We are pointed to the vicious and criminal population of our cities, of which we furnish more than our due proportion, as a conclusive argument against the moral tendency of our religion, and a savage howl of indignation, that rings throughout the land, is set up against the legislature or the municipality that ventures to grant us the slightest aid in our struggles to protect our children from the dangers that beset them, though bearing no proportion to the aid granted to non-Catholics. Yet it is precisely to meet cases like ours that a public provision for education is needed and supposed to be made. Protestants make the great mistake of trying to cure the evil to which we refer by detaching our children from the church, and bringing them up bad Protestants, or without any religion. The thousand and one associations and institutions formed by Protestant zeal and benevolence for the reformation or the bringing up of poor Catholic children, and some of which go so far as to kidnap little papist orphans or half orphans, lock them up in their orphan asylums, where no priest can enter, change their names so that their relatives cannot trace them, send them to a distance, and place them in Protestant families, where it is hoped they will forget their Catholic origin, all proceed from the same mistake, and all fail to arrest, or even to lessen, the growing evil. They necessarily provoke the opposition and resistance of the Catholic pastors, and of all earnest Catholics, who regard the loss of their faith as the greatest calamity that can befall Catholic children. So long as faith remains, however great the vice or the crime, there is something to build on, and room to hope for repentance, though late, for reformation and final salvation. Faith once gone, all is gone. It is necessary to understand that the children of Catholics must be trained up in the Catholic faith, in the Catholic Church, to be good exemplary Catholics, or they will grow up bad citizens, the pests of society. Nothing can be done for them but through the approval and coöperation of the Catholic clergy and the Catholic community. The contrary rule, till quite recently, has been adopted, and public and private benevolence has sought to benefit our children by disregarding, or seeking to uproot, their Catholic faith, and rejecting the coöperation of the Catholic clergy. The results are apparent to all not absolutely blinded by their misdirected zeal.