The Third Republic has found a better way. To say nothing of the extensive network of electoral strongholds that they have established all over the country by unlimited and most abusive high licence, the masters of France have enlisted the enthusiastic support of myriads of pettifogging lawyers and all the nondescript red-tapers of law by the unlimited supply of lucrative jobs, pickings, and perquisites, furnished by the notorious laws of 1901 and of 1904, and their bandit operations called “liquidation.”

They do not all pocket a few hundred thousands, like the millionaire Socialist, M. Millerand, appointed by M. Waldeck Rousseau, but all have a share in the carving up of the quarry. Not content with devoting to this novel kind of graft all the holdings of the hapless Congregations, who fell into its trap and asked for authorization, the Government has kindly put up more than four millions and a half of public money, thus far, to cover the cost of innumerable lawsuits, expropriations, etc., going on all over the country since four years. The mobilizing of the regular army for the expropriations was in itself an important item. All this reckless, thriftless expenditure, joined to the continuous drain of millions from the Caisses d’Epargne and the exodus of capital, will lead up to national bankruptcy as in 1795.

To throw dust in the eyes of the public, domestic and foreign, a most elaborate document has been published regarding pensions and retreats for aged congréganists ruthlessly thrown into the streets.

This document is a huge farce, seeing that these pensions are only conditional to there being funds enough, and there will be no assets left. The Chartreux of Grenoble had some hundreds of their aged workmen on their pension list. These were, in common justice, creditors of the order, and should have received compensation from the liquidateur. But the latter repudiated their claims absolutely.[10]

What a fall was there from the billions of the Congregations, held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900, to bait his Socialist majority with promises of pensions for workmen, etc.

The Bill of alleged Separation, eminently calculated to bring Church and State into constant contact and collision, holds out another golden perspective. To use an expressive slang term, there is in it unlimited poil à gratter, fur to scratch, for years to come—nay, as long as the Republic lasts.

A few days after it was voted, 200 “venerables” of the Grand Orient offered a banquet to M. Briand, the reporter of the Law of Separation, while at a Socialist Congress presided over by M. Combes, the President of the Commission of Separation, referring to this law, declared “that the war against the Church must be carried on without intermission.”

Commenting thereon, the Temps sarcastically wrote: “If the clerical spectre is still to haunt us, was it worth while to be turning like squirrels in a cage for the past five years?”

The gist of the law is in the articles that regard “Associations cultuelles,” which are aimed at the destruction of Catholic hierarchy and unity. M. Ribot sought, in vain, to obtain that religious edifices and property should be attributed only to associations approved by the bishop in each diocese. The words bishop and diocese are most carefully eschewed throughout the law. The attribution of property is to be made to “associations formed in conformity with the rules of general organization of the cult whose exercise they are to assure” (Art. 4). The formula is most perfidious, and intentionally so, whereas the amendment of M. Ribot and the one little word bishop might have rendered the law supportable.

What are “the rules of general organization”? The seventy-six Organic Articles, perfidiously added by Napoleon to the Concordat, purported to be “rules of general organization of Catholic worship.” Some of these are rankly heretical, and have of course never been observed. These Organic Articles are abrogated together with the Concordat by the new law (Art. 37), but what is to prevent the Conseil d’Etat, composed exclusively of Freemasons, from deciding that these articles are still a criterion, being the statu quo ante?

By similar means all their church property was taken from the Catholics of Geneva (1872-5) and turned over to apostate French priests, Loyson, Carrère, etc.

A like contingency is foreseen by Art 8. It is anticipated that rival associations may claim the same church property, and that scissions may arise in associations, regularly formed and invested.

Now in these cases the decision does not lie with the bishop, nor even with the ordinary civil courts. Decrees of Conseil d’Etat are suspended everywhere like swords of Damocles, or rather like the blades of the guillotine sèche, which has replaced the bloody guillotine of “the grand ancestors of 1793,” whom these up-to-date Jacobins invoke so complacently. We must not forget, too, that Conseil d’Etat means Conseil du Grand Orient. It is said that the Masons are secretly organizing Associations cultuelles, so-called Catholic. Human nature has not changed since 1790, and it would be strange, if they could not pick up another Abbé Gregoire or two, and a Talleyrand to boot. They can always import some of that ilk from Geneva if necessary.

Moreover, these Associations cultuelles can be dissolved for so many reasons (five), at a moment’s notice, by a decree of Conseil d’Etat, that it does not seem worth while to form them.

The paltry reserve fund the Associations cultuelles are allowed to have must, like the rest of their funds, be deposited in the Government’s strong-box, and can only be used “for building, repairing, embellishing church edifices.”

Evidently, it is not intended that there shall be any further ecclesiastical recruitment. Seminaries are eliminated, ipso facto, as they cannot exist on thin air.

I do not enter into the details regarding pensions of aged priests, as it is all too contemptible, the sums accorded being just enough to starve on. But we may note a few violations of liberty and justice.

1. All church property, movable or immovable, to which are attached fondations not directly regarding public worship, which are, in other words, charitable or educational, are to be turned over to civic institutions. Thus testators who left money for Christian parochial schools and charities see it applied to the paganizing of the rising generation and the poor.

2. All churches and chapels arbitrarily closed by M. Combes are to remain disaffected, i.e. confiscated.

3. Ecclesiastical archives and libraries of episcopal sees and grand seminaries that are claimed by the State are to be immediately transferred to the State. This reveals the whole Jacobin mind. The Church is to be deprived of all social action, by education and charity, which she has exercised since two thousand years, and she must be mummified like the Photian and Coptic and Nestorian Churches.

The confiscation of these archives and libraries by a pagan state is, to my mind, the most serious loss. Money can always be found again, but when impious vandals have destroyed or dispersed these libraries and archives, they can never be replaced. All English students deplore the irreparable loss, caused by the cynical and base uses made of invaluable manuscripts by reforming vandals in the sixteenth century.

4. The Law of Separation deprives communes of the right to give any subventions for religious worship—though the State inscribes on its own budget the stipends to chaplains of lyceums frequented by children of the rich, notwithstanding Art. II.

5. A whole class of citizens are placed hors la loi, in that they are deprived of the right of trial by jury for offences amenable to this procedure. They (priests) are placed on the same footing as convicted anarchists.

6. Divine service is assimilated to any public meeting. A band of Socialists may fill the church and render prayer impossible by their irreverent attitude but they cannot be expelled unless they resort to violence.

7. The same class of individuals can invade any cathedral at any hour and insist on inspecting, gratis, all its treasures (objets mobiliers classés). In other words, these venerable edifices, the church of Brou, Notre Dame, etc., are treated already like public museums, less well in fact. And all this, we are told seriously, is “Separation.”

Meanwhile the two parties most nearly concerned in this question, the Holy See and the French people, thirty-five million Catholics, have never been consulted.

M. Briand with remarkable impudence asserted that, since thirty-five years, the country had sighed after “Separation,” though he well knows that no one thought about it but the Grand Orient. He himself admitted, in the same session, that the question did not exist (n’était pas posée) at the beginning of this legislature (1902), and was only raised by the Pope’s violations of the Concordat. This lie, which tends to become historic, was amply exploded, when M. Combes was convicted in the Chambers of having suppressed a document, which amply justified Pius X’s action in the case of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, which the lodges used as a casus belli. Moreover, we must remember that the current Jacobin thesis is that the Seventeen Articles of the Concordat, which alone were signed by Pius VII, and the Seventy-six Organic Articles, added ex parte by Napoleon, in violation of every code of honour and equity, form an intangible whole. Nevertheless, the Seventeen Articles of the Convention which were alone signed by Pius VII and Napoleon, in Messidor l’an IX, took effect as soon as the ratifications were exchanged. The churches, seminaries, etc., were immediately “placed at the disposal of the Bishops,” and the stipulated indemnities were forthcoming.

It was not till Germinal l’an X that the Seventy-six Organic Articles were promulgated, together with the Convention.

Now no one surely can be accused of violating articles regarding which he has never been consulted. Yet this is precisely the ground taken by the Jacobins.

A senator of the Right alleged, in defence of the Concordat, Art. 1134 of the Code Civil: “Conventions legally formed are a law to those who make them. They can only be revoked, by mutual consent, by those who make them, and for causes which the law recognizes.”

Thereupon the reporter replied: “There was a Convention between Pius VII and Napoleon; this Convention formed a whole (un ensemble) with the Seventy-six Organic Articles.” And as no Government has ever been able to enforce these articles, some of which are rankly heretical, the reporter alleged Art. 1184 of the Code against Art. 1134 to defend the Government’s ex-parte denunciation of the Concordat. This Art. 1184 declares that “a Convention is rescinded when one of the parties does not keep his engagements.”

In other words, they say Pius VII and his successors have always protested against the Seventy-six Organic Articles which the former did not sign, therefore we are justified in denouncing, ex parte, the Convention or Concordat of Seventeen Articles signed by Pius VII and Napoleon.

It is by this sophism that the Third Republic justifies the repudiation of a portion of the National Debt; for the payment of annual indemnities to the Catholic clergy was undoubtedly placed on the “Grand Livre” of France by the Constituante, and recognized as part of the National Debt by succeeding legislatures, before and since 1801.

Recently, when it was proposed to suppress, without indemnity, the Majorats of the ancien régime, M. Rouvier, Président de Conseil, indignantly rejected the motion, saying, “Il ne faut jamais que la signature de la France soit protestée.” But when it is a question of mere Catholics, the sense of national honour becomes blunted. They are hors la loi. This form of jurisprudence has been familiar to highwaymen from time immemorial—for them, the unarmed are always hors la loi.

M. Raiberti, a deputy from Nice, eloquently protested against the vote of urgency, declaring that the country had never been consulted. “No law,” he said, “can be just and stable which does not express the wishes of the people.” All in vain. The Socialist voting machine worked automatically at every turn towards the end.

It is an incontestable fact that Separation has never appeared on any programme these thirty-four years, except on that of 181 deputies at the elections of 1902. Nevertheless, 341 (against 249) have just voted for this law of Separation that is the negation of fifteen centuries of national history.[11]

The Gazette de France calculates the number of electors represented by these 341 deputies who carried the Separation Bill in the Chambers in July:—

“On a total of 11,219,992 French electors only 2,997,063 pronounced yesterday by their deputies in favour of the denunciation of the Concordat and the spoliation of the Church, voted by a so-called majority.

“We must bear in mind that at the elections of 1902 the majority only vanquished by 200,000 votes out of 8,000,000 voters inscribed, and there are 400,000 functionaries. Thus spoke a senator (de Cuverville), and he further quoted the declarations of M. Deschanel in a public speech, July, 1905.

“A minority, he declared, governs the country, and a law voted by a certain majority represents 25 to 30 per cent. One deputy is elected by 22,000, another by 1000. The Department du Nord has 500,000 more inhabitants than six departments of the south-east, yet it has five deputies less. Roubaix, with 125,000 inhabitants, has one deputy, while the Department of Basses Alpes, with 115,000 inhabitants, has five deputies.”

It is easy to see how a little judicious electoral geometry and arithmetic will always give the Government a majority. Each arrondissement having a deputy, it is only necessary to cut up a given district, notably anti-clerical, into a great many arrondissements, in order to secure an increased number of deputies, blocards; and vice versa the process need only be reversed in districts suspected of “clericalism.” We must also remember that at least one-third of the electors never vote, and so the Government can always have a majority.

This Separation Law is, as M. Briand said, only “transitory.” It is, I repeat, eminently perfidious. There is no form of tyranny, vexation, and spoliation which cannot be legalized by its equivocal articles. It contains all that is necessary to eliminate Catholicism from France as far as public worship is concerned.

On June 3rd I wrote, “What these Jacobins want is to have the law voted before the elections of May, 1906, and then say to the people, ‘You see the law is voted, and nothing is changed.’” At the final session after the vote, M. Briand, in a speech now pasted up all over the country, said, “Our work is done. What have you to say? You tried to trouble the conscience of the French Catholics, but can you find anything in the Bill to warrant your grievances? Dare now to tell the people the churches are to be closed, the priests proscribed.” Yet all this, alas! arrived almost immediately after the first Separation Law made in 1795.

“No one,” echoed M. Deschanel, a smooth-tongued, dainty politician like M. Rousseau, “can maintain that this law is the work of hatred and persecution, unless it is travestied by some profoundly dishonest Government.”

“Like that of M. Combes, who travestied Waldeck Rousseau’s Associations Bill,” rejoined a deputy of the Right.

This Law of Separation bears the same imprint as that of 1901; both emanated from the same quarter. It is, I repeat, a masterpiece of guile and arbitrary tyranny. Any sense can be given to the ambiguous language in which the most important articles are couched, and their interpretation is not to be left to ordinary civil tribunals. The jus et norma in all doubtful questions is to be the Conseil d’Etat. In other words, the Grand Conseil of the Grand Orient is to be the supreme court of first and last appeal.

The Church in France might just as well descend into the catacombs here and now. It will come to this, unless some cataclysm rouse the French to a violent uprising, in which the Third Republic and all its works and ways will be swept away.

The Senatorial Commission is composed of fourteen Jacobin Freemasons. Their rulings are a foregone conclusion. The Separation Bill may be considered already voted in the Senate.

Great crimes against liberty, justice, and humanity cannot be circumscribed by national frontiers. They offend all Christendom, and though nations may, supinely, say “Am I my brother’s keeper?” they pay the penalty sooner or later. France in acute revolution will mean Europe in flames, as in 1792.

THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY

12th October, 1905.

THE stories that are going the rounds of the whole European Press leave little doubt as to the fact, that a once great, free nation had her Foreign Minister, M. Delcassé, kept in office by the King of England while he was in Paris this spring, and that two months later, he was dismissed at the behest of Germany, who tore up the Anglo-French Convention regarding Morocco and inaugurated the Congress of Algeciras. No nation can act as France has done with impunity.[12]

This is curious too when we consider that France is so sensitive about the ingérence of even a spiritual sovereign, that the denunciation of a Concordat and the rupture with the Holy See were ascribed to the fact that Pius X had taken the liberty of suspending two French bishops!

It is also interesting to recall that the Bill of alleged Separation was first voted at the Congress of Free-Thought held at Rome, in September, 1904. The motion was made by Professor Haeckel, of the University of Jena, Prussia, that: “We congratulate M. Combes in his struggle for free-thought against theocratical oppression, and for the radical separation of Church and State.” Allemane, a French Socialist deputy, exclaimed: “This is not enough. We want the abolition of the Church.” Robin, another French deputy, rejoined: “We are equally opposed to both. We demand the abolition of Church and State.”

I have already stated how the annual convent of the Grand Orient of France notified M. Combes (September, 1904) of their wishes regarding the passage without delay of the Separation Bill. This Bill was voted, or rather enregistered, by the Chamber of Deputies in July, as it will be done shortly by the Senate.[13]

Yesterday in Paris, the bureau of the “Federation of International Free-Thought” actually intimated to the French Senate its behest that the Law of Separation of Church and State be voted, without discussion or amendment, before December 31st. When we consider that this bureau is composed of one French Socialist Freemason deputy, the others being German, Belgian, and Italian, it seems preposterous! It would be so, even if all were Frenchmen, seeing that the Senate is supposed to be a free deliberative body, having the responsibility of accepting or rejecting what is done in the lower House.

The London Saturday Review is almost the only organ in the English language which seems adequately to appreciate the enormity of the religious persecution in France.

“The extraordinary conspiracy of silence on this momentous matter, in the English Press,” writes the Saturday Review, London (July 8th, 1905), “is doubtless due to the fact that English Christians and gentlemen are usually considered unfit to represent English newspapers on the Continent. The Paris correspondents of our leading journals, being nearly all men of oriental extraction, cannot, however honourable and enlightened, be expected to entertain any interest in the fate of the Christian religion. We are invariably led by these gentlemen to believe that all is for the best in the best of republics. When, a fortnight ago, France suddenly realized that she was within sight of a war with her ancient foe on the other side of the Rhine, a thrill of terror passed over the land at the mere thought that while engrossed in the work of dechristianizing France, and hustling monks and nuns up and down the country, the politicians in power had demoralized the army, neglected the navy, and left the frontiers almost entirely unprotected. Things have quieted down since then, but none the less there is a feeling of unrest which makes people dread the passage of a law that may lead to internal divisions and disorders even more serious than those which agitate France at the present time.”

Referring to the Bill of alleged Separation, the Saturday Review continues: “La Lanterne (the organ of the ‘bloc’) intimates that ‘it only accepts the Bill as it stands as a preliminary; we must silence the priests and prevent them from infusing any more of the virus of religion into the minds of the people.’ ... To a thinking foreigner, the spectacle presented by contemporary France is an amazing one. Here is a great nation, which for sixteen centuries has proclaimed herself ‘eldest daughter of the Church,’ renouncing her great position as protector of the Catholics in the east and breaking off her connexion with the Vatican, at a time when Germany is menacing her and proclaiming at Metz, of all places in the world, her imperial wish to become more friendly with the Church.”

This is an allusion to the Emperor William’s having himself invested by the papal legate with the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, surrounded by German cardinals and prelates, as well as the highest military dignitaries of Alsace-Lorraine. For me, the dismissal of M. Delcassé and the whole Moroccan incident are the handwriting on the wall which the French are slow to read. On the Feast of St. Michael, September 29th, the Minister of Public Worship held high revelry at a banquet of five hundred Freemasons in the church of the recently expropriated convent of the Ursuline nuns at Ave-ranche, just opposite that wonderful pile known as the Mount St. Michel, a mediæval monastery and church. It is not stated whether—like Balthazar—he sent for the vessels of the temple.

The crimes against justice, liberty, and humanity committed in France, since four years, are without a parallel in Europe since the Revolution of 1790, if we except, of course, the atrocities in the Turkish Empire. But most dire racial and religious antagonism may be alleged on behalf of the Turk. In Spain, too, similar violations of liberty, justice, and humanity have been committed during the nineteenth century, but this was done in the heat and turmoil of revolutionary and anarchist upheavals. In France they were committed in cold blood, under cover of law. Nearly 27,000 Catholic schools, freely patronized by Catholic parents, have been suppressed, thousands of aged men and women have been dragged out of their homes and cast into the street, vi et armis, the regular army being employed in a great many cases. Their homes, built up by years of patient labour, have been confiscated and sold for a trifle. Yet many of them were authorized and had contracts with the Government. Recently, convent and school buildings, estimated at 200,000 francs, were sold for 2200 francs.

Two days ago, forty-three nuns of the Benedictine Order were expelled from their homes; eleven of them were over seventy, and quite infirm. The Congregations who were wary enough not to ask for authorization, and realized what they could before going into exile, are not to be pitied so much. Unfortunately, the majority fell into the Government’s trap and asked for authorization, which obliged them to declare all their assets, that have been confiscated, and of which they will never see one cent. Not only have all the assets been consumed in the process called “liquidation,” but the Government has been obliged to put up over 4,000,000 of the public money to cover the expenses of the “liquidators.” So ends the myth of the “billions of the Congregations,” held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 to his Socialist henchmen.

The terrible inroads, made by anti-patriotism and anarchical Socialism by means of public-school teachers, are seriously alarming the creators of this modern Frankenstein. Domiciliary perquisitions are being made just now, in many cities, to seize the leaders of a conspiracy to debauch the young conscripts who begin their two years’ military service now. A brochure, called Crosse en l’air (meaning military revolt), has reached, it is said, the million mark of circulation, in spite of the Government.

The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese war is an illustration of what I wrote in Slav and Moslem ten years ago, page 170: “Henceforth commerce, not ideas, will rule in the council chambers of the world. Politics will be forged in counting-houses and warehouses, ‘where only the ledger lives,’ in whose dusty atmosphere none but merchantable ideas are current. Wars will be declared, peace be made, alliances formed or repudiated, according to their probable effect on the pulse of the market.”

Without wishing to derogate from the merit of Mr. Roosevelt’s good offices, I am convinced he could not have succeeded if the financial consideration had not rendered the belligerents docile. Japan was absolutely at the end of her financial resources; the Russian coffers were not far from empty. By the intermediary of the President, both parties were given to understand that not a yen or kopeck more could they borrow if peace were not concluded there and then. Any prolongation of that war would have meant financial panic in many countries, chiefly in France. Israel, by its bankers, has its hand on the throttle in Christendom, and can make for peace and war more than all the peace congresses. When we reflect on the three cruel, uncalled-for wars which followed the Hague Conference in 1898, we can only tremble for the future, if there is to be a new peace congress. In spite of conferences and Jew bankers, guns will continue to “go off by themselves.” These Delcassé revelations are not calculated to render the Germans more friendly to France or England, and the knowledge they have acquired of France’s inability and unwillingness to fight must be a strong temptation to a nation whose population is increasing at a formidable rate, in spite of emigration, while that of France is stationary, not to say steadily decreasing.

Belgium, that great country in a very small compass, has doubled hers since 1830. With 7,000,000 inhabitants, the figure of her business operations is now the same as that of France with 38,000,000. This last statement was made by M. Leygnes, ex-minister, in a recent political speech, regarding the steady decadence of France under Jacobin rule since twenty years.

No country wants war, but all fear it. The causes of unrest are manifold and legion.

In an important political speech made by Lord Beaconsfield (Disraeli) at Aylesbury, September 20th, 1873, he expressed himself as follows: “I can assure you, gentlemen, that those who govern must count with new elements. We have to deal not with emperors and cabinets only. We must take into consideration secret societies, who can disconcert all measures at the last moment, who have agents everywhere determined men encouraging assassinations, and capable of bringing about a massacre at any given moment.”

The passage is quoted in an article in the Nineteenth Century (1876), “A History of the ‘Internationale.’” The “Internationale,” by the way, is fast superseding the “Marseillaise.” The verse of blasphemy against Christ and His mother is followed by one which ends with these words: “Our balls are for our generals.” A short time ago there were prolonged riotous strikes on the eastern frontier. A striker was killed accidentally. Thereupon M. Berteaux, the Minister of War, retired a general and imprisoned a captain and a lieutenant for the crime of having allowed the lancer regiments to carry lances when they were sent out against the strikers!

To propitiate these rioters the Minister of War went to Longwy, and the strikers marched past singing the “Internationale,” and the Minister of War actually saluted the red flag! He afterwards protested in the newspapers that he did not salute the red flag, but the men and women who were escorting it! This Minister of War began life as dry-goods commercial traveller. He is to-day a millionaire agent de change at the Paris Bourse, and is said to ambition the presidential chair.

Shakespeare wrote: “Motley is the only wear.” In France, everything seems to be running to red. I have witnessed here two “free-thought” funerals, one last April and another yesterday, in which pall and banners were red, and even the coffin was draped in flaming red. Red “is the only wear,” though it is not easy to understand why “free-thought” should necessarily blush—for itself. At the “Free-Thought” convention held, recently, at Paris, under government patronage, anarchy dominated, just as it did at Rome last September. Red was the keynote.

THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT

February 3rd, 1906.

ON August 19th, 1905, I described some of the odious features of the alleged Separation Bill voted by the House of Deputies on July 7th, at “midnight, the hour of crime.” It may truly be ranked in that category to which Cicero referred when he said, “There are laws which are merely conventions among thieves.” “The vote of the Senate is a foregone conclusion,” I wrote. The order had been given; every amendment (there were about a hundred) was rejected automatically, and the law was voted, December 6th, 1905, by a majority of 180 to 101. “The French Government,” I wrote (June 30th, 1900), “is on the verse of apostasy. 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 deserve, and are punished for the evil doings of their rulers! ‘I gave them a king in my wrath,’ was once written of the Jews. Is there sufficient vitality left in the French national constitution to reject the poison which is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign?” To-day this apostasy, not of the nation, but of the French State, is complete. It is the latest, though by no means the last act of a series of anti-religious laws, elaborated by the Grand Orient and voted by majorities and cabinets formed by them. I dealt with this subject on March 17th, 1900, and said, then, that “with a Parliament and Ministry like this any legislation is possible.”

The pseudo-Separation Bill is the most important legislation accomplished in France since a century at least, and it has been done in a manner which would not be tolerated in any free, civilized country. An Act, which is the repudiation of fifteen centuries of national life, and is fraught with the gravest consequences both political and religious, interior and exterior, has been rushed through both Houses with most unseemly, “scandalous haste.” “You are treating it,” said a senator, “as if it were a question of a fourth-rate railroad.” There was only one deliberation in the Chamber of Deputies, and not one in the Senate we may say. Senators of the Right were allowed to soliloquize eloquently. Their speeches were admirable from every point of view and might well have given pause to the Left. But these were dumb, by order. With few exceptions, the reporter and President of the Separation Commission and the Minister of Worship alone spoke, to curtly and peremptorily repulse the proposed amendments. M. Rouvier, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, who did not speak at all in the House of Deputies, made but one appearance, on November 9th, at the first session of the Senate, to declare that “the question was essentially a political one,” and that there was “a primordial and dominant interest for the Government that this reform should be completed before the Senate went before the electoral body.” He further declared “that the Senate had given its adhesion in advance ... if it were otherwise the Government would resign.” Surely a singular speech to make to a deliberative assembly, on a matter that transcends in importance anything that has been transacted in the French Parliament since 1793.

If the law were not what Cicero calls “a convention among thieves,” how did M. Rouvier know “that the Senate had given its adhesion in advance”? Indignant at the systematic refusal of the Left to enter into any discussion, a senator exclaimed: “You are a deliberative assembly; try at least to keep up appearances.” MM. Monis and Clemenceau spoke on the Left, not to refute the arguments of the Right, but to travesty history, to malign and misrepresent, and to discuss subjects wholly irrelevant. M. Monis entered into a long digression on the Franco-Prussian war in order to incriminate a French cardinal and Pius IX. He was ably refuted by M. de Lamarzalle.

Whence this unseemly haste to vote a measure so important on the ragged edge of a legislature? Next month one-third of the Senate is to be renewed, the presidential term expires, and in May general elections are to take place. In vain the Right, in learned and eloquent speeches, adjured the Senate to postpone the final vote: (1) till one-third of the Senators had been replaced; (2) till the Municipal Councils had been consulted; (3) till the country had been consulted; (4) until after the general elections of May, 1906. All in vain. “Motions préjudicielles” and a hundred odd amendments all had the same fate.

The explanation of this “scandalous haste” is very simple. The reporter of the Commission said: “If you do not vote this liberal law now, you can say good-bye to it, for you will never see it again.”

The country has never been consulted, and the Government wishes to confront the people with the accomplished fact, and above all to be able to say, as I pointed out in my last: “You see the law is voted and nothing is changed.” If this law had been passed two years ago, it would have gone into operation a year before the general elections and the people might have been roused. On the other hand, if it hung fire now, it would certainly have to be placed in all the electoral programmes. Everything has been planned and foreseen by the lodges since twenty years.[14]

Several senators of the Right convincingly established that there was no adequate reason for this unseemly haste—that no organic law had ever been passed without a second reading; and they adjured the Senate not to abdicate. M. de Chamaillard even offered to withdraw all the proposed amendments (about a hundred) if the Senate would not vote the “urgency” and give the law a second reading. All in vain.

No one ignores or denies that the true purpose of the law is to dechristianize France; even the spokesmen of the Government could not dissimulate the truth. The coterie of Freemason Jacobins who have ruled France for the past twenty years have not renounced their scheme of national schismatic churches; only, instead of having one, which was seen to be impossible, they propose to establish dozens of them by means of associations of worship. Articles 4, 6, 8, 19 dealing with these associations contain the whole venom of the law. In vain the obscurities, the anomalies, the legal antinomies were pointed out, and explanations demanded. Règlements d’organization and Conseil d’Etat, it was said, would settle everything later on! In this Review, August 19th, I commented on the text of the law—and not one word, not one comma, has been changed by the Senate!

To-day, Islamism is, ipso facto, the only religion recognized by the French Government; its ministers and mosques and schools are provided for, and its ceremonies are often honoured by the presence of state officials. This, in spite of Article 2, “the Republic recognizes and subventions no worship.”

Another point worth noticing is that while discussing Article 1, “The Republic assures liberty of conscience,” the Minister of Public Worship, speaking for the Government, clearly indicated that state functionaries would never be permitted to send their children to any but government schools.

There are three points on which I insist in conclusion: (1) That the country has not been consulted. At the general elections, 1902, not one senator, and only 130 deputies out of 580 had “Separation” in their programmes, and the Budget of Worship was voted in 1902, 1903, 1904 by a compact majority who would then have been indignant had it been said that they were acting against the wishes of the country. On January 27th, 1903, M. Combes himself repelled a suggestion of denunciation of the Concordat thus: “If you do this by an improvised vote ... you will throw the country into the greatest difficulties, trouble consciences, and cause a veritable peril to the Republic.” Now the country has not been heard from since 1902. Yet the law was rushed through, on the eve of a new election, for reasons I have indicated.

(2) We must remember that when continual violations of the Concordat are alleged as an excuse for the rupture, the Jacobins constantly confound the seventy-five Organic Articles with the seventeen articles of the Convention called Concordat, 1801, which alone was signed by Pius VII.

(3) The suppression of the indemnity Concordataire is, as far as the Catholic clergy are concerned, a partial repudiation of the National Debt. It was recognized as such by laws of 1789, 1790, 1791, 1793, 1801, etc.

This law of pseudo-Separation is not only a law of spoliation, but also of supreme tyranny, in that in the name of Separation, it pretends to regulate minutely the mode of existence of its victims, in future, by special codes, and deprives them of the right to have more than the strictest necessary for a hand-to-mouth existence.

I am convinced that to acquiesce in regard to these “associations of worship” will be to fall into the Government’s trap as the Congregations did when they applied for authorization in 1902. It will only mean retreating before the enemy, and postponing the hour of violent persecution and combat, which must come before the Jacobin-Freemason yoke can be broken.

THE INVENTORIES

12th February, 1906.

YEAR by year, I have foreshadowed and characterized the programme of persecution, spoliation, and arbitrary tyranny which is that of the Judeo-Masonic coterie which governs France, by means of the Socialist vote. We have now reached the second part of this programme.

In 1901 the Associations Bill was, according to Waldeck Rousseau, intended to give legal standing and liberty to the unauthorized as well as to the authorized Congregations. We all know, to-day, how twenty-seven thousand of their schools have been closed, and how the Congregations, simple enough to fall into the Government’s trap by asking for authorization and furnishing inventories of their property, have been robbed of everything and turned adrift.

The inventories now being made in the churches, amid scenes of violence and bloodshed, with the cooperation of the regular army, represent the first step on the road to wholesale spoliation and strangulation. If only the victims would be docile and resigned there would be no trouble whatever. Resistance will compel the operators to be drastic, when they would rather go slowly and surely. The French voters should be consistent. After giving themselves such law-makers, they ought at least not to wince when the laws made by them are put into execution. But this is an incurable idiosyncrasy of the French; they are clear-sighted, energetic, and practical in the administration of their private affairs, but when it comes to politics and government, they are absolutely apathetic and purblind. Any pothouse politician can wheedle them out of their votes, who would find it difficult to coax a sou out of their pockets. All they ask is to be left in peace to attend to their business and pleasures. It is only when the unpleasant practical sides of laws like those of 1902, 1904, and 1905 are brought home to them that the peasant seizes his pitchfork, and the bourgeois his cane, and bloody manifestations occur all over France, as in 1902, 1904, and to-day (1906).

Generally speaking, inventories are made only when property is about to change hands, as in cases of death and bankruptcy. Now the adherents of the Catholic Church in France are numerous and very much alive, and they cannot see why their ecclesiastical furniture and property should be inventoried, quite forgetting that they gave carte blanche to the “bloc” of Briands, Brissons, Combes, etc., who made the law they are now resisting.

If Associations cultuelles are formed, a consummation most devoutly to be deprecated by every friend of Catholic France, evidently they will be composed by bishops, curés, and their present conseils de fabrique, and there will not be any transmission of property.

If there were no animus furtandi, no malevolent projects of strangulation in the background, the Government would have contented itself with denouncing the Concordat, and repudiating that portion of the National Debt represented by the Budget of cults, instituted by the Jacobins themselves, in 1790, when they appropriated Church property and assumed the charge of maintaining Catholic worship in France. Neither Protestant nor Jewish worship was included, originally, in the Budget de Cults, seeing that their Church property had not been touched, and they had no part in the Concordat.

When the Anglican Church was disestablished or separated from the State in Ireland, it surely never occurred to Mr. Gladstone and his Government to order inventories to be made in the churches.

To understand this revolt of the French people just now, we must recall their past experience with inventories. In 1790 a decree obliged all cathedral chapters and titulars of benefices to furnish complete inventories of all their holdings, and in March, 1791, about four hundred millions of Church property was seized and sold by the State. In 1901 the Congregations were invited to furnish ample inventories with their demands for authorization; no authorizations were given, but the inventories were very useful for the wholesale spoliations which followed, spoliations which still masquerade under the pseudonym of “liquidations.”

Moreover, the State makes these inventories to-day as proprietor, though by no sleight of language can its ownership be proven, even as regards churches existing before the Revolution, while many costly structures have been erected and endowed since then by private initiative.[15]

Fierce riots occurred over one of these churches built on private grounds. The proprietor produced his title deeds, proving that the commune had not contributed one cent and that he was absolute owner, but this made no difference.

The law Mirabeau of 1789 distinctly recognized that all ecclesiastical property then existing had been “irrevocably given to the Roman Catholic Church for public worship and charity.” The Jacobins of to-day apparently base their claims (Art. 12 de Separation) on this loi Mirabeau, which declares, forthwith, that all this Church property is “placed at the disposal of the nation,” (“mise à la disposition de la nation”). But Art. 12 of the Concordat uses exactly the same words in speaking of what was left, in 1801, of Church property, edifices, etc.—“sont mises à la disposition des évêques”—all was “placed at the disposal of the bishops”; and the faithful, moreover, were invited to reconstitute the stolen patrimony by gifts and legacies, which are now to be confiscated.

Church edifices and everything pertaining thereto, as well as pious legacies (fondations), are to confiscated, if Associations cultuelles are not formed before 6th December, 1906, or if said associations are dissolved for any of the five cases foreseen by the law ironically called of “Separation.” Lineal descendants may claim fondations made by ancestors, but this liberal provision is illusory, as all important bequests are made by people who are childless. Thus the dead are despoiled as well as the living.

The recitals which fill the daily papers of churches besieged and assaulted by gens d’armes and the regular army are very sickening, coming so soon after a similar campaign against convents. There are places where no workmen will break down doors or pick locks for the fiscal agents, and they are obliged to carry operators, or official crocheteurs, around with them.

Recently two thousand soldiers were mobilized against a village church. In many places the regular army have occupied the churches, unexpectedly, before daylight, and thus the people were outwitted and the inventories were made quietly. Though, if we may believe a functionary interviewed by a reporter of the Journal de Génève, not one inventory has been made thoroughly, as the Government is very anxious to have it over. The probability is that the odious work will soon be suspended entirely, so that all may be forgotten before the elections of May.[16]

Yesterday two superior officers of the Engineering Corps at Cherbourg had their swords broken by the Government, because they manifested their disgust too openly. Many others are under arrest, because they refused to lead the assault on Church edifices, and their careers may be considered at an end.[17]

The first article of this Law of alleged Separation declares that “the Republic assures liberty of conscience.” Yet surely it is a violation of liberty of conscience to command a Catholic officer to batter down the doors of his parish church. Moreover, when this article of the law was being discussed in the Senate, the Minister of Cults (M. Briand), speaking for the Government (as M. Rouvier was never present!), gave it to be clearly understood that functionaries would never be allowed to send their children to any but government schools! Yet surely it must be a matter of conscience with any Catholic to send his children to schools, which are frankly and aggressively materialistic and atheist.

Article II declares that “the Republic recognizes, salaries, and subventions no religion.” This too must not be taken literally. For, as I anticipated last year (May 29th), this law, made against thirty-five million French Catholics, is not applicable to six million Mohammedans of Algeria. Their mosques, their ulemas, their schools and congregations will continue to be supported by the Republic which neither recognizes nor supports any religion. This is just, seeing that the Third Republic took all their ecclesiastical property, promising annual subsidies instead, just as the Jacobins of 1790 did with regard to the Catholics, only in the latter case the capital appropriated is retained, while the charge is repudiated.

Meanwhile Islamism is the state religion of France, ipso facto; the only one whose ceremonies and mosques are honoured by government officials on solemn occasions. Shades of Godfrey de Bouillon and St. Louis!

Spoliation and poverty would be endurable if only the Church were truly separated from the State. But the latter presumes to dictate to the Church a new organization of its parishes (Associations cultuelles), to limit its financial resources, and decide how these are to be obtained, how they must be invested, and what use may be made of them.

DUC IN ALTUM

20th August, 1906.

“AND the Lord said to Peter, Launch out into the deep,” Duc in altum. To-day again the successor of Peter has heard the word of command, Duc in altum. He has exercised that potentiorem principalitatem or eminent leadership ascribed to the Roman See by St. Irenæus in the second century, and the whole leash of anti-clericals are transported with rage and surprise at this grand act of Pius X, the one contingency for which they were not prepared. The previous encyclical (Vehementer) had left them indifferent. They treated it as a mere rhetorical manœuvre destined to cover a retreat, and as a covert acquiescence in their law of tyranny and spoliation.

The whole venom of this law is, as I wrote a year ago (August 19th, 1905), contained in the numerous articles that regard Associations cultuelles—which are aimed at the very life of the Church, by the destruction of her hierarchy, which is the basis of her constitution. In the English and American Press it is sought, disingenuously, to make-believe that these associations were merely “boards of trustees” to administer Church property, and that similar associations exist in the United States, England, Germany, etc., with the approbation of the Holy See. This is not so; French parishes already have fabriques and conseils de fabriques, that correspond to boards of trustees. They are abolished by the Law of Separation, and for them are substituted these Associations cultuelles, in which the bishops have no standing and no authority whatever. Any seven, twelve, or twenty-five persons, calling themselves Catholics, because they happen to be baptized, can form one of these associations, claim a church and all its revenues, and run the parish to suit themselves.

Even after one association has been legally formed “according to the general rules of worship” (Art. 4), a most ambiguous expression, which the lawmakers deliberately refused to make explicit, it is anticipated that scissions may occur, and that rival associations may claim the same Church property. In all these contentions the bishop has no voice except incidentally. The Conseil d’Etat, an administrative tribunal composed exclusively of Freemasons, is the supreme judge of the orthodoxy of these associations. The phrase “formed according to the general rules of worship” was supposed to offer ample guarantee to Catholics. Yet recently the Journal Officiel has officially registered four or five schismatic associations, formed by already interdicted priests. They are in insignificant hamlets, it is true, one of them being a parish of only 175 members, but they are test cases, and show how foolish it would have been to trust to the illusory guarantee offered by Article 4, “according to the general rules of organization of worship.”

The discussion raised by M. Combes with the Vatican, regarding the words nobis nominavit in the canonical investiture of French bishops presented by the Government as candidates, and then the affair of the deposition of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval, 1894, convinced them that a national schismatic church was impossible, so they fell back on this alternative scheme of Associations cultuelles, destined to set in motion a process of slow disintegration and gradual decomposition. A noted Freemason said recently, “Twenty years of secular schools have made us the masters of France; with twenty years of Associations cultuelles every trace of the Catholic religion in France will be effaced.”

In the Senate M. Berger, a Protestant Freemason, made the following interesting statement (Journal Officiel, p. 1380): “The law,” he said, “had been slumbering in the Republican programme for the past fifty years ... but how can a law be perfect that has had only one deliberation?... Instead of this a voice cries to us, ‘Vote, vote.’ Here are articles in disagreement with each other—Vote. They are in contradiction with the spirit of the law—Vote. They violate existing rights—Vote, vote. Do your duty as a Republican.... Well, yes, I will vote this law from a sense of duty.”[18]

This same senator described the true character of the Associations cultuelles when he said, “They are free associations destined to take the place of the ancient Church.”

Not less clear was the statement of M. Briand, Minister of Public Worship: “Dissensions may arise, not in matters of dogma only, but in questions of administration. We must allow those, who do not wish to submit, to form independent autonomous associations if they wish to use the same church.”

If Christians anywhere wonder at the severity of the papal encyclical rejecting these associations, it is because they have not even scanned the text of the law, and accept, unchallenged, the misrepresentations of a Press which seems to derive all its information from organs like La Lanterne, L’Action, Le Siècle, Le Temps, etc. This Law of alleged Separation presumes to dictate to the Catholic Church, an organization in which episcopal authority, the basis of her divinely given constitution, is completely set at naught. The Roman Pontiff, her supreme head, was not once consulted, and in order to make it impossible to do so, they began by severing all connexion with the Vatican in 1904. It is very much as if, after suppressing all their schools and colleges, the English Government were to pass a law declaring that Quakers and Presbyterians are to be deprived of all their ecclesiastical property unless they consent to adopt episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer. Would any one under these circumstances hesitate to say that Quakers and Presbyterians were persecuted? I trow not.

When Henry VIII had resolved to reduce the Church of England to the condition of a department of State, his first step was to undermine her constitution by removing the keystone of the arch. To do this it was necessary to detach the clergy from Rome, the See of Peter on whom the Church is founded. In 1530 he compelled them “to acknowledge the king to be the singular protector and only supreme lord, and, so far as the law of Christ will allow, supreme head of the English Church and clergy.” In 1532 Convocation further abdicated by the elimination of the saving clause, “as far as the law of Christ will allow.” They also consented to have their canon law revised by a Royal Commission, “with a view to the elimination of all canons contrary to the laws of God and of the realm.” Their abdication and submission were recorded in an Act of Parliament, and “henceforth,” writes Wakeman, the Anglican author of a history of the English Church, “the Church of England will be at the mercy of Parliament.” We all know how the schism and apostasy of this great province of the Church were consummated by Elizabeth. The fate of Moscow, and that of Constantinople five centuries before, was the same. Detached from Rome, they fell beneath the tyranny of the State.

It is this condition that the Judeo-Masonic coterie would fain have brought about in France. The seventy-six Organic Articles added surreptitiously to the Concordat of 1801 had no other object in view. But, as M. Combes admitted in the Chambers, the Papacy never accepted them, and no government had ever succeeded in enforcing them. The question of nobis nominavit and that of the Bishops of Dijon and Laval were the last abortive efforts to bring about a schism. Failing this, they resolved to reduce the Church in France to the condition of a Polish Diet, in which the Conseil d’Etat, i.e. the Grand Orient, would have enjoyed an unlimited liberum veto.

Even legally speaking, these Associations cultuelles could not function normally, because their situation was anomalous. They were neither owners, usufruitiers, nor simple tenants of the Church property of which they had the charge and the responsibility. The law is, as I said before, full of antinomies and obscurities. Senators of the Right pointed them out one by one. All in vain. Decrees of Conseil d’Etat will settle every question as it arises was always the Government’s reply.

The trap was smartly constructed, and neatly baited with the greater portion of the present patrimony of the Church, some two million pounds, it is said, and all Church edifices, etc. Everything is to be confiscated if Associations cultuelles are not formed by December 11th, 1906.

Considering the disastrous consequences of not forming associations, it is not surprising that some Catholics, and even some priests, were disposed, once more, to retreat before the enemy by forming some kind of Janus-faced association, canonical on one side, and in conformity with the law on the other. But it is absolutely false that a majority, or even a minority, of the bishops at the Assembly were in favour of the acceptation of the Law, telle quelle.

The clergy and the Catholics of France have been retreating before the enemy for twenty years and more, quite forgetting the “Resist the devil and he will flee from you.”

Leo XIII, in his profound attachment to France, loyally lent his aid to the Third Republic when implored by M. Grevy. He begged the clergy and the Catholics to rally to the new regime in the interest of peace.

He even discountenanced the formation of a Catholic party in France at that time, because Catholics being divided, politically, into three camps—Royalists, Republicans, and Imperialists or Bonapartists—he feared strife, and did not wish the Catholic religion to be identified with any form of government.

At the time of Leo’s death the Journal de Genève (Protestant) declared that “this Pontiff had at least one miracle to his credit, in that to the end he had maintained kindly relations with an ungrateful Republic that repaid his condescendence and friendly aid by reiterated provocations.” This is quite true. The scholar laws of 1886, when this campaign against religion was begun by irreligious instruction, given under a mask of neutralité, now completely laid aside; unjust fiscal laws against the Congregations; and finally the laws of 1901, 1902 and 1904 which embittered Leo’s last hours, were so many acts of hostility, leading up to the final assault, all foreseen and prepared in the Judeo-Masonic lodges since a century we may say. “Il faut sérier les questions,” said Gambetta, whose maxim was Le clericalism c’est l’ennemi; and “clericalism,” it seems now, means simply God. To-day, they openly proclaim that God is the enemy.

After destroying the outposts and the ramparts by the destruction of all her religious orders engaged in teaching, preaching, and ministering to the poor and the halt, it was resolved to storm the citadel, the Church of France herself, and the Law of alleged Separation was sprung upon the nation.

If any confirmation were needed as to the great hopes the Masonic coterie had founded on the Associations cultuelles, we find it in the unanimous outburst of surprise and fury which some of their more moderate Press organs sought in vain to dissimulate. Billingsgate cannot furnish the Lanterne with terms adequate to the occasion; all the more so, that from the beginning it has affirmed, in most scurrilous language, that never, never would the Church refuse the “liberalities” of the law, by which is meant the permission to keep some of her property. Three editorials of La Lanterne—November 25th, 1905, “Ils capitulent!”; August 16th, 1906, “C’est la guerre”; and “La folie suprême,” of August 20th—are most interesting revelations of the contemporary Jacobin mind.[19] Even the millions represented by the confiscation of the menses episcopales, etc., which the law had assigned to the Associations cultuelles, cannot console these sectarian Jacobins, whose budget shows a deficit of hundreds of millions. They loudly proclaim that the law must be enforced integrally, forgetting that the numerous articles regarding Associations cultuelles are already null and void, and that they themselves propose to annul those regarding pensions to aged priests. If they had the courage to enforce Article 35 of the law (police des cultes) every French bishop would be in prison for reading the encyclical of August 15th in the churches. Other articles of the police des cultes also fall to the ground, as they were aimed at Associations cultuelles, who were to be held responsible if a preacher used seditious language in the pulpit.

No Associations cultuelles will be formed except by Freemasons masquerading as Catholics; but at least there will be no confusion, no disorganization of the Church, which was the main purpose of the law. Thus has Pius X unmasked their batteries and spiked their guns. They will have to resort to other arms, those of undisguised persecution, the very thing they wished, above all, to avoid.

Little is left standing of the Law of Separation but the articles of spoliation and confiscation. If these Jacobins have the courage to enforce them “integrally,” as they say, even to the confiscation of Church edifices, it will mean, for the present, the most threadbare poverty. Whether they will dare to do so remains to be seen.

M. Clemenceau stopped the inventories, because, he said, “it was not worth while to have riots and bloodshed for the pleasure of counting a few candelabras.” He and his employers may find that it is not worth while to risk the Republic for the sake of some Church edifices, for which they have no use.

They may content themselves for the present with seizing all the available cash, which will go the way of the “billions” of the Congregations, and the exchequer will grow poorer and poorer, till the vanishing point of national bankruptcy is reached as in 1793.[20]

Referring to the critical condition in which the Church was placed under the feudal system owing to the abusive practice of investiture by laymen of ecclesiastical dignitaries, Guizot writes: “There was but one force adequate to save the Church from anarchy and dissolution, this was the Papacy” (History of Civilization).

To-day also, the Papacy, alone, could rally the clergy and the faithful in complete unity, to offer a solid and compact resistance to these associations of a law of anarchy and dissolution. “That they all may be one that the world may believe” (John XVI).

By a stroke of his pen Pius X, whom these anti-clericals affect to despise as an ignorant peasant, has broken up their cunningly contrived trap. To reject the associations seemed fraught with dire consequences and a perilous launching into deep waters. Happily the French episcopate are worthy and equal to the emergency. My “First Impressions” regarding them (p. 5) were correct.

Their addresses to Pius X and to their flocks, form, with the encyclicals “Vehementer” and “Gravissimo” (15th August), one of the grandest pages of the annals of the Church. “Satan hath desired to sift you as wheat”; to sift you in sore persecutions; to sift you by poverty and by riches; to sift you in the flux and reflux of barbarian invasions; to sift you in the ruins of crumbling empires, that you, like them, might become as “dust which the wind scattereth,” the dust of sects and schisms and national churches. “But I have prayed for thee, Peter, and thou, confirm thy brethren.” Duc in altum.

SEPARATION

24th November, 1906.

DISGUISE the fact as they may, there is religious persecution in France. Never since the days of Julian the Apostate has any war been waged against Christianity more malign, more insidious. The ancient Faith was crushed out, by sheer force, in England and in many parts of the Continent, in the sixteenth century. In France, too, it seemed, in the eighteenth century, as though Christianity had received its quietus by the same brutal means. But methods have greatly altered. Masonic Jacobins, to-day, shudder at the mere suggestion of blood. A senator of the Right warned the Government that the Separation might lead to bloodshed. Thereupon the minister Briand made a gesture of deprecation. “Pray do not speak of blood,” he cried. One man was killed during the inventories; and immediately they were stopped, and the Rouvier Ministry fell. Yesterday again in the Chambers M. Briand exclaimed, “Du sang, quelle parole atroce!” (“Blood, what an atrocious word!”).

They have pondered the words of the Divine Master, “Fear not them that kill the body”; and they are determined that there shall be no more martyrs in the usual sense, no more guillotines, no more noyades as in 1790. But they mean to choke out every germ of Christianity by casting the minds of the rising generation in a mould of atheism, and to quench every divine spark in the adult by degrading him in his own eyes to the level of a mere animal, that must seize every fleeting advantage, by fair means or foul, because there is no hereafter.

“We have combated the religious chimera, and by a magnificent gesture we have put out all the lights in heaven, which will never more be rekindled.... But what then shall we say to the man whose religious beliefs we have destroyed?” Thus spoke on November 8th, 1906, M. Viviani, Socialist Minister of Labour. At the same tribune, the very next day, M. Briand declared that his Government was not anti-religious, but only irreligious, or neutral. Meanwhile both this Minister of Public Instruction and M. Clemenceau, in public speeches all over the country, have been reviling and calumniating the religion of the nation, and congratulating public instructors on their zeal in emancipating the minds of their pupils from all religious superstition, thus training up “true men whose brains are not obstructed by mystery and dogma,” whose “consciences and reason are emancipated.”

In December 1905, this same M. Briand declared that the Government would never suffer that its hundreds of thousands of public functionaries send their children to any but state schools, and to make assurance doubly sure, a law is deposed, and will soon be passed, establishing a state monopoly of instruction. Disconcerted by the attitude of the Papacy and the splendid unity of the clergy and their flocks, the one contingency for which they were not prepared, the French atheocracy has decided to content itself with spoliation for the present. A receiver is to be appointed for all the holdings of the Church, menses episcopales, pious and charitable foundations, libraries, etc. The Left clamoured for the immediate attribution of the property to the communes, as the law requires. But M. Briand declared that it would be for them “a nest of vipers” and “poison their budgets”!

M. Lassies summed up M. Briand’s discourse by these unparliamentary words: “Vous avez du toupet, vous——” (“You have brass enough, you——”).

Not daring to close the churches at present, they have resorted to a subterfuge (cousu de blanc) in order to avoid doing so. The Republic having promised religious liberty, they say the faithful and their priests may come together “accidentally” and “individually” in the churches. Now the text of the law is formal. Art. I says: “The Republic guarantees the free exercise of public worship, under the following restrictions.” Then follow the restrictions, i.e. articles regarding the associations; in other words, the constitution of the new by-law-established churches, which were to inherit all the patrimony of the ancient Church and take its place.

M. Briand himself, before the encyclical, had openly proclaimed that there could be no public worship without these associations. The efforts made by M. des Houx of the Matin (alias “Mirambeau”), M. Decker David (a deputy mayor), and other agents of the lodges or of the Republic, to form these associations have been ludicrously pathetic. Failing these, the Government has decided to leave the churches open for another year, nevertheless. To storm them, and hold them after they had been stormed, would be too perilous an enterprise, judging by the troubles caused by the inventories. Therefore they have resolved to reduce the clergy by famine, by military conscription, the suppression of seminaries, and other vexatory measures. Moreover, the closing of the churches is the one measure that would convince the masses that something had happened, and that their religion was really persecuted. To the extreme Left, clamouring for the immediate confiscation of Church edifices and property, M. Briand said, “You want to strangle the Catholics right away; we do not wish to do so” (November 9th, 1906). Precisely. What they do wish is to empty the churches by every means, then close them, one by one.

On December 11th, 1906, state receivers are to be appointed for all Church property, movable and immovable. The very sacred vessels and ornaments, chasubles, etc., are all appropriated, and merely lent to the Catholics, temporarily, at the Government’s good pleasure. There has been of late years a dearth of treasures of ancient religious art in the Salles Drouots of Paris, Frankfort, Munich, etc. But soon Jew brocanteurs will be in clover. All that escaped the revolutionists of 1790 will be scattered to the four winds ere long. This is one of the by-products, duly discounted, of this “law of liberty” called “Separation.”

But they still have a latent hope that the inextricable difficulties will force Catholics to capitulate and form associations. M. Briand’s circular, 31st August, 1906, ordered his prefects to report to him any subreptice associations not in conformity with the law of 1905. Cardinal Lecot’s society for the support of aged priests (their old age pension fund being taken like everything else) is certainly of this category. It conforms to none of the requirements of the law of 1905, nevertheless M. Briand gives it a clean bill of health (November 9th). His speech in the Chambers is a complete repudiation of his circular of August 31st, and is a tissue of misrepresentation and tergiversation. He harps upon Article 4 (“the associations must be formed according to the general rules of worship”), which he declares “places all the associations under the control of the bishops and of the Holy See.” Article 8 of the law provides, it is true, for endless schisms, all subject to the decisions of the Conseil d’Etat, alone competent to judge if an association is or is not orthodox, i.e. “formed according to the general rules of worship.” In this Article 8, also, he finds a guarantee which should satisfy all reasonable Catholics!

Now this same M. Briand, as Minister and reporter of the law, combated (April 6th, 1905) in the Chambers a proposed amendment tending to safeguard ecclesiastical authority in this matter. “You wish to turn over to the Pope, by means of the bishops (la haute discipline), the government of these associations. We cannot subject the faithful to this discipline.”

In the Senate, too, this same minister declared “that even after one association had been legally formed, dissensions might arise, not only in matters of dogma, but also of administration; we must allow those, who do not wish to submit, to form another independent association if they wish to use the same church.”[21]

If the intentions of the Government were so benevolent as M. Briand pretends, why did they not accept the insertion of the word “bishop” in Article 4? It would have rendered the associations tolerable; but this they strenuously opposed, and the keystone of their law was demolished by the non possumus of Pius X, August 15th. In the Chambers (November 9th) M. Briand admitted that “the law had been made in view of the organization of Associations cultuelles.” This I have affirmed since nearly two years, and it is in vain that, elsewhere, M. Briand seeks to make-believe that the law has accomplished its purpose, which, in reality, it has just missed.

Even to-day, if the intentions of the Government are as candid and benignant as M. Briand pretends, why do they not insert one little amendment in the text of the law which would make it possible for the Church to form these associations? No, not so. They wish the Holy See to accept the word of some irresponsible minister, or some declaration of the Conseil d’Etat, equally valueless.

In 1901 Waldeck Rousseau solemnly declared in the Chambers that Article 13 of the Associations Bill in no wise affected the parochial schools, and two days after the law was voted three thousand of these schools were summarily closed. He had also assured the Vatican that authorized Congregations had nothing to fear. Even M. Delcassé and the Ambassador at Rome had given similar assurances to the Vatican before the law of 1901 was deposed in the Chambers. With these and similar precedents it would be idle indeed to attach any faith to M. Briand’s dulcet, fair, feline, fallacious utterances in the Chambers (November 9th). They are merely “words, words,” and verba volant. Moreover, how long will M. Briand and the Clemenceau Cabinet be able to resist the Socialist impact of the advance guard?

More than a year ago, I wrote that any interpretation could be given to some of the ambiguous terms in which the law was couched, and that this ambiguity was deliberate and intentional.

By his own authority. M. Briand (Chambers, November 12th, 1906) has offered the Catholics one year more in which to form associations under the Separation Bill. Thereupon M. Puech, a deputy of the Left, flung these biting words at the Government: “The law without the associations is void ... it has fallen to pieces.... And you have no associations. In 1907 you will not have them any more than in 1906.... Void, nothingness, chaos, behold your law.” “In 1790,” said the same deputy, “as to-day, the struggle was engaged between two principles, between dogma and science.... The Constituante was not firm. Camille Desmoulins spoke like M. le Ministre Briand.... Three succeeding assemblies were forced logically to extreme measures—death and transportation.”

The astute guile that characterizes M. Briand’s declarations in the Chambers can only be compared to that of Julian the Apostate, who began his reign by a grand edict of toleration. Or rather it recalls those deliberations of that council in Pandemonium (Book II, Paradise Lost): “Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood, the fiercest spirit, now fiercer by despair, spoke thus: My sentence is for open war of wiles I boast not.” But he was overruled by Beelzebub, who “pleaded devilish counsel first devised by Satan,” and which consisted in “seducing the puny habitants of Paradise to our party” by guile and fraud.

These associations of the law of 1905, which ignorant or malevolent writers continue to represent as being the same as those of Prussia and other half-Protestant countries, were a most ingenious device for inducing the Church to commit suicide by the repudiation of her divinely given constitution.

The point, that essentially differentiates associations for public worship in Prussia and elsewhere from those of the law of 1905, is that, in the former, the Catholic hierarchy was respected. In them the curate is by right president, episcopal authority is paramount, and the State cannot intervene if dissensions arise. Now Articles 8, 9, etc., of the French law are the very antipodes of all this.[22]

The fact is that there can be no real accord between the Church and the French atheocracy, whose openly avowed object is the radical destruction of the religious idea, even of natural religion.

Never perhaps, in the history of humanity, has there been such a monstrosity as a distinctly atheistic state. Pagan antiquity, even the Grecian Republics, had a cult of some kind. The First Republic, under Robespierre, having decreed the abolition of Christianity, immediately substituted theo-philanthropy. But the Third Republic proclaims itself atheist, and insists that the nation shall be made atheist by means of public schools.

Hitherto the words lay, layman, meant in French as in English, simply, not of the clergy; to-day, laïque in France means atheist. L’école laïque means, not a school taught by laymen, but a school of infidelity. Catholic lay or secular schools are still holding their own against the state schools, which are nearly empty in some communes.

Not satisfied with having suppressed twenty-seven thousand religious or congregational schools, the annual September convent of the Grand Orient has decided that all these Christian lay schools, primary and secondary, must disappear. It also finds that the State lycées de filles “are not sufficiently laicized,” meaning of course not sufficiently atheized and depraved. Yet the work seems to be well under way, if we are to judge by the following extracts from the discourse pronounced on the grave of a child of twelve by one of her companions of an école laïque near Allevard, in presence of the whole school. “For thee infinite nothingness has begun, as it will begin for all of us. Thy death, or rather the supposed Being who caused it, must be very wicked or very stupid.... He made thee the victim of a society refractory to society solidarity.... We really cannot excuse this celestial iniquity.” I transcribe from the anti-clerical Dépêche Dauphinoise. The spectacle of this free-thought funeral, and of a little schoolgirl blaspheming over the grave of a playmate, is simply hideous. Poor hapless victims of a pagan state, that nevertheless enlists the sympathies of Christians who spend millions on missions to the heathen Chinese!

This Masonic convent has also decided “that the means of production and exchange must be restituted to the collectivity.” Therefore we know in advance what the new Chambers will accomplish: State monopoly of instruction, and State Socialism prepared and accomplished as rapidly as possible.

Under these circumstances it really does not matter very much if the churches remain open or not, for the present. As an English ecclesiastic recently observed, “We can do without our churches, but we cannot do without our schools.”

It is by means of Christian schools that Europe was redeemed from barbarism, and preserved from relapsing into its first estate. Each generation, in turn, must be redeemed from barbarism, as were our forefathers, by the Christian upbringing of the young, otherwise retrogression must inevitably ensue. Every gardener understands this. It is natural law in the spiritual world. To descend and retrograde is so much easier than to ascend.

To-day, the eternal enemy of God and man seeks to wrest from the Church the great fulcrum by which Christendom was upraised from barbarism, and to use her own arms against the Church, by converting schools into nurseries of infidelity and immorality.

In vain secularists would tell us that history, geography, and grammar are neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Mohammedan. The venom of infidelity and vice can be conveyed by the conjugation of a verb. Physical geography may be used as a catapult against the very notion of right and wrong. As to the misuse of history, its possibilities are unlimited. Moreover, the Church, that has received the divine commission to “teach all nations,” needs the aid of all the arts and sciences to accomplish this mission. The Catholic Church, that is essentially, and jure divino, Ecclesia docens, will never forego her right to teach them all, as she has been doing for two thousand years. In the sixteenth century China seemed hopelessly closed against Christian missionaries. But where apostles failed to penetrate, a man of science, who was also a saint, succeeded. Mathew Ricci, the Jesuit savant, was welcomed by mandarin literati, and founded the first Christian mission in China in 1581.

All the old universities of Europe were founded by the Church. The arts and sciences grouped themselves around the Chair of Theology, as hand-maidens around their mistress. Religion is, indeed, the aromat which alone preserves them from becoming corrupt and corrupting. Already, society is beginning to discover the evil effects of separating religion from learning. The knowledge and uses of fire form one of the main lines of demarcation that separate us from animals. Monkeys appreciate the kindly blaze, but the smartest of them has never attempted to light a fire.

When men, with this distinctive and dangerous knowledge of fire, shall have degraded their mentality to that of the simian by atheism or secularism, and its concomitant materialism, the social order will no longer be possible. A few rudely constructed, diminutive bombs can lay the proudest city in ruins.

To-day, as in 1790, France is the field on which another great battle is to be fought between Christianity and paganism, and its results will be far-reaching. The French atheocracy has “said unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways” (Job XXI. 14). Churches, here and there, have already been profaned by Masonic revelry, the cross has been demolished on every highway, and removed from every school and hospital. The State, disposing of all the power and all the riches of the nation, is at the command of a secret society that is the sworn and avowed enemy of religion. If the Church again come forth victorious from the struggle, stronger and purer through poverty and persecution, “if the Christian Hercules uplift Antæus, son of the earth, into the air and stifle him there, then—patuit Deus.”

LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY

LIBERTY is, pre-eminently and indisputably, a product of Christianity and must diminish with every diminution of the faith. “Other influences,” writes Lecky, “could produce the manumission of many slaves, but Christianity alone could effect that profound change of character that rendered the abolition of slavery possible, and there are,” he says, “few subjects more interesting than the history of that great transition” (History of Rationalism, II, 258).

There is, indeed, no grander spectacle than that of the Catholic Church proclaiming, in ages of barbarism, a divine “Thou shalt not” to masters, whose power over their slaves was unlimited by any law, and even assuming jurisdiction over them in virtue of a moral law, above all human laws.

Ecclesiastical jurisprudence enacted penalties against “masters who took from their theows (Saxon slaves) the money they had earned; against those who slew their theows without just cause; against mistresses who beat their theows so that they died within three days.... Above all, the whole machinery of ecclesiastical discipline was set in motion to shelter the otherwise unprotected chastity of the female slaves” (Wright’s Political Condition of the English Peasantry in the Middle Ages). “That Church which seemed so haughty and so overbearing in its dealings with kings and nobles,” writes Lecky, “never failed to listen to the poor and the oppressed, and for many centuries their protection was the foremost of all the objects of its policy” (History of Rationalism, II, 260). Simultaneously with the gradual abolition of slavery, we find the elevation of woman, and her redemption from polygamy, a natural concomitant of slavery. “No ideal,” writes Lecky, “has exercised a more salutary influence than the mediæval conception of the Virgin [he means devotion to]. For the first time, woman was elevated to her rightful position and the sanctity of weakness was recognized. No longer the slave, the toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of a reverential homage of which antiquity had no conception. Love was idealized. The moral character and beauty of female excellence was for the first time felt ... a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh, and ignorant, and benighted age this ideal type infused a conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past.... In the millions who have sought with no barren desire to mould their characters into her image ... in the new sense of honour, in the softening of manners in all walks of society, in this, and in many ways, we detect its influence. All that was best in Europe clustered around it [the devotion to Mary], and it is the origin of many of the purest elements of our civilization” (History of Rationalism, I, 231).

These are striking words from the pen of a rationalist, and would that all women understood that the laws of divorce, the first-fruits of the weakening of the Christian principle, and the pagan renaissance in Europe, mark also the first steps of their retrogression to the condition, from which they were uplifted by Christianity.

After centuries of judicious preparation, the emancipation of all Christians was proclaimed by Pope Alexander III. “This law alone,” writes Voltaire, “should render his memory precious to all, as his efforts on behalf of Italian liberty should endear him to Italians” (Essai sur les mœurs).

Mr. Hallam has satirically remarked in his History of the Middle Ages, page 221, that “though several popes and the clergy enforced manumission as a duty on laymen, the villeins on church lands were the last to be emancipated.” But he well knows, for he has told us himself on page 217 of the same work, that “the mildness of ecclesiastical rule and the desire to obtain the prayers of the monks induced many to attach themselves as serfs to monasteries.” An old German proverb, too, says: “It is good to live under the crozier.” When the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII, we know by Strype’s Chronicles, that misery and vagrancy reached terrible proportions.

But while freely admitting that “in the transition from slavery to serfdom, and from serfdom to liberty, the Catholic Church was the most zealous and the most efficient agent” (II, 234), Lecky is loath to admit that her action in the sphere of political liberty was equally efficacious, and that this second emancipation could have been accomplished slowly, and judiciously, as was the first, without the upheavals, the violence, and the excesses of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet on page 158, vol. II, he reminds us that “St. Thomas Aquinas, the ablest theologian of the Middle Ages, distinctly asserts the right of subjects to withhold obedience from rulers who were usurpers or unjust.” “To the scholastics of those days also,” he says, “we chiefly owe the doctrine of the mediate rights of kings, which is very remarkable as the embryo of the principles of Locke and Rousseau.” Authority considered in the abstract is of divine origin; but still the direct and immediate source of regal power is the nation, according to Suarez. Apparently, the noisy standard-bearers of civil liberties and political rights, in the eighteenth century, were not exactly pioneers, but mere plagiarists.

“As long,” continues Lecky, “as the object was not so much to produce freedom, as to mitigate servitude, the Church was still the champion of the people.... The balance of power created by the numerous corporations she created or sanctioned, the reverence for tradition, which created a network of unwritten customs with the force of public law, the dependence of the civil on the ecclesiastical power, and the right of excommunication and deposition, had all contributed to lighten the pressure of despotism” (II, 235).

We must array Mr. Lecky against himself, and conclude that the Church did more than “mitigate servitude”; she also produced freedom by the institution of these numerous guilds and unwritten laws, many of which still existed until they were swept away by the Revolution of 1790, which left nothing standing but an omnipotent tyrant, called the State, and a defenceless people, corvéable, taillable, and guillotinable, at mercy. These “unwritten customs with the force of public law” made Spain the freest country in Europe, until the seventeenth century. To suppress these fueros of the commons, or unwritten constitutional liberties, was one of the chief objects of the Spanish Inquisition, established by royal authority, and aimed chiefly at the bishops, as champions of popular rights. One of its first victims was the saintly Archbishop of Toledo. The Basque provinces retain their fueros intact to this day.

In France too liberty succumbed with the Public Law of Europe (1648).

In 1314 Philippe le Bel, in order to obtain subsidies, convoked the States General (Les Trois Etats). From that time to 1359, they were convoked seven times. In the first half of the fifteenth century there were fourteen convocations. From 1506 to 1558 there was an interruption of fifty-two years. From Henry II to the minority of Louis XIII, the States met six times. In 1614 was held the last convocation of the Trois Etats, until 1789.

Under the despotic Louis XI (1401-83), Philippe de Commines still dared to write with impunity: “Il n’y a roi ni seigneur qui ait pouvoir, outre son domaine, de mettre un denier sur ses sujets sans octroi et consentement, sinon par tyrannie et violence.” (“It would be tyranny and violence for any king or lord to raise a penny of taxation on his subjects, without their leave and consent.”)[23]

“Nevertheless,” writes de Tocqueville, “the elections were not abolished till 1692 ... the cities still preserved the right to govern themselves. Until the end of the seventeenth century we find some which were small republics, in which the magistrates were freely elected by the citizens and answerable to them, and in which public spirit was active and proud of its independence” (Ancien Régime, p. 83).

Mr. Lecky is pleased to attribute to the papal power “some of the worst calamities—the Crusades, religious persecutions, the worst features of the semi-religious struggle that convulsed Italy.... It is not necessary,” he continues, “to follow in detail the history of [what he is pleased to call] the encroachments of the spiritual on the civil power” (II, 155), though it would be more correct to say the encroachments of the civil on the religious power.

But it is very necessary to do so, because though the main object of these struggles of the spiritual power with despotic kings was the independence of the Church, it cannot be gainsaid that personal and civil liberty were thereby enhanced, as Lecky himself admits (p. 235).

It would be too long to discuss here the Crusades, which merely saved us from the fate now enjoyed by Islamic countries, or the alleged persecution of the Manichæans, who, under the name of Albigenses, menaced to disrupt the incipient civilization of Europe by their subversive tenets of anarchy and collectivism, equally opposed as they were to ecclesiastical and to civil government.

The “semi-religious wars,” or the so-called “wars of investiture,” which both he and Montesquieu disingenuously confound with the wars of Italian independence, eminently contributed to the cause of civil liberty in England, not less than in Italy, and elsewhere. Anselm, Becket, and Stephen Langton were worthy coadjutors of the policy of St. Gregory VII and the pioneers of political liberty. No one understands this better than Mr. Wakeman, the Anglican author of a recent History of the English Church.

“It is true,” he says, “that Anselm could not have maintained the struggle [against clerical investiture by laymen] at all if he had not had the power of Rome at his back. Englishmen quickly saw that the question between Anselm and Henry was part of a far wider question. They felt that bound up with the resistance of the archbishop was the sacred cause of their own liberty. The Church was the one power in England not yet reduced under the iron heel of the Norman kings. The clergy was the one body which still dared to dispute their will. To them belonged the task of handing on the torch of liberty amid the gloom of a tyrannical age. The despotism of the crown was the special danger to England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the Church that, in that time of crisis, rescued England from slavery. Had there been no Becket, Stephen Langton, Archbishop of York, would have failed to inspire the barons to wrest the Charter from John” (p. 105). And on page 108 he continues: “From the Conquest to the time of Simon de Montfort two great dangers threatened England, the uncontrolled will of unjust, wicked kings and the grinding administrative despotism of the government. From both she was saved by the Church. In her own canon law she opposed to the king’s laws a system which claimed a higher sanction, was based on principles not less scientific, and was already invested with the halo of tradition.”

It is this same canon law that the Church in France is, to-day, opposing to the tyranny of an omnipotent State or parliamentary majority, alias Grand Orient, which has, since four years, crushed out two of the most sacred liberties—the right to live in community and the right to educate one’s children in the Christian faith, the faith of our fathers, “once delivered to the saints.”

The long struggle, between the Popes and the German rulers, who sought to establish their despotic rule in Italy and enslave the whole Church by making the bishops of Rome their domestic chaplains, resulted in the glorious Congress of Venice, 1177, confirmed by the Peace of Constance, which is the first instance in history of peoples wresting political liberties from regal tyrants. The Magna Charta is the second in point of time.

After a long and seemingly hopeless struggle with Frederick Barbarossa, Alexander III, to whom this Hohenstaufen had opposed a series of servile anti-popes, triumphed, and with him triumphed the League of the Italian Cities, of which he was the unarmed chief. Milan, Brescia, Pavia, and other cities, which had been razed to the ground by the tyrant, thanked the Pope for having rendered them their liberty. Alexandria, an important city of the Piedmont, bears the name of this peaceful liberator. Voltaire refers to these events in the following terms: “Barbarossa finished the quarrel by recognizing Pope Alexandria III, kissing his feet, and holding his stirrup.” (Le maître du monde se fit le palefrenier du fils d’un gueux qui avait vécu d’aumônes.) “God has permitted,” exclaimed the Pope, “that an old man and a priest should triumph, without fighting, over a terrible and powerful emperor” (Essai sur les mœurs, II, 82).[24]

In the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, the clergy, at an early date, and long before the schism of 1054, began to succumb to Cæsaro-papism, a revival of the ancient pagan system, in which the temporal ruler was also the high-priest of his realm, and we well know that neither personal nor civil liberty ever found foothold in this Bas Empire.

“While the ecclesiastical monarchy of the West,” writes a Protestant historian, “could lead onward the mental development of the nations to the age of majority, could permit and even promote freedom and variety within certain limits, the brute force of the Byzantine despotism stifled and checked every free movement” (Neander, History of the Church, VIII, 244).

The French kings, even more than the English before Henry VIII, strove hard to establish the same system, and above all to exempt themselves from the Christian law of monogamy, which, with personal freedom, constitutes the great line of demarcation between Eastern, and Western or Latin civilization. Montesquieu assures us that a neighbour’s wife, unlawfully taken, or their own unjustly repudiated, caused all, or nearly all, the troubles between the Papacy and the French kings.

On the whole, however, civil liberty in Europe had reached an advanced stage in the fifteenth century. Cities and provinces really had more self-government then, than during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, more than they have now in some countries, notably in France.

The neo-paganism of the Renaissance was one of those periodical revolts of what St. Paul calls the “carnal mind, which is enmity with God.” “Sapientia carnis inimica est Deo” (Rom. VIII). It was a conjuration against Christianity and culminated in the Protestant revolt, which for ever destroyed the unity of Christendom, and set in motion a progressive scepticism or rationalism, which is Protestantism in its last analysis.

For more than three centuries English writers have repeated that the Protestant revolt was a struggle for liberty of conscience, notwithstanding the incontrovertible fact that all its foremost leaders were bitterly opposed to religious toleration, and that the sects relentlessly persecuted each other, as well as the adherents of the ancient faith.

Protestantism being, intrinsically, the nursery of rationalism, was necessarily a diminution of Christianity, and produced a corresponding diminution of liberty, both personal and civil. At the Congress of Westphalia, 1648, where, as Macaulay states, “Protestantism reached its highest point, a point it soon lost and never regained” (Essay on Ranke), was formulated the monstrous axiom Cujus regio ejus religio, which became the common law of Europe in lieu of the hitherto prevailing rule of One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. Henceforth, as in pagan days, each ruler assumed the right to dictate the religious beliefs of his subjects in the new system of national churches. The “territorial system” it was called, and represented the net result of a century of Protestantism.

There were, indeed, no fiercer despots over men’s consciences than the so-called “reformers.” If any doubt let him read their lives. Let him read of the bloody strife that rent the Netherlands after they had shaken off the Spanish yoke; how the great Barneveldt fell a victim to miserable oppression of Gomarists by followers of Arminius, and vice versa; how Remonstrants persecuted contra-Remonstrants, all on account of some metaphysico-religico distinctions neither understood clearly.

Then let us consider the embarkation of the Pilgrim Fathers from Holland, where they had sought asylum from the rigid conformity enforced by reformed England. Finding themselves no better off in the republic, which had emancipated itself, simultaneously, from Spain and Rome, the Pilgrim Fathers shook the dust of the old world from their feet and sought a new hemisphere. Surely in the primeval forests men might hope to interpret Scripture and serve God each according to his own lights. Not so. No sooner were the camp fires lighted, and the barest necessities of life provided for, than we find a theocracy of the most hard and fast type established by the Argonauts of the Golden Fleece of religious toleration. A veritable office of the Holy Inquisition was instituted “to search out and deliver to the law” all who “dared to set up any other exercises than what authority hath set up.” While it was gravely affirmed that “these cases were not a matter of conscience, but of a civil nature,” Sir John Saltonstall wrote from England to the first Puritan Grand Inquisitors, Wilson and Cotton, remonstrating “at the things reported daily of your tyranny, as that you fine, whip, and imprison men for their consciences.”

The acts of the Inquisition dwindle into insignificance if we place in the other balance the excesses committed, and the penal laws enacted from 1530 to 1829 against Dissenters and against English Roman Catholics in England. The Toleration Act of William and Mary, 1701, relieved Protestant “Recusants,” but the penal laws against Catholics were maintained till 1829, though many had fallen into desuetude. The principal were: For hearing Mass a fine of 66 pounds and one year’s imprisonment; they were debarred from inheriting or purchasing lands; they could hold no office nor bring any action in law; they could not teach under pain of perpetual imprisonment; they could not travel five miles without a licence, nor appear within ten miles of London under penalty of 100 pounds; while the universities were closed against them by test acts. Catholics having been thus deprived of all means of obtaining a liberal education and raising their voice on behalf of the truth, Protestant writers, since three hundred years, have been able to travesty and misrepresent, unchallenged, all the facts connected with the Reformation.

In France Louis XIV persecuted the Huguenots in virtue of the Cujus regio ejus religio (Whose the kingdom his the religion), and in spite of the protests of Innocent XI, who instructed his legate d’Adda to beg James II to intercede for them, declaring that “men must be led, not dragged to the altar.”

The German, Swiss, and Scandinavian rulers made, modified, and changed the religion of their subjects at will. Of the intolerance of the Calvanistic Republic of Geneva less said the better. Oppenheim, often pawned by its needy electors, is said to have changed its form of Protestantism fifteen times in twenty-one years. In Denmark, where Lutheranism was paramount and unadulterated, we find, writes Dollinger, “that the nobility made use of the Reformation to appropriate not only the Church lands, but that owned by the peasants.” “A dog-like servitude weighs down the Danish peasants, and the citizens, deprived of all representative power, groan under oppressive burdens” (Geshicte von Rugen, p. 294, quoted by Dollinger).

“The dwellers on the great estates of the Church were now obliged to exchange the mild rule of the clergy for the oppressive rule of the nobility,” writes Allen, page 313. “By these laws and enforced compacts the spoliation and the degradation of once free peasants were accomplished.” In 1702 Frederick IX abolished slavery, but glebe serfdom, as in Russia, continued till 1804. Until 1766 the education of the people stood at the lowest grade, and it was not till 1804 that freedom was conferred on 20,000 families who had been in a state of serfdom since the Reformation.

In Sweden we find the great Protestant hero, Gustavus Vasa, appropriating all the commonage lands of the villages, and even the weirs, the mines, and all uncultivated lands. Gustavus was, of course, obliged to share the spoils with his henchmen, whose rule was even more oppressive, and the peasants became wholly impoverished and degraded.

In Germany we find the same record of spoliation and oppression of the peasantry, whose rights there was none to defend since bishops no longer sat in the Diet. In 1663, 1646, 1654, the personal liberty of the peasants was progressively annihilated. “Then was forged that slave chain,” writes Boll, “which our peasantry have had to drag within a few decades of the present day” (Mecklenburg Geschichte). In 1820 this glebe serfdom was abolished by the Grand Duke.

In Pomerania, united with Brandenburg since the Reformation, Protestantism was paramount already in 1534, and the fate of the peasantry was the same. The oppression was so intolerable that even those whose farms had not been appropriated or turned into grazing grounds, as in Ireland, fled the country. In the peasant ordinance of 1616 they were declared “serfs without any civil rights,” and preachers were compelled to denounce fugitives from the pulpit.

The Elector of Brandenburg, it will be recalled, was the first to abjure Catholicism, and founded what became in 1701 the Prussian monarchy.

There was no general Diet since 1656. The Estates no longer met, and the rulers imposed taxes at their will. Peasants fled to Poland, or became mendicant vagrants or brigands.

The Lutheran clergy were mere puppets in the hands of their tyrannical rulers, who even dictated or revised their sermons at times. Prussian despotism reached high-water mark under Frederick the Great, but he being a frank and consistent rationalist, who believed “in letting every man be blessed in his own way,” religious persecution ceased.

In Brunswick and Hanover the spoils of the Church appeased for a time the greed of reformation princes, but habits of luxury were engendered by their ill-gotten wealth, and they soon resorted to “money clipping.” The towns lost all their inherited independence. For the decisions of municipal councils were substituted governmental decrees and circulars, as in France to-day, and ere long all trace of the ancient freedom of the Estates was lost. “The clergy,” writes Havemann, “had long since sunk into dependence.... The cities were languishing from lack of public spirit.... The power of modern states was unfolding itself over the sad remains of the ancient life and liberty of the Estates.”

In Saxony there was a nip-and-tuck struggle between Lutheranism and Calvinism in which the rack and the scaffold were freely used by Lutheran princes, who enforced their form of Protestantism according to the axiom Cujus regio ejus religio.

On the Church lands in England had lived a dense population of tenant farmers. When these lands were confiscated by Henry VIII, thousands of these peasantry became helpless paupers under the new regime. Vagrancy and mendicancy reached alarming proportions. It was enacted that vagrant beggars should be enslaved. If they tried to escape they were to be killed.

It appeared to Burnet (History of Reformation) that the intention of the nobility was to restore slavery. According to Lecky there were 72,000 executions in the reign of Henry VIII; vagrant beggars furnishing a large contingent.

Under Elizabeth charity by taxation or poor rates was resorted to for the first time in the history of Christendom.

I think we must admit that liberty, both civil and religious, made shipwreck at the Reformation, and that the champions of the Protestant revolt were not exactly actuated by a desire for the well-being and freedom of conscience of their fellow-men.

In England all was laboriously reconquered till 1829, when Catholics were emancipated on their native soil.[25]

Some Catholic countries, Spain and Italy, were saved from the horrors of religious wars, but all felt the effects of the new rationalistic spirit, which, being a diminution of Christianity, was also a diminution of liberty. They lost many civil liberties, and despotism strengthened its bands, till the great upheaval of 1790 destroyed the whole fabric of Europe and inaugurated a system of constitutional representative government.

Representative government, our modern fetish, was not unjustly rated by J. J. Rousseau, when he said “that a people with a representative government were slaves except during the period of elections, when they were sovereigns.” France to-day is a striking illustration.[26]

An amusing incident is related by Leroy Beaulieu of a Neapolitan who hired donkeys to tourists. He was an eager advocate of representative government in 1869. Questioned as to his reasons, he said that since twenty-one years he had been hiring donkeys to English, French, and American tourists, who enjoyed representative governments and were all rich. Some years later the eminent economist met him again, and congratulated him on Italy’s having acquired a representative constitution. The disabused peasant bitterly denounced the new regime in that the burden of taxation had trebled, and that the very donkey he hired out was taxed.

If the laws, or at least all important ones, were submitted to untrammelled public vote, then only might we say that the government was truly representative.

In many cases universal suffrage means the tyranny of ignorant, unprincipled majorities, while nowhere can it oppose an effective barrier against the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, and the creation of all-powerful oligarchies. When the majorities and the oligarchies come into collision, liberty will succumb. There will be more than one Bridge of Sighs.

It is in vain that false philosophers would persuade us that altruism, some vague “moral element of Christianism,” will combine with rationalism and perpetuate our Christian civilization in some transcendent form.

Christian civilization and morality are intimately and indissolubly connected with Christian dogma. The Fatherhood of God, Jupiter Optimus, was not unknown to the ancients, but the brotherhood of man, involving personal liberty and also civil liberty by extension, is essentially a Christian predicate, and is based on the dogma of the Incarnation.

The lofty contempt our modern rationalists express for the fierce controversy waged over two Greek vowels by the partisans of Homoousion and Homoiousion merely betrays their ignorance of its vital importance. On that dogma, so nobly maintained by the See of Peter and Athanasius, rests our whole fabric of Christian civilization, the brotherhood of man, and its logical sequence, freedom from slavery.

It is as absurd to suppose that the “moral element of Christianity” will continue to exist after the erosion of Christian dogma, as to expect that a tree we have hewn down will continue to bear fruit. It may indeed for a time remain verdant, and even put forth new shoots, just as we often see the loveliest flowers and fruits of Christianity in the lives and characters of individuals with whom the Christian faith has almost ceased to exist. But let us not be deceived. The lingering sap will cease to flow, and the last semblance of life will fade away. “The elements of dissolution have been multiplying all around us,” writes Lecky. And when rationalism or secularism, or neo-paganism in other words, which has already corroded Christendom to so great an extent, shall have accomplished its work of disintegration with the aid of godless schools and gross literature, society will, I repeat, be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery, or perish.

CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION

“AT the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “the Church saved Christianity ... resisted the internal dissolution of the Empire and the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization.... Had the Church not existed the whole world must have been abandoned to purely material force” (History of Civilization, I, 38).... “When all was chaos, when every great social combination was vanishing, the Church proclaimed the unity of her doctrine and the universality of her right; this is a great and powerful fact which has rendered immense service to humanity” (ibid., II, 19).

This unity was indeed the great factor in European civilization. On it the new civil societies, like wild olive branches, were grafted, so to speak. It became the bond of political unity, a kind of centripetal force, we may say, and the redemption from that inordinate love of independence which characterized the barbarians.

Consequently the new civil societies made the maintenance of religious unity the foremost object of their policy. It became the public law of all Europe and the common law of each state. To impugn this unity was considered a most heinous offence not against God only, but against the nation and against all Christendom.

“Thus,” writes another great Protestant, “Christianity became crystallized into a single bond embracing all nations, and giving to all life, civilization, and all the riches of the mind” (Hurter, Life of Innocent III, I, 38).

A corollary of this system of an universal Christian society was the recognition of a supreme tribunal. “One of the most elevated principles of the age,” writes the same eminent German, “was that, in the struggles between the peoples and their rulers, there should be a superior authority charged to recall laws not made by men, though their interpreter were himself a man.” Referring to the fiercely contested election of Othon, he continues: “Othon was the first to have recourse to Rome, the tribunal with whom rested the decision in these matters, when the parties did not wish to resort to the arbitrament of war.”

In France we find the great Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, remonstrating with the Bishop of the free chartered city of Beauvais, brother of the King, with whom he was often at odds.

“I beseech you not to raise a guilty hand against the King ... for you must see the consequences of armed insurrection against the King, especially if it be without consulting the Sovereign Pontiff.... If the King, drawn aside by evil counsellors, has not acted rightly, it was proper to have informed him by the bishops and notables, or rather by our Holy Father the Pope, who is at the head of the whole Church, and could easily have reconciled all differences.”

In England we have many instances of both laymen and clergy appealing to the arbitrament of the Papacy.

“The recognition of some principle of right, powerful enough to form a bond of lasting concord, has always been the dream of statesmen and philosophers,” writes Lecky. “Hildebrand sought it in the supremacy of the spiritual power, and in the consequent ascendency of moral law” (History of Rationalism, 245).

Voltaire pays homage to this public policy of the Middle Ages. “The interests of the human race required a controlling power to restrain sovereigns and protect the lives of peoples. This controlling power of religion could well be placed in the hands of the Papacy. The Sovereign Pontiffs warning princes and people of their duties, appeasing quarrels, rebuking crimes, might always have been regarded as the images of God on earth. But men, alas, are reduced to the protection of laws without force” (Essai sur les mœurs, II).

He describes what really did exist for centuries, though, of course, papal arbitration was not always efficacious. Every great institution needs time to develop and mature. It would not be great were it otherwise. Moreover there were, unfortunately, many troublous times between the sixth and the fifteenth century, in which the Papacy itself was captive, buffeted, demeaned, and exiled by the struggles and ambitions of turbulent political factions in Rome itself. The very day on which Gregory VII excommunicated the German Emperor, he was seized and imprisoned by a noble Roman bandit, until his people were able to deliver him by main force.

“Another corollary of this universal Christian Society was that right found a protector in the common Father of the faithful; in the grand idea of a supreme chief who without employing material force judged in last resort.... What great misfortunes would France and all Europe have been spared if, in the reign of Louis XVI, an Innocent III had been Pope. His rôle would have been to save the lives of the people” (Hurter’s Innocent III, II, 200-23). To German Protestant writers like Hurter, Voigt, Neander, etc., is due the honour of vindicating the true rôle of the Papacy in the Middle Ages.

The rights of suzerainty exercised by the Papacy also formed part of the public law of Europe. In those wild, lawless days, when robber barons enjoyed the privilege of being highwaymen on their own estates, and often extended their depredations to those of their neighbours, property rights had no sanction, and the weaker succumbed to the stronger in virtue of the “fist right,” which we now translate variously by “the right of the strongest,” political “majorities,” and the “survival of the fittest.”

The practice then arose among weak owners of dedicating their lands to the Church, in order to obtain spiritual or moral protection against the brute force of stronger neighbours. What private owners did in a small way was done by princes on a larger scale.

Referring to the peculiar incidents when roving Norman pirates, in possession of Sicily and Naples, seized the person of the Pope and insisted on becoming his vassal, Voltaire writes as follows:—“Robert Guiscard, wishing to be independent of the German Emperor, resorted to a precaution which private owners took in those days of trouble and rapine. The latter gave their property to the Church under the name of Oblata, and, paying a slight tax, continued to enjoy the use of it. The Normans resorted to this custom, placing under the protection of the Church in the hands of Nicholas II (1059) not only what they held, but also their future conquests (on the Saracens). This homage was an act of political piety like Peter’s Pence; the two pence of gold paid by the Kings of Portugal; like the voluntary submission of so many kingdoms” (Essai sur les mœurs, II, 44).

It was thus that England became a fief of the Holy See, a most unfortunate circumstance, as the temporal pecuniary obligations arising therefrom were exploited to estrange the English from the See of Peter, in the following centuries.

“In 1329,” continues Voltaire, “the King of Sweden, who wished to conquer Denmark, addressed the Pope as follows: ‘Your Holiness knows that Denmark depends on the Roman See and not on the German Emperor.’ ... I only wish to show,” Voltaire adds, “how every prince who wished to recover or usurp a domain appealed to the Pope.... In this case the Pope defended Denmark, and said he could only decide on the justice of the case when the parties had appeared before his tribunal, according to the ancient usage.”

Nor did Christians alone appeal to this spiritual tribunal. The bull of Innocent III, cited by Hurter, is an excellent exponent of the mind of the Church in all times. “As they (the Jews) claim our succour against their persecutors, we take them under our special protection, following in this the example of our predecessors, Calixtus, Eugenius, Alexander, Clement, and Celestin. We forbid every one to force a Jew to be baptized, for he who is compelled cannot be said to have the faith. No Christian must dare commit any violence against them, nor seize their property, without a legal judgment. Let no one trouble them on their feast days by striking or throwing stones at them,” etc.

It will be objected that the fulcrum of Western civilization was a spiritual despotism. But these terms exclude each other. Can we call an authority despotic which had no material force, and rested only on a divine commission and the common sense of prince and people, recognizing its credentials—on public opinion in fact?

It was a fundamental law of every state that any one, no matter what his rank, who impugned the Unity of the Faith, or committed offences so heinous as to justify the supposition that he was no longer a Christian, fell under the ban of the Church and became outlawed, if at the end of a year he had not been absolved. In his Historia Imperatorum Schafnaburg explains the wintry flight of Henry IV across the Alps to Canossa by his eagerness to be absolved before the year had revolved, because otherwise he would have forfeited his crown. Ut ante hanc diem non absolveretur, deinceps juxta Palatinas leges indignus regio honore habeatur.

Three causes were generally admitted as sufficient for the excommunication of a sovereign. First, if he fell from the faith. Second, if he ravaged or seized ecclesiastical lands or desecrated churches. Third, if he repudiated his own wife or appropriated his neighbour’s. This latter point, as Voltaire and Montesquieu have pointed out, was the cause of nearly all the quarrels between the French kings and the Papacy, a fact which our Jacobins, in the Chambers and elsewhere, deliberately ignore, when they mendaciously misrepresent the Church as having constantly encroached on the civil power. The case of Philippe Augustus and the hapless Ingleburge of Denmark was a test case, so to speak.

“It was not,” writes Hurter, “a question of contested claims of the Papacy, but of this great question, Is the sovereign subject to the laws of Christianity? It had to be decided whether the royal will should triumph or not over the force regarded as constituting the unity of Christendom” (Life of Innocent III). Montesquieu’s testimony is unimpeachable when he testifies that this Public Law of Europe was universally recognized. “All the sovereigns,” he writes, “with inconceivable blindness, themselves accredited and sanctioned, in public opinion, which had no force except by it.”

If the laws against heretics, who were to our forefathers what the anarchists are to us, were oppressive, some of the blame should surely be apportioned to the laymen who sat in the mixed assemblies in which they were made. “Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was deluged in bloodshed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.” It is in this disingenuous way that Lecky refers to the operations of the Public Law of Europe against the Albigenses or Manichæans of Provence, and probably to the wars of Italian independence and the Thirty Years War. Until the thirteenth century he assures us that practically no persecutions (prosecutions) against heretics occurred. It was then that the Public Law of Europe began to be trampled on by sectarians who adopted and propagated Gnostic, Paulician, Manichæan, and other subversive theories, imported from the East by Semitic-Islamic settlers in the fair lands of Provence. Spain and Italy, the countries in which the Public Law of Europe was maintained, were the only ones who were spared the horrors of civil religious wars. They were saved by inquisitions, it will be retorted.

Without seeking to defend the system, we may be permitted to inquire whether it were not preferable, at that time, to execute some ringleaders of religious revolt (30,000 in three centuries is a fair estimate), than to deluge whole countries in blood for many decades, about controversies which not one in a million could possibly grasp? Lecky the rationalist assures us that “the overwhelming majority of the human race, necessarily, accept their opinions from authority. Avowedly like Catholics, or unconsciously like Protestants. They have neither time nor opportunity (nor capacity) to examine for themselves” (History of Rationalism, I, 101).

Does any one seriously believe that the Camisards were fighting for predestination and infant damnation, which have been shelved recently by Presbyterians in the United States?

In England, France, Germany, everywhere, greed and political ambition were the incentives; the passions of ignorant masses were merely used as a means. Back of both, and behind all, we descry secret societies, the true pandemoniums, where these revolts are organized, and whence Mammon, “the least-erected spirit that fell,” Moloch, “horrid king besmeared with blood,” Belial, and all that crew, described by Milton, are sent forth to execute the behests of the eternal enmity between “the serpent’s seed and the seed of the woman.”

In this unholy struggle “all the bonds of cohesion on which political organization depended were weakened or destroyed,” writes Lecky. “The spirit of private judgment had descended to those totally incapable of self-government, and lashed their passions into the wildest fury” (History of Rationalism, p. 239). Voltaire is even less complimentary. He describes the Hussites as “wild beasts whom the severity of the emperor had roused to furor.”

In Germany, apostate ecclesiastical and secular electors were seeking their own aggrandizement. Bishoprics with their manses were converted into hereditary principalities. As to their Swedish ally, Gustavus Adolphus, I refer my readers to the judgment of a Protestant admirer of this doughty champion of the Reformation. On page 329 of Thirty Years War Schiller writes as follows:—

“The last, the greatest service, Gustavus Adolphus could render to religious and civil liberty was to die (1632, at battle of Lutzen).... It was no longer possible to doubt that he was seeking to establish himself in Germany, not as a protector, but as a conqueror. Already Augsburg boasted that it had been chosen as the capital of the new monarchy. The Protestant princes, his allies, made claims which could only be satisfied by despoiling the Catholics. It is then permitted to conclude that like the barbarian hordes of yore, he intended to divide the conquered provinces of Germany among the Swedish chiefs of his army. His conduct towards the unfortunate Elector Palatine, Frederick V, is unworthy of a hero. The Palatinate was in his hands, justice and honour required that he return it to the legitimate sovereign. But to avoid doing so he had recourse to subtleties which make us blush for him.”

It is only fair to add that Gustavus did finally restore the Palatinate to Frederick, but as a fief of the Swedish crown.

What, I ask, has been gained by the overthrow of the Public Law of Europe? For this was waged the Thirty Years War, one of the most cruel the world has known. Atrocities were committed on both sides, and the tu quoque argument is very foolish. But if it be admitted that defensive war is always just and righteous, we must allow that the Catholics were justified in fighting for their public law. They were in possession since more than twelve centuries, and were resisting assailants who showed no quarter, and who robbed them of their churches and persecuted them, relentlessly, whenever they gained the upper hand, just as the Puritans did in Maryland. And what was the net result of the Thirty Years War? The loss of liberty both civil and religious. The German electors, ecclesiastical as well as secular, had been but administrators of free citizens, who now became subjects with little or no voice in the government. As to religious liberty, the new axiom Cujus regio ejus religio was substituted for One Lord One Faith. The ruler of each realm became the infallible Pontiff of his subjects. “If any gratitude from this scandalous and accursed world were to be gained, and I, Martin Luther, had taught and done nothing else than this, that I have enlightened and adorned the temporal authority, for this alone should it be thankful to me, since even my worst enemies know that a like understanding as to the temporal authority was completely concealed under the Papacy” (Walch’s Augs., XIV, p. 520).

In this same connexion Schiller makes the following statement. “No country changed religion oftener than the Palatinate. Unhappy weathercock of the political and religious versatility of its sovereigns, it had twice been forced to embrace the doctrines of Luther and then to abandon them for those of Calvin. Frederick III deserted the Confession of Augsburg, but his son re-established it by most violent and unjust measures. After closing all the Calvinist temples and exiling the ministers and school teachers, he ordered by his will that his son should be brought up by Lutherans; his brother, however, annulled this will and became regent under the young Frederick IV, who was confided to Calvinists with strict orders to destroy in his mind the “heretical doctrines of Luther by all means, by beating and whipping even.” It is easy to guess how subjects were treated when the heir to the throne was thus tyrannized over” (Thirty Years War, p. 40).

What, I ask, has Europe gained by the overthrow of its public law? Strife, anarchy, nihilism in religion as in philosophy. After centuries of dabbling, floundering, and blundering, we are again seeking to devise some principle of unity, some Amphictyonic Council to supplement the illusory balance of power; to set up a Court of Arbitration to replace the one that really did exist in the Middle Ages and functioned as well as could be expected in those days of liquescence.

All in vain. The grand Peace Congress from which the Papacy was excluded was followed, almost immediately, by two most cruel wars which were pre-eminently subjects for arbitration. Men will submit to this court questions about which they do not care enough to fight about them, but these subjects only will they submit to arbitration. Unless the Lord build the house, in vain they labour who build.

There is only one tribunal that can ever arbitrate efficaciously, and this is the one which presided at the Genesis of Christendom.[27]

Socialists and anarchists, without having pondered the passage from Guizot I quoted in beginning this chapter, understand perfectly that our Western or Christian civilization is grounded on the unity of one Holy Catholic Church, and the destruction of the social structure being the object of their ambition, they very logically direct all their efforts to destroying this foundation.

The work of disintegration was begun in the sixteenth century. “Socinius, the most iconoclastic of Protestants, predicted that the seditious doctrines by which Protestants supported their cause would lead to the disintegration of society” (History of Rationalism, II, 239).

This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by the grands ancêtres of bloody memory.

“The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface to Questions contemporaines), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all organizations, excepting only the Catholic Church. The clergy alone have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives, so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a dismantled society.”

The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected, in toto, the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands, but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within her, and on the third day she rose again.

What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality.

The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church into an ever-increasing number of viviparous Associations cultuelles, independent of all ecclesiastical control.

The successor of Pius VI, Ithuriel-like, has pierced the thin disguise of the toad lurking in the purlieus of Eden.[28] Instead of a divided demoralized clergy, the Masonic Jacobins are confronted by the serried ranks of an invincible phalanx.

“At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “it was the Church with its magistrates, its institutions, and its power that vigorously resisted the internal dissolution of the empire and of the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization between the Roman and the barbarian worlds” (History of Civilization).

Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution. The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity.

Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism perhaps—or perish.

21st November, 1906.

APPENDIX

Page 29

Séance du 28 Decembre, 1906.

Au Sénat Journal Officiel, page 1236.

M. DELAHAYE: “M. Briand’s law is older than himself. We find traces of it in all the Masonic convents.... Gentlemen, why are we going to vote this additional law, as we did the first Separation Law, without changing an iota?... Because the lodges have so decided.

“The Convent, the public should be told, is the general assembly of the lodges.... The Convent, called during the Revolution La Convention, is the source of all our evils. On 12 November, 1904, brother Lafferre (a senator), thirty-third degree, read the following ordre du jour: ‘The general assembly of the Grand Orient addresses to M. Combes warm assurances of sympathy and confidence, and begs him to persevere courageously in the struggle to defend the Republic against clericalism, and accomplish social, military, and fiscal reforms. The Assembly demands that at the session of January, 1905, Separation and the retraites ouvrières be discussed simultaneously.’”

M. Lafferre and the reporter of the new Separation Law here applauded ironically.

M. Delahaye continued: “Let us pass to the Convent of 1905, séance 23 September, 1905. “Le Frère Roret, reporter (of the Masonic Commission): ... A wish more important, and which will be adopted without discussion, emanates from the Congress of the region of Paris. It regards the Separation and has been slightly modified by the (Masonic) Commission (of political and social studies). The Congress demands that the Separation Law voted in the Chambers be amended by the Senate. Your Commission judges that it is most important that this law be voted immediately and promulgated before the legislative elections (May, 1906), so that the country may see that it is a liberal law and not at all vexatious.... Your Commission proposes the following vote: ‘The Convent emits the wish that the law, imperfect but perfectible, be adopted by the Senate as rapidly as possible and promulgated before the elections, but that it be amended later by the Republican Parliament and rendered more distinctly laïque.’”

M. Delahaye continued: “It is well to notice that laic has two meanings. For us it means not ecclesiastic; for Freemasons it means atheistic, anti-Catholic.... I have proved, incontestably, that M. Briand is here as the mouthpiece of Freemasonry, to which he says he does not belong.... There is a privileged Congregation in France which holds property as a société immobilière of the Grand Orient by ‘interposed persons.’ This Congregation is about to sell its real estate of the Rue Cadet (Paris). It received an offer of 1,250,000 francs. The State offers to buy it for 1,300,000 francs, to be used as a telephone office.... I wish to know why the State does not simply expropriate this Congregation, seeing that it is illegal, because this société immobilière is simply a personne interposée?... Gentlemen, the book just published by one of your former friends, M. Flourens (ex-minister), La France Conquise Edward VII and Clemenceau, is going to enlighten rulers deaf to the voice of the Pope (who had condemned Masonry since 1728). The Bourbons and the French nobility, whom Freemasonry had doomed to death, were dancing on the first floor of the lodges, while overhead sentence was being passed on them.... In spite of many changes of government since a century, we are descending steadily, because your principles, destructive of family, country, and private property, have entered into our legislation.... We have a fine army, but at your touch it becomes no more than a national guard. We have many vessels, but no navy.... Ere long kings and emperors, who now utilize Freemasonry, will end by saying, ‘This instrument is very dangerous.’”

There were cries of “Clôture, clôture.” The discussion was closed. No one replied to M. Delahaye.

Pages 113-125

Commenting on the annual Convent of the Grand Orient, September, 1906, the Journal de Génève, the leading Swiss Protestant daily, made the following statements:—

“LE RÔLE DE LA MAÇONNERIE

“Septembre, 1906.

“Il ne faut pas se dissimuler que la franc-maçonnerie tient entre ses mains les destinées du pays (la France). Quoiqu’elle ne compte que vingt-six mille adhérents, elle dirige à sa guise la politique française. Toutes les lois dont le catholicisme se plaint si amèrement ont été d’abord élaborées dans ses convents. Elle les a imposées au gouvernement et aux Chambres. Elle dictera toutes les mesures qui seront destinées à en assurer l’application. Nul n’en doute, et personne, non pas même les plus indépendants, n’oserait heurter de front sa volonté souveraine. Il serait aussitôt brisé, celui qui se permettrait seulement de la méconnaître.

“Jamais, depuis l’époque où Rome commandait aux rois et aux princes, on ne vit pareille puissance. Et cette puissance est d’autant plus forte, à cette heure, qu’elle vient de subir victorieusement une crise redoutable. Après l’affaire des fiches, on croyait la maçonnerie morte, tout au moins bien malade; mais, à force d’audace, elle a triomphé de ses ennemis, qui déjà sonnaient joyeusement l’hallali. Les deux tiers des membres de la Chambre actuelle sont francs-maçons.

“La volonté de la franc maçonnerie, nul ne l’ignore plus, c’est de détruire le catholicisme en France. Elle se dresse comme une Eglise contre l’Eglise de Rome. Elle n’aura ni cesse ni répit, qu’elle ne l’ait jetée bas, qu’elle n’en ait semé les poussières au vent. Tous ses ressorts sont uniquement tendus vers ce but. Les autres religions, si même elle ne les ignore momentanément, elle paraît les ménager. Elle se dit sans doute que, le catholicisme ayant rendu l‘âme sous son étreinte, l’anéantissement des autres confessions ne serait pour elle que jeu d’enfant.

“Mais l’adversaire n’est pas encore terrassé, auquel elle s’était attaquée. Il est comme Antée, qui, toutes les fois qu’il touchait le sol, retrouvait de nouvelles forces. Elle s’en rend bien compte. C’est pourquoi, crainte que d’un tour de reins désespéré il ne se dresse dans toute sa vigueur, elle n’a point poussé jusqu’ici la lutte à fond. Parfois même elle semble accorder une trêve; elle rentre dans ses quartiers. Mais, dès que la vigilance des catholiques lui paraît suffisamment endormie, elle se jette de nouveau sur sa proie. Elle continuera cette tactique jusqu’au triomphe définitif.

“Ce triomphe est-il prochain ou lointain? Pour le moment, la défiance de Rome est bien éveillée, et Pie X n’est peut-être pas de ces hommes qui se laissent prendre aux feints désarmements.

“Quelques-uns se demanderont comment il peut se faire qu’une minorité si faible gouverne ainsi tout un pays. C’est pourtant très simple. D’abord les maçons sont étroitement unis; et l’union fit toujours la force. Ensuite, appartenant tous aux classes moyennes, ils exercent par leur situation personnelle, par leurs fonctions—tous les gros bonnets de l’administration sont affiliés à la franc-maçonnerie—une influence très grande. L’on peut dire qu’ils disposent de toutes les faveurs gouvernementales; et ces faveurs, ils ne les distribuent qu’à bon escient. Non seulement donc ils tiennent à leur discrétion tous ceux qui occupent un poste quelconque de l’Etat, mais encore tous ceux qui aspirent à en occuper un, et ils sont légion. Ça leur fait une armée formidable, disciplinée par l’intérêt.

“On comprend que, dans ces conditions, la franc-maçonnerie n’ait qu’à faire un signe aux pouvoirs publics pour qu’elle soit immédiatement obéie. Quoi qu’elle décide, ce sera exécuté sur l’heure.

“La franc-maçonnerie, dit-il, sait mieux que le gouvernement lui-même, quelle somme de résistance, en ce moment, le catholicisme peut opposer à un assault décisif. Elle n’ignore pas que, quoiqu’il soit très ébranlé, il serait très hasardeux de le vouloir abattre d’un dernier coup. Elle craint surtout que, si elle ne parvenait pas à lui faire exhaler le soupir suprême, il ne retrouvât une nouvelle vie, la volonté et l’énergie de vaincre à son tour.

“La franc-maçonnerie se gardera de compromettre, dans une lutte chanceuse, les fruits de longs efforts. Elle a emprunté sa devise à Rome: ‘Patiens quia æterna,’ et elle attendra qu’elle puisse frapper à coup sûr. Les probabilités sont donc pour que, tout en s’opposant à ce que des relations soient renouées avec le Saint-Siège, elle ne chassera pas les catholiques de leurs derniers retranchements, c’est-à-dire de leurs églises; elle les y laissera tranquilles, jusqu’au jour où, par un nouveau coup d’audace, elle s’en emparera.

“Un de ses orateurs a prophétisè qu’avant peu on entendrait des ‘batteries d’allégresse’ sous les voûtes de Notre-Dame; et les prophéties maçonniques ne se sontelles pas souvent réalisées?”

Page 204

On November 9th, 1906, M. Briand described the Status of the Church in France as follows (Officiel, 2459): “The churches are affected to public worship and must remain so indefinitely.... It is our duty to leave them open.... Reunions are possible, you may have them. The priest may live in direct communication with the people, he may receive manual gifts. Perhaps the Catholic hierarchy about which you are so much concerned will suffer. Perhaps this faculty left to the faithful to live with their priest haphazard (au hasard de la rencontre) will soon dry up the revenues of the priests; it will certainly dry up those of the bishops.”

It is well also to recall here the words pronounced by M. Briand, October 17th, 1905 (Journal Officiel, 1223), regarding the Associations cultuelles: “They will be hardly born on the 11th December, 1906. They will not have had time to obtain funds. If we deprive them of the patrimony of the fabriques and menses episcopales it will be impossible for them to maintain public worship, and the faithful will be unable to practise their religion.”

Yet the Government impudently declares to-day that the Catholics are hard to please!

On December 1st, 1906, M. Briand sent forth an ukase commanding every priest to consider public worship assimilated to public meetings, and to make a declaration to the mayor according to the law of 1881.

Now the law of 1905 says that public worship cannot be regulated by the law of 1881. Moreover, this law requires the constitution of a bureau, and that a declaration be made before each meeting twenty-four hours in advance. M. Briand took upon himself to modify the law (l’assouplir) and to say no bureau was necessary, and that one declaration would do for a year! The clergy made no declarations. A few were made by Anarchists and Freemasons.

From the 12th to the 20th December the police were kept busy making thousands of procès verbaux all over France. This idea of making 65,000 prosecutions every day was soon found to be grotesque and impracticable. Moreover, under the law of 1881 it is the owner of the public hall or the café or cabaret who is prosecuted for not making the required declaration. The State and the communes being now the alleged owners of the churches since December 11th, 1906, they should have been prosecuted and not the priests. This same M. Briand, who thus modified the law of 1881, had declared in the Chambers: “Common right no longer exists if you interpret it otherwise than the law” (November 9th, Journal Officiel, p. 2438).

Since December 11th, 1906, the Church in France is very much in the condition of the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho.

On December 29th, 1906, a new Law of Separation was passed. It confers on 36,000 mayors the right to invest 36,000 priests with a precarious use of Church edifices, sauf désaffection. The time-limit is to be decided, à l’amiable, between the mayors and their nominees. Truly this is the reductio ad absurdum of separation.

M. Briand assures us “that the mayor will accord the church to the curé most capable of keeping it in good condition” (Journal Officiel, p. 3398, December 21st, 1906). This is lay orthodoxy. “As to the period of enjoyment, it is impossible to fix it by law,” says M. Briand, “to one, two, or three years” (Officiel, p. 3407), “‘ce sont des questions d’espèce qui seront tranchées selon les communes’; it will vary in each commune.”

To this M. Ribot replied: “‘C’est l’anarchie dans 36,000 communes.’ At every election this question will be raised, Shall we leave the church to the curé or not? You are making of this question, eminently a governmental one, a municipal question, given over to dissensions, competitions, and coteries” (Officiel, p. 3407).

The new Law of Separation (December 29th) abolishes the sequestration ordered on December 11th of all Church revenues, etc., till December, 1907. It turns over immediately to the communes and to lay institutions all the property of the Church. Yet on November 9th (Journal Officiel, p. 2461) M. Briand stoutly resisted the Left, clamouring for this very thing. “We must not raise illusory hopes,” he said.

“No,” cried a deputy, “it will be like the milliard of the Congregations.”

“There are fourteen millions of revenue,” continued M. Briand,” ...but are they ‘liquid,’ free of charges? The communes are stretching out their hands to receive. You will give them what? Nests of lawsuits. Yes, nests of vipers that will poison the communes with their venom.”

To explain this change of policy M. Briand said: “We have acquired the certitude that the situation is without issue. It was impossible to expect that during the next year regular associations (of 1905) will be constituted to claim this property of the fabriques. We cannot remain another whole year in this uncertainty” (Journal Officiel, p. 3396, December 21st). A French proverb says: “Souvent femme varie bien fou qui s’y fie.”

And in the same session M. Briand, to explain why it was not possible to lend the churches to curés under the new law for any definite time, said: “In fixing no term the Government is logical. Having a law to execute (that of 1905), and having the conviction that the Church will end by accepting it, we could not give to uncontrolled associations under the law of 1901, which are a concession to the Church, the same advantages as to Associations cultuelles” (1905) (Journal Officiel, p. 3407, December 21st, 1906).

The new law of December 28th, 1906, says the use of the churches can be obtained by the declaration of the curé individually, or of an association formed according to the law of 1901, or rather according to certain articles of this law only. The Church may not avail herself of the articles which permit the formation of associations called “of public utility”—like the S.P.A., for instance.

This is what these Jacobins understand by combating the Church. A coup de liberté by dint of liberty! They speak of giving droit commun, common right. But they never do so. The Church is excluded from the right of forming Associations d’utilité publique conferred by the law of 1901, though placed under this law since December 28th, 1906. The new law is only a makeshift. M. Briand said (21st December, p. 3398, Journal Officiel): “Evidently this legislation is not definitive. Turn the pages of history up to the Revolution; you will see that the Convention had the same difficulties as we to-day. See the number of laws voted in the year 1795 alone” (there were eleven Laws of Separation). Just so. France stands where she did in 1795.

PAGE 228

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN CATHOLIC MARYLAND

Confirmed by the Lord
Proprietary by an instrument
under his hand & seale.

Enacted & made at a
Geñall Session held 1 &
20 day of Aprill Anno Dm̃
1649 as followeth viz.

PHILLIP CALVERT.
26th August 1650.

An act concerning Religion.

fforasmuch as in a well
governed & Xpian Com̃on Wealth matters concerning Religion and the honor of God ought in the first place to bee taken into serious consideracon & endeavoured to bee settled. Be it therefore ordered and enacted by the Right Hoble Cecilius Lord Baron of Baltemore absolute Lord Proprietary of this Province with the advice & consent of this Generall Assembly. That whatsoever ‘pson or ‘psons within this province & the Islands thereunto belonging shall from henceforth blaspheme God that is curse him or deny our Saviour Jesus Christ to be the sonne of God, or shall deny the holy Trinity or the unity of the Godhead, or shall use or utter any reproachfull speeches concerning the said Holy Trinity shal be punished with death & confiscation to the lord Proprietary and his heirs....

And bee it also further enacted by the same authority advise and assent that whatsoever ‘pson or ‘psons shall from henceforth uppon any occasion of offense or otherwise in a reproachful manner or way declare call or denominate any ‘pson or ‘psons whatsoever, inhabiting residing or traffiqueing or commerceing within this Province or within any of the Ports Harbors Creeks or Havens to the same belonging, an heritik, Scismatick Idolater, puritan, Independent, Calvenist, Anabaptist Brownist Antimmoniam, Barrowist Roundhead, Sepatist Presbiterian, popish prest, Jesuite, Jesuited papist or any other name or terme in a reproachful manner relating to matter of Religion shall for every such offense, forfeit and loose the some of tenne shillings one half thereof to be paid unto the person of whom such reproachfull words are or shall be spoken and the other half thereof to the Lord Proprietary.... And whereas the inforceing of the Conscience in matters of religion hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous Consequence in these Commonwealths where it hath been practised. And for the more quiet and peacable govt of this Province & the better to pserve mutuall Love & Amity amongst the inhabitants thereof. Be it therefore also by the L[-o] Proprietary with the advice and consent of this Assembly Ordeynd & enacted that noe persons whatsoever within this province or the Islands Ports Harbors Creeks thereunto belonging professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth bee any waies troubled Molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof within this province ... nor any way compelled to the beliefe or exercise of any other Religion against his or her consent soe as they be not unfaithfull to the Lord Proprietary or molest or conspire against the Civill Govt established.... And that all & every person that shall presume contrary to this act directly or indirectly either in person or Estate wilfully to wrong disturb or molest any person ... in respect to his or her Religion shall be compelled to pay trebble damages to the party soe wronged or molested & for every such offence shall also forfeit 20s sterling ... or if the ptie soe offending as aforesaid shall refuse or be unable to recompense the party soe wronged ... then such offender shall be severely punished by publick whipping & imprisonmt without baile or maineprise....

The ffreemen have assented.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SLAV AND MOSLEM

SOME OPINIONS

“Slav and Moslem does you the greatest honour, for I quite understand how difficult it is for foreigners to comprehend so correctly as you do the origin, the value, and the destinies of our institutions.

Prince Cantacuzene.

“Russian Imperial Legation, Washington.”

“The perusal of your valuable and interesting book on the historical relations of Slav and Moslem has afforded the keenest pleasure.

A. Iswolzy.

“Légation Impériale de Russe près le Saint Siège.”

“We are separated from the Western world by difference of race, culture, and history, and the Western mind is very hard in understanding us. Therefore the testimony of a just and unprejudiced mind is always gratefully appreciated in Russia.

C. Pobedonostzeff,

“Petersburg. Président du Saint Synod.”

“I was not only pleased with Slav and Moslem, but acknowledge a large accretion to my knowledge of the subject.

Your friend,
Lew Wallace,
Author of ‘Ben Hur,’ and formerly Ambassador
of U.S. to Constantinople.”

“I consider Slav and Moslem the clearest exposition on the Eastern Question I have ever met with.

J. Hughes,
Author of the “Dictionary of Islam.”

“I regard Slav and Moslem as a very valuable contribution to the history of Russia. You are entitled to great credit for your comprehensive view of the Russian Government and people.

John Sherman,

“Washington. Senator and Diplomat, U.S.”

“Your development of the historical relations of Russia and Turkey is admirable and full of interest. In vigorous and picturesque language you have presented the other side.

John A. Kasson,

“Washington. Senator and Diplomat.”

“I find no words to express the historic breadth of your political summary, and the deep and genuine philosophy and truth of your treatment of this great drama.

Cassius Marcellus Clay,
Ten years Minister of the U.S. at St. Petersburg.”

“I have read Slav and Moslem with much interest, as it contains many suggestions to fruitful thought regarding this great empire.

Andrew D. White.

Legation of the U.S., St. Petersburg.”

“Slav and Moslem is written with justice, clairvoyance, and talent.

Juliette Adam.”

“I have read many books on Russia, but none met with my approval to such an extent as Slav and Moslem.... The statements and descriptions of the Russians are so correct.... During the years of my official stay I studied the people, their history and language, and know what I am talking about.

John Karel,
U.S. Consul at St. Petersburg.”

“For the chapter on the Crimea alone your book deserves the thanks of all who would study the present century.

Geo. J. Lemmon,
Lecturer and Publicist.”

SOME PRESS NOTICES

“Vivid historical sketches.... Eminently worthy of careful perusal.”—The Press (Philadelphia).

“The author shows an intelligent mastery of his subject.”

Herald (Boston).

“Its every sentence is clear-cut and positive.... The subjects are all treated with a vigour and boldness that rivet the attention from first to last.”

The American (Baltimore).

“The author has a surprisingly firm grasp on his subject.... Vivid, thorough, original.”

The Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah).

“Intensely readable.... It is one of the notable books of the day.”—Commercial Gazette (Cincinnati).

“From first to last the book is one of unusual interest.”

The Chronicle (Augusta, Ga.).

“A sober and trenchant defence of Russia.”

Times Star (Cincinnati)

“Mr. Brodhead writes lucidly and discriminatingly.... Interesting and suggestive throughout.”

The Churchman (New York).

“J. Brodhead’s work on the Eastern is creating a more and more favorable impression throughout the country.”

The Press (New York).

PLYMOUTH
WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I transcribe the following from Le Lyon Republicain (ministerial anti-clerical), 1905:—“The criminality of youths from sixteen to twenty-five is increasing in shameful and overwhelming proportions. This collection of beardless scoundrels, cynically vicious, murderers, thieves, souteneurs, is the curse of our large cities.... It is only since fifteen or eighteen years at most that criminalists notice this remarkable depravation of youths almost children.... May we not ask if the State that has done the most for instruction has not done the least for education? Truly this frightful development of youthful criminality, of alcoholism, and anti-socialism must make us reflect.”

“Fifteen years or eighteen at most.” The scholar anti-Christian laws of Jules Ferry, Goblet, Paul Bert, date from 1882 to 1895, and by their fruits they are judged.

[2] In January, 1906, M. Poincaré, minister of finance, in reply to M. Grousseau, admitted that up to February, 1905, the State had advanced the sum of 4,551,319 frs. to the liquidators of the Congregations.

[3] “Vel Judam non videtis, quomodo non dormit, sed festinat tradere me Judæis?” (Feria V in Cœna Domini—“See ye not Judas, how he sleeps not, but makes haste to betray me into the hands of the Jews?”)

[4] According to a recent article in the Figaro, 8th October, 1906, among the conscripts sent this month to the army by Paris, ninety could neither read nor write; seventy-nine could read only.

[5] It was only at the annual September Convent of the Grand Orient, 1904, that it was decided to rush the assault on the Church itself by the law of alleged separation. “Il nous reste un rude coup de collier à donner ... la separation figurera en Janvier prochain a l’ordre du jour de la chambre.”

[6] At the Free-Thought Congress.

[7] His native city recently hoisted the French flag and proclaimed its annexation to the Third Republic, 1906. Of course it was only a platonic demonstration on the part of Sicilian Freemasons.

[8] M. Rouvier had obtained a law obliging every one without exception who distilled anything to pay the usual tax on alcohol. This law was made and repealed by the same Parliament, so that now every one who has a peach or a plum tree can manufacture any kind of alcohol of poor quality, and retail it in the buvettes or drink-stands which are found at every step almost; in every little vegetable and grocery shop, even in Government tobacco stores where stamps are sold. These buvettes are the curse of France to-day. They have caused far greater ravages than the Franco-Prussian war.

[9] “We do not wish to see the secular arm placed at the service of free-thought,” said a deputy of the “bloc” not long since. “Meanwhile the secular arm in the service of free-thought has closed all our schools and colleges,” retorted a deputy of the Right.

[10] On November 17th, 1906, the Bishop of Nancy wrote as follows to M. Briand, Minister of Cults, regarding the sad plight of the Sisters du Saint Cœur de Marie at Nancy: “In 1902, 56 of them were huddled together in a small house situated at the extremity of their grounds.... Their spacious chapel was razed to the ground and in its place three private houses have been built. The property was sold for 527,000 francs. The liquidator promised that in conformity with the law the sisters should receive pensions. Out of the 56 there remain to-day but 44. Of these 10 are over seventy, and 22 of them are over sixty.... In these last four years they have received out of the 527,000 francs only 12,000 in three instalments.... They owe 17,800 to their baker, butcher, etc., and are threatened with starvation if further credit be denied them.... Are these aged women, who have devoted their lives to the instruction of the poor, to die of cold and hunger, M. le Ministre?” And these things happen in the twentieth century under a Government that proclaims the rights of man and of the poor!

[11] There is no such thing as proportional representation in France, and the whole electoral machinery is manipulated to give the Government a majority.

[12] Recently in the Chambers (November 13th, 1906), M. Lassies criticized that part of M. Clemenceau’s declaration in which he referred to the Holy See “as a foreigner subject to foreign influences.” “Foreign influences,” said M. Lassies, turning pointedly to M. Delcassé, “we find them here in the person of the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, who fell from power without our knowing why. Whence came the gust which caused his fall? From which frontier?”

[13] The Bill was adopted by the French Senate early in December.

[14] Everything except the encyclique of August 15th, 1906.

[15] M. Lefas, deputy of the Right, maintained in the Chambers (Nov. 9th, 1906, Journal Officiel, p. 2448) that “the churches could not form part of the Communal domain when Communes did not exist in France. Communal domain only began with the existence of the Communes; that is to say, a hundred years ago.” Therefore these Church edifices cannot be said to belong to the Communes to-day. Formerly France was divided into parishes, and each parish had its parish church.

As to the cathedrals, if kings and nobles, like other Catholics, contributed to their embellishment or construction, they did so as Catholics. All the guilds and corporations, too, contributed, not only money, but personal labour. Would this entitle the syndicates of masons, goldsmiths, etc., of to-day to claim these cathedrals? But the chief factor in the construction of these noble edifices were the freely given toil and humble labours of the multitudes of Catholics who raised these monuments of faith. It is well known that a Catholic church cannot be dedicated as long as any one has a lien on it, that is, not until the Church’s proprietorship of the building is undisputed. Therefore the assumption that these edifices belong to the State and the Communes can only be justified on the theory of the men who, seeing a trunk lying in the hall of a hotel, said, “This trunk belongs to no one; let us say it belongs to us.”

The recent judgment of the highest court of England in the case of the “wees and the frees” of the Scotch Presbyterian Kirk is eminently applicable in this question of Jacobin appropriations and spoliations.

[16] These inventories, left incomplete after the fall of the Rouvier Ministry (February), are being completed now (November, 1906).

[17] When the daily Press is constantly recording the exploits of cambrioleurs picking locks and bursting open coffres forts with dynamite, it is very piquant to see the Government doing the same thing, flanked by gens d’armes and the regular army. Yesterday at Nantes 1500 soldiers, with two generals and one colonel, surrounded the cathedral at 5 a.m. Forty locks were picked before noon! In cambrioleur slang this would be called a “record haul.” Thanks to the injunctions of Pius X, there was no bloodshed, and M. Clemenceau and his friends proclaim that these inventories are made sans incident.

[18] This Protestant senator seems to have been inspired by an eloquent passage in Bossuet, “Une voix nous crie, Marche, Marche.”

[19] The founder and owner of La Lanterne is said to be a Frankfort Jew, and it is an open secret that all the advanced Socialist and anti-clerical dailies are owned or controlled by the princes of Israel. And it is from these that English and American papers seem to derive all their information regarding the Church in France.

[20] LES CAISSES D’ÉPARGNE.

Voici le relevé des opérations des Caisses d’épargne ordinaires avec la Caisse des dépôts et consignations du 1er au 10 octobre, 1906:—

Dépôts de fonds 2.830.949 fr. 72. Retraits de fonds 6.576.856 fr. 30. Excédent des retraits 3.745.906 fr. 58.

Excédent des retraits du 1er janvier au 10 octobre, 1906, 26.784.318 fr. 60.

[21] Thus Notre Dame might witness a Catholic Mass in the morning, a theosophical reunion at noon, and a positivist conference in the evening. The Swiss Catholics, 1872-6, had some such experiences: a venerable priest died recently at Berne who had refused to give up the keys of his church for other uses, and was imprisoned for many years; while the last prisoner of Chillon was the Catholic Bishop of Fribourg, another victim of the Swiss Kulturkampf.

[22] When public men and editors in France and elsewhere descant on German Associations cultuelles accepted by the Holy See that rejects them in France, they stand accused of ignorance or malevolence. M. Briand basely insinuated (Chambers, 9th November) that the Church in Germany was being ransomed by France: “Notre situation à nous est-elle la rançon de la situation d’un pays voisin? Je me borne à poser la question.” The fact is there is no such thing as German Associations cultuelles, each State of the Confederation has its own regulations. Bavaria has a concordat and a papal nuncio at Munich. The Governments of Würtemberg and the Grand Duchy of Baden made special conventions with the Holy See, 1857 and 1859. Alsace-Lorraine is still under the French Concordat of 1801 between Pius VII and the First Republic. Prussia and Hesse in 1873 and 1875 made special conventions with the Vatican. Prussia has a Legation to the Holy See at Rome. Moreover, in none of the German states is there separation of Church and State. They all recognize and subsidize the Catholic Church and one form of Protestantism. In Prussia several bishops are appointed senators by the King. In Alsace-Lorraine the Bishop of Strasburg is member of the Council of State. In Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg, the prelates are members of the Upper House.

[23] What would Philippe de Commines have said had he heard of the little coup de main (November 20th, 1906), by which deputies and senators in quasi huis clos voted themselves an increase of 6000 francs without any “octroi or consentement” of the sovereign people, delivered from tyranny and servitude by the Revolution?

[24] There is in the Palace of the Doges at Venice an immense picture commemorating this Congress, where the Peace of Constance was prepared.

[25] In refreshing contrast with this record of persecution is the proclamation of religious liberty in Maryland, 1650. “The Catholics took quiet possession [of Maryland], and religious liberty obtained a home, its only home in the wide world ... every other country had persecuting laws.... Protestants were sheltered against Protestant intolerance. The disfranchized friends of Prelacy in Massachusetts and the Puritans from Virginia were welcomed to equal liberty of conscience and political rights as Roman Catholics in the province of Maryland.... In 1649 the General Assembly of Maryland passed an Act to this effect, yet five years later, when the Puritans obtained the ascendency there, they rewarded their benefactors by passing an Act forbidding that liberty of conscience be extended to ‘popery,’ ‘prelacy,’ and ‘licentiousness of opinion’” (Bancroft’s History of the United States, I, VII.).

Lecky corroborates this statement: “Hôpital and Lord Baltimore were the two first legislators who uniformly maintained liberty of conscience, and Maryland continues the one solitary home for the oppressed of every sect till Puritans succeeded in subverting Catholic rule, when they basely enacted the whole penal code against those who had so nobly and so generously received them” (History of Rationalism, II, 58).

An abridged copy of the Act of 1650, the first Act of religious toleration, will be found in the Appendix. The original from which I copied is in the archives of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

[26] On November 9th, 1906, the Socialist minister Viviani, after “putting out the lights in heaven,” exclaimed, “What shall we say to these sovereigns who are slaves economically speaking, to these men who enjoy universal suffrage yet suffer in servitude? How shall we appease them?”

[27] Hall Caine, explaining the title of his book, The Eternal City, expressed himself as follows: “In the new methods of settling international disputes, the old mother of the Pagan and the Christian worlds will have her rightful rank.... Her religious and historical interest, her artistic charm, above all the mystery of eternal life seem to point to Rome as the seat of the great court of appeal which the future will see established.”

[28] Paradise Lost, Book IV.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
their precedessors=> their predecessors {pg 97}
evacute Rome=> evacuate Rome {pg 111}
public shools=> public schools {pg 206}

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Table of Contents

- THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE 1900-1906

- PREFACE

- CONTENTS

- THE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN FRANCE

- FIRST IMPRESSIONS
- THE TWO CAMPS
- THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
- THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL
- ARBITRARY INCONSISTENCY
- A PAGAN RENAISSANCE
- INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM
- UNAUTHORIZED CONGREGATIONS
- A COMBES COUP DE MAIN
- LEGALIZED DESPOTISM
- DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE
- UNCHANGING JACOBINISM
- DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU
- LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE
- THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- A PAPAL NOTE
- FREEMASONRY
- FREEMASONRY
- PART SECOND
- ALCOHOLISM IN FRANCE
- THE LAW OF SEPARATION
- CATHOLICISM IN GERMANY
- PSEUDO-SEPARATION
- THE PROGRESS OF ANARCHY
- THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT
- THE INVENTORIES
- DUC IN ALTUM
- SEPARATION
- LIBERTY AND CHRISTIANITY
- CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION

- APPENDIX

- FOOTNOTES:

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