itiate the scheme, in which
case France would have lost the artistic achievements of M. Carolus
Duran.

The house in the Via del Vantaggio I believe still makes a part of the
'pious foundation,' and the municipality of Lille has very sensibly
added a yearly sum of 800 francs to the 1,600 francs allotted under the
will of the Chevalier Wicar to each beneficiary, together with a
travelling outfit of 300 francs.

Coming back from the Musee to breakfast in my very comfortable hotel
near the _gare_, I found there awaiting me M. Grimbert of Douai, who had
most obligingly come over to show me what the friends of religion and of
liberty are doing in Lille to prove that the religious sentiment is not
'dead' in this part of France, and that the Christians of French
Flanders do not intend to let their children be 'laicised' into the
likeness of M. Jules Ferry and M. Paul Bert, without an effort to
prevent it.

The Department of the Nord has long been conspicuous in France for the
number and the excellence of its educational institutions. The
statistics collected by M. Baudrillart show that it stands side by side,
in this respect, with the Department of the Seine. Of the 663 communes
which make up the Department of the Nord, only three in 1881 were
without a school. The department contains 1,680,784 inhabitants. Of
these, considerably more than one-third, or 680,951, live in the 17
cantons and 129 communes of the arrondissement of Lille, which includes
of course the city, and here we find 340 public schools, 1,038 classes
for instruction, and 116 free educational establishments. Over against
this organisation of education must be set a very notable development of
intemperance. I do not infer this from the extraordinary amount of
beer-drinking which goes on in the Nord, to the extent, according to M.
Baudrillart, of 220 bottles a year to every man, woman, and child in the
department, against 170 in the Ardennes and 153 in the Pas-de-Calais.
For, after all, it may be doubted whether habitual drunkenness is much
more common in beer-drinking than in wine-drinking countries; and there
can be no question, I think, that it is much less common in countries in
which wine is abundant and cheap, than in countries in which wine is an
imported luxury. But the consumption of alcoholic liquors is apparently
on the increase in this great department.

At the beginning of this century, long before Lille and Roubaix had
begun to draw into their