THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

27th June, 1904.

THEAssociations 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 theEvening Postof 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 expulsionsmanu militariwhich 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 theregular 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 executionsmanu militarirepresent 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 executionsmanu 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 refusedin 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 severalgenerations 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 themodus operandiof 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 àcheval” 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 theirown. 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 1830it 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 theCongregations, 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 thenthat 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 theircandidates 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 summercloud, 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 “standand 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 ofstage scolaireis 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.

13th June, 1904.

THEstorm 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(commanditéeby 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 theGirondinscalled Radicals to-day. No efforts of opportunism will save them from theguillotine sèchewhich 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, thebillions held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg forretraîtes 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 orcongréganistclergy 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 thetable raseof 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 themodus operandiof 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 theReviewin 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. Tosuppose 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 amachine en arrièrepolicy. 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 seizeFrance’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.

December, 1904.

WEcannot 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 amonarchy 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 themodus operandiof 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, orcommanditaire, 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 certainnumber.... 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 leftin peaceful possession of the Trastevere and the port of Ostia, for instance? There is no difficulty except with the Grand Orient, thisimperium 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.

21st January, 1905.

INthese 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 veritablerégime des suspectswhich 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 themodus operandiof 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. TheItalian campaign against Austria was undertaken ere long.

In theEvening Post, November 8th, 1904, I find in a review of Count Hubner’sMemoirsthe 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 printingfichesor 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 fortheir 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 andprerogatives.... 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 certainordre de jourwere 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 anotherordre 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’ punitiveexclusion), 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’sCatalina. 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 inHumanitya 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, andviscera, 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 ofmain 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 beingparticeps criminisin 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.

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 theEvening 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 Vaticanwithdraw 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 faithundertake 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 systemin 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 aquid pro quoof 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 clergyis 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.

July 10th, 1905.

THEChambers 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, orbloc, 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 therendu compteended with this phrase: “To-morrow amnesty for thebouilleurs de cruand wine frauders.” This heartless Government, that flings aged and infirmcongréganistsout 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, irreligiousPress, 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 30,000debits de boissons.

TheGauloisrecently 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, whichcannot even be transported through the country. In this admirably governed commonwealth there is, it is said, but one saloonbrasserieto 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.

June 3rd, 1905.

THEREis 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 Churchin 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 itsbureaux d’enregistrement, and not even that. Under theancien régimethe 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 themodus operandiof a secret society. Before me areverbatimreports 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, orfiches, 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 Orientpublished 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 thecommanditaires, 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 theRégenceand 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 inDevil 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 ofKulturkampfin 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 ofsocialistic 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 perfidiousfeature 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 theDirectoireand 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 ofaumôniersof 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 norsubsidizes 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. Salmeronand 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,aliasFreemasons, 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.

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