In 1874 the Municipal Council of Chauny founded six purses of 450 francs a year, each to be competed for by candidates wishing to fit themselves to compete for the Lacroix scholarships, the successful candidates being left at liberty to enter any one of the free schools in Chauny. As Madame Lacroix has made the curates of the churches of Notre-Dame and St.-Martin _ex-officio_ members of the council of her fund, it is to be presumed that the Government at Paris will find some way of striking these clergymen out of the list, as it has already struck all ministers of religion out of the local committees of supervision in educational matters throughout France, for a French Republic is nothing if not logical. My likening of Chauny to a French Rotterdam or Amsterdam may be excused when I say that in the middle of the last century the Mayor of Chauny assured the Intendant of Soissons that the municipality had to keep up no fewer than twenty-seven bridges. What with the Oise and its affluents, and the many watercourses created about the place, either to drain the marsh lands or to facilitate navigation, Chauny really is an aquatic little capital like Annecy in Savoy. Naturally its citizens set a certain value on their fishing rights, and it may edify those who obstinately insist on regarding the feudal ages as ages of brute force, to know that so early as in 1175 the citizens of Chauny, by the lieutenant of the bailliage, Messire Regnault Doucet, asserted and successfully maintained before the royal representatives their right to fish in all the waters round about their town in all lawful ways against the pretensions of no less a personage than the Duchesse d'Orleans. In 1540 this right was confirmed to them anew, and it was then shown that at an inquest held in 1475 the witnesses had testified that from time whereof the memory of man ran not to the contrary no citizen of Chauny had ever been molested in the exercise of his right to fish in the waters of Chauny either on behalf of the Duc d'Orleans or on behalf of the King. The local archives, which are singularly rich and well-preserved, are full of instances like this, which show that the general current of life in this corner of France, long before the Revolution, was determined neither by the caprices of the great, nor by the passions of the mob, but by systematic considerations of law and of tradition, until for the confusion of France, and more or less of the civilised world, the natural evolution and development of law and order were suddenly and insanely interrupted through the inconceivable weakness of a most amiable and useless king, by the 'wild asses' of Mirabeau, acting in 1789 under the pressure of what so friendly an eyewitness of their conduct as Gouverneur Morris calls the 'abominable' populace of Paris.