difficult task, seeing that as a rule respectable, industrious Frenchmen will not touch politics, while the emissaries of the lodges go out into the slums of mining and industrial centres, and organize primaries and Socialist clubs that defeat any respectable candidate who dares to enter the lists against the candidate of the Government. Jules Lemaître, in the Echo de Paris, states that there are 400 deputies and 10 ministers who are Freemasons. As these latter number about 25,000 in France, it follows that there is one representative in Parliament for every 50 Freemason electors, whereas there is only one representative for every 1800 votes who are not affiliated to the “Grand Orient.” With a house packed in this way, any legislation is possible. Madame Sorgues, lately sub-editor of Jaurès’ Socialist organ, La Petite Republique, has published some interesting revelations, showing how the Judeo Freemasons have made tools of the Socialists in order to seize the reins of government. “In combating the combats of Dreyfus,” she writes, “Jaurès and his friends brought about a singular rapprochement of the two most irreconcilable camps ... the presents of the kings of capital were accepted. The first service rendered was to restore the tottering Socialist Press.... All the advanced [meaning anti-clerical Socialist] dailies have passed into the hands of the great barons of finance; they are their journals now, not the journals of the workers.... Then they cast their eyes on Waldeck Rousseau, the clever rescuer of the Panamists.... The agent of the Dreyfus politics had the happy thought of introducing into the Cabinet, Millerand, the Socialist leader, with the consent of his party. Socialism become ministerial would be domestiqué, and rendered inoffensive against capital,” etc. Last fall, the President, Loubet, when at Lyons, dared to be the guest of the Chamber of Commerce, in spite of the Socialist mayor, Augagneur, and his gang. Immediately, the Aurore, a Socialist organ of Paris, clamoured for his suppression in these terms: “As he is not subject to the same accidents as Felix Faure, we must defend ourselves without waiting for the good offices of Judith.” M. Faure, M. Loubet’s predecessor, it will be remembered, is said to have died suddenly after a cup of tea at a soirée given by a rich Jewess, and the present ministry of the Dreyfus revision, to which he had been steadfastly opposed, came into power almost before the country knew what had happened, bringing in their political wallet another Dreyfus trial and this notorious Associations Bill.

If I insist, it is because I wish that it may be clearly understood that the French people are not guilty of the criminal legislation of which they are the victims, owing to their incurable reluctance to touch the mire of politics, left, as a rule, to the most unworthy and unscrupulous.

M. Waldeck Rousseau is a smart, wily politician; so was Camille Desmoulins, an obscure, ambitious lawyer, who saw in the Revolution of 1790 a grand opportunity of reaching a proud eminence. This accomplished, he had no further use for Revolutionists. “The Revolution is over,” he said; but it went on and on, until his own head rolled into the fatal basket.

How long will all this last? How long will the mad dogs of Socialist anarchy be held in leash?

THE ASSOCIATIONS BILL

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.