to avoid fallacies of one kind or another; and travellers in Austria, in Japan, in Brazil, detect easily where such fallacies lie.

We will not introduce any remarks about religion in its influence upon national manners, because we must get into this scrape, that, the higher the religion the greater the expectation which it justifies. We might hazard the theory that a pure Catholic society would present the most typical code of manners, and we might point to certain countries where, such society existing, the manners are, in fact, almost perfect. But the crowding of business masses, of worldly or striving throngs, in all cities, whatever their religion, tends to the obscuring of the graceful influences of religion and to the triumph of selfishness over modesty. In England, where the religions are various, it is not possible to trace their social influence. Controversy does not breed gentle homage any more than it unites social strata. Yet the days are passed when sectarianism in England threw up barriers of "religious" demarcation. At one time they did so; they do not now. A Catholic and a Dissenter are equally welcome in a drawing-room if they bring their contributions of good breeding. Englishmen are simply weary of "polemics." They talk religion, but only as they talk politics. There are, of course, bigoted people, but they are laughed at if they make their bigotry a pretext for any personal depreciation. This is the rule with the vast majority. It may be said that this is a good sign and a bad sign. Sincerity is usually ardent if respectful. Indifference may be polite, but it is not Christian. Here we touch on broader questions than manners, or the social canons of exterior interchange. We have spoken only of superficial manners, and of certain natural, broad fallacies in their promptings. We should conclude that the generous race that is now spread over the earth has as much earnestness of character as any other race, and that its foibles of manners are rather created by social accidents than by a dimness of perception or of sympathy. Nay, we should go beyond this, and say that such foibles, in their purely external silliness or vulgarity, are often but a set-off against an inner appreciation of whatever is admirable in character. Even very bad manners are sometimes a shy covering of certain nervous or untrained sensibilities. Why should we expect that the majority, in any country, should be any better bred than it is disciplined? A" gentleman,” in any country, is that very rare being who unites every grace that makes a man. There must be this delicacy of the nature, with this breadth of the intelligence, and the culture which gives charm to both. Yet, sometimes, even in the humblest classes-in England and everywhere else—we meet with a natural winningness of manners which is inborn, ineradicable, without merit, being the gift of mother nature, not of "society." This kind of " gentleman

liness" has no country. It can neither be created nor extracted by art, and, like genius, it acknowledges no laws. Perhaps it may be said that an average modesty of position is most favorable to a modest grace of manners. And, on this principle, we can explain why, in England, the best manners are generally seen in the educated humbler classes.

IS FROUDE A HISTORIAN ?

Romanism and the Irish Race in the United States. Part I. James Anthony Froude, North American Review, December, 1879.

HE December number of the North American Review affords

THE

matter for wonder and surprise, and we ask ourselves whether this ancient quarterly, in which so many of the best efforts of American literary ability have appeared, has lost all dignity and all decency by removing to New York. Leaving the narrower circle of New England thought for the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of New York seemed to promise freedom from many prejudices. and grooves of thought that were apparently inevitable in its former. home. But the leading article, which in its first word applies to seven millions of Americans a term of insult, a degrading opprobrious epithet, drawn from the rogue's lexicon or the vile invective of polemic pulpits, makes one think it some remnant of olden time, some fierce philippic of a New England clergyman, written in the days when men were hounded on by “pulpit, drum ecclesiastic," to burn the convent at Charlestown. But there it is, in black and white, in the forefront of the North American.

The epithet Romanism shows the writer to be an unscrupulous enemy, one whose moral sense is so warped that it is useless to expect any fair or moderate treatment at his hands. All we can look for is skill. The article bears the name of one who has written on subjects connected with the history of the British Isle. For that work his studies may have fitted him so far as his powers of appreciating motives and events permit him to write history. But it is a surprise to find him treating an American subject. A passing visit to this country, without any special study of our complex and strange history, certainly did not fit him to write on such a theme with any credit to himself or usefulness to his reader.

VOL. V.-8

We can hardly conceive the article to have been spontaneous; or, if really such, that the editor would accept it on its merits. It is impossible that any American scholar would accept such an article as at all adequate to the subject or fit for the position assigned it. Are we, then, to infer that it was written to order; that an American quarterly employs the hireling pen of an ignorant foreigner to treat one of the perplexing questions in this country: the actual position of the Catholic Church here and the influence it is likely to produce on the Protestant element, or receive from it, and consequently the result on the local and national affairs during the next fifty years.

We blush as Americans to see an English writer thus retained to vilify any part of the American people. Time has brought its changes. Sixty years ago all America hailed with pride a work of a Catholic writer, An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America, and Strictures upon the Calumnies of the British Writers. Now a great American review becomes the accessory of a calumnious British writer in assailing Americans.

Mr. Froude ranks among historical writers. His attractive style, his vivid imagination, his warm partisanship are admitted; his historical accuracy has been questioned. Meline, in defending Mary, Queen of Scots, against Froude, obtained from the State Paper Office documents cited by this English writer, and proved, as English judges mildly expressed it, that Mr. Froude did not seem to know the value of quotation-marks; in fact, that he garbled documents by suppressing passages and making paragraphs read on consecutively, which in the original had no relation to each other. But such investigations have little attraction for readers generally, who shrink from the study of old documents with obsolete language and quaint forms. They leave this critical work to dry-asdust antiquarians, and are content to enjoy a writer's volume who tells his story plausibly and attractively, even though from the highest standard of morality and historic truth it cannot be said that he tells it well.

Now, however, that Mr. Froude takes up a subject of American history reaching far back into the past, and with a future that merits the most serious thought of the American statesman who has the true interests of his country at heart, the position of affairs changes. Here the matter is, to a certain extent, familiar to us all. Our history dates back less than three centuries, and though the

1 By Robert Walsh, Jr.

2 Mary, Queen of Scots, and Her Latest English Historian.

number of those who are professed students of our forefathers' days is much smaller than we wish, our numerous historical societies are a nucleus around which thousands gather, becoming daily more and more interested in the topic.

Let us see, then, how Mr. Froude treats his American topic, and we appeal to our historical societies for a decision whether such a man shows either the research of the student, the knowledge of the subject, the careful weighing of clashing testimony, or the impartial, sober, critical judgment that constitute an historian.

He does not cite an authority for a single statement from the first line to the last. We shall endeavor to extract from his rambling and declamatory text various propositions, and meet them by the fruit of thirty years' study and a collection of nearly two thousand books, pamphlets, and volumes of papers and periodicals bearing on the Catholic Church in the United States.

He assumes that the Catholic Church has just begun to attack the various Protestant denominations, and that the latter have just awakened to their danger, especially as Catholic Lower Canada is on the north and Catholic Spanish America on the south. "That religion," he says (p. 523), “unfortunately is, by its own choice, at war with every other." "And they (the Anglo-Americans) are now confronted with the unpleasant fact that the Catholicism, which they have already so much cause to fear, is in all these countries overwhelmingly predominant." (P. 525.)

Now, as matter of history, has the Catholic body here from the early days been on the offensive or on the defensive? The question is easily answered. They have been altogether on the defensive; not attacking but attacked, often meeting from the majority around them persecution, oppression, unjust legislation and judicial action, as well as lawless violence from the mob, and unfair discrimination in various departments. They have had to contend with a feeling of strong prejudice and antipathy, excited against them by the governing body in England to effect the change by which that country, the majority of whose people were still Catholic in the reign of Elizabeth, became Protestantized. This prejudice, long cultivated and kept alive by misrepresentation of Catholic doctrines, Catholic practices, and the facts of Catholic history, has become a second nature to most non-Catholics. While all other matters require study, everything Catholic comes to these people by a kind of intuition. They will tell you an immense deal about the Mass without ever having seen a Mass offered or once read seriously through the liturgy of the Mass, and so with a hundred points. Even among those who have ceased to believe in the dogmatic teaching of any Protestant denomination or avail them

selves of its ordinances, the feeling remains strong that Catholicity is wrong and that Catholics must be put down.

Catholics are perfectly aware of this feeling, and are living it down, confident that the time will come when this strong prejudice must yield to the force of common-sense; that sooner or later those who wish to know what Catholics really believe and what they really do, will take the same steps to acquire information that they do in regard to other matters, and not depend on old wives' tales, whether put forward by some old crone or by an English historian.

The first document bearing on the position of Catholic and Protestant in this country is the charter of Maryland. It grew out of an event which raises no blush to the cheek of the Catholic. Turning from the inhospitable Avalon, which he had planted on the shores of Newfoundland, and attracted by the glowing description his wife gave of Virginia, which she had visited, Lord Baltimore resolved to contribute all his influence and colonization to the increase of that province. "When, in October, 1629, he visited Virginia in person, the zeal of the assembly immediately ordered the oaths of allegiance and supremacy to be tendered him. It was in vain that he proposed a form which he was willing to subscribe; the government firmly insisted upon that which had been chosen by the English statutes, and which was purposely framed in such language as no Catholic could adopt." (Bancroft, i. p. 240.) Certainly Catholics were not the sinners here against the broad principles of toleration and religious freedom. Lord Baltimore asked only what he had established at Avalon, in Newfoundland, and failing to obtain it from Virginia, he sought from the king a charter for a colony adjoining that which repulsed him for his faith. Of Maryland, which under his charter his son founded, Bancroft wrote: "Every other country in the world had persecuting laws; through the benign administration of the government of that province, no person professing to believe in Jesus Christ was permitted to be molested on account of religion" (p. 248).

As a contrast we find Massachusetts, in 1647, forbidding Jesuits to enter Massachusetts, banishing them if they did, and visiting them with death in case they returned. (General Laws, p. 67.) As early as 1631, one Sir Christopher Gardner, suspected of being a Catholic, was summarily sent out of the colony, and this same year Massachusetts initiated the policy by which none could be admitted as freemen who were not members of some church in the colony, and as none but Congregational churches were permitted, this effectually barred all others from any voice in public affairs. (Palfrey's New England, i. pp. 329, 330, 345.)

Maryland, in which the majority had by this time become Cath