Down on the Looney Pike?
There are the queerest people there--
You never saw the like!
The ones that do the useful work
Are poor as poor can be,
And those who do no useful work
All live in luxury.
They raise so much in Crazy Land
Of food and clothes and such,
That those who work don't have enough
Because they raise too much.
They're wrong side to in Crazy Land,
They're upside down with care--
They walk around upon their heads,
With feet up in the air.
--T.
VI. WITHDRAWAL OF PRIZE OFFER.
Never have anything to do with those who pretend to have dealings
with the supernatural. If you allow supernaturalism to get a
foothold in your country the result will be a dreadful
calamity.--Confucius.
Mrs. Brown and I hereby withdraw, for the present at least, our prize
offer, and for two reasons:
1. We are convinced that it is as necessary to the welfare of the world
to smite supernaturalism in religion as capitalism in politics, but
while many are able and willing to attack the octopus of capitalism,
this is true of only a few in the case of the dragon of supernaturalism.
Some hesitate because they feel with one of the critics of Communism and
Christianism that revolutionary forces are coming to the surface in the
churches.
"Where," he asks, "shall we classify the stand of the Catholic Church
against the open shop? What shall be said of the Interchurch report on
the steel strike? What of the attitude of the combined commission in
Denver of Catholics, Protestants and Jews on the street car strike?"
We have no desire to belittle such efforts nor to discourage their
promoters; but (though they may afford some local and temporary
alleviation to the miseries of far the greater part of the
world--miseries growing out of its division into two classes, a small
class of owning masters and a large class of working slaves) we center
no hope in them, because the whole history of the supernaturalistic
interpretations of religion, not excepting the Christian, show these
efforts to be only reformatory and temporary bubbles which sooner or
later are always pricked by the masters of what little revolutionary air
they contain, and so never issue in any general or permanent improvement
of the sad lot of the overwhelming majority of the slaves.
How little the church serves the working slaves, and how much the owning
masters, will appear from the follo
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