[3] M. Turquet ran in September in the first arrondissement of the Seine against M. Yves Guyot, and there was no election. At the election in October the Government proclaimed M. Yves Guyot elected by a small majority.
'I answered him,' said M. Fleury, 'that what he said was very fine, and that the friend of Fourier, Victor Considérant, had said it before him. What I wanted to know, however, was, what the Boulangists proposed to do with the Catholics, the believers, in France should the General get into power.'
'We shall begin,' said M. Turquet, 'by suppressing the budget of worship. We shall do this to satisfy the blockheads who are a noun of multitude.
'But we shall restore, in another shape, to the clergy the indemnity which is certainly due to them. We shall give the bishoprics either a fixed sum, or a revenue proportional to the population of each bishopric, so that the people may receive gratuitously the offices of religion. This is a public service, and it shall be remunerated as it ought to be. As to the Religious Orders, they shall have full liberty to constitute themselves, to educate children, to care for the sick and infirm, so long as they keep within the limits of the common law. All property in mortmain shall be suppressed. A community of teachers, for instance, may own the college necessary for the students, but not a forest adjoining that college.'
To M. Fleury's natural question how the college should be maintained, M. Turquet replied, 'You know as well as I do, that wealth no longer consists in real estate alone. You can now carry in your pocket a fortune in bonds payable to the bearer. The Religious Orders may own these, like other people. A dozen of us in the Chamber hold these views. You seem to think us Utopianists. But General Boulanger will make it possible for us to apply these ideas!'
If General Boulanger and M. Turquet really imagine these views to be 'American,' it would be instructive for them to look into the masterly protests of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, against the doctrines of Mr. Henry George as adopted and expounded by Father McGlynn. The Catholic Church in the United States holds its own property, real and personal, and manages it to suit itself. It would be interesting to see an attempt made in the legislature of an American State, to carry through a law like the decrees issued in France in 1881, forbidding curates and vicars to receive legacies left to them for the benefit of the poor in their parishes, or to distribute to the poor sums left to the Bureau of Public Charity, with an express proviso that they should be distributed by the clergy of the place.