months, and continues to be annoying. Ultramontanes crow and their papers daily celebrate the "Victory of the Vatican," and the "Confusion of the Government," but this chortling does not in itself matter; the extreme Left has grumbled at the temporizing policy of the Cabinet but has not yet been actively hostile. The Government, having pocketed the rebuff of the Pope's move, can afford to wait now. Can the Catholic public also afford to wait? Most probably, for come what may, the churches will not be closed, and services will continue to be held somehow or other, though how exactly it is to be done is still doubtful. But can the Roman Catholic Church of France afford to wait? Can it afford anything at all just now? Has it now any means, ideas, policy, or definite being of its own? Does it know whither it would go or does it want to go anywhere? Has it a present, much less a future? Is it a Church any longer? One cannot tell; not a French priest in his heart of hearts could swear to any positive and definite hope for the practical future of his Church now. He knows only that he knows nothing. The Vatican has successfully thrown the entire Church into utter confusion. The Pope has played pretty passes against the French State, which has been hit, but easily recovers, not being very vulnerable. The real sufferer is another; the Roman Catholic Church of France pays the piper and will go on paying for long, in many ways. Passive obedience to begin with was very well as a tribute to the master, but it has brought no credit, satisfaction, or benefit to the servants. The Church of France is not more looked up to because it has been constantly and successively stultified in all it attempted or suggested by the Vatican. One may admire its obedience, but its most faithful son cannot admire it for the ill luck which has pursued its every meek endeavor to ar

range for itself a quiet life. The Bishops' elaborate scheme was ignominiously brushed away by the last Encyclical. The Disestablishment Law of 1905 being diabolical would recourse be had to the Law of 1901 on associations without imperilling salvation? The unhappy Cardinal Lecot of Bordeaux formed an association under the 1901 Act, but it appears to be tainted with poisonous emanations from the Act of 1905; he is still struggling to assure Rome that it is pure, and the Government that it is legal. But if it be legal, being an association directly or indirectly proposing to carry on religious worship, it complies with the 1905 Act, and if it do so, it is impure; while if it were not legal according to the 1905 Act, it would also be illegal according to that of 1901, and the Cardinal could not have registered it. M. Briand called Cardinal Lecot a M. Jourdain, who spoke prose without knowing it; but he is more, he is M. Jourdain struggling to prove that his prose is no prose, and speaking more and more prose, as he tries to prove that it is no prose. The Pope's move has been a pretty one, but it has driven the Church of France into a corner of absurdities.

The Act of 1905 being damned, and a Cardinal having played with the Act of 1901 and singed his fingers, there remained the Act of 1881 on public meetings. M. Briand, who has been ever ready to take the first step when the Vatican showed the way since the Encyclical, and has been persistently flouted for his pains, drew up a delightful circular, clear enough for him who ran to read, which reduced the requirements of the law of 1881 to a mere annual formality. After all the Church in France must presumably conform to some law or other, pace the Vatican. A discreet minimum of legality was offered, such as no lay body, hedged in by the surrounding net

work of French law, ever had the chance of accepting, and the French clergy was accepting the surprising boon with an affected standoffishness concealing an amazed joy. A few hours later the Vatican pleasantly proclaims in two curt sentences by telegraph that the law of 1881 is as damnable as those of 1901 and 1905; two archbishops have, as usual, to eat their words and revoke instructions prematurely given to their clergy; the French Government once more receives the rebuff direct, and simultaneously the French Church gets one more knockout blow which sends it staggering and dazed, and which it must take trying to smile. It is a pretty match, but the French Church possibly would prefer not to be the third party on whom all the hits tell most. The Pope's latest score off the French Government of course throws the French Church into worse confusion than ever. Priests are to continue officiating in the churches, but they are strictly bound to officiate illegally; one single step towards lawfulness takes them out of their allegiance to Rome. It is a pretty situation, brought about by the Vatican for the sole joy of placing the French Government in the predicament either of allowing the laws of the country, by which every other public body abides, to become a dead letter for the Roman Catholic clergy alone, or of summoning forty-five thousand priests perhaps twenty-one times a week into the police courts for each Mass said and for consequent misdemeanors punishable by fines or imprisonment never exceeding fifteen francs or five days, however often the offence be repeated. The Vatican apparently is sacrificing the French Church to the satisfaction of paying out the French Government for having brought in the Disestablishment Act before the French Parliament without papal permission. The Church of France

is allowing itself to be sacrificed with a lamblike meekness which would have been unthinkable in the days of Bossuet, whereby one may suppose that the Vatican is only egged on. When France was the eldest daughter of the Church-presumably she is so no longer -the French Church most certainly would have stiffened its neck and would have tinged its filial obedience to the Pope with a care for its own temporal existence. Will the Church now ever rebel? Most probably not. Will French Catholics save it, when the Pope destroys? Three quarters of them will blow colder and colder; the remaining quarter will consist eventually of political Catholics only, who will urge the Church on the same hopeless path of feeble rebellion, futile lawlessness, and sedition without method. The unlucky Church is now gagged, and bound hand and foot to the schemers who have used it for political purposes; the Pope has week by week tightened the bonds in the last four months. Talk of religious war is nonsense in modern France. The Government can expel the sleek, baby-faced Monsignore who had been pleasantly fanning the faint flame of agitation, and who had all the leading French prelates under his podgy thumb. The Government can prosecute a few hundred priests for illegally holding public meetings, i.e., saying mass; it cannot and will not prosecute them all. Nor can it ever apply the article of the code by which servants of a foreign potentate in France may be deprived of French nationality against the body of the French clergy; nor can it close the churches. M. Clemenceau's "you asked for war, you shall have it,” is a figure of rhetoric twice removed from facts.

But if the Government cannot go to war except hyperbolically, what can the French Church do? Absolutely and entirely nothing. It never was as powerless as it is to-day, after four months

of the Pope's tender mercies. The Catholic minority in the country is obviously dwindling: loss of the outward pomp of faith will certainly not increase its numbers, nor will self-imposed outlawry. Catholic and anti-Republican were not exactly synonymous a year ago, but they will be soon if the Pope persists in scoring off the Government; not because Republican Catholics will have gone against the Republic, but because Catholic Republicans will have left the Church in despair. When the Church has become identified completely with an ever diminishing political party, it will have become a sect. Religious War? With what weapons will the Church fight? The beadle will no longer wear his scarlet and gold lace at weddings, only three wax candles will burn on the altars, funeral trappings must be only of the "sixth class" if a priest is to officiate, because henceforth the charges for the beadle's best clothes, for wax candles, and for the hideous eyesores of black and silver hangings, will be the perquisites of the devil's own, the legal sequestrator: these are the deadly measures with which the clergy will carry war into the enemy's camp. It is a pathetic programme. Simultaneously tremendous words accompany futile

acts. The Vicars of St. Ferdinand des Ternes will "defend their lives with every weapon" against the "knives of assassins hired by politicians"-in pleasant, industrious, rich, middle-class Ternes, where money rolls in to the motor trade! The militant clergy has no sense of realities, and priests who have intelligence enough, and would have honesty enough, to cry down melodrama, are gagged by Rome. The RecThe Monthly Review.

tor of St. Pierre da Gros Cuillou in the Rue St. Dominique shrieks: "We swim up to the neck in Anarchy"; truly enough, but not as he meant it. His own meaning is exquisite, when one knows the Rue St. Dominique, where little shops pursue their busy little lives in provincial peace. Anarchy may be anywhere, but not in the Rue St. Dominique, and there seems to be some of it in the Church of France. If the Church look, for the stamina, backbone and organizing brain which it lacks for the fight, to its faithful followers, it is grievously mistaken. In the most religious parts of the country three thousand odd Church "inventories" have just been taken with very few knocks. There may be street rows of course, but there will not be religious war, even if the Vatican should pursue for years its triumphant policy of paying out the French Government. There will be no war and no martyrdom, the blood of women and children will not flow, not even the blood of men, the churches will not be closed, and mass will be said. One single trick, for instance, may save, and in some cases has already saved, the priest's face: the statutory declaration under the 1881 Act, and under the new Act which is the Government's latest mild countermove, may be made by a couple of laymen and he will then be master in his Church and need never be supposed to know why. At all events, whatever device of pious casuistry or legal legerdemain win the day, there must be peace, not war; but a peace without much honor for the Church, which will have been left a weak, shorn, and shrunken Church.

Laurence Jerrold.

Two years ago a considerable sensation was created by the news that a certain Russian sect who had settled in the Canadian North-West, known by the name of Doukhobors, had broken loose, abandoned their farms and set out naked across the prairies in search of the new Messiah. Beyond the fact that the Dominion Government had to take strict measures with them and send out the Mounted Police to round them up and return them to their homesteads, if need be, by force, nothing more was heard of them and even at this present time people so far west as Winnipeg have very erroneous notions concerning these their brother citizens of the Empire. For instance, you will be told that they are a race of religious fanatics who are dull-witted, incapable of prolonged or skilful labor, and a very bad investment for any country in which they settle. The prejudice against them is very strong and usually mixed up with a considerable amount of contempt.

That this should be so is natural, for, in the first place, as refugees from the Russian autocracy they were in the beginning held to be a dangerous anarchical element. Then being men of an alien culture, and incapable of speaking English, they were unable to mingle with the general inflow of emigrants and were led to band themselves into colonies, thereby retaining and reproducing in Canada all the old strange peasant life which they should have left behind them. And, lastly, there was amongst them a certain percentage of the wild, religious, roving element which was the direct outcome of the social conditions of their native land.

Much, therefore, of the ill-feeling

which their advent occasioned was due to misunderstandings arising from their lack of English and their peculiar up-bringing.

In order to form a just estimate of the Doukhobor I visited a colony which had been settled in the country seven years, and which is sufficiently large to be fairly typical of all their settlements; this I found at Canora on the Canadian Northern Railroad.

Canora is a rapidly growing town of only three years of age which owes its beginning to the coming of the railway. The Doukhobors were therefore the first people in this country, being four years ahead of the town, and are to-day very large landowners in that district. On asking the opinion of their Englishspeaking neighbors, I found that no one had a word to say against them, and that for the most part they were praised. Of their hospitality much was said, for any man, no matter what his tongue or nationality, who knocks at a Doukhobor's door is sure of a welcome. It is a religious instinct and principle with them to do all that lies within their power for the stranger and to allow no payment. His horse is taken in, and fed on the best fodder which they can provide, whilst the master is given the run of the house.

very

Men have told me of how on departing they have tried to make some small return by offering money to the children, but they have always been re fused it-a self-denial which would be a very severe test to the English child.

After months of travel in the NorthWest one's eye becomes weary of the low, wooden-built houses of the colonial farmer, and a great longing arises for the quaint red-brick and narrow-gabled homestead of the Midlands. To this monotony the Doukhobor village is an

exception. There is a distinct attempt at the artistic in all his undertakings. The village of which I am about to speak was built upon the slopes of what we should call a glen in Scotland, and was surrounded with a green overgrowth of trees and shrubs. The buildings were long and low, made out of rough-hewn trees plastered over with a mixture of clay, dung and straw, whilst the roofs were made of the same mixture and for the most part overgrown with grass and wild-flowers. Some of the walls of the houses had been painted, and the shutters were decorated with bold floral designs mostly of the sun-flower type. The windows were hung with curtains of bright colors and spotlessly clean. Each cottage stood by itself and was surrounded by a garden containing all manner of vegetables. In the midst of the village one immense barn had been built in which all the farm implements were kept. The fields around the colony were well cultivated and bore heavy crops of wheat and oats promising a big harvest. They were however in no ways like an English cornfield but of many acres and quite open. One reason for this is that all their ploughing is done by steam.

On this particular part of the country the steam-plough has not been much of a success, for the farmers don't know how to handle it properly and are therefore giving it up. Within seven miles of where I write a catastrophe has occurred and a steam-plough is lying, and has been lying, in a morass for the last fortnight. The Doukhobors, however, who are reputed to be so stupid, have made their steam implements a success and continue to use them.

On driving into the village I hailed an old white-haired man and commenced to ask him where I could find some one to show me around, but all he could say was "Me no speak English." He, however, soon found and

brought me some one who could. This new-comer was a big, broadshouldered fellow with a high complexion, blue eyes and flaxen hair-he must have stood at least six feet two. He took off his hat to me (a thing which few men do in the North-West), and shook hands, afterwards kissing my hand. This is the customary mode of greeting with the Doukhobor, save that on meeting one of his brethren he always kisses his cheek. I was very anxious to see them at their religious services, but was told that they only hold their public worship once a day, and that at four in the morning.

This particular settlement consisted of forty farms which were worked in common by the community.

All their earnings are handed over to the head man of their order, Peter Veregan, who invests all the brotherhoods savings for the profit of all. Any differences which may arise are settled among themselves in a religious way, for a Doukhobor makes no use of the civil courts. Indeed, the entire pattern of their lives may be said to be religious and based upon their interpretation of the scriptures. How well the established order of things works amongst them may be tested by the fact that there is no crime amongst them, no drinking, no smoking, and no strong language. Every where that I went I met with the spirit of tranquility and the greeting was always the same-the raised hat and the handshake. They are a people of the Breton type of countenance, broad-faced, with high cheek-bones, eyes far apart and a somewhat flattened nose. They bear the mark of men who have been down-trodden and exploited by one who was stronger than they, but who, having re-asserted themselves, have escaped and found peace.

The women are all dressed in linen stuffs of a subdued color, with white handkerchiefs thrown over their heads