not ask if police and politicians are getting a rake-off from the
saloon, or if traction magnates are using it as an agency for the
controlling of votes; they do not plunge into prohibition movements or
good government campaigns--they simply take the man in, at a standard
price, and the patient slave-sisters and attendants get him sober, and
then turn him out for society to make him drunk again. That is
"charity," and it is the special industry of 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.