Part 3

Another proposition, a corollary of the first, is equally true. If, and when, and where Christianity disappears, liberty, which is bound up with and inseparable from the Christian law, will also diminish and disappear, _tantum quantum_.

The world, in my opinion, has never adequately laid to heart the terrible lessons taught by the French Revolution. They are not laid bare in their naked hideousness. The glamour of those much-violated principles of 1789, and the catchwords of liberty, equality, and fraternity are used to cover up the dire significance of that event. In a moment of wild delirium, the most illustrious of nations allowed its government to pass into the hands of a band of atheists prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured in the name of the whole nation, and the worship of Reason inaugurated with all the paraphernalia of ritual and the pomp of worship. What was the immediate result? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. Terror reigned supreme. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the law of _Suspects_. From my window at Lyons, I could see the monument to the victims of 1793. This city had at first submitted to the Revolutionary government, but the Lyonnais revolted when they found themselves deprived of civil and municipal liberties they had enjoyed under the most despotic kings. Lyons was besieged by those singular champions of liberty who, according to Macaulay, “crowded into a few months more crimes than had been committed by the French kings in as many centuries.”

Lyons succumbed after a gallant resistance of ten months. This quarter, where stands the monument to the victims, was then swampy ground, and it was literally soaked that year, not with the overflow of the Rhône, but with human gore. On the beautiful Place Bellecour two guillotines functioned day and night, but they were inadequate to the bloody task, and the citizens were mown down in batches on the Place des Jacobins. The successors of these Freemason Jacobins control the destinies of France to-day, by means of a Socialist parliamentary majority, obtained by the means I described in a previous article. They lost no time in ostracising tens of thousands of France’s noblest sons and daughters, who may not live as they see fit, nor exercise a profession which is open to all by law. The law Falloux of 1852 confers on all citizens duly qualified the right to teach or open schools, and it is still unrepealed. Millions of parents are deprived of the right to educate their children as they see fit in their native land. Exile is the price of liberty. This is the beginning of that diminution of liberty which must always accompany the elimination of the Christian principle on which our civilization reposes.

With stupendous cynicism Waldeck Rousseau calls the Associations Bill a “law of liberty and of appeasement.” One or two passages will exemplify the character of this infamous Act.

ART. I

All associations can be formed freely and without authorization.

ART. XIII

No religious association can be formed without authorization given by a law which will determine how it is to function.

One of M. Waldeck Rousseau’s henchmen stated the truth squarely, a few days ago, when he said “the enemy is God,” improving on Gambetta’s maxim, “Le clericalisme voilà l’ennemi.”

Already there are symptoms that the Premier is being carried away by his Socialist advance guard. When they now demand the suppression of the Concordat he no longer protests as earnestly as he did, affirming his devotion to the secular clergy, whose interests, he used to declare, were the main object of the Trouillot or Associations Bill.

The trial of Comte Lur Saluce by a so-called “High Court,” composed of senators, was a most peculiar episode. Accused of plotting to restore the monarchy, his defence was one long, incisive, itemized arraignment of the Third Republic and all its works and ways. His judges listened with much interest, fascinated, no doubt, by the truth of his statements, after which they found him guilty with extenuating circumstances--a tacit admission apparently that his enmity to the Third Republic was justified. Meanwhile, poor France is threatened with all the horrors of another revolution, if the same elements compose the next parliament, as they most certainly will, if opposition candidates are not even allowed to hold meetings unmolested, as at Toulouse and Lyons recently.

Religious liberty has however found a new home in a most unexpected quarter, none other than the realm of the Grand Llama of Tibet, who is sending a special embassy to the Czar. The latter may follow the good example and proclaim religious liberty in all the Russias, at the same time as the Calendar reforms which are being prepared. The two questions are not as irrelevant to each other as one might suppose at first sight.

INCONSISTENT JACOBINISM

_11th November, 1901._

In 1894, 1895, and 1896 I contributed several papers on the Eastern Question to the _Progress_. At that time public opinion was much excited and indignant over the massacres in Armenia, but none of the Powers who signed the Berlin Treaty thought fit to interfere. Massacres on a small scale were renewed from time to time, and a few months ago they reached considerable proportions; but nothing was done to punish the culprits, or to protect the victims of Turkish barbarity.

This week a mild surprise has been caused by the sending of the French fleet to Turkish waters. The callous lethargy, which a sense of duty, a chivalrous sympathy with the weak and the oppressed, could not dispel, has yielded to a financial exigency. Two naturalized citizens are creditors of the Sultan for a large sum. It is true they have been receiving most usurious interest these last fifteen years, but now Lorando and Turbini wish to recover their capital; and lo! the might of France is put forth on their behalf! It is said that M. Waldeck Rousseau, the Premier, is professionally interested in the matter, and will receive a fee even bigger than the one he earned when he saved his clients in the Panama scandal, who are now in the seats of the mighty. The long-suffering French taxpayer will grudgingly pay the expenses of this naval demonstration, and the Porte will promptly pay up in order to be rid of his unwelcome visitors. But France does not mean to be a simple collector for MM. Lorando and Turbini.

The elections of 1902 are at hand, and the semi-Jacobins in power are anxious to obtain the suffrages of the better element, and not be entirely carried away captive by their Socialist and ultra-Jacobin supporters, through whom they have seized the reins of government.

The Crimean war, as I have shown in _Slav and Moslem_, was partly brought about by a similar preoccupation on the part of Napoleon III, who had just made himself emperor by an infamous _coup d’état_. Voltairean France had allowed her protectorate over the Eastern Christians to fall into desuetude, and Russia supplanted her. But when the latter exercised her treaty-acquired rights, France and England combined against her.

To-day with impudent inconsistency the Third Republic, which has done its utmost, these thirty years, to dechristianize France, sees fit to exact from the Porte that French religious schools be allowed to multiply freely, and that its protectorate over Eastern Christians be distinctly recognized.

What is more, the Republic demands that the Catholic University of Beyruth deliver diplomas entitling the recipients to practise medicine in all parts of the Turkish empire. Now, considering that the Third Republic has just made a most iniquitous law against religious congregations, depriving French parents of the means of educating their children in accordance with their faith, it is a grotesque incongruity that the Turks should be compelled to harbour these congregations and their schools, which are being closed in France with a latent view to establishing a Government monopoly of education.

This university of Beirut, and practically all the French schools and hospitals in Turkey, are under the direction of Jesuits, Dominicans, Assumptionists, etc., and they are of great importance to French influence, as they implant this language and the love of a nation that has such admirable sons and daughters.

I have no doubt that railroad concessions will also be demanded, and that all details were discussed during the Czar’s recent visit to Paris. Russia is using France to checkmate Germany in her Bagdad railway scheme, and to undermine her influence with the Sultan.

The deaths of Abdul Hamid and the Emperor of Austria may at any moment precipitate the European crisis which all expect and fear.

Meanwhile, neither China nor the Moslems have said their last word. In the heart of China, Tung-fu-Siang and Prince Tuan may, even now, be engaged in founding a new Mohammedan power. A China galvanized by that dangerous vitality of Islam would mean the extinction of Europe in China. And if any great Moslem chief should succeed in combining the interests of the faithful in Africa and Turkey, the European nations may all look to their laurels.

The self-conceit and self-complacency of the white races are simply immense. This self-complacency is unparalleled, except perhaps by that which distinguished the Jewish people. Because Providence had chosen them for the accomplishment of certain designs which were to embrace the whole human race in their ultimate scope, the Hebrews flattered themselves that the Gentiles only existed for their benefit, as the yellows, browns, and blacks do for us to-day. When the chosen people had filled their cup of iniquity, heedless of that last pathetic appeal, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” etc., there came that terrible siege (A.D. 70) which made them henceforth a people without an altar, without a country.

Another proud empire arose, intoxicated with material and military greatness, and we all know how the barbarians, our forefathers, overthrew the mighty empire of the Cæsars.

We, their descendants, flatter ourselves that because we wield the sceptre of civilization and science, we do so in virtue of some inherent race-qualities, and that our candlestick can never be moved, whatever may have happened to the rushlights of antiquity. But if we have been in the vanguard of civilization and science since many centuries, it is merely because we were Christendom. To-day Protestantism has devoured, one by one, all the vital truths of Christianity, till it is strictly true to say of many so-called Christian peoples and individuals, “Thou hast a name”--for Christian beliefs with their practical sides have been almost eliminated.

When the apostasy of the governments of Christian peoples shall have been consummated, when unlimited divorce, which is successive polygamy, shall be generalized; when monogamy shall vanish from our codes, which forms, with freedom from slavery, the line of demarcation between Western and Eastern civilization--then indeed shall we be ready for the burning.

The modern barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst. Godless education and the peculiar political methods of unscrupulous, educated proletariat are rapidly preparing what may be termed government by anarchy.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at Nice, and was waiting for a tramway to return home, when a youth of about fifteen, with a candid, ingenuous countenance, waved his newspapers just out with the cry: “Voilà la lutte sociale. Buy _La lutte sociale_.” I took the extended copy, asking the youth if he believed in the _lutte sociale_.

“Oh yes, of course I do,” he replied with a most convinced air.

“What is this _lutte sociale_?” I inquired. This he “did not know.”

Glancing through the leading article, I read a virulent denunciation of the clergy, and a most contemptuous diatribe against the masses, _à la Voltaire_. “They [the masses] are formed of vicious, ignorant, covetous individuals.... What writers call ‘the soul’ of the multitude is in general nothing but an immense horrible cry of wild beasts, an accumulation of the lowest instincts of the human brute ... they do not reason, they howl and they strike.”

It is these masses that unscrupulous politicians and secret societies are preparing to hurl against organized society as in 1789, after having destroyed in them from infancy all reverence for God or man: _Ni Dieu ni maître_--neither God nor master.

In self-defence, society will be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery--or perish.

UNAUTHORIZED CONGREGATIONS

_25th April, 1902._

I hesitate to write anything more on religious conditions at the present time, because I shall have to repeat what I have written in these columns since two years. My worst previsions have been realized. The Budget of Cults which I had hoped would be thrown as another sop to Cerberus, has been voted by a compact Ministerial majority.

If the clergy of France, with the Holy See, do not themselves reject all connexion with a distinctly pagan government, and hold their own as the Church did in the first three centuries, I fear this fair land may revive the experiences of the Byzantine or Bas Empire, as it is aptly called, for there is a distinct determination to enslave or to destroy the Church.

The French are an optimistic people. From year to year they keep repeating that matters will soon improve, that the next elections will make everything right and restore liberty.

France’s great misfortune is, I repeat, that respectable people will not, as a rule, touch politics, or soon give them up in disgust, while denaturalized Frenchmen and naturalized foreigners do nothing else for a living.

In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish a representative government in Southern Gaul. “But,” writes Guizot, “no one would send representatives, no one would go to Arles.” This same state of mind is working the ruin of France to-day.

On March 17th, 1900, I wrote: “Thus the bad element captures the votes of the labouring masses by the circulation of vile newspapers and brilliant promises of the Social Utopia that is coming. Consequently both Houses are packed with this element, whose war cry is _Vive la Sociale_, and whose emblem is the red flag of anarchy which was waved under the very nose of President Loubet at a recent Republican fête. With a parliament and a ministry like this any legislation is possible. If other means fail, all the Congregations engaged in teaching will be suppressed.... But Waldeck Rousseau is no fool,” I added. “He and his Freemason employers know that there are some thirty odd millions of French Catholics.... The Government cannot afford to rouse them from their political lethargy by violent measures.... Religious liberty must be destroyed by degrees.”

Two years have elapsed since the notorious Associations or Trouillot Bill has been passed; and the law Falloux (1850), which guarantees liberty of teaching, may already be considered as abrogated in favour of a state monopoly of education.

Never since the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), strongly reproved by Pope Innocent, has so great a blow been dealt at liberty of conscience and the rights of free citizens. The pendulum of progress has been set back at least two hundred years; nay, we witness an odious reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny. And this crime against liberty, this liberticide, is committed in the twentieth century, amid the plaudits of all sectarian haters of the Catholic Church, and in a country which unceasingly flaunts its catchwords of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

The general elections of May, 1902, will not, I fear, modify the situation. I doubt, indeed, if any efforts, however earnest and well-concerted, could now retrieve the political situation.

Waldeck Rousseau, whose wily effrontery is something more than human, knows this, and begins to throw off his mask of Liberalism.

His recent political speech in the mining centres near Lyons was bold enough, judging by a stenographic report, for the _Officiel_ and _Havas_ toned it down somewhat.

He gave it to be understood that only those congregations who relieved the State in caring for the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the insane were to be tolerated. In other words, the souls of her children are to become the prey of a pagan State, but their diseased bodies are to be left to the care of the Church!

Eight Jesuits are being prosecuted for preaching Advent sermons, though they have closed their establishments and dispersed. The proper course, apparently, would be to arraign the bishops and curés who had invited these Jesuits to occupy their pulpits. Waldeck Rousseau is too wily for that. His policy is to make a fine distinction between the secular and regular clergy--to divide and conquer.

Three other Jesuits, who profess theology at the Institut Catholique, obtained from Rome dispensation of their vows, in order to be able to retain their chairs at the Institut. They, too, are being prosecuted for alleged violation of the Associations Bill.

I think the situation is clear, and that if any Catholics here or elsewhere still misapprehend the true purport and scope of this law of 1901, their purblindness is no longer admissible.

A COMBES COUP _DE MAIN_

_23rd August, 1902._

The elections of May, 1902, have not improved the situation in France. No efforts, as I said, however earnest, could now retrieve the political situation. For twenty-five years the “Grand Orient” has been gathering into its hands all the threads of power; ministers, presidents, cabinets are made, unmade, remade, as it suits the well-conceived plans of this band of sectarian Jacobins, who differ from other Freemasons in that with them God is both non-existent and _l’ennemi_ to be vanquished, while at the same time they are strictly a political organization, whose object is to control the country and conform it to their own image.

The Associations Bill, or to speak more accurately, the law against all Christian education, was decreed by the lodges in 1877. An abortive attempt was made to carry it through in 1880. That attempt was premature, because the “Grand Orient” had not yet gained complete control over the judiciary. To-day very nearly every part of the administration is in their power.

People wondered why Waldeck Rousseau resigned immediately after the elections, which seemed a tribute to the success of his administration. The reason of this shuffling of the cards is evident. It had been resolved, as soon as the elections were assured, to make a _coup de main_, and close, summarily, 3000 primary schools, frequented by hundreds of thousands of children of the poorer classes, and this a few weeks before the holidays, without the slightest regard to the fact that state lay schools were already inadequate, while in many places there were none but congregational schools.

Now Waldeck Rousseau, speaking for the Government, had most formally declared that these schools were in no wise affected by the law of 1901 (Associations Bill), and continued to be regulated by the law of 1885 on primary education. It was by making this solemn declaration that Waldeck Rousseau obtained votes enough to carry Art. XIII of the Associations Bill, which is now being flagrantly violated by the closing of these 3000 primary schools.

Many of these schools were conducted by a few Sisters in buildings owned by private individuals, and the sealing up of these premises was a distinct violation of property rights. In one instance, the proprietor resorted to the use of a ladder to go in and out of his house; in another the local tribunal removed the seals and restored the house to the owner; but the Government had the premises sealed again. I cannot say who had the last word, but it is certain that there is open conflict between the judiciary and the executive. The tribunals have not yet been sufficiently _épurés_, nor the magistrates sufficiently _domestiqués_. It is consoling to think that there are still a few magistrates in France who have not “bowed the kneel to Baal, nor kissed his image.”

But a complete _épuration_ of the army and of the judiciary is going on. All the “suspects” are being displaced, from the humblest _garde champêtre_ to the highest prefect and magistrate. It will then be smooth sailing for the coalition in power.

The _coup de main_ against the primary schools having been resolved upon, it is easy to understand how desirable it was that Waldeck Rousseau should not be on the Ministerial bench to undergo interpellations and eat his own words. A quondam Seminarist was put in his place, and bore the brunt of the interpellations. He contented himself with saying that “M. Waldeck Rousseau had made a mistake”--_voilà tout!_ The Left meanwhile came to his assistance by banging their desks and vociferating against the deputies of the Right and Centre. A free fight was taking place in the hemicycle, when M. Combes produced the decree, closing the session, and so ended this disgraceful scene at two o’clock in the morning.

Of course it is pretended by Ministerialists that all these primary schools of the poor were closed in virtue of Art. XIII of the law of 1901. This is absolutely false. Jules Laroche, a Liberal who cannot even be suspected of “clericalism,” in his public letter, announcing to M. Combes an interpellation, expressed himself as follows, quoting M. Waldeck Rousseau’s own words, consigned in the _Officiel_ of March 19th, 1901:--

“As to the right to open private schools, the Chamber knows that this is regulated by a special law; a simple declaration is enough, the school is then under the State Inspector. Art. XIII [Associations Bill] has absolutely nothing to do with the legislation on education, and the new law does not touch it at all.”

“Thus spoke Waldeck Rousseau,” continues M. Laroche. “It was on this formal, categoric, and solemn declaration that we voted Art. XIII. You, M. le President [Combes], are not applying Art. XIII. You are violating it, you are transforming the law of 1901 into a trap, and the loyal and categorical declaration of M. Waldeck Rousseau into the act of a traitor” (_en œuvre de trahison_).

This is enough for any one who cares to know the truth. It is thus that the French people are fooled and led on, step by step, to their destruction.

Nevertheless, many admirers of these sectarian persecutors prefer to believe that all these primary schools and infant asylums were closed because they refused to comply with the Associations Bill! Many of these teachers belonged to amply authorized Congregations. Those of Savoy and the county of Nice had letters patent from the King of Savoy and Piedmont, and the treaty of annexation to France, 1860, distinctly stipulated that the religious congregations and ecclesiastical properties should never be molested; it was one of the conditions on which the inhabitants consented to be annexed. Of all this the Third Republic makes litter.

The amusing part of M. Combes’ _coup de main_ is that his minions even went around expelling small groups of three to five sisters employed by the Government in the infirmaries of State Lyceums! In these instances, however, they neglected to seal up the premises, as they did in the case of private owners--a fine Jacobin distinction between _mine_ and _thine_.

The Socialist Mayor of Reims recently took upon himself to laicize the civil hospital, which, strange to say, had been served uninterruptedly for two hundred years by a congregation called “Sœurs de l’hôpital,” whom even the Revolutionists of 1793 had spared.

Ministerial organs like the _Matin_ are now busy assuring the public that the sick, the blind, the insane, are not all to be cast into the streets like the children of the poor, until the Government finds time and money to build schools for them.