marriage until they had given him some article of intrinsic value,
and I have often seen jewelry, silver-mounted pipes, watches and many
other things confiscated by the priestcraft before they would perform
the ceremony.

It is strange to me, indeed, that America, which is and should be by
every law of justice and right, a Protestant nation, is so
unconcerned and so listless over the insults that Catholicism daily
offers Protestantism, for if it is not a most damnable insult to
stigmatize your offspring as bastards, then we are unable to discern
and distinguish between a brazen insult and a flattering compliment.

Whenever America learns the actual and true meaning of Catholicism
and her teachings, there will be an awakening among the Protestant
world that will make the four corners of the government of the United
States tremble with a righteous indignation.

Now, if the offspring of that dear old mother is a bastard, then she
is nothing more nor less than a common whore, and you cannot arrive
at any other rational conclusion. This is only reasoning from
intelligent deductions; therefore, whenever Catholicism calls the
children of Protestant parents bastards simply because these parents
were not united in wedlock by a Catholic priest, they villify the
sacred name of father and mother, and trail in the slime of disgrace
the sweet memories of that sturdy old father and that angelic old
Protestant mother.

I am at a loss to know and to understand how Protestantism can sit so
unconcernedly by with folded hands and allow this vulturous foe of
human rights and human privileges to brazenly rear its institutions