had felt the
cold less in America when the thermometer marked 25 deg. below zero. It was
not much, but the silence was broken. Common suffering made a kind of
link between us. After this he dropped an occasional gracious word as he
passed, and one morning he came and sat by me and began to talk on
subjects of extreme interest. Chiefly he insisted on the rights of
conscience and the tenderness for liberty of thought which had always
been shown by the Church of Rome. He had been led to speak of it by the
education question which has now become a burning one in the American
Union. The Church, he said, never had interfered, and never could or
would interfere, with any man's conscientious scruples. Its own
scruples, therefore, ought to be respected. The American State schools
were irreligious, and Catholic parents were unwilling to allow their
children to attend them. They had established schools of their own, and
they supported them by subscriptions among themselves. In these schools
the boys and girls learnt everything which they could learn in the State
schools, and they learnt to be virtuous besides. They were thus
discharging to the full every duty which the State could claim of them,
and the State had no right to tax them in addition for the maintenance
of institutions of which they made no use, and of the principles of
which they disapproved. There were now eight millions of Catholics in
the Union. In more than one state they had an actual majority; and they
intended to insist that as long as their children came up to the present
educational standard, they should no longer be compelled to pay a second
education tax to the Government. The struggle, he admitted, would be a
severe one, but the Catholics had justice on their side, and would fight
on till they won.

In democracies the majority is to prevail, and if the control of
education falls within the province of each separate state government,
it is not easy to see on what ground the Americans will be able to
resist, or how there can be a struggle at all where the Catholic vote is
really the largest. The presence of the Catholic Church in a democracy
is the real anomaly. The principle of the Church is authority resting on
a divine commission; the principle of democracy is the will of the
people; and the Church in the long run will have as hard a battle to
fight with the divine right of the majority of numbers as she had with
the divine right of the Hohenstauffens an