To propitiate these rioters the Minister of War went to Longwy, and the strikers marched past singing the “Internationale,” and the Minister of War actually saluted the red flag! He afterwards protested in the newspapers that he did not salute the red flag, but the men and women who were escorting it! This Minister of War began life as dry-goods commercial traveller. He is to-day a millionaire _agent de change_ at the Paris Bourse, and is said to ambition the presidential chair. Shakespeare wrote: “Motley is the only wear.” In France, everything seems to be running to red. I have witnessed here two “free-thought” funerals, one last April and another yesterday, in which pall and banners were red, and even the coffin was draped in flaming red. Red “is the only wear,” though it is not easy to understand why “free-thought” should necessarily blush--for itself. At the “Free-Thought” convention held, recently, at Paris, under government patronage, anarchy dominated, just as it did at Rome last September. Red was the keynote. THE ABOLITION OF THE CONCORDAT _February 3rd, 1906._ On August 19th, 1905, I described some of the odious features of the alleged Separation Bill voted by the House of Deputies on July 7th, at “midnight, the hour of crime.” It may truly be ranked in that category to which Cicero referred when he said, “There are laws which are merely conventions among thieves.” “The vote of the Senate is a foregone conclusion,” I wrote. The order had been given; every amendment (there were about a hundred) was rejected automatically, and the law was voted, December 6th, 1905, by a majority of 180 to 101. “The French Government,” I wrote (June 30th, 1900), “is on the verse of apostasy. Is this a cause, a presage, or a symptom of national decadence? All three I fear. Nations stand or fall with their governments. They have the government they deserve, and are punished for the evil doings of their rulers! ‘I gave them a king in my wrath,’ was once written of the Jews. Is there sufficient vitality left in the French national constitution to reject the poison which is undermining it, and of which alcoholism, unknown in France fifty years ago, is but the outward and visible sign?” To-day this apostasy, not of the nation, but of the French State, is complete. It is the latest, though by no means the last act of a series of anti-religious laws, elaborated by the Grand Orient and voted by majorities and cabinets formed by them. I dealt with this subject on March 17th, 1900, and said, then, that “with a Parliament and Ministry like this any legislation is possible.”