Chapter 2-7

7.

Reverting, however, to Chicago’s reverend Utopian constructor, thus waileth he with cajoling crudity: “The laws of social evolution, far from being the blind, barbarous and brutal struggle for organic existence, consists in the physical, intellectual, and moral well-being of all the members of society, so constituted that the politico-ethical principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity shall have the largest possible realization throughout the social organism. The main features of the condition of progress are Christian churches, Christian schools, Christian governments, Christian ethics and economics.”

Another seductive but most malignant State Socialist (Henry George) roundly proclaims that “The salvation of society, the hope of the free and full development of Humanity is in the gospel of brotherhood, the gospel of Christ,” and thereupon he proposes to make politicians the national rent-tax collectors, Administrators of everything in general and all-round Distributors of State Pensions to ‘the poor and needy.’ Has not mankind had sufficient experience of what politicians are? Those black-hearted, creeping thieves and frauds. Their sting is deadlier than the bite of a cobra, and in the breath of their mouth there is, death. Curses be upon ye, O ye Politicians, and upon all who advocate increasing your prerogatives!

Presidential candidates, from Jefferson, to Lincoln, (also their apish imitators) have generally indulged in equally shallow rhodomontade , because it means votes, and for votes, office-seekers would dress up in glowing language and ray forth any devilish deception.

For two thousand years these effeminate superlatives have been trumpeted to the remotest corner of every Christian land, and yet (while enervating the morale of people), they have dismally failed to inaugurate the much foretold Earthly Paradise. They were preached by bare-foot monks at the inauguration of the Dark Ages, in order that those saintly lovers of the common people might creep into the administration of cooperative wealth and power. Now, the same general ideas are revived and dressed up (this time in politico-economic garb) by the eloquent agitator, in order that he may rule and plunder in the future, through the agency of the state; just as the priest once ruled and plundered through the equally rapacious agency of the Church.

When the Church triumphed the Dark Ages began, and when it is finally rooted out (together with all its social antennae) the Heroic Age dawns once more. True heroes shall be born again as of old, for our women may yet be something more than rickety perambulating dolls and drug-stores in spectacles.

The ‘Church’ is the idol of the priestly parasite. The ‘State’ is the idol of the political parasite. Beware, O , America! That in escaping from the holy trickery of the monk, you fall not an easy prey to ‘the loving kindness’ of the politician. Even if the ‘reformer’ succeeds in re-establishing upon majority votes, the dark tyranny of the ‘greatest number,’ we have this consolation to fall back upon, such organization must ultimately tumble down of its own weight, and then re-divide up into warring fragments. Nothing that is unnatural can last for long.

The Universal Church is no more; all we see of it now is jealous remnants. And the Universal State, the Social Democracy, the Economic Republic, the Brotherhood of Man, should they practical form, are pre-ordained to similar failure. All they could do, would be to postpone the operation of the survival of the fittest, drugging nations in temporary sedatives.

No matter how eagerly madmen may try to do it, there is no known process whereby they can jump out of their own skins. Christian or socialist churches, paternalisms, schools, governments, administrations, ethics and moralisms (even if genuinely Christian and Fraternal) would be wholly impotent to change the natural course of things and, therefore, powerless to command the survival of mental and physical cripples, even although those cripples were as canonized saints for ‘goodness,’ and as the sands of the seashore for number. Shrieking sentimentalism is indeed a feeble lever wherewith to overturn the immutable order of the Universe. It cannot do it. No! Not if it were whooped till the crack of doom! Not even if it had a Lamb of God in every city, ready to be butchered each Friday afternoon in order to make a Christian holiday.