Among the proposals to which I refer are those made in Oregon, California, Washington, Michigan and Alabama to restrict Catholic teaching and learning. The laws proposed have not attempted directly to prohibit Catholic schools, but they indirectly achieve that end, by compelling all children of certain ages to attend public schools during all the hours of all the school days through out the year. What is perhaps the most preposterous of these attempts, actually became law in Oregon in 1922. Its provisions are incredible to upholders of a supposedly free government. They create a Prussian type of surveillance and control over all private instruction, and empower a County School Superintendent, vested with absolutely autocratic authority from which there is no appeal, to decide whether such private instruction as may be allowed is being “properly” conducted and to compel children receiving such private instruction as he may disapprove to attend the public school in the district of their residence. Fortunately, protest against this outrageous law from Catholics and other citizens, has taken the questions to the courts. Equally fortunately, the Federal District Court in Oregon has pronounced against the law’s constitutionality. At Washington, it is the Sterling education bill at which lovers of our constitutional liberties, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, are looking askance as a possible gateway to Federal compulsion of public school attendance, or to other Federal interference with individual freedom in the acquisition of knowledge. In view of these legislative tendencies, then, and of the intolerant and lawless aggressiveness of certain groups which are violently anti-Catholic, and quite ready to translate their feelings into political control, may there not well be concern lest our guaranteed American freedom become a farce? This is no time then for thoughtful Catholics to take sides against freedom. They need it to protect their own rights. Am I wrong in thinking that, on sober thought, they will not wish to line up against a bill that makes a stand for the very principle that is most dear to them, namely, their right to knowledge of their own choosing? It has been generally assumed that Catholic Representatives, as such, will vote against the Cummins-Vaile Bill, which touches inferentially upon “birth control”; but will they, can they, when they reflect that this measure only seeks to repeal the same kind of pernicious legislation as now imperils the civil liberties of all of us, but Catholics in particular, in the matter of their schools and religious instruction? For these reasons I respectfully ask your judicial consideration of the above facts and those which follow, as they have a bearing on the decision to be made as to this bill by any Congressman who is at the same time a loyal Catholic and a conscientious legislator.