It will hardly do however, in the twentieth century, to give the sole credit for the continued subjugation of the working class to religion. It may be freely conceded that this curbing of the oppressed class in society has always been the main function of all religions. It is from this point of view that Ruskin, speaking as one of the well-to-do, defines the English national religion as: "The performance of church ceremonies, and the preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work while we amuse ourselves." In earlier times, before science had demoralized theology, religion was able to accomplish this result almost unassisted. There is also a considerable grain of truth in Kidd's contention that this repression was of service to the race, distasteful as this may be to the average free-thinker. It is a well known and essential tenet of the evolutionary philosophy that the mere existence of anything proves it to have some real place in the general scheme of things, and that which has existed for centuries must have had some useful function to perform. Even chattel slavery may be successfully defended on this ground. The reason why the Red Indian cannot adapt himself to European civilization is probably to be found in the fact that his race has not been subjected to those long centuries of slavery and serfdom which has developed in the white races that capacity for sustained and continuous labor which is indispensable to modern civilization. In so far as religion assisted in that painful discipline by promising fantastic and visionary rewards in some future cloud-land, thus rendering the slavery more endurable, it has functioned usefully in the development of society. While this may justify religion in the past, it is hardly a good reason for its preservation in the future, and it is encouraging that only an insignificant handful of very poorly informed Socialists consider it worth while to spend their energies bolstering up exploded superstitions which are useful only in a slave society. That this is the real function of religious belief, the ruling class has always been quick to apprehend. A fine example of this appeared in the German parliament when Mr. Windhorst, member of the Clerical Party, appealed to the bourgeois legislators not to encourage the spread of irreligion among the masses. In a moment of anger, he forgot the listening Social Democrats and the listening world. Said he: "When the people lose their faith they will no longer bear their intolerable misery, they will rebel." This is really what Kidd took three hundred pages to say. Those who, accepting this view, conclude that freethought is sufficient to accomplish the liberation of the work ing class, are the victims of a great delusion. The time has long passed when the ruling class depended solely on the priest for the quiescence of their victims. Except among catholics, the priest has ceased to be an effective policeman. The protestant churches no longer contain any considerable proportion of wage workers. The protestant worker has come to recognize the antediluvian nature of biblical teaching and he refuses even to listen to it. When the protestant church conceded the occupant of the pew the right to use his own judgment, it signed its own death-warrant. The catholic. church has always seen the danger of this, and it owes its great power among its working men to its logical and consistent policy of refusing to allow them to think for themselves. In the twentieth century the ruling class has weapons much more effective than the antiquated vaporings of preachers. The newspaper has usurped the functions of the pulpit. and this is why editors are well paid while the majority of preachers are almost starving. Now that the preacher cannot "deliver the goods" the capitalist refuses to foot the bills. Time was when the priest was the most valuable of all the intellectual hirelings of the ruling class, but with capitalism this is not so, for the preacher's method of enslavement destroys the intelligence of the slave and renders him incapable of useful service in a mode of wealth production which requires in its workers an active brain, able to comprehend the complex processes of machine production. The schoolmaster is able to produce a slave psychology and at the same time develop this necessary intelligence. The editor is able to contribute to the impregnation of the worker's brain with bourgeois ideas, while he preserves his own influence by sprinkling his effusions with scientific ideas. Therefore the schoolmaster and the editor, and for similar reasons the professor, are rated above the preacher, and the preaching profession is fast becoming a negligible quantity. In the past week, we have had a notably clear demonstration of this. At a meeting of the Pittsburg Ministerial Union, Jan. 13, '08, the Rev. Joseph Cochrane of Philadelphia delivered himself as follows: "Ministers are underpaid and the scale of their pay and advancement in the last ten years does not begin to compare with the average hodcarrier." "Conditions existing to-day in the educational institutions of the country are exactly the reverse of what they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. Where formerly 80 per cent of the students graduated from the great Eastern colleges left their studies to enter the ministry, while 20 per cent took up the practice of law, medicine or business, of the students graduated by the Eastern universities last year only 2 1-2 per cent were trained for the ministry. This meant only one minister for every twenty-five pupils in the East. "The majority of students who now enter colleges to study for the ministry leave their studies to take up law, medicine, dentistry or business. The atmosphere of the institutions in which they receive their trainng is to be lamented. "In this materialistic age, the dearth of ministers is due, at least to some extent, to the small salaries to be had." And so Mr. Kidd's theory that religion is alone responsible for the continued submission of the working class is steadily and rather rapidly losing ground, so that propaganda limited to modern liberalism free-thought has already become an anachronism. Capitalism has filled its armory with intellectual weapons that are more effective because more modern. Among its choicest are the press and the lecture platform. The workers are beginning to realize more than ever that the only remedy for this is a platform and a press of its own. As this realization becomes more vivid new Socialist platforms are established and Socialist papers are born over-night. Thus does the working class fight fire with fire. It develops its own social intelligence and promotes a revolutionary psychology; a psychology which grows out of the economic world, the world of real things, freed from superstitions theological and otherwise, a psychology which when it has gathered sufficient force and begins to find mass-expression will relegate to history the last form of economic slavery. ARTHUR M. LEWIS. T Poetry and the Social Unrest. AKE up the latest magazine, read through its scant bits of verse, and see if you can find therein an answer to the canting wail, "Why have we not poets nowadays?" Most of our versifiers-with Byron still echoing in their ears and modern esthetics crowded into some segregated section of their brains -are classical and unashamed. By "classical" I mean stilted, formal, conventional. In the great periods of English literature poetic souls have been touched by song of lark and nightingale, and now the tuneful pair go wailing together thru the verses of Americans whose experience with them has been limited to natural history museums. Keats and Tennyson look as sad in the broken lines of our periodicals as did Virgil and Horace in their eighteenth century couplets. This goes to show that our "poets" are not genuine. And like unto this truth is the next. Not being genuine they lack the breadth of interest which was characteristic of their great originals. Shelley and Byron, Wordsworth and Tennyson wrote of birds and flowers, of river and mead, but their feeling for landscape beauty, just because it was real, did not stand alone. Any man who cares for bird-song or violet or the infinite stretches of green below and blue above will care most of all for his fellow beings: nothing human will be alien to him. Read over the titles to the poems of any of the men mentioned: see how wide were their sympathies, how far-flashing their hates, how they stood near the center of the world movement of their time. If Shelley penned "To Constantia Singing," we owe to him also a "Song to the men of England," a cry of encouragement "To the Republicans of North America," and a sad stanza which still gives voice to the woes of Ireland, Byron wrote much of love and women, but when the great cry went forth from struggling Greece it was in his trumpet lines that it reached the corners of the earth. Mind you I am not saying that these men were political or didactic poets, or that poetry should deal largely with passing human struggles. But a great poet must feel the length and breadth, the height and depth of our nature; must be able to speak out of the inmost core of our racial being, out of that soul of us that can perish only with our kind. And how can he know humanity except through the aspirations and defeats, the spiritual rending and tearing and readjusting which he can feel in the society of his own time? The man who lives in this moving, breathing world of ours blind and deaf to these will never be a poet for all his pretty lines to skylark and nightingale. But our versifiers do not speak out of the heart of their time or of any time. Not strange then appears the fact that the great social unrest of the twentieth century should find so little echo in their stanzas. In otner lands, to be sure, the cry of the proletariat has found eloquent voice in picture and statue and poem; but here in America we are timid and tardy. There are signs, however, of better things to come: what a few years may bring forth no man can tell. With this in mind the reader may take more than a passing interest in the poems which these paragraphs are designed to introduce. Their author would be the last to claim for them any transcendent qualities. But they deal with a theme of transcendent interest to the readers of THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST REVIEW, and deal with it in a manner which seems to me vigorous and effective. The first two picture forth two of the results of our heartless civilization: the others are a call to us to rise in revolt. Wм. E. BоHN. WHO DROVE THEM FORTH? Written on occasion of the lay-off of ten thousand employees of the Union Pacific Railroad. The frost-king howls his frenzy down the skies, The scraggling pines like spears point to the south; A countless herd of starving cattle dies. Only the shadows hear their shuddering cries, As hungry coyotes tear their helpless shanks; Can sense where, winding, rough, the black trail lies. Who drove them forth? Where doth God's finger point? Loud howl the winter winds, low hangs the sky; Eric Dale. |