"No Interference"

Two figures study a posted broadsheet headed STATE COURT summarizing Parker v. Dufresne, a Holyoke, Massachusetts case in which hackman Joseph Parker sued Rev. André B. Dufresne—a French Catholic priest—for $10,000 after Dufresne used ecclesiastical authority to forbid parishioners from hiring Parker's carriages, apparently to punish a business rival he had excommunicated. The left figure, drawn as a rotund, robed cleric peering upward, carries the ethnic caricature then routinely applied to Catholic clergy in anti-clerical American illustration. On the left wall: Dufresne's original interdiction notice; on the right: a STATE LINE / EARTHLY HACK marker beside a wagon wheel. Nast's argument is jurisdictional: Judge Bacon's ruling, quoted at length, holds that American civil law recognizes no ecclesiastical power to destroy a private citizen's livelihood. Church authority stops at the church door.