of Mexico together own only three small refineries.  They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and butcheries, and do a vast trade.  Yet they continually intrigue for legacies—­a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns—­and they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them.  It is piquant to add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely maintain that the society never engaged in commerce.  It should be added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by the King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted only ten colleges.

#"Holy History"#

And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of procedure.  Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask why; so you will learn something about the partnership between Superstition and Big Business!

It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the ecclesiastical machine.  As I write, they are making a new Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event.  Each paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd’s crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool’s cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera company.  The Los Angeles “Examiner”, the only paper in the city with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer—­one of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West “rodeo” one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G.O.P. convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch square, at the head of his effusion.  He takes in the Catholic festivity; and does it phaze him?  It does not!  He is a newspaper man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the assignment and write like the devil.  To read him now you might think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy: 

Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and devotion piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St. Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.

And then, a month later, conies another occasion of state—­the twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association