King's favorite) sold a bishopric to a clergyman for 5600
pounds. (She betted him the 5000 pounds that he would not be
made a bishop, and he lost, and paid her.) Was he the only
prelate of his time led up by such hands for consecration?
As I peep into George II's St. James, I see crowds of
cassocks pushing up the back-stairs of the ladies of the
court; stealthy clergy slipping purses into their laps; that
godless old king yawning under his canopy in his Chapel
Royal, as the chaplain before him is discoursing.
Discoursing about what?--About righteousness and judgment?
Whilst the chaplain is preaching, the king is chattering in
German and almost as loud as the preacher; so loud that the
clergyman actually burst out crying in his pulpit, because
the defender of the faith and the dispenser of bishoprics
would not listen to him!
#Land and Livings#
And how is it in the twentieth century? Have conditions been much
improved? There are great Englishmen who do not think so. I quote
Robert Buchanan, a poet who spoke for the people, and who therefore
has still to be recognized by English critics. He writes of the "New
Rome", by which he means present-day England:
The gods are dead, but in their name
Humanity is sold to shame,
While (then as now!) the tinsel'd priest
Sitteth with robbers at the feast,
Blesses the laden, blood-stained board,
Weaves garlands round the butcher's sword,
And poureth freely (now as then)
The sacramental blood of Men!
You see, the land system of England remains--the changes having been
for the worse. William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon
peasantry contented, so he left them their "commons"; but in the
eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away. We saw the same
thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same
motive--because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas
people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.
In England, from the time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary,
the parliaments of the landlords passed some four thousand separate
acts, whereby more than seven million acres of the common land were
stolen from the people. It has been calculated that these acres might
have supported a million families; and ever since then England has had
to feed a million paupers all the time.
As an old song puts the matter:
Why prosecute the man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
And let the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose?
In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in
British soil: some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others
children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days
of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts. Seven men own practically
all the land of the city and county of London, and collect tribute
from seven millions of people. The estates are entailed--that is,
handed down from father to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy
any land, but if you want to build, the landlord gives you a lease,
and when the lease is up, he takes possession of your buildings. The
tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a
year. So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for
trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes
on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the
shore.
And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church
owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city
lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts;
so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.
The income from the holdings of a church constitutes what is called a
"living"; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of
the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and
scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the
eighteenth century.
About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land
owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and
needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor
radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to
the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical
concerning the grafts of grace.
In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had a
large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a
thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing
twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birth-day, to preach
a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting
that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that
is, clergymen holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do
their work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with
strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it
without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl
Marx, that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of
their thirty-nine articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.
There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They are the
sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the clergy; they
have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and possess the one
essential qualification, that they are gentlemen. Their average price
is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their function was made clear
to me when I attended my first English tea-party. There was a wicker
table, perhaps a foot and a half square, having three shelves, one
below the other--on the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next
the muffins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you
pass the curate, please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call
that the curate, because it does the work of a curate."
#Graft in Tail#
As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with
the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their
campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted
when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my
writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I must
know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did
not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was "in
tail"; the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which
in America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate,
a "Millionaire's Club", for admission to which the members paid in
cash; but in England the same men came to the same position as their
birth-right. Political corruption is not an end in itself, it is
merely a means to exploitation; and of exploitation England has even
more than America. When I explained this, my popularity with the
British ruling classes vanished quickly.
As a matter of fact, England is more like America than she realizes;
her British reticence has kept her ignorant about herself. I could not
carry on my business in England, because of the libel laws, which have
as their first principle "the greater the truth, the greater the
libel". Englishmen read with satisfaction what I write about America;
but if I should turn my attention to their own country, they would
send me to jail as they sent Frank Harris. The fact is that the new
men in England, the lords of coal and iron and shipping and beer, have
bought their way into the landed aristocracy for cash, just as our
American senators have done; they have bought the political parties
with campaign gifts, precisely as in America; they have taken over the
press, whether by outright purchase like Northcliffe, or by
advertising subsidy--both of which methods we Americans know. Within
the last decade or two another group has been coming into control; and
not merely is this the same class of men as in America, it frequently
consists of the same individuals. These are the big money-lenders, the
international financiers who are the fine and final flower of the
capitalist system. These gentlemen make the world their home--or, as
Shakespeare puts it, their oyster. They know how to fit themselves to
all environments; they are Catholics in Rome and Vienna, country
gentlemen in London, bons vivants in Paris, democrats in Chicago,
Socialists in Petrograd, and Hebrews wherever they are.
And of course, in buying the English government, these new classes
have bought the English Church. Skeptics and men of the world as they
are, they know that they must have a Religion. They have read the
story of the French revolution, and the shadow of the guillotine is
always over their thoughts; they see the giant of labor, restless in
his torment, groping as in a nightmare for the throat of his enemy.
Who can blind the eyes of this giant, who can chain him to his couch
of slumber? There is but one agent, without rival--the Keeper of the
Holy Secrets, the Deputy of the Almighty Awfulness, the Giver and
Withholder of Eternal Life. Tremble, slave! Fall down and bow your
forehead in the dust! I can see in my memory the sight that thrilled
my childhood--my grim old Bishop, clad in his gorgeous ceremonial
robes, stretching out his hands over the head of the new priest, and
pronouncing that most deadly of all the Christian curses:
"Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou
dost retain, they are retained!"
#Bishops and Beer#
For example, the International Shylocks wanted the diamond mines of
South Africa--wanted them more firmly governed and less firmly taxed
than could be arranged with the Old Man of the Boers. So the armies of
England were sent to subjugate the country. You might think they would
have had the good taste to leave the lowly Jesus out of this
affair--but if so, you have missed the essential point about
established religion. The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for
the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing
upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests
and deacons to earn their "living." During the Boer war the blood-lust
of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified
monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of
Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and
children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right
Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply.
Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian
glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta,
who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation "virile";
nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making
"noble natures".
The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example, the
opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India
and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred
million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making a
hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new
"virility," undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic;
whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and
subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established
church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord
Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with
horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:
I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is
terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless,
unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history;
and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years,
than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two
centuries.
That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued
to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last
two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout
the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung
Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:
Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and
China can never meet on a common ground. China views the
whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a
fiscal.
And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the
English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and
country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are
clamoring for restriction;--and what prevents? Head and front of the
opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the
Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early
temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot
recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith
brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, he was
confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy, protesting
against the act. And what was the basis of their protest? That beer is
a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but also that there was
property invested in brewing it. Three hundred and thirty-two clergy
of the diocese of Peterborough declared:
We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the
present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave
injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private
property, spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent
people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment, which
must do harm to our cause and hinder our aims.
I have come upon references to another and even more plainspoken
petition, signed by 1,280 clergymen; but war-time facilities for
research have not enabled me to find the text. In Prof. Henry C.
Vedder's "Jesus Christ and the Social Question," we read:
It was authoritatively stated a short time ago that Mr.
Asquith's temperance bill was defeated in Parliament through
the opposition of clergymen who had invested their savings
in brewery stock, the profits of which might have been
lessened by the bill.
Also the power of the clergy, combined with the brewer, was sufficient
to put through Parliament a provision that no prohibition legislation
should ever be passed without providing for compensation to the owners
of the industry. Today, all over America, appeals are being made to
the people to eat less grain; the grain is being shipped to England,
some of it to be made into beer; and a high Anglican prelate, his
Grace the Archbishop of York, comes to America to urge us to increased
sacrifices, and in his first newspaper interview takes occasion to
declare that his church is not in favor of prohibition as a measure of
war-time economy!
#Anglicanism and Alcohol#
This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British
radicals; they see it at work in every election--the publican
confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with
spirituality. There are two powerful societies in England employing
this deadly combination--the "Anti-Socialist Union" and the "Liberty
and Property Defense League." If you scan the lists of the organizers,
directors and subsidizers of these satanic institutions, you find Tory
politicians and landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy, and
large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting
called by the "Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a
denunciation of Socialism by W.H. Mallock, a master sophist of Roman
Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a dozen members
of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary of the Federated
Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer
Trade Association, and three or four other alcoholic magnates.
In every public library in England and many in America you will
find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations,
and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock
misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these
writings are brutal--setting forth the ethics of exploitation in the
manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied
for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural science. Said
this shepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he
cannot get subsistence from his parents, and if society does
not Want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest
portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he
is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no cover for him. She
tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own
orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century; but
it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the growth of
Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of Privilege have
grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now that they have a deep
sympathy with our fundamental purposes; they burn with pity for the
poor, and they would really and truly wish happiness to everyone, not
merely in Heaven, but right here and now. However, there are so many
complications--and so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist
bug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D.D.,
expounding "The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands
to another may be inspired by the same passions as have
blinded the present holders to their own highest good, and
may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has ever
been manifested by the rich and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D.D., an especially popular clerical
author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:
The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run
through them, of which this is one. Where God has been so
patient, it is not for us to be impatient.
And again, Professor Robert Flint, of Edinburgh University, a
clergyman, author of a big book attacking Socialism, and bringing us
back to the faith of our fathers:
The great bulk of human misery is due, not to social
arrangements, but to personal vices.
I study Professor Flint's volume in the effort to find just what, if
anything, he would have the church do about the evils of our time. I
find him praising the sermons of Dr. Westcott, Bishop of Durham, as
being the proper sort for clergymen to preach. Bishop Westcott,
whether he is talking to a high society congregation, or to one of
workingmen, shows "an exquisite sense of knowing always where to
stop." So I consulted the Bishop's volume, "The Social Aspects of
Christianity" and I see at once why he is popular with the
anti-Socialist propagandists--neither I or any other man can possibly
discover what he really means, or what he really wants done.
I was fascinated by this Westcott problem; I thought maybe if I kept
on the good Bishop's trail, I might in the end find something a plain
man could understand; so I got the beautiful two-volume "Life of
Brooke Westcott, by his Son"--and there I found an exposition of the
social purposes of bishops! In the year 1892 there was a strike in
Durham, which is in the coal country; the employers tried to make a
cut in wages, and some ten thousand men walked out, and there was a
long and bitter struggle, which wrung the episcopal heart. There was
much consultation and correspondence on episcopal stationery, and at
last the masters and men were got together, with the Bishop as
arbitrator, and the dispute was triumphantly settled--how do you
suppose? On the basis of a ten per cent reduction in wages!
I know nothing quainter in the history of English graft than the
NAIVETÉ with which the Bishop's biographer and son tells the story of
this episcopal venture into reality. The prelate came out from the
conference "all smiles, and well satisfied with the result of his
day's work." As for his followers, they were in ecstacies; they
"seized and waltzed one another around on the carriage drive as madly
as ever we danced at a flower show ball. Hats and caps are thrown into
the air, and we cheer ourselves hoarse." The Bishop proceeds to his
palace, and sends one more communication on episcopal stationery--an
order to all his clergy to "offer their humble and hearty thanks to
God for our happy deliverance from the strife by which the diocese has
been long afflicted." Strange to say, there were a few varlets in
Durham who did not appreciate the services of the bold Bishop, and one
of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he made
reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The biographer then
explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted that he suffered for
the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and so ascetic that he would
have lived on tea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curious
condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea
and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who
didn't want to live on tea and toast, were compelled to!
#Dead Cats#
For more than a hundred years the Anglican clergy have been fighting
with every resource at their command the liberal and enlightened men
of England who wished to educate the masses of the people. In 1807 the
first measure for a national school-system was denounced by the
Archbishop of Canterbury as "derogatory to the authority of the
Church." As a counter-measure, his supporters established the
"National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the
Doctrines of the Established Church"; and the founder of the
organization, a clergyman, advocated a barn as a good structure for a
school, and insisted that the children of the workers "should not be
taught beyond their station." In 1840 a Committee of the Privy Council
on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops,
setting forth the decree of "their lord-ships" that "the first purpose
of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits
of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion." In
1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the
country "a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil." In 1870,
Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the
parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were "growing into
savages."
As with Education, so with Social Reform. During the struggle to
abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored
to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred
emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of
London laid down the formula of exploitation: "Christianity and the
embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil
property."
Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the
cultured classes of England:
In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest
political controversies of the last fifty years, whether
they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce,
whether they affected religion, whether they affected the
bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject
they touched, these leisured classes, these educated
classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.
The "Great Commoner" did not add "these religious classes ", for he
belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record
will supply the gap. The Church opposed all the reform measures which
Gladstone himself put through. It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832. It
opposed all the social reforms of Lord Salisbury. This noble-hearted
Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion
supported him, and to the end only a few. He expressed himself as
distressed and puzzled "to find support from infidels and
non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or
declaimers."
And to our own day it has been the same. In 1894 the House of Bishops
voted solidly against the Employers' Liability Law. The House of
Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed
Womans' Suffrage, and voted against it to the end. Concerning this
establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen,
used the vivid phrase: "This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life."
He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about
ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin.
Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, has
written of their record and adventures: