Part 11 (1/2)
And then, a month later, conies another occasion of state--the twenty-third Annual Banquet. the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
a.s.sociation 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 doc.u.ments 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ill.u.s.trated ”write-ups”:
Where Spring is January; Wealth Waits in California; The Bright Side of Suns.h.i.+ne 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.s-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 G.o.d, 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 Superst.i.tion and the Merchants' and Manufacturers'
a.s.sociation, 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 a.s.sault 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-s.h.i.+p 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.suming 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 mult.i.tude 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, cla.s.s-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 Superst.i.tion 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 G.o.dless 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 Cas.e.m.e.nt 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.