whom he pays
annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the
title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks. His successors
are still inclined to regard them in the same light; in their hands the
State is ever what he made it, that is to say a monopolizer, convinced
that its rights are illimitable and that its interference everywhere
is legitimate, accustomed to governing all it can and leaving to
individuals only the smallest portion of themselves, hostile to all
bodies that might interpose between them and it, distrustful and
ill-disposed towards all groups capable of collective action and
spontaneous initiation, especially as concerns proprietary bodies.
A self-constituted daily overseer, a legal guardian, a perpetual and
minute director of moral societies as of local societies, usurper of
their domains, undertaker or regulator of education and of charitable
enterprises, the State is ever in inevitable conflict with the Church.
The latter, of all moral societies, is the most active; she does not let
herself be enslaved like the others, her soul is in her own keeping;
her faith, her organization, her hierarchy and her code are all her own.
Against the rights of the State based on human reason, she claims rights
founded on divine revelation, and, in self-defense, she justly finds
in the French clergy, as the State organized it in 1802, the best
disciplined militia, the best classified, the most capable of operating
together under one countersign and of marching in military fashion under
the impulsion that its ecclesiastical leaders choose to give it.

Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two
conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or
both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the
French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the
United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French
transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts
itself against interventions like those of the French State and the
difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to
attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first
or the last of these two policies. The French State, however,
institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to
take the contrary course.[5346]--At one time, as during the last years
of the Restoration and the first years of the se