adds: "It is just possible that, if he will pay any attention to the teachings of history, he may find food for meditation in the system on which the Propaganda Fide and the English College at St. Omers [Jesuit College] were recruited during their best years. The latter school (now Stonyhurst) kept the English Catholics loyal English Gentlemen during the worst times of the Penal Laws. Many of them accompanied James II. into his exile at St. Germain, but it would be hard to find one who held a commission, as the Irish and Scotch exiles did, in the French service, when France was at war with his own country. We had no Regiment de Howard firing on the English Guards at Fontenoy, as the Regiment de Dillon did, and Wellington's chief secret agent in Spain was a Stonyhurst boy."[1]
The whole history of the Society refutes the imputation of want of patriotism. Is it not significant that the two shrewdest monarchs of the eighteenth century, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Catharine II. of Russia, protected the Jesuits? Would they have done so if there had existed even the slightest doubt about their patriotism? And, as to France, Dr. Huber admits that "the greatest generals, as Condé, Bouillon, Rohan, Luxembourg, Montmorency, Villars, and Broglie, have come from the schools of Jesuits."[2] The same may be said of many great men in Austria, Bavaria, and other countries where the Jesuits conducted schools. Also in the nineteenth century their patriotism has been publicly acknowledged. We quote the words addressed to the Jesuits