himself in advance, and made himself responsible for it by either a
written or verbal promise. He responds to all these engagements; he
has funds on hand at the maturity of each contract. In 1883, the
bishop of Nancy, in need of one hundred thousand francs to build a
school-house with a work-room attached to it, mentions this to a
number of persons assembled in his drawing-room; one of these puts his
hand in his pocket and gives him ten thousand francs, and others
subscribe on the spot to the amount of seventy-four thousand
francs.[57] Cardinal Mathieu, during his administration, archbishop of
Besançon, thus collects and expends four millions. Lately, Cardinal
Lavigerie, to whom the budget allows fifteen thousand francs per
annum, wrote that he had spent eighteen hundred thousand francs and
had incurred no debt.[58] - Through this initiative and this
ascendancy the bishop becomes a central social rallying-point; there
is no other in the provinces, nothing but so many disjointed lives,
juxtaposed and kept together in an artificial circle prescribed from
above; so that a good many of these, and of most consideration,
gravitate to and group themselves, especially since 1830, around this
last permanent center and form a part of its body; he is the sole
germinating, vivifying, intact center that still agglutinates
scattered wills and suitably organizes them. Naturally, class and
party interests incorporate themselves additionally along with the
Catholic interest which he represents, and his ecclesiastical
authority becomes a political influence; besides his secular and
regular clergy, over and beyond the two thousand five hundred
exemplary or directorial lives which he controls, we see behind him an
indefinite multitude of lay adhesions and devotedness. Consequently,
every government must take him into their calculations, and all the
more because his colleagues stand by him; the episcopacy, banded
together, remains erect in face of the omnipotent State, under the