What makes the strength of these Catholic organizations in Germany is that they represent all classes of society—princes, peasants, artisans, nobles, and bourgeois—whereas Socialism finds its recruits almost exclusively, amongst the proletariat, cultured and uncultured, chiefly the latter.
At the Congress, Prince d’Arenberg renewed the usual protestations against the Piedmontese occupation of Rome, and the Bishop of Strasburg rejoiced that, “in spite of the devastations of the French Revolution, the ancient faith was still flourishing in Alsace, whence he hoped it might soon extend its salutary influence.”
These events are significant following the diplomatic humiliation inflicted on France when M. Delcassé, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was peremptorily dismissed at the behest of Germany.
Not long since the Socialist Bebel saucily told M. Jaurès the French would never have a pension for old age until the Germans gave it to them. Nothing, too, would please William more than to play the rôle of a paladin of religious liberty to the oppressed French Catholics.
Nor is there anything to prevent the resuscitation of the Germanic Confederation as it existed in the Middle Ages. The Habsburgs and the Austrian Empire might never have arisen, and the Hohenstauffens might still be reigning, if they had had sense enough to keep their hands off the Papacy. Napoleon, too, might have founded a dynasty as long-lived as that of the Bourbons, had he not also fallen into the same evil ways, and sought to dominate the whole Church by enslaving the Sovereign Pontiff. His nephew, the third Napoleon, in his youth, unfortunately became the bondsman of secret societies, whom he aided and abetted in the spoliations of 1870 which preluded his fall.
The Third Republic, too, will be shattered on the same rock, though not before having caused irretrievable wrong to France, I fear.
PSEUDO-SEPARATION
19th August, 1905.
IN the past, marauding kings and robber barons bound to themselves their fighting lieges by investing them with vast tracts of stolen lands which they, in turn, distributed among their leal followers.
The Third Republic has found a better way. To say nothing of the extensive network of electoral strongholds that they have established all over the country by unlimited and most abusive high licence, the masters of France have enlisted the enthusiastic support of myriads of pettifogging lawyers and all the nondescript red-tapers of law by the unlimited supply of lucrative jobs, pickings, and perquisites, furnished by the notorious laws of 1901 and of 1904, and their bandit operations called “liquidation.”