Government Subsidy for Religious Teachers
THERE is at least one member of the existing national legislature who openly advocates a union of church and state in the United States, in the form of a subsidy granted by the government to religious teachers in the Philippines. This legislator is Congressman Bourke Cockran, a Roman Catholic. Mr. Cockran, says the New World (Catholic), “has been making an extended study of conditions in the East” (as a member of the Taft party), where “the conviction was forced upon him that the Catholic Church alone can solve the problem of restoring peace, contentment, and harmony in our Eastern colonial possessions.” In a recent speech on the subject of preparing the Filipinos for independence, Mr. Cockran, as reported by the New World, said:— The surest and best way of educating the Filipinos up to a point of prosperity where they would be capable of independence is to subsidize the Catholic missionaries. . . . It is said that the government can not subsidize any church or religious institution. Yet the government is bound to spread civilization by all means available if its promise of independence shall be taken for more than a promise. To guide the natives for their own interests we must rule them in peace, and to do so we shall have either to educate or kill them. Believe me, it will cost twice as much to kill them as to educate them. Every Filipino killed so far has required an expenditure of from two hundred dollars to three hundred dollars for his putting out of the way. Suppose that each man who educated a Filipino got a subsidy of from fifteen dollars to twenty dollars, would it not serve to bring to these islands the men needed for that work? I do not advocate the subsidizing of our own church alone, but I call on the government to avail itself of the machinery of the church, which was the first institution in the world to maintain the superiority of voluntary labor over coerced labor. It would be a fine thing, thinks this congressman, for the government to use the machinery of the Catholic Church for its purposes, and then, of course, it would only be fair reciprocity for the Catholic Church to use the machinery of the government for her purposes. There is altogether too much prospect of such reciprocity.