such statement in any of
the other Worcester newspapers. I never anywhere expressed
the idea that there should be a confessional or that there
was any need of a Father Confessor, or that I wanted to see
something in our Protestant churches like the Father Confessor
in the Catholic. The whole thing is a miserable lie and invention
made out of whole cloth. The language, which you quote, about
an attempt to recall on one side, "the cruelties of the Catholic
Church and frighten our women and children with horrid hobgoblins,"
is not my language. That does appear in the _Telegram_. But
it is the reporter's statement of what he understood my idea
to be in his own language. What I said was: "We are confronted
with a public danger which comes from an attempt to rouse
the old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to have
ended with them, between men who have different forms of faith.
It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of the
Catholic Church and to frighten old women of both sexes, and,
on the other side, to band the men of the Catholic Church
together for political action. Both these attempts will fail."

There is no more zealous believer in the principles of the
New England Puritans, and no more zealous advocate of them,
than I am. There is not a man in Massachusetts who has more
at heart the welfare and perpetuity of our system of free
common schools than I have. I was the first person, so far
as I know, who called public attention to the fact that they
were in danger, in any formal way. I drew and had put in
the platform of the Republican State Convention the following
resolution: "The Republican Party ever has maintained and
ever will maintain and defend, the common schools of Massachusetts
as the very citadel of happiness. They shall be kept open
to all the children and free from all partisan and sectarian
control."

This doctrine I stand by. And I stand by the further doctrine,
as I stated at length in my address at Clark University, that
the whole resources of the Commonwealth are pledged to their
support, and that that is the bottom mortgage on every dollar
of our property, and that no person can escape or be allowed
to escape that responsibility. The difference between you
and me is a difference of method. I want to get the 700,000
Catholics in Massachusetts on our side. I want them to send
their children to the public schools, to pay their share of
the cost, and when their yo