_M. Spuller:_ "I will explain.... The new spirit is this: instead of a mean, vexatious and exasperating war...." (Protests from the Extreme Left--Applause from the Centre). _M. Rene Boblet:_ "Whom are you accusing of carrying on this exasperating war?" _M. Camille Pelletan:_ "You insult the memory of Ferry." _M. Spuller:_ "If you permit me, gentlemen, I will say that it is I myself whom I accuse at the present moment, so that nobody can be offended." _M. Millerand:_ "That is a _mea culpa_." _M. Spuller:_ "Precisely, but all your _finesse_, all your casuistry will not prevent the country from understanding my words." _M. Chauvin:_ "The country will understand that the Government has become clerical." M. Spuller replied: I shall certainly be understood without, and when I assert that in a new situation we have need of a new policy, a new spirit, I am sure of being understood by everyone who is not blinded by his passions. That new spirit of which I speak, I do not wish you to think it ought under any pretext to be a spirit of weakness, of condescension, of abandonment, of abdication; on the contrary it ought to be a lofty and large spirit of tolerance, of intellectual and moral renovation, altogether different from that which has prevailed heretofore. Such is my profound conviction.... Yes, gentlemen, and mark it well the Church must not any longer pretend, as she has so long contended, that she is tyrannized, persecuted, hunted, shut out and kept out of the social life of the country. I will say to M. Goblet, who has done me the honor of interrupting me, and of crying out as they cry out to me in the public reunions: "Confess that you are with the Pope;" I will say to him that it would be no more unworthy of me than of him to recognize in the present Pope a man who merits the grandest respect, because he is invested with the highest moral authority. These words, in the very Chamber itself, and uttered by a man who professed himself bound by no religion, found many echoes in the same quarter. Not the least important and significant were those of M. Casimir Périer, President of the Council. The Government had spoken its _mea culpa_ with full consciousness of its fault.