Nor must we forget the devotion of reparation by which the Carmelites have contrived to enrich our gifts with "inestimable pearls." This reparation to the Holy Face covers not only these terrible words, blaspheming the name and the person of our Lord, but also those blasphemous denials of His Divinity, of His Omniscience, of His Omnipotence, so rife in the world at this very time. What Catholic, even if not very pious, has not shuddered, not only at words uttered, but at whole blasphemous sentences printed, put before the young of all classes, defying, as it were, the Omnipotence that can punish, as well as spurning the mercy that redeems, and yet unable, it would seem, to offer any fitting reparation? To such, how grateful will be the opportunity to repair, in some small measure, for the irreverences committed against our Lord. Nor is this reparation to be confined to those who have made their first Communion. The smallest child that can say an "Our Father," or a "Hail Mary," can offer this as a reparation to the Holy Face in behalf of our beloved Pope, Leo XIII., and thus win for itself a grace, blossoming now, to bear fruit in years. to come. We can never calculate the force of impressions made upon. the mind of the young, and what father, what mother, would not secure this impression for good on the susceptible minds of their offspring.

ELIZA ALLEN STAR R.

God Must Have His Place.

It is not only religion—not only true wisdom - but it is men's and nations' interest to give God His place in human affairs and to recognize and adore His presence and His power in the workings of this world. The civilization that is false to Him cannot be beneficial to man. The developments of individuals and peoples which ignore Him must lead straight to destruction. The progress which goes not towards Him, is not progress. Human fabrics, without the Divine cement, must totter. Sink their foundations ever so deep, let them tower ever so high — they must fall. There can be no salvation for the individual without him; there can be no social amelioration without him. Necessary for man isolated, He is necessary for men in their collective capacity.

Mark our words. They sound barsh-but they express the truth. Yes, woe to the nations that forget and ignore God. Are they strong? He can shatter their strength. Are they proud? He can bend their brows to the very dust. Are they prosperous? With a wave of His hand He can blast their prosperity. Boast they of their grandeur? He can dig it a grave. Do they lift up their heads vainly exalted? In the clouds lurk the lightning to strike and scathe the lofty oak. Do they brag of their security? He can change the calm into the tempest. The powers of life and death in His hands, He wields them in justice and in judgment over the nations and the centuries, in accordance with their relations to Him and His laws and truths.

How stands our age towards God? How, our people? Are we

for Him or against Him, that we may know whether He is for us, or against us? What is the measure of our faith in Him our fear of Him our love for Him? Is the face of our century turned towards Him to adore, or to deride? Are we giving Him room and place or are we crowding Him out? In the progress we are making, are we moving towards Him or from Him? What are the signs of His présence among us?

New Orleans Morning Star.

A Prolific Race.

ALTHOUGH a great deal has been written about the FrenchCanadians within the last five or six years, it is not generally thought that they are the most prolific race that men have, so far, had an opportunity of writing about from reliable statistics.

There was no real census of Canada taken in 1760, when it came under English domination; but there was a very close estimate made of the then existing population, and it was made both by French and English authorities. The estimate ranged from 60,000 to 70,000 for the whole of the enormous region to which France surrendered claim after the battle of the Plains of Abraham. It is safe to say that about 65,000 was about the number of the French speaking persons who came under English rule on this continent in 1760. The last census of Canada was in 1880, and it showed within a fraction of 1,400,000 French-Canadians in the Dominion; the number is now estimated at 1,600,000, and the number of people of French-Canadian birth and extraction residing in the United States is estimated at fully 500,000. This will give the astonishing results of 65,000 people having increased to 2,100,000 in 127 years! No increase recorded by any authentic statistics now known to exist, gives any approach to this in rapidity. The increase in the population of Ireland between the years 1700 and 1800 was at one time considered the most extraordinary in history; in 1700 the population of Ireland was estimated at about 1,000,000, but it reached over 4,000,000 in the year 1800. This increase, enormous as it was, was only 400 per cent. in a century; whereas the increase in the French-Canadian population has been 2,800 per cent. in 127 years! Admitting that there were 70,000 people in Canada in 1760, and that 2,100,000 have sprung from them, it will be found that the latter figures are twenty-eight times the amount of the former; and therefore the. increase of the French Canadians, would appear to be fully five times greater than the increase of the Irish during the time in which their increase was most rapid. To put the extraordinary increase in the French-Canadian population in a still more striking light, it will be found that supposing the population of the United States to have been 3,500,000 in 1776-that was the estimate - and 50,000,000 in 1880, the increase of the French-Canadians has been nearly 20 per cent. greater; and that if this country had increased its population in the same ratio, it would have contained about 70,000,000 instead of 50,

000,000 in 1880.

But it should be remembered that the United States has had half the world pouring its surplus population into them for more than a century, while the French-Canadians hardly received a man from the mother-country during the same time. The emigration from France to Canada has been absolutely nil since 1760.

The extraordinary increase of the Canadian-French is one of the most. interesting and suggestive social phenomena that can well be conceived, and would seem to indicate that there is some radical physical difference between the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland and those of France. The Canadian-French population is about the oldest white race on this continent, and yet they show no tokens of physical decay. It is popularly believed, and seems to be satisfactorily proved, that Americans of the oldest American stock are not generally as robust as those whose fathers or grandfathers came from Europe; but this rule does not hold good with the Canadian-French, for they are probably the hardiest race in the world. They do not average quite so tall as the Americans, but they are much more generally broad-shouldered, wiry and healthy. The wonder is how it came to pass that a mere handful of people have, in spite of one of the most rigorous climates in the world, grown into a veritable nation in a little over a century.

The Citizen does not profess to be able to solve the FrenchCanadian problem; but it can at least show some of the causes which induced such extraordinary prolificness amongst the inhabitants of the banks of the St. Lawrence. To begin, the climate, if severe, is one of the healthiest in the world. The heats of summer are often intense, but rarely last more than a few days. Fever and ague are unknown, and the people live simply. But a fact that has tended more than anything else to the extraordinary increase of population, they are eminently virtuous. They marry early and have generally enormous families. Twenty children are by no means an uncommon family in Lower Canada. There is not the feverish haste to get rich which ages so many Americans before their time. And then the Habitants—that is one of the names by which they are known-are sincerely religious. In no part of the world, perhaps, are family and social intercourse more Christian, more gentle or more beautiful than amongst the "Habitants." Crime may be said to be almost unknown. It could easily be proved that there have been more murders and homicides in one generation in Kentucky than ever took place amongst the Canadian-French from the beginning of their history. Virtue is ever the strongest thing in the world. The handful of peasants who were so despised by the English that they were regarded as inferior to the Indians, and whose total disappearance or absorption was so often prophesied, have in the long run. conquered their conquerors. They form already nearly fifty per cent. of the inhabitants of the Dominion, and at their present rate of increase they will be its masters again before a century.

It is to be ardently hoped that the French of Canada will stick to their language in the future as well as they have in the past. It would be nothing short of a national catastrophe for them were they to give it up now, when power is almost within their grasp. Their language and their nationality are bound up together; if one goes both go.

The Citizen, Chicago, Ill.

THE intelligent Irish commissioner of the Boston Daily Globe tells how he captured an anti-home-ruler :

The religious feeling in Ireland has no more bearing upon the cause of Home Rule than the man in the moon. I have found Catholics who are Home Rulers and Catholics who are royalists in every county in Ireland, and I have found Protestants who worshipped in the same. church equally divided between their admiration for Gladstone and Salisbury. One of the most flourishing leagues I visited was in Protestant Belfast, and the hottest den of royalty I got into was an aristocratic clubroom in Catholic Cork. As there are Catholics and 'Protestants who vote the Democratic and Republican tickets in America, in the same way are the church members divided in Ireland, with this exception, that while the parties are pretty evenly divided in the United States, the Home Rule party in Ireland is overwhelmingly in the majority, so that even in Dublin, the hotbed of royal favor and patronage, the Home Rulers are about three to one.

Without making any more general observations, I will proceed to special cases, and give the talk of a few men whom I met in their own words.

One of the most pronounced Tories I ever talked with, an Irishman by birth and education, and at present a wealthy merchant of London, where he has become thoroughly Anglicized, was Mr. Thomas Harkins. I first met him at a London theatre, where he was holding forth to a select crowd of admirers on the utter incapability of the Irish race for self-government, or even for self-support. As I had but lately arrived I paid no heed to his tirade, but when he began to attack America and called us a coarse race of money-grabbers I could stand it no longer, "and went for him then and there." We parted in anger, and though I do not think he had the best of the argument, I am free to confess that the sympathies of the crowd were largely in his favor. When I came down to my hotel breakfast the next morning the waiter gave me a seat opposite my antagonist. A mutton chop and some rather muddy coffee restored our temper, and when the meal was over he went out to act as my guide through the city. There may be other men who know as much about London as he, but if so I have never met them. The next day I left for Dublin and did not see him again for two weeks. One evening early in July I was sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons listening to Mr. Gladstone's famous speech against the coercion bill when a hand was laid on my shoulder and turning around I recognized my old opponent. I went home with him to his bachelor chambers that night. In a few minutes he was questioning me closely about what I had seen in Ireland. I told him about the condition of affairs at Luggercurran and Bodyke, giving my impressions of the people and the system by which they were ruled. He listened patiently. When I was done he turned to me and said:

"I don't believe a word of it. You have been deceived by the priests and the agents of the league. Whiskey and Romanism are the curses of Ireland. Take them away and let the people go to work and Ireland will be as prosperous as any other country."

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Of course we had another pitched battle, which ended in my making him an offer to the effect that he should accompany me to Ireland, go out to some of the places I had visited and see things for himself, and if he did not find affairs as I had stated I was to pay his expenses, while, if I were correct, he was to pay my bills. He accepted the wager at once, and we left for Dublin, Sunday night, arriving in Bodyke, Monday noon. We passed the afternoon and early evening in visiting the evicted tenants on the O'Callahan estates, allowing the people to tell their own story and show their simple homes. My friend asked many pertinent questions, and was frequently very sharp in dealing with the poor people. For the first two hours his desire to learn the inside facts made him almost rude. Then he lighted his pipe and began to talk more easily. About this time, too, I noticed that he began to give away half-pence to the children and pat them on their heads. In half an hour more he was distributing pennies, which grew to sixpences, to shillings and to half-crowns as time went on, and when at sundown we called at the humble cot of a poor widow, I noticed that he slipped a ten-shilling piece into her hand as we left.

"It beats hell," said he, as we mounted a car to ride back and catch our train. That was the only sentence he uttered until we reached our hotel in Dublin. After dinner we strolled down Grafton Street. When we reached Trinity College he slipped a five-pound note into my hand, saying:

66 You have won the bets. I did not believe you when you told me the story, but you did not tell me half of it; no man living can tell it. I could never have believed that so much misery existed, and would not believe it now if I had not been compelled to do so. I shall go back home a Home Ruler, and hope to see the day when Ireland is free."

I saw him again later, and learned that he had given £20 to the league. He told me that all decent Englishmen would be Home Rulers if they would take pains to investigate for themselves, as he had done. I am inclined to think so, and believe that the opposition to Ireland that exists among the gentry of England is due to ignorance of the facts, more than to any antipathy to the race.

TORIES MAY WELL BE ALARMED.-In the Nineteenth Century appears an article by Mr. Gladstone entitled "Electoral Facts of 1887," in which he says that the general election of 1886 indicated not the conviction but the perplexity of the country. He contends that the results of the recent elections are equivalent to an improved Liberal strength of twenty-two per cent., and that, giving the Conservatives the benefit of all doubts, a new election would leave the latter in a minority of one hundred and three. This basis, he continues, is too narrow to allow of a demonstration or the expression of undue confidence on the part of the Liberals; but, viewing the figures in cold blood, a rational Tory or dissident will probably regard them as of marked significance, and may even begin to inquire in a reflective temper, "Where is all this to end?"