death of kings is
the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies,
the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening
flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and
sycophancies--all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State
churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung
from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad,
wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his
commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hanging....

And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to
kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street.
Leland Stanford, son of a great king of Western railroads, died; and
standing over his coffin, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop,
preached a sermon of fulsome flattery, wherein he likened young Leland
to the boy Christ. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly
reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout
his lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley
Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical
connections, was free to state the facts about him:

He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press,
got his grip on the public service, including even the
courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon
the last three Presidents--making the latter provide for the
offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania
could no longer stomach--and all without identifying his
name with a single measure of public good, without making a
speech or uttering a party watchword, without even
pretending to be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he
carried the bag and could buy whom he would.

Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed
by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J.S. Ramsey, who stood over
the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he
had been "a statesman who was always on the right side of every moral
question!"

In that same year of 1904 died the high priest of our political
corruption, Mark Hanna. He had belonged to no church, but had backed
them all, understanding the main thesis of this book as clearly as the
writer of it. In his home city of Cleveland the eulogy upon him was
pronounced by Bishop Leonard, in St. Paul's Episcopal Church; while in
the United States Senate the