mselves, or were registered, as Catholics,
580,707 as Protestants, 40,439 as Israelites, and 81,951 as 'not
professing any form of religion.'

Yet I suppose that, if the eminent public man who saw, as in a vision,
these five millions of registered atheists marching to the assault of
Christianity in France were to announce their existence as a fact to a
large public meeting in some great English provincial city to-morrow, we
should have leaders in some of the English journals a day or two
afterwards prognosticating the immediately impending downfall of all
religion in France. Our modern democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
have made such rapid and remarkable progress of late years in the art of
forming opinions, that if Isaac Taylor could come back to the earth he
left, not so very long ago, he would hardly, I think, recognise the
planet.

The fashion of taking it for granted that the whole world is fast going
over to the gospel of ganglia and bathybius, of _vox populi et praeterea
nihil_, is not confined to the 'fanatics of impiety' in France. I have
heard it seriously stated in a London drawing-room by another public man
of repute within the last year, that he believed 'Mr. John Bright and
Mr. Gladstone were the last two men who would ever cite the Christian
Scriptures as an authority in the House of Commons.'

The uncommonly good English of the Christian Scriptures may perhaps
constitute an objection to their free use in addressing popular
political assemblies. But, admitting this, I hesitate to accept the
statement. That it should have been made however, and made by a man of
more than ordinary ability, is perhaps a thing to be noted.

But I revert to France.

As the time drew near for the Legislative elections of 1889, the
Republicans in power began to perceive that their methods had not been
crowned with absolute success. The awkward corner caused by the enforced
resignation of President Grevy had indeed been turned, because the
Constitution of the Third Republic provides for the election of the
President by the Assembly. But it is one thing to play a successful
comedy in the Assembly with the help of what in America is called 'the
cohesive power of the public plunder,' and quite another thing to get a
satisfactory Chamber of Deputies re-elected by the people of France
after four years of irritating and exasperating misrule. Much was
expected from the dazzling effect upon the popular mind of the Universal