and the care and expense of bringing up and providing for a large family of children with the poor-have, to an almost incredible extent, smothered the maternal instinct, and made the prevention of conception, and fœticide, almost general. We no longer meet with those large families of ten, a dozen, or even a score of children, not unfrequently met with two or three generations back. But for the influx of foreigners-with whom our practices, vices, and crimes, have not yet obtained-the census in the older states, instead of an increase, would show an actual decrease of population. This is the testimony of medical men, who have made the subject a special study.

Children with the rich, the well-to-do, and the fashionable, interfere with the mother's pleasures and dissipations; and with the working classes they are a real burden, for the habits and sentiments of American society, are such, especially in cities and large towns, that children cannot, as a general rule, be brought up to work, and to assist their parents in obtaining by their industry an honest livelihood. We have by our factory system and cash payments, broken up and destroyed. the "home industry," by which each family produced and manufactured for itself-say, nineteen out of every twenty articles it consumed. Children now will not work, they cannot be made to work; they will run away from home first, and live in the streets or dens by thieving, and form a numerous criminal population for the correctional police, for our penitentiaries, and prisons, the number and magnitude of which is one of the striking features of the land, especially in the eastern and middle, and the earlier-settled western states.

It needs no argument to prove that a republic with these vices and crimes, to say nothing of the dishonesty and fraud in the business world, the untrustworthiness and rascality of men in official life, preying on its vitals, and corrupting its life at its very source, cannot stand. The life of a nation is gone when the purity and the sanctity, the sacredness and inviolability of the family, are no longer maintained, and children are counted a nuisance instead of a blessing. Perhaps no one thing has done so much to corrupt our republic, and to bring it to the verge of ruin, as the abolition of marriage as a religious institution, a sacrament of the New Law under the regulation and supervision of the spiritual authority, and declaring it a simple civil contract, subject to the civil authority alone, and while that civil authority acts independently of the spiritual order. It is corrupting, not only our

own country, but all Europe, except so far as the church is able to arrest its ravages among the faithful. These vices are not peculiar to republicanism, but do and will obtain under any political system that claims to be independent of the spiritual authority.

The state can apply no remedy, and is impotent to arrest the evil that threatens its very existence, because the state here depends on the people, and it is the people themselves, as I have said, that are in fault. A popular government, like ours, can be only the exponent of the popular will and sentiments, only of the virtues and vices of the people. When the people have cast off the law of God, are carried away by false notions and morally destructive theories, and have become corrupt in both theory and practice, the government, holding as it does from them, is necessarily impotent to reform them, to recall them to truth and virtue, and maintain among them the supremacy of right and justice. The American state, if separated from the church of God, assumes the divinity of the people, puts them in the place of the church, and supposes them to be both infallible and impeccable; which, unhappily, is by no means the fact, whatever the demagogues may say in order to deceive them. The people are no more infallible or impeccable collectively, than men and women are individually.

To appeal from the state or government to the people, as our journals do, is absurd; for not only are the people in fault, but in a democracy they are themselves the state, and the government is always as wise, pure, just, and virtuous as they are, and not seldom even more so. To appeal from it to them may be to appeal from the higher to the lower, but never from the lower to the higher. The constitution, and even the laws are far better with us than the people; and it is only the laws demanded by the people or the dominant public sentiment, that are unwise, unjust, corrupt, and corrupting. The constitution. and the common law, as we have seen, recognize the supremacy of the spiritual order and the subordination of the temporal. But the people, led away by their passions, by greedy or ambitious demagogues, and by the various sects into which they are divided, which hold from and are sustained by them, and which, therefore, are themselves in the temporal order, and in no sense represent the spiritual order, or have any spiritual authority, will not suffer the state to keep in its action within its own order or constitutional limits, within which it is independent and supreme,-for though its order is

subordinated to the spiritual, yet within its order it has no superior, but constantly force it to usurp spiritual functions, to define and apply the law of God for itself, by its own authority alone, and thus to violate both civil and religious liberty.

At the moment I am writing, the various sects constituting the majority-and that the ruling majority of the American people-forgetful of the fundamental law of the state, are banding together, and using all the means in their power to force the government, under one pretext or another, to usurp spiritual functions and to assert the supremacy of the temporal in face of the spiritual. Such is the movement to amend the constitution of the United States, so as to give the sects authority ultimately to establish their religion, and to disfranchise and outlaw all who refuse to accept it. Such is the new movement for a national compulsory system of education, which will necessarily be either sectarian or purely secular; in either case, an unchristian education. Such also is their effort to sustain in each of the states public schools at the public expense, to which a respectable minority cannot with a good conscience send their children. They strive to give the state absolute control over the education of the young, trusting themselves to be able always to control the state. The supremacy of the temporal is their principle; for they, counting for nothing in the spiritual order, have, and can have, only temporal authority.

The remedy for the vices of our democratic society, the most generally approved, is education. But the people cannot educate above their own level; and whether they will or not, the education they give through the state will only reproduce themselves, and be marred by their own vices and errors. The majority of the American people will sustain only sectarian or secular schools, and in such schools they can really educate only for the secular order, and train children and youth either in a false religion or in no religion at all, and therefore to be either fanatics or atheists. The stream cannot rise above the fountain, and you cannot get from the people what is not in them. Education can aid in remedying the evils, if it be under the direction of the church of God, and educate the child in reference to the end for which God makes us, and fit him for the performance of his duties in life, and for immortality. But, after all, it is but little that education can do-even the best education possible-in a corrupt society. Children are not educated in the schoolroom

alone. They are educated in the bosom of the family; in the streets; by the general tone of the society in which they are brought up; by their companions and associates. The general character and conduct of the pupils of our parochial schools, and the students and graduates of our Catholic colleges, are hardly above those of the pupils of the public. schools, or the students and graduates of non-Catholic colleges; and when they grow up and enter political life, are rarely distinguishable from them. This shows that character is formed far less in the schoolroom, and by tutors and professors, than by the general tone and character of the society in which children are brought up; which, in turn, shows that the tone and character of society are not to be changed. by education. They must be corrected before the edu cation can be made what it should be. Education, then, is not, and cannot be, the remedy, nor supply it. In a country like ours, which is almost completely secularized, the reliance must be on the missionary rather than the school

master.

The constitution of the American state needs no change; nor do the laws, with very few exceptions (chiefly those relating to marriage and divorce), need much alteration. What the state needs, is a spiritual authority above and independent of it, competent to define what are or are not the rights of men, that is, the rights of God, and to enforce through the conscience of the people respect for them and obedience to them. If the American people had been Catholics, Catholic in principle as well as in name, papists, and not simply citizens who hold politics are independent of religion and not subject to the law of God, they would never have compelled nor suffered the state to usurp spiritual functions; and few, if any of the evils that impair the efficiency of our government, even threaten the very existence of the civil and religious liberty it professes to guaranty, could ever have occurred. Neither secularism nor sectarianism could have controlled legislation. The state would have confined itself to its own order, and taken the definition of the rights and powers of the spiritual order from the church.

For a Catholic people recognizing the supremacy of the spiritual order and the church as its representative in human affairs, a republican government is a good government; perhaps the wisest and best of all possible governments. But without the Catholic Church, as the church of the people,

to supply the power which the constitution presupposes or needs to secure its practical efficiency, it is, as our American experiment is proving, an impracticable government; is, as I maintained thirty years ago in the Democratic Review, tantamount to no government at all. Under a democracy the people govern; but what governs the people? What prevents the people from willing and enacting injustice, or the special interests of certain classes from controlling or misleading the people and their representatives, and making the government their factor as is really the case already in our republic? The government with us is controlled by special interests, and really taxes the whole people for the special benefit of the few, in violation of all right and equity.

It is a commonplace, and has been from the beginning, with our statesmen, that our republic cannot stand without the intelligence of the people, nor with it even, without religion and morality. But a religion or a morality, that holds from the people and varies as their opinions vary, is only their view of religion and morality, and is no power independent of them, and competent to control them, or to maintain for them the authority of the spiritual order. The religion or morality that can save republicanism by subjecting the people to the divine law, and through them force the government to govern in subordination to the spiritual order -that is, right, truth, and justice-must be from above, not from below; hold from God, not from the people; be independent of them, and govern them instead of being governed by them. It must be an organic power, a spiritual kingdom, with its own laws, discipline, and administrative organs, divinely instituted, supported, protected, and assisted; not a simple doctrine, idea, theory, view, or opinion, which has no life or force except what it derives from the subject believing or entertaining it. The only religion or morality of this sort that there is, or even claims to be, is the Catholic Church, of which the pope, successor of Peter, and vicar of Christ, is the supreme governor and infallible teacher. It is, therefore, I maintain, that without this One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, the church of the creed, as the church of the American people, or the major part of them, our republic cannot stand, or our civil and religious liberty be preserved.

The state is secular, and the secular, as we have seen, cannot stand on itself. It cannot any more exist without the