M. Ferry's law was intended to repeal a previous law adopted in 1875, and which had not been then three years in operation. By the Law of July 12, 1875, the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had modified, in the interest of liberty, the monopoly of higher education in France enjoyed by the State. It was an essentially wise, liberal, and 'progressive' law. But the Republicans of Gambetta could not endure it, for it gave the Christians of France the right to provide for the higher education of their children in their own way; so it must be abolished. It was abolished; and though the Senate, making a partial stand for law and for the equal rights of French citizens, struck out 'Article 7,' M. Ferry and his friends, who controlled the President, caused him to issue an Executive decree, to which I have already referred, breaking up the religious orders aimed at in 'Article 7.' This was in 1880. In 1882 the Chamber adopted a law proposed by M. Paul Bert, confirming to the State the monopoly of secondary education; and to-day we see M. Clemenceau, the avowed enemy of M. Jules Ferry and of the Opportunists, shaking hands with them in public, after the elections of 1889, on this one question of deadly hostility to all religion in the educational establishments of France. At a banquet given on December 3 by certain anti-Boulangist students in Paris to the Government deputies for the Seine, M. Clemenceau declared himself in favour of 'the union of all Republicans'--upon what lines and to what end?--'To prepare the Grand Social Revolution and make war upon the theocratic spirit which seeks to reduce the human mind to slavery!' In other words, the Third Republic is to combine the Socialism of 1848 with the Atheism of 1793, the National workshops with the worship of Reason, and to join hands, I suppose, with the extemporised 'Republic of Brazil' in a grand propaganda which shall secure the abolition, not only of all the thrones in Europe, but of all the altars in America. If language means anything and facts have any force, this is the inevitable programme of the French Republic of 1890, and this is the entertainment to which the Christian nations of the New World and the Old were invited at Paris in the great 'centennial' year 1889. Believing this to be the inevitable programme of the Republic, as represented by the Government of President Grevy so long ago as 1880, I was yet surprised, as 1 have said, to see the strength of the protest recorded against it by the voters of France at the Legislative elections in 1885, because the Republic of Thiers and Macmahon had made, and deservedly, so much progress in the confidence of the French people, that I had hardly expected to see the essentially conservative heart of France startled, even by three or four years' experience of the Government of M. Grevy, into an adequate sense of the perils into which these successors of the Marechal-Duc were leading the country.