July, 1904.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right parents have to educate their children as they see fit, and the right all citizens have to live as they see fit, and teach when duly qualified, are primordial, inalienable rights that cannot be violated without crime, and a crime which must find its repercussion in all civilized countries. In general it may be said that every Government has a right to administer its own affairs as it sees fit. This is precisely what the Turks assumed when they were massacring the Bulgarians and the Armenians. But Europe thought differently in 1877. The Jacobins of 1793, who had conquered France then, as to-day, by cleverly combined manoeuvres 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.