What is still more melancholy, the Benedictines, Bernardines, and even the Chartreux are permitted to have mortmains and slaves. Under their domination in several provinces of France and Germany are still recognized: personal slavery, slavery of property, and slavery of person and property. Slavery of the person consists in the incapacity of a man's disposing of his property in favor of his children, if they have not always lived with their father in the same house, and at the same table, in which case all belongs to the monks. The fortune of an inhabitant of Mount Jura, put into the hands of a notary, becomes, even in Paris, the prey of those who have originally embraced evangelical poverty at Mount Jura. The son asks alms at the door of the house which his father has built; and the monks, far from giving them, even arrogate to themselves the right of not paying his father's creditors, and of regarding as void all the mortgages on the house of which they take possession. In vain the widow throws herself at their feet to obtain a part of her dowry. This dowry, these debts, this paternal property, all belong, by divine right, to the monks. The creditors, the widow, and the children are all left to die in beggary. Real slavery is that which is effected by residence. Whoever occupies a house within the domain of these monks, and lives in it a year and a day, becomes their serf for life. It has sometimes happened that a French merchant, and father of a family, led by his business into this barbarous country, has taken a house for a year. Dying afterwards in his own country, in another province of France, his widow and children have been quite astonished to see officers, armed with writs, come and take away their furniture, sell it in the name of St. Claude, and drive away a whole family from the house of their father. Mixed slavery is that which, being composed of the two, is, of all that rapacity has ever invented, the most execrable, and beyond the conception even of freebooters. There are, then, Christian people groaning in a triple slavery under monks who have taken the vow of humility and poverty. You will ask how governments suffer these fatal contradictions? It is because the monks are rich and the vassals are poor. It is because the monks, to preserve their Hunnish rights, make presents to their commissaries and to the mistresses of those who might interpose their authority to put down their oppression. The strong always crush the weak; but why must monks be the stronger? CICERO.