tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">141

• Vaughan's Life of St. Thomas Aquin., 427

• Weiss's American Religion, 720
• West's State of the Dead, 574
• Whipple's Literature and Art, 430
• Wonders of European Art, 576
• Wonders of the Heavens, 432

• Young's Catholic Hymns and Canticles, 719

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XIII., No. 73.—APRIL, 1871.[1]

UNIFICATION AND EDUCATION.[2]

The Hon. Henry Wilson, recently re-elected senator in Congress from Massachusetts, may not be distinguished as an original thinker or as a statesman of commanding ability, but no man is a surer index to his party or a more trustworthy exponent of its sentiments and tendencies, its aims and purposes. This gives to his article in The Atlantic Monthly, indicating the policy to be pursued by the Republican party, a weight it might not otherwise possess.

Mr. Wilson is a strong political partisan, but he is above all a fervent Evangelical, and his aim, we presume, is to bring his political party to coincide with his Evangelical party, and make each strengthen the other. We of course, as a Catholic organ, have nothing to say of questions in issue between different political parties so long as they do not involve the rights and interests of our religion, or leave untouched the fundamental principles and genius of the American system of government, although we may have more or less to say as American citizens; but when either party is so ill-advised as to aim a blow either at the freedom of our religion or at our federative system of government, we hold ourselves free, and in duty bound, to warn our fellow-citizens and our fellow-Catholics of the impending danger, and to do what we can to avert or arrest the blow. We cannot, without incurring grave censure, betray by our silence the cause of our religion or of our country, for fear that by speaking we may cross the purposes of one or another party, and seem to favor the views and policy of another.

Mr. Wilson's New Departure is unquestionably revolutionary, and therefore not lawful for any party in this country to adopt. It is expressed in two words, National Unification and National Education—that is, the consolidation of all the powers of government in the general government, and the social and religious unification of the American people by means of a system of universal and uniform compulsory education, adopted and enforced by the authority of the united or consolidated states, not by the states severally each within its own jurisdiction and for its own people. The first is decidedly revolutionary and destructive of the American system of federative government, or the division of powers between a general government and particular state governments; the second, in the sense proposed, violates the rights of parents and annihilates the religious liberty secured by the constitution and laws both of the several states and of the United States.

The general government, in our American political system, is not the national government, or any more national than the several state governments. The national government with us is divided between a general government having charge of our relations with other powers and internal matters of a general nature and common to all the states, and particular state governments having charge of matters local and particular in their nature, and clothed with all the powers of supreme national governments not expressly delegated to the general government. In the draft of the federal constitution reported by the committee to the convention of 1787, the word national was used, but the convention finally struck it out, and inserted wherever it occurred the word general, as more appropriately designating the character and powers of the government they were creating. It takes under our actual system both the state governments and the general government to make one complete national government, invested with all the powers of government. By making the general government a supreme national government, we make it the source of all authority, subordinate the state governments to it, make them hold from it, and deprive them of all independent or undivided rights. This would completely subvert our system of government, according to which the states hold their powers immediately from the political people, and independently of any suzerain or overlord, and the general government from the states or the people organized as states united in convention. A more complete change of the government or destruction of the federative principle, which constitutes the chief excellence and glory of our system, it would be difficult to propose, or even to conceive, than is set forth in Mr. Wilson's programme.

Mr. Wilson, however, is hardly justified in calling the revolution he proposes a "New Departure." It has been the aim of a powerful party, under one name or another, ever since 1824, if not from the origin of the government itself. This party has been steadily pursuing it, and with increasing numbers and influence, ever since the