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lady forgives all and pays for all. We do not defend secession, nor do we condemn it. The game of nations, by the very nature of it, makes criticism absurd. There is no regular price for two-pair; nor any patented process for making a fortune, or a nation.

Are not republicans just a little disingenuous in pluming themselves on the conduct of the war and on the present prosperity of the country? Let alone the dead, the maimed, and the sorrowing, was the war within $1,500,000,000 of the original estimate of its cost? And to what besides their enormous expenditure of credit is a seeming prosperity due? Very nearly had we run into the panic times invariably consequent to great extravagance, when the failure of European crops and the timely discovery of treasure in native metal and oil saved us and kept the balance of trade in our favor; but it should not require a professional economist to perceive, nor a habitual croaker to lament the fact, that a booming prosperity is not the normal condition of a nation that owes two thousand millions of dollars. That much of the debt is due to Americans is but an aggravation; unfortunately they are all Americans who must pay. And if in spite of this we are prospering, then, as between the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress, at least some credit is due to the senior member of that celebrated firm.

It is accounted a charge against the democratic party that it embraces nearly the whole catholic vote. But true conservatism, which looks upon all worship with equal toleration, is not impugned but rather approved by this large concession. The Church sides with the democracy because in her most vital functions she is democratic. Her powers and judgment are not in the past, but ever of the living spirit; not of the dead books and canons of a race gone by, but ruling in the bosom of the ordained prelacy as the right of decision in all questions of doctrine and practice. This is the very essence of democracy: faith in our divine descent, liberty and responsibility. To the church God is not radical, literal, unyielding, but forgiving, compromising, conciliatory. In her the dead still have hope. But what can a radical say of the mercy of God? Is it just, to forgive the sinner let him go- ignore the sacred majesty of offended law? Is this after the justitia fial, ruet coelum method? Surely radicalism will not turn to God for example and countenance!

There is perhaps no prejudice more set than that with which certain protestants view the catholic church. In her devoted children, so many of whom in this country dwell cheerfully in constant labor, they cannot see poor human nature clinging to her doctrines for religious uses and ends, but only a set of trained conspirators clinging together for a hereditary secret political purpose of aggrandizement which never transpires. How poor and crude and ungentle-how void of the poetry of history, are these discriminations against the mother church: she who stood by at the birth-throes of all the institutions yet extant among men, and from beneath whose gray hood may yet come the murmured pax vobiscum at the end of them all. See for how many generations all the life and glory of the world-the keys to the Kingdom not only, but to literature and art and arms were in her keeping! Like a "great admiral," her tall masts dipt in light, she came grandly down, bearing the ark and the evangels. Her handsome prelates smiled like gods over the dark crowd. Bravo and brigand knelt in the highway for the priest's blessing, and gave up the gold robbed from my lord. The books that keep the past sweetened the mellow hours in their dim cloisters; the inspirations of the lineal head composed the conscience of the friars in peace, and gave them a hallowed and solemn mastery of life. Well said Edmund Burke: It is a sour, malignant and envious disposition, without love for the reality or taste for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor.

That prelates of the catholic church have abused their positions in the past is not denied, nor that the founders of protestantism in America did exhibit bigotry and cruelty; we cannot charge individual sins to party purposes and ideals. The church is not committed to the democracy nor is the democracy committed to any church. Favors her benevolent institutions have certainly had, in company with others-obtained by personal influence; but the day is quite fresh in our memory when a democratic governor of the Empire state said that catholics as such should not dictate what manner of organization should parade the streets of New York; and the