The Bill of Rights, passed at the Revolution of 1688, assumes it as the clear duty of the subjects "to vindicate and assert their ancient rights and liberties." The Act of Settlement declares that "the laws of England are the birthright of the people thereof."
The correspondence and analogy between the principles of the great charter, together with its successive commentaries and confirmations, and those upon which the American Revolution rests, are obvious and striking. We may particularly instance the royal infringements upon the rights of the colonists, in refusing assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary to the public good; keeping up standing armies in time of peace without the consent of the legislature; affecting to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power; quartering armed troops upon the inhabitants; imposing taxes upon them without their consent; depriving them, in many cases, of the benefit of trial by jury; and altering fundamentally the form of their government.
Without a basis of right principle, the American Revolution would have been a rebellion against legitimate authority, and the people would have been deprived of that rectitude of conscience which bore them through the war; they would have been demoralized by the overthrow of their inbred loyalty, without which no free government is secure. If there was not a violation of conscience in withdrawing their allegiance to the British crown, it was because they had sovereign rights which were above that allegiance. It was because there was a Magna Charta which, in the words of Coke, "would brook no sovran." The contest was for those transmitted liberties which the American people claimed as a birthright under the British Constitution. Nearly six centuries divide 1776 from 1215; but the gulf is spanned by that arch of immortal principles which was projected by Cardinal Stephen Langton and his Catholic compeers in the meadow of Runnymede.
In violating the unity of Christendom in the sixteenth century, England thus outraged the national conscience, and her disloyalty to the truth that she had inherited for a thousand years was followed by the oppression of her colonies, which finally led to their separation from her. There was this great principle involved in that contest, and this great difference in favor of the colonists: England oppressed them, from her want of Catholic guidance and restraint and the observance of her own organic principle; they resisted her on that basis of public right, and loyalty, and reason, which had been embedded in the English Constitution by their common Catholic ancestry. Not for the defence only of those rights, but for the knowledge of them—for their very existence—were our ancestors indebted to the Roman Catholic religion.
Upon the traditional laws and free principles of the English Constitution, we have erected an unrivalled system of order and right, while in English hands they have degenerated into a scheme of legalized oppression which is without a parallel among nations claiming to be free. Providence, acting on events, has so disposed them that England's persecution of the faith has transferred the Catholic population from that country to this, where with the language are found also the true tradition and the just development of the English Catholic constitution.
What is wanted to the perfection of American nationality is a firm moral, that is, religious foundation. It is easily susceptible of proof that no strong nationality has ever subsisted without such a basis. I do not, of course, limit the proposition to the Christian religion. But the foundation must be the more stable as the religion which underlies and props it is nearer to a conformity with unmixed truth. The first step in our career of greatness was to turn from England and to advance toward that unity which she had abandoned—when we seized upon the traditional Catholic principles and defended them against her attempted despotism. The true course of our national welfare and security lies still in the same direction—toward unity, and toward the Catholic Church. For what is to supply the spiritual needs of this young, and energetic, and glorious people? Surely not these transmitted and transplanted heresies which have passed into their decline and are tottering in their dotage. The creed which might answer for some bounded island, a petty electorate, or a mountain canon, is too narrow for this continental power, which needs a religion confederate as its own union and wide as the expansion of its own domain.
We have here many difficult and dividing moral questions already pressing for a solution. The fusion of the Caucasian tribes—already harmonized by the Catholic traditions, and never very remotely divided by characteristics—will probably serve but as the origination of a superior race: at least physiological laws give no ground to fear a deterioration. But we have here a numerous distinct race which must ever remain distinct, and which increases more rapidly than the white population.
I am not aware that history furnishes an instance of the just reconciliation of two distinctly different races of men upon the same soil, except by the aid of the Catholic religion. In Mexico and in South America the Catholic religion is establishing such a reconciliation, and it is the only harmonizing element in those societies.
It is impossible to say what peaceful solution of the problem will be reached here; but the ultimate destiny of the African blood planted and rooted on this soil will be either adjudicated upon Catholic principles, or else philanthropic theories, veil them as we may, will apply to the evil the remedy still worse of civil war. Questions like this demand a guide to conscience and a clear and uniform exposition of moral obligations.