As everyone knows, the "society lady" is not an independent and
self-sustaining phenomenon. For every one of these exquisite,
sweet-smelling creatures that you meet on Fifth Avenue, there
must be at home a large number of other women who live sterile
and empty lives, and devote themselves to cleaning up after their
luckier sisters. But these "domestics" also are human beings;
they have emotions--or, in religious parlance, "souls;" it is
necessary to provide a discipline to keep them from appropriating
the property of their mistresses, also to keep them from becoming
enceinte. So it comes about that there are two cathedrals in New
York: one, St. John the Divine, for the society ladies, and the
other, 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 doorway; 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."
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 and French-Canadian and Bohemian and Mexican and
Portuguese and Polish and Hungarian. Who but the Catholic Church
can handle these polyglot hordes? Who can furnish teachers and
editors and politicians familiar with all these languages?
Considering how complex is the service, the price is extremely
moderate--the mere actual expenses of the campaign, the cost of
red fire and torch-lights, of liquor and newspaper
advertisements. The rest may come out of the public till, in the
form of exemption from taxation of church buildings and lands, a
share of the public funds for charities and schools, the control
of the police for saloon-keepers and district leaders, the
control of police-courts and magistrates, of municipal
administrations and boards of education, of legislatures and
governors; with a few higher offices now and then, to flatter our
sacred self-esteem, a senator or a justice on the Supreme Court
Bench; and on state occasions, to keep up our necessary prestige,
some cabinet-members and legislators and justices to attend High
Mass, and be blessed in public by Catholic prelates and
dignitaries.
You think this is empty rhetoric--you comfortable, easy-going,
ultra-cultured Americans? You professors in your classic shades,
absorbed in "the passionless pursuit of passionless
intelligence"--while the world about you slides down into the
pit! You ladies of Good Society, practicing your "sweet little
charities," pursuing your "dear little ideals," raising your
families of one or two lovely children--while Irish and
French-Canadians and Italians and Portuguese and Hungarians are
breeding their dozens and scores, and preparing to turn you out
of your country!