One of the most exemplary and useful members of the order since its

restoration, Mother St. Joseph—in the world, Jane Chanay—is made known

to us in the biography whose title we have given. There are few lives

of which a judicious and faithful account would not be useful, and no

kind of writing is more attractive to most readers than biography. It

is seldom, however, that we meet with a religious biography with which

we are altogether pleased, and this now before us is not at all to our

taste. There is certainly no reason why the life of a nun should not

be as full of interest as that of a woman engaged in the frivolities

and vanities of the world, and we cannot but think it is the fault of

the author that Mother St. Joseph’s has not been made both instructive

and entertaining. The narrative is slow and interrupted, the style

heavy, and the facts often trivial without being either amusing or

edifying. We have the authority of Cardinal Donnet for the assertion

that the book is commendable for the beauty of its diction; but this

is certainly not true of the English translation, which is often

neither correct nor elegant. Take, for instance, the following

examples: “Other saints … are restored to their Creator with not _a

maze_ to dim their lustrous brightness” (p. 22). “When once the fire

of jealousy is kindled in the soul, nothing can _satiate its ravages_”

(p. 26).

We close with the following sentence, which we commend to the

attention of grammar-schools: “This good father having, in the course

of his missions, met with several widows and pious young women who

were desirous to retire from the world and devote themselves to the

service of the salvation of their neighbor, but were deterred for want

of means to enter convents, he formed the intention to propose to some

bishop the establishment of a congregation into which those devoted

women could enter and devote themselves to labor for their salvation,

and fulfil all the good works of which they were capable in the

service of their neighbor” (p. 66).

PRINCIPIA OR BASIS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. By R. J. Wright.

Second Edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott & Co. 1876.

The eight or ten pages of letters from various persons with which this

volume is prefaced, and in which the author receives thanks for copies

of his book, forcibly remind us of Sheridan’s formula for

acknowledging the publications that were constantly sent him: “DEAR

SIR: I have received your exquisite work, and I have no doubt I shall

be highly delighted _after_ I have read it.” The persons, known and

unknown, whose names are paraded here all anticipate a time when they

shall be able to congratulate themselves upon having put the _Basis of

Social Science_ beneath their feet.

Mr. Wright is doubtless a well-meaning man; and if good intentions

could pacify a critic’s irritable soul, between him and ourselves

there would be no quarrel. His aim has been, he informs us in his

preface, to write a work which, without offending the religious,

political, or scientific susceptibilities of any one, would commend

itself especially to “pious young men” and “students for the ministry,

who really desire to be useful and to be abreast of their age on this

subject”; and we are therefore prepared to find him ready to embrace

with equal tenderness a Mormon prophet, an Oneida free lover, a French

communist, and a Catholic monk. Mr. Wright’s sweetness and piety are

as offensive to us as the caress of a Yahoo was to Dean Swift. These

attempts to reconcile the antagonisms, incompatibilities, and

contradictions of the age, by besmearing them all with honey, are

worse than absurd; they add to the confusion and weaken the power to

apprehend truth. The self-imposed task of the author of this volume is

one which the greatest mind now living could not perform in a

satisfactory manner. Of all sciences, the social is, if it may as yet

be called a science, the most difficult, the most involved and

uncertain; in its idea it is a synthesis of all knowledges, and no one

who has not gathered into his own mind the intellectual achievements

of the whole race should attempt to construct a philosophy of social

science. The importance of the study of sociology we fully admit, and

gladly welcome even the humblest efforts to increase our knowledge of

this subject; but when those who ought to remain in the ranks seek to

take command, they become disorganizers. Had Mr. Wright been modest,

he might have been useful; having attempted too much, he has failed to

accomplish anything. In fact, he has not the first requisite of an

author—a knowledge of the language in which he writes. His style is

barbarous and tumultuary, often ungrammatical. It must, however, be

striking and emphatic, if we are to judge from the number of words

printed in italics and majuscules. And his thought is like his

style—incoherent, crude, and embryotic. He has read Comte, Fourier,

Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Appleton’s _Cyclopædia_, and with their aid

and the help of a certain “Theory of the Six Units” he has sought to

develop an ideal of human society not more impossible than Plato’s

_Republic_ or more visionary than More’s _Utopia_.

The keynote to his system is the “Theory of the Six Units.” The six

units are the Individual, the Family, the Social Circle, the Precinct,

the Nation, and Mankind. It seems to have been his acquaintance with

certain other “singular sixes” that led him to a belief in six, and

but six, social units. In the first place, “the figure which gives the

maximum amount of internal content with the minimum amount of external

surface of similar bodies joined together is a HEXAGON.” Again: “In

developed civilization there are six great classes of society”; but it

is only in some future work that the author will tell us about these

six great classes. And just here we wish to find fault with Mr. Wright

for a habit he has of adroitly arousing our curiosity, and then, as we

are beginning to imagine we are about to learn something, coolly

dropping us with the remark that the matter “will be portrayed in

another book.” He sometimes, too, seems to take a wicked delight in

puzzling his readers, as in the following sentence: “All affairs, when

they become ordinary, are apt to become matters of business; and

business matters are—well, we need not say what.” But to return to the

“sixes.” There are six fundamental motors of human passions. There are

six infinities—namely, deific spirit, soul spirit, matter, space,

duration, diversity. There are six organs of sense (the old notion

that there were but five is exploded)—sensation, temperature, taste,

smell, hearing, sight. There are six crystallizations—monometric,

dimetric, trimetric, monoclinic, triclinic, and hexagonal. There are

six religious societies—Adam, Adam and Eve, Patriarchy, Israel in

Egypt, Israel in Palestine, the Christian Church. It follows as a

matter of course that there must be six social units; and in fact, if

it were worth while, we could prove that there must be ten or twenty.

There is no unit in which Mr. Wright so much delights as the Precinct.

The real cause of the American civil war he has discovered to have

been a neglect of Precinct by both the North and the South; and it is

quite probable, we think, there is no social or political problem

which may not ultimately be solved in the same felicitous and

satisfactory manner.

Genius is manifested—at least this is, we believe, the opinion of Mr.

Emerson—quite as strikingly in quotation as in original composition,

and we respectfully call the attention of the philosopher of Concord

to Mr. Wright as a confirmatory example of this law of mind. Many a

household will find food for thought in the following citation:

“Family miffs are a grand institution for giving needful repose and

after-exhilaration to overtasked affection.” And this other will be

interesting to politicians: “It is to the criminal propensities of man

that we owe civilization.” “Alas!” sighs our pious philosopher, “that

the Radicals cannot make a better basis for civilization than the

foregoing crime-begetting one.”

From Wells, the phrenologist, Mr. Wright gets the following quotation,

which almost makes us repent of what we have written: “As a class the

theologians have the best heads in the world.”

CANTATA CATHOLICA. B. H. F. Hellebusch. Benziger Bros.

This is a collection of music for the “Asperges,” “Vidi Aquam,”

several Gregorian Masses, the Gregorian Requiem, the Preface, the

Pater Noster, Responses, Vespers, the Antiphons of the Blessed Virgin,

“O Salutaris,” and “Tantum Ergo,” besides a large number of pieces

intended to be used at Benediction and at various other times. The

Gregorian chants for the “Asperges,” “Vidi Aquam,” and the Masses are

harmonized by Dr. F. Witt. We cannot say that we admire the peculiar

“drone bass” which Dr. Witt uses so extensively, and the harmonies

are, to our ears, crude, and sometimes even barbarous, and as a

general rule are not in accordance with the _mode_. We also noticed

some ear-splitting _fifths_, used without any excuse whatever. The

Requiem is very incomplete; five verses only of the “Dies Iræ” are

given, and the Gradual and Tract are entirely omitted. Mr. Hellebusch

remarks in his preface that “the Preface and Pater Noster should only

be accompanied when required by the officiating clergyman and after

rehearsal.” In looking in the book for the reason for this remark, we

find that to accompany the simple melody of the “Preface of Trinity”

one hundred and ninety sharps, flats, and naturals are required; and

in the accompaniment of the words “socia exultatione concelebrant,” in

the “Common Preface,” we find twenty. The melody of the “Preface” has

also been altered by sharpening “do” all through. Over eight pages are

devoted to Responses, exclusive of the Responses for the Preface and

Pater Noster. In that portion of the book devoted to Vespers are some

grave errors. On page 103 is a note which informs us that “the Psalms

_can_ be chanted to any of the following _authentic_ or _simplified_

Vesper tones.” We have yet to learn which are the eight _authentic_

tones, and we were not aware that authentic and _simplified_ meant one

and the same thing. The eight Psalm-tunes are given with their various

endings, and with the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and _Sixth_, or “Final by

words of one syllable.” We suppose “mediation” is meant; but then the

Sixth tone has no different mediation for words of one syllable, and

the rule for Hebrew proper names is not given at all. In the Fifth

tone the “si” is improperly marked flat. The pointing of the Psalms is

very bad; we have “spirítui, spiritúi, vidít, sicút, motá,” etc. In

the latter part of the book, however, the pieces are selected with

good taste, and musically, although not practically, well arranged.

The book has been made up in too great a hurry.

ASPERGES ME. MASS IN F. MISSA DE ANGELIS. C. P. Morrison,

Worcester, Mass.

The “Asperges” is chiefly remarkable for some very clumsy and

incorrect modulations and the utter absence of any kind of melody and

design. The “Mass in F” is an easy setting of the Ordinary of the Mass

combined with a nauseating adaptation of English words for the use, we

suppose, of the “separated brethren” who like this kind of music. We

looked for and found the close on the words “Filius Patris,” with a

new movement for the “Qui tollis,” and the inevitable RESURRECTIONEM

mor … tu … o … rum. The C clef is placed at the beginning of the tenor

part, and the notes are incorrectly written, as if in the G clef, an

octave higher. The composer ought to know that the C clef is of as

much importance as either the G or F clef, and not a purely fanciful

character to be used or not at the option of the writer. The harmony

of the “Missa de Angelis” is entirely modern, full of chromatic

passages, dissonances, etc., which Mr. Morrison again ought to know

are not allowed in harmonies for Gregorian chant.

ALL AROUND THE MOON. From the French of Jules Verne. Freely

translated by Edw. Roth. With a Map of the Moon constructed

and engraved for this edition, and also with an Appendix

containing the famous Moon Hoax, by R. Adams Locke. New

York: The Catholic Publication Society, No. 9 Warren Street.

1876.

It is not often the case that translations are, like the present one,

an improvement on the original, especially when the original work is

such an admirable one as that from which this translation is made. We

noticed the first part, published under the title of _The Baltimore

Gun Club_, some time ago, favorably, and have been even more pleased

with this sequel.

Mr. Roth calls the book a free translation, but this term hardly

conveys the idea of the adaptation which he has really made of the

text. Verne certainly intended, when he laid the scene in America, to

make the characters, incidents, and conversation thoroughly American,

and he succeeded as well as could have been expected; but the task was

one simply impossible for a foreigner, and any translation at all

approaching to literal exactness, no matter by whom made, would have

been sure to have shared the defects of the text. Mr. Roth, therefore,

to carry out the author’s idea, had practically to rewrite the book in

such a way as to preserve the genius of the conception while altering

the details in a way which required an ability like that of the author

himself.

Besides having made the book really an American one, he has added to

its scientific merit by a fuller explanation of the problem which is

the nucleus of the story.

The “Moon Hoax,” which is appended, was probably the most successful

and the best contrived of all the scientific canards which have ever

appeared. It was written more than forty years ago, but its memory has

not yet died out, and it was so cleverly done as to be well worthy of

this reprint.

The book is illustrated by twenty-four cuts, besides the map of the

moon mentioned in the title. It would really have been better without

the rather clap-trap additional about the Centennial at its close, but

this makes it all the more American, and may be excusable under the

circumstances.

THE WYNDHAM FAMILY: A Story of Modern Life. By the author of

_Mount St. Lawrence_. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale

by The Catholic Publication Society.)

The best of motives and any quantity of the most pious reflections

have combined to make of these two volumes a remarkably dull story.

This is to be regretted; for those who can overcome the repugnance of

wading through page after page of what, with the best will in the

world we can only call dreary writing, will find much sound sense on

the conduct of the family and what are called “the exigencies” of

modern society. The author has attempted a bold feat—to paint the

“heroics” of the kitchen, or, as they are called in the story, “the

glory of service.” That there may be, that there is often, glory in

service there can be no doubt. This is the power of Christianity. That

a cook may be, and indeed often is, a model of self-sacrifice, or at

least a source of great self-sacrifice in others, he would be a rash

man who should undertake to deny. The author of _The Wyndham Family_

would reverse the old saying that “God sends the food, but the devil

sends the cook.” To be sure, the particular cook here held up to view

turns out to be quite a superior character, and this makes one of the

surprises of the story. The experiment, however, can scarcely be

considered a happy one. Were the two volumes condensed into one; were

the atmosphere of the kitchen a little less obtrusive; were the girls

in the story made to talk like girls, and not like what on this side

would be called by some “school marms”; were there only a little more

of the relief afforded by such a character as “Uncle Sanders,” _The

Wyndham Family_ might have been not only what it now is, a vehicle for

highly moral reflections, but a popular and interesting story.

It is strange that England, which has done so much in reviving

Catholic English letters within the last century, and which is so high

in the higher walks of literature, should, with a very few exceptions,

continue to furnish about the poorest specimens of Catholic stories

that the world has ever seen. Indeed, a kind of “goody-goody” school

has grown up there which holds its own with exasperating persistency.

The sooner that school is broken up the better. There surely might be

found a happy medium between the “penny dreadful,” or the fleshly

school of fiction, and that which reads like a very weak dilution of

the penny catechism.

THIRTY-FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION OF THE

CITY AND COUNTY OF NEW YORK FOR THE YEAR ENDING DECEMBER 31,

1875.

Apart from the mass of interesting statistics contained in this

report, the comprehensive style adopted by the compiler of presenting

facts and figures deserves special mention.

We have been interested in the development of the law compelling

children to attend school, but fail to find satisfactory information

regarding its workings in the report of the Superintendent of Truancy.

An increase of 7,614 in the daily average attendance is claimed by

him. These figures do not agree with the facts stated on pp. 12 and

213, and in addition the attendance of 1874 shows an increase of

15,094 over 1873.

After a year’s trial the superintendent comes to the conclusion that

the law, as it now stands, is a failure, and recommends the enactment

of other laws, and the erection of new institutions to enforce the

present law, of which he says: “Instances of opposition on the part of

the parents to the law, or the efforts of the agents, are extremely

rare; but rather do they regard them as welcome visitors and valuable

auxiliaries, their authority and suasion being earnestly solicited for

the reformation of the child” (p. 424).

FLAMINIA, and other stories; LUCAS GARCIA, and other

stories; PERICO THE SAD, and other stories; ROBERT, OR THE

INFLUENCE OF A GOOD MOTHER; THE CRUCIFIX OF BADEN, and other

stories; THE STORY OF MARCEL, and other tales. New York: The

Catholic Publication Society. 1876.

These are all excellent stories, choice flowers of fiction culled from

French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English gardens, while those of

native growth are not forgotten. They are reprints from THE CATHOLIC

WORLD; and how admirably fitted they are to meet a general want the

reader may judge for himself by glancing at this month’s Bulletin,

which presents the verdict of the Catholic press on them. Nothing is

more needed nowadays than good popular Catholic literature, stories,

perhaps, more than anything else. We accordingly welcome the

republication in book form of stories which were universally well

received as they appeared in the columns of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, and

only hope that the series may be continued.

EPISODES OF THE PARIS COMMUNE IN 1871. Translated from the

French by the Lady Blanche Murphy. Benziger Brothers, New

York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. 1876.

This is a little volume of very readable sketches, relating the

persecutions and sufferings of the various brotherhoods of Paris

during the brief reign of the Commune in 1871. Their schools were

closed, their houses invaded, and the brothers who had not succeeded

in escaping to some safe hiding-place were arrested and thrown into

prison. The services of the Christian Brothers as ambulance nurses

during the war were known to the whole country; but the Commune

ruthlessly drove them from the bedsides of the wounded and dying

soldiers. “Down with the Black-gowns!” was the cry. “Death to the

Brothers! Let them go join Darboy.”

“The watchword of the Revolution,” said Raoul Rigault to M. Cotte, the

writer of one of these sketches, and late director of the press

ambulances of Longchamps—“the watchword of the Revolution is death to

religion, to ritual, to priests!” And he added: “As long as there is

left in the land one man who dares pronounce the name of God all our

labor will have been in vain, and we shall not be able to lay down the

sword and the rifle.”

The style of the translation is easy and simple, and these _Episodes_

will very fittingly occupy a place in “The Catholic Premium-Book

Library.”

THE STORY OF A VOCATION: HOW IT CAME ABOUT, AND WHAT BECAME

OF IT. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1876.

This is really the story of two vocations—of one in the world, and of

another in, but not of, the world. It is one of those pure, graceful,

yet interesting tales which are only too few. The translation, from

the French, is well done. Parents and those who have charge of

children will find this book not only highly entertaining but of real

utility.

THE EPISCOPAL SUCCESSION IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND,

A.D. 1400 TO 1875. With appointments to monasteries and

extracts from consistorial acts taken from MSS. in public

and private libraries in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Ravenna,

and Paris. By W. Mazière Brady. Vol. I. Rome: Tipografia

della Pace. 1876.

This collection of curious documents relates to the Catholic

succession. It is of great utility to the searcher into ecclesiastical

antiquities. The author has consulted archives and searched out old

records with much diligence, and gathered together a number of curious

items of information of great value and interest to the antiquarian

student. The most interesting of these is the account of Dr. Goldwell,

Bishop of St. Asaph, the last of the old line of Catholic succession

in England, a prelate whose learning and sanctity make him worthy to

close the series which St. Augustine began.

BOSTON TO WASHINGTON. A Pocket Guide to the Great Eastern

Cities and the Centennial Exhibition, with Maps. New York:

Hurd & Houghton. 1876.

The title of this work will give the reader but a poor idea of its

value compared with other guides, which are mere advertising sheets.

This book is neat in every way—in its paper, in its printing, in its

illustrations, and in its binding—and contains a great amount of

interesting and correct information about the cities of Boston, New

York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, and will prove a

valuable guide to the traveller, whether native or foreign.

VOYAGES DANS L’AMERIQUE SEPTENTRIONALE. Par L. R. Père P. J.

De Smet, S. J. Bruxelles: Benziger Bros.; New York.

This is a French edition of Father De Smet’s travels as an Indian

missionary in the Rocky Mountains and in Oregon. This celebrated

Jesuit, besides being a zealous apostle, was also a keen observer of

men and customs, and his descriptions of Indian life, with which no

man was more familiar, are both entertaining and instructive. A

biography of Father De Smet has been recently published in Belgium, an

English translation of which would, we think, be welcomed by American

Catholics.

NOTE TO THE ARTICLE ON “THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY.”

Those who read carefully the philosophical articles which appear from

time to time in our pages will notice that different, and even

contradictory, opinions on some points are to be met with

occasionally. It seems proper to explain, therefore, that the editor,

and those who assist him in supervising the conduct of the magazine,

while professing a general adhesion to the doctrine of St. Thomas,

allow a considerable latitude in the expression of individual opinion

by the different writers who contribute articles; and do not

necessarily imply, in their approbation of pieces for publication,

that they concur in every respect with the statements and arguments

contained in them.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 136.—JULY, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1876.

SONNET.

THE CENTENARY OF AMERICAN LIBERTY.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

A century of sunrises hath bowed

Its fulgent forehead ‘neath the ocean-floor

Since first upon the West’s astonished shore,

Like some huge Alp forth-struggling through the cloud

A new-born nation stood, to Freedom vowed:

Within that time how many an Empire hoar

And young Republic, flushed with wealth and war,

Alike have changed the ermine for the shroud!

O “sprung from earth’s first blood,” O tempest-nursed!

For thee what Fates? I know not. This I know

The Soul’s great freedom-gift, of gifts the first—

Thou first on man in fulness didst bestow:

Hunted elsewhere, God’s Church with thee found rest:—

Thy future’s Hope is she—that queenly Guest.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES,

1776-1876.

The social conditions of life which have been developed in the

European colonies of North America, though to a certain extent the

result of the physical surroundings of the early settlers, are chiefly

the freer growth of principles which had been active, for centuries,

in the Christian nations of the Old World. The elements of society

here, unhindered by custom, law, or privilege, grouped themselves

quickly and spontaneously into the forms to which they were tending in

Europe also, but slowly and through conflict and struggle. The great

and most significant fact, that it was found impossible in the New

World to create privileged classes, clearly pointed in the direction

in which European civilization was moving. Another fact not less

noteworthy is the failure of every attempt to establish religion in

this country.

Though there is but little to please the fancy or fire the imagination

in American character or institutions, it is nevertheless to this

country that the eyes of the thoughtful and observant from every part

of the world are turned. The Catholicity of Christian civilization has

generalized political problems and social movements. Civilization,

like religion, has ceased to be national; and the bearing of a

people’s life upon the welfare of the human race has come to be of

greater moment than its effect upon the national character. It is to

this that the universal interest which centres in the United States

must be attributed.

We are a commonplace and mediocre people; practical, without high

ideals, lofty aspirations, or excellent standards of worth and

character. In philosophy, in science, in literature, in art, in

culture, we are inferior to the nations of Europe. No mind

transcendentally great has appeared among us; not one who is heir to

all the ages and citizen of the world. Our ablest thinkers are merely

the disciples of some foreign master. Our most gifted poets belong to

the careful kind, who with effort and the file give polish and

smoothness, but not the _mens divinior_, to their verse; and who, when

they attempt a loftier flight, grow dull and monotonous as a

Western prairie or Rocky Mountain table-land. Our most popular

heroes—Washington and Lincoln—are but common men, and the higher is he

who is least the product of our democratic institutions.

Our commercial enterprise and mechanical achievements are worthy of

admiration, but not so far above those of other nations as to attract

special attention.

If to-day, then, the American people draw the eyes of the whole world

upon themselves, it is not because they have performed marvellous

deeds, opened up new realms of thought, or created higher types of

character, but because their social and political condition is that to

which Europe, whether for good or evil, seems to be irresistibly

tending. Beyond doubt, the tendency of modern civilization is to give

to the people greater power and a larger sphere of action. Every

attempt to arrest this movement but serves to make its force the more

manifest. This spirit of the age is seen in the general spread of

education, in the widening of the popular suffrage, in the separation

of church and state, and in the dying out of aristocracies. We simply

note facts, without stopping to examine principles or to weigh

consequences. Those who resist a revolution are persuaded that it will

work nothing but evil, while those who help it on hope from it every

good; and the event most generally shows both to have been in error.

Our present purpose does not lead us to speculate as to the manner in

which the general welfare is to be affected by the great social

transformations by which the character of civilized nations is being

so profoundly modified; but we will suppose that the reign of

aristocracies and of privilege is past, and that in the future the

people are to govern; and we ask, What will be the influence of the

new society upon the old faith?

The essential life of the Catholic Church is independent of her

worldly condition; and though we are bound to believe that she is to

remain amongst men until the end, we are yet not forbidden to hold

that at times she may to human eyes seem almost to have ceased to be;

that as in the past Christ was entombed, the _deletum nomen

Christianum_ was proclaimed, in the future also the heavens may grow

dark, God’s countenance seemingly be withdrawn, and the voice of

despair cry out that all have bent the knee to Baal.

“But yet the Son of Man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you,

faith on earth?” We may hope, we may despond; let us, then,

dispassionately consider the facts.

First, we will put aside the assumption that it is possible to

organize this modern society so as to crush the church by persecution

or violence. In a social state, which can be strong only by being

just, attempts of this kind, if successful, would inevitably lead to

anarchy and chaos, out of which the church would again come forth with

or before the civil order. We cannot, then, look forward to a

prolonged and open conflict between the church and the civilized

governments of the world without giving up all hope in the permanency

and effectiveness of the social phase upon which we have entered. In

the end the European states, like the American, must be convinced

that, if they would live, they must also let live; since a _modus

vivendi_ between church and state is absolutely essential to the

permanence of society as now constituted.

The question, then, is narrowed to the free and peaceable life of the

church in contact with the popular governments which are already

constituted or are struggling for existence; and it is in their

bearing upon this all-important subject that the world-wide

significance of the lessons to be learned from a careful study of the

history of the Catholic Church in the United States becomes apparent.

For a hundred years this church has lived in the new society, and all

the circumstances of her position have been admirably suited to test

her power to meet the difficulties offered by a democratic social

organization. The problem to be solved was whether or not a vigorous

but yet orderly and obedient Catholic faith and life could flourish in

this country, where what are called the principles of modern

civilization have found their most complete expression.

If we would understand the history of our country, we must not lose

sight of the religious character of the men by whom it was explored

and colonized. Religious zeal led the Puritans to New England, the

Catholics to Maryland, and the Quakers to Pennsylvania; and among the

Spaniards and the French there were many who, like Columbus and

Champlain, deemed the salvation of a soul of greater moment than the

conquest of an empire. We might, indeed, without going beyond our

present subject, speak of the heroic and gentle lives of the apostolic

men who, from Maine to California, from Florida to the Northern Lakes,

toiled among the Indians, and not in vain, that they might win them

from savage ways and lift them up to higher modes of life. The

Catholics of the United States can never forget that the labors of

these men belong to the history of the church on this continent; that

the lives they offered up, the blood they shed, plead for us before

God; and that if their work is disappearing, it sinks into the grave

only with the dying race which they more than all others have loved

and served. But in this age men are little inclined to dwell upon

memories, however glorious. We live in the present and in the future,

and, in spite of much cheap sentiment and wordy philanthropy, we have

but weak sympathy with decaying races. We are interested in what is or

is to be, not in what has been; and perhaps it is well that this is

so. We have but feeble power to think or act or love, and it should

not be wasted. If Americans to-day are busy with thoughts of a hundred

years ago, it is not that they love those old times and their simple

ways, but that by contrast they may, in boastful self-complacency,

glory in the present. They look back, not to regret the fast-receding

shore, but to congratulate themselves that they have left it already

so far behind. It is enough, then, to have alluded to the labors of

the Catholic missionaries among the North American Indians, since

those labors have had and can have but small influence upon the

history of the church in the United States. To understand this history

we need only study that of the Europeans and their descendants on this

continent.

The early colonists of the present territory of the United States were

as unlike in their religious as in their national characters. English

Puritans founded the colonies of New England; New York was settled by

the Dutch; Delaware and New Jersey by the Dutch and the Swedes;

Pennsylvania by Quakers from England, who were followed by a German

colony. Virginia was the home of the English who adhered to the

Established Church of the mother country, and North Carolina became

the refuge of the Nonconformists from Virginia; in South Carolina a

considerable number of Huguenots found an asylum; and in Maryland the

first settlers were chiefly English Catholics. Nearly all these

colonies owed their foundation to the religious troubles of Europe.

The Puritans, the Catholics, and the Quakers were more eager to find a

home in which they could freely worship God than to amass wealth.

The religious spirit of New England, whose influence in this country,

before and since the Revolution, has been preponderant, was as narrow

and proscriptive as it was intense, and a gloomy fanaticism lay at the

basis of its entire political and social system. The Puritan colonies

were not so much bodies politic as churches in the wilderness. To the

commission appointed to draw up a body of laws to serve as a

declaration of rights, Cotton Mather declared that God’s people should

be governed by no other laws than those which He himself had given to

Moses; and one of the first acts of the Massachusetts colony was the

expulsion of John and Samuel Browne with their followers, because they

refused to conform to the religious practices of the Pilgrims. If

dissenting Protestants were not tolerated in New England, Catholics

certainly could not hope for mercy; and, in fact, they were denied

religious liberty even in Rhode Island, which had been founded by the

victims of Puritan persecution as a refuge for the oppressed and a

protest against fanaticism. Though Mr. Bancroft, whose partisan zeal,

whenever there is question of New England, is unmistakable, denies

that this unjust discrimination was the act of the people of Rhode

Island, it served, at any rate, so effectually to exclude Catholics

that when the war of independence broke out not one was to be found

within the limits of the colony.

Puritanism, more than any other form of Protestantism, drew its very

life from a hatred of all that is Catholic. The office and authority

of bishops, the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, the sign of the

cross, the chant of the psalms, the observance of saints’ days, the

use of musical instruments in church, and the vestments worn by the

ministers of religion were all odious to the Puritans because they

were associated with Catholic worship; and in their eyes the chief

crime of the Church of England was that she still retained some of the

doctrines and usages of that of Rome. Religion and freedom, though

their conception of both was partial and false, were the predominant

passions of the Puritans; and since they looked upon the Catholic

Church as the fatal enemy alike of religion and of freedom, their

fanaticism, not less than their enthusiastic love of independence,

filled them with the deepest hatred for Catholics. They had the

virtues and the vices of the lower and more ignorant classes of

Englishmen, from which for the most part they had sprung. If they were

frugal, content with little, ready to bear hardship and to suffer

want, not easily cast down, they were also narrow, superstitious,

angular, and unlovely; and these characteristics were hardened by a

cold, gloomy, and unsympathetic religious faith. The credulity which

led them to hang witches made them ready to believe in the diabolism

of priests; while the narrowness of their intellectual range rendered

them incapable of perceiving the grandeur and excellence of an

organization which alone, in the history of the world, has become

universal without becoming weak, and which, if it be considered as

only human, is still man’s most wonderful work. With the æsthetic

beauty of the Catholic religion they could have no sympathy, since

they were deprived of the sense by which alone it can be appreciated.

Though they fasted, appointed days of thanksgiving, and, through a

false asceticism, changed the Lord’s day into the Jewish Sabbath, the

fasts and saints’ days of Catholics were in their eyes the

superstitions of idolaters; and while they assumed the right to

declare what is true Christian doctrine and to enforce its acceptance,

they indignantly rejected the spiritual authority of the church,

though historically traceable to Christ’s commission to the apostles.

The measures, therefore, which the colonies of New England took to

prevent the establishment of the Catholic Church on their soil, were

merely the expression of the horror and dread of what they conceived

its influence and tendency to be. In 1631, just eleven years after the

landing of the _Mayflower_, Sir Christopher Gardiner, on mere

suspicion of being a papist, was seized and sent out of the Colony of

Massachusetts Bay, and in the same year the General Court wrote a

letter denouncing the minister at Watertown for giving expression to

the opinion that the Church of Rome is a true church. Three years

later Roger Williams, whose tolerant temper has been an exhaustless

theme of praise, joined with the Puritans in declaring the cross a

“relic of Antichrist, a popish symbol savoring of superstition and not

to be countenanced by Christian men”; and, in proof of the sincerity

of their zeal, these godly men cut the cross from out the English

flag. Priests were forbidden, under pain of imprisonment and even

death, to enter the colonies; and the neighboring Catholic settlements

of Canada were regarded with sentiments of such bigoted hatred as to

blind the Puritans to their own most evident political and commercial

interests. So unrelenting was their fanaticism that one of the

grievances which they most strongly urged against George III. was that

he tolerated popery in Canada. In the New England colonies, down to

1776, the Catholic Church had no existence, and the same may be said

of the other colonies, with the exception of Maryland and of a few

families scattered through parts of Pennsylvania. In Maryland itself,

where the principles of religious liberty, which now form a part of

the organic law of the land, had been first proclaimed by the Catholic

colonists, the persecution of the church early became an important

feature in the colonial legislation. In successive enactments the

Catholics were forbidden to teach school, to hold civil office, and to

have public worship; and were, moreover, taxed for the support of the

Established Church. The religious character of Virginia, though less

intense and earnest than that of New England, can hardly be said to

have been less anti-Catholic; and it is therefore not surprising that

we should find the cruel penal code of the mother country in full

vigor in this colony.

It would have been difficult to find anywhere communities more

thoroughly Protestant than the thirteen British colonies one hundred

years ago. The little body of Catholics in Maryland, in all about

25,000, who, in spite of persecution, had retained their faith, had

sunk into a kind of religious apathy; and as their public worship had

long been forbidden and they were not permitted to have schools, to

indifference was added ignorance of the doctrines of the church. A few

priests, once members of the suppressed Society of Jesus, lingered

amongst them, though they generally found it necessary to live upon

their own lands or with their kindred, and with difficulty kept alive

the flickering flame of faith. Without religious energy, zeal, or

organization, the Maryland Catholics were gradually being absorbed

into mere worldliness or into the more vigorous Protestant sects; and,

in fact, many of the descendants of the original settlers had already

lost the faith. In this way the character of the old Catholic colony

had been wholly changed; so that Maryland surpassed all the other

colonies in the odious proscriptiveness of her legislation, levying

the same tax for the introduction into her territory of a Catholic

Irishman as for the importation of a Negro slave. The existence of the

Catholic families there, and of the small and scattered settlements in

Pennsylvania, if recognized at all by the general public, was looked

upon as an anomaly, an anachronism, which, from the nature of things,

must soon disappear. There is no exaggeration, then, in saying that

the Revolution found the British provinces of North America thoroughly

Protestant, with a hatred of the church which nothing but the general

contempt for Catholics tended to mitigate; while the seeming failure

of the Catholic settlement in Maryland, one hundred and fifty years

after the landing of Lord Baltimore, gave no promise of a brighter

future for the faith.

In the presence of the impending conflict with England political

questions became supreme, and the Convention of 1774, in its appeal to

the country, entreated all classes of citizens to put away religious

disputes and animosities, which could only withhold them from uniting

in the defence of their common rights and liberties. Though this

appeal was probably meant to smooth the way for a more cordial union

between New England and the Southern colonies, which were even then as

unlike as Puritan and Cavalier, it was also an evidence of the public

feeling, showing that with the American people religious questions

were fast coming to be merely of secondary importance. At any rate it

was responded to cheerfully and generously by the Catholics, who,

without stopping to think of the wrongs they had suffered, threw

themselves heartily into the contest for national independence. The

signer of the Declaration who risked most was a Catholic, and a

Catholic priest was a member of the delegation sent to Canada to bring

about an alliance, or at least to secure the neutrality of that

province.

The conduct of the Catholics in the war made, no doubt, a favorable

impression, and the very important aid given to the American cause by

Catholic France had still further influence in softening the

asperities of Protestant prejudice; but, unless we are mistaken, we

must seek elsewhere for the explanation of the clause of the federal

Constitution which provides that “no religious test shall ever be

required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the

United States”; as well as of the First Amendment, to the effect that

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or

prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” These provisions were merely a

part of a general policy, which restricted as far as possible the

functions of the federal government, and left to the several States as

much of their separate sovereignty as was consistent with the

existence of the national Union.

This is evident from the fact that the federal Constitution placed no

restriction upon the legislation of the different States in matters of

religion, leaving them free to pursue the intolerant and persecuting

policy of the colonial era; and, indeed, laws for the support of

public worship lingered in Connecticut till 1816 and in Massachusetts

till 1833, and anti-Catholic religious tests were introduced into

several of the State constitutions. In New York, as late as 1806, a

test-oath excluded Catholics from office; and in North Carolina, down

to 1836, only those who were willing to swear to belief in the truth

of Protestantism were permitted to hope for political preferment. New

Jersey erased the anti-Catholic clause from her constitution only in

1844; and even to-day, unless we err, the written law of New Hampshire

retains the test-oath.

The provision which denied to the general government all right of

interference in religious matters was a political necessity. Any

attempt to introduce into Congress religious discussions would have

necessarily rent asunder the still feeble bands by which New England

and the Southern States were held together. The reasons of policy

which forbade the federal government to meddle with slavery applied

with ten-fold force to questions of religion.

The First Amendment to the Constitution, of which we Americans are so

fond of boasting, cannot, then, be interpreted as the proclamation of

the principle of toleration or of the separation of church and state;

it is merely the expression of the will of the confederating States to

retain their pre-existing rights of control over religion, which,

indeed, they could not have delegated to the general government

without imperilling the very existence of the Union. Nearly all the

leading statesmen of that day recognized the necessity of some kind of

union of church and state, and their views were embodied in the

different State constitutions.

The year before the first battle of the Revolution no less than

eighteen Baptists were confined in one jail in Massachusetts for

refusing to pay ministerial rates; and yet John Adams declared “that a

change in the solar system might be expected as soon as a change in

the ecclesiastical system of Massachusetts”; and at a much later

period Judge Story was able to affirm that “it yet remained a problem

to be solved in human affairs whether any free government can be

permanent where the public worship of God and the support of religion

constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state.”

There is no foundation, we think, for the opinion which we have

sometimes heard expressed, that the First Amendment to the

Constitution was intended as an act of tardy justice to the Catholics

of the United States, in gratitude for their conduct during the war

and for the aid of Catholic France. It in fact made no change in the

position of the Catholics, whom it left to the mercy of the different

States, precisely as they had been in the colonial era. Various causes

were, however, at work which, by modifying the attitude of the States

towards religion, tended also to give greater freedom to the Catholic

Church. The first of these was the rise of what may be called the

secular theory of government, whose great exponent, Thomas Jefferson,

had received his political opinions from the French philosophers of

the eighteenth century. The state, according to this theory, is a

purely political organism, and is not in any way concerned with

religion; and this soon came to be the prevailing sentiment in the

Democratic party, whose acknowledged leader Jefferson was, which may

explain why the great mass of the Catholics in this country have

always voted with this party. Another cause that tended to bring about

a separation of church and state was the rapidly-increasing number of

sects, which rendered religious legislation more and more difficult,

especially as several of these were opposed to any recognition of

religion by the civil power. And to this we may add the growing

religious indifference which caused large numbers of Americans to fall

away from, or to be brought up outside of, all ecclesiastical

organization. The desire, too, to encourage immigration—which sprang

from interested motives, and also from a feeling, very powerful in the

United States half a century ago, that this country is the refuge of

all who are oppressed by the European tyrannies—predisposed Americans

to look favorably upon the largest toleration of religious belief and

practice. There is no question, then, but the Catholics of this

country owe the freedom which they now enjoy to the operation of

general laws, the necessary results of given social conditions, and

not at all to the good-will or tolerant temper of American

Protestants. Let us, however, be grateful for the boon, whencesoever

derived. At the close of the war which secured our national

independence and created the republic the Catholic Church found

herself, for all practical purposes, unfettered and free to enter upon

a field which to her, we may say, was new. At that time there were in

the whole country not more than forty thousand Catholics and

twenty-five priests. In all the land there was not a convent or a

religious community. There was not a Catholic school; there was no

bishop; the sacraments of confirmation and of Holy Orders had never

been administered. The church was without organization, having for

several years had no intercourse with its immediate head, the

vicar-apostolic of London; it was without property, with the exception

of some land in Maryland, which, through a variety of contrivances,

had been saved from the rapacity of the colonial persecutors; and,

surrounded by a bigoted Protestant population, ignorant of all the

Catholic glories of the past, it was also without honor. But faith and

hope, which with liberty ought to make all things possible, had not

fled, and soon the budding promise of the future harvest lifted its

timid head beneath the genial sun of a brighter heaven. The priests of

Maryland and Pennsylvania addressed a letter to Pius VI., praying him

to appoint a prefect-apostolic to preside over the church in the

United States; and as the Holy See was already deliberating upon a

step of this kind, Father Carroll was made superior of the American

clergy, with power to administer the sacrament of confirmation. This

was in 1784.

The priests, who at this time, for fear of wounding Protestant

susceptibilities, thought it inexpedient to ask for a bishop, were

now, after longer deliberation, persuaded that in this they had erred,

and they therefore named a committee to present a petition to Rome,

praying for the erection of an episcopal see in the United States. The

Holy Father having signified his willingness to accede to this

proposition, and it having been ascertained, too, that the government

of this country would make no objection, they at once fixed upon

Baltimore as the most suitable location for the new see, and presented

the name of Father Carroll as the most worthy to be its first

occupant. The papal bulls were dated November 6, 1789, and upon their

reception Father Carroll sailed for England, where he was consecrated

on the 15th of August, the Feast of the Assumption, 1790.

Events were just then taking place in France which were of great

moment to the young church on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The French Revolution was getting ready to guillotine priests and to

turn churches into barracks; and M. Emery, the Superior-General of the

Order of Saint Sulpice, who was as far-seeing as he was fearless,

entered into correspondence with Bishop Carroll, in England, with a

view to open an ecclesiastical seminary in the United States. The

offer was gladly accepted, and the year following (1791) M. Nagot

organized the Theological Seminary of Baltimore, and in the same year

the first Catholic college in the United States was opened at

Georgetown, in the District of Columbia. In 1790 Father Charles Neale

brought from Antwerp a community of Carmelite nuns, who established

themselves near Port Tobacco, in Southern Maryland. This was the first

convent of religious women founded in the United States, the house of

Ursuline nuns in New Orleans having come into existence while

Louisiana was still a French colony. A few years later a number of

religious ladies adopted the rule of the Order of the Visitation and

organized a convent in Georgetown; and in 1809 Mother Seton founded

near Emmittsburg, in Maryland, the first community of Sisters of

Charity in this country, just one year after Father Dubois, the future

Bishop of New York, had opened Mt. St. Mary’s College. In 1805 Bishop

Carroll reorganized the Society of Jesus, and in 1806 the Dominicans

founded their first convent in the United States, at St. Rose, in

Kentucky. Two years later episcopal sees were established at New York,

Boston, Philadelphia, and Bardstown, with an archiepiscopal centre at

Baltimore.

In this way the church was preparing, as far as the slender means at

her command would permit, to receive and care for the vast multitudes

of Catholics who began to seek refuge in the United States from the

persecutions and oppressions of the British and other European

governments. But her resources were not equal to the urgency and

magnitude of the occasion, and her history, during the half-century

immediately following the close of the Revolutionary war, though full

of examples of courage, zeal, and energy, shows her in the throes of a

struggle which, whether it were for life or death, seemed doubtful.

Like an invading army, her children poured in a ceaseless stream into

the enemy’s country, and, arrived upon the scene of action, they found

themselves without leaders, without provisions, without means of

defence or weapons of heavenly warfare. Far from their spiritual

guides, in a strange land, without churches or schools, the very air

of this new world seemed fatal to the faith of the early Catholic

immigrants; and when, yielding to the rigors of the climate or the

hardships of frontier life, they died in great numbers, their orphan

children fell into the hands of Protestants and were lost to the

church. Their descendants to-day are scattered from Maine to Florida,

from New York to California.

Bishop England, though inclined to exaggerate the losses of the church

in this country, was certainly not mistaken in holding that during the

period of which we speak, though there was an increase of

congregations, there was yet a great falling away of Catholics from

the faith in the United States.

Unfortunately, the want of priests and churches cannot with truth be

said to have been the greatest evil, especially in the early years of

the organization of the hierarchy. A spirit of insubordination existed

both in the clergy and the laity. “Every day,” wrote Bishop Carroll,

“furnishes me with new reflections, and almost every day produces new

events to alarm my conscience and excite fresh solicitude at the

prospect before me. You cannot conceive the trouble which I suffer

already, and the still greater which I foresee from the medley of

clerical characters, coming from different quarters and of various

educations, and seeking employment here. I cannot avoid employing some

of them, and soon they begin to create disturbances.” There were

troubles and scandals in nearly all the larger cities, which in some

instances were fomented by the priests themselves. The trustee system

was a fruitful cause of disturbance, threatening at times to bring the

greatest evils upon the church; especially as there seemed to be

reason to fear lest the dissensions between the clergy and the laity

might serve as a pretext for the intermeddling of the civil authority

in ecclesiastical affairs. Except in the two or three colleges of

which we have spoken, there was no Catholic education to be had; and

for a long time the few elementary schools which were opened were of a

very wretched kind. Indeed, we may say that it is only within the last

quarter of a century that many of the bishops and priests of this

country have come to realize the all-importance of Catholic education.

Another unavoidable evil was the mingling of various nationalities in

the same church, giving rise to jealousies, and frequently to

dissensions; and to this we may add that the very people to whom above

all others the church in this country is indebted for its progress met

with peculiar difficulties in the fulfilment of their God-given

mission. This fact did not escape the keen eye of the first bishop of

Charleston.

“England,” he says, “has unfortunately too well succeeded in

linking contumely to their name [the Irish] in all her

colonies; and though the United States have cast away the

yoke under which she held them, many other causes have

combined to continue against the Irish Catholic more or less

to the present day the sneer of the supercilious, the

contempt of the conceited, and the dull prosing of those who

imagine themselves wise. That which more than a century of

fashion has made habitual is not to be overcome in a year;

and to any Irish Catholic who has dwelt in this country

during one-fourth of the period of my sojourn it will be

painfully evident that, although the evil is slowly

diminishing, its influence is not confined to the American

nor to the anti-Catholic. When a race is once degraded,

however unjustly, it is a weakness of our nature that,

however we may be identified with them upon some points, we

are desirous of showing that the similitude is not complete.

You may be an Irishman, but not a Catholic: you may be

Catholics, but not Irish. It is clear you are not an Irish

Catholic in either case! But when the great majority of

Catholics in the United States were either Irish or of Irish

descent, the force of the prejudice against the Irish

Catholic bore against the Catholic religion, and the

influence of this prejudice has been far more mischievous

than is generally believed.”[125]

We must not omit to add that many of the early missionaries spoke

English very imperfectly and were but little acquainted with the

habits and customs of the people among whom they were called to labor;

while the five or six bishops of the country, separated by great

distances from their priests, rarely saw them, and consequently were

in a great measure unable to control or direct them in the exercise of

the sacred ministry. The French missionaries, who in their own country

had seen the most frightful crimes committed in the name of liberty

and of republicanism, found it difficult to sympathize heartily with

our democratic institutions; and from Ireland very few priests came,

because the French Revolution had broken up the Continental Irish

seminaries from which she drew her own supplies.

The purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 added little or nothing

to the strength of the church in the United States, since, owing to

the wretched French ecclesiastical colonial policy, which did not

permit the appointment of bishops, the Catholic population of that

province, a large portion of whom were negro slaves, had been almost

wholly neglected. What the state of the church was in Florida at the

time of its cession to the United States may be inferred from the fact

that in the whole province there was but one efficient priest, who at

once withdrew to Cuba, and afterwards to Ireland, his native country.

In the early years of the present century Protestant feeling in this

country was much more earnest and self-confident than at present—in

the simple days of camp-meetings and jerking revivals and childlike

faith in the pope as Antichrist, and in priests and nuns as Satan’s

chosen agents; when the preachers had the whole world of anti-popery

commonplace wherein to disport themselves without fear of

contradiction. The universal feeling of pity for those who doubted the

supreme wisdom of our political institutions was bestowed with not

less boundless liberality upon all who failed to perceive that

American Protestantism was the fine essence and final outcome of all

that is best and purest in religion. Catholic opinion, on the other

hand, was feeble, unorganized, and thrown back upon itself by the

overwhelming force of a public sentiment strong, fresh, and defiant.

We were, moreover, still under the ban of English literature that for

three hundred years had been busy travestying the history and

doctrines of the church, to defend which was made a crime. There were

but few Catholic books, and those to be had generally failed to catch

the phases of religious thought through which American Protestants

were passing. It was more than thirty years after the erection of the

see of Baltimore that the Charleston _Miscellany_, which Archbishop

Hughes called the first really Catholic newspaper ever published in

this country, was founded; and fifty years after the consecration of

Bishop Carroll there were but six Catholic journals in the United

States.

Much else might be said in illustration of the difficulties with which

the church has had to contend, and of the obstacles which she has had

to overcome, in order to win the position which she now occupies in

the great American republic. Enough, however, has been said to show

that it would be difficult to imagine surroundings which, while

allowing her freedom of action, would be better suited to test her

strength and vitality.

The 15th of next August eighty-six years will have passed since the

consecration of Bishop Carroll, and to this period the organized

efforts of the church to secure a position in this country are

confined. The work then begun has not for a moment been intermitted.

In the midst of losses, defeats, persecutions, anxieties, doubts,

revilings, calumnies, the struggle has been still carried on. Each

year with its sorrows brought also its joys. The progress, if at times

imperceptible, was yet real. When in the early synods and councils of

Baltimore were gathered the strong and true-hearted bishops and

priests who have now gone to their rest, there was doubtless more of

sadness than of exultation in their words as they spoke of their

scattered and poorly-provided flocks, of the want of priests, of

churches, of schools, of asylums, of the hardships of missionary life,

and of labors that seemed in vain. Still, they sowed in faith, knowing

that God it is who gives the increase. Like weary travellers who seem

to make no headway, by looking back they saw how much they had

advanced. New churches were built, new congregations were formed, new

dioceses were organized. On some mountain-side or in deep wooded vale

a cloister, a convent, a college, a seminary arose, one hardly knew

how, and yet another and another, until these retreats of learning and

virtue dotted the land. The elements of discord and disturbance within

the church grew less and less active, the relations between priest and

people became more intimate and cordial, the tone of Catholic feeling

improved, ecclesiastical discipline was strengthened, and the

self-respect of the Catholic body increased.

The danger, which at one time may have seemed imminent, of the

estrangement of the laity from the clergy, disappeared little by

little, and to-day in no country in the world are priest and people

more strongly united than here. With the more thorough organization of

dioceses and congregations parochial schools became practicable, and

the great progress made in Catholic elementary education is one of the

most significant and reassuring facts connected with the history of

the church in the United States. The number of pupils in our parochial

schools was, in 1873, 380,000, and to-day it is probably not much

short of half a million, which, however, is even less than half of the

Catholic school population of the entire country. But the work of

building schools is still progressing, and the conviction of the

indispensable necessity of religious education is growing with both

priests and people; so that we may confidently hope that the time is

not very remote when in this country Catholic children will be brought

up only in Catholic schools. By establishing protectories, industrial

schools, and asylums we are growing year after year better able to

provide for our orphan children.

The want of priests, which has hitherto been one of the chief

obstacles to the progress of the church, is now felt only in

exceptional cases or in new or thinly-settled dioceses. A hundred

years ago there were not more than twenty-five priests in the United

States; in 1800 there were supposed to be forty; in 1830 the number

had risen to two hundred and thirty-two, and in 1848 to eight hundred

and ninety. In ten years, from 1862 to 1872, the number of priests was

more than doubled, having grown from two thousand three hundred and

seventeen to four thousand eight hundred and nine. The lack of

vocations to the priesthood among native Americans was formerly a

subject of anxiety and also of frequent discussion among Catholics in

this country; but now it is generally admitted, we think, that if

proper care is taken in the education and training of our youths, a

sufficient number of them will be found willing to devote themselves

to the holy ministry.

In 1875 there were, according to the official statistics of the

various dioceses, five thousand and seventy-four priests, twelve

hundred and seventy-three ecclesiastical students, and six thousand

five hundred and twenty-eight churches and chapels in the United

States. There were also, at the same time, thirty-three theological

seminaries, sixty-three colleges, five hundred and fifty-seven

academies and select schools, sixteen hundred and forty-five parochial

schools, two hundred and fourteen asylums, and ninety-six hospitals

under the authority and control of the Catholic hierarchy of this

country.

One hundred years ago there was not a Catholic ecclesiastical student,

or theological seminary, or college, or academy, or parochial school,

or asylum, or hospital from Maine to Georgia.

Father Badin, the first person who ever received Holy Orders in the

United States, was ordained in the old cathedral of Baltimore on the

25th of May, 1793, just eighty-three years ago. It is now eighty-six

years since Bishop Carroll was consecrated, and down to 1808 he

remained the only Catholic bishop in the American Church, whose

hierarchy is composed at present of one cardinal, ten archbishops,

forty-six bishops, and eight vicars-apostolic.

In 1790 there was not a convent in the United States; in 1800 there

were but two; to-day there are more than three hundred and fifty for

women, and there are probably one hundred and thirty for men.

We may be permitted to refer also to the increase of the wealth of the

church in this country, especially since this seems to be the cause of

great uneasiness to the faithful and unselfish representatives of the

sovereign people. The value of the property owned by the church in

this country, as given in the census reports, was, in 1850,

$9,256,758; in 1860, $26,774,119; and in 1870, $60,985,565. The ratio

of increase from 1850 to 1860 was 189 per cent., and from 1860 to 1870

128 per cent.; while the aggregate wealth of the whole country during

these same periods increased in the former decade only 125 per cent.

and in the latter only 86 per cent. In 1850 the value of the church

property of the Baptists, the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and the

Presbyterians was greater than that of the Catholics, but in 1870 we

had taken the second rank in point of wealth, and to-day we think

there is no doubt but that we hold the first.

“Whatever causes,” says Mr. Abbott, in his recent article on _The

Catholic Peril in America_, “may have contributed to this significant

result, it is certain that among the chief of them must be reckoned

exemption from just taxation, extraordinary shrewdness of financial

management, and fraudulent collusion with dishonest politicians.”

Those who know more of the history of the church in this country than

can be learned from statistical reports, or articles in reviews, or

cyclopædias are aware that there are no possessions in the United

States more honestly acquired, or bought with money more hardly

earned, than those of the Catholic Church; and that her present

wealth, instead of being due to special financial shrewdness, has in

many instances been got in spite of great and frequent financial

blundering; while the bishops and priests of America, with here and

there an exception, have neither had nor sought to have any political

influence, nor would they, if disposed to meddle with partisan

politics, meet with any encouragement from the Catholic people. Their

position with regard to the question of education is the result of

purely conscientious and religious motives; and while claiming for

Catholics the right to give to their children the benefit of religious

training, they have everywhere and repeatedly given the most

convincing proofs of their sincere desire to concede to all others the

fullest liberty in this as in other matters; and though they cannot

approve of that feature in the common-school system which excludes all

teaching of doctrinal religion, they have never thought of pretending

that those to whom it does commend itself should not be permitted to

try the experiment of a purely secular education, provided they

respect in others the freedom of conscience which is now a part of the

organic law of the land.

With very few exceptions, Catholics have, throughout the whole

country, been rigidly excluded from all the higher political offices;

though now, unfortunately, this can hardly be considered a grievance,

since the general corruption and unworthiness of public life have

caused the more respectable class of American citizens to shrink from

the coarseness and vulgarity of our partisan contests. On the other

hand, those nominal Catholics who acquire influence in what are called

“ward politics” are generally very much like other politicians, eager

to serve God and the country whenever it puts money in their purse.

What political reasons may have determined the great body of Catholic

voters in this country to prefer the Democratic to the Whig, and later

to the Republican, party, we know not; but we are very sure that

nothing could be more unfounded than to imagine that the welfare or

progress of the church can in any way be connected with the success of

Democratic partisanism. As a religious body we have nothing to hope

from either or any party. We ask nothing but the liberty which with us

is considered the inalienable heritage of all Christian believers; and

for the rest, we know that a politician doing a good deed is more to

be shunned than an enemy plotting evil.

The property of the Catholic Church in the United States has not been

exempted from taxation, except under general laws which applied

equally to that of all other religious denominations; and though we

can imagine nothing more barbarous, more hurtful to the progress of

the national architecture and to the general æsthetic culture of the

people, than a change in the policy which has hitherto prevailed, not

in this country alone, but in all the civilized states of the world;

nevertheless, if those who hold that religion has no social value

succeed in revolutionizing legislation on this subject, the Catholics

will not be less prepared than their neighbors to abide the issue.

A more interesting study than the wealth of the church is the growth

of the Catholic population in the United States, though, in the

absence of reliable or complete statistics on this subject, we are not

able to give an entirely satisfactory or exact statement of the facts.

The “number of sittings,” to use the phrase of the official reports,

given in the United States Census, is of scarcely any assistance in

determining the religious statistics of the country. The number of

Protestant church sittings, for instance, was in 1870 19,674,548,

whereas the membership of all the Protestant sects of the country was

only about 7,000,000; and it is well known that, while in most

Protestant churches many seats are usually unoccupied during religious

service, in the Catholic churches the same seat is frequently filled

by three, or four, or even five different persons, who take it in

succession at the various Masses.

Ninety-one years ago Father Carroll set down the Catholic population

of the United States at twenty-five thousand, and he may have fallen

short of the real number by about ten thousand. In 1808, when

episcopal sees were placed at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and

Bardstown, the Catholic population had increased to about one hundred

and fifty thousand. In 1832 Bishop England estimated the Catholics of

the United States at half a million; but in 1836, after having given

the subject greater attention, he thought there could not be less than

a million and a quarter. Both these estimates, however, were mere

surmises; for Bishop England, who always exaggerated the losses of the

church in this country, not finding it possible to get the data for a

well-founded opinion as to the Catholic population, was left to

conjecture or to arguments based upon premises which, to say the

least, were themselves unproven. The editors of the _Metropolitan

Catholic Almanac_ for 1848, basing their calculations upon the very

satisfactory returns which they had received from the thirty dioceses

then existing in the United States, set down our Catholic population

at 1,190,700, and this is probably the nearest approach which we can

make to the number of Catholics in this country at the time the great

Irish famine gave a new impulse to emigration to America. From 1848

down to the present day the increase of the Catholic population has

been very rapid, it having risen in a period of twenty-eight years

from a little over a million to nearly seven millions. The third

revised edition of Schem’s _Statistics of the World for 1875_ gives

6,000,000 as the Catholic population of the United States, and the

_American Annual Cyclopædia_ for 1875 reckons it as more than

6,000,000; and from a careful consideration of the data, which,

however, are still imperfect, we think it is at present probably not

less than 7,000,000. This remarkable growth of the church here during

the last thirty years must be attributed to various causes, by far the

most important of which is beyond all doubt the vast immigration from

Ireland; to which, indeed, we must also chiefly ascribe the progress

of the church during this century in all other countries throughout

the world in which the English language is spoken. No other people

could have done for the Catholic faith in the United States what the

Irish people have done. Their unalterable attachment to their priests,

their deep Catholic instincts, which no combination of circumstances

has ever been able to bring into conflict with their love of country;

the unworldly and spiritual temper of the national character; their

indifference to ridicule and contempt; and their unfailing

generosity—all fitted them for the work which was to be done here, and

enabled them, in spite of the strong prejudices against their race

which Americans had inherited from England, to accomplish what would

not have been accomplished by Italian, French, or German Catholics.

Another cause of the more rapid growth of the church during the last

quarter of a century may be found in the more thorough organization of

dioceses, congregations, and schools, by which we are better able to

shield our people from unhealthy influences, and thus year after year

to diminish our losses; while the increasing number of converts to the

faith helps to swell the Catholic ranks. Of 22,209 persons who were

confirmed in the diocese of Baltimore from 1864 to 1868, 2,752, or

more than 12 per cent., were converts; and our converts are generally

from the more intelligent classes of Americans. The efforts to arrest

the progress of the church, which now for nearly half a century have

assumed a kind of periodicity, may be placed among the causes which

have added to her strength. These attempts are made in open violation

of the religious and political principles which are the special boast

of all Americans, and the only arguments which can be adduced to

justify them are drawn from fear or hatred. Whenever we have been made

the victims of lawlessness or fraud, as in the burning of the

Charlestown convent and the churches of Philadelphia, or in the

spreading “Awful Disclosures” throughout the land, the sympathies of

generous and honest men have been attracted to us. And when Protestant

bigotry has made an alliance with a political party in order to

compass our ruin, it has merely succeeded in forcing the opposing

party to take up throughout the whole country the defence of the

Catholics. Thus during the brief day of the “Know-nothing” conspiracy

large numbers of Protestants, for the first time since the

Reformation, were led to examine into the history of the church, with

a view to defend her against the traditional objections of

Protestantism itself. In fact, in a country which looks with equally

tolerant complacency upon every form of belief or unbelief from

Atheism to Voudooism, from the Joss-House of the Chinaman to the

Mormon Tabernacle and breeding caravansary of free-love, to imagine

that there can be either decent or reasonable motives for exciting to

persecution of the Catholic Church is sheer madness; nor can we think

it less absurd to suppose that the good sense and justice of the

American people will allow them to commit themselves to a policy as

inconsistent as it would be outrageous.

However this may be, there can be no doubt but the repeated and

unprovoked attacks made upon the Catholics of the United States by

fanatics and demagogues have helped to increase their union and

earnestness; and this leads us away from the growth of the church in

her external organization to the consideration of the development of

her spiritual and intellectual life. And here we are at once struck by

the similarity between her progress and that of the country itself,

which has been diffusive at the expense of concentration and

thoroughness. Nevertheless, no attentive observer can fail to be

struck by the intense and earnest religious spirit by which the great

body of the Catholics of the United States are animated, as well as

the readiness with which they co-operate with their priests in

promoting the interests of religion. Nowhere do we find greater

eagerness for instruction in the truths of the faith, or greater

willingness to make sacrifices in order to give to the young a

religious education, than among the Catholics of this country. Our

priests are, as a body, laborious, self-sacrificing, and

disinterested, and are honestly struggling to make themselves worthy

of the great mission which God has given them in America.

Our position in this country hitherto has turned the thoughts of our

best minds to polemical and controversial writing, which, though

useful and even necessary, has only a temporary value, since it is

addressed primarily to objections and phases of belief which owe their

special significance to transitory conditions of society and opinion.

Controversies between Catholics and Protestants which forty years ago

attracted general attention and produced considerable impression,

would now pass unnoticed; for the simple reason that Americans, in the

confusion of sects and religious opinions, have come to realize that

Protestantism has no doctrinal basis, and is left to trust exclusively

to religious sentiment. Dogmatic Protestantism is of the past, and the

most popular preachers are those who appeal most skilfully to the

religious instincts without requiring the acceptance of any religious

beliefs. Most of our best writers have been men whose arduous labors

left them but little time for study or literary composition, and their

works frequently bear the marks of hasty performance; but they will

nevertheless not suffer from comparison with the religious writings of

American Protestants. The ablest man who has devoted himself to the

discussion of religion and philosophy, or probably any other subject,

in the United States during the last hundred years is Dr. Brownson,

all of whose best thoughts have been given to the elucidation of

Catholic truth; and though there was something wanting to make him

either a great philosopher or a great theologian, or even a perfect

master of style, we know of no other American of whom this may not

also be justly said; unless, perhaps, we may consider Prescott,

Hawthorne, or Irving worthy of the last of these titles. And though we

Catholics have no man who is able to take up the pen which has just

fallen from the hand of Dr. Brownson, none who have the power which

once belonged to England and Hughes, we are in this not more

unfortunate than our country, which no longer finds men like Adams or

Jefferson to represent not unworthily its supreme dignity; nor any

like Webster, Clay, or Calhoun, whose minds were as lofty as their

honor was pure, to lend the authority of wisdom and eloquence to the

deliberations of a great people.

During the hundred years of our independent life the external

development of the church, like that of the nation, has been so rapid

that all individual energies have to a greater or less degree been

drawn to help on this growth. Another century, bringing other

circumstances, with them will bring the opportunity and the duty of

other work. A more thorough organization must be given to our

educational system; Catholic universities mast be created which in

time will grow to be intellectual centres in which the best minds of

the church in this country may receive the culture and training that

will enable them to work in harmony for the furtherance of Catholic

ends; a more vigorous and independent press, one not weakened by want

or depraved by human respect or regard for persons, must be brought

into existence. We must prepare ourselves to enter more fully into the

public life of the country; to throw the light of Catholic thought

upon each new phase of opinion or belief as it rises; to grapple more

effectively with the great moral evils which threaten at once the life

of the nation and of the church. All this and much else we have to do,

if our God-given mission is to be fulfilled.

And now we will crave the indulgence of our readers while we conclude

with a brief reference to what we conceive to be the office which the

Catholic Church is destined to fulfil in behalf of the American state

and civilization.

De Tocqueville, in his thoughtful and singularly judicious treatise on

American institutions, makes the following very just remarks:

“I think the Catholic religion has been falsely looked upon

as the enemy of democracy. On the contrary, Catholicism,

among the various sects of Christians, seems to me to be one

of the most favorable to the equality of social conditions.

The religious community in the Catholic Church is composed

of but two elements—the priest and the people. The priest

alone is lifted above his flock, and all below him are

equals. In matters of doctrine the Catholic faith places all

human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise

and the ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to

the details of the same creed; it imposes the same

observances upon the rich and the poor; it inflicts the same

austerities upon the powerful and the weak; it enters into

no compromise with mortal man, but reducing the whole human

race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions

of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are

confounded in the sight of God. If Catholicism predisposes

the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare

them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of

Protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent

more than to render them equal.… But no sooner is the

priesthood entirely separated from the government, as is the

case in the United States, than it is found that no class of

men are naturally more disposed than the Catholics to

transfuse the doctrine of the equality of conditions into

political institutions”[126]

The generous sentiments which two centuries and a half ago led the

Catholics of Maryland to become the pioneers of religious liberty in

the New World, are still warm in the hearts of the Catholic people of

the United States. We have even here been the victims of persecution,

and it is not impossible that similar trials may await us in the

future; but we have the most profound conviction that, even though we

should grow to be nine-tenths of the population of this country, we

shall never prove false to the principle of religious liberty, which,

to the Catholics of the United States, at least, is sacred and

inviolable. For our own part, we should turn with unutterable loathing

from the man who could think that any other course could ever be

either just or honorable.

The Catholics of this republic are deeply impressed with the

inviolability of the rights of the individual. We believe that the man

is more than the citizen; that when the state tramples upon the

God-given liberty of the most wretched beggar, the consciences of all

are violated; that it is its duty to govern as little as possible, and

rather to suffer a greater good to go undone than to do even a slight

wrong in order to accomplish it. For this reason we believe that when

the state assumed the right to control education, it took the first

step away from the true American and Christian theory of government

back towards the old pagan doctrine of state-absolutism. Though we

uphold the rights of the individual, we are not the less strong in our

advocacy of the claims of authority. In fact, the almost unbounded

individual liberty which our American social and political order

allows would fatally lead to anarchy, if not checked by some great and

sacred authority; and this safeguard can be found only in the Catholic

Church, which is the greatest school of respect the world has ever

seen. The church, by her power to inspire faith, reverence, and

obedience, will introduce into our national life and character

elements of refinement and culture which will temper the harshness and

recklessness of our republican manners. By her conservative and

unitive force she will weld into stronger union the heterogeneous

populations and widely-separated parts of our vast country. The

Catholics were the only religious body in the United States not torn

asunder by sectional strife during our civil war, and we are persuaded

that, as our numbers grow and our influence increases, we are destined

to become more and more the strong bond to hold in indissoluble union

the great American family of States. The divisions and dissensions of

Protestantism have a tendency to prepare the public mind to

contemplate without alarm or indignation like divisions and

dissensions in the state; and all who love the country and desire that

it remain one and united for ages must look with pleasure upon the

growth of a religion which, while maintaining the unity of its own

world-wide kingdom, inspires those who are guided by its teachings

with a horror of political dissensions and divisions.

[125] Bishop England’s works, vol. iii. p. 233.

[126] _Democracy in America_, vol. i. p. 305.

A FRENCHMAN’S VIEW OF IT.[127]

M. Claudio Jannet has recently sent forth from the little town of Aix,

in Provence, a work on the United States of the present day which may

be both interesting and profitable to American readers. It does not

appear that M. Jannet has visited the country whose moral, social, and

political condition he sets himself to describe. His information has

been gathered from books, pamphlets, and periodicals; his conclusions

are the result of deliberation rather than the hasty observations of a

tourist, and they are all the more valuable because they are not

distorted by the usual blunders and prejudices which obstruct the

vision of the average Frenchman in America. The European traveller,

particularly the French traveller, finds many things in our country to

shock his prejudices and offend his tastes. The discomforts of the

journey, the harshness of the climate, the extravagance of living, the

imperfections of our domestic economy, the general crudeness of our

new and incomplete civilization, the press and hurry of business, the

lack of æsthetic culture, the vulgarity of popular amusements—all

these things put him out of the humor to be just. He dislikes the

surface aspects of American life, and, with the best disposition in

the world, he commonly fails to see what lies underneath. He fills his

note-book with dyspeptic comments, and when he goes home he writes a

volume of blunders, and all the Americans who read it laugh at it.

Take, however, a conscientious Frenchman of sober and reflective turn

of mind, shut him up in his own study, supply him with an abundance of

the right kind of American books and newspapers, let him ponder over

his subject at leisure in the midst of his accustomed comforts, and

the chances are that he will write a very good essay on the condition

of this country, and tell a great many wholesome truths which we

ourselves hardly suspect.

M. Jannet’s book has been evolved in this way. His industry in the

collection of materials seems to have been remarkable; and if his

judgment has not always kept pace with it, the instances in which he

has been misled are fewer than we should have expected. For most of

his mistakes he can show the excuse of an American authority. It does

not become us, therefore, to find too much fault with him. We are

rather disposed to overlook errors in the statement of particular

facts, and consider the really valuable and novel points in his essay,

with the moral which he wishes us to draw from it. We shall find in

what he says abundant food for reflection, even when we believe him to

be wrong.

He sets out with an attempt to show that the spirit of revolution has

been waging incessant war for nearly a hundred years upon “the work of

Washington,” and that the Constitution, as it was devised by the wise

and conservative party represented by our first President, has been

almost torn to shreds, and is destined to destruction by the

aggressions of radicalism. M. Jannet’s references to “the school of

Washington” seem rather odd to an American reader. We doubt whether

there ever was a distinct political school to which that name could be

properly applied; and it is not at all clear that there have been two

well-defined and antagonistic political principles in conflict since

the very foundation of the government, as Ormuzd and Ahriman, the

spirit of good and the spirit of evil, waged perpetual warfare, in the

Zoroastrian system, for the dominion of the world. The philosophical

historian is fond of tracing in the revolutions of states and the

development of political theories the steady growth of some fixed

principle of action. But it is a specious philosophy which takes no

account of accidents. M. Jannet has made the mistake of going too

deep, and overlooking what lies right on the surface. He sees the

spirit of radicalism, fostered by the influx of communistic and

infidel immigrants from Europe, attacking the conservative safeguards

originally established in our federal and State constitutions,

assailing the rights of the States, extending the suffrage, sweeping

the country into the vortex of uncontrolled democracy. “Popular

sovereignty” is the watchword of this radical movement. “The doctrine

of popular sovereignty,” says M. Jannet, “is based upon the idea that

man is independent, and that consequently there can be no authority

over him except with his own consent. This principle established,

there can no longer be any question of limiting the suffrage by

conditions of capacity, of fitness, or of the representation of

interests, since sovereignty is an attribute of the voter in his

quality as a man. The exclusion of women and minors from the polls is

only an abuse, a relic of old prejudices. Thus the most advanced party

already places female suffrage at the head of its programme, and

perhaps it will some day be established in the United States. The

people, being sovereign by nature, cannot be checked in its will by

any custom, any tradition, any respect for acquired rights. Whatever

it wills is just and reasonable by the mere fact that it so wills.

There can be no permanent constitution for the country; the

constitution can be only what the people wills, or is thought to will,

_for the time being_.” About the year 1850, according to our author,

the heresy of “popular sovereignty,” otherwise the religion of

revolution, obtained full headway, and the radical party, making

skilful use of the anti-slavery sentiment which had hitherto been

cultivated only by a small band of eccentric philanthropists, captured

the masses of well-meaning, unreflecting voters. Liberty and

emancipation were their watchwords; but their real purpose was only

the supremacy of the mob. Slavery was the abuse which they pretended

to attack, but they only feigned a horror for it in order to win over

the small but zealous party of sincere abolitionists; their actual

object was to abolish the federal Union with its limited powers, and

set up a unitary democracy based upon the despotism of universal

suffrage. “From the day when this party came into power by the

election of Lincoln,” says M. Jannet, “nothing remained for the South

but to take up arms to protect its rights against the projects already

disclosed.” And he adds that the radical movement towards pure

democracy “alone can explain the unheard-of ferocity with which the

Northern armies fought, and the odious persecution which followed

their triumph, and which still lasts, ten years afterwards.”

Thus the anti-slavery agitation was only an incident—and, indeed, M.

Jannet seems not to regard it as a very important one—in the long,

uninterrupted, deplorable decline of America from a moderately

conservative federal republic to the despotism of an ignorant,

centralized democracy. It can hardly be necessary to point out to

American readers the serious mistake in M. Jannet’s theory. It is

useless to look beyond slavery for an explanation of the changes

wrought within the past fifteen years in the character of the American

government. Mr. Seward was right when he declared that there was an

irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. It had been

gathering force for years when it broke into war in 1861; it had been

the original cause of nearly all the encroachments upon the rights of

the States which preceded the Rebellion, and it had made the very

words “State rights” odious to a vast majority of the Northern people.

The plain truth is that the only State right which the conservative

and aristocratic party cared about maintaining was the right to hold

human beings in bondage, and buy and sell them like cattle. They chose

to identify a political theory with a hateful social institution, and

it was only natural that, when the end came, theory and institution

should go down together. The evil influence of slavery, however, has

survived the extinction of slavery itself. We must not forget that the

active men of 1876 were boys in the exciting period just before the

war, and their political creed took shape at a time when the doctrine

of State rights was the defence of the slave-driver and the

secessionist, and the federal power was the safeguard of freedom and

union. The ideas impressed upon them during the years of conflict have

remained during the years of peace, and have affected in a most

serious manner the fortunes of the country during the period of

reconstruction. For four years, so crowded with great historical

changes that they may be counted as equivalent to nearly a whole

generation of uneventful peace, the nation was taught by the necessity

of war to believe that the reserved rights of the States must yield to

the paramount necessity of preserving the Union, and ultimately of

destroying slavery for the sake of union. It would be unfair to say

that the letter of the Constitution fell into contempt, but there was

a general agreement that constitutions, to be worth anything, must be

elastic instruments, stretched to cover unforeseen emergencies.

Naturally, when the war was over we did not return at once to the old

ideas. In the provisions for saving the fruits of the contest,

guarding against fresh attempts at disunion, and protecting the

emancipated race in its newly-acquired liberties, the despotic and

absolute spirit of the war still prevailed. The federal government

which had put down the rebellion was called upon to secure its

victory. So for the next ten years we saw a constant assumption at

Washington of powers which no Congress or President would have dreamed

of asserting a generation ago. The “reconstructed States” became

little more than vassal provinces, practically ruled at the seat of

the federal government. In some cases, even after the military

governors had disappeared and the States had been restored to

representation in Congress, and nominally to their full powers of

self-administration, we have seen soldiers sent from Washington to

decide local election contests, legislatures dispersed at the point of

the federal bayonet, and the verdict of the ballot rudely set aside by

the President’s despotic order. The general course of legislation for

the Southern States at Washington was inspired by the belief that the

whole Confederacy was a hot-bed of insurrection and crime. Special

laws were enacted to prevent the “rebel element” from acquiring that

predominance in the Southern communities which naturally belonged to

it, and to lift up the negroes to a political power to which they were

not entitled by their numbers, and for which they were not qualified

by character or education. The control of elections was taken away

from the States by the Enforcement laws, and the ordinary police

duties of preserving the peace were usurped by federal appointees

under a strained interpretation of the statutes. An incident reported

in Alabama during the political campaign of 1874 illustrates the

extreme length to which federal interference was carried, and the

ingenuity with which it was employed for merely partisan purposes. A

Republican politician had been murdered in August of that year, and

the perpetrators of the deed had not been discovered. The guilt was

charged, however, upon several active Democrats, and just before the

election they were arrested by a federal marshal and committed for

trial. Of course there was no law which gave the federal authorities

cognizance of murder, and no indictment for that offence could be

found in a federal court; but it was desirable that the arrests should

be made for political effect, and the accused were consequently

indicted under a clause of the Enforcement law for “conspiracy to

prevent a citizen from voting “—a conspiracy to prevent his voting in

November by killing him in August! The arrest served its purpose, and

it is hardly necessary to say that the case never was tried.

But of late the progress of the country towards centralization has

been sensibly checked. The abuses of the past few years have been

followed by a popular reaction. The temper of the South is better

understood. The North begins to see the dangers of the course it has

been following, and at the same time to feel ashamed of its injustice.

And more than all else, the Supreme Court of the United States, in two

able decisions, sweeps away a great mass of the most mischievous

Enforcement legislation, and redefines the almost obliterated

boundaries of State and federal authority. The judgment of the court

in the Grant Parish and Kentucky cases marks an era in our

constitutional history. It neutralizes a great deal of the evil

consequences of the war period, and can hardly fail of a most salutary

effect upon future legislation. When he has read it, even M. Jannet,

perhaps, will take a more cheerful view of our condition.

But let us leave the historical part of M. Jannet’s book, and look at

the picture which he draws of our actual condition. We do not purpose

to criticise it. We shall let our readers correct errors for

themselves, as they can easily do, while we content ourselves with

showing them how the political and social aspects of our country

impress an intelligent foreign student. M. Jannet is deceived

sometimes; he takes too seriously the satire of “the American humorist

Edgar Poë,” and the mixture of sarcasm and burlesque which he cites

from “The gilded age by Mark Twain and Dudley”; but upon the whole he

tells the sober truth. He gives a pretty exact account of our

electoral system, and especially of our system of nominations, which

practically prevents the people from voting for anybody except the

favorites of a little knot of professional politicians assembled in a

committee or ward meeting. As political struggles in the United

States, he says, are not for the triumph of principles, but only for

the possession of power, politics has naturally become debased,

high-minded citizens have insensibly become disgusted with it, and at

the same time the rising flood of universal suffrage has driven the

wealthy classes out of political life. Between 1824 and 1840 the party

organizations were definitively settled, and since then politics has

been the exclusive appanage of politicians by profession. M. Jannet

gives a very unpleasant sketch of this class of persons, and describes

the machinery of manipulating conventions and setting up candidates

with considerable minuteness and accuracy. Nor is it possible for us

to read without mortification his account of the manner in which the

professional politicians carry on the government:

“Such institutions leave the nation completely disarmed

against corruption. No one, either in the executive or the

legislative branch, has any interest in stopping it. We

shall even see that, under the political customs of the

country, the representatives of power in every grade have a

manifest interest in tolerating it.… Before the presidential

election the politicians who manage the conventions of the

party make careful bargains with their candidate for the

distribution of the offices. The President, when he desires

a re-election, has here in the same manner a powerful motive

of action; all the federal employees fight for him with

ardor and by every possible means, for the retention of

their places depends upon his triumph. It is easy to see how

party spirit is inflamed by the prospect of so much booty in

case of success. The evils of this system have become more

striking as the number of federal employees has increased.

Given the prevalence of dishonesty and love of money, it is

evident that office-holders who can retain their places only

a few years must make use of the time to enrich themselves.…

But corruption is not confined to the employees, properly

speaking; it extends in a large measure even to the

representatives of the nation. The President nominates his

cabinet, subject to the confirmation of the Senate. But in

the party conventions the President’s choice is fixed in

advance. Arrangements of the same kind are made with the

senators; for their approval is necessary for a thousand

federal appointments, and naturally for the most important.

The result of this state of things is that the Senate which,

by the Constitution is a directing political body without

whose co-operation it is impossible for the President to

carry on the government, becomes a theatre of incessant

intrigue and corruption.”

We prefer not to follow M. Jannet in his brief recital of the Crédit

Mobilier scandal, the Fremont affair, the Pacific Mail bribery, the

operations of the Tweed and Erie Rings, the boldness of the lobby, the

power of the railway corporations in politics, the pressure of

enormous debts and taxes as the inevitable consequence of legislative

venality, and the degradation of the judicial office. It is a horrible

account, but it is not exaggerated. For all his statements—save, of

course, some mistakes of secondary importance—M. Jannet can show good

American authority.

In the face of all this disorder and corruption the best citizens,

disgusted with political life, hold themselves every year more and

more strictly aloof from it.

“Men of property, merchants, and manufacturers are injured

by the mismanagement of affairs, and deplore it; but each

one finds it for his individual advantage not to lose his

time in trying to correct public evils. The country is still

rich enough to bear the waste and rascality of a government

which calls itself popular.… Even in these days there are

certain influences of religion, race, or locality which

sometimes bring honest and capable men into the local

political assemblies; but the ruling trait of American

democracy is nevertheless the ostracism of the upper classes

and of eminent men. The consequence is that these classes

become more and more dissatisfied with democratic

institutions, and cast wistful eyes towards the

constitutional government, in reality more free than theirs,

which Great Britain and her colonies enjoy. From De

Tocqueville and Ampère to Duvergier de Hauranne and Hepworth

Dixon, all observers have been struck by this sentiment, not

in general openly expressed, but sufficiently shown by the

considerable number of distinguished Americans who pass the

greater part of their lives out of the country.”

In this there is just a modicum of truth—less now, perhaps, than there

was when it was written; for there is to-day an unmistakable tendency

among our best citizens to resume that share in the management of

public affairs from which they have too long suffered themselves to be

excluded. But M. Jannet follows Hepworth Dixon in his stupendously

absurd remarks on the “moral emigration” of the best men of America,

and finds it a proof of distaste for democratic institutions that

Washington Irving should have rambled about the Alhambra, Bancroft

accepted the mission to England, and Hawthorne the consulate at

Liverpool; that Motley should have read the archives of the Dutch

Republic at the Hague, Power and Story studied among the monuments of

Italy, and Longfellow amused himself with the “Golden Legend” when he

might have found so many heroic subjects at home! We are astonished

that M. Jannet, who has certainly read a great many American books,

should not have perceived the dense ignorance which distinguishes this

particular portion of Dixon’s _New America_ perhaps above the rest of

the book. M. Jannet has only to pause and reflect for a moment, and he

will not accuse Diedrich Knickerbocker and the author of the _Life of

Washington_ and _Rip van Winkle_ of neglecting his own country to

lounge in Granada, nor blame the poet of Cambridge because he rhymed

the “Golden Legend” as well as the story of Evangeline and Miles

Standish. Hawthorne too, the most thoroughly national of American

romancers, and Bancroft, who has spent a lifetime in the study of

American history! Is it also to Mr. Hepworth Dixon that M. Jannet is

indebted for the discovery stated in the following passage?

“Americans, even those who at heart are most disgusted with

democracy, have a passionate love of their country, and look

upon themselves as the first nation of the world. This

patriotism, despite its exaggerations, is a great power for

the country. Without precisely desiring the establishment of

a constitutional monarchy, many enlightened Americans aspire

to a stronger and more stable government under a republican

form. I have been struck, in the intercourse that I have had

with many of them, by the secret admiration with which the

rule of Napoleon III. in its day inspired them. This rule,

democratic in its origin, revolutionary in its principle,

but favorable to the preservation of material order and the

acquisition of wealth, agreed very well with their desire

for additional security, and at the same time with their

lack of principles. Sentiments of this kind—and they are

wide-spread—are one of the greatest dangers that threaten

American society.”

Of course the corruption which disgraces politics appears likewise in

the private life of the people. The constant aim of the Yankee, says

M. Jannet, is to make money.

“The love of money seizes the young man from the time of his

adolescence, and does not let the old man allow repose to

the evening of his life. Except in the old slave States,

there is no class of people of leisure in America. From top

to bottom of the ladder, all society is a prey to devouring

activity. Its economical results are considerable; the rapid

growth of the nation and its prodigious development in all

the arts of material well-being are the fruits of this

ardent labor which knows no rest. If the Americans love

money, it is not for the sake of mere acquisition, but in

order that they may give themselves up to the enjoyment of

luxuries and launch into new speculations. Harpagon is a

type which does not exist among them. Indeed, they generally

lack those habits of patient economy which constitute the

strength and the virtue of our old races of peasants and

_bourgeois_. Their readiness to spend and their generosity

in case of need equal their appetite for gain. One who fails

to take account of this characteristic restlessness of

American life will get but an imperfect idea of the private

habits and public institutions of the people. In no country

are ‘honors’ more eagerly sought after or is democratic

vanity more freely indulged; but it must be confessed that

‘honor’ is interpreted among Americans, or at least among

Yankees, in quite a different sense from that which is

accepted in Europe. No man plumes himself upon

disinterestedness. Magistrates, generals, statesmen, accept

subscriptions of jingling dollars as testimonials of public

esteem. It is alike in dollars that they pay, among the

Yankees, for injuries and insults. This universal thirst for

gold has perhaps the good effect of softening political

asperities, at least so long as a boundless field remains

open for work and speculation. The unbridled love of money,

in fact, lowers all men to the same level, and stifles alike

fierce fanaticisms and generous passions. The same ardor in

the pursuit of wealth soon scatters the family. Aged

parents, home, or the paternal acres, nothing can restrain

those who are ruled by this passion alone. There is no

attempt, as there is with us, to conceal the love of money.

‘The almighty dollar!’ cry the Americans with admiration. A

new-comer is presented to them. ‘How much is this man

worth?’ they ask, instead of inquiring, as we should do,

about his antecedents and his merit. Everything is

overlooked for a rich man, and, except in a few chosen

circles, a bankruptcy counts for nothing when fortune smiles

again. Nowhere is merit valued without money. Hence the

inferiority of American literature and art; hence the

commercial customs that prevail in professions which we

style liberal. Physicians, counsellors at-law, even

ministers of the Gospel (we speak, be it understood, only of

the Protestant sects), advertise as freely as the commonest

working-man. Poverty is held in contempt to a degree of

which our older society, formed in the school of Catholicity

and chivalry, can have no idea. In spite of universal

suffrage and absolute political equality, there is no

country in which so great a gulf has been placed between the

rich and the poor. This superficially democratic society

would not live in peace two days, if it were not that the

poor man can raise himself with a little trouble to comfort,

if not to fortune. But when the natural riches of the

country become less abundant and the demand for labor

abates, will not these hard social customs become a cause of

formidable antagonism? Distant as this future may still

appear, the question is one which no serious observer can

well avoid asking.

“The pursuit of wealth is the main-spring of material

progress, but when it is carried to an extreme it misses the

very object of its pursuit. The excessive love of money has

developed in the United States a financial dishonesty which

stains the national character and causes a great loss of the

public property. Who has not heard of the great fires which

so often destroy entire quarters of the large cities? They

are often kindled by individuals who wish to conceal their

bankruptcy or to get the amount of their insurance. These

crimes affect a multitude of innocent persons and cause an

increase in the rates of insurance; in short, it is the

nation at large which pays for such frauds by an increase in

the cost of all its products. It is the same thing with

failures. They entail no dishonor, as they do in France;

that is why they are so many.…

“The causes of this perversion of the moral sense are

complex. Amid the almost infinite subdivision of Protestant

sects there is no longer any religious teaching which

addresses itself with authority to the mass of the nation.

We do not take sufficient account of what Catholicism is

doing in our country to maintain the fundamental ideas of

morality even among men who during their lives remain

strangers to its practices. The corruption of the public

authorities and the inefficient administration of justice

have also a great influence.… Moreover, we must take into

consideration the very mixed character of the population.

Even the native Americans are incessantly in motion. They

transfer themselves from one end of the country to the other

for the slightest of reasons, and thus they escape the

salutary control of local opinion which, among stable

populations, is one of the most powerful moral influences.

The establishment of joint-stock companies for financial and

commercial enterprises—an innovation which dates from about

fifty years ago—has done a great deal to weaken the

sentiment of responsibility.… If certain companies are

honestly administered, a great number are made the occasion

of shameless frauds. We see audacious speculators buying up

a majority of the stock in order to make secret issues of

new shares. This operation is called ‘stock-watering.’ It is

estimated that between July 1, 1867, and May 1, 1869,

twenty-eight railway companies increased their capital from

$287,000,000 to $400,000,000. These shares only serve for

stock-gambling, and woe to those who have them left on their

hands! ‘It would appear,’ says an American writer, ‘that the

railroad speculators have three objects in view: First, to

get as much as possible of the public lands; experience has

proved that the more they ask the more they will obtain, and

that the ease with which Congress is induced to favor their

projects is proportioned to the liberality with which they

distribute funds for corruption. Secondly, to raise in

Europe as large a loan as possible, no matter at what rates.

Thirdly, when they have got all the land and all the money

they can, and have attracted all the immigration from

Germany they can hope for, they sell the railroad, at

whatever loss to the bondholders, and make a little ring of

members of the company its sole proprietors!’ The great

number of these immoral speculations, the adventurous

character of commerce, and the senseless luxury in which all

business men indulge bring on periodically grave financial

crises of which Europe feels only the after effects.

Malversation is common even in institutions which have the

best reasons to be free from it. Enormous defalcations are

daily committed in the administration of charitable works,

neutralizing in a great measure the generosity with which

the Americans have endowed them.”

Alas! it is impossible to deny that these statements are substantially

true. The discoveries of corruption in public life which have recently

produced so much political excitement surprise nobody who has studied

American society. This is a “representative” democracy; and though

certain well-understood causes, which it would be out of place to

discuss here, have long been at work driving the highest class of our

citizens out of public employment, it is undeniable that as a general

rule the morality of men in office is about on a level with that of

the voters who put them there. When peculation and swindling become

common in commerce, and a man who makes money is always treated with

respect until he goes to the penitentiary, it is almost inevitable

that there should be bribery in the cabinet and conspiracy in the

antechambers of the White House. The stream cannot rise higher than

its source.

But if we wish to understand the real condition of the American

people, we must study it in the nurseries of all public virtue—the

home, the school, and the church. With the first of these the woman

question has a most intimate connection. De Tocqueville said that

Americans did not praise women much, but daily showed their respect

for them. Now, says M. Jannet, things have sadly changed. We have

ceased to respect women, and we are always talking about their rights.

There is a considerable party among us which not only insists upon the

right of women to vote and hold office, but would make of them

lawyers, physicians, and ministers of the Gospel, and give them the

direction of industrial and commercial enterprises precisely as if

they were men. M. Jannet confesses that American women, on the whole,

show very little eagerness to play the new _rôle_ which the modern

social reformers have created for them; but the agitation, if it

produces no practical results, has a very unhappy influence upon the

female mind, and a bad effect upon female education. How fearfully the

family relation has been impaired in America all intelligent observers

know. The laxity and confusion of the marriage laws; the shocking

frequency of divorce; the publicity given to scandalous and indecent

investigations; the prevalence of the crime of infanticide, against

which the press, the pulpit, and the medical profession have long

exclaimed in horror; the growing inability or unwillingness of

American women to bear the burden of maternity; the rapid decay of the

American element in the population through the excessive proportion of

deaths to births; the breaking up of homes; the license allowed to the

young of both sexes—all these things are the appalling symptoms of a

deep-seated social disorder. We have been in the habit of making it a

reproach to the French that there is no word in their language which

expresses the American and English idea of home; but it may be

questioned whether, retaining the word, we are not in danger of losing

the reality. In the cities, at all events, there has been within the

last quarter of a century a lamentable change in domestic life.

Fashionable society has broken up the family gatherings around the

evening lamp. The mother no longer lives in the midst of her children;

she spends her days in shopping, visiting, and receiving, and her

nights in the ball-room. Children are educated by hired nurses, and

before they are full grown emancipate themselves from the control of

parents whom they have never been taught to respect and obey. “At

home,” in the jargon of the day, has become a travesty of its original

meaning; it designates the exhibition of a domestic interior from

which all the characteristics of home life are rigorously excluded.

Architects are forgetting the meaning of home, and in the fashionable

house of the period the domestic virtues could hardly find a lodgment.

The hotel and the boarding-house are driving out of existence those

model homes which were once the glory of America. What else could we

expect? It is the woman who gives character to the household, and the

tendency of our time is to remove woman from the fireside and set her

upon the platform.

That there is nothing in the American school system to supply the

defects of American home education no Catholic will need to be

assured. The whole system rests upon the principle that the

school-teacher has nothing to do with the cultivation of the moral

nature of his pupil. His duty is limited to the atlas, the copy-book,

and the multiplication-table. The pretext upon which this rule has

been adopted, says M. Jannet, is respect for all religious beliefs,

but its real end is to create a generation without any positive

religious belief whatever. Zealous Christians even among Protestants

are not deceived by it. A report upon the state of schools in

Pennsylvania in 1864 says: “The importance, not to say the absolute

necessity, of religious education becomes day by day more apparent. If

we wish to maintain our institutions, it is essential to raise the

standard of character and to revive among our people the spirit of

Christianity. The generation which will soon succeed us should not

only be skilful of hand, stout of heart, and enlightened in mind, but

it must learn also to love God and man and practise duty.” But

unfortunately, continues M. Jannet, such remonstrances have proved

unavailing, and the “unsectarian” system is now permanently

established—a sad result for which the Protestant clergy is in great

part to blame. Nearly all of them approve the system, in the belief

that Sunday-schools will be sufficient for religious instruction; but

“true Christians point out that this separation of the two branches of

education tends to make religion regarded as something foreign to the

practical affairs of life.” Our author shows how steadily the godless

theory of education has gained acceptance; he perceives the growing

disposition to enforce it by the authority of the federal government,

and make it obligatory upon the States to provide irreligious schools,

and upon the people to use them. In the progress of this destructive

tendency he traces the influence of German ideas, political,

pseudo-philosophical, socialistic, and atheistic, in which lies one of

the greatest dangers of the republic. “Two things strike us in these

new currents of opinion: on the one hand, their opposition to the old

bases of Anglo-Saxon ideas and liberties under which the United States

lived until about 1850; on the other, their identity with the

principles disseminated in Europe by the revolutionists. It is

impossible for an impartial observer not to recognize here the effect

of one and the same cause acting in accordance with a well defined

aim. This cause, this agent, let us say at once, is Freemasonry. It is

easy to judge of the real purpose which it has in view by studying it

in the United States. There the conflicts and passions of the Old

World have no place; what Freemasonry seeks to accomplish is the

destruction of all positive religion and of every principle of

authority in man’s political and social relations.”

Protestantism, far from checking these disastrous tendencies, has

allowed itself to increase them; and even if it had the will to

constitute itself the defender of the state and the family, it is torn

by intestine divisions and driving rapidly towards disintegration. Yet

M. Jannet does not quite give us up for lost. “The crisis which is now

passing over the country and checking its material prosperity may be

the signal for a reform, in forcing honest men to recognize the vices

of their institutions and the corruption of their manners.” There are

four influences which he hopes may combine to save us. These are, 1,

the wisdom and energy of the people of the South, who, after ten years

of persevering efforts, have at last begun to recover the direction of

their local affairs, and to clear away “the ruins caused by the war

and the domination of the Radicals.” 2. The success obtained by the

Democrats, or rather the Conservatives, in the elections of November,

1874, and April, 1875—a success that will put an end to the despotism

with which the Radicals have cursed the country for fifteen years. We

give these two points for what they are worth; of course we do not

believe that there is any such fundamental difference between the

people of the North and the people of the South, the people who call

themselves Republicans and the people who call themselves Democrats,

as M. Jannet imagines. 3. The great number of American families who,

in the midst of corruption and disorder, have faithfully preserved the

virtues and domestic habits which lie at the foundation of all

prosperous society. 4. Lastly and chiefly, the marvellous progress of

the Catholic Church.

We make no comment upon this portion of his essay, but we end our

review with a few lines from his closing paragraph which it will do us

Americans, at the beginning of our new century, no harm to take to

heart: “In all countries, in all times, under the most diverse

historical and economical conditions, the moral laws which govern

human society are unchanging and inevitable. Founded upon the

decalogue, nay, upon the very nature of God, the distinction between

good and evil knows no mutation. Everywhere men are prosperous or

unfortunate, according as they keep the divine law or break it.”

[127] _Les Etats-Unis Contemporains, ou les Mœurs,

les Institutions et les Idées depuis la Guerre de la

Sécession._ Par Claudio Jannet. Paris: E. Plon et Cie.

1876.

LETTERS OF A YOUNG IRISHWOMAN TO HER SISTER.