And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church
owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city
lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts;
so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.
The income from the holdings of a church constitutes what is called a
"living"; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of
the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and
scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the
eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land
owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and
needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor
radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to
the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical
concerning the grafts of grace.

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 birth-day, 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--on 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
NAIVETÉ 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
on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" 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 Salisbury. 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 Salisbury, 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. Russel, 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
     oweners in the American markets. After that the children
     were simply at the mercy of their oweners, 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 owener 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 fourteen 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 six-pence 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 exempted; 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 grave-stones;
when I was a little older, and knew Wall Street, it seemed to me a
sublime thing that here in the very heart of the world's infamy there
should be raised, like a finger of warning, this symbol of Eternity
and Judgment. Its great bell rang at noon-time, and all the traders
and their wage-slaves had to listen, whether they would or no! Such
was Old Trinity to my young soul; and what is it in reality?

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 bloodhounds
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: