either out of curiosity, or from motives of business, to assume the badge of the faction opposed to the court. It was a handful of straw, stuck in the hat-band. When the Prince de Condé and the Duke of Orleans presented themselves to the excited multitude, they were travestied like mimers on May-day, straw in their hats, straw for shoulder-knot, a wisp of straw flourished in their hands. Their first act was to sign the treaty of union against Cardinal Mazarin, when a letter arrived from the King, enjoining the Prévôt des Marchands to adjourn the assembly for a week, and an immense number of the corporation and of the bourgeosie seemed inclined to obey the royal order. This was not what the Princes wished, and they aban doned the "parloir" in anger. Soon the firing commences around the Hôtel de Ville, upon which an exasperated multitude pours in hot haste, as if it were a den of Mazarins. In vain the priests of St.-Jean-en-Grève carry the Sacrament in solemn procession, to appease the violence of the rioters. The rioters carried the Hôtel de Ville by storm, and its inmates threw themselves prostrate, believing in their terror that their last hour was come, as, indeed, it was for many. In every corner the dying confessed themselves to the priests, who hastened from room to room to console the victims of that fatal day, which witnessed the last convulsion of the Fronde. A century and a half from thence, the Hôtel de Ville was once more the scene of riot and blood. It was the day of the fall of the Bastille. Flesselles, the last of the prévôts des marchands, was killed by a pistol-shot, and his head carried through Paris, fixed on a pike. A few days after, Berthier, Intendant of Paris, was massacred on the same spot. Before his death, the rioters forced him to embrace the head of his brother-in-law, Foulon. The latter was seized at some distance from Paris, and was driven along, like a beast, to the Hotel de Ville, his feet bare, his neck surrounded with a collar of nettles, and some hay thrust into his mouth. It was he who, when the sufferings of the people were the subject of conversation, brutally replied, to an observation addressed to him, in the memorable words, "Let them eat grass!" It was at the Hôtel de Ville that Louis the Sixteenth was obliged to assume the tri-coloured cockade, and from the windows he showed himself to his liegès of his good city of Paris. It was thither, also, he was conducted, on the famous sixth of October, when he made that strangest of royal progresses into Paris, which we have already noticed more at length in a former paper. The last of the prévôts des marchands was Flesselles, as we have said.

But the office of Mayor, which replaced, under the Revolution, the old civic title, was filled, in the days of October, by the celebrated Bailly, model philosophe, who knew everything except human nature, and believed in nothing save himself. After him came Marat and Robespierre, resolved, as Danton said, to see what plenty of bleeding would do for their patient, the nation. And the 9th Thermidor dawned over Paris, mad with joy at its deliverance from the reign of terror. Under the Empire and the Restoration, the Hotel de Ville played no prominent part in politics, but assumed its ancient rôle of chef-lieu of émeute in the July of 1830. On the 29th, it was the seat of the Provisional Government. On that day the King consented to form a new ministry. "It is too late," was Lafayette's reply. Then it was that the Republic and the Orleans-monarchy found themselves competitors for the favour of the people. Louis Philippe took time by the fore-lock, and reached the Hôtel de Ville on the 30th of July. Lafayette and he embrace. They appear together on the balcony of the grande salle, and again they embrace. An enthusiastic acclamation resounded from the Place de Grèce, and the Citizen-King could assure himself that he had well laid the foundation of the "throne surrounded with republican institutions." And that, too, was shattered, and a new provisional government sits in the Hôtel de Ville. And one day, as often before, the staircases and rooms of the old civic palace are thronged with armed men. And their cry is for the Red Republic, for the Drapeau Rouge. "You wish," cries de Lamartine, "for the red flag instead of the tricolor. Le drapeau rouge! It shall never be mine. Why? Because the tricolor has made the tour of the world with your liberty and your glory, and the drapeau rouge has made no other than that of the Champs de Mars, dragged along in the blood of the people." The populace applauded, and France was saved.

Beyond the Hôtel de Ville is the newly constructed barrack, the magnificent Caserne Napoléon, and, in front, the Rue Saint Antoine !

In this, and in my last, paper, I have conducted you from the Tuileries to the Hôtel de Ville-from the new mansions of rank and opulence in the west, to the ancient abodes of labour in the famous quarter of St. Antoine. In our passage through the Rue de Rivoli, we have traversed centuries in the life of France, we have passed, in our street promenade, from the Empire back to the Roman Prefecture-from the Revolution to the cradle of the monarchy and we have had for companions of our walk men amongst

the greatest for their genius, or the most interesting for their career, in a country whose history is rich with genius and interest. Another day we shall take a stroll in a quarter of Paris which will not give us less amusement, I hope, nor less instruction than that Rue de Rivoli and its Neighbours, to which we now bid adieu.

QUARTERLY RECORD OF THE PROGRESS OF REFORMATORY SCHOOLS AND OF PRISON DISCIPLINE.

By The Juvenile Offenders' Act, the Manager of the Reformatory School is empowered to teach any religion he shall think best to the young criminals committed to his institution. This would naturally be the faith of which he professes himself a follower; and as all the Schools yet established in England and Scotland are conducted by members of the Church, or by Protestant Dissenters, the Roman Catholics, it would appear, felt the necessity for some Reformatory managed by those of their own communion. Accordingly, in the early part of last July, a meeting was held in London, for the purpose of forming a Reformatory School Committee, and of entering into other necessary details. We insert the following "leader," from a recent number of The Weekly Register and Catholic Standard, as it expresses, we presume, the wishes and intentions of those who called the Meeting. It is, however, unjust to those who have already founded Reformatory Schools, and is particularly unfair towards our friend Mr. Recorder Hill. In fact the whole truth of the question was most correctly stated by Miss Carpenter in her evidence before the Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, when she declared, that the founder should be at liberty to teach any religion he pleased in his school, and that all who were dissatisfied should have power, had they the charity, to found Schools in which the Young Criminals of their own creed could be instructed. This we think fair and just, but we do not consider the leader which we shall now insert as either fair or reasonable in accus

ing those of proselytism who will not teach a religion in which they do not believe:

"THE CATHOLIC REFORMATORY SCHOOL.

We need hardly call the attention of our Catholic readers to the advertisement inserted by the Committe appointed by His Eminence to superintend the establishment of a Catholic Reformatory School. In the present state of the law, any child may be sent to a reformatory school for a trifling breach of the police regulations without any moral fault. If there is no Catholic reformatory school, it is certain that numbers will be sent to Protestant schools, and brought up in enmity to the religion of their parents. No such Act ought to have been passed until reformatory schools had first been provided to which children could be sent without violation of their religious liberties. The reason why this obvious piece of justice was neglected was twofold: first, there is a considerable and influential party with whom it is a primary object to subject Catholic children to an antiCatholic education, and who hesitate to use no means which may bring about that object. For this purpose they are, wherever they can, freely employing bribery, persuasion, and every kind of art; and before this Act passed, they had obtained one to enable them to use force in the case of that large class of Catholic children in London whose poverty may bring them, with or without moral fault, into the police court-we mean the Middlesex Reformatory School Bill of last session. That bill was obtained by the Middlesex magistrates. It provided for the education in the Protestant religion of every child who might get into any scrape-true, the Chairman of the Middlesex Magistrates, Mr. Henry Pownall, denied that their object was proselytism: yet, when the Committee of the House of Commons added to the bill a provision that no child should be educated in any religious creed contrary to that of his parents, or to which they shall object; and that it shall be lawful for any minister of the religious persuasion of any juvenile offender, or in which his parents shall wish him to be brought up, to visit him in school, and under certain regulations as to number, &c., to perform worship there on Sundays,' the Magistrates, with Mr. Pownall at their head, so strongly opposed this clause that they defeated it in the House of Lords. And on what ground? We are not left to guess. The Ragged School Magazine,' the organ of the proselytising schools, published their objection to it, on the ground that the large proportion both of juvenile and adult criminals in the United Kingdom are Roman Catholics;' and asked, Will it be pleaded that the objection of the parents ought to be listened to in the case of Roman Catholics? Are not those parents generally as wretched and ignorant as their children, whom they have for the most part trained to crime?" It concluded: We must therefore continue the diffusion throughout all our schools, refuges, and reformatories, of that Evangelism which is common to all true protestants in the land, and without which the degraded and polluted can never be elevated and purified." Our extracts give an imperfect notion of the manner in which the paper we are quoting avows proselytism towards Catholic children

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as the object of the Reformatory Schools. This might not have. committed the magistrates, but Mr. Pownall, their chairman, went out of his way to adopt it; writing to the Editor-I cannot sufficiently thank you for it,' and promising the opposition of the magistrates, and predicting, truly as soon appeared, its rejection by the Lords. He ended: I will not fail to give your Magazine to the magistrates, for which they as well as myself return you our sincere thanks.' We do not then exaggerate, when we say that a large body of the most respectable Protestants, among whom are the great majority of the Middlesex Magistrates, avowedly desire Reformatory Schools expressly because the greater part of their involuntary inmates will be Catholics, and because they will have the opportunity' of educating them as Protestants. We do not suspect Mr. Pownall of intentional falsehood, when he indignantly disavowed any intention of proselytising. He was thinking, no doubt, only of Protestant sects; he meant that the school would not be employed to make converts from one Protestant sect to another; that every possible exertion would be made to bring up Papists' to Protestantism, he probably took for granted, and thought it unnecessary to express anything so obvious. Members of Parliament no doubt there are who are of the same mind.

However, this party would hardly have been strong enough to obtain a law to compel all Catholic children convicted of any trifling offence to be educated as Protestants if Parliament had been aware what they were about. The truth is, Protestants have no belief that it is possible for the very poor and suffering classes to have any reli gion at all. They sincerely believe, and the experience as far as it goes no doubt justifies the belief, that not only the beggars in our streets, but the numerous classes which carry on different trades in them, as costermongers, street-sweepers, &c., have no religion at all. Indeed, they would extend this almost without an exception to the labouring class of London and other great towns. This manner of regarding the poor strikes a Catholic with inexpressible force in reading Protestant writings upon almost any subject connected with them. A Protestant poet complains:- Times are altered now, and Englishmen begin to class the beggar with the knave, and poverty with sin. He does not exaggerate. Father Hutchinson, of the Oratory, says:

Thus when Mr. Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, who was examined before the committee on Juvenile Offenders in 1852, was asked whether, if all the children in reformatory schools were to be committed to the care of a Protestant Chaplain, some difficulty might not arise on the ground of differences of religion. He answered that he did not apprehend it, for that the criminals had no religious differences; they have no religion at all; they are not divisible into Roman Catholics and Protestants; they are practically heathens.' The same argument has been used again and again by different members of the House of Commons. When it was urged upon them that the religious opinions of these children ought to be respected, and that provision ought to be afforded them for being instructed in their own creed, and for practising their own religion, the answer has always been the same, that it was idle to speak of their religious