The peasants were the majority of the nation, as they are to-day. At a rough guess, out of some five million heads of families, three and a half at least were of this class. What were they? They were more ignorant, more fearful, and more unhappy than ever the inhabitants of French soil had been before. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the worst of the barbarian invasions had not produced among them such special and intense misery as had the running down of the governmental machine in the eighteenth century. Their songs had ceased. Search the folk-lore of France, and you will find a kind of gap after the centralisation was complete, and after the lords had left them—after the seventeenth century. It is as though that oldest sign of communal life, the traditions and the stories of the little circle of the village, had died just before the death of the village itself. As to religion, with which all this natural and fertile love of legend is so closely knit, it lingered, but it lingered hardly. The priest still survived, but his action was cut off by penury; in places the extreme physical needs of the peasantry, whose lot he shared, entered into his life to an intolerable degree, and a half-paganism resulted. Twenty, thirty pounds a year is not enough for the celibate who holds the sacramental power in the village. I will show you in the rural communes of France church after church part of whose buildings are very old, part very new: and what is the reason? That in all these places the church fell into ruins till the new State came to rebuild it. You may discover many cases of restoration in the eighteenth century where a great cathedral or a famous church or abbey is renewed: it is the work of the upper clergy, and the dole out of their vast fortunes. In the villages such cases are rare and eccentric. The Revolution, for all its antagonism, gave to the Faith a new life. There are to-day more monasteries and convents, more of the clergy, both regular and secular, by far more missionaries, than there were in 1789, but there are fewer bishops.