Moreover, their protest against the bill implies a distrust of their own church people that will prove embarrassing to the leaders if persisted in. Since the teaching of the church is against the use of contraceptive knowledge, are the leaders to announce thus publicly that they have so little faith in the efficacy of church teaching and so little trust in the moral rectitude of the church members that they would wish to invoke the arm of the law to keep the people in ignorance. If the church people can not be assumed to have the loyalty and strength to live up to their own beliefs, it is surely stretching the bounds of reasonableness for the Catholic leaders to suggest that the non-Catholic population, which is five-sixths of the whole, should go without this knowledge in order to protect the Catholics from their own weakness. The inappropriateness of the Catholic attitude is well brought out by the following excerpts from a recent letter from a member of our league to the chairman of the Senate Sub-committee of the Judiciary: “You would not agree that, at the behest of the Methodists, or the Elks, or the Young Men’s Hebrew Association there should be passed a Federal law to apply to the whole American public, which law represented merely a belief. You can not then, believe that a law should fail to pass merely because it does not accord with the Catholic belief. A law, being a rule of action, should not stand for what is simply an article of faith. The Cummins-Vaile Bill does not enjoin any action or the refraining from any action. It simply will give legal status to certain scientific knowledge and means which are now proscribed. No one will be compelled to learn the knowledge; no one will be compelled to use the means. No belief will be interfered with; no rule of action will be laid down. The principle of making laws to satisfy a religious group, crystallizing religious beliefs into rules of action for all the people, went out of this Government with the adoption of the United States Constitution.” Various inaccuracies in Miss Laughlin’s statements regarding the publications of the Voluntary Parenthood League were answered at the Hearing, but that part of the report is not germane to the subject of this book, except as to the correction on one point which led to a series of question and answers which give light on the working of the minds of some of the Committee.