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Referring to the exclusiveness of the Klan, I am not quite prepared to admit that the conditions stipulated for membership in the organization set up the insuperable barrier that some people suspect. It has been pointed out in many hostile criticisms that the Semitic race is excluded from membership in the Klan. It is not true, for instance, that the Klan has set up arbitrary barriers to the admission of the Hebrew; but it is true that the orthodox Hebrew has established around himself barriers that preclude his admission into the organization.

The orthodox Jews are perhaps the most exclusive people in the civilized world. Their racial pride exceeds the pride of any nation or any land. They have a right to be proud in view of all their history. The Hebrew literature, the Hebrew religion, the Hebrew commonwealth, and more than all, the Hebrew jurisprudence, much of which has been adopted by our western society, entitles the race to hold to its distinctive qualities and characteristics with a pride that all the world respects and admires. They have everywhere been a peculiar people. Because of marked racial distinctiveness, not to say eminence, they have drawn a boundary line about their social and religious life, shutting themselves in and the rest of mankind out.

Perhaps there is no patriotism in the world comparable to that of the Jew. His attachment to his ancient home-land and to his institutions has been through the ages a consuming passion. In the early history of his development, when defeated in war, reduced to slavery and crushed under mountainous oppression, his loyalty to his country and his creed never wavered. There is no picture in history more pathetic and, indeed, more inspiring than that of the Jew in bondage. Toiling in the brickyards of Goshen, taunted with the despoiled glory of his country, the taskmaster demanding, as the burning lash was laid upon his bared shoulders, that he sing the songs of his native land, his intrepid spirit was unconquered and his superb loyalty unbroken: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning, and if I do not esteem thee above my chiefest joy, let my tongue cleave unto the roof of my mouth."

The Jew has brought his religion to America, establishing his temple worship and clinging tenaciously to his creed of Theism. He has been welcomed with a hospitality such as has been tendered the Jew by no other nation. His religious institutions have had all the protection of the law thrown about them, and they have been covered by the broad mantle of American liberalism. He has been granted the right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of his own conscience, with none to molest him or make him afraid. But he has organized in America no system of evangelism to convey his religious message to the people without the pale. He has made no proselytes or attempted to make any. He has held his church exclusively for himself and his posterity. To the orthodox Jew his religion is entirely an expression of his nationality. He has never invited men without creed to inquire into his dogmas and his doctrines. Indeed, he has held to his religion as a heritage that belongs to the Jew and to which none other than a Jew could subscribe as a matter of right or even as a privilege. A highly intelligent and influential Gentile sect, the Unitarians, has built its religious life about the doctrine of Theism. There are no fundamental or essential differences between the orthodoxy of the Jew and that of this Gentile sect, but even the Gentile theist has had no invitation to Judaism, and has been tendered scant cordiality by this proud, exclusive race that took its religion from the visible and audible presence of Jehovah and preserved it inviolate for themselves and for their kind.

In coming to America the orthodox Jew has brought with him all the racial pride that distinguishes him throughout the ages. He does not undertake to mingle his social life with that of the native people of the country, nor does he invite those of other racial lineage to cross his threshold. He marries and intermarries only with his kind. If the offspring of the orthodox Jew marries a Gentile he is excommunicated with drastic and fearful ceremony. So does the Jew keep himself apart. Even in the remote and sparsely populated sections of the country, where a single Jewish family is established in a village or at a cross-roads, selling merchandise, when the time comes for the marrying of his children, he does not seek or desire that the people with whom he has been trading, or that the children with whom his children have been taught in the common schools, shall be introduced into Jewish family life. He seeks to mate his children with members of his own race, even though the mating has to be done at long range. Sometimes a suitable husband for a marriageable daughter, or an acceptable wife for a marriageable son, has to be obtained in New York or Chicago or San Francisco, from a thousand to three thousand miles away.

Perhaps this Jew has understood for ages what some of our American sociologists will not learn from biology; that is, that the amalgamation of two distinctive race types may lose, in the offspring, much of the distinctive good of both. A people of mixed race is long in establishing both the fact and the sense of unity. Its individual minds tend to instability. Witness, for instance, the results due to the divergent people who inhabit Ireland. Racial stability, as a biological fact in the realm of psychology, is a precious result, perfected only by long, very long unity of blood. A mixed race finds, for a long period, difficulty in attaining individual balance and social peace. With the orthodox Jew another racial purpose inclines him, with relentless will, toward racial segregation. His people are the chosen of Almighty God. They listen through the centuries for the voices of angels proclaiming the advent of the true Messiah. To mix his blood with that of the Gentile is to lose his vision, his hope and his immortal soul.

The Klan organizes itself around the principles of Christianity, which diverge widely from the principles of Jewish orthodoxy. If it requires that those seeking admission into the organization should subscribe to the tenets that are Christian, it can not be construed into hostility toward the Jewish race. We believe that, side by side, a few Jews and many Christians, or a few Christians and many Jews may live in peace and contentment. For in either case the minority can never, by power of number, challenge the basic things of civilization of the majority. Let me here emphasize with all the power I possess: in America the Jew must ultimately mix with the Gentile. One million Jewish immigrants and their descendants can be, and will be, through the centuries, absorbed into the great body of our American people. Here we touch upon the true cause of the modern Zionism. His exclusiveness forbade the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Roman, and the Russian, to destroy his racial identity. To-day he is surrendering in Western Europe and America to the liberalism of the younger generation of Jews and the neighborliness of the modern Gentile. Liberalism and Americanization will eventually break down the exclusiveness of even so large a number as we now have among us. But if practically free immigration continues and five millions, or ten millions, of Jews come to us within the next generation--then we shall have a people within a people, a state within a state, and the sad conditions of Poland or Roumania will be re-enacted in America. A two per cent. Jewish population can be, ultimately, thoroughly Americanized. A ten per cent. Jewish population will lead us from danger unto danger. We shall have absolute Jewish separatism on the one hand, and anti-Semitism on the other. We shall then witness all those profound and terrible reactions which relentlessly mark the sharp contacts of two vitally different societies upon the same soil. I submit that when the Klan as an organization, holding to the tenets of Christianity, provided that any white native-born American who subscribes to its conditions may enter into the Klan, the Jew was not arbitrarily excluded. In fact, there are some native-born American Jews who have accepted Christianity and have at the same time become eligible to membership in the Klan. But the hard and fast racial organization of the orthodox Jew does not permit him to go outside of prescribed boundaries in either his social or his religious life. We have not excluded the Jew. The orthodox Jew has excluded himself.

The Klan not only protests that it is not anti-Semitic. The Klan seeks the execution of a policy which will prevent the growth of anti-Semitism in America.

Is The Klan Anti-Catholic?

The Catholic colony of Maryland, under the Calverts, was composed of a most excellent type of freedom-loving Englishmen. Cardinal Gibbons, who recently passed to his reward, was a fine example of this type. These people were seeking, as were so many others who then came to America, liberation from tyranny, bigotry, and intolerance. They brought with them a spirit not unlike that of the Cavaliers to the south of them, to whom their destiny was to be indissolubly linked by ties that remain unbroken to this day. These brave Catholic settlers in the wilderness, many of whom were people of refinement and education, invested themselves whole-heartedly in the early development of our country. No well-informed student of American history doubts that their large contributions to our American nation have seldom enough been sufficiently recognized.

In the great battle of Long Island, in the summer of 1776, Washington stood upon an eminence and watched the Maryland brigade as it strove to cut its way through the encircling forces of the British. "Good God, what brave fellows I must this day lose," he said, as he observed their desperate position. Later in the day, when he saw them fall, like the leaves of Autumn, he is said to have wept over the loss of the very elite of his army. Of such stuff as this were the Maryland Catholics in the American Revolution. The historian, John Fiske, describes that terrible and unhappy day as follows: "In this noble struggle, the highest honors were won by the brigade of Maryland men, commanded by Smallwood, and throughout the war we shall find this honorable distinction of Maryland for the personal gallantry of her troops fully sustained, until in the last pitched battle, at Eutaw Springs, we see them driving the finest infantry of England at the point of the bayonets."

Just a word more with reference to this sort of American Catholic. In the spring of 1921 a distinguished assembly of educators and savants, representing nearly every country, assembled with the University alumni to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the University of Virginia. The opening prayer of the first public meeting was offered by the Catholic Bishop of Richmond. In that invocation the Bishop returned thanks to Almighty God for that great deed of Thomas Jefferson which led to the separation of Church and State in Virginia.

To such Catholics as these all true Americans, whatever their religious beliefs, are bound by ties so indissoluble as to make perfect our fellowship in Americanism. It is to this section of Roman Catholic believers, no matter what their ancestry may be, that the Klan makes especial appeal for understanding and co-operation.

Catholic Maryland won for herself the high distinction of being among the three colonies which permitted and protected religious freedom. So we can acclaim the Catholic colonists as among the very first to realize the full meaning of Americanism, not only as to the outward things of government, but also as to the inner things of the human soul. It should not be forgotten, too, that these same advocates of political liberty and freedom of conscience were themselves grossly offended and injured for a time in their own colony by a period of Protestant oppression. American history is a strange, strange story. To understand our America of the present, and her problems, we must look deep into the records of the past. With an unbiased mind we must set ourselves to seek out the truth.

In the State of Maryland one still finds in remote hamlets the original Catholic edifices, with their sacred symbols, gracing the countryside. Wherever we find such an American Catholic church, the American public school is seen in the immediate vicinity. When the American Catholic in Maryland, or in any other state, goes to the ballot-box, he votes as an American citizen, not being under ecclesiastical control. We members of the Ku Klux Klan, positively insist upon making this distinction among Catholics. We ask, and who can say that we ask too much, that our whole Catholic population bring its American citizenship up to these high standards set by the original American Catholics. When this is done, we shall surely find the greatest pleasure in rendering to the Catholic Church that full measure of esteem which shall be its due.

During the past two generations great submerging waves of European immigrants have rolled in upon us. One wave brought with it loyalty to the German Kaiser and treason to America. Another wave threatened to smother our working people with the noxious poison of Bolshevism. Still another sought to make a bitter animosity toward England and the British Empire the main-spring of all its political and social activities in America. Is there anything remarkable, anything inexplicable, about the fact that millions of illiterate peasants from the more backward parts of Europe, if they happen to be Roman Catholics, should continue among us their backward European methods? The peasantry of Poland were, until the Great War, practically a serf population. Why deny the most evident facts? They are still, in general, verminous and insanitary, illiterate and stupid. The theory that they can quickly be made into Americans is the thought of a fool. The view that their church can conduct itself like the American Catholic church in Maryland is equally ridiculous.

This immigrant element has been misused in two ways. Its clergy has kept it ignorant of America by keeping its children out of our public schools; and it has been used in our elections as a mass vote by those who exercise control over its votes through the political power of the church.

With reference to the public schools our American position is as simple as it can possibly be. Having established the public-school system as the veritable cornerstone of the nation's democracy, we request, in the most brotherly spirit, all our immigrant peoples to give it whole-hearted support. We invite their children to sit beside our own children and receive the education needed to insure their good citizenship, their self-support, and their self-respect. And then there are those who say that we of the Klan hate the immigrant and seek to deny him his rights!

These immigrant children, sitting side by side in the same school, will be received as guests in one another's homes. They will form those deep and lasting friendships which will make for true social unity. When we open our arms and our hearts to receive them and to give them all we have, it is they who reject us. They deny themselves the best gift we can possibly offer--a free public education. How often are we Americans made unhappy--sometimes, I fear, a bit displeased--when we see on one side of the street a beautiful, spacious and sanitary public-school building, and on the other side of the street a poorly constructed, insanitary and overcrowded parochial school. Our own children go to the public school. The immigrant children go to the parochial school. Our own children are taught by teachers carefully selected and trained for their service. In the overcrowded and insanitary parochial school the teaching is usually of a standard incomparably lower; often it is unworthy to be called education. Has the world ever presented a more curious and perplexing problem than we have here? We see American citizens of property and influence anxious to tax themselves in order to present to the child of the Sicilian, Hungarian, or Polish peasant the best common-school education in all the world. And then we see, to our unutterable amazement, this peasant serf, or city wastrel, misled by his clergy, rejecting the only worthy means we have of making Americans out of his children. To an average American this whole situation is both perplexing and distressing.

As regards the use of the Catholic vote in elections, the facts, while startling enough, are more easily understood. In 1917, to mention a single instance, all the country watched the Catholic church of New York City defeat one of its own distinguished members, Mr. Mitchell, for Mayor. No informed person longer seeks to deny the political influence of the Catholic church. Very recently Archbishop Hayes, of New York, personally directed the New York police to break up a public meeting called in the Town Hall by American citizens. The police appeared before the meeting began and actually went so far as to prevent its beginning. The law could not have been violated because no chance was given to violate the law. Archbishop Hayes simply decided that he would not permit this meeting, which had nothing whatever to do with any church or religious issue. So he ordered the doors of the building which had been hired for the purpose to be locked and the crowd driven away by the police. All we can say to our Catholic fellow citizens is just this: DO NOT FORCE US TO RESIST YOU. If you take direct control of the police power out of the hands of the duly constituted officers of government, then we, as Americans, must eventually resist your police power in defense of our liberty. Gifted with an infinite desire for peace and with great patience, we shall wait until we do not dare to wait longer. Meanwhile we plead with you daily: Do but accept the basic principles of our Americanism and all arguments, all unpleasantness, will vanish in a single hour.

In a democracy the separation of church and state implies much more than the abolition of state support of the church. Separation of church and state must mean with us that the individual citizen shall permit neither the state to interfere with his religious worship nor the church to interfere with his duties as a citizen. Only a developed political mind can understand the nature of this very modern duality of attitude. The outward separation is, after all, largely a form of law. The inward separation, the state of mind, is the true source of the freedom both of the church and the state. When the individual walks into his church he must enter with his body and his mind free to worship according to the dictates of his conscience. When he enters the voting-booth, when he enters the court-room, when he opens his mouth to mix his thoughts with his fellow citizens as regards things political, mind and mouth and hand must be free from the control of the church.

To understand our problem fully we must never forget the platitude that our immigrant people are not Americans. They are Europeans. Immigrant Catholics are European Catholics. In almost every country of Continental Europe there is a Catholic party. The Catholic political party of Germany, of France, of Italy, of Belgium, of Austria, or of Hungary, seeks to win the elections and control the government outright. Again, to repeat myself, is there anything strange about the fact that when these immigrants form themselves into enormous foreign communities in our great cities or industrial districts they should act here just as they act in Europe? I do not think so. It is all simple enough. Its outward effects, at least, are as easily understood as a Mississippi flood or a San Francisco earthquake. We must either put an end to this thing or this thing will put an end to our democracy. We can not have a Hungarian, a Polish, an Italian, or an Irish peasant Catholic party among us and still preserve the political system of our American nation which has been created by three centuries of democratic evolution. A political system run by sectarian ecclesiastics and an Anglo-Saxon bill of rights can not live on the same soil. In these things there can be no compromise. To surrender an inch is to surrender all and yield to the executioner.

As regards this whole matter, our American humility and false modesty has already worked us great harm. These matters must at last be dragged into the open and publicly discussed. Hence this exceedingly plain statement. If some of our citizens wish their children to attend parochial schools, then we want those parochial schools properly inspected. We would like to know what textbooks are being used. The public ought to know just how much education, and what manner of education, the fourteen-year old immigrant boy or girl is possessed of when he leaves school. What does this boy or girl know about himself? How much reading and writing and arithmetic has he laid hold of? What has he learned of American history and American institutions? We Americans of all sections confess, not without shame, that we have not as yet done nearly enough for public education. But the means we have provided we wish to have used; the standards we have set, none too high, we wish to have regarded; and what we are seeking to do for the immigrant we would like to have fully appreciated.

We seek for all our more recent immigrant peoples such a blending with our people as shall find in religion and the church no hindrance to Americanism. We expect, that, more and more, we shall be united by the lasting bonds of a common patriotism, a common morality, and common social ideals. We crave the development among us of such a Catholic church as will not make intermarriage with those of other faiths impossible or difficult. To throw such a chasm between our young people as is never bridged by the marriage tie would be a lasting curse to our country. Let us seek by every means to make all Christians ready for that more perfect unity of the entire Christian church which should ever be an ideal with all of us.

The reader will find repeated again in this book, until it perhaps wearies him, a certain expression. This statement represents something which I have made fundamental in all my thinking. We Americans must approach this and similar tasks in a spirit of the utmost fellowship and gentleness. Our every act must partake of kindliness and consideration. We expect to find, side by side with us in this matter, the American part of the Catholic church. Together we shall work out the problem and then forget it. This difficulty is, after all, but a passing phase of our complex social process. In a generation it will have been left behind us. The difficulties, even the tragedies, of one century often furnishes amusement to the historians of the next. So let us, in this thing, take thought of the morrow, too. May the execution of the policy we have declared be everywhere so inwrought with honorable motive and worthy purpose that presently none shall have the slightest cause to be against us or deny to us that fellowship and affection we seek to win from every American.

The Terminology of The Klan

Diligent inquiries have been made into the peculiar terminology used by the Klan to designate its purposes and mission. Why is the word "Imperial" employed to characterize the chief officers of the organization? Why is the organization designated as an "Invisible Empire"? Does the Klan contemplate, perhaps, a nation-wide organization that at the height of its strength means revolution and the overthrow of our present republican form of government? These and other similar questions--some intelligent, others less so--are being asked by both the enemies and the friends of the Klan.

The words "Imperial" and "Empire" find no friendly place in the vocabulary of a democracy. Whenever used they are connected with autocratic government and centralized power. These terms, as usually employed, are in sharp contrast to the principles of our great American democracy. We have everywhere and always held that imperialism is a despicable thing, a survival of despotic power that came up from the caveman and was exercised always by force. Germany and Russia were the last great exponents in Europe of this imperialistic idea of forcible conquest. Nothing has been more revolting in America than the suggestion of centralized power by which a nation was to be governed and directed. Even the temporary expedient of taking the Philippine Islands into our keeping, as a necessary sequence to the war with Spain, and holding them under military rule until the people could be developed into approximate democracy and govern themselves, found strenuous opponents. During all the twenty years that we have maintained the mandate, it has caused dissatisfaction among the nations.

We of the South know only too well what the reign of the bayonet means. The tragedy of American history was the untimely death of Lincoln. Had he lived the story of the Reconstruction would have been different, very different. Following the "deep damnation of his taking off," the white race of the South was subjected to the supremest test to which Anglo-Saxon worth was ever put in the history of the world. The test did not result from the defeat of the Confederacy, or in the devastation of the states over which the armies fought, or in the appalling loss of life during the four sanguinary years. It was in the Reconstruction period, when the armed forces of the victorious North occupied the entire Southland and secured to the Negro a lordship over Anglo-Saxon democracy, refinement and civilization. The mute anguish of those years can not be put into any form of speech. But let me speak no word of blame. My people of the South hate every form of coercive government as they love the freedom of our great democracy. There is to us one symbol expressing the deepest loyalty of the Klan, elevated even above the Fiery Cross. It is the American flag. To the Klan it is the emblem of human liberty and security, guaranteed to every citizen of the land and signalled to all the world beyond our borders. So jealous is the Klan of the American flag that it is unwilling to share its place with the flag of any other nation. We are unwilling even that the colors of the nations to whom we are bound by ties of both blood and gratitude shall in this country mingle their colors with the American flag. We desire no confusion in the minds of American people as they look upon the emblematic flags of different nations as to that place of supremacy in our loyal devotion which we hold for the American flag alone.

But at the same time the Klan renounces no obligations or responsibilities to the rest of the world. We believe that the world is moving toward "That one far-off divine event," "the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world," but even when this greater fraternalism of the world is consummated, we should not be willing for our colors to be commingled with those of other nations. The emblem that symbolizes our sacrifices and our victories, our failures and our triumphs, and out of which our common democracy has come, must have in our hearts no lesser place, or even an equal place, with those of other nations. With us the place of our flag is not below, or along-side, the flags of other peoples. It must be kept apart and above.

We are ready to interpose our will and our strength to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak anywhere. We are ready out of our abundance to distribute charity to the unfortunate to the uttermost ends of the earth, without respect to race, color or clime. We are quite prepared to promote a great democratic evangelism to the oppressed and downtrodden peoples of all the earth, that they too may become conscious, through democracy, of human worth, and achieve something of the freedom which we enjoy. Yet everywhere we shall serve under our own colors. All the nations of the earth shall continue their separate existence and work out their destiny under the emblems into which have been spun and woven the distinctive characteristics of their race and their country. All this has been relentlessly brought home to us through the resurgence of the nations during and after the Great War. Nothing but absolute independence would satisfy the Poles. Ireland must be free or perish in revolutionary effort. The smaller the people, the greater its effort to prove its right to national independence, its capacity for a separate government. With these facts in mind it would seem superfluous for native-born Americans to explain or defend our spirit of patriotism and nationalism.

The phrase "Invisible Empire" means that the Ku Klux Klan undertakes to establish and maintain a nation-wide organization in the thought of our people. It plans a conquest only in the realm of the invisible where men do their thinking. The mentality of the American people is to be awakened, stimulated, and directed. It means the sovereignty of Americanism, of the democratic idea, in every American mind. We plan no system of coercion or outside pressure by which the American people are to be forced into this "Invisible Empire." I may modestly, and not irreverently, say that the idea underlying the establishment of the Klan and its principles in America was taken from one of the leaders in the early Christian Church, who said that the propagation of Christianity was without force, noise, or violence, without army or treasury, but that the Great Leader had established an everlasting kingdom by taking captive the thoughts of men. So the Klan holds that anything constructed by force may be destroyed by a superior force. Anything impressed upon unwilling subjects by outside effort may be rejected and thrown off in the springtime of returning power. Anything and everything that is established by such exercise of force is marked and destined for decay and return to the dust. But that which is once established in the deeper thought, from the spiritual need, of mankind is indestructible because there is no manner of force that can lay hold of it. Alexander said, "Philip, my father, gave me life, but Aristotle taught me to think." It is not the blood of Philip, through Alexander, that pulses in the arteries of the world's civilization of to-day; but it is rather the thought of Aristotle, which, despite all the Alexanders of history, runs through the story of the world's civilization in all the lands and all the centuries. It is the idea possessing the spirit which vitalizes all our basic institutions and movements toward human freedom which animate the noblest endeavors of human life. It is in the thought of the American people that the Ku Klux Klan undertakes to establish its "Invisible Empire," mighty in its ultimate consummations, indestructible and glorious forever.

Symbolism of The Klan

Much ado has been made about the strange symbolism of the Klan. I stated at the beginning that the regalia now in use by the organization, like the terminology, was selected as a memorial to the original Ku Klux Klan. It has been generally regarded as grotesque and ghostly, designed to intimidate and terrify persons against whom the displeasure of the Klan might be directed. But the only purpose in adopting the white robes and incidental trimmings was to keep in grateful remembrance the intrepid men who preserved Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the South during the perilous period of Reconstruction.

The regalia of the Klan, however, expresses something more in the present organization than a mere memorial. Its symbols convey to the initiated the highest sense of patriotism, chivalry and fraternalism. These symbols were designed by myself during the years that I pondered a revival of the old order, and contemplated the endangered position of the native-born American throughout our commonwealth. Every line, every angle, every emblem spells out to a Klansman his duty, honor, responsibility and obligation to his fellow men and to civilization. None of it was wrought for mere ornamentation, and none of it designed as mere mysticism. All of it was woven into the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan for the purpose of teaching by symbolism the very best things in our national life.

Emblematic robes are not uncommon to organizations of men banded together for either religious or fraternal purposes. My affiliations with the church and my connection with a number of fraternal orders have convinced me that the impelling truths which grapple and hold the loyalties and convictions of men are taught better by symbolism than ritualism. The Roman Catholic church proclaims the authority of its mission to the world through the insignia of its clergy and its rulers; while its service of sacrifice and sanctity, of separation and consecration, is expressed in the robes of its nuns and its celebrants. In that colossal pile, St. Peter's at Rome, the most splendid edifice of Christianity in all the world, is to be found a vast collection of stones and gold, an array of art so magnificent that it dazzles even the imagination, an amazing accumulation of trophies torn by conquest from pagan temples--all symbolizing the universal dominion of the church not only over all things material but also over all things religious. The robes of the cathedral are elaborate and impressive throughout all the grades and ranks of service, from the drab garb of the keeper of the portals to the flashing parti-colored uniforms of the Swiss guard, and on through the white, red, and black trappings of the attendants in the inner courts to the vivid scarlet of the cardinals and the gorgeous purple of the pope. All are designed to express some function, or mission, or doctrine of the church in its vast system of evangelism.

The Anglican church of Great Britain and the Protestant Episcopal church of America, as well as various other Protestant organizations have found it to be impressive and inspiring for the clergy and the sisterhood to wear robes designed to mark them as men and women set apart for service to humanity. Perhaps the Greek Catholic Church has the most elaborate system of teaching great religious truths by symbolism of any other religious organization. It undertakes to convey to the world the idea of its virility as a Christian organization by an extensive and artistically wrought out symbolism in its robes and insignia.

It goes without saying that nearly all, or perhaps all, of the great fraternal organizations of the world are characterized by the robes they wear. There are different robes of different orders and various robes for the same order in different degrees. These carry the message of fraternalism in the garments that are worn. Why should we, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, be singled out and condemned for adopting a symbolism altogether unique, to represent our particular service to the age in which we live?

Some objections, probably not wholly misdirected, have been made to the mask that is worn by the Klan in public parades and demonstrations. The objections would have all the more force if it were true that the membership of the Klan were concealed from public scrutiny; but this is not true. Every local Klan has the custody of its roster and the roster may be given to the public at the option of the local Klan. Besides, it is overlooked that the Ku Klux Klan is a chartered organization--in fact twice chartered under the laws of Georgia.

Its membership is subject to the scrutiny of the State at its will. In addition to all this, the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan in respective communities are well-known, responsible and representative men, and their connection with the Klan is generally known to the community at large. So influential and conspicuous are those men that their leadership is a guarantee of the worthy and orderly purposes of the Klan. However, the matter of removing the mask from the Klan whenever it appears in public is under consideration, and it is not improbable that the Klan will be authorized to remove the mask whenever a public demonstration is given.

Outrages and atrocities, expressing various forms of prejudice and hate, have broken out in some parts of the country during the past twelve months. Often they have been charged to the Ku Klux Klan. It is the same old story repeating itself. During Reconstruction days crimes were perpetrated by men wearing regalia similar to that of the Ku Klux Klan. The government spent much time and money investigating these crimes, and compiled altogether forty-six volumes in reports, but wherever the perpetrators of an outrage against order and decency were uncovered, they were found to be not Klansmen but Scalawags and Carpet-Baggers who had used regalia like that of the Klan under which they might enact their dual purpose of committing a crime and blackening the reputation of the Klan. At the recent investigation in Washington numerous crimes were charged to the present-day order of the Ku Klux. These had been heralded in startling stories by the press throughout the land. I vigorously denied that a single crime had ever been committed by the authority of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. I repeat that it is not an order that can tolerate or condone disorder, violence or lawlessness. It pledges itself now and always, here and everywhere, to the protection of society under constituted authority. It holds itself in readiness to serve the best interests of society, not despite the law, but always under the law and through the law.

Symbolism teaches the great principles of life, and being, and destiny, better than any form of speech. There is in human nature an element of mysticism that responds to suggestion and intimation when no logic or philosophy could reach it. The mightiest movements in our human nature, those which transform the character and transfigure the spirit, have their seat in a realm deeper than where man does his thinking or even his willing. It is in that part of human nature where the loyalties and affections, the prejudices and the passions are kept, and it is only the mystical, the mysterious, the intangible that can reach these forces in human nature, arouse them, and put them into action. It is poetry and art and music that move and stir the best that is in us and make us conscious of what we may do and be. It is not strange then that symbolism has been used by the church in order to stimulate reverence and devotion; that it has been used by lodges to awaken fraternalism and humanism; and that it has been used by every great patriotic organization to arouse passion for native land and freedom. Indeed, every cause that has ever lived and flourished in the world, whether religious, fraternal, or patriotic, has been highly spiritualized and all the fiery forces of the inner man have been elicited and organized in its service. There must be in every real movement something of the fervor of the Crusaders. Without this every spiritual effort of man, whether great or small, has had its ardor grow cold and the bright light of its enthusiasm go out in darkness.

The Rendezvous

Once a year, to be exact, on the sixth day of May, the Klan from all over the country makes a pilgrimage to Stone Mountain. Men from every walk and station in life leave their daily pursuits and journey to the Klonvocation. They come from the pulpit, the schoolroom, the market, the bank, the mine, the factory, the shop, the farm, and from high offices of public trust and authority, and meet at this unique rendezvous. Stone Mountain is sixteen miles south of Atlanta. The place of assembly is not without interest. It is a huge boulder compacted into solid granite and thrown up, ages ago, by some terrific convulsion. The stone is three miles in circumference and something more than a mile in altitude by the trail leading to its summit. Its frowning and forbidding front is scant of foliage. Soil which the winds have brought and deposited in its crevices and on its craggy sides has no deepness. Adventurous shrubs and trees that have sprung up from time to time have been beaten back by sun and storm because they had no anchorage in the earth. To this mountain boulder of solid granite the Klan resorts for comradeship and consecration. The pilgrimage is not unlike that conjectured by a noble and worthy order which takes its initiates to the far East, travels them through the unmarked desert, over blistering sands, and under a sky of brass, while the breath of the winds is like that of a furnace, scorching the weary pilgrims as step by step they fight on to the Mecca. The Klansmen make their way along the poorly defined and jagged trail of Stone Mountain, climbing upward, always upward, every step taken requiring a step higher, until, among the elderly members, the last ounce of fortitude and endurance is expended in the ascent to the top. There on the bald crest, far above the insistent clamor and demands of daily life men are alone with each other and in the presence of the infinite. It has sometimes seemed to us to be a place where two eternities met, the past giving its solemn command to the men so isolated and elevated, and the future beckoning them on to still further achievement. First, there comes a sense of tranquillity. The men look out upon the peace and harmony of the stars and seem to feel in their souls something of the strength and orderliness of the planets in their courses. Then comes, during our preliminary ceremonies, a moment of marvelous moral tension and exhilaration. The vast throng, with upturned faces, deeply moved to eloquent agony of speechless prayer, catches a glorious inspiration. It comes upon the multitude as a wind moving gently through the forests in the autumn time. Every soul is thrilled. In this conscious moment each man feels as if he were in a holy temple consecrating all that he is and all that he has to a great cause. In response to his dedication, new and secret divine forces begin to stir in his consciousness. I have looked upon the whole assembly of strong men, a few of whom had jeopardized life unto death on the fields of war in the Sixties, and a larger number of younger men who had just carried themselves like demigods in the fierce fighting in France, and I have seen the tears rush unbidden from their eyes and trickle down their cheeks, while here and there a sob that could not be controlled shook the frame of a man unafraid of either life or death. It is the time and place where all pettiness and meanness is submerged and washed out by the great surge of the profoundest sense of human worth. It is a moment in which all hates and animosities and prejudices die and in which love and sacrifice and altruism are reborn. It is a time in which all that is coarse and unchaste and unrefined in human life is consumed by a holy passion, and all that is noble and courteous and divine is made regnant.

In the execution of such ceremonies, the Klan evidences its practical nature and its concrete knowledge. Americans can not be aroused by the mere citation of facts. Our minds are stuffed unto bursting with facts. We want action. And we do not propose to wait a generation as has been so often the case, and then weep because it is too late to act. We seek to draw the souls of men into a service which means sacrifice. This service is vital to the nation, and essential to the salvation of our civilization. The language of symbolism is the language of the soul.

The Klan disperses, goes back to mingle with men, to meet all the stresses and the exigencies of life. But in each man there is a light that never before fell on sea or shore, that will lie upon the task that he is set to do, and, however hard and menial it may be, will transform that work into a beatitude. More than this: We have daily evidence that this light, in honor, kindness and charity, falls upon our fellow men along the pathway that they and we walk together. Surely there can be no hidden dangers in the assembling of men under such conditions, impelled by such motives, capable of such inspiration.

If we undertake to build or maintain a civilization in which the moral and social idealisms of men are not mixed with the mortar in the structure, we shall most surely build for decline and decay. But if Americanism becomes a holy cause in which the souls of men are enlisted, in which service of our country and our country's service of the world is made first and foremost, then we shall build an empire indestructible; because, mingled with the cruder material there will be the elements that are everlasting. In such workmanship alone can there be security for those American institutions which we seek to save by the consecration of all we have and all we are.

Democracy as a Social System is on Trial

In a preceding chapter I stated that we Americans are barely reproducing our numbers on our own soil. In comparison with the colored and foreign elements our percentage is every year being reduced. In full view, within a few decades at most, lies the new America. Perhaps it has been fear of giving offense to others, more likely it has been pure carelessness and individual selfishness on our part, which has prevented us from discussing our country of to-morrow. The new America, if the present tendencies continue, will be a nation composed of a majority of American white farmers only in the middle western and plains states. Black farmers will ultimately predominate throughout the coastal regions of the South and the Mississippi Delta, and Japanese farmers will rapidly multiply their numbers on the Pacific coast. But the ever-increasing city population already numbers over half the nation. This city population in the North and East contains to-day about fifteen per cent. of original Americans. Presently this diminishing element will count only a few capitalists and professional persons. The majority of the business class, even, will be composed of Greeks, Jews, Germans, Italians and their descendants. The great working class of the cities is even now composed of two elements. First, there are the skilled workers, mainly British, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians, with their immediate descendants. The unskilled working people of the cities, always tending to submerge the skilled, are composed of Italians, Negroes, Slavs, Jews, French-Canadians, and thirty-odd other elements from the south and east of Europe and from Asia. Recently seventy-two Americans, members of a literary club, in a small industrial town in New York, took a census of their children. They discovered, much to their surprise that altogether they were rearing exactly fourteen offspring. Meanwhile fourteen children is not an uncommon number at all for an Italian or French-Canadian couple to add to the citizenship of our country.

Questions arise here which it is quite necessary for us to answer at once. Why, indeed, do we Americans lay such great store by our peculiar racial heritage? Are not our recent immigrants, taken as a whole, as "good" as we? If we do not desire to bring children into the world, should not our country be left to others who are willing to undertake the responsibilities of parenthood? Hence, why are we not disposed to accept our dissolution silently and go to the grave with a smile?

The answer to these questions is implied in the title of this article. It is the cherished belief of the members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan that democracy--democracy in all its aspects, the social spirit of democracy, the practice of democracy, the regeneration of the soul of mankind through democracy--that this is the greatest of all values created by modern civilization. We hold further that the part played by the American people in the evolution of democracy has been of primary importance. Despite all our mistakes, and they have been many, we have succeeded. And our success, even with its limitations, has been, we fully believe, as a light and as a leading to all the world. It was our glorious privilege to unlock the prison door of France when our sister republic was first created in the French Revolution. It was largely the success of universal, white, male suffrage in America which impelled our brethren of the British Empire to undertake the same colossal experiment. No doubt our history has been the subject of far too much fervid eloquence and vain boasting. We have not often hesitated to tell all the world about ourselves. Here I am seeking merely to state the simple facts, because without them the standpoint and argument of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan could not be understood.

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