The Moslems for a long time levied on the Spaniards and the Venetians a tax of so many boys and girls a year, but no Government of a free people has yet called on all parents to stand and deliver, not their purse, but the souls of their children, that it may sow therein the tares of a hideous state materialism. The right free citizens have to follow their inclination and conscience by living in community and practising the counsels of evangelical perfection to which they feel called is a most sacred part of personal liberty. “Liberalism,” writes Taine, “is the respect of others. If the State exists, it is to prevent all intrusion into the private life, the beliefs, the conscience, the property of the individual. When the State does this, it is the greatest of benefactors. When it commits these intrusions itself, it is the greatest of malefactors.” Curiously similar was the judgment of an old Spanish peasant with whom Montalembert conversed during his travels in Spain after one of its nineteenth-century anti-clerical revolutions and the usual accompaniment, the suppression of religious Congregations. Pointing with her bare and scraggy arm to some deserted monastery buildings, she pronounced these two eloquent words, “_Suma tyrania_,” acme of tyranny! DESPOTISM PLUS GUILE _6th June, 1903._ The true character and scope of the Associations Bill can no longer be dissimulated. It should have been labelled “An Act for the suppression of religious congregations and Christian education preparatory to the suppression of Catholicism in France.” Nor is this all. It looks as if this Trouillot or Associations Bill, with its numerous articles, was merely a vulgar trap set by the Government to extract from the doomed unauthorized Congregations accurate information regarding their property and members, in order to seize the former and see to it that the latter are for ever debarred from teaching. These inventories were a necessary part of all demands for authorization, without which no Congregation could henceforth exist. I say “seize,” for every one knows that “liquidation” means purely and simply spoliation and confiscation. I have in previous articles dwelt on the bad faith of the Combes ministry in closing by simple decree some three thousand free parochial schools, in spite of the solemn assurance given by M. Waldeck Rousseau, on behalf of the State, that these schools were in no wise affected by the new law of 1901 (Associations Bill). At the last session of the Chambers a more monstrous illegality was committed. “Both the letter and the spirit of the law of 1901 were violated.” These are the words pronounced at Bordeaux recently by M. Decrais, an ex-minister, who was thereupon elected senator by an imposing majority.