Riallaro: The Archipelago of Exiles

by Godfrey Sweven

One of the first and most effective changes in the spiritual scheme of the state had been the gradual degradation of all the great posts in the church. The princely salaries attached to them were from tenure to tenure reduced till at last the chief ecclesiastical officers had to rely on charity for subsistence. The great spiritual influence that obstinately clung to them drew occasionally men of rank and ability. But all the common priesthoods fell so low in estimation that at last the state had to fill them with the milder type of higher-class criminals. No one would enter voluntarily into what was practically mental slavery to the government of the time. So, if any marble citizen fell into habitual and transparent falsehood, or failed before the eyes of all in some dishonest scheme, or let his fortune imperceptibly leak away and ceased to conceal the financial minus on which he luxuriously lived, he was promptly given the choice of the church or journalism; though for that matter the two had been for centuries amalgamated; they were but two branches of ecclesiastical business.

For it would have been foolish on the part of so successful a government to stop one intellectual leak in the nation and leave a wider one unguarded. It had been always a matter of course that those who could teach or influence the people with any talent should be the servants of the state. It came about, therefore, that, as a literature developed, the church was but journalism through speech and ceremony, journalism was but the church in writing. They were but two phases of the same function of the state. And the governors laughed as I told them of the position of affairs in Europe, where the state was supposed to rule the church, but had allowed the press complete independence. And they told me as a close analogy the story of one of their citizens who had soon drifted into idiocy; a bird of great beauty had flown into his house, and he resolved to catch it; and to make sure of it he planted a ring of servants all round the house and shut his doors and locked them, and opened his windows wide. For some time afterwards, if any one of them met me, he would with a twinkle of the eye ask me whether the governments of “Yullup” had ever caught their bird.

There was, I inwardly confessed, a logical thoroughness about leashing in the service of the state the twin spiritual powers of the church and the press. But I was pained in my European vanity to find the most cherished features of our modern civilisation so productive of mirth. They showed me that the only two logical positions were complete independence of both the great spiritual powers or complete control of both; nothing could justify the release of one and the bondage of the other.

As retaliation for their laughter at our civilisation and its hard-won fruits I smiled at their employment of criminals as priests and journalists, and asked them how they could expect to have religion well taught or truth well disseminated by such characters. They were not to be beaten—those subtle reasoners; I felt this in the smile of superiority with which they met mine. They asked me how I could expect priests who were by their positions and incomes independent of the state, and bound only by their own caprices or by those of the locality or circle to which they ministered, to teach the creed of the nation aright? To secure their salaries or to win reputation, they would launch into originalities, nay, into absurdities: they would pander to the predominant passions of their flocks, whilst keeping up the appearance of teaching the creed. The very contradictoriness of human nature would drive them in different directions from one another. With the journalists this would be still more the case, bound as they would be by no definite creed or set of rules or kind of emotions. How could they be expected to spread truth when there was no guide or master for them, no book of truth to appeal to? Nothing could be so productive of mental chaos as a class of men who without training or guidance or common consent or a common set of beliefs or principles should be allowed to pour their vagaries into the minds of the people. Would the nation ever advance, or keep from degeneracy, if these were to be its daily teachers, men who would pander to the commonest of popular passions and tastes, heedless of right or truth or even policy?

And when the state had both religion and journalism in its hands, how was it to secure the dissemination of what it considered absolute truth except by complete abeyance of the wills and characters of the disseminators? Centuries ago they had had a church whose priesthood was filled by men of the purest life and highest principle and then no one knew what the creed was; it was torn into shreds; and over its remains the preachers and theologians trampled like wild colts; there were a hundred schools and sects within the church, and each claimed for itself divine authority and divine truth; the people could find no guidance in faith or in morality; nor dare the state interfere with the extreme preachings or practices of any division, or even of any individual priest, for his followers, seeing the nobleness of his life and believing therefore that he had reached ultimate truth, would gladly die at the stake for him; and the high-salaried ecclesiastics having once got into their posts lived a free life without regard for God or man or government; they became fountains of immorality and discontent; by their example on the one hand and their luxury on the other, the spiritual head of the church was powerless; he dared not interfere with the privileges of his subordinates or even their beliefs; everything was indeed chaos, and that a chaos of religious enthusiasm.

It was the birth and growth of journalism that taught the state the true cure for such a diseased condition. Some of the most abandoned but able men in the nation had sunk so low that no one would trust them; in order to get something to live on they were driven to take advantage of an invention that had been recently made; the use of free types had cheapened printing, and with this and some other means of cheaply multiplying written productions, they determined to sell at a price sheets that would amuse the people. They were successful; and the more they invented lies and filled their sheets with fiction, the more lucrative it became. All the most accomplished liars of the nation crowded into it, and it was generally spoken of as the new profession of lying for the amusement of the people. The fortunes that had begun to be gained in it and the various attacks made upon men in authority called the attention of the ministry to the nascent power. And they were only just in time; a few more years and it would have been too strong for any state to cope with. They manipulated it with caution; they bought up the poorest and most unscrupulous of the journalists into what was practically lifelong servitude to the state, and turned the whole force of their talents in fabricating untruth against the few that had made fortunes in the trade; it was not long before these latter were ruined and had to sell their services to the government. But after a time it was found that the ablest of the state journalists grew vain of their powers and showed signs of striking out for themselves. Wages was not a strong enough lien over the talents of men who had grown conscious of their hold on the people. The trade was therefore proclaimed a state monopoly, and all the conceited journalists were weeded out; and into their places were put the most capable of the marble criminals who had been condemned to state servitude for life. It was made one of the rewards of good behaviour amongst convicts; for as journalists they were allowed to live in some degree of luxury; they had full scope for their craving for falsehood and dishonesty, and made of these a fine art. The only condition they had to fulfil was obedience to orders; all their productions were based on ideas supplied to them by the department and had to undergo criticism or revision by its officers. The state had them absolutely in its power; and yet the average of literary talent amongst them was far higher than when journalism had been free and independent; in fact a literature of some power, a pure state literature, had resulted. It was universally acknowledged that genius is essentially immoral on one or more rules of the moral code and sometimes on all; it has ever a vein of eccentricity or even madness in it that makes it leap over the pales of convention or principle or law; and hence in previous ages it had always been a pariah. At its first escapade it was now hurried into the fetters of the state, and was soon glad to accept the comparative freedom of state journalism. Thus the government had gathered into its service the greatest imaginations of the people, and through them could mould the nation to what purpose it would.

The success of this conquest of a new-born power and domestication of the wild spirits of the race pointed out the true secret for remedying the evils of religion and the church. Eccentricity was rampant in them; they were ever producing discontent and riot and rebellion; they were the homes of all that threatened the existence of the state. And yet the state dared not remove the offending priests, lest it should inflame the disloyalty of the people who followed them. The most astute of their statesmen saw the lesson of the conquest of journalism and applied it. He gradually reduced the salaries of the clergy, basing the policy chiefly on the ground that those who served God should be humble and free from the temptations of luxury; another and minor reason was that during a time of scarcity and depression economy was needed in the departments of the state. His successors carried out his craft with as much system and success, and, when the lower clergy had been reduced to a pittance, crusaded through the journals against the princes of the church and their luxury. By this time the marble citizens had ceased to send their children into the ordinary priesthoods, which gave no more the chance of a career, and all the clergy now belonged to the poorer classes. The higher posts were in the gift of the government; and it stripped them one by one of their great revenues and bestowed them thus lowered upon the common priests who showed themselves obsequious and obedient. And at last the very headship of the church was surrendered by the aristocracy, when it had lost its enormous salary and influence. The state at once created a department of public worship to absorb its functions. But, without journalism in its hands, it would never have been able to accomplish so complete a revolution; against it and its power over the people the church dignitaries were pithless; whilst the common clergy were too much torn by sectarian opinions to offer a united front. The later steps of this clever statecraft were easy and rapid.

But religion was not yet turned to its final purpose. Even the poor priests had their eccentricities, and broke away from state leading-strings. The unity of church and government was merely nominal, if this could occur. To make any function of the state real, perfect discipline is needed. A national army would succumb to the first foe, if regiments of it, or individual generals, were to follow their own caprice. And a national church, if it is to be a true engine of the state, has still more need of exceptionless discipline, inasmuch as it has to master the spirits of men.

Generation after generation of Aleofanian statesmen turned their best energies to this problem. Experiment after experiment was tried, but none succeeded till the policy of government journalism was adopted. Criminals with a turn for piety—and very few were without it—were offered the choice of incarceration for life or careers as priests. Already the people had been inoculated by the journals with the belief that the stream of divine unction had poured down through the ages quite irrespective of the channels along which it flowed; it would have been a hard thing indeed if the evil characters and lives of so many priests in the past had stopped their transmission of the favour of heaven to their flocks; long ago would true religion have failed them had it depended on the officiating ministers of the deity; it would have shown limitation of God’s omnipotence if He had been supposed unable to send His inspiration through any person or character. The journalists had indeed found it easy to press home this doctrine, for the great church dignitaries, being often men of evil life, had been forced to inculcate it for many ages, and, being not seldom feeble in intellect, had reduced their duties down to the mere performance of ceremonies and the reading of prayers and portions of the sacred books. It was only amongst the poorest sectaries that the clergy had to use their brains in the way of reasoning out abstract doctrine into practical precept, or in rousing their flocks to religious fervour. Their light it was easy to extinguish or ignore. And all the marble city and its society readily accepted the change from the dull, uninterested performances of the old dignitaries to the smart elocution and brilliant histrionic attainments of the criminals. The state chose these not only for their piety, a common and superabundant commodity amongst them, but for their grace of speech and action, and sent them for several years to a great dramatic college, where every one of the arts of the stage was taught to perfection.

The long-talked-of reamalgamation of the theatre and the church was at last silently accomplished. What was the use of paying to see a poor performance in the theatre or concert-room, when they could enter any church for nothing and see a far more brilliant ceremonial enacted, and hear far more talented elocution? The minister of public worship encouraged by rewards the clever rogues, whom he had selected for the church, to invent new and more interesting modes of conducting the services, and new and more fascinating ways of chaining the attention of a crowd. The dramatic companies and public entertainers had to close their doors and seek employment under the state, and especially in the Bureau of Fame. The old revenues of the church were spent on magnificent choirs and instrumental bands, on the training of the musical talent of the nation for its services, as well as on the training of the criminals for its priesthood. As a rule the best histrionic ability straggled off into prison, for it delighted in outraging first convention and then law; it had a great taste, so my guide informed me, for extravagance and show, and soon developed a tendency to lying and hypocrisy. And such a truthful and sincere people had elaborate laws, of course, for the punishment and constraint of such vices. Thus the state got all the actor-talent of the marble city into its power. But it had to hire the musical talents, for they were too vain to have any vice but quarrelling; they had to be caught by other nets, the nets of gain; it secured from childhood all who had fine voices or great and original talent for melodious composition, or the management of musical instruments, and it trained them elaborately for the service of the church; the only certain employer was the state, and thus it had a monopoly of everything musical in the nation.