emperors and marshals, princes and
priests.

"France has thus displayed, since its first revolution, a
most remarkable contest. The spirit of freedom has more than
once placed its people in front of human progress, and ever
again the spirit of reaction has dragged them back into the
abyss of mental and moral decay. Its priests have invariably
triumphed over its reformers. The Roman church has always
held a supremacy above the law. Of all the national
institutions, it has alone preserved its freedom of action
unimpaired. It receives an enormous subsidy from the state.
While all other associations are held under a strict
subjection, while political meetings are scarcely allowed,
while the press is silenced, while Protestant churches can
hold no assemblies or synods except by the connivance of the
government, while Protestant churches are forbidden to have
either bell or steeple, the Roman priesthood hold their
councils and assemblies unrestrained, and cover the land with
their sodalities, their societies, their processions, and
their pilgrimages. The church is the only well-organized
political party. Its agents are active in every commune. Its
severe discipline produces order through all its hosts of
Jesuits, monks and priests. Its confessors rule in the
palaces of the wealthy and the hovels of the peasants. It
forbids education, it stifles thought, it inculcates a
pitiless severity against Protestants and reformers; and with
natural indignation the leading Republicans point to the
dominant church as the chief source of all the woes of
France, as sacrificing the morals, integrity and mental
elevation of the nation to the single purpose of maintaining
the ascendency of a foreign Pope. The French Republicans have
been forced to see that the Papal church is the necessary foe
of freedom. It would be well if our own people could learn
from their experience, and guard with strict vigilance their
institutions from the secret and open assaults of a foreign
priesthood.

"There is no doubt, at least in the minds of the French
Republicans, that to the intrigues of the Papal faction is
due the disordered and hopeless condition of the nation.
Gambetta's paper, _La Republique_, assures its readers that
the assembly is ruled by a party devoted wholly to the
ecclesiasti