The Iron Heel by Jack London Page B

excited.
    â€œIt is wrong!” he cried. “It is so short-sighted on the part of the workingmen. How can they hope to keep our sympathy—”
    â€œWhen we are compelled to walk,” Ernest said slyly.
    But Bishop Morehouse ignored him and went on:
    â€œTheir 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.”
    â€œAh, now you are up in the air again,” Ernest remarked dryly. “Come back to earth. Remember, we agreed that the average man is selfish.”
    â€œBut he ought not to be!” the Bishop cried.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œYes, 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.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œBut that is not the teaching of Christ!” cried the Bishop.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œThe Church does not condone it,” the Bishop objected.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œI had not looked at it in that light,” the Bishop said naïvely. “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.” 18
    â€œYou never had the proletariat,” Ernest cried. “The proletariat has grown up outside the Church and without the Church.”
    â€œI do not follow you,” the Bishop said faintly.
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œAnd there, a century and a half ago, originated the modern proletariat,” Ernest continued. “And the Church ignored it. While a slaughter-house was made of the nation by the capitalists, the Church was dumb. It did not protest, as today it does not protest. As Austin Lewis 19 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. 20 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