age of theories and of ideas is past even in the land of the great Revolution. Few Frenchmen, beyond a score or so of my learned colleagues of the Institute of France, are perturbed about the death of Gallicanism or the breach made in the great revolutionary settlement of the Consulate-though the latter may have some practical consequences in time of interior trouble. But the ordinary French citizen cares no more for these things than the average English elector dreads the removal of the Bishops from the House of Lords, though it would, by abolishing the First Estate of the Realm, destroy the basis of the British Constitution.

The English and the French nation are each undergoing a rapid transformation of character. We English have always been materialistic and practical in tendency, with our materialism tempered by our respect for tradition. The French at the Revolution abandoned tradition for ideas, and during the nineteenth century a basis of idealism has always been found in their acts. Twenty years hence the love of

tradition in an Englishman and idealism in a Frenchman will be as rare as either of those qualities are in a citizen of the United States. The French and the English temperaments will probably remain as different and as mutually unsympathetic as they ever have been ; but the ways of thought of the two nations will approximate under the influence of the material consequences of modern civilisation. The psychological change which is operating in the French character seems to have taken its decided course from the artificial starting point of the beginning of a new century. The Dreyfus affair, which filled the latter years of the nineteenth century, was the last explosion of idealism in France. The extravagances of extreme partisans in that conflict, which took the form of pseudo-patriotism on the one side and of anti-militarism on the other, had each for its basis an idea. But when the storm had passed away, the nation seemed to have left behind in the old century all its idealistic heritage of the Revolution.

Although the Dreyfus affair was the chief contributory cause of the anti-clerical legislation which the French Parliament has enacted since 1900, the debates in the Chamber and the Senate on the Separation Bill bear out my belief that the age of ideas is past in France. I am probably the only person in the world who has read every word uttered in those debates. Even the industrious stenographers of the two French Chambers, who in their admirable daily work put to shame the perfunctory reports of Hansard, peruse only those fragments of oratory which they in turn take down. But the long hours of a tedious convalescence gave me an extended leisure for such light reading; and in the copious eloquence of Senators and Deputies I found little trace of one of its marked characteristics in the quite recent days when I frequented the tribunes of the Luxembourg and the Palais Bourbon.

No subject would, in the past, have given such occasion for the development of doctrine. Yet even when the Revolu

tion was appealed to by Deputies, it was most often in a discussion of the financial aspect of disestablishment-as to whether or not the Budget of Public Worship was founded by the First Consul as a perpetual indemnity for the property of the Church nationalised in 1789. There was no struggle on either side to propagate, to maintain, or to confute an idea, such as that of "a Free Church in a Free State" which was heard of in every ecclesiastical colloquy under the Monarchy of July. After the first debates the Separation Bill was often discussed in an empty and languid house. But the benches became crowded and passions were roused whenever the material interests of the electorate were in question: when, for example, the privilege was at stake of the bouilleurs de crû, the untaxed rural distillers, whose ardent products prejudice the licensed industry of the towns, at the expense of the excise. Then it was that the Chamber was filled with angry tumult and abyssus abyssum invocabat, while clericals and anti-clericals of the

vine-country banded together to encounter the alliance of reactionaries and socialists from the cities of the north. Their fury recalled that of the bygone days when Frenchmen used to engage in mortal combat for an idea; but the strife of conflicting doctrine was assuaged under the more animating influence of material interest. This changed mental attitude of the French was reflected in the literature and oratory of the general election now proceeding. The anti-clerical candidates rarely appealed to abstract principles to justify the Separation Law. But they published statistics of the cost of pensions under that Act, to show that the Budget of Public Worship still remained a burden to the tax-paying elector, though gradually to disappear owing to their efforts.

The change was even more noticeable in the speeches in the Senate. For there, until ten years ago, the aged members who had taken part in the Revolution of 1848, and who in their youth had heard the cannon of "July," or had talked with survivors of