The Iron Heel. Jack London
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that is not the teaching of Christ!” cried the Bishop.
“The Church is not teaching Christ these days,” Ernest put in quickly. “That is why the workingmen will have nothing to do with the Church. The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery with which the capitalist class treats the working class.”
“The Church does not condone it,” the Bishop objected.
“The Church does not protest against it,” Ernest replied. “And in so far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the Church is supported by the capitalist class.”
“I had not looked at it in that light,” the Bishop said naively. “You must be wrong. I know that there is much that is sad and wicked in this world. I know that the Church has lost the—what you call the proletariat.”5
“You never had the proletariat,” Ernest cried. “The proletariat has grown up outside the Church and without the Church.”
“I do not follow you,” the Bishop said faintly.
“Then let me explain. With the introduction of machinery and the factory system in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the great mass of the working people was separated from the land. The old system of labor was broken down. The working people were driven from their villages and herded in factory towns. The mothers and children were put to work at the new machines. Family life ceased. The conditions were frightful. It is a tale of blood.”
“I know, I know,” Bishop Morehouse interrupted with an agonized expression on his face. “It was terrible. But it occurred a century and a half ago.”
“And there, a century and a half ago, originated the modern proletariat,” Ernest continued. “And the Church ignored it. While a slaughter-house was made of the nation by the capitalist, the Church was dumb. It did not protest, as to-day it does not protest. As Austin Lewis6 says, speaking of that time, those to whom the command ‘Feed my lambs’ had been given, saw those lambs sold into slavery and worked to death without a protest.7 The Church was dumb, then, and before I go on I want you either flatly to agree with me or flatly to disagree with me. Was the Church dumb then?”
Bishop Morehouse hesitated. Like Dr. Hammerfield, he was unused to this fierce “infighting,” as Ernest called it.
“The history of the eighteenth century is written,” Ernest prompted. “If the Church was not dumb, it will be found not dumb in the books.”
“I am afraid the Church was dumb,” the Bishop confessed.
“And the Church is dumb to-day.”
“There I disagree,” said the Bishop.
Ernest paused, looked at him searchingly, and accepted the challenge.
“All right,” he said. “Let us see. In Chicago there are women who toil all the week for ninety cents. Has the Church protested?”
“This is news to me,” was the answer. “Ninety cents per week! It is horrible!”
“Has the Church protested?” Ernest insisted.
“The Church does not know.” The Bishop was struggling hard.
“Yet the command to the Church was, ‘Feed my lambs,’” Ernest sneered. And then, the next moment, “Pardon my sneer, Bishop. But can you wonder that we lose patience with you? When have you protested to your capitalistic congregations at the working of children in the Southern cotton mills?8 Children, six and seven years of age, working every night at twelve-hour shifts? They never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid out of their blood. And out of the dividends magnificent churches are builded in New England, wherein your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, full-bellied recipients of those dividends.”
“I did not know,” the Bishop murmured faintly. His face was pale, and he seemed suffering from nausea.
“Then you have not protested?”
The Bishop shook his head.
“Then the Church is dumb to-day, as it was in the eighteenth century?”
The Bishop was silent, and for once Ernest forbore to press the point.
“And do not forget, whenever a churchman does protest, that he is discharged.”
“I hardly think that is fair,” was the objection.
“Will you protest?” Ernest demanded.
“Show me evils, such as you mention, in our own community, and I will protest.”
“I’ll show you,” Ernest said quietly. “I am at your disposal. I will take you on a journey through hell.”
“And I shall protest.” The Bishop straightened himself in his chair, and over his gentle face spread the harshness of the warrior. “The Church shall not be dumb!”
“You will be discharged,” was the warning.
“I shall prove the contrary,” was the retort. “I shall prove, if what you say is so, that the Church has erred through ignorance. And, furthermore, I hold that whatever is horrible in industrial society is due to the ignorance of the capitalist class. It will mend all that is wrong as soon as it receives the message. And this message it shall be the duty of the Church to deliver.”
Ernest laughed. He laughed brutally, and I was driven to the Bishop’s defence.
“Remember,” I said, “you see but one side of the shield. There is much good in us, though you give us credit for no good at all. Bishop Morehouse is right. The industrial wrong, terrible as you say it is, is due to ignorance. The divisions of society have become too widely separated.”
“The wild Indian is not so brutal and savage as the capitalist class,” he answered; and in that moment I hated him.
“You do not know us,” I answered. “We are not brutal and savage.”
“Prove it,” he challenged.
“How can I prove it . . . to you?” I was growing angry.
He shook his head. “I do not ask you to prove it to me. I ask you to prove it to yourself.”
“I know,” I said.
“You know nothing,” was his rude reply.
“There, there, children,” father said soothingly.
“I don’t care—” I began indignantly, but Ernest interrupted.
“I understand you have money, or your father has, which is the same thing—money invested in the Sierra Mills.”
“What has that to do with it?” I cried.
“Nothing much,” he began slowly, “except that the gown you wear is stained with blood. The food you eat is a bloody stew. The blood of little children and of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, drop, all about me.”
And suiting the action to the words, he closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. I burst into tears of mortification and hurt vanity. I had never been so brutally treated in my life. Both the Bishop and my father were embarrassed and perturbed. They tried to lead the conversation away into easier channels; but Ernest opened his eyes, looked at me, and waved them aside. His mouth was stern, and his eyes too; and in the latter there was no glint of laughter. What he was about to say, what terrible castigation he was going to give me, I never knew; for at that moment a man, passing along the sidewalk, stopped and glanced in at us. He was