The Year in France

A VIGOROUS reassertion of the traditional French abhorrence of délation,¹ in a period which had appeared inclined to tolerate it, has been the most interesting, the most significant, and the most reassuring event of the past year in France, whether the point of view be that of national politics or that of national psychology. The French people have got back — thanks to a complete exposure of French free-masonry as an agency of political corruption and intrigue — the robust sense of honor which long was theirs, but which, to put it as mildly as possible, had latterly been badly compromised. This change is an unmistakable symptom of convalescence, if not a proof of complete restoration to health.

The Latin races have always taken exceedingly high ground regarding espionage of every sort except that which is strictly professional. Neither the Latin temperament nor the Latin ethical code based on the Latin temperament admits the right of any man who is not a detective by trade to turn even the worst criminal over to justice. The Latin peoples hold that the rôle of informer is absolutely incompatible with the character of a gentleman.

A score of years ago a French criminal Charles Redon, escaped from a French prison and succeeded in crossing the frontier into Spain with his father, by favor of the latter’s devotion. Arrived at Palencia, they consulted the leading lawyer of the place. The lawyer betrayed their confidence. He had them imprisoned, and steps were being taken toward their extradition, when the 1350 inhabitants of Palencia rose as one man, with the bishop and the prefect at their head, demanded their release, obtained it, and then drove the treacherous lawyer out of the town with imprecations and yells.

More recently, when the notorious Humberts (who were in hiding at Madrid) were turned over to the police by a member of the Spanish Royal Academy, Señor Cotarello, the entire Spanish press denounced his act in no measured terms, Nuñez de Arce brought the matter to the attention of the Academy, and several members of the Academy threatened to resign, on the ground that they did not wish to make a part of the same body with M. Cotarello, who, “being neither a policeman nor a magistrate,” had been “guilty of contemptible conduct.” The poor, to whom M. Cotarello offered the twenty-five thousand francs he was given for his revelation by the French authorities, flatly refused to accept it. France (where the offering of a reward for the apprehension of the Humberts had been strenuously objected to) and the rest of Latin Europe were inexpressibly shocked and disgusted by Señor Cotarello’s action. “On this subject,” wrote Charles Laurent, at the time, “public opinion will listen to neither raillery nor reason. It is useless to try to gild for it the pill, to attempt to mislead it regarding its own sentiments. Though it may hesitate for a second, it quickly gets its bearings again, and resumes the right path. With us, whoever has played the rôle of informer is thereafter condemned to resort to a pseudonym if he wishes to enjoy the fruits of his villainy in peace. And in Italy, in Spain, among all the peoples, even the most remote, who are of Latin origin, it is the same — imperiously.”

The immediate occasion of the outbreak of the abhorrence of délation noted in the opening paragraph of this article was the proclamation in the Chamber of Deputies by M. Guyot de Villeneuve (corroboratory documents in hand) of the scandalous extent to which the Minister of War had utilized (with the knowledge, if not the consent, of the premier, M. Combes) the highly organized spy system of the Grand Orient of France as a basis for the degradation and promotion of the officers in the army service.

The documents produced by M. Guyot de Villeneuve were indeed of a nature to create a sensation. They consisted of a voluminous series of secret notes regarding individual army officers and civil functionaries, prepared with great pains and infinite attention to detail by a bureau of the Grand Orient specially established and equipped for the purpose, with the help of free-masons in all sections of France and in all walks of life. These notes concerned themselves with the personal habits and morals, and even with the thoughts of their subjects. They invaded the sanctity of family life. Starting from the false premises that free-thinker and republican are interchangeable terms, and that a person who takes the sacrament, or even goes to mass, is necessarily disloyal to the Republic, they blacklisted those officers who profess or practice religion, and called down condign punishment upon them. They pass belief in their pettiness. M. Combes is said to have deprived of his job a certain river-keeper for the offense of having transported in his boat a member of a religious fraternity from one bank of the river to the other. The surprising thing is, not that M. Combes should have punished the offense, but that he should have learned of the offense. Such an incident indicates better than pages of explanation could the perfection of the masonic spying system, and shows at the same time that the loyalty demanded in reality by M. Combes was not loyalty to the Republic, which is perfectly consistent with religion, but loyalty to M. Combes which, it is very true, is not.

A veritable tidal wave of blended indignation and disgust swept over France at M. Guyot de Villeneuve’s unsavory revelations, catching up and hurrying along with it hosts of stanch anti-clericals who had hitherto been the warmest supporters of the ministry.

M. Joseph Reinach, for instance, said: “That a government has the right to inform itself, by its own agents (its direct agents responsible to it),regarding theloyalty of army officers, no one under any régime has ever contested. But the loyalty of an officer to the government is quite a different thing from his political, philosophical, and religious conscience, which should be an impenetrable domain. Loyalty to the government consists in a respectful attitude toward the constitution and its institutions, and this may very properly be made a matter of discipline. But the right stops there. To go farther is the inquisition.”

The country at large had paid relatively little attention to such puerile displays of bigotry and petty spite, to such gratuitous and profitless persecutions, as the removal of religious emblems from the court rooms and of crosses from the cemeteries; the suppression of the Messe Rouge or Mass of the Holy Ghost for the magistracy; the putting of an embargo, locally, on the wearing of the cassock; the placing of the statue of the skeptic Renan before the Cathedral at Tréguier; the exclusion of the sisters of charity as nurses from the Invalides and from the marine hospitals; the interdiction of religious processions; the forbidding of soldiers to frequent Catholic clubs and recreation rooms; the abolition of the traditional Good Friday rites in the navy; and the substitution of cold and colorless civil festivals for the picturesque pardons of Brittany.

It had shown very few signs of being excited when the right to take vows and to live in common was denied to a large class of French citizens; when an Alsatian abbé was expelled from French territory, before he had uttered a word, because it was assumed that he was going to criticize the ministry; when priests and ecclesiastics were disciplined for allowing monks of the preaching orders to deliver Lenten sermons in their churches; when schoolmasters were encouraged to make their influence not only non-religious, but anti-religious; and when its own monks and nuns, expelled at the point of the bayonet, were welcomed with open arms by non-Catholic countries as accessions to their material, moral, and intellectual wealth.

It had beheld without waxing exceedingly wroth a measure already sufficiently radical, intolerant, and oppressive fade into insignificance before a measure still more radical, intolerant, and oppressive; the law of associations gradually transformed from the instrument of control it was designed to be by its sponsor, Waldeck-Rousseau, into a weapon of suppression ; the withdrawal of the right to teach from the unauthorized congregations, from the authorized congregations, and from all the congregations successively; and the resort of the ministry in power to the paradoxical extreme of violating the law for the sake of enforcing a law.

It had listened almost listlessly to unabashed proclamations from the ministry that the political disqualification of Catholics and a monopoly of charity, as well as of education, were a part of its ideal, and to bumptious threats from some of the extremist members of the parliamentary majority that they would blot out churches altogether and set up an irreligion of the state.

It had submitted tamely to the closing of more than fourteen hundred congregational establishments, including those (for which it had well-founded gratitude or affection) of the Carthusians who were engaged in industries that contributed to its wealth, of the sisterhoods consecrated to charity, of the Benedictines devoted to the care of orphans, and of the Christian Brothers, whose technical schools had won the highest awards at the Exposition of 1900, and had been openly approved again and again by the Chamber and the Senate; submitted likewise to the diminution of French diplomatic prestige in the Orient; to the closing of mission chapels; to the proscription of preaching and teaching the catechism in the Breton tongue; to the breaking of plighted faith; and to the flagrant violation of all the fundamental liberties (except that of the press), and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which stipulates distinctly that no person shall be disturbed for his religious opinions.

All these things it had seen and heard and endured without being greatly disturbed, otherwise than locally, thereby; but it could not stomach délation.

The parties whose names were revealed as district agents of the Grand Orient’s information bureau, and who were members of all the trades and professions, were so ostracized and boycotted, and even mobbed, that they were constrained to change their places of residence and business. Many were forced into duels, and a few committed suicide.

Capitaine Mollin, the go-between for General André, the Minister of War, and the Secretary of the Grand Orient, was forced to resign by General André, who hoped to make of him a scapegoat.

This hope being deceived, General André was forced to resign by the Premier, M. Combes,² who hoped to make of him a scapegoat; and this hope being deceived, in its turn, M. Combes, finding his position absolutely untenable, resigned, to forestall defeat, while he still had a slender majority.

M. Combes and General André paid the tribute vice frequently pays to virtue, by endeavoring to cover up their wrongdoings. They put forth formal, hesitating, half-hearted disclaimers, mildly decrying délation. But inasmuch as they visited no adequate punishment on the offenders, and inasmuch as they accompanied their disclaimers, the former with an address to the prefects inculcating espionage under a slightly different form and organizing it into a highly complicated system, and the latter with a statement that many of the army officers were hostile to the Republic, that the army must be purified and republicanized at all hazards, and that no source of information should be neglected which could be utilized for its purification and repubhcanization, these disclaimers could not be taken very seriously. To repudiate the notes of délation in one breath, and to assert that they employed them only for the good of the state in another, was a proceeding little calculated to impress the unbiased with their innocence. General André portrayed to the chamber with harrowing detail the pathetic plight of the Protestant, Jewish, and Freethinking officers under the previous ministries by reason of the social ostracism to which their Catholic fellow officers had subjected them, and announced his determination of giving the Catholic officers their turn at being made uncomfortable, — as if a resort to social ostracism were a punishable offense, and as if retaliation were a motive for a minister supposed to be a statesman to avow.

Unlike Combes and André, the officers of the Grand Orient of France did not beat about the bush. They did not deny the charges brought against them, nor even attempt to palliate them in any way. On the contrary, they proclaimed, with a frankness that would be effrontery if it were not fanaticism, tale-bearing in the interests of the Republic to be a very rare and special brand of virtue,³ thereby bringing themselves into a discredit with the nation at large from which they will not soon emerge.

M. Lafferre, the Grand Master of the Grand Orient, defended the notes of délation in the Chamber, and, in a document sent to all the lodges of France by the Supreme Council on the third of November, the following passages occur: —

“There is not one of our lodges, there is not one of our brothers, who is not familiar with the fierce campaign carried on during the past few days against our order by the entire monarchic, nationalist, and clerical reaction. They have been trying, by resorting to insult and clamor, to distort the acts of which we are justly proud, and thanks to which we have helped in some small measure to rescue the Republic from the underground manœuvres of its eternal enemies. . . .

“And now, we desire in the name of the whole Masonic body to declare boldly that, in furnishing to the Minister of War detailed information regarding the faithful servants of the Republic and regarding those who by their incessantly hostile attitude to the Republic have occasioned the most natural anxiety, the Grand Orient of France claims not only to have exercised a legitimate right, but to have accomplished the most important of duties.

“The Republic is our common property. We have purchased it dearly, and the Masons, above all others, may claim the honor of having caused its triumph. Without Free - masonry the Republic would have disappeared long ago, freethought would have been definitely stifled by the triumphant congregation, and Pius X would reign as master over an enslaved France.

“ Is it not ridiculous to see our enemies treat to-day as contemptible espionage the acts by which we put the administrators of the commonwealth on their guard against the treasons of faithless functionaries, and signalized to them those who were the best fitted to serve them usefully? . . .

“ Our activity is a necessary counterpoise to that of the Catholic clubs. . . . Is the sleeping partner of a great industrial concern a contemptible informer if he signalizes to the manager of the business in which he has invested his fortune the maladministration of some employees, and the intelligence, honesty, and worthiness of others ? Verily, words have changed their meanings in the mouths of the Nationalists, and for them moral laws have lost their force.

“And who are these Nationalists and these clericals who are trying to make it appear a crime for the Grand Orient to have performed loyally its duty ?

“They are the very ones who from the foundation of the Republic have by incessant slander and deceit kept away all the Republicans from all the administrations, and more especially from the Army, and have replaced them by adversaries of the established order who are ready for all the coups d’état and all the reactions. . . .

“And it is these men, who ought to hang their heads because of their impudent misdeeds, who assume a self-righteous tone to-day and charge with disloyalty one of the most loyal,most legitimate, and most republican acts which the Grand Orient of France has performed.

“And it was before the cries of outraged modesty of such people as these that so many Republicans in the Chamber (several Masons included) were for an instant disturbed and disconcerted; so much disturbed and disconcerted that no one of them was able to find at the opportune moment the fitting word, and no one of them was capable of seizing the occasion to glorify Masonry, which was being assailed by its eternal adversaries, and to proclaim in the presence of all that it had deserved well of the Republic.

“We call the attention of our lodges, and of all Masons of the present and of the future, to the votes of weakness, of fear, and of cowardice cast by a certain number of Republicans who, at the very moment when it was necessary to present a united front to the unchained reaction, added their voices to those of our most irreconcilable enemies. They recall, alas, the weakness, the fear, and the cowardice of the most sombre days of Boulangism and of Nationalism.

“In spite of them, the Republic has once more come off victor. Many, we hope, will speedily recover their self-possession. In the meantime, our lodges will keep an eye upon them.”

L’Action and several other extremist journals, which take their cue from the Grand Orient, adopted a similar audacious attitude and indulged in similar utterances.

When the writer stated, a year ago, that M. Combes probably had a separation project “up his sleeve,” he did not suspect that M. Combes, crafty as he was known to be, would be crafty enough to bring about a series of totally unnecessary controversies with Rome which would culminate in the breaking off of diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and would make separation present itself as the only possible course; nor that he would be crafty enough to father a project of separation of church and state that would not separate the church from the state, but would bring the former, on the contrary, more completely under the latter’s power. Nevertheless, this is what occurred. M. Combes did all these things.

He contrived to make it appear that Rome had deliberately violated the Concordat, — although he knew perfectly well that what Rome had violated (if she had violated anything) was not the Concordat, but the Organic Articles, the force of which she had not only never recognized, but had always protested against as a gross breach of good faith on the part of Napoleon I, — and he even succeeded in getting an overwhelming vote from the Chamber to the effect that this violation of the Concordat by the Vatican left France absolutely no choice.

Then, when he had wrought the legislators up to the proper pitch of vindictiveness, he broached a scheme which he called a separation scheme, but which was in reality a shrewd device for paying off old grudges, for facilitating the suppression of religious education, for making the practice of worship as difficult as possible, and for defying the Pope; a device, in a word, for establishing a concordalory régime without a Concordat. The measure by which he proclaimed his willingness to stand or fall was a bill of persecution and confiscation, not a measure of liberation, and was well characterized by M. Brunetière as a measure “not of separation but of proscription.” The liberty it claimed to confer was not liberty, but oppression, like all the liberty with which M. Combes ever had anything to do.

Among other things, it made the very existence of individual churches dependent on ministerial caprice, and stipulated that their accounts should be subjected to the Prefect, or his representative,whenever he might call for them. It forbade the holding of religious services in any place not built for the purpose and not authorized by the government, and abolished the right of churches to federate, except within the limits of a single department, — a proceeding more distasteful and more dangerous to Protestants than to Catholics.

“The rich departments,” said M. Desmoulins, apropos of the Combes measure, “will not be authorized to come to the aid of the poor departments, and the churches the most liberally endowed will not be able to turn over their surplus receipts to a central treasury in order to constitute a sinking fund. . . . M. Combes suppresses the solidarity of Christians. The Free-masons may organize and federate as they will, but the Catholics are denied this privilege.”

M. Clément, commenting on the same measure, said: —

“M. Combes thinks, doubtless, that the liberty so parsimoniously accorded to the monastic associations which were recognized by the law of 1901 would be too great for the churches. He imposes on these last, therefore, extra regulations, and, most curious of all, denies them the right to federate except within the limits of a single department. The consequence of this restriction of the right of association will be to deprive the poor departments of every kind of assistance from adjacent departments in the maintenance of Catholic worship. Another consequence will be the suppression of the archbishoprics. As to the Protestant and Israelitish churches, this restriction means death, nothing more nor less. Having no more a common organization, being no longer able to unite their resources and put them under the control of a central committee, consistory, or general synod, the Protestant cult and the Israelitish cult are doomed to disappear. It is a fresh revocation of the Edict of Nantes with which the Bonaparte who directs the destinies of Republican France strikes them.”

These opinions are the opinions of churchmen, it is true, and as such are subject to caution. But M. Clemenceau, who cannot be suspected of tenderness toward the Church, although he has held himself heroically independent of M. Combes’s dictation,speaks to the same effect no less emphatically.

“M. Combes,” he says, “would have it so that he and his successors might hold the clergy by the right they will have to turn over to or to withhold from said clergy each and every one of the religious edifices. The ecclesiastic who shall have displeased the ministry will find himself deprived of his episcopal palace or of his presbytery. The priest who shall have opposed the official candidate in the local elections will be sure of his affair. His church will be taken away from him sooner or later.”

Many ancient and honored radicals, notably M. Maret and M. Goblet, have indulged in similar utterances.

While the immediate occasion of the withdrawal of M. Combes was unquestionably the tale-bearing scandals, the underlying cause was the supreme weariness of the community with M. Combes’s brutal and intolerant treatment of religion.

M. Combes’s successor, M. Rouvier, appreciated this twofold fact. Accordingly, he issued at once an unequivocal proclamation severely condemning the system of secret reports upon the lives of the army officers, and approving the expulsion of one of the most shameless of the délateurs from the Legion of Honor, and the dismissal of another from the Superior Council of War; and he made it plain, while accepting the general programme of M. Combes, that he repudiated his barbarous methods and his revengeful spirit.

“ We have before us,” said M. RenaultMorlière soon after M. Rouvier became premier, “a ministry which by its declarations and its first acts has shown us that it is doing its best to atone for the blunders of its predecessor.” “The atmosphere has become more breathable,” said M. Thierry, “since the accession of Minister Rouvier. Ever since the reading of the ministerial declaration, we have had the feeling that we were no longer dealing with the same people. The tone has changed. We are back in France, back in the country of good taste, of tact, and of courtesy, all qualities which were conspicuous by their absence in the character of the former President of the Council.”

M. Rouvier’s attitude has been conciliatory in an eminent degree. “We would like,” he says, “to accomplish this reform (the separation of church and state) with unanimity.” Nor is this attitude a pose. M. Rouvier, whose political traditions are opportunist, was anything but a warm partisan of separation when he formed a part of the ministry of M. Combes. He was the member of the Combes cabinet most opposed to the recall of M. Nisard, the French ambassador to the Vatican, and did not sign the decree suspending diplomatic relations between France and the Vatican. Indeed, he would probably never have become an advocate of separation at all, if the peculiar circumstances of his accession to the premiership had not forced this rôle upon him.

The project of M. Bienvenu - Martin which M. Rouvier adopted as the measure of the ministry is totally different in temper from the measure of M. Combes. It partakes of M. Rouvier’s moderation, just as the Combes measure partook of the bigotry of M. Combes. It lacks the atmosphere of contention that enveloped, fatally, everything which M. Combes tried to do. It is an attempt to come to an understanding with religion rather than to antagonize it, and marks a cessation of direct war upon the church. It bespeaks an honest desire to secure religious liberty and independence for all denominations.

Like its predecessor, it abolishes the Concordat, suppresses all existing public establishments of religion, requires the present church associations to transform themselves into civil corporations, and prohibits all appropriations of government funds for religious purposes; but, unlike its predecessor, it recognizes rights in the religious associations and imposes obligations on the communes and on the state. It discards the most odious and oppressive features of the Combes measure. It extends greatly the limits within which religious societies may federate. It increases the grants, indemnities, and pensions of the clergy, and includes a number of provisions intended to make as easy as possible the transition from the old to the new régime.

Furthermore, there is nothing in the text to prevent the formation of associations to worship elsewhere than in the state buildings, or to prevent the bishops and clergy from participating in politics outside of the pulpit.

The fundamental weakness of the Rouvier measure is that it contradicts itself. It is hesitating and incoherent. What it seems to accord in one section it seems to withdraw in a nother. “The first article of this separatist project,” says Henri Maret, a freethinking advocate of real separation, “establishes liberty, but the following articles suppress it. And these articles are thirty-one. Now liberty can be annihilated in less than thirty - one articles.” “We feel that the persons who drew up this measure,” says Comte d’Haussonville, a Catholic believer in real separation, “were divided between two feelings: a fairly sincere desire to accord to the church the liberties essential to its iife, and the fear of being reproached for according too much.”

The preamble is, in truth, as brave as any one could desire. Thus: “We wish to guarantee the free exercise of worship, and this liberty should have no other limitations than those which are imposed by considerations of public order.” The difficulty is that the “limitations imposed by considerations of public order” are made so numerous and finical that the brave preamble is well-nigh buried out of sight by them, and the net result is a mere change in the form of the control of the church by the government, not the abolition of that control.

The Rouvier measure is based on the assumption that the bulk of the property now in the hands of the church belongs to the state or the communes, although this is far from being a settled point in law. It commits an injustice in compelling the transferral to the new religious associations of the property acquired since the Concordat, as to which no one pretends that it belongs to the state. It practically confiscates, by turning them over to the state, all the charitable foundations of the churches, thus establishing a state monopoly of charity. Indeed, by restricting the activity of the church to worship, it makes impossible what is known in America as the “institutional church.” It laves the communes free to rent the church buildings to the churches, or not to rent them, as they please, and free likewise to turn them over to secular uses, or even to sell them to outside parties at the end of twelve years; but it makes no provision for their purchase by the church from the state. It bases the rents of the church buildings not on the rentable value of the buildings themselves, but on the revenue of the lessees.

It dictates how church funds shall be invested, and stipulates what revenue the investments may bring. It forbids the holding of political meetings in buildings habitually used for worship, and punishes by fine or imprisonment or both any attempt on the part of a clergyman to influence the votes of electors or to persuade them to refrain from voting. It provides for the dissolution by the courts of churches against which complaints are made. It devotes a dozen articles to La Police des Cultes (the phrase has an unfortunate sound in a law of liberty), although all the points with which this police deals are amply covered by the common law. Thus, it makes special provision for the punishment of clergymen for defaming or insulting government officials by readings, speeches, or the posting or distribution of circulars; for direct provocation to resistance to the execution of the laws or the legal acts of public authority; and for endeavoring to excite or to arm a portion of the citizens against the other citizens, — quite as if these were not already punishable offenses when indulged in by any persons or class of persons whatsoever. It abrogates none of the oppressive religious legislation of the past few years. On the other hand, it goes out of its way to reaffirm the acts of July 1, 1901, December 4, 1902, and July 7, 1904.

The cordial reception given to M. Rouvier’s project, in spite of these inconsistent, superfluous, and petty features, is a further proof of the unpopularity of M. Combes.

“Under the Combes ministry,” says M. Clemenceau, “several members of the cabinet would not consider separation. Now they vie with each other in their eagerness for it. Everybody is in a hurry to sign, including M. Delcassé. It has even been difficult, it appears, to make the Minister of Agriculture understand that his signature is not necessary.”

The hostility to the Combes ministry was, in fact, less to its policy abstractly considered than to its harsh and odious methods. In the long run M. Combes’s personality proved to be the greatest obstacle in the way of his own ideas. It was less because M. Combes wished to abrogate the Concordat, than because he was willing “ to upset a policy deep-rooted in French history without any regard for the delicate bonds he was sundering,” that he aroused antagonism.

Practically all the religious and political groups are so heartily sick of the troubled atmosphere of the last few years that they are willing to accept, if not to advocate, almost any solution that is put forward as a means of pacification, and there is every prospect, therefore, that M. Rouvier’s bill, which disclaims, unlike M. Combes’s bill, every species of retaliation, will go through substantially as it stands.

The Combists (anti-clerical radicals, socialists, and socialist-radicals), although far from satisfied with so relatively mild a measure, are limiting their action to an attempt to amend it in the direction of greater severity, having at last come to realize, through the discomfiture of their leader, that there are still lengths to which it is dangerous to go against the church. The Socialist demand that atheism be taught in the schools has been effectually rebuked; the frankly avowed anti-Christian movement has collapsed. The change from Combes to Rouvier has at least checked effectually the insolence of those who were proclaiming their intention to abolish public worship altogether, and this in itself is a great gain.

Such of the Radicals as are not violent anti-clericals are disposed to welcome any arrangement that will extricate the state from the absurd situation which constrains it “to penetrate into the temple, and to choose the person who shall represent there the good God;” which makes it “the duty of men who profess incredulity to indicate to others what they shall believe and in what measure they shall believe it, — to regulate, in a word, a dogma in which they do not believe themselves. They are willing to take any step that seems to lead towards a society in which every sort of religion and philosophy shall be preached, propagated, and annihilated at its own risk and peril,” and in which “no one shall be forced to occupy himself with what does not concern him.”

The Conservatives oppose the Rouvier bill almost to a man, on principle, but in a formal, perfunctory way which makes it clear that it does not alarm them unduly.

The Progressives, while preferring for the most part the maintenance of the status quo, are bending their energies, true to their opportunist tendencies, not to securing the defeat of the bill, but to ameliorating it by amendments in the direction of less severity; and they will probably vote for it whether they can ameliorate it or not.

The Protestants, while not a little dismayed by the gravity of the financial problem which will confront them when they are obliged to make their churches selfsupporting, in consequence of the withdrawal of the state subsidy, are so much less dismayed than they were by the absolute prohibition of federation contained in the Combes bill, that they seem to have renounced the idea of making any very vigorous opposition.

The Jews, being easily sufficient unto themselves, financially and otherwise, have so little to gain or lose either way that they are profoundly indifferent to the outcome, except in so far as they discern in separation a sort of Dreyfusard triumph.

The Catholics are less disturbed by the Rouvier Bill in its present form than by their fear of what it may lead to. “The Catholics,” says the deputy Denys Cochin, “know to what use laws of liberty are put. The fate of the free school makes it possible to augur what will be the fate of the free church.” They have long been preparing themselves for the cessation of the state subsidy, and if they could be assured that the proposed law would not be employed as a lever to deal with the churches as the monastic orders have been dealt with, they would be wellnigh resigned to its passage. As it is, they are less bitterly hostile to it than they were to the Combes Bill. Indeed, the more fair - minded and progressive Catholics, while far from being satisfied with it, inasmuch as it does not accord to the clergy the same rights which private citizens possess, admit that it is not “a project of oppression and degradation,” as was the bill of M. Combes, and are inclined to regard it as a possible first step toward “the free and independent church in a free and tolerant state,” which has come gradually to be their ideal since they have seen how impossible it is for a church to fulfill its spiritual mission under a joint control.

The banefulness or innocuousness of most of the provisions to which they take exception will depend less on their letter than on the spirit in which they are interpreted and administered, and they have high hopes that the results of the next general election (in which the whole people will express for the first time their sentiments regarding the church issue) will be favorable to an interpretation and administration of the most liberal and tolerant sort.

In a word, the church and the state, after years of a troubled union, in the course of which they have had frequent periods of “shying plates at each other’s heads,” so to speak, have about reached the conclusion that their temperaments are mutually incompatible, and that to agree to disagree and live apart amicably is the wiser course.

The fourfold programme of the Combes ministry, which was nominally adopted by the Rouvier ministry, was stated as follows by M. Combes in an address delivered last summer at Carcassonne: —

“We have assumed the responsibility of the direction of public affairs solely in order to realize a determined programme, of which France already knows the main lines: before all and above all, the complete secularization of our society by the complete victory of the lay spirit over the clerical spirit; in the second place, the reform of our military organization, and the reduction of the duration of the service to two years; in the third place, the introduction into our financial legislation of imposts upon the revenue as corrective of the inequalities and injustices of our fiscal régime; in the fourth place, the passage of laws for the assistance of the workingmen and the establishment of old-age pensions for them, — aims which have been always understood, and which have been in a sense the object of all the laws, projects, and propositions of laws of social order, which have secured or retained in the last fifteen years the solicitude of the republican assemblies.”

The first of these items has been so materially modified by the temperate attitude of M. Rouvier as to have become almost a dead letter, as has been seen above.

The second item is practically an accomplished fact, both chambers having already voted for the army bill.

The third item is likely to go through at no very remote date, though M. Rouvier confesses himself lukewarm with regard to the matter.

The fourth item seems likely to wait a long time for its acceptance; not because there is any very formidable opposition to it on principle, but because the cost of it is greater than the state seems likely to be able to bear in the near future, — the increase in funds from the probable withdrawal of the subsidies to the churches being counterbalanced by the increased appropriations necessitated by the replacing of the suppressed schools of the monastic orders by public schools.

The strengthening of the Franco-Italian entente; the maintenance of the peace of Europe and the status quo in the East, and the arbitration of the Dogger Bank incident, thanks in a large measure to the steadying influence of the Anglo-French entente; the definition of the rôle of France in the north of Africa; and the calm, dignified, but determined response of M. Delcassé to the German Emperor’s boutade at Tangiers, have marked the year in diplomacy.

The honoring of Mistral with a Nobel Prize by the Swedish Academy; the welcoming of Barrett Wendell to the Sorbonne; the reversion of several distinguished writers (notably Anatole France and Jules Lemaître) to literature, after they had squandered several years on politics, have marked the year in letters.

A further development of the tendency already noticeable in 1903-04 to improve the literary tone of the popular theatre; a worthy revival of the poetic drama; and an adequate, if novel, interpretation of King Lear by Antoine, have marked the stage year.

An awakening to the need of technical training has marked the year in education. A trade-union movement for Sunday rest has marked the year in social betterment. Two successful crossings of the English Channel in airships have marked the year in applied science. The partial vindication of Dr. Doyen’s cancer theories and treatment has marked the year in medicine.

These and several other things, in these and several other departments of life and thought, would call for a detailed presentation in this letter, had they not been overshadowed by the great socio-religious conflict centring about the attempt of M. Combes to secularize French society from top to bottom.

A well-known publicist characterized this conflict the other day as the gravest crisis France has known since the period of the great Revolution. The writer believes the estimate of this publicist to be just, and this is the reason that he has practically ignored all the other events of the twelvemonth.