M. Combes is a sectary, a renegade seminarist given over to Freemasonry. His policy is the vigorous application of the anti-liberal law, the refusal of all authorizations asked by the Congregations, and the abrogation of the Falloux law. M. F. Veuillot, writing in the _Univers_, pays his respects to the minister in no measured terms. He says M. Combes is "devoid of talent, virtue, honor--a brute unable to conceive a generous thought, to realize a great work, to produce anything useful, to show any effort of a patient and beneficial kind. The brute, however, has formidable fists, and he strikes out blindly before him. The man is without a breath of intelligence, a single sentiment of delicacy. He is but a commonplace mediocrity personified, rancid with hatred and puffed up with pride. As he cannot leave anything to make him famous, he will be notorious to posterity for his brutality alone." Finally, the Abbe Felix Klein, in the North American Review for February, 1904, remarks: M. Combes and his friends, who imagine that they are the leaders of all progress, are committing again the errors of the Middle Ages. That which Philip II. did in Spain, in his making use of the Inquisition; that which Louis XIV. did in France, in revoking the Edict of Nantes and in driving out the Protestants; that which England did, in her treatment of the Pilgrim Fathers, the anti-clericals in France are doing today in their hatred of the religions orders. They are placing these orders beyond the law; they are preventing members of these orders from living as they see fit to live, and from earning their daily bread; they are practically forcing these members to leave France, all solely because of their ideas and innermost convictions. It is the old crime of heresy reversed. Since 1789, the French state has professed no longer to recognize religious vows, either to protect or to attack them; and in this it does well. But how illogical it is, then, to deprive certain individuals of their civil rights, merely because they take vows which it does not recognize! How does it concern the state if young men and women take the vow of chastity before God, and lead a life in common, devoting themselves to doing good in the manner they deem best? Is it not monstrous that, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the government of a great country should arrogate to itself the right of interfering in a matter of this kind, even that it should bring such subjects into the scope of its deliberations? Whether this vow be good or bad it is a question for one's own conscience. Let those who think it bad endeavor to turn others from it by means of persuasion; but to try to prevent it by brute force is the most retrograde course in the world.