Cæsar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century

by Ignatius Donnelly

Here the speaker grew wild and hoarse with passion, and the audience, who had been growing more and more excited and turbulent as he proceeded, burst into a tremendous uproar that drowned every other sound. A crowd of the more desperate--dark-faced, savage-looking workingmen--made a rush for the platform to seize the clergyman; and they would soon have had possession of him. But in this extremity I sprang to the front of the platform, between him and the oncoming mob, and by my mere presence, and the respect they have for me as their friend, I stilled the tempest and restored order.

"My dear friends!" I said, "be patient! Are you the men who boast of your toleration? You meet to discuss your sufferings and their remedy; and when one tells you how he would cure you, you rise up to slay him. Be just. This poor man may be mistaken--the body of which he is a member may be mistaken--as to the best way to serve and save mankind; but that his purpose is good, and that he loves you, who can doubt? Look at him! Observe his poor garments; his emaciated figure. What joys of life does he possess? He has given up everything to help you. Into your darkest alleys--into your underground dens--where pestilence and starvation contend for their victims, he goes at high noon and in the depth of the blackest night, and he brings to the parting soul consolation and hope. And why not? Who can doubt that there is another life? Who that knows the immortality of matter, its absolute indestructibility, can believe that mind, intelligence, soul,--which must be, at the lowest estimate--if they are not something higher--a form of matter,--are to perish into nothingness? If it be true, as we know it is, that the substance of the poor flesh that robes your spirits--nay, of the very garments you wear--shall exist, undiminished by the friction of eternity, æons after our planet is blotted out of space and our sun forgotten, can you believe that this intelligence, whereby I command your souls into thought, and communicate with the unsounded depths of your natures, can be clipped off into annihilation? Nay, out of the very bounty and largess of God I speak unto you; and that in me which speaks, and that in you which listens, are alike part and parcel of the eternal Maker of all things, without whom is nothing made." [Applause.]

"And so, my friends, every good man who loves you, and would improve your condition, in time or in eternity, is your friend, and to be venerated by you." [Applause.] "And while we may regret the errors of religion, in the past, or in the present, let us not forget its virtues. Human in its mechanism, it has been human in its infirmities. In the doctrine of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, which are the essential principles of Christianity, lies the redemption of mankind. But some of the churchmen have misconceived Christ, or perverted him to their own base purposes. He who drove the money-changers out of the temple, and denounced the aristocrats of his country as whited sepulchres, and preached a communism of goods, would not view to-day with patience or equanimity the dreadful sufferings of mankind. We have inherited Christianity without Christ; we have the painted shell of a religion, and that which rattles around within it is not the burning soul of the Great Iconoclast, but a cold and shriveled and meaningless tradition. Oh! for the quick-pulsing, warm-beating, mighty human heart of the man of Galilee! Oh! for his uplifted hand, armed with a whip of scorpions, to depopulate the temples of the world, and lash his recreant preachers into devotion to the cause of his poor afflicted children!" [Great applause.]

"There is no Power in the world too great or too sacred to be used by Goodness for the suppression of Evil. Religion--true religion--not forms or ceremonies, but inspired purpose--should take possession of the governments of the world and enforce justice! The purified individual soul we may not underestimate. These are the swept and garnished habitations in which the angels dwell, and look with unpolluted eyes upon the world. But this is not all. To make a few virtuous where the many are vicious is to place goodness at a disadvantage. To teach the people patience and innocence in the midst of craft and cruelty, is to furnish the red-mouthed wolves with woolly, bleating lambs. Hence the grip of the churches on humanity has been steadily lessening during the past two hundred years. Men permanently love only those things that are beneficial to them. The churches must come to the rescue of the people or retire from the field. A babe in the claws of a tiger is not more helpless than a small virtuous minority in the midst of a cruel and bloody world. Virtue we want, but virtue growing out of the bosom of universal justice. While you labor to save one soul, poverty crushes a million into sin. You are plucking brands from a constantly increasing conflagration. The flames continue to advance and devour what you have saved. The religion of the world must be built on universal prosperity, and this is only possible on a foundation of universal justice. If the web of the cloth is knotted in one place it is because the threads have, in an unmeaning tangle, been withdrawn from another part. Human misery is the correlative and equivalent of injustice somewhere else in society.

"What the world needs is a new organization--a great world-wide Brotherhood of Justice. It should be composed of all men who desire to lift up the oppressed and save civilization and society. It should work through governmental instrumentalities. Its altars should be the schools and the ballot-boxes. It should combine the good, who are not yet, I hope, in a minority, against the wicked. It should take one wrong after another, concentrate the battle of the world upon them, and wipe them out of existence. It should be sworn to a perpetual crusade against every evil. It is not enough to heal the wounds caused by the talons of the wild beasts of injustice; it should pursue them to their bone-huddled dens and slay them." [Great applause.] "It should labor not alone to relieve starvation, but to make starvation impossible;--to kill it in its causes.

"With the widest toleration toward those who address themselves to the future life, even to the neglect of this, the sole dogma of our society should be justice. If there is an elysium in the next world, and not a continuation of the troubled existence through which we are now passing, we will be all the better fitted to enjoy it if we have helped to make this world a heaven. And he who has labored to make earth a hell should enjoy his workmanship in another and more dreadful world, forever and forever.

"And oh, ye churches! Will ye not come up to the help of the people against the mighty? Will ye not help us break the jaws of the spoiler and drag the prey from between his teeth? Think what you could do if all your congregation were massed together to crush the horrid wrongs that abound in society! To save the world you must fight corruption and take possession of government. Turn your thoughts away from Moses and his ragged cohorts, and all the petty beliefs and blunders of the ancient world. Here is a world greater than Moses ever dreamed of. Here is a population infinitely vaster in numbers, more enlightened, more capable of exquisite enjoyment, and exquisite suffering, than all the children of Israel and all the subjects of imperial Rome combined. Come out of the past into the present. God is as much God to-day as he was in the time of the Pharaohs. If God loved man then he loves him now. Surely the cultured denizen of this enlightened century, in the midst of all the splendors of his transcendent civilization, is as worthy of the tender regard of his Creator as the half-fed and ignorant savage of the Arabian desert five thousand years ago. God lives yet, and he lives for us."

Here I paused. Although the vast audience had listened patiently to my address, and had, occasionally, even applauded some of its utterances, yet it was evident that what I said did not touch their hearts. In fact, a stout man, with a dark, stubbly beard, dressed like a workingman, rose on one of the side benches and said:

"Fellow-toilers, we have listened with great respect to what our friend Gabriel Weltstein has said to us, for we know he would help us if he could--that his heart is with us. And much that he has said is true. But the time has gone by to start such a society as be speaks of. Why, if we formed it, the distresses of the people are so great that our very members would sell us out on election day." [Applause.] "The community is rotten to the core; and so rotten that it is not conscious that it is rotten." [Applause.] "There is no sound place to build on. There is no remedy but the utter destruction of the existing order of things." [Great applause.] "It cannot be worse for us than it is; it may be better." [Cheers.]

"But," I cried out, "do you want to destroy civilization??"