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once raise that party to power, we could use it to secure the adoption of our educational system."

      This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned. He was not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable to his moral sense. But he remained true to the cause of the workingmen while abandoning the organization which assumed to voice their needs and their wishes. Probably these more ulterior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them. Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at large. It is fair to predict that this generation, or another which shall succeed it, will yet have the good sense to regret, and the courage to atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church, and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of Christianity in deterring them from it.

      Father Hecker's account of his own youthful connection with the "Workingman's Democracy," although written with the direct intention of placing his estimate of Dr. Brownson on record, has too many strictly autobiographic touches in it to be here omitted. Such passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished. The five articles on Dr. Brownson, beginning in The Catholic World of April, 1887, and concluding in November of the same year, contain almost the only matters relative to his personal history which he ever put into print. Concerning the party, of which Dr. Brownson says that he had ceased to be a recognized leader at this time, although he still threw his influence as a speaker into all its projects for social reform, Father Hecker writes:

      "We called ourselves the genuine Democracy, and in New York City were for some years a separate political body, independent of the 'regular' Democracy, and voting our own ticket. I have before me the files of our newspaper organ, the Democrat, the first number of which appeared March 9, 1836, published by Windt & Conrad, 11 Frankfort Street. In its prospectus the Democrat promises to contend for 'Equality of Rights, often trampled in the dust by Monopoly Democrats,' to battle 'with an aristocratic opposition powerful in talent and official entrenchment, and mighty in money and facilities for corruption.' 'In the course of this duty it will not fail fearlessly and fully to assert the inalienable rights of the people['] against 'vested rights' and 'vested wrongs.' It claims to be the 'instructive companion' of the mechanics' and workingmen's leisure, 'the promotion of whose interests will ever form a leading feature of the Democrat.' And in the editorial salutatory it speaks thus:

      "'We are in favor of government by the people. Our objects are the restoration of equal rights and the prostration of those aristocratical usurpations existing in the state of monopolies and exclusive privileges of every kind, the products of corrupt and corrupting legislation. … At this moment we are the only large nation on the face of the earth where the mass of the people govern in theory—where they may govern in reality, if they will—where the real taxes of government, although too heavy, are but trifling, and where a majority of the population depend on their own labor for support; yet such is the condition of that large class that the fruits of their toil are inadequate to sustain themselves in comfort and rear their families as the young citizens of a republic ought to be reared.

      "' … He is very shortsighted, however, who thinks that a majority of the people, where universal suffrage exists, will submit long to a state of toil and mendicity. The majority would soon learn to exercise its political rights, and command its representatives to carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further, and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of sale. (In a foot-note of the editorial:) We actually heard these and several such propositions discussed by a number of apparently very intelligent mechanics, after the adjournment of a meeting called to consider the subject of wages, rents, etc.'

      "At that time the main question was the condition of the public finances, and our agitation was directed chiefly against granting charters to private banks of circulation. We condemned these as monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies—that is to say, to the use of public funds or the enjoyment of public exclusive privileges by any man or association or class of men for their private profit."

      We interrupt our direct quotation from this article in order to relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brothers were concerned, in the words of the late Mr. George Hecker:

      "When we were bakers the money in common use was the old-fashioned paper issued by private banks under State charters. We were regularly against it. So we bought a hand printing-press and set it up in the garret of our establishment. All the bills we received from our customers, some thousands sometimes every week, we smoothed out and put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic): 'Of all the contrivances to impoverish the laboring classes of mankind, paper money is the most effective. It fertilizes the rich man's field with the poor man's sweat.' They tried to punish us for defacing money, but we beat them. We didn't deface it; we only printed something on the back of it. Isaac and I often worked all night putting up handbills for our meetings, for in those days there were no professional bill-posters."

      Father' Hecker's acquaintance with Dr. Brownson, which had so powerful an effect upon his future career, began in 1834, when Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the principles and aims of this party. Isaac was then in his fifteenth year. Among the conversations recorded in the memoranda we find this reference to their earliest interview:

      "I first met Dr. Brownson in New York, in our house. I was then reading the Washington Globe, Benton's speeches, Calhoun's, etc. The elder Blair was its editor; its motto was, 'The world is governed too much'—a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement except in the way of revolution. After the establishment of the American Government the principle expressed in that motto could only be abandoned or pushed into revolution and anarchy.

      "I put this question to Brownson: 'How can I become certain of the objective reality of the operations of my soul?' He answered: 'If you have not yet reached that period of mental life, you will do so before many years.'

      "It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn."

      In the article on the "Workingman's Party," already quoted from, Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to lecture before the New York members of the party for several years, goes on as follows:

      "If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher, should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men, the answer is plain. The true philosopher will not confine himself to abstract theories. But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his fellow-men—in the highest earthly development of our better nature if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the lusts of the animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school. The man who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a socialist of some school or other. Says Dr. Brownson in The Convert, p. 101:

      "The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an earthly end, to be attained in this life. Man was not made for God, and destined to find his beatitude in the possession of God his Supreme Good, the Supreme Good itself. His end was happiness—not happiness in God,

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