The result then to us, to Catholics, is not doubtful, as the result of persecution never is. It is strange that such a keen‐sighted, eminently practical man as Prince Bismarck should become so suddenly blind to all the teachings of history. The meanest religion that exists among men thrives on persecution even when it has nothing better to support it. As for us, as for the Jesuits particularly, “suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe.” Their great Founder left it to them as his last legacy. And indeed, the measure he meted out to them has been filled to overflowing. While we are thus strong in faith, while we know that Prince Bismarck is only beating the air in his vain and impious efforts to extinguish that fire which God kindled and bade to burn, while we are calmly confident that he will shatter his mightiest forces against the Rock of Ages, and come back from the conflict battered and bruised—finding out too late that he made the one grand mistake of his life, which greater than he have made before him—still we cannot shut our eyes to the fact of the great injuries he is inflicting upon us, and the many fresh trials imposed upon the church and our Holy Father in his declining years. What, then, are we to do? We have power, and we must use it. We have voices, and we must make them heard. We have the silent, if not the outspoken sympathy of powerful bodies opposed to us in creed. We have the heart, when we show ourselves, of every free man and hater of oppression in any form. We have the genius of our own constitution on our side. We must speak out plainly and boldly as Catholic Americans. We must do what has already been done in London at the meeting in S. James’ Hall, presided over by the Duke of Norfolk; where peer and ploughman, gentle and simple, priest and layman, were one in protesting against this slavish policy of Prince Bismarck. Let us do the like. Let our eminent men, and they are not few, call us together here in New York, in every city throughout the nation—in behalf not only of our suffering brethren, but of those rights which are inalienable to every man that is born into this world—in protestation against a principle and a policy which, if they found favor here, would sap the life of our nation, and throw us back into the old slavery that we drowned in our best blood. Our standpoint is this: as there are rights which the state does not and cannot give us, those rights are inviolable, and the state cannot touch them. To God alone we owe them; to God alone we give them back, and are answerable for them. The state is not supreme in all things, and never shall be. These are the principles we defend, and are happy in being their persecuted champions.