s of hungry animals, will
take to eating the filthiest stuff, rather than want food for
rumination. It is for the philanthropists of the present day, and for
those who are paid for making such inquiries, to trace the connection
between the _roues_ of your cities, your Bloomer women, your spiritual
rappers, and other countless extravagances of a diseased public mind,
and between the abominable publications to which we allude.

3d. Our people are not generally great readers of the trashy newspapers
of the day; and in this respect they show their good sense, or at least
have happened on good luck: it is therefore our duty to supply them with
cheap and amusing literature, to entertain them during the few hours
they are disengaged from work. And what reading can afford the Irish
Catholic greater pleasure than any work, however imperfect, having for
its end the exaltation and defence of his glorious old faith, and the
vindication of his native land--his beloved "Erin-go-bragh"? Impress on
his susceptible mind the honor and advantage of defence and fidelity to
the CROSS and the SHAMROCK, and you give him two ideas that will come to
his aid in most of his actions through life. We are ashamed here of the
cross of Christ, when we see it continually dishonored and trampled on
by heretics and modern pagans, in their scramble for money and pleasures.
On the other hand, the poverty, humiliation, and rags of old Erin, of
the kings, saints, and martyrs, scandalize us; and from these two false
notions the degradation and apostasy of many Irishmen commence. Hence they
no sooner land on the shores of America than they endeavor to clip the
musical and rich brogue of fatherland, to make room for the bastard
barbarisms and vulgar slang of Yankeedom. The remainder of the course of
the apostate is easily traced, till, ashamed of creed and country, he ends
by being ashamed of his Creator and Redeemer, and barters the inheritance
of heaven for the miserable and short enjoyments of this earth.

A _fourth_, and a leading motive in the publication of this work, is to
record the manly defences which the people among whom the author lives
have made of the creed of their fathers, and to enable them to refute,
in a simple, practical manner, for the edification of their opponents,
the many objections proposed to them about the faith. By placing a copy
of this work in the hands of every head of a family in the congregation
in which he presides, the autho