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and colleges, and in sustaining priests and emissaries. Everything is done to captivate, and to liberalize in appearance, a system essentially despotic. The sagacity of the effort is discovered, in avoiding to attack and shock the prejudices of the adult, that they may direct the education of the young. They look to the future; and they really have great advantages in doing so. They send out teachers excellently qualified; superior, certainly, to the run of native teachers.* Some value the European modes of education as the more excellent, others value them as the mark of fashion; the demand for instruction, too, is always beyond the supply, so that they find little difficulty in obtaining the charge of Protestant children. This, in my judgment, is the point of policy which should be especially regarded with jealousy; but the actual alarm has arisen from the disclosure of a correspondence which avows designs on the West, beyond what

The Catholic priests who instruct are to my knowledge the best educated men in the States. It was a pleasure to be in their company.

I have here set down. It is a curious affair, and is one other evidence, if evidence were needed, that popery and jesuitism are one."

I think that the author of Sam Slick may not be wrong in his assertion, that all America will be a Catholic country. I myself never prophesy; but I cannot help remarking, that even in the most anti-Catholic persuasions in America there is a strong Papistical feeling; that is, there is a vying with each other, not only to obtain the best preachers, but to have the best organs and the best singers. It is the system of excitement which, without their being aware of it, they carry into their devotion. It proves that, to them there is a weariness in the church service, a tedium in prayer, which requires to be relieved by the stimulus of good music and sweet voices. Indeed, what with their anxious seats, their revivals, their music, and their singing, class and sect in the States have even now

every so far fallen into Catholicism, that religion has

become more of an appeal to the senses than to the calm and sober judgment.

167

SOCIETIES AND ASSOCIATIONS.

ALTHOUGH in a democracy the highest stations and preferments are open to all, more directly than they may be under any other form of government, still these prizes are but few and insufficient, compared with the number of total blanks which must be drawn by the ambitious multitude. It is, indeed, a stimulus to ambition (and a matter of justice, when all men are pronounced equal), that they all should have an equal chance of raising themselves by their talents and perseverance; but, when so many competitors are permitted to enter the field, few can arrive at the goal, and the mass are doomed to disappointment. However fair, therefore, it may be to admit all to the competition, certain it is that the competition cannot add to

the happiness of a people, when we consider the feelings of bitterness and ill-will naturally engendered among the disappointed multitude.

In monarchical and aristocratical institutions, the middling and lower classes, whose chances of advancement are so small that they seldom lift their eyes or thoughts above their own sphere, are therefore much happier, and it may be added, much more virtuous than those who struggle continually for preferment in the tumultuous sea of democracy. Wealth can give some importance, but wealth in a democracy gives an importance which is so common to many that it loses much of its value; and when it has been acquired, it is not sufficient for the restless ambition of the American temperament, which will always spurn wealth for power. The effects therefore of a democracy are, first to raise an inordinate ambition among the people, and then to cramp the very ambition which it has raised; and, as I may comment upon hereafter, it

appears as if this ambition of the people, individually checked by the nature of their institutions, becomes, as it were, concentrated and collected into a focus in upholding and contemplating the success and increase of power in the Federal Government. Thus has been produced a species of demoralizing reaction; the disappointed units to a certain degree satisfying themselves with any advance in the power and importance of the whole Union, wholly regardless of the means by which such increase may have been obtained.

But this unsatisfied ambition has found another vent in the formation of many powerful religious and other associations. In a country where there will ever be an attempt of the people to tyrannize over every body and every thing, power they will have; and if they cannot obtain it in the various departments of the States Governments, they will have it in opposition to the Government; for all these societies and

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