s. We will find that
population more intellectual, more cultivated, more moral, more active,
living, and energetic than any other.

The Catholic population of this country, taken as a body, have a
personal freedom, an independence, a self-respect, a conscientiousness,
a love of truth, and a devotion to principle, not to be found in any
other class of American citizens. Their moral tone, as well as their
moral standard, is far higher, and they act more uniformly under a sense
of deep responsibility to God and their country. They are the most
law-loving and law-abiding people. The men of that population are the
most vigorous, and the hardiest; their virgins are the chastest; their
matrons the most faithful. Catholics do, as to the great majority, act
from honest principle, from sincere and earnest conviction, and are
prepared to die sooner than in any grave matters swerve from what they
regard as truth and justice. They have the principle and the firmness to
stand by what they believe true and just, in good report and evil
report, whether the world be with them or be against them. Among
Catholics you will not find the flunkeyism which Carlyle so unmercifully
ridicules in the middling classes of Great Britain, or that respect to
mere wealth, that worship of the money-bag, or that base servility to
the mob, or public opinion, so common and so ruinous to public and
private virtue in the United States.

The mental activity of Catholics, all things considered, is far more
remarkable than that of our non-Catholic countrymen; and, in proportion
to their numbers and means, they contribute far more than any other
class of American citizens to the purposes of education, both common and
liberal, for they receive little or nothing from the public treasury;
and in addition to supporting numerous schools of their own, they are
forced to contribute their quota to the support of those of the State.
Thus, to take a single illustration, the public school-tax in Cincinnati
for last year amounted to $810,000. Of this the Catholics--such is
their proportion in that community--contributed $230,000, or more than
one-third of the whole rate. This large sum--L162,000--goes to the
management and formation of schools which the Catholics of Cincinnati
are debarred, by their consciences, from entering. They have therefore
their own schools, which they have built, and support entirely at their
own expense, without any assistance whatever from the Sta