ART. IAll associations can be formed freely and without authorization.ART. XIIINo religious association can be formed without authorization given by a law which will determine how it is to function.
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 themonarchy, 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.
11th November, 1901.
IN1894, 1895, and 1896 I contributed several papers on the Eastern Question to theProgress. 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 thanthe 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 inSlav and Moslem, was partly brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III, who had just made himself emperor by an infamouscoup 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-Siangand 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 mayhave 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. BuyLa lutte sociale.” I took the extended copy, asking the youth if he believed in thelutte sociale.
“Oh yes, of course I do,” he replied with a most convinced air.
“What is thislutte 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.
25th April, 1902.
IHESITATEto 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 isVive 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 sogreat 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 theOfficielandHavastoned 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 preachingAdvent 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.
23rd August, 1902.
THEelections 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 andl’ennemito 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 resignedimmediately 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 acoup 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 certainthat there is open conflict between the judiciary and the executive. The tribunals have not yet been sufficientlyépurés, nor the magistrates sufficientlydomestiqués. 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 completeépurationof the army and of the judiciary is going on. All the “suspects” are being displaced, from the humblestgarde champêtreto the highest prefect and magistrate. It will then be smooth sailing for the coalition in power.
Thecoup de mainagainst 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 isabsolutely 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 theOfficielof 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 authorizedCongregations. 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 mainis 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 betweenmineandthine.
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 theMatinare 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 todemand 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 thenon-assermentésor non-jurors of that epoch.
Decidedly these modern Jacobins have no imagination; all their proceedings have a twang of ancient history. Read in Taine’sAncien 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 andwomen 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 asLa 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.
15th February, 1903.
ACURIOUSfeature 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 togovernment 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.
Thecorvéable, 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, allexceptthevendors of alcohol, are as much crushed by taxes now as thecorvéableswere 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, thenoyadesand thefusilladeswhich 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; forde factoinfallibility 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 bythe 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 practisePovertyby submitting to fiscal confiscations for the laudable purpose of equalizing fortunes,Chastityor unchastity according to new Government formulæ regarding divorce and free love, etc., with a view to procreation under governmental supervision, and above allObedience 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 thisguillotine sèchewhich 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 presentedto 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 intothe 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!
6th June, 1903.
THEtrue 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 inno 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 ofArt. 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 theMonarchie 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 scholarlaws 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, whothey say “are all in connivance with the Congréganists.”
M. Combes has sent a circular to the bishops requiring that all churches and chapelsnon concordatairesbe 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 theirnon possumusis 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 andhis employersthe “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, orcrocheteurs. 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 theEvening Post, August 25th, M. Othon Guerlac, with lofty affectation ofimpartiality, 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 executedin 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 rejoiceat the possible return of Waldeck Rousseau, or at anymachine en arrièrepolicy.
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.
6th May, 1903.
LASTAugust 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 thatthreetimes 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 placedhors 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 nationalprogress 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 regardingipso factoexcommunications 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 [thedo ut des] for which the Pope, as supreme chief ofthe 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, withcarte blanchefrom 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 associatedwith 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 continentalblocusagainst 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 wasceded 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.
August, 1904.
IREFERmy 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 3000authorizedinstitutions were ordered to close their doors, and almost immediately was inaugurated the long series ofliquidations, 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 theConstitution,” 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 inany 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.”
July, 1904.
MODERNdemocracy, 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 allthe 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 asine quâ nonof any society, of any government. Lucanus only expressed an universallyaccepted 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 asine quâ nonof 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 thewealth, 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 proportiontantum 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 partin 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 othersisters 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, acrèche, 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 cleverlycombined 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.