Elsewhere, the conflict is less permanent and less sharp the two conditions which aggravate it and maintain it in France are, one or both, wanting. In other European countries, the Church has not the French form imposed upon it and the difficulties are less; in the United States of America, not only has it not undergone the French transformation, but the State, liberal in principle, interdicts itself against interventions like those of the French State and the difficulties are almost null. Evidently, if there was any desire to attenuate or to prevent the conflict it would be through the first or the last of these two policies. The French State, however, institutionally and traditionally, always invasive, is ever tempted to take the contrary course.[5346]--At one time, as during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the second Empire, it allies itself with the Church; each power helps the other in its domination, and in concert together they undertake to control the en tire man. In this case, the two centralizations, one ecclesiastic and the other secular, both increasing and prodigiously augmented for a century, work together to overpower the individual. He is watched, followed up, seized, handled severely, and constrained even in his innermost being; he can no longer breathe the atmosphere around him; we can well remember the oppression which, after 1823 and after 1852, bore down on every independent character and on every free intellect.--At another time, as under the first and the third Republic, the State sees in the Church a rival and an adversary; consequently, it persecutes or worries it and we of to-day see with our own eyes how a governing minority, steadily, for a long time, gives offence to a governed majority where it is most sensitive; how it breaks up congregations of men and drives free citizens from their homes whose only fault is a desire to live, pray and labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening of taxation already too great. IV. Contrasting Vistas. Other difficulties of the French system.--New and scientific conception of the world.--How opposed to the Catholic conception.--How it is propagated.--How the other is defended.--Losses and gains of the Catholic Church.--Its narrow and broad domains.--Effects of Catholic and French systems on Christian sentiment in France.--Increased among the clergy and diminished in society.