MONKS AND NUNS IN FRANCE.
ACCORDING to the Interior there are 16,000 monastic establishments in France, with something like 400,000 inmates, or 1 to every 100 inhabitants. If to these 400,000 celibates who form the army of the Catholic Church, we add the 600,000 men in the army, and the three or four hundred thousand men and women who form the army of the civil service, we find that every 25 Frenchmen have to maintain a monk or a nun, a soldier or a civil servant or his family. Thus every citizen has to support one twenty-fifth of a member of these three categories, and as of the 40,000,000 Frenchmen only 8,000,000 at most earn or possess money, each of these 8,000,000 has to maintain13one-fifth of a monk, nun, soldier, or civil servant. The cost of the soldier and civil servant appears, of course, in the budget, but that of the monk or nun is a charge which must in some form be added to the taxation. It may be presumed, moreover, that only one-eighth of the population can be counted on as able to bear the public burdens, while there are certainly not more than 4,000,000 to face the cost of the 200,000 “religious.” Thus every 5 persons possessing an income have to maintain a monk or nun with the proportionate share of keeping up the establishment.—Missionary Review.