In North America their vigilance was no less marked. “In 1611 Jesuit missionaries came over and labored with remarkable zeal and success in converting the Indians.”[149] In Maryland, a Catholic colony from the first, they held unbounded sway. Speaking of the time of Lord Baltimore, Thompson says: “At that time, in England, the papists were chiefly under the influence of the Jesuits, whose vigilance was too sleepless to permit the opportunity of planting their society in the New World to escape them.”[150] Their work has been quietly done from the very first, and some think that because of the papal decree of 1773, suppressing the order, they have ceased their work. This, however, is a mistake; for “Gregory XVI, whose pontificate commenced in 1831, was the first pope who seemed encouraged by the idea that the papacy would ultimately establish itself in the United States. His chief reliance, as the means of realizing this hope, was upon the _Jesuits_, upon whose entire devotion to the principles of absolutism he could confidently rely.”[151] But the Jesuits always accomplish their work largely by means of education, hence we may look for them to use the same tactics in our country that had proved so eminently successful to their cause in England and Germany. [Sidenote: Object of Jesuit schools in America] “The chief thing with the Jesuits,” as Gressinger writes, “was to obtain the sole direction of education, so that by getting the young into their hands, they could fashion them after their own pattern.” It has been the avowed aim of the Jesuits to stamp out Protestantism, and with this, republicanism. In this country, where these two principles were pre-eminently conspicuous, and so closely associated that whatever kills one kills the other, it is doubly true that by gaining control of the educational system the order could work for the papacy the utter ruin of America, both from a religious and a civil standpoint. From the dawn of our history there has been within our borders, mingling with our loyal citizens, a class of educators who carry out this principle described by Thompson. “The Roman Catholic youth are forbidden by the papal system from accepting as true the principles of the Declaration of Independence or of the Constitution of the United States.”[152] Leo XIII, who was educated a Jesuit [Thompson], remains true to his principles. His biographer says “that the ‘false education’ and ‘antichristian training’ of the young which prevail in the United States and among the liberal and progressive peoples of the world must be done away with, abandoned, and ‘Thomas Aquinnas [a Catholic of the thirteenth century] must once more be enthroned as the “angel of the schools;” his methods and doctrines must be the light of all higher teaching, for his works are only revealed truth set before the human mind in its most scientific form.’”[153] [Sidenote: Progress of papal principles]