Note 321:2 — Chapter XVIII

The subject is reviewed in detail, from opposite points of view, by Bishop O'Gorman, pp. 489-500, and by Dr. Daniel Dorchester, "Christianity in the United States," pp. 618-621. One of the most recent estimates is that presented to the Catholic Congress at Chicago, in 1893, in a remarkable speech by Mr. M. T. Elder, of New Orleans. Speaking of "the losses sustained by the church in this country, placed by a conservative estimate at twenty millions of people, he laid the responsibility for this upon neglect of immigration and colonization, i.e., neglect of the rural population. From this results a long train of losses." He added: "When I see how largely Catholicity is represented among our hoodlum element, I feel in no spread-eagle mood. When I note how few Catholics are engaged in honestly tilling the honest soil, and how many Catholics are engaged in the liquor traffic, I cannot talk buncombe to anybody. When I reflect that out of the 70,000,000 of this nation we number only 9,000,000, and that out of that 9,000,000 so large a proportion is made up of poor factory hands, poor mill and shop and mine and railroad employees, poor government clerks, I still fail to find material for buncombe or spread-eagle or taffy-giving. And who can look at our past history and feel proud of our present status?" He advocated as a remedy for this present state of things a movement toward colonization, with especial attention to extension of educational advantages for rural Catholics, and instruction of urban Catholics in the advantages of rural life. "For so long as the rural South, the pastoral West, the agricultural East, the farming Middle States, remain solidly Protestant, as they now are, so long will this nation, this government, this whole people, remain solidly Protestant" ("The World's Parliament of Religions," pp. 1414, 1415).

It is a fact not easy to be accounted for that the statistics of no Christian communion in America are so defective, uncertain, and generally unsatisfactory as those of the most solidly organized and completely systematized of them all, the Roman Catholic Church.