It is not, however, generally true that parents send their sons to the schools of the unauthorised associations, because the secular instruction is particularly good. There seems to be two reasons for the comparative popularity of these schools. First of all, they are cheaper. The celibacy of the teacher makes his requirements fewer, he is willing to content himself with something less than would be necessary to a man with a family. Besides this, there are legends of private bounty on an immense scale, which enable the schools to sell their instruction below cost price; but one cannot help suspecting that there may be some exaggeration in estimating the effect of this element. Secondly, there is a slight social advantage on the side of the Jesuit schools. The small Legitimists of the provinces always send their sons to them, and so it comes that the upper middle class, who like to think of their children sitting on the bench with the son of M. le Comte and M. le Marquis, send them also to the Jesuits. The English reader, who knows the eagerness of the new rich to send their boys to Eton, not for education, but for social tone and the chance of scraping acquaintance with a lord, will understand all this readily enough. But there are other_considerations, of which he will scarcely hear without a smile. The Jesuits not only keep a keen eye in after life upon a pupil, whose promise has excited their interest, and push him on in his business or profession; they are also an agence de mariage, skilful and influential brokers in the great market of young men and young women, and their favour is thought an excellent way to a good match.

What is the real objection in the minds of some of the strongest and coolest men in France to the interference of the religious orders in national education? What at bottom is the consideration that commends the new law to responsible statesmen? For we ought not to forget that it by no means originated with a pack of journalistic firebrands, and that it is ardently approved by more than one powerful man, who is neither doctrinaire nor fanatical Voltairean. The sovereign argument of the political chiefs who approach the matter from the purely political side is that which we quoted at the outset of this paper from the speeches of M. Gambetta. To allow the Orders to teach, and the bishops to direct faculties of superior education, is to invite the division of the nation into two. That half of the nation which is instructed in the Government schools will imbibe one set of ideas, and the half which is instructed in the ecclesiastical schools will imbibe another set of ideas, the contraries of the first. The two great groups will grow up to speak different languages, will be ani mated by mutually hostile aspirations, will not love the same country. They will hate one another as Orangemen and Papists hate one another in Ireland. Is not this, we are asked, exactly what has happened in Belgium? In Belgium superior education is free, and the government universities and the ecclesiastical universities are on an equal footing. The result is the most distracted country in Europe. Belgium is in a permanent state of civil war, which would inevitably end in the violent disruption of its whole political system, if it were

not in some sort held together by the safeguard of external Powers. We are reminded of what was said by a Belgian statesman to a writer in these pages a half-dozen years ago:- We thought that to found liberty it was enough to proclaim it, to guarantee it, and separate Church from State. With pain I see that we were mistaken. The Church, trusting for support to the rural districts, is bent on imposing its power absolutely. The large towns, which have been won over to modern ideas, will not give way without a struggle. We are drifting to civil war, as in France. We are already in a revolutionary situation. The future before my eyes is big with storms."

1

Why, they say, should the course of things run differently in France? There, too, the influence of the Catholic priesthood is enormous, as anybody may see for himself, who does no more than count up the legácies and donations conferred on ecclesiastical establishments and religious congregations. If the men who opposed Federalism ninety years since were right, it cannot be wrong to oppose with might and main this profounder destruction of the integrity of the country that is going on before our eyes in our own day. Federalism meant no more than the political independence of various sections of the land; but what France has to confront now is a peril that goes infinitely deeper than mere political separatism, a peril that means fierce moral dissension, anarchic hatred of citizen for citizen, a severance of a great nation of brethren into two camps of furious and irreconcilable foes. It is the dragon's teeth of Cadmus that liberty permits the church to sow throughout France.

The force of such considerations as these, nobody will be likely to deny, who has reflected on the conditions and destinies of the Catholic societies of Europe and South America. There is a real peril, but the question between us and the French government turns on the way in which it should be met. It cannot be met in all Catholic countries in the same way, and there is no common canon of political criticism that will rule each case. The Falk Laws, for instance, are on a different plane from M. Ferry's law, because Dr. Falk was imposing restrictions

(1) These donations and legacies are only valid on condition that they have been authorised by decree of the President of the Republic in the Council of State. The official report which has been published as to the decrees submitted to the Council of State shows the extent of the gifts and bequests made during the five years between 1872 and 1877, distributed as follows:

That is to say, about two millions and a quarter sterling in all.

of a disciplinary and other kinds on a paid and privileged Church of the State, and I for one have never been able to see that a paid and privileged Church has any business to complain, if its pay and privileges are granted on conditions. M. Ferry, on the other hand, im. poses a restriction on a class who neither receive nor ask anything from the State, except to be left alone. But if the two sets of laws were more alike than they are, we should still have to take into consideration the different histories of the French and Germans, the different conditions of their populations, the different relations that have subsisted between the government and the clergy in the history of the two countries; and it might appear that restrictions were right and expedient in the one case, which would be neither right nor expedient in the other. Belgium, again, stands distinctly within historic conditions of its own, and there are some observers who think that the Liberals of that country lost their last chance when they were cut off from Holland.

But France is not Belgium. In spite of divisions so intense that they sometimes might almost make one suspect that the moral anarchy which her statesmen dread has already come upon her, her people have historic traditions, economic interests, an incomparable vivacity of intelligence, a constant accessibility to ideas, which might b trusted to protect them for the next century, as they have done in the last, against the new invasion of superstition and bigotry. If the ecclesiastical influence grows, it is at least due to voluntary adhesion. If parents choose to send their sons to schools under ecclesiastical direction, there must be an attraction of some kind in such schools, and what the Government ought to do is not to drive out the teachers and close the doors, but to bestir itself to provide higher attractions of its own. That the Republican Government is active in spreading its schools, we are aware. The budget for primary instruction has gone up since 1870 from eleven millions of francs to thirty millions. The budget for superior instruction has been more than doubled within six years. Building and equipment of institutions for superior instruction are going on in Paris and the Departments, to the amount of two millions sterling. Fine laboratories are being built. New chairs are founded. The School of Medicine is being reconstructed. The School of Chemistry is nearly finished. The old Sorbonne will soon make room for a monument worthy of its imperishable name. Why not remain in this good way? Why not drive out the congregationists, if they are to be driven out, not by doubtful repression, but by vigorous competition?

There is a still more important question to which no proper answer is to be had. Is the sentiment of the French nation in favour of legislation of this kind, or against it? If the common sentiment is against it, then it is inconsistent with the principles of sound government, to force a law for which opinion is not only not prepared, but against which it is actively hostile. If on the contrary, the common sentiment is in favour of it, then the law is superfluous; it cannot be worth while

to introduce legislation of the most violently irritating kind, merely to guard the nation against perils from which its own firm prepossessions would guard it independently of legislation. The law is either impotent, or it is unnecessary. We ask what it is that the Radicals dread in the teaching of the clericals, and we are told that what they dread and what they are fighting against is not the theology but the politics of the clerical teachers. We press the matter with importunity, and ask what it is that they are afraid of in the politics of the clericals. The answer is that they will bias the minds of their pupils against the republic, against civil marriage, in favour of the old aristocratic system, in favour of the old system of landed property. This is the best answer that is given by the most intelligent of the advocates of the bill. But what can be more incredible, more contrary to notorious experience, than that the son of the French peasant should lend an ear to direct maxims or privy inuendoes against the most sacred, ineradicable, violent, fundamental of all the assumptions of the daily life of his home! The peasant's strongest passion is his passion for his land, and his most inveterate hate is his hate against the memories of his old régime. Words are powerful, no doubt; but what words from priest or congregationist will avail against the overwhelming motives of independence, self-respect, material well-being, and against a type of living which has been finally developed by a century of habit and possession? What is odd is that the very people who thus profess to dread the sinister teaching of the priest and his allies, are most confident in assurances to their English friends that France is Voltairean to the core; that the peasant will go up to his curé, ask him for what candidate he intends to vote, and then walk away to vote as matter of course for his rival; that there is no real Catholicism in France except among the old families and the upper bourgeosie who imitate the old families, as in England our enriched dissenter turns Churchman; that the great mass of the people of France are willing to respect the priest so long as he confines himself to his functions at baptisms and funerals, on Sundays and at Easter, but that no creature in the world is so suspicious as the peasant, so jealous, so umbrageous, if the priest attempts by one hair's-breadth to cross the well-defined line that separates his business from that of other people. If all this be so --and nowhere is the state of things more graphically painted than by the clericals themselves when it suits them to deplore the fearful ravages of the Voltairean wolf in the field-then where is the peril, the urgency, the crying need to save the State?

Even if the peril is really so portentous, and if restriction be the right method, then M. Ferry's bill is inadequate. The conclusion is too narrow for the premises. It is assumed that civil society is menaced in the very foundations of its fabric, that the current of ultramontanism has burst its banks, and threatens to flood modern civili-' zation in a sombre deluge of superstition and absolutism. Education is only a pretext. Religious opinions are only a mask for politics, and for a war to the knife against civil and political laws. If this be so,

the liberaus cry, would it not be to show ourselves the dupes of mere words to remain inactive and disarmed before a foe whose dexterity and whose daring are equally unbounded? Opinion, we are told, does not demand persecution, but what it insists upon is that the government shall stand firm against the storm that has been let loose by an irrepressible and lawless order. But if so formidable a tempest is unchained, are not those right who ask whether you are likely to force the swollen torrent back to its bed by closing eighty-nine ecclesiastical colleges, and forbidding some seven thousand congregationalistseight hundred of them Jesuits-from teaching? The heart of the clerical peril is not in the Jesuits or the unauthorised congregations. It is the authorised congregations with whom you ought to deal boldly, because the authorised congregations control primary instruction, and primary instruction is everywhere admitted to be within the exclusive functions of the State. The answer is that this will come in good time. At present the normal schools for training government teachers are wholly unequal to supply the required number. Action is already taken towards establishing a normal school in each department, but the process is still incomplete. It is well known, too, that a strong and comprehensive measure is being prepared for making attendance at school compulsory. If you will only wait, say the ministerialists, you will see that we are not so impotent as to suppose our task to be finished with the indirect suppression of the free faculties, and the direct suppression of the unauthorised teachers. But then why have begun this immense process by a restriction which divides liberals, and incenses clericals, without any sort of proportionate gain?

Finally, there is a vital objection to the policy of the bill, and it is simply this. The law will inevitably be without effective operation. This is an objection so fatal, and so undeniable, that we are perplexed to understand how the able men who support the new policy can persist. An ardent and influential advocate of the bill confessed to the present writer, in the midst of a vigorous and unflinching contention on its behalf, his intimate conviction that its provisions would be evaded. Nobody doubts it. At the Catholic congress in Paris a few days ago a lay member, a lawyer, drew a pathetic picture of the unfortunates whom the new bill would strip of their profession and their livelihood, and send wandering over their native land, proscripts within the bosom of their own country. The thought of such a spectacle filled him with sombre thoughts and crushed his heart. But the orator soon took comfort. After all, the laws of the Church allow the Pope to relieve a member of a religious order from his vows. Many members, he said, will no doubt be so relieved; and these will be the most devout, the most strongly attached to their order, in general the superiors of houses. They may have been Jesuits, Marists, Dominicans, Eudists, and so forth, but they will be so no longer. What can your new law say to them? Yet their spirit, methods, aims, all that you suppose you are going to annihilate, will remain exactly what

L. M.-L.-19.