Excerpt from The Catholic World, Vol. 94: October, 1911 Without the sanctions of religion it is vain to hope that the family tie or any other will be kept secure by even the most stringent legislation. The confidence that is reposed in public opinion as a corrector Of wrongs and abuses is justi fied no doubt whenever that opinion itself, formed on right principles and in accordance with true standards, is strong enough to prevail and to deal out summary justice to those who defy it. But public Opinion is an affair of the general conscience, and when this is blunted or weakened, its protest against wrong-doing must lose its earlier vigor, and dwindle into a passive indifference if not into an outright endorsement of what it should condemn. And since legislation also is so largely affected by public Opinion, remedial enactments, if framed at all, will hardly get beyond the page of the statute book. They will not, at any rate, have the binding force that they would have if they could presuppose on the part of the individual citizen that deeper moral sense which seeks first the kingdom of God and His justice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.