d
scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the
eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land
owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and
needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor
radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to
the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical
concerning the grafts of grace.

In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had a
large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a
thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing
twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birth-day, to preach
a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting
that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that
is, clergymen holding more than one "living"--to furnish curates to do
their work; it might be interesting to note that this law met with
strenuous clerical opposition, the house of Bishops voting against it
without a division. Thus we may understand the sharp saying of Karl
Marx, that the English clergy would rather part with thirty-eight of
their thirty-nine articles than with one thirty-ninth of their income.

There is always a plentiful supply of curates in England. They are the
sons of the less influential ruling families, and of the clergy; they
have been trained at Oxford or Cambridge, and possess the one
essential qualification, that they are gentlemen. Their average price
is two hundred and fifty pounds a year; their function was made clear
to me when I attended my first English tea-party. There was a wicker
table, perhaps a foot and a half square, having three shelves, one
below the other--on the top layer the plates and napkins, on the next
the muffins, and on the lowest the cake. Said the hostess, "Will you
pass the curate, please?" I looked puzzled, and she pointed. "We call
that the curate, because it does the work of a curate."

#Graft in Tail#

As one of America's head muck-rakers, I found that I was popular with
the British ruling classes; they found my books useful in their
campaigns against democracy, and they were surprised and disconcerted
when they found I did not agree with their interpretation of my
writings. I had told of corruption in American politics; surely I mus