If there were no _animus furtandi_, no malevolent projects of strangulation in the background, the Government would have contented itself with denouncing the Concordat, and repudiating that portion of the National Debt represented by the _Budget of cults_, instituted by the Jacobins themselves, in 1790, when they appropriated Church property and assumed the charge of maintaining Catholic worship in France. Neither Protestant nor Jewish worship was included, originally, in the _Budget de Cults_, seeing that their Church property had not been touched, and they had no part in the Concordat. When the Anglican Church was disestablished or separated from the State in Ireland, it surely never occurred to Mr. Gladstone and his Government to order inventories to be made in the churches. To understand this revolt of the French people just now, we must recall their past experience with inventories. In 1790 a decree obliged all cathedral chapters and titulars of benefices to furnish complete inventories of all their holdings, and in March, 1791, about four hundred millions of Church property was seized and sold by the State. In 1901 the Congregations were invited to furnish ample inventories with their demands for authorization; no authorizations were given, but the inventories were very useful for the wholesale spoliations which followed, spoliations which still masquerade under the pseudonym of “liquidations.” Moreover, the State makes these inventories to-day as proprietor, though by no sleight of language can its ownership be proven, even as regards churches existing before the Revolution, while many costly structures have been erected and endowed since then by private initiative.[15] Fierce riots occurred over one of these churches built on private grounds. The proprietor produced his title deeds, proving that the commune had not contributed one cent and that he was absolute owner, but this made no difference. The law Mirabeau of 1789 distinctly recognized that all ecclesiastical property then existing had been “irrevocably given to the Roman Catholic Church for public worship and charity.” The Jacobins of to-day apparently base their claims (Art. 12 de Separation) on this loi Mirabeau, which declares, forthwith, that all this Church property is “placed at the disposal of the nation,” (“_mise à la disposition de la nation_”). But Art. 12 of the Concordat uses exactly the same words in speaking of what was left, in 1801, of Church property, edifices, etc.--“_sont mises à la disposition des évêques_”--all was “placed at the disposal of the bishops”; and the faithful, moreover, were invited to reconstitute the stolen patrimony by gifts and legacies, which are now to be confiscated.