government became the American bludgeon-carrying police that marched a lot of holy and suffering men from place to place, in contempt of all law, decency and humanity, and finally appealed to the Pope in their insufferable and audacious impudence to force said Friars to leave the Islands as so many convicts or transported slaves. And all this having been done at a distance and done in the name of liberty and law and order and for the advancement of civilization, the outraged sense of humanity and justice at home was hushed up with lies and bribes, the thousands of our dead were not counted or their numbers published, until the Roosevelt government has become and will go down to history as the most brutal and'tyrannous government in existence at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Any Roman Catholic or other prelate who approves of all this, deserves the deepest contempt of mankind.

Now there is no bloody revolution going on in our midst. All this has been done in cold blood; much of it is looked upon as hardly more than a good joke for the government engaged in the infamy, and how can we explain it? Roosevelt comes of good stock, has had a college education, has even written so-called books; Root, his Secretary of War and right-hand man is a college-bred man, presumably with some human instincts; Wood, the Cuban figure-head, is also a professional man and would be a gentleman. Not any one of the three would be guilty of doing a personal cruelty to any man bigger and stronger than himself. They are among the best types of Twentieth Century American gentlemen; and yet I hold that their personal natures are as brutal as their public actions, that is, the actions they have sanctioned, and that their conduct, like the conduct of the Twentieth Century French government, is beasdy and brutal, uncivilized and unchristian, dishonorable and contemptible, a lie and a shame, a disgrace and a dishonor to the American name and to Americau history—all this proving that Republicanism in France and in the United States, the two great republics of modern times, is a palpable, bare-faced and rotten lie, a degraded and hell-bound slavery, a cool and deliberate insult to God and man. I hold, moreover, that as the brutal feature of the infamy is only a part of the general and cruel injustice and inhumanity of our social and commercial life, it is not to be blamed on Freemasonry or other so-called benevolent organizations, but comes of a wholesale selling out to the devil and his angels under the guise of " liberty, fraternity and equality."

During the past year the State of Pennsylvania was the scene of a striking manifestation of the same bestial elements and under the name of liberty, etc., etc., As a matter of fact the organization known as the Labor Union, formerly known as the Knights of Labor, is a more tyrannous and brutal organization than the government of France or that of the United States. Every man who joins it becomes an abject slave.

If it should formulate its so-called principles every one of them would prove to be a contradiction of all human rights, a disgrace to the name of liberty and a rotten and contemptible lie. But here the sympathy of the ignorant masses, led by a lot of timid and cowardly newspapers, was with the law-breakers, the violaters of liberty, and all in the name of liberty and humanity.

The entire attitude of the officers of the Labor Union, the constant attitude of said representatives—in times when no strikes are pending as well as when a strike is on—has long been, alike toward mine owners and operators and also toward miners and laborers, an attitude of the most brutal, outrageous and all-provoking tyranny.

No sane man on earth complains of a laboring man in any sphere because he tries by any fair means to get an advance of wages, or concessions of any kind, that will advance his own social or financial position.

No sane man on earth complains of any number of laboring men for organizing and combining to accomplish this or these ends.

No sane man on earth complains when a thousand or a hundred thousand such men drop their tools and cease to work for an employer who will not grant their single-handed or united demands. It is the right of laboring men to organize in order to make their demands more effective.

No sane man on earth complains of any legitimate pressure brought to bear on the employers of labor in order to urge or squeeze from them the demands that labor makes upon their capital.

But here the liberties of labor end and the rights of capital become one with the common rights of civilized mankind. The same rights conceded to the laboring men who have quit work must be also conceded to all men on earth who may be willing or who desire or who have to labor for their daily bread. The fact that a man belongs to an organization known as the Union, or otherwise known, does not give him any rights that are not possessed in precisely the same measure by all men on earth. Mitchell or any other man is either an infamous fool or an infamous scoundrel who does not know or who presumes to deny this. Now, every principle on which the Union was organized, every principle on which said Union is ruled, all the actions of the officers and representatives of said Union, are a contradiction not only of these related and eternal principles of human rights, world-wide and eternal, but they are a brutal and tyrannical violation of such rights.

During the month of September, 1902, various priests and other respectable people and some crack-brain Catholic editors were denouncing mill-owners and operators for defending the very basic principle of liberty that I am here stating and denning. These men were simply untaught fools, whose sympathies and shrunken receipts had run away with their brains. The principles of justice and true liberty are the same, no matter who surfers, who lives or who dies; and of all men on earth a priest of the Living God should be the last to deny such principles and to advocate tyranny and lawless men.

To put it short, suppose the mines are all running smoothly. The men are satisfied, or moderately so; but in every mine there are not only men of different nations but of different ideas as regards the advisability of belonging to this or that church or to this or that club, or to this or that labor organization, Union or what not.

At stated intervals the walking delegates of the Labor Union, being anxious to play God Almighty, will visit the operators of said coal mines, and, having learned already from their pals who are and who are not members of their Union, will inform said operators that A, or B, or C, or a hundred of them are not members of the Union. "Well, what of it ?'' the operators will say—that is, he will say this if he, for one moment, forgets whose slave he is, "What of it?" repeats the walking delegate, simply this: "If A does not plank down his five dollar fee and become a member of the Union, we demand that he be discharged; and, if not discharged within a certain period named, we will close your mine."

This, as near as may be, was the language of a mine owner and operator to me not long ago, a gentleman who had been himself formerly a labor leader and now is a mine owner, as the famous or rather notorious Powderly is also said to be.

In a word, regardless of all human rights and liberties alike of the employer and employed, the walking delegate of the Union is the tyrant master o\ a\\ wen concerned. Sometimes he is a reasonable man and sometimes a common brute, who will use his power without reason and spoil all Vie can spoil. day—all of a piece and all hell-born and hell-filling with the wrecks and hopes of mankind.

Again, during the strike of the past summer, the cowardly newspapers almost daily announced that while squads of non-union men, anxious to work, were proceeding toward the mines they had engaged to work in, they were met by large numbers of Labor Union men and '' persuaded'' to refrain from working. Now the persuasion used in every single case was the brutal persuasion of the bludgeon. In many cases such non-union workingmen were persuaded, that is, beaten to death by the representatives of Mitchell and Co. In a hundred cases and covering a territory of hundreds of miles these brutal representatives of Mitchell and Co. were picketed, posted, bludgeon or gun in hand, on all the roadways leading to said mines, for the sole purpose of "persuading," that is, for the sole purpose of beating said would-be workmen back from the work they needed and were willing to do. Lawlessness, brutal and open lawlessness was perpetrated over the whole district affected by the strike, encouraged and explained or apologized for by Mitchell and the cowardly newspapers of Philadelphia;—while Quay and Penrose and Governor Stone and President Roosevelt and others in what is called authority and places of power were playing at the dirty game called politics—seeking vindication and re-election for themselves or their pals and not doing one stroke of honest work to save or defend the principles of liberty, human rights and eternal justice.

In a word, while my sympathies are everywhere and always have been with the laboring man, I hold that the Labor Union, that is its officers and other officials in the state of Pennsylvania, were and are responsible for all the lawlessness, all the cruelties, all the suffering, all the financial and other losses that have occurred during the months of the strike, and that the ruling power in this case, that is, the Labor Union, was as vile and low and degrading and inhuman a force as the forces ruled by Robespierre, Mirabeau and Danton during the French Revolution,—as degrading and tyrannical as the forces used by McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft & Co., during our war with Spain ; and that the Labor Union and the government of the United States and the government of France to-day— all in the name of human rights and human liberty are the most blinded, sordid and damnable agencies of cruelty in the world to

What does it all mean? I ask again.

Shall we say that the wells of justice right and reason were poisoned by the falsehoods and wrongs built into the very foundations of modern republicanism, so that our presidents, chief justices, prelates, senators and labor-leaders, who would be glad to do what is right, are simply blinded and compelled from their birth so that they can not see and act as true and God-fearing men?

William R. Hearst, proprietor of the New York American and foumal, puts more news and more brain power into any one afternoon issue of the Journal than you can find in the total output of the Philadelphia newspapers in a week, still the New York Journal was pig-headed and ignorant and tyrannical in its persistent advocacy of the American-Spanish war and was just as pig-headed and ignorant in its blind-as-bat advocacy of the claims of Mitchell and his Labor Union throughout the entire coal strike in Pennsylvania. At the same time its editorials on President Roosevelt and the Trusts were as lucid as they could possibly have been, had they been revelations direct from heaven.

Were we to reason of the Journal as it reasoned of Roosevelt and the trusts, we should say that the Journal was right in the one case and wrong in the other because it was always Democratic and Roosevelt was Republican ; and on the other hand that it advocated the cause of the strikers because the great masses of the people who are ignorant and sympathetic with them, are its patrons and readers.

At all events it is clear that the Journal, like the stupid and cowardly Philadelphia papers, is run, edited and managed in its own corrupt interests, without any fixed basis or principle of right and wrong ;—that, in a word, it is as base and cruel and tyrannical and ignorant as the President and his government; showing as we said that whatever phase of American life you strike and examine, is found to be hardened, reckless of all justice, selfish and without any regard for actual human rights or liberties of any kind.

While engaged in writing this article, and when I had reached this point in the work, it came to me through the New Orleans Picayune, the New York Freeman's Journal, and the Catholic Telegraph, of Cincinnati that Leo XIII and the total power of Rome was to take a more aggressive attitude toward the tyrannous action of the