Part 5

To understand their position we must recall that the Convention confiscated all Church property and lands, the pious donations of kings and people which had accumulated during fifteen centuries of national progress and prosperity. Not satisfied with this act of spoliation, they threw these lands on the market with the precipitation and greed that characterize all revolutionary iconoclasts, fondly believing that the whole nation had sloughed off Christian superstitions regarding _ipso facto_ excommunications of all, who seized or even acquired Church lands. They were mistaken. These holdings became a drug on the market. From common prudence and honesty, if not from higher motives, few could be found willing to traffic in the pious gifts and foundations of their ancestors. Ten years of massacres, of civil and foreign wars, and anarchy, did not improve matters. Two classes of landed proprietors, two standards of valuation were created, and civil and religious discord was perpetuated in this material form. When Napoleon undertook the work of reconstruction, his first care was to restore normal conditions in the real estate market by obtaining a clear title to the confiscated lands of the Church. There was but one person who could give this clear title. To him Napoleon appealed, and the Concordat was signed.

Pius VII could not, however, relinquish all claims to the confiscated lands without compensation. Hence the engagement entered into by the French Government to pay in perpetuity adequate subsidies for the maintenance of an adequate number of bishops and parochial clergy. This was the consideration [the _do ut des_] for which the Pope, as supreme chief of the Catholic Church, gave a clear title to the confiscated lands. The payment of these subsidies became henceforth a charge on the public treasury, a portion of the national debt, just like the payment of interest on state bonds.

The suppression, at the present moment, of these subsidies in the case of the Bishop of Nice and many other bishops and hundreds of parish priests is a partial repudiation of this part of the public debt. And there is nothing to prevent the repudiation of the whole. “What do we care for legality?” “We have the majority,” were utterances which passed unrebuked in the Chambers recently. They can imprison and kill the Roman Catholic clergy. The First Republic did both most freely. So did Nero and Bismarck. It also tried the experiment of a national schismatic Church and failed. The Third Republic openly proclaims its intention of renewing the experiment in which Abbé Gregoire, with _carte blanche_ from the Republic, so signally failed a hundred years ago.

To understand the abnormal conditions prevailing in France, we must remember that France is in revolution since a century or more. The Revolution of 1793 was essentially a religious movement, born of the monstrous alliance of the French ruling classes with the spirit of libertinage and infidelity. It destroyed the monarchy and all the institutions of the ancient regime, merely because they were associated with the Catholic Church, whose destruction was their main object--a means to an end. The final purpose was the destruction of Christianity and its noblest fruit, liberty. The ideal, then as now, is the omnipotent State, sole purveyor, teacher, and preacher. This may seem exaggerated, but it is strictly the spirit and the tendency of the Revolution since 1789. Napoleon was the offspring and the incarnation of the Revolution. After Austerlitz, he threw off the mask, and clearly showed his intention of establishing state despotism on the ruins of all civil and religious liberty. There was but one will in Europe that resisted him. Alone of all the sovereigns of Europe, the aged, defenceless Sovereign Pontiff refused to enter into his continental _blocus_ against England, declaring that all Christians were his children, and we know the story of his long martyrdom at Fontainebleau. Capefigue, in the third of his ten volumes on the Consulate and the Empire, comments on the singular fact that the First Republic always bitterly antagonized the United States, and he explains this “singular phenomenon” by the reason that the former was a government of tyranny and anarchy, whereas the Republic of Washington was one of law and liberty.

What was true then is equally so to-day. The United States owe their independence to his most Christian Majesty, the murdered Louis XVI, and not to any pagan French Republic. Louisiana was ceded by the Emperor Napoleon, and not by any French Republic, first, second, or third. There can be no sympathy between the two republics other than that of sectarian sympathy with persecutors of the Catholic Church. I speak of the Government, not of the French people, whose genius and high qualities we must always admire.

Methods have greatly altered in all departments, but the generating principle, the inner mind of Jacobinism, is unchanged. We hear no more about the worship of the Goddess of Reason and theo-philanthropy. Jacobin clubs have changed their signboards; they are now called Lodges of the “Grand Orient,” but they rule France with an iron hand by means of the Socialist vote. When the day of reckoning comes with the Socialist masses, who are now being used as cats’ paws, the Revolution will again enter into one of its acute phases. Millerand and Jaurès are merely politicians who fall into line with the Government quite gracefully. But, as Lincoln said, you cannot fool all the people all the time. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church will reap the benefits of persecution. The Congregations will carry on their work elsewhere, and she will more than recuperate her losses on this little point of earth called France. Unhappy country that is committing “national suicide,” to use the expression of Leroy Beaulieu.

DEATH OF WALDECK ROUSSEAU

_August, 1904._

I refer my readers to what I wrote on May 4th, 1901, regarding the advent of the Waldeck Rousseau Cabinet, and its policy after the sudden and suspicious death of M. Felix Faure, rapidly replaced by M. Loubet. I then related how Socialist revolutionists were skilfully used to obtain a majority with which both Houses were packed to carry through the odious legislation of the last few years.

The laws of 1901 (Associations Bill), and of July 7th, 1904, suppressing all teaching religious orders, are measures which represent the closing of some twenty-seven thousand Christian schools!

Two days after the law was voted some 3000 _authorized_ institutions were ordered to close their doors, and almost immediately was inaugurated the long series of _liquidations_, a genteel euphemism for wholesale spoliation of the victims, deprived of their homes, and of their only means of earning a living, as they may no longer teach.

There is nothing more tragically pathetic than the last appearance in the Senate of M. Wallon. This veteran republican, called the “Father of the Constitution,” and now a hoary octogenarian, raised his quavering voice in one last eloquent denunciation of the laws of 1901, 1902, and 1904. Condemning the shameless violation of property rights, he boldly applied to the Government the Article of the Code which debars the assassin of the testator from inheriting his property. “Messieurs,” he cried, “on n’hérite pas de ceux qu’on a assassinés.” “Gentlemen, it is not permitted to inherit from those we have destroyed.”

Equally tragical was the last appearance in the Senate of M. Waldeck Rousseau, so near his last hour.

He had risen from his bed of sickness to unburden his conscience by protesting against the anti-clerical fury of his ci-devant supporters and instruments. In vain he denounced the violations of his law of 1901, travestied by that of 1904 suppressing even authorized Congregations. The verve of the great tribune had abandoned him. His speech was but a hollow echo of its former eloquence. Twice he reeled and was forced to steady himself by clinging to the railing. When he rose for the second time, to reply to the sarcasms of M. Combes, he suddenly lost the thread of his discourse, and before he had ended, many benches were vacated; the forum, where his words had so often been greeted with wild applause, was almost empty.

“He threw down the thirty pieces of silver, saying, I have sinned. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to it. And he went forth.”

It is needless to inquire whether the story of attempted suicide be true or not; to-day he is no more. The last two years of his life were a long agony, of which the last two hours were passed on the operating table. While he was dying under the surgeon’s knife the minions of his successor, M. Combes, were invading a convent of Notre Dame Sisters. They even insisted on going into the infirmary to inventory beds and blankets. A sick nun was so shaken by the emotion caused by this unwonted intrusion, that she had a seizure and died before the minions of the law had left the convent.

And thus persecutor and persecuted met on the threshold of eternity.

This sister is only one of the many hundreds of infirm and aged who have been literally killed by this infamous legislation of 1901 and 1904, and only one of the thousands who are dying of hardships and privations. Many of them are living on four sous a day.

The Government wanted to give M. Waldeck Rousseau a national funeral, strictly pagan and masonic of course; but he had left instructions to the contrary, and is to be buried from his parish church, Ste. Clothilde. Whether he received the last Sacraments of the Church or not is still a matter of conjecture. The death of Waldeck Rousseau will not in any way affect the trend of politics. The recent municipal elections are proclaimed a victory for the Government. As usual not one-third of those inscribed voted. _A quoi bon?_ Before the law of 1901 was voted, the immense majority of the municipalities consulted pronounced in favour of the Congregations. This made no difference.

Before the law of 1904 suppressing authorized Congregations was voted, the Right demanded that the municipal councils be consulted again. The Government peremptorily refused. As I have said before, nothing can restrain Jacobin tyranny but a national cataclysm which would bring about a violent reaction. “We have the majority, what do we care for legality?” as the Left proclaimed recently at the Palais Bourbon.

They have no other rule of conduct but the “fist right,” now known as “the majority.”

LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE

_July, 1904._

Modern democracy, which flatters itself that it has shaken off all the shackles of authority, is itself but an evolution of what it so loftily contemns. If we are free to-day, it is because our fathers have borne the yoke of Christ.

In one of his sonorous paradoxes, Rousseau declared that “men are born free and everywhere they are in chains.”

That all men are born free is as false a statement as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. Men are not born free. Our rights and liberties are secured by laws which are a circumscription of the sphere of individual independence for the benefit of the community, and this in virtue of a divine “thou shalt not,” written on the tablets of the heart, or on tables of stone. Human laws have no sanction except in divine law, and no man has a right to command his fellow-men, except within the limits of natural and of divine law.

The sum of liberty in every community is the sum of its amenity to law, both divine and natural. Hence Plato’s remark that “republics cannot exist without virtue in the people,” and Montesquieu’s assertion that “the vital principle of democratic government is virtue.” All human laws deriving their sanction from divine and natural laws, it follows that liberty must diminish when these laws are violated with impunity.

Plutarch, referring to the Golden Age, which, according to all writers, even Voltaire, came first, writes that “in the days of Saturn all men were free.” Our data regarding this period are not numerous, unfortunately; but we learn from the traditions of all peoples, as well as by revelation, that something momentous happened, which abolished the Golden Age. Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was chained to a rock. Sisyphus was compelled to roll a stone uphill all his days. Adam was condemned to labour in the sweat of his brow, etc. The myths are various, but the central idea is always the same--a crime punished by a penalty involving the loss of liberty.

What the nature of the act of disobedience committed by Adam when he ate the forbidden fruit we do not know. Probably we should not understand even if we were told; for the magnitude of a crime is always commensurate with the intellect of the criminal, and knowledge has considerably diminished among the sons of men. To name anything as Adam, or whoever is thereby designated, named all the creatures in the Garden implies that his knowledge of them was adequate, while the great trouble with all our up-to-date science is, that back of every phenomenon, of every fact, stands an inexorable X, an unknown quantity that baffles research.

If we could wrest her secret from the Sphinx in any one instance, it is probable that the whole book of nature would stand revealed. But the angel with the flaming sword guards the portal.

With the passing away of the Golden Age, or “the days of Saturn, in which all men were free,” there came a diminution of light, and above all of liberty. What justice does in individual cases, when malefactors are incarcerated, seems to have been accomplished on a large scale, when the masses of a race, nay of the whole species, were reduced to slavery. For though our data regarding the “days of Saturn when all men were free” are scant, we do know, beyond a peradventure, that before Christ slavery was the normal condition of the masses in every age, in every clime; not alone among barbarous and predatory tribes, who reduced their captives to this condition, but also among the most stable and cultured communities--in Assyria, in Babylon, Egypt, Idumea, Rome, Greece, everywhere. Nor was there found one sage, one legislator, to raise his voice against an inveterate institution, which one and all deemed a _sine quâ non_ of any society, of any government. Lucanus only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he wrote that “the human race only existed for a few”--_Humanum paucis vivit genus._ Towards the end of the Republic, when Rome numbered a million and a half inhabitants, there were only some 20,000 proprietors; all the rest were slaves.

Sages and legislators of antiquity who considered slavery a _sine quâ non_ of government were not wrong. Vast numbers of human wills cannot be left in freedom without a restraint of some kind. “Christianity alone,” writes the Rationalist Lecky, “could affect the profound change of character which rendered the abolition of slavery possible” (_History of Rationalism_, II, 258).

When Peter the Fisherman proclaimed the brotherhood of man, saying “Men, brethren” to all alike, the Church began her perennial mission of liberty by sanctification. Individually, men must be delivered from the yoke of evil passions by Christianity, so that the masses might be delivered from servitude.

The powers of darkness, that are now waging fierce warfare on the Christian Church, understand perfectly what the legislators of antiquity understood and practised. Being resolved to uproot Christianity and its moral teaching, which alone have rendered freedom and government compatible, they are casting about for some new kind of slavery, which apparently is to take the form of State Socialism. A coterie is to concentrate in its hands all the power, all the wealth, all the natural resources of the country. This coterie will be named the State; the others, the cringing, crouching millions yclept the Sovereign People, will have nothing left but to obey the edicts of the Omnipotent Infallible State, only teacher, preacher, and general purveyor. _Humanum paucis vivit genus._

This reversion to the pagan regime from which Christianity delivered us will be the just penalty of apostasy from Christianity.

If, and when, and where Christianity is crushed out, liberty both civil and personal, which are bound up with and inseparable from it, will disappear in exact proportion _tantum quantum_.

We need only turn a few pages of contemporary history and read the lessons taught by the French Revolution. The most illustrious of nations, in the zenith of its civilization, allowed the government to pass into the hands of a band of neo-pagans prepared by Voltaire and his ilk. Christianity was solemnly abjured; its temples were desecrated; at Notre Dame a prostitute, posing as the Goddess of Reason, was worshipped; on the Champ de Mars the new religion of theo-philanthropy was inaugurated.

What was the immediate consequence? In the twinkling of an eye all liberty vanished. The most sacred rights of the individual were proscribed. Men could no longer call their lives their own under the Law of Suspects, a time to which Camille Pelletan, _ministre de la marine_, actually referred, yesterday, as “an hour when under the influence necessary, but somewhat enervating, of Thermidor, the Republic was in danger.”

Without going so far back as 1793, we have but to read the records of the Commune in 1870, which was a phase of the Revolution that is still marching on. One of the moving spirits of this time was Raul Ripault. M. Clemenceau was only Mayor of Montmartre, and M. Barrère, now ambassador at Rome, was an active member.

To Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, one of the hostages taken and shot by the Commune, Raul Ripault said, “Ta liberté n’est pas ma liberté, aussi je te fait fusiller” (“Thy liberty is not my liberty, so I have you shot”).

Liberty, I repeat, is bound up with and inseparable from Christianity. To-day, as in 1793, a coterie of atheists or neo-pagans have captured all the avenues of power by means of godless schools and the Socialist vote, and even by hobnobbing with the red flag of anarchy, which waved unrebuked around M. Loubet at that famous fête called Triomphe de la République.

They have worked, steadily and intelligently, to this end since twenty-five years, while two-thirds of the country have been absolutely indifferent to politics. Some even affect to ignore the name of the President. Laborious, honest Frenchmen as a rule despise politics, and cannot be induced to take part in them or be candidates for office. One has but to consult the electoral returns to see how many hundreds of thousands abstain from voting. Thus the Government has passed into the hands of the Judeo-Masonic coterie.[3]

As in 1793, the first result is the diminution of liberty. It was long sought to represent the Associations Bill (1901) as a mere measure of domestic economy. It was the entering wedge of tyranny. The object to be attained is the suppression of all Christian education, by the suppression of all religious teachers, preparatory to a state monopoly of education.

The indignant protestations and the tumultuous manifestations of men and women who fill the streets with cries of “Vive la liberté!” “Vivent les sœurs!” are wholesome signs; but I think it is just as well that the Jacobins should go on and do their worst. Overvaulting tyranny, like ambition, doth overleap itself. At the Gare St. Lazare, recently, some ten thousand people accompanied the expulsed sisters of St. Vincent to the train with cries of “Liberty! Liberty!” The police were powerless.

In another place the population unharnessed the horses of the omnibus that was taking some other sisters to the station. They dragged the conveyance back and broke down the doors of the convent which had been sealed by the Government.

In Paris at least 50,000 children of the poor have been thrown into the streets; for the state schools were already inadequate, and 30,000 or more children were waiting for a chance to comply with the law of compulsory education.[4] In a mining town, a _crèche_, or infant asylum, where 150 babies from six months to four years of age were cared for while their mothers worked, was closed suddenly.

When we think of all the suffering and inconvenience caused by these executions, we are amazed that more blood has not flowed.

The right parents have to educate their children as they see fit, and the right all citizens have to live as they see fit, and teach when duly qualified, are primordial, inalienable rights that cannot be violated without crime, and a crime which must find its repercussion in all civilized countries. In general it may be said that every Government has a right to administer its own affairs as it sees fit. This is precisely what the Turks assumed when they were massacring the Bulgarians and the Armenians. But Europe thought differently in 1877. The Jacobins of 1793, who had conquered France then, as to-day, by cleverly combined manœuvres in which fear played a large part, also thought it was nobody’s business, if they saw fit to drown, proscribe, and guillotine by tens of thousands, in order to enforce their peculiar views of liberty. But every act of tyranny, every crime against liberty, offends all Christendom. It cannot be circumscribed by national frontiers. Soon all Europe was weltering in blood. The First Consul marched rough-shod over Europe, imposing French liberty on unappreciative nations. And we all know how the allied armies occupied Paris in 1815 and curbed the Revolution for a season. History repeats itself.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

_27th June, 1904._

The Associations Bill, pre-eminently an act of oppression and religious persecution, has been rendered doubly odious by the many illegalities by which it has been surrounded, some of which I enumerated in my letter in the _Evening Post_ of May 6th. Not long since, M. Decrais, ex-Minister of the Waldeck-Rousseau Cabinet, was elected by a large majority at Bordeaux, after he had branded the wholesale execution of the religious orders as “a violation of the spirit and the letter of the law of 1901,” and assured his electors that he had not voted with the Government on that occasion. Indeed, these Jacobins seem to revel in illegality for its own sake, and cannot even respect their own enactments.

Civil war on a small scale has been raging since nearly two months in various parts of France. It became quite monotonous to read the recital of all these expulsions _manu militari_ which filled the columns of the daily Press. The programme was almost the same in every case. The crowds varied from three hundred to many thousands, according to the locality, and were more or less violent in their denunciations of the Government; the police and the regular army, employed to surround the convents and disperse the crowds of manifestants, were also more or less numerous, and acted more or less brutally. The troops as a rule left their barracks at night, arrived on the scene at 2 or 3 a.m., and awaited daybreak before surrounding the house. Then, the Commissaires ringing in vain, the doors are battered down, police and soldiers enter the breach and find a few old monks in the chapel, for as a rule the communities had dispersed. The delinquents are marched off between two rows of soldiers, the crowds break out in seditious cries of “Vive la liberté, à bas les tyrans,” numerous arrests of both sexes are made, and the country is informed that, fanaticized by the monks, men and women have assailed the representatives of the law.