In modern France the chances of escape from the parliamentary game, tawdry at its best, at its worst a social peril, are much greater than in this country. The names and forms of the thing are not of ancient institution. There is therefore no opportunity for bamboozling people with a sham continuity, or of mixing up the interests of the party hacks with the instinct of patriotism. Moreover, in modern France the parliamentary system happened to come up vitally against the domestic habits of the people earlier and more violently than it has yet done in this country. The little gang which had captured the machine was violently anti-Christian; it proceeded step by step to the destruction of the Church, until at the end of 1905 the crisis had taken this form. The Church was disestablished, its endowments were cancelled, the housing of its hierarchy, its churches and its cathedrals and their furniture were, further, to be taken from it unless it adopted a Presbyterian form of government which could not but have cankered it and which was the very negative of its spirit. So far nothing that the Parliament had done really touched the lives of the people. Even the proposal to put the remaining goods of the Church under Presbyterian management was a matter for the theologians and not for them. Not one man in a hundred knew or cared about the business. The critical date approached (the 11th of December, if I remember rightly). Rome was to accept the anti-Catholic scheme of government or all the churches were to be shut. Rome refused the scheme, and Parliament, faced for once with a reality and brought under the necessity of really interfering with the popular life or of capitulating, capitulated. What has that example to do, you may ask, with that movement in the south of France, which is the text of these pages? The answer is as follows: