The Intermountain Catholic. (Salt Lake City [Utah] ;) 1899-1920, 1902-11-08

spirit of the papal recommendations
and constitutions than any other nation
on EARTH
How do you account for that, seeing
that the country has always been most
thoroughly anti-papal?" inquired Dick.
The answer given leads the conversa-
ton following:
CONVERSATION VIII (Continued1
by the fact that our institutions
originated with the people. whose DO
llt1cal common sense had been formed
by the papal instructions and teachings
Tor over a thousand years These in
structions were all favorable to the
people, to liberty, and to good order,
and were generally displeasing to au-
thor1ty, and rejected by it. They sunk
INTO the hearts of the people, and be-
came their doctrine in distinction from
the doctrine of the court, and too often
of courtly prelates. The liberty we en-
JOY goes back to old Anglo-Saxon
| times-times never really forgotten by
the English people. Always, after the
Conquest, it is, in the struggle with
| the Norman rulers, a demand for the
revival of Anglo-Saxon laws, the laws
OF Edward the Confessor, as they were
called, because he was the last of the
Anglo-SaXon kings. The memory of
these laws, with the great principles
asserted by the sovereign pontiffs. sur
v1ved in the minds and hearts of the
English people down to the time when
our ancestors emigrated to this western
hemisphere, and formed. as it were.
their civil and political common sense
why then do you not place more
confidence in the people?"
Il would if the people were now what
they were then. But the people, dur
ing the last seventy years, have been
corrupted, and induced to abandon
| their Evolutionary common sense for a
Jacobinical common sense which sup
poses the people are the original and
immediate source of power, and that
| their innate wisdom is always to be
| regarded as the wisdom of God. from
which there is no appeal. Yet it is not
| the people themselves that l distrusr.
When they are well informed and not
misled by miserable sophists and dem
agogues, l have great reliance on their
good sense, and a very high respect
for their decisions. The people at the
epoch of our revolution were much
more trustworthy than were their rul-
ers, and would be. now, if they had not
been too much fattered, and made to
is to extend popular liberty, instead of
preserving it, Having been made, to a
fearful extent, to believe that their Sc
curity is in charging the popular basis
of our institutions, they have become
fit tools for pushing liberty to license,
and of substituting the mob for the
| state, the caucus for the convention
And Vince hope you remedy?"
Through the peole themselves, if you
will, listening to wiser counsels and re-
covering their former good sense. The
first thing to be done is to brand with
infamy the political atheism so boldly
preached by tyrannical courts, and so
tiercely and widely propagated by med
ern revolutioIists, and enable the peo-
pie to understand and feel that they
hold their power as a trust, and are
as much bound to conform to the law
of God in their collective as in their in
] dividual capacity. The next thing for
them to understand is that a check on
the power of the political sovereign,
whether the sovereign be the will of the
| one, the few or the many, is absolutely
essential alike to good government and
to liberty, and therefore that they must
| abdicate their own fancied omnipotence
and consent to wholesale restraints
even on their own power. They must
learn that it is an evil ito govern too
much. as well as to govern too little,
and that a broad margin should always
be left to the individual. We must
have a free government, that is, a gov
eminent that respects the freedom of
the individual and leaves him, not
merely free to do good, but even free
to do evil. Where the government ex-
tends its supervision over every act
of mans life. and leaves him scope only
to do good, it exerts a most pernicious
influence; it strikes a blow at all free
and vigorous action and reduces the
whole population to a state of torpor.
Under such paternal government all
stagnates and becomes putrid, as we
see in the despotic east. There is no
manliness, no vigor, no heroic activity
We are all, except in commerce, trade
and industry, fast approaching such a
state of things by the tyranny of pub
lie and sectarian opinion, and in our at
tempts at sumptuary legislation. If
the legislature does not soon and firmly