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Place the same number of Anglo-Americans in the position of these poor and reviled Irish people, subject them to the same privations and the same usage, and we should find a difference not at all flattering to our national vanity. Out from these narrow lanes, blind courts, dirty streets, damp cellars, and suffocating garrets, will come forth some of the noblest sons of our country, whom she will delight to own and to honor. Reflect on this, my countrymen, and reflect that the children of the foreign population will grow up native Americans, and you may well moderate your feelings against them. They are too numerous to be massacred, too numerous to be driven from the country, and native Americans, we hope, have too much self-respect, if nothing else, to seek to make them bond-slaves. The immigration will soon cease or be greatly diminished, and in a few years the foreign population will be assimilated to the native. So, after all, with mutual forbearance, the evil will gradually disappear.

THE KNOW-NOTHINGS.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for 1854-5.]

ARTICLE I.

OUR readers have no need to be informed that there is a secret anti-Catholic organization throughout the Union, bearing some resemblance to the Orange lodges of Ireland, of persons who very appropriately call themselves Knownothings. The party that is represented by this organization is substantially the late anti-Catholic native American party, and is led on, avowedly or unavowedly, under the direction of foreign anarchists, and apostate priests and monks, by men of desperate fortunes, fanatics, bigots, and demagogues, some of home and some of foreign production. The party reduced to its own elements would have little or no importance, but, affecting to be national, it is, in the actual state of the country and of national, religious, and political passions and prejudices, somewhat formidable, and demands the grave consideration of every true American, and especially of every Catholic citizen.

The Know-nothing party, taken in a general rather than in a special sense, rely for their success on two powerful sentiments; the sentiment of American nationality alarmed by the extraordinary influx of foreigners, and the anti-Catholic sentiment, or hatred of the Catholic Church, shared to a greater or less extent by the majority of our countrymen, and which, by the anti-Catholic declamations of Protestant England, Exeter Hall, and apostate priests and monks, and by the extension and consolidation of the church, and the freer, bolder, and more independent tone of Catholics, in the United States, has been quickened just now into more than its wonted activity. The strength of the party consists in the appeals it is able to make to these sentiments, especially to that of American nationality, for with the American people this world carries it over the other, and politics over religion.

From neither of these two sentiments should we as Catholics have much to apprehend, if they were not combined and acting in concert. Our obvious policy is, then, to do all we lawfully can to keep them separate in the public mind, and prevent them from combining. This can be done, humanly speaking, only by satisfying the sounder portion of our non-Catholic countrymen,-as every Catholic knows to be true, that there is no incompatibility between Catholicity and the honest sentiment of American nationality, and that whatever of foreignism attaches for the moment to Catholics in this country attaches to them in their quality of foreigners, and not in their quality of Catholics. This is certain, for the sentiment of nationality is as strong in the bosom of the American Catholic as in the bosom of the American Protestant. Nothing seems to us more important at this crisis in relation to the Know-nothing movement, than for us clearly to distinguish the sentiment of nationality from the anti-Catholic sentiment, and to be on our guard against offering it any gratuitous offence, and by our indiscretion enlisting on the side of that movement the large class of respectable non-Catholics who love their country more than they hate

popery.

It cannot be denied that the immense majority of our Catholic population have emigrated from various foreign states, principally Ireland and Germany, and have brought with them, as it could not otherwise happen, foreign sentiments, attachments, associations, habits, manners, and

usages. They bear not on coming here the stamp of the American mint, and are to the American people foreigners in feeling and character. This is not said by way of disparagement to either party, but as a fact, and a fact that gives to our church something of a foreign aspect, and prevents her from appearing to the natives as a national or integral element in American life. They are apt, therefore, to conclude from it, not only that the mass of Catholics are foreigners, or of foreign birth and manners, tastes and education, but that Catholicity itself is foreign to the real American people, and can never coalesce with our peculiar national sentiment, or prevail here without altering or destroying our distinctive nationality. This conclusion, all unfounded as it is, is nevertheless honestly entertained by many, and directly or indirectly enlists on the side of the Know-nothing movement, not simply the anti-Catholic bigots and demagogues of the country, but a very considerable portion of the more sober non-Catholic body of Americans, who, though they love not our religion, would otherwise stand by the religious liberty recognized and guarantied by our constitution and laws.

It was to meet this view of the case, that we wrote the article on The Native Americans. We saw, or thought we saw, the sentiment of American nationality fearfully excited against Catholics; we saw a storm gathering and ready to break in fury over our heads; we saw anti-Catholic mobs and riots taking place in a large number of the states; we saw that Catholics could be attacked, their persons and property endangered, and their churches desecrated or demolished, with impunity; we saw that the authorities were in most places favorable to our anti-Catholic assailants, and indisposed to afford us protection, and that Catholics, a feeble minority as we are, could, however brave and resolute, do little to protect ourselves in a hand to hand fight. We found a secret sympathy with the Know-nothing movement where we least expected it, and men secretly encouraging it who would naturally loudly condemn it, actuated by dislike to foreignism rather than by any active hostility to Catholicity as distinguished from the foreign elements accidentally associated with it. We wrote mainly for these, to show them that they had no reason for their secret or open sympathy, for we, a stanch Catholic, were a natural-born American citizen, and as truly and intensely American as the best of them.

Some of our friends, mistaking our purpose and wholly misconceiving the drift of our argument, construed our remarks into an attack on our foreign population, and as an especial insult to Irish Catholics,-not stopping to reflect that a Catholic American publicist could not possibly dream of insulting the Irish Catholics in the United States, unless an absolute fool or madman, neither of which will any of our Catholic or non-Catholic friends readily believe us to be. We deeply regret the misapprehension of our friends, and their hasty and uncalled-for denunciations of us; because they have thereby, unwittingly, played for the moment into the hands of the Know-nothings; because they have, as far as they could, given a practical refutation of our argument, and confirmed in the minds of our non-Catholic countrymen the very impression which we wished to efface,—that an American cannot become a Catholic, be a good Catholic, and maintain his standing among his Catholic brethren, without virtually renouncing his nationality, ceasing to feel and act as an American, and making himself a foreigner in the land of his birth. We fear the denunciations of us, under the circumstances, by the larger portion of the Catholic press in the English tongue, will hereafter, when it is no longer an object with them to excite Catholics against us personally, be used by the Know-nothings with terrible effect against the Catholic population of the country. We hope, however, that the candid among our non-Catholic countrymen-and we trust that there are many such-will not fail to perceive, what is the real fact, that these denunciations, after all, do not make any thing against our position, for the offence which our Catholic friends took was taken in their quality of foreigners, not in their quality of Catholics.

The misapprehension of our article, as it seems to us, has been extreme, and we can explain it only on the ground that Almighty God has suffered it to remind us that he has his own method of defending his cause and protecting his children, and to impress upon our heart, what in our pride we were perhaps in danger of forgetting, that his church. does not stand in human policy, human wisdom, human sagacity, or human virtue; that he will prosper no policy, however wise or just it would otherwise be, which might in him who devises and urges it rob God of his glory, or render his supernatural providence less visible and striking. He has permitted a momentary delusion to blind and mislead the judgments of our friends, for his greater glory and

our spiritual good. We bow therefore in humble submission, and cheerfully kiss the rod that chastises us.

But while we murmur not against Providence, we may, we trust, be permitted to say that the animus of our article has been wholly misapprehended, and an interpretation. given to our remarks which was not intended, and which, with all deference to our critics, we do not believe warranted by any recognized rule of construction. For what we said, fairly construed, we hold ourselves responsible; but we do not, and will not, hold ourselves responsible for what we did not say, and what, with our known sentiments, our character, position, and antecedents, it must be obvious on the slightest reflection we could not have meant. Our article was written by one who combines in his own person the character of a stanch Catholic and a natural-born American citizen, who wrote to reassure his non-Catholic countrymen, to prove practically to them, that there is nothing in Catholicity to offend their nationality, and to caution his Catholic friends of foreign birth and education against so obtruding the foreignism, which as a matter of course adheres to them, as to offend the national sensibility;-to separate in the minds of both parties the Know-nothing movement from the question of nationality, and to make it obvious to every one that the Know-nothings are not a national party, and have not the slightest claim to be regarded as such, though, through an ordinary confusion of ideas, they are just now able to enlist on their side, to some extent, the honest feeling of American nationality. Had our friends understood us, we feel sure that they would have stood by us, and seconded our efforts. If they had done so, we think Knownothingism would have received a deadly wound. But God has ordered it otherwise, and we submit.

Questions which touch national feelings and habits are, no doubt, delicate things to deal with, but we believe it the wisest way, when they must be dealt with, to approach them in a bold, straightforward, and manly manner, and deal them such a blow that no second blow will need to be struck. This is our policy. No Catholic can consent to be impeded in his free speech or independent action, so far as they are lawful and necessary to promote the cause of truth and virtue, by the tyranny of any nationality, whether his own or another's. Every Catholic knows that there are among Catholics, as well as non-Catholics, diversities of race and nation, and that these diversities do not pertain to Catho

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