Protestants now tolerate Protestant dissenters, and allow Jews and infidels equal rights with themselves; but they find great difficulty in regarding any outrage on the freedom of the church as an outrage on religious liberty. She is Catholic, not national, over all nations, and subject to none; therefore no nation should tolerate her. Even in this country Protestants very reluctantly suffer her presence, and the liberal Dr. Bellows, a Protestant of Protestants, warns, as we have seen, Catholics not to attempt to act as if they stood on an equality with Protestants. It is only a few years since the whole country was agitated by the Know-Nothing movement, got up in secret lodges, for the purpose, if not of outlawing or banishing Catholics, at least of depriving them of civil and political citizenship. The movement professed to be a movement in part against naturalizing persons of foreign birth, but really for the exclusion of such persons only in so far as they were Catholics. The controversy now raging on the school question proves that Protestants are very far from feeling that Catholics have equal rights with themselves, or that the Catholic conscience is entitled to any respect or consideration from the state. Public opinion proscribes us, and no Catholic could be chosen to represent a purely Protestant constituency in any legislative body, if known to be such and to be devoted to his religion. Our only protection, under God, is the fact that we have votes which the leaders of all parties want; yet there is a movement now going on for female suffrage, which, if successful, will, it is hoped, swamp our votes by bringing to the polls swarms of fanatical women, the creatures of fanatical preachers, together with other swarms of infidel, lewd, or shameless women, who detest Catholic marriage and wish to be relieved of its restraints, as well as of their duties as mothers. This may turn the scale against us; for Catholic women have too much delicacy, and too much of that retiring modesty that becomes the sex, to be seen at the polls. But the imperfect toleration practised by Protestants is by no means due to their Protestantism, but to their growing indifference to religion, and to the conviction of Protestant and non-Catholic governments, that their supremacy over the spiritual order is so well established, their victory so complete, that all danger of its renewing the struggle to bring them again under its law is past. Let come what may, the spiritual order can never regain its former supremacy, or Cæsar tremble again at the bar of Peter. Cæsar fancies that he has shorn the church so completely of her Catholicity, except as an empty name, and so fully subjected her to his own or the national authority, that he has no longer any need to be intolerant. Why not, indeed, amnesty the poor Catholics, who can no longer be dangerous to the national sovereign, or interfere with the policy of the state?