to transfer the benefices of the Catholic dignitaries to the _alt-Catholics_ in order to constitute an independent German Church, which would unite the whole of Germany religiously, as he had already united it politically. All Catholics, of course, would be members of this new Church. The State Protestantism of Prussia would, in due time, join this State Church, and there would be, if not one Faith and one Baptism, one Church and one State. The calculations of Chancellor Bismarck were, however, at fault. He soon discovered that the clergy were grossly calumniated, and that the _alt-Catholic_ Church in which he trusted never counted more than thirty priests; that this number increased not, and that the hundreds of thousands of adherents of whom the pseudo bishop, Reinkens, boasted, were only some twenty thousand to thirty thousand, scattered over all Germany. These had no principle of cohesion. They could not agree as to any fundamental point of religious doctrine or discipline. According to a census made in 1876, they numbered only one hundred and thirty-six, in a population of twenty-five thousand Catholics, at the city of Bonn, which M. Reinkens had selected as the seat and centre of his episcopal ministrations. Meanwhile, there was a considerable reaction in prevaricating Bavaria. The Catholic minority was changed into a majority, and the Prussian Catholic representation, which was called the fraction of the centre, was strengthened at the elections of 1874 by an increase from twenty-five to forty votes. The chancellor, although enlightened, was not corrected. Nothing could divert him from his evil purpose. By a strange confusion of ideas, he called _Kulturcampf_ (struggle for civilization) the open war which he waged against the Church, the source of all civilization and of liberty of conscience. The persecuting laws which, with the aid of the so-called “liberal” party, or party of unbelief, he succeeded in causing to be enacted were to the following effect. As was to be expected of the blind political fanaticism of the party, the Jesuits were the first objects of hostility, and the first victims of persecution. The May laws required that these unoffending individuals should be expelled without any form of trial, and deprived of their rights of citizens. At the same time, certain religious orders which, it was pretended, were affiliated with the Jesuits, were subjected to the like treatment. All ecclesiastical seminaries were suppressed, the solons of legislation pretending that it was necessary to oblige the candidates for the priesthood to imbue their minds in lay schools, with the ideas and wants of modern society.