University of Virginia Library

Here follow the contents of the May, 1898, ICONOCLAST published by Brann's friends after his death

THE PASSING OF WILLIAM COWPER BRANN.
BY G. P. GERALD.

POETIC legend says that on a moonlight night, two thousand years ago, along the shores of the gulf of Patras, a mighty voice was heard, crying "Great Pan is dead!" And from the mountains and the valleys, the woods and grottoes, where stood the altars of those who worshiped at the shrine of Pan, was reëchoed back the cry, "Great Pan is dead!" On the second of April, when the winged lightning bore over a continent, and to foreign lands beyond the sea, the news that W. C. Brann of the ICONOCLAST was dead, in every land where his writings are known, from men and women who worship at the shrine of genius, went up the wailing cry, "Brann of the ICONOCLAST is dead." Oh, death! thou grim and imperious master of us all, how dreadful to the living are your silent darts, that are ever striking with impartial hand the old man in his dotage, the strong man in his prime, the brave man in his courage and the craven in his fear.

W. C. Brann was 43 years of age, and had just arrived at that period when he was beginning to realize the hopes and aspirations of years, when he was stricken down amid the rejoicings of many and the sorrows of many thousands more. He was born in Coles county, Illinois, and at the ago of two and a half years, by the death of his mother, was placed with a sister some two years older than himself, in the care of Mr. Hawkins and his wife, who lived on a farm in that county. He remained with them ten years, and then, longing to be something more than a

farm hand, he packed his small belongings in a little box and at night, when all was still, he took the box under his arm and went out into the lonely darkness of the moonless night, without money, friends or education, to commence the struggle which ended in his untimely death at Waco.

Mr. Brann always spoke in the most kindly terms of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, and when he purchased his home in this city, he offered to share it with them, but having grown old and being comfortably situated they did not desire to change.

The first place he secured was that of a bell boy in a hotel, and from that passed on to other situations, realizing all the time, what every proud spirited boy would do under the circumstances, the bitterness that frinedlessness, ignorance and poverty bring to the struggle of life. Among other things he learned the trade of painter and grainer, also that of printer, all the time storing his mind with what scraps of education that his life of poverty and toil permitted. After he gathered sufficient education he became a newspaper writer, and in 1877, at Rochelle, Ill., was married to Miss Carrie Martin, who, with two children, Grace and William Carlyle, "Little Billy," as we call him, survive him. After the death of Mrs. Brann's mother, he took to his home one of her sisters, now Mrs. Marple of Fort Worth, and although often driven to the most desperate straits to make a living, he proved to her to be both a brother and a father. He continued his newspaper career in Illinois and Missouri, until some thirteen years ago, when he came to Texas, and gradually became known by his connection with various papers of the State. For a short time he had an interest in a paper called the ICONOCLAST, published in Austin, but he soon found himself back at his old trade, that of driving his

pen for others. At last, worn out by long years of unremitting and generally poorly requited toil, wearied with waiting for opportunity to write as he wished but could not do as an employee of others, he determined to again strike out for himself, as he had done in his early boyhood, and in 1894 came to this city and established the ICONOCLAST, which was a success from its first issue, and continued to grow in circulation as he grew in reputation as a writer, until the copy that witnessed his death reached an issue of nearly 90,000.

The world, for several generations, has been discussing whether Shakespeare wrote the plays that bear his name, thousands believing that it was impossible for a man who had no more education than Shakespeare had in his youth, to have exhibited the varied knowledge and learning that characterize his works, therefore these attribute them to Sir Francis Bacon, one of the most brilliant and best educated men of his time. All the evidence goes to show that at the age of 18, when Shakespeare married, that he had acquired with a "little Latin and less Greek," the ordinary education accorded to the sons of the well-to-do middle-class Englishmen of his time, of which his father was one. At 18 Mr. Brann had barely secured the rudiments of an English education, and had he lived to the age of Shakespeare, there is no telling to what heights, intellectually, he would have risen. From a slight knowledge of his hopes and aspirations, I can say, that while he dearly loved the ICONOCLAST, as a vehicle by which he could convey to the world his thoughts, he had aspirations that went far beyond it, and proposed that during the next ten nor twelve years, after his mind had been fully stored for the work, to leave as a legacy to the world, in a continuous work, his conception of the wrongs done to humanity, the evils that spring from them and

the remedies to be applied. And all who have read him closely and noticed how, month by month, he grew greater and brighter, will surely join in saying, that the loss of such a work from such a man, at the meridian of his intellectual life, is only second, if not equal, to the loss of the unwritten volumes of Buckle's "History of Civilization." Alas! that such a man, with such a great future before him should have died standing on the very threshold of his work.

In the private relations of life Mr. Brann was as extraordinary as in his public career; he presented that combination that is so rare that even novelists do not attempt to paint it, the combination of the lover and the husband, and as a father, a friend, a lover of humanity, with a broad mantle of charity for all, he had few equals.

While he wrote in prose, he was a poet, and of him can be truly said:

As a writer, Mr. Brann had his faults, but they were the heritage of this God-given son of genius, and with them he climbed the heights and died among the greatest, both of the living and the dead. And had he lived ten years longer, in all probability, the intellectual world would have held him as the grandest writer that this

earth has ever known since the days when old Homer painted the matchless beauty of the bride of Menelaus, and told of the godlike courage of the Greek and Trojan as they fought for her, from the Scamander to the sea. While the ignorant, the bigoted and intolerant are rejoicing in his death and garnishing his grave with the slime of their slander, they may be assured that his name and writings will live until the English language dies, and when W. C. Brann is dead and forgotten, so will be Sterne, Smollet, Fielding, Swift, Pope, Steele, Addison, Goldsmith, Shakespeare, Ben and Sam Johnson, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Carlyle George Eliot and all that mighty host that have made the English language what it is. The language that the little tribe of the Angles brought from the forest of Germany to Britain swallowed the Britain, and survived the Norman conquest, and then absorbed both the conqueror and his language. And in the dead centuries of over a thousand years, in every generation has produced some mighty intellect to speed it on in building up the bulwarks of human rights and human liberty, until they have grown so high that despots turn from it with loathing, and slaves cannot speak it. The language of the Magna Charta and the Declaration of American Independence, the two instruments that have spread the bread of liberty before a hungry world. And as a writer of this language, with all its mighty past and greater future. W. C. Brann had few equals and no superiors.

I have been asked, both before and since his death, what were his religious opinions, and while every man's religious opinions are his own, and no one has the right to question them, I will say he was a Deist something after the manner of Thomas Paine, and for the benefit of some of our professors and preachers, who do not know the difference between an Atheist and a Deist, I will say

that a Deist is one who believes in one God, and rejects all forms of so-called revealed religion. Mr. Brann loved nature and when he looked upon it, he saw nature's God, that with eternal fingers has written his message on earth and sky, so that savage and civilized, Christian and Infidel alike could read, that has by immutable and unvarying laws, regulated the bloom of the flowers, the course of the winds, and the fall of the leaf, as well as the revolutions of the countless millions of worlds that are ever speeding through the unmeasurable realms of space. He believed that this mighty power, that men call God, could perpetuate man in the hereafter as easily as he had placed him here, and while he, like many others, knew that all his hopes and faith did not furnish one atom of real proof as to what lies beyond the gates of death, still he hoped for the brighter and better life, and when that beautiful smile overspread his face when he died, those who beheld it felt that he had realized his hopes, and in the shadowy realm that bounds the Stygian river had met his little girl Inez, whose untimely death at the age of barely 12 years, had worked such havoc in his heart. Mr. Brann loved nature, not only when the gorgeous god of day threw over earth and sky the flashing strands of his golden hair, but in the night time when all else was wrapped in the arms of sleep, the twin sister of death; and the belated passer-by of his home often saw the gleam of his cigar as he sat or walked upon the lawn, in the small hours of the night: and at such time I know there came through his soul the thoughts, if not the words, of that death-devoted Greek, who to the question from the woman that he loved, "O, Ion, shall we meet again," answered, "I have asked that dreadful question of the hills that look eternal. Of the clear streams that flow on forever. Of the bright stars amid whose fields of azure my raised spirit has walked in glory. All, all are dumb."

But when I gaze upon thy face, I feel that there is something in the love that mantles through its beauty that cannot wholly perish, we shall meet again, Clemanthe. But it was not the name of Clemanthe that passed his lips, it was ever "Inez, darling Inez, we shall meet again."

I here reproduce in his own words an extract appropriate to this subject. It is from the ICONOCLAST of March, 1896, and an article headed "Beecher on the Bible":

"I know nothing of the future; I spend no time speculating upon it—I am overwhelmed by the Past and at death grips with the Present. At the grave God draws the line between the two eternities. Never has living man lifted the somber veil of Death and looked beyond.

"There is a Deity. I have felt his presence. I have heard his voice, I have been cradled in his imperial robe. All that is, or was, or can ever be, is but "the visible garment of God." I seek to know nothing of his plans and purposes. I ask no written covenant with God, for he is my Father. I will trust him without requiring priests or prophets to indorse his note. As I write, my little son awake, alarmed by some unusual noise, and come groping through the darkness to my door. He sees the light shining through the transom, returns to his trundle-bed and lies down to peaceful dreams. He knows that beyond that gleam his father keeps watch and ward, and he asks no more. Through a thousand celestial transoms streams the light of God. Why should I fear the sleep of Death, the unknown terrors of that starless night, the waves of the river Styx? Why should I seek assurance from the lips of men that the wisdom, love and power of my heavenly Father will not fail?"

Like the lowly Judean carpenter who gave his life in a protest against the wrongs which wealth and power had done to his fellow man, he was hated by the Pharisees and hypocrites, but he never cast a stone at the poor and unfortunate, but was ever ready to support the weak battling in the cause of right against the cohorts of the wrong.

He was not only a poet, but was a prophet and a priest; not the prophet and priest of orthodoxy, that has handed down to us through the ages, written in the blood of slaughtered millions, that dark story of forked-tailed demons and flaming hells, that has given us a God that loves us better than an earthly father can, yet permits us in the sight of his great white throne to writhe and suffer through the endless ages of eternity in the flames of hell. But he was a priest and prophet of a greater and grander faith, that in the evolution of the unborn centuries yet to come, will strip from the Godhead all of the horrid concepts, born of the puny hate of man for his fellow man.

Mr. Brann was a man of the highest moral courage, no one doubted this, but some doubted whether he had that kind of physical courage that is necessary to contend with mobs and assassins, but when the hour came —when, without the slightest warning or anticipation or danger, the death wound tore through his back, with a coolness that few even of the bravest of men would have possessed under the circumstances, with a courage that could have led the Irish exiles, in that desperate and deathless charge on the bloody heights of Fontenoy, he turned and fired every bullet of his pistol into the body of his assassin.

I will briefly sketch here some of the main facts that led to his death, not only justice to the dead, but to his

living friends who only knew him as a writer and have been compelled to read in the newspapers the loathsome and lying slanders sent out against him from this city.

The origin is to be found in the visit to this city of ex-Priest Slattery, who, for gross immorality, had been kicked out of the fold of the Catholic church. He was accompanied by a woman fully as bad as he, and these two saints set up to lecture, and the substance of their lecture was briefly this, that convents and female schools under the charge of the sisters, were but bawdy houses to satisfy the lust of the Catholic priesthood. Mr. Brann, who heard, in the opera house in this city, these vile slanders flung amid thunders of applause, mostly from a gang of blackguards from and around Baylor University, outraged by the wrong done the pure and stainless women whose vows bar them from the slightest hope of reward on earth, yet devote their lives in and out of the convent walls to soothing the sorrows and relieving the sufferings of humanity, attempted to reply in their defense, and for this he was hooted and nearly mobbed by this precious lot of curs and had to be escorted from the opera house by the police. After the Antonio Tiexeria scandal came out, and he saw the poor girl reduced to ruin, standing barely on the verge of womanhood, desolate and friendless in a foreign land, with his whole sympathetic nature aroused in her behalf, he certainly struck some hard blows at Baylor. In his repeated thrusts he made one at the professors which is believed by many to have cut far deeper than anything ever said about the Brazilian girl, and that was his proposition to open a night school for their benefit. In last October ICONOCLAST, in a paragraph, he expressed the hope that Baylor would not continue to manufacture ministers and Magdalens. For

this he was twice mobbed, and it is claimed eventually murdered.

Since Mr. Brann's assassination I have seen it charged in some papers, notably one bearing the word Christian at its head, that he was killed because he had slandered his slayer's daughter, and then follows a lot of hypocritical rot about regretting bloodshed, but that there was an unwritten law that required the death of a man who would slander the female relatives of another. A greater falsehood was never published in even a pious Christian weekly. He never mentioned the name of any woman connected with Baylor except the Brazilian girl, and her case was in the courts, and while his friends deeply regretted his unfortunate expression it neither justified his mobbing or his murder. And in the judgment of all fair-minded men, under the circumstances could have been more readily construed to mean Antonio Tiexera than any other woman on earth, for within Baylor's sacred precincts she had been reduced to that condition to which, when a woman arrives, men call her a Magdalene. If this was the motive that prompted his slayer, I ask why he did not appeal to the unwritten law sooner; he who appeals to it must do so at the first information has been conveyed to him that the wrong has been done and he cannot wait for months and then use it as a defense, and I do not hesitate to say that hundreds besides myself in this city do not believe that this prompted his assassin, except to be used as an excuse.

Mr. Brann loved Waco as he never loved any other place; for he knew that within its borders could be found as many brave, liberal-hearted men, pure and noble women as could be found in any other spot on earth with the same population. He loved it, for he said that here was the first place he ever found a real home, and here was the

place he had for the first time been recompensed for his toil by receiving over a bare subsistence. Now, did Waco love Mr. Brann, or did it hold him the foul slanderer of her purest and best, as some claimed him to be? Let us see. Every effort was made to throw cold water on any turnout to his funeral; it was told around the city that no women would attend and that no flowers would be sent, but what was the result? From his home to the cemetery the sidewalks were crowded, save at Baylor University, the place that is responsible for his death, and hundreds of men and women who had no carriages walked from his home over two miles to the cemetery, and when the long funeral cortège passed within the gates, around his grave was a sea of human faces unequaled in numbers ever before gathered around any other grave in Waco. Yet Waco had lately laid to rest within that cemetery a man whom she dearly loved and on whom Texas had been proud to confer her high places, a man who in bygone years had so gallantly led her sons on so many bloody fields. As to the flowers, no greater profusion was ever seen on any other grave in Waco, or, perhaps, in Texas, a tribute that the pure and stainless women of Waco paid to the martyred dead. At his funeral was noticed a greater number, both from the city and county, of the sun-kissed sons of toil than had ever been gathered here around any other grave. Why were they there in such numbers? Why did they bow their manly heads o'er the coffin of the dead? I will answer for them. It was because they knew that the dead man loved the land that they, their sires and their grandsires loved; that he was seeking to uproot the evils, both socially and politically, that are so rapidly overrunning it; that al lthe gold of earth, or the plaudits of those who feel themselves the grand and great could not win him from his task of defending a people's rights against those who were seeking to strike them down, and if he had made an error in a paragraph subject to a double construction, that above all else on earth in his heart he sought

He was followed to his grave by hundreds of men who but a few years ago had given of their money liberally to build up the new Baylor, many of whose wives, daughters and sisters had been educated there. Is it reasonable to suppose that these men who clung to him in life with hooks of steel, and followed him to his grave with tears, are such cravens that, alike in life and death, they would stand by the man who had foully slandered their wives, daughters and sisters' fame? Out upon such a supposition, it can only find lodgment in a breast that holds that the Yahoo of Swift is a true picture of the human race, and that the lowest of the type is living here. If Mr. Brann was the slanderer of women, why did so many of them, from the hundreds that crowded the lawn around his home, lead their children up to his coffin, and those that were not able to look into it they would raise up in their arms that they might look into the dead face of the Prince of the Imperial Realm of Language.

Mr. Brann was no slanderer of women, no man on earth had a greater veneration for the good and pure or more sympathy for the fallen, and he would have died before he would have wronged intentionally either class. In this case he had struck in behalf of a poor and unfortunate girl who had been grievously wronged at Baylor, and it used to be held, and is yet held in some communities, that the man who strikes in the defense of a defenseless

woman exhibits the highest trait of chivalry, even if he had made a mistake in striking, but here in Waco, with its Christian schools and churches, and its so-called Christian civilization it was rewarded first by mobs and then by murder.

He was a man who was incapable of malice, he bore none for injuries that most men would have rewarded the cowardly perpetrators by shooting them down like they have their prototype, the sneaking wolf; this arose from the innate tenderness of the man who shrunk from the taking of life, even of an animal, unless it was necessary.

I have used no words of sympathy for his wife, for time and not words can soothe sorrow such as hers, but for the benefit of those at a distance who were her husband's friends I will say that she has the sympathy of all the men and women of this city, irrespective of church or creed, who are not the indorsers and abettors of mobs and assassins, and I am glad to say that this collection of hyena-hearted human vultures, though far too many, are in the minority.

Now, to the dead friend of humanity, the eternal foe to wrong and hypocrisy, I bid adieu forever here, and for aught I know, for hereafter. The greedy grave, whose hungry mouth is never filled, has claimed him, and in the arms of old earth, the last mother of us all, we have laid him to sleep, as peacefully as in infancy he slept upon his mother's breast, indifferent alike in death as in life to the human ghouls who pursued him. Never again will his splendid intellect drive a pen. "In thoughts that breathe and words that burn" against the serried ranks of injustice and of wrong. Others will follow in his footsteps, and battle as faithfully as he for the cause of right, but, alas, none are clad like him in the Milan mail of intellectuality, against which the cloth-yard shafts of

foes could rattle but could never pierce. Now, that for him the restless dream of life has closed, I know that every admirer of his genius, no matter of what faith or of no faith at all, will join me in the wish that for him death did not bring oblivion's dreamless sleep, where Lethean waves forever wash the pallid brow of death, but Elysian fields in which he met in joy the loved ones that had gone before and will await in peace the loved ones that are left behind.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! Thou that killeth the prophets and stoneth them that are sent unto thee."

REST—REST IN PEACE.
BY W. H. WARD.

THERE comes, I think, in the life of every man a time when feeble words come faintly up for utterance—when the human soul refuses to ease tell its agony in empty phrases—when neither tongue can tell nor pen portray the gloom which o'ershadows the spirit engulfed in woe. This suffering may be selfish, or be merged in a general sorrow. As I write the simple sentence, Brann is dead, a pall settles over my spirit, and, groping blindly in the dark, I feel there remains on earth scarce a single ray of light. I knew this man, and to know him was to love him—knew his faults and his virtues; loved him in spite of one and for the other. His faults were human; his virtues were Godlike. For years we trod together Life's unequal pathway—at times I felt that I stayed his falling steps, and my my own feet have strayed oft and again has his firm hand led me back into the light. He was to me a delightful study, for which I found never failing recompense. I have watched his majestic mind

expand as the florist watches the budding beauty of a flower, ever growing in its unfolding loveliness. I have lived with him in his home, surrounded by those whom he loved—seen him joy with their gladness, while his heart contracted with every pain that approached his loved ones—have stood with him on the banks of some mighty river, and watched the evening sun throw its chain of fire across the bosom of the waters, while his poetic spirit reveled in the beauties of the sunset sky. Under the shadow of Lookout, I have gazed with him upon those beetling crags, where the fate of a nation was in part decided, while he thanked God fervently that the heart of the nation yet beat steady and strong—have strolled with him in the forests when vernal nature spread its glorious carpet for the foot of man—have felt his great heart expand to receive every subtle impression of beauty and tenderness from nature's matchless canvas—have seen this man against whom the anathema of infidelity and atheism have gone forth, humbly bow to worship God in his handiwork. For him, as for us all, there were times when the earth was darkened with doubt; but there were moments, I know, when his aspiring soul mounted the clouds and caught some reflex of the great white light that breaks on the throne of God. It has been charged that he had neither faith nor religion. In justice to the memory of the dead, I deny the charge. He had a faith as noble as it was unfaltering—that truth was eternal and the love of justice could never utterly fade from the hearts of men. His religion was simple still, though confined by neither church nor creed—'twas the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man. As he loved truth and justice even so did he despise falsehood—declaring that he hated all "who loveth or maketh a lie." He loved his fellows as few men have done. The great desire of his heart, and no small part of his lifework, was devoted to the alleviation of human suffering. In his nature he was frank and open as the day—generous to a fault. I do not believe that he gave his affection fondly or foolishly. If those whom he loved failed to reach his high standard, it was not his fault. His was a great heart and he gave its tenderness with a princely hand, feeling himself rich in giving—glorying in his own munificence. No man could have been the recipient of this rich bounty without feeling himself ennobled by the gift. He had the faculty of attracting to him all whom he considered worthy of his affection. He possessed in a rare degree that which, for want of a better name, we term personal magnetism. Intellectually, he was a meteor that shot athwart the literary firmament, leaving a train of fire behind to mark his course. Within a period of four years, in an inland Texas town, he built up a magazine which was read by a large percentage of the English-speaking people. He had at the time of his death a larger clientèle of readers than any living writer. For years he did all of the work of the ICONOCLAST himself, but of late he had gathered about him a corps of contributors in whose genius he himself reveled—a "bunch of pansy blossoms," he fondly termed them, whose beauty and fragrance would, he declared, delight the literary world. The hand that held these blossoms is now folded across a pulseless breast; but the silken skein of his affection will yet serve to bind the flowers together. The bright particular star of the Iconoclastic galaxy is dimmed, but the blended light of the others may still serve to illumine the dark places of life, and, in so doing, help to achieve that betterment of man for which their chief toiled so earnestly, battled so bravely and hoped so ardently. The poor and oppressed have lost a friend and protector—true womanhood has lost one of its ablest defenders—liberty its bravest champion—his country a hero, ever ready to fight for a redress of her wrongs. He was a humanitarian in the broadest and best sense of the word. In his heart there lived ever a hope that the time might yet come, in this fair land of ours, when there would be "neither a millionaire nor a mendicant—a master nor a slave." In life he was dear to me, his memory is dearer still, nay, 'tis sacred. I would not play Boswell to any Johnson, but this was my friend, tender, loving and loyal to me, and now that he is dead I come to lay this tribute in the dust at his feet. He has been judged oftenest and most unjustly, as men usually are, by those who knew him least. Beneath the iron corselet which confronted the eyes of the world there beat in this man's breast a heart tender as a child's, and as loving as a woman's, that throbbed in agony for every ill to which humanity is heir. I remember in the early morning once he came into my room and silently beckoned me to his study. There in the vines at the window, scarce three feet from his desk, sat one of our Southern Orioles—a feathered songster, trilling forth the gladness of his heart in song. Brann watched the bird and drank in the music of his song. I saw his face light up with exquisite tenderness, and I knew that he accepted this matin song of the bird as a message from his Maker. I trust I may be pardoned for relating this simple incident, but it served to show me the man as few things could have done. I know 'tis true that: "As snowflakes fall to the earth unperceived and are gathered together in a pile, so do the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. No single flake creates a sensible change on the pile, and no single act constitutes, however much it may exhibit, a man's character." But it is from simple things that the sum of life is made up —from those acts which are most spontaneous and usually least observed that human nature may best be determined and most justly estimated. This man made no preachment of his virtues, believing that "the years are seldom unjust." He was the Navarre of modern journalism, and his white plume ever showed in the thickest of the fight. It was his strong hand that taught the "doubtful battle where to rage"; 'twas his to enchain friendship and inspire followers. Had he battled for a creed as he fought for a faith, his bones would have been canonized. Had he struggled for a party as he stood for the State, no political preferment would have been held beyond his reach. Had he lived in another age, among other people, his body would have been inurned in the Valhalla of the Brave. As it is, all that is mortal of him occupies only so much of Texas soil as may serve as "paste and cover of his bones." Little does he reck of this, and his friends should not repine, for the same prairie breezes that waft incense of flowers over the graves of Travis, Bowie and Crockett, sing a sad requiem over the final resting place of Brann. The aspiring soul has found its fixed abode among the stars; his Titanic intellect which, here on earthy ever struggled for the light, now bathes in the effulgence of the Sun. His heart, ever unquiet because of the woes of his kind, now knows that peace which "passeth the understanding of man." The hand of the All-Father has forever soothed the heart-hunger and unrest of life from his troubled breast. That hand which swept, at will, every cord of the harp of life, has fallen nerveless, but its music will yet linger in the hearts of men until love of truth and beauty shall utterly fade from the earth. A long good-night to thee, Brave Heart, thy better part has found the better place; to that which is mortal and remains with us, we say, Rest—Rest in Peace.

A MEMORIAL TO W. C. BRANN.

IT as been suggested that the friends and admirers of Mr. Brann join in a contribution to mark the spot where he sleeps. It is proposed, if this meets the approval of friends, that it be a granite vase, some four or five feet high, surmounted either by a life size statue in bronze or marble of the dead, holding in his hand a copy of the ICONOCLAST, as if offering it to the passer-by, and the word ICONOLAST upon it in letters sufficiently large to be read at a distance of twenty feet. It is said by those who claim to know that such a memorial can be erected at a cost of some $3,000 or $4,000.

Many of his friends would not approve, and neither would he if he could express himself, of anything that would require any large expenditure of money while so many thousands of worthy men and women are struggling in vain to secure the bare necessities of life, these holding that costly monuments can do the dead no good, and are in bad taste in the living. There can be no doubt that thousands in the years to come will seek his grave to lay their offerings upon the shrine of genius, and while his will be marked I wish to say in this connection to those asking in what condition Mrs. Brann is left financially that while she will have sufficient to keep the wolf from hers and her children's door if properly managed, that she will not have over a tithe of what it has been published that she would.

Submitting these few words for the consideration of his friends, I can say if a response sufficiently favorable come, then the proper steps will be taken to carry it out; if not, nothing more will be said, at least not from me; and as his friend I would not approve of keeping standing

in the ICONOCLAST a list of subscribers to the fund; if the suggestion is carried out it will be time enough to publish it when the work is finished and the statue unveiled. G. B. GERALD.
. . .

The man who takes up Brann's work will only succeed, not replace him. He was a star of the first magnitude, and such bodies are not created in an hour—not always in an age. He who attempts an imitation, however clever his work, would stand before the world, self-confessed, a failure from the first. Booth, in his favorite character inspired us—Joe Jefferson could only prompt us to laughter. Yet, is not Jefferson without genius in his way? There is no reason, however, why he who follows may not be as loyal to the faith, as courageous in the fight, as Brann was known and acknowledged to be. The Chief is dead, but did not die until he had blazoned the way for those who dare follow where he so bravely led.
. . .

In life Brann often said he wanted no mourning worn for him, save that which enshrouded the hearts of his family and friends—that the mere trappings of woe were but its "limbs and outward flourishes," which, too often, failed to reach the heart.

SPEAKING OF BRANN.

Died Fighting April 2, 1898.

—WILLIAM MARION REEDY, in St. Louis Mirror.

DEATH OF W. C. BRANN.

WHAT a sable pall was flung over the spirits of countless thousands who heard last week that Editor W. C. Brann, of the ICONOCLAST, was no more. "The heavens seem hung in black and the clouds are wrung of their stars," wrote a St. Paul friend who idolized the apostolic seer.

The world is dark with excess of grief for the immortal soul of an illimitable genius has been sent to its maker and scattered with the star dust of the eidouranion William C. Brann was an apostle. Like Christ, like Lincoln and others whom we deify, he was misunderstood and reviled, and a cowardly bullet pierced him in the back, a martyrdom of which he had a premonition.

The head and front of his offending was strict adherence

to the truth, though the heavens fall. He knew no fear, but was never the aggressor.

The lamented Brann was an educator, and an emancipator of human liberty and human thought. The hypocrite stood in awe of his judgment. When he indicted him to be arraigned before the great bar of public opinion he dipped his pen in acid that seared the eyeballs, and wrote their sentence diluted with worm-wood and gall. It is not small wonder that the Judas Iscariots and the lemurs trembled at his power.

Brann's tragic exit from this vale of tears is inspiration now for jackals to attack his name. Luke the dull, dull ass they are not afraid to kick the dead lion, while their ears wave to the seventh heaven of delight. In earth life they feared his name, but like ghouls they now go down into the grave to besmirch his memory. And this, too, from those who profess to follow the teachings of the meek and lowly Nazarene.

Strange as it may seem to the hypocrite, Brann was a religious man. His creed was the religion of humanity. His biographers, if they do him justice, will write his name with the blood of the lamb high up on the flying scroll.

Brann's friends, and they are legion, should not repine if he is not canonized as his bones are hearsed in death, for "whenever was a god found agreeable to everybody? The regular way is to lynch, as the Baylorites did, to hang, to kill, to crucify and excoriate and trample them under their stupid hoofs, cloven or webbed, as the case may be, for a century or two; and then take to braying over them when you discover their divine origin, still in a very long-eared manner!" So speaks the sarcastic man, in his wild way, very mournful truths.

Brann was as the "life-tree, Igdrasil, wide-waving and

many-toned, with fimbriated tendrils down deep in the Death-Kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men and with boughs reaching always beyond the stars and ever changeless as the immutable empyrean of eternal hope."

They could better spare the whole State of Texas than William C. Brann. While the galled jades winced beneath the scorpion whips of his satire, and would have preferred fireballs, they felt the potency of his dynamics and scurried to the soldier works of the masters for a glint of mental pabulum they had never known before.

The editor of The Sunday Eye is in receipt of many letters from admirers of the late lamented genius. They are rich in anathema and maranatha of Brann's heartless and cruel detractors. With one accord they have expressed the wish that I excoriate the revilers who desecrated by bludgeon words the sacrosanct acre of God in which reposes the mortal tenement of the sacred scribe.

I do not believe as Mr. Charles Campbell, of Anchor, does, that they should be gibbeted high as Haman. Nor do I think as Mr. C. E. Stewart, of Minier, does, that they should be lashed naked through the world and lambasted till death ends the heart throbs. I believe that they should be permitted to live until they have read the great genius and learned to understand and exalt him. It would make them better for it, religion would not suffer by it, though Baylor sank a thousand leagues beneath the seven-hued regions of Tartarus.

The ICONOCLAST minced no words. When it dealt body blows they landed in the brisket and affected the solar plexus in a very apprehensive way.

Lincoln was gentle and generous, Ingrsoll was brilliant and broad, but Brann was all this and greater. His untimely death was a distinctive loss to the march of civilization and a gain to the shams of hypocrisy which takes now a new grip on the English language to batter down

the shackles Brann had welded about them with public opinion.

Brann was a reformer who meant reform. He wore his heart upon his sleeve, but would be cruel to be just. He endured mental anguish great as was suffered in the garden of Gethsemane. As the sweetest perfume exhales from a crushed, blooming rose so the sweeter and nobler sentiments welled up from the perennial spring of his fountains of love when most bruised and racked with pain.

I have no fear of his acceptance on the right hand up there where men are judged by their deeds and not by semblance of better things that a canting world may simulate. He is in Valhalla with the other battling heroes where the alabaster boxes of eternal love are showered upon the halo of their brighter radiance. Brann wrote to catch the wide world's attention that he might teach them gentler things than feculent shocks. He was essentially an ascetic devoted to uplifting in his own sure way.

All the classes came trippingly to his and all the dogmas, all the purlieus of sociology and political economy were as an open book to him. When he soared to the sun he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and the expurgation of money power which he believed was the ne plus ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolic perfidy. He preached as he felt, tender and terrible, loving and vehement, a strange commingling of Titanic vulgate and cooing peace. Brann was eccentric but all genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed Quixotic. He was a man whose loftiest ideality was purity in womanhood. He adored children and was in many respects child-like. He was as

Friend Brann, through blinding mist of sympathetic tears, I say adieu.—Geo. L. Hutchin, in the Bloomington Eye.

A PEN PICTURE OF BRANN

IT is hard for me to realize that Brann is dead. It seems only yesterday night that he sat opposite me at table, and talked of his plans and projects and spoke so hopefully, so boyishly of the future that he was never to realize.

For a long time I had a curiosity to see Brann, of the ICONOCLAST. His pyrotechnic vocabulary, his strange admixture of erudition and slang, his almost womanly sympathy and the more than Apache ferocity with which he pursued his enemies, the tender and poetic metaphor that gemmed his iron prose, and the singular blending of optimism and pessimism that characterized most of his work suggested an anomaly that appealed to the imagination, and I was anxious to see what Brann looked like.

I had an opportunity when he came here to lecture. I knew his business manager, Mr. Ward, who figured in the dreadful duel in which he lost his life, and who was, at that time, arranging his lecture dates. Ward is a big Texan, over six feet high, and I suppose he weighs all of two hundred pounds. He is a lawyer who drifted into journalism years ago, and under a somewhat rough-and-ready exterior there is not much trouble in finding the gentleman and the scholar. Well, Ward introduced me to Brann, and after a while the three of us foregathered in a private room of a down-town café, and stayed there for several hours that I remember with unmixed delight.

Looking back at the episode, I have difficulty in framing

my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the principal thing that struck me was his lack of pose and affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful naïveté.

"I want to pull out of the ICONOCLAST as much as I can," he said. "And since we have made enough money to do so, I have bought a great many outside contributions. My idea," he continued, "is this: As long as I wrote most everything in the publication myself it was strictly a one-man paper; and if anything should have happened to me it would have been worth nothing to my wife and family. What I am trying to do now is to organize a corps of contributors who can keep it up if I should be taken away."

Had he any suspicion of the prophecy that lurked in these words? Perhaps he had; for when I suggested to him the advisability of leaving Waco, with its petty local dissensions and the personal dangers incident to them, he shook his head.

"I got together $11,000 not long ago," he said, "and put it into a house. It is the first money worth talking about that I ever had, and I feel that the investment ties me, more or less, to Waco. But aside from that," he went on to say, "I am a little afraid that the ICONOCLAST would lose its characteristic flavor if I moved it to one of the big Eastern cities. You will remember that that experiment was tried with the Arkansas Traveller, which was moved from Little Rock to Chicago, and promptly fell flat. The same thing happened to the Texas Siftings, when it was taken from Austin to New York. I am inclined to believe that a publication acquires a savor of the soil in which it springs, and it is a mighty risky business to try to transplant it."

He told me of Col. Gerald, who had killed the Harris brothers only a few weeks before. "Gerald is a wonderful old man," he said. "He is over sixty, but he is as straight as a pine. He has a light mustache and chin beard, and eyes the color of the blue you see in old china. He don't know what fear is. He thinks it is some kind of a disease like smallpox or appendicitis, and only know that he has never had it." Between talk we ate oysters and drank a little beer. Brann impressed me as being a very temperate man.

The conversation drifted frequently to his plans for the future. "I've been roasted a good deal for the go-as-you-please style of the ICONOCLAST," he said, "and, between ourselves, wish I could have refined its style a trifle. But if I had done so we would never have gone over the 100,000 mark as we did last week. However, I'm tired of it," he said slowly, "most infernally tired. I am anxious next year to devote myself to a higher class of work. I have a novel about half done, and also a play, and I am very hopeful that they may both succeed."

It was long after midnight when we parted. He said that he expected to be back "one of these days."

Poor Brann! It sickens one's soul to think of the value of such a life as his as against that of his slayer. Good God! His little finger was worth all the Texas pot-house politicians and Baylor University pharisees that could be lined up between her and Orion.—O. H. S., in the Looking Glass.

SEMPER VIVAT IN MEMORIAM.

Now that partisan hate has succeeded in hounding to his death America's most eloquent champion of humanity; has

driven to the verge of insanity an adoring wife, and thrown o'er the roseate lives of two tender, clinging children the black pall of a sorrow that will forever embitter their hearts, perchance it will pause; will remember the teachings of that other "friend of humanity" who, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, was crucified for daring to fight what he believed to be wrong; whose religion may be summed up in one word—"forgiveness."

Brann's enemies were professed followers of this Christ. With tearful eyes and uplifted, supplicating faces they besought the God of Justice to—in the beautiful language of the prayer left us by his Son—"lead us not into temptation" and "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us"; and the next day passed resolutions congratulating a mob of brutal ruffians for frightening a sick woman nearly to death, kidnaping her defenseless husband and forcing him—under threats of instant death—to retract what they knew to be the truth. A few weeks later, they were "resoluting" and "sympathizing" and formulating plans for the erection of a monument to the memory of two would-be assassins who were killed while attempting to carry out their cowardly work. Oh, Christianity!—that thy cloak—pure as polar snow—must cover such infamy!

Brann's death blots from the firmament of American journalism its brightest star. He was an intellectual titan. In him was embodied the philosophy of Carlyle— the brilliancy of Voltaire,—the withering sarcasm of Desmoulins—the poetry of Ingersoll. His genius, universal as that of Shakespeare, was ever aligned on the side of the weak and oppressed; ever, with god-like fearlessness, he stood for Right against Might—for purity against corruption. In church, in state, in society— he tore the painted mask from the face of hypocrisy and

exposed it, in all its festering hideousness, to the world's ridicule.

Brann has been damned as an atheist—by people who have never read, and are incapable of reading and understanding, a single paragraph from his pen. The author of "Tiens ta Foi," "Charity," "Man's Immorality"—was not an atheist. He refused to bend the knee to superstition— to lend a patient ear to earth's self-constituted vice-gerents of Omniscience. But God spoke to him through nature. The flowers he so passionately loved were reminders of His loving tenderness; in the divine music of Wagner, Liszt and Chopin, he recognized the voice of God. His faith was broad as the universe—deep as infinity. He loved purity; he hated hypocrisy; and for this he died —a martyr.

Inspiration comes from God. The children of genius needs must be the favorites of Omniscience. Yet theologians vilify Brann from the pulpit—teachers denounce him to their pupils. For nearly ten years he has been the target of vindictive spite—such spite as only a narrow, bigoted mind can be capable of. This is the greatest compliment mediocrity can pay to genius.

Brann is dead! Still forever is the pen whose wondrous alchemy transposed the English language—with all its inherent harshness—into music sweet as song of Israfil. Stilled is the heart that stood alone, defiant, a bulwark 'gainst the wave of corruption that is engulfing our land.

Brann is dead! But when Baylor University has sunk beneath the wave of oblivion; when the very bones of the splenetic-hearted hypocrites—who goaded to his death the grandest man America has ever produced—have crumbled into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust— Brann's name will live—a beacon light for those who love truth for truth's sake.

Brann is dead! The blow that wrung our hearts with unavailing anguish but ushered him into the company of Shakespeare, Carlyle, Hugo and Wagner. And there, whether it be in the light that beats on God's great throne, or in the serbonian darkness of a hell more horrible than that pictured by Dante—is the true Heaven.—Abbott Graphic.

BRANN'S BRAVE BATTLE.

WITH humble soul and heavy heart we take up our pen to chronicle the death, yea the murder of one of the brightest and purest noblemen that God ever creaed—W. C. Brann. A few years ago he, W. H. Ward and the writer each occupied desks, side by side, in the editorial rooms of The Waco Morning News. There budded a friendship between that trio that we full believe shall blossom into ripe fraternal love on a shore as yet unknown to Mr. Ward and the writer. Mr. Brann was editor of the ICONOCLAST, and as its name indicates it is a smasher of idols from Tadmor in the Wilderness to the mountains of Hepsedam. Scorning the sensual, always against the vulgar, in much the same manner as Carlyle, Brann stuck the gaffles of truth deep into the sides of wrong in high places, and exposed rottenness wherever found. With rugged English, twisted into sentences more cutting than whips of scorpions' tails, he stood up and fought for right as opposed to might. He tore off the plaster of moral cancerous ulcers, now so prolific on the body politic of the world, and held high the treachery, the bigotry, the superstition, the damnably dirty doings of a generation that accepts hidebound dogmas for the ultima thule of reasoning and truth; precept for right and in reality worships at the

shrine of exploded fables and crowns, by its own acts, the parrot as its preceptor—lives and dies, having no desire to do anything that somebody has not done before! Is it any wonder that such a man as W. C. Brann should fall a victim to such a populace? He was hounded to his death—mobbed, spat upon, shot and murdered, by several thousand pin-headed obstreperous patrons and followers of a little pee-wee college, that turns young ladies out enceinte almost yearly and hires its professors for less salaries than a railroad brakeman gets.

Brann's good work will live, his fame will survive and an intellectual race yet will rise up and bless his name when the lying epitaphs of the assassin sent to the d—— by him shall have crumbled to earth ten thousand years. We cannot close this faint tribute of respect to our dead friend without acknowledging the worth of such true men as Mr. W. H. Ward and Judge G. B. Gerald, both of whom are able, brave, high-toned gentlemen, and both of whom came near dying, and both were willing to die, or see that Mr. Brann got fair play while he lived.—S. M. Scruggs, in the Tribune.

BRANN IS NO MORE.

ON the first of April—All Fools' Day—W. C. Brann, of the ICONOCLAST, and T. M. Davis riddled each other with bullets in Waco, Texas. Both of them died the following day. The trouble between them grew out of the attack made by Brann in his paper on the Baylor University, a Baptist institution attended by the daughter of Davis. At the time that Brann accused the students of the college of immorality, he was assaulted by them, and barely escaped lynching at their hands. He was forced to make

a retraction and was ordered to leave town. Being a courageous man Brann refused to emigrate.

The Irish Standard chronicles the untimely and awful death of Mr. Brann with poigmant regret, and tenders its condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways he won the admiration of the American people. He was a man of great mental endowments, and in the use of invective, often degenerating into billingsgate, he stood without a rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and he despised religious intolerance. As an American he loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo-American alliance. He held hypocrites in supreme contempt and lashed the pharisees unmercifully. When Catholic priests and sisters were misrepresented by sectarian bigots, he used his tongue and pen in their defense. So ably did he vindicate the Catholic church from their aspersions that many supposed him to be a Jesuit in disguise. In the last issue of the ICONOCLAST he told a correspondent what he thought of Mrs. Shepard and ex-priest Chiniquy. Had Brann lived in a more civilized community than among the bigoted Baptists of Texas, he would have used more elegant language in his magazine than it contained for the past few months.

We entirely disagree with the Pioneer Press in its characterization of the deceased journalist when it says: "From attacking the private lives of the prominent and successful men of every quarter of the union and levy-levying blackmail as the price of silence from those whose slips or frailties his keen hyena-like appetite for filth had enabled him to scent, it was an easy step to the most scurrilous assaults on men and women whose only offending lay in their uprightness and virtue."

Brann never attacked men and women for their "uprightness and virtue," and our St. Paul contemporary is

guilty of calumny when it says so. Every evildoer and hypocrite feared him, while upright men and virtuous women had a champion in him. His bitterest enemies never accused him of being a blackmailer, and the editor of the Pioneer Press took care he was dead before he made the unwarrantable charge.—The Irish Standard.

BRAVE AND BRAINY BRANN.

THE killing of W. C. Brann in a duel at Waco, Texas, a few days ago, is but a repetition of the punishment that generally falls to newspaper men who persistently print the truth. Brann was an intellectual giant. The rarest accomplishments possible for a human mind to acquire were not too intricate for him to master. His versatility was as boundless as his originality was unique. Absolutely fearless and utterly indifferent regarding his personal safety, he dared to expose the charlatan and the trickster in whatever walk of life he chanced to meet him. Endowed with a mind that was only circumscribed by the Infinite itself and fortified with a thorough classical education, he held the hypocrite up to contempt and public scorn and deservedly lashed him with the lash of sarcasm. True, some of our erudite(?) members of the press have presumed to pass judgment upon him; men as incapable of rendering a just criticism of his talents as they have found it impossible to rise to his standard of excellence. One who is especially in love with himself has said that had Brann been less soulless he might have been an ornament to his trade. Trade! When men attain Brann's intellectual standing, and they are as rare as the intellectual sloven is numerous, the trade evolves into a profession. It is indeed disheartening to see one devote his

life and his talents to truth and justice, only to be belittled after death by those whose poverty-stricken understandings render them incapable of half-appreciating the man's genius, to say nothing of his nobility of purpose in endeavoring to elevate mankind. He has been accused of blasphemy by another who has probably been as startled by Brann's truthful declarations as he himself would have been had he at some time dared to commit such a rash act. Despite these intellectual "pee-wees" Brann's writings will live long after the surf of eternity has carried the penny-a-liners out upon the sea of oblivion. In the tragic death of W. C. Brann the world has lost the most versatile pen the century has produced and it is with sincere grief that we chronicle his sudden taking away.—The Gilroy (Cal.) Telegram.

BRANN, OF THE ICONOCLAST.

W. C. BRANN, the fearless editor of the ICONOCLAST, is no more. The ICONOCLAST is published at Waco, Texas, and was started but a few years ago by its gifted author with no more capital than his genius and the courage of his convictions. The ICONOCLAST assailed every form of avarice, hypocrisy and infamy; in a few months the publication gained a world-wide reputation and amassed for its editor a handsome fortune because it was bought and read by thousands of people who love truth, when boldly proclaimed, for truth's sake. Some time ago the ICONOCLAST laid bare the iniquities of some white-sepulchral hypocrites having charge of a young ladies' seminary under the auspices of a religious denomination. The pious and lecherous scoundrels, and their ilk, who felt aggrieved by the publication of the sensational facts, instead of resorting

to the law and proving that they had been libeled, and vindicating themselves by the imprisonment of Brann, resorted to mob violence, and what they lacked in courage they supplied with numbers, and beat their helpless victim into insensibility. In the very next issue of the ICONOCLAST, Brann, its outraged but incomparably fearless editor, in speaking of his cowardly assailants, used the following defiant and sadly prophetic words: "Truth to tell there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's worth a charge of buckshot who deserve so much honor as being sent to hell by a white man's hand! If Socrates was poisoned, and Christ was crucified, for telling unpalatable truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of their time, it would ill become me to complain of martyrdom for a like offense." Brann was shot in the back by a drunken "local" politician, who doubtless had as much conception of morality and honor as did those whom Brann had assailed openly and above-board in the ICONOCLAST. Brann, though mortally wounded, turned and shot his assassin, wounding him fatally—Brann and his assassin have both died—one, mourned as a martyr in the cause of truth; the other mourned by the "splenetic-hearted hypocrites" of Waco and elsewhere.—Charleston Enterprise.

A MARTYR TO FREE SPEECH.

POOR Brann has fallen a martyr to Baptist bigotry. The foul minded crowd who imported Slattery to Waco ran a university whose iniquities Brann exposed. The deacons of the church and the preachers combined against him and his life was attacked again and again because he was not afraid of telling the truth. The last attempt was

successful and his blood is on the head of the bigots of Waco.

We have not read in any of our "American" dailies nor have we seen in any of our Evangelical weeklies a condemnation of this outrage on free speech. If the conditions had been reversed, if a Catholic had shot down the defamer of Catholic women, the country would have rung with denunciations of Catholic bigotry. But the Baptist beetle-browed can for months plan the death of a man who has exposed their hypocrisy and the assassination is taken as one of the few "occurrences" which diversify life in those monotonous Texas towns.

Brann was not a Catholic. In the eyes of the majority Baptists of Waco he was an infidel. He had no sympathy with any creed as a creed; but as far as we can judge he loved truth and justice and hated wrong and hypocrisy. It was this natural feeling for right and fair play which led him into the battle with the A.P.A. the battle in which he perished. We believe that he acted according to his lights, and to those who live by the law as it is shown to them, God will not deny grace. Many a man and woman who never saw Brann, and do not sympathize with the extreme views he held on certain religious matters, and might perhaps take exception to his style of conveying his opinions, will yet because of his manly defense of ladies slandered without cause by the vilest of the vile, breathe a silent prayer that God may have mercy on his soul. As long as ye did it unto these you did it unto Me. Even a cup of cold water shall not lose its reward.—The Monitor, San Francisco, Cal.

EDITORIAL ETCHINGS.
TO THE PUBLIC.

THE editorial supervision of the May ICONOCLAST has been to me a labor of love. The stress of circumstances under which the work has been done, is too well known for either explanation or apology for its shortcomings. This issue of the paper is intended as a memorial of the man who founded it; whose genius has so long adorned its pages, and whose personality has endeared it to so many thousands of readers throughout the land.

W. H. WARD.
. . .

In the Vicksburg Dispatch of Sunday, February 13, appeared an article from the pen of Ida Clyde Gallagher, of Vicksburg, a very bright and gifted writer, in which she pays a feeling tribute to the character of W. C. Brann. The article in question has been widely read and copied. It was written while Mr. Brann was on his Southern lecture tour, and is peculiarly appropriate to this issue of the ICONOCLAST. I therefore reproduce it with pleasure:

"The development of all really great forces afford an interesting study for the mind capable of grasping and measuring them. The overflow of a river, the eruption of a volcano or the devastation of a storm arouse admiration even while they inspire terror and awaken awe. But it is the purely human force, with its infinite variety, which charms while it enthralls. A man born and reared, as other men, bound by the same ties, subject to the same laws, fettered by the same conventionalities, to throw off the yoke of circumstances, break through the trammels of the conventional, grapple with and overcome every obstacle

that lies in his path, until he reaches the summit of Olympus and bodily fronts the Gods, or towers among men, like Saul above his brethren. We may envy him, as we ever envy the truly great, or be disposed to close his lips in death, because he tells us unpalatable truths, yet admire him secretly and in our hearts exalt him. We may not confess as much while he lives and labors, but when his lips are dumb in death, his breast pulseless, we lay our hatred and envy in the dust at his feet, and rear in marble a gleaming shaft to commemorate the virtues of the dead. The name of "Brann" has inspired this homily; Brann, of the ICONOCLAST, the man whose praises are being sung loved by half the world, by the other half condemned, whose whole life has been a battle and a march, who wars as did the Titans and if he gropes blindly at times ever struggles toward the light. This is the man who began his education while rearing a family, and went from behind the smokestack of a locomotive to the tripod of a daily paper. Who in a few years has risen to dizzy heights of fame, whose utterances are waited for and attended by more than half a million people, many of whom he does not and can not convert, but all of whom he impresses. A man who is said to be an ideal husband and father, a tender, loyal and devoted friend, yet whose entire existence is devoted to a warfare against existing evils, bitter as death, and uncompromising as the grave. You may not always be right, Mr. Brann, indeed, we shrewdly suspect you are not, but we respect you and admire you just the same, because you attack boldly and fight fearlessly. Yes, we admire you, and shall not wait to whisper it to your tombstone either."
. . .

If the futility of brute force as an appeal to reason required an object lesson, it might easily be found in the

fact that while the hand that wielded one pen lies motionless in death, hundreds of others have been raised up to fight under the same banner.
. . .

Several months ago a number of the students of the Baylor University, acting without regard for the laws of either God or man, attempted to mob the editor of the ICONOCLAST in an effort to bridle his pen. The hand which they sought to restrain has now been enjoined by a court whose order is irrevocable. In every state in the union men have come forward to take up a fight which Brann himself considered ended, and the object is accomplished. In reproducing tributes to the memory of the dead editor I have felt it my duty in several instances to blue-pencil certain passages which might have been considered as reflecting upon those who are innocent and unoffending. The moral here needs no pointing.
. . .

To his readers and admirers, who have uniformly expressed regret over the death of her husband, Mrs. W. C. Brann desires to return a woman's thanks for the kindly sympathy extended.

SIMPLE STATEMENT OF FACTS.
BY W. H. WARD.

CONCERNING the tragedy of April 1, in which W. C. Brann lost his life and I, myself, was slightly wounded, as a sensational event, enough and more than enough, has already been said in the daily press. I should not have mentioned the matter here at all, but I know the readers of the ICONOCLAST will expect a statement of the facts. I

therefore give a subjoined account of the affair from the Independent Pulpit, published in Waco by J. D. Shaw. Mr. Shaw is well known to the people of Texas. There is not a man in the state who will doubt that his account of the tragedy is in absolute accord with truth and justice. In the extract referred to Mr. Shaw says:
LET THE PLAIN TRUTH BE TOLD.

The lateness of this Pulpit affords me an opportunity to correct some false impressions with regard to the recent tragedy in which W. C. Brann lost his life.

That there should have been some errors of view among bystanders as to the various incidents in that deadly conflict is not surprising, and of these, trifling in their nature, I will not here write.

The idea that Brann was seeking a difficulty with Davis is certainly false. He had made his arrangements to go on a lecturing tour, had spent the day at his home, went to town about 4 o'clock that afternoon to get a shave, and on his return walked with his business manager, Mr. W. H. Ward, by the office in which Davis was sitting. Having passed the office a few steps, Davis stepped out and shot him in the back. This was the shot that killed him, and it was after receiving it that he turned, drew his revolver and opened fire upon his assailant.

Now as to Mr. Ward: He left Brann's house some time after Brann did, had joined the latter a few minutes before the firing, and was at the time walking by his side. When Davis fired, Ward jumped at him in an attempt to get his, Davis' pistol, caught hold of it over the muzzle and was shot through the hand. Ward was unarmed, having left his revolver in a grip at Mr. Brann's house. His hands were gloved and he had no idea of a difficulty at the time.

I state these facts not through any feeling of prejudice, having never been mixed up in the Brann-Baylor trouble, but solely in the interest of the truth. I can understand how an excited observer, seeing Mr. Ward extend his hand to get Davis' pistol and seeing immediately the fire of the same, might have thought that Ward did the shooting, and it was this mistake that caused his arrest.— Independent Pulpit.

To this I will only add, that neither Mr. Brann nor myself were in the slightest anticipation of trouble. He left home, having the boy to drive him down in his buggy, shortly before 4 o'clock on the afternoon of the tragedy. I awaited his return to drive to the train to meet my brother, whom I was expecting with a party of friends that evening. At 20 minutes to 6 o'clock he had not returned and I took the first car down, as several ladies who chanced to be at Mr. Brann's home will testify. I left the car at Fourth and Austin streets at about 6 o'clock, walked to Herz Bros., gave an order for some books, and met Mr. John Guerin, walked with him toward the depot, met Mr. Brann at the corner of Fourth street and Bankers' alley, chatted with him for a moment, when Mr. Guerin walked on, and Mr. Brann and myself crossed the street and walked towards Austin avenue. We had passed the place, where I afterwards learned Davis' office was located, about ten paces, when Davis came out and opened fire from the rear. His opening fire was the first warning of the trouble. We were walking side by side, conversing together, when the first shot was fired. That shot entered Mr. Brann's back, and caused his death. I will add, that I was unarmed, and had not removed my driving gloves, which were taken off when my wound was dressed, and had been with Mr. Brann not more than three minutes when the shooting

occurred. These are the facts, as substantiated by the signed statement of over a score of eye-witnesses, the same now being in the hands of my attorneys, Messrs. Baker & Ross, and C. R. Sparks. I do not wish to speak ill of the dead, therefore I shall have but little to say of Mr. Davis. My acquaintance with him was brief; I never met him but once—when he was shooting another man, in the back.

THE LAST LESSON.

Reference has been made by Judge Gerald to the pathetic tragedy in Brann's life because of the loss of his daughter. The burden of sorrow which he bore is beautifully revealed: in the following account of that tragedy which was written by Brann.

POOR in gold and goods yet richer than Fancy ever fabled in home and happiness, the young father toiled and hoarded his scant wage; the little mother denied herself a thousand things that women covet, and they said: "It is for her, our Inez, our fairy queen. Her feet shall find no thorns in Life's path; a father's strength a mother's love shall fill it with sweetest flowers."

Beautiful to their eyes, and other eyes, was she, as Grecian sculptor's dream and still more beautiful when childhood's early years flashed by and the bud was bursting into womanhood's glorious bloom. No crowned empress so imperial seemed, yet pride so womanly and softened

by such grace that each and all yielded sweet allegiance to her sway.

And they would sit and watch her at her books or play, drinking with greedy ear her admiring teacher's oft-told tale of triumphs won in classroom or on the green, and watched her comrades,—loving subjects they—weave crowns of flowers for her fair brow and hail her queen.

And so the days went by, toilsome yet happy days until, when scarce passed to her 'teens, the youthful swains began to sigh for her and bashful cast their tribute of flowers—such as they knew she loved—into the open door, then blushingly retreat, fearing cold comfort from her imperious eyes. And one there was of her own age, who seemed to haunt the street, until the mother noticed it and said:

"Daughter, what does he ever near the house?"

And the father fretted and spoke harshly of the boy, and sharply to his child saying: "You do encourage the little fool to haunt the place. Speak to him no more." And the daughter made reply:

"Father, I never spoke to him, nor he to me." And she arose, and taking her music roll went forth and the boy followed her.

"Our daughter deceives us!" cried the father fierce with rage; and he followed the twain.

"You have deceived me, daughter!"

His voice was sharp, and, quailing before his wrath as though it were a blow, she gasped, "Oh, father!" and returned with him in silence to their home.

And the little mother fretted and lectured her; but she sat silent, brooding upon the great wrong, and the queenly eyes were full of tears that seemed frozen by her pride and could not fall.

They never fell. The gust of anger from the doting

father's lips, the breath of doubt of her dear word, and her little heart seemed broken quite; the world seemed desolate. The father's good-night kiss; the mother's tender solicitude were in vain,—the wound was too deep to heal. And while they slept and dreamed sweet dreams of her fair future she poured her heart out to the good God, who never doubted her, and leaving a little note that was a wailing cry of hopeless pain, passed by her own fair hand to the great Beyond.

And the father kissed the dead lips of his first born and knew that he had killed her. And ever in his heart there is a cry, "I killed her!" And night and day that cold, sweet face doth haunt him; and day and night he hears that piteous cry, wrung from his child when he broke her heart, "Oh, father!" and ever the little mother's lamentation goes up to heaven, "Our house is left unto us desolate!"

SALMAGUNDI.

THERE is a class of men who take especial delight in pistol practice—when the "other fellow" furnishes the target. They shut their eyes and literally feel what is going on —see pistols flashing, as the man, with a well-developed Texas "jag," sees keyholes in the door at 3 o'clock G.M. —just legions of them. As a matter of fact when pistols are really cracking, powder actually burning and bullets sweetly singing "Nearer My God to Thee," these are the first to seek the sheltering arms of a two-foot wall— "most any old wall," so it won't leak lead.
. . .

I wish to call attention of the readers of the ICONOCLAST to the pack of journalistic jackals who are raising their

illfamous howl over the body of Brann. As usual, when the Lion is dead the hyena comes forth for a feast. Life is too short and the game too mean to justify individual firing, so I will take a pot-shot at the pock; these animals are so much alike in tastes, character and habits that one will typify all. I therefore call attention to "Majah" Burbanks of the New Orleans Picayune. The State constitutional convention has eliminated the negro from Louisiana politics. Had that body also placed journalism under the color ban they would have disposed of the "Majah" most effectively, and, I might add, to the entire satisfaction of all concerned; unless, indeed, the coons had objected to their company. So help me God, I would rather be a yellow dog, with an abbreviated narrative, and belong to a disreputable negro, than go around with my cowardly heart in my throat, fearing to look a man in the face while alive, then mercilessly assail his character after death. Bah! the mere existence of such creatures revolutionizes Darwin's theory—argues the survival of the unfittest.
. . .

It is well for the public to understand that the murder of W. C. Brann did not remove all of the abuses from which this country suffers, and the frauds and fakes which prey upon it. Assassination may shatter an instrument, but it cannot conquer a cause. There is still work for the ICONOCLAST to do, and it will be done. It will continue to place its brand upon the forehead of the seducer, the whining hypocrite, the sniveling rogue, the confidence man, the fakir and the fool. It is proposed to show this country that the pistol is unconvincing as an argument and useless as a brake upon reform. Brann is dead; but there are men alive who lack his phenomenal ability, perhaps, but who share his deathless hatred of the rotten in morals

and in politics. The mission for the ICONOCLAST is unchanged and unended. Its field is its own. It will be filled.
. . .

The man who seeks the American spirit must look for it in the South and West. He will not find it in the East. That part of our common country is inhabited by a nation of shopkeepers as distinct from the peoples of the other sections as the lion is distinct from the jackal. They are smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogues, tied to the counter and till, dollar-marked niederlings of the department stores, jack rabbits of Wall street, coyotes of the boards of trade. If every man who has traded upon the distress of his country and the peril of his kinsfolk were to be shot this morning, the air of the north Atlantic states would be heavy with powder smoke. From that well kept and wearisome prostitute and buffon, Chauncey Depew, down to the smallest operator of a bucket-shop, they are all tarred with the same brush—things in trousers who would sell their souls for coin. They own the president of this country, and they own many of the congressmen, having bought and paid for them.
. . .

America, I suppose, is as religious as its neighbors, but it is for the dollar first and for Christ afterward. Easter is a period devoted to commemoration of the saddest and noblest event in human history, the highest and most important event. It is used by thousands of our merchants, however, as a time specially devoted to making money. From the manufacturer of "Easter cards," to the maker of hot cross buns, the signs and symbols of religion are made the means of chasing the nimble 10-cent piece. The cross is the hall mark of printed sentiment, to be sold for a quarter, and the crucifixion is done over and over again

in gingerbread. The ICONOCLAST may not get to heaven by the Baptist route or the Methodist route, or by any one of the thousand routes which "Christians" have been pleased to blaze out for sinners in the centuries since Christ died, but it is a long way above that kind of impiety— sacrilege is a better word for it.
. . .

How does the republican party—the party of gold —look now, from fat Tom Reed at its head down to "Nancy" Green, son of Hetty Green, at its tail? Is it the party of patriotism? May it be trusted to uphold the honor of the nation? Is it honest? Is it even decent? Nay. I say that nine out of every ten republican congressmen who voted for the intervention resolutions did so because they were driven to it by fear of outraged citizens, democrats and republicans alike, not becasue they were patriots. I say that the representatives of the republican party are bound hand and foot to the millionaires of America. I say that the leaders of that party are without principle. The polls next November will show what the honest money and honest patriotism people of the nation think of the republican party.
. . .

From the time that Fitzhugh Lee reached Washington the myrmidons of William McKinley sought to detract from his services to the country and to belittle his rugged patriotism and love of truth. The popinjay in the White House could not bear to listen to the roar of welcome that greeted him as he stepped from the train. It was like the Oleaginous Ohio poltroon to inspire detraction of one who is his official inferior, and his superior in everything that goes to make a man. The Virginian is not intellectually great. He is plain of speech and manner. But he has carried high the unstained banner of the Lees. He

has stood to his post in the face of danger. He has beared the traitorous Spaniard in his stronghold. He has demonstrated once that God never made a more courageous animal than the Southern gentleman. Beside such a man, the purchasable McKinleys and gross scoundrelly Hannas of the nation are dwarfs.
. . .

Dr. Dowie, of the Chicago "Zion," a place where faith cure fools who have cirrhosis of the liver are allowed to die for a consideration, has written a circular and sent out a million or two of copies. He wants every adult person in the United States to send him 50 cents, so that he can have money to send out more literature with which to catch more fools. The people of Chicago can confer a favor upon themselves and humanity at large by taking Dowie five miles out into Lake Michigan, tying three hundred pounds of scrap iron to his heels and dumping him overboard.
. . .

Mrs. Henrotin, president of the Federation of Women's clubs, has telegraphed McKinley from Chicago that she, as the representative of that influential band of hens, cordially and heartily indorses everything he has ever done or thought of doing. It is proper to say that Mrs. Henrotin no more represents her sisters than I represent the W. C. T. U. She is only another instance of the modern highly developed female, eaten by an itch for writing and getting her name into the newspapers. The mothers, sisters, wives, daughters and sweethearts of America no more indorse William McKinley than they indorse any other coward. The women of the federated clubs are much like other women when they stop playing upon the ink bottle and begin playing upon the cook-stove. They have taken off Mrs. Henrotin's back hair,

and she now eats her meals from the mantelpiece. All of which is proper.
. . .

Little Jimmy Eckles, Cleveland's undersized underling, got some handclaps and whoops from the Chicago Credit Men's association when he addressed the members at the Grand Pacific hotel on the night of April 12th. He talked about the business men's longing for war when the country is insulted, and these snipes and jack bailiffs of the big mercantile houses, warmed into drunken courage by gallons of cheap wine, yelped in unison. This auriferous insect, who was for four years comptroller of the currency, is remembered in Washington chiefly for a remarkable burst of speed displayed one night when his timorous mind conceived the idea that a somnolent hackman was going to rob him. He had his dress suit case in one hand and his plug hat in the other, and he covered three blocks in ten seconds. The cabby, whom he had hired, waked in time to discover the meteoric dash, and was the most puzzled man in the capital. Eckles is a warrior, and his credit giving, or refusing, listeners are all warriors.
. . .

J. Guy Smith, of Cotulla, was locally called, so I am informed, "Brann No. 2." Like most other men, he was far behind W. C. Brann in wealth of intellect, in largeness of heart, in charity, in his hatred of wrong and the oppressor. It appears, however, that he had the habit of speaking his mind and he was shot for it. Also that he was shot in the back.
. . .

Joe Leiter, the wheat speculator of Chicago, is followed about all day by detectives whom he has hired to protect him. I do not know if anyone contemplates giving him his deserts, but since he has used his inherited millions

to make bread dearer in thousands of poor mouths, he should be whipped twice a day for a month. Under a properly constituted and administered government, Leiter and his kind would be sent to the penitentiary at hard labor. He is as much a robber as any brigand of the Italian passes) and as much of a thief as any pickpocket in America.
. . .

A great many people imagine that "Your Uncle Sam" will frazzle hell's bells out of Spain in one word and two motions, that all of this preparation for threatened conflict with Spain is much ado about little; that the United States will get up early some morning and administer the paternal slipper to the Spanish pantaloon, simply by way of diversion or to get up an appetite for breakfast. The result of the scrap may show that the job had best be undertaken after a square meal.
. . .

As the war is not yet on I rise to remark that it is my sincere wish that those who have lost a scrap may find it —that those who have clamored so hard and so long for hostilities to begin, may find standing room only in the theater of war, and be given positions in the full glare of the footlight, with a corporal's guard behind them, to see that they do not strike a retrograde motion when the curtain rises on the first act.

[This completes the last issue of the ICONOCLAST. The publication of the paper was not continued, though evidently this was intended when the May issue was printed. The following articles were written shortly after the death of Brann but did not appear in the ICONOCLAST.]

THE DEATH OF BRANN.
BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

MR. BRANN, who was killed in Waco last Friday, was a much greater man than even his admirers knew. He had many virtues which, in a way, his peculiar tactics in journalism belied. For instance, his paper was read, for the most part, by people who took a delight in his calling a spade a spade, and, in fact, in his seeking out spades to write about. This was not the true Brann at all. The man was clean-minded in his conversation. He thought cleanly. He lived cleanly as a gentleman should, though he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous ruffian, reveling in the slums. He was essentially a family man and a student who "scorned delights and lived laborious days." His regard for the purity of women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up to his own preachment on all the various forms of integrity with much more strictness than people who affected to believe he was leper. Furthermore the man was an ascetic in his essential spirit. He had the true taste for the finely done thing in letters and if he did not devote himself to what might be called the more refined literary artistry, it was because he felt that there was danger of drawing too fine the lessons he thought it his duty to impart. There was no use, he said, in writing to the few. One should write so that all might read, running. He maintained that the way to instill principles in the people was to secure their attention first, and he did not hesitate to secure their attention by any device that seemed available. Therefore he felt himself justified in appealing to the lower instincts in men in order that, while they were all unsuspecting, he might inculcate something better.

And so there ran through his publication the strangest contrasts of sweetness and salacity, of eloquence and bombast, of purity and pornography, of jewel-phrases and gutter slang, excerpts of enthralling poetry and brothel billingsgate. He pointed his morals with putridity and he adorned his really beautiful style with barbarities and banalities which make one shudder. He set his fine thoughts like jewels in compost. He ravished the classics to mix them up with sentences that stunk of the stews. The man seemed to indulge in special flights of poesy with no other purpose than to achieve a disgusting anti-climax of muckery and mockery. The person who read Brann intelligently was impressed most by this habit of irony in the Waconian. It was of the essence of his iconoclasm. He had something in his effects in this line that was piteous. There was no denying his appreciation of the pure air, of the beautiful in life and nature, of the truth as thinkers see and feel it. It seemed to me that when he had soared up towards the ever vanishing Ideal, he reached a point whereat he turned in disgust and hurled himself madly back to the dungiest part of this dungy earth. There was a mighty dissatisfaction, even a despair, in Brann, and a touch of sadness in his writing as in his face. The more I read of his deliberate pandering to the literarily excrementitious appetite, the more I saw, or thought I saw, that he was afflicted with a mighty ennui, and was chiefly trying to escape from his own torture as one who knew not whether solace was to be found either in the spiritual or the earthly nature of man. Such a one as he might have been expected to take up any cause that assailed the existing condition of things politically and sociologically. While he was an ascetic his asceticism was only a wreaking of his own bitterness upon himself. He was a man in whom strong emotions were easily excited and he put into his writing all the passion which he suppressed in his dealings with his fellows socially. He never felt malice towards people whom he assailed most maliciously. He saw them simply as representatives of some fault in our social or political system, and he felt that he was doing his duty by his own conception of what the world should be, by pillorying them as object lessons of characters to be eliminated in his good time coming. When he saw a foul wrong he saw it personified in some man or woman. Then he went abroad in seach of foul things to say about it. And he found them and he hurled them at the object, and he polluted the atmosphere for a mile around. When he wrote about the abstractions of poetry and philosophy he wrote with a sweeping, swinging rhythm that thrilled anyone. He was master of the diapason. His ear was not attuned particularly to minor chords. He loved cyclonic clashes of words and he would strike out fecal flashes to illuminate them. His Correggiosity was at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him often, bore him away from his thought and landed him in some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself, to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brann believed that the country was, if not in itself decadent and degenerate, under the control of decadent, degenerate and depraved men. He believed that society was a social cesspool. He thought that most religion was hypocrisy. He believed that most wealth represented nothing more than the superior and diabolic genius of dishonesty. So believing he so preached and he preached with a vehemence that was in a sense vicious. His terribly irony made his work an engine of anarchy. Not that he meant anarchy at all, but because the people who were caught by his banalities could not differentiate sufficiently to extract the core of truth from the great superstructure of extravagances with which he hid it. Mr. Brann meant only to lift the world up, and one of his queer conceptions was, that his own dragging down of things pure to the lowest levels of life and thought and feeling was calculated to make his multitudinous clientèle look upward. He was mistaken. He came to know it, too, for he said to me one evening, "I am only a fad." "I'll pass away when my vogue is done, like Brick Pomeroy." He wished he could believe that the best way to help people up was to take a stand and view a little above them. He said, when it was suggested that he try this tack, that he feared it was too late. Not that he wholly abandoned his belief in his own plan, but it seemed to me that he felt sorry that once attention could be attracted by being shocking it could only be held by a continuance of the shocks.
. . .

In my personal dealings with Mr. Brann I found him a person of almost feminine fineness. It was amusing to meet him after some particularly atrocious issue of the ICONOCLAST, either personally or by letter, and have him "roar as gently as a sucking dove." In such moods he revealed a character that was really sweet—though I must apologize for that misused word. He was impressed with the pity of life. He loved to toy intellectually with subleties of thought. He had intuitions in art and poetry, and music touched him truly and deeply. I never have seen such a gentle man with women and his estimate of woman, either in conversation or writing, was a high and noble one. If at times he wrote so that his conception of virtuous womanhood was unpleasantly associated with ideas that

revolted you, it was his peculiar belief that purity was all the purer for the contrast and antithesis. He loved children, too, and in his more familiar moods, according to his intimates, he was like one whose heart was as a little child. He cared no more for money after he began to make it than he cared in his Bohemian days when he was readier to give than to take. He loved his friends blindly. He did not hate his enemies, he despised them. He had all the manly virtues, courage, generosity, modesty. Yes, modesty; for egoism such as he had was not foolish pride. His egotism was only his own force asserting itself. His friendship was almost foolish. He praised too generously. He was inclined to help everybody he could and I am sure that he never assailed anyone or anything that did not represent to him uncharity and snobbery. He was not envious. His mind was on the Texas scale; he knew no meanness. His was Kentucky origin and he was tainted with Kentucky's Quixotism. He loved liberty and he loved love. He was the friend of the people as he dreamed they should be. He was the advocate of the greatest enlargement of rights. With little of what he strove for in immediate political issues did I sympathize. He believed more in what is called socialism than I do, but he believed it most earnestly. He was the greatest force in this country, with his 80,000 issues of his magazine per month, for all the things that go with Free Silver. His following included all the thinking followers of Bryan and his work had no little effect, in its powerful music and color, upon many people to whom Bryanism represented the political abomination of desolation.
. . .

As to the manner of Mr. Brann's death there is only to be said that he expected it. He judged from the characters of those he attacked, that they would assassinate

him. He died as he expcted to die, without any cringing to his enemies. Some people he attacked who did not deserve his vitriolic attentions, but he thought they did. In the main he scourged and sacrified only those who deserved. The manner in which he was killed and the cause in which he was killed—the cause of an institution in which a girl was debauched in the name of Christ and turned out of doors to starve to the glory of religion—glorify him. He who fought in the open was shot by a sneak from behind. The sneak himself was shot in his act of cowardice. Mr. Brann was brilliant and brave. He partook of the qualities of the men who immortalized the Alamo. He was the first man who identified Texas with thought. He loved Texas so well that he defended the code of private and public mobbery for righting wrongs. To that cruel coward code he fell a victim. With all his faults as I see them, I can think of him only as worthy of being buried in some high place, to the strains of Sigfried's Funeral March, and can only say, with Browning of the dead "grammarian"— —The Mirror for April 7, 1898.

PRIVATE VENGEANCE. A CONSIDERATION OF ALLEGED CHIVALRY.

SOME person has sent me a marked copy of the New Orleans Picayune, the marked matter being an editorial substantially approving the manner of the taking off of Mr. Brann, the editor of the ICONOCLAST.

Granted that, as the Picayune declares, Mr. Brann wantonly attacked spotless reputation, that decency and purity were not sacred to him—an assumption, by the way, that is a rank injustice to Mr. Brann's memory— let us see about this matter of private vengeance which the Picayune approves.

Are there not laws in all the States against libel? Are there not laws against publishing obscene and defamatory matter? If there be, then what justification can there be for private vengeance? What is the use of laws if men on any provocation may set aside those laws and set themselves above them and execute the person who may have offended, or who may be imagined to have offended them? If private vengeance is to prevail what is to prevent any person construing any criticism into a mortal offense and assassinating the critic, even though the critic be palpably and undeniably criticizing for the public good? When the individual is made the judge, jury and executioner of whomsoever displeases him, what becomes of law, of order, of civilization? There is not a day in the year that one could not justify the murder of a hundred editors, if the rightfulness of the killing were determinable solely by what the killers thought of the criticisms against them in the papers controlled by those one hundred editors.

If we can tolerate a state of society in which any man,

for what seems to him good and sufficient reason, for anything from biting the thumb at him to jesting about his whiskers, may take the life of another, why shall we not tolerate the man who will take another's property because the taker deems the other has too much or has unjustly accumulated what he has?

What is the result of this sanction of private vengeance? It is anarchy. Pursued to the ultimate of its logic it means that every man is a law unto himself and the justice of an execution rests upon nothing but the opinion, or delusion, of the executioner. What one man might call a trifle might, to another man, call for blood. You could kill a man because his boots creaked or his eyes squinted or he wore the wrong shade of your favorite color in his necktie. Ridiculous? Not at all. Liking or disliking any of these trifling things is only a matter of personal preference. They may be as distasteful to one person as the tone of an editorial is to another. If a man may rightly kill a writer, like Mr. Brann, why would it not be right for someone to kill any editor? At one time there was talk in the South of killing the late Joseph B. McCullagh for his editorials. How if Senator Hanna were to "go gunning" for the editorial "roasters" of himself, or for the malevolent cartoonist? Mr. Brann attacked hypocritic preachers, snide politicians, shoddy society people, shyster lawyers. He did it in, to me, an exaggerated manner, but he felt that such manner was necessary to arouse the people. Were Brann's blasts against Baylor University intrinsically worse, more a license of the press than let us say the assaults of the New York World, the New York Journal or the Post Dispatch upon Pierpont Morgan and the Trusts? And yet, if any Trust magnate, crucified as a blood-sucker on the poor, were to shoot the editor of one of these sheets, he would be howled to the hangman's

noose. The Trust magnate would be told he should have had recourse to law. But in the South, no—Mr. Brann was rightfully assassinated. No law for him! Why? Because Mr. Brann assailed a few Southern "josses." If Mr. Brann were justly slain then the next person who may dislike an editorial in the Picayune may kill its editor on the ground that the editorial—no matter how trifling in its imputation—is "carrion journalism." This law of chivalric private vengeance would justify a saturnalia of murder in every large city where gossip circulates in society. The chivalry of it! A man has written something he deems to be true and comments upon it as he deems it his duty in a quasi public capacity. Everyone who does not like the article can "take a pop at him." But, says the chivalrous Picayune, the law of private vengeance does not apply to anything save grave offenses in scurrility. Ah! The offensiveness of a criticism is only a matter of individual capacity for pain or humiliation. The trifle is only a trifle, because a man thinks it so. It may become a thing of importance at any time if you leave the decision of its importance solely to the judgment of the man who is going to resent it.

Private vengeance makes for the creation of a caste of bulldozers. Let it become known in a community that criticism is an invitation to Death, and who profit? Not the men of spotless reputation. Not the decent and pure elements of the community. Not at all. The ruffian gang in politics profits. The sanctimonious crooks profit. The seducer and betrayer, who is a dead-shot, profits. Every social and civic iniquity flourishes under this dominance of the law of private vengeance. All the people who deserve criticism are ready to shoot. They are the judges of their own spotless reputations. They will kill the man who spots it. So it is that in almost every Southern city there has

grown up a class of political Brahmins absolutely secure from criticism that counts. Take New Orleans. The papers feared for years to breathe a breath of attack against the "spotless reputations" of its leaders. The story of the corruption that developed is too well known to require telling. After all, it is not the people of spotless reputation who are assailed in the papers. Whenever anyone is assailed the chances are there is ground for the assault, and there is at least a prima facie evidence that attack or exposure is necessary in the interest of public morality. Any reputation would be spotless if no one dared attack it. If it were high crime to assail people vigorously how would dishonor, debauchery, fraud and crime in high places ever be brought to light. If the right of private vengeance shall prevail in any community then the ruffians and blackguards may pursue their nefarious ends unhampered because of the terror they inspire by threats to shoot their critics. This recognition of the right of the individual to punish, by the infliction of death, the person who has injured him, puts the community at the mercy of the worst elements in it. It is the extension of the barbarism of lynch law. It makes every man, who wants to be one, a mob. It develops the idea of savagery in revenge to such an extent that the individual executioner of the offender against himself does not hesitate to wreak his vengeance from behind. It promotes assassination.

Aspersions upon the virtue of women are certainly indefensible on any imaginable ground. They demand often a punishment which the law is inadequate to provide. They cannot be ignored. They constitute the exceptions which confirm the rule that it is well to let the law punish slanderers. And in general men are expected to protect to the last extremity the reputations of

the women of their family and their acquaintance. The person who attacks publicly or privately the virtue of a woman deserves the limit of vengeance, for the publicity of legal proceedings toward punishment only aggravates the original wrong. Mr. Brann did not attack the virtue of girl-students at Baylor University. He attacked the administration of that institution and the killing of him was the result of a distorted view of the trend of his criticisms. If it were believed that he assailed the virtue of girl-students at Baylor he would not have a single mourner in the Southwest. And no man in any part of the United States can have a following of respectable people, if he defames women. The feeling of reverence for woman is so general that it is often a defense for personal violence against writers who never dream of attacking feminine honor. Aside from the fact that death is too light a punishment for the man who attacks womanly chastity, the law of private vengeance is not sweepingly and invariably to be condemned. I am not liberal enough in recognition of the great fact of human nature to admit that the objection to private vengeance is mainly an objection to the recognition of the right of individual execution of the death penalty for any criticism. Men ought not to be shot for criticisms of public institutions. It would be foolish to argue against the fact that men occasionally feel called upon to resent criticism by an appeal to battle without weapons. The killing of critics at the whim of the criticized is the evil against which protest is made. Plain assault and battery is easily defensible on the ground that no one can be expected always to have his temper in control. It makes writers careful, and it is not followed by the regret which follows killing. Writers are expected to keep within bounds in their criticisms, and even then they are certain to generate ill feeling in the criticized and their friends, but so long as the offense is not murderous of reputation and mortally malevolent the private execution of writers is an offense not to be condoned on a mistaken interpretation of chivalry. For all sins of journalistic criticism, outside of the diabolism of blasting reputations for virtue, the law provides adequate remedy, and if it does not, then it were idle to say that the exasperated victims of criticism should not have recourse to their fists, although decent criticism, free from malice, addressed to people in position semi-public would not seem to call for violence under pretense of resenting something much worse. As a rule I should say that the criticism which does not call for extreme and desperate punishment calls for no notice at all, or if it does, in the case of men, there are laws, civil and criminal, that cover the case, with ample punishment for the offense. This is the practical view of the remedies against "carrion journalism."

A public sentiment strong enough to support private vengeance is strong enough to support the law. There are laws for the punishment of slander. More rigorous laws could be enforced. If the people hate slanderers bitterly enough to kill them, then they should hate them enough to see that the laws against slander are enforced. The moral sentiment that can sustain the one could sustain the other. But the individual execution of vengeance is a turning away from the law. It is the fostering of the bully and the killer for drunken pastime. It is a bulwark for boodlers, blackguards, frauds and lechers. It gives rein to individual passion without limit. Such chivalry is barbarism.—Pasquin.

BRANN, THE FOOL.
BY ELBERT HUBBARD, EDITOR OF THE PHILISTINE.

IT'S a grave subject. Brann is dead. Brann was a Fool. The Fools were the wisest men at Court; and Shakespeare, who dearly loved a Fool, placed his wisest sayings into the mouths of men who wore the motley. When he adorned a man with a cap and bells it was as though he had given bonds for both that man's humanity and intelligence. Neither Shakespeare nor any other writer of books ever dared to depart so violently from truth as to picture a Fool whose heart was filled with perfidy.

The Fool is not malicious. Stupid people may think he is, because his language is charged with the lightning's flash; but they are the people who do not know the difference between an incubator and an egg plant.

Touchstone, with unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk, into exile. When all, even his daughters, have forsaken King Lear, the Fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak. And when in our own day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, Mercutio and Jacques, we find they are men of tender susceptibilities, generous hearts and intellects keen as a rapier's point.

Brann was a Fool.

Brann shook his cap, flourished his bauble, gave a toss to that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asked questions and propounded conundrums that Stupid Hypocrisy could not answer. So they killed Brann.
. . .

Brann was born in obscurity. Very early he was cast upon the rocks and nourished at the she-wolf's teat.

He graduated at the University of Hard Knocks and during his short life took several post-graduate courses.

He had been wage-earner, printer's-devil, printer, pressman, editor.

He knew the world of men, the struggling, sorrowing, hoping, laughing, sinning world of men. And to those whom God had tempted beyond what they could bear, his heart went out. He read books with profit, and got great panoramic views out into the world of art and poetry; dreaming dreams and sending his swaying filament of thought out and out, hoping it would somewhere catch and he would be in communication with another World.

Discreet and cautious little men are known by the company they keep. The Fool was not particular about his associates; children, sick people, insane folks, rich or poor —it made no difference to him. He sometimes even sat at meat with publicans and sinners.

He was a Mystic and lived in the ideal. This deeply religious quality in his nature led him into theology, and he became a clergyman—a Baptist clergyman.

But no church is large enough to hold such a man as this; the fool quality in his nature outcrops, and the jingle of bells makes sleep to the Chief Pew-Holder impossible.

So the Fool had to go.

Then he founded that unique periodical, which, in three years, attained a circulation of 90,000 copies. This paper was not used for pantry shelves, lamp lighters, or other base utilitarian purposes. It cost ten times as much as a common newspaper, and the people who bought it read it until it was worn out. All the things in this paper were not truth; mixed up amid a world of wit were often extravagance and much bad taste. It was only a Fool's newspaper!

In this periodical the Fool railed and jeered and stated

facts about smirking Complacency, facts so terrible that folks said they were indecent. He flung his jibes at Stupidity, and Stupidity sought to answer criticism by assassination.

Texas has a libel law patterned after the libel law of the State of New York. If a man takes from you your good name you can put him behind prison bars and place shutters over the windows of his place of business.

The people who thought Brann had injured them did not invoke the law. They invoked Judge Lynch——

A mob seized the Fool, and, placing a rope about his neck, led him naked through the October night, out to the Theological Seminary, which they declared he had traduced.

There they smote him with the flat of their hands, and spat upon him. It was their intention to hang the Fool, but better counsel prevailed, and on his signing, in terrorem, a document they placed before him, they gave him warning to depart to another State. And on his promising to do so, they let him go.

But the next day he refused to leave; and his flashing wit still filled the air, now embittered through the outrage visited upon him.

His enemies held prayer-meetings, invoking Divine aid for the Fool's conversion—or extinction. One man quoted David's prayer concerning Shimmei: "Bring Thou down his hoar head to the grave in blood!" And others still, prayed, "Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."

But still the Fool flourished his bauble.

Then they shot him.

That hand which wrote the most Carlylean phrase of any in America is cold and stiff. That teeming brain which held a larger vocabulary than that of any man in

America is only clay that might stop a hole to keep the wind away. That soul through which surged thoughts too great for speech has gone a-journeying.

Brann is dead.

No more shall we see that lean, clean, homely face, with its melancholy smile. No more shall we hear the Fool eloquently, and oh! so foolishly, plead the cause of the weak, the unfortunate, the vicious. No more shall we behold the tears of pity glisten in those sad eyes as his heart was wrung by the tale of suffering and woe.

His children are fatherless, his wife a widow.

Brann the Fool is dead.—The Mirror.

April 14th, 1898.

WILLIAM COWPER BRANN.
BY J. D. SHAW.

WILLIAM COWPER BRANN was born in Humboldt Township, Coles County, Illinois, January 4, 1855. He was not raised in the home of his parents, though his father, Rev. Noble Brann, survived him, and is still living. His mother having died when he was two and a half years old, he was within the next six months placed in the care of Mr. William Hawkins, a Coles County farmer, with whom he lived about ten years. As to his childhood experiences on the Hawkins' farm nothing is now known. They were probably such as are common to children raised in the country. Of Mr. Hawkins he always spoke kindly, referring to him as "Pa Hawkins." His nature was not suited to farm life, however, and he finally made up his mind to see more of the world, hence without ever having disclosed his resolution to any one, he quietly walked away

one dark and cheerless night, carrying in a small box under his arm all that he then possessed, and leaving behind him the friends of his childhood in the only place he had ever known as his home, thus entering upon the active struggle of life at thirteen years of age, without friends, destitute of means, and almost entirely uneducated.

The first position he obtained was that of bell boy in a hotel. Later on he learned to be a painter and grainer, then a printer, a reporter, and finally an editorial writer. He was energetic, industrious and painstaking in whatever he undertook to do, therefore always employed. Early in his struggle he realized the need of an education, in the acquirement of which he applied himself with eager diligence. Nature had endowed him with keen perceptive powers, a retentive memory and great mental vigor, by means of which he soon accumulated considerable knowledge. Every moment that could be spared from his daily toil was spent in reading books of science, philosophy, history, biography and general literature. In this way he became thoroughly informed on almost every important subject, as will be seen by the contents of his writings.

On March 3, 1877, at Rochelle, Illinois, he was married to Miss Carrie Martin, who, with their two children, Grace Gertrude and William Carlyle is now living in the beautiful home, here at Waco, from which he was buried April 3, 1898.

During all the years, from the time he left the hospitable home of Mr. Hawkins, in 1868, until after he had successfully launched "Brann's ICONOCLAST," he suffered the harassing annoyances of extreme poverty, in the endurance of which he was cheerful, hopeful and diligent in the equipment of his mind preparatory to the work he always believed he would some day be able to accomplish.

Beginning his literary career as a reporter, he was soon

made an editorial writer, in which capacity he became well-known throughout Illinois, Missouri and Texas. As such he was versatile, forceful and direct. There was no needless repetition of tiresome circumlocution in his composition. He possessed an inexhaustible vocabulary, from which he could always find the words best fitted to convey his meaning at the moment they were most needed, and every sentence was resplendent with an order of wit, humor and satire peculiar to a style original with himself.

In July, 1891, he issued at Austin, Texas, the first number of "Brann's ICONOCLAST." Only a few numbers appeared, when it was suspended and he resumed his editorial work, then on the Globe-Democrat, of St. Louis, Missouri, and later on the Express of San Antonio, Texas. It was in connection with his first attempt to establish the ICONOCLAST that he delivered a few lectures that were well received. In later years he went upon the platform again with every prospect of a successful career in the lecture field.

In the summer of 1894, he settled here in Waco, and, in February of the following year, revived the ICONOCLAST, which was successful from the first issue, having reached, at the time of his death, a circulation of ninety thousand copies. It was through the ICONOCLAST that his genius found full scope for development, and that he became best known to the public. In its columns he dared to be himself. There was now no restraint imposed upon him by timorous publishers. It belonged to him, and in it he gave full wing to his own thought. It was this intellectual freedom, sustained by the magic power and personality of a real genius, that gave to it such widespread popularity.

Mr. Brann has been classed as a humorist. This he was,

and of a type peculiar to himself, but he was not content with merely having amused or entertained the people, he aspired to arouse public sentiment in the interest of certain reforms. He was a hater of shams and defied every form of fraud, hypocrisy and deceit. He made of his humor a whip with which to scourge from the temple of social purity every intruder there. He joined in no partisan schemes for place or power, but, confident of his own ground, he would stand alone in the defiance of popular humbugs and frauds. This heroic independence, while admired by many, made him a mark for the envy and hatred of such as feared him, and in the end proved to be the cause of his death.

But with all his uncompromising hatred of shams, there beat in the bosom of W. C. Brann a warm and generous heart for the world at large, and no man was ever a more devoted friend to the poor and needy. No beggar was ever turned away from his door empty handed, and no worthy cause ever asked his help in vain. His religion was to do whatever he believed to be right, and to defy the wrong even though it should be found parading in the garb and livery of righteousness.

Mr. Brann was fond of nature. He loved the mountains, the lakes, the rivers and the billowy sea. He loved to walk amid forest trees and watch the birds fly from bough to bough and warble their songs of love, but in all the wide, wide world, his home life was the most sacred object of his devotion, and when prosperity gave him the means to do so he found great delight in making it beautiful and pleasant. He was fond of his friends, but the love he bore his wife and children was sublimely beautiful, tender and affectionate.

His sudden death was a shock not only to his immediate friends, but to the hundreds of thousands who knew him

through the ICONOCLAST. Walking quietly along the street, talking with a friend, he was shot in the back by one T. E. Davis, a partisan on the Baylor side of the Brann-Baylor trouble.

After receiving, without warning, his death wound, Mr. Brann turned upon his assailant, drew a revolver and vindicated his courage by delivering his fire with such deadly aim as to leave Davis in the throes of death, which came to his relief about twenty hours after the fray.

Mr. Brann received three wounds, from the first of which he died at 1:55 a.m., April 2nd, surrounded by his family and many sympathizing friends.

The impression has gone abroad that Mr. Brann was without friends and admirers in Waco. The falsity of this impression was made manifest, by the funeral attendance, said, and generally believed, to have been the largest ever seen here.

He was a believer in religion, therefore, it was not improper that a religious service was held, conducted by Rev. Frank Page, D.D., of the Episcopal church, though the writer, acting in according with the wishes of the family, spoke a few words at the grave.

In Oakwood Cemetery the body of Brann was laid to rest in the embrace of our common mother earth, and under a mound of floral offerings, which though profuse and costly were but a feeble expression of the sincere grief that struck dumb with awe the thousands upon thousands who had learned to love him with an affection accorded to few men.
. . .

My position as to Mr. Brann's style of journalism has been freely expressed, and while he was still alive. I do not approve of all he saw fit to write, nor of the spirit in which he wrote, but that he was a real genius and a

benefactor of his race cannot be denied. It was with him, as it is with all men of his type, he made strong and bitter enemies, still his friends and admirers were numbered by thousands, I may safely say hundreds of thousands.

The purposes, direction and character of the ICONOCLAST were in many respects different from those of this Pulpit, nevertheless there was between Mr. Brann and myself a strong tie of friendship that, so far as I know, never suffered the breach of a single moment, and I sincerely mourn his loss as a personal friend whose kindly greetings were to me as glimpses of the sun on a winter's day.

Of humble birth, beset by poverty and environed by many difficulties, he applied himself to the study of literature with such diligence as to acquire abilities possessed by few, and when once equipped for the field he occupied with such consummate skill, no power of prejudice could keep him from rising like a star of the first magnitude. Alas! how soon that star has been obscured and by what ignoble means! But, against great odds, its brief existence was characterized by a brilliancy that no prejudice or hatred can ever obliterate.

Having dealt candidly with Mr. Brann while living, I will not now ignore the fact that he had faults, and his inability to overcome these marred, here and there, the splendor of his intellectual achievements. His faults, though, were of a kind that may be permitted to pass into the grave with his body. His virtues were many, and for these he was loved, despite the imperfections he could not always control. His services to mankind were numerous and they were rendered with a devotion as ardent as that of a lover; for these he will be remembered, nor can any power rob him of his fame as a literary genius—a poet, a humorist and a satirist.