charged with holding civil allegiance to a foreign ecclesiastic,
who is also a foreign prince or potentate. You would not name
the class of men whom you or some of you know to be thus
falsely charged, because you were not all ignorant, unlettered
men, and entirely unacquainted with the history of both ancient
and modern times, but you repeated the false charge itself, which
had been made, and left the previous denunciation, this charge
and prejudice, ignorance and bigotry, to make the particular ap-
plication. You meant and intended to point out, and did point
out the members of the Catholic religion, that whole class of citi-
zens as the persons who were to be proscribed and excluded from
office, though you would not and did not say so in words.

There were several motives for this; the Know-nothing oaths
and obligations boldly and directly proscribed them. Enough
must be said by you in this article, to fulfil these oaths, and sat-
isfy these* your constituents. The quoted clauses of this article
were sufficiently distinct for these purposes. The purpose to
proscribe a class of citizens on account of their religious faith,
caution suggested should not be plainly and positively avowed
if possible to be avoided, because it was and is violative of the
Constitution, and would on that account be resisted by all its true
friends and real supporters; and such an open avowal, moreover,
would have precluded evasion or denial which might be useful
and necessary to the success of the party in some quarters. You
sought by the mode adopted to accomplish all these ends, but
you attempted too much—you overreached yourselves, and fail-
ure is the consequence. You may now, and probably will soon
erase the article from your Platform—blot it from the paper; but
it is too late. It caused you many and rapid successes at first;
the tide is now refluent, and wherever the flux of tide is great
and most rapid, there also is the reflux swifter and more violent.
Sowers of the "wind shall reap the whirlwind." Enough.

This minority, then, can perceive no greater difference between
the purposes and injunctions contained in and put forth by this
8th Article of the Philadelphia Platform, of June, 1855, and the
proscriptive clauses of the Know-nothing oaths cited in the earlier
part of this report, than there is in the obligation never to vote
for nor support any man for any political office if he be a Roman
Catholic, and the injunction to advance to political office those
only who are not of the Roman Catholic; which is just no differ-
ence at all in sense, but some in sound. The language used is
different—one is affirmative, the other negative in form. One is
plain, direct and explicit; this declares its purpose and intention
plainly, boldly. The other, afraid and ashamed to speak out,
uses terms so arranged as to convey but not to express their pur-
pose, by talking of charges of which they know the accused to

A

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