more than a score of claimants for the support which it alone at first solicited.  The lowest estimate of juvenile publications of a purely secular tone yearly sold in America carries the figure far into the millions.  Some of these, and it is well to know that they are the most widely sold, are first-rate in a literary point of view and employ the best artists for the pictures.  To say that they are secular but feebly expresses the totally unmoral influence they for the most part exert.  They are the extension of the unreligious school into the homes of the people.  When Father Hecker and Mrs. George V. Hecker and their associates began The Young Catholic, this vast mirage of the desert of life had but glimmered upon the distant horizon; they saw it coming and they did their best to point Catholic youth away from it and lead it to the real oasis of God, with its grateful shade, its delicious fruits, and its ever-flowing springs of the waters of life.

As already said, The Catholic Publication Society was begun a year after The Catholic World was started, its aim being to turn to the good of religion, and especially to the conversion of non-Catholics, all the uses the press is capable of.  It was a missionary work in the broadest sense seeking to enlist not only the clergy but especially the laity in an organized Apostolate of the Press, to enlighten the faith of Catholics and to spread it among their Protestant fellow-citizens.  Its first work was to be the issuing of tracts and pamphlets telling the plain truth about the Catholic religion.  Local societies, to be established throughout the country, were to buy these publications at a price less than cost, and distribute them gratis to all classes likely to be benefited.  To catch the eye of the American people, to affect their hearts, to supply their religious wants with Catholic truth, were objects kept in view in preparing the tracts.  Although some of them were addressed to Catholics, enforcing important religious duties, nearly all of them were controversial.  More than seventy different tracts were printed first and last, and many hundreds of thousands, indeed several millions, of them distributed in all parts of the country, public, charitable, and penal institutions being, of course, fair field for this work.  They were all very brief, few of them covering more than four small-sized pages.  “Three pages of truth have before now overturned a life-time of error,” said Father Hecker.  The tract Is it Honest? though only four pages of large type, or about twelve hundred words, created a sensation everywhere, and was answered by a Protestant minister with over fifty pages of printed matter, or about fifteen times more than the tract itself.  One hundred thousand copies of this tract were distributed in New York City alone.  It is printed herewith as a specimen, both as to style and matter, of what one may call the aggressive-defensive tactics in Catholic controversy: