from all the public hospitals. Finally
some person in charge of the place, more humane than his fellows, sent
out to a Lazarist house in the neighbourhood and asked the Lazarists to
send a priest. The priest came. He was received very rudely, kept
waiting a long time in an ante-room, and when he was finally conducted
through the wards to the dying man, all sorts of vulgar and foolish
jeers were uttered about his mission as he passed along; and it was with
the greatest trouble that he finally succeeded in imposing some sort of
decent respect for the death-bed of this poor sufferer upon the hospital
attendants.

'This is the spirit,' said the priest who told me the tale, 'of the
Commune, or rather of those Communards who murdered the hostages. These
murderers simply put this spirit into deeds instead of words. They made
the name of the Commune so odious that when Victor Hugo in 1876 proposed
a general amnesty of the condemned Communards, the Chamber rejected it
without taking a vote.

'In 1880 the same general amnesty was proposed, and the Chamber adopted
it by a very large majority. Do you wonder that thoughtful men look with
horror on the current which is carrying us in such a direction as that?
At this moment two men of high personal character, Admiral Krantz and M.
Casimir Perier, are lending their support to a Government which
represents this current, and yet Admiral Krantz and M. Casimir Perier
have recorded their deliberate conviction that the men who clamoured for
an unconditional, indiscriminate amnesty for the Communards were simply
abusing the name of clemency for the rehabilitation of crime.

'Look again,' he said, 'at the spirit in which the laicization of the
schools is conducted. There are a hundred families we will say in a
village. Ninety-nine of these families are Christian families, not
families of saints--I wish I knew such a village as that!--but Christian
families. Go into their homes, and you will see the crucifix hanging in
the chambers, religious prints upon the walls. One family is a family of
atheists. I suppose the case, for as a matter of fact I know no such
family. But I will suppose it. There is a school in the village, and in
that school there hangs a crucifix, the gift of some pious resident.
Ninety-nine fathers and mothers of the village desire that crucifix to
be respected. One father and one mother (a bold supposition this!)
desire it to be removed. The authorities send in a man who