ies and the Councils of the Elders are no longer allowed to
receive and administer legacies for the relief of the poor, for
hospitals or asylums. Formerly, where no manse existed in a commune, the
Protestant minister was allowed a certain sum for lodgings. This has
been stopped. In short, the Protestants, like the Catholics of France,
find themselves treated by an oligarchy of irreligious fanatics as
pariahs in their own country. The Protestants, like the Catholics, are
driven into irreconcilable hostility against the Republic by a
Parliamentary majority which treats all religious questions in the
spirit of M. de Mortillet, Mayor of St.-Germain, and a Radical deputy
for the Seine-et-Oise. In 1886 some speaker in the Chamber appealed in
the course of his speech to the law of God. 'The law of God!' broke in
M. de Mortillet; 'pray, what is God?'

The more completely this spirit of the Mayor of St.-Germian gets the
control of the Republican party, the more obvious it becomes that the
Republic must gravitate into Socialism.

As it steadily alienates from itself the vast multitudes of Frenchmen
who are either religious men, or recognise the vital importance of
religious institutions to the existing social order, it is compelled to
court the alliance of the avowed enemies of the existing social order.
This is strikingly illustrated in the political condition of the great
Southern Department of the Bouches-du-Rhone. This department offers a
most instructive contrast with the Calvados.

In the Bouches-du-Rhone, the Government Republicans were as badly beaten
in 1889 as in the Calvados. But in the Calvados they were beaten by the
Monarchists, and in the Bouches-du-Rhone by the Radicals and the
Socialists.

In the Bouches-du-Rhone the Radicals and Socialists threw 52,989 votes,
the Government Republicans no more than 7,218. Marseilles, the greatest
commercial city in France, a city of 'Republicans before the Republic,'
with traditions which give dignity to its democratic tendencies,
repudiated the Republic of M. Jules Ferry and M. Carnot as emphatically
as the Monarchical Morbihan. Even the Boulangists were nearly twice as
strong, and the Monarchists were more than twice as strong in Marseilles
as the Opportunist Republicans. The Boulangists threw there 13,123, and
the Monarchists 14,445 votes. The strength of the Boulangists gives zest
to a terse verdict upon the '_brav' general_' which I heard delivered by
a _cocher_ in Mars