The parties of the Left in the chamber, united upon this question in the Bloc republicain, supported Combes in his application of the law of 1901 on the religious associations, and voted the new bill on the congregations (1904), and under his guidance France took the first definite steps toward the separation of church and state.

Since the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, it has been steadily increasing, the Russian peasants of a village often emigrating en bloc.'

In 1900 he withdrew from La Justice to found a weekly review, Le Bloc, which lasted until March 1902.

The budget presented to the Reichstag by Prince B 610w, which laid new burdens upon the landed and capitalist classes, was fiercely opposed bytheAgrarians, and led to the break-up of the Liberal-Conservative bloc on whose support the chancellor had relied since the elections of 1906.

He declared himself a strong partisan of the union of the Left in what is known as the Bloc, in order to check the reactionary deputies of the Right.