Our Irish-American fellow-citizens gave concern to many. One complaint was that they brought hither their anti-English prejudices, by the loud and continual assertion of which they tended ever to embroil us with England. There proved to be slight danger from this source, particularly after the rise of a powerful pro-Irish sentiment and party among the English themselves. Others had great fear of the Irish as Catholics, they being the chief representatives of that faith in the United States. The growth of the Roman Catholic Church in our borders was certainly very rapid. An American clergyman, McCloskey, was made Cardinal in 1875. A University, subject to the Catholic Church was erected in Washington. Catholicism in America was no longer a mission church as it had been until quite recently, but had a full national organization as in the other great nations of the earth. A strong movement was developed among the Catholic clergy against our common schools as usually administered. Parochial schools were erected in most Eastern cities and large towns, and efforts made to fill them with children who, but for their existence, would be in the public schools. Public schools were denounced as godless because they did not, as of course they could not, give positive religious instruction. This opposition was doubtless a menace to our time-honored and on the whole very efficient school system, so that what the future of this was to be no one could confidently predict. It was to be remarked, however, that some of the warmest defenders of the public schools appeared in the Catholic ranks; nor was there any evidence that, as a class, American citizens of Irish birth and descent prized the free institutions of this nation a whit less than the rest of the people. A greater peril beset the nation in the decay which slowly crept over our family life. The family has in every civilized age been justly regarded as the pillar of the state, but the integrity which it possessed among our fathers, their children invaded in many ways. Mormonism, decadent if not dead, about which so much had been said, was but one of these, and perhaps not the worst. If crimes of a violent nature were becoming less frequent, crimes against chastity were on the increase. Easy divorce was considerably responsible for this. The diversity of marriage and divorce laws in the various States was a great abomination. How to remedy it did not appear. Many called for a constitutional amendment, lodging solely in Congress the power of making laws upon this vital subject.