a dogmatic attitude in order to save their positions from disaster. Internationalism they call roundly treason. By many among them all tendencies toward collectivism are denounced in unsparing terms. The republican alliance with the moderate socialists has been repudiated so soon as it was rendered unnecessary by success at the polls. So that it becomes easy to understand the outburst of Urbain Gohier, one of the chief of the imprisoned anti-militarists, when he exclaims: "Did not the Inquisition punish heresies with awful sentences pronounced in the name of orthodoxy? Was I not a heretic since I separated myself from governmental orthodoxy in certain essential matters? Is it not the duty of the French Republic to defend itself, just as does the Roman Church, against new ideas?"1

Thus French life and thought remain in an unsettled condition. Notwithstanding recent progress toward stability, they are passing through successive critical stages in the endeavor to reach a state of equilibrium. The question therefore arises, What is the issue of the process to be? On the political side the answer to this question is simpler than it is in the sphere of morals and religion. For the republic has more and more gained strength as the reactionary parties have shown their unfitness to guide in national affairs. Under firm, if somewhat drastic, leadership, its partisans have secured control of the army, have effected the separation of church and state, have ended the Dreyfus scandal, and at the last elections gained a victory which has established them in a position of authority and power. It is possible—although at present it does not seem probable—that France may some day risk the experiment of a constitution based on collectivistic principles. With characteristic audacity she may work out before the eyes of the world the venture of a socialistic state. But the danger of a royalist or imperialistic restoration has so far faded into the background that it is hardly going too far to term it definitely over. In matters spiritual the case is different. The real division of the country, says Hanotaux, once more, concerned the question of religion. The remark applied in the first instance to the years succeeding the war; but the conclusion continues to hold good today,

'The Independent, July 13, 1906, p. 76.

since the varieties of religious opinion in France represent in an acute form the divided condition of modern thought at large. The conservatives are for the most part Catholics-by virtue of political allegiance even when they are not influenced by religious motives of a personal kind. Among the moderate republicans are found a few liberal Catholics or representatives of French Protestantism, and a few theists or theo-philanthropists, but chiefly freethinkers of the more tolerant type. On the left come the Freemasons, the Socialists and, further still, the militant atheists, who seek the destruction of all religious creeds.

One July night we stood on the border between the Normandy and Brittany of earlier days. It was a pleasant summer evening, sweet and fair, as nights in northern France are wont to be in summer time. The chatter of the tourist crowd was ended. The few lingering travelers stood in silence, watching the Mont Saint Michel in the fading evening light. From the bronze Saint Michel at its summit to the village huddled at its base the mount rose nobly against the sky. There was the abbey church, crowning the fortress and the secular buildings of the pile beneath. There was the parish church, in part hewn out from the rock on which the abbey stands, and filled, we knew, with banners hung by the faithful pilgrims of this later age. There where the tourist enters, where the servants gather, where the touts and porters struggle for the unwary traveler's coin-at the level ground, amid whatever of sordidness our modern life brings to the ancient place even there the entrance gate and the beginning of the encircling walls served to remind one of the life of other days. And so the scene before us seemed a figure of the land at large. Here was the best remaining of the old régime. Here, rising in the twilight, was the shadow of the France of history. Nay, here, in the splendid symbol, stood France itself-la vieille France, the France of literature, of religion, of work, of art; the France which had known military grandeur, which had bred heroes of the cloister and of mission journey as well as leaders on a hundred stricken fields; the France which in letters as in power had dominated Europe till toward the opening of the Revolutionary strife. Yet even here reminders of the present conflict were not to be avoided. Within

these fortress walls this same sweet summer night, beside the street which leads up to the abbey gate, the traveler might find clear evidence of the unrest which is distracting France today. In the name of the French republic, the notice ran, and in accordance with the vote of the Chamber of Deputies, there shall be placarded in every commune of France the speech of M. Briand reporting the bill for the separation of church and state, and the vote of each deputy on the passage of said measure. Thus at the Mont Saint Michel itself which Frenchmen visit as though it were a patriotic shrine, and where they forget something of their usual political acerbity, the turmoil of the conflict makes itself apparent.

What is the issue to be? The clerical reactionary finds no hope for France except in a return to the unquestioning ecclesiastical allegiance of former times. The radical extremist is sure that all religious belief, like all metaphysical speculation, all thought of any and every kind which seeks to penetrate beyond the limits of time and sense, has been outlawed by the progress of the age. And since France is the torch-bearer of the nations, it is hers to take the lead in this, the final emancipation of the mind. But the present writer is constrained to acknowledge that he is in possession of no such confident answer. A complete return to the ecclesiasticism of the old régime seems impossible for modern France. On the other hand, it may well be doubted whether the French culture of the future is to be entirely agnostic. And again, as one ponders over the problem, insistent memories return of what he himself has seen. Memories of humble parish priests and faithful worshipers, of wayside shrines, of reverent processions on saints' days or at the feasts. Above all these comes back the recollection of another summer evening and the experiences it brought. The scene is now no longer in the western provinces, but near to Paris and the center of French culture, in the cathedral town of Chartres. Impatient to renew acquaintance with the minister we had wandered forth at nightfall, content to view the exterior of the edifice until it should grow too dark to see at all. But we found that there were lights within the building and when we reached the portal the door was open, and so we ventured in. And, having entered, we felt the influence of the ancient faith despite

all modern change. Above us stretched away the lines of nave and transept, the recesses of the vaulting scarce revealed from out the darkness. At one's side it seemed there knelt another human figure, and you discreetly gazed until a white-coiffed nun appeared, praying with other forms than yours, but understood among these fine surroundings. Anon a chant was heard, floating far down the church beyond the choir; and then a sound of moving feet, which at each renewal increased and came the nearer. At length the worshipers appeared, bearing tapers in their hands in token of their service and to guide their footsteps through the gloom. They were making the stations of the cross, a little band of poor folk, their faces and their figures worn in the stress of life's sorrows and life's battle. But in the great cathedral, at close of summer eve, in the midst of the strife which bids fair to tear away from France the support of that great faith which has been her prop and stay since the days of her earlier kings, their worship seemed to voice the spirit of supernal truth. "For, "Our beloved France," it seemed to say, "in you too, our country and our home, in spite of all the fierceness of the storm, religion evermore abides."

And this suggestion may stand as the best attainable answer to the question which has been proposed. Apart from incalculable political revolutions the success of the republican form of government in France seems reasonably assured. In like manner there are possibilities of intellectual and moral change which no one can foresee, but which may alter, as often in the past, the whole spiritual aspect of an epoch. But, these aside, two forms of spiritual development lie open before the France of the future. In the one case the secular spirit may fully dominate the nation. Then the great experiment will in fact be tried, with an outcome beyond all prophecy except that it will be big with chances of disaster. Or, under the beneficent rule of a government republican in fact as well as name, civil and religious liberty alike may flourish. Then French culture will remain divided, but faith will not cease to play its part in the development of the nation.

A.C. Armstrong.

ART. VIII. OUR ENGLISH SPELLING OF YESTERDAY -WHY ANTIQUATED?

ness.

THERE is a marked distinction between spoken and written language. In writing a system of conventional symbols is adopted to represent speech. At best such a system is ill-devised and incomplete. In many cases, as in our own tongue, the written language fairly bristles with innumerable inaccuracies and inconsistencies and with flagrant absurdities of orthography. Of course the written language is only an imperfect attempt to represent graphically the spoken speech and is a mere shadow of the real substance, of the living tongue. No system of symbols has been adopted which represent with absolute accuracy and adequacy a spoken language at all periods of its history. It is a matter of extreme doubt whether any living language is now, or ever has been, represented by its alphabet with absolute accuracy and precision. It is quite probable that no living European tongue is today represented by its alphabet with more than approximate accuracy and completeAs for the dead languages, like the classics, we may be reasonably certain that neither the Greek nor the Latin alphabet correctly and adequately represented those respective languages at all periods of their history. The body of Latin literature now extant is but a desiccated, lifeless mummy of the living, pulsating speech which was heard upon the lips of the ancient Romans. Of that robust and vigorous Latin vernacular, as employed by Cicero and Virgil in all its purity, we have only embalmed specimens, preserved to us in the stirring rhetorical periods of that prince of Roman orators and in the stately rhythmical hexameters of that famous Mantuan bard. Quantum mutatum ab illo-how unlike the spoken language, how unlike the burning eloquence which used to thrill the populace in the ancient Roman Forum! Small wonder we are accustomed now to speak of the tongue of the ancient Roman and of the tongue of the ancient Hellene as a "dead language," for those noble tongues perished, truly, centuries ago, when they ceased to be spoken by the inhabitants of Rome and Athens respectively.