I have tried in the closing chapters of “The Profits of Religion,” and also in “The Book of Life,” to make plain that I honor the religious impulse in its true form. But that does not mean that I owe respect to human systems which call themselves religious, and which make the spiritual needs of mankind a basis of enslavement. I can tolerate the business man who tells me that “money makes the mare go”; I can show him how, under a cooperative system, money would make the mare go faster. But I find it hard to tolerate those preachers of “personal righteousness,” who keep the eyes of the working class uplifted to heaven, while their pockets are picked on earth; our modern Pharisees, who take the greatest of the world’s proletarian martyrs, and bind him anew, and deliver him to be crucified upon a jewelled cross.

I make this explanation because we are now going to have a glance at some of our “religious” colleges. Let us begin with Wooster, Ohio, an institution run by the Presbyterian church. We have seen how at Clark they are introducing a summer school, to make education pay; and we can see what that will end in, because the college of Wooster has for many years been run by its summer school: an absurdly crude, privately-owned, money-making institution, which draws schoolmarms by offering gold watches as prizes for those who bring in the greatest number of new students, and by advertising in terms of dollars and cents the amount of business done by its free teachers’ agency. In country newspapers it advertises itself as “a School of Inspiration, Preparation and Perspiration.” Fifteen hundred schoolmarms come each summer, and the local papers explain that they are “free with their expense accounts.” The regular college, having only five hundred students, is relatively unimportant.

The active trustees, being local business men, naturally want to boost the summer school; whereas the faculty of the college have absurd notions of the dignity of true knowledge. Out of this grew a furious quarrel, which lasted for several years. The partisans of the summer school kicked out the excellent president of the college, who had spent sixteen years building it up from nothing. They brought in to replace him a shouting Y. M. C. A. evangelist of no college training, an utter ignoramus, and so many kinds of a liar that it would take the rest of this book to tell about it. The American Association of University Professors investigated the affair, and devoted a hundred and thirty-six pages to it, and the bulletin for May, 1917, is a study of the mental processes of a religious hypocrite, shouting about the love of Jesus, while stooping to every kind of vile and cowardly intrigue.

Also, while we are in Ohio, let us have a look at Muskingum College, at New Concord. We may see this through the eyes of Professor Arthur S. White, who was let out of the Department of Political Science and Sociology this year. The charge against him was that he had created “a critical attitude” among the students. The vice-president of the college charged him “with having taught the students to think, and that they were not thinking the right things.” At the very beginning of his work, three years ago, he had explained to the students his dislike of “the compartment method of education,” whereby students are crammed into a certain tight mold. “I remarked that such methods were destructive of personality, and must foster decay in our institutions. When I had finished the whole class applauded. At the end of the hour, some eight or ten waited to tell me that they were, and had been, victims of such methods, and that they hoped my work would be different.” As a result of this, Professor White’s classes in political science increased from twenty-seven to a hundred and forty-two.

There was no fault to be found with his character or personal conduct, nor is he a Socialist or propagandist of any sort. I quote again from his statement: “My method was to present all the facts on every question that were available; to analyze ideas, dogmas and institutions in the light of their original professions and accomplishments. I tried to respect the personality of my students, by insisting on their being free to make a conscientious choice of their loyalties.” But, of course, this did not fit into a college whose dean phrased the duty of the faculty: “Our attitude toward the president should be that of the soldier to the general, it should be the attitude that he can do no wrong.” Muskingum is a Presbyterian institution, and in order to get the financial support of the church, it advertises itself widely as a “safe” place for parents to send their children. Everything must be “in accordance with our tradition of ideals and customs.” So, of course, the professor who taught his students to think had to move on.

Let us also move, to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where there is a little religious toadstool in the heart of the oil country, and with a Standard Oil board of trustees. On this Allegheny College we have a report of the American Association of University Professors, in the bulletin for December, 1917. The president (now president-emeritus) is a product of Judge Gary’s Northwestern University, a Methodist clergyman, and trustee of the Carnegie Foundation. An alumnus who got to know him writes me: “Crawford is a man who has seemingly lost his moral perception, and throughout his stay at Allegheny was notoriously untruthful and untrustworthy.” For fourteen years he had a professor of English literature by the name of Frank C. Lockwood, who was an ardent Prohibitionist, and came into conflict with the two local grand dukes of the board of trustees, political bosses and attorneys representing applicants for liquor licenses in Meadville. Professor Lockwood had the audacity to run for congress on the Prohibition ticket, with the backing of the Progressives; and, worse yet, although he himself was a Methodist minister, his wife joined the Unitarian church. The report does not make clear what the interlocking trustees expected the Methodist professor to do about this; they would hardly have been satisfied if he had divorced his wife for being a Unitarian; maybe they expected him to beat her until she reformed. Anyhow, the board adopted a resolution forbidding its professors to take part in politics by becoming candidates for public office; and, furthermore, it made clear its intention to drop Professor Lockwood at the end of the next year—so he quit. A college professor is not a citizen in Pennsylvania, any more than he is in Illinois!

Let us have a look at the prairie country, the “free state” of Kansas. At Washburn College, an institution of the Congregational church at Topeka, we shall again find the worship of God and Mammon perfectly blended. All the local plutocracy is represented on this board, and also a collection of clergymen, headed by the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon, famous throughout the Middle West as the author of “In His Steps.” The president of Washburn is the Reverend Parley Paul Womer—I am aware this sounds like a novel, but it isn’t. Washburn had been in financial need, and President Womer was called in as a “fund-raiser”; he being the perfect type of plutocratic piety, with knees calloused from constant worship before the altar of the Golden Calf.

His record also is set down in a report of the Association. We find him requiring one of his professors to promote a certain student, because his father was “a prominent and well-to-do man,” and “had intimated that if Washburn would graduate his son he might do something handsome for the college in a financial way.” We find him continually humiliating members of the faculty, by warning them not to do this and not to do that “which might conceivably be displeasing to any persons from whom we might hope for aid.” We find him refusing all reforms in the way of faculty control, because “Washburn depends for its financial support on business men, men of large financial interests who would be quick to resent any appearance of Bolshevism in the administration of the college.” We find him summarily discharging professors who opposed his combination of boot-licking and bullying, and then lying about these professors, and then asking that the committee of the Association should consider these lies to be “confidential”!

Finally, matters came to a head; more than half the faculty either resigned or were discharged, and the students rose up and began bombarding the pious president’s house with rotten eggs. But did that make any difference to President Womer? It did not! The smell of rotten eggs evaporates quickly, but money endures, and he is the boy who gets the money. His interlocking trustees stood by him, and one month after the publication of the damning report of the Association, I find in the Topeka “Daily Capital” a front-page story about the culmination of President Womer’s marvelous drive to raise the endowment of Washburn to eight hundred thousand dollars. He has raised three hundred and seventy-five thousand outside of Topeka, and three hundred thousand inside. Fifty thousand of this comes from Mr. Joab Mulvane, the grand duke of the city, and according to the newspaper, “the walls of the Chamber of Commerce shivered in the greatest uproar of applause they ever enclosed.... President Womer received at last night’s meeting a demonstration of cordial good-will and appreciation such as few public men hope for in a lifetime.” “One of the greatest days in the history of Topeka,” was Mr. Mulvane’s own characterization of the event. There are two columns of this kind of rapture, with the names of all the donors and the “volunteer workers,” and descriptions of parades, fireworks, dancing, brass-bands, and the singing of “Washburn pep songs.”

Also the Catholics have their educational machine, and raise money from wealthy Catholics for the protection both of Catholicism and of wealth. In the city of Washington they have a great central institution. An official of the United States Department of Education writes me:

We move South to Durham, North Carolina, home of Trinity College, a considerable religious institution, founded by Washington Duke, the tobacco king. A friend of mine who knew the old gentleman tells me how he furnished his mansion, ordering the books for his library by the size and color of binding; and now his statue decorates a college grounds. The present head of the family is James B., locally known as “Buck” Duke, and it would be a poor pun to describe him as the Grand Duke of Trinity College. He and his brother, Mr. B. N. Duke, his wife, his son and his daughter, have all purchased the good will of North Carolina Methodism by making public gifts to Trinity, amounting to four million dollars; all three of the male Dukes are therefore on its board of trustees. James B. has just given a million to the endowment, fifty thousand towards a new school for religious training, and other sums for gymnasium and law building. So I note in the Greensboro “Daily News” an editorial headed: “The Duke Also Has Virtues.”

Forty years ago “Buck” Duke could not borrow ten thousand dollars in North Carolina; today he boasts that he is worth four hundred million, beside what his father and brother have accumulated. Assuming that his services in providing the world with tobacco were worth a hundred dollars a week, it would have taken a hundred and fifty-four thousand years to earn his own share of this money. “Buck” is distinguished among interlocking trustees in that he has had a decision of the United States Supreme Court on his money-making methods; the exact words are that he “persistently and continuously and consciously violated the law.” The Supreme Court has not yet passed on the fact that a man who is worth four hundred million dollars pays only eight hundred and twenty-eight dollars taxes in the state where he lives in a magnificent palace!

The Methodist church is, as we know, violently opposed to the use of tobacco, but it applies the ancient saying of one of the Roman emperors, Pecunia non olet—money has no smell. Mr. Duke completed his purchase of the church by a so-called donation for the support of its superannuated ministers, and so his right to run both church and university is undisputed. He brought in a South Carolina minister of pliant principles, and made him president of the university, and this president never lost an occasion to chant the praises of his grand Duke. The grand Duke had this chief chanter made a director of his Southern railroad, and wanted to have him made also a bishop of the church, but for three successive years he failed; then he hired some regular lobbyists and sent them to the Methodist General Conference—and that was the way to do it. “Pecunia non olet”; and also, “pecunia parlat”; and also, “pecunia ambulare equinam fecit!”—if you will let me fix up the Latin.