acts, immunity from the ordinary tribunals.

In

every walk of life, the State, unchecked by those provincial and municipal liberties which are the great clogs upon arbitrary power, weighs down the individual. The idea, so dear to doctrinaire legislators among ourselves, is realised. The nation, to use a phrase of one of its greatest living writers, is un peuple d'administrés," destitute of that social hierarchy which, as Mirabeau's keen eyes discerned, is the best barrier against tyranny. The dead level of enforced equality is broken only by an aristocracy of officials, fortuitously intruded into and removable from the several Departments. The "man and the citizen" is nominally sovereign. The only liberty he really enjoys is the liberty of a ticket-of-leave man under perpetual surveillance. Freedom is, in fact, the prerogative not of the individual, but of the State; that is to say, of the professional politicians-usually political adventurers of the lowest type-who control and prey upon the State. The picture painted by Landor, in a few pungent words, is realised: "Society trodden down, and forked together, in one and the same rotten mass, with rank weeds covering the top, and sucking out the juices."

Pass to another element of individual freedom, the right to dispose of one's own property, which is, in fact, realised liberty. The Revolution has shown plainly enough how hostile it is to this right. Its publicists regard property as a mere privilege,

E

which the State may, at pleasure, hold to ransom. Hence the monstrously heavy succession duties, which periodically ruin wealth and prevent its accumulation. Hence the tyrannical restriction of testamentary power, whereby France has been covered with "a multitude of small perpetual entails," while at the same time, a deadly wound has been inflicted upon the spirit of the family, that sacred institution which, next to religion and in common with religion, is the source of all virtue, of all prosperity, of all true patriotism. But, indeed, of the prerogatives of the father, the Revolution makes small account. What more monstrous invasion of them is conceivable than the arrogation by the State of a monopoly of primary education, in contemptuous disregard of a man's inviolable right and sacred duty to bring up his children as his conscience dictates ? * What heavier blow could be given to individuality-that essential element of liberty-than to cast all the youth of a country into one common mould? It must be owned that the Revolution here follows out consistently its main principle. Destroy all other inequalities,

*Five-and-twenty years ago, one of the most thoughtful and sincere Liberals France has ever known, the late M. Laboulaye, wrote: "S'emparer des générations nouvelles pour façonner leur esprit au gré de la mode, ou des passions du jour, c'est dépouiller l'homme du premier et du plus saint de ses droits."-Le Parti Libéral, p. 67.

and intellectual inequality remains. Eradicate it wholly you cannot. But the best way to minimise it is by a uniform system of compulsory State education, like the French. And what a system! A system rooted and grounded in Atheism, and avowedly designed to produce a nation of Atheists. But the subject of the Revolution and Religion requires a chapter to itself.

CHAPTER III.

THE REVOLUTION AND RELIGION.

HOSTILITY to Christianity is one of the chief characteristics written upon the history of the Revolution. In the popular movement which immediately preceded it, and from which it directly issued, the clergy of France, as a body, heartily joined. The vast majority of the fifty thousand curés had small cause to love the ancien régime, with its tyrannous abuses and legalised injustice. Even among the Prelates, taken though they were, almost exclusively, from the noble caste, there were not a few strenuous advocates of reform. It was not until the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen was adopted by the National Assembly that the anti-Christian inspiration of the Revolution was clearly manifested. The underlying principles of that famous document are Rousseau's doctrines, that goodness, lawlessness and equality are the natural attributes of man: that the ultimate source of sovereignty lies in the personal rights of the separate parties to the social contract: that the

popular will is the supreme fount of justice. These are the direct negation of the Christian doctrines that man is born with a fault, a taint, a vice of nature; that he is born under the law of virtue; that he is born under subjection to the family and to those larger societies which have sprung from the family; that civil authority is of divine appointment, although it has reached those who are clothed with it through the people; that justice is anterior to all experience, wholly independent of the volition of any man or number of men, eternal, immutable, absolutely binding upon the human race, as upon the totality of existence * · There is an entire contrariety between the Declaration of Rights, which

*The following extract from the Brief Caritas, addressed by Pius VI. on the 10th of March, 1791, to Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and the Bishops of the National Assembly, may well be cited here "Jam cum hominis sit ita sua ratione uti ne supremum auctorem non tantum agnoscere, verum et colere, admirari ad eumque se suaque omnia referre debeat, cumque ipsum subjici jam ab initio majoribus suis necesse fuerit ut ab ipsis regatur atque instituatur, vitamque suam ad rationis, humanitatis religionisque normam instituere valeat; certe ab uniuscujusque ortu irritam constat atque inanem esse jactatam illam inter homines æqualitatem ac liberNecessitate subditi estote (Ad Roman. xiii. 5). Itaque ut homines in civilem societatem coalescere possent, gubernationis forma constitui debuit, per quam jura illa libertatis adstricta sunt sub leges supremamque regnantium potestatem, ex quo consequitur quod S. Augustinus docet in hæc verba : 'Generale quippe pactum est societatis obedire regibus suis.' Quapropter hæc potestas non tam a sociali contractu quam ab ipso Deo recti justique auctore repetenda est: quod quidem confirmavit Apostolus in superius laudata Epistola: Omnis anima potestatibus sublimioribus subdita sit; non est enim potestas nisi a Deo," xiii. 1.

tatem.