blican leader were at
times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was
difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have
'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to
extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land of France!

Not less striking, in quite another sense, was the grim and stony
silence with which the appeal of the Republican leader was received by
the Right, representing, as the Third Republic has chosen to make the
Right represent, the Religion, and with the Religion the Liberty, of
France.

It reminded me, I am sorry to say, of the way in which a naturally
amiable and considerate householder might be expected to listen to the
arguments of an adroit and accomplished burglar showing cause why he
should be locked into the plate-closet to protect him from the police.

M. Jules Ferry's offer was to suspend the application to certain
religious bodies of the interdict fulminated against them by himself and
the Republican Government. At last he paused, evidently oppressed by the
steady, unresponsive gaze of his hearers.

Then the silence was broken!

'Do you speak for the Government?' called out a fiery deputy of the
Right.

M. Jules Ferry hesitated a moment and then replied, 'No! I speak for
myself; but there are many who think as I do!'

'You!' came back the hot response. 'You! bah!--you are nothing!'

The real response came later, on September 22, when, in his own town of
St.-Die, the chief of the Opportunists, despite all the efforts of the
prefect of the department and of the local authorities to carry him
through, was beaten by a Monarchist. Obviously M. Ferry had heard how
things looked from his committee at St.-Die when he made his fruitless
appeal to the Eight in the Chamber!

Finding that nothing was to be expected from any cajolery of the Right,
or any transactions with the outraged and awakened Christianity of
France, the Government at last gave up the control of the impending
elections unreservedly into the hands of M. Constans of Toulouse, of
whom I have already spoken. To him, as Minister of the Interior, all
the machinery of politics was abandoned. Every prefect in France became
an electoral agent to do his bidding.

For the first time too, I believe, even in French administrative
history, all the employees of the post-offices and the telegraph offices
were transferred from the control of the Director of Pos