THE A. P. A. CONTROVERSY
One very unreasonable, yet very natural excitement has stirred
deeply the American people on several occasions in our history.
It came to us by lawful inheritance from our English and Puritan
ancestors. That is the bitter and almost superstitious dread
of the Catholics, which has resulted more than once in riots
and crimes, and more than once in the attempt to exclude them
from political power in the country. This has sometimes taken
the form of a crusade against all foreigners. But religious
prejudice against the Catholics has been its chief inspiration.
I just said that this feeling, though absolutely unjustifiable,
was yet quite natural, and that it came to us by lawful inheritance.
I have always resisted it and denounced it to the utmost of
my power. My father was a Unitarian. I was bred in that
most liberal of all liberal faiths. But I have believed that
the way to encounter bigotry is by liberality. If any man
try to deprive you of your absolute right, begin to defend
yourself by giving him his own. Human nature, certainly American
human nature, will never, in my opinion, long hold out against
that method of dealing.
Our people, so far as they are of English descent, learned
from their fathers the stories of Catholic persecution and
of the fires of Smithfield. Fox's "Book of Martyrs," one
of the few books in the Puritan libraries, was, even down to
the time of my youth, reverently preserved and read in the
New England farmhouses.
So it was believed that it was only the want of power that
prevented the Catholics from renewing the fires of Smithfield
and the terrors of the Inquisition. It was believed that
the infallibility and supremacy of the Pope bound the Catholic
citizen to yield unquestioning obedience to the Catholic clergy
in matters civil and political, as well as spiritual. There
was a natural and very strong dread of the Confessional.
This feeling was intensified by the fact of which it was
partly the cause, that when the Irish-Catholics first came
over they voted in solid body, led often by their clergy, for
the Democratic Party, which was in the minority in the New
England States, especially in Massachusetts. England down
to a very recent time disqualified the Catholics from civil
office.
Our people forgot that the religious persecution, of which
they cherished the bitter memory, was the result of the spirit
of the age, and not of one form of religious faith. They
forgot that the English Protestants not only retaliated on
the Catholics when they got into power, but that the Bishops
from whose fury, as John Milton said, our own Pilgrim Fathers
fled, were Protestant Bishops and not Catholic. They forgot
the eight hundred years during which Ireland had been under
the heel of England, and the terrible history so well told
by that most English of Englishmen, and Protestant of Protestants,
Lord Macaulay.
"The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful,
to replenish the earth; but they were doomed to be what the
Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman,
what the blacks now are at New York. Every man of the subject
caste was strictly excluded from any public trust. Take what
path he might in life, he was crossed at every step by some
vexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive,
that he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspired
to be powerful and honoured, he might gain a cross or perhaps
a Marshal's staff in the armies of France or Austria. If
his vocation was to politics, he might distinguish himself
in the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he was a
mere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. The
statute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish
to the Roman Catholics but too good a ground for recriminating
on us when we talk of the barbarities of Bonner and Gardiner;
and the harshness of those odious laws was aggravated by a
more odious administration. For, bad as the legislators were,
the magistrates were worse still. In those evil times originated
that most unhappy hostility between landlord and tenant, which
is one of the peculiar curses of Ireland. Oppression and
turbulence reciprocally generated each other. The combination
of rustic tyrants was resisted by gangs of rustic banditii.
Courts of law and juries existed only for the benefit of the
dominant sect. Those priests who were revered by millions
as their natural advisers and guardians, as the only authorised
dispensers of the Christian sacraments, were treated by the
squires and squireens of the ruling faction as no good-natured
man would treat the vilest beggar."
When I came into political life shortly after 1848, I found
this anti-Catholic feeling most intense. The Catholics in
Massachusetts were, in general, in a very humble class. The
immigration, which had well begun before the great Irish Famine,
was increased very much by that terrible calamity. The Irishmen
were glad to build our railroads at sixty cents a day, dwelling
in wretched shanties, and living on very coarse fare. They
had brought with them the habit of drinking whiskey, comparatively
harmless in their native climate--though bad enough there--
but destructive in New England. So they contributed very
largely to the statistics of crime and disorder.
Even then they gave an example--from which all mankind might
take a lesson--of many admirable qualities. They had a most
pathetic and touching affection for the Old Country. They
exhibited an incomparable generosity toward the kindred they
had left behind. From their scanty earnings, Edward Everett,
a high authority, estimates that there were sent twenty millions
of dollars in four years to their parents and kindred.
There was some jealousy on the part of our working people,
especially the men and women employed in large manufacturing
establishments, lest the Irish, by working at cheaper wages,
would drive them out of employment. But the Irishman soon
learned to demand all the wages he could get. The accession
of the Irish laborer increased largely the productive forces
of the State. So there was more wealth created, of which
the better educated and shrewder Yankee got the larger share.
By the bringing in of a lower class of labor he was elevated
to a higher place, but never driven out of work. The prejudice
of which I have spoken showed itself in some terrible Protestant
riots in New Orleans and in Baltimore, and in the burning
of the Catholic Convent at Charlestown.
There was also a strong feeling that the compact body of
Catholics, always voting for one political party was a danger
to the public security. Of course this feeling manifested
itself in the Whig Party, for whose adversary the solid Irish-
Catholic vote was cast. As early as 1844, after the defeat
of Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster made a suggestion--I do know where
it is recorded now, but I was informed of it on good authority
at about the time he made it--that there must be some public
combination with a view to resist the influence of our foreign
element in our politics.
But there was no political movement on any considerable scale
until 1854. In that year there was a very dangerous crusade
which came very near National success, and which got control
of several States.
In the fall of 1857 the Republican Party elected its first
Governor. The slavery question was still very prominent,
and the people were deeply stirred by the attempt to repeal
the Missouri Compromise. So in that year, under the leadership
of Nathaniel P. Banks, Gardner, the Know-Nothing Governor,
was defeated, and from that time the strength of Know-Nothingism
was at an end. I was elected to the Senate in the fall of
1856 as the Republican candidate from the county of Worcester
over the Know-Nothing and Democratic candidates.
It is a remarkable fact that of the men known to join the
Know-Nothing Party, no man, unless he were exceedingly young
and obscure when he did it, ever maintained or regained the
public confidence afterward, with the exception of Henry Wilson,
Anson Burlingame and Nathaniel P. Banks. These men all left
it after the first year. Wilson and Burlingame denounced
it with all the vigor at their command, and Banks led the
forces of the Republican Party to its overthrow.
I ought to say, however, of this movement and of the A. P.
A. movement, as it is called, of which I am now to speak,
that I do not think the leaders in general shared the bitter
and proscriptive feeling to which they appealed. The secret
organization, founded on religious prejudice, or on race prejudice,
is a good instrument to advance the political fortunes of
men who could not gain advancement in an established political
organization. So a great many men are active and busy in
such organizations, who would be equally active and busy in
movements founded on precisely the opposite doctrines, if
they could as well find their advancement in them. Yet, as
I have said, the prejudice which lay at the bottom of this
movement was very powerful, very sincere, and not unnatural.
Secret societies were formed all over the country. It seemed
not unlikely that the surprise of 1854 would be repeated,
and that the great Republican party, which had done so much
for civil liberty, would either be broken to pieces or would
be brought to take an attitude totally inconsistent with religious
liberty.
The organization, calling itself the American Protective
Association, but known popularly as the A. P. A., had its
branches all over the North. Its members met in secret,
selected their candidates in secret--generally excluding all
men who were not known to sympathize with them--and then attended
the Republican caucuses to support candidates in whose selection
members of that political party who were not in their secret
councils had no share. Ambitious candidates for office did
not like to encounter such a powerful enmity. They in many
cases temporized or coquetted with the A. P. A. if they
did not profess to approve its doctrine. So far as I know,
no prominent Republican in any part of the country put himself
publicly on record as attacking this vicious brotherhood.
Many men who did not agree with it were, doubtless, so strong
in the public esteem that they were not attacked.
That was the condition of things when, in the early summer
of 1895, I delivered an address at the opening of the Summer
School of Clark University in which I spoke briefly, but in
very strong terms, in condemnation of the secrecy and of the
proscriptive principles of this political organization. I
declared: "I have no patience or tolerance with the spirit
which would excite religious strife. It is as much out of
place as the witchcraft delusion or the fires of Smithfield."
I added: "This Nation is a composite. It is made up of many
streams, of the twisting and winding of many bands. The quality,
hope and destiny of our land is expressed in the phrase of
our Fathers, 'E Pluribus Unum'--of many, one--of many States,
one Nation--of many races, one people--of many creeds, one
faith--of many bended knees, one family of God." A little
later I went with the Massachusetts Club, of which I was a
member, to an outing at Newport. There, briefly but still
more emphatically, I called upon the people not to revive
the bitter memories of ancient, social and religious strife.
These two speeches excited the indignation of the leaders
of this organization. A gentleman named Evans, I believe
born in England, took up the cudgels. He was supported by
many worthy clergymen and a good many newspapers which had
been established to support the doctrine of the A. P. A.
organization. Mr. Evans, if I am right in my memory, claimed
that he was not a member of the organization. But he stood
up for it stanchly in two letters to me, in which he very
severely denounced what I had said, and pointed out the wicked
behavior of some Catholic priests to whom he referred. He
said he had looked up to me as he formerly did to Charles
Sumner and William H. Seward; that my course would tend as
absolutely to the breaking up of the Republican Party as Daniel
Webster's speech did to the breaking up of the old Whig Party,
and that I had rung my own death knell; that the one mistake
Wesley made when he called slavery "the sum of all villainies"
was that he did not except the Roman Catholic Church. He
added that there were at least three million members of these
patriotic orders, constituting at least three fifths of the
Republican Party, and that their membership was being added to
daily. Mr. Evans also said, what was absolutely without
foundation, that I had said, "We need a Father Confessor."
That gave me my opportunity. I answered with the following
letter in which I stated my own doctrine as vigorously and
clearly as I knew how.
WORCESTER, Aug. 5, 1895.
T. C. EVANS, ESQ.:
_My Dear Sir_--One of the great evils, though by no means
the greatest evil of secret political societies, is that foolish
and extravagant statements about men who don't agree with
them get circulated without opportunity for contradiction
or explanation. You seem to be a well-meaning and intelligent
man; yet I am amazed that any well-meaning and intelligent
man should believe such stuff as you repeat in your letter
of August 3. I never said, thought or dreamed what you impute
to me. I don't believe there ever was any report in the Worcester
_Telegram_ to that effect. Certainly there is none in the
report of what I said in the summer school at Clark University
the morning after, and there is no such statement in any of
the other Worcester newspapers. I never anywhere expressed
the idea that there should be a confessional or that there
was any need of a Father Confessor, or that I wanted to see
something in our Protestant churches like the Father Confessor
in the Catholic. The whole thing is a miserable lie and invention
made out of whole cloth. The language, which you quote, about
an attempt to recall on one side, "the cruelties of the Catholic
Church and frighten our women and children with horrid hobgoblins,"
is not my language. That does appear in the _Telegram_. But
it is the reporter's statement of what he understood my idea
to be in his own language. What I said was: "We are confronted
with a public danger which comes from an attempt to rouse
the old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to have
ended with them, between men who have different forms of faith.
It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of the
Catholic Church and to frighten old women of both sexes, and,
on the other side, to band the men of the Catholic Church
together for political action. Both these attempts will fail."
There is no more zealous believer in the principles of the
New England Puritans, and no more zealous advocate of them,
than I am. There is not a man in Massachusetts who has more
at heart the welfare and perpetuity of our system of free
common schools than I have. I was the first person, so far
as I know, who called public attention to the fact that they
were in danger, in any formal way. I drew and had put in
the platform of the Republican State Convention the following
resolution: "The Republican Party ever has maintained and
ever will maintain and defend, the common schools of Massachusetts
as the very citadel of happiness. They shall be kept open
to all the children and free from all partisan and sectarian
control."
This doctrine I stand by. And I stand by the further doctrine,
as I stated at length in my address at Clark University, that
the whole resources of the Commonwealth are pledged to their
support, and that that is the bottom mortgage on every dollar
of our property, and that no person can escape or be allowed
to escape that responsibility. The difference between you
and me is a difference of method. I want to get the 700,000
Catholics in Massachusetts on our side. I want them to send
their children to the public schools, to pay their share of
the cost, and when their young men and women are suitable,
are intelligent, liberal persons, attached to the school system,
I want some of them to be employed as teachers. I don't wish
to exclude them from my political support when they are Republicans
and agree with me in other matters, because of their religious
faith. Nor do I wish to exclude them from being public school
teachers, if they will keep their particular religious tenets
out of their instruction, because of their religious faith, any
more than I would have excluded Phil Sheridan from his office
in the army, or would have refused to support him for any
public office, if he had been nominated for it. Further,
I want to state and advocate my opinions in the face of day,
and you may be sure that I shall do this without flinching
before anybody's threats or anybody's displeasure or indignation.
You, on the other hand, I understand, want to go into a cellar
to declare your principles. You want to join an association
whose members are ashamed to confess they belong to it; many
of whom, without apparently forfeiting the respect of their
fellows, lie about their membership in it when they are asked
about it. You want to mass together the whole Catholic population
of Massachusetts to the support of their extreme and wrong-
headed priests, if any such can be found.
The difference between us is a difference of methods in accomplishing
the same result. I think your method would overthrow the
common school system, would overthrow the Republican Party,
and would end by massing together all the Catholic voters,
as proscription always does mass men together, to increase
and strengthen that political power which you profess so much
to dread.
When O'Neill, the young Catholic soldier of Worcester, lay
dying, he said: "Write to my dear mother and tell her I die
for my country. I wish I had two lives to give. Let the
Union flag be wrapped around me and a fold of it laid under
my head." I feel proud that God gave me such a man to be
my countryman and townsman. I have very little respect for
the Americanism that is not moved and stirred by such a story.
If O'Neill had left a daughter who had her father's spirit,
I would be willing to trust my child or grandchild to her
instruction in secular education in the public school, even
if the father had kissed with his last breath the cross on
which the Saviour died, or even if the parting soul had received
comfort from the lips of Thomas Conaty or John Power or John
Ireland or Archbishop Williams.
When John Boyle O'Reilly, the Catholic poet, sang the praises
of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in that noblest of odes, when
he quoted in his preface from William Bradford and John Robinson
and Robert Cushman, I was glad to hear what he said, especially
when he quoted from the lips of the clergyman Robinson: "I
charge you before God that you follow me no further than you
have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveal
anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready
to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my
ministry, for I am verily persuaded, I am very confident,
the Lord hath more truths yet to break forth out of His Holy
Word." I liked what he said. If I understand your former
letter correctly, you didn't. That is where we differ. When
John Boyle O'Reilly said, declaring the very spirit of New
England Puritanism, and speaking of religious faith, "the
one sacred revolution is change of mind," when he spoke these
noble lines:
So held they firm, the Fathers aye to be,
From Home to Holland, Holland to the sea--
Pilgrims for manhood, in their little ship,
Hope in each heart, and prayer on every lip.
Apart from all--unique, unworldly, true,
Selected grain to sow the earth anew;
A winnowed part--a saving remnant they;
Dreamers who work; adventurers who pray!
We know them by the exile that was theirs;
Their justice, faith and fortitude attest.
When he further said:
On the wintry main
God flings their lives as farmers scatter grain,
His breath propels the winged seed afloat;
His tempests swerve to spare the fragile boat;
Here on this rock and on this sterile soil,
Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men;
Began the making of the world again,
Their primal code of liberty, their rules
Of civil right; their churches, courts and schools;
Their freedom's very secret here laid down--
The spring of government is the little town!
On their strong lines, we base our social health--
The man--the home--the town--the Commonwealth;
Their saintly Robinson was left behind
To teach by gentle memory; to shame
The bigot spirit and the word of flame;
To write dear mercy in the Pilgrim's law;
To lead to that wide faith his soul foresaw--
I liked what he said. If I understand your former letter,
you didn't. You don't want a man who differs from you saying
or thinking such things. I want the whole 700,000 Catholics
of Massachusetts to believe what John Boyle O'Reilly believed,
and to love and reverence the Puritan founders of Massachusetts
as he did, and I think my way is the way to make them do it.
You don't, if I understand you. You think the way to make
good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to
Protestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters,
from all public employment and to go yourself into a dark
cellar and curse at them through the gratings of the windows.
I stated my religious faith and my ideas of the relation
of our religious denominations to each other, in an address
I delivered at Saratoga last year, of which I send you a
copy, and which I hope, as you have kindly volunteered to
send me so much of your opinion, you may perhaps be willing
to read. It doesn't become me to say anything about it myself.
I am deeply sensible of its imperfections. It fails to do
justice to what is in my own heart. But perhaps I may be
permitted to say that within a few weeks after it was delivered,
an eminent Catholic clergyman sent me a message expressing
his delight in it. The most famous Episcopalian Bishop in
the country said to a friend of mine that he had read it with
great pleasure and that it sounded to him like the old times.
A Baptist minister, bearing one of the most distinguished
names in the country, wrote me a letter, in which he said,
as he read it, "At every sentence, I said to myself, Amen,
Amen." An eminent Orthodox minister, Doctor of Divinity,
read it aloud to his parish, in full, instead of his Sunday's
sermon. And a very excellent and able Methodist minister
wrote to me and said, "If that is Unitarianism, I am afraid
I am a Unitarian." I think the time has come to throw down
the walls between Christians and not to build new ones. I
think the time has come to inculcate harmony and good will
between all American citizens, especially between all citizens
of the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
You quote some expressions which you attribute to Catholic
clergymen. If you don't get any nearer right in quoting
them than you do in quoting me, I don't believe that they
ever said any such thing. If they have, they never will
persuade any considerable number of Catholic laity in this
country, in this nineteenth century, to follow them. You may
perhaps induce the Catholic young men and women of Massachusetts
to believe there is something in what those clergymen say.
They never will succeed in doing it themselves.
I don't think you will succeed in getting any considerable
number of the people of this country, who are able to read
and write, or to count ten on their fingers, to believe that, as
I am entering my seventieth year, I am actuated by any personal
ambition, in the counsel which I give my fellow citizens.
I don't think you will get them to believe that, if I were
so actuated, I should begin by saying anything which would
estrange a considerable number of the Protestant Republican
citizens of Massachusetts. I don't think you will convince
them that I am indifferent to the good will of so large a
portion of the American people as are said to be enlisted
in the ranks of the secret society to which you refer. If
you know as little of your Catholic fellow citizens as you
know of me, you have a good deal as yet to learn of the subject
of which you are speaking.
On the other hand, you may be quite sure I should be unwilling
to do injustice to any of my fellow citizens. They will hardly
need be assured that I would not lightly or unnecessarily
incur their disapprobation. But you may perhaps think it
pardonable that I should not be thoroughly informed as to
the principles, motives or conduct of a secret society. As
you have undertaken the duty of giving me information, will
you kindly answer for me the following questions:
1st. Is the organization to which you refer a secret organization?
Are its discussions in the face of day? Do the persons whose
political errors they especially oppose have an opportunity
to know their purposes and to be convinced by their arguments?
If the organization be in any respect secret, why is it deemed
necessary to maintain such secrecy in the United States of
America and at the close of the nineteenth century?
2d. Is it the custom of many persons who belong to it to
deny, when inquired of, that they are members of such an
association? And if this be true, does such a falsehood cost
them the respect and friendship of their associates or diminish
their influence in the order?
3d. Do members of the association, after joining it, retain
their membership in other political parties? Do they agree
together upon candidates for office or delegates to conventions
to nominate officers and then go into their party caucuses
to support such delegates agreed upon in secret, without consultation
with their political brethren? If that be true, does it seem
to you that that course is honest?
4th. Do you understand that any considerable number of Catholic
laymen, in this country, accept the interpretation which you
put upon the fifteen articles which you quote as principles
of the Roman Catholic Church? Is it not true that the interpretation
is absolutely rejected by the Catholic laity in general, and
that they affirm for themselves as absolute independence of
the Pope or of the clergy in all secular matters as you or
I claim for ourselves in regard to Protestant clergymen?
5th. Are not Italy and France, two Catholic countries, to-
day as absolutely free from any temporal power or influence
of the Pope or the Catholic clergy as is Massachusetts?
6th. I have had sent me a little leaflet, purporting to be
the principles of the American Protective Association, which
you doubtless have seen. When you say, in your third article,
that the American Protective Association is "opposed to the
holding of offices in the National, State or municipal Government,
by any subject or supporter of such ecclesiastical power,"
and in your fifth article, that you "protest against the employment
of the subjects of any un-American ecclesiastical power as
officers or teachers of our public schools," do you mean,
or no, that no Catholic shall hold such National or State
or municipal office, and that no Catholic shall be a teacher
in a public school? You don't answer this question by quoting
the language of church officials in by-gone days or the intemperate
language of some priests in recent times. It is a practical
question. Do you or don't you mean to exclude from such office
and from such employment as teachers the bulk of the Catholic
population of Massachusetts?
7th. Is it you opinion that General Philip H. Sheridan,
were he living, would be unfit to hold civil or military office
in this country? Or that his daughter, if she entertained
the religious belief of her father, should be disqualified from
being a teacher in a public school?
I have no pride of opinion. I shall be very glad to revise
any opinion of mine and, as you state it, I shall be very
glad to "know better in the future," if you will kindly enlighten
me.
You and I, as I have said, have the same object at heart.
We desire, above all things, the maintenance of the principles
of civil and religious liberty; and above all other instrumentalities
to that end, the maintenance of our common school system,
at the public charge, open to all the children and free from
partisan or sectarian control. If you and I differ, it is
only as to what is the best means of accomplishing these
ends. If you think that they are best accomplished by secret
societies, by hiding from the face of day, by men who will
not acknowledge what they are doing, and by refusing public
employment to men and women who think on these subjects exactly
as we do, but whose religious faith differs from ours, then
I don't agree with you. I think your method will result
in driving and compacting together, in solid mass, persons
who will soon number nearly or quite fifty per cent. of the
voting population of Massachusetts. Nothing strengthens
men, nothing makes them so hard to hear reason, nothing so
drives them to extremity in opinion or in action as persecution
or proscription.
On the other hand, my method is the method of absolute freedom
and of pure reason. The Catholic boy, who has grown up in
our common schools, who had formed his youthful friendships
with his Protestant classmates, whose daughter or sister,
as he grows older, is employed as a teacher, will very soon
be attached to our common school system as we are ourselves.
He will be required, as he gets property, to pay his share
of his support. He cannot ask to be exempt from a tax to
which all Protestants cheerfully submit, whether their own
children be in the schools or not, and he will not easily
be made to give his consent to paying twice. The American
Spirit, the Spirit of the age, the Spirit of Liberty, the
Spirit of Equality, especially what Roger Williams called
"Soul Liberty" is able to maintain herself in a fair field
and in a free contest against all comers. Do not compel her
to fight in a cellar. Do not compel her to breathe the damp,
malarial atmosphere of dark places. Especially let no member
of the Republican Party, the last child of freedom, lend his
aid to such an effort. The atmosphere of the Republic is
the air of the mountain top and the sunlight and the open
field. Her emblem is the eagle and not the bat.
I am faithfully yours,
GEORGE F. HOAR.
After the publication of the foregoing letter, I received
one from Theodore Roosevelt, who was holding a high office
in New York City, then at the beginning of his illustrious
political career. He expressed his hearty sympathy and approval,
and offered to lay aside everything else and come to my aid,
if I so desired. I need not say I took special pleasure in
this letter, which disclosed so unmistakably the honest and
brave heart of the man, who was then in his difficult office
fighting wild beasts at Ephesus. But I did not need to accept
his offer.
I was angrily denounced. But the leading Republican papers
soon came to my support. The Republican political leaders
generally, though quietly, approved what I had said and done.
The generous and just heart of the American people was stirred,
and the result was that the movement, inspired by bigotry
and intolerance, lost its force, languished for a year or
two, and was little heard of afterward.
I dare say that the same causes which excited it may provoke
a similar movement more than once hereafter. But I believe
it will fail as that failed.
I know how prone men are, especially old men, in telling
the story of their lives, to over-estimate the value and the
consequence of the things in which they have taken a part.
But I think I am not extravagant in claiming that the overthrow
of this dangerous delusion was of great value not only to
the Republican Party, but to the cause of religious liberty
in this country, and that the success of the A. P. A. would
have been the destruction of both.