#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 consumes 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 Superstition 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 en-rolled, 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 Elaine 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 t 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 an establishment of religion." 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, conies another occasion of state--the
twenty-third Annual Banquet. 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 the temperature went to over 110, and several
times 114--the Los Angeles space was left empty!

In the same way, there is a rule that our earth-quake 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"!

     P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the
     statements on page 155, Upton Sinclair was described as a
     "scoundrel" by a former prime minister of the Austrian
     Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a
     court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns--about $7
     in American money.

       *       *       *       *       *




#BOOK FOUR#

#The Church of the Slavers#

  Bee, 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.

  --Buchanan

       *       *       *       *       *




#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.