Unfortunately, whilst the Republican Left had advanced a step, the Government had remained stationary, and was so far from being prepared to redeem the pledges which it had given that the Minister of Justice, M. Le Royer, retired sooner than touch the magistracy, and, when M. Waddington's attention was persistently called to the necessity of making provisions in the Foreign Office for something like honest service of the existing institutions, he also threw up his portfolio.

M. de Freycinet, who succeeded M. Waddington as Premier on December 26, 1879, modified the Cabinet by taking in several members of the Republican Left-men who were ready to answer to the special demands of the moment, but who were hardly more likely than himself to be of good counsel should any unforeseen emergency arise to tax their powers of discernment and foresight. The Extreme Left remained, of course, unsatisfied, and held themselves ready, by a policy of coalition with the Right, to vex and embarrass the Government whenever this could be done with safety to themselves, and they showed their temper as soon as the session opened by abstaining or voting against the re-election of Gambetta as President of the Chamber (by 259 out of 308 votes) on January 13, 1880. Three days later (January 16) M. de Freycinet made his public statement of the Ministerial programme. He declared that the Senate should be pressed to vote the laws on public instruction which had been agreed to by the Chamber in the previous July; that the magistracy should be reorganised; that the administration should be reformed; that Bills should be introduced regulating the right of association, the liberty of the press, and other minor matters which urgently demanded legislation. There was, indeed, very little difference between the declaration of M. de Freycinet and that which had been made by M. Dufaure on January 10, 1879-the reform of the magistracy, of the public services, and of public instruction formed the main points of both, and critics of all shades of opinion were naturally inclined to protest :-

Ce n'est pas la peine, assurément,

De changer de gouvernement.

But the pledges given by M. Dufaure had not been kept, whereas it was now understood that no trifling would be allowed. Considerable prefectorial changes were immediately gazetted (January 14), accompanied by an even longer list of those effected in the magistracy; the Judges of course could not be touched, but men holding subordinate posts, and who had shown marked hostility to the Republic in the discharge of their duties, were pensioned off or dismissed the service in large numbers. Bills embodying all the reforms which had been declared urgent were also introduced without loss of time, and as the only questions on which the great body of the Left-made up of the pure Left and the Republican union-were seriously at variance seemed to be questions of degree rather than of principle, an attempt was made to bring

about the fusion of these two groups so as to afford the Cabinet the support of a certain majority. This attempt, however, fell through, and the Cabinet remained exposed not only to the surprises which might be prepared for them by the unnatural alliance of the Right with the Extreme Left, but also to the accidents which might arise from any division taking place between the two principal groups of their party. Occasionally, too, the Left Centre -like Dufaure's group in the Senate-would further complicate matters by voting with the Conservatives, and it was by a combination of this nature that M. Léon Say, the ex-Minister of Financewhose conduct in the matter of " conversion was still regarded by many with suspicion—obtained the Presidentship of the Finance Committee of the Upper House on January 29.

His successor, M. Magnin, had been instantly interrogated (January 18) as to the intentions of the Government in respect of the same vexed question of the conversion of the Five per Cents. ; he at once declared that no explanation or hint would be given on the subject either then or at any future time, and the order of the day which he demanded was promptly voted by a majority of nearly a hundred. Two days later his colleagues, M. Cazot and M. Ferry, brought in their respective Bills for the reform of the magistracy and for that of primary education. On the same day the House agreed to the Bill dealing with girls' secondary education; and on the 23rd the Senate began the discussion of the proposed reconstitution of the Council of Superior Education, in the course of which the Right was enabled to carry an amendment against the Government by the aid of their friends in the Left Centre.

In spite of the same combination the Cabinet succeeded in carrying on February 5 the election of Professor Broca to the life senatorship vacant by the death of M. de Montalivet, an election which was regarded as important because it secured a vote in favour of the Bill on Higher Education which would shortly come before the Senate, and some hopes began to be entertained that the celebrated Clause 7, embodying the proposal to take away the right of teaching from all those who belonged to unauthorised congregations, would be accepted as a compromise. The agitation which for many months past had been actively carried on throughout the country against this clause, if it showed that a large section of the community were violently opposed to it, had also brought to light the indisputable fact that there was a deep and widespread feeling in its favour. On this point, at least, the majority of the Chamber was to the full as advanced as the constituencies, but the Senate was to a great extent without the circle of the influences which largely affected the deputies of the Lower House. On February 24, the day on which M. Lemoinne was elected Senator, the Senate proceeded to discuss the Bill. Clauses 1 to 6 were passed without difficulty, and on March 4 M. Bérenger opened the debate on Clause 7 with an impassioned pleading which he ended with the words: "I stand here, not as the advocate of the Jesuits, but as

the defender of the cause of freedom." M. Bérenger divided the honours of the first day with M. Buffet, who devoted himself to the task of producing a very skilful rhetorical confusion between what was meant by the words Clericalism and Catholicism; but on the 5th M. Bertauld intervened in reply with great effect from a strictly legal point of view; and after a stormy debate-lasting into the following week-at the close of which M. Ferry himself spoke at great length on the political aspect of the question, the division was taken and the clause rejected by 148 to 129. The votes of the Right had been strengthened by the adhesion of Jules Simon, of Dufaure and Laboulaye, whose example was followed by twenty-six moderate Republicans, and the honourable names of Littré and Fourichon were to be counted amongst the seven intentional abstentions. There was not the slightest chance that the Senate would reverse this decision at a later stage of the Bill, and all the world awaited with the greatest anxiety the further action of the Cabinet.

The composition of the majority by which the clause had been defeated in the Senate furnished the means of analysing the exact nature and extent of the opposition in the country. It consisted, as has been seen, of the Right-that is to say, of the three dynastic groups, Legitimists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, strengthened by a handful of Conservatives or moderate Republicans-and one or two Liberal doctrinaires, who, charmed by M. Bérenger's appeal to the name of liberty, gave occasion to their friends to repeat Madame Roland's protest, "Ah! Liberté, Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!" It was now perfectly clear to those in power that the class which protested against Clause 7 had comparatively small support in the country, and that support almost wholly confined to the enemies of the existing institutions, whilst, on the other hand, it became daily more evident that the whole of the working and thriving population, the thews and sinews of commercial France, the class which formed the foundations of the modern power, would not be satisfied unless measures were at once taken to regulate the whole question.

The communications received from heads of electoral cominittees, who have now begun to exercise great influence in political life, made it clear that Ministers were face to face with a political necessity which no longer left room for the discussion of the question on the grounds of theoretical desirability, and it may be as well here briefly to mention the principal causes which had produced this state of opinion. The French Republican majority argue that the members of the religious orders have long enjoyed in France all the privileges of citizens, together with complete exemption from their responsibilities. The people see with anger that civilians are torn from their homes and from the steady exercise of their peaceful industries to perform their term of forced military service, whilst thousands of able-bodied men are exempted without question.

The whole of France is covered with a network of

unauthorised orders, many of which openly subsist by begging (even in departments in which lay mendicity is punished by imprisonment), whilst others turn to account the labour of the aged poor or of the young children whom they are supposed to maintain as a work of charity. All the children who in England find their place either in reformatories, industrial schools, or workhouses, subject to State inspection, are in France under the management of these unauthorised and irresponsible communities, whose revenues are swelled by their unpaid labour. The number and the great scale of these establishments seriously interfere with the normal conditions of labour-needlewomen, for instance, have to compete with the nuns, who not only obtain the gratuitous services of the orphans confided to them by the State, but are further advantaged by the labour which they strictly exact of the little ones whose parents pay for their maintenance in the belief that their children are obtaining a useful education. Even the attempt to make the authorised orders contribute something of the wealth which they were known to possess fell through in consequence of the partisanship of the Bench, and the income-tax voted by the Versailles Assembly on their revenues could not be obtained by the Treasury. The same Judges who have been recently ruling the existence of proprietary interests vested in these corporations, and completely ignoring the mortmain provisions of the Code, defeated the proposed imposition of the income-tax by declaring that where there were vows of poverty there could be no taxable estate, or where there were no dividends there could be no income. These are the grounds on which the opinion held by the great majority of the French electorate had been formed, and which led them to insist on the active intervention of the Government.

It would have been more convenient to Ministers to have dealt in the first place with the reform of the magistracy, and to have put off dealing with the unauthorised associations until they had created a judicial body, ready to administer the existing laws in the spirit of existing institutions, in the place of men who openly aided and abetted the active political hostility displayed by the ecclesiastical corporations. For it must not be forgotten that the political attitude assumed by the religious orders-as has been recently acknowledged by the Bishop of Amiens in his pamphlet on "La Crise Religieuse "-was aggressive; it furnished a constant incitement to civil war, and demanded measures of repression at the hands of those to whom the defence of the Republic had been intrusted. The action of the Jesuits appeared the most dangerous, and Clause 7 was therefore brought forward as a minimum, and its rejection by the Senate deprived the Government of the time which they wished to gain and brought matters to a crisis.

Under this pressure, the Cabinet determined to apply the laws, and when the second deliberation of the Senate on the Bill took place (March 15) M. de Freycinet made a declaration to that effect. On March 23 decisions were come to as to the mode of deal

ing with the Jesuits and other unauthorised congregations. It was agreed to despatch M. Desprez to Rome to negotiate directly with the Pope; and on the 30th the Journal Officiel published the expected Decrees, the first of which granted the Jesuits three months' grace in which to break up all their establishments in France, whilst by the second all unauthorised congregations were summoned, within the same space of time, to apply for authorisation. To this end it was necessary that they should declare the names and numbers of their members, the amount of their property, of their revenues, and of their expenses; it was also necessary that they should give in a copy of their rules and regulations approved by the Bishops of the dioceses in which any branches of the association were maintained, and declare themselves subject to their authority in all spiritual things.

Before the week was out (April 4) it was decided by the congregations that they would neither apply for authorisation nor communicate the rules and regulations by which their associations were bound; a violent agitation against the Decrees began; and it was foreseen that the three months which had to elapse before their execution would be employed in contriving every possible means of resistance. Attempts were at once made to obtain a manifestation of adverse opinion from the conseils généraux, then sitting, and about twelve or fifteen were "saisis de vœux contre les décrets," but in each case the prefects refused to admit the legality of the vote, meeting it by the previous question; and when, on May 4, the hostile interpellation of M. Lamy, a strongly Catholic member of the Left Centre, gave the Chamber an opportunity of distinctly pronouncing its judgment on the question, the order of the day demanded by M. de Freycinet was promptly carried by a majority of 362 to 137.

In the Senate, feeling of course pronounced itself with almost equal strength in the contrary direction. In the course of the same month M. Léon Say-who had left Paris at the end of April, having accepted the post of Ambassador to London in the hope of negotiating a fresh commercial treaty with England-came forward as a candidate for the Presidentship of the Upper House, then vacant by the resignation of M. Martel. He stood as the avowed adversary of Clause 7, as well as all similar legislation, and to this fact he owed his success, for on May 25 he was elected in spite of the efforts made by the Government to secure the return of M. Le Royer.

It was now more than ever certain that every measure of reform large enough to satisfy the demands of the vast majority in the country, and to obtain the support of the Chamber of Deputies, would be steadily obstructed by the Senate, and in the teeth of this difficulty the Government was forced to go on with its work. The long-promised Bill regulating the right of public meeting had been passed by the Chamber on the 15th. On the 30th M. Cazot, Minister of Justice, introduced the Bill embodying the changes