t the
astonishing prosperity of this great institution is viewed with extreme
dissatisfaction by the authorities at Paris, and particularly by the
University of France, which has been confirmed again under the Third
Republic in the monopoly of academic privileges, of which it was very
sensibly deprived by the Assembly under the Government of the
Marshal-Duke of Magenta. By way of expressing this dissatisfaction with
dignity and emphasis, the Government of the Third Republic actually
forbids free Catholic universities to use the title of universities. M.
Ferry's Article 7 not being yet law in this best of all possible French
Republics, Catholics cannot be prevented from spending their own money
in founding institutions which are really universities. But, at all
events, they can be forbidden to give any one of them the title of a
university, that being reserved for the State establishment, which, from
Paris, extends its academic sway all over France.

I called the attention of M. Arthaut to the fact that a great Catholic
University has been this year founded in the capital of the Republic of
the United States, and that the President of the Republic, himself a
Protestant, not only attended the ceremonies of the foundation, but made
a brief speech, in which he expressed his best wishes for its progress
and prosperity. 'That, I am afraid,' said M. Arthaut, 'is a kind of
republic which we are not likely to see established in France.'

To measure the significance of this Catholic work in behalf of liberty
and religion here at Lille, it must be borne in mind that the very men
who are building it up with such splendid liberality and enterprise are
compelled by the iniquitous laws of the Third Republic to bear their own
share as taxpayers in supporting here at Lille another academic
institution of a similar scope, but of less importance, under the direct
control of the University of France, from all share in the
administration of which religion and the ministers of religion are as
rigidly excluded as that refugee of the First French Revolution, Stephen
Girard, intended they should be from the college which he founded at
Philadelphia. Of course the same thing is true of the Catholics all over
France. Out of their pockets must come nine-tenths of the enormous sum,
as yet quite incalculable, but certainly running far up in the hundreds
of millions of francs which is still to be expended by the Third
Republic upon its 'scholastic pa