In every human society of which we have record there has been one
class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of
wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much
smaller class which has done the directing. To belong to this
latter class is to work also, but with the head instead of the
hands; it is also to enjoy the good things of life, to live in
the best houses, to eat the best food, to have choice of the most
desirable women; it is to have leisure to cultivate the mind and
appreciate the arts, to acquire graces and distinctions, to give
laws and moral codes, to shape fashions and tastes, to be revered
and regarded--in short, to have Power. How to get this Power and
to hold it has been the first object of the thoughts of men from
the beginning of time.
The most obvious method is by the sword; but this method is
uncertain, for any man may take up a sword, and some may succeed
with it. It will be found that empires based upon military force
alone, however cruel they may be, are not permanent, and
therefore not so dangerous to progress; it is only when
resistance is paralyzed by the agency of Superstition, that the
race can be subjected to systems of exploitation for hundreds and
even thousands of years. The ancient empires were all priestly
empires; the kings ruled because they obeyed the will of the
priests, taught to them from childhood as the word of the gods.
Thus, for instance, Prescott tells us:
Terror, not love, was the spring of education with the Aztecs....
Such was the crafty policy of the priests, who, by reserving to
themselves the business of instruction, were enabled to mould the
young and plastic mind according to their own wills, and to train
it early to implicit reverence for religion and its ministers.
The historian goes on to indicate the economic harvest of this
teaching:
To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed for the
maintenance of the priests. The estates were augmented by the
policy or devotion of successive princes, until, under the last
Montezuma, they had swollen to an enormous extent, and covered
every district of the empire.
And this concerning the frightful system of human sacrifices,
whereby the priestly caste maintained the prestige of its
divinities:
At the dedication of the temple of Huitzilopochtli, in 1486, the
prisoners, who for some years had been reserved for the purpose,
were ranged in files, forming a procession nearly two miles long.
The ceremony consumed several days, and seventy thousand captives
are said to have perished at the shrine of this terrible deity.
The same system appears in Professor Jastrow's account of the
priesthood of Babylonia and Assyria:
The ultimate source of all law being the deity himself, the
original legal tribunal was the place where the image or symbol
of the god stood. A legal decision was an oracle or omen,
indicative of the will of the god. The power thus lodged in the
priests of Babylonia and Assyria was enormous. They virtually
held in their hands the life and death of the people.
And of the business side of this vast religious system:
The temples were the natural depositories of the legal archives,
which in the course of centuries grew to veritably enormous
proportions. Records were made of all decisions; the facts were
set forth, and duly attested by witnesses. Business and marriage
contracts, loans and deeds of sale were in like manner drawn up
in the presence of official scribes, who were also priests. In
this way all commercial transactions received the written
sanction of the religious organization. The temples
themselves--at least in the large centres--entered into business
relations with the populace. In order to maintain the large
household represented by such an organization as that of the
temple of Enlil of Nippur, that of Ningirsu at Lagash, that of
Marduk at Babylon, or that of Shamash at Sippar, large holdings
of land were required which, cultivated by agents for the
priests, or farmed out with stipulations for a goodly share of
the produce, secured an income for the maintenance of the temple
officials. The enterprise of the temples was expanded to the
furnishing of loans at interest--in later periods, at 20%--to
barter in slaves, to dealings in lands, besides engaging labor
for work of all kinds directly needed for the temples. A large
quantity of the business documents found in the temple archives
are concerned with the business affairs of the temple, and we are
justified in including the temples in the large centres as among
the most important business institutions of the country. In
financial or monetary transactions the position of the temples
was not unlike that of national banks. . . .
And so on. We may venture the guess that the learned professor
said more in that last sentence than he himself intended, for his
lectures were delivered in that temple of plutocracy, the
University of Pennsylvania, and paid out of an endowment which
specifies that "all polemical subjects shall be positively
excluded!"