POISONING THE WELLS OF HISTORY

The professors will doubtless reply at once that I seem to expect an encyclopedia which is written for the service of the general public to include Rationalist opinions or at least to allow its writers to make positive statements on controversial matters, which is a sin against the ideal of educational publications. To the first of these complaints I would reply that Rationalism is now the attitude of a much larger proportion of the reading public than Christian belief is, yet in a thousand signed articles or short notices in the Britannica Christian writers are permitted to express their peculiar opinions and convictions freely, it would hardly be an outrage to expect the editors to allow Rationalists to provide the accounts of Rationalism, Skepticism, Naturalism, Atheism, Agnosticism and scores of similar articles which bear upon their position. But that they have not done so but have invariably hired hostile theologians to mangle these subjects is the smallest and least important criticism that I have here expressed. Of course, I do not expect them to act differently. Rationalism is unorganized and has no influence on the circulation of large and expensive works that are mainly destined for reference libraries. But is there any harm in drawing the attention of the public who use the books to that fact?

Well at least, they will say, McCabe expects to find the views which Rationalists take on controverted subjects embodied in the work. Again I do nothing of the kind. I might plead once more that as the majority of the serious reading public are no longer Christians they have the same right to have the critical view of a particular issue brought to the notice of Christian readers as these have to have their views forced upon the Rationalist. Has the capital invested in the Encyclopedia Britannica been provided by the Sacred Congregation for Propagating the Faith, the Catholic Welfare body, the Knights of Columbus -- somehow my mind asks a question or two at this point -- the British Catholic Truth Society or Westminster Federation. the Episcopal Church, the Methodists, or the Baptists? The earlier editions of the Britannica were published in days when the immense majority of those who consulted the book were Christians. It chooses to act today as if there had been no change. We, of course, know why. The cost of producing such a work and the profit on it have mainly to be secured from public or college or other institutional libraries, and these are to an enormous extent, especially in America, subject to a clerical censorship. I am too faithful a realist to make the welkin ring with my complaints because the publishers recognized this situation. Or am I churlish because I draw the attention of the public to the fact that this situation has an influence on the contents of the book.

I would not even embark upon these considerations only that I know from 50 years experience that what I do say will be ignored or misrepresented and the public will be distracted from my real criticisms by triumphant refutations, rich in irony and rhetoric, of something that I did not say.

The candid reader hardly needs me to re-state the chief grounds of my analysis of the work. The main idea is stated plainly in the introductory pages. I had occasion a few years ago to take up the matter. I have myself little need to look for my information, except perhaps a date occasionally, in encyclopedias, and when I do I generally collate the British, American, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, all of which are equally available to me. But I had, as I said, assured a correspondent that he would find proof of the castrated singers of Roman churches even in the Britannica, and this led to my discovery that the 14th edition differed materially in article after article from the 11th. (The 12th, 13th, 15th, and 16th are not "editions" in the proper sense but reprints). And pursuing this inquiry I discovered that the editors of the 14th edition had come to some remarkable secret arrangement with the Catholic Church. I say "secret" because, as I showed, the Westminster Catholic Federation with which the compact was made, though American priests assisted in the work, was compelled to make a public and humiliating disavowal of what it had claimed. Otherwise, the public would never have heard that there had been any arrangement.

For the first time I have now had the leisure to make an extensive though not complete comparison of the two editions, and the reader has seen that the second statement of the Westminster Federation -- that they had simply altered dates and technical points about their church -- is false. Any person familiar with these matters will assume that the bargain really was that if they were permitted to scratch out everything in the 11th edition that was, in the familiar phrase, "offensive to Catholics," they would recommend even nuns to admit it into their libraries (possibly with the anatomical and some other plates cut out) and would not oppose it in the public libraries. I doubt if it was part of the bargain that they could insert new matter that was "agreeable to Catholics," except such things as the cardinal's sermonette on the sin of birth control and the Roman prelate's publicity of the Vatican (and the genuine tomb of St. Peter).

However, as we have seen, pious zeal cannot be content with mere excisions. Give a priest an inch and he will take an ell of a lot. He does not learn casuistry for nothing. Under cover of the need of abbreviation he has deleted whole paragraphs, even columns of facts which were offensive to him because they flatly contradicted what he said or wrote, and then, possibly fearing that he had cut out too much, he inserted sentences or paragraphs which "put the Catholic point of view." He has taken phrases or paragraphs of the original writers of the articles and, while retaining their initials, he has repeatedly turned them inside out or has said that "recent research" (the gymnastic of some other Catholic apologist) has corrected his statements.

And I say that for an encyclopedia to allow this and not candidly explain it to the public but even try to prevent the Catholics disclosing it is a piece of deception. The writers who did the work had not the decency -- or were they forbidden? -- to give their names, as other contributors do. It is therefore possible that the plea may be urged that various groups of folk were engaged in the work of correcting errors in the 11th edition and it was thought best to lump all these little men together as Mlle. X. We are, however, intrigued by the fact that all these alterations, suppressions, and additions that I have examined uniformly serve the interests of Catholic propaganda and are generally characterized by the familiar chief feature of that propaganda -- untruthfulness.

Possibly the plea will be made that most of these are cases of historical statements, and that the Catholic has a right to object to the inclusion of any statement upon which historians are not agreed. I have pointed out one fallacy here. When the Catholic objects that "historians" dispute a point he generally means that it is disputed by historians of his own church: the men who say that Peter was buried at Rome and Torquemada burned only 2,000 heretics, that the Dark Age was bright with culture and virtue and the Age of Chivalry and the Crusaders irradiated the entire world, that the church was just tainted a little by a wicked world at one time but it soon purified itself by a Counter-Reformation, that there was horrible butchery at the French, Russian and Spanish Revolutions, that the Christian church abolished slavery and gave the world schools, hospitals, democracy, art, and science, and a thousand other fantastic things. If encyclopedias propose to embody these self-interested antics of Catholic propagandists the public ought to know it. In this little work I let them know it. Just the sort of thing an Atheist would do, yon may reflect.

In not a single one of these criticisms have I complained that a majority-view of historians or scientists or other experts has been given to the public without reserve, though it is considered proper in serious works of history or science to add that there is a dissentient majority-view. My complaint has been throughout that even the majority-view of historians has been suppressed or modified and the evidence for them cut out where the Catholic clergy do not like that particular view to reach the public because it conflicts with what they say; and that in scores of cases statements which are peculiar to Catholic writers and opposed to even the majority-opinion of experts have been allowed to be inserted as ordinary knowledge. I have given a hundred instances of this many of them grossly fraudulent and impudent. In short, the 14th edition of the Britannica has been used for the purpose of Catholic propaganda.

I do not in the least say that it is the only work of public reference that has been so used. The new Encyclopedia Americana betrays a lamentable degree of Catholic influence, and even the more scholarly Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics has curried favor with Catholics by entrusting a number of important articles ("Inquisition," etc.) to Catholic writers, with the usual disastrous results; while manuals of European, especially medieval, history by some American professors strain or suppress evidence scandalously to suit Catholic authorities. I have here merely given the definite evidence in one field that the Catholic Church uses its enormous wealth and voting power to poison the wells of truth and to conceal from the public the facts of history which make a mockery of the fantastic claims it advances today.

Beyond this I have given many examples of the outdated character of a monstrous amount of stuff in the Encyclopedia that ought to have been displaced (instead of sound historical sketches) to make room for new matter. That is a natural vice of an old encyclopedia; or so we should be inclined to say if new encyclopedias did not, in order to get the patronage of reactionary institutions, imitate them. Who wants in a modern encyclopedia the mass of stuff about saints and martyrs, which are to a great extent pure fiction and rarely honest, about ancient kings, queens, and statesmen about whom the sketches lie glibly or are loaded with dates and events of no use to us, about a thousand points of theology and ritual which ought to be confined to a religious encyclopedia. It is not alone in regard to the Catholic Church that our works of reference are so full of calculated untruths and outdated obsequiousness. Although, as I said, the section of the public that ever consults one of these large works -- 60 to 70 percent never do -- is predominantly non- Christian we do not expect the full truth, especially in regard to history, in them. The domination of the economic corporations of the clergy is too complete to permit that. I have a small Rationalist Encyclopedia presently appearing in London which I wrote six or seven years ago. It Will show how different the truth, gathered from the works of experts, is from the stuff one reads in encyclopedia-articles on matters affecting one's philosophy of life; though I fear it will be issued in two expensive volumes, instead of the cheap fortnightly parts (as originally intended) of my larger American publications, and my labor will be virtually wasted; for the clergy will see that public libraries do not get it. It is a lamentable situation, for from the religious field this modern manipulation of truth extends to many others. I hope this short investigation will help to open the eyes of the American public to its new mental slavery.