hese ideas!'

If General Boulanger and M. Turquet really imagine these views to be
'American,' it would be instructive for them to look into the masterly
protests of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, against the doctrines
of Mr. Henry George as adopted and expounded by Father McGlynn. The
Catholic Church in the United States holds its own property, real and
personal, and manages it to suit itself. It would be interesting to see
an attempt made in the legislature of an American State, to carry
through a law like the decrees issued in France in 1881, forbidding
curates and vicars to receive legacies left to them for the benefit of
the poor in their parishes, or to distribute to the poor sums left to
the Bureau of Public Charity, with an express proviso that they should
be distributed by the clergy of the place.

On one very important question of French politics, M. Fleury, as a
practical politician in this great and active department, gives me a
good deal of useful light. This is the question of the expenses of the
electoral machine. In France, as in America, no limit is set by the law
to the possible expenditure of a political candidate. I have already
given the estimate made for me in Artois of the general cost of the
legislative elections, and I have been told by more than one
well-informed French politician in other parts of France, that the
average cost of a candidacy for a seat in the Chamber may be roughly
estimated at twenty-five thousand francs, or a thousand pounds sterling.
This would show, allowing two candidates only for each seat, an
expenditure of thirty millions of francs, or twelve hundred thousand
pounds, at each French parliamentary election, being very nearly the
figure given me in Artois. We send only 330 members to Washington, but
we elect a new House every two years. The British House of Commons,
though more numerous even than the French Chamber, probably spends a
good deal less upon getting itself elected than either the French or the
American House.[4]

[4] At this time (October, 1889) there is a difficulty in New York
about a good candidate for the seat vacated by the death of the late
Mr. S. S. Cox, being a prominent democratic member of Congress,
because the candidate must consent to an annual 'assessment' on his
salary for political purposes. The French Government, I am told,
collects these 'contributions' easily, the deputies 'recouping'
themselves by patrona