The business of the Clerical Department of the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association is to justify the processes of trade, and to preach to clerks and employees the slave-virtues of frugality, humility, and loyalty to the profit system. The depths of sociological depravity to which some of the agents of this Association have sunk is difficult of belief. Twelve years ago I was invited to address the book-sellers of New York, in company with a well-known clergyman of the city, the Reverend Madison C. Peters. This gentleman's address made such an impression upon me that I recall it even at this distance: a string of jokes spoken with an effect of rapid-fire smartness, and simply reeking with commercialism. I could not describe it better than to say that it was on the ethical level of the "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son". Again, I attended a debate on Socialism, in which the capitalist end was taken by another famous clergyman, pastor of the Metropolitan Temple, the Rev. J. Wesley Hill. He was so ignorant that when he wished to prove that Socialism means free love, he quoted a writer by the name of "Herr Beeble"; he was so dishonest that he garbled the writings of this "Herr Beeble", making him say something quite different from what he had meant to say. I could name several clergymen of various denominations who have stooped to that device against the Socialists; including the Catholic Father Belford, who says that we are mad dogs and should be stopped with bullets. Or consider the Reverend Thomas Dixon. This gentleman's pulpit-slang used to be the talk of New York when I was a boy; and when I grew up, and came into the Socialist movement—behold, here he was, chief inquisitor of the capitalist Holy Office. I had a friend, a man who saved my life at a time when I was practically starving, and to whom therefore I owe my survival as a writer; this friend had been a clergyman in a Middle Western state, and had preached Jesus as he really was, and so was hated and feared like Jesus. It happened that he was unhappily married, and permitted his wife to divorce him so that he might marry the woman he loved; for which unheard of crime the organized hypocrisy of America fell upon him like a thousand devils with poisoned whips. The Reverend Dixon's holy rage was fired; he applied his imagination to my friend's story, producing a novel under the title of "The One Woman"; and it is as if you were reading the story of Jesus and the Magdalen transmitted through the personality of a he-goat. Of late years this clerical author has turned his energies to negrophobia, and militarism, making millions out of motion-picture incitements to hatred and terror. The pictures were made here in Southern California, and friends in the business have described to me the pious propagandist in the position of St. Anthony surrounded by swarms of cute and playful little movie-girls.
Or take the Rev. James Roscoe Day, D. D., S. T. D., L. L. D., D. C. L., L. H. D., a leading light of the Methodist Episcopal Church, who offers himself as comic relief in our Clerical Vaudeville. Dr. Day is Chancellor of Syracuse Universi............