r his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for
the purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the
law of the Church under the pretext of observing the civil
law.

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting of
this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a circulation of
more than a million; and naturally the Knights of Slavery do not enjoy
reading it. Year after year they have marshalled their power to have
this paper barred from the mails--so far, in vain. They caused an
obscenity prosecution, which failed; so finally the press rooms of the
paper were blown up with dynamite. At the present time there is a
"Catholic Truth Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose
the anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising absolution
and salvation to the families, dead and living, of those who "come
across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of the American
Federation of Catholic Societies" for September, 1915, I find a record
of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism of the Catholic Church from
the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany Catholic congressman, proposes a bill
in Washington; and Judge St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the
Federation's "law committee", points out the difficulties in the way
of such legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing
religion, because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks the
purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they can slip
into the present law the words "scurrilous and slanderous"; he hopes
that this much can be done without the American people catching on!

You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want to
start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to restate
the main thesis of this book. It is not the New Inquisition which is
our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege. It is not Superstition,
but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use
of sheep's clothing.

You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the "ignorant
foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democ