and because I thought it necessary for the Church. If it were not done, I would do it now; but I have signed my own death-warrant." In September, 1774, after many menaces, this prophecy was fulfilled. The initial letters of a pasquinade appeared on St. Peter's church, which he interpreted: "The holy see will be vacant in September," which was verified in his death on the twenty-second of that month, attended with every symptom of poison. No candid student of the facts can doubt that he died by Jesuit hands.

The society survived. After a masked and hidden life for more than forty years, it was openly reinstated by Pius VII. It immediately reentered on its course of unchanging craft and intrigue; and to-day its general, or "the Black Pope," is the real ruler of the Roman world. Through the present dummy pope on the throne of St. Peter, the disciples of Loyola still proclaim the persecuting doctrines of mediaval Rome, still propagate the intolerant creeds of Pius IV. and Pius V., still excuse the massacre of St. Bartholomew and defend the Inquisition, still defy governments and await the opportunity to destroy all their foes, the chief of whom are the schoolmaster and the printer. They plot and incite the wars against modern civilization, and lead the reactionary movements of the nineteenth century.

From its institution by Loyola to the present time, the Society of Jesus has proved to be the greatest enemy of man. In its inquisitorial, unrelenting pursuit of blood, it has spared neither race nor age, neither thrones nor firesides. The general voice of history arraigns it as the secret source of all the horrors and enormities, tortures and crimes, that the old persecuting power of papal Rome has inflicted on mankind since 1538. This long indictment of blood and misery includes every atrocity of secret assassination and public wholesale slaughter. The tortures and the cries of dying heretics, the ruin of countless families, the flight of terrified and hopeless throngs from their native land to the friendly shelter of Germany and Switzerland, were the earliest fruits of the merciless teachings of Loyola. The Jesuits led the

armies of the persecutors into the beautiful Vaudois valleys, and the worst atrocities of that mournful example of human wickedness are due to their brutal fanaticism. As politicians, they brought war, pestilence, and famine to Germany, destroyed the impulse of reform in France, made Italy and Spain the scoff of nations, led the revolts of Ireland, stimulated the fanaticism of Alva, tormented far-distant China and Abyssinia, assailed Russia, filled England with plots, and taught the Romish Church its policy of persecution and intrigue. They were everywhere the most active of politicians, in wars, civil tumults, in Spanish Armadas and sudden assassinations. It was at the instigation of the Jesuits that Charles V. began the great religious wars which carried desolation and death throughout Germany; that the Protestants of Venice were thrown into the Adriatic; that the terrible Inquisition was renewed with a severity that exceeded all its former cruelties; that the reformers of all lands were dragged forth to the martyrdom of flames; that John Louis Paschal was roasted alive before Pope Pius IV. and his holy college at Rome in 1560; that the Christians of the valleys of Piedmont were put to death with atrocities that seem almost inhuman to remember; some impaled, some burned in a slow fire, some hacked to pieces and their wounds filled with quicklime, some covered with brimstone matches and set on fire, and the mouths of some filled with gunpowder, the explosion of which blew off their heads. It was the Jesuits who urged on the wholesale slaughter of the Huguenots; who were the direct instigators of those fearful wholesale persecutions which depopulated France, under Louis XIV., and by which, in Languedoc alone, one hundred thousand persons perished, of whom ten thousand met death by fire, strangulation, and the rack. It was they who accomplished the assassination of Henry IV. of France, by the dagger of Ravaillac, in 1610; who in 1662, by poisoning Blaise Pascal, put out the most brilliant intellect that ever lighted this world; who in 1709 brought about the destruction of Port Royal, the seat of their adversaries, the Jansenists: who in 1605 concocted the memorable gun

powder plot, by which the king, queen, and parliament of England were to have been blown up by thirty-six barrels of gunpowder exploded by the match of Guy Fawkes; and who have been, directly or indirectly, at the bottom of nearly all the calamities which their opponents, both Catholic and Protestant, both sovereigns and subjects, have endured since their dark plotting order commenced its career of crime.

The Jesuits, like all the other religious orders, bound themselves by the usual monastic vow of poverty. Publicly abjuring the possession of property as a crime, and professing poverty as a virtue, they clandestinely monopolized the wealth of the world-the domains of princes, the traffic of merchants, and the political power of governments. They excelled all the other mendicant orders in duplicity and rapaciousness. Animated by a crafty and unprincipled zeal for the emolument of their society, they established missionhouses among savage nations, under the pretext of civilizing them and saving their souls. But this specious pretext was but a pious mask, under which was concealed an infamous scheme of swindling the natives abroad out of property, and wheedling the devout at home out of liberal donations and splendid legacies. Pagan simplicity has never been a match for monkish craft; and no sooner had the gold and gems of the natives inflamed the zeal and sharpened the shrewdness of the monks than these were wrung from them by some swindling transaction. They made fortunes out of the devout at home and the savages abroad.

The following transaction illustrates the adroitness of this avaricious sacerdotal order: In the year 1701, eight heavy cases arrived in Cadiz from the Indies, marked chocolate. Those who handled this part of the cargo complained that they had never lifted such heavy boxes of chocolate before. They fancied they contained lead instead of an article of diet. This merchandise was consigned, not to a merchant, but to "the Very Reverend the Procureur General of the Society of Jesus, at Madrid." Curiosity was awakened by the extraor dinary weight of the cases, and one of them was opened.

Nothing was to be seen but veritable chocolate, in enormous cakes, well packed. Yet the immense weight of the cakes remained to be accounted for. They found the cakes hard to break; but when one yielded to a smart blow, it was found to be solid gold, thinly coated with chocolate. This led to the discovery that the Fathers, under color of their mission, were carrying on a vast trade for the profit of the society, which for a long time had been known to be rich in ready gold, to a degree for which even their known craft and greediness seemed insufficient to account.

At that time Spain swarmed with Jesuits, and they enjoyed the favor of the court; their vast possessions in houses, schools, colleges, and churches were magnificent beyond the splendor of palaces; they lived like princes. They denied all knowledge of the chocolate-coated gold, and were so persistent in their assumed innocence as to suffer its entire confiscation to the royal exchequer. They put up with this enor mous loss rather than have their world-wide enterprises exposed and unmasked, They could not afford to let the world know that gain was the secret of their godliness. But underneath their most specious and harmless pretexts, there was sure to be something hidden that was gain to them. Power and wealth were the grand objects of the society; and nothing in the world that might yield them profit in these particulars was left untaxed.

As teachers, the wily Jesuits strove to grasp the complete control of education. They became the most powerful agents in advancing or restoring the declining power of Rome. They have ever denounced as godless and immoral that system of public instruction which in Europe and America has stimulated the progress of industry and of honesty. When Austria secularized her schools, it was considered by the Jesuits and their dummy pope an act of direct rebellion. According to them the State has no business to intermeddle with education. Our own republican school system has evoked their utmost hostility. No school will be approved by them unless it be under the control of Jesuit teachers. Jesuit papers advise

their people not to send their children to our schools, to refuse to pay their school tax, and bishops urge their flocks to prefer ignorance to instruction at the public school. At a Catholic convention held not long since in St. Louis, our free school system was denounced in a resolution as "a curse to the country, and a floodgate of atheism and sensuality." It was there openly proclaimed that the Catholics "stood before. the country as enemies of the public school;" and that "they would as soon send their children into a pest house, or bury them, as send them to our present schools." "The New York Tablet," a Jesuit organ, for March 1872, said: "Let schools be modified as they may, they will never serve our purpose unless placed under the control of the Church." The Jesuit press and priests everywhere strive to excite their people to violence against our teachers. The most fiendish and malignant assaults have been the result. Instances are still fresh in the public mind where teachers have been struck down by Jesuit assassins, as at Hunter's Point, and left bleeding and dying in the schoolhouse, as at Centralia. The great conflict of the day is between the pope and the printing press, the Jesuit and the common school. The Catholic crusade of this century is against free education.

The fact is notorious that the Romish Church seeks nothing less than the establishment of Jesuit schools in our country, which shall be maintained from the public treasury. Our large, turbulent, Catholic population, which, as statistics show, furnishes more than three-fourths of our criminals and paupers, is taught by plotting Jesuit priests to hate the teacher and the public school. They would revive in our own favored land the old, happy time, when in Ireland the priest stood in the road and whipped the children who attempted to enter the schoolhouse back to their wretched hovels. They would gladly fill our great American cities with the sloth and vice and degradation that have been expelled from the capitals of the Old World. And our own self-preservation demands that the foreign population in our midst shall submit to have their children pass through the alembic of our