accepted. Nothing is more creditable to humanity, nothing proves more clearly the vital energy of religious faith, than that fruitful harvest of admirable work which was reaped on a soil which so recently had been devastated by such a frightful storm. It has often been pretended in the French Chambers and in the Press that these manifestations of energy were enabled to take place only in consequence of a mistaken spirit of toleration, inasmuch as the Concordat, which was signed in 1801 by Pope Pius IX. and the First Consul, forbade the reconstitution of the Congregations which had been dissolved by the Revolution, by the very fact that it did not expressly contemplate such reconstruction. But that is a gross error and a deliberate misreading of the documents. As a matter of fact the first article of the Concordat of 1801 specifically states that "the Catholic religion shall be freely exercised in France." Now the liberty of the Catholic Church is complete and whole only if it can, free and untrammelled, fulfil its mission in its entirety, and if it is, as a necessary consequence, supplied with all the organs which it requires in order to be able to do its work. Any other conception of liberty would amount to a complete negation of its existence; for the fundamental condition of liberty is freedom to make use of that liberty. If it is the fact that the existence of the religious orders is not an essential feature of Christianity, it is, at all events as far as the Catholic Church is concerned, a natural product of its teachings and a necessary factor in its organisation; and this was so ever since the earliest centuries of the Christian era. I hope I shall have no great difficulty in making even my Protestant readers understand the object and the legitimate nature of those orders when I try to reply to the accusations levelled against them by their enemies in France. Looking at the question solely from the point of view of liberty, I say that the Catholic Church is obviously a better judge than its adversaries as to what factors constitute the sum-total of its essential properties. The celebrated Portalis expressed this fact very neatly in the speech which he made in the Legislative Assembly when he presented the new Concordat in the name of the First Consul. "When a new religion is sanctioned or an old one is maintained, the control which is exercised over it must be in accordance with the principles of that religion. The wish that is manifested and the power which it is desired to claim to arbitrarily improve religious ideas and institutions constitute a pretension which is contrary to the very nature of things."

Those words have an honest ring which proves that they were spoken in good faith. At the very moment when the

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discussion of the question of the Congregations was begun in France, Pope Leo XIII. affirmed in an important document not only his affection for those institutions, but also the reasons, founded on principles and on facts, which both justify their existence and make it an essential condition of the free exercise of the Catholic religion. After that I think the question ought to be regarded as settled. Let me add that England—and it redounds greatly to the honour of that home of liberty-never dreamed of curtailing the privileges of the Catholic Church by means of restrictive laws affecting religious associations, since the day when religious quarrels were finally dropped and the Catholic Church was emancipated from the heavy fetters with which the old laws had bound her. This is the first and most important observation evoked by pretensions based on the 'silence of the Concordat of 1801 which is used as a weapon against the religious orders.

There is another argument in favour of those orders, deducible from the terms of the documents containing the negotiations which preceded the signing of the Concordat. Those documents have formed the subject-matter of a most instructive publication by Count Boulay de la Meurthe. Now it is no doubt true and only natural that the Holy See wished that express mention of the re-establishment of the religious orders should be made in the Concordat, and it is equally true that the First Consul refused his assent; but the terms in which that refusal was couched indicate its true meaning. At the last conference of the plenipotentiaries it was expressly declared that the re-establishment of the religious orders should do no more than form the subject-matter of an encyclical, should the Sovereign Pontiff deem it advisable to issue one. It follows, therefore, that the desire of the head of the French Government was to establish the principle that henceforward the Congregations were to be looked upon as purely religious institutions, deriving their existence from the authorisation of the Holy See, and receiving no civil sanction at the hands of the general law. As a matter of fact, if one wished to insist on the letter as well as on the spirit of our Concordat, one could logically deduce therefrom the complete liberty of the Congregations, rather than the necessity of an administrative authorisation which is far less in conformity with the principles of modern society than with the spirit of the royal ordinances of the old régime.

Further, if the Concordat bears the meaning which some assign to it, how was it that the Government of the First Consul, as well as all succeeding Governments, immediately

recognised the existence of such a large number of Congregations ? Yet that was what happened; several male orders and a very large number of female institutions received prompt recognition. This fact leads me on to define and explain the position occupied by the Congregations in the last century in the eye of the law. Such an explanation is very necessary, as one of the chief complaints made against the majority of those institutions was that they were in a state of rebellion against the law. I have reason to fear that this calumny, which has been frequently repeated in the French Press and which has led and still continues to lead so many of my countrymen astray, has been propagated in neighbouring countries also, and has deceived men of good faith as to the true position of affairs. After 1789, though the old régime was abolished in principle and in fact, succeeding Governments, as was natural in the case of a country where traditions of extreme antiquity possessed a powerful influence, continued to be imbued to a very great extent with the spirit, the methods and the mental attitude, if I may use that term, of the ancient monarchy, more especially with respect to all that concerned the exercise of the royal prerogative. It is a remarkable thing, or appears to be so at first sight if one forgets the extent to which people are unconsciously influenced by the form of the intellectual inheritance bequeathed by their predecessors, that the French Republic, though it was founded more than thirty years ago and was the product of a reaction against former monarchical forms of government in general and the Napoleonic tradition in particular, should, nevertheless, have continued to be thoroughly imbued with those very forms. Throughout the present religious crisis it has been clear, as I shall prove hereafter, that the fundamental idea which animates our adversaries as well as their ultimate aim was, so to speak, inherited from the legislators of the revolutionary period, just as the doctrines which they invoke, and the conceptions of government to which they give their allegiance, closely resemble those entertained by Napoleon, and are, in consequence, in spite of appearances, practically identical with the principles of absolute monarchy. The Jacobins of the first Republic are primarily responsible for this confusion of ideas in that, under the influence of the teachings of J. J. Rousseau, they transferred to a collective body, to the people, the attributes, moral and intellectual as well as political, of supreme sovereignty. The mental attitude of the parliamentary majorities of the third Republic is the same as that of the Jacobins. Napoleon wished to be the embodiment of both the old and the new order, and all the institutions with which he

endowed France bear the marks of that besetting aspiration. The monarchical Governments which succeeded him wrought no change in the social organisation which his powerful hand had fashioned. When Louis XVIII. was called to the throne, Napoleon remarked, "My bed is a good one, he has only got to change the sheets and lie down"; and this observation was equally applicable to the Restoration, to the subsequent Government of July, and to all succeeding Governments down to and including the present one. From the administrative point of view we are still in Napoleon's bed. Mr. J. E. C. Bodley has made the same remark in his excellent book on France, which has had many readers in England, viz., that no matter what the form of government may be, republican or monarchical, autocratic or parliamentary, the civic life of the nation is always regulated by the lasting and forceful mechanism of the Napoleonic machine.

In spite, however, of this fidelity to tradition, the great social transformation accomplished in 1789 has lost none of its effects. Though the wielders of supreme power still maintain the pretensions and the theories pertaining to the monarchical Government of the old régime, the manners and customs and the conceptions which are the product of the Revolution tend more and more to develop the feeling for liberty and the need of it. This twofold influence, which manifests itself in every department of public national life, produced from the very inception of the new society an exceptional state of affairs as regards the position of the religious Congregations. They preserved the character, imposed upon them by the Revolution, of associations of ordinary citizens whose private obligations are ignored by the civil Government; but in the eye of the law they could have no collective existence save by virtue of the authorisation of the supreme power. Such associations as were recognised by the Government became legally existent entities; in their collective capacity they were enabled to acquire, to possess, and to alienate property, and to receive donations and legacies. Those that were not invested with that authorisation remained mere associations of citizens, whose collective members constituted, as far as the rights of ownership were concerned, limited companies, for the regulation of which the law provides. Many merely rented the houses, whether schools or hospitals, which provided the field for their activity, from societies composed exclusively of lay members. These "unauthorised" Congregations were, as a matter of fact, just as lawful as those from which they were thus nominally distinguished. The sole difference was that the latter

had a personal civil existence in the eye of the law with all its consequent advantages and liabilities, while the former neither enjoyed those advantages nor were subject to those liabilities. This state of affairs was sanctioned by all forms of government at all periods, and in the absence of any law defining and regulating the liberty of association its existence was looked upon as the actual justification for the reappearance of the Congregations and their development in the light of day during the whole course of the century. Short of actual abrogation, no clearer proof of the fact that the revolutionary laws had fallen into desuetude could be found. Consequently, in spite

of any misapprehension to which a deceptive misdescription may give rise, no possible justification can exist for considering the so-called unauthorised Congregations as being in a state of revolt against the laws of the country; and the truth of this statement is proved by the fact that under every form of government the various State departments made formal arrangements with them, at one time with reference to the colonies, at another in connection with charitable undertakings and prison administration. Thus the first accusation levelled against the Congregations falls to the ground.

There is another accusation which has been spread broadcast by the Press, and which I will at once clear out of the way. An attempt has been made to persuade the people that the associations do not pay taxes like the rest of the community. This allegation cannot be maintained, and any one who is in the least degree acquainted with French legislation is aware that it is mere calumny. The authorised Congregations, in the same way as other civil communities, pay the so-called "mortmain tax," to which the property of all analogous associations is subject, and which has the effect of preventing the accumulation of property in the hands of persons whose corporate existence never ceases and whose possessions consequently never become liable to the payment of succession duty. The unauthorised Congregations paid all the direct taxes payable by private citizens and, in addition thereto, a special tax to which they were subjected about twenty years ago in their character of religious associations. It is unnecessary to go further into the details of this fiscal question; these few words have sufficed to prove that the members of the Congregations were neither privileged persons from the point of view of taxation, nor rebels against the general law.

But I should not have exhausted this aspect of the question if I omitted to say a word on the subject of the wealth of the Congregations; for that was one of the chief instruments