“When we complained of the hostility of the Ultramontanes we were thinking of those French priests who were convicted upon trustworthy evidence of having fired upon our soldiers. In repeating these charges we have other priests in mind who, a few days ago, under the pretext of bringing the last consolation to the dying, sneaked through our camp outside Paris as spies; and to the manifesto of the former ultramontane deputy, Keller, an Alsacian, published in the _Union_, which declares that the war against us is a ‘holy war,’ and that every shot fired at a German is an _œuvre sainte_. We imagine that after this explanation our Silesian contemporary will no longer doubt our respect for the Catholic Church, and will not itself desire to identify the Catholic cause with those who thus act and speak, and are guilty of such a gross abuse of the conception of ‘holiness.’” On my submitting the article to the Chief he said: “You still write too bluntly for me. But you told me that you were capable of delicate irony. Here, however, there is much more irony than delicacy.” (I had only reproduced his own expressions, which, however, shall be avoided in future.) “Write it all in a different strain. You must write politically, and in politics the object is not to give offence.” The Chief then altered the article in part, the first paragraph assuming the following form: “We had not believed that at this time of day the use of the expressions ‘ultramontane’ and ‘ultramontanism’ could lead to any misunderstanding. We imagined that Catholics had as clear a conception of the meanings of those words as the members of other Christian communities, and that they would understand that no offence was intended to them in complaining of the attacks of the Ultramontanes. It was on this supposition that we dealt with the opposition of the party in question to the latest development of German affairs, and we are surprised to find that a Silesian newspaper, notorious for its violence of language, has inverted our meaning, substituting the Catholic Christian world for the coterie which we attacked.” The Minister struck out the adjective “zealous” before “opponents of Germany,” and also the following sentence beginning with the words “For the purpose of removing.” The concluding passage read as follows after the Minister had corrected it: “In complaining of the Ultramontanes we were thinking, as we expressly stated, of the party of the _Münchener Volksboten_ and similar organs, whose slanderous jibes stir up the Germans against each other, and who encouraged the French to attack Germany and are partly responsible for the present war, inasmuch as they represented French victory to be easy and certain, and the German people to be disunited; we had in mind the priests of Upper Alsace and the French priests who instigated the country population to murderous attacks upon our troops in which they themselves took part; we had further in view those priests who