convention of 1787, there were only about 25,000 avowed Catholics in the whole Union. To-day they number 17,000,000. More than one-third of all who now attend Christian churches in the United States are Roman Catholics. The Catholic Church has several times as many members as any other religious denomination. The figures in the state of New York show that about 65 per cent., nearly two-thirds, of all regular attendants at Christian churches, are Roman Catholics, and that the remaining attendants are divided among many separate Protestant denominations. Hence the correctness of the assertion that the Catholic religion is the great religion of this country. It is true and should be added that Catholics hope that the day will come when the people of all denominations will more adequately appreciate the fact that religious instruction tends to promote the best and the most loyal citizenship, that the Catholic parochial schools are, therefore, rendering a public service, and that as such they should be allotted a reasonable part of the public educational fund raised from general taxation, measured by and limited to the actual saving to that fund, provided also that a required standard of education be maintained. In England, for example, the Catholic parochial schools receive grants of public moneys if they fulfil certain conditions of efficiency in secular instruction, staff qualification and equipment, and the extent of these grants is approximately the actual saving to the public fund. In the Catholic diocese of Long Island, in which we live, there are now over 68,000 children being educated in the Catholic schools and colleges, and in Greater New York there are more than 130,000 children attending the parochial schools. All these children would have to be educated in the public schools and at the expense of the taxpayers if the Catholic schools did not educate them, and this Catholic education involves an immense direct saving to the public school fund. Statistics recently submitted to the Constitutional Convention sitting at Albany showed that the immediate saving to the city of New York alone from the parochial schools was fully $7,500,000 per annum, and that not one penny of this saving was being contributed by the city or the state to the cost of educating and training these Catholic children. Consequently, it is not unreasonable to believe that justice and tolerance will finally prevail, and that the day will come when it will be recognized as equitable and as a wise and enlightened public policy to provide that whenever any denomination, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, is, in addition to giving religious instruction, educating and training large numbers of children according to satisfactory secular standards and tests, and is thereby relieving the public educational fund, every such denominational school should be granted out of the public funds some part of the actual saving so made, because it is rendering a public service.