The Iron Heel, Jack London [free children's online books TXT] 📗

“Yes, they’re quarrelling over the division of the earnings of the street railways.”

Bishop Morehouse became excited.

“It is wrong!” he cried. “It is so shortsighted on the part of the workingmen. How can they hope to keep our sympathy⁠—”

“When we are compelled to walk,” Ernest said slyly.

But Bishop Morehouse ignored him and went on:

“Their outlook is too narrow. Men should be men, not brutes. There will be violence and murder now, and sorrowing widows and orphans. Capital and labor should be friends. They should work hand in hand and to their mutual benefit.”

“Ah, now you are up in the air again,” Ernest remarked dryly. “Come back to earth. Remember, we agreed that the average man is selfish.”

“But he ought not to be!” the Bishop cried.

“And there I agree with you,” was Ernest’s rejoinder. “He ought not to be selfish, but he will continue to be selfish as long as he lives in a social system that is based on pig-ethics.”

The Bishop was aghast, and my father chuckled.

“Yes, pig-ethics,” Ernest went on remorselessly. “That is the meaning of the capitalist system. And that is what your church is standing for, what you are preaching for every time you get up in the pulpit. Pig-ethics! There is no other name for it.”

Bishop Morehouse turned appealingly to my father, but he laughed and nodded his head.

“I’m afraid Mr. Everhard is right,” he said. “Laissez-faire, the let-alone policy of each for himself and devil take the hindmost. As Mr. Everhard said the other night, the function you churchmen perform is to maintain the established order of society, and society is established on that foundation.”

“But that is not the teaching of Christ!” cried the Bishop.

“The Church is not teaching Christ these days,” Ernest put in quickly. “That is why the workingmen will have nothing to do with the Church. The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery with which the capitalist class treats the working class.”

“The Church does not condone it,” the Bishop objected.

“The Church does not protest against it,” Ernest replied. “And in so far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the Church is supported by the capitalist class.”

“I had not looked at it in that light,” the Bishop said naively. “You must be wrong. I know that there is much that is sad and wicked in this world. I know that the Church has lost the⁠—what you call the proletariat.”19

“You never had the proletariat,” Ernest cried. “The proletariat has grown up outside the Church and without the Church.”

“I do not follow you,” the Bishop said faintly.

“Then let me explain. With the introduction of machinery and the factory system in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the great mass of the working people was separated from the land. The old system of labor was broken down. The working people were driven from their villages and herded in factory towns. The mothers and children were put to work at the new machines. Family life ceased. The conditions were frightful. It is a tale of blood.”

“I know, I know,” Bishop Morehouse interrupted with an agonized expression on his face. “It was terrible. But it occurred a century and a half ago.”

“And there, a century and a half ago, originated the modern proletariat,” Ernest continued. “And the Church ignored it. While a slaughterhouse was made of the nation by the capitalist, the Church was dumb. It did not protest, as today it does not protest. As Austin Lewis20 says, speaking of that time, those to whom the command ‘Feed my lambs’ had been given, saw those lambs sold into slavery and worked to death without a protest.21 The Church was dumb, then, and before I go on I want you either flatly to agree with me or flatly to disagree with me. Was the Church dumb then?”

Bishop Morehouse hesitated. Like Dr. Hammerfield, he was unused to this fierce “infighting,” as Ernest called it.

“The history of the eighteenth century is written,” Ernest prompted. “If the Church was not dumb, it will be found not dumb in the books.”

“I am afraid the Church was dumb,” the Bishop confessed.

“And the Church is dumb today.”

“There I disagree,” said the Bishop.

Ernest paused, looked at him searchingly, and accepted the challenge.

“All right,” he said. “Let us see. In Chicago there are women who toil all the week for ninety cents. Has the Church protested?”

“This is news to me,” was the answer. “Ninety cents per week! It is horrible!”

“Has the Church protested?” Ernest insisted.

“The Church does not know.” The Bishop was struggling hard.

“Yet the command to the Church was, ‘Feed my lambs,’ ” Ernest sneered. And then, the next moment, “Pardon my sneer, Bishop. But can you wonder that we lose patience with you? When have you protested to your capitalistic congregations at the working of children in the Southern cotton mills?22 Children, six and seven years of age, working every night at twelve-hour shifts? They never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of their blood. And out of the dividends magnificent churches are builded in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends.”

“I did not know,” the Bishop murmured faintly. His face was pale, and he seemed suffering from nausea.

“Then you have not protested?”

The Bishop shook his head.

“Then the Church is dumb today, as it was in the eighteenth century?”

The Bishop was silent, and for once Ernest forbore to press the point.

“And do not forget, whenever a churchman does protest, that he is discharged.”

“I hardly think that is fair,” was the objection.

“Will you protest?” Ernest demanded.

“Show me evils, such as you mention, in our own community, and I will protest.”

“I’ll show you,” Ernest said quietly. “I am at your disposal. I will take you on a journey through hell.”

“And I shall protest.” The Bishop straightened himself in his chair, and over his gentle face spread the harshness of the warrior. “The Church