You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want to start an American “Kultur-kampf.”  I make haste, therefore, to restate the main thesis of this book.  It is not the New Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.  It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep’s clothing.

You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the “ignorant foreign vote.”  Turn to Lecky’s “Democracy 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-mills of Paterson, the cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.