y out of their own pockets
570,383_l._ against 93,000_l._ paid annually out of their own pockets by
the taxpayers of Great Britain for their monarchical sovereign,
eighty-six lords-lieutenant, a Viceroy of Ireland, and thirty-two
lieutenants of the Irish counties. From the point of view of the
taxpayers, this would seem to lend some colour to Lord Beaconsfield's
contention, that economy is to be found on the side of the system which
rewards certain kinds of public service by 'public distinction conferred
by the fountain of honour.'

The threadbare witticism about the Bourbons of 1815, who had learned
nothing and forgotten nothing, may well be furbished up for the benefit
of the Republicans who now control the Third French Republic. However
true it may, or may not, have been of the Comte de Provence and the
Comte d'Artois, Henri IV., who was certainly a Bourbon of the Bourbons,
had a quick wit at learning, and upon occasion also a neat knack of
forgetting. He thought Paris well worth a mass, heard the mass, and got
Paris.

It was not necessary for the Republicans of the Third Republic, after
the formidable lesson which France read them at the elections in 1885,
to hear mass themselves. They were perfectly free to persist and to
perish in their unbelief, and, like the hero of Sir Alfred Lyall's 'Land
of Regrets,'

'Get damned in their commonplace way.'

All that Christian France asked of them in 1885 was that they would
leave their fellow-citizens as free to hear mass as they themselves
were free not to hear it. They had only to let the religion of the
French people alone, to respect the consciences and the civil liberty of
their countrymen, and the tides that were rising against them, and the
Republic because of them, must inevitably have begun to subside.

The hostility between the Church and the Republic in France is
absolutely, in its origin, one-sided. The Church is no more necessarily
hostile to the Republic as a Republic in France, than it is to the
Republic as a Republic in the United States or in Chile, or in Catholic
Switzerland. The Church can be made hostile to a Republic by persecution
and attack just as it can he made hostile in the same way to a monarchy.
Neither Philippe le Bel nor Henry the Eighth was much of a Republican.

But the Republicans of the Third Republic, in 1885, would learn nothing
and forget nothing. They met the protest of millions of voters in France
with a renewed virulence of An