purely commercial programme, has made a new and clean-cut line of cleavage in British politics and has brought about one of the most remarkable political situations which England has seen within the last fifty years.
There is one type of problem to be found in almost every country in Europe from which happily we are in America altogether free. It has to do in one form or another with the relations between Church and State. It will be more clearly comprehended how great a blessing it is for us to be free from such controversies when something is understood of the bitterness, the blind sacrifice of general good, and the countless obstacles in the way of political progress which these struggles engender.
The most striking instance of such a problem, and one with a phase particularly unfamiliar to us, is the French clerical question. In every European country there is more or less state support of the Church, and that has everywhere resulted in the relations between the Church and State forming at times the subject of bitter controversy. Not only has the one absorbing political question in France for several years been the suppression of the religious orders, but in Italy the strained relations between the Vatican and Quirinal form always an important feature of the situation. In Italy the problem reaches down into the very roots of political life, and must for a long time have a profound effect on the national development, presenting as it does a controversy of the first importance at every election and at every session of Parliament.
A majority of the most intelligent and best meaning voters of France believe that the life of the republic has been in peril. The general attitude of the Church, and particularly the character of the teaching of the religious orders, are the sources of this supposed danger. Nearly half of the youth of France have, even in recent years, received instruction in clerical schools. The belief is firmly fixed in the minds of more than half of the voters that this instruction has tended to raise up enemies of France.
The struggle against the powerful religious orders is by no means a new one there. When the present Government came into office, with Waldeck-Rousseau as Premier, the particular mandate which it had from the voters was to curb the power of the religious orders, and especially to restrict their rights to teach. Curiously the law which Waldeck-Rousseau framed in 1901 almost exactly duplicated one which had been passed a hundred and fifty years ago. The orders flourished in spite of a century and a half of restrictive legislation. When the present Government began its campaign of repression, there were 325,000 members of the orders. They held real estate valued at more than a billion francs, and one of the complaints against them that particularly appealed to the small land-owner was that so vast a property had almost completely been withdrawn from productive usefulness. The personal wealth of the orders was so great it would be difficult to estimate it. Its extent is illustrated by the fact that when the prosecution became severe the sales of their French Government securities were great enough to be the main factor in a market decline that was regarded almost as a national calamity.
A feature of the situation that has been particularly trying has been the unstinted use of this wealth in elections to secure the success of clerical candidates, or rather, to compass in any way possible the defeat of the Republicans.
The relations between Church and State in France are defined by a concordat which stands to-day as Napoleon drew it. Catholics, Protestants and Jews all receive allowances from the state, although the Catholic Church receives 41,000,000 francs of the 43,000,000 of such church subsidies.
The student of French institutions finds the living genius of Napoleon in many phases of government to-day. He seems less like a deposed ruler against whose system of politics nearly a century of effort has been directed than like a vigorous sovereign absent from France on a brief vacation. The influence of Napoleon, in the stamp he left on French institutions, seems after the vicissitude of succeeding monarchy, empire, and republic, and the passing of nearly a century greater than that of any living man. And so this concordat, which he drew in 1801, and which has passed unchanged through succeeding forms of government, has remained to become the chief problem of French politics more than a century after it was signed. The concordat re-established the legal ex-