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 or less reluctant alliance with the Papacy. The
Church is here, and her followers are here, before the war several
hundred thousand of them pouring into the country every year. It is no
longer possible to do without Catholics in America; not merely
do ditches have to be dug, roads graded, coal mined, and dishes
washed, but franchises have to be granted, tariff-schedules
adjusted, juries and courts manipulated, police trained and
strikes crushed. Under our native political system, for these
purposes millions of votes are needed; and these votes belong to
people of a score of nationalities--Irish and German and Italian