e little atheist Aristodemus, and were David Hume to reappear at
Reims, where he got his early schooling, he would certainly find himself
treated by the authorities as no better than a Catholic.

The irreligion of the Third Republic is a dogmatic irreligion. Bayle
would find no favour in its eyes, because protesting, as he said he did
'from his inmost soul protest, against everything that was ever said or
done,' he must of course protest against the Nihilism of M. Marcou and
M. Paul Bert.

Unfortunately for the 'true Republicans,' it is essential to their
success that with the religious faith they should also abolish the
patriotic traditions of France. M. Jules Simon, a Republican and a
Republican Minister of Public Instruction, has found himself compelled
to denounce in the clearest and strongest language the deliberate
attempt which these 'true Republicans' are making 'to teach the children
of France that the glory of France began with 1789, and that it was
never so great as under the Convention.'

Stuff like this is actually taught in the schools into which it is the
object of the present French Government to drive by statute all the
children of the country.

'These men,' says M. Jules Simon, 'who proscribe the name of Jesus
Christ and forbid it to be mentioned in the schools of France, on the
pretext that public education must be neutral in such matters, do not
hesitate to have children compelled to attend schools in which they are
taught that Louis XIV. was a tyrant without greatness or ability, and
that Louis XVI. was an enemy of his country justly condemned and
executed.'

Of the great historic France--the France which aided the American
colonies to establish their independence, after contesting with England
the dominion of North America and of India for more than a century--the
France of Montesquieu and of Rabelais, of Henri IV. and Sully, of
Francois I. and St.-Louis, of Chivalry and of the Crusades, the coming
generation of Frenchmen, if these fanatics can get their way, will know
no more than their Annamite fellow-citizens in Asia. It is not
surprising that a Government controlled by such men with such objects
should have amnestied the criminals of the Commune. The _petroleurs_ who
destroyed the Tuileries and the Hotel de Ville were only trying in their
practical way to abolish the history of France before 1789.

Here at Reims the history of France, I think, will die very hard. No one
could doubt this