The construction or restoration of that canal would turn the scale anew in favor of Catholic Europe, and therefore we may expect Great Britain and our own country to oppose it.

ART. VI.-1. "Our Houses are our Castles": a Review of the Proceedings of the Nunnery Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature; and especially their Conduct and that of their Associates on Occasion of the Visit to the Catholic School in Roxbury, March 26, 1855; with an Appendix containing several Documents relating to the Subject. By CHARLES HALE. Boston. 1855. 2. Report of the Joint Special Committee appointed to Investigate the Conduct of the Committee on the Petition of E. P. Carpenter and others, and the Charges and Impulations against the Committee contained in the Boston Daily Advertiser.

3. Report of the Special Committee appointed to investigate the Conduct of Joseph Hiss, Member of the House, and one of the Committee on Nunneries.

4. Report of the Joint Special Committee on the Petition of E. P. Carpenter and others, Sylvanus Adams and others, John A. Coddington and others, Curtis Morse and others, and Wm. H. Hayden and others, in Relation to Nunneries, &c.

5. Report of the Committee to whom was referred the Report of a former Committee appointed to investigate the Conduct of Mr. Hiss.

WE feel some little repugnance to allude to the general character and conduct of our Legislature during the late session. It was such a Legislature as Massachusetts never had before, and, there is little doubt, such as she will never have again. Massachusetts has many faults, and a portion of her people are affected by various disgraceful fanaticisms; but it would be gross injustice to suppose her fittingly represented by her present government. She has had the misfortune to fall into the hands of a faction, and the majority of her sons have no sympathy, it is our firm belief, with the insane proceedings of

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her present General Court. Thousands at the late election voted with the Know-Nothing party who were deceived as to its real character and purposes, and who now are heartily ashamed of having deserted their old party friends; and we entertain not a doubt that the Commonwealth at the next election will fully redeem her character, and prove to the world that, however she may have been betrayed into a passing folly for a moment, she is still sound at the heart, and attached to the Union and to republican institutions.

The Know-Nothing party, most appropriately named, calls itself the American Party, and professes to be truly American. Now we are among those who believe that there is a real American character, and not unworthy of the love and respect of every American citizen; but we confess that we cannot see one single American characteristic in this new party. The American has undoubtedly his faults, many and great, but he is open, straightforward and manly. What he does, he would do openly and aboveboard. He has a natural dislike to secret cabals and midnight conspiracies, and a generous love of fair and honorable dealing. In the way of trade or dicker he will undoubtedly make as good a bargain as he can; he may be bold and rash in his speculations, but even in the way of business the genuine American is as honest and as high-minded, as fair and as honorable, as the citizen of any other country on the globe. Nothing is more repugnant to his innate character than a political party that covers itself with secrecy, and operates in the dark. Secret organizations are not native to him, and are borrowed from abroad. This very American party so called owes its very conception, its plan, its organization, and its rules, to foreign nations, and does but copy the Orange Lodges of Ireland and the Carbonari of Italy. It is un-American, and opposed to the great principles of general suffrage and eligibility which lie at the foundation of our American system. It is at war with the free and manly exercise of that dearest right of freedom, the elective franchise, for it subjects it to the decision of irresponsible chiefs, unknown to the Constitution and disowned by our laws.

The Free Soil and Anti-Catholic character of this party is of foreign, not American origin, and is borrowed from

our most formidable rival, Great Britain. Every charge it brings against Catholics and Catholicity is of British manufacture, and glutted the English market before it was thrown upon our own, and in its Abolition movements it is but following in the wake of British philanthropy. It is un-American in its hostility to foreigners. Americans have always boasted something of a cosmopolitan character, of being superior to the narrow prejudices of race or nation, and of estimating men by what they are in themselves, not by the accident of birth. When they won independence and liberty for themselves, they wished to do it for mankind. They threw open their doors to the oppressed of all lands and of all creeds, and said, Here be the home of virtue and the asylum for the oppressed to the latest generation. On these broad and generous principles we founded our society and our commonwealth. Yet this pseudo-American party disowns these principles, and founds itself on those very narrow-minded and ignoble prejudices of race or nation which we begun by discarding. We had declared all professedly Christian denominations equal before the state, and this party, copying the bad example of England in Ireland, seeks to establish by the Constitution and laws a Protestant ascendency. We are republican, and boast that the people are sovereign; but this party, by transferring the authority from the people to the lodge, and from bodies freely chosen by the people as their representatives to the unknown and irresponsible chiefs of a secret society, belies this boast, and destroys the very essence of our republicanism. Indeed, we know nothing distinctively American that is not warred against by this new party. As an American we disown and discard it.

Nevertheless, the party calls itself, in spite of the misnomer, the American party, and seeks to make itself a national party. It aspires to the Presidency, and hopes to rule the Union. We have seen what it is in its principles, and, happily for the American people, our Massachusetts Legislature during its last session can show what it is in practice. We have neither the space nor the disposition to review the proceedings of the Legislature during its session, but we select a passage from its history which may serve to show what is the spirit, the elevation of mind, and the gentlemanly bearing of Know-Nothing legislators. All

the members of the Massachusetts Legislature for 1855, with only two exceptions, were elected on the KnowNothing platform. Their membership of the new order was duly vouched for in its lodges or secret councils, where their nominations were severally made. The nature of the obligations assumed by members under oath, itself in violation, in this State, at the time, of positive law, and therefore the nature of that platform, have been ascertained, in part at least, by witnesses in some of our courts of justice, drawn out on interlocutory questions as to bias, the judges having decided that witnesses could not plead their oath to maintain secrecy in bar to answering the interrogations as to the intent and purpose of obligations unlawfully taken. The two principal propositions of the platform, as thus judicially determined, are, in substance,— 1. Exclusion from office and the exercise of the elective franchise of all persons whose parents and whose grandfather or grandmother were not born in the United States; and 2. Exclusion from office and the right to vote of all Catholics, regardless of ancestry; so that persons who, like ourselves, are descended from the first settlers of New England, would be deprived, if Catholics, of all political rights. The obligations imposed by the order on its members were occasionally referred to in legislative debates, when members betrayed symptoms of manly independence, and of an intention to evade the secret orders of its council in reference to matters pending in the General Court. That the members of the Legislature had taken the unlawful oaths which gave them this secret power over each other was quietly confessed in the course of the session, by the passage, without discussion, of an act repealing the provisions of the 128th chapter of the Revised Statutes, which imposed a penalty for taking or administering oaths not authorized by law. Thus was constituted a body of law-makers, who, with but two exceptions, obtained their seats by violating an express law of the State, and bound to obey implicitly an authority unknown to our Constitution and laws.

During the first week of the session, operations were commenced under both branches of the platform. Some of the measures proposed were nipped in the bud by the discovery that they were not within the jurisdiction of the State; and of these we will not now speak. The first

demonstration against Catholics, resulting in any sort of action, was in relation to nunneries. In the House of Representatives, on the eighth day of the session, Mr. Joseph Hiss, of Boston, who in the end was "hoist with his own petar," moved an order instructing the Judiciary Committee to consider the expediency of a law providing for the inspection of nunneries. Then were received several petitions, painfully lugubrious in style, setting forth that the petitioners believed "that acts of villany, injustice, and wrong are perpetrated within the walls of said institutions with impunity, as a result of their immunity from public inspection." These petitions were referred to a joint special committee, together with the order of Mr. Hiss, relinquished by the Judiciary Committee for that purpose; and Mr. Hiss was appointed on the special committee. Shortly after, at the instance of this committee, the following order was passed in concurrence:

"Ordered, that the joint special committee on the inspection of nunneries and convents be authorized and instructed to visit and examine such theological seminaries, boarding-schools, academies, nunneries, convents, and other institutions of a like character, as they may deem. necessary to enable them to make a final report on the subject committed to their consideration."

Under the Constitution, the Legislature had no power to authorize any such visitation and examination, and the committee made no attempt to act under the order, except so far as it embraced Catholic institutions. And under this convenient view of the power intended to be granted, they visited the Catholic educational institutions at Worcester, Roxbury, and Lowell. Undoubtedly this was the extent of their purpose when they obtained the authority; but an application limited to a visitation of Catholic institutions only would have been a little too barefaced to be granted by a Legislature sitting by virtue of a Constitution which secures to the whole people the right to be governed by "general laws." After the lapse of more than nine weeks, the committee submitted their report, which amounted so nearly to nothing, that it would have been impossible, except in a "mock session," to have raised a discussion upon it, considered by itself, and without reference to a bill, from the Committee on Education, in relation to private teachers, then pending in the House. The