The Government wanted to give M. Waldeck Rousseau a national funeral, strictly pagan and masonic of course; but he had left instructions to the contrary, and is to be buried from his parish church, Ste. Clothilde. Whether he received the last Sacraments of the Church or not is still a matter of conjecture. The death of Waldeck Rousseau will not in any way affect the trend of politics. The recent municipal elections are proclaimed a victory for the Government. As usual not one-third of those inscribed voted. _A quoi bon?_ Before the law of 1901 was voted, the immense majority of the municipalities consulted pronounced in favour of the Congregations. This made no difference. Before the law of 1904 suppressing authorized Congregations was voted, the Right demanded that the municipal councils be consulted again. The Government peremptorily refused. As I have said before, nothing can restrain Jacobin tyranny but a national cataclysm which would bring about a violent reaction. “We have the majority, what do we care for legality?” as the Left proclaimed recently at the Palais Bourbon. They have no other rule of conduct but the “fist right,” now known as “the majority.” LIBERTY AND STATE SERVITUDE _July, 1904._ Modern democracy, which flatters itself that it has shaken off all the shackles of authority, is itself but an evolution of what it so loftily contemns. If we are free to-day, it is because our fathers have borne the yoke of Christ. In one of his sonorous paradoxes, Rousseau declared that “men are born free and everywhere they are in chains.” That all men are born free is as false a statement as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. Men are not born free. Our rights and liberties are secured by laws which are a circumscription of the sphere of individual independence for the benefit of the community, and this in virtue of a divine “thou shalt not,” written on the tablets of the heart, or on tables of stone. Human laws have no sanction except in divine law, and no man has a right to command his fellow-men, except within the limits of natural and of divine law. The sum of liberty in every community is the sum of its amenity to law, both divine and natural. Hence Plato’s remark that “republics cannot exist without virtue in the people,” and Montesquieu’s assertion that “the vital principle of democratic government is virtue.” All human laws deriving their sanction from divine and natural laws, it follows that liberty must diminish when these laws are violated with impunity.