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could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished.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: