Sixty years ago there were only 10,000 demented in France. To-day there are more than 80,000.
Belgium has just made a law prohibiting not only the manufacture, but all traffic in absinthe, which cannot even be transported through the country. In this admirably governed commonwealth there is, it is said, but one saloon brasserie to every two thousand inhabitants. Formerly the number of drinking-places was limited and restricted in France; to-day the highest of high licence prevails.
Recently I counted not less than fourteen places where alcoholic drinks were sold in a charming little seaside village of four or five hundred inhabitants.
THE LAW OF SEPARATION
June 3rd, 1905.
THERE is still a persistent tendency in the Press to believe or make-believe that the Bill of alleged Separation, still pending in the French Chambers, means Separation as it is understood in England and the United States, and that the whole question is only one of dollars and cents, or of the suppression of the Budget of Cults. It is true that there is to be a partial repudiation of the National Debt by the suppression of the few paltry millions paid yearly to the French clergy as a slight indemnity for the vast amount of property confiscated by the Jacobins of 1792, but this is a mere detail, and would be considered but a small ransom, if, thereby, the Church could enjoy the same liberty as in the United States.
The Associations Bill was proclaimed to be a “law of liberty,” and we know to-day that it was only a vulgar trap set by the Government to betray the Congregations into furnishing exact inventories of all their property so that it might be more easily confiscated.
The Separation Bill is also a law of perfidious tyranny aimed at the very existence of the Church in France. M. Briand caused great hilarity in the Chambers when, by a slip of the tongue, he declared that in every part of it “could be seen the hand of our spirit of Liberalism.”[9] What is evident throughout is the hand of the secret society which has governed France since twenty-five years, and in whose lodges and convents all the anti-religious laws have been elaborated.
The Chambers are merely its bureaux d’enregistrement, and not even that. Under the ancien régime the Parliament could and often did refuse to enregister royal acts and decrees.
It was two years before the Parliament of Paris consented to enregister the Concordat of 1516. But the Chambers to-day are merely the executive of the Grand Orient. This is the plain unvarnished truth, which is corroborated by all who have any knowledge of French politics.