When the war against all new establishments was well under way, the "Bloc" then took up the question of congregations unauthorized but applying in due legal form for the favor of authorization. This the orders had been instructed and encouraged to do. Their treatment displayed at once the insincerity and hatred of the Government. A "Commission on Congregations" was formed, composed of thirty-three members, of whom twenty-one were Freemasons. The Commission instructed the anti-clerical Rabier to draw up a bill. The discussions of the Chamber upon this bill, resulted in the dissolution of fifty-three orders of men. On March 18, 1903, twenty-five teaching congregations were suppressed, comprising 11,763 religious divided into 1690 communities. A few days later twenty-eight preaching orders received the same sentence. Among these were the Capuchins, the Redemptorists, the Dominicans, the Passionists, the Salesians, the Franciscans, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Benedictines, the Fathers of the Oratory, the Barnabites, the Carmelites and many others. On March 26, the Carthusians, considered as a commercial order, were condemned by a vote of 322 against 222. It was at this time that the anti-clerical Rouanet uttered that saying so significant of the whole Governmental policy: "We need not concern ourselves with either legality or right." The proscriptions were hardly pronounced than measures were at once taken for the liquidation of the property belonging to the dissolved congregations. We need not linger to relate the pathetic scenes accompanying the consequent expulsion of these fifty-three orders of men, nor the wave of indignation it produced throughout France and the civilized world. [Illustration: CARDINAL RICHARD.] After the congregations of men the war was carried on against similar orders of women. It was to no purpose that Messrs. Plichon and Grousseau demonstrated in the Chamber the confusion manifested in the articles of the bill which designated as teaching orders the congregations devoted to the hospitals, and those whose lives were purely contemplative; it was in vain that they showed forth the success of the incriminated orders that they brought forth the declarations of the majority of the municipal councils pronouncing for the maintenance of these orders. Even M. Leygues who had voted for the law of July 1, 1901, as Minister of Public Instruction at the time, declared that the new bill by rejecting the demands of the Sisters _en bloc_ was contrary to that law. In spite of all protests the project was voted and carried by a majority of 285 to 269. Thus eighty-one congregations of women were at a single blow dissolved. On August 9, 1903, M. Combes speaking at Marseilles before a congress of teachers declared: