Probably these more ulterior aims of their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of those who followed them.

Yet the genesis of the present purely secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property, and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at large.

It is fair to predict that this generation, or another which shall succeed it, will yet have the good sense to regret, and the courage to atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church, and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of Christianity in deterring them from it.
Father Hecker's account of his own youthful connection with the "Workingman's Democracy," although written with the direct intention of placing his estimate of Dr.Brownson on record, has too many strictly autobiographic touches in it to be here omitted.

Such passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished.

The five articles on Dr.Brownson, beginning in _The Catholic World_ of April, 1887, and concluding in November of the same year, contain almost the only matters relative to his personal history which he ever put into print.