watched by his enemies in England, who, controlled by bigotry no less than covetousness, were alert to find an opportunity to oust him so as to profit by his misfortune, made the Maryland Catholics more moderate and tolerant than their age, and those qualities have always characterized the Church in America. There has never been any clash of authority between the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and the temporal power; no American Catholic has served Church and State with a divided allegiance; the Catholic Church, while teaching its own creed, has ever taught the higher creed of obedience to the State and respect for civil authority. Catholicism in America has not destroyed or weakened the fibre of American Republicanism; from a small beginning the Church has grown and become a mighty instrument in the development of American character, but it has been accomplished without the direct participation of the Church in politics. In other countries the Catholic Church found it necessary, or at least believed it to be advisable, to become an active political factor and to endeavor to influence the action of parties, but it has never done so in America. Baltimore's first settlers were moderates, and their descendants were equally moderate. Ultramontanism was unknown, and it was only later, after the Revolution, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, that the heavy immigration of Irish Catholics, to be later strengthened by the immigration from other Catholic coun

tries of Europe, profoundly affected and modified the character of American Catholicism, aroused the last vestige of Puritan intolerance, and led to Know-Nothingism and the abortive attempt to inject religion into politics by the creation of the A. P. A.1

But in Baltimore's day Catholics and Protestants lived on neighborly terms. At one time the domi

1 The American Protective Association, or A. P. A. as it was generally called, was founded in 1887 as a secret political association, nominally to embrace "all who will be true Americans, irrespective of race, color, creed, original nationality, or previous conditions of life," but actually to curb the power of the Catholic Church in America. In its high-sounding declaration of principles the animus of the association is revealed in holding "that support of any ecclesiastical power of non-American character which claims higher sovereignty than that of the United States, is irreconcilable with American citizenship"; and in its protest "against the employment of the subjects of any un-American ecclesiastical power as officers or teachers of our public schools." Bowers, who founded the Association, explained its purpose in these words: "The chief idea we had in view in the constitution was this: that we had no right under the Constitution of this country to oppose any religious body on account of its dogmatic views, faith, etc., but we did believe we had a right to oppose it when it became a great political factor. We believed then and we believe now that every man in this country has a right to worship God according to the dictates of his conscience, but we did not believe that the Constitution intended to convey the right to any set of men to control and manipulate the political affairs of this country to the aggrandizement of any ecclesiastical power." - Malcolm Townsend: Handbook of United States Political History, pp. 152–153.

The A. P. A. rapidly gained a large membership and for a brief time was a terrifying bogey to timorous politicians, but it never exerted any political power and soon collapsed, an exotic that could find no nourishment in the soil of America, which nurtures every liberal idea, no matter how preposterous, but breeds no bigotry.

The Know-Nothing Party, formed in 1852, was avowedly opposed to Romanism and in favor of the election to public office of none but nativeborn Americans. It existed for four years, and during that time exerted considerable political influence.

nant religion, later Catholics were sorely persecuted; the Church of England, that afterwards was to be more powerful than any other creed, was, in the first years, surpassed in wealth and the number of its communicants by noncomformism, and as late as 1677 there were only three Anglican clergymen in the colony, and the few churches were without endowment and had to rely on the uncertain generosity of their congregations for the support of their ministers. In the House of Burgesses a few years before three quarters of the members were Puritans. They had come from Massachusetts as well as Virginia, and were in numbers sufficient to establish a community of their own at Ann Arundel.1 Maryland, it is true, was a Catholic colony, but the influence of the Puritans was strong, and it was this coexistence of sects and creeds that differentiated Maryland from Virginia and Massachusetts and brought a new element to form the American character.

The men who first planted Maryland were made of better stuff than the neighboring Virginians, and in this as in so many other things Baltimore showed his sound sense and his wide vision, and probably he was able to profit by the experience of the Virginia Company. The scum of the jails and the slums was not gathered up to be thrown down in Maryland, and inducements were offered to sound energetic men to start a new life. But Mary

1 Bozman: History of Maryland, vol. ii, p. 393.

1

land, to speak quite frankly, similar to all the other English possessions of that day, was regarded as a convenient place for the disposal of criminals, and to it convicts were sent in large numbers. "The number of convicts imported into Maryland before the revolution of 1776," Scharf tell us, "must have amounted to at least twenty thousand. From the year 1750 to 1770 not less than four to five hundred were annually brought into the province." This estimate is confirmed by other writers. The colonists bitterly resented that Maryland should be made a penal colony, and protests proving vain, acts were passed by the legislature prohibiting the importation of criminals, but these acts were declared void by the Crown. The legislature then resorted to the expedient of taxing criminals, under the clause of the charter which gave the colony the power to levy duties on imported merchandise, on the ground that as convicts were sold for service on their arrival in the colony, they were merchandise and not men, and subject to duty. But this construction of the charter the Crown overruled, and the practice of exporting criminals to Maryland as well as to other American colonies continued until the Revolution broke the power of England to make the New World a dumping-ground for its criminals and paupers. It is only proper to add, that while many of the criminals were felons, many were unfortunate rather than vicious; many had committed no greater

1 Scharf: op. cit., vol. i, p. 371.

offense than to fail in business; some were political prisoners who had plotted against the Crown or had been taken with arms in their hands. They were a mixed lot, not all bad, but few of them better than indifferent.

Climatically very similar to Virginia, and like Virginia with convenient water transportation making the laborious work of road-building unnecessary, the culture of tobacco was carried on in Maryland and was a source of great wealth, which required the use of African slaves and white indented servants. In Maryland as in Virginia, everywhere, in fact, where slavery became an institution, it put a stigma upon free labor and caused the free white man to lose his self-respect by being compelled to do work that was regarded as fit only for bondsmen belonging to an inferior race, or criminals who were made to labor in the fields as a punishment. With the growth of the colonies Maryland became a wheat-raising as well as a tobacco-growing province, and some of the largest landowners found it more profitable to turn their tobacco lands into wheat. Virginia always clung to tobacco and slavery; Maryland, as her wheat-fields multiplied and the export of flour became a profitable trade and Baltimore a port of first importance, was less dependent upon servile labor for her prosperity, which in time modified political views. Virginia after wavering threw in her lot with the other slaveholding states and joined the Confederacy; Mary