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 Such passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished.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.