St. Patrick’s, for the servant-girls.  The latter is located on Fifth Avenue, where its towering white spires divide with the homes of the Vanderbilts the interest of the crowds of sight-seers.  Now, early every Sunday morning, before “Good Society” has opened its eyes, you may see the devotees of the Irish snake-charmer hurrying to their orisons, each with a little black prayer-book in her hand.  What is it they do inside?  What are they taught about life?  This is the question to which we have next to give attention.

Some years ago Mr. Thomas F. Ryan, traction and insurance magnate of New York, favored me with his justification of his own career and activities.  He mentioned his charities, and, speaking as one man of the world to another, he said:  “The reason I put them into the hands of Catholics is not religious, but because I find they are efficient in such matters.  They don’t ask questions, they do what you want them to do, and do it economically.”

I made no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the remark—­like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his mind set to work to reconstruct the creature.

When a man is drunk, the Catholics do not ask if it was long hours and improper working-conditions which drove him to desperation; they do 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.  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.”