carried to its logical extreme, the ideal government; and hates, above all things, "Americanism." What strikes an Anglo-Saxon as the merest commonplace of healthy politics or intellectual life is in his eyes the most pernicious heresy. We believe that freedom to teach and to write is the only way to discover the truth, and are confident that in the struggle of life which opposing systems must pass through the truth is sure in the end to win. Not so Renan. "The idea that there is a true knowledge, which must be taught, protected, patronized by the state, to the exclusion of false knowledge, is losing ground--one of the results of the general enfeeblement of notions of government." This is bad enough, but the political situation is even worse than the moral and intellectual; for M. Renan finds that France has "preferred the democratic programme, according to which the state, composed of the agglomeration of individuals, having no other object than the happiness of these individuals _as they themselves understand it_, gives up all notion of initiative above their feelings and ideas. The consequence of such a state of things is the pursuit of prosperity and liberty, the destruction of whatever remains of the spirit of class, weakening of the power of the state. Individuals and the subordinate groups of the state, such as the county and the township, will prosper under such a regime; but it is to be feared that the nation, the country--France--will lose every day something of its authority and its strong cohesion. The period which we are entering upon will be one of liberty _a l'Americaine_."