r The Catholic Democracy of America,64 - Digital Repository Services

10 Romani Catholicism in America.
United States whether his ancestors were British or Batavian,
Teutonic or Scandinavian, whether his religion be Papist or
Presbyterian, Episcopalian or Methodist, and the members of
the Roman Catholic Church throughout the Union are stamped
with unmistakable national characteristics as were the baseball-playing
seminarists in the Pamphilj Doria gardens.
Almost fifty years have passed since Macaulay wrote:
" There is not and there never was on earth a work of human
policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic
Church." In the interval, the Holy See has lost its sovereignty
over a strip of Italian territory: the troops of the Empire
which was the bastard offspring of the French Revolution no
longer garrison the Castle of St. Angelo, but the Church, if
it has lost the temporal sway of a province, has gained spiritual
dominion all over the face of the earth, and that by the indirect
agency of the chief Protestant race of the world.
That the Anglo-Saxon is the most vigorous race which the
world has ever seen is shown by the ease with which it is
imposing the English language on all peoples with which it
intermingles—not by conquest, as in the case of some of the
Roman colonies, not by penal coercion, as in that of the French
Huguenots at the Cape, whose language was stamped out
by the Boers, but simply by contact. The American nation
affords the great exemplification of this process. In the British
Empire it is being carried out, though less conspicuously, but
in the United States, where probably less than one-half of
the inhabitants are of purely British descent, it is so complete
that the grandchildren of Germans who spoke no word of
English will talk to an Englishman of the Elizabethan literature
as " our common inheritance." It may be urged that the
Irish Catholics have done as much as the Anglo-Saxons in
making English the lingua franca of half the world's surface.
This is in a sense true, but the Irish are not, strictly speaking,
a colonizing race. The Irish like the Germans, are splendid
settlers, and Greater Britain would have been a comparatively
small domain without their prolific aid; but since the days