your arguments, your assumed dignity, your forced galvanised wit, are all bestowed upon another. I should not perhaps have regarded this use of my name in your cock-fight with the Herald, and might have permitted you to employ it for the amusement of the ring; but, sir, flattery in certain quarters has made you insolent; you aim to carry it with some portions of the public, by assuming a swaggering air, which contrasts strangely with the affected meekness appearing in other parts of your first epistle. The bad influence of such a tone might be increased by my remaining silent under your repeated and insulting use of my name. Besides, whether you meant it or not, there are some things in your letter of grave moment.

There are conclusions from it to which I wish to call the attention of the public, although your vanity may have entirely concealed from you the legitimate inferences to be derived from from some of your own most emphatic declarations. In thus addressing you, sir, I shall use language plain and distinct, with as much courtesy as a due regard and proper answer to the Jesuitism of your letter to Mayor Harper will permit. I shall take shelter under no affirmations of meekness, so offen repeated as to become stale and nauseous even to the least festidious. I shall not, in almost every paragraph, call my Maker to witness the purity and sincerity of my motives. I shall affect no mawkish, sentimental love of peace, or seek to imitate that gentle assumption of a meek and quiet spirit, in which the mild author of the Carroll Hall harangues sees fit to indulge. There is some finesse too fine. There is not only an ambition that overleaps, but also an art which overreaches itself, and produces no other effect than to blind the one who uses it to what is palpably visible to every eye.

The acts and facts on which we take issue with you were not done in a corner. There are those who are familiar with the state of things in regard to our public schools, before you came upon the stage of religious and political action in New York. They know that these schools were prosperous, peaceful, harmonious, and attended by the most encouraging results, before your name was associated with the question; and they also know that simultaneously with your uncalled-for interference, strife, discord and the most unhallowed passions have for years been rife. The papers directly under your control,-so directly under your control, I say, and as I shall prove, that you may to all intents be regarded as their responsible editor-have not certainly been distinguished for that lamb-like spirit, that breathing of love to God and good-will to man, in which your let

ter so much abounds, and which seem to have so enraptured some transcendental editors, who would have us believe that they belong to the most liberal party in the universe, and that therefore, because they are so far removed from Rome, they are entitled to be considered the most candid and impartial judges

that could be found.

In the overflowing rapture with which you contemplate your own picture of your own exuberant charity, love, meekness and humble resignation to the Divine will, under persecutions for righteousness' sake, you seem to have utterly forgotten that there are Protestants who read the Truth Teller and the Freeman's Journal, and who are familiar with the tone which has for years been manifested by those pure religious papers. It must be well known, indeed, how free they have kept from all political strife, in comparison with other journals, like them; devoted to the interests of particular religious sects-especially, for example, such party incendiary prints as the New York Observer, Baptist Advocate, and Christian Intelligencer. Above all must you have forgotten your own report of that famous Carroll Hall harangue, the remembrance of which you supposed you could obliterate by connecting it with the name of Bennett. Whatever claims you may assert to the gentleness and meekness of the dove, I cannot charge you here with the wisdom of the serpent. You should have examined your files of the Freeman's Journal before you ventured upon what doubtless seemed to you your most triumphant and impregnable position. You might in that case, have been saved from the miserable apology which you are reluctantly compelled to present in your second letter, namely, that Bennett did not report you right, (although word for word in direct continuation with the report of your own organ;) simply because the latter contained more of the same rhetoric, yet in no respect altering the meaning or force of what you are represented in the Herald to. have said,

Ever bear it in mind, reverend sir, that you did not call that report simply deficient, or censure it as containing only part of your speech, although correct as far as it went, but you styled it a perversion," a caricature, a burlesque," the base coinage of Bennett's own brain, or "such a speech as his reporter tho't proper to make." Our Protestant Bishops, whom you visit so profusely with your meek and gentle censures, would not so easily have forgotten a circumstance of such a nature. It would have formed a marked era in their lives, which would not so soon have escaped from their memories. So frequent, so long.

protracted, have been your political conflicts, that you may be readily excused for not remembring all your political speeches, or all the circumstances under which they were reported. And well for the dignity and gentleness of your late Episcopal epistle that it was so. The stirring Hibernian rhetoric of that Carroll Hall harangue, had it risen to your recollection during the placid hours in which you were writing that most Catholic production, would have made great discord with the holy emotions of love, good-will and gentle charity, with which your heart was filled. The thundering sound of the shillelahs, as, in all your Episcopal dignity, you called upon them not to flinch in the coming political contest, would have acidulated the milk of human kindness; the tumultuous uproar of the Irish cheering would but ill have sympathized with the train of calm and pious meditation in which you indulged, on the depravity of human nature, as exhibited in the wickedness of Bennett, and in the wanton persecution of so quiet and unobtrusive an individal as yourself.

But, sir, to the point. Was that Carroll Hall speech actually made, and in substance uttered, as set down in the Herald and Freeman's Journal, and afterwards copied into the Commercial Advertiser? This sir, is an issue of your own choosing. It is the true issue, and you know it. It is not a matter of more or less; but did you actually say what. Bennett reports you to have said? How much more of the same sort you may have uttered, makes no difference. Is Bennett's report a burlesque, a caricature, a false representation? Your assertion that it is so, is the foundation of all your positions. I might regard what you say in your second letter as a cognovit on this point; but I prefer making it a matter of argument, because I can thus more easily use it as the ground of certain views I wish to present. With you it is an indispensible position. It is the basis of all your charity to your enemies. The confidence you felt in the success of this manœuvre, by which you associate the name of Bennett with that report, to destroy its credit, was the source of all that extreme candor, that exuberance of good feeling, that satisfaction with yourself, for which you receive the unmeasured praises of certain editors.

I have a right to regard it as your strong position, although utterly incapable, even had it been maintained, of defending you from other charges. With this position, then, falls your whole

argument---for it is the corner-stone of your superstructure. All your meekness, your resignation to the Divine will, your confidence in the justice of the great and generous American nation, were but the fruits of the complacency with which you contemplated the perfection of this your stronghold. The history of the Sept of the Hughes, of your life, the struggles of your boyhood, the triumphs of your manhood- becomes a tale which, however interesting in itself, and under other circumstances, has in this connection neither point nor force. Your defence of that most pious demagogue O'Connell, with O'Connell's wife, the tear that so silently dropped from the eye of the patriot, and which so moved your sensibilities, your philippic against Bennett, your gentle reflections upon the clergy of our city, your attack upon my humble self, lose all their interest at least, if they do not become utterly unmeaning.

Did you then make that Carroll Hall speech, as reported in the Freeman's Journal? Then, sir, I reply to the proposition you have so solemnly laid down, and to which you challenge the attention of "that whole class of editors and reverend divines," whom you say "you regard as represented by James Gordon Bennett and William L. Stone." Then, sir, you did act the part of a political priest. Then, sir, you did attempt to organize a political party in the city of New York-not, as you have asserted, to protest against the infringement and violation of already vested legal rights, but in opposition to, and for the destruction of, institutions and principles which had been in successful and most beneficent operation before yourself and a large portion of the audience you addressed, had any claim even to the protection of the American laws. This is the sophism which runs through both your letters, and which I trust elsewhere fully to expose. Then, sir, I again repeat, you did set in operation a train of causes which led to the passage of the odious school law, the exclusion of the Bible from our common schools, that blackening of the books with which you have the unparallelled assurance to revile those, who, by this act, (although indiscreetly and wrongfully, as I believe,) endeavored to do away those objections and complaints, which you never intended should be removed until they had accomplished ulterior, and, in your eye, far more important objects. Then, sir, you did corruptly court the favor of a political party, by pledging or causing to be pledged, the votes of your audience to that side which should aid in the accomplishment of your schemes-a bargain which was most corruptly consummated by causing your troops, who, up to a certain time, had remained in VOL. II-SIG. 12

the field, to yield the ground to your allies the moment the news was received that the bill, by the most iniquitous means, had been passed. Then, sir, have I not a right to say, in view of these well known facts, and of the mighty power which you boast of possessing in this city, (of which more anon,) that, notwithstanding your denial, you did minister aid to the intrigues. of corrupt politicians, even if you had art enough to escape the evidence of intriguing directly and personally with them? Then, I say, you did not (as you assert "you always have done) both publicly and privately, preach the obligation of peace and good-will to all men." Then, finally, you did exhibit a spirit, which, although it might have had the poor merit of native genuineness and sincerity, was directly opposed to all those meek, and kind, and gentle, and forgiving influences which you would have us believe are always predominant in your heart.

Let me pause a moment, as I endeavor to bring up before the mind the scenes of that most remarkable event--the subject presented the audience addressed-the loud accompaniments of noise and tumult. What was to be decided? It was, sir, that which is to this nation the great question of questions,the best mode of conducting a public system of education, and the great principles on which it should be founded,-a question, which, of all others, required a most thorough and careful examination of those first truths which lie at the foundation both of moral and political philosophy,--a question surrounded with new and peculiar difficulties, in its connexion with the liberal institutions of our country, a question whose decision was to be so made as to escape the evils of infidelity on the one hand, and of sectarianism on the other, but in respect to which the previ-ous success of the New York schools, had inspired the most sanguine hopes, that there had been found a right basis on which that decision could be placed, a question which needed the deepest reflection of the profoundest minds, and that, too, at their calmest periods and in their calmest moods. And who composed the audience to whom you addressed yourself? Did it consist of the sages of our land,-our best writers, our profoundest thinkers, our ripest scholars? The farthest from it. possible. You made your inflamatory appeals to an excited and ignorant tribunal, to a promiscuous political mass-meeting, in the midst of tumultuous cheering and the ringing of shillelahs. You distinctly held out the interests connected with this most grave and solemn question, as game to a heated and struggling political party, willing to grasp at any thing, and to offer any bribes to obtain success in a charter election,--a prize which,