Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/180

 Simonianism" in the thirty-second number of The Westminster Review, says:—

"'The thirteenth, fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth sittings introduce religion. On which it is enough to state, and leave every man to decide on its truth by his experience—that there never was but one class of men that needlessly introduced religion as the instrument of settling men's temporal affairs, and but one other class that ever have submitted to it. The world wants honest lawgivers, not pious ones. If piety will make men honest, let them favour us with the honesty, and keep the piety for God and their own consciences. There never was a man that brought piety upon the board when honesty would do, without its being possible to trace a transfusion in the shape of money or money's worth from his neighbour's pocket into his. The object of puzzling the question with religion is clear. You cannot quarrel for sixpences with the man who is helping you the way to heaven. The man who wants your sixpences therefore assumes a religious phraseology, which is cant; and cant is fraud, and fraud is dishonesty, and the dishonest should have a mark set on them.'"

But as there may be clubs that profess philanthropy when they mean murder, so there may be clubs that, without much profession of exalted benevolence, brotherly love, and such rodomontade, are really benefactors of mankind. The Political Economy Club was a club of this kind. Professor Bain, in his Life of James Mill, mentions an