In 1901 the Associations Bill was, according to Waldeck Rousseau, intended to give legal standing and liberty to the unauthorized as well as to the authorized Congregations. We all know, to-day, how twenty-seven thousand of their schools have been closed, and how the Congregations, simple enough to fall into the Government’s trap by asking for authorization and furnishing inventories of their property, have been robbed of everything and turned adrift. The inventories now being made in the churches, amid scenes of violence and bloodshed, with the cooperation of the regular army, represent the first step on the road to wholesale spoliation and strangulation. If only the victims would be docile and resigned there would be no trouble whatever. Resistance will compel the operators to be drastic, when they would rather go slowly and surely. The French voters should be consistent. After giving themselves such law-makers, they ought at least not to wince when the laws made by them are put into execution. But this is an incurable idiosyncrasy of the French; they are clear-sighted, energetic, and practical in the administration of their private affairs, but when it comes to politics and government, they are absolutely apathetic and purblind. Any pothouse politician can wheedle them out of their votes, who would find it difficult to coax a sou out of their pockets. All they ask is to be left in peace to attend to their business and pleasures. It is only when the unpleasant practical sides of laws like those of 1902, 1904, and 1905 are brought home to them that the peasant seizes his pitchfork, and the bourgeois his cane, and bloody manifestations occur all over France, as in 1902, 1904, and to-day (1906). Generally speaking, inventories are made only when property is about to change hands, as in cases of death and bankruptcy. Now the adherents of the Catholic Church in France are numerous and very much alive, and they cannot see why their ecclesiastical furniture and property should be inventoried, quite forgetting that they gave carte blanche to the “bloc” of Briands, Brissons, Combes, etc., who made the law they are now resisting. If _Associations cultuelles_ are formed, a consummation most devoutly to be deprecated by every friend of Catholic France, evidently they will be composed by bishops, curés, and their present _conseils de fabrique_, and there will not be any transmission of property.