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Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA'S
CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
HOW A POPULAR REFERENCE WORK IS BEING USED AS A
WEAPON AGAINST FREE CULTURE AND TWISTED TO
FIT THE PURPOSES OF LYING OBSCURANTISTS
BY JOSEPH McCABE
HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS
GIRARD, KANSAS
**** ****
FOREWORD
A few months ago I published a work, "History's Greatest
Liars," in which I examined a dozen manuals of world or European
history which have issued from the American press in the last
quarter of a century. Their main purpose seems to have been to tell
Europe how to understand itself; to dispel the mist of superstition
and prejudice with which its own earlier historians, from Gibbon
and Mommsen to the great Cambridge History, have obscured its fine
medieval record, and to select the vital elements out of the vast
jumble of uncouth names, bewildering dates, and insignificant
events which used to pass as history. But having to dip
occasionally into these ponderous tomes in composing my earlier
historical works, I have been repeatedly startled to find that what
was -- now -- in the new history was not true and what was true was
not new. I therefore made a systematic examination of the works.
Within the prescribed limits of my book I could not pursue the
enquiry beyond the Reformation, and in the present volume I extend
it as far as the Second World War.
We realists will agree with Leonard Woolf when he says:
"The sordid and savage, story of history has been written
by man's irrationality, and the thin precarious crust of
civilization which has from time to time been built over the
bloody mess has always been built on reason."
If the worst fears of many sagacious observers of our time are
realized, same angel in the upper counting-house will in a few
years write off the story of man, impatiently, as "From Armageddon
to the Third World War." And when I discovered that the new history
was written under the influence and in favor of one of the worst
agencies that have hindered progress for the last 15 or 16
centuries, the Church of Rome, I feared that it must have had some
share in causing the present mental aberration of the race.
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
But how shall a man judge between the statement and the
counter-statement? Most of my readers know that I have given the
full evidence for our version of European history in scores of
works. Other readers, it seemed, might turn to a very learned-
looking new encyclopedia which assures them that in the compilation
of it "enormous and painstaking effort was expended to make it the
most complete and up-to-date of its kind." For the second edition
of this Columbia Encyclopedia, which was published in 1950, we are
told that "every article was again most carefully scrutinized and,
where necessary, pruned and revised." I have checked it throughout
on the points on which, as I have shown, the American public is
duped by the new history and the latest edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and here is the result.
**** ****
1. THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA
This work takes its title from the fact that it was, it says,
"compiled and edited at Columbia University." it must be the
weightiest volume that the American press ever produced. The new
edition of it, which appeared last year, seems to weigh about 20
pounds. What the advantage of compressing 6,000,000 words -- the
equivalent of 60 novels of the average length -- in one volume may
be I cannot imagine. It has the disadvantage that, while 30 folk
simultaneously could consult separate volumes, of an ordinary
encyclopedia, one must imagine a queue of readers impatiently
waiting their turn in the National Library to consult this oracle.
The editors may plead that they had to find room for 70,000
entries. I venture to suggest that the number could have been
reduced to about 20,000 if they had omitted one to three line
notices of obscure villages abroad and obscure men, from the days
of the pyramids to our own time, which no one will ever read; or,
at the most, some learned professor, who has other and more
reliable works of reference might possibly find an interest in one
of these once in 10 years. Many further thousands of entries, short
biographical notices of mythical saints, obscure popes, kings and
queens who merely lived, loved and died, soldiers of no
distinction, bishops, humdrum professors and authors, etc., might
Safely have been omitted, and less space given to royal persons
might have spared space for kings who really helped the world along
or queens who sinned more picturesquely. The English Charles I and
Charles II, for instance, have a full enormous page to themselves,
while monarchs who are worth remembering get about a tenth of a
page each,
But let me say at once that this encyclopedia has certainly
one distinction, though it does not boast of it. It has more ladies
than men on the list of its editorial and writing staff, 31 females
and 28 males. We, of course, applaud their bold vindication of the
new equality of the sexes; or we would applaud if we could take it
as proof that the majority of experts on the many subjects
discussed are now feminine. Unfortunately, we cannot infer that if
we know the technique of creating an encyclopedia. A number of real
experts are paid handsomely to write and sign lengthy articles on
subjects of which they are masters, and the bulk of the work is
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
copied from earlier encyclopedias by a large number of "Penny-a-
liners." None of the articles in the Columbia are signed. You might
infer from this that all articles are written by experts, but we
shall have reason, presently, to doubt this.
There are, on the other hand, peculiarities of this
encyclopedia that one is tempted to ascribe to the preponderantly
feminine character of the staff. Sex questions, for instance, which
deeply interest large numbers of readers in America, are treated
with an inconvenient delicacy or ignored altogether. The article
"Sex" might be read in a Sunday-School, and it is perhaps
creditable to the editors that they seem never to have heard, since
they have not a line about them, of such things as sexology,
adultery, aphrodisiacs, paederasty, sodomy, lesbianism, girdles of
chastity, perversion, Ivan Bloch, Professor Kinsey, or any of the
technicalities of modern sexology.
Doubtless it would be a mistake to affect to sex the same
influence in the very different treatment of religion, which is
boundlessly hospitable. Most of the articles of this nature seem to
have been written by Fundamentalists or Catholics. On the cover the
work boasts that it has at least a few words on every proper name
in the Bible, and you know what that means for the Old Testament.
From Adam and Eve to Peter they are treated with respect, and the
writers who do not treat them with this respect are apt to be
ignored. There is a paragraph about a Professor Haldeman who, it
appears, was a school-master about the middle of the last century,
but Mr. Haldeman-Julius is not mentioned. I should have thought
that hundreds of thousands of Americans were more interested in my
distinguished friend than in Abiaraph, Abitub, or Arboga. Last year
the editors of the new International 'Who's Who' did me the honor
of putting me among the 40,000 most distinguished citizens of the
earth, but, alas, I am shut out of this Columbia Valhalla. Atheism
(which is wrongly defined) gets the same number of lines as
Athangild. It has now as many supporters as the pope, but the
encyclopedia assures us readers that it has now "few active
advocates except the orthodox Marxian Communists;" who, by the way,
have been for many years very chary of advocating it.
In contrast, Romanism is treated with a generosity that must
have touched the hearts, if not the pockets, of its supporters.
Just once or twice a bit of the truth slipped through while the
censor slumbered. For instance, in the article "Eunuchs" it is
admitted that men castrated for the purpose sang the soprano parts
in the papal choir at Rome until the latter part of the 19th
century. Catholics got this cut out of the last edition of the
encyclopedia Britannica and vigorously denied it when I stated it.
But such lapses are rare in the Columbia. Usually in any
article relating to the church there is so much suppression or
smothering of harsh facts, so much truly Catholic sentiment, that
one feels that the pope must have given, or sold cheaply, some of
his Iron Crosses to members of the staff. In the chief articles
(Mass, Eucharist, Confession, the soul, relics, lives of the popes,
etc.) one seems to smell the fragrant breath of a Child of Mary.
Saints and martyrs whom even the Jesuit experts have shown to be
myths are here enshrined with all the old respect, while medieval
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
mystics like St. Anselm get as much space as the Emperor Hadrian or
Frederick II. Individual notices of scores of popes to whom not
even a Catholic ever refers swell the volume of the work, and their
virtues and high qualities -- just two out of the scores of sinners
are admitted to have been "immoral" -- astonish us. Where it is
advisable, from the Catholic angle, to be silent, the encyclopedia,
is silent. It has no articles on toleration, persecution, the
death-sentence for heresy, mental reservation, apostates, Catholic
nullification of marriages, torture, Feasts of Fools, the Syllabus,
etc., and other bits of false statement reconcile the reader to the
peculiar position of the Church. For instance, in the article on
marriage we read that "in all human groups, simple or advanced,
anthropologists find monogamy to be the dominant form of marriage."
In so far as this covers the Catholic doctrine of the
indissolubility of marriage it is the exact reverse of the truth.
In view of all this we know what to expect in the field of
history, which today is more dreaded by the Church than science
because in its own version of European history it rivals Baron
Munchausen. Articles of an historical nature show generally --
where the Catholic Encyclopedia has not had to be consulted, as in
lives of saints, martyrs and popes -- the guidance of the new
history. In my criticism of this I complained in the first place of
the way in which it slighted the most notable advances, from the
modern angle, in the Greek-Roman civilization -- the Ionic-
Epicurean line of thought and its fine results in the science of
Alexandria and the social-welfare schemes of the Roman Empire --
and later attempts, foiled by the popes in the Dark Age, to bring
the race back to this line. The objection applies in full force to
the new encyclopedia. The growth of a sound conception of the
universe and life in the ancient world is ignored, and the work of
the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, and particularly the Arabs is
miserably undervalued.
On the other hand the Catholic myth that their Church, instead
of bringing darkness upon civilization, brought light into a dark
world and made heroic efforts to preserve it after the collapse of
the Roman Empire is sustained in hundreds of articles. In the list
of the popes, which is obviously borrowed from the Catholic
Encyclopedia, 40 out of the first 50 are described as saints. The
halo decorates even Victor I (friend of the most brazen concubine
in the harem of the debauched Emperor Commorlus), Collistus (ex-
slave and, imprisoned for theft, and a corrupter of the church),
Damasus (who got elected by his followers murdering 150 of those of
his rivals, an acknowledged forger of lies and myths, and the only
pope who was indicted by the civil authorities for adultery),
Boniface I (who, fought his way to the throne), Zosimus I (whom
some historians think as bad as Damasus,) Symmachus (repeatedly
accused of adultery), and Hormisdas (whose son, "St." Silvarius,
succeeded to the papacy). The Church, moreover, gives the first 30
popes their halo on the ground that most of them earned the crown
of martyrdom, whereas, even the Catholic experts on the martyrs
like Duchesne, Delehaye, Ehrhard, etc., admit that only one Pope
ever died for his faith. Even the ancient legend of the seven
persecutions of the early church finds place in this up-to-date
encyclopedia. History has recognized for the last hundred years
that there were only two.
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
The Dark Age, it seems, has been so completely abolished by
the new historians that it has not here been considered worthy of
a special entry. It is explained in the article on the Middle Ages
that at one time the phrase Dark Age was applied to the whole of
the Middle Ages. No historian ever did this, so the encyclopedia's
little joke -- that we now see that the darkness was not so much in
the period as in the mind of those who considered it -- falls flat.
Nor is the encyclopedia more impressive when, following the new
historians, it gives the Carolingian Renaissance as one of the
great discoveries that make the Dark Age light. Our encyclopedia
even says that "the preservation of classical literature was due
almost entirely to his initiative" -- which is more daring, even
than the myth that "the monks preserved the classics" -- but it
admits that he is "scarcely to be considered educated by later
standards." In point of fact his secretary tells us that though he
tried hard, he never learned to write. However, the encyclopedia
tells us that he was a man of such "simple manners" and led such a
"frugal existence" that the Church declared him "Blessed" (or a
semi-saint). I should not have thought that any cultivated person
was unaware that he was a savage in war (the Saxon war), and that
he and his daughters and court had a notorious contempt for the
Church's supreme virtue, chastity.
As I showed in the earlier volume, it is now generally agreed
in history that the work of Charlemagne has bean greatly
exaggerated and that it was in any case wiped out in the next
generation. I admit that the Columbia could quote in its support
practically the whole of the historians, but listen to this. In its
article on Pope Nicholas I, who became Pope 54 years after the
death of Charlemagne, the Catholic Encyclopedia says about the time
of his accession:
"Christianity in western Europe was then in a melancholy
condition. The Empire of Charlemagne has fallen to pieces. ...
Christendom seemed on the brink of anarchy.... There was
danger of a universal decline of the higher civilization."
Contemporary with Charlemagne was the Lombard civilization in
Italy which did make a permanent impression. Our encyclopedia
barely mentions it. The pope and Charlemagne (who got most of his
teachers from it) did their best to destroy it.
The article on "Education" (which is shorter than the
following article on King Edward I) has not a single word about the
system of universal free schooling for the sons of the workers in
the Roman empire which had no equal in history until the French
Revolution. Thus the reader who has been inoculated with the
monstrous lie that "the church first gave the world schools" is
encouraged to persevere in it. Much the same is the impression
given by the article "Libraries." There is a reference to the
"great public libraries of the Roman Empire," of which it is
lightly said that as they were "filled with pagan learning" they
were destroyed or burned. We are told also that the Arabs
"collected and preserved many libraries." Not a word is said about
the burning of the Alexandrian Library and others by the monks and
Christian mobs long
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
before the Middle Ages began, and, as no figures are given, the
reader gets a totally false, perspective. He might be less disposed
to surrender the phrase Dark Age if he were told that the
Alexandrian Library had about 500,000 books, and the Arab royal
library at Cordova (in the 10th century) had the same number, but
no monastic library in the whole of Europe had as many as 2,000
books (99 percent religious), and very few had 500. throughout the
Middle Ages. Yet this is what the chief of the new historians,
Professor Thompson, has established in his defense of medieval
culture.
The article on Roger Bacon says of his 30-year confinement in
monasteries of his order, which is fully substantiated in the most
reliable biography of him, in the Dictionary of National Biography:
"Bacon would seem to be involved in some obscure trouble
with the authorities of the Church, but there is no evidence
that his difficulties were caused by his interest in science,
and it would seem more likely that they were due to his
notoriously pugnacious disposition."
Instead of explaining that, as is now well known, his
remarkable scientific learning was derived entirely from the
Spanish Arabs through a school of their science at Oxford, it is
scurvily granted only that he was "acquainted with Arab
Aristotellanism." Aristotle's share in his science was like a
single pebble in a truck-load of ballast.
The article on the Arabs is just as inadequate, and in the
article on Sylvestus II (Gerbert) not a single word is said about
the Arab character of his learning and his studies in Cordova.
Under the title Canossa we get the discredited myth that the
Emperor Henry stood or knelt three days barefoot in the snow
begging absolution of the pope; a legend that Professor Thompson
himself refutes. Under "Chivalry" we get the full flavor of the
Catholic myth of the Age of Chivalry.
My readers will have noticed that in the field of historical
lies this is my pet aversion, for this purely mythical moral
splendor during three centuries is still generally believed outside
serious history (and by most of the new historians) and regarded as
one of the best redeeming features of the Middle Ages, while every
historical expert on any country in Europe during the period (1100-
1400) shows that it is the exact opposite of the truth. Yet here in
the Columbia you get the myth in all it's virginal freshness. There
is not even a hint that it was ever disputed. The "ethical code" of
the knights, who were almost entirely on the moral level of
Hitler's worst troops, is said to be "Still the basis of the ethic
of gentlemanly conduct." We get unctuous passages like this:
"The cult of the Virgin, with which chivalrous love is
intimately connected, was the supreme expression of the
glorification of womanhood."
That is as flagrant a defiance of the facts as the saying of a
Jesuit writer that the Inquisition was a model court for the
administration of justice. For the overwhelmingly greater part of
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
the women of the Age of Chivalry were "viragoes," as Professor
Luchaire calls them, who despised tenderness and chastity. It is
only when the Inquisition got busy that we find a few pious
sonnets; and Bayard, who is here given as a type of chivalry, does
not belong to the age of chivalry at all. The standard work of Leon
Gautier is given as the chief authority, yet he says, often in
violent language, just the opposite of what the dreamy writer of
the article says. I notice that peculiarity in several places.
The Donation of Constantine, the blatant forgery by which the
popes claimed that the Emperor Constantine had bequeathed nearly
the whole of Italy to the papacy, may seem an awkward document to
mention when the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges that it was a
forgery. But Our encyclopedia glides gracefully -- much more easily
than its Catholic colleague -- over the thin ice. It seems that it
was "never of great practical value." In point of fact, as I
pointed out 30 years ago, Pope Hadrian, in whose court it was
forged, expressly reminds Charlemagne (Ep. LX) that it was the
bases of the swollen territorial claims of the papacy, and this
makes it clear that the forged document was shown to the Frank
monarch when he was taken, melodramatically, to the "tomb of St.
Peter," to sign the document which, by the way, mysteriously
disappeared) in which he awarded nearly the whole of Italy to the
pope. The Columbia adds that "it was not, as is sometimes asserted,
universally accepted in the Middle Ages." The undisputed fact is
that from the date of Charlemagne's award (774) to within a few
years of the end of the Middle Ages (as fixed by this encyclopedia)
it was universally accepted. To the great anger of the papacy,
which severely punished him, Lorenzo Valla then exposed the
forgery, but the Church insisted that it was genuine and up-held it
until the 19th century. Equally false is the statement that the
pope's temporal power did not rest on the Donation of Charlemagne
but on that of his father, Pepin. That monarch awarded the pope
only the territory he had conquered in Italy, which was far
smaller; and Pepin, an entirely ignorant and boorish soldier, was
duped by a forged "letter from St. Peter in heaven," which we still
have, just as Charlemagne was duped by the forged Donation of
Constantine.
For the errors and misleading statements in the devout article
on the Crusades I should require an essay and must refer my readers
to my discussion of these piratical expeditions in my earlier
volume. Our encyclopedia regards them as an outcome of "the highest
point which religious devotion had reached in Western Europe,"
though it does admit an infiltration of less august motives. The
description of the knights of Europe at the beginning of the 12th
century as very devout is humorous. They were then in the most
brutal and licentious stage of the so-called Age of Chivalry. In
calling for the first crusade the pope, whose sermon we, still
have, held out to the knights the prospect of rich loot, and all
experts on the crusades acknowledge that, except in a few cases,
the motives were greed, love of fighting, and liberation from the
heavy feudal burdens at home. Historians admit also that the Turks
did not hinder pilgrimages as the Columbia, says, and a crusade was
unnecessary. The pope chiefly aimed at bringing the Greek Church
under Rome. Naturally the perfidy and horrors of the Fourth
Crusade, which I described in the earlier volume, do not appear in
this article.
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Just before the Fourth Crusade the Knights whet their
appetites for loot in the massacre of the Albigensians, and this
foulest episode of the 13th century is gravely misrepresented. The
reader has not the least idea of its magnitude. It was not the
people of Albi (one city) but a population of hundreds of thousands
all over Southeastern France that defied the church: not because
they all embraced what is called the Albigensian creed, which few
strictly adopted, but because of the corruption of the church. The
article does not tell that it took 300,000 soldiers several years
to reduce the region, so numerous were the rebels. The article says
that the action of Pope Innocent III in sending a body of preachers
to them was decisive -- they notoriously accomplished nothing and
that is why the Pope turned to violence but their efforts were
hampered by "the war which soon broke Out." and this war was
"overshadowed by political interests from the first." This is a
miserable sophistication of the whole ghastly story in order to
conceal the guilt of the pope. Not a word is said about the
duplicity with which he engineered the "war," and the reader has no
suspicion of the mighty volume during three or four years of rape,
loot, and murder, as described, by contemporary Catholic writers.
Out of it all, as the encyclopedia rightly says, emerged the
Inquisition; for even after the appalling carnage and the ravishing
of the most civilized part of Christendom large numbers continued
to reject the faith. So this grim institution was, says the
encyclopedia, just "an emergency measure" -- it lasted in Catholic
countries until the 19th century -- and in the usual fashion of
Catholic propagandists it tells the reader that the worst evils
were due to the civil authorities and the people, who, in their
horror of heresy, compelled the gentle papal authorities to act.
"Burning of heretics was not common in the Middle Ages" the writer
says. The editors have overlooked the fact that in the article on
Witchcraft we read, "Burning, as for heresy, was common." He omits
also to remind the reader that until the 11th century the
population was too ignorant, the clergy generally too illiterate,
and sensual, and the middle class too scanty for heresy to spread,
and that burning began as soon as heresy began. But the chief fault
of the article is to exonerate the clergy at the expense of the
laity. The inquisitors, it says, were always anxious to avoid the
extreme penalty but the civil rulers were sterner. All the greed
and sacrifice of the innocent was, the writer says, because the
confiscated property of the heretic went to them. It did not. It
was divided between the informers, the Inquisitors, and the civic
power. The writer does not perceive how much he (or she) gives away
in saying that the civic authorities got the loot. It was just
because civic rulers were so reluctant to persecute that the papacy
tempted them with this loot, besides threatening them with
excommunication. The writer also says that torture was used against
"a long-standing papal condemnation of torture (e.g. by Nicholas
I)." When a writer says "e.g." he means that he is quoting one out
of many others he could quote. He not only could not quote any
others but Nicholas I himself never issued a general condemnation
of torture. Neither that fanatical historian of the early medieval
popes, Father Mann, nor the Catholic encyclopedia credits him with
this. And at the close of this remarkable article the writer warns
the reader against Lea's scholarly work on the Inquisition as out-
dated and inaccurate, and recommends instead a zealous French
Catholic and two other works that I cannot trace.
Bank of Wisdom
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The Society of Jesus is another of those subjects as to which
much mendacious Jesuit literature is in circulation, and a neutral
encyclopedia ought to give a correct statement of facts only. Here
again I must refer to my earlier volume. It is enough that here all
the charges brought against the Jesuits, as much by Catholics as by
non-Catholics, until modern times are lumped together, solid or
exaggerated, and handily declared ridiculous. The reader must just
take the word of the anonymous writer. There is then a summary of
their glorious record -- the zeal for purity particularly tickles
me as they were notoriously the confessors of most of the loose
princes and nobles of Catholic Europe -- and their distinction in
science and learning. It is, of course, not stated that when Pope
Clement XIV suppressed the society in 1773 he emphatically endorsed
the charges brought against it by the Catholic monarchs. And the
authorities given for these entirely Catholic contentions are, of
course, a bunch of Catholic writers.
Speaking of Jesuit writers reminds me that one of the more
learned of them in the last generation, the French Jesuit Delehaye,
was a leading expert on martyrs. The martyr-literature of the
Church is so packed with forgeries that Delehaye and other clerical
experts could not even pretend to apply modern historical methods
to it and not acknowledge that it is for the overwhelmingly greater
part a mass of forgery, yet in popular Catholic literature and the
ritual of the Church all this Catholic scholarship is completely
ignored. Out of this dilemma the Columbia easily escapes. It has no
article on "Martyrs." But it has a short article on the Colosseum,
the ancient Roman Amphitheaters, which closes with the words,
"According to tradition persecuted Christians were thrown here to
beasts." Now this is the subject of a special work by Father
Delehaye, who shows that there is not a particle of evidence that
any Christian was ever "exposed to lions" in the Amphitheater.
Similarly, it has long been known, and acknowledged by Catholic
scholars like Delehaye and Duchesne that the "martyrs of the
Catacombs" are mostly bogus, but the long article on the Catacombs
in the Columbia does not give a hint of this.
An amazing contrast in historical values is seen in the twin
articles "Reformation" and "Catholic Reform." Whether it occurred
by accident in the allocation of themes or from a politic fear that
American Protestants would not tolerate the familiar juggling with
facts in the cage of the Reformation I do not know, but while the
article on the Reformation is very fair and based upon Protestant
authorities, the article on the Catholic Reform is on the worst
lines of the new history. We are told that "it is pejoratively" --
get out your best dictionary -- "called the Counter-Reformation";
as, in fact, the best Catholic historian of the last 50 years. Dr.
L. Pastor (whose work is not mentioned), calls it. To call it that,
we read, is to suggest that it was only a response to the
Protestant Reformation; when practically all European non-Catholic
historians assert and no one who knows the facts can avoid saying.
Except that we get a frank reference to the corruption of the
bishops and the immoral Renaissance papal court, the article is the
same tissue of lies and sophistry as that which I examined in the
previous volume.
Bank of Wisdom
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CRIMES AGAINST THE TRUTH
"The central feature of the Catholic reform was the Council of
Trent" we read, and the popes of the Council were Paul III (who
resisted the Emperor's demand for a council -- he was too busy
enriching his four children), Julius II (one of the most repulsive
popes of that gay century) and Pius IV (after whose election, says
Pastor, "the evil elements at once awakened once more"). As a
matter of historical fact, the Council did not begin its debates
until 1562, when the Reformation had swept over half of Europe;
but, of course, it is "pejorative" to say that the reformation
provoked it. The reign of Paul IV (died 1559) was, the writer says,
"devoted to the purge of the papal court," and from Paul's time
dated the "quasi-monastic air that has ever since characterized the
Vatican." Phew! In the earlier volume I quoted a Cardinal's
description of the papal court in 1670, a century later, as grossly
corrupt. The "quasi-monastic" makes me laugh when I remember how,
in 1904. I stood on the summit of the Capitol in Rome with an
American official who knew it well. He pointed out the house of the
mistress and children of Cardinal Vanrutelli, who had got several
votes for the papacy in the 1903 election. As, I showed, only three
popes, who ruled collectively for only 15 years, brought about a
limited reform of Rome (chiefly in regard to sex); and the
statement that there was Catholic Reform in England, France, and
Spain is ridiculous.
Among the many pages on saints my eye is caught by "St.
Bartholomew's Day, Massacre of," and I turn eagerly to the account
of this foulest outrage of the 16th century (which is supposed to
have followed the Catholic Reform). Only 20 lines are devoted to it
(much less than to the St. Bernard Dog), and nothing is said about
the appalling extent and brutality of the massacre. The article on
the Thirty Years' War is worse. In the vein of the new history it
is represented as predominantly a political struggle. "It was," we
read, "a general European war" and "it is recognized today that the
accent placed by 19th-century historians on the religious aspects
is misleading." This is recognized by nobody except Catholic and
the American new historians, and it is worse than misleading that
an encyclopedia that presents itself to the public as neutral
should say otherwise. In fact, the writer then goes on to describe
it as an almost purely political struggle; a conflict of petty
German princes and foreign powers -- France, Sweden, Denmark,
England -- against the Holy Roman Empire. France notoriously
refused to take part in it, to the great anger of Rome, and one
does not need to know much to realize that if you strike it out of
this list you have simply a conflict of Protestant and Catholic
forces. As I told in the earlier volume, the papacy had collected
funds for years for a war for the extinction of Protestantism. It
was instigated by the Jesuits through their royal and military
pupils, and they moved freely in the imperialist camps; and the
papacy subsidized it until, near the end, Pope Urban VIII allowed
his greedy relatives to appropriate the whole of the war-fund. That
political antagonism entered the quarrel no one ever disputed, but
it was overwhelmingly a religious war, and a war of the most
barbarous description.
The article on Galileo and other articles will be considered
presently, when we examine the new historians on these points. But
it must be understood that there are very many other articles
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besides those I have noticed, or will notice that are very far from
being neutral and balanced statements of the facts. In the few
lines on Satanism we have a purely Catholic perversion of the
facts. Apart from witchcraft, which was a formal religion or cult
of Satan, the Black Mass was either a hypocritical exploitation of
the rich by priests, as it was in the time of Louis XIV, or, as
regards recent times, a fiction of novelists. The long article on
Scholasticism is obviously Catholic and gives no hint of the
ordinary philosophic estimate of that weird collection of
disputations about fixed dogmas. It amuses me when it says that the
University of Louvain, under Cardinal (then Professor) Mercier, was
a busy center of the new zeal for Thomism. I was Mercier's favorite
pupil there, and he let me know how far his creed was from that of
Thomas Aquinas.
The article on slavery is a masterpiece of misrepresentation.
Slavery in the Roman Empire is most unjustly described, and it is
said that the introduction of Christianity "mitigated" their
condition. It was, in fact, relieved by the Stoic-Epicurean lawyers
and, especially, the great Epicurean Emperor Hadrian. But not a
word is said about the many pagan condemnations of slavery -- we
still have fine speeches against it by the friend of the Emperor
Dio Chrysostom -- and, on the other hand, the defense of it by the
two leading Catholic moralists, Augustine and Aquinas. The reader
does not get the faintest idea, how the lot of the urban slave in
Rome was transformed before 150 A.D., or how vilely the serfs of
Europe (real slaves and the bulk of the population) were treated
for seven centuries, and in many countries longer. He does not
realize, though a little reflection would tell him, that it must be
so, since the whole of those wonderful moralists, the Scholastics,
who are now proposed to us as moral guides, failed to condemn
slavery or serfdom, and that no pope condemned them until the
French philosophers of the 18th century taught them justice. The
introduction of slavery into America -- it had never been fully
abolished in Europe -- is misrepresented in the interest of the
Church. The large use of slave-eunuchs by the Moslem is heavily
censured, but it is not mentioned that the Spanish Arabs were
furnished with castrated slave-boys -- apparently castrated by the
monks -- by Catholic France. Wilberforce is said to owe his zeal
for abolition to his Christian piety, whereas his very orthodox
sons admit in their biography of him that he learned it from
skeptical writers and was himself a skeptic for 10 years
afterwards.
It will be understood that for my present purpose I have not
made a systematic examination of this 6,000,000 word encyclopedia.
I have just selected a few articles in which I was likely to find
the kind of prejudice and untruth which I suspected after my
analysis of the new history. Any reader who is familiar with my
writings on the popes for instance, will be amused to read the
article on the papacy and the scores of notices of individual
popes. It is amazing how many virtues of them (generally vouched
for by their epitaphs) I overlooked and how many vices of theirs
the writers of the encyclopedia overlooked. I have, moreover,
confined myself to historical articles, and in fact to such as
relate to Catholic history and therefore properly confirm my
suspicion that the Catholic Church in America, with its masses of
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ill-instructed voters and readers, has such influence on the
circulation of books and periodicals through its hold on
bookstores, libraries and reviewers. that it is directly and
indirectly poisoning the sources of public instruction. But I am
little more than half-way through my task and must return to the
analysis of important points in the new history, now coupling with
it a glance on each point at the Columbia Encyclopedia.
2. DEATH FOR HERESY CONTINUES
When we cross the chronological line of the year 1600, which
we did at the close of the first part of this work, an important
point to consider is whether the foul practice of imposing
penalties, especially the death-penalty, for criticizing the
traditional creed continued in what the historians called Modern
Times. Some of our historians blunt the edge of the indignation of
their readers at the horrors of the Inquisition -- if they have
been conscientious enough to tell these -- by reminding them that
the Protestants as well as the Catholics now punished or executed
men for heresy. Some go so far as to insist that Catholics, having
so exalted an opinion of their creed, were logical and consistent
in doing so, while the Protestants, being free to read both sides
and less peremptory, had no right to inflict such penalties. To all
such Sophistry in the mouths of laymen we moderns reply that the
papacy and the hierarchy were mainly defending their own privileges
by such outrages on the most precious of all freedoms, the right to
form and assert one's own convictions. And it is, in any case, most
unjust to Protestants to suggest that as long as they had the power
to do so they were equally guilty with the Catholics of torturing
and murdering men who differed from them.
One has a right to expect historians who claim that they apply
psychology to the record of the past to remind their readers of the
momentum of tradition, as few of them do. As this horrible practice
had been forced upon the civic authorities of every country long
before the, Reformation and men had been taught to regard it as a
vital part of religious duty, no impartial person would expect the
Protestant powers at once to reject it, especially in the time of
religious wars and Jesuit plots and revolts. Yet it died out in
Protestant countries when this turbulent period was over, though
the state was still all-powerful and the nation in each was still
virtually united in its faith. In England, which had never admitted
the Inquisition but had a national law, the statute De haeretico
Comburendo, condemnings, heretics to be burned, this was abolished
as early as 1678. In France, torture or execution for heresy
continued until the days of Voltaire; in Italy, Spain, Portugal,
and Latin America until the 19th century. Hardly one of our
historians notices this socially significant fact. Not one notices
the still more important fact that the Church of Rome still
officially claims in its Canon Law, reaffirmed in this century. not
only that it has the right but the duty to put heretics (by which
it means all who were once baptized in it, even as infants, and
have quit it) to death, and therefore to inflict on them any
punishment short of death. No Protestant church has held that for
more than 200 years. But the Catholic Church is bound to revert to
the practice if ever a Catholic government feels itself strong
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enough to permit it. Take no notice of American Catholic writers
who say otherwise. Let them quote a papal declaration that the law
is, not in abeyance, but is officially disowned and abolished.
The last historical phase of this infamous practice on a large
scale gives us a splendid opportunity of testing the reliability of
the new history. In the 16th and 17th centuries the sacred fury
expended itself mostly upon witches and I do not know a single one
of our historians who has a correct idea of its nature. The
majority of them do not mention it. Professor Langer refers only to
witchcraft in America. The few who do refer to "the abominable
superstition," as Professor Lucas calls it, have the old
discredited idea that the witches were men and women who
individually "sold their souls to the devil," or aged and neurotic
dames who were suspected by the people of having done this. "It was
still generally thought," says Professor Lucas, "that the evil
spirits and the. devil operated in the witches." It is true that
this was a common opinion, but the mass of definite evidence that
has been collected in recent years, particularly from the records
of trials of witches, shows that witchcraft was an organized
religion, spread from end to end of Europe, with at least hundreds
of thousands of adherents at any time in the 16th and 17th
centuries, having a large body of officials who were the equivalent
of priests and a ceremony of initiation for which the women
presented even their babies in arms, and with apparently as many
men as women members.
It was a definite cult of the devil (called the Spirit) and on
intelligible grounds. If, on the lines of the ancient Persian
religion, which was its chief root, God created Spirit only and the
devil created matter (including the body) -- if God put a harsh
prohibition on sex and the devil must encourage what he had created
-- man's supreme, friend was the devil and not the Christian God.
The sexual hypocrisy of nearly the whole of Christendom century
after century encouraged the creed. It was not a revival of the
Albigensian creed, for the real Albigensians frowned upon sex as
the work of the devil and honored Christ as a "pure spirit." The
witches respected Christ as the apostle of austerity and worshipped
the devil. They did not, as in the popular conception, sell their
souls to the devil in order to get preternatural powers, knowing
that after death they must join the devil in hell. They made no
claim to unusual powers, and they rejected the repulsive Christian
idea of the devil and hell.
The evidence for this view of witchcraft has been collected by
H.C. Lea in his posthumous "Materials Toward a History of
Witchcraft" (3 vols. 1939), the German expert Dr. W.G. Soldan, and
especially Dr. Margaret Murray, of London University, ("Witchcraft
in Western Europe," 1921). It is so generally accepted in Europe,
that it is recognized in the latest editions of both our leading
encyclopedias, the Britannica and the Americana. I am not for a
moment suggesting here that our now historians are claiming to have
corrected the "Old" history. The endorsement by the whole of them
of the theory that has been current in European history for
centuries and their complete exclusion of the new view just
confirms what I have said: the writer of a universal history must
on most points take his views from others, and the new historians
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have unfortunately taken theirs largely from Catholic writers. The
Columbia Encyclopedia amusingly illustrates this. The writer of the
article on Witchcraft gives the old idea in all its ripeness, never
even mentioning that it has been challenged, and then he blandly
gives as his chief authority Dr. Margaret Murray (whose book he or
she has never even glanced at), the ablest and most convincing
champion of the new view.
The fault of the new historians here is the more remarkable
because the old idea of the witch is not only ridiculous in itself
but was completely refuted by authentic evidence given in so
important an American publication, with a special chapter on the
subject, as Prof. A.D. White's "History of the Warfare of Science
with Theology" (3 vols. 1876). The old idea, so incongruous in the
"new" history, was that these witches were wrinkled old dames who
lived in isolation, generally on the fringe of a village or the
forest, yet used once a month to repair (flying through the air on
a broomstick) to some glade in the forest where they held an orgy
(apparently with a company of devils) with all the sexual vitality
of goats.
Apart from this inherent absurdity, the evidence given by Dr.
White, later multiplied enormously by Lea and Dr. Murray, ought to
have blown the old myth sky-high. It is a letter written in 1629 to
a friend by the Chancellor of the Bishop of Wartzburg about things
that are happening under his own eyes at that time. He says that
400 men in his city have been, or are to be, arrested on the charge
of witchcraft, and they include a dean (who has been tortured),
several priests, 14 seminary students, the notary of the Church
Consistory (a very learned man), and several lawyers and city
officials. Several beautiful and virtuous teen-age girls and
hundreds of children of both sexes from the age of three to five
have been or are to be executed. This was the situation in a large
number of German cities, to the panic of the clergy. In three
months 900 were burned in the bishopric of Barberg and 600 in
another bishopric. The one historian who has attempted to compute
the number of witches burned says -- doubtless with a large
exaggeration -- that it is 9,000,000. Another historian says that
300,000 were burned in England, where, Miss Murray shows, the cult
was similarly organized and so firmly held that women willingly
died for it. It was the same in France. An entire region in the
South of France is described by the distinguished judge who was
sent to clear it up as wholly given up, including the priests, to
witchcraft and sexual orgies every month. Yet in this vast spread
of a rival religion to Christianity on the threshold of modern
times our new historians, who give one-tenth the space to it that
they give to many an insignificant monarch or saint, are so little
interested that they just repeat about it an old legend that breaks
up from its inherent absurdity the moment you reflect upon it.
3. GALILEO AND THE ADVANCE OF SCIENCE
As we approach Modern Times our historians see that the
science which is slowly developing into one of the most beneficent
of human agencies must receive more attention, I assume that most
readers will agree with me that it is mainly in virtue of our
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science and our social idealism that oar age has risen -- or had
until the present demoralization began a few years ago -- so high
above all earlier ages. A modern history ought, therefore, to make
a special point of tracing the broken course of these two factors
through the past 2,500 years, and in this our historians almost
completely fail. Instead of doing justice to the Ionic-Epicurean-
Alexandrian development of science they enlarge upon Aristotle --
is it because Catholics are now calling their philosophy the
Aristotelic-Thomist philosophy? -- and they do little justice to
the great revival and further development in the Arab-Persian
world. Instead of frankly describing the fine social schemes
inspired by the Epicureans in the Roman Empire, they, or most of
them, ascribe the improvement to the new religion which, when the
Empire perished, let the whole of its social welfare work perish.
Scarcely one of them fully acknowledges that the revival of
civilization in Europe was initially due to the influence of the
brilliant civilization -- brilliant in science and social welfare
as well as art and wealth -- of Arab Spain. They echo the absurd
Catholic pretensions about "the science of the school-men." They
suppress all the evidence of the church's hostility to science and
all reference to the imprisonment of Roger Bacon and the tragic
fate of Cecco d'Ascoli and Vesalius; and they do not tell how
Copernicus, who got his central idea from the revived Greek
literature, was so persecuted that he dare publish it only as an
hypothesis, and only when the door of escape to heaven was opening
before his eyes.
We now come to the famous case of Galileo. Most of our
historians (Langer, Sheppard and Godfrey, Geise, Sellery and Krey)
seem to have decided that this little matter of the persecution of
Galileo was not worth mentioning. Others (Boak, Slosson, and
Anderson) refer to the first trial, which was comparatively
harmless, and not to the scandalous second trial, condemnation, and
grave persecution of the aged scientist. Professors Wallbank and
Taylor (II. 40) on the other hand say that "in the last trial
torture was applied to the old scientist, now 70"; of which there
is no evidence, and it seems unlikely. Professor Perkins says
(351):
"These revolutionary teachings (that the sun is
stationary and the earth moves) were regarded by many as
wicked contradictions of the teaching of the Bible. The clergy
feared that they would turn men away from religion. Here,
Galileo was imprisoned and forced to swear that his teachings
were false."
This sophistication of the facts is hardly better than
suppression. Some of these historians who set out to help us really
to understand the mind of the Middle Ages have strange ideas of the
conditions. The common people about whom -- according to them --
the papacy was so concerned, not only know nothing whatever about
the new idea of a central sun, but very few of them had ever heard
that Joshua had once commanded the sun to stand still. Not more
than 10 percent of the Italian people could read and not 1 percent
ever read the Bible; and the idea that the Old Testament was read
to them in church is absurd.
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Professor Lucas may have been conscious of this when he says
that Galileo annoyed the philosophers. who followed Aristotle, and
these approached the theologians, who as a rule were friendly
towards the theories of Copernicus. In point of fact it was the
Polish clergy, not the Italian professors of philosophy, who
intimidated Copernicus. "However," says Professor Lucas, "Galileo
harshly ventured into biblical scholarship" -- to the profound
extent of pointing out that Joshua (or the writer) evidently
believed that the sun traveled round the earth -- and so drew upon
himself an inevitable condemnation. This, however, was "not an
official pronouncement of the Church because the pope did not sign
it." He seemed to think that the Sacred Congregation was not an
official body.
The wickedness of Galileo, he says, forced the Church from
both its earlier and its later liberal attitude towards science. To
justify the latter part of this strange proposition he asks us to
observe that from this date onward we find eminent men of science
equally distributed among Catholics and Protestants. The partisan
is apt to form his own opinion as to who is or is not eminent in
Science, but fortunately Professor Lucas has several admirable
chapters on science and names about 70 of its more distinguished
representative in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Omitting
those whose opinions about religion are obscure. this is what we
find:
17th Century -- 4 Catholics and 12 Protestants.
18th Century -- 3 Catholics, 6 Protestants and 9 Rationalists.
19th Century -- 4 Catholics, 8 Protestants and 22
Rationalists.
A complete list of the more eminent names of the last hundred
years, when distinguished men of science have been so numerous
would betray that not half a dozen out of hundreds were Catholics.
I have shown repeatedly that such men is Pasteur and Claude Bernard
are falsely described as such.
Professor Barnes, who rightly treats European history since
1600 in large developments (political, economic, etc.) rather than
detail, avoids the persecution of Galileo, but I feel that in his
fine work he has suffered some influence of the new history in his
treatment of science. He is severe on earlier historians of science
who followed, he says, "the once popular doctrine that medical
superstition was suddenly superseded in the late 15th and 16th
centuries by the rapid and unparalleled discovery of scientific
truth" (II. 143). They thought, he continues, that the flight of
the Creek scholars to Italy when the Turks captured Constantinople
in 1450 (which he counts the end Of the Middle Ages) brought about
the Renaissance, and this led to the Reformation and the Age of
Enlightenment. Now he says, we realize that the roots of the
scientific development that appears in the case of Copernicus and
Galileo go far beck into the Middle Ages. We perceive, in fact,
that the Crusades were "the most potent influence in introducing
Muslim and Hellenistic science into Europe." Greek science -- there
was none in the medieval Greek empire -- or that of the Alexandrian
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Greeks was incorporated in Arab culture long before the 12th
century, and this in turn was penetrating into Europe (see Gerbert,
for instance) long before the first crusade; apart from the fact
that whatever love of luxury the few brutal chiefs of the Crusades
who returned to Europe brought with them, they were certainly not
of a character to introduce science. That science was brought into
Europe from Arab-Spain and Sicily in the 10th and 11th centuries I
have myself always contended and do not know any serious older
authorities who differ.
Professor Barnes is here misled by the work of Professor
Thorndike, "The History of Magic and Experimental Science" (2 vols.
1923), which, he imagines, traces a good deal of the mastery of
science by Christian Scholars before the year 1300. But all
Professor Thorndike's heroes were known cultivators of Arab
science. They are men who either went to study in the Arab colleges
(Gerbert, Abelard, William of Auvergne) or men (Grosseteste, Bacon,
etc.) whom these taught. Such details as he adds do not alter our
general estimate. The point that is really open for fresh research
by an unprejudiced investigator is why, if Christian scholars were
welcomed to Arab colleges as early as the 10th century, even the
science of astronomy -- in which the Arabs had made great progress,
made so little, if any, advance in Christendom until the end of the
15th century. The science of chemistry, we admit, was much
cultivated, because princes and prelates were eager everywhere for
the chemist or alchemist to find the elixir of life (to keep them
out of heaven as long as possible) and the philosopher's stone (for
turnings. base metals into gold).
The experience of Copernicus and Galileo on the threshold of
the scientific age, and smothered with Catholic sophistry and
mendacity ever since, ought to be presented with scrupulous
accuracy to the modern reader. If I do this, briefly on the facts
as they are determined by the leading experts -- Prowe for
Copernicus and Favaro for Galileo -- the reader will see how
unsatisfactory the new historians are at this point. Niklas
Coppernigh (in Latin Copernicus) was not "a devout Polish priest,"
but a loose-living Prussian medical man whose bishop-uncle made him
titular canon (though never priest) to give him an income. He spent
some years in the universities of North Italy, but did not lecture
there or in Rome. In North Italy he picked up the old Greek idea
that the earth circles round the sun, and after his return to
Poland verified it with instruments of Arab origin; but the scheme
of the solar system which he worked out was totally wrong. The
hostility of the clergy forced him to put off the writing and
publication of his famous book until the end of his life, and even
then he had to represent it only as an hypothesis. When Galileo,
now armed with a telescope, proved that it was a fact and was so
indiscreet as to mention Joshua he was, in 1615 summoned by the
inquisition, headed by Cardinal Bellarmine, and his theory of the
central position of the sun was condemned as "formally (explicitly)
heretical." Whether he solemnly promised never again to teach it is
disputed. The highest authority, Favaro, denies this. Copernicus'
book was put in the index, and the teaching of his system was
forbidden in all Catholic colleges until the 19th century.
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Eighteen years later, there was a second and far more serious
trial of Galileo, and the account given by A. Favaro, the chief
Italian expert (not translated, I believe), is based upon documents
in the possession of the Vatican which were taken by the French but
were not made public until late in the last century. These and
Favaro's work are not taken into account by the new historians and
are not mentioned in the bibliography of our "up-to-date" Columbia
Encyclopedia; and Fahie's book, which it recommends, is too early
to take account of them.
Here I need say only that the documents show that Pope Urban
VIII, who is generally represented as benevolent to science and
most considerate to Galileo, pressed the trial with great
harshness, even cruelty in view of the age and illness of the
scientist, because Galileo had, in his recent book, made him
ridiculous in the eyes of Rome: that the statement, that the earth
revolves round the sun was again declared formally heretical; and
that, while the actual use of torture is improbable, there is a
significant blank in the records from June 21 to 24, and Favaro
thinks that this means that Galileo was in the dungeon of the
Inquisition. He was exiled from his beloved city, Florence, for the
rest of his life. And the Catholic Professor Walsh says in his
"Popes and Science" that Galileo's life was "one of the most serene
and enviable in the whole of science."
4. THE JESUITS AND DEMOCRACY
So generously has the new history broadened the opportunities
of the lying propagandist that he now occasionally advances claims
for the church which arc positively indecent in their audacity.
Last year the Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus (who still
believe that the medieval knights were chivalrous) issued, and
supplied free to the American public in hundreds of thousands of
copies, a pamphlet with the title "Is the Catholic Church a Menace
to Democracy?" On the contrary, it assures the defenseless public,
it is just from the Jesuit theologians of the church that the
Fathers of the Revolution got the idea of democracy. On page 17 it
has a short article "Did, Bellarmine whisper to Jefferson?" To
support this weird idea of the ghost of Cardinal Bellarmine, head
of the Inquisition and the man who condemned Galileo, inspiring
Thomas Jefferson, the most dogmatic materialist in American
literature, the article gives a number of quotations from the works
of Bellarmine -- in the usual Catholic way, no reference is given
so nobody can check them -- and a number of sentences from the
Declaration of Independence (which many attribute to Thomas Paine)
and asks us to Admire the identity of sentiment and even of
language. Other Catholic writers couple the Jesuit Suarez, also of
the 17th century, with Bellarmine as co-discoverer of the Sublime
principle of democracy.
Now if this sort of thing were worth serious examination we
should ask a few questions about it. Isn't it much more likely that
Jefferson, who is not known to have wasted much of his time on
medieval theologians, got his democracy from English writers of the
time of the Civil War (Lilburn, etc.), or French skeptical writers
of the 18th century whom he read; assiduously? Did he rely need to
borrow the idea from anybody, seeing that it had occurred to lesser
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men over and over again in the course of history from the Greeks
onwards? How was it that the Papacy tolerated this teaching in the
works of two important Jesuit's while it insisted on the divine
right of all Catholic kings? How is it that that stupendous
monument of American Catholic scholarship, the Catholic
Encyclopedia, which in its long articles on the two Jesuits does
not say a word about this wonderful anticipation of modern ideas,
missed such a golden opportunity? How is it that in the great fight
for modern democracy (1760-1860) the papacy was the most determined
supporter of the murderous anti-democrats? and so on.
We will not pretend to be surprised that our own historians
entirely ignore this discovery of the American Jesuits, though
since it has been forced upon the public by Catholic propagandists
for the last 30 years we might hope to find some notice of it. It
is true that on earlier pages we have found them violently, even
heatedly, lashing out at unnamed writers (mostly Catholic fiction)
who are supposed to have said that Europe was entirely boorish, and
gross during the Dark Age; that this Dark Age lasted until the 15th
century, that the 13th century was still a gross age: that it was
the church that began the burning of heretics and the Reformation
was mainly caused by the corruption of Rome and so on. But, of
course, in these cases it is anti-Catholic writers whom they
rebuke. However, while we should not dream of expecting them to
refute the statements of Catholic historian, we could justly demand
that on all issues of vital social importance they ought to provide
an adequate and correct statement of the facts.
Now on this question of the evolution of the democratic idea,
which to us moderns is as vital as the evolution of science, our
historians, while devoting much space to political evolution, no
more give an adequate account than they do in the case of early
science. in fact, our Columbia Encyclopedia has a good word to say
for the Jesuit theory. In its article on the Jesuit Suarez, which
occupies just as much space as the article on Charles Darwin, it
says:
"His teaching on the Divine right of kings, that earthly
power is properly held by the body of men and that kingly
power is derived from them ...
The democratic idea had, of course, occurred to men (in Greece)
2,000 years before the time of Suarez. It was one of the most
valuable elements brought back to the race by the revival of
classical literature, which our historians generally disparage.
Early in the 12th century one of the pupils of Abelard, the noble-
minded monk Arnold of Brescia (whom the popes judicially murdered)
preached the idea with great success in the cities of North Italy.
Our historians never explain why these cities were more enlightened
than Rome until recent times, and they misrepresent the democratic
movement in them and at Rome and do not give the reader the least
idea that in Rome democrats fought the pope for two centuries and
were as savagely treated by the popes as by the foulest monarchs.
We shall find them just as careful to suppress the facts for the
19th century, when a full knowledge of the fierce and bloody
hostility of the popes to the democrats would enable the reader to
distinguish soundly between reactionary and constructive agencies,
which Catholics do not want him to do.
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We shall see that presently. Meantime, it would puzzle any
reader who knew both the ancient and the modern history of
democracy to understand how it can ever be claimed that just when
royal absolutism, according to all historian became worse than ever
(in the latter part of the 16th century) two Jesuit theologians who
were in all other matters as narrow-minded as Thomas Aquinas,
insisted that a nation had the right to self-government and could
depose a misbehaving king. Our historians might at least have
reminded their reader's of one change that would at once give them
an idea of the value of the Jesuit argument. Half the monarchs of
Europe were now Protestants, and the Jesuits were plotting
everywhere to undermine their authority. The Jesuits had entered
upon the cloak-and-dagger phase of their history. When, in 1589,
the French king, Henry III, was murdered by a monk for his anti-
papal policy, the leading Jesuits of Paris publicly applauded the
murder. One published a book which defended regicide, and a pupil
of the Jesuits attempted to murder Henry IV. If this was their
attitude in a country which was mainly Catholic, what would they be
likely to say about Protestant monarchs like Queen Elizabeth?
Bellarmine and Surez were especially concerned about James I,
who was trying to discover traitors by imposing an oath of
allegiance on the Catholics who Survived in England. So they made
the timely discovery that God conferred upon the people the right
to govern themselves and the people could delegate this authority
to a king. Naturally, if he misbehaved they could take back their
power or depose him; provided they had "the sanction of the
Church," as the article on Bellarmine in the Encyclopedia of Social
Science says. The whole theory was a trick to get individual
Catholics to murder, of the people to rise against Protestant
rulers, and it was quietly dropped when the iron curtain was
established between Protestant and Catholic Europe, especially when
the Catholic kings forced the pope to suppress the Jesuits. The
Papacy which had in the 12th century condemned the English Barons
for demanding what is now respectfully called the first instalment
of democracy, Magna Carta was still in the 19th century the
strongest support of the vile monarchs of Naples, Spain and
Portugal in their wholesale massacres of democrats. But you won't
read that in the new history.
5. LOUIS XIV AND THE EDICT OF NANTES
In the 17th century Italy and Spain sank rapidly into the
ignoble somnolence in which they would remain as long as they were
Catholic. Germany was paralyzed by the Thirty Years' War, and
England was checked in its progress by the Civil War. France, which
had ignored the pope's order to enter the religious war, grasped
its opportunity and became the most brilliant and most prosperous
power in Europe; and its splendor culminated in the reign of Louis
XIV. There is here an admirable opportunity to test the value of
any modern history, and it is easy to do so by seeing whether the
history accepts or rejects the gross compliments that Catholic
literature pays to Louis XIV and his work. He has come down to us
as "The Great Monarch," "The King Sun"; not only the most
magnificent king in Europe, but the man who raised France to the
peak of its prosperity and splendor.
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In modern critical history the gorgeous robes and impressive
physical appearance of Louis XIV barely cover an ignoble
personality; a man of gross appetites in food and sex, a man so
weak in self-control that, in defiance of his church, he never made
the least effort to keep within the bounds of decency in these
respects. He had a mediocre intelligence and a monstrous vanity,
and whatever great work is assigned to him was performed by his two
chief ministers, Colbert and Louvols. The gorgeous palaces
(Versailles, etc.) which seem today to the tourist to confirm the
legend of his greatness really bear witness to the callousness of
his egoism, for the funds were wrung cruelly from a vilely-treated
and sometimes starving people. For their capital city, Paris. he
hid a contempt, and he very rarely ventured into it because it was
squalid and resentful. The one important act of his reign for which
he was personally responsible was the revocation of the Edicts of
Nantes; that is to say, the annulment of the charter of toleration
of Protestants, an act which inflicted appalling suffering on the
best part of the nation and began the ruin of his country. From the
social and moral point of view his age was not glorious but fully
equal in viciousness to the "glorious" 13th century.
In face of all this the duty of a modern historian is clear,
and our new historians fail in it. They cannot, of course, repeat
the Catholic legend of Louis XIV in its full flavor, but they
suppress the unflattering truth and so confirm the legend in the
minds of readers. Oar Columbia Encyclopedia gives him three times
as much space as it gives to the Emperor Hadrian, and, beyond
casually mentioning his mistresses, conveys the impression that he
really was a great monarch and had "an infinite capacity for work."
Professors Boak, Slosson, and Anderson allot him a "glorious reign"
with a few shades. Wallbank and Taylor find him a man of "more than
average intelligence." But I do not here so much complain of what
they say as deplore the lack of frankness which leaves the Catholic
legend intact. In no chapter have we found them describing the
social and moral grossness of the general population, lay and
clerical, and I submit that that is because they would have to tell
truths that would be quite inconsistent with their continual praise
of the Church as a moral agency. Moreover, in the 16th century they
all claim a great reform of the Church, and the reign of Louis XIV
affords a unique opportunity to judge what the reform was worth,
for we have a better knowledge of its character than of that of any
previous century.
For the writing of one of my books I read a large volume of
the official police records for the time of Louis (the Archives of
the Bastille). Stenography was now in use, and these long verbatim
records of trials, helped out by the horrible tortures in the
jails, afford an almost unique picture of the criminality of the
greatest city in Europe. Poisoning with arsenic was terribly rife,
especially in the middle class and a dozen priests in the actual
service of the church duped and exploited the wealthy middle class
and the nobles by performing "black masses," by means of which they
professed to put folk in contact with the devil. It is a Catholic
lie that this was done only by a few ex-priests. There was not one
ex-priest among them, and some were fashionable preachers in Paris.
Babies were sacrificed to the devil, and some of the highest ladies
in the land lay nude at the altar while the priest said his parody
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of the mass on their bellies. The vilest scum of Paris hung round
the palaces, even the royal palace, and pandered to the
unrestrained passions of the nobles. The Cardinal Arch bishop
flaunted his mistresses as openly as the king, and the people sang
ribald songs about him in the streets. On account of Louis XIV,
says the Duc de Saint Simon, one of the chief French writers of the
age, "Paris became the main sewer of the lusts of Europe." Gambling
was more sordid than in any other age, and in some ways the
glittering nobles were filthy. There is an unforgettable scene in
a letter of one of the literary ladies. There had been a Quarrel
between the King and his chief mistress. He complained that she
stank because she never took a bath, and she retorted that the
smell came from his chronically foul breath. In another letter we
find one of the greater nobles receiving convoys as he sits on his
pot in his bedroom in the morning. The streets of Paris still had
no pavements and no sewers. Filth was thrown from the bedroom
windows in the narrow streets, down the middle of which an open
sewer trickled, and the stench was notorious throughout Europe.
This was Paris in the glorious reign. But our historians do
not think it of interest to describe these things, or to tell how
the streets of Cordova had been paved and sewered seven centuries
earlier and the streets of Rome a thousand years before; and I
have admired a good sewage system in a Cretan Royal Palace that
was nearly 4,000 years old. Our tourists find confirmation of the
legend of the Golden Age of Louis XIV when they visit his superb
palaces. No one tells them how the money to build them was
squeezed out of the veins and pores of the people. A large part
of the country was at one time so distressed that folk fled to
the woods from the tax-gatherer, tried to live on grass, bit into
their own limbs, or ate bodies of some of the nude children who
wandered in troops over the country.
As to the moral value of the church, the life of Louis
itself is eloquent. From the age of 16 to 45 he had a succession
of mistresses who were as well known as Mrs. Truman is in America
today. Did the Jesuits denounce him one of the monarchs whom the
people ought, on their "democratic" theory, to depose? On the
contrary, during all this time he had successive Jesuit
confessors and none of them demanded the dismissal of his
mistresses as their own theology required them to do. Nearly all
the nobles and ladies and mistresses had Jesuit confessors. It
was their golden age. At the age of 45 Louis fell under the
influence of a lady (herself a convert from loose ways) of strict
virtue and piety. In view of his age, poor health, and the pace
of his life it seems probable enough that Louis had lost his
vigor. However that may be, Mme. de Maintenon and the Jesuits
closed round him, foully persecuted the Huguenots, and in the end
persuaded him to do penance for his sins by revoking their
charter of freedom, the Edict of Nantes. it was, apart from the
vast amount of suffering, a deadly blow to his country from which
France never recovered. It is estimated that 300,000 families of
the most sober and industrious type fled, and England, in which
most of them settled, rose to the level from which France fell.
As Professor Barnes says, "the Protestants had been butchered in
droves."
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Some may claim that, however much France sank in prosperity
it must have been morally improved. It was not. Although the king
dropped his mistresses (and took to pious savagery instead), the
nobles, as the Cambridge Modern History shows, were as flagrant
as ever after Louis' conversion. And it was far worse after his
death. It is undisputed that in the higher clerical and
aristocratic circles the standard of conduct fell lower than
ever. With all his industry in love-making Louis had left no son,
an the Duke of Orleans became Regent. He, his licentious (and
probably incestuous) daughter, and his debauched favorite,
Cardinal Dubois, presided over orgies in the court that had been
unknown under Louis. The Cambridge History says (VI. 332):
"The open vices of Orleans and his daughter doubtless
contributed to the lawlessness of society, but in the
reliable memoirs (Saint Simon, etc.) the vilest stories
relate not to Orleans but to others, and the example of the
prince was followed by the dukes and by such of the nobility
as came into contact with society and by lawyers and
financiers."
But what was the reformed papacy doing? It had made a cardinal of
one of the vilest of the courtiers, Dubois, and the distinguished
jurist President de Brosses tells us in his 'Familiar Letters'
that on his visits to Rome he found Pope Benedict XIV (counted by
Catholics the greatest pope in two centuries) eager for the
latest smutty stories about the court and "full of good stories
about girls" himself.
You cannot fully understand the French Revolution if your
historian refuses to say a word about all this, yet there, is not
a word about it in most of the new histories.
6. PARALYSIS OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
By the second half of the 17th century the struggle of
Catholic and Protestant, which had cost millions of lives in a
century, was over. Europe was now divided into two halves by the
real Iron Curtain of religious hatred. At this point a historian
who is faithful to his primary social duty, which is to enable
his readers to recognize which agencies in the human tragi-comedy
have been progressive and which reactionary, would pause to
contrast the fortunes during the next two centuries of,
respectively, the countries which still followed the guidance of
the pope and those that did not. It would doubtless be considered
a sectarian act if he did this too pointedly, but at least he
ought to provide his reader with the facts. In this again the new
historian completely fails. The story of each country in modern
times is told at some length, but in the case of Catholic
countries we have just the conventional account of kings,
battles, and similar matters without any indication of the causes
of their decay. The historian is careful not to draw attention to
the fact that the more solidly Catholic a country was the deeper
it sank, while the Protestant countries rose as rapidly as the
Catholic countries declined. That is the broad and significant
fact of European life from about 1650 to the French Revolution
or, with that interruption, to 1850.
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On the extreme wings of the European world, untainted by
heresy, were Catholic Poland and Ireland. Poland showed the last
flicker of its earlier greatness under Sobieski in the 17th
century and then became the drab, illiterate, anarchic, and
miserably poor land that its neighbors would cynically divide
between them in the 18th century. After that it falls out of the
news until 1918.
Ireland had long before dropped out of European
consideration, and it remained ignorant, violent, fanatical, and
impotent. It is sometimes said that we must make allowances for
its poverty in natural resources, but that did not matter much
until the Industrial Revolution began; and the historian smiles
at the complaint that all its misfortunes were due to English
misrule, which was certainly grievous. It and Poland were, until
the second half of the last century, On a level with the strictly
Catholic countries: Italy, Spain, Portugal, and South America.
And not simply socially and economically, but in regard to what
the Church calls virtue.
Spain and Portugal were the most conspicuous examples of
Catholic paralysis, for they had under the Arabs far surpassed
every other country in Europe in size and population, prosperity
in every class, enlightenment, and general character. This
prosperity had been lowered by the real Moors, who were Moslem
fanatics from Morocco and were far inferior to the Arabs, before
the Spanish Catholics, with the help of a vast army of French and
English knights, had fallen upon it, but until the 15th century
the Catholic kings were as a rule sufficiently independent of the
Church to take over the culture and the services of the Arabs,
Moors and Jews. But when the final step, the conquest of Granada,
was taken, the priests had only a fanatical queen and the crafty
and unscrupulous Ferdinand to deal with, and they were permitted
to set up the harshest intolerance and the most truculent branch
of the Inquisition. The popes, our historians generally point
out, did not control the Spanish Inquisition. No, they wanted to,
but Ferdinand and his clergy coveted the rich spoils (from
confiscation) for themselves, and warned Rome to keep out. The,
ruin which this brought upon Spain was checked for a time by the
gold of America -- they had learned navigation from the Arabs --
then a palsy crept over the short-lived brilliance of Catholic
Spain. Before the year 1,000 the Peninsula, or the lower half of
it, had supported 30,000,000 of the happiest, most prosperous,
and most enlightened people in Europe. Before the end of the 17th
century, Spain -- the whole of Spain had only 6,500,000 people,
and they were among the poorest and most ignorant in Europe; and
certainly not more virtuous than any other. Spain and Portugal
fell under the same disdain as Poland and Ireland in the eyes of
Europe.
Italy, as statesmen would say at a later date, had become,
thanks largely to the ambition of the papacy, "merely a
geographical expression." The northern one-third of it was under
Austria, as the heir of the Holy Roman Empire: the central one-
third was the kingdom of the pope; the south was the kingdom of
Naples. Except for one or two small Balkan countries which were
ruled by the degenerate Sultan of Turkey the papal kingdom and
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that of Naples were the poorest in wealth, culture, and character
in the whole of Europe. I return to them, especially the papal
states, in later sections. The north was in far better condition
than these, and the apologist at once points out Austria, which
ruled it, was a Catholic country. You will look in vain in the
new history for the explanation; which is that while it did
remain Catholic after the Thirty Years' War, its most famous
monarch in the 17th century, Joseph II, the man who did most to
raise the level of its civilization, was a pupil of Voltaire and,
in express defiance of the pope, ruled it on the principles of
the French deists and atheists. The Columbia Encyclopedia, while
giving a list of his great reforms and even some of his anti-
clerical measures, goes out of its way to deny the influence of
the French Freethinkers, against all authority. Joseph was a
contemporary of Frederick the Great and drew his inspiration from
the same source. Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes's edition of Ploetz's
"Epitome of History" (1935), which is necessarily very brief in
it's notices, is moved to lengthy admiration of the reign of
Joseph II -- he regenerated the Austrian monarchy, lending it
nobility and vitality -- and it alone frankly tells how he defied
Rome and disbanded 30,000 monks. But Dr. Barnes is, as I said,
not properly counted among the new historians.
And this concealment of the truth about the lack of social
inspiration in the Catholic faith which, in view of its
pretensions in our time, is very important, is further helped by
the way the development of French civilization is treated. The
general corruption of which I gave some idea in the last section
plainly shows, since the church professes to be particularly
concerned about sex-morals, that it had no social influence and
therefore nothing to do with the rise of the nation, but by
suppressing these facts the reader is left to entertain the claim
of the Catholic apologist. Naturally any thoughtful man will
reflect that if the church had no influence on sexual conduct and
general viciousness it certainly had none on the increase of
wealth, the progress of art, and military victories. The truth,
of which the reader gets no idea, is that France was not at all a
Catholic country in the same sense as Italy, Spain and Portugal.
The best elements in the Church itself defied the papacy and
declared the independence of the Gallican Church. There were more
than a million Protestants in the land, and the licentiousness of
the higher clergy encouraged. the skepticism that had been
growing for a century. A number of the greatest French writers
from the 16th century onward -- Montaigne, Cyrano de Bergerac,
Moliere, Boileau, Bayle -- were Freethinkers and had extensive
support in the middle class. France was only in a formal sense a
Catholic country,
On the other hand the Protestant countries advanced rapidly
once the religious wars were over and the devastated areas
restored. England, in suite of the reaction of the Civil War and
the Puritan period, became superior to any in art, science,
literature, trade, and prosperity. Holland acquired a trade,
prosperity, and social position which most folk have now
forgotten. Prussia, under the Skeptical Frederick, became the
most enlightened and one of the mast advancing countries in
Europe. Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden won an
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importance they had never had before. There is no need for
learned research in making up the account. Every historian knows,
though few will say, that the Catholic world sank lower and
lower, and in proportion to its Catholicism. The new history
offers no explanation of this interesting phenomenon.
7. VOLTAIRE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
The chief defect of the writing of both science and history
is that a vast amount of unnecessary detail is included. This
tires and repels a reader and he is less able to appreciate the
(educationally) more important general truths. The new history
not only has this general defect, but it fails repeatedly even to
mention the general truths, especially when these would be
resented by the Catholic authorities. Every other development --
artistic, literary, political, economic, etc. -- receives full
and impartial treatment, but situations and events which the
Catholic apologist wants suppressed are either omitted or
scantily noticed or misrepresented. I have here nothing to say
about the historian's excuse that he would be trespassing on the
domain of theology (as he quite often does when it gives no
offense) if he stated these, or that in writing for the public he
has no right to affront one-fifth (as Catholics count) of the
American nation. I am content to state the facts.
When we come, as we now do, to the 17th century, we find
another of these lamentable omissions. There is no good ground
for saying, as most of our historians do, that the Middle Ages
ended in 1450 or even 1550, but they might plausibly argue that
Modern Times began about 1750. A new conception of life, a new
spirit, won its way into the mind of the middle class, which
then, at least, might justly be called the backbone of a nation,
and long before the end of the century it was recognizable as the
modern conception which, after overcoming the devils or dragons
of the first half of the 19th century, established itself and has
transformed the world. None of our historians make this quite
clear. The new conception is associated especially with the work
of a number of French writers who have, not very aptly, come to
be known as "the Philosophers"; unless the word be used in its
original sense, "seekers after wisdom." But they sought wisdom,
not in the cloud-land of metaphysics, but in regard to the nature
of the universe and of man and his practical problems. In the
last century they were apt to be superficially dismissed as a
bunch of Atheists or near-Atheists who, by disturbing the
religions serenity of the French mind, "unleashed the passions of
the mob" and caused all the bloodshed of the Revolution.
This miserable caricature of a great and pregnant
development was so thoroughly discredited by the modern French
historians (and the writers of the Cambridge Modern History) long
before the new history was born that it is not included with
other Catholic myths in the works I am examining. Even the
Columbia Encyclopedia has a long and generally admirable article
on Voltaire; though it is sublime in its simplicity when it says
that, "his chief flaw is his prejudice against religion."
Professor Langer, it is true, virtually ignores the whole
movement and thus leaves the stirring 18th century unexplained in
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some of its most important aspects. All the others are
complimentary even to "Voltaire the Scoffer" and to the romantic
revolutionary Rousseau.
But they completely fail to impress the reader with the
historical importance of the school as a whole. Professor Geise
goes out of his way to criticize "the Age of Reason" at great
length and in effect suggests that the Romantic School which
arose in reaction to it was more important, which, we shall see,
is absurd. Professor Lucas observes (693) that Voltaire's age did
not understand the profound importance of medieval culture in the
history of civilization; which reminds us only of the inflated
language which the new history uses about the beautiful 13th
century and the Middle ages generally. He does, however, later
say, if too inadequately, that humanitarianism was "a marked
feature of the Age of Reason." Professor Barnes rather Surprises
us by criticizing Voltaire's lack of taste, which suggests that
he is unaware of the grossness of morals and manners during the
reign of Louis XIV and the Regency (in which Voltaire was
educated); and he fails to appreciate Voltaire's splendid and
self-sacrificing work for political freedom, toleration, and
other social ideals. As to taste, Voltaire was an aristocrat of
exquisite taste though apt to use the freedom of speech of the
time in his jibes at the hypocritical church. He was as fond as
any other rich man of the pleasures and luxuries of Paris, yet
rather than stifle his indignation at untruth and injustice he
spent nearly the whole of his adult life in exile from it.
Compare the futility and self-indulgence of the arch bishops and
conservative nobles of France.
But what one chiefly deplores here is that the whole of our
historians and the Columbia Encyclopedia fail or decline to
inform their readers of the Profound social importance of the
work of the philosophers and the high distinction of most members
of the group. In earlier sections we have found them complaining
that when a brilliant period like the Renaissance opened the
"old" historians did not recognize its roots in earlier
centuries. Now they fail lamentably to show how the great
developments of the 19th century were deeply rooted in the French
school of the 18th century; and one cannot hesitate to connect
this defect with the fact that the religious authorities bitterly
resent any candid treatment of the fact that European progress
was so slow under the Church but, in its social aspects and in
regard to science, entered upon a stage of rapid advance when the
clerical lead was replaced by that of a brilliant group of
Freethinkers. These men thought primarily of inducing the world
to look to science rather than to theology or philosophy, but
they meant science in its broadest range; social, political, and
economic reform as well as astronomy, physics, biology, and
anthropology.
Their chief instrument of education was the famous
encyclopedia in 53 volumes which they published, in difficult
circumstances and under heavy persecution, from 1751 to 1772.
There are few modern reforms of which you will not find the germ
in it, while the criticism of religion in it is not obtruded. It
had for the time an enormous circulation in France and abroad,
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for some of the ablest scholars and writers in Europe contributed
to it. Professors Sheppard and Godfrey make the curious
reflection (II, 148) on it:
"It lacks the scholarship such a compendium of the arts
and sciences merited."
The list of its chief contributors includes the famous Baron de
Montesquieu (the real pioneer of modern democracy, whose great
work "The Spirit of the Laws" makes Bellarmine and Suarez look
like thimbleriggers), the still more famous Count Buffon (the
greatest scientist of his age), Voltaire (certainly the most
brilliant writer and historian of his age), Rousseau, Turgot (the
founder of economic science and one of the ablest ministers of
state), Laland (one of the finest astronomers and mathematicians
of the time), Euler ("probably the most talented mathematician
that ever lived" says Dr. Barnes), D'Alembert (who was hardly
second to him), Diderot (one of the most learned men in France),
Bernouilli (famous Italian scientist), Marmontel (one of the most
brilliant French writers of the time), Baron D'Holbach,
Helvetius, and others of the most cultivated writers in Paris. It
is strange to find Dr. Barnes, who has only a few lines on the
work -- he calls it "a monumental survey of knowledge" -- saying
that these writers "shared with Aquinas and Duns Scotus many of
the problems they discussed" (II. 185).
In spite of the high position of the chief writers they had
to produce their work in the teeth of fierce hostility. As volume
after volume was more or lese secretly printed and published they
were repeatedly condemned and the authors threatened. When the
work was near completion the clergy bribed the printers to
mutilate the finest articles after Diderot had passed the proof.
But the leading Minister, the Due de Choiseul, a secret skeptic,
and -- it is amusing to learn -- the king's chief mistress Mme.
de Pompadour protected the rebels, and the great work circulated
freely when its arch-critics the Jesuits, were suppressed by the
pope as grave offenders.
The immense influence of the book rebukes our historians for
taking so little notice of it. Such was its circulation that the
printers made a profit of $5,000,000: an immense sum to make out
of a literary and scientific work at a time when little more than
10 percent of the community could read. It electrified the French
middle class and put into their minds the germs of all the
reforms which they put forward in the Revolution before the pious
Robespierre ruined it with his Supreme Being and Terror. Germany,
where Frederick II (more French than German in culture) warmly
welcomed the chief writers, now ceased to be a medieval power and
entered the modern world, the world of Goethe, Catherine the
Great welcomed them to Russia, where it seemed for a time as if
the modern ideas were dissolving the medieval feudalism. Joseph
II of Austria eagerly accepted the ideas of the Encyclopedia, as
I said in the last section, and in the 10 years of his reign made
immense progress in the reform of his country. In north Italy its
plea for reform of prisons and the penal code inspired. the
Marquis de Beccaria to write the first great work on that line.
Its gospel penetrated even the sordid kingdom of Naples, and an
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enlightened Voltairean minister" Tannucci, bravely attempted to
cleanse the Augaean stables; The greatest pope of the century,
Benedict XIV, corresponded amicably with Voltaire, but here the
medieval thickets were too dense and profitable for the reform
idea to make progress.
Europe was "filled with it and shaken by it" says an
authority in which we should hardly expect such language, the
Encyclopedia Americana. The most eminent minister that Portugal
had in that century, the Marquis de Pombal, a Voltairean, began
with great success to save the country from the squalor into
which it had drifted, but the clergy checked and then ruined his
work. The equally distinguished first minister of spain, the
Count d'Aranda, a friend as well as a Pupil of Voltaire,
initiated a series of notable reforms in Spain, but again the
church destroyed his work, Even in England the French
Encyclopedia had a host of readers, and the reform ideas which
spread in England before the French Revolution came mainly from
it. and from writers inspired by it. One reads still how the
abolitionist William Wilberforce was inspired by his deep
Christian faith to take up the cause of the abortion of Slavery,
but I do not know any historian or writer on the subject who
quotes from the official biography of Wilberforce, by his
orthodox sons, that he was a skeptic until near the age of 30,
and he learned his zeal for abolition from French skeptical
writers whom he read in his teens. From England and France the
ideas of the French Encyclopedia, perhaps copies of it, crossed
the Atlantic -- Jefferson, at least, was a goad French scholar
and prized the friendship of some of the French skeptics -- and
inspired men like Franklin and Jefferson with their social
idealism. The reform which the work advocated -- it was in the
encyclopedia that Jean-Jacques first expounded his dream of
equality -- was later thundered over the world by the French
Revolution. The royalists and clerics flattered themselves that
they had buried them forever after the fall of Napoleon, but it
is the realization of these ideas that makes our world superior
to any age that has gone before. No other single work has had so
beneficent and massive a part in making the new world. But the
new history dismisses it in a short and tame paragraph.
8. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Professor Barnes introduces his treatment of this most
towering event of the 18th century, this first fine fruit of the
French Encyclopedia, with this admirable passage (II. 107):
"The French Revolution was long portrayed as an epic of
blood and glory. The Reign of Terror loomed up as the great
event of the Revolution. ... A subsequent generation of
historians have tended to minimize the element of gore and
confusion. They have made it clear that the French
Revolution represents a very considerable collection of
permanent achievements in the creation of modern society."
We may wish that he had made it plainer that in this case he does
not mean that it is the new American historians who have
corrected the older libels of the Revolution. For more than half
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a century Paris University has had a special chair of the history
of the Revolution, and the old libels were completely refuted
before the end of the 19th century. In fact, even older and more
conservative French historians like Thiers, Taine, and Sorel had
refuted most of the lies that had got into English literature,
and from it to American, from emigrant nobles and priests -- even
Carlyle, exposed many of them in 1836 -- and they were finally
dismissed from serious history in Professor Lavisse's "History of
the Revolution" and the works of Professor Aulard.
Yet, these lies are still much alive in literature. Not many
years ago a novelist who is well above the average in culture
spoke casually and irrelevantly about "the prostitute who sang
ribald songs from the High Altar of Notre Dame": a gross
misrepresentation of a solemn and artistic pageant that was
performed in the cathedral when it was used no longer for
Catholic services. Quite recently, that distinguished British
scholar and humanist, Dr. Gilbert Murray, has repeated some of
the worst of the old legends in a published lecture. Thus a much
larger literature than that of the Catholic propagandist still
spreads its lies While, especially since it has became the
fashion to couple the French and the Russian Revolutions.
Catholic radio and Catholic influence, in the press have given a
new vitality to the old lies. In these circumstances, while We do
not expect the new historian to quote and condemn these Catholic
lies, he may surely be expected to give an adequate account of
the facts which are so grossly falsified.
In this they again fail us, though most of them give a
generally fair account of the course of events. The broad truth
about the Revolution which not only as a matter of historical
truth, but for purposes of social controversy today, ought to be
impressed upon the reader is that the actual revolt in 1789 was
accompanied by little bloodshed even on the part of the ignorant
masses. It was a fine middle-class overthrow of a galling
tyranny, which at first demanded even less than the Fathers of
the American Revolution demanded and then proceeded during two or
three years to reform the country and draft a constitution that
was more admirable than any other in Europe and included more
social advances even than the American.
There were no official reprisals, as there would be when the
clerical-royalists recovered power, and the burning of the
Bastille and attack on the Tuileries cannot be considered popular
outrages, especially as the king drew his armies round Paris.
There were a few individual mob-outrages in Paris, but the chief
acts of violence were the burning of chateaux and murder of small
nobles and their families in the provinces. There is solid
contemporary evidence, not noticed by any of the new historians,
that it was agents of the Duke of Orleans, who coveted the
throne, who went out from Paris and inflamed the densely-ignorant
peasants by spreading rumors that the king and the nobles were
plotting against them. The guillotine was not even invented until
three years later, and the execution of the king and queen, still
later, was voted by the Assembly because they attempted to fly to
join the bitter enemies of the republic abroad.
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It is mentioned by few of our historians that the Revolution
was voluntarily accepted by the king, the nobles, and the hearts
of the clergy on August 4, 1789, and that the nobles and higher
clergy then almost immediately began to fly to England and
Austria, and inflame those countries with gross exaggerations of
events. It is not made clear that the middle-class men, led by a
few nobles, who had carried the revolution continued all through
1790 and 1791 in a city that was in the circumstances remarkably
free from disorder, to work out a constitution and plans for
social amelioration (including abolition of slavery, general
education, and other measures which were yet unknown even in
America). Near the end of 1791 the new constitution was finished
and hardly any of our historians tells this: the politicians, by
an act of virtue that has hardly a parallel in the history of
politics, bound themselves to take no office under it, to avoid
even the suspicion of graft and so handed power to a new,
inferior, and inexperienced body of men. This was shortly
followed by a fierce civil war, excited by the clergy, in
Britanny and a plan of the monarchs of England, Austria and
Prussia, egged on by the fugitive nobles and priests, to send
large armies of the finest soldiers of the time and destroy the
republic. It was in these circumstances, which are rarely clearly
stated, that, four years after the actual revolution, there
occurred those horrible massacres which are by a deliberate
confusion, represented as characteristic of the French
Revolution.
The first was what is called the September Massacre. Even so
liberal and learned a historian as Professor Barnes says of it
(11. 113):
"The mob got out of hand and between September 2nd and
7th. 1792, it is estimated that 2,000 to 20,000 Royalists
were slain."
Before the end of the, last century the French historians had
carefully sifted all contemporary evidence, and it is summed up
in Professor Lavisse's authoritative "History of the Revolution"
(10 vols. 1901). The "mob' of Paris was not only not concerned in
the massacre, but resented it. One small section of the Paris
Commune, about 500 citizens, organized and carried out the
massacre with the respectable design (they said) of purifying
Paris in view of the grave danger of the nation. They seem to
have been mostly middle-class men. The number of victims was
about 1,100, and more than one-half of these were criminals or
prostitutes from the jails; less than half the inmates of the
jails at that time, as the official documents show. "The people
of Paris," says Lavisse, "had taken no part in these outrages and
warmly condemned such scoundrels." Danton and the government
leaders took strict precautions to prevent further massacres; and
the people in the provinces were "generally horrified." So much
for the first "unleashing of the passions of the mob."
The reactionaries always connect this supposed bloody
hysteria of the mob with the loss of religion; in fact, in fact,
they say that Danton and Robespierre first deprived them of the
restraints of the Catholic faith and the horrors followed. The
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truth, which Professor Aulard has shown in a small specialist
work ("Christianity and the French Revolution." 1927) is that the
mass of the People voluntarily quit the Church, and Danton and
Robespierre resisted all their demands that it should be
disestablished until the summer of 1793. I do not find that any
of our new historians endorse the Catholic legend that the people
of Paris then set up a cult of Reason and had a Prostitute
masquerading as the Goddess of Reason in the cathedral. That myth
is too ragged to appear in any but a Catholic Publication. The
ceremony in honor of Liberty and Reason that was held in Notre
Dame, which had been handed over by the clergy to the
municipality, was a dignified pageant in which a lady (not a
prostitute and not using the altar) Personified Liberty and
recited a fine ode composed by the leading poet of the day.
But an important point in this connection, which none of our
historians mentions, is that before the Terror of 1793-4, the
really horrible page of French history (four years after the
Revolution), the Catholic religion and Atheism (which was
Publicly burned in effigy before all Paris) were replaced as the
official religion by the Cult of the Supreme Being, and it was
this high priest of this cult, Robespierre, who, hated Atheism
more deeply than he hated Romanism, who was responsible for the
cold savagery of the Terror. Exact research has brought down the
number of victims to about 20,000 -- less than half the number of
victims of the St. Bartholomew Massacre -- and of these only 6
percent were aristocrats and 8 percent priests and nuns. It was a
political massacre of Robespierre's opponents, and as they were
followers of the Atheist Danton, we may almost say that it was
largely a massacre of Atheists by theists.
There are other aspects of the Revolution which, for actual
sociological reasons, our historians ought to impress upon the
modern reader, and they do not. Professor Barnes and Professor
Geise, alone point out that, in spite of the long period of
reaction that followed the fall of Napoleon the Revolution
contributed to European civilization certain elements that it had
lacked for 12 or 13 centuries. It put an end to feudal tyranny,
for, except in Russia, kings, nobles and priests, in spite of
their recovery of power, rarely used it so ruthlessly as they had
done, and only for a few decades. The new historians are too apt
to say that feudalism had died in the 15th or 16th century, but
in its most odious form it lasted in France, where there were
still immense numbers of actual serfs, until the Revolution. It
took up the demand for the abolition of slavery and ended the
shameful ownership of a high proportion of the soil of France by
the clergy. The workers, urban and rural, were, taught to look
forward to a time when the scandalous inequality in the
distribution of wealth would be rectified and the black contrast
between the life of the privileged one-tenth and the foul
existence of the nine-tenths would be gradually relieved. As
Professor Barnes says (II. 190):
"It is a significant fact that more than 99 percent of
the period of man's existence on this planet was passed
through without any consciousness of actual progress in
hundreds of years."
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It was Turgot and the encyclopedists who first started the
idea of an indefinite possible progress in the improvement of
life. It was one of the noblest citizens of the Revolution, the
Marquis de Condorcet, who first developed it in a book that
spread widely; and it was his noble wife who pleaded for the
emancipation of woman from 13 centuries of injustice. The scheme
of general education for both sexes that Tallyrand worked out for
the revolutionary government had no equal until late in the 19th
century. The use of torture was abolished, the law reformed,
democracy established.
And just as the encyclopedists had planted the idea of these
reforms in other countries, so the Revolution taught the people
to demand them and how to get them. The revolutionary armies that
in time poured south as far as Naples and over Spain and Portugal
emptied the foul dungeons of state and church (the Inquisition).
broke their instruments of torture everywhere, and set up
humanitarian republics. Even in England, in spite of the fierce
hatred of the Revolution that was fed by the lies of political
fugitives, as such folk libel Russia or Czechoslovakia today,
Jacobin Clubs appeared in the cities, and when the period of
suppression and reaction ended, the rebels emerged from the
vaults and began a score of reform-movements (political,
industrial, educational, pacifist, feminist, etc.). "The world"
said even the conservative historian Freeman "was never the same
again after the French Revolution." But the new history knows
nothing of this, and it is not the aspect of the Revolution that
interests the Columbia Encyclopedia.
I find it still worse that our historians completely ignore
another point which has definite lessons for us today, and again
they are lessons which the Catholic authorities do not wish us to
draw. In modern French history and the Cambridge History there
are two Terrors, the Red and the White. Even our Columbia
Encyclopedia mentions -- it just gives it half a line -- that
there, was a White Terror, not even explaining what the phrase
means. But you will not find even the phrase in the index of any
of these histories, and the facts which it indicates are entirely
suppressed.
It means the Royalist-Catholic Massacre of the Reds. At the
death of Robespierre the secretly organized Catholics took
advantage of the political confusion and believed that they were
about to recover power. Though still a minority they fell with
fury upon the republicans. At Lyons, for instance. 20,000
Catholics seized and held the city for a time and barbarically
murdered a large number of active republicans. The same occurred
in 62 departments (county divisions;) of the country, and
thousands were slain in a few months. No records were kept so it
is not possible to say whether there were as many victims as in
the Red Terror, but the Paris Government, as soon as order was
established, sent men to collect information, and it is the
opinion of the French historians, that there were not less, and
that its savagery was worse, though all this was directed by
educated Catholics. They, says Professor Martin, "showed a
mixture of cold cruelty and depravity which was more hideous than
the brutal ferocity of the Jacobin Terrorists." He reproduces the
official reports.
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This savagery was renewed after the defeat of Napoleon, and
we can only imagine how far it would have gone if Wellington and
the other allied leaders in Paris had not compelled the king to
check it, although it was now organized by the aristocracy and
the priests. How many Americans ever heard of the White Terror?
Most of them have read or seen pictures of the densely-ignorant
slum women of Paris knitting at the foot of the guillotine. Does
one in 100,000 of them know that we have, not a rumor or fiction,
but definite evidence that Catholic "ladies" embroidered their
silks while, they sat, in chairs specially provided for them by
the civic officials, to watch the less merciful dispatch of
revolutionaries? In the five years of the Revolution less than
four thousand aristocrats, priests and nuns were murdered or
executed. Far more rebels against the monarchy and the church
were murdered in a few months in the White Terror. The new
history has not a word to say about this.
9. THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
Still worse is the complete suppression of the bloody
chronicle of the murder and torture during the next 40 years of
men whose only demand was for constitutional monarchy and the
abolition of the Inquisition. The history of Europe from about
1750 onward is more important and richer in lessons for us today
than any other period of history. French writers began, we saw,
to draft the plan of a higher civilization from 1750 to 1780. In
the Revolution the foundations were laid, and then, after the
compromise of the reign of Napoleon, the restored monarchs and
the Church tore up the foundation stones and forced the race back
under a regime of absolute monarchy, the Inquisition, the
subjection of women, industrial semi-slavery, dense ignorance,
and sordid criminal law and practice.
The monarchs met at Vienna and formed a Holy Alliance,
blessed by the Church, to (they said) stamp out the last spark of
the revolutionary fire. From 1820 to 1860 (and in some places
later) the peoples of Europe fought magnificently for the
restoration of those Rights of Man (now everywhere recognized)
,which the Revolution had formulated and the pope had derided. In
England, Germany and Protestant countries they were won early,
and with little bloodshed. In France, Italy, Spain. and Portugal,
the lands which were saved from the taint of Protestantism, about
400,000 unarmed men and women, even children, fell in the great
battle, and more than a million rotted in medieval jails or penal
colonies or were driven into exile. If yon care to add the men
who died in arms, facings, seasoned troops for the same cause in
Poland. France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Latin
America, the number rises to millions. And it is hardly too much
to say that all this is suppressed in the new history and the
Columbia Encyclopedia. It is very fully and indignantly described
in the Cambridge Modern History.
The large Catholic literature that pretends to prove that
the Church is not, and never was, hostile to democracy would look
very tawdry if these facts were put before the public in their
full brutality; and many other writers who are eloquent about the
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bloodiness of popular revolutions and the passions of the mob
would be exposed as blind leaders of the blind if these facts
were told in the general public's manuals of the history of
Europe or the history-classes in school and college. The
journalistic and literary practice of applying this supposed law
-- the bloody chaos of revolution and the Justice and restraint
of the counter-revolution -- to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917
and deducing that it must have been accompanied by a good deal of
bloodshed, would be recognized as political propaganda. For this
savagery of revolution and serenity of counter-revolution is the
exact opposite of a law of history or a lesson of the history of
Europe since 1789. Since that year there have been four
revolutions and three counter-revolutions in France, eight
revolutions and six counter-revolutions in the three divisions of
Italy; six revolutions and six counter-revolutions in Spain, and
a further number in Portugal, Germany, Austria, and Hungary.
There have been about 40 revolutions and counter-revolutions in
all, and there was little bloodshed during or after the people's
seizure of power, but there were terrible reprisals after each
recovery of power by the gentle and gentlemanly clerical-
royalist's.
Is not this as well worth telling and describing at adequate
length as the development of science, the improvement of
machinery, the evolution of capitalism, the extension of the
colonial system, or the, history of literature in the 19th
century? Isn't it important at least to sum up all these
revolutions and counter-revolutions and point out how they
represent one of the mightiest efforts of the race to throw off
the burden of old errors and injustices and lift life to a higher
level? The new historian and the encyclopedia entirely fail or
refuse to do this. They refuse to make even summary statements of
the ugly facts, as these are told in the Cambridge Modern
History; and it would be ridiculous to ignore the fact that to
make these statements. even briefly (but truthfully), would
mortally offend the Catholic authorities and the modern
representatives of kings and princes, so there is no hint of
them. Most of our manuals, after a short and generally, as far as
it goes, fair account of the French Revolution, completely ignore
subsequent revolutions, or just notice that there were isolated
disturbances here and there in the course of the next half-
century. Only Professor Barnes whose work is generally loyal to
his claim in his introduction that the supreme aim of history is
to help the living to cast off what remains of the burden of the
past and rise to a higher level, notices the chief revolutionist
and connects them with the great French Revolution. But he omits
the evidence that shows the guilt of the church, the inhumanity
of the clerical-royalist's revolutions, and the general freedom
from bloodshed of the popular revolutions.
I have not space here to devote more than a few lines to
each of the 40 revolutions, but it is necessary to give the
reader some idea of the horrors through which European
progressives passed. Italy was, as I said, divided into three
political spheres. The northern part, under Austria, suffered
less, and I will not linger over it. The central part was the
kingdom of the pope, and I will deal with this in the next
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section, as it is important to understand its condition. The
southern part and Sicily were the kingdom of Naples, and the man
who speaks slightly of it today as the classic land of dolce far
niente -- "it is grand to have nothing to do" -- would learn with
surprise that it had a high civilization under the Greeks 23
centuries ago, and still higher under the Arabs 900 years ago,
and one of the most progressive regimes in Europe under the
Voltairean minister Tannucci in the 18th century; and that under
the French revolutionary troops in 1792 it set up a very
promising republic which the restored Catholic monarchy and
church savagely suppressed, yet its people for the next 60 years
made an heroic fight for justice. Under Ferdinand I, who got back
his throne by a solemn oath at the Altar to respect the
constitution, 100,000 men, women and children were done to death,
and the king, at whose perjury the bishops smiled, was one of the
vilest monarchs in Europe. There were orgies of savagery. One
royalist leader drank his wine from the skull of a liberal, and
once a group of Catholic beggars roasted and ate the bodies of
liberals under the palace windows. It is a royalist Catholic
general, Colletta, who tells us these things, and Professor Croce
answers for the conscientiousness of his work. It was continued
after the death of the king by an anonymous writer, and this
historian claims that there were 150,000 further victims under
Francis II. The best stocks of the middle class (and some of the
nobles) were exterminated.
In the case of Spain, where the king was of the same gross
type as Ferdinand of Naples and perjured himself in the same way
to recover his throne, we have a full account of the horrors in
the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. 5). Here the clergy and the
Jesuits cooperated even more actively with the Royalists, and the
savagery lasted, roundly, from 1814 to 1860, with the
interruption of several bloodless revolutions, to be revived
under the late Alfonso XIII and again under the present dictator
Franco. Even the queens of Spain in this period were despicable
types of women, yet the pope gave that highest reward of feminine
purity, the Golden Rose, to the loosest of them all, Queen
Isabella. I estimate from the figures given in contemporary
writers that Spain in less than 50 years gave at least 150,000
martyrs to the cause of democracy, and the sufferings of hundreds
of thousands of others were severe. We must remember that in
those days and in the hot summers of south Europe the jails were
as vile and deadly as the Black Hole of Calcutta. in Portugal
King Manuel, a man of even more sordid type and a perjurer like
his royal cousin of Madrid and Naples, let loose an even worse
savagery; for it was these Catholic monarchs and their bishops
who "unleashed the passions of the mob." We have contemporary
assurance that of a total population of about 2,000,000 no less
than 17,000 were executed, 17,000 were sent to a living death in
the penal colonies, and 30,000 were packed into the fetid jails
in the space of five years; and the Church cooperated as
cordially as in Spain.
Of all these savage reprisals after clerical-royalist
recoveries of power, to which must be added the ferocious
executions in Hungary in 1849 and the horrors in the papal states
to which I will return, not a word is said in the new history --
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Such is the effect that in 1948 the press generally overlooked
the fact that this was the centenary of Six great democratic
revolutions (followed by no reprisals) in Europe, which shook as
many kings from their thrones, and that 1949 was the centenary of
six counter revolutions which put the kings and the pope back on
their thrones and were followed by such reprisals as I have
described. What school or college in America now hears of these
things? What book will you find in circulation that tells them?
And the professors who set out to tell European professors the
truth about the history of Europe are silent.
Only in the case of France do they, or most of them, tell
that there were revolutions in 1830 and 1848, but they do not
make it clear that this meant a repeated emergence of the
revolutionaries or democrats who had been crushed into the earth
by the White Terror after the death of Napoleon. Even in a small
and neutral manual designed for British schools (J.G. Aldham's
"Students notes of European History," 1927, u. 40) we find the
situation thus briefly described:
"An amnesty refused: and 38 of the most prominent men
in France banished and Nay executed. The White Terror in the
South of France rivalled the Red Terror of the Revolution.
Wholesale pillage and murder, and hundreds of executions."
The distinguished French historian. Professor Martin (Vol. IV,
Ch. IV) has a long and detailed account of this stage of the
White Terror. He says that the reaction comprised every variety
of infamy -- obscenity, rapacity, ferocity -- it surpassed the
ignominy of the Thermidarcan reaction of the year III (the Red
Terror). And when the government was at last forced by the Allies
to cheek "the, wild Catholic disorder," it proceeded itself
against Napoleonists and Protestants "with implacable vengeance."
The hatred of rival politicians, the pathetic fury of
illiterate crowds, avenging 15 centuries of oppression, are
thought worthy of description, but this organized massacre,
directed by educated folk living in luxury, is not to be
considered of any social significance. The systematic persecution
of democracy and of freethinkers and Protestants continued until
1830. The revolt now took the form of pitched battles in the
street of Paris against the trained royalist-clerical regiments.
With barricades and primitive muskets (seized from the museums
and sometimes loaded with old-fashioned printers' type) the
rebels conquered the king's troops, losing 5,300 killed and
wounded in the fight.
But the prince they raised to the throne to replace the
tyrant had duped them, like Ferdinand of Naples, Ferdinand of
Spain, and Miguel of Portugal, and in a few years the struggle
was revived. More than 10,000 were sent to the vile jails and the
deadly penal colonies and thousands were shot when the workers,
who were not taking the place of the students and middle-class
men, numbers of these now joining the Royalists, led by strange
new leaders called Socialists, again raised the barricades and
gave Europe the signal for revolt as far as Rome, Even in London
the government marshalled 500,000 police and troops to meet an
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expected march of the Chartists, England made its peace with the
workers, but in Catholic countries there was the familiar triumph
of "law and order" -- with the aid of a vast army of Russian
serfs -- and the familiar bloody revenge. In Paris at least
10,000 workers were shot in the streets, besides the thousands
whose bodies were just flung into the Seine like dead dogs. You
may have wondered sometimes why European Socialists still chant
"Our flag is red with martyrs' blood," and rave at the
Bourgeoisie. It began in the terrible events of 1848 and 1849,
when the middle-class generally supported the reactionaries. But
the sleek and treacherous descendent of Napoleon (Napoleon II)
whom they had chosen to be their savior from the threat to their
bank accounts turned against them and allied himself with the
clericalist and aristocracy, and by 1852 we find the liberals
complaining that 100,000 of their best men are in jail, penal
colonies, or exile. Would one of our new historians tell us why
whole chapters may be spared for the learning of medieval monks
and the struggles of rival kings and dynasties, yet all these
things, which still live in our problems today, must be
completely suppressed?
10. THE PAPAL STATES
The plea might be made both for the clerical-royalists who
perpetrated these horrors and the historians who suppressed them
that they regarded these revolutions as blind and dangerous
revolts of the passions of the mob -- as if the rulers of the
people, secular and spiritual, were not responsible for the
unhappy condition of most of them -- against the restraints of
Religion, Law and Order, Democracy, and divinely-appointed
Monarchs. When we find a Humanists, scholar like Dr. Gilbert
Murray saying that "all revolutions are full of horror and
inhumanities" and that Europe "recoiled in horror" from the
atrocities of the French Revolution as it row recoils from the
legendary atrocities of the Bolshevik Revolution, we realize how
widely this grossly false conception of modern history is still
entertained, and we resent more deeply than ever the suppression
of the facts in the new history. It encourages a mischievous
misconception of the world-struggle in which we are still engaged
and permits unscrupulous papers to dupe their readers with the
idea that Stalin and his colleagues are driven by the same
criminal ambition as Hitler and Mussolini were.
The proper concern of an historian is not with the revenge
that a crowd here and there may take on their exploiters in the
sudden dawn of a new liberty; just as in the Spanish Revolution
in 1932 a few folk in widely-separated localities burned churches
or killed a few priests or monks. Every historian knows that the
radical reason why the world entered at such a late date in
history upon the path to real civilization was the development of
an extensive middle-class, a body of men more independent,
intelligent, and better educated than the princes or priests.
Until in the second half of the last century the workers in turn
were educated, these middle-class men had to organize and lead
every revolution, however much they had to rely on the vigor of
the workers to carry it through. These men knew well that for
more than 1,000 years the mass of the people had been kept in
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ignorance and treated with gross injustice, yet in no revolution
which they carried did they inflict reprisals on the exploiting
class. On the other hand the fully-educated monarchs, nobles, and
priests who controlled the counter-revolution, the men who were
the champions of law, order and decency, always perpetrated the
most cruel reprisals. This coupling of revolutions with the
Passions of the mob is a gross historical lie.
A second contrast is that from 1789 onward the leaders of
the revolutions were usually men of character whose aim was to
get justice for the people. The monarchs against whom they
rebelled were in large part repulsive in their conduct, and the
nobles, ministers, and higher clergy were as a rule selfish,
frivolous and (from the church angle) immoral. But a third and
much more important contrast is that these kingdoms which were
defended against revolutionaries with the greatest cruelty and
bloodshed were, apart from the small Balkan states which were
still under the Turks, the foulest in Europe in respect of law,
order, decency and justice, and that the revolution at once
initiated a series of what everybody now regards as reforms.
I will illustrate this by a short description of the papal
States as described by contemporary liberal Catholic and Italian
writers and all recent non-Catholic historians (and some
Catholic). I have often quoted the opinion of the chief Catholic
historian of recent times, Lord Acton that the Popes of the first
half of the 19th century were "worse than the Old Man of the
Mountains" (the arch-murderer of history), and the verdict of the
famous French priest, Lantennais, approvingly quoted by the
Catholic Lady Blennerhassett in the Cambridge Modern History (X.
164, that Rome in 1832 was "the foulest sewer ever opened to the
eye of man." Professors Boak, Slosson, and Anderson quote
Gladstone's indignant remark that the kingdom of Naples, the
next-door neighbor and docile subject of the papacy was "the
negation of God erected into a system of government"; meaning the
negation of all moral principle, for the government was very
pious. But neither they nor any other recent American historians
even glance at the condition of the Papal States. In fact you
would be inclined to gather from the new history that the papacy
ceased to exist after the death of Napoleon, came to life again
in the person of Leo XIII (whom they are able to describe
(inaccurately) as a progressive and constructive force, then
almost completely disappeared from the scene while the present
century was wrestling with it's gigantic problems. What, the
papacy was really doing in this time I will tell later.
Under the Republic and Napoleon the French had token over
Italy and introduced good government and many reforms. When the
Vienna Council restored the papal kingdom -- the, pope, like the
kings of Naples, Spain, and Portugal, solemnly promising to
respect the reforms -- all the French improvements were destroyed
or abandoned. Even new roads and sewers were neglected, the lamps
in the streets of Rome unlit and neglected. The administration
was entirely put into the hands of clerics, and by these, as the
Catholic Lady Blennerhassett says dishonesty was "developed into
a system." The Secretary of state, Cardinal Antonelli, son of one
of the poorest peasants, lived opulently and loosely, yet left
$20,000,000 at his death. The peasants, who made a few cents a
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day with great difficulty, took to banditry on such a scale that
9,000 Soldiers had at times to protect a train bringing a Royal
visitor to Rome. All schools were closed. The Inquisition and the
Jesuits were restored, and thousands of progressives soon crammed
the jails; and there, were no fouler jails in Europe, Orsini
tells us that when he was sent from Rome to the villa in which
Alexalider VI had once enjoyed his orgies -- his obscene frescoes
still adorned the walls in 1850 -- he found that men with a life-
sentence were chained to the wall and never released even for
sanitary purposes. The higher clergy were as openly loose as in
the 16th century, and the standard was very low among all the
clergy and the monks and nuns. The courts and Vatican offices
were sodden with corruption; the people were illiterate to the
extent of 95 percent: crimes of violence were appalling, and the
men who dared to demand reform died by the thousand on the
scaffold or in the horrible jails.
At Rome 40,000 (including 10,000 priests) out of a total
population of 170,000 lived on the corrupt system, and the city
was, as I quoted a distinguished French priest saying, "the
foulest sewer that was ever opened up to the eyes of man." the
British Ambassador, Lord Clarendon, pronounced it "the shame of
Europe." In 1831, in fact, the kings of Prussia, Austria, France,
and Britain gravely censured the pope in an open letter and
demanded that he should reform his dominion. And only half a
century later Pope Leo XIII was posing as the moral ruler of the
race and telling the nations how they needed the guidance of the
papacy; as Pious XII is telling them today. But don't look to our
historians or our grand new encyclopedia for a word of all this,
though it is all vouched for by the Catholic Italian historians
of the time -- the Marquis d'Azeglio and his brother, the
statesman Farini, etc. -- and endorsed in all non-Catholic
histories (Cambridge History, Professor Orsi, Bishop Nielsen, R.
Thayer. Bolton King, etc.).
The papacy had from the start benignly blessed this fetid
system. Indeed, while almost the last thing our historians say
about the papal court is that it thoroughly purified itself in
the 16th century, there is no evidence that it ever was reformed
(except for a few years in the 16th century) and plenty of
evidence that it was not. The aged, incompetent Pope whom
Napoleon had treated like a lackey died in 1823, and the corrupt
Secretary of State engineered the election of a 70-year-old
converted rake (father of several bastards in the good old
style), whose chief ambition was to shoot as many birds as he
could in the Vatican garden, He dribbled in his invalid chair for
a few years, and the corrupt cardinals then elected a gluttonous
and lazy monk of questionable morals, a man who ate candy and
read the saucy novels of Paul de Kock while Cardinal Albarii (the
bare-footed peasant boy who died worth $20,000,000) ruled his
kingdom. "Horror and dread darkened the whole of Rome," says
Veri, while a countess amused Europe by claiming in the courts
that she was a bastard and heiress of Cardinal Albani.
But the revolutionary forces were shaking the soil of Europe
before he died (1846), and the cardinals allowed one of their
number who professed liberalism to become Pope Pius IX (of
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disputed memory in history, a quarter-saint in the Church). He
did in 1848 sanction reform in Rome, then, in the disguise of a
footman, fled from the palace to the still utterly demoralized
kingdom of Naples and summoned Louis Napoleon from France to
destroy the Roman republic for him. It is enough to say that the
Papal States sank back into the stinking mud, and soon the
horrible jails were packed again with political prisoners. The
face of one of them, Orsini, frowns at me from the wall of my
study as I write, and his description of them is among my books.
It was in such a world that Pius IX penned that tawdry defiance
of the modern world, the Syllabus.
But modern Italy was gathering strength in the north, and in
1870 the national armies entered Rome and made an end of the
ignoble kingdom of the pope and its bloody history. Our
historians tell this and they explain that when in 1929 the pope
accepted a bribe of $95,000,000 from Mussolini to bless his
corrupt regime, it was not a bribe but a long-delayed
compensation, with compound interest, for the seizure of the
Papal States in 1865-70. They omit to tell one important point
about that seizure. A plebiscite was taken in every province of
the papal kingdom and, by an overwhelming majority the
inhabitants voted that they wanted an end of papal rule. But,
says, the Catholic, the pope had warned his people not to take
any part in this sacrilegious plebiscite. Listen. The city of
Rome had a population of 180,000 of whom 30,000 or 40,000 lived
on the miserable papal system, yet 40,831, which must mean about
the whole of the remaining adult male voters, cast their votes
for Victor Emmanuel and 46 for the pope! In the city and its
province taken together 133,681 voted for Victor Emmanuel and
only 1,501 for the pope. In the first province in which the
plebiscite was taken 132,853 voted for Victor Emmanuel and 1,590
for the pope Surely these facts are not only of interest but of
importance. But would the pope like them published?
THE REVOLT AGAINST REASON
I am here ignoring the admirable, sometimes valuable,
accounts of many typical modern developments that we find in
these manuals of European world history: scientific, industrial,
literary, artistic, and so on. I am not looking for inaccuracies,
which an expert on these developments might or might not find in
our new manuals of history. My purpose is much more serious. I am
showing that from Greek-Roman days onward the new history, by
suppressing large masses of relevant, and undisputed facts,
borrowing false statements from Catholic or idly conventional
writers, and distorting the balance of importance of historical
documents, gives a false view of the evolution of real
civilization and the relative value of the factors or agencies
which have contributed or hindered that evolution. Most of those
factors are still active in "the loom of time," and the most
serious function of history today is to throw the very
considerable light that it can upon their usefulness or their
harmfulness.
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Two further points demand our attention before we come to
the history of our own time. The first is that most of our
historians describe -- some insist at considerable length -- a
Revolt against Reason following upon the Age of reason (or Age of
Enlightenment) of the middle of the 18th century. Professors
Sheopard and Godfrey say (II. 184):
"In the revival of the religious spirit of the time,
and it was widespread, the Church of Rome began to regain
some of its lost influence while the Protestant churches,
especially in England and America, went through a baptism of
evangelical cleansing."
Professor Barnes, who keeps a sense of proportion in his scanty
treatment of the religious development, nevertheless speaks of "a
marked growth of religious feeling and pietism," as a reaction
against Voltairianism, in the first half of the 19th century.
Professor Lucas deals at some length with the supposed revolt,
but he is misleading in paying so much attention to the
philosophy of Kant. Not only had this no connection with the
revolt against reason or the Revival of religion which the others
describe -- Kant's freethinking contemporary Goethe had
immeasurably more influence on the general reading public than he
-- but Kant himself was an arch-apostle of reason and as such was
dreaded by theologians. Even when in his later year's he decided
to say a good word for God and the Soul (and this was never
widely accepted even in philosophical quarters) he still said
that he was appealing to reason (Practical as distinct from Pure
Reason).
Others quote the Romantic Movement which began in Germany
toward the end of the 18th century and spread to France and
England. This is represented as a return to medieval thought over
the ruins of Voltairianism, but nearly every great name given in
connection with it is that of an artist or a literary man. A
renewed appreciation of Gothic architecture spread -- even as far
as America -- but there was no new appreciation of medieval
theology. It was mainly a trend in art and literature. especially
fiction, and the characteristics of it had been as conspicuous in
Rousseau as they were in Goethe's early romantic stories or the
later novels and poems of Victor Hugo.
The chief fact which one recognizes in all this exaggerated
talk about a Revolt against Reason was the spread of religious
revivals started by John Wesley in England and James McGready in
America. Our Columbia Encyclopedia has, strangely, no article on
Reason: though one would think that the changed attitude to it in
modern psychology and the renewed talk in our time about a Revolt
from Reason makes this very desirable. But in the article
"Revivals" a good deal is said about McGready's activity at the
end of the 18th century. I need not discuss how far the
psychology of the times encouraged revivalism because this was in
no sense a Revolt against Reason. The folk who joined the
movement had not been conspicuous as followers of reason. And
this applies also to the Wesleyan or Methodist movement in
England. We do not read of any of the, British followers of
Voltaire breaking with him to join Wesley. Whatever number of the
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British workers who had been indifferent about religion and gross
in behavior were won to the Methodist body, it was mainly
recruited from the Church of England. It was a revolt against the
formalism and ritual of the church, the stress on correctness of
dogma and indifference to morals, and a return to the Bible. In
Protestant countries, where only higher-educated men of the
middle class had read Voltaire or the encyclopedia, no historian
has yet contended that the evangelical churches had lost much
ground, and it is, therefore, curious to speak now of a great
revival. That the Roman Church recovered power is a platitude,
and that with the recovery of power it was able to compel large
numbers at least to profess to believe in it follows from the
facts I gave in the preceding section. The new position of the
papacy after 1816 counted in two ways; it could drastically
suppress criticism of religion, leaving the field free to the
100,000 priests of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal and it
could, except in France, use the grim power of the Inquisition to
bring men into subjection. It would be surprising if the Vatican
could not count for more adherents in 1826 than it did in 1816.
Napoleon had already paved the way for it in reestablishing the
Church and favoring it in every possible way. Although he was
himself unquestionably a skeptic, he felt and said that the power
of the clergy was an important part of the basis of his imperial
authority. So in the first half of the century the Catholic one-
third of Europe returned, except for the short spell after a
popular revolution, to the Middle Ages. It is ingenious of our
historians to refuse to tell HOW the Church of Rome recovered
power (by political alliance with despotic monarchs) and what use
it made of the power, and then ask us to admire the growth of
religion.
Even in England there was very serious coercion. Attendance
at church on Sundays was a legal obligation, and writers of the
19th century describe the paid beadles or bailiffs collecting the
miserable men who were sleeping off the Saturday night's drink
and herding them to a church. There was also little freedom for
Freethinkers to disturb the beliefs of churchgoers. My old friend
George Jacob Holyoake, who lived in those days, was sent to jail
for six months for making a mild joke or "blasphemy" at the
expense of his Christian hearers. In short, the half-century from
1815 to 1865 was one of profound reaction throughout Europe. If I
were a Christian writer I should be more disposed to conceal the
fact that it witnessed a new spread of religion.
If the idea of stressing this apparent recovery of religion
is to connect this with the various reforms or humanitarian
movements which began to be active in the second part of the
century it is even more misleading. We saw that in the Age of
Reason in the 18th century the germs of these reforms, most of
which had been dormant since Roman days, found a congenial soil
in the mind of Europe, and in the revolutionary years they began
to be embodied either in legislation or in propagandist bodies.
It is generally true to say that they were mostly blighted in the
wintry decades of the reaction after Waterloo. The one exception
was the growth of the Abolitionist Movement. A sincere and
distinguished writer of the Church of England, Canon Streeter,
one of the leading British apologists, says (The Spirit, p. 358):
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"The greatest blot on the history of the Church in
modern times is the fact that, with the glaring exception of
the campaign to abolish slavery, the leaders in the social,
political, and humanitarian reforms of the last century and
a half in Europe have rarely been professing Christians,
while the authorized representatives of organized
Christianity have as often as not been on the wrong side."
It illustrates the weakness of this sort of clerical apologetic
that on the American side we have the Rev. Loring Brace (Gesta
Christi, p. 265) saying:
"The guilt of this great crime (black slavery) rests
upon the Christian Church as an organized body."
And he considers that in America the worst sin of the Churches is
in not helping abolition. The churchless cynic might reflect
that, apparently, in England, where there were (apart from its
remote colonies) no slaves, the churches were valiant against
slavery, and in America, where there were vast bodies of slaves
the churches owned great numbers of them -- the Methodists and
Baptists who had passed through the reforming flames of the great
revival owned 450,000 of them -- and violently opposed the
abolitionists. Streeter would retort that the greatest name in
the whole Abolitionist movement is that of William Wilberforce a
strict member of the Church of England. It never seems to occur
to the historians who make Wilberforce stand for the Church of
England in this humanitarian reform that, while they can (or
could if they knew much about the matter) name half a dozen
clergymen (out of thousands and no bishop) who supported the
Abolition Movement in England, the only effective champion they
can quote is a layman. What is worse -- and I believe that I am
the only writer who has pointed this out -- Wilberforce was a
skeptic when he first learned to attack slavery, and he learned
it from skeptical literature. I have said this on an earlier
page, but I am so solitary in this discovery that I will here
quote his own words. In his diary, which is included in the
biography of him by his sons, he speaks of "the dreadful effects
of the efforts afterwards used, but too successfully, to wean him
from all religion." He makes it clear that by "afterwards" he
means after the age of 12 and it was at the age of 14 that he
first wrote against slavery (1773). Ten years later he tells a
friend in a letter (p. 32):
"My moral and religious principles are such as in those
days are not very generally prevalent.."
His sons explain that he was nearly 30 when he was converted to
Christianity. He carried over his zeal for abolition from his
dark past, and from that date he never adopted any other
humanitarian reform.
It is the same with all other reforms which one or other of
our historians ascribe to the influence of religion. I have
summarized the real history of all of them in my book "How
Freethinkers Made Notable Contributions to Civilization"
(Haldeman-Julius, 1938). In this I trace the early stages of all
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the great social reforms, as I have done in the case of slavery,
feminism, education, philanthropy, legal reform, etc. That pious
half-century, (1800-1850). which our historians describe as one
of a great religions revival, was the time when modern social
reforms struggled up out of a wintry soil. The men and women who
fostered their growth were in a very large majority outside the
churches, and churchmen were in a large majority opposed to them.
But our new historians disdain to notice the literature in which
the truth about these matters is patiently and scientifically
traced. It encroaches upon the field of religious controversy,
they say. They prefer to follow on such matters the conventional
and theological literature with all its ancient and superficial
untruths. This is, presumably, not encroaching upon theology.
12. THE THIRD REVOLUTION
The historian of the future will probably regard the period
1500 to 2000 as by far the most important in the history of the
race. The human record from what is called the dawn of
civilization to about the year 1500 will be to him a moving-
picture of the mass of the race toiling blindly while they mostly
bear the burden of a privileged one-tenth who live on their
labors and use them up in wars. In a few ages what is called a
middle class, men whose work required that the bandages be
stripped from their eyes yet they are not counted as of the
sacred, privileged castes, multiplies, and we get ideas of
freedom and reform. This occurred at the end of the Dark Age,
during which privilege had been unchallenged by the blind mass of
serfs, and a few like Arnold of Brescia began to preach a social
gospel. The most obvious caste to attack, both on account of its
hypocrisy and the feebleness of its claims, was the clergy, and,
we saw, revolt against the church at once began. But the church
was able to retaliate with fire and sword until, in the 16th
century, the political situation and the cynical moral condition
of the papacy and the church facilitated a combined action of
princes, nobles, middle-class, and people, and half of Europe
rejected the right to dominate and exploit of the most powerful
body of priests the world had ever known.
The echo of the great shock rumbled over Europe until the
middle of the 17th century, and then the middle class, with its
leisure to think and its self-consciousness, began to consider
the next privileged class, royalty and nobility. England made the
first dent in the monarchical structure by cutting off the head
of a king, but in its new prosperity the English middle class
settled down again to an idle acquiescence, and it was the
French, who bore, the more galling tyranny, who took up the
crusade. Few nobles, who clung to the monarchs in self
preservation, could join the middle class, but the workers were
rapidly developing self-consciousness, and stimulated by the news
of a revolt and the setting up of a republic in America, they
began to move. Through 70 years of revolution, counter
revolution, and bloody reaction, the workers and middle class
fought together while the second privileged class, the monarchs
and nobles of the feudal type, was destroyed or tamed.
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Meantime, the workers concentrating in cities to meet the
needs of the Industrial Revolution, stung by the rapid increase
of wealth of the middle class while their own condition remained
semi-servile granted education at last by the benevolent
bourgeois, slowly prepared for the Third, the Economic
Revolution. Even this was long led by the middle class men:
Socialists of the type of Robert Owen, Marxian, Socialists.
Communists, Anarchists, Christian Socialists, etc. But in the
later part of the 19th century universal free education in most
countries created a new proletariat, and it began to regard the
middle class capitalists as its natural enemy. The middle class
had, with its wealth, taken the place of the old feudal nobility
and generally thought that the millennium had been reached by the
First (Religious) and second (Political) Revolutions. Taking
advantage of the miserable inadequacy of the system of schooling
it created a vast system of daily and Sunday papers which should
take over the work of education from the age of 16 or so; just
when the thinking portion of the cortex is beginning to be
educable. Where circumstances compelled this -- where it was
necessary to concede a yard in order to save a mile -- it
cordially admitted that social improvement was possible. But,
Evolution not Revolution. Rome was not built in a day. Private
enterprise is more vital to the interests of the race, more
sacred, than even altars and thrones.
That is the most important feature of the history of the
19th century. What then happened we will consider in the next
section, but a few words must be said here. The prospect of a
Third Revolution led to a sort of Counter-Revolution against the
earlier two, the Religious and the Political. The middle class,
the Humanists of the 16th century, the Liberals of the 19th, who
led the religious and political attacks on privilege, now joined
amicably with the conservatives (the modern representatives of
the Royalists) and the clericalist against the common enemy.
Ignoring, or in our ill-informed age not knowing, the fact that
the "martyr's blood" in which the symbolic red flag of the
Socialists had been dipped was in the main Liberal blood, they
jeeringly called the men who now marched under it the Reds, and
in the press and on the platform they vaguely conjured up visions
of them wading to power through lakes of blood. They generally
add "as in the French Revolution"; which, in fact, had been led
by what we should call the middle-class Liberals. And while it
was the middle class that had ruined the churches in the 19th
century, so now, to please their new clerical allies, agreed that
these Reds would destroy civilization by a violent suppression of
religion. Such is the historical basis of what men call their
convictions today.
I do not belong, and have never belonged, to any political
organization. Dogmas do not agree with my mental digestion. I
write all this simply as a historian, an observer and chronicler
of facts. It seems to me that this historical development, which
has created a situation that causes many sound-minded folk to
mutter to themselves the old Latin slogan "Those whom the Gods
wish to destroy they first make mad," calls much more seriously
than how many books there were in medieval libraries for a
thorough and impartial enquiry. This is, therefore. almost the
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last point on which we may test the new history, both in regard
to what it says and what it does not say but, in view of the
abounding lies, ought to say. We shall find in most cases that
just as up to the 17th century it significantly harmonizes with
the Catholic version of events, so for recent decades it tells
the human story much in the accents of the new Triple Alliance of
the Church, State and Money.
13. THE EMERGENCE OF COMMUNISM
If we reflect that those forces in the Triple Alliance that
are particularly concerned about money -- that is to say, about
the right of the individual to make an indefinite amount of
wealth (bankers, enterprisers, etc.) -- must, like the clergy,
act through politicians, we understand the union of such
incongruous elements in a hatred of the Communist Party. It, they
say, wages a war to the death against their ideals; Religion
Private Enterprise, and Democracy. The party has, of course,
modified its formulae in the course of the struggle. Officially,
it now declares itself not concerned about religion, though all
its leaders are Atheist and there cannot be much doubt what the
future of religion would be if they prevailed in the great
conflict. They claim also that they advocate democracy; in fact,
a purer democracy than that of the self-styled Democratic powers.
And, at present, at least, they have not the least idea of
forcing economic equality. Nevertheless, it remains true that
they would ultimately destroy the Holy Trinity of the new Holy
Alliance: Religion, Private Enterprise, Democracy.
It is, therefore, at first sight, surprising that in the
works of our historians we find little to resent when they
describe the rise and aims of the Communist Party and the
attainment of power in Russia. The reader will not forget that
all the works which I set out to examine were written before 1946
when the journalist's Hymn of Praise of Soviet Russia began to
lower its note and became a Hymn of Hate. Mast of the works were
written in the 30's, when not much notice was taken of the lies
of the Catholic Press and the pope's strident call for "the
extinction of Bolshevism." In the article in the latest edition
of the Encyclopedia Britannica Farbmann writes (in 1933):
"Until quite recent times legend had taken complete
control of the Russian Revolution, and it is only lately
that critical control has begun to substitute for it a solid
basis of historical fact."
We could not expect our historians to anticipate that the
poisonous legends of 1917 to 1927 would not only be restored but
amplified after Russia's magnificent Performance in the war. Yet
the present morbid hysteria could have been checked to some
extent if the public could refer to historical works in which the
earlier libels were refuted by a full statement of facts.
The Columbia Encyclopedia has three generally correct and
informing articles (Bolshevism, Communism, and Russian
Revolution), but they fail to tell facts of crucial importance
and at times they encourage the libel by careless casual
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observations. They refer to "the bloodshed that had accompanied
the Russian Revolution." The reader gets the idea, that this
confirms the legend of "the passions of the mob" in rape and
murder, whereas in both the revolutions of 1917 there were few
outrages apart from the inevitable fighting in the streets, and
of these few there were more at the first (Liberal-Socialist)
than the second (Bolshevik) revolution. It was later, in the
White War (in which Americans, British, Czechs, French and
Japanese invaders outnumbered the White Russians), that something
like savagery occurred, and it is unjust to say, as the
Encyclopedia does, that "atrocities were committed on both sides
throughout the Civil War." It was more an invasion than a Civil
War." and we have impartial testimony that the Bolshevik soldiers
were the least to blame.
But the chief fault here is a lack of balance in such facts
as are given, and it is the same in the new history. Professors
Wallbank and Taylor entirely mislead when they Say (ii. 348):
"During the course of the second revolution in Petrograd
disorder and massacre were prevalent throughout Russia."
There was hardly any bloodshed in Petrograd and no massacres (but
a few days fighting against armed police) in Moscow; and peasant
disorders were promptly checked by the Bolshevists. If we
understand the Tsarist horrors of preceding years (to 1912), the
intense strain, distress and confusion of the year 1917, we
almost agree with Mrs. Litvinor and her history of the revolution
that it was "one of the most bloodless on record." Outrages
amounting to savagery began several months after the revolution,
these were committed not by the mob in the cities, but by the
armies, especially the anti-Bolshevik Russian troops in the
field. Professor Geise seems to be confused about this when he
says that after the revolution the Bolsheviks only kept power by
the unmitigated use of rigid discipline and terrorism, and he
apparently entertains some of the most mendacious legends when he
speaks of the extreme anti-intellectual and anti-family attitude
of the revolutionary period. The second point is absurd. What the
Bolsheviks did was to institute civil marriage, make divorce
easy. and declare children born out of wedlock legitimate. The
one or two small local Soviets who wanted a common right to women
were freaks and were at once condemned by Moscow.
But in order to show how badly historians (except Professor
Barnes) fail to provide the reader with an account of the
revolution which would enable him to judge the wild stories that
are current today I must give a very short sketch of the Progress
of events. In this, I follow one of the best and most detailed
histories of it -- apart from partisan versions on both sides --
the British W.H. Chamberlain's work "The Russian Revolution" (2
vols. 1935).
No historian has a lenient word for the Tsarist regime. The
government and church stank. They had oppressed the people
murderously for 1,000 years. And if some describe the abortive
revolution of 1905, they still give no idea of the horrors that
preceded it and the savage oppression that continued until 1910
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or later. The defeat of Russia, by Japan had led to a shocking
disclosure of the corruption of the official and noble class and
a widespread revolt, and the reprisals were appalling and lasted
several years. The jails had normal accommodation for 107,000
prisoners, but by 1910 they had 180,00 mostly political
prisoners. Boys and girls who attended a radical lecture or read
an underground journal were arrested. Youths and girls over 15
were shot on the street or stripped and flogged (with the brutal
knout) in the jails, and the young women (largely university
students) were raped by the gross jailers. Suicides in jails rose
to 160 in one month, and typhus was terribly rife. It is material
to remember that even the young radicals of 1917 had Passed
through this diabolical ordeal a few years earlier; and it is not
immaterial to add that the British and American press and the
churches had almost entirely ignored the savagery that went on
for years. Papers that were in 1913 to pour out volcanic rhetoric
over enormously exaggerated stories of Bolshevik outrages had
been silent about the monstrous and real outrages perpetrated at
the order of educated and religious men from 1904 to 1912. Every
Russian knew these things. Hardly any American did; and the
volumes of European history that now appeared gave him no help.
To the heavy distress into which this struggle had driven
the country was now added the strain of the First World War, the
sacrifice of millions of peasants. the acute scarcity of food. In
February 1917 the strain snapped, and the combined Constitutional
Democrats (Cadets, led by university professors and other middle
class men and a few liberal nobles) and the Socialists seized
power. Some call it the March Revolution, because it was in the
next month that they compelled the Tsar to abdicate. No historian
rate, was the real Russian Revolution, as all historians relate.
It was "in the main good-natured," says Chamberlain, but there
was naturally a fight with Tsarist troops and police, and in the
provinces the peasants here and there burned mansions and
murdered nobles. There was actually more bloodshed at this first
revolution than at the Bolshevik Revolution in November. Yet such
is the debauchery of the human mind in our time that the
overwhelming majority do not know even that there were two
revolutions, and they just heap together all the bogus stories
and atrocities in a confused idea of "the Bolshevik Revolution of
1917." I doubt if one American in a million knows that it was the
Liberals who forced the Tsar to abdicate. No historian points out
that there were no official reprisals at either revolution,
though, as I have told, every royalist-clerical counter-
revolution during 130 years had been followed by fiendish
reprisals. There were murders, but no massacres; and the man who
shudders at these outbreaks among the peasants ought to read of
the thousand years of brutal treatment of them and how church and
state had left them, right up to the revolution in a sodden
state, morally and intellectually. But don't look for any of this
in the new history or the new encyclopedia.
No one questions that the new regime was feeble and
incompetent and the country drifted toward a new crisis. Price
Lvov, a literary noble -- he translated my "Church and the
People" into Russian -- was the first leader but was soon
compelled to withdraw. Professor Milyukov, leader of the Cadets
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(Liberals), was next. I knew him well in later years. He was a
fine man but not strong, and was hampered by his Liberal distrust
of the people. There was no place for a "benevolent bourgeois" in
that boiling world. Kerensky, Right-wing Socialist, remained for
some months but was quite incompetent for the job. He allowed the
Bolshevik leaders to return -- I met Trotsky in New York the day
before he set out, and I didn't like him at all -- but scattered
them again for a premature revolt in the summer, though he had to
recall them to help him when the Tsarist General Kornilov marched
on Petrograd. But the Bolshevik leaders alone knew precisely what
they wanted, and they had been toughened by long exile. The
soldiers were tired of war; the whole country was tired. They
worked on that line. Just as in the 16th century the religious
revolt succeeded, while earlier revolts had failed, largely
because the Emperor was a foreigner to the Germans, so the
Bolsheviks succeeded because there was a war on and they
supported the resentment of it by the army and people.
I am concerned here only that our historians tell the story
in such a way that writers, editors, and politicians cannot so
easily press upon the public their unjust and inflammatory
version of the revolution. There was little more bloodshed at the
Second Revolution than at the first, and the idea of the Liberals
politely taking over the portfolios and deposing the Tsar in
February and the Bolsheviks wading through a stream of blood to
power in November is monstrously wrong.
At Petrograd, which was still the seat of government, the
proceedings were, says Chamberlin, "relatively bloodless." There
were three days of desultory fighting, the Tsarist police firing
from windows and more resistance in the south. Deaths in such
fights are not outrages. The Reds themselves lost about 500 men.
In places soldiers and sailors sometimes killed their former
officers, while in many places the peasants burned mansions and
killed landowners and nobles. Their backs still smarted from the
knout. There were no reprisals, as there had always been when, to
parody the familiar phrase, "the passions of the nobles and the
priests were unleashed." In fact, one of the first acts of the
Bolshevik leaders was to abolish the death sentence. Chamberlain
says (I. 242):
"Moscow was the sole place in Central and Northern
Russia in which the Bolshevik regime and power encountered
serious, substantial, and sanguinary resistance."
The Bolshevik revolution was over and it had so far carried out
the wishes of the army and the nation that it was, as revolutions
go, accomplished with little violence.
The violence began in what all our historians call The civil
War, though hardly one of them tells the reader that in the
armies which fought Bolshevism during, the next two years only
about one-tenth of the soldiers were Russians. It was an invasion
war, waged by about 200,000 Japs, Czechs, French, British, and
Americans against a beggarly and starving people. Elections for a
Constituent Assembly (Congress) were held in November, and the
qualifications had been so determined by Kerensky that 62 percent
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voted against the Bolsheviks. Lenin, nevertheless announced that
the Assembly would meet in January, but feeling rose to white
heat. The Bolsheviks were pledged to withdraw from the European
war, and the agents of the Allies lent all the aid and
encouragement they could to the Cadets, Social Revolutionaries,
and Tsarists. Large provinces broke away and declared themselves
Independent, and such was the scarcity of food in the cities and
confusion in the provinces that nerves were strained everywhere.
Our historians admit that the country was terribly dilapidated
and suffering, but unless readers get some concrete details they
still picture Russia to themselves as not very different from
Britain and France during the war.
When the Assembly met there was at once a clash of Menshevik
(and allies) and Bolshevik, and the soldiers and sailors who
attended in great numbers drowned the orators. An attempt had
previously been made to murder Lenin, and there was a known plot
to kidnap him. He dissolved the Assembly and inaugurated, on the
familiar lines of the Marxian philosophy, the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat (of the Community Party). The nation at large, says
Chamberlain, was completely indifferent to this, but the Cadets
and Social Revolutionaries were, naturally, infuriated and began
to organize and to form underground movements. The negotiations
with the Germans for a sperate peace, which was conducted in
March, were pushed on and the Allies intrigued with the
Mensheviks and in the provinces; and this anger was increased by
the action of the Bolsheviks in repudiating all the international
loans that the Tsarest government had contracted. Before the Fall
of 1918 Petrograd, half starved itself, looking out upon a vast
country that was in ruins and inconceivably demoralized, saw
armies of well-fed and perfectly-equipped troops -- the world in
arms -- advancing from east, north and south to destroy it
utterly. There were 70,000 Japs (who felt that this was a grand
opportunity to annex their first large slice of Asia), 35,000
Checks, about 40,000 White Russians and volunteers, 35,000 French
and other West Europeans, 13,000 British and Americans, and at
least 50,000 Poles.
The Columbia Encyclopedia ("Russian Revolution") describes
at some length the fighting that followed as a Civil War between
the Reds and the Whites. It does not tell that the Whites were
entirely equipped by the Japanese, Americans, French and British,
and were only a tenth of the whole. It says, rather ridiculously,
that "few of the Whites were Tsarists." it does not mention that
the immense armies of 150,000 Japs, White Russians, etc., from
the east advanced ruthlessly over more than 4,000 miles of
Russia. corrupting all who were corruptible and torturing or
'killing those who were not, living on the food of the starving
country. It just says briefly at the end of its account of the
war that it was "complicated by Allied intervention," whereas,
clearly, the regular troops of the Allies must have done by fir
the most fighting. It says that the British and Americans
"occupied" Murmansk and Archangel, and only, to prevent stores
from falling into the hands of the Reds, but "American forces did
not participate in the fighting between the Allies and
Bolsheviks."
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The latter is a wanton fiction for American consumption. In
August 1918 two American regiments landed in Siberia to help the
British to protect the rear of the Czechs and Japanese. On August
1st a British fleet reached Archangel with 6.000 British and
Canadian troops. 5,000 Americans, and 2,000 Italians and Serbs.
The American government said that these were all the troops that
were available at the time. Chamberlin described in detail how
these troops were intended to fight their way across a thousand
miles of Russia and join the Japs when they reached the Volga.
That was a dream, but the Americans fought their way 200 miles
south of Archangel, took Shenkursh, and held it until the Reds
drove them back. The British and Americans got no help, he says,
from the people they had set out to deliver and were obliged to
quit Archangel before the winter. And the first authority
recommended by the Encyclopedia is Chamberlin's book!
The encyclopedia is, as I said, almost equally misleading
when it says that "atrocities were committed throughout the civil
war by both sides." Professor Langer is equally misleading when
he says (1036.),
"These executions and persecutions made a miserable
impression throughout the world and did much to discredit
Russia."
As regards the soldiers, we have impartial testimony that the
Reds were the least guilty of all. When, in February, 1918 the
Bolsheviks had recaptured Kiev and some of them had retaliated on
the Ukrainians, the Soviet issued an instruction, which is given
by Chamberlin, that "any who disgrace themselves by the murder of
unarmed people must be expelled from the Soviet army and handed
over to a revolutionary court" (I. 376). As all admit that the
White Russians -- whose leaders were aristocrats with long
tradition of brutality to the peasants -- and the Poles committed
atrocities, it would be foolish to suggest that Soviet
resolutions prevented retaliation. But the French scientist, Dr.
G. Montandon, who was head of the International Red Cross and
with the armies in the east, says in his books, "Two Years with
Kolchak (the Whites) and with the Bolsheviks" (1927, but not
translated, of course), that the Whites kept 250,000 prisoners in
camps of the later Nazi type and treated them with terrific
brutality. The Poles and Czechs also were brutal, he says, but
"the good and mystic Russians (Reds) were more humane." He sums
up, on the strength of "what we have seen with our own eyes and
heard with our ears," that "the Reds are less sanguinary than the
White Russians and their supporters" (p. 38). The French General
Rouquerol ("The Adventure of Admiral Koleliak," 1929. also not
translated) agrees about the Whites. Even the young aristocratic
officers were "cutthroats" a German General assured him.
This distinguished French General, by the way, defends the
Reds against another libel. On an earlier page I quoted Professor
Geise attributing the general hatred of the Bolsheviks in part to
their supposed attempt to destroy marriage. General Rcuquerol
says (p. 246):
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"This alleged nationalization of women in Russia is one
of the most pyramidal inventions that was ever constructed
in the brains of its cronies. The truth is very different.
It is that never in the history of prostitution was this
more nearly abolished than in the first period of the
Bolshevik regime."
It was much the same in regard to religion. Professor Langer says
(p. 993) that "the Bolshevik campaign against religion appalled
all Christendom." It is enough to recall that on April 23, 1930
the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a Conspicuously
religious man, read out in the House of Commons this official
assurance from the British Ambassador at Moscow:
"There is no religious persecution in Russia in the
strict sense of the word Persecution, and no case has been
discovered of a priest or anyone else being punished for
practicing religion."
Our Professors seem to take as authoritative such works as
Lancelot Lawton's history of the Russian Revolution. They have
this excuse that the author was the representative in Moscow at
the time of the Chief British Liberal daily. But so peculiar is
the ethic of journalism in regard to Russia that this writer
makes the Bolsheviks kill 1,275 archbishops and bishops when
there were -- see the Catholic Encyclopedia -- only 169
archbishops and bishops in Russia; and even on the just charge of
treason very few of these were shot.
There was, however, a Red Terror, from the fall of 1918 to
the summer of 1920, when the Allies and Whites were driven out.
The death penalty was reintroduced for traitors and the terrible
Cheka set up. Chamberlin estimates that it condemned and executed
about 50,000. Some British and American papers said 1,700,000;
the Bolsheviks said about 20,000. Take your choice. There had
been treason everywhere. But the condition of the country after
four years' war, two revolutions, and a savage civil war was
inconceivable. The nation had not had enough food for three years
and was drifting into the great famine of 1921-2. More than a
quarter of a million international forces were in Russia, and the
largest army got to within 300 miles of Moscow. A girl of the
Social Revolutionary Party shot Lenin and maimed him for life.
The press of the world was gloating over the impending victory
over the improvised and ill-equipped Red Army. In November, 1918,
the British Financial News said:
In the city (London) events are shaping once more
toward international suzerainty over Russia, modelled on the
British plan over Egypt. Such an event would transform
Russian bonds into the cream of the international market."
Even when the other Allies were driven out by the poorly-equipped
Reds -- and no historian gives them credit for this or suggests
that it shows the general feeling of the people -- the Poles, who
thought they could now seize the rich and vast province of
Ukraine from the afflicted Russians, spurred by the Catholic
Church and subsidized by the French, pressed on. And since
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outside the chief cities the Bolsheviks were in the minority,
there were millions of traitors and the whole of the clergy
helped the enemy. We can admit, without using violent language,
that 50,000 of them were shot.
Just one word more. When Professor Langer says that "the
terrible number of executions discredited Russia" it is possible
that he refers also, if not chiefly, to the purges, trials and
execrations of later years. These certainly were, together with
the, lie about religion, the chief material used by the press of
the world before the war to poison all nations against the
Communists and support the pope's cry for the extinction of
Bolshevism. Stalin, it was said, was murderously getting rid of
rivals. When most of their leaders confessed their guilt, foreign
journalists nauseously speculated as to what hideous means had
been used to extort the confessions.
Now the most famous of these trials was in 1938, and the
vilest language was used about it in America. Well, in December,
1937, and January. 1938 an American engineer, neither Socialist
nor Communist, John D. Littlepage, wrote a series of articles in
the Saturday Evening Post. He had just returned from special work
in the Russian mines. To his article on January 1st be gave the
title "Red Wreckers in Russia." He wrote that he had known many
of the Bolshevik leaders who were executed or imprisoned in 1936
and 1937. and he said:
"I am convinced, from my experience, that these
Communists made genuine confessions.
He said that there was an extraordinary amount of treachery and
sabotage, some political (Trotskyist), and some for foreign gold,
and he named several leaders (who were arrested months later) as
being to his knowledge, bribed' by the Germans or Japanese. The
U.S. Ambassador Davis was present at the big 1938 trial, and he
tells that of 21 accused at least 19 were clearly guilty, yet
abuse was heaped upon Stalin (sadism, bloody Jealousy, etc.) for
these trials all over the world.
14. PAPAL POLICY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Most of the works I have examined were published before the
beginning of the Second World War, so I have no occasion here to
discuss any events since that time. There is, however, one more
outstanding theme of our own time on which I must say a few
words, especially as it is, mainly by suppressing facts, totally
misrepresented in the new history and the Columbia, yet the truth
about it is of vital social importance today; and it is
misrepresented obviously because of Catholic pressure. In an
earlier section we ended with the spectacle of Pius IX returning
to the brutal feudal policy of his predecessors when reaction
seemed to have recovered full power in Europe and defying all
liberal and progressive thought with the stage thunder of his
syllabus. He lived to see Italy sweep away the temporal power and
make considerable progress in revolt against the Vatican: and to
see France sweep away his friend Napoleon III and set up a
republic.
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Leo XIII inherited this (from the Church angle) dangerous
situation. Our historians and our encyclopedia pay him the
familiar gorgeous compliments, but in fact his pontifical career
was a series of blunders. By his obstinacy for some years in
maintaining his predecessor's attitude he drove the French
Republic into the arms of "the Jews and Freemasons" (so he said),
saw all its institutions secularized and the Catholic population
sink rapidly from more than 20,000,000 to less than 10,000,000.
He repelled all advances of the Italian Government and saw
skepticism capture the middle class and spread extensively among
the people. In these and other countries (Spain Portugal, Latin
America, Belgium, the United States, etc.), his church lost at
least 50,000,000 members during his pontificate. He was harsh and
offensive in his dealings with the American hierarchy, and, while
he won some ridiculous prestige in the world-press for saying in
an encyclical that the workers had a right to a living wage -- a
singular discovery for these inspired moralists after 1,500 years
of power -- he retracted even this in his last years and died in
despair, while the anti-papal statesmen died serenely in the dawn
of a new world.
His successors in the first three decades of the present
century had not his ability, and they blundered along while the
Church continued to decay. One would think that our historians
were unaware that the birth-rate of Catholics, who are forbidden
under pain of hell to practice birth control, is double that of
the rest of a civilized community, and that Catholics in
publishing their statistics count the millions of seceders from
their body as actual members of it. But their reports to Rome are
required to be truthful, and the popes saw the shrinkage of the
church continue. They saw vast numbers fall away in Spain, which
moved on toward its Socialist and Liberal Revolution of 1932.
Literacy and skepticism spread equally in Latin America, and
Socialism made rapid strides in Italy and South America. The
future of the Church in the democracies was clouded and, in
further disproof of its fabled intelligence-system and sagacity,
the Vatican embarked upon what is known as the Eastern Policy,
looking for compensation in the mere docile regions of the
decaying. Orthodox Church and Asia for the immense losses in
Europe and the United States. I remember that I was in Athens
when the Turks under Kemal swept the Greek army out of Asia
Minor. The secretary of the British Legation told me that the
Greek Foreign Minister assured the Legation that this defeat,
which came like a clap of thunder, was due to the fact that the
Turks got French guns, tanks and officers. The Vatican felt that
the Turks were the coming power in the East and their skeptical
rulers might, in their disdain of Islam, be induced to favor the
pope's ambition in the East. In view of the general
representation of our historians that the papacy is, and always
was, the greatest moral power in the world, it is singular that
Professor Langer is the only one of them who devotes a page to
papal policy and work in the fateful first quarter of the present
century -- and Professor Langer just pays the conventional
compliments to the popes.
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One of the more important inaccuracies on this page (933) of
Professor Langer's book is when he says of Pope Pius XI: "From
the outset he took a strong stand against Communism." He was. as
a matter of fact, elected pope in February 1922, and in April and
May his representative, the Archbishop of Genoa, conspicuously
courted the Red envoy Chicherin at the Genoa Conference, and,
though the Catholic priests had been expelled from Russia for
treachery in the Civil War, got permission for the Jesuit mission
to be re-admitted; and it remained there, apparently on the best
of terms with the Communists, until 1924, when the priests were
again expelled for treachery.
The point is important because 1924 was the real date of the
beginning of the new papal policy: back to the West, to cooperate
with the leaders of the democracies and dictators against
Communism and Socialism. It was in 1924 that the Jesuit Father
Walsh, one of those expelled from Russia, started the vitriolic
and mendacious campaign against Communism in America. By then new
and fiercely anti-social forces had appeared in Europe, and,
while Nazism was still uncertain of its future, Mussolini became
a power. A new force appeared also in Rome after the blundering
mediocrities who had occupied the chair since the death of Leo
XIII. Cardinal Pacelli became Secretary of State to the senile
Pius XI in 1929 and the full papal policy was soon clear;
alliance with any and every power -- democrats or Fascists,
Christian or Japanese -- that promised to work for the extinction
of Communism. But how Pius XII cooperated with the Japs from
their invasion of Manchuria onward, consecrated Fascism in Italy,
Nazism in Germany, and Phalangism in Spain, inspired the sordid
dictatorships in South America, was intimately associated with
the Germans, Italians and Japanese in setting the world aflame in
the Second World War, and, when they lost their ghastly gamble,
found that his "international moral power" was still
indispensable to the Capitalists, Politicians, and Militarists
who made the destruction of Communism the ground for a third war
is another story, now involved in the manuals I have examined,
that I discuss in other works.
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