e had led to the criminal usurpation
of the throne by the former emperor Napoleon." They felt that they were
called upon to eradicate the adherents of the so-called "French ideas"
just as Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he
burned Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the sixteenth
century a man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to
rule his subjects as he saw fit was a "heretic" and it was the duty
of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the nineteenth
century, on the continent of Europe, a man who did not believe in the
divine right of his king to rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw
fit, was a "heretic," and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to
denounce him to the nearest policeman and see that he got punished.

But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of
Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done
in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was
the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in
palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops. They peeped
through the key-holes of the ministerial cabinet and they listened to
the conversations of the people who were taking the air on the benches
of the Municipal Park. They guarded the frontier so that no one might
leave without a duly viseed passport and they inspected all packages,
that no books with dangerous "French ideas" should enter the realm of
their Royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture hall and
woe to the Professor who uttered a word against the existing order of
things. They followed the little boys and girls on their way to church
lest they play hookey.

In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy. The church had
suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church property
had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the generation
that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the
other French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when the
Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in October
of the year 1793. The priests had followed the "emigres" into their long
exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies and they set
to work with a vengeance.

Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours of
educating the young. Their order had