The agitation produced by M. Combes's order to close all
unauthorised schools by the agbncy of the police spreads rapidly in France. Most of the schools closed are girls' schools; they are, for reasons stated elsewhere, very popular; and in many districts the people are almost ready to defend the nuns who manage them by force. In country town after country town the magistrates have been compelled to call out gendarmes to support the police, and even then have occasionally failed from their own unwillingness to use violence to their respectable opponents. The resist- ance is most violent in Paris, where the Nationalists have taken up the question, and the police, being openly defied, have been forced into making a multitude of arrests. The mobs even threaten the President's residence, which is now specially guarded. The contention of the Opposition is that a pledge given by M. Waldeck-Rousseau has been broken, and that the schools ought to have been closed by legal process. Even newspapers friendly to the Government affirm this view, and it is quite certain that if M. Combes does not yield he will have a boiling-hot Session. And yet if he does yield he will find his own majority slip away, French Radicals demanding before all things a strong-willed leader. He has made a bad blunder.
