"France has thus displayed, since its first revolution, a most remarkable contest. The spirit of freedom has more than once placed its people in front of human progress, and ever again the spirit of reaction has dragged them back into the abyss of mental and moral decay. Its priests have invariably triumphed over its reformers. The Roman church has always held a supremacy above the law. Of all the national institutions, it has alone preserved its freedom of action unimpaired. It receives an enormous subsidy from the state. While all other associations are held under a strict subjection, while political meetings are scarcely allowed, while the press is silenced, while Protestant churches can hold no assemblies or synods except by the connivance of the government, while Protestant churches are forbidden to have either bell or steeple, the Roman priesthood hold their councils and assemblies unrestrained, and cover the land with their sodalities, their societies, their processions, and their pilgrimages. The church is the only well-organized political party. Its agents are active in every commune. Its severe discipline produces order through all its hosts of Jesuits, monks and priests. Its confessors rule in the palaces of the wealthy and the hovels of the peasants. It forbids education, it stifles thought, it inculcates a pitiless severity against Protestants and reformers; and with natural indignation the leading Republicans point to the dominant church as the chief source of all the woes of France, as sacrificing the morals, integrity and mental elevation of the nation to the single purpose of maintaining the ascendency of a foreign Pope. The French Republicans have been forced to see that the Papal church is the necessary foe of freedom. It would be well if our own people could learn from their experience, and guard with strict vigilance their institutions from the secret and open assaults of a foreign priesthood.