tiny, has ceased his droning invitation to us, "Faites votre jeu, Messieurs." The wheel has turned: "le jeu est fait;" and almost before we guessed what was at stake, we find ready to our hand, and not yet too heavy on our neck, Our Established Church.

Recognizing, then, the just limitation of inquiry in the settlement of all questions in regard to the expediency of an Establishment; recognizing also the probable advantages there are in accomplishing great public events in the quiet way in which this has been effected, it may be worth while to take a strictly historical and practical view of our Establishment; what it is, and how it

came.

Here, then, in this commonwealth of five million souls, the ancient Church acknowledging the jurisdiction of the Roman See, while it owns its duty of caring for the whole people, claims from one and a half to three millions within its own immediate pale. Its sacerdotal or clerical body, including under that title the fraternities and sisterhoods devoted to whatever work of charity or instruction, numbers not far from two thousand, absolved from all secular and domestic cares, consecrated to the sole service of the Church and of religion, organized in a true and stringent hierarchy which is moved like a splendid mechanism by the touch of the Primate at New York. The surface of the State is mapped out into nearly seven hundred parishes, comprised in the archdiocese of New York, and the dioceses of Brooklyn, Albany, Rochester, and Buffalo. Nor is the parochial organization of any one of these numerous divisions deemed complete until it includes, besides all needful lands, buildings, and equipments for proper religious uses, a whole educational system of free-schools for boys and girls, and select schools for such as can pay a price for a better commodity, sufficient in capacity, if not in excellence, to enable the entire Catholic population to dispense with such provision as the State may make for the instruction of youth. Into these schools are gathered, for an education VOL. IV.-51

at least untainted by the reading of the Protestant Bible, not many less than a hundred thousand children. Of institutions of a higher order, whether for educational, benevolent, sanatory, or strict ly religious purposes, whether called asylums, hospitals, colleges, academies, or convents, the number approaches, if it does not pass, one hundred and fifty, many of them established on a vast scale, and endowed with splendid munificence. Of the money value of this enormous landed estate, owned as it is for the most part in fee-simple by one or another of five ecclesiastics under no accountability for their ownership to any civil tribunal, no computation better than a conjecture can easily be made. The "Catholic Directory " which has furnished imperfectly the preceding data, is silent, for whatever reason, upon this point. If, however, we consider the great average size of the churches, built as they are for the finest effects of a stately ceremonial, as compared with the mere preachinghouses of the Protestant sects: the value of the well-chosen building-sites in New York and the other cities, and the immense costliness of the cathedrals and greater churches; if we add in almost every parish, the ground and buildings of the parochial and other schools; if we roughly guess the value of the Provincial Seminary at Troy, of St. John's College at Fordham, of the Sisters' Academy at Yonkers, of St. Mary's Hospital at Rochester, of St. Patrick's Orphan Asylum on Fifth and Madison Avenues; we may well assume that $40,000 would be a low average for churches, and $20,000 for other institutions; and upon such a basis the aggregate worth of all this property must reach from thirty to fifty millions of dollars. Whether such an endowment, exclusive of all sources of annual revenue by public largess or otherwise, is adequate or not for the established Church of a State of five millions, is a question for the future.*

*The total "subvention," in the year 1844, to the Catholic Church in France (population, 35,000000, almost exclusively Catholic), from the nation

Such, then, are the numbers, the high organization, the hierarchical force of this great body; such too, and out of all proportion to the poverty of its members and the recency of its growth, its vast corporate wealth. That the Church should grow in numbers was but the plain and direct result of a series of physical causes, the construction of our great public works, beginning with the Erie Canal, to attract the most faithful children of the Church; the Irish famine to expel them; the misgovernment of many German States, driving hither their population. That the growing Church should be provided in a reasonable degree with priests, teachers, and places for Church service, in spite of the extreme poverty of most of its members, would have followed from a less carnest zeal than they have commonly shown. But this magnificent expansion of solid wealth out of abject penury calls for some clearer illustration. Perhaps we may add our farthing-candle's ray of light.

Hardly sixty years ago the slender

al treasury, departments, and communes was $9,000,000.

The entire endowment of the Irish Church, so soon to be disestablished, for a population of nearly 6,000,000, is valued at £17,000,000, or $85,000,200; which includes, however, in addition to the classes of property mentioned above, the value of certain bountiful sources of revenue, capitalized upon the basis of twenty years' purchase. But the disproportionatety splendid endowment of the Irish Church has been one of the chief grounds of Catholic and dissenting complaint.

The reports of various charitable institutions to the comptroller of the State, in 1868, show the following valuation of property owned by those named, over and above their indebtedness. There is no reason to believe that any of the institutions has over-estimated its own property: Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum, Brooklyn...........

Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum,

$161,231.43

New York... 235,000.00 St. Joseph's Asylum, New York.... 127,000.00 Society for the Protection of Roman

Catholic Children, New York.... 205,760.09 St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester.......197,912.25 That agreeable writer, Mr. James Parton, in his sympathetic paper in the Atlantic Monthly for April, 1868, is of the opinion that "Our Roman Catholic Brethren " own $50,000,000 worth of lands and buildings in the diocese of New York alone. This diocese includes only the southern corner of the State, up to the 42d degree of latitude, and excludes Long Island. Mr. Parton appears to have had access to excellent sources of information.

Catholic community of the Northern States was deemed important enough to require the services of three bishops, who were thereupon established at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. But such became, before many years, the effective operation of the physical causes just specified, that when half that time had passed, the number of adult males, of inferior intelligence, but devoted with enthusiasm to the Church, and obedient to its clergy with the docility of an ardent faith, had increased so that their influence upon public affairs, under a system which allots the same quantity of political power to the brutish man as to the enlightened, was worth considering. Nor were there wanting managers of public affairs quick to discern the uses of this instrument, if only they might get their hands upon the lever that controlled it. The way seemed short and plain. Of two great parties, one seemed made to attract, without effort and by its very nature, the suffrages of an alien class, of an abject caste, and of a Church largely held in disfavor and apprehension; for it made ostentatious and sonorous profession of its indifference to all such circumstances as qualifying the one essential fact of humanity. It was rather to the leaders of the other party, which included great numbers of those who looked askance upon alienage, lowness of degree, and Catholicity, that it seemed needful to win such votes by substantial evidences of good-will. There arose, therefore, a generous competition. What Democrats were ready to do, out of the broadness of their avowed principles, for this half-outcast body, Whig managers were eager to do by way of disclaiming the narrow prejudices confessed by thousands of their followers. If Democrats were content to acquiesce in whatever condition of affairs should be accomplished by the popular will, Whig statesmen recognized the duty of foreseeing the inevitable, and of assisting it. If all the efforts they put forth to this end, devoted and effective as they were-if the relations of subservient amity which the

chief of these prescient managers had maintained for a generation, through much contumely, with that eminent prelate who governed the Church in New York-resulted in no great profit to them or their party, it may help to show that an instinctive affinity is stronger than that gratitude which is merely a sense of benefits already conferred.

Not far from the year 1847, the diligent explorer of our annual statutes will find, almost for the first time, a few donations for charitable purposes quietly stowed away in the depths of the "Act-making appropriations for the support of the government" for the current year. Here and there also begin to appear special statutes for like purposes; as for example, the Act in 1849 (chap. 279), appropriating $9,000 of money raised by general tax to the Hospital of the Sisters of Charity, in Buffalo. From this point, however, the honorable rivalry of parties was producing a like result to that which attends the not dissimilar emulation of a public auction. The bids rose one above another with a boldness which possibly was not diminished by the fact that the bidders were offering what did not belong to them. From year to year, more and larger benefactions of this class were found necessary to "the support of the government," until in 1866 they had multiplied sufficiently to be collected into a district "Charity Bill," which has been annually enacted ever since, as solicitously as if, like the English Mutiny Act, all our liberties depended upon it. At the same time, and by a movement almost precisely parallel, the yearly statute-book has been encumbered annually to a greater degree with the enactments which authorize the one for the city of New York, the other for the precisely conterminous county, the levy of such sums as the State deems adequate for municipal government, and which prescribe the general objects for which they may be expended. Exactly in like manner, there begin to be discovered in these "Tax Levy" bills, considerably less

than twenty years ago, the same germs which have fructified so bountifully in the general "Charity Bill" for the State at large. By virtue of the enactment last mentioned the State paid out during the year 1866, for benefactions under religious control, $129,025.49. Of this a Jewish society received $2,484.32; four organizations of the Protestant sects had $2,367.03; while the trifling balance of $124,174.14 went to the religious purposes of the Establishment. Looking, by way of variety, at the following year for data regarding the strictly municipal gifts for like purposes, we find from the last report of the Comptroller of the city that during 1867 there was paid to Catholic ecclesiastical institutions the sum of near $200,000, aside from what may lie hidden in a vast total of more than a million, of which the details can be found only in the report of the "Department of Public Charities and Correction." While there are other benefactions in the list, hardly any are for objects having even remotely a religious character, and not one for a sectarian object. And if the proportion thus indicated holds good in the State and civic gratuities of 1868, which exceeds, we can hardly say by how much, the princely sum of half a million,* it must be conceded that the Church is in a fair way of obtaining its own, with, perhaps, a trifle of what others might lay some claim to.

But these figures do not fully indicate the favor with which the Church has been treated by her children in official station, cooperated with as they have been by the well-disposed outside the fold. The city of New York has certain great corporate possessions,

*The State Comptroller reports as paid by the State alone last year, to "Orphan Asylums, &c.," $141,328.84, and adds that this sum is exclusive of $201,000 appropriated by the "Charity Bill."

It is in view of the constant disposition of our civil State to deal kindly and even generously by The Church that we cannot but deprecate, as needlessly irritating to non-Catholic citizens, and serving no useful purpose to the Church, such utterances as the following from the leading Church newspaper of this city. Speaking of a railroad bill lately pending before the New York Legislature, which would have necessitated the removal of St.

which, if not downright wealth to the owner under the management they have received, contain at least, like Mrs. Thrale's brewery, "the potentiality of wealth, beyond the dreams of avarice," so far as such dreams had expanded in Dr. Johnson's time. Sad stories have been hinted from time to time within these few years past, of something like scoundrelism in dealing with and get

Peter's Church, Barclay Street, the New York Tablet says, in a recent number:

"We will only say that the first stone of St. Peter's Church taken down by a railroad would, in our opinion, inaugurate such riots as New York has not yet seen. This we say by way of solemu warning. Let the speculators try it, and they will find what we say is true. St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street shall not be desecrated. That timehonored fabric must stid. If the Catholics of New York cannot protect St. Peter's Church, and preserve it for coming generations of their brethren, they can do nothing. None would deplore more than we any disturbances, or tumult, in this or any other city; but we say, and say again, that an unnecessary railroad shall not run where the most dear and sacred of sanctuaries stands, while there are Catholics in New York to prevent such a deseoration."

Now no one whose memory reaches back to the last year or two of the administration of our late Archbishop will have the hardihood to question the power of the ecclesiastical authorities to summon, at a single word a most ferocious mob, in front of the archiepiscopal palace. And it is not to be doubted that the silent consciousness in the minds of the public and of the authorities, that this tremendous power is held in leash every moment by our ecclesiastical rulers, does its part in securing ready acquiescence in the wishes of the Church. But we point to the unbroken record of public legislation and administration in favor of all Church interests, as an argument for adhering to peaceful processes so long as these accomplish all that every reasonable friend of our Establishment can ask. We plead with our Catholic fellow-citizen against the use of needless menaces that only mortify the honorable pride, and exasperate the feelings of a weaker party. Surely the events of 1863, are a sufficient warning that the sensitive feelings of our Catholic public are not to be trifled with; and those events are not so easily forgotten that the lesson of them roquires to be enforced with threats. The power of the mob and the riot, has, perhaps, been providentially placed in the hands of the Church, in this unbelieving time and nation, as the natural substitute for those more spiritual weapons--the interdict and the excommunication which seem to have lost something of their ancient virtue. But this power should be held in reserve as the ultima ratio of the Church. There can be no good, and may be great harm, in thus drawing it unnecessarily from the armory of the Church, and brandishing it in the face of an unoffending and compliant public. The idea, in the prosent case, that a railroad ring, however wealthy and adroit, could stand up, in the Albany lobby, against the influence of the Established clergy, is too absurd for comment.

ting rid of these vast properties,—the ferries, docks, markets, and various blocks and tracts of land, on the part of the New York government. It is not for us to sit in judgment upon those functionaries, nor to conjecture how much of the municipal property, so far from having stolen, they have, with the high virtue of those who let not their left hand know what their right hand doeth-who "do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame "-quietly devoted to the pious uses of the Church. But the last Comptroller's report contains, with regard to certain of the real estate which yet remains on the island of Manhattan, some interesting avowals, by which the city government is willing to let its light so shine before men that they may see its works, and glorify its father, which is no matter where. In the schedule of city property subject to payment of ground-rent (pp. 166-169,) we find that the premises on " 51st Street and Lexington Avenue" are leased to the (Catholic) Nursery and Child's Hospital; that the lease is dated April 1, 1857, is perpetual, and for the annual rent of One Dollar, which was three years in arrear. That the property on "81st and 82d Streets and Madison Avenue" is leased to the " Sisters of Mercy;" that the lease (the date of which is not given), is perpetual, and the annual rent One Dollar, which, however, had been paid until within two years of the report. That the land 51st and 52d Streets, Fourth and Fifth Avenues," was leased April 1, 1857, to "The Roman Catholic Orphan Asylum," perpetually, for the annual rent of One Dollar. This sum, however, it is gratifying to observe, has been fully paid to the end of 1867.

on

66

Upon some part of this property, or upon another tract held by a like title and upon similar terms, is in course of erection the new St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is intended to be worthy of its proud rank of metropolitan church of this great commonwealth.*

* It is pleasant to find Mr. Parton, in the Allantic for April, 1868, extolling the foresight of the late Archbishop Hughes in buying this tract at a

From estimates of those competent to appraise land in New York, it appears that these blocks alone are worth not less than $3,000,000.* It may be concluded, therefore, that the city would get the worth of this property, if it applied every payment upon the principal, asking nothing for interest, in about one million years.

Thus increasingly munificent in their provision for the maintenance of a church-establishment have been the rulers of an American State, during a generation noted for the fiercest onslaughts, in other lands, upon the sacred institutions of antiquity, and in which scoffers have pretended to discover more "spiritual wickedness" than pure spirituality in the "high places" of politics. In so extraordinary a ratio, too, has this devout allotment of the public revenues increased, that what in 1849 was but about $13,000 and that given but grudgingly, is grown to not far from $500,000, in 1868, bestowed with the frank generosity of those who give of others' goods. If some crabbed rustic, the slowness of whose toilsome gains begets a narrow curiosity concerning the manner of disposing of them, or whose sectarian jealousy sets him against the Church of the Commonwealth, shall reckon that this rate of increase, far beyond the increase of the Church, will bring the annual gift to $10,000,000 in 1918, and to $80,000,000 in 1968, we need only smile at his hedge-philosophy. It is quite enough that these benefactions should continue upon the scale they have now reached for a few years longer. Every year the Church gains upon the sects. The generation in which we are proud to be numbered, assumes the burden of the ages. When our children are men and women, the State, perhaps, will have done giving to the Church; perhaps it will have be

gun soliciting from the Church instead. And the wild reaction of irreligion which seems to be sweeping on as it has before over Christendom-the spirit which at different times has driven even from every Catholic country the Society of Jesus itself should it then reach this favored commonwealth, will find the Church with all its agencies, too strongly entrenched in the benefactions of these years to be dislodged.

No State-Church, it may fairly be said, fulfils the whole duty of its position, which fails to grasp and superintend the whole system of education. No graver charge can be brought against the Church of Ireland or the Church of England than that with the enormous means at their disposal, they have suffered such vast populations to be born, grow old, and die, in the deadly darkness of ignorance that envelops them from the cradle to the coffin. The Church of New York, however its enemies may malign it, will be free from this sin. So far has it been conscious of the duty, that it has not been content that the thing was done, unless done by itself. The State was managing the matter in its own rude way. Pretending, it is true, to exclude sectarian teachings, it yet required the Bible, which, when unaccompanied by suitable comments, is confessedly a sectarian book, to be read in its schools. No better proof was needed that the Church could not abdicate its duty. Its efforts were, therefore, two-fold. It sought to exclude sectarianism from the public schools; it sought also to make schools of its own which should compete with the public ones, be maintained with the public money without being responsible to the public, and in time render the State schools superfluous. That it does not lose sight of the former object in the vast success of the latter may be seen by observing the names of candidates, at every municipal election, for the Board of Education. If an inborn reserve has kept back from other positions the Celtic adherents of the dominant faith, duty or skillful organization crowds them into these can