and unchanged throughout his life in the
political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen
of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar
self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to
learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely
personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind.
Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the
straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice,
and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local
management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells
us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of
lecturers to his brother John and himself. It was doubtless this fact
which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr.
Brownson which then began. His was the strongest purely human
influence, if we except his mother's, which Isaac Hecker ever knew.
And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to
compare them with each other.

________________________

CHAPTER III

THE TURNING-POINT

A BRIEF consideration at this point of a certain permanent tendency
of Father Hecker's mind will be of present and future value to the
student of his life. It has been said already that he never changed
the principles he had adopted as a lad among the apprentices and
journeymen of New York; principles which, for all social politics, he
summarized in the homely expression, "I am always for the under dog."
Thus, in the article quoted in the preceding chapter, he had the
right to say of himself and his associates:

"We were guileless men absorbed in seeking a solution for the
problems of life. Nor, as social reformers at least, were we given
over to theories altogether wrong. The constant recurrence of similar
epochs of social agitation since then, and the present enormous
development of the monopolies which we resisted in their very
infancy, show that our forecast of the future was not wholly
visionary. The ominous outlook of popular politics at the present
moment plainly shows that legislation such as we then proposed, and
such as was then within the easy reach of State and national
authority, would have forestalled difficulties whose settlement at
this day threatens a dangerous disturbance of public order."

We dwell on his political consistency, however, only because it
affords an evidence of t