Chapter XVII: The End (9)

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.