Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York.  “Bloody shirt” Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the draft-riots!  By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish Secretary of the Interior.  And of course under such an administration the cause of “Religion” made tremendous strides.  Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor became a means to political advancement.  You might see a hard-swearing old political pirate like “Uncle Joe” Cannon, taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and betaking himself to the “Cardinal’s Day Mass”, to bend his stiff knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate on a throne.  You might see an emissary of the United States government proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a revolution.

#Secret Service#

This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical thought.  Because the popular magazines were opposing the plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of this bill.  At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped by every sort of persecution.  I was at that time in intimate touch with the “Appeal to Reason”, and I know that scarcely a month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some new “regulation” especially designed to limit its circulation.  I recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic Attorney General and sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.