and I am familiar with
the writings of the rest, and know whereof I speak.

You _intentionally_ deceive and misrepresent the American party, when
you charge that they seek to proscribe one class of our citizens--that
they desire to interfere with the rights of conscience--and to say _how_
men should worship God. Why don't you inform your readers that
Archbishop Hughes, and other Catholic Bishops, were the first to
introduce religion into political discussion in this country? This would
not suit your purposes--it suits your objects, taste, and inclination
better, to slander the American party by wholesale, and to charge upon
its members the atrocities committed by your foreign and pauper allies.
We only choose to vote against them, and to vote for American-born
citizens and Protestants: which is as much our _right_, as it is the
right of these foreign Catholics to vote against and proscribe American
Protestants. For this, you and your villainous associates exhaust the
whole vocabulary of Billingsgate upon the American party. What is their
offence? Why, they simply place certain questions before persons
desiring to act with them, which they think, at least, may affect the
national welfare, and before the people of the Union, and ask their
opinion of these questions at the ballot-box. The American party has
always denied, and I again reiterate the denial, that we do, at all
proscribe, or in any way interfere with, any class of our foreign
citizens, save that we propose to send _convicts_ from European prisons
back to their own native and infamous dens, as fast as they land
here--but these are not _citizens_ of ours. I appeal to our Platform,
and our Book of Constitutions, and I offer to any man a handsome
reward--any man who will produce in either a statement containing the
proscription you falsely charge against us. I now say, Gov. Brown,
either do this, or cease your empty vaporing against the _proscriptive_
features of our system, as you are pleased to style it. You declaim most
lustily in favor of religious liberty for Catholics, which you know we
do not propose as a party to interfere with; and this you plead for at
the altar of Methodist "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers," who know
there is no religious liberty for Protestants where Catholics have the
power to prevent it! You plead in the most plaintive tones for the
rights of foreign Catholics to be sworn into good citizens in less than
_one year_ after they la