THE PRESENT POSITION OF CATHOLICS IN FPtANCE. J 79 



papacy and the clergy have been able to threaten governments, 

 to disturb the civil order, to impede public policy, and they have 

 done this by influencing illiterate or semi-educated voters ; but 

 they have never been able to legislate directly, or to assume 

 the responsibilities and power of othce. Every election shows 

 a decrease in the clerical and reactionary parties, not only in 

 the Chambers, but in the departmental, the municipal, and the 

 communal councils ; a decrease, not merely in those who are 

 elected, but a more significant shrinkage in those who vote. 

 The reactionary parties are disappearing fast, even in those 

 backward districts which used to be the strongholds of 

 clericalism. This process has gone on steadily for the greater 

 part of a century, and during the last forty years with an 

 ever-growing rapidity. At present, the various reactionary 

 parties are a neghgible quantity in the legislature, and they 

 seem tending to extinction in the electorate. France may thus 

 be contrasted with Belgium, let us say, where liberals and 

 clericals are almost equally balanced, and both sides are able 

 to gain majorities, and form administrations. Though it should 

 be added that this result is only obtained in Belgium, so far as 

 the clericals are concerned, by a manipulation of the franchise 

 which is not likely to be permanent. 



jS'ow the conclusions which I draw, with regard to France, 

 are either that the roman catholics are a small and ever- 

 diminishing fraction of the people ; or that their leaders have 

 not sense enough to organise the forces which they might 

 control ; or, granting the existence of such forces, then the bulk 

 of the roman catholics are either apathetic, or they are out of 

 sympathy with the policy and aims of their hierarchy, and above 

 all of Eome. I think there is something to be allowed for in 

 these two last reasons ; but I hold that my first conclusion is 

 entirely true, and that it explains the whole situation. Out of 

 the 38,000,000 or so, of the French population in France, only a 

 dwindling minority is even nominally catholic, and of that 

 minority again only a still smaller section are practising and 

 contributing to their religion. The actual numbers are not 

 easily computed. Spain, with a population of 16,000,000, is 

 given, by certain ultramontane authorities, only 4,000,000 of 

 practising catholics, one quarter of the population. This is 

 thought by many observers to be too large. In any case, the 

 proportion in France is certainly much lower than in Spain; even 

 when the figures are increased by those multitudes who, for 

 domestic or social reasons, are christened, married, and buried 

 by the clergy, but who have no other dealings with the church. 



