Decidedly these modern Jacobins have no imagination; all their proceedings have a twang of ancient history. Read in Taine’s _Ancien Régime_, “_La conquête Jacobine_,” and it will seem like current history. You will read how prefects and maires and gens d’armes often knocked in the dead of night at the doors of peaceful sisters and ordered them to disperse. At Avignon, recently, the police had to barricade the streets to prevent thousands of indignant men and women from manifesting before the Prefecture. Lyons is preparing to resist. The speech pronounced by the Socialist mayor, M. Augagneur, at the political banquet on 14th July, would certainly warrant retaliation. After the usual stereotyped glorification of that disgraceful performance known as _La Prise de la Bastille_, M. Augagneur said: “The new Bastille we must take to-day is that power, far more dangerous, of the spirit of the past incarnated in the Church, acting by its priests, its preachers, its monks, its professors, by all its lay accomplices. It is this Bastille we must destroy, if we do not wish to see wasted the immense efforts of 113 years ... thus, gentlemen, I invite you to drink to the success of the campaign being waged by the Government.” This is clear speaking. “No greater misfortune can befall a nation,” wrote Lecky, “than to cut itself away from its own past as France has done.” It is this misfortune that these blinded sectarians are seeking to consummate in hatred of the Catholic Faith, which is so bound up with the fibres of the nation that they can only be torn out with the last palpitating remnants of national life. LEGALIZED DESPOTISM _15th February, 1903._ A curious feature in the case of the doomed Congregations in France is that more than nine hundred awards were made to them for educational work during the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Leroy Beaulieu, who presided over this international jury, has written several articles, and a most scathing letter to M. Combes, on the subject of his malicious official calumnies. He, Brunetière, Paul Bourget, and many other distinguished Frenchmen have countersigned a Defence, presented by the Salesian Fathers, in which not less than thirty-four misstatements made by M. Combes are rectified. In general, it may said that all these official statements are as unreliable as those made by the Commissioners of Henry VIII. The Chambers were supposed by the law of 1901 to decide what Congregations were to be granted authorization. They really were allowed no voice in the matter. M. Combes presented only the names of four or five, Les frères de St. Jean de Dieu and some others, who are to be spared for the present. The remaining sixty-four were condemned without a hearing. Parents of the richer classes will soon be compelled, like the poor, to send their children to government schools, keep them at home, or send them to foreign lands to be educated. The true character of the Jacobin policy is becoming every day more apparent.