in which our fellow-citizens generally regard them. As citizens, as Americans, we feel the same interest in them, experience the same pride in them, and, as a question of property and public right, we hold them as a common heritage, in which we have the same interest and authority as our fellow-citizens. We are, therefore, equally interested in their proper management and good government, and we yield to none in our desire to promote their prosperity and success. There is no part of public administration more sacred or important, no function of the state so momentous, no public responsibility so awful, as this. Accepting them, as we do, as a part of our common property and united work, we shrink not from any effort for their good government and success, and, if need be, for their improvement, reformation, and correction. When properly conducted, we have nothing but praise for them; and if, on the other hand, they are mismanaged, the funds extravagantly applied; if they are made the instruments of cruelty, perversion, or despotism; if in them or any of them religious liberty is violated, and systems of proselytizing are carried on against Catholic children, or the children of the sects, or those of the Jewish Church, we as Catholics and as American citizens will speak out freely and boldly in denouncing them. We are not disqualified from doing this, either as citizens or Catholics; not as citizens, because they belong to us as much as to other citizens; our money is there with that of others; and the Constitution gives us liberty of speech and of the press, and guarantees to us “the right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances”;[3] not as Catholics, for we have as such the experience of eighteen hundred years of the most exalted works of charity; and because we claim for ourselves no special privilege over others, but are willing to concede to all what we claim for ourselves. No clamor will deter us from the exercise of this right, or from the performance of this duty. And whilst we cannot yield our rights to any one sect of Protestantism, we are equally determined, while respecting the rights of all Protestants, not to yield our constitutional rights to all the sects of Protestantism combined under the false and deceptive name of unsectarianism. We do not believe in _ex-parte_ and sham investigations of public abuses in respect to public institutions, and we do not belong to, and are determined not to be deluded by, whitewashing committees of investigation and amiable grand juries. We are ever ready to praise, yet we shrink not from administering censure.