160 State Papers and Addresses

trary to the principles to which you subscribe, we have only to look about us.
We might refer to a recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly in which the efforts
of the sovereign State of North Carolina are applauded because it has "the
first States'-sponsored birth control clinics in the country. " Praise is heaped
upon the commonwealth because the State has sponsored so many clinics that
no spot in North Carolina is more than fifty miles from such a headquarters.
How powerful is the force of example can be gleaned from the article which
tells us that South Carolina, following in the footsteps of its sister State,
recently launched a parallel program; that Georgia is about to make a decision
and that Arizona has manifested lively interest. What an achievement of a
State of which to boast!

But a companion article, written by Father Francis J. Connell of the faculty
of Mt. St. Alphonsus Seminary explodes the finely spun theories and the con-
tention for justification of this policy on behalf of the State. As shown in
Father Connell's answer, published in the Atlantic Monthly and, also, in Readers
Digest, the very undertaking on the part of an individual or State is of its
essence contrary to moral law and inimical to the advancement of Society.
Hopefully may it be said that the simple truths and the immutable laws of
God as well as of nature may become known, more widely understood and prac-
ticed, through the extension of the League of Laymen's Retreats or otherwise
so that the sacredness of the family may be fully appreciated and preserved.

Other illustrations are not lacking as to the need for constructive thought
and efforts toward the improvement of conditions affecting our generation. You
are well aware, of course, that in the last decade there has been the most
sustained and vigorous challenging of our system of administering criminal
justice that has ever occurred in this Country. Our Nation is described as the
most lawless in the world and certainly it will not be seriously urged that the
rising tide of crime results from the fact that we do not have laws enough.
To the contray, the present situation exists despite the fact that the legislative
branches of our states and of the national government are piling up new laws
on the average of 40, 000 each year. In our own State of Maryland it was my
experience to have caused more than 700 enactments to become law this year,
but has anybody noticed a resulting desired betterment in the morals of the
people as a direct result thereof ? Much more lasting and helpful and worth-
while are the results of your movement, which produces on your part a strong
and vigorous determination to conform to necessary regulation, because to obey
the law is right.

How much more quickly would the crime problem be solved if this move-
ment could have the extensive and powerful influence, which is designed for it
and of which it is thoroughly capable. Disrupted homes, the severance of the
family ties and the resultant disaster to children, who are citizens of tomorrow,
all menacing influences to present day civilization, woud be counterbalanced
if the aims, the principles and the objectives of this movement were extended
as far as the moderators had planned.

And finally if the world had but the vision and wisdom of Ignatius, the
Manresan, it would turn its back speedily upon war. It would let peace reign
again in the skies as it once reigned over Judea's hills on that first Christmas
night. Everything at Manresa breathes of peace. All of its religious ex-
ercises, beginning with the mass of the morning, tell of peace. It is significant
that all the conferences at Manresa are built on peace pacts, written four