our parents,' to be
effaced from the school-house walls. In others, children were compelled
to give up the Catechisms which they had brought with them to school,
intending to go on after school hours to the parish church. In this same
year M. Fournier stated in the Senate that persons appointed by the
Minister of Public Instruction to distribute prizes in the schools had
made speeches to the children in which they spoke of all religion as
mere superstition. He cited one such orator as contrasting 'scientific
education, the only true education, which gives man the certainty of his
own value and urges him onward to progress and to the Light,' with
'religious education which fatally plunges him into a murky night, and
an abyss of deadly superstitions.' Another luminary of the State
exclaimed in a burst of eloquence, 'Young citizenesses and young
citizens! We have been accused of banishing God from the schools! It is
an error! Nothing can be driven out which does not exist. Now God does
not exist. What we have suppressed is only a set of emblems!'

These emblems were the religious inscriptions, and the crucifixes, taken
out of the school-houses. Of these emblems the Prefect of the Seine, in
1882, carelessly observed in the course of an enquiry before the Senate,
that the removal of them was 'only a question of school furniture!' And
the Municipal Council of Paris, with which M. Floquet in 1882 so
cordially co-operated, formally adopted resolutions calling for the
complete suppression in all the primary schools 'of all theological
instruction whatsoever.' 'No one,' said one councillor, M. Cattiaux,
with much solemnity, 'can prove the existence of God, and our teachers
must not be compelled to affirm the existence of an imaginary being.'

With M. Floquet as President of the Chamber, M. Carnot and his Ministers
are at the mercy not of the Radicals only, but of the Radical allies of
the Commune. The French Monarchists to-day are fighting out the battle
of religion and of civilization for every country in Christendom.

Though the Calvados was the chosen home of M. Guizot, it was not his
birthplace. Like M. Thiers, whom he so little resembled in other
particulars, M. Guizot was a son of the South. He was born at Nimes, in
the Gard, a city rather Republican than Royalist by its traditions, even
under the old Monarchy. His father was an advocate, and by the charter
of Nimes, which organized in 1476 the 'consular' government of the