Considering that since 1888 not less than 20,000,000 have been added every year to the public expenditure, one might suppose that the Government would think twice before depriving itself of this army of some 180,000 self-sacrificing men and women who minister to the poor, the sick, the maimed, the blind, the insane, the orphan, and the outcast. Recently the Prefect of the Department of Bouches du Rhone was summoned by the anti-clericals to secularize all the hospitals. He refused to accede to their request, alleging that the budget of charity was totally inadequate already, and that many indigent sufferers were turned away from lack of accommodation. This is only one item; what will it be when the Government has to pay an army of hirelings to minister to the poor all over the land? But the Congregations do not concern themselves with bodily wants only. Many of them are devoted to the education of all classes. This is the head and front of their offending, and the true reason of their taking off. Every one knows that the godless scholastic institutions devised by Paul Bert, Ferry, and Jules Simon are repugnant to the nation, and have been a complete failure. In spite of the millions of public money lavished upon them, they have never been able to hold their own against the religious schools of the Congregations, which are supported entirely by private initiative, and at the cost of great pecuniary sacrifices on the part of Catholic parents, who support two sets of schools—those they patronize and those for which they have no use. Not content with imposing these sacrifices, as in the United States, the Third Republic now proposes to crush out all competition by suppressing the teaching congregations, and indeed all congregations, with the proviso of retaining for the present such as shall be deemed of public utility—meaning, of course, those who bring surcease to the straining budget by rendering gratuitous service to thousands, who would be a burden to the State, in a country already taxed to its utmost capacity. The tyrannical and arbitrary character of a measure which declares all conventual institutions “against public order” on account of their vows, which are likened to “personal servitude,” and yet utilizing some of them, does not trouble these modern Dracos. Still less are they concerned with the iniquity of depriving thousands of citizens of the right to dispose of their lives as they see fit, and of preventing millions of parents from educating their children as they choose.
About the middle of the last century, representative men like Montalembert, Lacordaire, Berryer, Dupanloup, entered the political arena to fight the battle of free education against the tyranny of the State University. They won the day, and freedom in educational matters seemed henceforth the inalienable appanage of France and of all communities boasting of Western civilization.
The aim of the projected Law of Associations is to crush out this liberty. It is no question of Church and State, but of Christianity and liberty against atheism and tyranny. All the rest is mere padding. It is a reversion to Lacedæmonian state tyranny and an odious anachronism. No wonder, then, that the present Dreyfus-Rousseau ministry should seek to throw dust in the eyes of the public, even subsidizing press syndicates to mislead public opinion abroad.
In a nutshell, the Trouillot Bill amounts to just this: No association can exist without government authorization, which will never be given to any religious congregation formed for educational purposes. None need apply but those who work with the Government. “We will give our money only to those who please us,” said the Socialist mayor of Lyons recently. “Our money,” forsooth—considering that the taxpaying portion of the community of Lyons is strongly Catholic and Conservative. Yet this municipal autocrat declared that destitute children, who went to any but state schools, should not be assisted by civic funds.
It is the true Jacobin spirit that permeates this Republican organism. The stamping out of religious education is itself but a means to an end. That arch-traitor Renan declared “that religion would die hard; primary education and the substitution of scientific for literary studies were the only means of killing it.”
The final purpose of this Republic is to establish national unity in national atheism, with perhaps a creedless church administered by servile state functionaries—a modified form of the worship of the Goddess of Reason. In saying this I do not calumniate the Republic, as Waldeck Rousseau himself clearly stated the governmental programme at Toulouse. A small coalition of Jews, Protestants, and other Freemasons have gained control of the country by capturing the Socialist vote. The latter do not yet see that they are being used as cats’ paws. For what fellowship can there be between Jew capitalists and collectivists? All honest, industrious Frenchmen despise politics as a rule. The great mining and industrial centres and the slums of large cities furnish practically all the voters, and this proletariat is lured on by brilliant prospects of the collectivist Utopia that is coming, when the Congregations and the Church have been abolished. Respectable Frenchmen, who do try to serve their country by taking a hand in politics, usually withdraw in disgust, and thus the scum comes to the top and is utilized by unscrupulous ambition. If any one wants to enjoy a clever, graphic pen-picture of French politics, let him read Les morts qui parlent, by M. de Vogué.
The purpose of those in power is, I repeat, to break away completely and for ever from the Catholic religion, with which the French nation is so bound up that its fibres can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life. “Few greater calamities can befall a nation,” wrote Lecky, “than to cut herself off as France has done from her own past in her great Revolution.” To consummate this calamity is the avowed purpose of this Government. A hue and cry is raised by its Socialist henchmen at papal ingérence in French affairs, though the Concordat surely gives the Pope a right to protest against the ostracism and proposed suppression of the Congregations, as being a violation of Article I of the Concordat, which guarantees the “free exercise of the Catholic religion in France.”
Meanwhile “The Jewish Alliance” and the “Internationale” operate freely and openly, causing strikes in every direction, and disorganizing the industrial conditions here for the benefit of other countries. During the last few months immense sums are being taken out of the country, not by the Congregations only by any means. The boom in the New York Stock Market, which redounds to the credit of the McKinley administration, may be connected with this migration of personal property from France.
It has been France’s glory and misfortune to be a great purveyor of ideas, ideals, and fashions. She is essentially missionary, and was in the vanguard of Christianity from the beginning. In the early centuries of the Church, her monastic missionaries peopled the islands that lie around this beautiful Riviera. St. Vincent de Lerins, St. Tropez, St. Aygulf, St. Maxim, have left indelible footprints in these regions. In her terrible Revolution France was an object-lesson to the nations, whose intervention saved her from self-extermination. Foreign war was a boon and a safety-valve. The Commune of 1870 was another warning to the nations. Again to-day she is being made a spectacle to men and angels—to men who are, with secret rejoicing, applauding the Waldeck Rousseau ministry, and all for which it stands. They known full well that decadence and doom are near. There will be another Sedan, another Commune. The colonies, Indo-China in particular, will be the first to fall away in the general dismemberment.
I know France intimately since more than thirty years, and it is with infinite sorrow that I diagnose her condition. Her recuperative powers are very great. I fear, however, that they will prove inadequate after the next great shock.