minister to leave the kingdom "at once and without éclat." When his secretary objected that Necker's extraordinary popularity was a strong presumption against his obeying this last command; that he had only to show himself, and the people would rise en masse to prevent his flight, Louis replied: "I know Necker; he will guard us against himself; he will obey me scrupulously, and fly without éclat." And he was right. The minister received the letter at three in the afternoon, and quietly put it in his pocket without communicating its contents even to his wife; he dined at the usual hour with some friends already invited; nothing in his appearance or conversation betrayed the slightest emotion during the repast; on leaving the table, he showed the letter of dismissal to Mme. Necker, ordered his carriage, and they went out for a drive; when they were about two hundred yards from the house, he pulled the check-string, and desired the coachman to drive to the nearest post-station. It was not till the following morning that his daughter and his numerous friends knew of his departure. The news electrified everybody. Camille Desmoulins' grand opportunity had arrived. He had already made himself notorious as a leader of malcontents; this afternoon he was drinking with a certain set of them in a café at the Palais Royal-of late a favorite rendezvous of patriots of his type -noisy and blustering, believing in copious libations as the most efficacious proof of patriotism. Desmoulus, on hearing the news, rushed out, pistol in hand, and, jumping on an orange-tree tub, proceeded to harangue the assembled multitude. He was afflicted with a painful stuttering in his speech, but this impediment appears to have been no hindrance to the effect of his oratory;

on the contrary, it gave it a more vehement character, impelling him to wild and passionate gesticulation, by way of helping out his defective. utterance. He spoke with his eyes, his teeth, every member of his body; he would shake out his hair in lionlike fashion, stamp his feet, toss his arms with clenched fists above his head to supply the word his tongue refused to articulate, and the energetic pantomine elicited the sympathy, while it fired the passions, of his hearers. "Citizens!" he cried, "I come from Versailles." (He came from a neighboring café, as we have seen, but what of that?) "Necker is dismissed. This dismissal is the tocsin of S. Bartholomew for all patriots. Before the sun has gone down, we shall see the Swiss and German battalions marching from the Champs de Mars to murder us like dogs. One chance yet remains to us.

To arms! Let us choose a cockade whereby we may know each other." This exordium was covered with thundering salvos by the patriots. "What color shall we choose ?” continued the orator. "Speak, patriots! Select your own flag. Shall it be green, the emblem of hope, or blue-the color of free America, of liberty, and democracy?" A voice from the patriots cried out: “Green, the color of hope!" But the choice was negatived by the voice of popu lar prejudice. Green, it was said, was unlucky. No; they would not have green.

A scene of indescribable tumult followed while the momentous question of the cockade was being canvassed. Finally, by what train of argument history does not record, blue, white, and red were elected to the honor of representing the patriots. They happened to be the colors of the House of Orleans. From the tub which served as a rostrum to the

crator the decree was shouted to the serried ranks around, and all through the gardens it was borne along the colonnade rapid as lightning, swelling, as it went, into a deafening peal that soon reverberated from the boulevards and the thoroughfares of Pars to Versailles. It is said, we know not whether or not on authentic testimony, that while this wild uproar, which terminated in the adoption of his House's colors by the popular party, was going on under his windows, Philip of Orleans, henceforth to be known under the title of Egalité, was coolly looking out at the performance, smoking his cigar, and discussing the probable effect of it ail at Versailles. By the time the whole city was out-of-doors, it was the hour for the performance to begin in the Palais Royal theatre, close by the scene of Camille's rhetorical triumph; other more interesting pieces, beginning with comedy and ending with tragedy, were now to be performed; a band of patriots, with Camille at their head, burst into the theatre, and, rushing on the stage, summarily reversed the programme of the evening. They flung tricolor cockades right and left, and called the spectators to arms. "The audience rose en masse" at the appeal, like a true-born Parisian audience, and, surging from pit and boxes, poured out impetuous and desperate, it knew not well why, at the bidding of Camille Desmoulins. He marched off, with the swelling stream behind him, to the studio of the sculptor Curtius; there the patriots seized a bust of Necker and Philip of Orleans, and carried them in procession through the streets. This was Egalité's official début, as a leader of the Red Revolution. It was at the Palais Royal he was arrested. Here, on the site of its first eruption, the wild demon which he had, in the measure VOL. XVII.-9

of his power, evoked and called up from the smouldering lava depths to the full activity of its satanic life, and flattered and bowed down to, was doomed at the appointed hour of retribution to raise its bloody hand against the regicide, and strike him down. On his way to the guillotine, the car, whether by accident or design, passed under Egalité's old' home. He raised his eyes for a moment to the windows, and, surveying them with an unmoved countenance, turned his glance calmly again upon the yelling crowd.

While the Terror lasted, the Palais. Royal remained untenanted. After the Restoration it was occupied by Louis Philippe while Duke of Or-leans; when the son of Egalité called himself to the throne of his nephew,. he forsook it for the Tuileries, and dur ing the remainder of his reign it was open to the public as an historical monument and museum. On the resurrection of the Empire, the Palais Royal became the residence of Prince Jerome Bonaparte, only surviving brother of Napoleon I. When this last venerable twig fell from the old imperial tree, it continued in the possession of his son, Prince Napoleon. Hither, in March, 1859, he brought his young bride, the Princess Clothilde, daughter of Victor Emmanuel, and there he resided until the memorable summer of 1870, when the disastrous war with Prussia came like a cyclone, and tore up the old tree by the roots, and sent the branches. flying hither and thither over the astonished face of Europe.

The Commune closes our retrospect of Richelieu's palace. The Tuileries and the Palais Royal sent up their petroleum flames together to the soft summer skies where the bright May sun was shining down,. serenely sad, upon the awful spectacle of Paris on fire--a funeral pile where

on were consumed, let us hope never again to rise from their ashes, the Commune itself, and the delusions of the few honest fools, if such there were, who believed in its insane theories. Surely as they fled, scared from their old historic haunts by the blaze and stench of the devilish modern fluid, the ghosts of Richelieu, and Mazarin, and Anne of Austria, and all that band of majestic figures from the unburied past, must have laughed a bitter laugh, wherein horror was not without a note of triumph, as they

looked back upon the ghastly scene. "Our little systems had their day," the dead legislators may have said, one to another, as they stood in the lurid light of the conflagration that illuminated, to the eyes of their disembodied spirit, the far-stretching vistas of the present and the past; "they were all faulty, how faulty we know now with unavailing knowledge, but, compared to this, were they not the Millennium, Eutopia, the ideal of the reign of justice upon the earth?”

THE tendency, to which we have heretofore alluded, to ostracize Catholics, and to take it for granted that this is a Protestant country, to be ruled exclusively by anti-Catholics, has had even a more dangerous and far-reaching effect beyond our borders, and that, too, apparently with official sanction. The popular prejudice has not unnaturally reached and infected the authorities at Washington. We do not allude especially to the present Administration or Congress, for the evil is of long standing; but we have no hesitation in saying that our diplomatic and consular systems as at present conducted are unjust to a very respectable minority of the American people, and are likely to mislead and deceive the nations with which we are on terms of peace and amity. The foreign appointees are, almost without exception, taken from the ranks of non-Catholics and without regard either to the feelings of a large class of our own citizens or the wishes of the people to whom they

are sent. The ministers plenipotentiary to the great powers of Europe have been invariably selected from the ultra Protestant class like Motley; while the numerous consuls. with a few honorable exceptions, have been men of the same way of thinking, according to their limited understanding. When the Holy Father was yet in possession of his dominions, we used to delight in sending him now and then a specimen of a genuine Know-Nothing; and when Spain

Catholic and conservative Spainbegan to feel the Gem of the Antilles slipping from her grasp, we despatched an atheistical filibustero, Soulé, to assure her of our friendship and goodwill. With Catholic countries generally we have acted in the same spirit of contradiction, as if our object were to excite hostility rather than to perpetuate kindness and harmony, as among them, particularly in South America, each legation and consulate habitually formed the nucleus of antiCatholic society. As long as this

blundering-we will not call it by a harsher name-was confined to our European appointments, it mattered little; for the relative condition of Catholics and the sects in this country is there pretty well known, and, the faith of the people being well fixed, prejudice and bigotry, even when protected by the stars and stripes, could do little harm.

It is of the character of our representatives in Turkey, Africa, India, China, and other places in partibus infidelium that we have most reason to complain. These American envoys and consuls seem to become volunteer lay evangelizers; and if, like our friends of the Methodist and Presbyterian missionary societies of this city, they do not succeed in converting the benighted heathen from the error of their ways, they endeavor, by the exercise of all their delegated authority, to thwart and depreciate the labors of those who can the Catholic missionaries from other Countries. Take, for example, India and China, the great missionary fields of the world, containing as they do at least one-half of the whole human race in a comparative state of civilization. The former being a province of Great Britain, it is natural that sectarian missions should receive at least a semi-official recognition and protection from the appointees of the head of the Protestant Church" as by law established"; but even in this respect the English officials have been outdone in zeal and officiousness by our own agents in the Indian Peninsula, as we learn from a late work on that country.* But in China, with its four or five hundred millions of idolaters, the case is different. There the Catholic priest and the devoted Sister of Charity, unsupported by the temporal arm,

Land of the Veda. By Rev. Dr. Butler.

and unawed by threats, torture, and death, have been most active and most successful in advancing the standard of the cross and winning souls to Christ. Their converts are numbered by tens of thousands, and their churches, schools, and orphanages dot the southern and western coasts; while the sectarian missionaries, lacking the sustaining power of the state, have practically done nothing. This has long been a source of much chagrin to the various dissenting proselytizing societies in England and the United States, as it also seems to have been the cause of exasperation to our Minister at Peking, Mr. Frederick F. Low.

That gentleman's mission to China appears to have embraced but three objects, if we except his attempt and absurd failure to bring the Coreans into communication with the outside world. The first of these was the protection of American Protestant missionaries, and them only; the second, to convince the Chinese officials that the United States have nothing to do with Catholics, or, as he is pleased to style them on all occasions, "Romanists"; and the third, to send home false despatches and mistranslated documents.

In looking over the foreign correspondence of our government for 1871, as presented to Congress with the President's Message,* we find that, in October, 1870, Mr. Low, without any authority whatever from Washington, ordered a United States war-vessel from Chefoo to Tungchow, for the sole purpose of returning some Protestant missionaries to the latter place, who, with their usual regard for the first law of nature, had fled from it upon the slightest

Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, transmitted to Congress with the Annual Message of the President, December 4, 1871.