204 BAILLT. 



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. 



" I declare," wrote the Mayor of Paris on the 5th of 

 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. 



" I 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 



