possible, but
nothing can be more certain than that the educational legislation of
France since 1882 has been aimed steadily and directly at the abolition,
not of Christianity alone, but of all religion.

It is curious to see the common school system of New England, which in
the beginning was the device of a theocracy bent on usurping the
authority of parents over their children, taken up after more than two
hundred years, and readjusted to the purposes of a set of men whom the
Puritans would have unhesitatingly whipped to death at the cart's tail
as blasphemers.

Only the other day, in the Chamber, an ardent Republican member, M.
Pichon, made a speech in which he openly avowed the object of laicising
the schools to be the destruction of religion. 'Between you, the
Catholics,' he exclaimed, 'and us, who are Republicans, there is a great
abyss. The interests of the Church are incompatible with those of the
Republican Government.' That the Republicans in the Assembly should have
applauded this declaration is rather astonishing, since it was in
substance an admission that the interests of the 'Republican Government'
are inconsistent with those of an admittedly immense majority of the
French people. But they did applaud it, and not long before M. Pichon
made the speech a solid Republican vote of 232 members had been recorded
for the suppression of the French Embassy to the Vatican. Is it
surprising that the Catholics of France should be asking themselves all
over the country whether it is possible for them to accept the Republic
without abjuring their religion?

The 'abyss' of which M. Pichon speaks has been dug, not by the Church,
but by the theorists who have expelled the Sisters of Charity from the
hospitals and the chaplains from the prisons of France, who refuse to
the poor the right to pray in the almshouses, and who throw the
crucifix out of school-houses which are maintained by the money of
Catholic taxpayers. As between M. Pichon and M. Ferry and their
fellow-conspirators on one side of this abyss, and the Marist Brethren
and the little children of France on the other side of it, the history
of the world hardly encourages the belief that it is the Marist Brethren
and the little children who will finally be engulfed!

It is a notable proof of the hold which Catholic ideas have upon the
people in this part of France, that notwithstanding a marked tendency to
emigration among the peasantry of the Boulonnais and o