WITHOUT PREJUDICE.
The Rev. F. L. Donaldson resembles other and less cultured Socialists in that his admiration for the policy of confiscating private property – a policy euphemistically called “Socialisation” – falls off considerably as soon as it is proposed to apply the process to the pockets of himself and of his own class. When his own teachings upon the evil of capitalism and the merits of those pantominic politicians, “The Forty Socialisers,” are about to be put into practice against the endowments of the Church in Wales, the reverend gentleman is inclined to call a halt. Never did parson perform so much self-stultification in the course of one sermon as the Rev. F. L. Donaldson did at St. Mark’s Church a week ago.
For example, after stating that Church property stands upon just the same principle as the property of other Corporations, and is no more “national” than all property is ultimately national, Mr. Donaldson objected to Disendowment of the Church by Liberal capitalists, whose hands, he said, “are not clean.” This interesting reflection upon the honesty of modern Liberalism may or may not be justifiable, according to one’s point of view. There is an old saying that one cannot touch pitch without being defiled, and Mr. Donaldson can hardly expect those who do dirty work to retain the lily-white purity of manual immaculateness.
The reverend gentleman, however, only intended his criticism of Liberal hands to apply to those hands that are not empty, for he said the hands of the Liberal party are not clean because it is the party of capitalism. Thus we see that poverty is the only test of moral worth. Tennyson’s “Northern Farmer,” with his generalisation, “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was out of it altogether, and the text, “To him that hath shall be given,” etc., has acquired a subtle, paradoxical, meaning, in the mind of the Vicar of St. Mark’s. If it were worth while, Liberals might apply the tu quoque argument to Mr. Donaldson, by questioning the spotlessness of his own hands, seeing that he is a capitalist, according to his own argument that Church endowments stand on precisely the same footing as any other form of ownership.
Mr. Donaldson, then, as a Socialiser, wants to abolish Capitalism, lock, stock, and barrel, but, as a Churchman, who, going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, has fallen among Socialisers, he objects to the Church being used as the corpus vile for early experiments, and says, in effects, “There are plenty of others to rob – rich Liberals and the like – rob them first, and then, when they are robbed, and their hands and pockets are alike cleaned, let them rob the Church.” If Mr. Donaldson’s sermon does not mean that, it means nothing. Was there ever such a pitiful exhibition on the part of a man, hoist with his own petard, or fallen himself into the pit he had digged for another?
However irrational and irresponsible as a political economist the Vicar of St. Mark’s may be, he is an educated man, who ought to realise the folly of starting an avalanche of confiscation down the slopes of society. His propaganda against private ownership is more worthy of a Dick Turpin or a Jack Sheppard than of a Church parson. The condemnation applied by the great Mr. Gladstone to Land Nationalisation – “If you intend to pay for the land, the scheme is folly, and if you intend to take it without payment, it is robbery” – is equally applicable to every other scheme for “socialising” private property, including the attack upon the endowments of every separate parish in Wales and Monmouth. If that robbery is ever committed, Mr. Donaldson’s own hands will have helped to render the crime possible. Let him realise that fact! It is too late now for him to cry out because, another Monsieur Guillotine, he looks like being made the victim of his own pet contrivance, “Socialisation.”
Our hero also made a great show of the text, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Seeing that he laid down the postulate that Church property and all other private property are exactly alike in principle, it is difficult to know of what use in his argument that particular text was. Perhaps he had in his mind that unrendering Liberal, the Rev. P. T. Thomson, Passive Resister, or those unrendering Liberals who manage the Victoria Institute and Wood Memorial Hall. If so he did not say. The inference left in the minds of the majority of his congregation was that the Church’s goods are God’s, and other people’s Caesar’s, which does not seem to tally with his claim that all property stands in one category. However, Mr. Donaldson may be congratulated on having a full church.
W.A.G.
(Leicester Evening Mail, 12th February 1912)
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