the few books in the Puritan libraries, was, even down to
the time of my youth, reverently preserved and read in the
New England farmhouses.

So it was believed that it was only the want of power that
prevented the Catholics from renewing the fires of Smithfield
and the terrors of the Inquisition. It was believed that
the infallibility and supremacy of the Pope bound the Catholic
citizen to yield unquestioning obedience to the Catholic clergy
in matters civil and political, as well as spiritual. There
was a natural and very strong dread of the Confessional.

This feeling was intensified by the fact of which it was
partly the cause, that when the Irish-Catholics first came
over they voted in solid body, led often by their clergy, for
the Democratic Party, which was in the minority in the New
England States, especially in Massachusetts. England down
to a very recent time disqualified the Catholics from civil
office.

Our people forgot that the religious persecution, of which
they cherished the bitter memory, was the result of the spirit
of the age, and not of one form of religious faith. They
forgot that the English Protestants not only retaliated on
the Catholics when they got into power, but that the Bishops
from whose fury, as John Milton said, our own Pilgrim Fathers
fled, were Protestant Bishops and not Catholic. They forgot
the eight hundred years during which Ireland had been under
the heel of England, and the terrible history so well told
by that most English of Englishmen, and Protestant of Protestants,
Lord Macaulay.

"The Irish Roman Catholics were permitted to live, to be fruitful,
to replenish the earth; but they were doomed to be what the
Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman,
what the blacks now are at New York. Every man of the subject
caste was strictly excluded from any public trust. Take what
path he might in life, he was crossed at every step by some
vexatious restriction. It was only by being obscure and inactive,
that he could, on his native soil, be safe. If he aspired
to be powerful and honoured, he might gain a cross or perhaps
a Marshal's staff in the armies of France or Austria. If
his vocation was to politics, he might distinguish himself
in the diplomacy of Italy or Spain. But at home he was a
mere Gibeonite, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. The
statute book of Ireland was filled with enactments which furnish
to the Roman Catholics but too goo