The following words will be an attempt to analyse the cause of the Cartesian Doubt, which, in our opinion, still lives as an intellectual disease in some of the noblest minds of our age.

1. It is our conviction that the universe and man are wholes or unities. Indeed each in its own way and both when united are such wholes or unities that any separation of a part is fatal to the whole. To exemplify: the laws of ethics will be found to be, in the end, sound economic laws. Theft, if not repressed by a commonwealth, will in the end destroy the commonwealth. Or again, the laws of mathematics, if denied, will mean the denial of the laws of psychology. Or the denial of ‘Thou shat not commit adultery’ will spread contagious disease. Or again, voluntary individual poverty will increase communal wealth.

2. Moreover, as man is a moral unity as well as an intellectual unity, man’s intellectual acts may be moral acts. Hence what is intellectually possible may be morally wrong; even as some acts, such as deliberate drunkenness, which are physically possible, may be intellectually harmful.

3. Man, like every other created being, is an imperfect being. Not only is he imperfect in being but in acting.

Moreover, since man can act deliberately some of his defective acts may be deliberate. But as man is master of his deliberate acts by his will, man’s deliberate defective acts, of body or soul, are moral faults. Acts attributable to the will are chargeable to the will.

Monsieur Fernand Gastebois, Mayor of St. Anonyme, was a Catholic and a Liberal. This feat may cause no flutter in the Nordic hearts of those for whom this story is intended, no quandaries in Nordic minds accustomed to distinguish between the claims of Peter and Caesar with untroubled equability. But in Lower Normandy in the years before the Great War, it took some doing to strike the balance between religion and politics of this particular shade; and the Mayor of St. Anonyme undoubtedly did it, with one unfortunate lapse which it is my business to relate.

A historian versed in the internecine bickers of France would doubtless be able to acquaint you with the springs of the situation. I, a mere looker-on, am not so fortunate and can only guess at the source of my hero’s difficulties. On the political side a Liberal is undoubtedly a fiercer beast in France than elsewhere. Horrid implications of Revolution hang about him. The rustle of innumerable Trees of Liberty is ever in his ears. In other lands such symptoms are tactfully given a Catholic turn and in the Liberty of the Sons of God your Nordic Liberal finds refreshment, light and peace. In France he is merely relegated to the left and kept there in the name of consistency, a false Latin god who did one of his worst pieces of work when he established as an anticlerical the kindly, pious and lovable Monsieur Gastebois.

If a year ago anyone had ventured to predict that the name of Daniel O’Connell could have aroused real national enthusiasm in Ireland, and among the Irish population of Great Britain, even in connection with the centenary of Catholic Emancipation, he would almost certainly have been told with complete conviction that O’Connell’s popularity in Ireland was dead for all time. Yet the demonstrations during the past few months in Ireland especially have shown such a sudden and overwhelming revival of his fame and of the deep affection with which he will always be regarded as long as the Irish tradition endures, as has amazed everyone who has watched the progress of the centenary celebrations.

I can speak only of what I saw myself during the week of celebrations in Cork, which, coming after the immense celebrations in Dublin, could scarcely be expected to repeat the extraordinary enthusiasm that the Dublin celebrations had aroused. Yet the demonstrations in Cork were on a scale which it is not easy to imagine. The High Mass in a great open space surrounded by hills attracted a vast concourse of people, which not only overflowed the two great fields which had been thrown into one, but filled all the slopes of the heights that overlooked the scene. The whole city was decorated with flags and banners and religious emblems, to an extent scarcely ever seen even in towns on the Continent, with centuries old traditions of public decoration. The large theatre was taken for three nights during the week, and on each of the three evenings the house was packed with people who paid for their seats, since the gallery only was open to free admission. On each occasion the chief event was a lecture on some aspect of Daniel O’Connell’s life’s work.

With the signing of the Lateran Treaty, the two parties of the ‘Blacks’ and the ‘Whites’ have disappeared from the Roman aristocracy. When, in 1870, the temporal power of the Popes over Rome ceased to exist, the Roman aristocracy could not forget its origin, and maintained with dignity an attitude of fidelity and respect towards the Papacy. The princely families of that time—and nearly all of them still exist—owed, with very rare exceptions, their own rise to the Papacy. It is certain that already in the seventeenth century the feudal nobility of the Middle Ages had disappeared. The few families which descended from them, such as Colonna, Caffarelli, Orsini, Conti, Massimo, Savelli, Publicola-Santacroce, while unable to consider themselves created by the Popes, had received from them in later times so many benefits that they were much on a level with those who owed their greatness exclusively to the circumstance of having seen one of their own blood on the Throne of St. Peter. Such was the case of the greater number: Borghese, Barberini, Aldobrandini, Odescalchi, Ottoboni, Altieri, Boncompagni-Ludovisi, Rospigliosi, Chigi, and Braschi. There were Papal families who did not live in Rome, such as the Corsini, returned to Florence, the Carafa, and the Pignatelli, re-established at Naples. In the list of the Roman Princes one also found the Ruspoli, Antici-Mattei, Lante, Cenci-Bolognetti, Sforza-Cesarini, Giusiniani-Bandini, Doria-Pamphili, and Del Drago, promoted from the marquisate to the principality on the occa-sion of a conspicuous marriage, and finally the Torlonia, the last-comers, who had gained the coat-of-arms and the closed coronet by services rendered to the Pontifical State.

Last September I had occasion to refer, in an Irish paper, to certain impressions a recent stay in Belgium had left in my memory. At that time Belgians were particularly interested in the so-called Louvain Controversy, which centred round a Latin inscription that the American architect of the New Library in Louvain, with singular lack of restraint, desired to impose on the building to the confusion of all wicked Germans and to the greater glory of all good Americans. The grandiloquent inscription was meant to crown his labours on this field of Flanders ten years after the close of the Great War. I noted some extraordinary features in the reactions of Belgian public opinion in this connection. The controversy, I had then reason to believe, was at an end. I was mistaken. According to the latest information from Belgium, the inglorious struggle has been renewed, to the disgust, we may be sure, of all true lovers of culture, not only in Belgium, but in America and the world over. One would like to know more of the reactions of public opinion in America on the issue that has quite recently been the subject of legal proceedings in Louvain, which have resulted in the American plaintiff being non-suited. But to come back to my own impressions of Belgium last year.

How Belgium has changed with the times. What, no doubt, will especially strike the traveller, who has known Flanders before the War, will be the rapid transformation that has taken place, not merely in the face of the country but in the very mind and spirit of the people. True, Bruges remains unchanged. Under the shadow of her belfry, lulled with sounds of sweetest melody, dreaming only of the past and heedless of the future, she slumbers to-day as peacefully as ever.

It has been said that on the whole it is more important that the law should be certain than that it should be just. Perhaps it is by a similar process of reasoning that criminologists are led to aver that it is the certainty of punishment following the crime in a short space of time rather than the amount of punishment which provides the chief element in its deterrent effect.

The law prior to 1925 relative to the authority of the father over the religious education of his children was certain. It was also, on the whole, just. Difficulties arose from time to time in its application, but at least there was some fixed law to be applied. It will be well, therefore, to consider this law and afterwards to attempt to understand what alterations have been made by the Guardianship of Infants Act, 1925.

The Law of England may be classified under two headings, Common Law and Statute Law. Common Law is the Law of decided cases—case law. It finds its authority in the fiction that such law always existed and to such pre-existing law the judges appeal. In fact, of course, case law is judge-made law.

The position of the father at Common Law was peculiar. The absolute dominion of the father, the ‘patria potestas’ of Roman Law, was not given to him. He had no power over life and death. But almost every other power was his. Moreover, such paternal rights were not counter-balanced by corresponding duties.