Yesterday I spent a few hours at Nice, and was waiting for a tramway to return home, when a youth of about fifteen, with a candid, ingenuous countenance, waved his newspapers just out with the cry: “Voilà la lutte sociale. Buy _La lutte sociale_.” I took the extended copy, asking the youth if he believed in the _lutte sociale_. “Oh yes, of course I do,” he replied with a most convinced air. “What is this _lutte sociale_?” I inquired. This he “did not know.” Glancing through the leading article, I read a virulent denunciation of the clergy, and a most contemptuous diatribe against the masses, _à la Voltaire_. “They [the masses] are formed of vicious, ignorant, covetous individuals.... What writers call ‘the soul’ of the multitude is in general nothing but an immense horrible cry of wild beasts, an accumulation of the lowest instincts of the human brute ... they do not reason, they howl and they strike.” It is these masses that unscrupulous politicians and secret societies are preparing to hurl against organized society as in 1789, after having destroyed in them from infancy all reverence for God or man: _Ni Dieu ni maître_--neither God nor master. In self-defence, society will be compelled to restore Christianity, or slavery--or perish. UNAUTHORIZED CONGREGATIONS _25th April, 1902._ I hesitate to write anything more on religious conditions at the present time, because I shall have to repeat what I have written in these columns since two years. My worst previsions have been realized. The Budget of Cults which I had hoped would be thrown as another sop to Cerberus, has been voted by a compact Ministerial majority. If the clergy of France, with the Holy See, do not themselves reject all connexion with a distinctly pagan government, and hold their own as the Church did in the first three centuries, I fear this fair land may revive the experiences of the Byzantine or Bas Empire, as it is aptly called, for there is a distinct determination to enslave or to destroy the Church. The French are an optimistic people. From year to year they keep repeating that matters will soon improve, that the next elections will make everything right and restore liberty. France’s great misfortune is, I repeat, that respectable people will not, as a rule, touch politics, or soon give them up in disgust, while denaturalized Frenchmen and naturalized foreigners do nothing else for a living. In 418 the Emperor Honorius wished to establish a representative government in Southern Gaul. “But,” writes Guizot, “no one would send representatives, no one would go to Arles.” This same state of mind is working the ruin of France to-day.