are based on the report of the British
Registrar-General, publishes the following statistics:

"The proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births is in
Ireland 3.8 per cent.; in England the proportion is 6.4; in Scotland 9.9;
in other words, England is nearly twice, and Scotland nearly thrice worse,
than Ireland. Something worse has to be added, from which no consolation
can be derived. The proportion of illegitimacy is very unequally
distributed over Ireland, and the inequality rather humbling to us as
Protestants, and still more as Presbyterians and Scotchmen. Taking Ireland
according to the registration divisions, the proportion of illegitimate
births varies from 6.2 to 1.3. The division showing this lowest figure is
the western, being substantially the Province of Connaught, where about
nineteen-twentieths of the population are Celtic and Roman Catholic. The
division showing the highest proportion of illegitimacy is the
north-eastern, which comprises, or almost consists of, the Province of
Ulster, where the population is almost equally divided between Protestants
and Roman Catholics, and where the great majority of Protestants are of
Scotch blood and of the Presbyterian church. The sum of the whole matter
is, that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch Ulster is fully three times
more immoral than wholly Popish and wholly Irish Connaught--which
corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that
Scotland, as a whole, is three times more immoral than Ireland as a
whole."

It is worthy, too, of notice, that in the tabular statement above
presented the percentage of illegitimacy in Holland and Switzerland, where
there are large Catholic minorities, is lower than in any other Protestant
country.

We have at hand evidences, furnished by Protestant writers, of the hideous
immoralities of certain European nations that are more thoroughly
Protestantized than England itself. Thus, Mr. Laing writes: "Of the 2,714
children born in Stockholm, 1,577 were legitimate, 1,137 illegitimate;
making only a balance of 440 chaste mothers out of 2,714; and the
proportion of illegitimate to legitimate children not as one to two and
three-tenths, but as one to one and a half."--_A Tour in Sweden in_ 1838.

But we are not disposed to parade these monstrous vices, no matter by whom
committed. We allude to them with feelings of shame, not of pleasure; and
give them a passing notice merely in self-defence against