I declared: "I have no patience or tolerance with the spirit which would excite religious strife.

There, briefly but still more emphatically, I called upon the people not to revive the bitter memories of ancient, social and religious strife.

You seem to be a well-meaning and intelligent man; yet I am amazed that any well-meaning and intelligent man should believe such stuff as you repeat in your letter of August 3.

The whole thing is a miserable lie and invention made out of whole cloth.

What I said was: "We are confronted with a public danger which comes from an attempt to rouse the old feelings of the dark ages, and which ought to have ended with them, between men who have different forms of faith.

It is an attempt to recall on one side the cruelties of the Catholic Church and to frighten old women of both sexes, and, on the other side, to band the men of the Catholic Church together for political action.

There is not a man in Massachusetts who has more at heart the welfare and perpetuity of our system of free common schools than I have.

I drew and had put in the platform of the Republican State Convention the following resolution: "The Republican Party ever has maintained and ever will maintain and defend, the common schools of Massachusetts as the very citadel of…

They shall be kept open to all the children and free from all partisan and sectarian control.

And I stand by the further doctrine, as I stated at length in my address at Clark University, that the whole resources of the Commonwealth are pledged to their support, and that that is the bottom mortgage on every dollar of our property…

I want them to send their children to the public schools, to pay their share of the cost, and when their young men and women are suitable, are intelligent, liberal persons, attached to the school system, I want some of them to be employed…

I don't wish to exclude them from my political support when they are Republicans and agree with me in other matters, because of their religious faith.

Further, I want to state and advocate my opinions in the face of day, and you may be sure that I shall do this without flinching before anybody's threats or anybody's displeasure or indignation.

I think your method would overthrow the common school system, would overthrow the Republican Party, and would end by massing together all the Catholic voters, as proscription always does mass men together, to increase and strengthen that…

Let the Union flag be wrapped around me and a fold of it laid under my head." I feel proud that God gave me such a man to be my countryman and townsman.

I have very little respect for the Americanism that is not moved and stirred by such a story.

You think the way to make good citizens and good men of them and to attract them to Protestantism, is to exclude them, their sons and daughters, from all public employment and to go yourself into a dark cellar and curse at them through the…

I don't think you will succeed in getting any considerable number of the people of this country, who are able to read and write, or to count ten on their fingers, to believe that, as I am entering my seventieth year, I am actuated by any…

If you know as little of your Catholic fellow citizens as you know of me, you have a good deal as yet to learn of the subject of which you are speaking.

We desire, above all things, the maintenance of the principles of civil and religious liberty; and above all other instrumentalities to that end, the maintenance of our common school system, at the public charge, open to all the children…

If you and I differ, it is only as to what is the best means of accomplishing these ends.

I think your method will result in driving and compacting together, in solid mass, persons who will soon number nearly or quite fifty per cent. of the voting population of Massachusetts.

Nothing strengthens men, nothing makes them so hard to hear reason, nothing so drives them to extremity in opinion or in action as persecution or proscription.

On the other hand, my method is the method of absolute freedom and of pure reason.

The Catholic boy, who has grown up in our common schools, who had formed his youthful friendships with his Protestant classmates, whose daughter or sister, as he grows older, is employed as a teacher, will very soon be attached to our…