ONE SHILLING. NET. CON Communion of Saints ChriS'ian Profession and Practice Religion of Collectivism Nonconformist Conscience Our Labour Churciies The Cost tf Cant Labourism v Liberalism National Labour Parliament Politics without Politicians Initiative and Referendum What 13 Anarchy? Anarchy and Outrage Give the Woman a Latch- Key 1 TE NTS n. Rights of Natural Children 1 IS. Communism and the Family 16. The " New Woman " / 17. 'Unto him that hath" ) 18. "Triumphant Democracy" 19. The Poor Man's Bank 20. Beef and Bureaucracy i 21. The Inferno of War ) 22. Pauper Suffrage ( 23. " Tender Mercies of the Wicked ] 2f. Royal Christening 2S. First Duke of MarP orough 1 28. Apostle of the Irish )NDON WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET STREET. EC. ' — ■ ■ ■ mr. NEW POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE. LET THERE BE LIGHT! I.— RELIGION. 3.— THE FAMILY 2.— POLITICS. 4.— ECONOMICS. 5. — MISCELLANEA. Learning without Thouoht is Labour lost : Tliought witliout Learning is perilous indeed. — Confucius. New occasions teach |new duties : Time makes ancient good uncouth : They must upward still and onward who would keep abreast of Truth. — Lowell. BY J. MORRISON DAVIDSON. (Of the Middle Temple) Barrister-at-La\v. Author of " Politics for the People," " The Old Order and the New, " The New Book of Kings," " The Book of Lords," "The Book of Erin," " Home Rule for Scotland," " Villager-s Magna Charta," " Gospel of the Poor," &c., &c. London : WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET ST., E.G. cc 1 ^ :5 AM TO My Little Grandsons, CO o FRANK MORRISON DUPLCCK. (aged eight) AND JOHN MORRISON MARLOWE. (aged two) In the Hope that they may Live To BE Worthy Citizens of ^ THE CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH \^ THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH. 185, Fleet Street, London, E.G. March, 10, 1896. 24r^«^ FOREWORD. Voice in the Night: What am I ? One who cries continually, with sweat and tears, to the Lord God, that it would please Him, out of His infinite love, to break down all Kingship and Queenship, all Priesthood and Prelacy ; to cancel and abolish all Bonds of Human Allegiance, all the Magis- tracy, all the Nobles, and all the Wealthy ; and to send us again, according to His promise, the One King, the Christ, and all things in common, as in the days of the First Church, when Christ Jesus was King. — Alfred Lord Tennyson : Queen Mary. CONTENTS. PART I— RELIGION. Pace No I. " The Communion of the Saints " . . . • • 3 No. II. Christian Profession and Pagan Practice ... 9 No. III. The Religion of Collectivism i5 No. IV. The " Nonconformist Conscience " and Civic Duty . 20 No. V. Our Labour Churches : a Personal Experience . . 26 No. VI. The Cost of Cant: "Without Money and V^ithout Price" (?) 33 PART II. POLITICS. No. VII. Labourism v. Liberalism; The Parting of the Ways . 41 No. VIII. A National Labour Parliament . ... 48 No. IX. Politics without Politicians 54 No. X. The Abolition of the House of Commons : The Initiative and Referendum ....... 60 No. XL What is Anarchy ? 67 No. XII. Anarchy and Outrage ...... 74 PART III.— THE FAMILY. No. XIII. " Lock up the Men : Give the Women a Latch-Key. !" 81 X. CONTENTS. No. XIV. The Rights of Natural Children: The " Legitimation League's " Program 86 No XV. " Communism and the Family " 92 No. XVI. The " New Woman "......, 97 PART lY— ECONOMICS. No. XVII. " Unto him that hath shall be given " , . . . 105 No. XVIII. " Triumphant Democracy " ? ...... ii2 No. XIX. " The Poor Man's Bank .■ " "Uncle" .... 120 No. XX. Beef and Bureaucracy 127 PART Y— MISCELLANEA. No. XXI. The Inferno of War 135 No. XXII. Baron Orchid de Screwe on Pauper Suffrage . . . 142 No. XXIII. The Tender Mercies of the Wicked" Draco Day. . 148 No. XXIV. The Royal Christening " Function "-■ Baby Wettin , 154 No. XXV. The First Duke of Marlborough . . , . • 160 No. XXVI. The Apostle of the Irish 166 Part I.— RELIGION. •'THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS." CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. THE "NONCONFORMIST CONSCIENCE" AND CIVIC DUTY. OUR LABOUR CHURCHES : A Personal Experience. THE COST OF CANT: "WITHOUT MONEY AND WITHOUT PRICE " (?) And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said Let there be Light : and there was Light. And God saw the Light, that it was good. (Gen. i., 2 3, 4.) Is) I. "^ifiE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS." Thou shall communise in all things with thy neighbour and not call things /nD^iff property: for if ye are communicants in what is imperishable, how much more should ye be in what is perishable.- St. Barnabas' Epistle. For the man who loves his neighbour as himself will waul for the latter the good things he wants for himself and he will try both by prayer and effort to get these things for his neigh- bour, if he loves him. — Justin Martyr. Whatever is of God is common to our use, nor must any one so appropriate His benefits and gifts as to prevent the whole human race from an equal enjoyment of the divine bounty and generosity. Thus equally for all the day lightens us, the sun shines, the shower waters, the wind blows, and a common slumber comes to the sleepers, and the shining of the stars and of the moon is collective propoty. By this example of equality thij rran who owns rents and profits which he shares with the fraternity, being himself by his free gifts both common and righteous, is an imitation of God the Father. — St. Cyprian. And Him evermore I behold Walking in Galilee, Through the cornfield's waving gold, In hamlet, and wood, and wold. By the shores of the Beautiful Sea. He toucheth the sightless eyes. Before Him the demons flee, To the dead He sayeth ; Arise I To the living : Follow Me ! 3 •♦the communion of the saints. And that voice still soundeth on From the centuries that are gone, To the centuries that shall be ! -Longfellow. NE Sunday evening recently it was my plea- sure and profit to address an audience in the Central Hall of tlie Social Democratic Federation, in the Strand — subject, " The Communist Christ." At the start I asked my hearers to divest their minds of all theological or anti- theological bias, one way or another, and to regard the Nazarene as they might Plato or Aristotle, Adam Smith or Karl Marx — simply as an illustrious Teacher whose Ethical and Economic System is before us. The audience seemed to be about equally made up of Social Democrats and Communist Anarchists, but, in the discussion that followed, all loyally kept to the purely human Christ. " What think ye of Christ ? " was practically the question before the meeting, and the answers given were most interesting. They showed what I had doubted, viz., that the speakers could distinguish clearly between the real Christ of the Commune and the fictitious Christ of the Churches. They re- cognised that the Son of Man did not place his " Kingdom of Heaven " i.e., the Commimistic Commm- wealth," in the clouds, but on this solid earth, and the only regret expressed was that princes, plutocrats and priests among them had contrived to balk man- kind of the grand reality so long. If any consider- able divergence of view emerged, it was confined to the inquiry whether the Founder of Christianity was a Social Democrat or a Communist Anarchist, both sections claiming Him with equal confidence and emulation. This point is one of very great importance, but happily it is of comparatively easy solution. A Social Democrat puts his trust in the State, like " THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS. 5 any other politician, Monarchical or Republican, Tory or Liberal. His object is to capture the " machine " in order to turn it to his own and better purposes. He desires to establish a national and international system of governmentally-controlled co-operation — an Involuntary Collectivism. Involuntary, because the very foundation-stone of the State is Force, always Force. In a Social Demo- cratic State the Justice Hawkins, and the Justice Day ; the soldier and the marine ; the policeman, the jailer, and the hangman would still be a neces- sity. In a word, even with Universal Adult Suffrage, the rule would still be one of political inferiors by political superiors, and the result might be — I do not say, with some prophets of evil, would neces- sarily be — a very grim form of despotism indeed. Anyhow, with Communist Anarchy — I do not, of course, for one moment, mean the pitiable insanity of the Ravachols, Vaillants, Henrys, and Santos — but the genuine Anarchy, of which I hold Christ was the unerring exponent — is introduced into the problem of human emancipation, a variant of im- measurable consequence. Where the Social Demo- crat would apply legal, and the Materialist Anarchist illegal, Force, the Christian Anarchist substitutes Love. His Collectivism is purely Voluntary. That one little word Love dissolves the State, and establishes the Commune. Patviotistn ceases and Humanitarianism takes its place. The aim of the Social Democrat and of the genuine or Christian Anarchist, is substantially the same, but their re- spective watchwords — Force, Love — and methods of procedure are wide as the poles asunder. The primitive Christians asked nothing, hoped nothing, from the State except to be let alone. To avoid giving offence they paid Caesar's taxes, even as Jesus had done, but in no other way did they acknowledge his authority. They would neither 6 " THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS." enter his Legions nor his pretended Courts of Justice. The Love which Christ exempUfied in His own life and exacted from His followers sternly forbade them either to " shed blood " or " go to law before the heathen." That was the moral bomb which Christ threw into ;he Graeco- Roman world, and it, at one time, bade fair to shatter the State into irreconstructible frag- ments. The great God Mammon trembled on his throne as he never trembled before nor since. The Communist Christ seemed about to depose him and bring confusion on all his votaries. The Acts of the Apostles tells us how the leaven that was to leaven the whole lump oi private property godlessness began to work : — And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul ; neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own ; but they had all things in common. Neither was there any of them that lacked ; for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. Now, as all manner of good Catholics and Pro- testants alike profess to find in primitive Christian precept and practice the justification of their own existence, it cannot be too frequently dinned into their ears that these were, to the backbone, anti- property and communistic. The earliest ** Churches" or Anarchist " Groups " were simply fraternities or brotherhoods having all things in common, and this is how the ** Early Fathers " were wont to voice their tenets : — St. Basil : " The rich man is a thief." St. Chrysostom : " The rich are robbers : better all thing^l were in common." St. Clement : " Iniquity alone has created private property.'' St. Ambrose : " Nature created community : private preperty it the off-spring of usurpation." " THB COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS. ' 7 St. Jerome : "Opulence is always the product of theft com- mitted, if not by the actual possessor, then by his ancestors." And even in the beginning of the Seventh Century, long after the atheist Emperor Constantine — " the first Christian Emperor " forsooth ! — the vile mur- derer of his wife Fausta, his son Caesar Crispus, and his nephew Licinius — had " nobbled " Christianity and harnessed it to the chariot-wheels of the Empire, the holiest of Popes, St. Gregory the Great, " the Apostle of the English," in his Pastoral Care, could write in respect of landlordism, the father of all other monopolies : — Let them know that the earth from which they were created is thi common property oj all mm, a.Qd that, therefore, the fruits of the earth belong indiscriminately to all. Those that make private Eroperty of the gift of God pretend in vain to be innocent ; for y thus withholding the subsistence of the poor they are the murderers of those who die daily for want of it. The late Rev. Tait Scott, of Lymington, whose recent death, at the early age of forty, all good Collectivists have the best reason to mourn, not long ago told me a little experience of his own, which in a striking manner shows how far the Churches and " clergy of all denominations '' have forgotten the warning of the Master : " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon " ; nay, how completely they have put Mammon in the place of God and His Christ : Mr. Tait Scott was,for some eight years, a missionary in New Guinea among aborigines, who had the reputation of being cannibals. This, he found, they were called by the thievish European traders merely as a pretext for cheating and robbing them. They were in reality strict Communists and Vegetarians, and, though naked as Adam and Eve, within the limits of the matriarchal family, highly moral. They had no idea oi private property , and consequently none 8 " THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS. of theft. No one lacked while another had. In a word, Mr. Tait Scott found the " cannibals " kindly, helpful, happy, intelligent even — naturaliter Christiani. But, alas, there had been false apostles of Christ in those parts before Mr. Scott's arrival, and these had been sowing tares, otiierwise imparting the " ele- ments of civilisation," to the natives. Mr. Tait Scott naturally asked to be made acquainted with the Christian converts, and found that they were dis- tinguishable from their fellows by one mark, and one only, VIZ., that each was the happy possessor of " a box with a lock and key ! " They had in fact gone gome way towards laying the foundations of gaol and workhouse and all the other humanising '• Resources of Civilization." There is, I am satisfied, no more important study to be tackled at the present moment, than that of primitive Christian communal arrangements which entirely ignored, indeed precluded, the very existence of a paid or " hireling ministry " (as the Quakers were wont to phrase it) of any kind, Greek, CathoHc or Protestant. " Without money and without price " must ever be the watchword of the Christian Faith if the Great Founder's mission is to be fulfilled. Said not St. Paul, " Let him that stole, steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands. . . . These hands ministered to my necessities and to them that were with me ? " Tennyson's " Third Voice in the Night," in " Queen Mary," was altogether right : — Third Voice: "What am I? One who crids continually with sweat and tears to the Lord God that it would please Him out of His infinite love to break down all kingship and queenship. all priesthood and prelacy ; to cancel and abolish all bonds of human allegiance, all the magistracy, all the nobles, and all the wealthy, and to send usagain, according to His promise, the One King, the Christ, and all things in common, as in the days of the first Church, when Christ Jesus was King." II. CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. That Government is the best which governs not at all, and when men are prepared for it, that is the kind of Government they will have.— Thoreau. To educate the wise man the State exists, and with the ap- pearance of the wise man, the State expires. — Emerson. Government is in its essence always a force actmg in viola- tion of justice. Christianity destroys all Government. — Leo Tolstoy. ND so another Christmas has come and gone, and we have crossed the thres- hold of the year of Grace, 1895, or as very competent scholars will have it 1897. Even more disputable still are the day and month of Christ's Nativity ; but such questions, though they may exercise the hypnotised sacerdotal mind, affect the rest of Christendom very little. And for good reason ; for what matter the time and manner of birth, or even of the death of the Son of Man, compared with the saving truths imparted by Him to his contemporaries, or compared with the measure of their acceptance or rejection by His pro- fessed followers to-day ? The "signs " or "miracles " of healing the sick and feeding the hungry ascribed 9 lO CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE, to Him in the Gospels may be rejected by supercilious "scientists " but there is one miracle more astounding than all the others, which no unprejudiced thinker, no competent student of history, dreams of controvert- ing, and in virtue of which He of Nazareth must ever reign in the innermost consciousness of the human race. And that miracle was this : that an unlettered Galilean artisan should arise in an obscure corner of the Earth to examine its proud civilizations, and con- fidently pronounce their foundations hollow, their justice a mockery, their religions hypocrisy and their glory an object of shame and contempt. He "con- victed the world of sin " as it never had been con- victed, and His indictment remains unanswered and unanswerable. Nor did the achievement of this Wonderful Per- sonage end there. He not merely brought home to men the full measure of their aberrations, but He bestowed on them an infallible compass by which in future to steer their course. The Wise Men of the East and the unmatched Philosophers of Greece had sought for some principle to reconcile the warring elements in the nature of man, but in vain. When Christ appeared they stood completely baffled, one and all. The Prophet of Nazareth solved the problem of problems without an effort. He simply proclaimed Love to be the Be-all and End-all of human existence ; nay, more, He identified it with the Primordial Prin- ciple of the Universe — with God Himself. And by exemplifying all-embracing love in His own life, and demanding it in His followers, Jesus restored the moral unity of man's nature and placed a New Heaven and a New Earth within the reach of human endeavour. For a couple of centuries or more after Christ's death love was manifested no less in the practice than CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. II in the profession of His followers, and in spite of the worst that the State could do by deadliest persecution, the violence of Pagan Individualism was powerless againt the love of Christian Communism. But in the beginning of the Fourth Century there came a deplorable change. The State, finding that it could neither s ibdue nor exterminate the Christians by violence, was seized with a sudden affection for them, and its craft-begotten love was a thou- sand times more fatal than its most virulent hate, For, by the Shades beneath us and by the Gods above, Add not unto your cruel hate your yet more cruel love. The vile Imperial homicide, Constantine, wedded the Church to the State in an incestuous union, and since then till now Christianity in all its grand divisions, Greek, Roman and Protestant has borne on its dishonoured forehead the sign of the State Beast, The " Communion of the Saints "' i.e., Christian /oy^-inspired Communism, has been wholly superseded by a grasping Individualism, clerical as well as lay, of unblushing avarice. I doubt, for example, if Joseph Parker, of the City Temple, is not as great an expert in " selling the Holy Ghost " as Simon the Sorcerer would fain have been. The story of Joseph and the reporter sermon- thief might almost bring a blush to the cheek of a City stockbroker. O Joseph, Joseph ! If the vindi- cation of the cause of Christ depended on thee and such mercenary gospellers as thee, how hopeless the outlook ! And in whatever direction we look, a mighty gulf yawns between Christian profession and practice. On every hand the love and equality inculcated by Christ are strangled by State violence and inequality. Is it a question of Monarchy ? " Then is it wholly forbidden in a Christian community where " he who would be the greatest must be the servant of all." 12 CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. Even " the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister." No prince or courtier can liave any possible existence in the Christian Common- wealth, and yet Queen Victoria is visible Head of the Church and Defender of the Faith ! Woe unto you, hypocrites ! Titles are rigorously condemned. Call no man Master, no man Father. Yet have we a whole Chamber of the Legislature crammed with Lords, noble and most noble, and Fathers-in-God, reverend and right reverend, in sheer defiance of the injunc- tion of the Christ whom they all profess to serve ! Are then Churches and Clerics of Rome, Canterbury, or Geneva in the grace of the Great Teacher ? Assuredly not " The Kingdom of Heaven is within you " and is not to be found in any Church — "neither on this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem," Rome or Canterbury. God is a Spirit, and can only be com- muned with in spirit and in truth. And he who would impart to his fellows the glad tidings of the Kingdom — how is he to equip himself for his task ? Not with a bishop's imprimatur or the hall-mark of some School of Divinity. These things, with their inevitable accessories, the goodly loaves and fishes, greedily abstracted from the products of sweated toil, have ever been the heavy impedimenta of Christian propaganda. The true messenger of Christ sets out moneyless, with an empty wallet and without so much as a redundant overcoat. But he is declared worthy of his meat, and that is his sole perquisite. Fancy Joseph Parker starting on a mis- sionary tour on those conditions, not to speak of the Right Reverend " Successor of St. Augustine " — him of Canterbury ! And what of our ermined Judges and the whole tribe of lawyers P " Woe unto you, lawyers ! " said Christ; "for ye have taken away the key of know- ledge." And again, "Judge not, that ye be not CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. 1 3 judged." This latter injunction Count Tolstoy has clearly shown is laid primarily on those who actually sit on the judgment-seat in our pretended Courts of Justice, and is not, as generally supposed, merely applicable to criticism of private or personal con- duct. Under the rule of violence of the pagan State the function of the Judge is necessary : under that of Christian love it inevitably disappears. Having due re- gard to environment, in respect of Judge and Convict, one would generally be justified in affirming that of the two, the former is the greater criminal. I wonder, for example, if it ever occurred to merciless Justice Day that the words of Him to whom, as a good Roman Catholic, he professes to look for mercy, might have some personal application to himself. And what of Generals, Admirals and other pro- fessional State Murderers, great and small ? From the Commander-in-Chief to Tommy Atkins they have deliberately sworn to kill without mercy whomsoever the rulers of the State, for the time being, order them to kill. Yet the express command of Christ stares them in the face — " Swear not at all." " Resist not evil." " He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword." If ye take a sword and dror it, And go stick a feller through, Guv'mint ain't to answer for it, God ti'ill send the bill to you. Here again, as in the case of the Judge, the law of Christian love completely negatives the law of Pagan violence and the distinctive element of the Gospel is unequivocally affirmed. How, for example, a callous Dugald Dalgetty Uke the late, much-lamented "Chinese Gordon," of pious memory, should have been habitually able to refresh his soul with Thomas a Kempis' incomparable De Imitattone Christi, while at the same time impiously shedding the blood of the reforming Taipings, in the interest of a cruel and effete despotism, is past all understanding. 14 CHRISTIAN PROFESSION AND PAGAN PRACTICE. Nor is it otherwise with Riches and Rich Men. " Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation." " It is as easy for a camel to go through p. needle's eye as for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." So said Christ, but the rich man, like professional murderer Gordon, takes only his profession of faith from the Son of Man. His practice he takes from the Pagan State, whose •very raison d'etre IS that mammon or private property/, which it was Christ's special mission to abolish. But, though on every hand we see Pagan violence above and Christian love below in the dire internecine struggle whicli has now lasted for more than eighteen centuries, there is no good reason to despair of the final issue. The realisation of the Christian ideal may be near or far, but it is certain. Even Christ himself, being asked wheii the end of the " world " or age of Pagan violence should terminate, was unable to say. " But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, nut the angels in heaven, but my Father only." Nevertheless He indicated sure signs of the mighty change, and enjoined watchfulness. The revolution of revolutions would come at the moment when the miseries of man had reached their utmost lim-t, and the glad tidings of the Kingdom of God had been proclaimed in eveiy quarter of the earth. " He that hath ears to hear let him hear ! " " When it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather to-day ; for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky ; but can ye not discern the signs of the times ? " III. THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. Not only they who to the petty feud bring termination and consent to peace ; Nor they who by their influence bid cease the cannon's boom and echoing war-trump rude ; Nor even they who heedfully exclude mistrusts of nations which, if let increase, Would the fierce war-do9:s speedily release — not to these only the beatitude Of peacemakers pertains. But even more to those who, subtly conscious of the breath Of coming changes, labour to restore the rock-hewn reservoirs of Social Faith ; Who, to men faltering, open wide the door through which new life beats down their dreams of death. T is significantly recorded of the Christ that "the common people heard him gladly." How different is it to-day with those who pretend to teach in His name! The " Masses " not only do not hear them gladly, they decline to hear them at all, and in so doing who shall say that they are not thoroughly well advised ? The workers of Palestine heard Jesus gladly, because He brought them the glad tidings of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth ; but which of the Churches incul- cates the Gospel of the Poor which He taught ? With scarcely an exception they are mere Syna- gogues of Mammon — Synagogues of Satan, where to the Rich the Gospel is preached. 15 l6 THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. Take the " great lying Church ' of England. No man dare call that a Church of Christ. It is above all things the Church of tne " Classes " in general and of the landlords in particular. Its Bishops are a by-word in the land for more than a pagan acquisi- tiveness. Their " covetousness " is so unbounded that should one of them die possessed of less than from ;^5o,ooo to ^350,000 he is regarded as a " failure." In some respects the leading Nonconformist Churches are even more odious than the Anglicans. They belong to the shop-keepers, and are " run " on the most approved shop-keeper lines. It is shekels not souls, that they are bent on saving. Theirs is the Gospel of the Front Pew. Of all the Protestant sects the Unitarians savour the least of superstition and the most of " culture " but what they have gained in intellectual breadth they have lost in social impulse. By losing living touch with Christ they have doomed themselves to sterility and decadence. An intellectual aristocracy can no more enter the " Kingdom of Heaven" than an aristocracy of birth or wealth. They are a a pathetic testimony to the warning of the incom- parable Master — " Without Me ye can do nothing." The poor know them not. To them Unitarianism is little more than a will o' the wisp. It is without a message, oscillating helplessly between Agnosticism and a barren Theism. Then there is the Church of Rome with its splendid pagan ceremonial, its ironclad dogmas and its priestly absolutism. It has never wholly lost its hold on the poor and ignorant, and is to-day perhaps the least mercenary of the Churches. But the thinking wage- earner, though he may, with the example of a Manning before his eyes, have ceased to regard Roman Catholicism with positive aversion, has yet not the slightest inclination to embrace its tenets, THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. IJ There is far too much to swallow and far too little to digest for his liking. Neither creed-bound Romanism nor creedless Unitarianism has any real message for him. He wants entrance into Christ's " Kingdom of Heaven" sure enough, but he distrusts his would- be conductors, one and all, and for very sufficient reasons too, though they may at times be of the unconscious order. He calls his " pastors " con- temptuously "sky-pilots." Finally, we have the new departure of the Salva- tion Army. That movement, in spite of its ecstatic theology, kettledrum manifestations, and platoon- firing, nevertheless comes nearer to living Faith in Christ than any other before the public. It alone shows practical regard for the real spirit of the " Kingdom of Heaven. ' " By their fruits ye shall know them." I am told that the organi- zation, like that of Rome, is autocratic, and there- fore objectionable, and such may be the case. But no man with eyes in his head can deny that it has worked miracles among the poorest and most degraded ; that it has inspired the hopeless with hope, fed the hungry and clothed the naked — done a work in truth that was beyond the power of all the Churches put together to accomplish. To the poor the Gospel of the Kingdom has once more been preached in street and alley, highway and byway. The results are patent, and I care not to criticise the methods. Even among the immediate followers of Christ, Judas contrived to be treasurer ; but the work went on all the same. But much or little as it may be given to the Salva- tion Army to achieve, it is certain that the Churches proper will never be able to convert the " masses," and it would be a black day for mankind if they ever should. For the religion of the New Democracy, and the Collectivist " departure," which it renders inevitable, will not be the " Kingdom of Heaven " of l8 THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. any of them, but the " Kingdom " as preached by Christ Himself, His Apostles, and the Early Fathers. That " Kingdom " was, of course, none other than the Co-operative Commonwealth, and it is much to be regretted that the New Testament revisers did not substitute that phrase for " Kingdom of Heaven," as Christ would doubtless have done had He been addressing the " Masses " of to-day. Similarly where He spoke of " Mammon " would He have sub- stituted " Private Property." For nothing is more certain than that His Kingdom, though it was not to be "of" this world, was to be "in" it. He merely taught that "the good people are the kind people, and the kind people the good people," and that goodness and kindness. In- dividualism and Mammon-worship, cannot co-exist. His was truly the Religion of Humanity, and with Collectivism His Kingdom, so long banished to the clouds by materialist princes, statesmen, and church- men, will again, as in the days preceding Constan- tine, be restored to the earth. This " Second Advent " the " Masses " are already beginning to hail, to the confusion of all the Churches. Instead of believing less in Christ than His hireling ministers, they not only believe in Him more, but they believe m Him in the way and for the very reasons for which He asked men to believe in Him. " Do and ye shall know." They are doing as well as the false teaching, and, indeed sheer negation, for long centuries, of His gospel of the " Kingdom " permit them. Consciously or uncon- sciously the faith of the " common people " in Christ, creedless though it may be, is as strong, or stronger than it ever was. And were His blameless feet To-day within our streets, methinks, men's doubts Would chafe Him little, and His hand would grasp The hand of many an outcast from the fold That boasts Him shepherd, and His test of love Would turn much gold to dross, much dross to gold. THE RELIGION OF COLLECTIVISM. ig It is in vain that Comte and such able disciples as our own Harrisons and Beesleys have set up a " Religion of Humanity " other than that which Christ proclaimed. Even from the philosophic point of view they err greatly if it be their object, as it presumably is, to bring the "Masses" to their way of thinking. They may talk as they will of Confucius, of the Buddha, of Zoroaster, of Mohammed, of Plato, of Aristotle, of Socrates, of Shakespeare, and the rest ; but the Ideal Man of the " Masses " will always be the Christ. He alone is known to them by fovce of association, and well it is that such is the case ; for Man or Messiah, He is worth more than they all rolled into one. They are doubtless precious enough, but He is indispensable. •' Behold I maks all things new ! " " Lo, I am with you alway even to the end of the world ! " "I am the Resurrection and the Life ! " With Him is the Secret of the Future — the eureka of the " Masses." That secret lies rather with those who, having suffered all that can be suffered from the inequalities of social existence as it is, can yet see the brightness of social existence as it might be ; who, while realising and sympathising with all that men have thought and done, can at the same time realise the greater grandeur of what is yet to be done and thought ; who, while they can appreciate the triumphs of science and industry, can at the same time appreciate the subtleties of art, the inmost depths of human hopes and feeling, the innocence and delight that may grow up round the path of each man and woman who "serves " the present age ; by discharging the commonest of domestic duties. These are the peace-makers, who now, as centuries ago, are worthy to be called the "Children of God." IV. The •« nonconformist CONSCIENCE" AND CIVIC DUTY. When we remember that 386,489 persons in London live" in one-roomed tenements, in some cases with more than nine persons to a room ; that in some districts children die at a rate of 260 per thousand before they reach their first year ; that one eut of every four Londoners dies a pauper, we feel that the [County] Council, which is doing its utmost to lessen this terrible waste of life, has tht strongest claims on the support of every humane citizen. — Manifesto of the Noxconformist CODNCIL. Preaching the Gospel means a never-ceasing attack on every wrong institution, until the earth becomes a New Earth, and all its cities Cities of God. It is as truly a holy work to lead a crusade against filth, vice, and disease in slums of cities, and to seek the abolition of disgraceful tenement houses, as it is to send missionaries to the heathen. — Prof. Ely. Christianity is not a state of opinion and speculation. Chris- tianity is essentially practical, and I will maintain this, that practical Christianity is the greatest curer of speculative Christianity. — Earl of Shaftesbury. He that willeth to do the will shall learn of the doctrine. — Jesus Christ. HE Appeal of the London Reform Union to the pastors of the Metropolitan Churches to aid in combating the forces of reactionary and anti-civic Moderatism, at the late London County Council Election, re- 20 THE '' NONCONFORMIST CONSCIENCE.'* 21 ceived a most notable, prompt and praiseworthy response from the Nonconformist Council. The Memorial Hall Manifesto indeed left almost nothing to be desired in point of tone or of Christian prin- ciple, while its vigour of diction was refreshingly unusual. It endorsed the good deeds of the Pro- gressive majority of the Council with an emphasis which can best be appreciated by those who have the most lively recollection of the forbidding rock out of which New Municipal London has been hewn : — A more honourable, self-denying, efficient administration English local government has never known. The record of its achievements, in face of gigantic hindrances, limited powers, and incessant misrepresentation is the marvel of other countries. This was unstinted praise, but who shall say it was undeserved ? I have a vivid recollection of the days — and they are not so long bygone — when indomit- able old Beal, with myself and some half-dozen other obscurities, constituted the whole available militant forces of Londinium Redivivum. We used to meet pretty frequently, in Beal's office, of a Saturday afternoon, after the clerks had gone, and solemnly pass resolutions worthy of anything recorded of the three historic tailors of Tooley-street. But we knew — or rather the " Father of London Municipal Reform " knew — a trick of much potency unknown to the Tooley-street propagandists. Beal kept a reporter — " Beal's Reporter" we called him — a highly impecunious and thirsty but withal discreet and dexterous Irishman, who invariably wrote out the most plausible accounts of our proceedings, so that you could not tell whether four persons or four hundred had taken part in them, and what was still more wonderful, this artist's " lineage " seldom failed of acceptance by the very newspapers which were most hostile to reform in Corporation, Metro- Dolitan Government Board, and Vestry. 22 THE " NONCONFORMIST CONSCIENCE Ah, methinks if Tom Mann and the Independent Labourists had known a little more of what ante- County Council London was like, and the sore shifts to which its earlier progenitors were put to bring the present rudimentary civic authority (as they may judge it) into existence, assuredly they would have thought twice before leaving it, as they rashly deter- mined to do, to the tender mercies of the " vested interests" of Peer and Publican. It was the case of General Wade and the roads ia the Scottish Highlands over again: Had you seen these roads before they were made, You would lift up your hands and bless General Wade ! But the Nonconformist Manifesto did far more tiian give its hearty benediction to the regenerative action of the Progressive majority on the County Council. It made the Churches themselves the factor in the community chiefly responsible for the further- ance of true Progressivism : — The overthrow of the evils under which London has suffered for centuries depends not so much on political parties as upon the Churches, whose business it is to destroy these evils at their roots by a practical application of the Christian Gospel. And so at last the Nonconformist Churches seriously propose to give us " a practical application of the Christian Gospel," and surely it is about time they did. " Political parties " have long enough had the direction of Christian Society. They have in- solently " bossed" it, ever since the alleged conver- sion of the Emperor Const antine, in such a way that the true meaning and distinctive principles of the Christian Faith have been almost hopelessly obscured and nullified. The mission of the Primitive Churches or Christian Brotherhoods " having all things in common " was to redeem the world of knavish politi- cians, and on no account to make peace with it, except on terms of unconditional surrender. But AND CIVIC DUTY. 23 instead of unconditional surrender a fatal alliance was struck up between Paganism and Christianity, which has given the former the earth for its *' sphere of influence " and the latter the clouds. The Churches abandoned sociology for theology, and in so doing abandoned the very basis of Christian life and action. It is hard to say if mankind has sufTered most from worldliness or from ctherwovldlincss ; but, on the whole, I am disposed to believe that the latter has been the greater curse. It is noteworthy that Moses was wholly silent on the question of the Ira- mortality of the Soul, and that all the sanctions of his Code are purely mundane. In Egypt the mummy, sarcophagus and pyramid industries, the offspring of the resuscitation doctrine, wasted an enormous proportion of the energies of the people, and the Hebrew Lawgiver wisely determined that the Israelities should be exempted from the banefui influences of a superstition so degrading. Nor did Christ concern Himself much about the next world. Nearly everything in His actual sayings applies exclusively to the present life. The Lord's Prayer, like the Mosaic Code, takes no cognisance of a life hereafter, and in the whole of the Sermon on the Mount, contained in Matthew v., VI, VII, the subject is barely alluded to. In truth, Christ oftener than not deprecated othevworldliness. When the mother of Zebedee's children desires them to rank high in Christ's kingdom. His reply is, " whosoever will be great among you let him be your servant," here and now. The rich young man who wanted to be saved is not instructed by the Master in any of the inanities of theosophic metaphysics — " Karma " is " not in it," — but is told to sell his pro- perty forthwith, and give it to the poor, and so pre- pare himself at once to do the will of God on earth. "He that believeth in Me hath everlasting life," said Christ, not shall have. '• And the Lord added to the 24 THE "NONCONFORMIST CONSCIENCE* Church daily such as should be saved," ran Acts ii., 47, in the old Version — a blunder of no small magnitude, attributable solely to the absorbing of/iu)'- worldliness of the translators. In the New Version the true sense of the text is well brought out, " And the Lord added to them day by day those that were being saved " — at that time and place. " Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth." Do here and noiv and ye shall know of the doctrine. That is the strait gate and the narrow way leading unto life, which no Church, as such, for fifteen hundred years or more, has been able to find, though many individual men in all ages have entered therein. Among these, the chief in our day is Count Leo Tolstoy, who appears to me to come nearer the mind of Christ, in his comprehension of the Kmgdom of God on earth, than even the great Apostle Paul himself, through whose writings a certain regretable strain of otherworldliness runs. Take even that magni- ficent passage where he says not boastfully, but in the spirit of matchless heroism : " For now am 1 ready to be offered up. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." Could anything well be grander ? But when he proceeds, " Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness,'' etc., otherivorldliness creeps in, and he carries my sympathy with him no farther. If I should be found among those entitled either to a Pauline " crown of righteousness," or a Petrine " crown of glory that fadeth not away," my feelings would be, I think, to hand my diadem to any one who might seem to want it, and ask instead for some few millions of years of sweet oblivion, before I was again called into the stormful arena of con- scious being. But — Fiat Voluntas Tua ! It is recorded of the saintly Madame Guion, the Catholic, that, in a vision, she met an angel bearing a furnace and a pot of water. " Whither goest AND CIVIC DUTY. 25 thou ? " she asked. " I go," said the angel, " with this furnace to burn up Paradise, and with this water to quench Hell, that men may hereafter love God without fear and without hope of reward." And without love to our brother whom we have seen, how are we to love God whom we have not seen ? " Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me." The Nonconformist Manifesto may, therefore, I think, be regarded as a notable " sign of the times," indicating a certain disposition, on the part at least oi the Free Churches, to return from the arid wastes of otherwovldliness to the green pastures of primitive Christian faith and humanitarian practice. They have made a start, at all events, in the right direc- tion, and, after aberrations so protracted, that is much to be thankful for. The more they do, the more cer- tainly shall they learn, and the Spirit of Truth that leadeth unto all truth, may yet make their light so shine before men that '• political parties " shall cease from troubling, and the State itself, which is always Pagan in its essence, be transformed into the Kingdom of God. Thy Kingdom come ! V. OUR LABOUR CHURCHES: A PER- SONAL EXPERIENCE. Laborare est orare (To labour is to pray,) My Father worketh hitherto and I work. — Jksus Christ. Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labour, working with his hands. . . . These hands ministered lo my necessities and to them that were with me. — St, Paul. Woe to him that increases that which is not his. — Habakuk (11.6) That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down ; according to the substance that he hath gotten he shall not rejoice. For he hath oppressed and forsaken the Pcor ; he hath violently taken away an house, and he shall not build it up — Job xx,, i8, 19. NDULGENT readers, I feel sure,will excuse me if 1 am a trifle garrulous on a subject with which many of them are better ac- quainted than I have the good fortune to be. But on Sunday, Jan. 13, '95, I had the honour to address the members of the Labour Church at Brad- ford, afternoon and evening, and the experience brought me so many reflections that other topics were, for several days, pretty well crowded out of what Lord Westbury would, peradvcnture, have observed "you 26 OUR LABOUR CHURCHES. 2"] are pleased to call your mind." Anyhow, my first Labour Church experience was on this wise : — I duly started for my destination from King's Cross, on Saturday afternoon, and but for a single fellow- passenger, who, about mid-way, dropped into my carriage — as excellent a third as man could wish — I was sole occupant. I was profitably ruminating over "Free-Railway-Travel" Cooper of Norwich's calculation that, under our supremely wasteful system of competition, every railway traveller has got to pay for at least seven vacant seats in addition to that actually occupied by him, at the moment when my companion for the rest of the journey presented himself. He was a young Anglican cleric, probably about thirty, " all shaven and shorn " and equipped in the regulation mock-modest uniform of his Trades Union. He had evidently been to visit " the Squire and his relations," "killing something," for conspicu- ous among his portable property was a goodly phea- sant, which manifestly added not a little to his contentment and sense of general superiority. Now towards all men who make a trade or pro- fession of the religion of Christ I am invincibly hos- tile, and this particular representative of "that great lying Church " of Carlyle's aversion, did not at first impress me favourably. Nevertheless, he courteously divided a comfortable rug with me, and we at once began to talk freely. He had not been long located in Bradford, was ecclesiastically " high," and politi- cally " low " — a " Socialist " in fact ! In turn I told him my mission to Bradford was to address the Labour Church — with an emphasis on Church — whereat he looked rather uncomfortable. And for sufficient reason. He evidently could not imagine a Church without Bishops and without ceremonial. He had in fact, been educated in Anglican Chttvchianity, and knew little or nothing of 28 OUR LABOUR CHURCHES: the spirit of Christ's teaching, or even of the most primitive institutions of the Christian Chucrhes. When told that a Bishop or Overseer was originally nothing more than a Presbyter or Elder, selected by his fellow Elders to discharge some particular function for a period more or less extended, and that Episcopal pretentions to superior sanctity or autliority are to-day the product of undiluted priest- craft and usurpation, my cleric took refuge in gloomy silence. He, in fact, knew only the pagan element which has been so ruinously worked into the Christian Faith, and could with ease have been placed hopelessly hovs de combat, by any average member of the Bradford Labour Church, in private conversation or on a public platform. Who shall teach the teachers ? Clearly none of the orthodox Churches has been able to solve llmt problem. Well, at the station, I found two unknown " Com- rades " waiting for me, and in Bradford that word is not a mere term of convention. It means that you are of the household of faith, the member of a brother- hood pledged to mutual helpfulness and hospitality, by invisible bonds of fraternal love and sympathy. I was taken to the home of one of my new friends for the term of my visit, and was made to feel that it was quite as much my home as his. Then I be- thought me of Christ's " Plan of Campaign "' which He laid down, tor the Seventy. They were not to trouble their heads about questions of food or raiment or hotel expenses, but when they entered town or village, to make for the abode of the first " Comrade " who was " worthy," and with him abide, in true communistic fashion, till their woik in the place was finished. Had my Anglican friend been one of the Seventy, he would have, doubtless, set out, armed with his pheasant well displayed, to give his mission a proper air of respectability. Well, Sunday came, and with it a rare old- A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 29 fashioned snow-storm, such as I used thoroughly to enjoy in boyhood, in my native Aberdeenshire. But now, alas, it is diflferent. Increasing years and a chronic bronchial affection have made me very susceptible to cold, and it was with the greatest effort that I was able to get through my first or afternoon lecture in any shape whatever. In the evening, however, I got on much better, chiefly because the Chairman or Bishop, a large-limbed, level-headed Yorkshireman, returned with a whole druggist's shop of remedies in his capacious pockets. Amongst these he recommended an efficacious anti- cough mixture of his own preparation, and to it was it owing that I did not break down altogether. My subjects were "The Collectivist Program," and " Property: its Cause and Cure" and, for such forbidding weather, the audiences were astonishingly good in point both of numbers and character. The la rge Hall of the Labour Institute will, at a pinch, seat twelve hundred persons, while the smaller, sacred to all sorts of social " functions," holds about two hundred and fifty. The rent-charge alone amounts to five pounds ten shillings a week. All expenditure is met by voluntary contribution — by " collections " at the ** services." In the Committee Room and at my host's house 1 was repeatedly asked about The Democratic Club and even The Isocvatic Club of the Metropolis — both, alas, extinct — and could not but feel that, in many important respects, such towns as Bradford are much bigger places than London. They have less to learn from us than we from them. Of us they know something, and are always eager to learn more ; of them we neither know nor care to know aught, though we are kept wonderfully well posted up in the affairs of Uganda and Afghanistan, Egypt and Armenia. Sheer, crass ignorance of men and things can be attained in London in much greater JO OUR LABOUR CHURCHES: perfection than anywhere else in the world. But the subject is too painful to be expatiated on. If the lectured at Bradford learned nothing from the lecturer, the lecturer certainly, in my case, learned a good deal from the lectured. After the evening lecture mine excellent host and hostess privately entertained a small party of friends of the " Cause " — some ten or a dozen — and we were able to exchange ideas freely. They were all young, hopeful, well-informed and thoughtful. They had read and digested all manner of Collectivist writings, and had seen and heard, in the flesh, at the Labour Church, nearly every prominent man and woman in the Movement : — Keir Hardie, Tillett, Mann, Herbert Burrows, Trevor, Clarion Blatchford, Kenworthy, Curran (Pete), Miss Margaret McMillan ("Our Margaret,") Miss Stacy, Miss Martin, Mrs. Bruce Glasier, and Mrs. Sydney Webb among others. We discussed the prospects of the Independent Labour Party, but could not see very far before us. But Ben Tillett's chances for Bradford were re- garded by the least sanguine as distinctly "good," and that Tories will come in for the other three divisions of the borough was, with astonishing equani- mity, taken for granted. The aversion to such Liberal employers of labour as lllingworth and Sir Isaac Holden surpassed anything I could have con- ceived. Compared with the Liberal Capitalist, the Tory Capitalist or Landlord seemed really to be looked on as quite a minor evil. We spoke also of Trades Unions. I urged against them that in respect of strikes, the reduction of the hours of labour, out-of-work benefit, etc., their action was necessarily abortive, inasmuch as it was directed towards the amelioration of the iniquitous system of wage-slavery instead of its destruction. This position was not very strenuously controverted. Indeed, the A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE. 3I general futility of strikes was readily conceded, but I felt, in the language of brother Jonathan, as if I "had bitten off more than I could chew," and the matter was allowed to drop. The Labour Church " runs " a smart, somewhat microscopic weekly of its own, the Bradford Labour Echo, and assuredly it needs it. There are four papers in the town, and they with one accord ignore the doings of the Party of Labour as if they were absolutely of no importance. Even from the point of view of the Capitalist Press such conduct is, to say the least, childish and almost un- intelligible. To reject " good copy " is always bad journalism, and the Labour Church platform must often supply as good as is locally going. In returning home on Monday, I had for carriage- mate (sole again), a very well-meaning specimen of the Liberal CapitaUst, an engineer, with an inherited business, employing some two hundred and fifty *' hands," and from him I was enabled to look at matters from the Capitalist's standpoint. He was much worried with law-suits about contracts, &c., and had ofiered to let his entire " plant " to his employees, if they would each pay him a rent of sixpence per day. It was his custom to pension his age-stricken (and always ungrateful) " hands " liberally — to one some- what inferior workman, he gave fifteen shillings a week and the veteran growled for twenty — and on his Board of Guardians he was one of three Liberals (to six Conservatives) who did thsir best to patch up in their own way, as the Trades Unionists do in theirs, the existing system of wage-slavery. But it will come, can come, to no good in the end, and I am more disposed to look for the salvation of the " Masses " to such bodies as our Labour Churches, inspired as they seem to be by the true Spirit of Christ, than to all the politicians and political organisations on the planet. 32 OUR LABOUR CHURCHES. "Behold! the Kingdom of Heaven is within vou' Lo; I am with you alway, even to the end of the world!" "I am the Resurrection and the Life ! " VI. THE COST OF CANT: "WITHOUT MONEY AND WITHOUT PRICE" (?) Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money ; come ye buy and eat ; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. — Isaiah. Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary ? — St. Mark. These hands ministered to my necessities, and to them that were with me. — St. Paul. It IS a melancholy thing to see men ^the bishops), clothed in soft raiment, lodged in a public palace, endowed with a rich portion of other men's industry, using their influence to deepen the ignorarce and inflame the fury of their fellow creatures. — Sidney Smith Freely ye have received, freely give Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in yoy purses. Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves ; but the work- man is worthy of his meat. And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, inquire who in it is worthy ; and there abide till ye go thence. — Jesds Christ. HE question of Church DisestabHshmenx in Wales opens the door to the considera- tion of a graver and more vital problem than any to be reached by legislation alone. We constantly talk of disestablishment when we 33 D 34 THE COST OF CANT. really mean disendowment. Between a body of State-endowed clerics and Seci-salaried preachers, there is in the end but little to choose. Once make religion a trade, or a profession like that of arms or the law, and it is vitiated at the very source. The moment Christianity became an^ affair of profit for a select few of its professors it ceased pro tanto to be the religion of Christ, and degenerated into paganism and priestcraft. The salt had lost its savour, and was and is good for nothing but to be trodden under the feet of men. In all profitable religions we may justly suspect the value and sincerity of the doctrine ; for how are we to know that it is not preached for the profit alone ? As a matter of fact, it can hardly be doubted that the vast majority of onr pulpits would at once be emptied if considerations of mere lucre; social standing and spiritual pride ceased to operate. But with the death of priestcraft would come the re-birth of true religion, like a babe in a manger again, pure and undefiled from the womb of a virgin mother. •' My house shall be called the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves " — thieves of all denominations, big thieves and little thieves, but each stealing as much as he can. In England and Wales alone there are upwards of 2S,ooo registered places of Public Worship. They are occupied by 270 sects, each of wliich imagines that it has got a shorter and safer cut to heaven than all the others, jointly and severally. They are steeped to the lips in wordliness and othev-tvordliness, which latter is a mere projection of their selfishness into the unseen and eternal. Among them are to be found the greatest variety of belief and the richest diversity of nomenclature. Latter Day Saints, Peculiar People, Christadelphians, Second Adventists, Ranters, and such like are more or less known to us ; but who, on earth, are THE COST OF CANT. 35 *' God's Own," the " Army of the King's Own," the "Christian Eliasites," the "Open Brethren," and the " Recreative Religionists ? " I am sure I know not, and still more certain am I that 1 cannot afford time to go on a voyage of discovery ; but one iceuld like to ascertain, if possible, with approximate accuracy, what it costs the country to keep alive so vast and varied a propaganda. In very many cases we can do little more than conjecture and deplore the subvention of error, ignorance, and chimera. To begin with, tlie Episcopate of the State Church, with its two Archbishops and thirty-two bishops, swallows up in hard cash close on ;^i 70,000 per annum, or at the rate of ^5,000 per man. These " Successors of the Apostles '' may be as inefficient in other respects as their worst enemies allege ; but no one can truthfully say that, as shepherds, they fail to shear the sheep to some purpose. And they are followed in the discharge of this self-imposed pastoral function by an army of twenty-three thou- sand assistant-shepherds of all grades. These divide among them a settled income amounting to _£'7,25o,ooo. In addition to this not insignificant sum there are Army and Navy chaplaincies, besides voluntary subscriptions galore. Altogether the Anglican Clergy must devour not less than ^10,000,000 per annum, or at the rate of more than ^400 per head. In Ireland the disestablished, but not disendowed, Anglican Church enjoys an annual revenue from all sources, which cannot be much under ;^40o,ooo. The boasted Disestablishment Act of i86g was a farce, inasmuch as the " compensation " to interested claimants, cleric and lay, amounted to about twelve out of the estimated sixteen millions of capitalised value. In Scotland the three Presbyterian Churches, Established, Free Church, and United Presbyterian, 36 THE COST OF CANT. in 1 89 1 raised respectively ^442,000, ^624,000, and £^372, 000 ; while in England this denomination con- tributed ^236,000, and in Ireland ^245,000. Next in importance to the Presbyterians come the Methodists of all kinds. They have an army of 4,000 ministers, and 40,000 lay preachers. What their aggregate revenue amounts to is only a matter of conjecture, but it may be safely set down at not less than ^1,300,000. Then we have the Congregationalists, whose revenue is reckoned at ;^472,ooo ; the Baptists at ;^35o,ooo ; the Welsh Calvinists at ^214,000; the Unitarians at ;^70,ooo ; the Society of Friends at ;^30,ooo ; Jews at £^150, 000 ; and various minor sects at ^"250,000. Last, but not least, is the Church of Rome, with its well-drilled army of eight Arch-bishops, forty-three bishops, and 6,170 priests. Its revenue in the United Kingdom has been guessed at ^1,500,000, but it may be much more, and can hardly be less. On the whole, therefore, it may be safely assumed that, for " sky-pilot " purposes, the people of this coun- try expend annually the vast sum of seventeen viillions sterling. And of this amount the "pilots" pocket probably not less than ^i 3,000,000 or ;^i4, 000, 000 per annum! And the sky-piloted — what of them ? Have they received value for their money ? Who will dare to say they have ? Spiritual things can only be discerned spiritually, and those alone who have had true spiritual experience can be of any service to those who have had it not. And those who have had such experience would no more dream of imparting it for a stipend, than St. Peter thought of selling the Holy Ghost for money to Simon the Sorcerer. " Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money." Preaching or teaching the Gospel of Christ Jov hive THE COST OF CANT. 37 has been the destruction of Christianity from the end of the third century downwards, and the rehgion of the Master will never recover its pristine power over the conscience and conduct of men until the heathenish practice is entirely abandoned. The example set in this respect by such men as Trevor, Bruce Wallace, and Kenworthy is simply invalu- able, and cannot fail to do a world of good, whether they live to see the fruition of their Apostolic endeavours or not. Of course there is a sense in which the Christian religion may be taught professionally, on the same terms as any other topic involving close investigation and sound learning. Christianity is unquestionably an historic religion, but as such its reverend official exponents are, in nine cases out of ten, the last men in the world to go to for enlightenment. They have almost no critical knowledge of the text of Scriptures, and are quite at sea about the faith of the Christians of the first three centuries before its paganisation was unhappily consummated. In that arena they are helpless in the grasp of a Bradlaugh, a Saladin, a Watts, or a Foote. It is to learned sceptics like Strauss, Renan and others that we are really indebted for the recovery of the resplendent lineaments of the true historic Christ — the Son of Man. It is they and such men as they that have rescued the Nazarene from the stifling embrace of clericalism, and made Him once more human, credible, and — though they meant it not — Divine. And Christ came " not to be ministered unto but to minister." How, therefore, may we conclude would He dispose of these precious seventeen millions were He here among us now ? He would say : *' They were earned by the sweat and tears of My toiling brethren, and for their benefit must they be applied. Do they not need Free Education in the higher,t 245890 38 THE COST OF CANT. branches of Science, Free Railway Travel, a Free Breakfast Table and Free Crematoria ? Until you have achieved these and other matters of even weightier obligation you are no followers of Mine. Go to! Without money and without price must my Gospel ever be preached." Part II.— POLITICS. LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM; THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS THE INITL\TIVE AND REFERENDUM. WHAT IS ANARCHY? ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. 39) And, methinks, the work is nobler, And a mark of greater might, Better far to make a thinkcy Than to make a proselyte ; Nobler for the sake of Manhood, Better for the cause of Truth, Though your thinker be but rugged, And your proselyte is smooth. 40) PART IL— POLITICS. (Published originally before the General Election of 1895 ) VII. LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. I do not disguise from you my impression that, if Liberalism were to receive a severe blow at the next General Election, it might be a blow from which it might be more difficult to recover than from former defeats. . , . You have it in your power either to increase the scope and soHdity of that edifice (of Liberalism), or you have it equally in your power, by apathy and half-heartedness, to shatter^ for all time, perhaps, what has been so laboriously built up. — Lord Rosebery at Cardiff. EYOND question this oracle is true, and candid as it is true. Right ahead of us is a mighty parting of the ways, and the "Peer Premier" apprehends the fact as distinctly as does the" Member for the Unemployed " The latter contemplates with a light, or indeed, with an exultant heart, " the wiping out of the Liberal Party " at the General Election, and all that is involved in that fateful proceeding. His lordship naturally does anything but exult at such a prospect ; but exult or not, it is a contingency too possible and too grave not to be reckoned with beforehand as far as one may. 41 42 LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM. Now as to the probability of a serious Liberal collapse when the national suffrage comes to be recorded, I hazard no opinion whatever. There is a depression in Mahatma Stock just at present, and investment in predictions is unwise ; but, assuming the debacle of the Liberal Party — and the assumption is very general — it may be permissible to inquire — What then ? Hitherto, with more or less fidelity, from the day that John Lilburne, the Leveller — " Free-born John " of Commonwealth renown — and other stout- hearted Democrats drew up the famous Agreement of the People of England, demanding for Englishmen a free and equal Representative (Assembly), there has never ceased out of the land a party, ofttimes sorely attenuated, which has stood up for the enfranchise- ment of the politically outcasted, and the Liberal Party to-day, with all its shortcomings, is unques- tionably the true depository of that honourable tradition. And, in the order of evolution, that emancipatory mission is, unfortunatel}', by no means exhausted. Every man and every woman. One Vote of One Value ; Annual, or at most Triennial Parliaments ; Second Ballot ; Payment of Members and Election Expenses ; All Round Home Rule ; and to crown theedifice of citizenship, iho. Initiative and Refeyendiim — all these are debts which, in the natural course of political events, we had a right to look to the Liberal Party to discharge, before its Nunc Dimittis was said or sung. Nay, more, as the Agreement of the People was born of Republican revolution, so might one have hoped its final realisation would be revolution once more, and that the memorable words of the Act of 1649, con- stituting England a Republic, would be re-enacted, to the consternation and destruction of the privi- leged " Classes," throughout the world. LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM. 43 How straiglit to the mark do these virile words go compared with the circumlocutory anti vetoing ' resolution " of a National Liberal Federanon : — That the people of England and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging are, and shall be, and are hereby constituted, made, established and confirmed to be a Common- wealth and Free State, by the Supreme Authority of the People — the Representatives of the People in Parliament — and by such as they shall appoint and constitute officers and ministers for the good of the People, and that without any King or Housi of Lords, Ah, there were giants in those days which old- fashioned Republicans like myself, with somewhat of an " historic conscience," fcndly love to dwell upon. But in these exclusively bread-and-butter times, they concern but few, and at best, it must be conceded, they furnish us with a political ideal only. And beyond that the Liberal Party, as such, cannot go. In the domain of econojnic legislation, it has proved itself, in some respects, a less efficient instru- ment than the Tory Party, which may by comparison almost arrogate to itself the title of the Party of Social Progress. The Magna CJiarta of the Factory "hand," it can never be Jorgotten, had for its worst foes. Bright, Cobden, and Gladstone! And yet are the Tories a sorry reed for the workers, in any circumstances, to lean on. They will do a good few things for the people, but little or nothing by them. The Liberals, on the other hand, at their worst, generally concede to the toilers the one thing supremely needful, to wit, the means of work- ing out their own salvation, for if the Political Common- wealth is not within a measurable distance of the Co-operative Commonwealth, the fault clearly lies with the workers themselves. Let us now consider where we shall find ourselves in the event of the " Liberal Party being wiped out," at the General Election, by the votes and abstentioBS of the Independent Labourists. The Tories, we 44 LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM. shall suppose, come back with a clear majority of a hundred or a hundred and fifty, while the Inde- penden. Labourists number five, or let us even say ten. The threatened " Classes " will feel them selves safer than they have done at any time since the i^eform Bill of 1832. With tlie prospect of an in- definite spell of power before them, prince, peer, plutocrat, bishop, brewer, London liveryman, land- lord, and J. P. will swell with rejuvenated pride and arrogance. From the faithful Commons Royalty will receive almost any grant it has tlie impudence and avarice to demand. The Peers will feel that at last they are a co-ordinate, if not a superior, branch of the Legislature, and will act accordingly, no longer con- fining themselves to the humble walks of the mangier and the vetoer, but striking out boldly, as of old, in the interest of what "Wee Johnny Russell" used magniloquently to call " my order."' The Established Churches of Wales and Scotland will exult like men unexpectedly saved from the gibbet ; whil* the staunch ally of the Bible, Bung, will more than ever feel convinced that he is a chief estate of the realm. The "Squire and his relations " may be depended on to see that everybody in rural England belong- ing to the " lower orders" is kept well within the limits of his " proper station." and that the agri- cultural labourer in particular shall derive no undue benefit, or sense of personal independence, by reason of the Parish Councils Act or any similarly ob- noxious measure. But for so many blessings to the " Classes " there must of course be some quid pro quo for the " Masses." The Salisbury-Balfour-Chamberlain "combine" is far too astute not to discern that, if the new Tory regime is to be permanent, it must pay " ransom " to the New Democracy, which has done so much to LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM. 45 make it even temporarily dominant, by the efface- ment of the Liberal Party. Already Lord Salisbury has begun tentatively to discriminate between the "brigandage " of "Socialism," and the "reasonable- ness " of " Social Reform," and has not Baron Orchid de Screwe, that is to be, yet another " unauthorised program " to touch with the wand of legislative authority ? What shape then will the inevitable " ransom " assume, and will it compensate the Independent Labourists for their exertions in bestowing on the •' Classes" a fresh lease of life by "wiping out the Liberal Party," are the questions which it behoves us to consider, as dispassionately as is at all possible, ere yet the parting of the ways is actually reached. First of all, it may be safely assumed that the Neiv Toryism, in return for the preservation and consolidation of the interests of the " Classes," will be prepared to formulate some sort of scheme for the pensioning of the sick and the aged, making the workers themselves find the bulk of the funds, if possible. That is the Brummagem idea, and, in the first Chamberlain Budget, provision will doubtless be made for its realisation. It will be really a great boon to the community, for it will go a long way to wipe out the curse and disgrace of our Poor Law system, even if its initial form should be imperfect and devoid of true humanitarian largeness of view. Again, we shall most probably have an imperative Eight Hours Day. That will not greatly affect the pocket of any important factor of the New Toryism, especially as the product of eight hours' toil has been fairly shown by experience to equal that of nine or even ten hours, while the limitation of the working day will be generally popular with the " Masses," Then there can be little doubt that we shall have legislation to facilitate the acquisition in fee simple ^6 LAliOL'KIbM V. LIBERALISM. of small parcels of land by agricultural labourers and other dwellers in the country. Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour have both repeatedly evinced alarm at the exceeding contraction of the base of the pyramid of English landlordism, and their desire to expand it by creating a host of petty owners or peasant pro- prietors is unquestionably genuine. And it need not be doubted they will succeed in any attempt the}' may make in that direction ; for the House of Landlords will readily fall in with any pro- posal that can so easily be demonstrated lo be a new and powerful guarantee for the permanence of their own rents and hereditary privileges. But as for the " dished " Collectivists, alas, it will do more to defeat their communalising policy than any other conceivable device of the Individualist enemy whose forces it will multiply ten, or it may be, a hundredfold. To my mind, the Leaders of Independent Labourism have about as much fore- sight as little children playing with lucifer matches or edged tools. In the towns, likewise, a similar course will be pursued. Advances will be made to enable work- men to invest in house property, so as to wed the more selfish element among them to the existing system of exploitation by landlord and capitalist. Indeed, whatever " social reforms " are undertaken by the New Toryism will have for their ulterior object the broadening of the base of Individualism. That much may be taken for granted, and just in propor- tion as that aim is attained will our work as Col- lectivists be rendered more and more arduous. With the forces of reaction manifolded under our very eyes, and with the workers but half-enfranchised, what can we hope for in the future? Is social salvation brought nearer to us ? I trow not. Are we not rather standing at the parting of the ways, and does it not behove us all to tread such LABOURISM V. LIBERALISM. ^J treacherous ground with unexampled caution ? To "wipe out the Liberal Party" before its time — before it has fairlv and squarely completed the goodly edifice of Self-Government, National and Local — were indeed " a blunder worse than a crime." On me the hare possibility of a quarter of a century of Tory rule acts like a nightmare. Timeo Danaos et dona fevcntes. VIII. A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. (Published originally before the General Election of 1895.) God said : I am tired of Kings, I suffer them no more ; Up to mine ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor. I will have never a noble, Nor lineage counted great ; Fishers, and choppers, and plowmen Shall constitute a State. And, lo and behold, how these poor mea Shall govern land and sea. And make just laws beneath the sun, As planets faithful be. And ye shall succour men, 'Tis nobleness to serve : Help those that cannot help again. Beware from right to swerve. — Emerson. N the columns of some not uninfluentia! journals, correspondents have, of late, been urging the workers to adopt the heroic policy of convoking a " Labour Parlia- ment," to formulate an authoritative program for the " Masses " — a program that may be duly served, as an ultimatum, on the Parliament of the " Classes," at St. Stephens. The order is a large one ; but it is not without historic precedent, and I had, at one time, hoped that the Trades Congress might develop into a true Labour Legislative Assemblage 48 A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. 49 that should do, for our modern British toilers, what the Concilium Plebis (Council of the Commons) achieved for the unprivileged citizens of Ancient Rome, centuries before the Christian Era. Bu*" /estina lentc — O, how hnte ! — has ever been the motto of the Trades Congress. The way in which the Plebeians of Rome, after centuries of struggle, eventually succeeded in im- posing their will on the Patricians is not without instruction for us, at the present moment. For purposes of analogy, the Plebeians may be taken to represent our " masses " ; the Patricians the " classes." Let us see, then, how, " in the brave days of old," the men of Rome worked out the problem. A Itx (law) (says the incomparable Institutes of Justinian) is what the Populus Romanus (Roman People) established on the proposition of a Senatorial Magistrate, such as a Consul. A plebiscitutn (enactment of the Commons) is what the Phbs (Common People, estabiishas on the proposition of a Plebeian Magistrate, such as a Tribune. The Pltbs differ from the Populus as a species from a yenus, for by the appellation of Populus the whole body of the citizens is denoted, including the patricians and senators, whilst by the appellation of PUbs is denoted the rest of the citizens, excluding the patricians and senators. But, after the Lex Hortensia, pUbisctta began to have equal force with leges. How came t>lebiscita thus to obtain the full force oi leges ? In 496 B.C. the plebs (•' masses ") seceded to Mons Sacer, or in the language of to-day, proclaimed a "general strike." Oh for that ancient spirit which curbed the Senate's will ! Oh for the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill ! In those brave days our fathers stood firmly side by side ; They faced the Marcian fury ; they tamed the Fabian pride : They drove the fiercest Quintius an outcast forth from Rome, They sent the haughtiest Claudius with shivered fascis home. The upshot of the " strike " was the appointment of plebeian "tribunes" with very extensive powers to promote the interest of the *' Masses " and veto adverse legislation by the " Classes." The next step was of even greater importance. B 50 A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. It was taken thirty-three years later, 460 B.C., when the Concilium Plebis (Labour Parliament) received Constitutional recognition. Its decrees or plehiscita were made binding on the plebeians themselves, but without the express sanction of the Senate, they did not bind the popul us. In 448 B.C. took place a second " secession " or general "strike" of the "Masses" against the " Classes." It materially extended the scope of plebiscitary legislation and, ten years later, by the Lex Ptihlica the Senate was required to give its sanction to plehiscita in advance. Then came the final blow to patrician authority. In B.C. 286, a third " secession" took place, and the famous Lex Hortensia was passed, which, in the words of the jurist Gains, declared that ^^ plehiscita should be of force universally, and thus put them on an equality with comitial (parliamentary) enact- ments." It will thus be seen that there is nothing essentially impracticable in the notion of a Labour Parliament. What the Plebeians of Rome achieved more than twenty centuries ago ought not to be too arduous an undertaking for the British " Masses " to-day. It is after all only a question of intelligent common under- standing and efficient execution. To carry out such a notable project money, of course, would be wanted ; but that need not surely be regarded as an insuperable obstacle. In a year, the contribution of one million pennies a-week, from one million contributors, amountstO;f2i6, 656 13s. 4d., a sum equal to a salary of ^200 per annum to each of the suggested 650 members of a Labour Parliament, leaving a balance to the good of ^86,656 13s. 4d. But that balance might readily be raised to ;^i5i,666 13s. 4d. by reducing the delegates to 325 or one half, without in the least impairing the efficiency of this new pro- spective People's House. In numbersas in procedure, A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. 5I the actual House of Commons is little better than a well-dressed mob (670 in number), which ought, in no respect, to be taken as a model for Collectivist imitation. Still though a million halfpennies a-week (^^108,333 6s. 8d. per annum) would be ample wherewith to establish a genuine Labour Parliament or Council of the " Masses," it would be well to stand out for the whole penny as an irreducible minimum, because, after the formulation of a complete Code of Collec- tivist Plehiscita — for which a Session, of say six months, might reasonably be expected to suffice — it would then be time to proceed, with horse, foot, and artillery to St. Stephen's, to summon that ancient stronghold of the " Classes " to surrender, and surrender, too, at discretion. The undertaking, though otherwise formidable enough in all conscience, would, thus essayed, be relatively easy. One-tenth the money and exertion, spent in any given year on abortive " strikes," would more than suffice to turn St. Stephen's inside out. For never was there a time, since Party Government began, so marked, on all sides, by a policy of imbecile "drift," as at the present hour. Neither the Wrangling House nor the Mangling House any longer believes in itself, A mysterious paralysis has seized on the Liberal Party. In despair it avowedly takes its marching orders from a conference of provincial party Caucusmongers ! As for the Conservative Party, it has absolutely no policy. It has merely a task — to defend the inde- fensible on every hand. If it succeed in supplanting the Liberal Administration at the next General Election — a contingency which Liberal atrophy, if not speedily arrested, will reduce to certainty — what we have got to look forward to is six or seven years of utter stagnation, a mere repetition of the intoler- able 1874-1880 period, varied only by sundry make- 52 A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMENT. believe "Social reforms " and a " Bloody Sunday" or two at home, with perhaps a big, CoUectivist- effacing Jingo war abroad. It is not a brilliant prospect, certainly, but it is one that the New Democracy must resolutely set itself to face by the convocation of a Labour Parliament or any other expedient, however novel or untried. One thing, at least, is greatly in our favour. Be we Christian Communists, Social Democrats, Fabians, I.L.P's., or even Anarchists, we are all substantially agreed that the existing Individualist regime has ceased to be longer tolerable, and that it is high time to make the most strenuous efforts to usher in the inevitable era of Collectivism. We have a common aim, and what is now really wanted is a common or united mode of giving it the most effective expression possible. To do that successfully you must have the hearty co-operation oi every element of intellect and character, as well as of numbers, that can possibly be enlisted in the cause. The brainworkers — Middle-Class men if you will — are still by far the most important ele- ment in the CoUectivist movement, and nothing is more certain than that the nation is not to be saved by mere workingmanism. There are already some fifteen alleged specimens of the genus working man — the professional genus — at St. Stephen's, and Heaven help Collectivism if it is to depend for its furtherance on them, or such as them ! Ignorance, servility and despicable low cunning are the distinguishing characteristics of most of them, and even when you do get men, like John Burns and Keir Hardie, of unquestionable ability, integrity, and courage, they seem seldom or never to be able, in the vitiated atmosphere of St. Stephen's, to rise above the cloudland of petty Trade Union, Individualistic palliative, into the pure ethlA of root-and-branch Collectivism. A NATIONAL LABOUR PARLIAMEN ^,3 Our great misfortune is that the Hour of Collectivism has come, but not the Man. At a juncture hke the present, an orator and organizer of the mark of Ferdinand Lassalle, who could say of himself without empty boast," For every line I write I am armed with all the science of our times," could renew the age of miracles. An honest, unsophisticated, Collectivist G.O.M. might bring back the Saturniaugna — the Age of Gold. God give us men ! A time like this demands Great hearts, strong minds, true faith, and wiUing hands; Men whom the lust of office does not kill, Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy, Men who possess opinions and a will, Men who have honour, men who will not lie : For while the rabble, with their thumb-worn creeds, Their large professions and their little deeds, Wrangle in selfish strife, lo, Freedom weeps, Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps. IX. POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. Someone has described the public as "voting cattle." This !s a picturesque and unusually appropriate expression. Repre- sentative legislation produces conditions resembling those of |)atriarchal times. The representatives take the place of the patriarchs, and their wealth consists similarly of herds and flocks. But nowadays these herds are not composed of actual cattle with horns and hoofs, but of cattle, figuratively speaking, who, on election days, are driven up to the ballot-box to deposit their votes. — Max Nordao. HE late Prince Consort, "Albert the Gilt," I can remember, once incurred severe condemnation in many, indeed in most, quarters, by expressing the opinion that *' representative institutions in this country are on their trial." A member of Parliament was then almost universally regarded with reverence, amounting in the vulgar mmd to something very like worship. He might be worthless enough personally, but his office at least was sacred, and clothed him with imputed respectability. How different is it to-day ! I used to be much amused at the reception frequently accorded to M.P.'s, by the old Democratic Club in Chancery Lane, while it yet flourished. They were apt to be treated as blind Samsons, good only to be made " sport " of by the scornful Philistines of unadulterated 54 POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. 55 Democracy. "What's his Httle game?" was the inquiry, expressed or implied, in nearly every case. It seemed to be taken for granted that a Member of Parliament must be a fraud, a humbug, or an impostor of some sort, and, indeed, the more open-minded legislators that came among us seemed largely to share in that opinion themselves. The truth is, the Repyesaitaiivc- System is based on a fiction of the grossest character. The representative is fabled to be a selfless, collective being, through whom his constituents speak and act. Before election he is consumed with zeal for the public interest. He forgets himself in his anxiety for the welfare of the community. But, the moment he is elected, he is a different being. The electors have lost their authority and he has gained it. He wishes to rise in the world, and his constituents are the rungs o' his ladder. He work for the community ? Not much ! He expects the community to work for him, if not in one way then in another. Without any great lack of charity, I think it may be doubted if there is in the House of Commons to-day, out of the whole noble six hundred and seventy, one single soul who can be pronounced altogether disinterested. Here and there you find a good, well-intentioned individual, but the sternest virtue cannot wholly resist the warping influences of such an atmosphere as is habitually breathed at St. Stephen's. In truth, the key-note of the entire Representative System is Ego, and it can never be otherwise. It is so at home and abroad. Where the system is most completely developed, there egoism is most rampant — in Britain, in France, in America, in th(i Colonies. In every case the Representative System has conspicuously failed adequately to voice the wants and aspirations of the democracy. Indeed the two ar'^ in a great measure incompatible. In practice, even Universal Suffrage does not spell Democracy, but 56 POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. plutocracy. There is not a single workman in the American Congress. The Repyescntatht System^ in a word, is the apotheosis of selfishness, and leads almost inevitably to the conclusion of the consistent Anarchist that " the best Governments are the worst." But, as the world is clearly not yet ripe for Anarchy by a long way, it remains to be seen if democracy cannot, with efficacy, assert itself outside the trammels of the Representative System. When Lord Salisbury induces the Peers to veto such important measures as the Home Rule Bill, it is on the express ground that the democracy has never really sanctioned them. In a word, he condemns the House of Com- mons, with its scant and chance majorities, as the mere voice of obligarchy, and appeals away from it to the great democracy out of doors. In a word, he is the champion of the Refevendum and more demo- cratic than the democracy itself. It is a strange position, certainly, for the leader of the Conservative Party to occupy, but his lordship is not the first builder that has " builded more wisely than he knew." But why, oh, why, when the Parish Councils Bill was before him, did he let slip so splendid an oppor- tunity of ridding us, once and for all, in our basal institution of the Commune, of "the never-failing audacity of Elected Persons?" In a rural parish, there can be no pretence that it is really necessary to have elected " bosses " to look after the interests of the parishioners. These, in their proper persons, are far more likely to decide wisely than the interested politicians into whose hands they are foredoomed to fall. The Act indeed makes qualified provision for Parish Meetings and, in so far, the thin end of the wedge oi Direct L^f^'ij/fl^WM has consequently been inserted into the Representative System. But there was nothing except inveterate custom, to prevent every meeting of the POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. 57 Parish Council being made a Parish Meeting, where every adult should be his or her own delegate. Had that been done — and it can of course yet be done — the same principle would infallibly in time have invaded every administrative area, from the Parish to the Nation. This wonderful process of transformation has been going on of late years, under our very eyes, in Switzerland (as will be seen in next chapter) and before long it will be completed. As usual, of course, our wise rulers and instructors have given no heed to so valuable a lesson in what so intimately affects the destinies of all " nations rightly struggling to be free." They do not comprehend the possibility of dispensing with "Elected Persons" and their insolent pretentions. But the thing can be done, and when it is done, we shall then, for the first time in the history of mankind, realise what democracy truly signifies. It signifies that, in the new society thus evolved, every man will politically be his own legislator; each will act on his own initiative and control economically the full product of his own toil. For in the fall of the Repveseniative System is necessarily involved the fall of Plutocracy and the extinction of pauperism, nay poverty. Already in Switzerland, small in area, naturally poor, and with a dense population, this has been, in a great measure, the result, and it will eventually be so wherever Direct Legislation is had recourse to. Before Direct Legisla- tion in Open Assembly or by Ballot monopoly-rent will speedily disappear, because it is not in the nature of things that one man's will being rendered as legisla- tively potent as any other's, there should be any toll paid by one man to another " for leave to toil " at the resources so abundantly supplied by our common mother Earth. Whatever rent may arise from differ- ences in the quality of natural resources will be made a 58 POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. community fund, to be substituted for taxes, or to be divided equally among all the producers, as circumstances may determine. Communities once free from the trammels and superstitions of the Representative System State bound- aries will speedily be wiped out, because very few questions will affect wide areas. With the decom- position of the State, society will resolve itself into its natural units — its abiding constituent elements — and, in place of tlie State, we shall have a Uni- versal Republic or World of Communes, and a milen- nium of peace and goodwill to all mankind. In the United States the advocates of the Referendum — an active, growing and eminently en- lightened body — have thus succintly catalogued its virtues. They confidently expect it to deliver the sorely tried Republic from the clutches alike of the professional politician and the plundering plutocrat. What the Referendum Will Do. It will simplify laws. It will purify the ballot. It will control monopoly. It will supplant violence. It will prevent revolution. It will make people think. It will accelerate progress. It will banish sectionalism. It will sever party bondage. It Avill simplify government. It will reduce taxation to necessity. It will wipe out plutocratic dictation. It will prevent the bribery of our law makers. It will establish Home Rule in every sphere. It will restore to the people their natuml rights. It will give us a Government of the people, by POLITICS WITHOUT POLITICIANS. 59 the people, for the people, whose corner-stone is equal and exact justice, political and economic, to all. N-B. — A sign of the growing distrust of Legislatures is, that in fifteen different States of tfie American Union, Bills will be introduced this year for the adoption of direct legislation by the people, on the plan of the Swiss Ininative and Referendum. The "practical politicians" are to a man the determined enemies of all such movements to strip them of power. X. THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS : THE INITIATIVE AND REFERENDUM. It is a delusion to suppose that because a Government is representative it must therefore he free. — John Randolph. The practice of modern Parliaments, with reporters sitting among them, and twenty-seven (forty) millions, mostly fools listening to them, fills me with amazement. — Carlvle. I do not believe, with the Rochefoucaulds and Montaignes, that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favour of general honesty. But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher order and for those who, rising above the multi- tude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. — Thomas Jefferson. N a speech, a little while ago, Lord Salis- bury reminded those who threatened the House of Lords with extinction, of the manner in which the astute astrologer, in Sir Walter Scott's " Quentin Durward," averted his doom at the hands of the crafty Louis XL The astrologer could not be precise as to the date of his own death, but he did know that the King's would follow in three days. 60 THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 6l The simile was excellent. Abolish the House of Lords, and what instructed citizen would ever dream of protracting the existence of the House of Commons beyond, say, a three years' period of grace ? In truth, the Representative System of Government has been found to be nothing better than a mask con- cealing from the befooled multitude all the ugliest features of human nature — personal ambition, party spirit, vanity, hypocrisy, avarice, lust of power and general godlessness. For years I beheld, from the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, our sorry " Elected Persons " in full palaver, and every year deepened my abhorrence of the whole abominable system of which they were at once the victimisers and the victims. It is hardly possible to conceive a worse moral school than the House of Commons. Like the Lords, it can only be cured by being wiped clean off the slate on which the list of our national institutions is inscribed. What to substitute ? The Initiative and Referendum ; and already is that " two-handed engine at the door, which, smiting once, shall smite no more." In the Parish Councils Act, as 1 have shown in " The Village for the Villagers," these vital principles of Democratic Government have received an application as bold as it was unlocked for, and I firmly believe that, in time, this modern Saturnus Referendus will devour all his children — Queen, Lords and Commons included. In the United States of Great Britain and Ireland all important projects of law, whether of State or Federal origin, will then have to be periodically (say, once or twice a year) submitted — Yes or No ? — to the Open Vote, or Ballot, of the Parish Electorates, enactment or non-enactment depending on the issues. This, to be sure, is a very sanguine saying or prophecy, especially at a time when not one" Free- born Briton " in a hundred thousand has anything 62 THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. but the haziest notions regarding the origin, history, or purpose of the Initiative and Reftrendiim — of Demo- cratic as distinct from Representative Government. But though ignorance is mighty, truth is invincible, and I am satisfisd that when once the principles of Democratic Government shall have been fairly set forth they will "go" like wildfire. So convinced am I of this that, if I had any reasonable assurance of ten years more of journalistic life in me, I should gladly devote them all to the overthrow of the Representative regime and the ushering in of the New Democratic Order. But recently I went on a short lecturing tour in the larger towns of Scotland and the North of England, and no subject to which I made allusion awakened half the intelligent interest and inquiry, aroused by what little I had to say regarding the Initiative and Referendum. Let us now make a brief excursion to the Father- land of the Referendum — Switzerland. It is a land of romance, and we are wont to regard it as the historic stronghold of European Freedom. But this is only very partially true. There never, for example, was any such personage as our childhood's hero, William Tell. The Dryasdusts (worse luck to them !) have not left so much as a vestige of him. Never- theless, though Switzerland, as a whole, was the home of despotism rather than of Freedom, it is still true that there, from time immemorial, was to be found hidden away the true democratic leaven which existed nowhere else. For a thousand years, in the ancient secluded Cantons (Commonwealths) of Glarus, Uri, Unterwald and Appenzell, the two great tests of true Democracy had been abundantly vindicated, viz. : — (i). That the entire Citizens should vote the Law. (2). That Land is not property, and can only be justly held for use. THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 6j But the traditions of Switzerland generally were very different. The oligarchic cities and feudal bishoprics of the old Swiss League, which lasted for six centuries, were hotbeds of oppression, and it was not really till 1848 — the Annus Mimhilis of European revolution — that the modern Swiss Republic was born. The Federal, {i.e., National) Referendum dates only from 1874, and the Federal Initiative from 189 1. This is how the present movement in favour of " politics without politicians " began : For a little over a year previous to the Napoleonic Coup d' etat of December 2nd, 1851, there appeared in Paris a weekly called the Democratie Pacijiqtie. It was the mouthpiece of such thinkers as Martin Rittinghausen, Emile Girardin, Louis Blanc, and Victor Considerant. It advocated gouvernement direct du peuple, was received with considerable favour, and as many as thirty French journals espoused the cause. But in a single night, black with villainy, Napoleon the Little cut short its career and " saved society." The Referendists then made Switzerland their headquarters, and thsre, old practice and new theory were first successfully wedded in the Canton of Zurich. In i86g, Karl Biirkli, and others less known to fame, carried the Initiative. It was speedily fol- lowed by its correlative, the Referendum, in the obliga- tory iovm, with the result, in the words of Biirkli, that — The Plutocratic Government and Grand Council (Legisla- ture) of Zurich, which had connived with the private banks and railways, were pulled down in one great voting swoop. The people had grown tired of being beheaded by the office-holders after every election. This gave the start to the two great principles of Democratic Government, viz : — (i) That every Citizen shall have the right to submit projects of law to his fellow-citizens (The Initiative.) 64 THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. (2) That the majority of citizens shall actually accept or reject projected laws (Tht Referendum.) How stands the matter to-day ? In Switzerland there are 22 Cantons (States) and 2,706 Communes (parishes or townships). Of the latter the vast majority are like unto our own new Parish Meetings, only much more so. Of the Cantons seventeen already respond to the Initiative and all but one (Freiburg) to the Referendum, in some form or other. The Referendum is either (i) Obligatory, or (2) Optional. It is obligatory — and all the strong forces are making for obligation — where every law and every expenditure beyond a fixed maximum must be put to the vote ot the Citzenship. It is optional where the Legislature, having passed an enactment, is petitioned by a fixed proportion of the Citizens — from one-sixth to one-fourth usually — to put it to the vote of the Citizens. How near the Swiss have already come to the total abolition of Representative Government the follow- ing table will show : — No. of Mode of Canton. Inhabitants Passing Dec. 1888. Laws. Uri 17.249 Open Assembly. Unterwald Obwald 15,041 „ Niwald 12,538 ,, Appenzell Outer 54.109 Inner 12,888 „ Glarus 33.825 Zurich 337.183 Obligatory RefeienduCv Berne 536,679 ,, „ Schwyz 50.307 ,, J, Soleure 85,621 ,, Bale (Country) 61,941 ,, « Grisons 94,810 ,, „ Aargau 193.580 „ ^ Thurgau 104,678 ,, THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. 65 No of Mode of Canton. Inhabitants Passing Dec 1888. Laws. Lucerne ••135,360 Optional Referendum. Geneva 105,509 ,, „ Zug 23,029 ,, Bale (City) ... 73,740 Schauffhausen 37,783 St Gall . 228,160 Vaud 247,655 ,, Ticino 120,751 Neuchatel 108,153 ,, ,, Valais 101,985 Financial Referendum. Freiburg ii9>i55 Representative Legislature. 2.917.749 As yet the Federal Referendum has only assumed the Optional form. It must be demanded by 30,000 citizens or eight Cantons, within ninety days after the publication of any law, or decree of the Execu- tive. Between 1874 and i8gi, 149 Federal laws and decrees were passed, and out of these 27 were challenged by the requisite 30,000 citizens — result, accepted 12, rejected 15. The Federal Constitution may be amended at any time by Referendum on the demand of 50,000 citizens. A like number is re- quired for the Federal Initiative. In Switzerland four languages are spoken — French, German, Italian and Romansch ; while in religion the people are sharply divided into Romanists, Protestants, and Rationalists. Yet is there no strain on the Constitution, because all feel that to antago- nise a Government, whose watchword is " Every Man his ov/n Legislator," would be absurd. How far we sluggish, precedent-ridden islanders are off this lofty, but by no means unattainable, ideal of Democratic Government one can only guess. But sure I am that all thinking men and women among us are heart-sick of the mockery of Representative Govern- ment, and will rejoice, whenever occasion offers, to F 66 THE ABOLITION OH THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. throw Queen, Lords, Commons, and all vain Party Politicians to the young lions of Democracy — the Initiative and Referenduvi — by them to be devoured, and their names for ever blotted out from the Democratic Book of Life. XI. WHAT IS ANARCHY ? And I beheld the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power. ECCLESIASTES. Learning without tkought is labour lost : thought without learning is perilous indeed. — Confucius. HAT is Anarchy ? " Society " is puzzled, bewildered, dumbfounded, does not know what to think, can only senselessly ban and rave. Yet Anarchy is, at least, as old as the Christian religion ; nay, properly under- stood, is the Christian religion in its primitive purity. But, needless to say, it is not properly understood by the desperate men who seek to propagate its principles by bomb and dagger. Comtism, it has been said, is Roman Catholicism with God left out. In likewise, the Anarchy of a Vailliant or a Santo is Christianity, with its distinctive element, love, left out, ant] hate put in its place. Just as the Anarchy taught and practised by Christ and His apostles is the best of all systems ever propounded, or likely to be propounded in this world, so the Materialis' Anarchy of the hour is the worst. Corruptio optimi pessima. The one is God's Anarchy, the other the devil's Anarchy. And what is most striking;, in the whole deplorable 67 68 WHAT IS ANARCHY ? business, is that the world of Mammon and the "Classes" cannot utter a single word of efiective moral rebuke to the bomb-and-dagger propagandists. Society can only say to them : " We have a majority on our side and are well provided with policemen, judges, jailers and hangmen, and hanged and guillotined ye shall be." In truth Society trusts to precisely the same weapons of the flesh as the Anarchist. Nay, the one lesson that the State inculcates above all others is that there is no remedy except force. " Thou shalt not kill ! " say statesman and priest to the Ravachols and the Henrys ; but what do the statesman and the priest themselves in the way of observing this aboriginal, universally-binding Commandment ? The one organises huge armies for purposes of wholesale murder and, when the hideous work is satisfactorily achieved, the other comes in and impiously exults, in the name of the Merciful and Compassionate One, over massacred multitudes led by them to the shambles. We punish (said old Seneca), murders and massacres com- mitted among private persons. What do we respecting wars and the glorious crime of murdering whole nations ? Here avarice and cruelty know no bounds. Barbarities are authorized by decrees of the Senate, and the votes of the People ; and enormities forbidden to private persons are ordered and sanc- tioned by legislators. Things, which, if men had done in their private capacity, they would have paid for with their lives, the very same things we extol to the skies, when they do them with their regimentals on their backs. "Companion" Vaillant got hxsmotd'oYdve, according to his diary, from Herbert Spencer: while Santo seems to have drawn his inspiration from the far more direct and intelligible Bakounine. Here is a choice extract from that grim Russian nobleman's " Revo- tionary Catechism," which will be something for the " Classes " to ponder in connection with their Gospel of Force : — WHAT IS ANARCHY? 69 The Revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no feelings, no property. He ought to be entirely absorbed in one single interest, one single thought, one single purpose, one single passion — the Revolution. He has only one aim, one sc\cnce— Destruction . For that, and for nothing else, he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry and sometimes medicine. He despises and detests existing moruhty, Between him and Society there is war— war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be ready to die, to endure torture, and with his own hands to kill all who place obstacles in the way of the Revolution. So much the worse for him if he has, in this world, any ties of relationship, of friend- ship, of love. Such then, in all their nakedness, are the methods by which the Revolution is to be accomplished. Let us now see what the Revolution itself is to be like, when it comes. The gist of the Anarchist case was thus set forth, in a remarkable Confession of Faith, read, by a spokesman, at the trial of forty-seven Anarchist insurgents, at Lyons, in 1883. We wish liberty — that is to say, we demand for every human being the right and the means of doing that which pleases him, to satisfy integrally all his wants, without any other limits than natural impossibilities and the wants of neighbours equally respectable. We wish liberty, and we believe its existence incompatible with the existence of any power whatsoever, whatever its origin and form— whether it be elected or imposed. Monarchical or Republican ; whether inspired by Divine right or by popular right, by anointment or by universal suffrage. The best Governments are the worst. The evil, in other terms, ia the eyes of the Anarchists, does not reside in one form of Government more than another ; it is in the idea of Goverment itself, in the pi inciple of authority. The substitution in a word, in human relatioBS, of Free C»n- tract, perpetualy revisable and dissoluble is our ideal. The Anarchists propose to teach the people how to get along without Government. They will learn, likewise, how to get along without property, holders. No liberty without equality. This, to be sure, is not the Anarchy of the Personal Liberty and Property Defence League. It is the genuine article, differing only from the Anarchy of Jesus of JO WHAT IS ANARCHY? Nazareth in the fact tiiat it eliminates the all-trans- forming miracle-working factor of love from the problem of Human Emancipation. Christ postulated not merely a Causa Causaiis, but a God of Love, and from that source His whole ethical system flows like a river of crystal. He repudiated jovu absolutely, and made lovi' " the fulfilling of the law." And repudiating force He necessarily repudiated the State, which is its express embodiment. The Christian Anarchist, therefore, is alone in a position to talk to the Materialist Anarchist in the gate. To the ethic of ftvct he opposes the ethic of lovt and, what is more, he can demonstrate, from the pages of universal history, that without Fvatevnity, Liberty and Equality are un- attainable ideals. How far Proudhon, the greatest name in connection with " Modern Anarchy,' is responsible for the elimination of the Christian prin- ciple of Fraternity from the inseparable Trinity — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity — it is not easy to say, for, unlike so many of his followers, he yielded to no man in appreciation of the Master and His work : — All at once (says he), a man appeared calling Himself Tht Word of God. It is not known to this day who He was, whence tie came, or what sui^j^ested to Him His ideas. He went about, proclaiming everywhere that the end of existing society was at liand ; that the world was about to experience anew birth ; that the priests were viper", the lawyers ignoramuses, and the philo- sophers hypocrites and liars ; that masters and slaves were equals ; that usury and everything akin to it was robbery ; that proprietors and idlers would one day burn, while the poor and pure in heart would find a iiaven of peace. Society was saved by the; negation of its own principles, by a revolution in its religion, and by violation of its most sacred rights. In this revolution the idea of justice spread to an extent that had not before been dreamed of, never to return to its original limits. Heretofore justice had existed only for tha masters ; it then commenced to exist for the slaves. And The Word of God, in spite of the " Classes," their priests, their philosophers, and their lawyers, is WHAT lb ANARCHY? yX not even yet wholly inaudible. Is it not heard in the mouth of a Count Tolstoy, a Dr. Clifford, a Bruce Wallace, a Kenworthy, not to mention scores of other earnest witnesses to the truth ? The future is with that " Jesus of Nazareth, who was a Prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the People," and such as strive, with heart and soul, to speak and act, however insufficiently, in the spirit and purpose of His infinite love. It remains to glance, for a moment, at the attitude of such nondescript Anarchists as Lords Bramwell and Wemyss, Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe and the Liberty and Property Defence Leaguers. To repudiate the State while fondly cling- ing to its only begotten offspring — private property — as " Individuahst Anarchists" would fain do, is worse than illogical. It is, it seems to me, dishonest, and peradventure, it will be found impossible ; and how, in particular, a man of Mr. Donisthorpe's con- spicuous intellectual vigour and high moral courage should elect to wriggle in such a cleft stick I cannot imagme. But such is Materialist Anarchy which seeks in vain for itself an ethical basis in " Natural- ism," where the Philosophic Doubter, now First Lord of the Treasury in the faithful Commons, cor- rectly surmises that none is to be found. With Spiritual Anarchy — the Communist Anarchy of Christ — it is altogether different. Jesus of Nazareth, from the first, set His face like flint against the institution of private property, alias " Mammon," and against the physical force by which alone the State or Kingdom of Mammon can be upheld. Abolish private property, and with it must go, almost as a matter of course, kings and queens, lords spiritual and lords temporal, ministers and M.P.'s, soldiers and marines, judges and policemen, gaolers and hangmen — in a word, the whole paraphernalia of the pagan State. In private property they live, 72 WHAT IS ANARCHY move, and have their being. In the forum of the Christian Conscience the entire bundle of egotisms labelled " patriotism " is completely ruled out. And this mighty social transformation — this supreme revolution in human nature itself — Mr. Donisthorpe would have us believe (see IVestmittster Gazette, Aug. 3rd, '94), Christ sought to achieve by other than peaceful means, because, though He explicit!}' told Pilate, *' If My Kingdom were of this world, tlien would My servants fight," He also with profound insight said, in another connexion, " Vent in mundum non latnrus pacem sed gladiiim.'" Unhappily, It is always so. The truth that makes us free is ever born of storm and tears, as our earth rose out of chaos, and as man himself comes wailing into the world. "The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." How should it ? Was not Galileo visited with a dungeon for saying the world moved ? But it is ever the " darkness " that is the " sword." Mr. Donisthorpe is on far firmer, and, indeed, on indisputable ground when, in extenuation of the odious crime of Caserio Santo, he reminds us " that Caserio was not the one to hit first." In foully slay- ing the good Carnot, Santo merely showed how well he had learned the first lesson of the State's De Fide Propaganda — viz., that there is no remedy except force. If, for example, in the military livery of the British State, Santo had gallantly gone forth to war and superintended the indiscriminate slaughter of some thousands of miserably fleeced and entirely innocuous Egyptian fellaheen, in the interest of the Honourable Mr. Shylock and his twenty five per cent " bonds," he would have been a hero of the first water and his reward a peerage and ^25,000 down. His Grace of Canterbury would have chimed in with a lusty " Te Deum Laudamus," and Church as well as State would have pronounced him blessed. As it was, the WHAT IS ANARCHY ? 73 misguided youth murdered one man, not in the interest of Dives but of Pauper (as he imagined), and he is all but universally execrated, and sent to the guillotine as an unspeakable monster of iniquity 1 'Taint your eppylettes and feathers Make the thing a grain more right ; 'Taint a-follerin' your bell-wethers Will excuse you in His sight. Ef you take a sword and drnr it, And go stick a feller thru, Guv'ment aint to answer for it, God 'II send the bill to you. To-day Europe is an armed camp ; to-morrow, as likely as not, it will be one vast cockpit, compared with which even militant Materialist Anarchy were a thing of clemency and mercy. Woe unto you hypocrites ! Must the vendetta go on ? Yes, until the Kingdom of God «, and the Pagan State is no more for ever. XII. ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. Force is no remedy. — John Bright. Ye have heard that it hath been said, " An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ! " But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil ; but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. — Matt. v. 38-41. HE " Mayfair Bomb Outrage, " (Nov. '94). whether intended to " remove " Mr, Justice Hawkins or not, can hardly fail to add to the odium that already attaches to Anarchy and Anarchists. But there are Anarchists and Anarchists, and it may therefore be permissible to seize the opportunity to differ- entiate between them. The true Anarchist looks on the deeds of the dynamiter with even more intense feelings of abhor- rence than those by which the ordinary citizen is inspired. He repudiates the State because the State rests on force, which all history loudly pro- claims to be no remedy. " He who taketh the sword shall perish by the sword," The dynamiter likewise repudiates the State, but vainly appeals to the State's sole weapon — forct. 74 ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. 75 He can only be compared to Beelzebub casting out Beelzebub. The cement of any conceivable Anar- chistic society is love — unconstrained brotherly kind- ness — and for love the dynamiter would substitute hate. There is in truth nothing in common between the profound Communistic Anarchy of which Christ was the Founder and the crazy creed of the dyna- miter, except that the State is repuditated by both. Even as regards the economic question they are not at one. Bombs and Communism are an inconceiv- able mixture. Indeed, private property and force are mseparable, and in their death they will not be divided. When love reigns private property will be no more. Common possission will as surely be the off- spring of love as private property is now the child of force. At best, Continental Anarchy is to be regarded as a cry of despair. Tlie men of the bomb are not all bad, though, of course, some thorough -paced scoundrels have attached themselves to their ranks. Some of them, indeed, are, I am assured, heroes in their way, self-sacrificing to a fault, irreproach- able in their lives, and chargeable with nothing worse than ignorance and the fanaticism that springs from ignorance. Even the illiterate " Death to the Judges ! Death to the Jurors ! Death to the Policemen ! " mani- festo affords some food for reflection. It arraigns the State in the persons of its executive officers, and challenges its right to sit in judgment on the in- dividual. " God ha'e mercy ! Hang a Bailie ! " to say nothing of a bewigged and ermined Judge. Now I would hang neither Bailie, Judge nor Policeman, but they are nevertheless an odious crew, against whom one's gorge involuntaril}' rises. I witnessed Robert's exploits on " Bloody Sunday," and shall never forget them. Nor is it possible to think of 76 ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. the brutal sentences for trifling offences against property, inflicted from time to time by such a callous judicial ignoramus as Justice Day, without feelings of the bitterest indignation and resentment. Some time ago, it will be remembered, Day sentenced three hungry lads, under eighteen years of age, previously unconvicted, to lengthened terms of imprisonment with hard labour for purloining a piece of bacon! Now "oppression," we know, " maketh a wise man mad," and, had I been one of those victims, I question very much if the rank- ling sense of injustice might not have impelled me to avenge myself on so notoriously incompetent a State functionary, who even added insult to injury by prefacinglusvindictive judgments with an edifying homily on the advantages of " short sentences ! " " Out of evil evil flourishes ; out of tyranny tyranny buds." But aynor omnia vmcit. Christ's Anarchy, which has love for its basis, will yet triumph, in spite of all appearances to the contrary. The Anarchy of Love will exorcise the Anarchy of hate when nothing else can. It will extirpate self from the heart of man, and with it the fell institution of private property will pass into the limbo of an almost forgotten barbarism. Mammon's temples will be deserted, and the God or rather Demon of Competition be without a single votary. War will be no more, and patriotism will be a meaningless substantive — a far oft" reminiscence of the world's crude childhood. There will be no State, no Justice Day, no Justice Hawkins, no " Tommy Atkins" in red, no " Bobby " in blue, no goaler, no hangman. For all these evil things and persons derive their very existence from private property — the one human institution which Christ unsparingly assailed under the designation "Mammon" — and must needs wither and die with it. Substitute common t>ossession for ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. 77 pvivate property and the " Kingdom of God," which the sublime Communist Anarchist of Nazareth an- nounced eighteen centuries ago, will be no longer to seek on earth. But what of the "blessed word," Democracy? it may be asked. Must that also be wiped off the slate of humanity ? Yea, verily; in the Kingdom of God on Earth, Monarchy, Oligarchy and Democracy will be alike unknown. For what is Democracy but an expansion of the old-time tyranny of Monarch and Oligarch ? It is, at best, the exaltation of numbers, the deification of the multiplication table, a con- founding of Jesus and Judas — an intellectual and moral absurdity. When, among a hundred men one rules 99, that is Monarchy or One-Man Government; when ten men rule 90, that is Oligarchy or Few- Men Government ; and when fifty-one men rule 49, that is Democracy or Majority — of — Men Govern- ment. But Justice and Right are as independent alike of the fifty-one, the ten, or the one, as are the truths of mathematics or physics. Truth knows neither majority nor minority. And after the " passing of " Democracy how shall it be then ? Thus, in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah : After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them ; and I will be their God and they shall be My people. In the " Kingdom of God " (the Co-operative Commonwealth) every man and every woman will be a law unto himself and herself, Right will be Might, and even the Initiative and Referendum will be no more needed. The " New Man " and the " New Woman " will have come, clothed in seamless robes of righteous- ness, fashioned on the perfect Anarchistic and 78 ANARCHY AND OUTRAGE. Communistic pattern set by the Master- Initiator 1 limself, Whose voice still soundeth on, From the centuries that are gone To the centuries that shall be. And that Voice said: My service is perfect Freedovi. What, then, we have got to do, in season and out of season, is to convince the people that Private Property is in no sense an institution of God, but a device of the devil, whose reign on earth will come to an end only when it is wholly discarded and effaced. Says Rev. James Macdonald, and says most truly : — God did not give the earth, its vegetables, its fruits, its mineral wealth, its cattle, the riches of river, sea, and ocean into the hands of the few to the degradation of the many ; and yet almost ninety per cent, of all the so-called sins and crimes of society may be traced directly or indirectly to private property. Sins against God forsooth I They are nothing of the kind, but sins against present social arrangements. Theft, fraud, embezzle- ment, forgery, gambling, poaching, and a multitude of other crimes are the terrible progeny of private property. It is a remarkable fact that the word " Catholic " (Kata holos) out of which so much ecclesiastical capital is made was unknown to Christ and His Apostles. In the earliest centuries of the Christian era, we constantly read of " the Cliurches '' (Anarchist Groups), never of the Church. The word *' Common " (Koinos) is the key to all the Master's teachings, social and spiritual. He repudiated everything known to jurists as " Acquired Rights," and recog- nised nothing but the ** Natural Rights of Man.'' "From each according to his ability to each according to his needs " was Christ's formula long before it was that of St. Simon. If you doubt this, consider the parable of the " Universal Penny." In Christian Anarchy lies the hope and salvation of the world. It is true and, because it is true, it will prevail. Magna est Veritas et prevalebit. Papt III.— the family. ♦'LOCK UP THE MEN: GIVE THE WOMEN A LATCH-KEY." THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN: THE LEGITIMATION LEAGUE'S PROGRAM "COMMUNISM AND THE FAMILY." THE "NEW WOMAN." (791) Men are what their mothers made them When each comas forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. — Emekson Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain come all the folds of the man's brain, duly obedient ; Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded ; Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all s\ mpathy ; First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself. — Walt. Whitman. however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and infirm. More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won Than women's are. Shakespeare : — Twelfth Night. «o PART IIL—THE FAMILY. XIII. «*LOCK UP THE MEN: GIVE THE WOMEN A LATCH-KEY ! " To cleanse society of the unfit we mast give to woman the power of selection in marriage, and the means by which this most desirable and important end can be attained will be brought about by giving her such training and education as shall render her economically independent. — Alfred Russel Wallace. From fairest creatures we desire increase. — Shakespearb. For of the Soul the Body form doth take : For Soul is form, and doth the Body make. ARRIAGE presents a problem of supreme gravity and delicacy, and so great is the danger of being misunderstood that one hesitates to speak with necessary candour on the subject ; for, as a rule, it is men, accustomed themselves to freedom — licence it may be — who say " Level up ! " ; while it is women, habituated to the severest restraints, who cry " Level down ; bind men with our fetters ! " Consequently, let one write never so rationally on the question, he is almost certain to be set . down as a hypocrite on the one hand, or a libertine on the other. 8i G 82 " LOCK UP THE MEN : " But the epoch of Collectivism is upon us and the problem of sex-relationship must be courageously faced, for it is certain as anything in the future that, with the abolition of Private Property, the property element in marriage, which is the dominating one at present, will also pass away. Existing marriage is a " survival " of the patriarchal age, and the patriarchal age and that of private property in excehis were coeval. The patriarch's " wife " was little better than a chattel, reckoned in the same category with his " ox " and his " ass," which it was forbidden to '• covet." She was priTate propevtv and the curse of property and the ferocious old Patria Potestas are upon her to this day. To remove this curse we must first demonstrate that patriarchal '^marriage," or v/hat remains of it, is an unquestionable "failure." And to do this we must assault the very citadel of European civilisation — tlie Family. It is a hard and ungrateful task, for the endearing associations that cluster around the words " husband,'' " wife " ; " son," " daughter" ; " brother,'' " sister," may well seem to atone for almost any defects in the institution, however grievous, that it is possible to point out. But " by their fruits ye shall know them," and these are bitter enough in all conscience. The possible bases or units of any Society are three in number — (i) the individual ; (2) the family ; (3) the community. The individual or autocrat pure and simple, who was the only freeman in a community of slaves, can hardly be said to exist anywhere in the present day ; but he was to be found almost in perfection in some of the ancient despotisms of the East, and in these, it is needless to say, the family had nothing but the most rudimentary exist- ence. Slavery excludes the very idea of marriage and the familN- and so, in a great measure, does our own mod'^rn factory system of production. " GIVE THE WOMEN A LATCH-KEY ! '' 83 In Greece and Rome, in their palmiest days, to which even now we look for "light and leading," the number of families was astonishingly few. In Athens, b.c. 309, there were 515,000 inhabitants and of these only g,ooo were citizens. The others had no political rights, and the slaves alone who were all illegitimates, numbered 400,000. In Corinth it was worse. There the bond were to the free as 640,000 to 40,000. Marriage and the family are, therefore, institutions of the " Classes," whose origin and consequences the " Masses " have good reason to examine with the greatest care and circumspection. As inventions of aristocracy, they had their roots in undiluted selfish- ness no less than autocracy, on which, nevertheless, they were an undoubted improvement, inasmuch as, within the narrow limits of the family, scope was given lor the development of true rt/^ms^?c feeling and action. But just as an autocrat preyed on the entire com- munity, so in marriage does family remorselessly prey on family. In a word the family, as it now exists, is, at best, an extended selfishness, at war with all the highest needs and aspirations of humanity. I have met the late Jay Gould, and can corroborate the general testimony that he was, in every respect, a most exemplary " family man " and Sabbath Day Christian. Yet when Monday arrived, he recked not a cent how many other families he brought to utter ruin in the nefarious pursuit of that property which it was indeed the original object of marriage to transmit intact to one's offspring. Within family limits Gould was as true an altruist as any man in America ; outside them he was little better than a human alligator. I wonder if Jay's pastor, the eminent Presbyterian divine. Dr. Pearson of New York, ever impressed on 84 " LOCK UP THE MEN : " him the Master's conception of the Family, as set forth in Matt, xii., 47-50 : — Then one said unto Him, Behold Thy mother and Thy brethren stand without desiring to speak with Thee. But He answered and said unto him that told Him, Who is My mother ? and who are My brethren ? And He stretched forth His hand towards His disciples, and^ said. Behold My mother and My brethren ! For whosoever shall do the will of My Father who is in Heaven, th2 same is My brother and sist-r and mother. The key to the history of mediaeval and modern Europe is the unbridled selfishness of the family. By cunningly uniting the hereditary principle with primogeniture, kings and nobles have succeeded in perpetuating their cruel robbery of the " Masses" from generation to generation, and what is more, with the aid of the priests, they have seemingly con- vinced the robbed, who have no property, that the spoiler's form of property-marriage is the most sacred institution on earth. They do not themselves really believe in the sacredness of anything but property. Their God is Mammon. Whether there be [a God] the rich man says. It matters very little; For I and mine, thank somebody, Are not in want of victual But the many, alas, are in want of " victual," and much besides. The war of family on family, the inevitable outcome of property-marriage, has for example, the dreadful result that injthis London of ours, the fabulously wealthy Metropolis of the World, sheer want has driven something like a hundred thousand of our bloommg maidens to look for their living on the street. But for property- marriage they might have been reputable matrons- mothers in Israel ; for it is notorious that, in physique and the great moral quality of unselfisshness, they are very frequently the best of their sex. I question if desire alone ever sent one of this sad army of social " GIVE THE WOMEN A LATCH-KEY ! " 85 martyrs to the pavement. When a woman's sole Capital is her labour and there is no market for that, she sells her body for which there is a market. Religion and morality inevitably succumb to an empty stomach. There is no alternative but suicide and even to "unfortunates" life is sweet. They are the victims of "private property" — of Mammon — whose worship was the only sin which the Saviour of man- kind specificall}'and incessantly denounced as closing the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven in the face of the devotee. And what is even worse — inside legal matrimony there is perhaps more moral guilt incurred than out- side it. The woman that marries merely " for a home," without genuine love of soul and body for the man to whom she links herself, differs from her sister on the street, on whose approach she gathers up her virtuous skirts, only in the matter of worldly prudence. Of the two, in the sight of God, she is perhaps the greater sinner. But let us judge not that we be not judged. Of far more importance is it to try to discover a true basis for marriage and Society. The individual has failed us as the unit long ago, and now the family stands condemned. We must, therefore, by the process of exhaustion, seek it where it resided in the dawn of " civilisation " — in the Community. XIV. THE RIGHTS OF NA^^URAL CHILDREN : THE "LEGITIMATION LEAGUE'S" PROGRAM. Bastard: But, mother, I am not Sir Robert'sson; I have disclaimed Sir Robert, and my land. Legitimation, name, and all is gone; Then, good mother, let me know my father. Some proper man, I hope. Lady Faulconbridge : Hast thou denied thyself a Faulcoa- bridge ? Bastard : As faithfully as I deny the devil. Lady Faulconbridge : King Richard Coeur de Lion was thy father ; Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge ! Bastard: He that, perftjrce, robs lions of their hearts May easily win a woman's. Ay, my mother. With all my heart I thank thee for my father. Who lives and dares but say thou didst not well, When I was got, I'll send his soul to hell. Come, lady 1 will show thee to my kin, And they shall say, when Richard me begot. If thou hadst said him nay, it had been sin. Who says it was, he lies; I say 'twas not. Shakespeare, " King John." INCE writing recently on the manifeat "failure " of the institution of " marriage " as it exists to-day in Cliristendom, my attention has been forcibly drawn by several friends, known and unknown, to the efforts 86 THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN'. 87 of the ^^Legitimation League" to find a remedy. I have been kindly furnished with the publications oi the League (Reeves, Fleet-street), and have ex- amined them with the care they unquestionably deserve ; but while appreciating to the full the courage, candour, and ability of the president, Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe ; the hon. secretary, Mr. Oswald Dawson ; the hon. treasurer, Mrs. Gladys Dawson and other prime promoters of the movement, I am sorry to say that they seem to me wholly to misconceive the very nature of the intolerable evils which they so praiseworthily seek to remove. They find that there are about a million and a half of illegitimates in the country, the innocent victims of gross social, legislative and ecclesiastical injustice, and, in the words of Mr. Donisthorpe, it is their desire " to enable honourable men and women to remove a stain from the escutcheon of honourable children, and to raise them to the same level as those born in lawful wedlock." The League, in point of fact, makes no attempt to remove the cause of illegitimacy ; it merely seeks to minimise its evil effects, and make the unavoidable respectable. " I do not," says Mr. Dawson, " pro- pose to abolish the Bastardy Laws. If this League has any concern with them at all, I should say it should be in the direction of seeking to raise the financial responsibilities of putative fathers, and making their obligations hold good in cases where the mother is possessed of means, which is not the case at present." What in truth the League substantially wants to do is to put the illegitimate and the legitimate, as far as is legally possible, on a footing of equality in respect of the cause of illegitimacy and prostitution — private property. The League has most unjustly been accused of advocating " free love " principles, when, as a matter of fact, it is doing its best to patch 88 THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN. up and rehabilitate the miserable existing form of property viavriage. Those who desire to perpetuate that institution could hardly do better than counte- nance the League in every way instead of reviling it. For the anomalies of our marriage laws are almost beyond belief, and the entire community owes the League a deep debt of gratitude for rivetting public attention on them, however ineffectual the palliatives it proposes may appear. Could, for example, anything be more atrociously unjust than the following cases instanced by Mr. Donisthorpe in his inauj^ural presidential address, as having occurred in his own experience : — A gentleman of large property died, leaving it to be equally divided among his children. The eldest unfortunately chanced to have been born a week or two before the wedding ceremony. Both parents were under the misapprehension that the marriage put the eldest-born in the same legal position as the others. Not so said " Law and Order." Had not the barons of England centuries ago, in their wisdom, decreed that " the laws of England shall never under- go any alterations which are opposed to that which is usual and proper ? " And so it came to pass, when probate enquiries fell to be made, that the eldest-born was left absolutely penniless, and branded as a bastard to boot. A hardly less grievous case was this : — A gentleman of thoroughly good repute in his circle had a wife, who unfortunately became hope- lessly insane and the inmate of an asylum. Another woman, who became his housekeeper as long as he lived, bore him a child of whom he was particularly fond. To this child he left his entire estate, some ^40,000. Meantime the lunatic wife died, and the will was unfortunately lost, or at least could not be found. The well-beloved child was in consequence left a pauper. THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN. 89 The following in the words of the President of the League : — " I know a case very intimately, because it happens to be that of a relative of my own. He is a man of no means beyond what he is entitled to under a settlement made by his own father. All his own children are entitled to certain property — to very considerable property. But his children by his deceased wife's sister come in for no share whatever. He himself would be willing to acknowledge these children just as he would the children of his first wife. But he is precluded by law, and he has no control whatever over the settlement." Yes, Mr. Donisthorpe, Bumble was right — *' the Law is an hass," and no mistake. And now for the League's methods of divesting the law of its asinine characteristics. These methods are mainly two in number — {a) Legitimation by Subsequent Mar- riage and (h) Adoption. In Scotland which, in most respects, is about half a centurj' in advance of England, marriage is a purely consensual contract, and whenever it takes place, however "irregularly," children born before the event are from that moment legitimated. It is a humane and just law, which has always worked well, and the League cannot surely be accused of any very serious innovation in agitating for its extension to England. It was the principle laid down in the Code of the first reputed Christian Emperor, Constantine. It was confirmed by the renowned prince of Imperial codifiers, Justinian, and incorporated in the Canon Law by the great Pope Alexander III., about the middle of the Twelfth Century. Yet, as I have said, our *' bold barons " would have none of it, and England is content, apparently, to abide by their decision. The House of Lords invariably declines to do aught to relieve minorities of their disabilities, and it is almost hopeless to expect that they should be induced to regard, except with the greatest disfavour, the first ameliorative proposal of the League. It would tend to unsettle go THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN. property their lordships would discover, and per- chance pave the way for the admission of the dis- reputable "deceased wife's sister " into the bonds of holy matrimony. Even the comparative novelty of legal Adoption might have a better chance than the Legitimatio per subseqiiens Matyimoniiim of ancient Rome and modern Scotland. In the ancient world, Adoptio was a notable institution which did much to break down the exclusiveness of the Patviarchal Family, and, if that eminently leaky hulk is to be kept longer afloat on the social sea, it will stop a hole as well as any con- trivance that can be devised. Let it never be forgotten that, in the palmiest days of the Roman Empire, the greatest Emperors — Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius — came to the purple, not by birth, but by adoption. In our own Celtic clans, too, the illegitimate son was on a footing of equality with the legitimate, and there was no bar to his succeeding to the Chieftain- ship, which he frequently did by reason of superior capacity; for it is a notorious fact that so-called " love-children," if at all well brouglit up, are generally more handsome and fitter in mind and body than the legitimate, as the Swan of Avon somewhat broadly explains. Edmund, Bastard son of Gloster, loguiiur : Why Bastard ? Wherefore base ? When my dimensions are as well compact, My mind as generous, and my shape as true, As honest Madam's issue ? Why brand thev us With base ? with baseness ? bastardy ? base? base ? Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take More composition and fierce quality, Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed, Go to the creatinf^ of a whole tribe lof fops Got 'tween sleep and wake ? King Lear. The muster-roll of the world's illegitimates, cast THE RIGHTS OF NATURAL CHILDREN. gi in heroic mould, is long, and illustrious as it is long. Setting aside the allegation of some of the earliest anti-Christian polemics that the Messiah was the Son of Mary and one Panthera, a Sardinian legionary, it is yet not a little remarkable that Christ Himself expressly repudiated Davidic descent : — How say the scribes that Christ is David's son? For David himself said by the Holy Spirit, The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand till I make thine enemies thy footstool. David therefore himself called him Lord ; and whence is he then his son ? And the common people heard him gladly. — Mark xii., 35, 36, 37. Into the theology or physiology, however, of the mystery of the Incarnation it is not now necessary for me to enter. Suffice it that, in the good time coming, it is permissible to hope that all children will be the offspring of true love-unions. Howbeit, chat can never be till woman is completely emanci- pated economically, and the ennobling duties of maternity are recognised as her chief vocation in life. Out of Collectivism will spring quite naturally the Matriarchal Mavriage and Family of the future, when all will be equally legitimate, when e7'evy woman, in the enjoyment of reasonable health, will be en- abled to taste the tender, God-given joys of mother- hood, when the last vestige of the infernal, old Prt/^m Polestas shall be no more, and the well-intentioned efforts of the Legitimation League be a mere memory of a barbarous past. Seek ye first the Co-operative CommonwealtJi, and all these things — and much besides — shall l)e added unto you. XV. "COMMUNISM AND THE FAMILY." A condition requiring the continuance of marriage, notwith standint; a change in the feeUng of the parties, is absurd, shock- ing, and contrary to humanity. — Jeremy Bentham. Run along, children, God bless you, I've done you enough harm already without taking your money. — Dean Swift (to a couple he had just married). It is a lamentable fact that the troubles which respectable, hardworking women undergo are more trying to the health and detrimental to the looks than any of the harlot's career.- Herbert Spencer. Marriage is such a rabble rout That those who are out would fain get in, And those who are in would fain get out. — Chaucer. N 77^1? Weekly Times and Echo, towards the close ot 1894, Mr. Frederick Rockell (for my sins it must be) appealed to me for " a clear statement " of my view of the position of the " F amily under Communism." Common possession based on universal love, he argued, must ever remain a beautiful dream so long as the egoistic institution of the Family remains : — In "Life" he (Count Tolstoy) tells us that lo\e, which for him is the one law, is not love at all when it finds expression in considerations of wife and children, so long as there are any outside claims on a man's love unfulfilled. " If I refuse,'' he 92 COMMUNISM AND THE FAMILY. 93 (Tolstoy) says, " to give bread to a beggar, because my children may suffer, then I do not love at all in the real sense of the word, but love only myself." Communism and the family being then utterly opposed fundamentally, does Mr. Davidson contemplate the substitution of free love for our present arrangement of in- dividual families based on monogamic principles ? Well, here we have a straight enough question in all conscience, and I wish I could in response make an equally "clear statement." But, though the words "free love," I am well aware, send a cold shudder through the very marrow bones of all that is pious and of good repute in this corrupted "society "of ours, let me ask what other kind of love is now, or ever was possible ? Compidsory love is something inconceivable. It is a contradiction in terms. No man can truly love even one woman unless he is free to love whatever is lovable in any other woman. Love cannot exist under constraint. It defies the gag of priest and politician. "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," and it is love alone that makes it visible on earth. " Perfect love casteth out fear," and when " fear " is eliminated from the relations of man and woman and complete inter-sex frankness is the rule, we shall have recovered Eden, regained Paradise. Love took up the glass of time, and turned it in his glowing hands ; Every moment lightly shaken, rains itself in golden sands. Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might ; Smote the chord of self, which, trembling, passed in music out of sight. But love is one thing, passion another. " God if Love " and love, like its Author, is in its nature infinite and eternal. It is an all-embracing cup that never overflows. Its centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. With passion it is different. It is finite, transient, mundane. It is an appetite in the physical ornon- 94 COMMUNISM AND THE FAMILY. spiritual order which, like hunger, is soon allayed by satiety, but which also, like hunger, if not normally satisfied, tends to derange man's entire organization, material and moral, and to produce the most disas- trous social phenomena. Gorge it or starve it, and evil consequences are inevitable. True marriage, or " free love," whichever you will, takes place, and can take place only when love and passion are so blended as to satisfy the highest spiritual and physical cravings of the human couple. All other unions of the sexes are tainted by con- straint and selfishness, and, however legal and out- wardly respectable, savour of sensuality, prostitution, and even rape. There is far more prostitution inside marriage than outside it. Such is the Anarchic-Communistic view of mar- riage. It posits unbounded trust in the inherent goodness of lumianity, in the unrestrained affection of man and woman, and lays at the door of pro- prietors, priests and politicians the criminality of the myriad loveless marriage-beds, the horrors of the brothel, the shame of seduction with its frequent concomitants, abortion and infanticide. For all these unspeakable evils it claims to be the sole and sovereign remedy. In the Kingdom of God on Earth as in Heaven there will be " neither marrying nor giving in marriage," and that quintessence of selfishness, the Family, in whose name such countless enormities are now habitually committed with im- punity, will be absorbed in the Greater Family of Humanity, in which love shall reign supreme. It is noteworthy that the man in the parable who had " married a wife "was not admitted to the " supper." The most exemplary " family man " I ever met with was the late unlamented Mr. Jay Gould. For the sake of his OAvn family he was prepared at any moment remorselessly to wreck thousands. With part of the family booty, his daughter, Anna Gould, COMMUNISM AND THE FAMILY. 95 reputed to be " worth," ;^3, 000,000 stg., bought, the other day, for husband, a cheap French Count (De Castellane), at the ridiculously low figure of ^20,000 per annum. Anna, however, considerately covenanted materially to increase the purchase-money, should the nobiliary goods, on due matrimonal delivery, be found according to the ante-nuptial sample. Good Anna ! As Christ knew nothing of patriotism, so knew He nothing of the family. " Woman " (to His mother) " what have I to do with thee ? Whosoever shall do the will of my Father who is in Heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." Howbeit, ii may be said, and truly said, that Christ laid down a rule with respect to divorce which far exceeded in stringency that enjoined by Moses. But this, I apprehend. He, did not for the purpose of upholding legal Judaic matrimony, but for that of asserting woman's right to a greater measure of consideration and justice than the then existing law bestowed on her. The Jewish law of divorce was one-sided to a degree. The wife was practically at the mercy of the husband's caprice, and might be turned adrift almost at any moment by a " bill of divorcemeiit " — a stroke of the pen or little more. Under any private property system — and in Christ's day, as in ours, Individualism was rampant — any partial adoption of free love principles can hardly fail to bring in its train intolerable evils, especially in so far as the women and children affected are concerned. In primitive times, whence we derive our conception of property and matrimony, the wife was herself property, a chattel slave, and every successive amelioration of her lot has con- sisted in greater and greater approximation to her husband in the right of property-sharing and hold- ing. But Communism alone can fully emancipate her economically, and, until the Era of Collectivism has been fairly inaugurated, it would be obviously g6 COMMUNISM AN'D THE FAMILY. perilous for her in the extreme to divest herself of any of the meagre safeguards which the existing law of matrimony has conferred on her. Our whole social life is an evolution, and to put the chariot oi fvee love — grand and ennobling as is the ideal — before the horse oi private pyoptvty abolition seems to me a most mistaken policy — I had almost said the height of folly. Indeed, though under Communism, free love, with probably at first the matriarchal faviily revived in some form or other, seems to me inevitable, yet would I much rather see the problem left for posterity to solve. Our children and our children's children will be in a far better position than are we to deal with it, in the light of a greatly increased wisdom and experience. Still it is natural for man to project himself into the future, to labour with hand and brain on works of which he can never hope to see the fruition, after the manner of our old friend Balbus in the Latin Delectus of our boyhood, who was given to " plant- ing trees, the fruit of which he himself should never see." These are days of free enquiry, and we may not put any topic of grave human interest, how- ever obnoxious to Mrs. Grundy on an Index Expurgaiorius. In discussing prematurely such a question as that of so-called " free love," the gratuitous dissipation of energy is after all more to be dreaded than any- thing else. Emerson has well said : Fear not the new generalisation. Does the fact look crass and material, threatening to degrade the theory of spirit ? Resist it not, it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as much. Under liberty freshly acquired soir.e evils are pretty certain always to spring up ; but the remedy never lies in restraint, but in more liberty. For always in thine eyes, O Liberty ! Shines that high light whereby the world is saved. And, though thou slay us, we will trust in thee. XVI. THE "NEAY WOMAN." Where love cannot be, there can be left of wedlock nothing but the empty husk of an outside ceremony, as undelightful and unpleasing to God as any other kind of hypocrisy. — John Milton. The vices of the people are, if I may say so, always hidden in the depths of legislation. There must be search if we would tear up the roots productive of these vices. — Helvetius, I regard the Church as the basic principle of immorality in the w orld and the most prolific source of pauperism, of crime and of injustice to women. — Matilda Joslyn Gage jITH no small reluctance, I feel constrained by the construction put on my previous contribution on this subject by Mr. Rockell, again to return to it. No topic, I am well aware, leant itself more readily to serious misapprehension, but I was scarcely prepared to read as a deduction from words which I had set down with unusual caution, the following sweeping assumption : ' The Family being impossible under Communism, Mr, Davidson being a Communistic Anarchist, boldly declares for promiscuous sexual arrangements." Well, if I either boldly or timidly declared for " promiscuous sexual arrangements," I am astonished to learn it. What I did, and do emphatically 97 « 98 THE " NEW WOMAN.' declare in favour of is what has been called — and not unreasonably — Free Love. And by Free Love is meant such a union of the sexes as shall suffer from no vile, tainted consideration of Property Priestcraft, or Statecraft in wliich, under the cloak of legality, lurks the foulest and most subtile spirit of impurity. But surely that is not to declare that under Com- munism promiscuity of the sexes is to be the rule. Indeed the word itself never once occurred to me as anyway relevant or in issue. When the Co-opera- tive Commonwealth comes, depend on it, it will bring its own solution of the sex problem with it, and it will be as simple, natural, and harmonious as the existing relationship, under the property regime, is warped, unnatural and horrible. Peradventure our grandchildren will look back on our age of mammon -marriages, divorce courts, prostitutions, seductions, infanticides and pederasties with a sense of loathing and moral abhorence of which we can form no adequate conception. For not until woman is fully emancipated economic- ally, and motherhood is recognised as the grand normal occupation of womankind, to be suitably recompensed by the community at large, instead of being, as hitherto, practically left to the caprice of the individual male employer of this peculiar species of " female labour," will it be possible to lay down any true basis of sexual morality. Mr. Stead, with more than his usual candour, has told us that the virtuous woman's chief aversion to the prostitute is that the latter is a " blackleg," who works below the regular Matrimonial Trades- Union Scale of wages, and, brutal, as the observation may be, it is, on the whole, just and true. There are hardly any women in any class of society, high or low, rich or poor, who enter into what is facetiously called "the state of holy matrimony," that do so with any adequate sense THE *' NEW WOMAN." 99 o! the solemn duties of maternity which they are in- curring. Nor are they greatly to be blamed for this. Nature has indeed made them the " predominant partners " in all that relates to the continuation of the human race, but, from time immemorial, " law- and-order " has set nature at defiance, making man ♦' the head of the woman." With what result ? This that woman, in all that affects sex-relationship, is for the most part, a mere bundle of deceits, conventions and hypocrisies, whose future is not to be prognos- ticated from her past or present. But with the advent of the Co-operative Common- wealth we shall know her as she is. She will then no longer need to wear a mask, competition with th6 " blackleg " will be at an end, and her independence of every individual male complete. She and her little ones, along with the aged and otherwise incapacitated, will be the first charge on the product of the entire community. It is at this stage (if any) in the development ot the " New Woman " that, as Mr. Rockell phrases it, "promiscuous sexual arrangements," will begin to tell: " If a man is at liberty to cultivate sexual relationships pro miscuously without any fear of a moral or legal code, no sooner would the sexual fascination of one woman be at an end than another would take its place, and this being again allayed by satiety, a fresh sexual attraction would succeed, and so life might come to be passed — to use a phrase of the modern novel — ia seeking fresh sensations." •' If a man is at liberty ! " But everything depends on that if. At present man is at liberty, and, in spite of codes moral and legal, he abuses his liberty most shamefully. With woman's economic emancipation man's " liberty " will cease and woman's " liberty " will begin in earnest. It will be she and not he who will then have the effective power of cultivating 100 THE "NEW WOMAN." successive " fascinations," and ushering in the age of promiscuity generally. But will she do it ? That I think may be greatly doubted ; anyway, one thing is certain — nothing that she can do will at all equal in infamy the monogamy- plus-prostitution system under which we at present groan. The Empire Music Hall case clearly revealed to the discerning eye that alongside the landlord interest, tiie whisky interest, the betting interest, &c., there is in our midst avast, latent lechery interest more widespread than any. It tried hard, in the obscene Capitalist Press, to set the moral tone and happily failed ignominously, as I trust it will always fail. Is man by nature a monogamic animal ? This most important question I am disposed, on the whole, to answer affirmatively, though the anthropology of the subject bristles with multiform presentments and the most striking contrasts and contradictions. The erotic passion has been so abnormally developed, at the cost of the legitimate generative purpose of sex, in barbarous ages when woman was a mere chattel, that it is almost impossible to arrive at an unbiassed judgment. But on again overhauling the words of Christ in the several Gospels dealing; with the matter, I am not a little surprised to find how com- jiletely He not merely abrogated the lax Mosaic law of divorce, so unjust to woman, but affirmed the natural permanence of the union of sex. "He who made them from the beginning, made them male and female, ... So that they are no more twam but one fiesh. What, therefore, God hath joined together let not man put asunder." According to this dictum monogamy is the natural law of humanity, which cannot be violated with impunity. Now, if this be nature's law. Free Love can have but one issue, \\z., permanent unions of the esxes. And this order may perfectly well survive the THE " NEW WOMAN. lOI effacement of the legal Patriarchal Family. That will most certainly be disolved with the institution of private property by which it is held together. Once abolish inheritance and the family wasp becomes stingless. But under Communistic and Free Love unions the primitive and entirely innocuous Matri- archal Famih will still be possible. I had a revered friend, Rev. Tait Scott, late Con- gregational Minister at Lymington, who spent eight years as a missionary among reputed '' Cannibals" in New Guinea. They were in reality Vegetarians and Communists. Exceptionally intelligent for " savages," they had not the faintest conception ot theft, because private property and poverty were alike unknown among them. They wore no clothes whatever, yet, within the limits of the Matriarchal Family their morality was most exemplary. Life unions, though no way obligatory, were in the great majority of cases the rule, while promiscuity was unheard of. And if the savage woman of New Guinea found no temptation in successive male " fascinations," such also may well be the case in the clarified brain and in the enlightened maternal conscience of her civilized European sister. It may well be that Communism will produce similar sexual phenomena in Great Britain and in New Guinea. In any case, it is fairly certain that Free Love will bring sexual salvation with it, and a race of sounder limb and saner intellect than any that has yet appeared on the planet. That the " New Woman," emancipated economically and mentally spiritualised, will be able to rise to the full measure of the inexpressibly solemn responsibilities of conception and maternity and make questions of promiscuity or non-promiscuity of minor consideration is my living taith. To despair of the New Matron is to despair of the entire future of the Genus Homo. My benison, therefore, rest on 102 " THE NEW WOMAN. the "N^zf^ Woman" — Comrade, Consort, and Lover of man in one — who, so far as 1 have seen her and noted her ways, is a most praiseworthy improvement on the Old Woman. It was, methinks, in a stray Chambers Journal that I once read these words, simple and sweet, of some true " minor poet " — destined, be it hoped, to become " major " one of :hese days — regarding The " New Woman " She does not '■ languish in her bower. ' Or squander all the golden day In fashioning a gaudy flower Upon a worsted spray ; Nor is she quite content to wait Behind her "rose-wreathed lattice pane, Until beside her father's gate The gallant prince draws rein." The brave " New Woman " sccirns to sigh And count it " such a grievous thing" That year on year should hurry by And no gay suitor bring ; In labour's ranks she takes her place, With skilful hand and cultured mind ; Not always foremost in the race, But never far behind. And not less lightly fall her feet Because they tread the busy ways; She is no whit less fair and svyeet Than maids of older days. Who gowned in samite or brocade. Looked charming in their dainty guise, But dwelt like violets in the shade, With shy, half-opened eyes. Of life she takes a clearer view, And through the press serenely mores, Unfettered, free ; with judgment true. Avoiding narrow grooves. She reasons, and she understands ; And sometimes 'tis her joy and crown To lift with strong, yet tender hands, The burdens men lay down. Part IV.— ECONOMICS. " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY ? THE POOR MAN'S BANK: "UNCLE." BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. (103) Now, Dives daily feasted and was gorgeously arrayed, Not at all because he liked it, but because 'twas good for trade. That the people might have calico he clothed himself in silk, And surfeited himself on cream that they might have the milk. He fed five hundred servants that the poor might not lack bread. And had his vessels made of gold that they might have the lead And e'en, to show his sympathy with the deserving poor, He did no useful work himself that they might do the more. Howbeit, there shall be no more poor with thee ; for the Lord will surely help thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it, if only thou diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all this Command- unent. Deut. xy.,4. 5 (R.V.). (104) PART IV.— ECONOMICS. XVIL *' UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN." SONG OF THE MODEST MONOPOLIST. My wants are few, I sit serene, Upon contentment's highlands ; If I can have earth's continents I care not for its islands. I would not climb upon a throne Through seas of bloody slaughter ; If I can call all lands my own, Why 3 oil can have the water. And all I ask is just this earth, To regulate and man it, And I surrender all my claims, To every other planet. And so you see I cut my cloth On a contracted pattern ; Give me the earth, I drop all claim To Uranus and Saturn. Little I need, my wants are few. Nor would I have them greater • I only want the land between The poles and the equator. Give me the Earth, 'tis all I ask, For me and my wife Sarah, Then I'll give all my fellow. men A house-lot in Sahara. — Pitt.sborg Post. 105 Io6 " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN." It is much easier to live without morality than without food, and when one has to be sacrificed to procure the other, morality is sure to go. The stomach is the commander of the soul, and, therefore, the great Labour Question is the great Moral Question, — Journal of the Knights of Labour. Everywhere but in the Church itself you will find men ready to perceive that Christ had no private or personal ends, but only a universal one, which was the redemption of our very nature itself from disease and death. — Henry James. IHOSOEVER," said Christ, " hath, to him shall be given ; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." Could anything be more unjust, nay, outrageous ? one is ready to exclaim. And }et, properly understood, such is the law of life not less in the spiritual than in the material universe. And this law is as reasonable as it is inexorable. " Hath " — what ? *' Given " — what ? All depends on how you fill in the blanks. It is not, for example, true that to him that hath riches, riches shall inevit- ably be given. Riches oft take the wings of the morning and fly away, and poor men do not invaria- bly remain poor all their days. But riches are in every case, the e_§ecls of adequate causes, and they who can control the causes will without fail enjoy the effects. There is no exception to the rule — given am efficient cause a coiresponding resultant is assured. To a Divine Law there can be no limitation and no exception. Throughout nature, life, growth, development are the resultant of vital energy operating in suitable en- vironment. The parable of the Sower who went forth to sow emphasises the absolute necessity laid upon man to secure fitting exterior surroundings, if he would fulfil the higher and highest law of his being. A Sower went out to sow his seed : and, as he sowed, some fell by the wayside; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN." IO7 And some fell upon a rock ; and, as soon as it was sprung up, It withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns ; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bear fruit an hundred fold. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. — Luke, viii., 5-8. Whatsoever organism, therefore, combines tlie living internal principle with fit external surroundings, to it shall be given growth and fructification. But whatso- ever organism has no such combination, from it shall be taken away even the appearance of organism. This is true of the whole vegetable and animal world, and applies equally to man's spiritual as to his physical nature. " The great Labour Question is the great Moral Question." A spiritual heaven never yet grew out of a material hell, and a material hell is what the governing and appropriating " classes " have created for the toiling ** masses " of every so-called " civilised " land. This they have done by ruthlessly divorcing the toiler from his environment, thereby producing ■economic conditions that are every day becoming more and more intolerable. By impeding industrial evolution they are most certainly maturing such a revolution as has never been witnessed since man appeared upon the planet. Wealth is the offspring of human energy employed on suitable materials in the outer world. This energy economists call " Labour," while the materials are generically called " Land." Whosoever, then, is able freely to unite labour and land, to him shall not riches but tveal-th, as opposed to ill-th, be given, and from him who is anyhow prevented from effecting such union shall be taken away, even the ability to labour, which he seemingly hath. Without access to land — economic land — the worker must needs take his place in the rank.s of the Unemployed, steal or starve. lo8 " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN." Now it is the business of those who are known as " Landlords " and " Capitahsts " — according to the economic definition of land both are equally land- lords — either wholly to debar the toilers from access to land (which is equivalent to a sentence of death, as Mr. Gladstone has truly told us), or they exact for themselves three-fourths of the products of access granted, in the name of " Rent " or robbers' toll, " The Land Question is the Labour Question," and no one ever apprehended this fact more clearly than the late unsavoury but shrewd Duke of Marl- borough. Writing from the United States where, years ago, he was travelling, he thus admonished his brother aristocrats at home and they were prompt to act on his advice : — Here you have an Anglo-Saxon race of sixty millions of people who work like beavers, developing your property and adding to jts value, if only you own real estate investments. In what, then, did his lordship's friends invest ? In /ff»^nominall} , but really in Republican, Anglo-Saxon, beaver-like labour. In all such " investments " the rich man simply buys the power to pocket the earn- ings of labour without giving any return. And the labour which his title deed conveys to him is, in its essence, Slave-\diho\\x for those whose gains he is enabled to appropriate must use the land thus monopolised or die. " O Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " Now, " Our Old Nobility," as a distinct species of the genus landlord, have at all times excelled in the art of "taking from him that hath not even that he hath"; but, in this respect, most remarkable, as- suredly, is this their latest achievement, which may almost be described as the "Conquest of the United States." In a recent issue, The Journal of the Knights of Labour gave the following instructive list of the greater British estates in the Republic, with the names of their alien and absentee owners, to whom " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN. lOQ tribute is regularly paid. Nothing could better illustrate the ubiquity as well as the rapacity of the marauders who " came over at the Conquest. ' The Texas Land Union Syndicate No. 5 — 3,000,000 acres. Interested peers ; Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Earl Cadogan, H, C. Fitzroy Somerset (this is the Duke of Beaufort), William Alexander Lochiel Stephenson, Douglas-Hamilton, Duke of Beaudon, the Duke of Rutland, Ughtred J. Kay-Shuttleworth and Ethel Cadogan (maid in waiting to the Queen). This syndi- cate owns whole counties in Texas, and tens of thousands of persons pay it rentals. Sir Edward Reid — 2,000,000 acres. This is a syndicate which owns land in Florida only. It includes the present Duchess of Marlborough, Lady Randolph Churchill and Lady Lister- Kaye. Viscount Scully — 3,000,000 acres. His lorcship maintains an elaborate system of bailiffs. Syndicate No. 4, 1,800,000 acres. This syndicate has all its holdings in Mississippi. It includes the Marquis of Dalhousie, George Henry Howard Cholmondeley (Viscount Cholmondeley), Georgiana, Viscountess Cross, the Hon. Lady Gordon and the Hon. Lady Biddulph. Marquis of Tweedale — 1,750,000 acres. The Marquis is William Montagu Hay, famed all over Scotland as the rack- rent lord. Phillips, Marshall & Co., London — 1,300,000 acres. This firm has the whole peerage for its clients. The Anglo-American Syndicate, London — 750,000 acres The funds of widowed peeresses are largely invested here The lands are in the South and West. Bryan H. Evans — 700,00c acres. Mr. Evans resides in London. His lands are in Mississippi. The Duke of Sutherland — 125,000 acres. This is the actress- loving, champagne-bibbing and rack-rent nobleman of police- court fame. The British Land Company — 320,000 acres. This land is all in Kansas. William Whalley — 310,000 acres. Mr. Whalley is the Squire of Peterboro, England. The Missouri Land Company — 300,000 acres. This ope ate» a Missouri domain, and has headquarters at Edinburgh. Robert Tennant — 230,000 acres This is all farming land. Mr. Tennant lives in London. Dundee Land Company — 247,000 acres. Lord Dunmore — 120,000 acres. no " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN. Benjamin Newgas, Liverpool -100,000 acres. Lord Houghton (in Florida) — 60,000 acres. English Land Company (in California) — 50,000 acres. English Land Company (in Arkansas) — 50,000 acres. Alexander Grant, London (in Kansas) — 35,000 acres. Syndicate No. 6 — 110,000 acres. This syndicate includes the Earl of Verulam and the Earl of Tankerville. The land is in Wisconsin, M. Elfenhauser of, Halifax — 600,000 acres. The land is in West Virginia. Syndicate No. i — 50,000 acres. This is a Scottish concern, and its land is in Florida. It is claimed that fully 20,000,000 acres of American land are thus owned by great landowners in England|and Scotland. This does not include the Holland syndicate, which owns 5,000,000 acres of grazing land in Western States, nor the German syndi- cate, owning 2,000,000 acres in various States. Of those rack-renters the most impudently exact- ing is Viscount Scully, who has hitherto proved himself one too many for the State Legislature of Illinois. In 1887, that body passed an Alien Land Act, directed solely against Scully. To evade it he had inserted beforehand a clause in all his leases making his tenants responsible for all taxes accruing against the property. The result was the creation of a large and solid body of voters, in the " Scully counties," hostile to all public improvements by means of taxation ! Now, however, there is something like open war between the whole herd of noble absentees and their tenants, and the combat is bound to deepen as it proceeds. Whether '* law and order " will long be able to protect British landlordism, fighting for its customary tribute, at such long range, may well be doubted. Indeed, that it should have done so hitherto well-nigh "passes the wit of man." At the great French Revolution of 1792 one grand mistake was made. Hereditary o/^c^s were abolished, but the institution of owned and inherited land was spared. In the next great social upheaval, be it in " UNTO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN.'' Ill America or Europe, that error will not be repeated, and the event cannot now be far off. IT IS SAID THAT— When Rome went down i,8oo men owned all the Roman world. When Babylon went down 2 per cent, of her population owned all the wealth. When Egypt went down 2 per cent, of her population owned 97 per cent of her wealth. There are about 40,000,000 people in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and 100,000 practically own all the United Kingdom. In i860 there were but two millionaires in the United States and no tramps. To-day there are 35,000 millionaires and 3,000,030 tramps. In the United States three-fifths of the entire wealth of the country is owned by 31,000 persons — less than one-twelfth of i percent. of the populacion. Verily, " Wtiosoever hath to iaim shall be given " ; but, in the good time coming, it is not the idler, but the worker that shall have, inasmuch as Free Access to Economic Land shall thenceforth be his inalienable heritage, with every resultant blessing. Ye may heed it not, ye haughty ones, Whose hearts, like rocks, are cold ; But the day will come when the fiat of God, In thunder, shall be told ; For the voice of the Great I AM hath said That the land shall not be sold. XVIII. ''TRIUMPHANT DEMOCKACY" . Careless seems the great Avenger ; History's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness twixt old systems and the Word : Not an ear in court or market to the low forboding cry Of those crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth, chaff must fly ; Never shows the choice momentous till the judgment hath passed by. — Lowell. The revolt of the New World against the Old has broken out. The stage is crowded with actors ; the struggle will be carried on with an amount of intellect such as the world has seen in no struggle before, and will see in none after. For it will be the last social struggle. The Nineteenth Century will hardly end before the contest is decided. — Adgust Bebel, BOUT this time nearly fifteen years ago, during the Presidency of Rutherford ^Q^^ Hayes, I chanced to be in Washington, ^'^^ T" where 1 enjoyed the hospitahty of Carl Schurz, then Secretary of the Interior, and I can well recall a conversation, at his table, on the prospects of Socialism in the United States. Social- ism was then a very weak exotic, maintaining a pre- carious existence in New York, but hardly anywhere else in the Union. Charles Francis Adams, grand- son and great-grandson of Presidents, who was pre- sent, nevertheless, arguing from the alarming growth of " corporations," with great insight, confidently 112 "triumphant democracy"? "3 predicted an internecine struggle between the Collec- tivist and the IndividuaHst principle. Schurz was seemingly incredulous, and related, with amused approval, the opinion of two German Socialists from New York who had just paid turn a visit. Asked how the movement was progressing, they had dis- gustedly replied : " Here it ish no gut, no gut. De peoples be too dam prosperous." And, though I durst hardly venture an opinion, it really seemed to me that the Teutons were riglit. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, to judge by any European standard, there were no visible signs of poverty. I was all through the Garfield Election, and heard nearly every one of the great party orators on the then situation, m New York, Boston, I^hiladel- phia, Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha, Denver, Leadville, and a multitude of other places, but of the " low fore- boding cry of crises " to come I heard nought. Every " ear in court or market " was deaf, except to the eternal jingle of the Almighty Dollar. The man who hopedlto become rich seemed to worship the great God Mammon with even intenser devotion than the man already rich. The workman orators talked with matchless volubility — eloquence even — about " the pauper labour of Europe " and its products as the one thing to be dreaded by the highly-privileged toilers of the Republic. At Chicago I saw a proces- sion of Trades Societies, several miles long, march- ing to Republican Party tunes, under banners inscribed with every conceivable reactionary device and motto. And the speeches were entirely in keep- ing. Men so completely hypnotised politically and economically I never saw, and 1 have seen a few. I was amazed, and am by no means surprised at their rude awakening since. But, if the " Masses " generally were as impervious to reason as the " Classes," there were not wanting warning voices among the " intellectual proletariat " I 114 "TRIUMPHANT democracy" ? to whisper confidentially in one's ear that the Republic was rotten at the core, and that it was only a question how long the appearance of tolerable health could be maintained. With wonderful pre- science Abraham Lincoln — the greatest of modern statesmen, in my opinion — had predicted the rise, on the ruins of the Slave-power, of a new and far more remorseless and formidable tyranny — viz., that of Mammon. The effects of an international war may be bad enough, but those of civil convulsion are always terrible. The desperate financial straits of the Federal Government, during the throes of the Civil War, tor the first time in her history made the Republic the easy prey of the Money-power, whose fangs have been lacerating her with fiendish cruelty ever since. "Corporations," "syndicates," "rings,'' "trusts," "pools," &c., of all kinds have eaten out her very vitals, exactly as her great Martyr- President had foretold, in the following wonderful prophecy, for it is nothing less : — Yes, we may all congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its close. It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. The best blood of the flower of American youth has been freely offered upon our country's altar that the uation might live. It has been indeed a trying hour for the Re- public ; but I see, in the near future, a'crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been en- throned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel, at this moment, more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midstj of the war, God grant my suspicions may be groundless. In ante helium days tnere was practically neither millionaire nor mendicant, and even the normal lot of the negro slave was greatly superior to that of the average British factory "hand" or agricultural labourer. Then, indeed, might the emigrant, with reason, sing ; "TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY ? II5 To the West, to the West, to the Land of the Free, Where the mighty Missouri rolls down to the sea Where a man is a man, if he's wiUing to toil. And the hamblest may gather the fruits of the soil. Now, the fell handiwork of Rentmonger, Interest monger and Profitmonger is everywhere visible, to such an extent that it is calculated one per cent, of the population owns seventy-one per cent, of the entire wealth of the United States, while the " ninety- and-nine ' are left ro scramble for the remaining twenty-nine per cent. The population is something under 70,000,000. The census of 1&90 showed that the soil of the Republic is owned by about 10 per cent, of that population, and that three-quarters of that 10 per cent, own little more than their homes, on which there is a mortgage indebtedness of ;^i, 200, 000, 000 ! Nor is that all. The land-ownmg class is being so constantly reduced by the foreclosure of mortgages that there need be no wonder should the Census of 1900 show that it is but 5 or 6 per cent, of the entire community. So overrun, indeed, is the land with mortgages on every hand, that if the ancient Greek plan of recording them by the erection of stone-tablets were had recourse to, the United States would appear like a vast cemetery. Between the mortgagee on the one hand and the bonanza farmer on the other, the once splendid yeomanry of the Republic, is being rapidly squeezed to death. Humboldt declared that the valley of the Mississipi alone could easily be made to feed all Europe, and now — paradox of paradoxes! — it is dis- covered that America is " overpopulated" and the stream of emigration which so long flowed from the shores of the Old World to the New has begun to flow back again with a steady current. Already the re-flow of steerage passengers exceeds the outflow by fifteen per cent ! Among other monstrous ofTspring, the Republic Il6 "TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY"? has given birth to a considerable variety of "kings," and among these the Railway Autocrat may justly take to himself the Oriental style and title of " King of Kings." One of this dynasty, a certain Pullman by name was at the bottom of the late great strike- war in the United States, and assuredly no Caliph of Bagdad ever treated his subjects' repeated com- plaints and representations with more supreme indifference and contempt than did he those of his employees. Nine times was he supplicated to submit the points in dispute to arbitration and nine times did he laugh his sorely aggrieved petitioners to scorn. Living in a delightful Summer Palace at Alexandria Bay, on the St. Laurence, remote from the centre of disturbance and beyond the reach of personal danger, it is the wont of this " Captain of In- dustry " to set a strong guard over his Winter Palace at Chicago, and then coolly to summon to his support, whenever trouble arises, the entire police and militar\ forces of the Republic, State and Federal, and with more or less alacrity they obey him. Mammon nods his head on his throne, and his vast dominions are shaken from centre to circumference. Never did the world see such a spectacle of irresponsible power before. G rover Cleveland may boast himself Pre- sident of the United States, but the Mayor of the Palace, whom he and all his satellites, great and small, must obey, is Plutocrat George M. Pullman. And yet wise and sagacious men foresaw the end from the beginning. The Republic of the United States is essentially a Private Property Protection Asso- ciation. The men who drafted the famous Constitu- tion, in 1787, consisted of fifty-five friends of the " Classes," and only sixteen of the " Masses," and against the former the latter in council struggled in vain. Such indeed, was the result, that Patrick Henry pronounced it " a counter-revolution more radical than that which separated America from "TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY ' II7 Britain," while Thomas Jefferson yet more emphati- cally declared that it " sounded the downfall of popular Government." Thomas Paine even went further, and with the eye of a true prophet, beheld the actual Republic of to-day, in the grasp of hollow mercenaries, destitute of every one of the noble humanitarian virtues which inspired its origin. In truth, competent authority has recently gone so far as to pronounce the United States " the most conservative country in the world." And yet time was, notably in the days of Cobden and Bright, when America was not a warning as she is^ to-day, but an example to the British Radical, He beheld her great economical prosperity, and erroneously attributed it to the supposed freedom of her political institutions, which are very imper- fectly understood among us even to this day. But now that the war of " Haves" and "Have-nots" has become acuter in America than in most European countries, the dangerously reactionary character of the American Constitution, as compared with our own incomprehensible hotch-potch, will become daily more and more apparent. Indeed, it is hardly to® much to say that, without a horrible revolution of "blood and iron," too frightful to contemplate, the most imperative reforms are impossible in the United States. Mr. George Washburne Siualley, the well-known New York correspondent of the Times and for long London correspondent of the Nciv York Tribune puts the matter thus : — The impatient English reformer will probably be first struck by the fact that before a proposed amendment (to the Consti- tution) can even be launched, it must obtain a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress. With that knowledge, he would probably reject the American system at once, for he would say to himself — " What chance is there of a two-thirds majority for Ho-ne Rule, or for Universal Suffrage, even in the House of Commons?"' Yet, when the American reformer has got his two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of Il8 "TRIUMPHANT DEMOCRACY" the Senate, he is only on the threshhold of his difficulties. He must then go to the separate States, of which there are forty- tour and to the legislatures of those States, each of which is com- posed of two Chambers. He has to appeal, that is, to eighty- eight separate legislative bodies, and he must manage to get a majority in three-fourths of these eighty-eight separate legisla- tive bodies, before his proposed coiistitutional reform can become part of the Constitution. The British Constitution, or what passes for sucli, has often been described as a " system of checks," but here are " checks " for yon with a vengeance. Remove our House of Lords, and the House of Commons may effect the most revolutionary projects, without the sHghtest friction, betwen ten o'clock and midnight. The House of Commons, of course, is anything but a revolutionary body, but that is largely our own fault. At any rate, it is not an almost hopelessly unworkable "machine" like the American Congress, and we have something to be thankful for. As for our American brethren, they have a terrible " hard row to hoe ; " but they may be trusted, if any men can, somehow to work out their own salvation, and it may be also that of the European peoples. Christendom is wistfully waiting for the social mot d'ordve and, if it is destined to come from the other side of the Atlantic, as the political mot d'ordre came a century ago, I for one shall gladly concede to them tke honour of hegemony. " Blood is thicker than water" after all. The ineffaceable memories of the anti-slavery struggle (1861-64), with its stupendous sacrifices for negro emancipation, come back to me thick and fast, whenever the wage-slavery system is seriously chal- lenged in the Great Republic. The puissant nation that, once thoroughly aroused, crushed, as in a vice, the " Chivalry of the South '' — and the revolted Con- federates, to do them justice, like Alan Breck, wive " bonny fighters " — is not likely to submit for ever to "triumphant democracy"? iig the domination of a ring of vulgar upstart Plutocrats. The splendid response to Lincoln's final appeal for recruits reverberates in my ears : We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more» From Mississippi's winding stream and from New England's shore ; You have called us and we're coming by Richmond's bloody tide, For Freedom's cause to lay us down our brothers' bones beside. Six hundred thousand loyal men and true have gone before ; We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more. XIX. ''THE POOR MAN'S BANK:" " UNCLE." If thy brother be waxen poor and fallen into decay with thee, then thou shall relieve him, yea, though he be a stranger or a sojourner, that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him or increase, but fear thy God that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shah not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase. — Levit., 35-37. And it is adjudged by authority of Parliament that all usury, being forbidden by the law of God, is a crime and detestable, 13 Eliz.,c, 8, ND jet it moves! Only some dozen years or more have elapsed since I first laid siege to the stronghold of Mammon — Usury — in the public press. To weeklies and dailies alike the very word Usniy was then totally unfamiliar and the crusade against so formidable a foe, so hoary an iniquity, seemed sufficiently Quixotic in all conscience. Not even Reynolds's Newspaper would publish my first article on the subject and, but for William Morris and The Covivtonweal, \twou\dmost probably never have seen the light of day. It was almost an affair oi Athanasius contra Mundiwi. Usury, abhorred of old by Jew and Gentile, had long ceased to be a cause either of reproach or punishment. Nay, in the disguise of " interest," " consols," " divi- dends," etc., it had become almost as sacred and incontrovertible a thing as " rent" itself. 120 "THE POOR man's BANK:" "UNCLE." 121 But now what is it our gratification to behold ? You can hardly take up a newspaper without encountering the old term of opprobrium, on some page or other; while, in all prints specially devoted to the advocacy of the worker's interests, the Usurer is invariably stript of his halo of social respectability and classed with the greatest male- factors and oppressors of mankind. While legisla- tively we proceed at a snail's gallop on the path of progress, it is unquestionable that the light is spread- ing from mountain peak to valley at a rapid pace, — at a pace that before long must find its expression in action that will astonish alike sleeping friends and sleepless foes. These reflections have occurred to me on the perusal of certain excellent articles in London, on " State Usury — Pawnshops and Poverty." It is now twenty-two years since Parliament last con- cerned itself with the "Three Golden Balls" of Lombardy, and well do I remember my own futile efforts at the time, in the editorial columns of an Edinburgh daily, to point out to the "Collective Wisdom,"' at St. Stephen's, the enormities involved in 35 and 36 Vict. c. 93, by which the poor pawner has ever since been scourged in accordance with " law and order." Under pretence of restraining extortion where the very poor were the pawners, the Parliament of that day was actually at the greatest pains to make them smart, in a direct ratio to their poverty. The smaller the sum borrowed and the shorter the time, the heavier the statutory usury which the Act of 1S72 tliscreetly, but quite erroneously, terms " profit." In respect of "loans of ten shillings or under " the Schedules of the Act set forth : — The pawnbroker is entitled to charge for this ticket one half, penny ; for pront on each two shillings or part of two shillings lent on this pledge, for not more than one calendar month, one 122 "THE POOR MAN's BANK:" "UNCLE." halfpenny ; and so on at the same rate per calendar month. After the first calendar month, any time not exceeding fourteen days will be charged as half a month, and any time exceeding fourteen days, and not more than one month, will be charged as one month. The pawnbroker's true "profit" consists of a ceaseless inllux of halfpennies "for this ticket," whose intrinsic cost is an entirely negligible quantity that ought, in all conscience, to be borne by the pawnee himself instead of the borrower, on whom, indeed, until i860, it was not imposed, in case of loans under five shillings. What is called his "profit" in the Act is really his "usury" of one halfpenny monthly for every unit of two shillings or part of two shillings lent on the security of pledges valued by the pawnbroker himself. In other words, he lends, absolutely without risk, twenty-four pennies for a month and receives in return, ticket-mulct and usury together, one penny, or at the rate of 50 per cent, per annum by order of a paternal Government ! Were the pledge to remain unredeemed till the expiry of the allotted period of twelve months, the pawner, it is true, would have to pay only sixpence- halfpenny, or at the rate of twenty-seven per cent, per annum, but it is precisely on the "parts" of time and coin that he comes most seriously to grief. Be the loan over or under the two shilling unit, the pawnbroker "scores " equally gaily, thus : — Rate per Loan. Period. cent, per an. 2S. od. Two weeks 108^ 2S. od. One week 2i6'l 28. od Three days 505J IS. 6d. Three days 676 IS. od Three days 1,014 Make the 2s. 2s. 3d. for three days, and 171 per cent, is added to the tribute exacted from Lazarus. Reduce him, on the other hand, to a loan of 6d., and he pays at the rate of 2,068 per cent, per annum ! And worse — with the growth of this enlightened nine- "THE POOR man's BANK:" " UNCLE." 123 teenth century the evil has grown, or rather has been progressively enhanced of set legislative pur- pose : — Act of 1800 Act of i860 Act of 1872 Loan 2S. 6d. — Gain §d. ... ^d. ... id. Time, 3 days' ticket Nil. ... id. ... jid. Rate per cent, per an. 192 ... 384 ... 576 Week in week out, the business transacted by " Uncle " is enormous — at the rate of ten pledges per head of the population, it is computed, or four hundred millions a year. All are fish that come to " Uncle's " net, high and low, rich and poor, but the poor especially in overwhelming proportions. They, like the poor in the Gospel, "are always with" " Uncle," but most of all in times of adversity. "Strikes," "lock-outs," low wages, no wages, sick- ness, accidents, bereavements, all bring grist to ** Uncle's " mill. When other shopkeepers sink, the pawnbroker swims buoj'^antly on the crest of a wave of prosperity. His twofold "profit ' on ticket and loan is good, but it is not the only arrow in his quiver. He has another, in case of loans under ten shillings, still more killing. Such pledges become the " absolute property of the pawnbroker," if not redeemed within the statutory twelve months. It is consequently his interest to undervalue articles (and he does it, of course) on the chance that in time they will become his " absolute property," a contingency, in many in- stances, to be calculated on with the utmost certainty. But if the amount loaned exceeds ten shillings his position is apparently somewhat less enviable. He has then got to sell by auction and, if the pawner turn up " within three years," by paying a penny he is entitled to inspect a record of the sale, and the pawnbroker must hand him over the surplus, if any. Needless to say, however, " the trade " has learned so to manipulate the sales as to reduce them to a 124 "THE POOK man's BANK:" "UNCLE." farce in which the pawner invariably comes out at the small end of the horn. London thus describes " Uncle's Tactics " in respect of statutory "auctions," and it does not exaggerate : — While the sale is on the pawnbroker holds a seat by the side of the auctioneer, and, with his privilege of bidding, takes good care that the articles fetch a fuil price, otherwise he buys them back again. There is really no desire at all on the part of many of the pawnbrokers to sell particular articles scheduled in the catalogue, and they buy them back with amazing rapidity. Diamonds, pearls, sets of gold watches and cases of valuable rings are mostly taken back again. That is certainly the case unless a certam price is realised. The pawnbrokers compete against the private bidder, but frequently favour the dealers. The business is often worked in rings, for directly particular dealers begin bidding the pawnbroker stops running up the price. The auction business is in the hands of a few firms who are on very good terms with, and, in some cases, related to, the pawnbrokers. There is, undoubtedly, collusion frequently, and the dealers and pawnbrokers arrange which articles they will have. It is a farce to say that the sales are public. The general public get little opportunity to attend, and if an outsider goes and bids, he is bowled out by a combination of pawnbrokers or dealers, or he is made to pay a prodigious price for an article. Should he land the article on the hands of any of the ring they combine to pay the loss. The sales in London are rarely adver- tised except in the Pawnbrokers' Gazette, where they come under the eyes only of members of the trade. A pawner who has allowed his article to go unredeemed for over a year, may claim the surplus which may arise from the sale of it. Pawnbrokers themselves admit that this surplus is rarely claimed. They manage, as a rule, to show, even on the rare occasions when claims are made, that the article has involved them in a loss. It is obviously in the interest of the pawnbroker to |buy the articles back at a low price and sell them in his shop. The fraternity are always telling us that they advance a greater amount on articles than do the (Continental) Monts de Piete. This is one of Uncle's little schemes to make people believe that he is a public benefactor. On all articles that are likely to sell well in his shop he advances as little as possible. It is obvious, supposing there is no collusion between pawnbroker and auction- eer, no understanding between pawnbroker and dealer, and supposing that the sale is attended by the public generally, that Uncle has still the advantage all round. He possesses informa- tion which no one else does ; he knows what the articles were "THE POOR man's BANK:" "UNCLE." I25 pawned for. He has it in front of him marked in his catalogue. He knows exactly how to act to benefit himself. Under such circumstances full and fair competition — such as exists in the sale of unredeemed pledges on the Continent — is impossible. If the loan is over £i the pawner is practically free to make the best terms he can with the pawnee. Under that amount he enjoys the " protection " of the State, such as I have described it. Its under- lying principle may be accurately summed up in the text : " Unto him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that he hath." London has evidently got up its case with great thoroughness, both at home and abroad, and it is with profound melancholy that one reads such a passage as this. It implies so much wretched, hand- to-mouth existence : — From inquiries we have made we find that, in the working- class districts of London, Monday is by far the busiest day for pawnshopping. On that day the Sunday clothes are usually the articles brought to " Uncle." The same kind of business is carried on on Tuesday. On Wednesday a little more variety is introduced, and on Thursday and Friday household furniture and the week's washing make their appearance, and on Friday and Saturday, except for miscellaneous pawning, most of the articles pawned in the early part of the week are withdrawn. Several managers told me that they knew customers who came_ regularly week by week with the same article for the whole year Any one thus bringing an article of clothing, for which they received 2s. 6d., would pay i^d. interest for the week, and if that article was renewed every week for the whole year, as I have been told is frequently the case, altogether 6s. 3d. would be paid by the end of the year for the weekly advance of 2s 6d. And must this surging stream of misery flow on unchecked ? Is there no remedy ? Of course there is : but we must discover the cause, before we can possibly hope to apply it. The pawnshop is the product — the inevitable product — of the merciless institution of private property, called by the Son of Man " Mammon." With private property abolished in the Co-operative 126 "THE POOR man's BANK:" "UNCLE." Commonwealth^ such an institution as the pawnshop could have no possible place. It would be meaning- less ; but for the present it is indispensable, and the immediate question is how to make it alleviate the prevalent misery most efficacious' y. We must bring the pawnshop back to its original purpose. It must be niiuiicipalised and made a real Monti di Pieta, or Poor Man's Bank, worked without usury, on the principle (not a penny more than the cost of management, i.e., from 5 to y\ P^'" cent.) laid down by the illustrious monk of Florence, Savonarola, in 1495. Savonarola started State-regulated pawn- shops to protect the poor ; here we set up pawn-shops to exploit them. If Parliament and our great Muni- cipalities cannot in 1895 accomplisli what the Re- public ot Florence achieved four centuries ago then they are good for little or nothing, and " Government of the People by the People for the People " is merely a hollow and pretentious formula, a delusion and a snare. XX. BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. Servility before the Law has become a virtue. — Kropotkine. Good men should not obey the laws too well. — Emerson. My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her. — Thoreau. Government is the great blackmailer. — Bdckle. In general the art of Government consists in taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give it to the other.— Voltaire. HE causes which contributed to the sur* prising rout of the Liberals in Forfar" shire were various, but not the least important was one of which we shall hear more presently, south as well as north of the Tweed. The farmers of Forfarshire, and the breeding counties of Scotland generally, hotly resent the action of the Board of Agriculture in prohibiting the importation from Canada of lean or "store" cattle (alive), under the pretext that they suffer from pleuro-pneumonia. The Dominion profited by the traffic, and agricultural Scotland profited still more 3o , but because out of two cargoes of Canadian cattle one or two cases of pneumonia — most pro- bably contracted in transit — were undoubtedly found, 127 128 BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. Mr. Gardner and the "expert" veterinary advisers of the Board must needs extinguish tlie entire trade. The statute says that " cattle shall be admitted to this country provided there is reasonable security against disease." It does not say provided there is no possibility of the introduction of disease, the absurd construction put upon it by the Board of Agriculture. Now what constitutes " reasonable security " in such a case ? If it is not enough that the Government of Canada should declare, as was done at Aberdeen, by the mouth of Sir Charles Tupper, High Commis- sioner for tlie Dominion, that Canada did not have, and never had a single case of pleuro- pneumonia, except one which was checked in quarantine, at Quebec,— it is surely to the purpose that it should voluntarily request the Board of Agriculture to select the ablest veterinarv experts in the country, and as many detectives as they liked, Canada to pay the whole cost of the inquiry if they succeeded in establiahinR that pleuro- pneumonia existed^in the Dominion. At the request of a very influential gathering of Forfarshire and Fifeshire agriculturalists, Sir John Leng, the Senior Member for Dundee, recently con- veyed to the President of the Board of Agriculture, in writing, a succinct statement of the facts ot the case, as vouched for by the Dominion Government, with an assurance, which could not be misunderstood, that the " agitation "in agricultural Scotland against his " scheduling " infatuation was serious. Mr. Gardner's response was a long-drawn, circumlocu- tory, official non-possumus. He was in the hands of his precious " experts " and they had banned Canadian live-stock ex cathedra, and banned they must consequently remain. At an indignation meeting in Aberdeen a "canny Bailie suggested that, if " the three experts" of the BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. I2g Department could not be circumvented in any other way, they should be pensioned and sent about their business. Nor am I at all sure that that would not be the best way of removing their obstruction ; for if your expert official " scientist " should once blunder, like the expert liar he is sure to "'stick to it." For is it not written in the Eleventh Commandment — "If you tell a lie, stick to it ?" Endow "scientific " error and it will fight for its stipend as stubbornly as endowed theological error has ever done. But the question raised by the Forfarshire farmers is far more than a mere Scoto-Canadian affair. It calls in question the entire policy of per- mitting the Board of Agriculture to " schedule " this country, or that, at its sweet will, as so smitten with contagious murrain as to necessitate the slaughter of cattle, imported thence into Britain, at the port of debarkation. If we are to revert to a policy of "(protection," let us do so in an open, straight- forward manner, and not in the covert, irri- tating, piecemeal fashion, set by the Board of Agriculture. Some fourteen years ago, as the representative in the Far West of a syndicate of leading provincial journals, English and Scottish — The Aberdeen Free Press, The Dundee A dvertiser, The Newcastle Chronicle, The Liverpool Mercury, and others — I had occasion to look closely into this pleuro-pneumonia imposture, and have never since ceased to marvel that even John Bull should not by this time have found it out. On the vast " ranges " that skirt the Rocky Mountains on the east are raised immense herds of cattle, which roam the Great Plains from year's end to year's end, as wild almost as the buffalo they have supplanted. What they feed on, in such a State, for example, as Colorado, is a mystery to the European eye. The rainfall is almost a negligible quantity, and but for the ubiquitous prickly cactus, K 130 BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. which seems to be able to flourish almost without moisture, the soil is at first sight destitute of vegeta- tion. But on closer inspection you discover, at slight intervals of a foot or more apart, little tufts of " gramma grass," scarcely over an inch high. And this meagre herbage is not merely " nutricious," but it has the invaluable property of " curing " or becoming hay where it grows. The cattle in con- sequence can survive even an occasional snow- storm. To get at their provender they scrape off the snow with their hoots and in the spring they are found not much the worse for their ex- posure. But they '* lay on " no "fat," developing only bone and muscle. At the "round-up," which takes place twice every year the " Cowboys," well- mounted and lasso in hand, drive the herds into one dense bellowing mass of hoofs and horns, and each ranchman proceeds to " cut out " the stock of kis own brand, the calves instinctively following their dams. All are lean, "stringy," and quite unfit for the English market; but the "steers" destined for London or Liverpool must be fattened somewhere and somehow, as the pleuro-pneumonia bogey abso- lutely forbids the English farmer undertaking that duty for which he is so exceptionally qualified. They are accordingly shipped to the Middle States where, for a few months, they are stall-fed or other- wise made fit for John Bull's dinner table, John generously rewarding Jonathan for this little service at the rate of from £^ to £5 per animal. Now, why all this generosity ? Surely the British farmer could put up with a five-pound note as well as his Illinois brother. England, as we all know is rapidly being laid down in " permanent asture," and, as tillage is disappearing, it stands to reason, that cattle-raising should in no way be handicapped. Ship " lean " cattle direct from the great breeding BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. 13! grounds of Canada and the United States, and they can be fattened on EngHsh meadows and in the grazing counties of Scotland as nowhere else in the world. The best refrigerated or other American and Australian meat is poor stuflf compared with the " prime Aberdeenshire," for which it is so commonly palmed off on credulous Londoners by the unprincipled rogues of Smithfield, acting in collusion with highly "respectable " West-end dealers, whose "swag"' is, in consequence, enormous. In truth John Bull's pleuro-pneumonia supersti- tion has made him the laughing stock of all the knowing agriculturists of America. In the Far West the disease is unknown, and the cattle of the Great Plains are otherwise the healthiest that can be handled. I made every possible enquiry regarding it, and " Cowboy," Ranchman, and State official alike testified to its non-existence. Some valuable pedigree bulls, imported from Aberdeenshire to im- prove the ill-favoured breed of Mexican cattle, I indeed found had suffered from it, but they did Mot communicate the malady to the roaming herds of the plains, and it may, I think, be doubted if after all it is even contagious. A few direct experiments to settle that point have yet to be made before I for one will believe it. In the Middle or feeding States of the Republic pleuro-pneumonia has of course occurred, as it has done in this country ; but, I believe, if the truth were told, less frequently. At Washington; I had an intimate conversation with the Minister of Agri- culture on the subject. He assured me that such was the case, but added, with cynical good hu.nour, that if the British Government withdrew the restric- tions on "store" cattle importation — so profitable is the delusion — the disease would break out with unexampled virulence in every feeding State of the Union ! 132 BEEF AND BUREAUCRACY. All this, and much more, I imparted, on my return to England, to Mr. Mundelia, who was then Cattle- doctor-in-Chief to the Liberal Administration. He evidently knew nothing personally of the subject, but, like Mr. Gardner, he had his infallible " ex- perts," and they tiien, as now, said, as did tlie Grand Monarque : L' etat c'est iiioi. So much for British Beef, British Bureaucracy, and British Free Trade ! There is a blessedness about that word " Pleuro-pneumonia " that even ' Mesopotamia " can hardly rival. Part v.— miscellanea. THE INFERNO OF WAR. BARON ORCHID DE SCREWE ON PAUPER SUFFRAGE. "THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE WICKED" DRACO DAY. THE ROYAL CHRISTENING "'FUNCTION": BABY WETTIN THE FIRST DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. ( i^^ ^ MENE, MENE. TEKEL. O, the bowers of Babylon are rare, And the tinkling fountains play Over gardens hung in the drowsy air, Where the careless youth and maiden fair Are dreaming the years away. And the Kings of Babylon are strong, And their dungeons dark and deep, And the Rich rejoice in the eign of wrong And the Priesthood joins in the robbers' soa| While the Toilers work and weep. And the walls of Babylon are high. And their arches grim and low, And the Birds of Commerce scream and fly While the proud Euphrates wanders by In its dark, relentless flow. But stern and still, like a Group.of Fates, Round the city's roar and din, The invading host of the Conqueror waits, In the midnight hush without the gates, While the feast goes on within. For the river that rolls in Mammon's pride Shall the People's servant be — By God's right arm shall be turned aside, And its channel surge with a grander tide. Than the pulse of the Persian Sea. (»34> PART v.— MISCELLANEA, XXL THE INFERNO OF WAR. Thursday, Fridav , Saturday, and Sunday were spent by tke Japanese soldiery in murder and pillage from dawn to dark, ki mutilation, in every conceivable kind of nameless atrocity, until the town (Port Arthur) became a ghastly Inferno to be remem- bered with a fearsome shudder until one's dying day. Bodies of n«en strewed the streets in hundreds, perhaps thousands, for we could not count — some with not a limbunsevered, some with heads hacked and cross-cut and split lengthwise, some ripped open, not by chance, but with careful precision down and across, disembowelled and dismembered, with occasionally a dagger or bayonet thrust m the private parts. I saw groups of prisoners, tied together in a bunch with their hands behind their^ backs, riddled with bullets for five minutes, and then hewn in'pieces. I saw a junk stranded on the beach, filled with fugitives of either sex and of all ages, struck by volley after volley until — I can say ao more. — Times Correspondent (January 8th, 1895). HE Times man evidently got faint-hearted at the sights he beheld at the capture of Port Arthur by the " brilliant " Japs — " the English of the Orient "^but he ought not to. If War is a right thing in itself — and all Christian nations in particular hold thai it is — it cannot be conducted in too thorough a manner. 135 136 THE INFERNO OF WAR. " Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." V^ victis ! This is seemingly Jap sentiment in regard to War, and there is no occasion lor us to lift up hands of holy liorror at the massacre and mutilation of the wounded or of helpless captives and non-combatants. The victors ought to slaughter all the wounded and give no quarter. The more horrible War can be made, the better. It should be the aim of all good men to strip it of every atom of fictitious " chivalry," every possible scintilla of "glory," by which the mind of the military murderer, from Commander-in-Chief to Drummer-boy, is apt to be glamoured. Everything should be done to make the butcher of his fellow-men feel that he is a butcher, and that his gaudy uniform is a mere badge of superior brutality. The organ of the German W ar Department, the other day, expressed serious apprehension that there ig a perceptible decline in the average ferocity of sentiment of the German soldier, but promised that steps should be promptly taken, nay, had already been taken, to amend the evil, particularly in the case of officers. This article was said to have been directly inspired by the Queen's hopeful grandson. Kaiser Ajax the Bellicose, whom, for his military virtues, the Mikado of Japan has decorated — and so deservedly — with the Most Exalted Order ot the Chrysanthemum. At any rate, it Bismarck's " Young Man " did not inspire the article, it is certain he was quite equal to the perfoimance. On one occasion — and who can forget it? — in 1891, this enfant tevvible ot State thus addressed certain young soldiers : — Recruits ! You have given me the oath of allegiance before the altar and the servant of the Lord. You are still too young to comprehend the true meaning of what has been said here, but first of all take care ever to follow the orders and instruc- tions that are given to you. You have taken the oath of allegi- ance to me; this means, children of my guards, that you are THE INFERNO OF WAR. I37 now my soldiers, that you have given yourselves up to me, body and soul But one enemy exists for you — fity enemy. With the present Socialistic intrigues — it may happen that I shall cotnmund you to shoot your own relatives, your brothers, even your parents (from which God preserve us !), and thenyoii are in duty bound to obey my orders unhesitatingly." Commenting on these tell-tale words of this most candid Young Man, Count Tolstoy observes : — This man expresses what is known but carefully concealed by all wise rulers. He says outright that the men who serve in the army serve htm and his advantage, and should be ready for that purpose to kill their brothers and fathers. Roughly, but distinctly, he lays bare all the horror of the crime for which men who become soldiers prepare themselves — all that abyss of abasement in which they fling themselves when they promise obedience. Like a bold hypnotiser, he tests the depth of the slumber; he applies red-hot iron to the sleeper's body ; it smokes and shrivels, but the sleeper does not awaken. Awaken ? No ! His business is to shoot down father and brother, base Socialistic intriguants, in the sacred name of the pvopevty of the "Classes," and he does his duty to the entire satisfaction of his Emperor and his Emperor's God ! O God of Righteousness, Liberty and Equality ! was ever wretch so degraded ? But the " Young Man " is after all mistaken when he talks so confidently about " my soldiers." The soldiers are not his. They belong mostly to thejjews and other rapacious European financiers, who " run " nearly all the great imposing Empires of the world including the British. Who, for example, impera- tively ordered out the British fleet and army for the seizure of Egypt ? Not Queen Victoria, not Gladstone and the Liberal Administration, but^their Financial Highnesses, Messrs. Rothschild, Goschen, Oppenheim and Co. The G.O.M. imagined and averred that he was " vindicating the Moral Law," when in reality he was perpetratingpne of the foulest crimes of the century, on a usury-devoured " people 138 THE INFERNO OF WAR. rightly struggling to be free " from the remorseless fangs of a gang of thirtj' per cent. Shylocks. I never think of the innocent blood shed at Alexandria, Tel- el-Kebir and El-Teb without a shudder. Talk of " Bulgarian " or " Armenian Atrocities " ! Bah ! No ; men do not now-a-days fight in the battles of King, Kaiser, or Czar : for these are powerless to put their hosts in motion unless tlie Barons of Finance, the Lords of Railway, Mine, and Factory have given the word of command : — If we were only consistent (says Prince Kropotkine) we should replace the lion on our standards with a golden calf, their other emblems by money bags, and the names of our regiments, borrowed formerly from royalty, by the titles of the kings of industry and finance — " 3rd Rothschild," " loth Baring," etc., We should at least know for whom we werek illing. War has been correctly described as " the sum of human villainy," and, as it presents itself in modern times, its atrocity is peculiarly aggravated. It has now become "an ogre," as Bastiat declared, "that requires as much for his digestion as for his meals." Next to the enormities of actual warfare are the enor- mities of armed peace. Roundly speaking, two- thirds of our entire revenue (^"60, 000, 000) are annually devoted to the ogre's upkeep ! Nor is it for military supremacy that the nations now struggle. It is for Markets — for economic superiority that they madly compete. We, in this country, more than a century ago, began the process of producing for export on a large scale, and nearly every one of the wicked wars waged by us since then has had for its real, if not its avowed object, the unscrupulous acquisition of new markets or the jealous exclusion of competitors from old ones. But now the game, which has already nearly ruined rural Britain, by draining its best blood into hives of manufacturing urban wretchedness, is visibly draw- ing to a close America, France, Germany, and even THE INFERNO OI- WAR. I39 Italy, Austria, Russia, and India are rapidly emulating us in the arts of the exploiter, and with such success that we have at last been reduced to put our trust in Darkest Africa, and the Right Hon. fiUbuster Cecil Rhodes ! We have well nigh reached the inevitable stage of equilibrium in rapacity, long ago foreseen by sagacious old Dr. Johnson, who said in his magisterial fashion : — Depend upon it, this rage for trade will destroy itself. You and I will not live to see it ; but the time will come when there will be an end of it. Trade is like gaming. If a whole company are gamesters, play must cease, because there is nothing to be won. When ailf nations are traders there is nothing to be gained by trade, and it will stop where it has been brought to the greatest perfection. That is to say, in Great Byitain. Even at this moment our home trade is fourteen times as great as our foreign, and yet for the sake of the latter we are prepared to commit almost any crime in the calendar on the slightest provocation, and it is the same with every Great Power in Europe. For years the nations have been preparing for a general mel6e, and yet " Sovereigns and Statesmen," if one were to believe them, are all the while toiling themselves to death to preserve a peace which no single people that can be named desires to break ! And this, just heavens, is the net outcome of all the wisdom of our governors, diplomatists and juris- prudents ! For this end did Parliament, in its wisdom, recently determine greatly to augment our bloated naval armaments ; and for this end did Sir William Harcourt produce his miraculous budget ! Now, there is but one way out of this vicious circle, this intolerable situation which is squeezing the very life-blood out of the workers of all Europe — the frank abandonment of Individualism with all its cruel consequences, and the general adoption of Collectivist principles. After the failure of the 140 THE INFERNO OF WAR. revolutionary movement of 1848, Alexander Herzen declared : " You would not have Socialism ? Well, then, you will have war — war for thirty, for fifty years." And he was right. Four millions of trained cut-throats are at present with the standards of European States, and twenty-eight millions, it is computed, can be mobilised, in case of need, for purposes of immolation, armed with weapons of most murderous and unprecedented efficiency. The blood runs cold in contemplation of the horrors tliat may any day be in store for us. " Put up the sword ; for they that take the sword shall perish by the sword." " My kingdom is not of this world (or age), else would my servants fight." Alas, how few are His servants after more than eighteen centuries of the proclamation of the Kingdom of God on Earth, of peace and goodwill to men. In no pro- fessed Christian country in the world is there any State institution to be found which is not mainly inspired by the spirit of Anti-Christ. Assuredly, the State is the Evil. No Anarchist is needed to tell us that. Is the religion of Christ then a failure ? By no means. We have no right to pronounce anything a failure till it has been tried, and no one can pretend that any serious attempt has yet been made to put it in practice. It will be time enough to despair of the triumph of love over violence when love has been fairly tested and found wanting. Christ com- pared His Gospel to "leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." Leaven works, but works slowly. So the leaven of Christianity is working among the nations and will, some day, perchance, be found to have " leavened the whole lump," when appearances point in quite another direction. To reconcile faith and works is the paramount duty of the hour and of every hour. " It is not they that call me, Lord, THE INFERNO OF WAR. 141 Lord, that shall be saved but they that do the will of my Father who is in heaven." And the Father, by the mouth of the Son, said : Put up the sword. O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade ; Where rumour of oppression or deceit, Of successful or unsuccessful war Might never reach me more ! In the noble words of Charles Sumner : — " Let THE BUGLES SOUND THE TrUCE OF GoD TO THE WHOLE World forever." XXII. BARON ORCHID DE SORE WE ON PAUPER SUFFRAGE. He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again : God shall cast them out of his belly. For he hath oppressed and forsaken the poor: he hath violently taken away a house and he shall not build it up. — Job. xx., 15, 19 Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your con- solation. Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven. — Jesds Christ. N speaking on the Registration Bill Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in a spirit of self- righteousness, observed : — " In no speech of mine will you find anything that commits me to the idea that a Pauper ought to be on the register." But pray, O Right Honourable Joseph " Ransom," why not ? Since 43 Elizabeth, Cap. 2, you must be aware that Paupers are as much an integral portion of our" Glorious Constitution" as either Queen, Lords, or Commons. Indeed, the pillars of the State are not three but tour — Queen, Lords, Commons and Paupers, and, generally speaking, the last are by far the most reputable and deserving members of the community. They muster, in the course of a year, about three million strong, and have a revenue — they and more 142 THE PAUPER AND THE SUFFRAGE. particularly the officials charged with their welfare — of nearly ^20,000,000, one way or another. They are as big an " interest " as either the Army or Navy, and they are older than either. One in every eight of all the useful workers of the nation belongs to the noble Brigade of Paupers. In the Army of Industry they have been the chief sufferers ; while you, right honourable sir, and others like you, have been in- dustriously " annexing " the spoils. Still press us for your cohorts, and when the fight is done, Still fill your garners from the soil that our good swords have won. Still, like a spreading ulcer that leech-craft may not cure, Let your foul usance eat away the substance of the poor. So many precious orchids, Mr. Chamberlain, so many lowly Paupers ; so many millionaires, so many inevitable mendicants. You may despise the Pauper as you will ; but he is your handiwork, and whatever be the measure of contempt with which you and the " gentlemen of England " regard him, he is still a man and a brother, with rights of which the direst poverty ought never to deprive him. Indeed, I -should say the more poverty-stricken a man is the more clamant is the necessity for arming him with the protection of the franchise. Most instructive perhaps, of all the parables is that of the vineyard and the " hands" employed in it. Some worked twelve hours, some nine, some six, some one, and that, too, in the cool of the evening. These last were questioned sharply : " Why stand ye here all day idle ? " And they answered as so many thousands sorrowfully do to-day, " Because no man hath hired us." At night the men were all paid equally a "fair day's wages." A "docker" standing about waiting for a job or walking long distances hunting for one is at harder work than the hardest to be incurred in any vineyard. The good " householder " was a man of sense as well as 144 "^"^ PAUPER AND THE SUFFRAGE. humanity. He recognised that one-twelfth of a day's wages would not procure a whole day's living, and, therefore he gave the impoverished toiler a day's living. Nor is it recorded that he attached any stigma or disability to the gift. To tlie " eleventh hour " man he should have said, according to the Chamberlain ethic : '• But, mind you, no voting. ' In no speech of mine will you find anything that commits vie to the idea that a Paupev ought to be on the Register.' " Only the " householder " didn't. " It is the first duty of Governments," said that wondrous youth St. Just, " to obey the call of the friendless and the unfortunate, for they are above all the powers of the earth." And the only way that Governments can seemingly be taught their " first " or any other "duty," is to keep the threat of an adverse popular vote constantly before their eyes. At a General Election the Independent Pauper Party ought to make as good a show as the " Beer interest " or the " Bible interest," and to have its vote properly "organized" by some Pauper Schnadhorst. Its programme could hardly fail to be tolerably democratic, one would think, but there is no telling. In no country in the world are even the elite of the workers really in favour of their own complete emancipation. When they " strike " or " agitate,'' it is not for any fundamentel disturbance of the existing social order ; but rather so to mend its more obvious rents from time to time as to keep it going inde- finitely. All that our " Labour Leaders " in the House of Commons have attempted hitherto is merely to aoply a few inefficacious Trade Union nostrums to the festering sores of the body in- dustrial. " Eight Hour Days," " Emplo.yers' Liability," " Factory Amendment Acts," etc., are all in a very important sense measures of reaction. By making for an improved Individualism they neces- THE PAUPER AND THE SUFFRAGE. I45 sarily tend to postpone the epoch of Collectivism. Why, for example, an Eight Hours Day ? Give a man his whole product instead of the third or fourth of it, and it should then be entirely his own concern whetherhe worked twenty-four hoursa-day, or twenty- four minutes. To establish the liability of employers and to improve the conditions of labour in their factories can scarcely be regarded as a patent method of " nationalizing the means of production," or "abolish- ing the system of wage-slavery." In truth, our " Labour Leaders " are a " feeble folk," so inconse- quent of aim and so infirm of purpose that I am not sure that if, instead of raising heaven and earth to put a few more of the tribe into Parliament, we got up a League of some sort to turn those out of the House who are already in it, we would not be doing a greater service to " the cause." They are like the Slave Leaders of antiquity who never took up arms for the abolition of Slavery, but always for some paltry reduction of its severities. But this is a digression ; for it is nothing to the purpose if our Pauper voters should fail adequately to grasp the root of their sorrows and degradation. Suffice it to say that, in nine cases out of ten, these are not of their own creation, but the work of -the " Classes," and Mr. Chamberlain tells us that that work ought to be an everlasting bar to the exercise of the franchise. It is not for the man but the " rate- payer " to vote. Nay more, " the majority of Radicals still hold the doctrine that a man should not be on the register who is on the rates." Well, "in my Radical days," that may have been so, but it is not so now. The New Democracy regards the Pauper as better fitted to discharge the duties of a citizen than any pauper-tnaking rent- monger, interest-monger, or profit-monger in the realm. What, after all, are the " rates " but a cunning invention of the "Classes" to ward off in- L 146 THE PAUPER AND THE SUFFRAGE. evitable " revolution " by the disinherited " Masses"? They are not charity. They are the safety-valve of our cruelly " glorious constitution," towards which many a despised Pauper has contributed ten times as much, in the vigour of his manhood, as he ever gets back in the decrepitude of his old age. The " Classes " no more pay rates than do the paupers. What they do is to disgorge a paltry fraction of the plunder of the " Masses." The workers directly and indirectly pay all, and keep the great lord of screws in orchids to boot. When you, Mr. Chamberlain, flatter yourself that you are paying rates, you are merely acting as a conduit- pipe, through which certain earnings of the workers pass into the local exchequer. It will be time for you and " the gentlemen of England " to arrogate to yourselves civic merit superior to that of Paupers, when you can honestly declare, with the noble Apostle of the Nations : Let him that stole, steal no more ; but rather let him labour, working with his hands. . . These hands ministered to my necessities, and to those that were with me. In a word, labour is the basis of every civic right. " He that will not work, neither shall he eat," says the same Apostle; nor a fortion vote. St. Paul's labour test remorselesly disfranchises all those who " toil not neither do they spin," alid a good job, too, would it be, if we could but brace ourselves up to applying it. The biters would then be the bitten, and Pauptr and Dives would exchange places. " Slowly, slawly, run the Coursers of the Night ; " yet the Day trn/l come at last, with healing on its wings, when Pauper despised of our " Lost Leader," shall, according to our Lord's promise, inherit the Kingdom, and the last shall be first. Mr. Chamberlain need not imagine that because he is *' lost " to the " cause," that the "cause" itself is "lost." One grand Apostate no THE PAUPER AND THE SUFFRAGE. I47 more implies general apostasy than does a single swallow make a summer ; For Humanity sweeps onward : where to-day the Martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands ; Far in front the Cross stands ready and the crackling faggots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday, in silent awe, return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's sacred urn Count |me o'er Earth's chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonised for hurled the contumelious stone. Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design, XXIII. '^THB TENDER MERCIES OF THE WICKED " : DRACO DAY. Judge not that ye be not judged ! Blessed nre the merciful for they shaii obtain mercy. — Jescs Christ. Have ye not read so much as this what David did, when him- self was an hungered and they who were with him ; how he went into the House of God and did take and eat the shew -bread, and gave also to them that were with him ; which it is not lawful to eat but for the priests alone. — Jesds Christ. " I have an opinion, upon which I should like to act more freely than I am able to do, that long detention in prison, is in itself a mischievous thing for a man, and particularly for young men. It is not desirable that young, healthy and active men as you are, should be sent to long terms of imprisonment losing manhood in prison — but that you should be turned out as quickly as possible to earn your own livelihoods by your own exertions. It is better for yiDur minds and for your bodies, and more likely to make you good members of society," — Justice Day (to three prisoners at Ipswich Assizes.) HESE words of judicial wisdom and hu- manity must have fallen on the ears of the three "young men ' to whom they were lately addressed, at the Ipswich Assizes, like chords of heavenly music. They had been found guilty of petty larceny and, doubtless thought, after such a merciful exordium, they were about to be reprimanded and dismissed, or at most, sentenced to 148 "THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE WICKED." I49 a few days' imprisonment. But alas for the vanity of human hopes and wishes. Mr. Justice Day speedily proceeded to shed daylight on their misun- derstandings and those of other petty offenders in a similar plight by passing the following merciless judgments : — (i) For stealing a piece of bacon, three youths aged seven' teen, seven, six, and Jive months respectively. (2) For stealing 7s. 6d., her first offence, a servant girl, aged eighteen, with good character from her mistress, ien months hard labour. (3) For obtaining 5s, iid., with some food and drink by false pretences, a shoemaker (no previous conviction) the former inmate of a lunatic asylum twelve months. (4) F- The Chief Clerk said that if the prisoner came to him after he came out of prison he thought he could get him to New Zealand cheaper than that. The prisoner thanked the Court and the police in the case. " And yet it moves ! " Mr. Hopwood's example is bound to be contagious. We want Hopwoods on every judgment seat in the land, and to get them there we must first of all have popular election of judges, as in the United States. If we elect men to make laws for us it is absurd to say that we are in- capable of selecting those who are most competent to admim'ster them. But all laws that are based on force are brutal, and wholly contrary to the law of Christ, who con- demned, in immeasured terms, their very basis — private property alias " Mammon." Love He taught, is the only sure foundation on which society can ever rest, and when that is truly in our hearts and not merely on our lips even Hopwoods, precious as they are in existing circumstances, will be alike unneces- sary and unknown. I heartily endorse the noble aspiration of Prince Kropotkine : — In the next Revolution welupe that this cry will go forth: ' Burn the guillotines ; demolish the prisons; drive away the THE TENDER MERCIES OF THE WICKED. 153 judges, policemen, and informers — the impurest race upon the face of the earth ; treat as a brother the man who has been led by passion to do ill to his fellow ; above all, take from the ignoble products of middle-class idleness the means of display- ing their vices in attractive colours ; and be sure that but few crimes will mar our society." XXIV. THE ROYAL CHRISTENING "FUNCTION": BABY WETTIN. Wha the deil hae we gotten for a King But a wee, wee German lairdie ! And, when thev gaed to bring him hame. He was delvin' in his kail-yairdie ; Sawin' kail and layin' leeks, But the hose and but the breeks, And up his beggar duds he cleeks. This wee, wee German lairdie. Scottish Jacobite Song. What is called Monarchy always appears to me a silly con temptible thing. I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity but. when by any accident the curtain happens to be open, and the company sec what it is, they burst into laughter. — Thomas Paine ND SO the mighty " function " (July, '94), is over. Edward Albert Christian George ^S<^^ Andrew Patrick David Wettin has been __1m#i ^ I successfully christened, and "Society," like Longfellow's Village Blacksmith, rejoices in the beatitude of "something attempted, something done to earn a night's repose." Seventy of the most noxious men and women in all Europe were congregated to witness the cere- mony, which it required two " Successors of the 154 THE ROYAL CHRISTENING " FUNCTION." 155 Apostles " (just heavens ! ),Beiison and Davidson, a " Canon," and an " Hon. and Rev.," to perform. The baptismal bowl, we learn, was of pure gold and the water was from the River Jordan ; but the details are necessarily meagre, as the Press was not privi- ledged to behold the Serenities playing at Christianity. But the exclusion of the Pressmen need not trouble them overmuch, for it is perfectly certain that Christ Himself would have been remorselessly excluded from the White Lodge "function." Benson Can- tuarius would have infallibly pronounced Him an " unordained " heretic and schismatic, one given to " stirring up class against class " ; while the Royalties would promptly have discovered that he had never been "introduced at Court" and was, therefore, not "in Society " at all. Conceive, however, how He would have addressed these double-dyed votaries of Mammon had He appeared in their midst at the christening in un- mistakable Messianic guise. To their " spiritual Pastors and Masters," the Bensons and Davidson, in their irreproachable lawn sleeves, He would have said : — Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which, indeed, appear beautiful out- wardly, but are within full of dead men's bones and all un- cleanness. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell ? Then, turning to the Queen and the Serenities, He would, doubtless, have apostrophised them as " ye jackals" (the epithet he applied to His own inonarch, Herod Antipas) and proceeded : " What business have ye to baptise or do aught else in My name ? Have ye never read in your New Testa- ments what I said, sixty generations ago, should be the position of " Princes " among my followers ? The Princes of the Gentiles bear dominion over them, and their great ones exerciGe authority upon them. But so shall it 156 THR ROYAL CHRISTENING " FUNCTION." not be among you ; but whosoever will be great among you, he shall be your minister. And wtiosoever of you will be the chiefest shall be the servant of all. And this, in tones of infinite solemnity, to Victoria the Avaricious : It is as easy for a camel to go through a needle s eye as for a rich woman to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Sell all thou hast and give to the poor, and take up thy Cross and follow Me. Lowell has powerfully imagined such a scene. The Christ ; " Have ye founded your thrones and your altars, then, On the bodies and souls of living men ? And think ye that buildinc; shall endure That shelters the noble and crushes the poor ? ' The Chief Priests, the Rulers and Kings ; " O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, We build but as our fathers built ; Behold thine images how they stand. Sovereign and sole through all our land." Then Christ sought out an artizan, A low-brovved. stunted, haggard man, And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin Pushed from her faintly want and sin. \ These set He in the midst of them, And, as they drew back their garment-hem For fear of defilement, " Lo, here,' said He, " The images ye have made of Me." By a piece of cunningly devised clap-trap Baby Wettin — for such was the by no means imposing surname of the Queen's late husband — has been called George Andrew Patrick David, after the respective patron saints of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Well, St. Andrew we, of course, know, and St. Patrick we know, and even St. David is nebulously respectable. But the " pre- dominant partner," alas, is always unfortunate. George of Cappadocia, a fraudulent army-Contractor, flourished in the fourth century and was raised to the throne of St. Athanasius in the most scandalous THE ROYAL CHRISTENING " FUNCTION." 157 manner. For a time he oppressed the province of Alexandria, till the people, no longer able to endure his exactions and profligate life, rose in rebellion, tore him and his wicked companions to pieces, and flung their bodies into the sea. Yet the image of this odious wretch, who was a greater monster than the dragon he was fabled to have slain, is stamped upon our coins to this day. There is, I am aware, another sort of shadowy, bowdlerised St. George of Cappadocia, in the Roman Calendar : but, so far as I have been able to ascertain, he is a mere pious figment of priestcraft. Truly, Georgia is ominous. George the First was reckoned vile — Viler still was George the Sec md ; And what mortal ever heard Any good of George the Third ? When to hell the Fourth descended, Heaven be praised, the Georges ended. At least it is to be hoped so, but England's taste in monarchs, as in saints, has at all times been peculiar. For one thing— and it is not a little remarkable — the "predominant partner" has never, for more than eight centuries, been able to produce a breed of native Royalties. She has always had to import them. She has been ruled by Normans, by Angevin Plan- tagenets, by Welsh Tudors, by Scottish Stuarts, by a Dutchman, and, alas by the meanest and most con- temptible of dynasties, the reigning Brunswick Guelphs. Once, indeed, we were threatened with a Cromwell dynasty, but even Cromwell's was merely a name assumed by a Welsh progenitor whose surname was Williams. On his mother's side Oliver was, curiously enough, a Stewart of the Royal line of Scotland, a remote cousin of the Blessed " Martyr " himself. But have these ignoble Guelphs and Wettins, then, 158 THK ROYAL CHRISTENING *' FUNCTION." really " come to stay"? Is Mr. Keir Hardie's the only voice to be lifted up in the " High Court of Par- liament " against this sempiternal, debasing idolatry of the White Horse of Hanover ? One prominent " Labour Member," from whom better things might have been expected — I will mention no name, tor I love the man — could not support Hardie in his opposition to the Congratulatory Vote on the birth of Baby Wettin, because among other reasons he had not been duly " circularised," and Baby's " mother had been in labour." Just Heavens, what revolting cant ! " Didst ever see Titan kiss a dish of butter? — pitiful hearted butter, that melted at the sweet tale of the sun ! If thou didst, then behold this compound." True, the pains of childbirth will always be respected by every man worthy of the name of man. It is reported of the heroic King Robert Bruce that he once, in his Irish campaign, risked a battle of great odds rather than leave behind on his march a poor sutler woman taken in maternity-labour. That was in truth a nobler deed than when he cleft to the chin the skull of "the fierce De Boune," in lace of both hosts on the field of Bannockburn. But to arrest for a single moment the business of Parlia- ment in order to felicitate a lusty young woman, nurtured in the very lap of luxury, and aided by every resource of obstetric science, because she had succeeded ui imposing a fresh burden on the bowed shoulders of the toilers, could never have even suggested itself except to a Legislature of born flunkeys, hypocrites and impostors. Is it not true — ^^ Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born" ? Why then all this wretched fuss and bustle about Baby Wettin and his mother ? Royalty is merely a trade, the most harmful of trades, and the child, if he grow up, can never hope to be other than an encumbrance and a curse to the THE ROYAL CHRISTENING *' FUNCTION." I59 nation that is saddled with him and his belongings. They are all alike. " There are no good Injuns, but dead Injuns," say the pioneers of the Far West. So grimly said Horace Walpole of Kings, and he knew the tribe well : "7 a)n fond enough of Kings as soon as they have a canopy of stone over them.''' O, thou that sea-walls sever From lands unwalled by seas ; Wilt thou endure for ever, O Milton's England, these ? Thou that wast his Republic, Wilt thou clasp their knees ? Those Royalties rust-eaten, Those worm-corroded lies, That keep thy head storm-beaten. And sunlike strength of eyes From the open air and Heaven Of intercepted skies. XXV. THE FIRST DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. I'd rather be the life o' ane than be the death o' twenty. — Burns. Not all that heralds rake from coffined clay, Nor floried prose, nor honied lies of rhyme Can blazon evil deeds or consecrate a crime. Byron. HE " Life of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough," by " our only general," Viscount Wolseley, has evidently been a very big, and doubtless congenial job, in the execution of which a good deal of self- revelation by the author is not the least interesting feature. How far the writer is given to "personal adver- tisement," as alleged by his detractors, I know not ; but it is undoubted that he has studied the art of war with a professional thoroughness very rare at any time in the British Army, and he and other officers like him have good reason to complain of the " German Royalties" that now, as in Marlborough's days, presumptuously stand between them and the higher and highest commands in the military service of the country. " A hit, a hit, a palpable hit " is the following, and the Cambridges, Connaughts, Saxe- i6o THE FIRST DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. l6l Weimars, and their whole tribe ought to be made to feel it :— Many of these right gallant princes mistook, as their descend- ants still at times mistake, the theatrical properties and the "stage business" of an army for real warfare. Their high- nesses of Waldeck and Vaudemont, of Nassau Saarbruck and Nassau Eriesland, of Wurtemberg and Pumpernickel, all good fighting soldiers, believed that they were endowed with the genius of command because they were princes. How must sorrow and amusement in turn have possessed Marlborough, when compelled to listen with respectful gravity, while their Serenities laid down the law to him upon strategy and tactics ! What gall and wormwood it must have been to a soldier of his stamp to find himself serving as a subordinate to a " wooden- headed " courtier like Bentinck ! Truly ; but of John Churchill, as a master-butcher of his fellow-men, I have no desire to say aught. It is allowed, on all hands, that he was an exceptional expert at his bloody trade, and that is enough for my purpose. But as a choice specimen of " Our Old Nobility," whom Englishmen proverbially " love," he is worth a little study. John was born at Axminster, 1650, the son of a ^' gentleman of England " of no particular estate. Like General Monk, Duke of Albemarle, the infamous betrayer of the English Commonwealth, he had many tough fights with the vagaries of English spelling, and generally got unhorsed, but he could speak English gracefully and to purpose. Nay, he could even make himself intelligible in French when extremity arose. In person he was so well-favoured that he was known amongst his intimates as " Hand- some Jack," but it was not his own beauty, but his sister Arabella's ugliness that first put the ball at his foot. James, Duke of York, afterwards James II., had an unaccountable taste for ugly mistresses, and one day, in the Park, Arabella forcibly contrived to attract his Royal Highness's attention to her lissom nether limbs, by pretending to tumble off her horse. l62 THE FIRST DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH. She was speedily added to the York harem, and the fortunes of the Churchills at once began to look up. " The necessities of the Churchills," says Macaulay, " were pressing ; their loyalty was ardent, and their only feeling about Arabella's seduction, seems to have been joyful surprise that so plain a girl should have attained such high preferment." Handsome Jack's second piece of good luck was on a par with the first. The infamous Baibara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, mistress of Charles II., conceived a violent passion for him, notwith- standing the fact that he ever " loved money better than women or fame." Says Macaulay : — " He was thrifty in his very vices, and levied ample contribu- tions on ladies enriched by the spoils of more liberal lovers. (Barbara had ;^i4,ooo a year from the King.) He was, during a short time, the object of the violent but fickle fondness of the Duchess of Cleveland. On one occasion he was caught with her by the King, and was forced to leap out of the window. She rewarded this hazardous feat of gallantry with a present of ;^5,ooo. With this sum the prudent young man (he was twenty- four) instantly bought an annuity of ;^500 a year well secured on landed property." Nor is that the worst, if Pope is to be believed : — The gallant, too, to whom she paid it down, Lived to refuse his mistress half-a-crown ! Starting as a penniless ensign, Churchill found himself at forty a Major-General and a Peer both of England and Scotland, and when James II. came to the throne, so complete was his trust in Arabella's brother that he made him Lieutenant-General of the kingdom. "Faithful and Unfortunate" is the Churchill motto ; but, if James had been wise, he would have read it — Faithless and Fortunate. The very day before the night he deserted to William of Orange, taking with him as many of his troops as he safely could, the Lieutenant-General of the kmgdom drew his sword in a Council of War, and solemnly announced that he meant to shed the last drop of his THE FIRST DUKL Ul' MARLBOROLGH. 163 blood in defence of his royal master. Regarding his contemplated desertion of James he at the same time piously svrote to William : " I think it is what I owe to God and my country " ! On one occasion Marshal Schomberg told the traitor to his face that " he was the first lieutenant- general he had ever heard of that had deserted his own colours. Churchill liad the effrontery to excuse himself by an appeal to "the inviolable dictates of his conscience and a necessary concern for his religion." And this plea Wolseley, oddly enough, seems to admit as constituting a higher law than that of military honour — than the sacyamenUim rnilitare ; but we shall presently see to what the scoundrel's religion and patriotism really amounted. For his serviceable treason William III. made Churchill an Earl — Earl of Marlborough — but was under no misapprehension regarding the villain's true character. He " was a vile man," said the Dutchman, "and he hated him, for though he could profit of treason, he could not bear the traitor." He was right. The traitor was speedily deep in intrigues with his old Royal Master in France, the exiled James, against William. As preliminary to the tyrant's restoration Churchill secretly obtained a written pardon from him, in exchange for which he undertook to betray his country's most vital military councils. It was determmed to send a secret ex- pedition under General Talmash to c'estroy Brest. Churchill accordingly wrote to James: — " It came to my knowledge what 1 uow send you that the bomb vessels and the twelv^i regiments which are now en- camped at i-ortsmouth, together with two marine regiments, are to be commanded by Talmash, and designed to burn the harbour at Brest, and to destroy the men-of-war there. This would be a great advantage to England, but no consideration can, or ever shall, hinder me from letting you know what I think may be for your service, so that you may make what use you please of this intelligence." 164 THE FIRST DURE OF MARLBOROUGH. Tlie use made of the intelligence was briefly this : The would-be surprisers were the surprised. Eight hundred British soldiers fell in a death-trap, and the man who sent them to the shambles, like Judas, had his reward as usual in the " money which he loved better than women or fame." When the lethargic and gluttonous Queen Anne came to the throne, Marlborough and his rapacious termagant spouse, Sarali Jennings, were the defacto rulers of Britain. They monopolised offices worth ;^46,ooo per annum ; but that was found insufficient and so the great Duke took to wholesale embezzle- ment. After due report by the Commissioners of Public Accounts the House of Commons resolved : 1, That the taking the several sums of money annually by the Duke of Marlborough from the contractors for furnishing the bread and bread waggons for the Army in the Low Countries was unwarrantable and illegal. 2. That the before-mentioned two sums of ;^282, 366, gs. jd. and ;^ 1 77 695 175. deducted from the troops in her Majesty's pay are public moneys, and ought to be accounted for. Altogether, the Duke's hioivn defalcations were over ;^400,ooo, and his brave companion-in-arms, Prince Eugene, had the mortification to hear men shout after the victor of Blenheim in Hyde-park, "Stop thief! Stop thief!" but the imperturbable Duke stuck to his plunder like a limpet, and the defrauded nation recovered never a penny ! Instead of that there was conferred on him Blenheim-park and a " perpetual pension ' of ^"4,000 a year, which the late notorious Duke was permitted to " com- mute," at twenty-six and a-half years' purchase, for ;^i 07,000 ! How faithful, and how unfortunate. Eventually Queen Anne suspected her great General of treason, and consulted the sagacious Lord Somers, who truthfully informed her that — Marlborough was the worst man that God Almighty ever made; that his ambition was boundless; and his avarice in- siatable ; and that he had neither honour nor conscience to THE FIRST DUKE OF MARLBORCV.c;H. 1 05 restrain him from any wicked attempt even against her person as well as against the country. In a concluding paragraph of strange moral obliquity Lord Wolseley, who can generally handle his pen as dexterously as his sword, tells us how John Churchill " expiated " his surely not inconsider- able " faults : " — But surely John Churchill's faults mav be deemed as mor® than expiated when we remeini:)er that he, formerly so hand- some, so gallant, so dominant, was, in bis helpless old age, shown for money by his own ser^'ants to \'isitors at Blenheim Palace, an object of vulgar ctiriosity to sightseers in the lonely corridors of the vast pile built to commemorate liis glory. Sic transit gloria viundi. On the tomb of John Churchill might well have been inscribed that most awful of epitaphs : "And the Rich Man Died and was Buried.' XXVI. THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. He comes, he comts with shaven crown, From off the storm-tossed sea, His garments piercing at the neck, With staff-Hke crook comes he ! Far in his house, at its east end, His cups ar.d patens lie ; His pr^ople answer to his voice. Amen ! Amen ! they cry. St. Fiech'sHvmn (Scholium). Itravelled its fair Provinces round. .'\nd in every one of the Five I found Alike m church, in palace and hall. Abundant apparel and food for all. Gold and silver I f(Mind and money : Plenty of wheat and plenty of honey ; I found God's people rich in pity, Pound many a feast and many a city. — King Alfred of Northumeria's Irish "Itinerary." (7th Century). ]UR Irish brethren have, this year ('95) been everywhere celebrating St. Patrick's Day with unusual animation, and they do well to keep the memory of their ilkistrious Apostle green. For his was a remarkable career, which it may be permissible here to trace with some degree of minuteness, inasmuch as it involves points, not a few, 166 THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. 167 that have puzzled even the learned, and led to the shedding of no end of controversial ink. In his " Confession," about the genuineness of which there need be no dispute, the Saint says of himself: — I, Patrick, a sinner, the meanest of the faithful, had for my father Calp'jrnius, a deacon, son of Potitus, a Presbyter, who was of the town of Bonavem Taberniae ; for he had a farm (villa) in the neighbourhood where I was made captive. I was then nearly sixteen years old. I was carried into Hibero, with many thousands of men, according to our deserts, because we had gone back from God, and had not kept His commandments, and were not obedient to the priests who used to warn us for our salvation. From this it will be noted that celibacy was net necessary to " salvation " on the part of clerics iu the Church which imparted the Christian Faith to St. Patrick ; but where it will be asked lay the mysterious " town of Bonavem Taberniae ? " Many wild guesses have been hazarded — Boulogne chief among them ; but there is every reason to believe that by the Taberniae in question was indicated the encampment at the western end of the Roman Wall on the Solway, where the Ninth Legion is known for long to have had its head-quarters, and 10,000 foot and 1,500 horse were usually stationed. St. Patrick's father, he tells us, was a Decurio or Roman Magistrate — "come of dacent people" — and there doubtless he would find sufficient scope for the exercise of his office, before the withdrawal of the Roman troops from Britain by order of the Emperor Honorius, a.d., 412. Where the Apostle of the Irish was born can hardly be said to be any longer a matter of con- troversy. His disciple Fiech (Fiech's Hymn) tells us it was at Nempthor and an almost cotit- mporary scholiast or commentator explains that Nemptiior is Alcluaid, the modern Dumbarton, for more than two hundred years the extreme outpost of Roman civilisa- 68 THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. tion in Caledonia. There is, moreover, it will generally be conceded — by Scotsmen, at least — strong a priori ground for believing that so creditable a specimen of humanity as St. Patrick must have been born in Scotland. Furthermore, in a fit of longing to revisit the home of his youth, the venerable man of God uses language which almost excludes the possibility of his being other than a irue-born Briton, in spite of all that Irish antiquarian ingenuity has done to give him a foreign parentage and a Roman mission. Whence also, though I should wish to leave them (the Irish)' and go into the Britains (in Britannias) though I should readily go as to my own country and parents, and not only so, but even as far as the Gauls, should visit my brethren that I might see the face of the saints of my Lord. By " the Britains " and " the Gauls " he, of course) meant the different provinces. Prima, Secunda, etc.» into which Rome divided her British and Gaulish conquests. Indeed, I think it may be fairly doubted if St. Patrick's knowledge of the world at all extended beyond the confines of Caledonia and Hibernia ; for his Latin — none of the best — was learned late in life, and his theology was not the theology of the Roman Pontiff and Curia by any means. The youthful Patrick was carried by his captors to Antrim, and there for six years he tended the flocks oi his master, Milcho, on Slemish Mountain. Then he contrived to escape from his sore bondage and to return to the scenes of his jocund boyhood, where his relatives received him with open arms and begged " that, after enduring so many tribulations, he should not depart anywhere." But that might not be. The " holy youth " had visions in the night which banished sleep from his eyes and roused him to Apostolic action. In the dead of the night, I saw a vision coming to me, as from THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. l6 Hibero, whose name was Victorious, bearing innumerable Epistles. And he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of it, which contained the words, " The voice of the Irish." And while I was repeating the beginning of the Epistle, I imagined that 1 heard in my mind the voice of those who were near the wood F< Icut, which is hard by the Western Sea, and this they cried: " We pray thee, O holy youth, to come and henceforth walk among us." And I was greatly pricked in my hear:, and could read no more, so I awoke Where did St. Patrick qualify for his great life work, the conversion of the Irish ? Doubtless in the famous monastery of Gandida Casa, the Whithern or White House, built by St. Ninian [circa 380 a. d.) where now stands the town of Whithorn in Wigton- shire. It is not easy to say when Christianity first reached the shores of far-off Britain, but that it had very early missionaries who did not take their creden- tials irom Rome is certain. In 209 A.D., TertuUian declares that Christ had subjects in Britain where Ca;sar had none, and he might have added, where the Bishop of Rome had none. Indeed St. Patrick, who began his Irish Apostolate circa 435 a.d., succeeded where an emissary of Pope Celcstine, St. Palladius, Archdeacon of Rome, had conspicuously failed, and much of the obscurity surroundmg the name of the Saint of Ne mphor is owing to the fact that the Ives of the two men have seemingly been purposely cimbined or confused in order to make a good Romaonout of a teachwi who had almost nothing in comm on with Romanism either administratively or doctrinally. St. Patrick had either never heard of the ironclad dogmas fornuiiated by the ^Ecumenic (meaning Imperial) Coimcils of Nicaea, 325 a.d., ; Sardica, 347 ; and Ephesus, 431, or he disregarded them without compunction. The eminently tolerant Church of Patrick and Columba knew nothing of the unholy passions that actuated the furious assembly of fanatics who at 170 THE APOSTLE OT THE IRISH. Nicaea tore to pieces creed after creed, and actually came to blows in their efforts to determine whether the Son was homooitsiait — i.e., of the same substance as the Father ; or homoiousian, of like substance. In his creed, or Confession of Faith, the founder of the Irish Church makes no mention of the resurrection of the body nor the descent into Hell. By the Son are all things created, and from Him proceeds the Holy Spirit that is infused into men. Between the Irish and Caledonian Churches the links of union were close and strong. If Erin owed Caledonia her Patrick, Caledonia owed Erin the hardly less commanding figure of Columba, who founded the Rome of the West in the far-famed Abbacy of lona, a.d. 563. This church differed from that on the Seven Hills in sundry respects. Its Cross was dissimilar in form. So was its tonsure. It kept a differently dated Easter, and its Sabbath was on the Jewish Saturday, not Sunday. Its Pri- mate was always a simple Presbyter or Elder, and never a Bishop. Bishops in the Church of SS. Patrick, Bridget, and Columba were very numerous and of small account. St. Patrick is re- ported to have consecrated as many as three hundred and fifty Episcopi Vagantes or Stroll- ing Bishops. They had no dioceses, and merely possessed a sort of spiritual degree. In the primitive Church of Ireland the monastic element dominated everything. It was not till far on in the twelfth century that the Christian Church in Ireland and Scotland was finally Romanized, the former by the English Pope Adrian IV. (Breakspeare) in con- spiracy with the English King Henry 11. ; the latter by St. Margaret, the English wife of Malcolm Canmore. Ireland enjoys the rare distinction of being the only country in Christendom bloodlessly converted to the Faith. St. Patrick's progress throughout Connaught, THE APOSTLE OF THE IRISH. I7I Ulster, Munster and Leinster was one long triumph, and even on " the Plain of Prostration," in Leitrim the Sacred Monolith of Pagan worship was over- throwr. without a protest. And the reason was this — St. Patrick was altogether an exceptionally wise and enlightened ecclesiastic, conserving everything that was worth conserving, and innovating only in matters essential. He converted the heathen holi- days into Church festivals, and with eight others he helped to purge and codify (438 — 441 a.d. the famous body of " Brehon Laws " or Senchus Mor, in the preface to which it is stated : How the judgment of true Nature, which the Holy Ghost had spoken through the mouths of the Brehons and just poets of the men of Erin, from the first occupation of the island down to the recepiion of the faith (440), were all exhibited by Dubhtach (Chief Brehon) to Patrick. What did not clash with the Word of God in the Written Law and in the New Testament, and with the consciences of the believers, was confirmed in the Law of the Brehons by Patrick, and by the Ecclesiastics and Chieftains of Erin. For the Law of Nature had been quite right, except the Faith and its obligations and the harmony of the Church and the People." The names of the Codihers have happily been embalmed : — Laeghaire, Core, Dairi the Hardy, Patric, Bennen, Cairnech the Just, Rossa, Dubhtach, Ferghus with Science : These were the Nine Pillars of the Senchus Mor. St. Patrick, otherwise Succat, is believed to have entered on his great mission in his forty-fifth year, and he lived to witness its completion. Then gave he His body to that pleasant country's earth And his pure soul unto his Captain Christ[ Under whose colours he has fought so long. He was indeed a rare Paladin of the Cross, and though I believe it is quite a delusion to suppose that he was a Roman Catholic, yet neither was he a Protestant. Peradventure he was something better than either — a Christian. Crown Sfo., cloth, 3$. 64. THE BOOK OF ERIN OR THE STORY OF IRELAND TOLD TO THE NEW DEMOCRACY. By J. MORRISON DAVIDSON, BAKRISTEK-AT-LAW. PRESS OPINIONS " Mr. Davidson is almost an unique writer of history. He masses up his freat literary indictment of tyranny to perfectly appalling dimensions. A.S for the book itself, it is, on che whole, we think, the best short history of the Irish tragedy that we have ever read. No more remarkable collec- tion of authorities, and no wiser or more judicious selection from them has ever appeared in print and only so vigorous and picturesque a writer Jis Mr. Davidson could have given life and movement to such a prodigious rattling of the dry bones of history. In a book of nearly 300 pages, it is Bot too much to say that there is not a dull or an uninstructive paragraph, and that the work fulfils the double purpose of a kind of Democrat's Companion to Irish History and of a lively epigrammatic sketch." — The Star. " In this compendious History of Ireland, Mr. Davidson's heart has given his pen full scope. The book, carefully compiled and admirably edited, is brimful of facts and will prove a valuable adjunct to the library of any student interested in the affairs of the sister kingdom. Mr. Davidson is a Scotsman, but a more concise and eloquent plea for Home Rule has n«yer been placed before the British nation even by Ireland's own sons. His exposition of the latter phases of the revolutionary raovemer^i is mas- terly to a degree " We experience a certain relief in coming to Mr. Morrison Davidson's Book of Erin.' Mr. Bryce and Mr. Shaw Lefevre pretend to be impartial and are not ; there is none ol this nonsense about Mr Davidson. It is a •ad thing, however, that we cannot quite recommend him to Gladslonians. ' The parliamentary death-bed repentance of Mr. Gladstone' is an awful £hrase which we meet on the threshold of his book. At the o;her end [r. Morrison Davidson blasphemes worse still. It is dreadful ; and we, a foreign and unfriendly folk, sympathise with the sufferings of the true Cladstonian as he reads Mr. I^avidson. He thinks the cowardly ferocity of '98 'heroic' He thinks that 'landlords and usurers are worse than highwaymen.' This is the kind of man that we like. There is no mistake about him," — Sahtrdny Rov.mi. Price 6d., cloth, la. 6d. THE BOOK OF LORDS. J. MORRISON DAVIDSON, BARRISTEK-AT-I.AW. pkilss opinions. '•The little book makes out its case. It should be circulated bj tb« hundred thousand throughout the United Kingdom to stir the people to a stern determination to put an end to an unmitigated curse.' — Northamp shire Guardian '• The ' New Book of Kings * and the ' Book of Lords.' Oh I that the children in the schools of Great Britain and Ireland could ba favoured with copies of each of these valuable books. What an awakening would soon arise ! Two millions of school children in England, "Wales and Scotland ; half a million of children attending regularly in Ireland. Could we plant copies of Davidson's two book» in each cottage home of these children — when we shall do that, then farewell to kings, lords, ladies, i^entry and idle thieves in this part of the earth." — TRANb--ATLANTic in the Irish World. "I have just been reading Mr. Morrison Davidson's two writings, the 'New Book of Kings' and the 'Book of Lords.' I close them both with a shudder. They contain stern and awful truths. With pitiless logic, with a grandly-simple eloquence, with a straightforward earnestness he tells his tale. From DeFoe to Junius and from Juniustill now Britain has had no such able pamphleteer " — Greenock Herald. Crown ai/o., 138 pp.. Prices— paper, 6d., cloth, is. bii. THE NEW BOOK OF KINGS. J. MORRISON DAVIDSON. BARRISTKK-AT-LAW. PRESS OPINIONS. " There are many valuable truths in the ' New Book of Kings ' justly and forcibly expressed. The remarks on the existing monarchy should be laid to heart by all thoughtful and candid readers." — Algernon C. Swinburne. ' It really ought to be circulated as a tract by hundreds of thousands. If this were done, it would have a tremendous political effect, and would quickly and greatly strengthen the hands of the Radical section of the Liberal party." — Flenry George. " I doubt whether Mr. George's ' Progress and Poverty ' has made a deeper impression than the ' New Book of Kings ' by Mr. Morrison Davidson, a well-known controversialist and original thinker." — London, Cor. Brooklyn Ea^le. " If Mr. Davidson had not fortified all his assertions by unquestionable historical authority, one would be very much inclined to set down his book as the nightmare of a man with a very powerful and a very morbid imagination." — T. P. O'Connor, in The Freeman's Journal. " Mr. Davidson handles the Kings and Queens as a skilful surgeoo would describe a skeleton to a class of students. There is an immeni* mischief-making power in this little paper-covered publication."—. Philadelphia Tinns. Tht Bellamy Edition, No. 3, price is cloth, m. THE "OLD ORDER AND THE NEW." FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COLLECTIVISM. Sdvagedom, Slavedom, Serfdom, Wagedom, Freedom. J. Morrison'' DAVIDSON. BARRISTER-AT-LAW. PRESS OPINIONS. "1 hope, within the next few days, to examine it with care." — W. E. Gladstone. •' The book I shall read with great interest. Next toFaith no subject is nearer to my heart than the lot and state of the People." — Henry E. Cari. Manning. " I have just finished reading ' The Old Order and the New ' with great interest and have no doubt it will help to open people's eyes to the fundamental errors of our present social system." — Alfred Russell Wallace. "You will do a capital service to our movement by the ' Old Order and the New.' There is so much in it. I know no popular history of Socialism to compare with it." — Rev . John Glasse, Greyfriars, (PMinburgh.) " I had already skimmed a little here and there and tasted the strong flavour of it. Be sure I will read it with delight and that I will speak of it whenever I have the chance." — Rev. Alex. Webster (Kilmarnock.) "The book is interesting, instructive and suggestive as I expected that H would be. It has pleased and puzzled me."— Si> Wilfrid Lawson. " If Mr. Morrison Davidson possessed the power of One who lived nearly two thousand years before him, he would assuredly clear the Stock Exchange of usurers, and of all profitmongers who live upon what they can squeeze out of the people." — Reynolds' Newspaper. " This little book should be in the hands of every one who wants to ge a clear grasp of the great movement of our time. Mr. Morrison Davidson is one of the very few Democratic journalists who have refused to sell their talents, and he should be rewarded by the regard of all men who have not fallen tcj low to respect manliness of character." — Labour Elector. " The sketch of the history of labour is very interesting. The epitome of the Socialist position is terse and forcible ; the short memoirs of emi- nent Socialists are vivid and good, and the ideal Socialist Republic, con- structed in the last two chapters is a fairly definiie object for sympathy or criticism." — Manchester Guardian. " The case for Socialism is put with great verve. Mr. Davidson ran- sacks the most brilliant writers of all time for passages which will give additional point to his own vigorously put contentions and his selections are alwH/s admirable. 'The Old Order and the New' is one of the liveliest books that can be read." — Dundee Advertiser. " Workmanlike thoroughness in dealing with his theme, together with skill and eloquence in its presentation, make this one of the best and most useful books that have yet appeared in English." — The Commonweal. " With the hereditary instinct of the Covenanter he (the author) curses even more vigorously than Hebrew prophets can curse the wretched system of capitalism. The volume is well worthy of perusal by our frUnds. It is clearly printed and well worth a shilling." — Justice. Billamy Librttry, No. 6, frice One Shilling SCOTIA REDIVIVA. HOME RULE FOR SCOTLAND. WITH LIVES OF SIR WILLIAM WALLACE, GEORGE BUCHANAN', FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, and THOMAS SPENCE, BV J. MORRISON DAVIDSON. BARRISTKR-AT-LAW. PRESS OPINIONS. " In this little brochure (Scotia Rediviva), Mr. Morrison Davidson makes a characteristically vigorous and outspoken assault on the present legisla- tive relations between Scotland and England. Mr. Davidson contends for a Federal in place of an Incorporating Union. . . Spiritedly written fcnd full of patriotic fervour." — North British Daily Mail. " Mr. Davidson is a Democratic, hard-hitting, cultivated and fearless jonrnalist. He here tries to make vividly clear the ills Scotland has •uffered in her struggle for independence." — Literary World. " Mr. Morrison Davidson, who is not unknown in the North of England, has just issued another of those trenchant manuals (Scotia Rediviva), which have done so much to promote democratic principles amongst the artiians of the metropolis." — Newcastle Chronicle. " A new book by Morrison Davidson, is sure to meet with a wide and warm welcome. His latest work is Scotia Rediviva which is an eloquent plea for Plome Rule for Scotland, with biographical sketches of four typical Scotsmen; to wit. Sir William Wallace, George Buchanan, Fletcher of Saltonn and Thomas Spence, the Father of latter-day Land Restorationists. — Northern Ensign. THE ''GRAND OLD MAN OF FLEET STREET." NOTES BY AUTOLYCUS Editor of the Workman's Times. I am going to devote the major part of my space this week to a brief biography of my friend John Morrison Davidson, who was one of the first to take me iu hand when I came np to London just a year ago, a raw country lad. I met him at the United Democratic Club in the old cellar in Chancery-lane before I had been in London a week, and was much •tnick by his picturesque appearance— he wore a Scotch cap in those days — and was proud to make his acquaintance, and I hope to secure his •steem. He has been kind enough to give me a few notes of his career, which I think will be found interesting reading. Anyhow, lifre they •re: — JOHN MORRISON DAVIDSON was born in a roadside house in the parish of Old Deer. Aberdeenshire, 50 years ago. He was sickly as a child and unable to walk to school, a distance of three miles, till his ninth year, when his education began. Luckily the school was an excellent one, and he made very rapid progress. At 14 years of age he became absistant master. In his i6th year he went to the University of Aberdeen, Ijaving obtained a scholarship (" bursary ") by public competition. He studied little or none there, and soon came into collision with two of the leading pro- fessors, whom he publicly defied. The place generally got too " hot " for Morrison, and he made an abortive attempt to join the Polish insurrec- tion of 1863. About the same time he married Rose Fowlie, an old schoolmate — the devoted mother of his eleven children — and the very young couple betook themselves to Glasgow. There Davidson taught in several schools with indifferent success. Aft;.r a time he was appointed master of the Burgh School of North Berwick — the Brighton of Edinburgh. Thence he went to Edinburgh as one of the Masters of the Circus Place School, then a very famous school indeed. But his heart was nevar in teaching, and he resolved to qualify for the Scottish Bar. He was a very distinguished law student, and obtained a complete mastery of legal principles under such famous professors at Cosmo Innes, Lorimer, and Muirhead. But Davidson all the while had led a double sort of life He was a bom journalist and politician. At 14 years of age he was a confirmed Re- publican and Democrat, and fairly astonished his accomplished elder Drother, Professor Thomas Davidson (of New York, then Rector of the Old Aberdeen Grammar School), by the "altra" character of his self- acquired views. " Morrison's " first public speech was characteristic. It was delivered in the Aberdeen University Debating Society in i860, when he contended that Milton must be regarded as a greater poet than Shakespeare, inas- much as the one was a Republican and the other a benighted Monarchist. His next utterance was at the opening of the terrible drama of the American civil war. when he led in debate for the North, against a future aenior wrangler, and scored a majority of five, an achievement of which he is to-day inordinately proud. At the same period he began to " write for the newspapers," his first contributions appearing as "leaders" in the Ptterhtad Stntintl. In Glasgow, in North Berwick, and in Edinburgh his pen was never allowed long to rust, but the directness of his style was most alarming to " able editors." To secure insertion of his ideas be early acquired the knack of apt quotation from acknowledged authorities, and thus often succeeded where he would otherwise have found a closed door. This was curiously illustrated in the case of the Edinburgh Datty Rivi$w (the organ of the "unco" guid " Free Kirk of Scotland) to which Davidson was for years regularly attached, first as leader writer, and latterly ai London editor. As in politics so in religion. Brought up a Preabyteriao ' Morrison " at a very early age became a Christian of the school of Ariu* and has never altered his opinions. Yet the '• unco guid " could and did trust him, and had no cause to regret their confidence. He has occa- sionally occupied Unitarian pulpits. In Edinburgh Davidson founded and wai boo. secretary for several 177 years of the Advanced Liberal Association, which t.'^cted much good in municipal as in Parliamentary politics. The fir.st School Board election unfortunately shattered it, Davidson seceding with a small minority who were opposed to all religious teaching in the public schooh. The seceders were unjustly stigmatised as " Secularists," but Lxjrd Rosebery cour- ageously accepted the post of president, and Davidson as hon. sec, and a ttif! but unavailing fight ensued. Two working class organs, the Scottish Re/oirner and the Craftsynan, both BOW extinct, bore ample evidence of " Morrison's " zeal in "the cause." In 1870 the Edinburgh Republican Club was formed. It comprised the choicest spirits in the ranks of Labour, and Davidson became its corresponding secretary. Hence the Scotsman's favourite term of oppro- brium, " Citizen Davidson." On coming to London Davidson entered at the Middle Temple, and was called to the English Bar in 1877, passing with credit all the examina- tions as the result of six week's study, during which period he worked regularly 18 hours per day. The strain, he admits, *' was terrible," and could not be repeated with impunity. While acting as London editor of the Edinburgh Daily Review " Morrison" became attached to the staffs of the Weekly Despatch and the Examiner, in both of which he did a great deal of the pioneer work of the London Municipal Reform League of the Lambeth branch, of which he was the first chairman. Latterly he became London correspondent of the Bradford Observer, gallery correspondent of the Leeds Mercury, and contributed to the Echo, in its Radical days, many leaders and an exceedingly popular series of Parliamentary sketches, entitled " Senators in Harness." He also wrote a daily letter for a syndicate of provincial evening papers. In the fall of 1880 Davidson represented in the Far West of America a syndicate of eight papers, including among others the N^uras//^ Chronicle, the Liverpool Mercury, South Wales Daily News, the Dundee Advertiser, and the Aberdeen Free Press. He investigated the condition of "ranching" on the Great Plains and of mining in the Rocky Mountains, and his " letters from the Far West " attracted much attention from their practical cha- racter and vigorous setting. In Boston, Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, and other cities, Davidson was received with the utmost consideration by the leading statesmen and literary men of the Republic, was honourably entertained at the White House by President Hayes, and declares that if he were not a Scotsman he would elect to be an American citizen. On his return to England he was made London correspondent of the Boston Advertiser which reflected the high culture of Harvard University. At the general election of 1880 Davidson accompanied the late lamented Ashton Dilke to Newcastle as his political adviser, and materially con tributed to his return. He took a leading part in the agitation that resulted in the defeat of the attempt to desecrate Westminster Abbey by placing in it a statue to the Prince Imperial, and was appointed, along with Karl Blind and William Morris, to draw up a declaration on the subject to the French Government and people. Along with Mr. Seymour Keay, Sam Storey, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and the late Henry Richard, he started the agitation against the Egyptian War, visiting Birmingham, Edinburgh, and other towns, to arouse public feeling against it. He corrected the proof sheets of Keay's famous "Spoiling the Egyptians." and was his " agent in advance " in the Moray and Nairn election. He belped to get up the first anti-coercion of Ireland meeting in Hyde Park, and presided on one of the platforms, ^where be introduced Justin McCarthy, father and sod, to an immense crowd. He was hon. secretary of the '• People's League for the Abolition of the House of Lords," and wrote for it in Rtynoldi' newspaper the "Book of Lords' " (Resves, Fleet Street), which is the text book on the institution. To that great organ of democracy he likewise contributed " The New Book of Kings." " The Book of Erin." " Scotia Rediviva," etc., and for several years the grim front page leader was his. To the Weekly Dispatch he contributed " Eminent Radicals in Parlisk- ment." 'Eminent Radicals out of Parliament," "Apostles of Democracy," etc., and in the Week'y Ttmes and Echo, his most successful volumes " The Old Order and the New," "The Gospel of the Poor." and " The Villagers' Magna Charta," the last being an exceedingly racy and useful exposition of the Pari^ Councils Act, 1S94, appeaped. He has also published " Politics for the People," first series, and hopes to complete before long "The Annals of Toil," which a severe illness arrested, to the regret of so many, when half finished in the pages of Ths Labour World. It will deal exhaustively with the History of Toil in tho Roman Empire and in Britain. In 1885 Davidson contested the burgh of Greenock on five minutes' notice at the instance of "The Scottish Land Restoration League," and though, of course, defeated, made a very favourable impression. A youth from Glasgow and a law student from the Temple composed his com- mittee! In six days, however, Davidson managed to deliver nine ex- haustive speeches, and to bring out an unique newspaper, The Greenock Fieiy Cioss. He stood in the Republican, Home Rule (Federal), and Collectivist interest, and if he had had six weeks instead of six days to " educate " the electors, it is not improbable that he might have been returned in spite of the defection oi the large Irish vote, which then went Tory, But Davidson is by nature a pioneer, and has no ambition to figure in Parliament, and thinks such men as he can at least do as much good work outside as in. Though comparatively yoang, he is the doytn of th« Democratic press of Britain, and that ought to be distinction enough for anyone in these days of social upheaval, when even "semi-regal" Har- court says, " We are all Socialists now." For about a year he edited the Democrat, the recognised organ of Land Restoration, and in its pages and those of Reynolds' he castigated Mr. Gladstone's Irish Home Rule and Land Bills with merciless severity. He was the fijst advocate of " Home Rule all round" (Federalism), and the first to fall foul of Henry George's defence of interest or usury. He is a foe of partizanship and naively defines his own position as that of an " Opportunist-Liberal-Republican-Communist- Anarchist Christian," It will be seen that Davidson has crowded a great deal of work into his life so far as it has gone. He is by no means spent yet, and I look for- ward to many years of pleasant intercourse with the Grand Old Man of Fleet-street (From the Daily Chiunicle). *' THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW " and "THE GOSPEL OF THE POOR." BY MORRISON DAVIDSON- Crown Svo, each One Shilling, cloth, lis. Writing to Mr. Morrison Davidson, under date Aug. 23rd, 1894, Count Leo Tolstoy says: — Dear Sik, — I got your two books, and thank you heartily for them. It is the greatest joy of my life to know persons such as you, and to see that the ideas which I live for are likewise the mainspring of life unto others, and are expressed in such heaiitiful and vigorous style as I had occasion to notice in your two bfioks. Both your books are remarkably good, and I cannot give the preference to either of them In " The Okl Order and the New " the Christian truth serves to corroborate the truth of the Socialistic tendencies; whereas in "The Gospel of the Poor" it is the Socialistic, Communistic, and Anar- chistic theories that serve to corroborate the Christian truth, which occupies the most prominent part. Though, while there is a censorship in Russia, the publishing of these books is out of the question, yet I shall get some of my friends to trans- late them, and will then spread them. The enemies of the Kingdom of God have but one means left them : it is to hush up the truth and make believe they neither hear nor comprehend it — the fact of which was so strikingly acknowledged by the French when they prohibited to publish the processes (pleadings) of the .Anarchists. It follows then the chief struggle which lies before a labourer of the Kingdom of God is to frustrate this plot of non-believing and non-hearing of what is seen and heard ot all. I therefore wish you, as a strong and active labourer, the greatest amount of spiritual energy and entire success in it. Yours truly. LEO TOLSTOY. Price Sixpence, cloth, One Shilling, THE VILLAGERS' MAGNA CHARTA. BY MORRISON DAVIDSON- " Mr. Morrison Davidson's little book is easy to review, for all criticism may be tersely e.\presst;d in the one word — excellent. But to this may be added the equally terse advice — get it. Very often we are asked by our readers for advice as to the workmg of the Parish Councils Act In future we hope all our readers and all the newly enfranchised ' Sons of the Soil ' will provide themselves with copies of this masterly exposition by Mr. Morrison Davidson." — Robert Blatchford (" Nunquam") in Clarion. " As the product of a man who is at once a skilled lawyer, an agitator, and a practical politician, the book is unique, and should at once find its way into e\ery village in the Kingdom." — Morning Leadtr. "The number of explanatory guides to the new Parish Councils Act is legion, ranging from brief summaries at twopence to elaborate volumes at 7s. 6d. We are disposed to think that the most lucid and useful of the whole lot is this vigorous little treatise, price sixpence, by Mr. Morrison Davidson." — The Manchester City News. "Altogether, it is the mon Hvely and the most interesting expositijn of in Act of Parliament that I have ever read." — London Correspondent Brad- ford Observer. " The Parson, the Lawyer, and the Landlord, whom the writer designates an ' Unholy Trinity,' come in for an unpleasant quarter-of-an-hour at the hands of this able social reformer. The Book should be read by every villager." — Bedford City Record. " This Sixpenny guide to the Parish Councils Act has been written by a lawyer for the people. The lawyer is that redoubtable democrat and able journalist, Mr. Morrison Davidson, who is an advocate as well as an expositor. The booklet is written in his trenchant style and as campaign literature for aggressive reformers in the country cannot be excelled." — London. " Mr. Morrison Davidson extols the Parish Meeting, which every elector can attend, at the expense of the Parish Council, where he may have 'only the five-hundredth part of a talker.' He proposes to extend the system of personal cognisance until the afifairs of District, County and Nation have all been subjected to ' the Initiattv* of the smallest practicable minority of the people, and the obligatory Referendum of the whole adult population within the area affected.' Think of a Radical denouncing the Representative System ! That is what Mr. Davidson dois,"~ London Cor. Aberdeen Free Press. " Mr. Morrison Davidson has provided the Villager with a popular diiiest of the Parish Councils Act, interspersed with those pungent and biting phrases and happy quotations which are characteristic of his style. His excellent booklet should be widely distributed all over the villages of England." — The Daily Chronicle. Dfllumv Librarv EUititn, No. 11, price Is., cloth, Si. POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE. BY MORRISON DAVIDSON. (i-IRST SERIES.) 'In this exposition of ultra-Democratic and Socialistic views, Mr. Morrison Davidson displays a fine impartiality. He has as lofty a con- tempt for the ' Liberals ' as for the ' Tories ' and indicates both to his ,, Fellow-Democrats ' as 'equally your enemies wherx in office.' Mr. Morrison Davidson is ' thorough.' He has the courage of his convictions and expresses himself with force and lucidity." — Glasgow Herald. " Speakers and debaters will find much in this volume which cannot fail to be of much use to them. Above all the book is sound, and the con- scientious Social-Democrat may leave it about the house without fear." — Justice. ,,When a presumably rational being can be found to stigmatise as the Dangerous Classes ' of Society ' I^rinces, Peers, Parsons, Publicans and Landlords,' it would seem that folly could no further go. The most damaging criticism that could be applied to his work would be to quote it inextenso : and this, out of regard for his feelings we refrain from doing." — The Colonies and India. " Mr. Morrison Davidson's ' Politics for the People' (First Series) will be found pleasanter read in'.,' for Conservatives than their opponents. But Mr. Davidson is a comj re i' nsive politician and even sensitive Liberals may tmd points of sympathy and agreement in this collection. He is animated by a fulness of faith and hope which puts sceptisra on his reader's part to shame." — The British Weekly. NEW BOOK by Morrison Davidson. Price One Shilling-. {Chtk, 2s.) The Annals of Toil. THE LOT OF THE ANCIENT LABOURER. Laborare est orare, CELTIC BRITAIN. MEDIEVAL CLASSES AND MASSES. BY J. MORRISON DAVIDSON, Barrister- at-Law, Of the Middle Temple. Author of " Politics for the People," " Tiie Old Order and the New," " The New Book of Kings, ' " The Boolv of Lords," " The Book of Erin," "Scotia Redevivia," " Villager's Magna Charta," " Gospel of the Poor," etc. IContron: WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET STREET, E.G. Where may be had Cataloi;ue of Books and Pamphleti on Social Questions Over 200 pages, post 8vo., bevelled cloth, 0(6 SHELLEY : Poet and Pioneer, A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, BY HENRY S. SALT. With Portrait of Shelley, arid Fine Etched View of Shelley't House at Marloiu. The Times says :— T s a book that can be read with enjoyment * * He is anxious to show that Shelley ■*■ was the inspired prophet who pointed to a complete emancipation of the individnal and to a ' larger and saner morality ' There is no doubt some truth in this view * • contains a good deal of sympathetic and vivacious criticism, and an amusing sketch of the change of opinion with regard to Shelley. — The Times, April i6, 1896. London : WILLIAM REEVES, 185, Fleet Street, E.G. Crown %vo, sewed, ONE SHILLING, lllC \J1111U . Development A Manual enabling Mothers to Initiate their Daughters, gradually and modestly into all the Mysteries of Life. BY Dora Langlois, &n Eminent Barrister, to whom the work was submitted before its publication, aayi :— " My verdict is favourable, both from a legal and moral point of view." Tlie Opinion of a Popular Author :- " It supplifsa long felt waut : dealing as it does with a subject (which could only be successfully handled by a woman possessed of delicacy of feeling, courage, and sound common sense." Ail Parenta interested in the future welfare of their daughters should Order this work at onca. LONDON : WILLIAM REEVES, 185, FLEET STREET ,E.C. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below FEB 7 195^ nEC10l975 REtrotMC MAY? 1981 APR 2 1934 Form L-9-15w-7,'35 UNIVERSITY of CALIFOKNIi AT LOS ANGELES T ^1158 00934 394 AA 001 182 778 9 \ \; JN' 'I 11 "