It is a rather surprising thing to me that a man who claims to have spent a part of his life as a professor of history in any college should be so strangely unfamiliar with the composition of the Southern Confederacy. I wonder if Simmons ever heard of Judah P. Benjamin! One of the foremost and ablest men in the cabinet of Mr. Davis was a Jew! I wonder if the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Invisible Empire ever looked into the military records of the Confederate Army and saw the large number of Jewish names, and if he knows that among some of the best and bravest soldiers the South ever had the Jew was very much in evidence. I wonder if Simmons ever heard of Pat Clebourne, the fighting Irishman who gave a good account of himself every time he went into action, or if he ever read the beautiful poems of Father Ryan, a Catholic priest who followed the Stars and Bars into the very jaws of hell to comfort the wounded and administer to the dying. There was scarcely a company of infantry, a troop of cavalry or battery of artillery, that did not have an Irish Catholic on its roster, and they soldiered and suffered and fought and died for the South along with their Protestant comrades. Yet, in the year 1915, is commenced the erection of a “monument to the Confederate soldier” in the shape of a secret, Jew-baiting, Catholic-baiting, Negro-hating, money-getting proposition that has the effrontery to call itself the name of the “Ku Klux Klan,” and to presume with its white-robed and masked members, to interfere with the administration of justice in the United States.
Along the lines of anti-Catholicism, the organization is working hard. Among the very first consignments of printed matter I received from “The Gate City Manufacturing Company” of Atlanta was a lot of cards, bearing no imprint, but asking several questions about the Catholic Church. The following is a copy:
“DO YOU KNOW?”
“That the pope is a political autocrat.
“That a secret treaty made by him started the war.
“That he is enthroned and crowned and makes treaties and sends and receives ambassadors.
“That one hundred and sixteen princes of his government are enthroned in our cities.
“That he has courts here enforcing the canon law.
“That he controls the daily and magazine press.
“That he denounces popular government as inherently vicious.