204 \ BAILLY. 
Bailly’s attention, that he had partly effected it, and that 
no one ever spoke of those odious dens with more elo- 
quence and firmness. 
_*T declare,” wrote the Mayor of Paris on the 5th of 
rd May, 1790, “that the gambling-houses are in my opinion 
a public scourge. I think that these meetings not only 
should not be tolerated, but that they ought to be sought 
out and prosecuted, as much as the liberty of the citizens, 
and the respect due to their homes, will admit. 
““T regard the tax that has been levied from such 
houses as a disgraceful tribute. I do not think that it 
is allowable to employ a revenue derived from vice and 
disorder, even to do good. In consequence of these 
principles, I have never granted any permit to gambling- 
houses; I have constantly refused them. I have con- 
stantly announced that not only they would not be 
tolerated, but that they would be sought out and pros- 
ecuted.” 
If I add that Bailly suppressed all spectacles of animal- 
fighting, at which the multitude cannot fail to acquire 
ferocious and sanguinary habits, I shall have a right to 
ask of every superficial writer, how he would justify the 
epithet of sterile, applied with such assurance to the ad- 
ministration of our virtuous colleague. 
Anxious to carry out in practice that which had been 
largely recognized theoretically in the declaration of 
rights—the complete separation of religion from civil 
law,—Bailly presented himself before the National As- 
sembly on the 14th of May, 1791, and demanded, in the 
name of the city of Paris, the abolition of an order of 
things which, in the then state of men’s minds, gave rise 
to great abuses. If declarations of births, of marriages, 
and of deaths are now received by civil officers in a form 
