ping cork. It is my experience in this respect that has convinced me that a Catholic country, a really Catholic country, can be well governed under a democracy, and that a Protestant or an infidel country cannot be.

A Protestant country cannot be, because Protestantism is illogical, unintellectual, both in itself and in its influence. Ask a Protestant what he believes; he can tell you, within certain limits, what he does not believe, but in vain does he try to tell you, in any clear or precise manner, what he does believe. In mere worldly matters, or material interests, he may be shrewd, and show intellectual acuteness and clearness, but in all other matters, in all that pertains to great principles of justice, or the higher order of intellectual and moral truth, he no sooner opens his mouth to speak, than you see that his mind is darkened, that his mental perception is dull, and his ideas are muddy and confused. He even regards all mental clearness, distinctness, and precision of thought as scholastic subtilties, to be despised by every man of common sense. Indeed, if you show a tendency to distinct, clear, and exact thought, he will make it the ground of reproach to you, and will applaud himself that he is above such littleness. Hence it is that Protestantism and Protestant culture, however powerful they may be in overthrowing an old established order, or obscuring and rendering ineffectual well-settled principles, are peculiarly unfitted to sustain popular institutions. Hence, as a general rule, popular freedom has little prevalence in Protestant countries. England is the freest Protestant country in Europe, and she is less free than she was when Catholic. Ours is the only really free country in the world where the majority of the people call themselves Protestant, and we owe our freedom to the accidents of our situation, and to the fact that the colonists were very generally dissenters from the Anglican Establishment, identified with the Anglican monarchy, not at all to Protestantism as such.

Nothing will save freedom here but the prevalence of Catholicity. Wild and reckless fanaticism is at work with our institutions, undermining law, and preparing the way for anarchy and despotism; principles are widely disseminated by all parties, that are incompatible with the existence of society itself; ever and anon, parties growing more and more formidable for their numbers and influence, spring up amongst us, and seek to translate their false principles into facts, or to make the country practically conform to them. In vain do you seek to arrest the evil. To do so you must draw, now and then, even

nice distinctions, and call upon the people to discriminate. But your distinctions are condemned as vain subtilties, as above the comprehension of the people, as unpopular, and making you unpopular; and the very men who see and feel their importance will make them subjects of ridicule with the people, and bid the rabble hoot at you for expressing them. Democracy itself has a natural tendency to merge the individual in the crowd, to bring every thing down to a commonplace level, and to superinduce the habit of asking, not, What is true and just? but, What will the people say? What will go down with the people? It is only by virtue of the presence of a highly intellectual religion, like the Catholic, a religion that leaves us neither to reason without faith, nor to faith without reason, but gives us reason with faith, and faith with reason, that is adapted to the human soul, appeals to man's spiritual nature, and by its august offices, its solemn prayers, its public instructions, and private meditations, keeps the mind and heart in constant exercise on the highest order of truth, - that the levelling and deadening influence of democracy can be neutralized, and the mental activity and discrimination necessary to its preservation and wholesome operation can be secured. very objection you urge against me is conclusive against your favorite democracy, unless you have the Church present as the religion of the great majority of the people. Protestant or godless democracy, like that which is popularly preached at home and abroad, would very soon plunge the most civilized nation into barbarism.

The

The considerations you suggest only show the necessity of the Catholic Church, under a political and social point of view no less than under a religious, to the salvation of society as well as to the salvation of the soul. It is necessary to inspire that spirit of self-sacrifice, that heroic virtue, without which society becomes a field of blood, or a mere charnelhouse. All the evils of society spring from pride and the predominance of the flesh, and no greater absurdity was ever sent up to us from the pit, than that of attempting to maintain order and social prosperity by playing off the pride and lust of one against the pride and lust of another. Less absurd were those grave philosophers of Laputa, who attempted to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. You cannot extract virtue from vice, nor develop social order and well-being from the elements of disorder and ruin. You can remove the evils only so far as you succeed in removing or in subduing the pride and lust from

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which they spring. It needs no great philosophy to know this, and still less, one would suppose, to perceive that you neither remove nor subdue the causes by employing them and providing for their universal activity.

Your modern reformers, socialists, communists, Red Republicans, and radical democrats, are a stupid race of mortals, and as blind as they are destructive. They all undertake to obtain from unmitigated selfishness the results, which, in the nature of things, can be obtained only from the severest and most self-denying virtue. All their schemes are based on the principle, that selfishness is to be made to produce the results of the most perfect disinterestedness, or that pure selfishness, having a perfectly open field and fair play, is the equivalent of pure disinterested affection. What falsehood! What nonsense! Yet these men call themselves philosophers, the great lights of our age! Alas! "if the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!"

As long as ignorance and sin remain, as long as men retain their vicious propensities and passions, there will be evil in the world, and there is not a more consummate fool than he who looks for a perfect civil polity, or a perfect state of society. Something to mitigate, even to ameliorate, no doubt, may be done, but can be done in no merely outward way. Nothing can be done further than you can reach the individual mind and heart, and bring them into harmony with the will of God, as he has revealed it in his word, and proclaims it through the voice of his Church. Men will never succeed in ameliorating their earthly condition till they learn to live for heaven alone, till they see all things in the light of God as their supreme good, and seek to modify them only at the bidding of divine charity.

You young men, even some of you who call yourselves Catholics, forget this. You have suffered yourselves to be seduced by the tempter. Protestantism and infidelity have no power over you, when they attack directly your Church or her dogmas; there you are on your guard and are firm; but you have not been equally on your guard against their indirect attacks, their attacks through your social affections and sentiments, your love of political liberty, intensified by long ages of Protestant misrule and oppression in the countries of your birth or descent, and your desire of worldly prosperity and social position. Through these the tempter assails you ; through these he whispers to you honeyed words, makes you sweet promises, and excites brilliant hopes, only to undermine

your faith, to entangle you in his snares, and to drag you down to hell, to hell both here and hereafter. Here is your danger; here is your weak side. You listen with the open hearts of generous youth, with the confidence of unsuspecting innocence, to the soft words of the betrayer, as to an angel of light. You are caught, you are led on from step to step, till you find yourselves far from the home of your fathers, far from the affectionate embrace of your mother, in arms against your Church, false to all your vows to God, false to yourselves, a grief to all good men and angels, and a joy only to the enemies of religion, who, while accepting the treason, despise the traitor. The very devils despise those they are able to seduce, and so do their children and servants, infidels, heretics, and schismatics.

Nay, my young friends, if you would be free and noble, and honored even, listen never to the siren voice of the charmer. The entrance of the career into which she would seduce you may be bright and flowery, but its progress grows darker and rougher at every step, till it finally ends abruptly in the blackness of eternal despair. I know that career which you are tempted to believe opens into life. I entered it as innocent and as full of hope as yourselves, and, as I fondly trusted, with motives pure and holy. Alas! how was I deceived! I lost my innocence, my virtue, every thing that a man should hold dear and sacred, found myself the companion of scoffers and blasphemers, a chief among the revilers of God's truth and God's law, and have gained only a stock of bitter experience, and a source of continual regret. Fear God, my young friends, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole of Be true to God, and he will never abandon you; serve him as he commands, with promptitude and fidelity, and fear nothing for your earthly prosperity, or for the spread and maintenance of liberty.

man.

ART. V.. The Plan of the American Union, and the Structure of its Government explained and defended. By JAMES A. WILLIAMS. Baltimore: Sherwood & Co. 1848. 12mo. pp. 168.

[This article was originally prepared for the American Review, at the request of the talented and accomplished editor of that highly

respectable journal, and in great part appeared in its number for August last. But as the editor omitted certain portions, and as his printers greatly disfigured, by serious typographical errors, the portions accepted, the writer of the article wishes us to insert it as it was originally prepared; which we do without any hesitation, for its views are our own. - ED. B. Q. Review.]

THIS work appears to have been written with an honest intention, and it bears evident marks of talent and serious study. It contains many just views on the Constitution of the United States, clearly, though not very vividly, expressed, but appears to us to err in its general theory of government, by overlooking the fact, that the necessity of government does not grow wholly out of the depravity of human nature, and that government itself is not restricted in its functions merely to the repression of violence, or the unjust encroachment of one man upon the rights of another. The maintenance of justice, or the repression and redress of injustice, is, no doubt, a chief function of government; but government has beyond this a positive mission to perform, positive benefits to confer or secure, which in no sense grow out of the wickedness of man, and which would be the same whatever the intelligence and virtue of individuals. Man is by his essential nature a social being, and demands society; and society demands social as well as individual labors. These labors have for their end, not merely the negative, but the positive, benefit of the whole community, and cannot be performed without government, by which society is made a corporation, capable of acting as an individual per

son.

But our present purpose is not to criticize this little work itself; we have introduced it simply as an occasion for offering some remarks on the subject of the presidential or executive veto, a subject which we should be happy to see discussed more generally than it has been, in a calm, philosophic spirit, from the point of view of the statesman, rather than from that of the demagogue or the partisan.

There is, and, as long as human nature remains as it is, will be, under popular governments, a strong tendency in the party that has succeeded to exaggerate the intrinsic importance of the constitutional provisions to which it owes its success, and also in the party frequently unsuccessful, to depreciate or unreasonably oppose those provisions, which, in their operations, have thwarted its wishes. We like that which aids us; we are hostile to that which defeats us. The men who can look be