The Morning Star And Catholic Messenger

Things to be Remembered.

[Catholic Standard.]

1. Pope Paul III., pronounced a sentence of excommunication of the most absolute nature against all those who should reduce the Indians to slavery. In this he was seconded by Charles V. The Church has ever strenuously opposed slavery and asserted the freedom of the individual. One of its most precious institutions—confession—reduces all to a common level by making each answerable at the same tribunal.

2. The Canadian Catholics won the Indian from his savage ways by teaching him, first, the Catholic religion; second, the arts of peace. They then made him a citizen, and gave him his eighty acres of land, together with necessary seed and appliances, thus placing him on a footing with any other settler. Result—no trouble with the red man.

3. The United States Government, on the other hand, votes a pile of money to be expended on the Indian for his soul's good and his body's comfort. It then appoints agents to dispense the money, and magnanimously allows the latter seventy-five cents out of every hundred for their trouble! Congress was lately reminded by its Kentucky member that out of the $7,000,000 assigned by that august body to the Indians, the agents had pocketed $5,250,000, leaving the poor red man $1,750,000, a very large proportion of which was, doubtless, eked out by them in the shape of fire water!

4. Let Congress take General Harney's advice and leave the Indian to the truly civilizing control of the self-sacrificing and disinterested followers of Father de Smet, and there will soon be no Indian troubles.

5. It is material to remember, too, that the Indian agents are usually 'Methodist preachers who thwart the priest in every way they can in the discharge of his duty among the Catholic Indians. The agent does not want the Indian to be civilized; he has to keep an eye to his 'perquisites' out of the Government grant for that.

6. The world sneers at the Jesuits and persecutes them for laboring for its good; but who have done so much to civilize savages in America as they? Bancroft says: 'The History of their labors is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America' (and he might have added Spanish and English too;) 'not a cape was turned, not a river entered but a Jesuit led the way.'

7. Hundreds of thousands of idols are shipped from Birmingham, England, to India and China. Protestant England performs the mission of our Divine Master with the Bible in its mouth, an idol in one hand, and a packet of opium in the other.