3rd April, 1901.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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