has been levied from such houses as a disgraceful
tribute. I do not think that it is allowable to employ a revenue derived
from vice and disorder, even to do good. In consequence of these
principles, I have never granted any permit to gambling-houses; I have
constantly refused them. I have constantly announced that not only they
would not be tolerated, but that they would be sought out and
prosecuted."

If I add that Bailly suppressed all spectacles of animal-fighting, at
which the multitude cannot fail to acquire ferocious and sanguinary
habits, I shall have a right to ask of every superficial writer, how he
would justify the epithet of sterile, applied with such assurance to the
administration of our virtuous colleague.

Anxious to carry out in practice that which had been largely recognized
theoretically in the declaration of rights--the complete separation of
religion from civil law,--Bailly presented himself before the National
Assembly on the 14th of May, 1791, and demanded, in the name of the city
of Paris, the abolition of an order of things which, in the then state
of men's minds, gave rise to great abuses. If declarations of births, of
marriages, and of deaths are now received by civil officers in a form
agreeing with all religious opinions, the country is chiefly indebted
for it to the intelligent firmness of Bailly.

The unfortunate beings for whom all public men should feel most
solicitous, are those prisoners who are awaiting in prison the decrees
of the courts of justice. Bailly took care not to neglect such a duty.
At the end of 1790, the old tribunals had no moral power; they could no
longer act; the new ones were not yet created. This state of affairs
distracted the mind of our colleague. On the 18th of November, he
expressed his grief to the National Assembly, in terms full of
sensibility and kindness. I should be culpable if I left them in
oblivion.

"Gentlemen, the prisons are full. The innocent are awaiting their
justification, and the criminals an end to their remorse. All breathe an
unwholesome air, and disease will pronounce terrible decrees. Despair
dwells there: Despair says, either give me death, or judge me. When we
visit those prisons, that is what the fathers of the poor and the
unfortunate hear; this is what it is their duty to repeat to the fathers
of their country. We must tell them that in those asylums of crime, of
misery, and of every grief, time is infinite in its duration; a m