I had a mind, you see, and I was using it. I was reading the papers, and watching politics and business. I followed the fates of my little slum-boys--and what I saw was that Tammany Hall was getting them. The liquor-dealers and the brothel-keepers, the panders and the pimps, the crap-shooters and the petty thieves--all these were paying the policeman and the politician for a chance to prey upon my boys; and when the boys got into trouble, as they were continually doing, it was the clergyman who consoled them in prison--but it was the Tammany leader who saw the judge and got them out. So these boys got their lesson, even earlier in life than I got mine--that the church was a kind of amiable fake, a pious horn-blowing; while the real thing was Tammany. I talked about this with the vestrymen and the ladies of Good Society; they were deeply pained, but I noticed that they did nothing practical about it; and gradually, as I went on to investigate, I discovered the reason--that their incomes came from real estate, traction, gas and other interests, which were contributing the main part of the campaign expenses of the corrupt Tammany machine, and of its equally corrupt rival. So it appeared that these immaculate ladies and gentlemen, aus dem Ei gegossen, were themselves engaged, unconsciously, perhaps, but none the less effectively, in spreading the pestilence against which they were blowing their religious horns! So little by little I saw my beautiful church for what it was and is: a great capitalist interest, an integral and essential part of a gigantic predatory system. I saw that its ethical and cultural and artistic features, however sincerely they might be meant by individual clergymen, were nothing but a bait, a device to lure the poor into the trap of submission to their exploiters. And as I went on probing into the secret life of the great Metropolis of Mammon, and laying bare its infamies to the world, I saw the attitude of the church to such work; I met, not sympathy and understanding, but sneers and denunciation--until the venerable institution which had once seemed dignified and noble became to me as a sepulchre of corruption. #Trinity Corporation# There stands on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street a towering brown-stone edifice, one of the most beautiful and most famous churches in America. As a child I have walked through its church yard and read the quaint and touching inscriptions on its grave-stones; when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a sublime thing that here in the very heart of the world's infamy there should be raised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity and Judgment. Its great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders and their wage-slaves had to listen, whether they would or no! Such was Old Trinity to my young soul; and what is it in reality?