because it recognizes the governor as the leader of his party. and the business agent of the state as a whole, and because it conforms to the processes essential in all effective budgetary procedure. It is a step in the right direction and may in time. be developed into a real budget system. In connection with the executive budget, it is well to remember that the plan is likely to prove weak and ineffective unless it gives the executive full power to employ experts, provide for public hearings, and require all necessary information; unless it gives him power also to appear personally, or through his representatives, before either house during the consideration of budget bills and to modify the budget, as may be required, before final action by the legislature; and unless it shall limit, if possible, the right to propose increases from the floor and provide that neither house shall consider other appropriation measures until the budget bill has been finally acted upon. Such "established services" of the state as the judiciary, public service commissions, and perhaps state educational institutions should be provided for through continuing appropriations, i. e., appropriations running until repealed directly by the legislature, thus reducing the danger of executive tyranny on the one hand and of political interference on the other. The legislative budget has been tried in many states, and it is apparently the only budget plan that would prove acceptable to Congress at the present time. This plan consists merely in creating a special budget committee, usually a joint committee of the two houses, for investigation, hearings, etc., and requiring that all appropriations shall find place in one or two appropriation bills. It is urged by those who would uphold the complete supremacy of the legislature. It appeals to the popular ear as being the "American" system, though, as Dr. Frederick A. Cleveland has pointed out, it is "American" only in the sense that America is the only great nation continuing practices which European nations have had the wisdom to get rid of years ago. It represents substantial improvement in the prevailing method, but clearly fails to remove its most serious defects. In all reforms of this kind the ideal, of course, is popular control. This ideal, however, is not new, nor is it distinctly American. It found expression in the Anglo-Saxon constitutional law, and was brought to America by the first colonists that crossed the Atlantic. It was uppermost in the minds of the men who adopted our Constitution and laid the foundations of our financial system. The changes of the 19th century were made to meet the complex conditions of modern social and political life. The purpose of these changes was to secure efficiency and at the same time perpetuate the democratic ideal. But experience has brought the conviction that in many ways our constitutional system achieves neither efficiency nor democracy in the fullest possible measure. The growth of the budget system is an expression of this conviction as applied in the field of public finance. Like the growth of the "commission" system in the field of general regulation, it has been made possible by the increasing realization that there is no real sacrifice of democracy involved in selecting a man or a group of men and delegating to them some task for which they are specially fitted, provided they are held to rigid account. Whether the delegation of power comes from an autocracy above or from the people below makes all the difference in the world. May it not be that democracy will find in this fact one of its answers to the Teutonic charge that it is "a blind, stupid, groping thing," capable of learning only in the costly school of experience? The Priest in Modern French Fiction* WILLIAM WISTAR COMFORT President of Haverford College Among the despatches from France there is occasional mention of deeds of bravery or of sacrifice performed by the priests. But no such fragmentary news can give an adequate idea of what this devoted band of men is doing, not only on the battlefield, but in binding up the distressed and brokenhearted in the deserted villages. In a tiny fishing village of Normandy we ourselves were present at a "Messe pour hommes" in which the curé, after adjuring the reservists leaving for the army and the fleet to recall God and Jeanne d'Arc, assured them also that he would care for and support their stricken wives and children. That was on the second of August. Since then much has happened to the men of that village and of all the villages in the sweet land of France. Not a priest but must have been called upon in new and untried ways to feel that he is an integral part of the community life and a son of the common "patrie." Perhaps nothing more effectively than this war of invasion could have drawn together all the sons of France and, in the presence of a common danger, united all men of piety and charity in one Christian brotherhood. If France can now purge herself of certain abuses and clothe herself in a deeper spirituality, the historian of the future may yet see in the present chastening not a curse but a blessing. In view of this unexpected rôle which the priests of France have been called upon to play in real life, it is interesting to review the large share of attention they have received in nineteenth century fiction-that branch of literature which most nearly reflects the divers sentiments of the nation. The priest has always been a conspicuous figure in the imaginative literature of France. In the age long gone, when the great feudal bishops went on the crusade it was natural 1. Atala. By François René de Chateaubriand. Paris, 1801 2. Le Rouge et le Noir. By Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Paris, 1830. 3. Le Curé de Tours. By H. de Balzac. Paris, 1832. 4. L'Abbé Tigrane. ByFerdinand Fabre. Paris, 1873. 5. La faute de l'Abbé Mouret. By Emile Zola. Paris, 1875. 6. L'Anneau d'améthyste. By Anatole France. Paris, 1899. And others. to find that saintly swashbuckler Turpin fighting with Charlemagne's Peers at Ronceval, just as it was natural for the Spanish Cid to count on the strong arm and the wise counsels of Alvar Fañez in his strife and bickerings with his king and the Moors of Valencia. Later, when the spirit of satire set in with the bourgeois literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the priests came in for their share of the jests and hard knocks. Cupidity, sloth, incontinence, and rancor were attributed to the priests and monks by the late mediaval writers, as has been the case in other Latin countries to the present day. Jean de Meun does not spare the clerks in the second part of the Roman de la Rose, and they are the butt of the jest in many of the contes and fabliaux, those fascinating "after-dinner stories in verse," as Professor Bédier calls them, from which the Italian novelists and our own Chaucer drew some of their happiest inspirations. For example, the cupidity of the priest is amusingly rewarded in the fabliau of La Vache au Prêtre. The priest had persuaded a frugal couple in his parish to give him the only cow they possessed, on the principle that they would receive a double reward for their gift to the Church. Upon receiving the peasants' cow, the priest confined her in his pasture by the same tether as his own cow. During the night the newcomer became homesick for her old quarters, and by sheer force induced the priest's cow to accompany her. The next morning the peasants had cause to praise the Lord for the prompt manner in which His promise had been fulfilled, while the priest was left to reflect at his leisure upon the fickleness of kine. It is remarkable that the conception of the Church entertained by the mediæval peasant was precisely the same as it is found to be in modern fiction: the Church is supposed to offer an easy and care-free existence. In the fabliau Des Estats du siècle we read of a young peasant: "Qu'au commencement de sa vie Les grans palaffrois, les chevaux, But he changed his mind later, when he saw it was necessary: "Quant uns homs se veut por clerc faire, Matin lever et tart cuchier, De jour panser, de nuyt songier, Et les autres afflictions Qui sont nés és prélations." But passing over the caricatures of monks and priests in Renaissance literature, and also the elegant "abbés" of the old régime, whose manners are not to be distinguished from the manners of "l'honnête homme" or perchance of "l'homme aux bonnes fortunes", let us confine ourselves to the parish priest in town or country as he is portrayed in the fiction of the last century. Even during a time when the claims of the Church have been vigorously opposed by politicians, and her authority threatened by attacks of free-thinkers, her representatives have claimed more than their usual share of literary attention as a distinct class in the French population. Not only are the clergy of France so numerous as to warrant treatment in any general survey of contemporary French society, such as that attempted by Balzac in the Comédie humaine or by M. Anatole France in the Bergeret series, but the circumstances of the individual priest are inevitably such as to place him in conflict with the social ideals of his fellows and with those of nature. Not only in Balzac's chronicles of the reign of Louis Philippe and in M. France's chronicles of the Dreyfus period, but at all times and under all conditions the Catholic priest is a man apart, with peculiar problems and temptations which the novelist seeks to analyze and portray. Certain distinctive marks are common, then, to all priests as members of an order called to perform a peculiar duty and to set a unique standard of holy living. But the circumstances in which their duty is appointed differ so widely, and the character of individual members of this order is so diversely fitted for the combat which is exacted of them, that in reality there is abundant variety offered for the study of the novelist. Then, too, in a country given over to such an intense feeling in |