the face and stun our ears at every turn, and which the "Reformation" has given us in exchange for the ease and happiness and harmony and Christian charity, enjoyed so abundantly, and for so many ages, by our Catholic forefathers.

All this has been amply proved in the fifteen foregoing Letters, except that I have not yet shown, in detail, how our Catholic forefathers lived, what sort and what quantity of food and raiment they had, compared with those which we have. This I am now about to do. I have made good my charge of beastly lust, hypocrisy, perfidy, plunder, devastation, and bloodshed; the charge of misery, of beggary, of nakedness, and of hunger, remains to be fully established.

But I choose to be better rather than worse than my word; I did not pledge myself to prove anything as to the population, wealth, power, and freedom of the nation; but I will now show not only that the people were better off, but better fed and clad, before the "Reformation" than they ever have been since; but, that the nation was more populous, wealthy, powerful, and free before, than it ever has been since that event. Read modern romancers, called historians, every one of whom has written for place or pension; read the statements about the superiority of the present

over former times; about our prodigious increase in population, wealth, power, and, above all things, our superior freedom; read the monstrous lies of Hume, who (vol. 5, p. 502) unblushingly asserts "that one good county of England is now capable of making a greater effort than the whole kingdom was in the reign of Henry V., when to maintain the garrison of the small town of Calais required more than a third of the ordinary revenues"; this is the way in which every Scotchman reasons. He always estimates the wealth of a nation by the money the government squeezes out of it. He forgets that "a poor government makes a rich people." According to this criterion of Hume, America must now be a wretchedly poor country. This same Henry V. could conquer, really conquer, France, and that, too, without beggaring England by hiring a million of Prussians, Austrians, Cossacks, and all sorts of hirelings. But writers have, for ages, been so dependent on the government and the aristocracy, and the people have read and believed so much of what they have said, and especially in praise of the "Reformation," and its effects, that it is no wonder that they should think that, in Catholic times, England was a poor, beggarly spot, having a very few people on it; and that the "Reformation," and the House of Bruns

wick and the Whigs, have given us all we possess of wealth, of power, of freedom, and have almost created us, or, at least, if not actually begotten us, caused nine-tenths of us to be born. These are all monstrous lies; but they have succeeded for ages. Few men dared to attempt to refute them; and, if any one made the attempt, he obtained few hearers, and ruin, in some shape or other, was pretty sure. to be the reward of his virtuous efforts. Now, however, when we are smarting under the lash of calamity; now, when every one says, that no state of things ever was so bad as this; now men may listen to the truth, and, therefore, I will lay it before them.

POPULOUSNESS is a thing not to be proved by positive facts, because there are no records of the numbers of the people in former times; and because those which we have in our own day are notoriously false; if they be not, the English nation has added a third to its population during the last twenty years! In short, our modern records I have, over and over again, proved to be false, particularly in my Register, No. 2, of Volume 46. That England was more populous in Catholic times than it is now we must believe, when we know, that in the three first Protestant reigns, thousands of parish churches were pulled

down, that parishes were united, in more than two thousand instances, and when we know from the returns now before Parliament, that, out of 11,761 parishes, in England and Wales, there are upwards of a thousand which do not contain a hundred persons each, men, women, and children. Then again, the size of the churches. They were manifestly built, in general, to hold three, four, five, or ten times the number of their present parishioners, including all the sectarians. What should men have built such large churches for? We are

told of their "piety and zeal"; yes, but there must have been men to raise the buildings. The Lord might favor the work; but there must have been hands as well as prayers. And, what motive could there have been for putting together such large quantities of stone and mortar, and to make walls four feet thick, and towers and steeple, if there had not been people to fill the buildings? And how could the labor have been performed? There must have been men to perform the labor; and, can any one believe, that this labor would have been performed, if there had not been a necessity for it? We now see large and most costly ancient churches, and these in great numbers too, with only a few mud-huts to hold the thirty or a hundred of parishioners. Our forefathers built for

ever, little thinking of the devastation that we were to behold! Next come the lands, which they cultivated, and which we do not, amounting to millions of acres. This any one may verify, who will go into Sussex, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall. They grew corn on the sides of hills, which we now never attempt to stir. They made the hill into the form of steps of a stairs, in order to plough and sow the flat parts. These flats, or steps, still remain, and are, in some cases, still cultivated; but, in nine cases out of ten, they are not. Why should they have performed this prodigious labor, if they had not had mouths to eat the corn? And how could they have performed such labor without numerous hands? On the high lands of Hampshire and Dorsetshire, there are spots of a thousand acres together, which still bear the ineffaceable marks of the plough, and which now never feel that implement. The modern writings on the subject of ancient population are mere romances; or they have been put forth with a view of paying court to the government of the day. George Chalmers, a placeman, a pensioner, and a Scotchman, has been one of the most conspicuous in this species of deception. He, in what he calls an "Estimate," states the population of England and Wales, in 1377,