f Roman Catholicism. They
have been at it for a thousand years, cleaning up loathsome and
unsightly messes--"plague, pestilence and famine, battle and murder
and sudden death." Yet--puzzling as it would seem to anyone not
religious--there were never so many messes, never so many different
kinds of messes, as now at the end of the thousand years of charitable
activity!

But the Catholics go on and on; like the patient spider, building and
rebuilding his web across a door-way; like soldiers under the command
of a ruling class with a "muddling through" tradition--

Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.

And so of course all magnates and managers of industry who have messes
to be cleaned up, human garbage-heaps to be carted away quickly and
without fuss, turn to the Catholic Church for this service, no matter
what their personal religious beliefs or lack of beliefs may be.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of every steel-mill, every coal-mine or
other place of industrial danger, you will find a Catholic hospital,
with its slave-sisters and attendants. Once when I was "muck-raking"
near Pittsburgh, I went to one of these places to ask information as
to the frequency of industrial accidents and the fate of the victims.
The "Mother Superior" received me with a look of polite dismay. "These
concerns pay us!" she said. "You must see that as a matter of business
it would not do for us to talk about them."

Obey and keep silence: that is the Catholic law. And precisely as it
is with the work of nursing and almsgiving, so it is with the work of
vote-getting, the elaborate system of policemen and saloon-keepers and
ward-heelers which the Catholic machine controls. This industry of
vote-getting is a comparatively new one; but the Church has been
handling the masses for so many centuries that she quickly learned
this new way of "democracy," and has established her supremacy over
all rivals. She has the schools for training the children, the
confessional for controlling the women; she has the intellectual
machinery, the purgatory and the code of slave-ethics. She has the
supreme advantage that the rank and file of her mighty host really
believe what she teaches; they do not have to listen to table-rappings
and flounder through swamps of automatic writings in order to bolster
their hope of the survival of personality after death!

So it comes about that our captains of industry and finance have been
driven to a more