God in the Schools

But that, you may say, was a long time ago. If so, let us take a
modern country in which the Catholic Church has worked its will.
Until recently, Spain was such a country. Now the people are
turning against the clerical machine; and if you ask why, turn to
Rafael Shaw's "Spain From Within":

On every side the people see the baleful hand of the Church,
interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life,
ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their
hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and
maintained in the interest of the Religious Orders, placing
obstacles in the way of their children's education, hindering
them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and
deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run
counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in
Barcelona; they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes
to war in Morocco; it is dragged into it solely in defense of the
mines owned, actually, if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The
consumos cannot be abolished because the Jesuits are financially
interested in their continuance.

We have read the statement of a Jesuit father, that "the state
cannot justly enforce compulsory education, even in case of utter
illiteracy." How has that doctrine worked out in Spain? There was
an official investigation of school conditions, the report
appearing in the "Heraldo de Madrid" for November, 1909. In 1857
there had been passed a law requiring a certain number of schools
in each of the 79 provinces: this requirement being below the
very low standards prevailing at that time in other European
countries. Yet in 1909 it was found that only four provinces had
the required number of elementary schools, and at the rate of
increase then prevailing it would have taken 150 years to catch
up. Seventy-five per cent of the population were wholly
illiterate, and 30,000 towns and villages had no government
schools at all. The government owed nearly a million and a half
dollars in unpaid salaries to the teachers. The private schools
were nearly all "nuns' schools", which taught only needle-work
and catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."

As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of
Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as
follows:

More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these
are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are
schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughter
houses, with stables. One school forms the entrance to a
cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master's table while
the last responses are being said. There is a school into which
the children cannot enter until the animals have been sent out to
pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather
begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One school
is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local
authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in
winter. One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison. Another, in
Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there
is a bull-fight in the town.

These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by
the name of Francesco Ferrer. He founded what he called a "modern
school", in which the pupils should be taught science and common
sense. He drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic
hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his principles the end of
their mastery of the people. When the Barcelona insurrection took
place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having been its
instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military
tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot beneath the
walls of the fortress of Montjuich. The case was thoroughly
investigated by William Archer, one of England's leading critics,
a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind. His conclusion is that
Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and
that his execution was the result of a clerical plot. Of Ferrer's
character Archer writes:

Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted
form a pretty complete revelation. From first to last we see in
him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible idealist. His ideals
are narrow, and his devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid,
if not of egoism, at any rate of self-interest and self-seeking.
As he shrank from applying the money entrusted him to ends of
personal luxury, so also he shrank from making his ideas and
convictions subserve any personal ambition or vanity.


The Menace

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest
idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain. There
are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers
to discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating
to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any
criticism of it as blasphemy. So we have opportunity to observe
the working out of the doctrine that the Church is superior to
the civil law.

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein,
Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J.
Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda. The
Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the
place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the
town, Father O'Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the
lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was
surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was
six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death. At the
trial which followed it developed that Father O'Connor and also
his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were accessories
before the fact.

Nor is this a solitary instance. The Catholic military societies,
with their uniforms and their armories, are not maintained for
nothing. As Archbishop Quigley declared before the German
Catholic Central Verein:

We have well ordered and efficient organizations, all at the beck
and nod of the hierarchy and ready to do what the church
authorities tell them to do. With these bodies of loyal Catholics
ready to step into the breach at any time and present an unbroken
front to the enemy we may feel secure.

And so, on the evening of April 15th, 1914, a group of Catholics
entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a
police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an
anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to a
lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing
happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev.
William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the
assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to
punish them failed, because no jury can be got to convict a
Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most
pious Leo XIII has laid down:

It is an impious deed to break the laws of Jesus Christ for the
purpose of obeying the magistrates, or to transgress the law of
the Church under the pretext of observing the civil law.

There are papers published to warn Americans against the plotting
of this political Church. One of them, "The Menace," has a
circulation of more than a million; and naturally the Knights of
Slavery do not enjoy reading it. Year after year they have
marshalled their power to have this paper barred from the
mails--so far, in vain. They caused an obscenity prosecution,
which failed; so finally the press rooms of the paper were blown
up with dynamite. At the present time there is a "Catholic Truth
Society" with a publication called "Truth", to oppose the
anti-Catholic campaign; and that is all right, of course--except
when the agents who collect the two-dollar subscriptions to this
publication make use of Untruth in their labors--promising
absolution and salvation to the families, dead and living, of
those who "come across" with subscriptions. In the "Bulletin of
the American Federation of Catholic Societies" for September,
1915, I find a record of the ceaseless plotting to bar criticism
of the Catholic Church from the mails. Fitzgerald, a Tammany
Catholic congressman, proposes a bill in Washington; and Judge
St. Paul, of New Orleans, a member of the Federation's "law
committee", points out the difficulties in the way of such
legislation. You cannot pass a law against ridiculing religion,
because the Catholics want to ridicule Christian Science,
Mormonism, and the "Holy Ghost and Us" Society! The Judge thinks
the purpose of the Papal plotters will be accomplished if they
can slip into the present law the words "scurrilous and
slanderous"; he hopes that this much can be done without the
American people catching on!

You read these things for the first time, perhaps, and you want
to start an American "Kultur-kampf." I make haste, therefore, to
restate the main thesis of this book. It is not the New
Inquisition which is our enemy today; it is hereditary Privilege.
It is not Superstition, but Big Business which makes use of
Superstition as a wolf makes use of sheep's clothing.

You remember how, when Americans first awakened to the universal
corruption of our politics, we used to attribute it to the
"ignorant foreign vote." Turn to Lecky's "Democracy and Liberty"
and you will see how reformers twenty years ago explained our
political depravity. But we probed deeper, and discovered that
the purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the
most corrupt of all. It dawned upon us that wherever there was a
political boss paying bribes on election day, there was a captain
of industry furnishing the money for the bribes, and taking some
public privilege in return. So we came to realize that political
corruption is merely a by-product of Big Business.

And when we come to probe this problem of the spread of
Supersition in America, this amazing renascence of Romanism in a
democracy, we find precisely the same phenomenon. It is not the
poor foreigner who troubles us. Our human magic would win
him--our easy-going trust, our quiet certainty of liberty, our
open-handed and open-homed and hail-fellow-well-met democracy. We
should break down the Catholic machine, and not all the priests
in the hierarchy could stop us--were it not for the Steel Trust
and the Coal Trust and the Beef Trust, the Liquor Trust and the
Traction Trust and the Money Trust--those masters of America who
do not want citizens, free and intelligent and self-governing,
but who want the slave-hordes as they come, ignorant, inert,
physically, mentally and morally helpless!

No, do not let yourself be lured into a Kultur-kampf. It is not
the pennies of the servant-girls which build the towering
cathedrals; it is not the two-dollar contributions for the
salvation of souls which support the Catholic Truth Society and
the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society and the Mary
Sodality and the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and
all the rest of the machinery of the Papal propaganda. These
help, of course; but the main sources of growth are, first, the
subsidies of industrial exploiters, the majority of whom are
non-Catholic, and second, the privilege of public plunder granted
as payment for votes by politicians who are creatures and puppets
of Big Business.


King Coal

The proof of these statements is written all over the industrial
life of America. I will stop long enough to present an account of
one industry, asking the reader to accept my statement that if
space permitted I could present the same sort of proof for a
dozen other industries which I have studied--the steel-mills of
Western Pennsylvania, the meat-factories of Chicago, the
glass-works of Southern Jersey, the silk-mills of Paterson, the
cotton-mills of North Carolina, the woolen-mills of
Massachusetts, the lumber-camps of Louisiana, the copper-mines of
Michigan, the sweat-shops of New York.

In a lonely part of the Rocky Mountains lies a group of
enormously valuable coal-mines owned by the Rockefellers and
other Protestant exploiters. The men who work these mines, some
twelve or fifteen thousand in number, come from all the nations
of Europe and Asia, and their fate is that of the average
wage-slave. I do not ask anyone to take my word, but present
sworn testimony, taken by the United States Commission on
Industrial Relations in 1914. Here is the way the Italian miners
live, as described in a doctor's report:

Houses up the canyon, so-called, of which eight are habitable,
and forty-six simply awful; they are disreputably disgraceful. I
have had to remove a mother in labor from one part of the shack
to another to keep dry.

And here is the testimony of the Rev. Eugene S. Gaddis, former
superintendent of the Sociological Department of the Colorado
Fuel and Iron Company:

The C. F. & I. Company now own and rent hovels, shacks and
dug-outs that are unfit for the habitation of human beings and
are little removed from the pig-sty make of dwellings. And the
people in them live on the very level of a pig-sty. Frequently
the population is so congested that whole families are crowded
into one room; eight persons in one small room was reported
during the year.

And here is what this same clergyman has to say about the bosses
whom the Rockefellers employ:

The camp superintendents as a whole impressed me as most uncouth,
ignorant, immoral, and in many instances, the most brutal set of
men that I have ever met. Blasphemous bullies.

Sometimes the miner grows tired of being robbed of his weights,
and applies for the protection which the law of the state allows
him. What happens then?

"When a man asked for a checkweighman, in the language of the
super he was getting too smart."

"And he got what?"

"He got it in the neck, generally."

And when these wage-slaves, goaded beyond endurance, went on
strike, in the words of the Commission's report:

Five strikers, one boy, and thirteen women and children in the
strikers' tent colony were shot to death by militiamen and guards
employed by the coal companies, or suffocated and burned to death
when these militiamen and guards set fire to the tents in which
they made their homes.

And now, what is the position of education in such camps? The
Rev. James McDonald, a Methodist preacher, testified that the
school building was dilapidated and unfit. One year there were
four teachers, the next three, and the next only two. The teacher
of the primary grade had a hundred and twenty children enrolled,
ninety per cent of whom could not speak a word of English.

Every little bench was seated with two or three. It was
over-crowded entirely, and she could hardly get walking room
around there.

And as to the political use made of this deliberately cultivated
ignorance, former United States Senator Patterson testified that
the companies controlled all elections and all nominations:

Election returns from the two or three counties in which the
large companies operate show that in the precincts in which the
mining camps are located the returns are nearly unanimous in
favor of the men or measures approved by the companies,
regardless of party.

And now comes the all-important question. What of the Catholic
Church and these evils? The majority of these mine-slaves are
Catholics, it is this Church which is charged with their
protection. There are priests in every town, and in nearly every
camp. And do we find them lifting their voices in behalf of the
miners, protesting against the starving and torturing of thirty
or forty thousand human beings? Do we find Catholic papers
printing accounts of the Ludlow massacre? Do we find Catholic
journalists on the scene reporting it, Catholic lawyers defending
the strikers, Catholic novelists writing books about their
troubles? We do not!

Through the long agony of the fourteen months strike, I know of
just one Catholic priest, Father Le Fevre, who had a word to say
for the strikers. One of the first stories I heard when I reached
the strike-field was of a priest who had preached on the text
that "Idleness is the root of all evil," and had been reported as
a "scab" and made to shut up. "Who made him?" I asked, naively,
thinking of his church superiors. My informant, a union miner,
laughed. "We made him!" he said.

I talked with another priest who was prudently saving souls and
could not be interested in questions of worldly greed. Max
Eastman, reporting the strike in the "Masses", tells of an
interview with a Catholic sister.

"Has the Church done anything to try to help these people, or to
bring about peace?" we asked. "I consider it the most useless
thing in the world to attempt it," she replied.

The investigating committee of Congress came to the scene, and
several clergymen of the Protestant Church appeared and bore
testimony to the outrages which were being committed against the
strikers; but of all the Catholic priests in the district not one
appeared--not one! Several Protestant clergymen testified that
they had been driven from the coal-camps--not because they
favored the unions, but because the companies objected to having
their workers educated at all; but no one ever heard of the
Catholic Church having trouble with the operators. To make sure
on this point I wrote to a former clergyman of Trinidad who
watched the whole strike, and is now a first lieutenant in the
First New Mexico Infantry. He answered:

The Catholic Church seemed to get along with the companies very
cordially. The Church was permitted in all the camps. The
impression was abroad that this was due to favoritism. I honor
what good the Church does, but I know of no instance, during the
Colorado coal-strike or at any other time or place, when the
Catholic Church has taken any special interest in the cause of
the laboring men. Many Catholics, especially the men, quit the
church during the coal-strike.


The Unholy Alliance

Everywhere throughout America today the ultimate source of all
power, political, social, and religious, is economic
exploitation. To all other powers and all other organizations it
speaks in these words: "Help us, and you will thrive; oppose us,
and you will be destroyed." It has spoken to the Catholic Church,
for sixteen hundred years the friend and servant of every ruling
class; and the Church has hastened to fit itself into the
situation, continuing its pastoral role as shepherd to the
wage-slave vote.

In New York and Boston and Chicago the Church is "Democratic"; so
in the Blaine campaign it was possible for a Republican clergyman
to describe the issue as "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But the
Holy Office was shrewd and socially ambitious, and the Grand Old
Party was desperately in need of votes, so under the regime of
Mark Hanna, the President-Maker, there began a rapprochement
between Big Business and the New Inquisition. Under Hanna the
Catholic Church got representation in the Cabinet; under him the
Cardinal's Mass became a government institution, a Catholic
College came to the fore in Washington, and Catholic prelates
were introduced in the role of eminent publicists, their
reactionary opinions on important questions being quoted with
grave solemnity by a prostitute press. It was Mark Hanna himself
who founded the National Civic Federation, upon whose executive
committee Catholic cardinals and archbishops might work hand in
glove with Catholic labor-leaders for the chloroforming of the
American working-class. Hanna's biographer naively calls
attention to the President-maker's popularity among Catholics,
high and low, and the support they gave him. "Archbishop Ireland
was in frequent correspondence with him, and used his influence
in Mr. Hanna's behalf."

And this tradition, begun under Hanna, was continued under
Roosevelt, and reached its finest flower in the days of Taft, the
most pliant tool of the forces of evil who has occupied the White
House since the days of the Slave Power. President Taft was
himself a Unitarian; yet it was under his administration that the
Catholic Church achieved one of its dearest ambitions, and broke
into the Supreme Court. Why not? We can imagine the powers of the
time in conference. It is desired to pack the Court against the
possibility of progress; it is desired to find men who will stand
like a rock against change--and who better than those who have
been trained from childhood in the idea of a divine sanction for
doctrine and morals? After all, what is it that Hereditary
Privilege wants in America? A Roman Catholic code of property
rights, with a supreme tribunal to play the part of an infallible
Pope!

Under this Taft administration the country was governed by the
strangest legislative alliance our history ever saw; a
combination of the Old Guard of the Republican Party with the
leaders of the Tammany Democracy of New York. "Bloody shirt"
Foraker, senator from Ohio, voting with the sons of those Irish
Catholic mob-leaders whom the Federal troops shot down in the
draft-riots! By this unholy combination a pledge to reduce the
tariff was carried out by a bill which greatly increased its
burdens; by this combination the public lands and resources of
the country were fed to a gang of vultures by a thievish
Secretary of the Interior. And of course under such an
administration the cause of "Religion" made tremendous strides.
Catholic officials were appointed to public office, Catholic
ecclesiastics were accorded public honors, and Catholic favor
became a means to political advancement. You might see a
hard-swearing old political pirate like "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
taking his cigar out of the corner of his blasphemous mouth and
betaking himself to the "Cardinal's Day Mass", to bend his stiff
knees and bow his hoary unrepentant head before a jeweled prelate
on a throne. You might see an emissary of the United States
government proceeding to Rome, prostrating himself before the
Pope, and paying over seven million dollars of our taxes for
lands which the filthy and sensual friars of the Philippine
Islands had filched from the wretched serfs of that country and
which the wretched serfs had won back by their blood in a
revolution.


Secret Service

This Taft administration, urged on by the Catholic intrigue, made
the most determined efforts to prevent the spread of radical
thought. Because the popular magazines were opposing the
plundering of the country, a bill was introduced into Congress to
put them out of business by a prohibitive postal tax; the
President himself devoted all his power to forcing the passage of
this bill. At the same time the Socialist press was handicapped
by every sort of persecution. I was at that time in intimate
touch with the "Appeal to Reason", and I know that scarcely a
month passed that the Post Office Department did not invent some
new "regulation" especially designed to limit its circulation. I
recall one occasion when I met the editor on his way to
Washington with a trunkful of letters from subscribers who
complained that their postmasters refused to deliver the paper to
them; and later on this same editor was prosecuted by a Catholic
Attorney General and sentenced to prison for seeking to awaken
the people concerning the Moyer-Haywood case.

From my personal knowledge I can say that under the
administration of President Taft the Roman Catholic Church and
the Secret Service of the Federal Government worked hand in hand
for the undermining of the radical movement in America. Catholic
lecturers toured the country, pouring into the ears of the public
vile slanders about the private morality of Socialists; while at
the same time government detectives, paid out of public funds,
spent their time seeking evidence for these Catholic lecturers to
use. I know one man, a radical labor-leader, whose morals
happened to approach those of the average capitalist politician,
and who was prevented by threats of exposure and scandal from
accepting the Socialist nomination for President. I know a dozen
others who were shadowed and spied upon; I know one
case--myself--a man who was asking a divorce from his wife, and
whose mail was opened for months.

This subject is one on which I naturally speak with extreme
reluctance. I will only say that my opponent in the suit made no
charge of misconduct against me; but those in control of our
political police evidently thought it likely that a man who was
not living with his wife might have something to hide; so for
months my every move was watched and all my mail intercepted. In
such a case one might at first suspect one's private opponent;
but it soon became evident that this net was cast too wide for
any private agency. Not merely was my own mail opened, but the
mail of all my relatives and friends--people residing in places
as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile
of a government official to whom I complained about this matter:
"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear." My answer
was that a study of many labor cases had taught me the methods of
the agent provocateur. He is quite willing to take real evidence
if he can find it; but if not, he has familiarized himself with
the affairs of his victim, and can make evidence which will be
convincing when exploited by the yellow press. In my own case,
the matter was not brought to a test, for I went abroad to live;
when I made my next attack on Big Business, the Taft
administration had been repudiated at the polls, and the Secret
Service of the government was no longer at the disposal of the
Catholic machine.


Tax Exemption

Today the Catholic Church is firmly established and everywhere
recognized as one of the main pillars of American capitalism. It
has some fifteen thousand churches, fourteen million
communicants, and property valued at half a billion dollars. Upon
this property it pays no taxes, municipal, state or national;
which means, quite obviously, that you and I, who do not go to
church, but who do pay taxes, furnish the public costs of
Catholicism. We pay to have streets paved and lighted and cleaned
in front of Catholic churches; we pay to have thieves kept away
from them, fires put out in them, records preserved for them--all
the services of civilization given to them gratis, and this in a
land whose constitution provides that Congress (which includes
all state and municipal legislative bodies) "shall make no law
respecting a religious establishment." When war is declared, and
our sons are drafted to defend the country, all Catholic monks
and friars, priests and dignitaries are exempted. They are
"ministers of religion"; whereas we Socialists may not even have
the status of "conscientious objectors." We do not teach
"religion"; we only teach justice and humanity, decency and
truth.

In defense of this tax-exemption graft, the stock answer is that
the property is being used for purposes of "education" or
"charity". It is a school, in which children are being taught
that "liberty of conscience is a most pestiferous error, from
which arises revolution, corruption, contempt of sacred things,
holy institutions, and laws." (Pius IX). It is a "House of
Refuge", to which wayward girls are committed by Catholic
magistrates, and in which they are worked twelve hours a day in a
laundry or a clothing sweat-shop. Or it is a "parish-house", in
which a celibate priest lives under the care of an attractive
young "house-keeper". Or it is a nunnery, in which young girls
are held against their will and fed upon the scraps from their
sisters' plates to teach them humility, and taught to lie before
the altar, prostrate in the form of a cross, while their
"Superiors" walk upon their bodies to impress the religious
virtues. "I was a teacher in the Catholic schools up to a very
recent period," writes the woman friend who tells me of these
customs, "and I know about the whole awful system which endeavors
to throttle every genuine impulse of the human will."

Concerning a large part of this church property, the claim of
"religious" use has not even the shadow of justification. In
every large city of America you will find acres of land owned by
the Catholic machine, and supposed to be the future site of some
institution; but as time goes on and property values increase,
the church decides to build on a cheaper site, and proceeds to
cash in the profits of its investment, precisely as does any
other real estate speculator. Everywhere you turn in the history
of Romanism you find it at this same game, doing business under
the cloak of philanthropy and in the holy name of Christ. Read
the letter which the Catholic Bishop of Mexico sent to the Pope
in 1647, complaining of the Jesuit fathers and their boundless
graft. In McCabe's "Candid History of the Jesuits" appears a
summary:

A remarkable account is given of the worldly property of the
fathers. They hold, it seems, the greater part of the wealth of
Mexico. Two of their colleges own 300,000 sheep, besides cattle
and other property. They own six large sugar refineries, worth
from half a million to a million crowns each, and making an
annual profit of 100,000 crowns each, while all the other monks
and clergy of Mexico together own only three small refineries.
They have immense farms, rich silver mines, large shops and
butcheries, and do a vast trade. Yet they continually intrigue
for legacies--a woman has recently left them 70,000 crowns--and
they refuse to pay the appointed tithe on them. It is piquant to
add to this authoritative description that the Jesuit
congregation at Rome were still periodically forbidding the
fathers to engage in commerce, and Jesuit writers still gravely
maintain that the society never engaged in commerce. It should be
added that the missionaries were still heavily subsidized by the
King of Spain, that there were (the Bishop says) only five or six
Jesuits to each of their establishments, and that they conducted
only ten colleges.


"Holy History"

And if you think this tax-exemption privilege should be taken
away from the church grafters, let me suggest a course of
procedure. Write a letter about it to your daily newspaper; and
if the letter is not published, go and see the editor and ask
why; so you will learn something about the partnership between
Superstition and Big Business!

It is not too much to say that today no daily newspaper in any
large American city dares to attack the emoluments of the
Catholic Church, or to advocate restrictions upon the
ecclesiastical machine. As I write, they are making a new
Catholic bishop in Los Angeles, and all the newspapers of that
graft-ridden city herald it as an important social event. Each
paper has the picture of the new prelate, with his shepherd's
crook upraised, his empty face crowned with a rhomboidal fool's
cap, and enough upholstery on him to outfit a grand opera
company. The Los Angeles "Examiner", the only paper in the city
with a pretense to radicalism, turns loose its star-writer--one
of those journalist virtuosos who will describe you a Wild West
"rodeo" one day, and a society elopement the next, and a G. O. P.
convention the next; and always with his picture, one inch
square, at the head of his effusion. He takes in the Catholic
festivity; and does it phaze him? It does not! He is a newspaper
man, and if his city editor sent him to hell, he would take the
assignment and write like the devil. To read him now you might
think he had been reared in a convent; his soul is uplifted, and
he bursts forth in pure spontaneous ecstacy:

Solemnly magnificent, every brilliant detail symbolically
picturing the holy history of the Roman Catholic Church in the
inexorable progress of its immense structure, which rises from
the rock of Peter, with its beacons of faith and devotion
piercing the fog of doubt and fear which surround the world and
the worldly, was the ceremony yesterday at the Cathedral of St.
Vibiana, whereby Bishop John J. Cantwell was installed in his
diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles.

And then, a month later, comes another occasion of state--the
Twenty-third Annual-Banquet of the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
Association of Los Angeles. I should have to write a little essay
to make clear the sociological significance of that function;
explaining first, a nation-wide organization which has been
proven by congressional investigation and by the publication of
its secret documents to be a machine for the corruption of our
political life; and then exhibiting our "City of the Angels",
from which all Angels have long since fled; a city in the first
crude stage of land speculation, without order, dignity or charm;
a city of real estate agents, who exist by selling climate to new
arrivals from the East; a city whose intellectual life is
"boosting", whose standards of truth are those of the
horse-trade. Its newspapers publish a table of temperatures,
showing the daily contrast between Southern California and the
East. This device is effective in the winter-time; but last June,
when for five days and nights the temperature was over 110, and
several times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!

In the same way, there is a rule that our earthquake shocks are
never mentioned, unless they destroy whole towns. On the
afternoon of Jan. 26th, 1918, a cyclone hit Pasadena, of violence
sufficient to lift a barn over a church-steeple and deposit it in
the pastor's front yard. That evening a friend of mine in Los
Angeles called up the office of the "Times" to make inquiry; and
although they are only thirteen miles away, and have a branch
office and a special correspondent in Pasadena, the answer was
that they had heard nothing about the cyclone! And next morning I
made a careful search of their columns. On the front page I read:
"Fourth Blizzard of Season Raging in East"; also: "Another
Earthquake in Guatemala". But not a line about the Pasadena
cyclone That there was plenty of space in that issue, you may
judge from the fact that there were twenty headlines like the
following--many of them representing full page and half page
illustrated "write-ups":

Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright
Side of Sunshine Land; Come to California: Southland's Arms
Outstretched in Cordial Invitation to the East; Flower Stands
Make Gay City Streets; Southland Climate Big Manufacturing
Factor; Joy of Life Demonstrated in Los Angeles' Beautiful Homes;
Nymphs Knit and Bathe at Ocean's Sunny Beach; etc.

Now we are in the War and our business is booming, we are making
money hand over fist. It is all the more delightful, because we
are putting our souls into it, we are lending our money to the
government and saving the world for Democracy! Our labor
unionists have been driven to other cities, and our Mexican
agitators and I. W. W.'s are in jail; so, in the gilt ball-room
of our palatial six-dollar-a-day hotel the four hundred masters
of our prosperity meet to pat themselves on the back, and they
invite the new Catholic bishop to come and confer the grace of
God upon their eating.

The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"--the labor-hating,
labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"--and here is
the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four
columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus
does love the Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is
poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen, the largest and
the most civilizing secular body in the country. You are the
pioneers of American civilization..... I am glad to be among you;
glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious land by the
sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate acquaintance the big
men who have raised here in a few years a city of metropolitan
proportions."

And then, bearing in mind his responsibilities as guardian of
Exploitation, the Bishop goes on to tell them about the coming
class-war. "On the one side a statesman preaching patience and
respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith; on
the other a demagog speaking about the tyranny of capitalists and
usurers." And then, of course, the inevitable religious tag: "How
will men obey you, if they believe not in God, who is the author
of all authority?" At which, according to the "Times", "prolonged
applause and cheers" from the Merchants and Manufacturers! The
editor of the "Times" goes back to his office, and inspired by
this episcopal eloquence writes a "leader" with the statement
that: "We have no proletariat in America!"


Das Centrum

In order to see clearly the ultimate purpose of this Unholy
Alliance, this union of Superstition and the Merchants' and
Manufacturers' Association, we have to go to Europe, where the
arrangement has been working for a thousand years. In Europe
to-day we see the whole world in conflict with a band of
criminals who have been able to master the minds and lives of a
hundred million highly civilized people. As I write, the Junker
aristocracy is at bay, and soon to have its throat cut; but there
comes a Holy Father to its rescue, with the cross of Jesus
uplifted, and a series of pleas for mercy, written in Vienna,
edited in Berlin, and sent out from Rome. The Holy Father loves
all mankind with a tender and touching love; his heart bleeds at
the sight of bloodshed and suffering, and he pleads the sacred
cause of peace on earth and good-will toward men.

But what was the Holy Father doing through the forty-three years
that the Potsdam gang were preparing for their assault on the
world? How was the Holy Father manifesting his love of peace and
good will? He is, you understand, the "sole, last, supreme judge
of what is right and wrong," and his followers obey him with the
utmost promptness and devotion--they express themselves as
"prostrate at his feet." And when the masters of Prussia came to
him and said: "Give us the power to turn this nation into the
world's greatest military empire"--what did the Roman Church
answer? Did it speak boldly for the gentle Jesus, and the cause
of peace on earth and good-will towards men? No, it did not. To
Bismarck in Germany it said, precisely as it said to Mark Hanna
in America: "Give us honors and prestige; give us power over the
minds of the young, so that we may plunder the poor and build our
cathedrals and feed fat our greed; and in return we will furnish
you with votes, so that you may rule the state and do what you
will."

You think there is exaggeration in that statement? Why, we know
the very names of the prelates with whom the master-cynic of the
Junkerthum made his "deal." He had tried the method of the
Kultur-kampf, and had failed; but before he repealed the
anti-Catholic laws, he made sure that the Church had learned its
lesson, and would nevermore oppose the Prussian ruling caste. We
know how this bargain was carried out; we have the record of the
Centrum, the Catholic party of Germany, whose hundred deputies
were the solid rock upon which the military regime of Prussia was
erected. Not a battle-ship nor a Zeppelin was built for which the
Black Terror did not vote the funds; not a school-child was
beaten in Posen or Alsace that the New Inquisition did not shout
its "Hoch!" The writer sat in the visitors' gallery of the
Reichstag when the Socialists were protesting against the
torturing of miserable Herreros in Africa, and he heard the
deputies of the Holy Father's political party screaming their
rage like jaguars in a jungle night. All over Europe the Catholic
Church organized fake labor unions, the "yellows," as they were
called, to scab upon the workers and undermine the revolutionary
movement. The Holy Father himself issued precise instructions for
the management of these agencies of betrayal. Hear the most pious
and benevolent Leo XIII:

"They must pay special and principal attention to piety and
morality, and their internal discipline must be directed
precisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely lose
their special character, and come to be very little better than
those societies which take no account of Religion at all."

It is so hard, you see, to keep a man thinking about piety and
morality while he is starving! I am quoting from the Encyclical
Letter on "The Condition of Labor," issued in 1891, and addressed
"to our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops
and Bishops of the Catholic World in Grace and Communion with the
Apostolic See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false
teaching," and the substance of its message is:

This great labor question cannot be solved except by assuming as
a principle that private property must be held sacred and
inviolable.

And again, the purpose of churches proclaimed in language as
frank as any used in the present book:

The chief thing to be secured is the safe-guarding, by legal
enactment and policy, of private property. Most of all it is
essential in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude
within the line of duty; for if all may justly strive to benefit
their condition, yet neither justice nor the common good allows
any one to seize that which belongs to another, or, under the
pretext of futile and ridiculous equality, to lay hands on other
peoples' fortunes.

And this, you understand, in lands where rapine and conquest,
class-tyranny and priestly domination have been the custom since
the dawn of history; in which no property-right can possibly
trace back to any other basis than force. In Austria, for
example--Austria, the leader and guardian of the Holy
Alliance--Austria, which had no Reformation, no Revolution, no
Kultur-kampf--Austria, in which the income of the Catholic
Primate is $625,000 a year! In other words, Austria is still to a
large extent a "Priestly Empire;" and it was Austria which began
the war--began it in a religious quarrel, with a Slav people
which does not acknowledge the Holy Father as the ruler of the
world, but persists in adhering to the Eastern Church. So of
course to-day, when Austria is learning the bitter lesson that
they who draw the sword shall perish by the sword, the heart of
the Holy Father is wrung with grief, and he sends out these
eloquent peace-notes, written in Vienna and edited in Berlin. And
at the same time his private chaplain is convicted and sentenced
to prison for life as Austria's Master-Spy in Rome!

It is a curious thing to observe--the natural instinct which, all
over the world, draws Superstition and Exploitation together.
This war, which is hailed as a war against autocracy, might
almost as accurately be described as a war against the clerical
system. Wherever in the world you find the Papal power strong,
there you find sympathy with the Prussian infamy and there you
find German intrigue. In Spain, for example; in Ireland and
Quebec, and in the Argentine. The treatment of Belgium was a
little too raw--too many priests were shot at the outset, and so
Cardinal Mercier denounces the Germans; but you notice that he
pleads in vain with the Vatican, which stands firm by its beloved
Austria, and against the godless kingdom of Italy. The Kaiser
allows the hope of restoration of the temporal power at the peace
settlement; and meantime the law forbidding the presence of the
Jesuits in Germany has been repealed, and all over the world the
propagandists of this order are working for the Kaiser. Sir Roger
Casement was raised a Catholic, and so also "Jim" Larkin, the
Irish labor-leader who is touring America denouncing the Allies.
The Catholic Bishop of Melbourne opposed and beat conscription in
Australia, and it was Catholic propaganda of treachery among the
ignorant peasant-soldiers from Sicily which caused the breaking
of the Italian line at Tolmino. So deeply has this instinct
worked that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New
York was campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish
suddenly forgot their ancient horrors. The Catholic "Freeman's
Journal" published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single
issue; while even "The Tablet," the diocesan paper, began to
discover that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all.
The same "Tablet" which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to
declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be "stopped with
a bullet"!

Note to second edition: Since the above was written, the war
fervor has swept America, including even the rank and file of the
Catholics, and what has here been said might seem unfair to
persons who have forgotten the attitude of the Church during the
early part of the conflict, and the struggle it cost to bring the
hierarchy into line. It is one of the ironies of history that the
most reactionary organization in the world should be lending its
aid to the destruction of the second most reactionary. When the
Catholic Church marches forth to war for Democracy, it is not
drawing America down into the pit, but is letting America pull it
out of the pit--at least for a time, and the spectacle is one in
which all lovers of progress will rejoice.



BOOK FOUR

The Church of the Slavers

 See, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
      The eye-balls fierce, the features grim!
  And merrily from night to morn
      We chaunt his praise and worship him--
Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
  Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!

 A wondrous god! most fit for those
      Who cheat on 'Change, then creep to prayer;
  Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
      Hell's burning incense fills the air,
  And Death attests in street and lane
  The hideous glory of his reign.


Face of Caesar

The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing
mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by
Economic Exploitation. From that standpoint the various
Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much
better. The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon
an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary
product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry,
drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand
years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove
anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to
do. The "Holy Book" being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and
wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the
direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the
Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most
dangerous form of utterance. If he could come back to life, and
see what men have done with his little joke about the face of
Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead. As for
Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up;
when he ordered, "Servants obey your masters," he meant exactly
what he said. The Roman official stamp which he put upon the
gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the
Reformation on.

In the time of Martin Luther, the peasants of Germany were
suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself
knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the
priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which
he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever
is done about it--until at last the miserable peasants attempted
to organize and win their own rights. Their demands do not seem
to us so very criminal as we read them today; the privilege of
electing their own pastors, the abolition of villeinage, the
right to hunt and fish and cut wood in the forest, the reduction
of exorbitant rents, extra payment for extra labor, and--that
universal cry of peasant communes whether in Russia, England,
Mexico or sixteenth century Germany--the restoration to the
village of lands taken by fraud. But Luther would hear nothing of
slaves asserting their own rights, and took refuge in the Pauline
sociology: If they really wished to follow Christ, they would
drop the sword and resort to prayer; the gospel has to do with
spiritual, not temporal, affairs; earthly society cannot exist
without inequalities, etc.

And when the peasants went on in spite of this, he turned upon
them and denounced them to the princes; he issued proclamations
which might have been the instructions of Mr. John Wanamaker to
the police-force of his "City of Brotherly Love": "One cannot
answer a rebel with reason, but the best answer is to hit him
with the fist until blood flows from the nose." He issued a
letter: "Against the Murderous and Thieving Mob of Peasants,"
which might have come from the Reverend Woelfkin, Fifth Avenue
Pastor of Standard Oil: "The ass needs to be beaten, and the
populace needs to be controlled with a strong hand. God knew this
well, and therefore he gave the rulers, not a fox's tail, but a
sword." He implored these rulers, after the fashion of Methodist
Chancellor Day of the University of Syracuse: "Do not be troubled
about the severity of their repression, for it will save many
souls." With such pious exhortations in their ears the princes
set to work, and slaughtered a hundred thousand of the miserable
wretches; they completely aborted the social hopes of the
Reformation, and cast humanity into the pit of wage-slavery and
militarism for four centuries. As a church scholar, Prof.
Rauschenbusch, puts it:

The glorious years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to
1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great
revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and
every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of life. . . .
The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and
creative when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted
the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became
"religious" in the narrow sense, it grew scholastic and spiny,
quarrelsome, and impotent to awaken high enthusiasm and noble
life.


Deutschland ueber Alles

As a result of Luther's treason to humanity, his church became
the state church of Prussia, and Bible-worship and Devil-terror
played their part, along with the Mass and the Confessional, in
building up the Junker dream. A court official--the
Oberhofprediger--was set up, and from that time on the
Hohenzollerns were the most pious criminals in Europe. Frederick
the Great, the ancestral genius, was an atheist and a scoffer,
but he believed devoutly in religion for his subjects. He said:
"If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in
the ranks." And Carlyle, instinctive friend of autocrats, tells
with jocular approval how he kept them from thinking: