ce with an ancient
and customary right. 'What business have these lawyers and doctors at
Paris,' said a farmer here to me, 'to be meddling with our usages and
ways here on our lands in Normandy? Let them fix general taxes, and
leave us to pay them in our own way!'

The war against the Church affects these Normans in the same way. It
does not seem to rouse them into a kind of fanatical fervour, such as
blazes up here and there in other parts of France, but it angers them as
a disturbance of their settled habits and convictions. 'The Church,'
said one of these Calvados farmers to M. de Witt; 'the Church is the key
of our trade. They must not touch it!'

What he meant was, that on Sunday at the village church the farmers,
after the mass, are in the habit of talking over all their affairs
together. It is a kind of social exchange for men whose calling in life
keeps them far apart during the week.

Is it to be supplanted for the benefit of the France of the future by
cockpits and cabarets, or courses of lectures delivered in 'scholastic
palaces,' by spectacled and decorated professors, on the 'struggle for
life,' and the 'survival of the fittest'?

The victory of M. Pierre de Witt in July was too complete to leave any
pretext for meddling with its results of which the authorities liked to
avail themselves. The law, however, gives abundant opportunities for
such meddling wherever a plausible pretext can be found. After the votes
of a commune have been verified and counted, two of the assessors start
off at once with all the votes and papers for the chief town of the
canton. The bureau of this chief town has power to 'verify and, if need
be, remake the calculations which show the majority. It may modify the
decisions of the communal bureaux as to the candidate to whom certain
votes properly belong, may decide what votes are to be treated as
entirely null, or to be counted in estimating the majority without being
held as given to either candidate. It may also decide what votes belong
to a candidate. It may also take away from the candidates elected, or
claiming to have been elected, all votes found in the urn or urns in
excess of the number of electors actually tallied as voting.'

The decisions reached by the bureau are next to be collated with the
_proces-verbaux_ of the communal bureaux--after which all the documents
connected with the election, including the tally-lists of the voters,
are to be sent to the prefect of t