25 DECEMBER 1880, Page 3

The French Senate, on Tuesday, gave the Government a sharp

rebuke. M. Herold, Prefect of the Seine, thought him- self entitled, under the law, to remove all crucifixes and religious emblems from the elementary schools of Paris. With that indifference to the religious feeling of others which is the most offensive specialty of the French Radical, he sent the police to take them away during school-hours; the police were very rough, and emblems considered sacred, at all events by all the children's mothers, were carted away as hi mber, and some broken in the pro- cess. M. Buffet, who led the attack, remonstrated, and though M. Herold explained that his orders had been misunderstood, the Senate passed a vote of censure by 150 to 35. M. Herold resigned, but his resignation will not, it is believed, be accepted. The incident displays a- spirit of blundering intolerance, and will only increase the impression among Frenchmen that the schools of the future are not to be neutral, but aggressively atheistic. The crucifixes did no more harm than the crosses on steeples do in England, and interfered no more with religious liberty. Are the physicists, if they ever got a majority here, to take the crosses down, as offensive to freedom of thought?,