The pseudo-Separation Bill is the most important legislation accomplished in France since a century at least, and it has been done in a manner which would not be tolerated in any free, civilized country. An Act, which is the repudiation of fifteen centuries of national life, and is fraught with the gravest consequences both political and religious, interior and exterior, has been rushed through both Houses with most unseemly, “scandalous haste.” “You are treating it,” said a senator, “as if it were a question of a fourth-rate railroad.” There was only one deliberation in the Chamber of Deputies, and not one in the Senate we may say. Senators of the Right were allowed to soliloquize eloquently. Their speeches were admirable from every point of view and might well have given pause to the Left. But these were dumb, by order. With few exceptions, the reporter and President of the Separation Commission and the Minister of Worship alone spoke, to curtly and peremptorily repulse the proposed amendments. M. Rouvier, Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, who did not speak at all in the House of Deputies, made but one appearance, on November 9th, at the first session of the Senate, to declare that “the question was essentially a political one,” and that there was “a primordial and dominant interest for the Government that this reform should be completed before the Senate went before the electoral body.” He further declared “that the Senate had given its adhesion in advance ... if it were otherwise the Government would resign.” Surely a singular speech to make to a deliberative assembly, on a matter that transcends in importance anything that has been transacted in the French Parliament since 1793. If the law were not what Cicero calls “a convention among thieves,” how did M. Rouvier know “that the Senate had given its adhesion in advance”? Indignant at the systematic refusal of the Left to enter into any discussion, a senator exclaimed: “You are a deliberative assembly; try at least to keep up appearances.” MM. Monis and Clemenceau spoke on the Left, not to refute the arguments of the Right, but to travesty history, to malign and misrepresent, and to discuss subjects wholly irrelevant. M. Monis entered into a long digression on the Franco-Prussian war in order to incriminate a French cardinal and Pius IX. He was ably refuted by M. de Lamarzalle.