ge, are committed
for murder per year. In Ireland there are nineteen to the million. In
Belgium, a Catholic country, there are eighteen murders to the million.
In France there are thirty-one. Passing into Austria, we find
thirty-six. In Bavaria, also Catholic, sixty-eight to the million; or,
if homicides are struck out, there will be thirty. Going into Italy,
where Catholic influence is the strongest of any country on earth, and
taking first the kingdom of Sardinia, we find twenty murders to the
million. In the Venetian and Milanese provinces there is the enormous
result of forty-five to the million. In Tuscany, forty-two, though that
land is claimed as a kind of earthly paradise; and in the Papal States
not less than one hundred murders for the million of people. There are
ninety in Sicily; and in Naples the result is more appalling still,
where public documents show there are _two hundred_ murders per year to
the million of people!

The above facts are all drawn from the civil and criminal records of the
respective countries named. Now, taking the whole of these countries
together, we have seventy-five cases of murder for every million of
people. In Protestant countries,--England, for example,--we have but
four for every million. Aside from various other demoralizing influences
of Popery, the fact now to be named beyond doubt operates with great
power in cheapening human life in Catholic countries. The Protestant
criminal believes he is sending his victim, if not a Christian, at once
to a miserable eternity; and this awful consideration gives a terrible
aspect to the crime of murder. But the Papist only sends his victim to
purgatory, whence he can be rescued by the masses the priest can be
hired to say for his soul; or his own bloody hand and heart will not
hinder him from doing that office himself. We think the above facts in
regard to vice and crime in the two great departments of Christendom
worthy the most serious pondering of every friend of morality and
virtue.

[9] Martinus Scriblerus says, that "the Pope's band, though the finest
in the world, would not divert the English from burning his Holiness in
effigy on the streets of London on a Guy Fawkes' day;" nor, I may add,
the Romans from burning him in person on the streets of Rome any day,
were the French away.

[10] For much of the information contained in this chapter I am indebted
to my intelligent friend Mr Stewart.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG