In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent
had a large family, he lived there. In another place the living
was worth a thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate,
himself appearing twice a year, on Christmas day and on the
King's birthday, to preach a sermon; the rest of the time he
spent in Paris. It is worth noting that in 1808 a law was
proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that is, clergymen
holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do their
work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with
strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting
against it without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp
saying of Karl Marx, that the English clergy would rather part
with thirty-eight of their thirty-nine articles than with one
thirty-ninth of their income.

There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They
are the sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the
clergy; they have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and
possess the one essential qualification, that they are gentlemen.
Their average price is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their
function was made clear to me when I attended my first English
tea-party. There was a wicker table, perhaps a foot and a half
square, having three shelves, one below the other the top layer
the plates and napkins, on the next the muffins, and on the
lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you pass the curate,
please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call that the
curate, because it does the work of a curate."


Graft in Tail

As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular
with the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in
their campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and
disconcerted when they found I did not agree with their
interpretation of my writings. I had told of corruption in
American politics; surely I must know that in England they had no
such evils! I explained that they did not have to; their graft,
to use their own legal phrase, was "in tail"; the grafters had,
as a matter of divine right, the things which in America they had
to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate, a
"Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in
cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as
their birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself,
it is merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England
has even more than America. When I explained this, my popularity
with the British ruling classes vanished quickly.

As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she
realizes; her British reticence has kept her ignorant about
herself. I could not carry on my business in England, because of
the libel laws, which have as their first principle "the greater
the truth, the greater the libel". Englishmen read with
satisfaction what I write about America; but if I should turn my
attention to their own country, they would send me to jail as
they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new men in England,
the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have bought
their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our
American senators have done; they have bought the political
parties with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have
taken over the press, whether by outright purchase like
Northcliffe, or by advertising subsidy--both of which methods we
Americans know. Within the last decade or two another group has
been coming into control; and not merely is this the same class
of men as in America, it frequently consists of the same
individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the international
financiers who are the fine and final flower of the capitalist
system. These gentlemen make the world their home--or, as
Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit
themselves to all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and
Vienna, country gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris,
democrats in Chicago, Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews
wherever they are.

And of course, in buying the English government, these new
classes have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the
world as they are, they know that they must have a Religion. They
have read the story of the French revolution, and the shadow of
the guillotine is always over their thoughts; they see the giant
of labor, restless in his torment, groping as in a nightmare for
the throat of his enemy. Who can blind the eyes of this giant,
who can chain him to his couch of slumber? There is but one
agent, without rival--the Keeper of the Holy Secrets, the Deputy
of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and Withholder of Eternal
Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your forehead in the
dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled my
childhood--my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial
robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest,
and pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:

"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins
thou dost retain, they are retained!"


Bishops and Beer

For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines
of South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly
taxed than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So
the armies of England were sent to subjugate the country. You
might think they would have had the good taste to leave the lowly
Jesus out of this affair--but if so, you have missed the
essential point about established religion. The bishops, priests,
and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the
robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the
opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their
"living." During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English
clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly
reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of
Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to
women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it
was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought
forward to make reply. Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi,
and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one
mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war
as a means of keeping the nation "virile"; nor Archbishop
Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making "noble
natures".

The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example,
the opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy
in India and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made
perhaps a hundred million "noble natures" by this method; and
also they were making a hundred million dollars a year. The
Chinese, moved by their new "virility," undertook to destroy some
opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use
British battle-ships to punish and subdue them. Was there any
difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless
this holy war? There was not! Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most
devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of
the clergy, and wrote in his diary:

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated.
We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and
unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have
shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed
of Christian blood in two centuries.

That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England
continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and
only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought
to an end. Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the
church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a
letter to the Anti-Opium Society:

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China
can never meet on a common ground. China views the whole question
from a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.

And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the
English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and
country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are
clamoring for restriction--and what prevents? Head and front of
the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the
Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early
temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot
recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith
brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer,
he was confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy,
protesting against the act. And what was the basis of their
protest? That beer is a food and not a poison? Yes, of course;
but also that there was property invested in brewing it, Three
hundred and thirty-two clergy of the diocese of Peterborough
declared:

We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the present
bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave injustice as
amounting to a confiscation of private property, spelling ruin
for thousands of quite innocent people, and provoking deep and
widespread resentment, which must do harm to our cause and hinder
our aims.

I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken
petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for
research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C.
Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:

It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr. Asquith's
temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through the opposition
of clergymen who had invested their savings in brewery stock, the
profits of which might have been lessened by the bill.

Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was
sufficient to put through Parliament a provision that no
prohibition legislation should ever be passed without providing
for compensation to the owners of the industry. Today, all over
America, appeals are being made to the people to eat less grain;
the grain is being shipped to England, some of it to be made into
beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his Grace the Archbishop of
York, comes to America to urge us to increased sacrifices, and in
his first newspaper interview takes occasion to declare that his
church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of war-time
economy!


Anglicanism and Alcohol

This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to
British radicals; they see it at work in every election--the
publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson
confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies
in England employing this deadly combination--the "Anti-Socialist
Union" and the "Liberty and Property Defense League." If you scan
the lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizers of these
satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and landlords,
prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-scale dealers
in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting called by the
"Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a
denunciation of Socialism by W. H. Mallock, a master sophist of
Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a
dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary
of the Federated Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine,
Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other
alcoholic magnates.

In every public library in England and many in America you will
find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations,
and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock
misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these
writings are brutal--setting forth the ethics of exploitation in
the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who
supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural
science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:

A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot
get subsistence from his parents, and if society does not want
his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food,
and in fact has no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty
feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and
will quickly execute her own orders.

Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth
century; but it was found that for some reason this failed to
stop the growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical
defenders of Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They
inform us now that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental
purposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really
and truly wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but
right here and now. However, there are so many complications--and
so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos.
Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D., expounding
"The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:

Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to
another may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the
present holders to their own highest good, and may be accompanied
with injustice as extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich
and powerful.

And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular
clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on
wage-slavery:

The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through
them, of which this is one. Where God has been so patient, it is
not for us to be impatient.

And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a
clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing
us back to the faith of our fathers:

The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
arrangements, but to personal vices.

I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what,
if anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our
time. I find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of
Durham, as being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop
Westcott, whether he is talking to a high society congregation,
or to one of workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense of knowing
always where to stop." So I consulted the Bishop's volume, "The
Social Aspects of Christianity" and I see at once why he is
popular with the anti-Socialist propagandists--neither I or any
other man can possibly discover what he really means, or what he
really wants done.

I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I
kept on the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find
something a plain man could understand; so I got the beautiful
two-volume "Life of Brooke Westcott, by his Son"--and there I
found an exposition of the social purposes of bishops! In the
year 1892 there was a strike in Durham, which is in the coal
country; the employers tried to make a cut in wages, and some ten
thousand men walked out, and there was a long and bitter
struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was much
consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at
last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as
arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you
suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!

I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the
naivete with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the
story of this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came
out from the conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the
result of his day's work." As for his followers, they were in
ecstacies; they "seized and waltzed one another around on the
carriage drive as madly as ever we danced at a flower show ball.
Hats and caps are thrown into the air, and we cheer ourselves
hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his palace, and sends one more
communication on episcopal stationery--an order to all his clergy
to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to God for our happy
deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has been long
afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in Durham
who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one
of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he
made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The
biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted
that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and
so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had
been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where
the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not
permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want to live
on tea and toast, were compelled to!


Dead Cats

For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been
fighting with every resource at their command the liberal and
enlightened men of England who wished to educate the masses of
the people. In 1807 the first measure for a national
school-system was denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as
"derogatory to the authority of the Church." As a counter-
measure, his supporters established the "National Society for
Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Doctrines of the
Established Church"; and the founder of the organization, a
clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a school, and
insisted that the children of the workers "should not be taught
beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council
of Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the
Archbishops, setting forth the decree of "their lordships" that
"the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of
the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and
precepts of revealed religion." In 1850 a bill for secular
education was denounced as presenting to the country "a choice
between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870, Forster,
author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons
were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into
savages."

As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to
abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts
endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism
conferred emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon
the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation:
"Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the
least alteration of civil property."

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of
the cultured classes of England:

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political
controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the
franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected
religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable
institution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these
leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes
have been in the wrong.

The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes," for
he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the
record will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform
measures which Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the
Reform Bill of 1832. It opposed all the social reforms of Lord
Shaftesbury. This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at
first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to
the end only a few. He expressed himself as distressed and
puzzled "to find support from infidels and non-professors;
opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers."

And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of
Bishops voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The
House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; the House of
Bishops opposed Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the
end. Concerning this establishment Lord Shaftesbury, himself the
most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase: "this vast
aquarium full of cold-blooded life." He told the Bishops that he
would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform,
because he knew that they would never begin. Another member of
the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russell, has written of
their record and adventures:

They were defenders of absolutism, slavery, and the bloody penal
code; they were the resolute opponents of every political or
social reform; and they had their reward from the nation outside
Parliament. The Bishop of Bristol had his palace sacked and
burnt; the Bishop of London could not keep an engagement to
preach lest the congregation should stone him. The Bishop of
Litchfield barely escaped with his life after preaching at St.
Bride's, Fleet Street. Archbishop Howley, entering Canterbury for
his primary visitation, was insulted, spat upon, and only brought
by a circuitous route to the Deanery, amid the execrations of the
mob. On the 5th of November the Bishops of Exeter and Winchester
were burnt in effigy close to their own palace gates. Archbishop
Howley's chaplain complained that a dead cat had been thrown at
him, when the Archbishop--a man of apostolic meekness--replied:
"You should be thankful that it was not a live one."

The people had reason for this conduct--as you will always find
they have, if you take the trouble to inquire. Let me quote
another member of the English ruling classes, Mr. Conrad Noel,
who gives "an instance of the procedure of Church and State about
this period":

In 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by
one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week
each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood.
The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the
chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for
whatever their masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at
first promised his help, now turned against them, and the masters
promptly reduced the wage to 7s., with a threat of further
reduction. Loveless then formed an agricultural union, for which
all seven were arrested, treated as convicts, and committed to
the assizes. The prison chaplain tried to bully them into
submission. The judge determined to convict them, and directed
that they should be tried for mutiny under an act of George III,
specially passed to deal with the naval mutiny at the Nore. The
grand jury were landowners, and the petty jury were farmers; both
judge and jury were churchmen of the prevailing type. The judge
summed up as follows: "Not for anything that you have done, or
that I can prove that you intend to do, but for an example to
others I consider it my duty to pass the sentence of seven years'
penal transportation across His Majesty's high seas upon each and
every one of you."


Suffer Little Children

The founder of Christianity was a man who specialized in
children. He was not afraid of having His discourses disturbed by
them, He did not consider them superfluous. "Of such is the
Kingdom of Heaven", He said; and His Church is the inheritor of
this tradition--"feed my lambs". There were children in Great
Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century, and we may
see what was done with them by turning to Gibbin's "Industrial
History of England":

Sometimes regular traffickers would take the place of the
manufacturer, and transfer a number of children to a factory
district, and there keep them, generally in some dark cellar,
till they could hand them over to a mill owner in want of hands,
who would come and examine their height, strength, and bodily
capacities, exactly as did the slave owners in the American
markets. After that the children were simply at the mercy of
their owners, nominally as apprentices, but in reality as mere
slaves, who got no wages, and whom it was not worth while even to
feed and clothe properly, because they were so cheap and their
places could be so easily supplied. It was often arranged by the
parish authorities, in order to get rid of imbeciles, that one
idiot should be taken by the mill owner with every twenty sane
children. The fate of these unhappy idiots was even worse than
that of the others. The secret of their final end has never been
disclosed, but we can form some idea of their awful sufferings
from the hardships of the other victims to capitalist greed and
cruelty. The hours of their labor were only limited by
exhaustion, after many modes of torture had been unavailingly
applied to force continued work. Children were often worked
sixteen hours a day, by day and by night.

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the
labor of children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day.
This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to
have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently
opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It
was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the
will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church,
whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B.
C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing
economic order. "Anu and Baal called me, Hammurabi, the exalted
prince, worshipper of the gods".... so begins the oldest legal
code which has come down to us, from 2250 B. C.; and the
coronation service of the English church is made whole out of the
same thesis. The duty of submission, not merely to divinely
chosen King, but to divinely chosen Landlord and divinely chosen
Manufacturer, is implicit in the church's every ceremony, and
explicit in many of its creeds. In the Litany the people petition
for increase of grace to hear meekly "Thy Word"; and here is this
"Word," as little children are made to learn it by heart. If
there exists in the world a more perfect summary of slave ethics,
I do not know where to find it.

My duty towards my neighbour is.....
 To honour and obey the King, and all that are put in authority
under him;
 To submit myself to all my governours, teachers, spiritual
pastors, and masters:
 To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters ....
 Not to covet nor desire other men's goods;
 But to learn and labour truly to get mine own living, and to do
my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to
call me.

A hundred years ago one of the most popular of British writers
was Hannah More. She and her sister Martha went to live in the
coal-country, to teach this "catechism" to the children of the
starving miners. The "Mendip Annals" is the title of a book in
which they tell of their ten years' labors in a village popularly
known as "Little Hell." In this place two hundred people were
crowded into nineteen houses. "There is not one creature in it
that can give a cup of broth if it would save a life." In one
winter eighteen perished of "a putrid fever", and the clergyman
"could not raise a sixpence to save a life."

And what did the pious sisters make of all this? From cover to
cover you find in the "Mendip Annals" no single word of social
protest, not even of social suspicion. That wages of a shilling a
day might have anything to do with moral degeneration was a
proposition beyond the mental powers of England's most popular
woman writer. She was perfectly content that a woman should be
sentenced to death for stealing butter from a dealer who had
asked what the woman thought too high a price. When there came a
famine, and the children of these mine-slaves were dying like
flies, Hannah More bade them be happy because God had sent them
her pious self. "In suffering by the scarcity, you have but
shared in the common lot, with the pleasure of knowing the
advantage you have had over many villages in your having suffered
no scarcity of religious instruction." And in another place she
explained that the famine was caused by God to teach the poor to
be grateful to the rich!

Let me remind you that probably that very scarcity has been
permitted by an all-wise and gracious Providence to unite all
ranks of people together, to show the poor how immediately they
are dependent upon the rich, and to show both rich and poor that
they are all dependent upon Himself. It has also enabled you to
see more clearly the advantages you derive from the government
and constitution of this country--to observe the benefits flowing
from the distinction of rank and fortune, which has enabled the
high to so liberally assist the low.

It appears that the villagers were entirely convinced by this
pious reasoning; for they assembled one Saturday night and burned
an effigy of Tom Paine! This proceeding led to a tragic
consequence, for one of the "common people," known as Robert,
"was overtaken by liquor," and was unable to appear at Sunday
School next day. This fall from grace occasioned intense remorse
in Robert. "It preyed dreadfully upon his mind for many months,"
records Martha More, "and despair seemed at length to take
possession of him." Hannah had some conversation with him, and
read him some suitable passages from "The Rise and Progress". "At
length the Almighty was pleased to shine into his heart and give
him comfort."

Nor should you imagine that this saintly stupidity was in any way
unique in the Anglican establishment. We read in the letters of
Shelley how his father tormented him with Archdeacon Paley's
"Evidences" as a cure for atheism. This eminent churchman wrote a
book, which he himself ranked first among his writings, called
"Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Classes of
the British Public." In this book he not merely proved that
religion "smooths all inequalities, because it unfolds a prospect
which makes all earthly distinctions nothing"; he went so far as
to prove that, quite apart from religion, the British exploiters
were less fortunate than those to whom they paid a shilling a
day.

Some of the conditions which poverty (if the condition of the
labouring part of mankind must be so called) imposes, are not
hardships, but pleasures. Frugality itself is a pleasure. It is
an exercise of attention and contrivance, which, whenever it is
successful, produces satisfaction..... This is lost among
abundance.

And there was William Wilberforce, as sincere a philanthropist as
Anglicanism ever produced, an ardent supporter of Bible societies
and foreign missions, a champion of the anti-slavery movement,
and also of the ruthless "Combination Laws," which denied to
British wage-slaves all chance of bettering their lot.
Wilberforce published a "Practical View of the System of
Christianity", in which he told unblushingly what the Anglican
establishment is for. In a chapter which he described as "the
basis of all politics," he explained that the purpose of religion
is to remind the poor:

That their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand
of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties,
and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the objects
about which worldly men conflict so eagerly are not worth the
contest; that the peace of mind, which Religion offers
indiscriminately to all ranks, affords more true satisfaction
than all the expensive pleasures which are beyond the poor man's
reach; that in this view the poor have the advantage; that if
their superiors enjoy more abundant comforts, they are also
exposed to many temptations from which the inferior classes are
happily extempted; that, "having food and raiment, they should be
therewith content," since their situation in life, with all its
evils, is better than they have deserved at the hand of God; and
finally, that all human distinctions will soon be done away, and
the true followers of Christ will all, as children of the same
Father, be alike admitted to the possession of the same heavenly
inheritance. Such are the blessed effects of Christianity on the
temporal well-being of political communities.

The Court Circular

The Anglican system of submission has been transplanted intact to
the soil of America. When King George the Third lost the
sovereignty of the colonies, the bishops of his divinely inspired
church lost the control of the clergy across the seas; but this
revolution was purely one of Church politics--in doctrine and
ritual the "Protestant Episcopal Church of America" remained in
every way Anglican. The little children of our free republic are
taught the same slave-catechism, "to order myself lowly and
reverently to all my betters." The only difference is that
instead of being told "to honour and obey the King," they are
told "to honour and obey the civil authority."

It is the Church of Good Society in England, and it is the same
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington,
Charleston. Just as our ruling classes have provided themselves
with imitation English schools and imitation English manners and
imitation English clothes--so in their Heaven they have provided
an imitation English monarch. I wonder how many Americans realize
the treason to democracy they are committing when they allow
their children to be taught a symbolism and liturgy based upon
absolutist ideas. I take up the hymn-book--not the English, but
the sturdy, independent, democratic American hymn-book. I have
not opened it for twenty years, yet the greater part of its
contents is as familiar to me as the syllables of my own name. I
read:

 Holy, holy, holy! All the saints adore Thee,  Casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea;  Cherubim and seraphim
bowing down before Thee,  Which wert, and art, and ever more
shall be!

One might quote a hundred other hymns made thus out of royal
imagery. I turn at random to the part headed "General," and find
that there is hardly one hymn in which there is not "king ... ..
throne," or some image of homage and flattery. The first hymn
begins--

     Ancient of days, Who sittest, throned in glory;
      To Thee all knees are bent, all voices pray.

And the second--

     Christ, whose glory fills the skies---

And the third--

     Lord of all being, throned afar,
      Thy glory flames from sun and star.

There is a court in Heaven above, to which all good Britons look
up, and about which they read with exactly the same thrills as
they read the Court Circular. The two courts have the same
ethical code and the same manners; their Sovereigns are jealous,
greedy of attention, self-conscious and profoundly serious,
punctilious and precise; their existence consisting of an endless
round of ceremonies, and they being incapable of boredom. No
member of the Royal Family can escape this regime even if he
wishes; and no more can any member of the Holy Family--not even
the meek and lowly Jesus, who chose a carpenter's wife for his
mother, and showed all his earthly days a preference for low
society.

This unconventional Son lived obscurely; he never carried
weapons, he could not bear to have so much as a human ear cut off
in his presence. But see how he figures in the Court Circular:

 The Son of God goes forth to war,
      A kingly crown to gain:
  His blood-red banner streams afar:
      Who follows in His train?

This carpenter's son was one of the most unpretentious men on
earth; utterly simple and honest--he would not even let anyone
praise him. When some one called him "good Master," he answered,
quickly, "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save one,
that is, God." But this simplicity has been taken with
deprecation by his church, which persists in heaping compliments
upon him in conventional, courtly style:

 The company of angels
      Are praising Thee on high;
  And mortal men, and all things
      Created, make reply:  All Glory, laud and honour,
      To Thee, Redeemer, King. . . . .

The impression a modern man gets from all this is the unutterable
boredom that Heaven must be. Can one imagine a more painful
occupation than that of the saints--casting down their golden
crowns around the glassy sea--unless it be that of the
Triumvirate itself, compelled to sit through eternity watching
these saints, and listening to their mawkish and superfluous
compliments!

But one can understand that such things are necessary in a
monarchy; they are necessary if you are going to have Good
Society, and a Good Society church. For Good Society is precisely
the same thing as Heaven; that is, a place to which only a few
can get admission, and those few are bored. They spend their time
going through costly formalities--not because they enjoy it, but
because of its effect upon the populace, which reads about them
and sees their pictures in the papers, and now and then is
allowed to catch a glimpse of their physical Presences, as at the
horse-show, or the opera, or the coaching-parade.


Horn-blowing

I know the Church of Good Society in America, having studied it
from the inside. I was an extraordinarily devout little boy; one
of my earliest recollections--I cannot have been more than four
years of age--is of carrying a dust-brush about the house as the
choir-boy carried the golden cross every Sunday morning. I
remember asking if I might say the "Lord's prayer" in this
fascinating play; and my mother's reply: "If you say it
reverently." When I was thirteen, I attended service, of my own
volition and out of my own enthusiasm, every single day during
the forty days of Lent; at the age of fifteen I was teaching
Sunday-school. It was the Church of the Holy Communion, at Sixth
Avenue and Twentieth Street, New York; and those who know the
city will understand that this is a peculiar location--precisely
half way between the homes of some of the oldest and most august
of the city's aristocracy, and some of the vilest and most filthy
of the city's slums. The aristocracy were paying for the church,
and occupied the best pews; they came, perfectly clad, aus dem Ei
gegossen, as the Germans say, with the manner they so carefully
cultivate, gracious, yet infinitely aloof. The service was made
for them--as all the rest of the world is made for them; the
populace was permitted to occupy a fringe of vacant seats.

The assistant clergyman was an Englishman, and a gentleman;
orthodox, yet the warmest man's heart I have ever known. He could
not bear to have the church remain entirely the church of the
rich; he would go persistently into the homes of the poor,
visiting the old slum women in their pitifully neat little
kitchens, and luring their children with entertainments and
Christmas candy. They were corralled into the Sunday-school,
where it was my duty to give them what they needed for the health
of their souls.

I taught them out of a book of lessons; and one Sunday it would
be Moses in the Bulrushes, and next Sunday it would be Jonah and
the Whale, and next Sunday it would be Joshua blowing down the
walls of Jericho. These stories were reasonably entertaining, but
they seemed to me futile, not to the point. There were little
morals tagged to them, but these lacked relationship to the lives
of little slum-boys. Be good and you will be happy, love the Lord
and all will be well with you; which was about as true and as
practical as the procedure of the Fijians, blowing horns to drive
away a pestilence.

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
gravestones; 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?

The story was told some ten years ago by Charles Edward Russell.
Trinity Corporation is the name of the concern, and it is one of
the great landlords of New York. In the early days it bought a
number of farms, and these it has held, as the city has grown up
around them, until in 1908 their value was estimated at anywhere
from forty to a hundred million dollars. The true amount has
never been made public; to quote Russell's words:

The real owners of the property are the communicants of the
church. For 94 years none of the owners has known the extent of
the property, nor the amount of the revenue therefrom, nor what
is done with the money. Every attempt to learn even the simplest
fact about these matters has been baffled. The management is a
self perpetuating body, without responsibility and without
supervision.

And the writer goes on to describe the business policy of this
great corporation, which is simply the English land system
complete. It refuses to sell the land, but rents it for long
periods, and the tenant builds the house, and then when the lease
expires, the Corporation takes over the house for a nominal sum.
Thus it has purchased houses for as low as $200, and made them
into tenements, and rented them to the swarming poor for a total
of fifty dollars a month. The houses were not built for
tenements, they have no conveniences, they are not fit for the
habitation of animals. The article, in Everybody's Magazine for
July, 1908, gives pictures of them, which are horrible beyond
belief. To quote the writer again:

Decay, neglect and squalor seem to brood wherever Trinity is an
owner. Gladly would I give to such a charitable and benevolent
institution all possible credit for a spirit of improvement
manifested anywhere, but I can find no such manifestation. I have
tramped the Eighth Ward day after day with a list of Trinity
properties in my hand, and of all the tenement houses that stand
there on Trinity land, I have not found one that is not a
disgrace to civilization and to the City of New York.

It happens that I once knew the stately prelate who presided over
this Corporation of Corruption. I imagine how he would have
shivered and turned pale had some angel whispered to him what
devilish utterances were some day to proceed from the lips of the
little cherub with shining face and shining robes who acted as
the bishop's attendant in the stately ceremonials of the Church!
Truly, even into the goodly company of the elect, even to the
most holy places of the temple, Satan makes his treacherous way!
Even under the consecrated hands of the bishop! For while the
bishop was blessing me and taking me into the company of the
sanctified, I was thinking about what the papers had reported,
that the bishop's wife had been robbed of fifty thousand dollars
worth of jewels! It did not seem quite in accordance with the
doctrine of Jesus that a bishop's wife should possess fifty
thousand dollars worth of jewels, or that she should be setting
the blood-hounds of the police on the train of a human being. I
asked my clergyman friend about it, and remember his patient
explanation--that the bishop had to know all classes and
conditions of men: his wife had to go among the rich as well as
the poor, and must be able to dress so that she would not be
embarrassed. The Bishop at this time was making it his life-work
to raise a million dollars for the beginning of a great Episcopal
cathedral; and this of course compelled him to spend much time
among the rich!

The explanation satisfied me; for of course I thought there had
to be cathedrals--despite the fact that both St. Stephen and St.
Paul had declared that "the Lord dwelleth not in temples made
with hands." In the twenty-five years which have passed since
that time the good Bishop has passed to his eternal reward, but
the mighty structure which is a monument to his visitations among
the rich towers over the city from its vantage-point on
Morningside Heights. It is called the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine; and knowing what I know about the men who contributed its
funds, and about the general functions of the churches of the
Metropolis of Mammon, it would not seem to me less holy if it
were built, like the monuments of ancient ravagers, out of the
skulls of human beings.


Spiritual Interpretation

There remains to say a few words as to the intellectual functions
of the Fifth Avenue clergy. Let us realize at the outset that
they do their preaching in the name of a proletarian rebel, who
was crucified as a common criminal because, as they said, "He
stirreth up the people." An embarrassing "Savior" for the church
of Good Society, you might imagine; but they manage to fix him up
and make him respectable.

I remember something analogous in my own boyhood. All day
Saturday I ran about with the little street rowdies, I stole
potatoes and roasted them in vacant lots, I threw mud from the
roofs of apartment-houses; but on Saturday night I went into a
tub and was lathered and scrubbed, and on Sunday I came forth in
a newly brushed suit, a clean white collar and a shining tie and
a slick derby hat and a pair of tight gloves which made me
impotent for mischief. Thus I was taken and paraded up Fifth
Avenue, doing my part of the duties of Good Society. And all
church-members go through this same performance; the oldest and
most venerable of them steal potatoes and throw mud all week
--and then take a hot bath of repentance and put on the clean
clothing of piety. In this same way their ministers of religion
are occupied to scrub and clean and dress up their disreputable
Founder--to turn him from a proletarian rebel into a
stained-glass-window divinity.

The man who really lived, the carpenter's son, they take out and
crucify all over again. As a young poet has phrased it, they nail
him to a jeweled cross with cruel nails of gold. Come with me to
the New Golgotha and witness this crucifixion; take the nails of
gold in your hands, try the weight of the jeweled sledges! Here
is a sledge, in the form of a dignified and scholarly volume,
published by the exclusive house of Scribner, and written by the
Bishop of my boyhood, the Bishop whose train I carried in the
stately ceremonials: "The Citizen in His Relation to the
Industrial Situation," by the Right Reverend Henry Codman Potter,
D. D., L. L. D., D. C. L.--a course of lectures delivered before
the sons of our predatory classes at Yale University, under the
endowment of a millionaire mining king, founder of the
Phelps-Dodge corporation, which the other day carried out the
deportation from their homes of a thousand striking miners at
Bisbee, Arizona. Says my Bishop:

Christ did not denounce wealth any more than he denounced
pauperism. He did not abhor money; he used it. He did not abhor
the company of rich men; he sought it. He did not invariably
scorn or even resent a certain profuseness of expenditure.

And do you think that the late Bishop of J. P. Morgan and Company
stands alone as an utterer of scholarly blasphemy, a driver of
golden nails? In the course of this book there will march before
us a long line of the clerical retainers of Privilege, on their
way to the New Golgotha to crucify the carpenter's son: the
Rector of the Money Trust, the Preacher of the Coal Trust, the
Priest of the Traction Trust, the Archbishop of Tammany, the
Chaplain of the Millionaires' Club, the Pastor of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, the Religious Editor of the New Haven, the
Sunday-school Superintendent of Standard Oil. We shall try the
weight of their jewelled sledges--books, sermons,
newspaper-interviews, after-dinner speeches--wherewith they pound
their golden nails of sophistry into the bleeding hands and feet
of the proletarian Christ.

Here, for example, is Rev. F. G. Peabody, Professor of Christian
Morals at Harvard University. Prof. Peabody has written several
books on the social teachings of Jesus; he quotes the most rabid
of the carpenter's denunciations of the rich, and says:

Is it possible that so obvious and so limited a message as this,
a teaching so slightly distinguished from the curbstone rhetoric
of a modern agitator, can be an adequate reproduction of the
scope and power of the teaching of Jesus?