while the aggregate vote of the country has not multiplied itself by three! The moral lies in the figures.

During the past five years, it is calculated there has been a steady immigration at the rate of three hundred thousand persons a year, or about one thousand per day! Out of each thousand, it is safe to consider at least one hundred and fifty to be voters. The great mass of these men is composed of all the ignorance, poverty, lawlessness, and general degradation, that could be induced to emigrate to America. They come to the ballot-boxes side by side with those who have been bred from their youth to a perfect familiarity with and respect for free institutions, and are too often found ready to become the servile tools of demagogues, even more reckless and unprincipled than themselves. These are the men we permit to help fashion our laws, give tone to general society, infuse energy into the spirit of our political organizations, and protect us and all our dearest interests from destruction or decay. With no knowledge of our Constitution, they never interest themselves to understand its meaning. They do not comprehend what is the scope of law, nor are they conscious of the existence of any check or responsibility that may hold them to its observance.

It is time this threatening danger be averted. The evil increases by continuance, and daily becomes more and more difficult of remedy. Unless efficient and timely safeguards are interposed by the vigilant watchmen of freedom, it will have acquired an imposing magnitude, capable of overawing the most energetic efforts for its subjugation.

II. Our institutions are alarmingly menaced, by the aggressions of the Romish priesthood.

We are well aware that much has been said on this subject; but with the practices and professions of that priesthood before our eyes, we insist that it is impossible to warn the people of America too frequently against the arts by which their liberties are sought to be subverted. It is not for Americans to raise the rallying cry of persecution. Every religious body should be left free to the enjoyment of its own worship, and the publication of its own creeds. Uncharitableness belongs not

to the spirit of our system. Interference with the convictions of conscience, is sternly forbidden by the whole history and tenor of our political customs.

But when religion forgets the holy cause of its mission, and, in the name of designing men, is inoculated with selfishness and ambition, and a spirit of arbitrariness in direct conflict with freedom, both of conduct and conscience---when it lays off the unsoiled robes of peace in which it has been clad, and girds on the sword in order to wage worldly conflicts-it seems then as if, with its own pure character, it had divested itself of its former claims to our reverence, and entered the field with all the greedy desires, deceits, artifices, and hot passions, that disfigure the character of man.

If the devotees of the religion of Christ once give over the singleness of their calling for the sake of compassing ends which are purely ambitious and worldly, they deserve to be met with the prompt rebuke that such conduct so richly merits. No reproofs can be too severe for their hypocritical practices. No opposition can be too unbending for their attempted usurpations. They are to be checked at the outset in a career that promises nothing but danger to the free government that affords them its indulgent protection.

That there are truly and devotedly pious members of the Romish priesthood in America, we shall not take it upon ourselves to deny; still their zeal burns only for the Church, whose faithful servants they are, while the tenets and practices of that Church are undeviatingly hostile to freedom. These facts are well supported. The professions of the temporal head of that Church are openly at war with free institutions. His words are swift witnesses of his hostility to any political system that secures liberty of conscience to the worshipper. He insists that the Church, and the Romish Church alone, is the source of all temporal as well as spiritual authority, and that to its tyrannical behests and decrees the State should bow in silent submission. In America, the people form the State; and hence the people must be brought beneath a yoke that takes away every thing like individual freedom, and offers in return nothing but the most degrading servility.

On such conditions, no free State could ever hope to stand. Its history would pass out of the light, into a darkness that would enshroud it from the eyes of the world, forever. The rock on which it stranded would always be marked, but, in the wide waste of the seas, no fragments of the noble structure would afterwards be found. It would be ingulfed in a vast whirlpool, that never gives back to the eye any tokens of the ruins with which its voracious appetite is gorged.

It would be easy to extend beyond the limits of our work, examples of this hostility of the Romish Church to liberty; volumes of confessions might be collected from the lips and pens of both priests and press, all going to establish beyond question their undying hatred to the freedom of the individual. The great writer and defender of Romish doctrines in this country, in his Review, frankly confesses as follows:

"I never think of publishing any thing in regard to the Church, without submitting my articles to the Bishop for inspection, approval, and endorsement." And after this important admission, he declares (with the Bishop's authority, of course,) that "Protestantism of every form has not, and never can have, any rights where Catholicity is triumphant."*

Daniel O'Connell, in one of his speeches in parliament, gives like testimony: "I declare my most unequivocal submission to the head of the Church, and to the hierarchy in its different orders. If the Bishops make a declaration on this bill, I never would be heard speaking against it, but would submit at once, unequivocally, to that decision. They have only to decide, and they also close my mouth; they have only to determine, and I obey. I wish it to be understood that such is the duty of the Catholics."t

* Brownson's Review.

+ Spotskniskay, recently a Romish priest, officiating in Paterson, was denounced as a heretic, and excommunicated by Bishop Hughes, of New York city, because he went to hear a Protestant minister lecture on Popery, a thing the priest declares he could do in Poland without censure, "but could not do it, in this land of liberty without expulsion from his Church."

By this kind of evidence of the proscription of all kinds of individual liberty in the individual, the spirit of animosity to American institutions, that directs the action of Romish priests, is laid open to public inspection. It is bitter and deadly in its operation, to the last conceivable limit. It affects to be quiet, when quiet is for its interest, yet never hesitates to trample ruthlessly on all law, and all liberty, when its increased power permits it so to do with impunity. By a process of astonishing accretion, it builds up a power within the State, the ostensible purposes of which are to overshadow every combination of opposing influence, and to subvert and defy all the forces of the civil government. It demands of its votaries a pledge totally vitiating their solemn oaths as freemen, and offers their united political influence to that party which shall show itself most supple to its insinuating address.

Against such a power there is great need that Americans should secure proper protection. Whether it seek to effect its objects by fraud or force, by stratagem or violence, it should be resisted in season, and resisted energetically to the end. The existence of such a power, aiming to reach political advantage under the professions of devotion to religion, is both alarming in its tendencies, and incompatible with the spirit and character of free institutions.

III. We stand in great danger of losing our liberties, from a growing indifference to the exercise of our own rights as voters at the polls.

In itself considered, this point is not strictly to be regarded as of an aggressive nature; but when viewed in connection with the other two, it assumes a magnitude and importance calculated to arrest the attention of the most careless and unreflecting. It implies a state of things within, in perfect co-operation with the dangerous designs from without; a previous preparation, that promises more certain success to the destructive plans by which republican liberty is besieged.

It is not necessary to our present purpose, to speculate on the causes of such supreme indifference, on the part of freemen, to the safety of their high privileges; enough that a truth so melancholy is forced on our attention. The fact is palpably plain. The results

betray themselves on all sides—in an inferior grade of public functionaries; in the impudent presumptions of demagogism; in the greater abundance of examples of intrigue; and in the general deterioration of that healthy influence which properly belongs to a nation of intelligent freemen.

Many of the best men of America refuse to go to the polls, while the worst never fail to avail themselves of their privilege.. It is impossible that this should long remain so, without a gradual change, for the worse, in the character of our government. What is most needed at the polls, is the constant expression of the opinion and will of the discreet and temperate portion of the community. It is only upon the sentiments of the more intelligent and sober citizens, that a republic like ours can hope to build a reputation for extended usefulness; or a renown that will bear its name, like a blessing, to every quarter of the habitable globe. Their common country has a right to demand their most zealous services in her behalf. She appeals to them in the name of that ample protection which her laws afford; she warns them by considerations of fear, of comfort, of happiness, and of obedience to their sincerest convictions of duty. If they give over their efforts on her behalf, what will all other efforts be worth? If they are careless of the safety of her noble institutions, to whom can she look with the hope of ever finding for them either advocates or defenders?

We do not claim that the complete vote of our more intelligent citizens would be capable of paralyzing the force of that ignorance which has of late years been making such astounding progress at the ballot-box. We would not venture, as yet, to hope as much; but the influence of that vote would give an impulse to the cause of enlightened freedom, such as has not been felt since the days of the heroic founders of the Republic. It would awaken loftier resolves in the breasts of many who now but help to confirm the secret decrees of demagogism. It would inspire the masses with more noble sentiments respecting liberty, with the wand of whose living spirit they have hardly yet been touched. It would shake off drowsiness and