(2) We must remember that when continual violations of the Concordat are alleged as an excuse for the rupture, the Jacobins constantly confound the seventy-five Organic Articles with the seventeen articles of the Convention called Concordat, 1801, which alone was signed by Pius VII.
(3) The suppression of the indemnity _Concordataire_ is, as far as the Catholic clergy are concerned, a partial repudiation of the National Debt. It was recognized as such by laws of 1789, 1790, 1791, 1793, 1801, etc.
This law of pseudo-Separation is not only a law of spoliation, but also of supreme tyranny, in that in the name of Separation, it pretends to regulate minutely the mode of existence of its victims, in future, by special codes, and deprives them of the right to have more than the strictest necessary for a hand-to-mouth existence.
I am convinced that to acquiesce in regard to these “associations of worship” will be to fall into the Government’s trap as the Congregations did when they applied for authorization in 1902. It will only mean retreating before the enemy, and postponing the hour of violent persecution and combat, which must come before the Jacobin-Freemason yoke can be broken.
Year by year, I have foreshadowed and characterized the programme of persecution, spoliation, and arbitrary tyranny which is that of the Judeo-Masonic coterie which governs France, by means of the Socialist vote. We have now reached the second part of this programme.
In 1901 the Associations Bill was, according to Waldeck Rousseau, intended to give legal standing and liberty to the unauthorized as well as to the authorized Congregations. We all know, to-day, how twenty-seven thousand of their schools have been closed, and how the Congregations, simple enough to fall into the Government’s trap by asking for authorization and furnishing inventories of their property, have been robbed of everything and turned adrift.
The inventories now being made in the churches, amid scenes of violence and bloodshed, with the cooperation of the regular army, represent the first step on the road to wholesale spoliation and strangulation. If only the victims would be docile and resigned there would be no trouble whatever. Resistance will compel the operators to be drastic, when they would rather go slowly and surely. The French voters should be consistent. After giving themselves such law-makers, they ought at least not to wince when the laws made by them are put into execution. But this is an incurable idiosyncrasy of the French; they are clear-sighted, energetic, and practical in the administration of their private affairs, but when it comes to politics and government, they are absolutely apathetic and purblind. Any pothouse politician can wheedle them out of their votes, who would find it difficult to coax a sou out of their pockets. All they ask is to be left in peace to attend to their business and pleasures. It is only when the unpleasant practical sides of laws like those of 1902, 1904, and 1905 are brought home to them that the peasant seizes his pitchfork, and the bourgeois his cane, and bloody manifestations occur all over France, as in 1902, 1904, and to-day (1906).