194 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS of the United States, but I have no doubt that, with God's blessing, these will be settled by the calm judgment and sound sense of the American people, without violence or revolution, or any injury to individual right. ' ' These sentences sound rather conmionplace to us and they were the merest matter of fact to the speaker, for he had always entertained and had often expressed the same senti- ments before, but they were sensationally new to Some and to all Europe. Educated only in the philosophy of monarchy, the European mind regarded the American polity as a wild experiment that must sooner or later result in failure. Sep- aration of Church and State was thought to be an impossible condition for both institutions. And here was a man, at once a cardinal and a plain American, proclaiming in the very heart of Christendom and in the face of royalty the greatness of the Western Republic and defending for that nation the relation between Church and State that obtained there. They knew enough concerning the character of the witness to understand that his testimony was worthy of consideration. Thus Car- dinal Gibbons may be said to have offered, however uninten- tional it may have been, to the centuried wisdom of the old- world peoples the first effective suggestion that they might learn something from the practical philosophy of young America. Often since then has the Cardinal had occasion to publish to foreign peoples the merit of our institutions, with the result that he is regarded abroad as one of the best repre- sentatives of the principles, life and spirit of the American nation. It was also on this first trip to Rome after his elevation to the cardinalate that Cardinal Gibbons endeared himself to the great army of workingmen as **the champion of labor*' in preventing the condemnation by the Church of the Ejiights of Labor. In the years following the Civil War the conflict between capital and labor speedily developed to an acute stage. The workingmen were compelled by conditions to organize themselves in a struggle for the protection of their rights against the power and greed of monopolistic industry. Most important among the numerous associations that were formed
