government the city of Washington! Let us imagine for a moment all this expanse of empire, embracing some fifty or sixty States, to be settled by its proportion of the foreign slaves of foreign Jesuits; and, inferring the future from the past, that they have been successful in extending their invasions upon the spiritual and political rights of the American people, what would be the direful consequences of this dreadful overshadowing of the moral and intellectual world?

"Are the religious wars and relentless persecutions of fire, rack, and other bloody demonstrations of bigotry, with which Popery has deluged Europe for ages, again to be acted over here, on the fair and unstained bosom of our vast and free Republic? Heaven forbid this foul desecration of our equal rights! And yet what hope of exemption gleams in the future, unless the friends of civil and religious liberty, animated by a sublime devotion to the welfare of their children and the freedom of prosperity, now combine to arrest the march of Papal usurpation before it overspreads the land, and plants its 'garrisons' of power deep into the bosom of our valleys, irresistible and unresisted?

"And here, sir, I may be permitted to ask, Why is it that the Jesuits have made such strenuous efforts to drive that Bible from our public schools? Why those dark insinuations of the unfitness of Bible truths for the daily duties of life? We claim for the American-born child of the foreign Roman Catholic the same glorious privileges our own children enjoy—to read, examine, investigate for themselves; to reject or adopt it as they see fit, unawed by any human power. Shall there be one code of morals for one class, and another for a higher or a lower one? Shall the Jesuit clergy coin a construction of the Bible for the people which the people have no right to test by their own understandings, and thus establish a human tariff for crime, adjusted by mere human authority, in opposition to the commandments of God, and meet with no resistance? Or rather,

so far from resistance, the approving smiles and generous encouragement of the representatives of the American people?

"Sir, we have lived to see the Bible driven from our public schools and burned in the public streets-that Bible, so inseparably interwoven with the genius and spirit of American institutions. The Congress of 1777 distributed thirty thousand copies of that Bible among the American people—that same Bible that Mary gave to her little George, whose precepts and whose principles led him, at the head of the American troops, to achieve that freedom which we now enjoy. Do what you may, I tell you that the American-born citizens of this country, at least the native-born Americans, will, at all hazards, keep that Bible in the hands of their little Georges too.

Sir, we do not protest against this religious link between our free Republic and the Papal throne; a throne, unlike all others, built upon power, spiritual and temporal, political and religious; a throne which makes man a slave, and transforms kings into fiends, priests into tormentors, a people into drones, a country into a desert; a throne which extinguishes the fire on the altar of domestic love in a form peculiar, fatal, revolting; snatching its votaries away from the homage of nature to the cold convent, the repulsive abbey, the gloomy cell of the anchorite, the horrid dungeon of the Inquisition, and the demoralizing edict of celibacy; stirring up sedition, rebellion, and civil war, as the only means of extending a power which reason revolts from, and persuasion fails to diffuse; which mankind have resisted in every age, at the peril and under the penalty of the cannon's mouth, the edge of the sword, the fire of the fagot, the torments of the stake, and the tortures of the rack!

"Sir, in the name of the American people, I protest against this innovation, which would make us a by-word among the nations. It is almost an obsolete but still a venerated and solemn custom, appropriate to all great and imminent conjunctures of public import, to invoke the special protection of a Superior

HENRY A. WISE.

135 Being, and, in the same spirit that animated our sires of 1776, I exclaim, God save the Republic !"

Parties reeled, politicians changed and cowered before the fiery eloquence of this daring reformer, whose words, repeated to-day, have a strange and almost prophetic significance. I am proud to claim that I was not one of those who feared to take issue with his doctrines, and this the more because now I find myself arrayed against the dangerous dogmas enunciated by certain grave potentates, and too sadly illustrated by their ignorant and misguided followers.

The fires lighted by Mr. Levin were subdued before other questions, but they were not extinguished. When he had almost passed from the stage of politics, and the Democrats regained their lost power, they broke out again in 1854, extending over a wider field, and for a time threatening a more permanent demolition of parties; but, like its progenitor, Know-Nothingism was too fierce and illogical to last. It died of its secrecy, and when this was dissolved the whole organization passed away like an exhalation. The Aaron's rod of anti-slavery swallowed up all other issues, and Know-Nothingism was lost in Secession, which even in 1854 began to project its black shadow, like a monstrous demon, upon the scene.

If Levin was the master-spirit who organized Native-Americanism in 1844, Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, was the fearless knight who did most to put down Know-Nothingism ten years later. The two men were marked antipodes-contrasts in demeanor as in doctrine. Levin was a stout and well-built man, with a sonorous voice and a commanding and flowing diction. Wise was lean, tall, and cadaverous, with vehemence and tones not unlike John Randolph's, and a steel-spring energy that, despite feeble health, never bent or broke. His campaign for Governor in 1855 was one of the most successful in politics. The new party was carrying every thing before it. It had enlisted some of the first intellects of the time-men like Henry

Winter Davis, Henry W. Hoffman, and J. Morrison Harris, of Maryland; Henry M. Fuller, of Pennsylvania; John S. Carlile, of Virginia; Zollicoffer and Etheridge, of Tennessee; George Eustis, of Louisiana; Humphrey Marshall, A. K. Marshall, and W. L. Underwood, of Kentucky. Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, had in whole or in part bowed to the torrent, when Wise came forth and breasted and broke it. His speeches were unique, original, and resistless. He traversed his State from the Alleghanies to the sea. He was ubiquitous. He became more than ever a national figure. Thousands of dollars were lost and won on the issue. The only money I ever wagered on an election was five hundred dollars I ventured on Wise. The following extract from a speech of Governor Wise, delivered at Liberty Hall, Alexandria, on Saturday, February 3, 1856, may not be out of place, if only as a counterpart to Levin's:

"I was saying when interrupted that the State of Virginia has every element of commerce, of agriculture, of mining, and of manufacturing. On Chesapeake Bay, from the mouth of the Rappahannock to the capes of the Chesapeake, you have roadsteads and harbors sufficient to float the navies of the world. From the River of Swans, on whose margin we are, down to the line of North Carolina, you have the Potomac, the Rappahannock, the Piankatank, from Mobjack Bay to James River, and the Elizabeth River—all meeting in the most beautiful sheet of water of all the seas of the earth. You have the bowels of your western mountains-rich in iron, in copper, in coal, in salt, in gypsum; and the very earth is rich in oil, which makes the very rivers inflame. You have the line of the Alleghanythat beautiful Blue Ridge which stands there, placed by the Almighty, not to obstruct the way of the people to market, but placed there in the very bounty of Providence to milk the clouds, to make the sweet springs which are the source of your rivers-[great applause]—and at the head of every stream is

THE OLD DOMINION.

137 the waterfall murmuring the very music of your power. [Applause.] And yet Commerce has long ago spread her sails and sailed away from you. You have not as yet dug more than coal enough to warm yourselves at your own hearths. You have set no tilt-hammer of Vulcan to strike blows worthy of gods in the iron founderies. You have not yet spun more than coarse cotton enough, in the way of manufacture, to clothe your own slaves. You have had no commerce, no mining, no manufactures. You have relied alone on the single power of agriculture and such agriculture! [Great laughter.] Your ledgepatches outshine the sun. Your inattention to your only source of wealth has seared the very bosom of Mother Earth. [Laughter.] Instead of having to feed cattle on a thousand hills, you have had to chase the stump-tailed steer through the ledgepatches to procure a tough beefsteak. [Laughter.]

"With all this plenitude of power she has been dwarfed in the Union; but, by the gods! I say that she has power now, the energy, the resources-may I say the men?-to be put upon the line of progress to eminence of prosperity, to pass New York yet faster in the Union than ever New York has passed her. [Cheers.] You have been called the 'Old Dominion.' Let us, as Virginians, I implore you, this night resolve that a new era dawn, and that henceforth she shall be called the New Dominion. [Cheering.]

"The present condition of things has existed too long in Virginia. The landlord has skinned the tenant, and the tenant has skinned the land, until all have grown poor together. [Laughter.] I have heard a story-I will not locate it here or there about the condition of our agriculture. I was told by a gentleman in Washington, not long ago, that he was traveling in a county not a hundred miles from this place, and overtook one of our citizens on horseback, with perhaps a bag of hay for a saddle, without stirrups, and the leading-line for a bridle, and he said: 'Stranger, whose house is that?' 'It is mine,' was