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 must
know that in England they had no such evils! I explained that they did
not have to; their graft, to use their own legal phrase, was "in
tail"; the grafters had, as a matter of divine right, the things which
in America they had to buy. In America, for instance, we had a Senate,