instead of chapel. This is offering a premium on hypocrisy, giving a bribe for dishonesty, and employing a force infinitely more detestable than that of the sword. We are unable to conceive anything more dishonorable, or more immoral and corrupting. This mode of proselyting is of itself sufficient to stamp Evangelicalism as from below, and to prove that its spirit is infernal, not supernal. True religion is never divorced from morality, and it can never consent to advance itself by immoral, dishonorable, or even ungenerous means. Its spirit is always free, noble, magnanimous.

It

Unhappily, Evangelicalism has no greatness of soul, no tenderness of heart, no sense of honor or justice. has never been able to propagate itself by moral means, and has always relied on low cunning, corrupting appeals, or the employment of force of some sort. It has not even the manly spirit of the ancient Græco-Roman Gentilism. To it all means are fair, are honorable, are just, that will detach people from the Church, and make them non-Catholics, although hypocrites or infidels. The dragonades of Louis the Fourteenth, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's, even as represented by the Protestants, were highminded and praiseworthy in comparison with the daily practices of Evangelicals in the West of Ireland, and even in some of our Atlantic cities. Evangelicalism reverses all the precepts of the Gospel, and makes converts only by arguments addressed to the body, the flesh, the animal man, instead of arguments addressed to the soul, to reason, and conscience. It cannot be generous even in its benevolence, and it will give a morsel of bread to the famishing only in exchange for conscience. It would assist us in our poverty from its abundance to educate and provide for our children, but only on condition that it can rear them up in its own evil ways, that it can make them Evangelicals, and twofold more the children of hell than its own adherents. If we have the spirit to refuse its assistance on such terms, it turns round and accuses us of being opposed to education, as loving ignorance, and as having no regard for the welfare of our children. If we exert ourselves, and from our scanty means, after paying our tax for the support of the public schools, provide schools of our own for our children, it raises the hue and cry against us, denies us the right to educate

our own children as we see proper, charges us with a premeditated design to break down the Common School system of the country, and of delivering over the poor innocent Protestant people body and soul to the Pope.

England under Evangelical influence has never consented to treat Catholic Ireland as having either the natural or the civil right to be Catholic, and for three hundred years has labored in all her intercourse with her to force her to turn Protestant. Her legislation, her administration, her beneficence even, has had this end, and this end only, in view. Hence the reason why Ireland has never been a happy and contented member of the British empire. If she had respected the religion of the Irish, and been contented to govern her according to the principles of common justice, we should never have heard of rebellion as the chronic disease of Ireland. But the Irish people chose to adhere to the religion of their fathers, and hence the Evangelical government of England has felt that it has the right to treat them as brutes, to trample on all their natural rights as subjects, to outrage their dearest and most sacred affections as men, and to make sport of their noblest qualities and their sublimest virtues as Christians. Evangelicalism is laboring with all its might to do the same thing here. There is no hostility in this country to the Irish, simply as such. The hostility to the Irish, which is so general and so deplorable, is hostility to the Catholic Irish, and springs from the Evangelical hatred of Catholicity. The Evangelical finds a brother in the Orangeman, and loves his "rich brogue," if brogue he have. It is the Catholic, not the Irishman, that he regards as an enemy, and he hates the American-born Catholic even more than the foreign-born. All his measures against foreigners, all his Native Americanism, all his pretended love of republicanism, all his talk against the Irish, and about Americans governing America, are directed solely against Catholics, and have for their end to force Catholics to become Evangelicals. The appeal to the Native American sentiment is a device of Satan, and proceeds from no love of true Americanism, but solely from hatred to Catholicity.

Here is a point which we wish such writers as Mr. T. D. McGee would consider. They make a mistake, and defend the Irishman, when it is not the Irishman, but the

Catholic, they should defend; for it is only for the sake of the Catholic that the Irishman is really attacked. Their defence of the Irishman, not of the Catholic, or of the Catholic mainly because he is an Irishman, tends to excite a national feeling against the Irish as Irish, and to enlist against them non-Evangelical, as well as Evangelical Americans; whereas, if they would defend the Catholic alone, or the Irishman only because a Catholic, they would have for their opponents only the Evangelicals, not yet a majority of the American people. The Irish themselves in this country need no special defence, and are best defended, not as Irish, but as Catholics, in common with the whole Catholic population of the country. That Catholic population is made up of native Americans, natives of Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Russia, Turkey, and they all have one common enemy, one common interest, and one common defence, and it is bad policy for them to attempt to draw any lines of division among themselves. They all stand on the same platform before God and the country, and should never in their defence separate themselves one from another. The only fault we find with the writers we allude to is, that they defend themselves on national instead of Catholic grounds, and thus do what they can to compel Catholics to divide among themselves according to their several nationalities, or to seek union by making themselves Irishmen. They would give the hegemony among the Catholics to the Irish, which is unjust to the other nationalities.

We say not this because we are unfriendly to the Irish, or because we do not love and respect them as much as we do our own race or nation. We have no great respect for Irish politicians, whether foreign-born or American-born; that is, a class of men with little solid talent, but great volubility, who regard the portion of our population born in Ireland or of Irish parents as their stock in trade, and seek to render themselves politically important by having it believed that they can command the "Irish vote." These men, commonly regarded as representing the Irish body, we hold in no high esteem, and we seldom fail to let them know it, because their influence, as far as influence they have, is injurious to the country. But it is a great mistake to suppose that these

represent the Irish population of this country, or that they are held in any higher esteem by our fellow-citizens of Irish birth or extraction than they are by ourselves. Every people has its demagogues, and after all these Irish demagogues are no worse than our Yankee demagogues, if indeed so bad, and if the Irish people may be influenced by demogogues, everybody knows that the native American people can be influenced still more by them. No people on earth were ever more completely under the control of demagogues than have been and are the descendants of the Puritans in this ancient Commonwealth of Massachusetts. While we confess we do not like Irish demagogues, we are bound to say that we do not consider them as worse than our own, and that we dislike them not because they are Irish, but because they are demagogues, and we dislike all demagogues.

But setting aside the demagogues, and coming to the Irish people themselves, even as we find them in this country, we appeal to every one who knows them intimately, if they do not at least equal, in all the private, domestic, and social virtues, any other portion of our population. Every national character has its defects, and traits not pleasing to people of other nations, and there are traits in the Irish character that we do not like; but when we look at the amiable qualities and solid virtues of the Irish people as a body, we are obliged to confess that they are unsurpassed by any people on the globe. The two works named at the head of this article describe the Irish peasant as he is at home, but they describe him very much as we find him here. Our readers know that we never allow them to forget our American character or our Puritan descent, and that we always scrupulously abstain from eveyrthing which might be construed into a flattery of the Irish; but in these times, when so much injustice is done. them by our Evangelicals, and every effort is made to excite a native American prejudice against them, it is but common justice to recognize their virtues, and to rebuke the contemptuous tone in which they are too often spoken of. The American national type is derived from the English, and the people of this country will always be an Anglo-American people in their predominant character; but he knows little of the Anglo-American who doubts that his character is mellowed and greatly improved in

There is

its flavor by its contact with the Irish Catholic. no portion of our population superior to that in which there is a large infusion of the genuine Irish element. Take even the Irish peasantry who come here, and you are struck with their industry, their quiet and loyal dispositions, their domestic virtues, and their warm and tender domestic affections. Visit their families, and you feel that you are in a pure and healthy atmosphere, and your hearts are melted by a love of parents to children, of chil dren to parents, of brothers and sisters for each other, that you have never found in the families of Puritan origin. They have their vices, no doubt; but what people has not? Their vices attract our notice, not because they are greater or more numerous than ours, but because they are different. Every people is tolerant of its own national vices, and intolerant of the national vices of others. The vices of the Irish are seen at a glance; they are all open, on the outside; the vices of the Yankee are concealed or disguised. The Yankee hides his vices, the Irishman his virtues.

The Evangelicals underrate the intelligence of the Irish peasantry. As a general thing, they do not read as much as the Yankees; they are not acquainted with so many speculative opinions in religion and morals, but they have even more natural shrewdness, and have more real, solid intelligence in all that relates to what is highest and best in human life. Much which we call knowledge, and which they have not, is nothing but acquired ignorance. Nine tenths of the knowledge we Americans boast of is nothing but sheer ignorance dressed in the garb of science. If you rise from the poor and illiterate to the educated and easy class of the Irish population of the country, you will find, as a general rule, that they are better trained and better informed than the corresponding class of Americans of Puritan descent. Their ideas are clearer, and their information more exact. Not a few of the best scholars and business men of the country are Irish, or of Irish descent. In point of manners and the graces and qualities which adorn society, the difference is very great, and by no means to the advantage of the Anglo-AmeriYou never find that ignorance, that coarseness and vulgarity, in the low Irish, that you find in the low Englishman or Anglo-American. There is in the least culti

can.