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work on the missions, drawn up on the eve of the Law
of 1901, gave a grand total of 7745 religious men and
9150 religious women supplied by France alone for
this work. The Missions Etrangeres in 1908 had in
its missions 37 bishops, 1371 missionaries, 778 native
priests, 3050 catechists, 45 seminaries, 2081 seminary
students, 305 religious men, 4075 religious women,
2000 Chinese virgins, 5700 churches and chapels, 347
creches and orphanages, sheltering 20,409 children,
484 pharmacies and dispensaries, 108 hospitals fand
lepers' asylums. Within the same year (1908) it
brought about the baptism of 33,169 adults and
139,956 infants. At Jerusalem Cardinal Lavigerie
founded in 1855 the seminary of St. Anne for Oriental
rites; the French Dominicans, founded in 1890, at
Jerusalem, a school for Biblical study, and on the
northwest coast of Asia Minor, near Constantinople,
the French Assumptionists reorganized the Uniat
Greek Church, and prepared the way for the suc-
cess of the Eucharistic Congress of 1893, pre-
sided over by the French Cardinal Lang^nieux, as
legate of Pope Leo XIII, at which Christians of the
many Oriental rites were assembled. For the Lebanon
district, French Jesuits have a school at Beirut with
520 students, for the most part medical, and a printing
press unrivalled for its Arabic printing. Besides this
they have 195 elementary schools about their univer-
sity. At Smyrna French Lazarists have a congrega-
tion of 16,000 Catholics where, in 1800, there were
only 3000. In Syria alone, the French schools, or
schools under French influence, have upwards of
19,000 pupils, and in the vilayet of Smyrna nearly
3000 pupils. The schools of the French Capuchins in
Palestine have 1000 pupils; those of the French
Jesuits in European Turkey, 7000 pupils.
In 1860 France intervened in behalf of the Chris- tians of the East, who were menaced by the fanaticism of Turks, Arabs, and Druses. It was on this occasion that Fuad Pasha is reported to have said, pointing to some religious who were present, "I do not fear the 40,000 bayonets you have at Damascus, but I do fear those sLxty robes there". At Mosul, some French Dominicans, assisted by Sisters of the Presentation of Tours, have had a residence since 1856; they have established hospitals, workshops, and dispensaries all over Mesopotamia, as well as a Syro-Chaldean seminary. These missionaries won back to Christian unity, under the pontificate of Leo XIII, 50,000 Nes- torians and 30,000 Armenian Gregorians. In like manner, twenty-six Jesuits of the province of Lyons have been building schools throughout Armenia dur- ing the past thirty years. The old See of Babylon was replaced in 1844 by the See of Bagdad where a French bishop rules over 90,000 Catholics of various rites. In Persia the French Lazarists have a congrega- tion of 8000 faithful, where, in 1840, there were only 400. The French Capuchins established at Aden are breaking ground in Arabia. French Jesuits are evan- gelizing Ceylon. Under the priests of the Missions Etrangeres, who are assisted by five communities of religious women, the number of Catholics in Pon- dicherry increased tenfold during the nineteenth cen- tury. Priests of St. Francis de Sales of Annecy have had charge of the vicariate of Vizagapatam since 1849. The city of Bombay alone has no fewer than twenty- seven conferences of St. Vincent de Paul. In Burma the priests of the Missions Etrangeres minister to 40,000 Catholics, where there were only 5000 in 1800. The mission of Siam, made famous by Fdnelon, and ruined at the beginning of the nineteenth century, numbers to-day more than 20,000 souls. And at the Penang Seminary French priests are forming a native clergy. The nine French missions of Tongking and Cochin- China have 6.50,000 ("atholics. It was a missionary, Mgr Puginier, who, from 1880 to 1892, did so much to open up those regions to French exploration. " Were it not for the missionaries and the Christians", a
Malay pirate once said, "the French in Tongking
would be as helpless as crabs without legs."
China is the mission-field of Jesuits, Lazarists, and French priests of the Missions Etrangeres. The French- Corean dictionary published by the priests of the Missions Etrangeres; the works on Chinese philology, begun in the eighteenth century by the Jesuit Amiot, and carried on in the nineteenth by the French Jesuits in their Chinese printing establishment at Zi-ka-wei; the researches in natural science made in China by the Lazarist David and the Jesuits Heude, Desgodins, Dechevrens; the work accomplished in the fields of astronomy and meteorology by the French Jesuits at Zi-ka-wei — all these achievements of French mission- aries have won the applause of the learned world. In the nineteenth century the recovery of Japan to the Church was begun Ijy Mgr Forcade, afterwards Arch- bishop of Aix, and French Marianists are labouring to build up a native Japanese clergy.
In Oceanica, since the year 1836, when Chanel, Bataillon, and a few other Marists came to take posses- sion of the thousands of islands scattered between Japan and New Zealand, the work of evangelizing has gone on through Australia, New Zealand, the Wallis Islands, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, and Syd- ney Island. The Fathers of the Sacred Heart of Issoudun are in the Gilbert Isles; the Fathers of Pic- pus are working in the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas. The fame of Father Damien (Joseph Damien de Veuster), one of the Picpus Fathers, the apostle of the lepers at Molokai, has spread through- out the world.
In Africa Father Libermann (a converted Alsatian Jew) and his Congregation of the Holy Ghost and the Immaculate Heart of Mary undertook, in 1840, the evangelization of the black race. It has now spread over the whole of that pagan continent; and the mis- sions established by Mgr Augouard in Ubangi are in the very heart of the cannibal districts. Jesuits, Holy Ghost Fathers, and Lazarists are working in Madagas- car; Jesuits are established along the Zambesi River, and the African Missionaries of Lyons have settle- ments around the Gulf of Guinea, at the Cape of Good Hope, and at Dahomey, while the Oblates of Mary are in Natal. In Senegal Mother Anne-Marie Javouhey, foundress of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny — she of whom Louis Philippe said: "Madame Javouhey c'est un grand homme — opened the first French schools in 1820, and set on foot the first attempts at agriculture in that region. In Egypt French Jesuits have two colleges; the Lyons Missionaries, one; the Brothers of the Christian Schools teach more than 1000 pupils; and 60 parish schools, with more than 3000 children, are under the care of French sisterhoods. French Lazarists minister to 13,000 souls in Abyssinia. The ecclesiastical province of Algeria, which in 1800 reck- oned 4000 souls, had at the time of Cardinal Lavi- gerie's death 400,000, with 500 priests, 260 churches or chapels, and 230 schools, while Tunis, which in 1800 had contained but 2000 Catholics, numbered 27,000, ministered to by 153 religious in 22 parishes. The Brothers of the Christian Schools were the pioneers of the French language in Tunis, as they had been throughout the Ottoman Empire from Constantinople to Cairo, and the Congregation of the W hite Fathers, who sent out their first ten missionaries from Algiers on the 17th of April, 1878, towards equatorial Africa, founded, in Uganda and along Lake Tanganyika, Christian communities, one of which, in May, 1886, gave to the Faith 1.50 martjTS.
Side by side with this peaceful conquest of the African Continent by the initiative of a French car- dinal, a place of honour must be given to the wonder- ful part played in the colonization and development of French Guiana, since the year 1828, by Mother J.a- vouhey, of whose efforts in Senegal we have already spoken. It was she, who under the July Monarch},
