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Title: Notes [Sep, 1888] Author: Freedom Press (London) Date: September, 1888 Language: en Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 2, No. 24, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3080, retrieved on April 14, 2020.
Daily open-air meetings of the unemployed in the middle of summer are an
ominous comment on the recommendations just issued by the Committee of
the House of Lords appointed to inquire into exceptional distress. With
the heartless insolence of men in whom power and luxury have dried up
all human sympathy, the Most Noble follow in the steps of Rehoboam's
youthful counselors and warn the administrators of that miserable
travesty of social justice and brotherly love, the Poor Law, that they
have erred on the side of sentimental leniency. Chastise the crime of
poverty not with whips but with scorpions. Restrict out-door relief. Do
away with labor yards. Do not meddle with relief works. Give no support
to schemes for the succor of the unemployed. Make your casual wards
still more like prisons. Such are the principal suggestions to local
authorities offered by the men who have never known what it is to do a
stroke of necessary work, or to want a meal, or to sicken with anxiety
as they tramp day after day from one insolent employer to another in the
vain search for a job, or to return weary and despairing to a fireless
hearth and starving children.
From the bottom of our hearts we thank you my lords, that so plainly you
show the workers that they have no justice, no mercy to expect from you
and your fellow property holders. Deliverance must come to every class,
as to every individual, from within. It is you and such as you w ho are
accentuating this universal teaching of experience for the working class
throughout the world. Perhaps the anniversary of 1789 may do something
to show you how far they have learned the lesson.
The courtly brutality of the Lords Temporal is worthily supplemented by
the hypocritical cynicism of the Lords Spiritual. "The Conference of
Bishops of the Anglican Communion, held at Lambeth Palace," have just
favored the world with their views upon Socialism and the social crisis.
"Excessive inequality in the distribution of this world's goods; vast
accumulation and desperate poverty side by side, these suggest many
anxious considerations to any thoughtful person," so deign to pronounce
the Right Reverend Fathers in God in their "encyclical letter." But
apparently their lordships' anxiety is for the propertied rather than
the poverty-stricken class. For the workers they have but the well-worn
gospel of "thrift and self-restraint." For the wealthy they speak many
comfortable words of suggestive and conscience-easing compromise.
Cooperation, peasant proprietorship, state saving bank, boards of
arbitration, sanitary acts, and such mild palliatives may safely be
supported by a Christian man without endangering his soul. "The state
may EVEN encourage a wider distribution of property by the abolition of
entail," or slightly vary the incidence of taxation. Whatsoever is more
than this cometh of evil.
Meanwhile let the Socialists look to it. Though "Christianity sets forth
no theory of the distribution of the instruments or products of labor,"
and the Church has the "deepest sympathy" with "the improvement of the
material and moral condition of the poor," and though the right Reverend
Prelates fully admit that "serving the poor and weak without special fee
or reward, is the ideal set before us by our Divine Master," yet they,
our spiritual guides, would most earnestly dissuade social reformers
from any rash attempts to inconvenience them that are rich in this
world; for "spoliation and injustice in any form is abhorrent alike to
the sentiment and belief" of the Church. But what of the spoliation and
injustice committed day by day when the workers are denied the right to
work or robbed of the produce of their labor by the monopolists of land
and capital? The Bishops say not. Of one thing only they are confident;
the Church can never ally herself with Anarchists, or any Socialists who
"consider private property a usurpation and wrong to the community," or,
in fact, entertain any objection to the civil and religious order as now
established. With the remainder "the clergy may enter into friendly
relations, trying to understand their aims and methods"!
For us Communist-Anarchists the Anglican prelates have one word of
bitterest reproach before they dismiss us for ever into the outer
darkness where are "Atheists," and persons who "advocate loose doctrines
as to family ties." "Anarchists seek to realize their aims, as far as
they have any, by undisguised murder and robbery"; but this is not the
worst. Later in the report it appears that we, undisguised robbers and
murderers, have not only, like the Christians, an ideal, but also the
unpardonable folly to believe that it means something attainable, and
the audacity to strive towards it. Whereas the bishops "hold that there
is no surer cause of failure in practical affairs, than the effort to
act on an ideal which has not vet been realized" (sic). One wonders in
what condition of prehistoric barbarism humanity would have been plunged
to day had every man shared the skeptical materialism of these
churchmen.