France, Spain, and many other Roman Catholic countries, thus witness the multitude of those bachelors increasing every year. The number of families and births, in consequence, is fast decreasing in their midst; and, if God does not perform a miracle to stop those nations on their downward course, it is easy to calculate the day when they will owe their existence to the tolerance and pity of the mighty Protestant nations by which they are surrounded. Why is it that the Irish Roman Catholic people are so irremediably degraded and clothed in rags? Why is it that that people, whom God has endowed with so many noble qualities, seem to be so deprived of intelligence and self-respect that they glory in their own shame? Why is it that their land has been for centuries the land of bloody riots and cowardly murders? The principal cause is the enslaving of the Irish women, by means of the confessional. Every one knows that the spiritual slavery and degradation of the Irish woman has no bounds. After she has been enslaved and degraded, she, in turn, has enslaved and degraded her husband and her sons. Ireland will be an object of pity; she will be poor, miserable, riotous, blood-thirsty, degraded, so long as she rejects Christ, to be ruled by the father confessor planted in every parish by the Pope. Who has not been amazed and saddened by the downfall of France? How is it that her once so mighty armies have melted away, that her brave sons have so easily been conquered and disarmed? How is it that France, fallen powerless at the feet of her enemies, has frightened the world by the spectacle of the incredible, bloody, and savage follies of the Commune? Do not look for the causes of the downfall, humiliation, and untold miseries of France anywhere else than in the confessional. For centuries has not that great country obstinately rejected Christ? Has she not slaughtered or sent into exile her noblest children, who wanted to follow the Gospel? Has she not given her fair daughters into the hands of the confessors, who have defiled and degraded them? How could women, in France, teach her husbands and sons to love liberty, and die for it, when she was herself a miserable, an abject slave? How could she form her husbands and sons to the manly virtues of heroes, when her own mind was defiled and her heart corrupted? The French woman had unconditionally surrendered the noble and fair citadel of her heart, intelligence, and womanly self-respect, into the hands of her confessor long before her sons surrendered their sword to the Germans at Sedan and Paris. The first unconditional surrender had brought the second.