Meanwhile, I find it set down in the usual statistical authorities accessible in 1884, that out of the 36,102,021 inhabitants of France, 35,387,703 registered themselves, or were registered, as Catholics, 580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not professing any form of religion.'
Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision, these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the planet.
The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of vox populi et præterea nihil, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.'
The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted.
But I revert to France.
As the time drew near for the Legislative elections of 1889, the Republicans in power began to perceive that their methods had not been crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced resignation of President Grévy had indeed been turned, because the Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal Exposition at Paris—so much, indeed, that I have had the obvious incongruity of selecting for the celebration of the French Revolution by a French Republic the centennial of a year in which no French Republic existed, accounted for to me by a French Republican on the express ground that the legislative elections were fixed for 1889! There may have been some truth in this. For nothing could be more preposterous than the pretext alleged for the selection by the French Government.
This or that thing which occurred at a particular time in a particular year may reasonably be made the occasion of a centennial or a semi-centennial celebration. But how is anybody to fix and celebrate the 'centennial' of a set of notions called 'the principles of 1789'?
In the United States we have celebrated the 'Centennial' of the Declaration of Independence, and the Centennial of the first Inauguration of the first President.
Did the French Government intend to invite the monarchies of Europe to celebrate the destruction by a mob of the Bastille on July 14, 1789? Hardly, I suppose! Or the Convocation of the States-General at Versailles on May 5, 1789? Certainly not—for the States-General were convoked, not under the 'principles of 1789,' but in conformity with an ancient usage and custom of the French monarchy.
What are the 'principles of 1789'?