that, in the fall of 1917 while the Socialist party in New York was campaigning for immediate peace, the Catholic Irish suddenly forgot their ancient horrors.  The Catholic “Freeman’s Journal” published nine articles favoring Socialism in a single issue; while even “The Tablet,” the diocesan paper, began to discover that the Socialists were not such bad fellows after all.  The same “Tablet” which a few years ago allowed Father Belford to declare that Socialists were mad dogs who should be “stopped with a bullet”!

P. S. The reader will be interested to know that for the statements on page 155, Upton Sinclair was described as a “scoundrel” by a former prime minister of the Austrian Empire, and brought suit against the gentleman, and after a court trial was awarded damages of 500,000 crowns—­about $7 in American money.

* * * * *

#Book four#

#The Church of the Slavers#

  Bee, underneath the Crown of Thorn,
    The eye-balls fierce, the features grim! 
  And merrily from night to morn
    We chaunt his praise and worship him—­
  Great Christus-Jingo, at whose feet
  Christian and Jew and Atheist meet!

  A wondrous god! most fit for those
    Who cheat on ’Change, then creep to prayer;
  Blood on his heavenly altar flows,
    Hell’s burning incense fills the air,
  And Death attests in street and lane
  The hideous glory of his reign.

  —­Buchanan

* * * * *

#Face of Caesar#

The thesis of this book is the effect of fixed dogma in producing mental paralysis, and the use of this mental paralysis by Economic Exploitation.  From that standpoint the various Protestant sects are better than the Catholic, but not much better.  The Catholics stand upon Tradition, the Protestants upon an Inspired Word; but since this Word is the entire literary product, history and biography, science and legislation, poetry, drama and fiction of a whole people for something like a thousand years, it is possible by judicious selection of texts to prove anything you wish to prove and to justify anything you wish to do.  The “Holy Book” being full of polygamy, slavery, rape and wholesale murder, committed by priests and rulers under the direct orders of God, it was a very simple matter for the Protestant Slavers to construct a Bible defense of their system.

They get poor Jesus because he was given to irony, that most dangerous form of utterance.  If he could come back to life, and see what men have done with his little joke about the face of Caesar on the Roman coin, I think he would drop dead.  As for Paul, he was a Roman bureaucrat, with no nonsense in his make-up; when he ordered, “Servants obey your masters,” he meant exactly what he said.  The Roman official stamp which he put upon the gospel of Jesus has been the salvation of the Slavers from the Reformation on.