is often wasted upon the narrowness and intolerance of the authorities of the Index. We are concerned with the law itself and with the principles which underlie this law and with the reasons which justify it. The measure of discretion (or of indiscretion) which characterises the action of the authorities in the administration of the law and in its application to this or that book or opinion deserves separate consideration.... It may safely be asserted that not a little of the ordinary criticism of the regulations of the Index is due in many cases to insularity. Probably out of every hundred Englishmen or Americans who rail against the restrictions of the Index, not a tithe has any direct acquaintance with, or takes any due account of, the flood of bitterly anti-Christian literature, often infidel, immoral, and blasphemous, and almost always insidiously polemical, which is poured over Italy and the Continent generally, by the masonic and anti-clerical press. It is in great measure this degrading abuse of one of the noblest faculties of civilised society, and the need of duly protecting the minds of the masses that the provisions of the Index are specially designed to meet. It is simply a measure of Catholic sanitation. In fact, were a representative collection of such continental literature translated and put into the hands of the average English father, we conceive that he would promptly improvise himself into a domestic Congregation of the Index and take pains to see that all such vehicles of infection were rigidly excluded from his family.... That the Catholic Church, which is necessarily an authoritative and a teaching Church, should be equally solicitous about the members of her family, and that from her standpoint she should extend her solicitude, not only to manifest evils but to assaults upon the faith which she believes to be the logical sub-structure of morality, is a principle which assuredly need not excite our surprise. However much we may feel that, in times like our own, when our best triumphs promise to be gained by guiding, rather than by limiting human liberty, and when necessarily much must be left to the discretion of the conscientious, the practical application of the principle is a matter which calls for the exercise of that generous and tactful delicacy that the Catholic Church knows so well how to use in teaching her children.... No one who looks upon the face of Christendom to-day can fail to note that there exists a clearly marked difference between the whole set of social and political circumstances which obtain in the English-speaking lands and those which obtain in the various countries of the Continent. This difference applies particularly to the very circumstances which most affect the use and application of the provisions of the Index.... We maintain