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

The Catholic Democracy of America, 66
tradition left them by Archbishop Carroll. There was Bishop
England, the first Bishop of Charleston, who from the outset
of his labors in the Slave States was marked as the ablest prelate
of his day, and is still remembered as " the light of the
American hierarchy." There was Bishop Dubois, the third
incumbent of the see of New York, who, strangely enough,
was a schoolfellow of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, a
brave old Frenchman who, waging war against the trustee
system in the administration of the churches, was threatened
at the age of eighty with the loss of his stipend, and replied,
" Gentlemen, you may vote me a salary or not; I need little;
I can live in a basement or a garret, but whether I come up
from my basement or down from my garret, I shall still be
your bishop." Dr. Hughes, his successor, was the first Archbishop
of New York, and was such a conspicuous figure in
American public life that, prior to the war with Mexico, the
Cabinet at Washington urged him to accept the post of minister
to that country, and towards the end of his life he
accepted a temporary mission to France during the War of
Secession. It was his successor, Archbishop McCloskey, who
was the first American citizen to be invested with a cardinal's
hat. Then there wis Archbishop Kenrick, the sixth in the
see of Baltimore, whose finished scholarship did not make him
the less efficient to rule the diocese of Philadelphia before his
elevation to the primacy in the troublous period we have mentioned.
The funeral of his predecessor—Archbishop Eccleston—was
followed by the President of the United States and
his Cabinet, at the very time when the Prime Minister of
England—Lord John Russell—was passing his Papa! Aggression
Bill. One word of mention should be made of John
Fitzpatrick, the young New Englander, who was consecrated
a boy-bishop, and who, not long before his premature death,
when the news cataetjf the firing on Fort Sumter, was the first
of the Boston clergy to order that all the churches should be kept
open for prayers for the Union. The civil war was a trying
experience for the Catholic Church, but though " Maryland,