This partnership of Bishops and Beer is painfully familiar to British radicals; they see it at work in every election—the publican confusing the voters with spirits, while the parson confuses them with spirituality. There are two powerful societies in England employing this deadly combination—the "Anti-Socialist union" and the "Liberty and Property Defense League." If you scan the lists of the organizers, directors and subsidizers of these satanic institutions, you find Tory politicians and landlords, prominent members of the higher clergy, and large-scale dealers in drunkenness. I attended in London a meeting called by the "Liberty and Property Defense League," to listen to a denunciation of Socialism by W. H. Mallock, a master sophist of Roman Catholicism; upon the platform were a bishop and half a dozen members of the Anglican clergy, together with the secretary of the Federated Brewers' Association, the Secretary of the Wine, Spirit, and Beer Trade Association, and three or four other alcoholic magnates. In every public library in England and many in America you will find an assortment of pamphlets published by these organizations, and scholarly volumes endorsed by them, in which the stock misrepresentations of Socialism are perpetuated. Some of these writings are brutal—setting forth the ethics of exploitation in the manner of the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English clergyman who supplied for capitalist depredation a basis in pretended natural science. Said this shepherd of Jesus:
A man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, and if society does not want his labor, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he is. At Nature's mighty feast there is no cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders.
Such was the tone of the ruling classes in the nineteenth century; but it was found that for some reason this failed to stop the growth of Socialism, and so in our time the clerical defenders of Privilege have grown subtle and insinuating. They inform us now that they have a deep sympathy with our fundamental purposes; they burn with pity for the poor, and they would really and truly wish happiness to everyone, not merely in Heaven, but right here and now. However, there are so many complications—and so they proceed to set out all the anti-Socialist bug-a-boos. Here for example, is the Rev. James Stalker, D. D., expounding "The Ethics of Jesus," and admonishing us extremists:
Efforts to transfer money and property from one set of hands to another may be inspired by the same passions as have blinded the present holders to their own highest good, and may be accompanied with injustice as extreme as has ever been manifested by the rich and powerful.
And again, the Rev. W. Sanday, D. D., an especially popular clerical author, gives us this sublime utterance of religion on wage-slavery:
The world is full of mysteries, but some clear lines run through them, of which this is one. Where God has been so patient, it is not for us to be impatient.
And again, ............