Slattery assures us that we need protection from the Pope. There was a time when the proudest monarchs of Europe trembled at the Papal nod; but gradually the Pope has been shorn of temporal power, confined ever more to the realm of spiritual, until to-day he exerts about as little influence on the political destiny of this world as does Dr. Cranfill with his little Prohibition craze. But Slattery will have it that the Pope is gradually undermining American institutions--leads us to infer that, sooner or later, he'll blow our blessed constitution at the moon and scatter fragments of the Goddess of Liberty from Dan to Beersheba, from Cape Cod to Kalamazoo. The Pope, it appears, is a veritable Guy Faux, who is tunnelling beneath our national capitol with a keg of giant powder in one hand and a box of lucifer matches in the other. What's the evidence? Why, out in San Francisco, so Slattery says-- but as Slattery's been convicted of lying it were well to call for papers--a Catholic school-board was elected and employed only Catholic teachers. The same awful thing happened in Detroit--if Slattery's telling the truth, which is doubtful in the extreme. Then what? With a pride worthy a more American act, this illogical idiot informs us that "when the Protestants captured the school-boards of those cities they discharged every one of the Catholic teachers and put only good Protestants on guard." And at that Baptist brethren--with water on the brain--who boast of Roger Williams, cheered so loudly as to be in danger of lockjaw. In the exuberant imagination of Slattery and his dupes there appears to be a wonderful difference between tweedledum and tweedledee. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that what is sauce for the Protestant goose should be sauce for the Catholic gander. They damn the Catholics for doing the very thing for which they commend the Protestant. That's the logic of the A.P.A.--the Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. In my humble opinion both were engaged in very small business. The only difference in the offenders that I can see is that while the Catholics are saying nothing, the Protestants are loudly boasting of their vicious subversion of the American principle of religious liberty. The circumstance is a sharp reminder that if we are to preserve a government of the people, for the people and by the people, we've got to keep religion of ALL kinds out of our politics, just as the framers of the federal constitution intended that we should do. Mixing religion and politics is like mixing whiskey and water--it spoils both. Slattery would have you believe that our Catholic citizens are simply emissaries of the Pope, to whom they owe allegiance both spiritual and temporal, and that they will, at the first opportunity, subvert American institutions and make this Nation simply a satrapy of the Vatican.