Eau, at an
anti-clerical meeting of Paul Bert's.

"He came in a little late to dinner. Some dozen of us were already
assembled on a flight of steps at the bottom of the garden when he
appeared. He spied me at once [a woman speaks!] across the green lawn
and a vase of tall fuchsias, and called out in his sonorous voice:

"'Admirable! superb! extraordinary! Never since Voltaire has such an
irrefutable indictment been brought against the clergy! And what a
style! What consummate art!'

"'And what bad policy!' said a great banker who was with us, in a low
voice, to me [note the me].

"Gambetta went on as he approached us:

"'And such an immense success--beyond anything that could be imagined!
Ten thousand enthusiastic cheers!'

"'The ten thousand and first would not have come from me,' I said [said
I], as we greeted one another.

"'You yourself,' cried Gambetta, 'you yourself, I tell you, would
have been carried away; if not by the ideas, by the genius lavished in
propounding them.'"

Yes, and notwithstanding Madame Adam's "religion" and the great banker's
"policy," Gambetta and Paul Bert were in the right, and miles above
their heads.

Following Madame Adam's lively nonsense, the _Echo_ says that Paul Bert
tried to set up another Inquisition. "In France," says this organ of
Christian Radicalism, "they strive to prevent a parent from giving his
child a religious education." They do nothing of the kind. They simply
insist that the religious education shall not be given in the national
school. Every French parent is free to give religious instruction to his
children at home, and there are still thousands of State priests who can
supply his deficiencies in that respect. Meanwhile national education
progresses in good earnest. The Empire left nearly half the population
unable to write their names. Now the Republic educates every boy and
girl, and Mr. Matthew Arnold assures us that the French schools are
among the best in Europe, while the sale of good books is prodigious.
Gambetta and Paul Bert worked, fought, and sacrificed for this, and they
cannot be robbed of the glory.

BRADLAUGH'S GHOST.

Directly after Charles Bradlaugh's death we expressed a belief that the
Christians would concoct stories about him as soon as it was safe to do
so. It took some time to concoct and circulate the pious narratives of
the deathbeds of Voltaire and Thomas Paine, and a proper interval is
necessary in the case of the great