Moreover, the right which parents have to give their children teachers of their own choice is also an inalienable right. The Lacedæmonian State imposed physical training on all its sons. The Turks for centuries levied a tax of so many boys and girls a year on the Spaniards and the Venetians, but no Government has yet called on every parent to “stand and deliver,” not the purse, but the souls of their children, that it may sow therein, from tenderest infancy, the tares of a hideous state materialism. With cynical hypocrisy this Government protests that liberty of teaching is intact, while parents see all the teachers of their own choice proscribed. The rich can send their sons to be educated across the border, but the law of stage scolaire is intended to meet this alternative. Those who have not frequented state schools are to be made pariahs, ineligible for the army, the navy, or any civil function—truly a singular application of the words “Compel them to come in,” which should be inscribed on all the scholar institutions of France to-day.
A PAPAL NOTE
13th June, 1904.
THE storm of words aroused the world over by a Papal diplomatic Note is another proof that the Papacy has lost none of its power and prestige, and is still, on this threshold of the twentieth century, the incarnation of moral power opposed to mere brute force, the right of the strongest. In reading the many silly comments on this Note in different parts of the globe, we are reminded of the brick thrown into the frog-pond and the emotion it caused.
Long before M. Loubet went to Rome it was well known that he would not be received by the Vatican, and the Papal Note is practically the same as the one drawn up by Leo XIII on a previous occasion, when it was sought to obtain a deviation from the policy of the Vatican in favour of a predecessor of M. Loubet. The protest itself contained nothing new, and was merely a reiteration of Papal claims to sovereignty in Rome, and a notice to rulers of other Catholic countries that there was no change in the policy of the Vatican, that declined to receive the visit of any such ruler who came to Rome as the guest of Victor Emmanuel.
The long session devoted to the discussion of the incident was merely a little anti-clerical diversion to kill time; otherwise the Papal Note would have remained pigeon-holed in M. Delcassé’s desk, where it had lain unheeded for weeks, when suddenly, at the psychical moment, M. Jaurès’ new Ministerial organ, l’Humanité (commanditée by the Jews), published the copy of the Note which had been addressed, it is said, to the King of Portugal. Then the little comedy was enacted at the Palais Bourbon, and the whole Socialist Ministerial Press clamoured, hysterically, for condign punishment of the Vatican and the vindication of the national honour. But nothing was done. M. Delcassé declined to state clearly if the ambassador to the Vatican, M. Nisard, had really been recalled, while M. Combes loftily sneered at “the superannuated claims of a sovereignty dispossessed since thirty-five years.” Yet he must have learned at the Seminary that the Papacy was exiled from Rome for eighty years once upon a time.[5] But all these ferocious Radicals declined to take advantage of this opportunity to denounce the Concordat, and M. Combes’ best friend, The Lantern, is now denouncing him as a traitor and a fraud. History is repeating itself: La Montagne (the Extreme Left of 1793) is getting ready to execute the Girondins called Radicals to-day. No efforts of opportunism will save them from the guillotine sèche which awaits them.
The silly talk of some of the great dailies who represent the Pope as “greatly worried” and confronted with the necessity of making an apology, can only be excused on the ground of ignorance of the whole situation. Personally I desire to see the Concordat denounced. The letter and the spirit of its first and most important article, which provided for liberty and the free exercise of the Catholic religion, have been flagrantly violated by the laws of 1901 and 1904, and by the illegalities committed by the executors of these laws.
All that remains of the Concordat is the indemnity paid yearly to the Catholic Church, as a very slight compensation for the millions stolen by the revolutionary government of 1792, known as the First Republic. Though it must be said to the credit of those Jacobins that when they instituted the budget of cults they recognized that they had taken the property of the Church, and that the payment of these yearly subsidies was part of the National Debt.
The Jacobins of to-day, less scrupulous than their forefathers of 1790, are craving for the repudiation of this portion of the National Debt.
The untold wealth of the Congregations, the billions held out as a glittering lure by Waldeck Rousseau in 1900 as a nest-egg for retraîtes ouvrières, having melted into thin air “the bloc” or Ministerial majority must be held together by the prospect of some new quarry. Those, who for years past made a fine distinction between the secular clergy and the regular or congréganist clergy are now convinced that there is no distinction to be made between them. When New York dailies kindly advise the French clergy and Catholics to give up what their editors are pleased to call “their salaries” and adopt the American system, they merely proclaim their ignorance of the situation.