racy and Liberty" and you will
see how reformers twenty years ago explained our political depravity.
But we probed deeper, and discovered that the purely American
communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all. It
dawned upon us that wherever there was a political boss paying bribes
on election day, there was a captain of industry furnishing the money
for the bribes, and taking some public privilege in return. So we came
to realize that political corruption is merely a by-product of Big
Business.

And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of Superstition in
America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a democracy, we find
precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the poor foreigner who
troubles us. Our human magic would win him--our easy-going trust, our
quiet certainty of liberty, our open-handed and open-homed and
hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We should break down the Catholic
machine, and not all the priests in the hierarchy could stop us--were
it not for the Steel Trust and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the
Liquor Trust and the Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters
of America who do not want citizens, free and intelligent and
self-governing, but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant,
inert, physically, mentally and morally helpless!

No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not the
pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering cathedrals; it
is not the two-dollar contributions for the salvation of souls which
support the Catholic Truth Society and the Knights of Columbus and the
Holy Name Society and the Mary Sodality and the National Shrine of the
Immaculate Conception and all the rest of the machinery of the Papal
propaganda. These help, of course; but the main sources of growth are,
first, the subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom
are non-Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted
as payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets of
Big Business.

#King Coal#

The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial life
of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of one
industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if space
permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a dozen other
industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of Western
Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the glass-works of
Southern Jersey, the silk