5

But the influence of the first class, as insidious as ever, is no
longer a hidden influence. It is openly recognized and wor-
shipped as a power in the State.                                             

It has determined the result of Presidential elections; and fixed
on more than one occasion, the public policy of the government.
Designing and ambitious men humble themselves before it: and
some even in their adulation, profess to prefer and elevate, the
foreign over their native fellow citizen.                                     

The people of Maryland have declared, in a way not to be
misunderstood, their appreciation of these evils, and their deter-
mination to remedy them.             

The right to vote is conferred by our Constitution alone. Its
limitations are prescribed in that organic law; and it is evident,
from the result of our late elections, that the people of (his State,
think it requires further guards.

In providing those guards hereafter, they will doubtless find
example and authority for them in the Constitution of the United
States, which allows no foreigner to be a Representative till he
have been seven years a citizen: nor a Senator, till he have been
nine years a citizen, and which excludes all foreign-born citi-
zens from the Executive chair.                           

These provisions, the wisdom of Washington approved to
guard the nation from foreign influence; and we, warned by his
fears, may well find instruction in his example.

The people of Maryland, were the first to decree by law the
separation of religion and the State. This principle, promul-
gated while she was yet a colony, after more than two hundred
years of practical interpretation, was embodied in the present
Constitution, in the 33rd and 35th articles of the Bill of Rights.
Those principles declare, that men shall worship free from the
control of the State, and that the State shall govern free from the
intrusion, of religious sects; and these fundamental principles,
acquiesced in from the beginning, have been unassailed in Mary-
land until our own day.

The people of this State have been called on to rebuke, and
have rebuked, an insidious attempt to elude and evade these
principles, in the endeavor of certain persons to destroy the pub-
lic schools of the State; and on their ruins, to erect with the
money of the State, sectarian schools of opposing religious par-
To divide the public school fund, among the sectarian schools,
in proportion to their scholars, is to foster and promote, by
means of the public money, religious differences among the people
of the State. It is to make religious sects, pensioners on the
public treasury. It is at once a bribe in money to religious sects
to obtain control of the State, so that their sectarian missionaries,
may be paid from the public purse. Yet it cannot be denied that
such an attempt has been made by designing men among us