This transformation is going on in our own times with a vigor which seems to increase every year. The {2} causes which have led to it were, at the outset, so trivial that no writer of the last century would have dreamed of making account of them. Yet, already at that time, Canada, where Catholicism is now more firmly established than in any other part of America, possessed that faithful and energetic population which has increased so wonderfully during the last half century; and even in the United States might have been found many an obscure, but a patient and stout-hearted little congregation--a relic of the old English Church, which after three centuries of oppression was to arise and spread itself with a new life. But no one set store by the poor French colonists; England and Protestantism, together, it was thought, would soon absorb them; and as for the _Papists_ of the United States, the wise heads did not even suspect their existence. The writer who should have spoken of their future would only have been laughed at. The English Catholics, like the Puritans, early learned to look toward America as a refuge from persecution, and in 1634, under the direction of Lord Baltimore, they founded the colony of Maryland. Despite persecution from Protestants whom they had freely admitted into their community, they prospered, increased, and became the germ of the Church of the United States, now so large and flourishing. In the colonial archives of the Ministry of the Navy we have found a curious manuscript memoir upon Acadia, by Lamothe Cadillac, in which it is stated that in 1686 there were Catholic inhabitants in New York, and especially in Maryland, where they had seven or eight priests. Another paper preserved in the same archives mentions a Catholic priest residing in New York; and William Penn, who had established absolute toleration in the colony adjoining that of Maryland, speaks of an old Catholic priest who exercised the ministry in Pennsylvania. The Catholics at this time are said to have composed a thirtieth part of the whole population of Maryland. This estimate seems to us too low. At all events, the increase of our unfortunate brethren in the faith was retarded by persecution and difficulties of all kinds which surrounded them. In the Puritan colonies of the North, they were absolutely proscribed. In the Southern colonies, of Virginia, Georgia, and Carolina, their condition was but little better; in New York they enjoyed a precarious toleration in the teeth of penal laws. In Maryland and Pennsylvania alone they were granted freedom of worship, and a legal status; though even in those colonies they were exposed to a thousand wrongs and vexations. Maryland persecuted them from time to time and banished their priests; and William Penn, in his tolerant conduct toward them, was bitterly opposed by his own people.