Protestants have very short memories if they have forgotten these things, or else they suppose that Catholics have no memories at all if they suppose that we can permit them to claim, unchallenged, to be and always to have been the party of liberty. It is not, however, the strangest delusion of Protestants, and is only of a piece with their delusion that Protestantism is Christianity and sustained by the Holy Scriptures. But let this pass. We yield to no one in our devotion to liberty or in our readiness to defend the rights of the citizen. We have no sympathy with the rioters of the Twelfth of July and not one word to offer in their defence. They broke both the law of the church and the law of the land, sinned against God, and committed a crime against the state. But we venture to deny that the police order forbidding the Orange procession infringed the liberty of any citizen or deprived the Orangemen of any right they had or could have on American soil. No men or class of men have the right, in the performance of no civil or religious duty, but for their own pleasure or gratification of their own passions, to do any act or make any display in the judgment of the police certain or very likely to provoke a riot or breach of the peace. This is common sense, and, we presume, common law. The Orangemen were required by no duty, civil or religious, to celebrate the battle of the Boyne by a public procession in the streets of our city, nor were they called to do it by any sentiment of patriotism--not of Irish patriotism, for the battle of the Boyne resulted in the subjugation, not the liberation, of Ireland--not American patriotism, for the event was foreign to American nationality. No foreign patriotism has any right on American soil. The event commemorated is wholly foreign to our patriotism. It occurred in a foreign country before our nationality was born, and has no relation whatever to any American sentiment. No precession not in honor of religion or some religious event, and wholly disconnected with American interests or sentiments, has any right on American soil, and can only take place by courtesy or sufferance, indifference or connivance. The prohibition of the Orange procession by the police would have 120 deprived the Orangemen of no right which they had or could pretend to have in this country; and if the procession was designed or even likely to irritate a portion of our citizens, and to provoke a riot, it was not only the right but the duty of the police, as conservators of the peace, to prohibit it, and as far as possible to prevent it.