FRENCH CATHOLICS AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

This article focuses on the methods commended by French Catholics for the improvement of economic and moral conditions of manual laborers. The immense material progress of the century ought evidently to be of more and more benefit to manual laborers, who constitute the great majority of mankind. Political progress, which is summed up in the universal triumph of democracy, has made them more and more anxious to realize the hopes born of improvements in machinery, of new ways of communication, and of the increasing rarity of war. The changes for the better already secured are considerable. The natural economic order is susceptible of constant improvement, simply through the action of Christian morality. The gospel renders the sense of justice more delicate. It enjoins respect of man and esteem of labor. Finally, by the large place given to charity it propagates a multitude of institutions adapted to the successive needs of the times and capable of tempering and softening the action of those economic influences just enumerated, which are the essential basis of terrestrial society.