In 1901 Waldeck Rousseau solemnly declared in the Chambers that Article 13 of the Associations Bill in no wise affected the parochial schools, and two days after the law was voted three thousand of these schools were summarily closed. He had also assured the Vatican that authorized Congregations had nothing to fear. Even M. Delcassé and the Ambassador at Rome had given similar assurances to the Vatican before the law of 1901 was deposed in the Chambers. With these and similar precedents it would be idle indeed to attach any faith to M. Briand’s dulcet, fair, feline, fallacious utterances in the Chambers (November 9th). They are merely “words, words,” and _verba volant_. Moreover, how long will M. Briand and the Clemenceau Cabinet be able to resist the Socialist impact of the advance guard? More than a year ago, I wrote that any interpretation could be given to some of the ambiguous terms in which the law was couched, and that this ambiguity was deliberate and intentional. By his own authority. M. Briand (Chambers, November 12th, 1906) has offered the Catholics one year more in which to form associations under the Separation Bill. Thereupon M. Puech, a deputy of the Left, flung these biting words at the Government: “The law without the associations is void ... it has fallen to pieces.... And you have no associations. In 1907 you will not have them any more than in 1906.... Void, nothingness, chaos, behold your law.” “In 1790,” said the same deputy, “as to-day, the struggle was engaged between two principles, between dogma and science.... The Constituante was not firm. Camille Desmoulins spoke like M. le Ministre Briand.... Three succeeding assemblies were forced logically to extreme measures--death and transportation.” The astute guile that characterizes M. Briand’s declarations in the Chambers can only be compared to that of Julian the Apostate, who began his reign by a grand edict of toleration. Or rather it recalls those deliberations of that council in Pandemonium (Book II, _Paradise Lost_): “Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood, the fiercest spirit, now fiercer by despair, spoke thus: My sentence is for open war of wiles I boast not.” But he was overruled by Beelzebub, who “pleaded devilish counsel first devised by Satan,” and which consisted in “seducing the puny habitants of Paradise to our party” by guile and fraud. These associations of the law of 1905, which ignorant or malevolent writers continue to represent as being the same as those of Prussia and other half-Protestant countries, were a most ingenious device for inducing the Church to commit suicide by the repudiation of her divinely given constitution.