These and other reflections are suggested by the perusal of a pamphlet, a sort of campaign document, issued by the "New York City Council of Political Reform," first published in 1872, and thought to be of consequence enough to be reissued in the present year of grace 1873. This document contains among others a report entitled "Sectarian Appropriations of Public Money." The very title of this report at once alarms and arouses us. We are alarmed at the dangers that menace, and we are aroused to defend, our rights as Americans. In this defence we invoke the genius of liberty and the spirit of "equal rights," and shall fight under the "Stars and Stripes," the flag of freedom, till we succeed in repelling the open as well as insidious assaults of the enemies of that truth which only can make us FREE.
The ostensible and praiseworthy purpose of the pamphlet in question is to expose the frauds upon the city treasury perpetrated by the late "Tammany Ring," which, in the person of the "boss thief of the world," is now on trial, in a sort, before the courts, charged with _robbery_, _theft_, and _perjury_, but the real purpose, the iniquitous and damnable purpose, is intimated in the following words of the report upon "Sectarian Appropriations, etc.": "Over $2,273,231 taken from the treasury in 1869, 1870, 1871. One sect gets in cash $1,915,456 92; besides public land, $3,500,000. Total to a single sect, $5,415,456 92." And further (on page 10 of the same report): "Nearly $2,000,000 of the money raised by taxes abstracted from the public treasury of the city and county of New York in the last three years alone for sectarian uses. A single sect gets $1,396,388 51, besides a large slice of the city's real estate."
This "sect" means the Catholic Americans of the city of New York, in numbers somewhere about 500,000, or nearly half the population of the city; of whom we are told elsewhere in this same report (page 4) that, "as a sect," it has during the last three years, _by an alliance with the Tammany Ring drawn_ (taken, abstracted) _from the public treasury, in cash, for the support of its convents, churches, cathedrals, church schools, and asylums, the enormous sum of_ $1,396,388 51.