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 [134] 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:

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 [135] be got to convict a Catholic, fighting for his Pope against a godless state. The most pious Leo XIII has laid down:

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 [136] "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 [137] 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 [138] 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:

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

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

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?

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

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.

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:

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.

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 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. [142]

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, [143] 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 [144] 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 [145] 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 [146] 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 [147] 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 [148] 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:

"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 [149] 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:

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, [151] 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":

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, [152] 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 [153] 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 [154] 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:

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 [155] See." The purpose of the letter is "to refute false teaching," and the substance of its message is:

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

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. [156] 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 [157] 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"!

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 [162] 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 [163] 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: