TEXAS TOPICS.
I NOTE with unfeigned pleasure that, according to claims
of Baylor University, it opens the present season with
a larger contingent of students, male and female, than
ever before. This proves that Texas Baptists are determined
to support it at any sacrifice—that they believe
it better that their daughters should be exposed to its
historic dangers and their sons condemned to grow up in
ignorance than that this manufactory of ministers and
Magdalenes should be permitted to perish. It is to be
devoutly hoped that the recent expose of Baylor's criminal
carelessness will have a beneficial effort—that hence
forth orphan girls will not be ravished on the premises
of its president, and that fewer young lady students will
be sent home enciente. The ICONOCLAST would like to see
Baylor University, so called, become an honor to Texas
instead of an educational eye-sore, would like to hear it
spoken of with reverence instead of sneeringly referred to
by men about town as worse than a harem. Probably
Baylor has never been so bad as many imagined, that the
joint-keepers in the Reservation have been mistaken in
regarding it as a rival, that the number of female students
sent away to conceal their shame has been exaggerated;
still I imagine that both its morale and educational
advantages are susceptible of considerable improvement.
The ICONOCLAST desires to see Baylor a veritable
pantechnicon of learning—at least a place where the careful
student may acquire something really worth remembering
—instead of a Dotheboys (and girls) hall, a Squeeritic
graft to relieve simple Baptist folk of their hard-earned
boodle by beludaling the brains of their bairns with mis-called education. Unfortunately there is more brazen
quackery in our sectarian colleges than was every dreamed
of by Cagliostro. The faculty of such institutions is
usually composed of superficially educated pepole who
know even less than is contained in the text-books. As
a rule they are employed because they will serve at a
beggarly price, but sometimes because their employers are
themselves too ignorant to properly pass upon the
qualifications of others. You cannot estimate a man's
intellect by the length of his purse, by the amount of money
he has made and saved; but it is quite safe to judge a
man's skill in his vocation by the salary he can command.
I am informed that there has never been a time when the
salary of the president of Baylor University exceeded
$2,000 per annum—about half that of a good whisky
salesman or advertising solicitor for a second-class
newspaper. If such be the salary of the president, what must
be those of the "professors"? I imagine their salaries
run from $40 a month up to that of a second assistant
book-keeper in a fashionable livery-stable. Judging by
the salaries which they are compelled to accept, I doubt
if there be a member of the Baylor faculty, including the
president, who could obtain the position of principal of
any public high school in the state. People cannot impart
information which they do not possess; hence it is that
the graduates of Baylor have not been really educated,
but rather what the erstwhile Mr. Shakespeare would call
"clapper-clawed." There is no reason, however, why the
institution should be in the future so intellectually and
morally unprofitable as in the past. Change is the order
of the universe, and as Baylor cannot very well become
worse it must of necesity become better. It will have the
unswerving support of the ICONOCLAST in every effort to
place itself upon a higher educational plane, to honestly
earn the money it pockets as tuition fees. I am even willing
to conduct a night school free of charge during three
months in the year for the instruction of its faculty if
each member thereof will give bond not to seek a better
paying situation elsewhere as soon as he learns something.
In any event, when Baylor can send me a valedictorian
fresh from its walls who is better informed than the average
graduate of our public schools, I'll give it a thousand
dollars as evidence of my regard, and half as much
annually thereafter to encourage it in the pursuit of
common sense.
...
I greatly regret that my Baptist brethren, Drs. Hayden
and Cranfill, Burleson and Carroll, should have gotten
into a spiteful and un-Christian snarl over so pitiful a
thing as Baylor's $2,000 presidency—that they should
give to the world such a flagrant imitation of a lot of cut-throat
unregenerates out for the long green. If one-half
that Hayden and Cranfill are saying about each other in
their respective papers be true—that I presume that it
is—then both ought to be in the penitientiary. Brethren,
please to remember that ye are posing as guardians of
morals, as examples for mankind—as people out of whom
the original sin has been soaked in the Baptist pool and
whose paps are filled to the bursting point with the milk
of human kindness. If you must fight and scratch like
a brace of Kilkenny cats, why the hell don't you sneak
quietly into the woods and fight it out instead of exhibiting
your blatant jackasserie to the simple people of
Dallas and McLennan counties and thereby bringing our
blessed church into contempt! Gadzooks! if you splenetic-hearted old duffers don't sand your hands and take
a fresh grip on your Christian charity I'll resign my
position as chief priest of the Baptist church and become
a Mormon elder. I'll just be cofferdamned if I propose
to remain at the head of a church whose educators,
preachers and editors are forever hacking away at each
other's goozle with a hand-ax and slinging slime like a
lot of colored courtesans.
...
Our little boiler-plate contemporary, the Austin Statesman,
prints a court docket containing 69 divorce cases—
side by side with 12 church notices. Which is cause and
which effect I will not assume to say; but Austin is
headquarters for camp-meetings—and every neurologists
endorsed the ICONOCLAST'S theory that emotional religion is
a terrible strain on the Seventh Commandment.
...
"Our heroic young," etc., etc., announces himself a
candidate for the United States Senate to succeed Roger
Q. Mills. The young man's modesty is really monumental.
Having succeeded by all manner of petty chicanery
in capturing the governorship, I am surprised that he isn't
seeking the job of Jehovah. Displacing Mills with
Culberson were much like substituting a Chinese joss for the
Apollo Belvedere or an itch bacillus for a bull-elephant.
I really cannot consent that the little fellow be sent to
Washington lest some hurdy gurdy man should swipe
him. Chawles says: "Next spring and summer I shall
canvas the state thoroughly, presenting my views of public
questions to the people." Which is to say that while
we are paying him a good stiff salary for doing his little
best to discharge the duties of one office, he will "canvas
the state thoroughly" chasing another. If he attempts
to perpetuate such a brazen swindle on the tax-payers of
Texas, I'll camp on his trail to some extent, and see that
he has a hot time in at least a few old towns. I cannot
afford to trail him at my own expense all spring and
summer, while he's cavorting around on free passes and
drawing $11 a day from the public purse for unrendered
services; but I'll trump his card in all the large Texas
towns as quick as it strikes the table. I'm getting dead
rotten tired of helping pay the salaries of Texas officials
for time devoted to fence-building, and it will afford me
considerable
satisfaction to place this cold-blooded little
ward on the body politic properly before the people. The
duties of the governor's office were supposed to be so
onerous that a board of pardons was created at the tax-payers' expense to lighten his labors; yet Mr. Culberson
proposed to spend the spring and summer, not in a
reasonable effort to earn his salary, but in explaining why
he should be sent to the senate. Coming before us thus
self-evidently unfaithful over a few things, this "heroic
young Christian" poker-player and red-light habitue has
the supernal gall to ask us to make him lord over many
things,—to accord him political promotion for dereliction
of duty! In the name of Balaam's she-ass, does this
snub-nosed little snipe suppose that we are all hopeless
idiots? You are the state's hired hand, Charlie boy—
duly employed to remain at Austin and display your
anserine ignorance in the governor's office. The people
don't care two whoops in hades what your "opinions"
may be on any subject within the purview of the United
States Senate. If you want to spend the "spring and
summer" rainbow chasing, a proper sense of duty to
your employers, even a slight conception of commercial
honor, would induce you to resign your present position.
If you are destitute of both honor and decency you will
probably campaign at our expense as you have promised;
but I opine that I can pour enough hot shot under your
little shirt-tails in a few engagements to drive you back
to your duty, and that you will go in a gallop. What
the devil do you suppose that Texans want with a two-faced little icicle like yourself in the United States Senate?
What taxpayer has asked you to become a candidate?
Despite all your wire-pulling, your trading and self-seeking,
and the further fact that you are employing the
state machinery to strengthen your pull, you really stand
no more show of succeeding Roger Q. Mills than you do
of succeeding the Czar of Russia. You have managed to
get thus far, not on your own merits, but solely because
you are "Old Dave" Culberson's son. Yours is simply
a case of
magni nominis umbra, and the umbra is getting
deuced thin at the edges, is no longer capable of
concealing the ass. For many years past we have been
paying men fat salaries for gadding about the country
exploiting their supposed "opinions." It is high time we
put an end to such idiocy, and I have selected you, as
probably the worst specimen of these political malefactors,
of which to make an example in the interest of
honesty.
...
A correspondent writes me from Nacogdoches, Texas:
"The Baptists of this town have forced your agent to
promise to discontinue selling the ICONOCLAST under penalty
of expulsion from the church." That's all right;
having purchased and paid for a Baptist ticket to the
heavenly henceforth, he doesn't want to be bounced from
the boat. Being thrown overboard in a canal two feet
wide and four feet deep is not so bad by itself considered,
but contumacious recalcitrants are invariable boycotted
in business by the hydrocephalous sect which boasts
that it was the first to establish liberty of conscience and
freedom of speech in this country, yet which has been
striving desperately for a hundred years to banish the
last vestige of individuality and transform this nation
into a pharisaical theocracy with some priorient hypocrite
as its heierach. The ICONOCLAST is in its seventh volume
and has never yet been caught in a falsehood or
published an unclean advertisement. I am proud to say
that no honest man or virtuous woman was ever its enemy,
but that holy hypocrites and sanctified harlots regard it
with the same aversion that a pickpocket does a policeman.
Yes; the action of the Baptists of Nacogdoches
was perfectly natural. What they want is a paper that
will afford them a charming mixture of camp-meeting
notices and syphilitic nostrums, prayer-meetings and
abortion pills, Prohibition rallies and lost manhood restorers.
I cheerfully recommend the Baptist Standard to their
kindly consideration.
...
When J. S. Hogg was governor of Texas he compelled
the Southern Pacific road to move a train-load of Coxey-
ites, whom it had, carried in from California and side
tracked west of San Antonio to starve. As counsel for
that impudent corporation—whose officials seem to have
been formed of the quintessential extract of the
exerementitious matter of the whole earth—he now makes a
"compromise" with the Culberson crew whereby it is some
$975,000
in and the state that much
out. James Stephen
can scarce be blamed for securing every possible advantage
for his client, even tho' it be such a notorious criminal
as the "Sunset"; but had he been attorney for the
state instead of for the corporation there would have been
no compounding of a felony "for the good of the people,"
no sacrifice of both dignity and dollars. It is amusing
to see Culberson and Crane making a house of refuge of
the coat tails of Reagan. "He approved it! he approved
it!" Of course he approved it—Attorney General Crane
"not having time during his term of office to prosecute
all the cases." But he'll "have time" just as hard to
spend half of next year chasing the governorship on time
paid for by the people. Reagan was compelled to accept
the compromise because the Culbersonian crew were too
busy office-chasing to prosecute the corporation. If the
Culbersonian crowd lined their pockets by that compromise
they are a set of thieves; if they didn't line their
pockets they simply suffered the corporation to play 'em
for a pack of damphools. As neither a thief nor a fool
is fit to hold a public office, I move that we build a large
zinc-lined political coffin and bury the whole crowd.
...
The St. Louis Mirror, the brightest weekly in the
world, recently had a remarkably interesting article on
Texas politics; but somehow it suggested to my mind that
German metaphysician who, having never seen a lion or
read a description of one, undertook to evolve a correct
idea of the king of beasts from his own inner consciousness.
...
It were interesting to know what kind of a swindle
W. L. Moody & Co. have in soak this season for the
guileless cotton grower. I have provided this office with
a car-load of nickel-plated tear-jugs for the benefit of
cotton men who will call later to tell me their troubles.
My idea is to build a condenser, start a wholesale salt
store and supply Baptist dipping-tanks with water free
of wiggletails. Say! There's millions in it. Col.
Mulberry Seller's eye-water enterprise were as nothing to
my graft when I get it agoing.
...
I note that the Wrong-Reverend E. H. Harman, formerly
presiding elder of the Methodist church at Brenham,
but given the grand bounce for getting too gay at
Galveston, where, in company with another sanctified
ministerial hypocrite named Wimberly, he had "a hot time
in the old town," with hacks, harlots and barrel-house
booze, has been converted to the Christian (or Campbellite)
faith and proposes to preach. Possibly his conversion
is genuine; but it is worthy of remark that he saw
nothing attractive in the Christian cult until no longer
allowed to occupy a Methodist pulpit—until reduced to
the necessity of either seeking a job in a new corner of the
Lord's vineyard or taking a fall out of the lowly cotton
patch. He ought to make an excellent running mate
for the "Rev." Granville Jones, the poorty preacher
who puts his picture on his evangelical guttersnipes to
show the people how a holy man of God looks after
confessing to having forged a letter derogatory to a poor
motherless working girl's reputation. As my father is a
Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against
his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack
bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes.
If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit
with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the
decent members of that denomination will tie him across
a nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity of his rear
elevation with a vigorous application of pine plank.
