The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 12 | ||
Lectures and Addresses of Brann
SPEAKING OF GALL.
GALL is a bitter subject, and I shall waste no time selecting sweet words in which to handle it. There's no surplus of sweet words in my vocabulary anyhow. I have never yet been able to rent my mouth for a taffy mill. Webster gives several definitions of Gall; but the good old etymologist was gathered to his fathers long before the word attained its full development and assumed an honored place in the slang vernacular of the day. It was needed. It fills what editors sometimes call a "a long-felt want." Gall is sublimated audacity, transcendent impudence, immaculate nerve, triple-plated cheek, brass in solid slugs. It is what enables a man to borrow five dollars of you, forget to repay it, then touch you for twenty more. It is what makes it possible for a woman to borrow her neighbor's best bonnet, then complain because it isn't the latest style or doesn't suit her particular type of beauty. It is what causes people to pour their troubles into the ears of passing acquaintances instead of reserving them for home consumption. It is what makes a man aspire to the governorship, or to air his asininity in the Congress of the United States when he should be fiddling on a stick of cordwood with an able-bodied buck-saw. It is what leads a feather-headed fop, with no fortune but his folly, no prospects but poverty—who lacks business ability to find for himself bread—to mention marriage to a young lady reared in luxury, to ask her to leave the house of her father and help him fill the land with fools.
Gall is a very common ailment. In fact, a man without a liberal supply of it is likely to be as lonesome in this land as a consistent Christian at a modern camp-meeting, or a gold-bug Democrat in Texas. Nearly everybody has it and is actually proud of it. When a young man is first afflicted with the tender passion; when he is in the throes of the mysterious mental aberration that would cause him to climb a mesquite bush and lasso the moon for his inamorata if she chanced to admire it, he is apt to think it love that makes the world go round. Later he learns that Gall is the social dynamics—the force that causes humanity to arise and hump itself.
Gall has got the world grabbed. Politics is now a high-class play, whose pawns are power and plunder; business is becoming but a gouge-game wherein success hallows any means. Our mighty men are most successful marauders; our social favorites minister in the temple of Mammon, our pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night the follies and foibles of the "Four Hundred," our God the Golden Calf. The standard by which society now measures men is the purse; that by which it gauges greatness the volume of foolish sound which the aspirant for immortal honors succeeds in setting afloat, little caring whether it be such celestial harp music as caused Thebe's walls to rise, or the discordant bray of the ram's horn which made Jericho's to fall. This century, which proudly
We make manifest our immeasureable Gall by proclaiming from the housetops that, of all the ages which have passed o'er the hoary head of Mother Earth, the present stands preëminent; that of all the numberless cycles of Time's mighty pageant there was none like unto it—no, not one. And I sincerely hope there wasn't. Perhaps that which induced the Deity to repent him that he had made man and send a deluge to soak some of the devilment out of him, was the nearest approach to it. We imagine that because we have the electric telegraph and the nickel-plated dude, the printing press and the campaign lie, the locomotive and the scandal in high life; that because we now roast our politcial opponent instead of the guileless young missionary, and rob our friends by secret fraud instead of despoiling our foes by open force, that we are the people par-excellence and the Lord must be proud of us.
Progress and improvement are not always synonyms. A
people may grow in Gall instead of grace. I measure a
century by its men rather than by its machines, and we
have not, since civilization took its boasted leap forward,
produced a Socrates or a Shakespeare, a Phidias or an
Angelo, a Confucius or a Christ. This century runs
chiefly to Talmages and Deacon Twogoods, pauper dukes
and divorce courts—intellectual soup and silk lingerie.
. . .
The poets no longer sing of the immortal gods, of war and sacrifice, while the flame mounts to manhood's cheek,
How can the acorn become a mighty forest monarch if
planted in a pint pot and crossed with a fuzzy-wuzzy
chrysanthemum? How can the Numidian lion's whelp become
a king of beasts if reared in a cage and fed on cold
potatoes, muzzled and made to dance to popular music? How
can the superior soul expand until it becomes all-embracing,
god-like, a universe in itself, in which rings sweet
sphere-music and rolls Jovinian thunder—in which blazes
true Promethean fire instead of smolders the sulphurous
caloric of the nether world—when its metes and bounds are
irrevocably fixed for it—when it can only grow in certain
prescribed directions, painfully mapped out for it by
bumptious pismires who imagine that their little heads
constitute the intellectual Cosmos?
. . .
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, lamented that he lacked Gall; but the melancholy Dane was dead years before the present generation of titled snobs appeared upon the scene. None of the princes or dukes of the present day appear to be short on Gall; none of the nobility seem to be suffering for lack of it. Not long ago a little Duke who owes his title to the fact that his great-grand-aunt was the paramour of a half-wit prince, kindly condescended to marry an American girl to recoup his failing fortunes. A little French guy whose brains are worth about two cents a pound—for soap-grease—put up a Confederate-bond title for the highest bidder and was bought in like a hairless Mexican pup by an American plutocrat. Now half-a-
A most shameful exhibition of Gall is the practice now coming into vogue with certain society ladies of encouraging newspapers to puff their charms—even paying them so much a line for fulsome praise. Not a few metropolitan papers reap a handsome profit by puffing society buds whom their fond parents are eager to place on the matrimonial market, hoping that they will "make good matches"; in other words, that they will marry money— its possessors being thrown in as pelon. Even married women, who are long on shekels but short on sense, sometimes pay big prices to get their portraits in the public prints—accompanied by puffs that would give a buzzard a bilious attack.
But the Gall of the girl who puts her picture in the papers, accompanied by a paid puff of her "purty," scarce equals that of the conceited maid who imagines she has only to look at a man and giggle a few times to "mash him cold"—to get his palpitating heart on a buckskin string and swing it hither-and-yon at pleasure. How the great he-world does suffer at the hands of those heartless
It is natural for men to pay court to a pretty woman as for flies to buzz about a molasses barrel; but not every fly that buzzes expects to get stuck, I beg to state. The man who doesn't tell every woman who will listen to him —excepting, perhaps, his wife—that she's pretty as a peri, even though she be homely enough to frighten a mugwump out of a fat federal office; that she's got his heart grabbed; that he lives only in the studied sunshine of her store-teeth smile and is hungering for an opportunity to die for her dear sake—well, he's an angel, and he-seraphs are almighty scarce I beg of you to believe. Since Adonis died and Joseph was gathered to his fathers none have appeared that I am aware of. These young gentlemen were all right, I suppose; but I'd like to see either of them get elected nowadays on the Democratic ticket in Texas.
But feminine conceit, fed on flattery, were as milk-shake unto mescal, as a kiss by mail to one by moonlight compared with the insufferable egotism of the "pretty man" who puts his moustache up in curl-papers and perfumes his pompadour; who primps and postures before an amorous looking-glass and imagines that all Eve's daughters are trying to abduct him. Whenever I meet one of these male irresistibles I'm forcibly reminded that the Almighty made man out of mud—and not very good mud at that. The two-legged he-thing who makes a clothes-horse of himself and poses on the street-corner perfumed like an emancipation day picnic; who ogles a pretty woman until the crimson creeps into her cheek, then prides himself on
. . .
More than a moiety of our so-called great men are but featherless geese, possessing a superabundance of Gall— creatures of chance who ride like driftwood on the crest of a wave raised by forces they cannot comprehend; but they ride, and the world applauds them while it tramples better men beneath its brutal feet. Greatness and Gall, genius and goose-speech, sound and sense have become synonyms. If you fall on the wrong side of the market men will quote the proverb about a fool and his money: if on the right side you're a Napoleon of finance. Lead a successful revolt and you are a pure patriot whose memory should be preserved to latest posterity; head an unsuccessful uprising and you are a miserable rebel who should have been hanged. "Nothing succeeds like success." Had the Christian religion failed to take root, Judas Iscariot would have been commemorated in the archives of Rome as one who helped stamp out the hateful heresy, and had Washington got the worst of it in his go with Cornwallis he would have passed into history as a second Jack Cade.
Alexander of Macedon was great, as measured by the world's standard of eminence. After two-and-twenty centuries our very babes prattle of this bloody butcher, and even his horse has been enshrined in history. In our own day Father Damien left kindred and country and went forth to die for the miserable lepers in the mid-Pacific, but he is already forgotten—his name and fame have faded from the minds of men. Yet greater and grander
But for Gall of the A1, triple X brand, commend me to the little pot-house politician who poses as a political prophet and points out to wiser men their public duties. We have to-day in this land of the free and home of the crank, thousands of self-important little personages who know as little of political economy as a parrot of the power of prayer, prating learnedly of free-trade or protection, greenbackism or metallic money. Men who couldn't tell a fundamental principle from their funny-bone, an economic thesis from a hot tamale—who don't know whether Ricardo was an economist or a corn-doctor— evolve from their empty ignorance new systems of "saving the country," and defend them with the dogmatic assurance of a nigger preacher describing the devil—make gorgeous displays of their Gall. I have noticed that, as a rule, the less a man knows of the science of government the crazier he is to go to congress. About half the young statesmen who break into the legislature imagine that Roger Q. Mills wrote the Science of Economics, and that Jefferson Davis was the father of Democracy.
But the Gall is not confined to the little fellows—the big political M.D.'s have their due proportion. The remedies they prescribe for Uncle Sam's ailments remind me of the panaceas put on the market by the patent-medicine men— warranted to cure everything, from a case of cholera-morbus to an epidemic of poor relations. We have one school of practitioners prescribing free-trade as a sure-cure for every industrial ill, another a more drastic system of protection.
Gall? Ye gods! Look at the platform promises of the
blessed Democratic party—then at its performances!
Look at the party itself—a veritable omnium-gatherum of
political odds and ends, huddled together under the party
blanket like household gods and barn-yard refuse after a
hurricane. High and low tariffs and free-traders; gold-bugs, green-backers and bi-metallists; Cleveland and
Croker, Altgeld and Olney, Hill and Hogg, Waco's Warwick
and Colonel Culberson's kid, all clamoring to be dyed-in-the-wool Democrats! When I get a new main-spring
put in my vocabulary I'm going to tackle the Gall of the
Populists and Republicans.
. . .
Some specimens of Gall amaze me by their greatness, some amuse me, while others only spoil my appetite. Of the latter class is the chronic kicker who is forever fuming about feminine fashions. If the hoop-skirt comes in this critic is in agony; if the "pull-back" makes its appearance
. . .
For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to him who had nowhere to lay his head; who pay a preacher $15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in the great cities of every Christian country children must steal or starve and women choose between death and dishonor. New York is crowded with costly churches that lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the clouds with golden fingers—monuments which Mammon rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value
While Europe and America are peddling saving grace in pagan lands—and incidentally extending the market for their cheap tobacco, snide jewelry and forty-rod bug-juice —they are also building warships and casting cannon— preparing to cut each other's throats while prating of the prince of peace! The idea of countries that have to build forts on their frontiers and keep colossal standing armies to avoid being butchered by their own Christian brethren; that are full of divorce courts and demagogues, penitentiaries and poorhouses, sending young theological goslings, who believe that all of divine revelation can be found in
I haven't much use for gold-plated godliness. Christ
never built a church, or asked for a vacation on full pay,
—never. He indulged in no political harangues—never
told his parishioners how to vote—never posed as a professional
Prohibitionist. He didn't try to reform the fallen
women of Jerusalem by turning them over to the police,
à la Parkhurst. Although gladiatorial shows were common
in his country—and that without gloves—he didn't go
raging up and down the earth like some of our Texas
dominies, demanding that these awful crimes against
civilization should cease. There is no record of his
engineering a boycott against business men who dissented from his
doctrine. I think he could have read a copy of the ICONOCLAST
with far more patience than some of his successors.
Human or divine, he was the grandest man that ever
graced the mighty tide of time. His was a labor of love,
instead of for lucre. The groves were his temples, the
mountain-side his pulpit, the desert his sacristy and:
Jordan his baptismal font.
. . .
Then there's the unconscious Gall of the pious parrot who is quite sure that the only highway to the heavenly
Just imagine that dear Lord, who so loved sinners that he died to save them from death eternal, looking over heaven's holy battlements and observing a miserable mortal plunging downward to his doom, leaving behind him a streak of fire like a falling star, his face distorted with fear, his every hair erect and singing like a jewsharp. He asks St. Peter:
"Who's that?"
"Oh," says the man on the door, "that's old John Smith."
The Lord goes over to the office of the Recording Angel and turns the leaves of the great ledger. He finds the name, "John Smith, No. 11,027," and on the credit page these entries: "He was fearless as Cæsar, generous as Macænas, tender as Guatama and true to his friends as the stars to their appointed courses. He was a knight of nature's nobility, a lord in the aristocracy of intellect, courtier at home and a king abroad. On the debit page he reads: "Went fishing on Sunday. There was a miscue on his baptism. He knew a pretty woman from an ancient painting, a jack-pot from a prayer-book, and when smitten on one cheek he made the smacker think he'd been smuck by a cyclone." Good-bye, John!
It may be that the monarch of the majestic universe marches around after every inconsequential little mortal, note-book in hand, giving him a white mark when he prays for the neighbor who poisons his dog, or tells his wife the truth regardless of consequences; a black one when he bets his money on the wrong horse or sits down on the sidewalk and tries to swipe the front gate as it goes sailing by; but I doubt it. If I could make the sun, moon and stars in
. . .
Why should we quarrel about our faiths and declare that this is right and that is wrong, when all religions are, and must of necessity ever be, fundamentally one and the same —the worship of a superior power, the great
. . .
Man's cool assumption that the Almighty made him as his "masterpiece" should be marked Exhibit A in the mighty aggregation of Gall. That after millions of years experience in the creation business—after building the archangels and the devil; after making the man in the moon and performing other wondrous miracles, the straddling six-foot biped who wears a spike-tail coat and plug-hat, a silk surcingle and sooner tie; who parts his name on the side and his hair in the middle; who sucks a cane and simpers like a school-girl struggling with her first compliment; who takes it for granted that he knows it all, when his whole life—including his birth, marriage and death—is a piece of ridiculous guess-work; who insists that he has a soul to save, yet labors with might and main to lose it; protests that there's a better land beyond the grave, yet moves heaven and earth to keep from going to it so long as he can help it—the assumption, I say, that this was the best the Creator could do, is prima facie evidence of a plentitude of Gall of the purest ray serene.
The calm assurance of man that the earth and all it contains were made for his especial benefit; that woman was
Masterpiece indeed! Why, God made man, and, finding that he couldn't take care of himself, made woman to take care of him—and she proposes to discharge her heaven-ordained duty or know the reason why. Tennyson says that, "as the husband is the wife is"; but even Tennyson didn't know it quite all. When wives take their hubbies for measures of morality, marriage will become an enthusiastic failure and Satan be loosed for a little season. We acknowledge woman's superiority by demanding that she be better than we could if we would, or would be if we could.
We are fond of alluding to woman as "the weaker vessel"; but she can break the best of us if given an opportunity. Pope calls man the "great lord of all things"—but Pope never got married. We rule with a rod of iron the creatures of the earth and air and sea; we hurl our withering defi in the face of Kings and brave presidential lightning; we found empires and straddle the perilous political issue, then surrender unconditionally to a little bundle of dimples and deviltry, sunshine and extravagance. No man ever followed freedom's flag for patriotism (and a pension) with half the enthusiasm that he will trail the red, white and blue that constitute the banner of female beauty. The monarch's fetters cannot curtail our haughty freedom, nor nature's majestic forces confine us to this little lump of clay; we tread the ocean's
But you will say that I have wandered from my text— have followed the ladies off and got lost. Well, it's not the first time it's happened. But really, I'm not so inconsistent as I may seem; for if the gentler sex exceeds us in goodness it likewise surpasses us in Gall. Perhaps the most colossal exhibit of polite and elegant audacity this world can boast is furnished by that female who has made a marriage of convenience; has wedded money instead of a man,—practically put her charms up at auction for the highest bidder—yet who poses as a paragon of purity; gathers up her silken skirts—the price of her legalized shame—lest they come in contact with the calico gown of some poor girl who has loved, not wisely, but too well.
Marriage is the most sacred institution ever established
on earth, making the father, mother and child a veritable
Holy Trinity; but it is rapidly degenerating into an
unclean Humbug, in which Greed is God and Gall is recognized
high-priest. We now consider our fortunes rather
than our affections, acquire a husband or wife much as we
would a parrot or a poodle, and get rid of them with about
as little compunction. Cupid now feathers his arrows
from the wings of the gold eagle and shoots at the stomach
instead of the heart. Love without law makes angels
blush; but law without love crimson even the brazen brow
of infamy.
. . .
But the fact that so many selfish, soulless marriages are made is not altogether woman's fault. Our ridiculous social code is calculated to crush all sentiment and sweetness
Every daughter of Eve dreams of an ideal,—of a man tender and true, who will fill her life with love's own melody; his word her law, his home her heaven, his honor her glory and his tomb her grave. And some day, from these castles in the clouds he comes—these day-dreams, golden as the dawn, become the halo of a mortal man, to whom her heart turns as the helianthus to the sun. At last the god of her idolatry doth walk the earth; but she must stand afar,—must not, by word or act, betray the holy passion that's consuming her, lest "that monster custom of habits devil," doth brand her bold and bad. Love ofttimes begets love, as the steel strikes fire from the cold flint, and a word from her might bring him to her feet; but she must stand with dumb lips and assumed indifference and see him drift out of her life, leaving it desolate
No; I wouldn't give woman the ballot—not in a thousand
years. I want no petticoats in politics—no she-senators
or female presidents; but I'd do better by woman; I'd
repeal that ridiculous social law—survival of female
slavery—which compels her to wait to be wooed. I'd put
a hundred leap-years in every century, give woman the
right to do half the courting—to find a man to her liking
and capture him if she could. Talk about reforms! Why,
the bachelors would simply have to become Benedicts or
take to the brush, and there'd be no old maids outside the
dime museums. But I was speaking of Gall.
. . .
Gall is usually unadulterated impudence; but sometimes it is irremediably idiocy. When you find a man pluming himself on his ancestors you can safely set it down that he's got the disease in its latter form, and got it bad. I always feel sorry for a man who's got nothing to be proud of but a dead gran'daddy, for it appears to be a law of nature that there shall be but one great man to a tribe— that the lightning of genius shall not twice strike the same family tree. I suppose that Cleveland and Jim Corbett, Luther and Mrs. Lease, Homer and J. S. Hogg had parents and gran'parents; but we don't hear much about 'em. And while the ancestors of the truly great are usually lost in the obscurity of the cornfield or cotton-patch, their children seldom succeed in setting the world
We have in this country three aristocracies: The aristocracy of intellect, founded by the Almighty; the aristocracy of money, founded by Mammon, and the aristocracy of family, founded by fools. The aristocracy of brains differs from those of birth and boodle as a star differs from a jack-o'-lantern, as the music of the spheres from the bray of a burro, as a woman's first love from the stale affection hashed up for a fourth husband.
To the aristocracy of money belong many worthy men; but why should the spirit of mortal be proud? The founder of one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of American families skinned beeves and made weinerwurst. The calling was an honest and useful one. His sausages were said to be excellent, and at a skin game he was exceptionally hard to beat; but his descendants positively decline to put a calf's head regardant and a cleaver rampant on their coat-of-arms. A relative much addicted to the genealogical habit once assured me that he could trace our family back 600 years just as easy as following the path to the drugstore in a Prohibition town. I was delighted to hear it, to learn that I too had ancestors—that some of them were actually on the earth before I was born. While he was tracing I was figuring. I found that in 600 years there should be 20 generations—if everybody did his duty—and that in 20 generations a man has 2,093,056 ancestors! Just think of it! Why, if he had gone back 600 years further he might have discovered that I was a lineal descendant of Adam, perhaps distantly related to
. . .
There are various grades of Gall, but perhaps the superlative brand is that which leads a man to look down with lofty scorn upon those of his fellow mortals who have tripped on Life's rugged pathway and plunged into a shoreless sea of shame. I am no apologist for crime— I would not cover its naked hideousness with the Arachne— robe of sentiment; but I do believe that many a social outcast, many a branded criminal, will get as sweet a harp in the great hereafter as those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. It is easy enough to say grace over a good square meal, to be honest on a fat income, to praise God when full of pie; but just wait till you get the same razzle-dazzle the devil dished up for Job and see how your halle-hallelujahs hold out before exalting your horn. Victory does not always proclaim the hero nor virtue the saint. It were easy enough to sail with wind and tide to float over fair seas, mid purple isles of spice; but the captain who loses his ship mid tempests dire, mid wreck and wrath, may be a better sailor and a braver than the master who rides safe to port with rigging all intact and every ensign flying. With
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,"
. . .
Half the alleged honesty of this world is but Gall, and must be particularly offensive to the Almighty. We have oodles of men in every community who are legally honest, but morally rotten. Legal honesty is the brand usually proclaimed as "the best policy." Only fools risk the penitentiary to fill their purse. The smart rogue is ever "honest within the law"—infamous in strict accord with the criminal code.
Dives may attire himself in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day, while Lazarus lies at his door for the dogs to lick, vainly craving the crumbs that fall from the millionaire's table, and still be legally honest, even a church member in good standing; but his loyalty to legal forms will avail him but little when he finds his coat-tails afire and no water within forty miles.
The girl who flirts with a featherless young gosling till he doesn't know whether he's floating in a sea of champagne to the sound of celestial music, sliding down a greased rainbow or riding on the ridge-pole of the aurora borealis, then tells him that she can only be a kind of Christmas-present, opera-ticket sister to him; who steals his unripe affections and allows 'em to get frost-bitten— carries him into the empyrean of puppy-love, only to drop
The man who preaches Prohibition in public and pays court to a gallon jug of corn-juice in private; who damns the saloon at home and sits up with it all night abroad, may not transcend the law of the land, but if his Gall should burst the very buzzards would break their necks trying to get out of the country.
The druggist who charges a poor dunderhead a dollar for filling a prescription that calls in Latin for a spoonful of salt and an ounce of water, may do no violence to the criminal code, but he plays ducks and drakes with the moral law.
The little tin-horn attorney, whose specialties are divorce cases and libel suits; who stirs up good-for-naughts to sue publishers for $10,000 damages to 10-cent reputations; who's as ready to shield Vice from the sword of Justice as to defend Virtue from stupid violence; who's ever for sale to the highest bidder and keeps eloquence on tap for whosoever cares to buy; who would rob the orphan of his patrimony on a technicality or brand the Virgin Mary as a bawd to shield a black-mailer—well, he cannot be put into the penitentiary, more's the pity! but it's some satisfaction to believe that, if in all the great universe of God there is a hell where fiends lie howling, the most sulphurous section is reserved for the infamous shyster—that if he cannot be debarred from the courts of earth he'll get the bounce from those of heaven.
The woman who inveigles some poor fool—perhaps old enough to be her father—into calling her his tootsie-
The man who sues a fellow-citizen for alienating his
wife's affections, instead of striking his trail with a bell-mouthed blunderbuss and a muzzle-loading bulldog; who
asks the court to put a silver lining in the cloud of infamy
that hangs over his home; who tries to make capital of his
shame and heal with golden guineas the hurt that honor
feels—well, he too may be a law-abiding citizen; but ten
thousand such souls, if separated from their Gall, might
play hide-and-seek on the surface of a copper cent for a
hundred years and never find each other.
. . .
Dignity is but a peculiar manifestation of Gall. It is the stock in trade of fools. If Almighty God ever put up great dignity and superior intellect in the same package it must have got misplaced. They are opposing elements, as antagonistic as the doctrines of infinite love and infant damnation. Knowledge makes men humble; true genius is ever modest. The donkey is popularly supposed to be the most stupid animal extant—excepting the dude. He's also the most dignified—since the extinction of the dodo.
When I see a little man strut forth in the face of heaven
like a turkey-cock on dress parade; forgotten aeons behind
him, blank time before him, his birth a mystery, his death
a leap in the dark; when I see him pose on the grave of
forgotten races and puff himself up with pomposity like
the frog in the fable; when I see him sprinkled with the
dust of fallen dynasties and erecting new altars upon the
site of forgotten fanes, yet staggering about under a load
of dignity that would spring the knee-joints of an archangel,
I don't wonder that the Lord once decided to drown
the whole layout like a litter of blind puppies.
. . .
A lecture on Gall were woefully incomplete without some reference to the press, that "archimedean lever" and "molder of public opinion." The average newspaper posing as a "public educator" is a specimen of Gall that cannot be properly analyzed in one evening. Men do not establish newspapers for the express purpose of reforming the world, but rather to print what a large number of people in a particular community want to read and are willing to pay for. A newspaper is simply a mirror in which the community sees itself, not as it should be, but as it actually is. It is not the mother, but the daughter of public opinion. The printing press is a mighty phonograph that
Speaking of prize-fights reminds me that a governor who, after winking at a hundred brutal slugging matches, puts his state to the expense of a legislative session to prevent a pair of gladiators pounding each other with soft gloves, is not suffering for lack of Gall; that those pious souls who never suspected that pugilism was an insult to our civilization until they got a good opportunity to make a grandstand play, then whereased and resoluted themselves black in the face anent its brutality, should be presented with a medal of pure brass. Politics is said to make strange bed-fellows, but I scarce expected to see a shoe-
Gall? Why, Geo. Clark presumes to give Bismarck
pointers and congress advice. Nobody knows so well how
to manage a husband as an old maid. A bachelor can give
the father of a village pointers on the training of boys.
Our Northern neighbors know exactly how to deal with
the nigger. The man who would starve but for the industry
of his wife feels competent to manage the finances of
the country. People who couldn't be trusted to wean a
calf, tell us all about the Creator of the Cosmos. Sam
Jones wants to debate with Bob Ingersoll, and every forks-of-the-creek economist takes a hard fall out of Henry
George. The A.P.A. agitators prate loudly of freedom of
conscience and insist on disfranchising the Catholics. We
boast of religious liberty, then enact iron-clad Sunday laws
that compel Jew and pagan to conform to our creed or go
to prison. The prohibs. want to confine the whole world to
cold water because their leaders haven't sufficient stamina
to stay sober. Men who fail to make a living at honest
labor insist on entering the public service. Political
parties charge up to each other the adverse decrees of
Providence. Atheists deny the existence of God because he
dosn't{ic} move in their set, while ministers assume that a
criticism of themselves is an insult to the Creator.
. . .
But to detain you longer were to give a practical illustration of my text. I will be told that Gall is a necessary evil; that a certain amount of audacity, of native impudence, is necessary to success. I deny it. Fame and wealth and power constitute our ideal of success—folly born of falsehood. Only the useful are successful. Father Damien was the grandest success of the century; Alexander
Success? A Gould must give up his gold at the grave, the sovereign surrender his sceptre, the very gods are in time forgotten—are swallowed up in the voiceless, viewless past, hidden by the shadows of the centuries. Why should men strive for fame, that feather in the cap of fools, when nations and peoples perish like the flowers and are forgotten— when even continents fade from the great world's face and the ocean's bed becomes the mountain's brow. Why strive for power, that passes like the perfume of the dawn, and leaves prince and pauper peers in death? Why should man, made in the mortal image of immortal God, become the subservient slave of Greed and barter all of time for a handful of yellow dross to cast upon the threshold of eternity? "Poor and content is rich," and rich enough. With a roof to shelter those his heart holds dear, and table furnished forth with frugal fare; with manhood's dauntless courage and woman's deathless love, the peasant in his lowly cot may be richer far than the prince in his imperial hall.
Success? I would rather be a fox and steal fat geese than a miserly millionaire and prey upon the misfortunes of my fellows. I would rather be a doodle-bug burrowing in the dust than a plotting politician, trying to inflate a second-term gubernatorial boom with the fetid breath of a foul hypocrisy. I would rather be a peddler of hot peanuts than a President who gives to bond-grabbers and boodlers privilege to despoil the pantries of the poor. I
BLUE AND GRAY.
AN ADDRESS TO THE OLD VETERANS.
[The following is a summary of Mr. Brann's address to the United American Veterans, San Antonio, Feb. 22, 1894.]
IT occurs to me that the time is not an appropriate one for lengthy speeches. This is a love-feast, and I have noticed that when people are much in love they are little inclined to talk. Perhaps I have been called upon because I'm a professional peacemaker, an expert harmony promoter. Were I not as meek as Moses and patient as Job I certainly would weary in well-doing—become discouraged and give o'er the attempt to inaugurate an era of universal
I can no more imagine a man loving only the north or south half of his country than I can imagine him loving only the right or left side of his wife. If I had to love my country on the instalment plan I'd move out of it. The man who is really a patriot loves his country in a lump. There's room in his heart for every acre of its sunny soil, its every hill upon which the morning breaks, its every vale that cradles the evening shadows, its every stream that laughs back the image of the sun.
When a man feels that way you can safely trust him with an office—and most of us are perfectly willing to be trusted.
As an American citizen I am proud of every man, of whatever section, who, by the nobility of his nature or the majesty of his intellect, has added one jot or tittle to the fame of his fair land, has increased the credit of our common country, has contributed new power to the car of human progress. They are my countrymen, friends and brethren. Are you of the North? Then I claim with you a joint interest in your entire galaxy of intellectual gods.
I have watched the progress of the United American Veterans' Association with uncommon interest, because it is distinctively a national organization, in which shriveled sectionalism and party prejudice find no place. Its corner-stone is American manhood, its object fraternity, its principles broad as the continent upon which falls the shadow of our flag. Do you know what that association means? —had you thought of its significance? It means that when brave men sheathe the sword the quarrel's done. It means that peace hath its triumphs no less than war. The world's annals furnish forth no parallel to that association whose guests we are to-night. Men have fought ere this and patched up a peace; but where, in all the cycles of human history, have they waged war more relentless than did Rome and Carthage, then, without a murmur, accepted the arbitrament of the sword and swung into line, shoulder to shoulder, a band of brothers, one flag, one country, one destiny and that the highest goal of human endeavor?
My attention has been especially attracted to this association because it is a practical illustration of what I have so often urged in print: That the pitiful sectional prejudices which we see here and there coming to the surface both north and south; that the petty hatreds, which appear to transform some hearts into bitter little pools in which Justice perishes and divine Reason is quite overthrown,
In commingling thus in a common brotherhood, those who followed the fortunes of the confederacy until human fortitude could no further go, and those who, with the sword's keen point, held every gleaming star in Old Glory's field of blue, are furnishing a commendable example to all our countrymen, to all humanity. It is an echo, nay, an incarnation of those words of Grant, the grandest that ever fell from victorious warrior's lips: "Let us have peace." The battlefield was sown long since with kindlier seed than dragon's teeth, has blossomed and borne the fruits of Life where Death reigned paramount. The flowers of our Southern fields are no longer dyed with the blood of the contending brave, but drip with heaven's own dews; the sullen battery has gone silent on our purple hills and the crash of steel resounds no more amid our pleasant valleys. No longer the Northern child waits and watches for the soldier sire whose lips have felt the touch of God's own hand; no longer the Southern woman wanders with bursting heart amid the wreck and wraith of the fierce simoon, brushing the battle grime from cold brows, seeking among the mangled dead for all that life held dear. The curse has passed: "Let us have peace."
The civil war was a national necessity. It was the fiery furnace in which Almighty God welded the discordant elements of the New World into one homogeneous people. For generations the Puritan hated the Cavalier, and the latter gave back scorn for scorn and added compound interest. This mutual dislike was a rank, infectious weed that first took root across the sea and ripened into that revolution which sent Charles the First to the block and invested Cromwell with more than regal power. Some of
I rejoice to see the veterans setting the example of reconciliation, for they, more than all others, have most to forgive and forget. I am doubly gratified that the good work should have begun in Texas, which has such cause to entertain the kindliest feeling toward every section of our common country, for each and all contributed to her past glory and present greatness. Among those who cast their lot in Texas when every step was a challenge to destiny and every hour was darkened by a danger; who faced unflinchingly the trials of frontier life and carved out an independent republic with the sword, were men from every State of the American union. One instance will suffice (though scores might be cited) to illustrate the cosmopolitan character of that band of heroes who made the early history of Texas one of the noblest cantos in the mighty Anglo-Saxon epic. The New Orleans Grays was the first military company to come from the States to the aid of the struggling Texans. It got its first baptism of fire in this city, being a part of that band of 300 Spartans who followed Old Ben Milam to attack General Cos and his 1,500 veterans. From the roster of the Grays I learn that the company numbered but sixty-four men, yet represented sixteen sovereign States and six foreign countries! Think of it! Twenty-five came from north of the Ohio, twenty-four from the Southern States, fourteen across far seas to fight for Texas liberty, while one brave lad came from God knows where, but he got there just the same! General Cos never inquired where Milam's men were born. He knew where his own were dying, decided that San Antonio had been overrated as a health resort and took to the chaparral.
As most of those daring spirits who flocked hither to fight for Texas remained, and ever since a steady human tide has poured in from all parts of the Union, and every country of Western Europe, we have become a mixed people, scarce daring to throw a rock in any direction lest we hit our relatives. And the cosmopolitan character of our people—the fact that the Puritan and the Cavalier have blended here as nowhere else—will be found a powerful factor in the attainment of a glorious future.
It is particularly appropriate that the Blue and the Gray should unite in observing the day that marks the birth of Washington, that soldier-statesman who marshalled our fathers under one flag and led them forth to the defense of human liberty. Whatever may have since mis-chanced, the trials and the triumphs of the Revolution are our common heritage. As the Greeks of old, divided among themselves, united to face a foreign foe, so did the American, North and South, unite beneath the banner of Washington and hurl down the gage of battle to Britain's mighty power, and no historian has yet presumed to say which was the better soldier. Washington belongs to no section. He was truly an American, pre-eminently a patriot. The nobility of his character was his very own; the dazzling splendor of his undying fame is the brightest jewel in Columbia's crown of glory, for it was born of the dauntless valor and nurtured with the priceless blood of a people whom kings could not conquer nor sophists deceive.
A husband and wife, long estranged, met at the grave of their firstborn, the child of their youthful strength. Their strife had been bitter, their love had turned to hate, and they elected to tread life's path apart. They stood, one on either side, and looked coldly upon each other. Then they looked down upon the little mound that held the
This day the North and the South kneel at the grave of Washington, their best beloved. The estrangement is forgotten, the bitterness of the years passes like an uneasy dream, they reach their hands each to the other across the tomb, and the benediction of God falls upon a re-united people.
HUMBUGS AND HUMBUGGERY.
THE GREAT AMERICAN PRODUCT
SATAN is supposed to have been the original Humbug; but he's a back number now—must feel dreadfully antiquated and useless among so many modern improvements.
That the American people love to be humbugged long since passed into proverb. Humbuggery may be called our national vice, our besetting sin. Like liberty, it appears to be in the very air we breathe, and we take to it as naturally as we go into politics. Our entire social system has become saturated with it. It is the main-spring of many acts we loudly praise, the lode-star of men we apotheosize, is oftimes the warp and woof even of the mantle of charity, which, like a well-filled purse—or a tariff compromise—covers a multitude of sins.
There are various kinds and classes of Humbugs; but
I am sometimes inclined to the view that humbuggery is a disease, and that some doctor will yet discover a gold-cure for it—will demonstrate that the bad habit is due to microbes that get into a man's mind and make trouble trying to turn around, or to bacilli that bore holes in his moral character and let his honesty leak out; for the medical fraternity has gravely informed us that kleptomania (sneak-thievery by eminently respectable people) and dipsomania (sottishness by the social salt of the earth), are simply diseases that should be treated with pills and powders instead of with penitentiaries and whipping-posts. Now if a man will steal a saw-mill and go back after the site simply because his pericardium is out of plumb or his liver has gone into politics; will nurse a juicy old jag until it develops into a combined museum and menagerie, because his circulation has slipped an eccentric or his stomach got out of its natural orbit, I submit, in all seriousness that he might be physically incapacitated for telling the truth by an insidous attack on his veracity by the dreadful falsehood fungi, and that the best way to restore his moral equilibrium—to remove him from the category of chronic Humbugs—would be to fumigate him.
The Lord once attempted to check the Humbug habit by striking liars dead; but soon saw that such a plan would prove more fatal than a secnod flood—that there wouldn't be even a Noah's Ark picnic of us left—and reluctantly relinquished it. Science has not yet succeeded in mastering the disease; but just give it time and it will save the world yet—will find a medical name for every human frailty; will be able to tell, by looking at a man's tongue, whether he's coming down with the mug-wump
The very best of people have a touch of the complaint
—"the trail of the serpent is over us all." Even our
young ladies are said to be, to a certain extent, Humbugs.
I have been told that many of them wear patent complexions,
"boughten" bangs, and pad out scrawny forms until
they appear voluptuous Junos, and thereby deceive and
ensnare, bedazzle and beguile the unsuspecting sons of
men. I have been told that many of them who are soft-voiced angels before marriage can give a rusty buzz-saw
cards and spades and beat it blind after they have
succeeded in landing the confiding sucker. But perhaps such
tales are only the bitter complainings of miserable
Benedicts who have been soundly beaten at their own game of
humbuggery. Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of
chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players
to lose. Too often, after much sugar-coated deception,
and many premeditated misdeals on both sides, one draws
a blank and the other a booby. After patient angling in
the matrimonial pool, one lands a stingaree and the other
a bull-head. One expects to capture a demi-god who hits
the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless
angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh
of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a
slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on
tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like
aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum
who comes home from the lodge at 2 g. m. and whoops
and howls for her to come down and help him hunt for
the keyhole, and is then snailed in by a policeman before
she can frame a curtain lecture or find the rolling pin.
. . .
False Pride is the father of humbuggery, the parent of
While proclaiming love of democracy we purhcase peers for our daughters. While boasting liberty of speech we assail like demons those who presume to dissent from our opinions in either religion or politics.
History is full of Humbugs and liberty itself oftimes but a gilded lie. No man is really free who is dependent upon the good will of others for employment. There can be no true liberty where Prejudice usurps the throne of Reason. Men are slaves instead of sovereigns when they suffer themselves to be held in iron thrall by political dogma or religious creed, blindly accepting the ipse dixit of things instead of exercising to the utmost the intelligence which God had given them.
I have said that charity itself is ofttimes a Humbug. It is so when it becomes the handmaid of ostentation instead of the true almoner of the heart; or when men give to the poor only because it is "lending to the Lord," then expect compound interest.
That philanthropist is a fraud who, after piling up a colossal fortune at the expense of the common people, leaves it to found an educational or eleemosynary institute when death calls him across the dark river. Knowing that Charon's boat is purely a passenger packet—that carries no freight, however precious—he drops his dollars with a sigh; but determined to reap some benefit from boodle his itching hand can no longer hold, he decrees that it be used to found some charitable fake to prevent himself being forgotten—some pitiful institute where a few
Many of the martyrs whose memory we revere, of the saints we apotheosize, of the heroes we enshrine in history, are one-third fraud and two-thirds fake. The man who ran grow in grace while his pet corn's in chancery, or lose an election without spilling his moral character; who can wait an hour for his dinner without walking all over the nerves of his wife, or crawl out of bed in the middle of his first nap and rustle till the cold, gray dawn with a brace of colicky kids, without broadly insinuating that he was a copper-riveted, nickel-plated, automatic, double-cylinder idiot to ever get married, is a greater hero than he that taketh a city.
The place to take the true measure of a man is not the market-place or the amen-corner, not the forum or the field, but at his fireside. There he lays aside his mask and you may learn whether he's imp or angel, king or cur, hero or Humbug. I care not what the world says of him —whether it crown him with bays or pelt him with bad eggs; I care never a copper what his reputation or religion may be: If his babes dread his home-coming and his better-half swallows her heart every time she has to ask him for a five dollar bill, he's a fraud of the first water, even tho' he prays night and morn till he's black in the face and howls hallelujah till he shakes the eternal hills. But if his children rush to the front gate to greet him,
The hero is not he that strives with the world for witness—who seeks the bubble fame at the cannon's brazen lip and risks his life that he may live forever.
To bear with becoming grace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; to find our heaven in others' happiness, and for their sake to sacrifice and suffer wrongs that might be righted with a thread of steel; to live an honest life in a land where Truth doth feed on crusts while Falsehood fattens at Lucullean feasts, requires more true manhood, more moral stamina, more unadulterated sand than to follow a flag into the very jaws of hell or die for the faith in the auto da fe. Heroes? Why unurn the ashes
"God could not be everywhere," says the proverb, "therefore he made mothers."
Let the heroes of history have their due; still I imagine
the world would have been much the same had Alexander
died of cholera-infantum or grown up a harmless dude.
I don't think the earth unbalanced would from its orbit
fly had Caesar been drowned in the Rubicon, or Cleveland
never been born. I imagine that Greece would have humbled
the Persian pride had there been no Thermopylae,
that Rome would have ruled the world had Scaevola's good
right hand not hissed in the Tuscan fire. It is even
possible that civilization would have stood the shocks had
"Lanky Bob" and "Gentleman Jim" met on Texas soil
—that the second-term boom of "our heroic young Christian
governor" would have lost no gas. One catfish does
not make a creek nor one hero a nation. The waves do
not make the sea, but the sea furnishes forth the waves.
Leonidas were lost to history but for the three hundred
nameless braves who backed his bluff. Had there been but
one Cromwell Charles the First would have kept his head.
In Washington's deathless splendor gleams the glory of
forgotten millions, and the history of Bonaparte is written
with blood of the unknown brave.
. . .
Humbuggery, fraud, deception everywhere.
And all the men and women merely players"—
Momus the major-domo, the millions en masque. Even friendship is becoming a screaming farce, intended to promote the social fortune or fill the purse. We fawn that thrift may follow; are prodigal of sweet words because they cost nothing and swell the sails of many a rich argosy; but weigh every penny we put forth, and carefully calculate the chance of gain or loss. It's heads I win, tails you lose, and when we cannot play it on that principle we promptly jump the game.
That's Shakespare.
That's nonsense. Reputation is but the ephemeral dew on character's everlasting gold; but he that steals a human heart and tramples it beneath his brutal heel; he that feigns a friendship he does not feel; he that fawns upon his fellows and hugs them hard and after scandals them, is the foulest fraud in all this land of fakes, the most hideous Humbug in all hell's unclean hierarchy.
I am sometimes tempted to believe that the only friendship that will stand fire is that of a yellow dog for a pauper negro. Strike a friend for a small loan and his affection grows suddenly cold; lose your fortune and your sweetheart sends you word that she will be a sister to you; your brother will betray you for boodle, your father fights you for a foolish flag and your heirs-at-law will dance
. . .
But the Humbug for whom I have least use is the man
who assiduously damns the Rum Demon; makes tearful
temperance talks; ostentatiously votes the prohibition
ticket; groans like a sick calf hit by a battering-ram
whenever he sees a young man come out of a barroom; then
sneaks up a dirty alley, crawls thro' the side door of a
second-class saloon; calls for the cheapest whiskey in the
shop, runs the glass over trying to get the worth of his
money; pours it down at a gulp and scoots in a hurry lest
somebody ask him to treat; who has a chronic toothache
—in the stomach—which nothing but drugstore whiskey
will relieve; who keeps a jug of dollar-a-gallon bug-juice
hid under his bed and sneaks to it like a thieving hyena
digging up a dead nigger—rents his property for saloon
purposes, then piously prays the Lord to protect the
young from temptation.
. . .
But perhaps the prince of Humbugs, the incarnation of fraud, the apotheosis of audacity, is the street-corner politician. He towers above his fellow fakes like Saul above his brethren. I have been time and again instructed in the most intricate problems of public polity—questions that have perplexed the wisest statesmen of the world— by men who had never read a single standard work on political economy, and who could not tell to save their souls—granting that they possess such perishable property— whether Adam Smith wrote the "Wealth of Nations" or the Lord's Prayer; who were not familiar with the constitution of their own state, or the face of a receipted wash-bill; who could scarce tell a sloop from a ship, a bill of lading from a sight draft; a hydraulic ram from
And these are the fellows who frame our political platforms and dominate our elections—whose boundless cupidity, colossal ignorance and supernal gall bring about starvation in a land of plenty—divide the most industrious and progressive people that ever graced the footstool of Almighty God into bloated millionaires and groveling mendicants.
Even patriotism has become a Humbug—has been supplanted by partisanship, and now all are for party and none are for the state. On July 4 we shout for the old flag, and all the rest of the year we clamor for an appropriation. The man who is kicked by a nightmare while dreaming of the draft demands a pension and every burning patriot wants an office. Twice, yea, thrice within the memory of men now living, America has been on the very verge of an industrial revolution, a Reign of Terror; yet we continue to hang our second Providence on a job-lot of political Jacksnipes who carry their patriotism in their pockets and their sense under their surcingles. While we who feed three times a day; who have a cocktail every morning and a clean shirt occasionally, are boasting of our allegiance to "the grand old party," or prating of the principles of Jeffersonian democracy—are blindly trailing in the wake of some partisan band-wagon like a brindle calf
Once after holding forth at some length on Humbugs, a physician said to me:
"Ah-er—you-ah—didn't mention the medical profession."
"No," I replied, "the power of language hath its limits."
The medical, mark you, is the noblest of all professions. It contains many learned and able men who devote their lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he transparent as glass and lit up by electricity. There are doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell whether a patient had a case of cholera-morbus or was afflicted with an incurable itch for office—who have acquired their medical information from the almanacs and could not distinguish between a bunion and a stone-bruise or find the joints in a string of sausage with a search-warrant.
I have noticed that when the doctors took to writing their prescriptions in Latin it quickly became a dead language—that when I take the poet's advice and throw physic to the dogs, their numbers rapidly decrease. But the doctors are jolly good fellows. Let it be recorded to their eternal credit, that, whatever may be their faults, precious few of them will practice in their own families. I have often wished that I was a doctor of medicine instead of a doctor of divinity. There are several fellows for whom I'd like to prescribe. There's a strong affinity between
I have been frequently asked why, in lecturing on Humbugs, I skip the lawyers. There are some subjects to which a lecturer must lead up gradually; so I discuss the doctors in my discourse on Humbugs and save the attorneys for my talk on Gall.
Even our boasted educational system is half a Humbug. Too many of our professors fondly imagine that when they have crammed the dry formulas of half a dozen sciences into a small head—perhaps designed by the Deity to furnish the directive wisdom for a scavengar cart; when they have taught a two-legged moon-calf to glibly read in certain dead languages things it can in nowise comprehend —patiently pumped into it a whole congeries of things that defy its mental digestive apparatus—that it is actually educated, if not enlightened. And perhaps it is— after the manner of the trick mule or the pig that plays cards. The attempt of Gulliver scientists to calcine ice into gunpowder were not more ridiculous than trying to transform a fool into a philosopher by the alchemy of education. If it be a waste of lather to shave an ass, what must it be to educate an idiot? True education consist in the acquirement of useful information; yet I have seen college graduates—even men sporting professional sheep-skins—who couldn't tell whether Gladstone's an English statesman or an Irish policeman. They knew all about Greek roots but couldn't tell a carrot from a parsnip. They could decipher a cuneiform inscription, perhaps, and state whether a pebble belonged to the paleozoic or some other period; but couldn't tell a subpoena from a search-warrant, a box of vermicelli from a bundle of fishworms.
We pore over books too much and reflect too little; depend too much on others, too little upon ourselves. We
Neither the public nor any other school system has ever produced one really great man. Those who occupy the dais-throne among the immortals, contended single-handed with the darkness of ignorance and the devil of dogmatism. Columbus scorned the schools and discovered a world. Napoleon revolutionized the science of war and himself master of Europe. Bismarck mocked at precedent, and United Germany stood forth a giant. Jesus of Nazareth ignored the learning of the Levites, and around the world arose the fanes of a new faith.
Reading is the nurse of culture; reflection the mother of genius. Our great religions were born in the desert. Our grandest philosophers budded and burgeoned in the wilderness. The noblest poesy that ever swept the human harpsichord was born in the brain of a beggar, came bubbling from the heart of the blind; and when all the magi of the Medes, and all the great philosophers of Greece had failed to furnish forth a jurisprudence just to all, semi-barbarous Rome laid down those laws by which, even from the grave of her glory, she still rules the majestic world.
I have been accused of being the enemy of education; but then I have been accused of almost everything; so one count more or less in the indictment doesn't matter. I am not opposed to education that is useful; but why should we pay people to fill the empty heads of fools with soap and sawdust?
Perhaps the most aggressive fraud that infects the earth is the professional atheist—the man whose chief mental stock-in-trade consists of doubt and denial of revealed religion, so-called.
About the time a youngster first feels an irresisitible impulse to make a fool of himself wherever a female smiles upon him; when he's reached that critical stage in life's journey when he imagines that he knows much more than his father, he began to doubt the religion of his mother; shrewdly asks his Sunday-school teacher who made God; demonstrates by the aid of natural history diagrams, that a large whale could in nowise swallow a small prophet— that if he did succeed in relegating him to its internal economy it were impossible for him to slosh around for three days and nights in the gastric juices without becoming much the worse for wear. He attempts to rip religion up by the roots and reform the world while you wait, but soon learns that he's got a government contract on his hands, —that the man who can drive the Deity out of the hearts and homes of this land can make a fortune turning artesian wells inside out and peddling them for telegraph poles. You can't do it, son. Religion is the backbone of the body social. Sometimes it's unbending as a boarding-house biscuit, and sometimes it's a bad quality of gutta-percha; but we couldn't get far without it. Most youths have to pass thro' a period of doubt and denial—catch the infidel humor just as they do the measles and mumps, but they eventually learn that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
There was never an atheistical book written; there was never an infidel argument penned that touched the core of any religion, Christian or Pagan. Bibles, Korans, Zandevestas—all sacred books—are but the feeble efforts of finite man to interpret the infinite; to speak forth the
An atheist once solemnly assured me that he couldn't possibly believe anything which he couldn't prove; but when I asked him what led him to take such a lively interest in the welfare of his wife's children, he became almost as angy as a Calvinist whose confession of faith had been called in question. Figure up how many things you can prove of those you believe, and you'll find that you have got to do a credit business or go into intellectual bankruptcy.
But the man who denies the existence of the Deity because he cannot comprehend his origin, is even less a Humbug than the one who knows all about him—the pitiful dogmatizer who devotes his life to the defense of some poor little guess-work interpretation of the mysterious plans of him who brings forth Mazaroth in his season and guides Arcturus with his sons.
Dogmatism is the fecund mother of doubt, a manacle on the human mind, a brake on the golden wheel of Christian progress; and every dogmatizer, whether in science, politics or religion, is consciously or unconsciously, a Humbug. You know, do you? Know what? And who told you? Why, the man in whose mighty intellect was stored
. . .
The average human head; like an egg—or a crock of clabber—absorbs the flavor of its surroundings. It is chiefly a question of environment whether we grow up Catholics or Protestants, Republicans or Democrats, Populists or political nondescripts. And yet we adhere to opinions we have inherited with all the tenacity of a dog to a bone or an American miser to a ten dollar bill. We assume that our faith political and our creed religious are founded upon our reason, when they were really made for us by social conditions over which we had little control. We even succeed in humbugging ourselves into the belief that we are the people and that wisdom will die with us, when the fact is that our head is loaded with out-of-date lumber—our every idea moulded or modified by barbarians who were in the bone-yard before Methusaleh was born.
Society is a vast organism in which the individual is but an atom. It is a montrous tree—a veritable Ygdrasyl— penetrating both the region of darkness and the realm of light. Whatever its peculiarities—whether monarchical or republican, Christian or Pagan—it is a goodly tree
Yet we boast of progess! Progress whither? From the savage who knew nothing to the dude who know less. From the barbarian who'd plundered your baggage, to the civilized Shylock who'd steal the very earth from under your feet. From that state wherein American sovereigns however poor, considered themselves the equals of kings and the superiors of princes, to that moral degradation and national decay in which they purchase the scurvy spawn of petty dukes as husband for our daughters. By the splendor of God, I'd rather be a naked Fiji Islander, dancing about a broiled missionary with a bull-ring in my
. . .
Some of my critics have kindly suggested that the Lord made a great mistake in not consulting me when he made the world; thereby ascertaining just how I would like to have it. I was not consulted anent the creation of the Cosmos, and perhaps it is just as well for them that I wasn't—they might not be here. Too many forget that while the Lord made the world, the devil has been busy ever since putting on the finishing touches. Why, he began on the first woman before she was a week old, and he has been playing schoolmaster to her sons ever since. I confess to a sneaking respect for Satan, for he is pre-eminently a success in his chosen profession. He's playing a desperate game against ominpotent power and is more than holding his own. He sat into the game with a cash capital of one snake; now he's got half the globe grabbed and an option on the other half.
I have been called a defender of the devil; but I hope that won't prejudice the ladies against me, as it was a woman that discovered him. I confess to the belief that Satan is a gentleman compared with some of his very humble servants. We are told that he is a fallen angel who found pride a stumbling-block—that he tripped over it and plunged down to infinite despair; but tho' he fell further than a pigeon could fly in a week, the world is full of frauds who could not climb up to his level in a month; who can no more claim kinship with him in their cussedness than a thieving hyena can say to the royal beast of Bengal, "Thou art my brother." They are not fallen angels; they are risen vermin. They didn't come down from thrones in heaven like falling stars; they
. . .
But speaking of the devil—were any of you ever in love? I'm talking about the sure-enough, old-fashioned complaint that makes a man miss meals and lose sleep, write spring poetry and misplace his appetite for plug tobacco; not of the new-fangled varioloid that yields to matrimonial treatment. There's a great deal of sugar-coated hum-buggery about this thing we call love. It reminds me of the sulphur and molasses my careful Presbyterian parents used to pour into me in the gentle springtime. I don't remember why they gave it to me; but it was probably because they didn't want it themselves. Perhaps they thought foreordination hadn't done much for me, and they had best get me used to sulphur gradually. I remember, however, that, like the average case of matrimony, it usually contained a good deal more sulphur than syrup.
Matches, we are told, are made in heaven; and I think it likely, for Satan himself is said to have originated there.
Most people marry without really knowing whether they're in love or not—mistake the gregarious habit for the mystic fire of Hymen's torch, the pangs of a bad digestion for the barbed arrows from the love-god's bow.
But when a couple's really got what ailed Romeo and Juliet they're in no more doubt about it than was the man after he sat down on the circular saw to see if it was running and found it the sole proprietor of a South American revolution. They don't have to send their feelings to a chemist for analysis and classification, nor take an invoice of their affections to see if any have got away. Love is really a very serious thing. Like sea-sickness, everybody laughs at it but those who have got it. When Cupid lets slip a sure-enough shaft it goes thro' a fellow's heart like a Kansas cyclone thro' a colored camp-meeting, and all the powers of hades can never head it off.
Love is the most sacred word ever framed by celestial lips. It's the law of life, the harmony of heaven, the breath of which the universe was born, the divine essence increate of the ever-living God.
But love is like all other sweet things—unless you get
the very best brand it sours awful easy.
. . .
Of all the pitiful Humbugs beneath high heaven commend me to those intellectual doodle-bugs who have become Dame Fashion's devotees and devote all their intellectuality to the science of dress—to the art of being miserable à la mode. Thousands are today sailing about in silk hats who are guiltless of undershirts; bedecked with diamonds while in debt to the butcher for the meat on their bones. Families that can scarce afford calico flaunt Parisian finery, keep costly carriages while there's a chronic hiatus in their cupboards, go hungry to bed six nights in the week that on the seventh they may spread a brave feast for fashionable fools. God have mercy on all such muttonheads. They are the natural breeders of good-for-naughts, for in such an atmosphere children grow up mentally dwarfed and morally debased.
Fashionable mothers commit their children to the care of serving-maids while they sail out to soirees and receptions—put their babes on a bottle while they swing round the social circle. No wonder their sons grow up sapheads, as destitute of backbone as a banana, as deficient in moral force as a firkin of fish. Think of an infant Napoleon nursing a rubber nozzle, of rearing a Brutus on patent baby food, of bringing a Hannibal up by hand! You can't do it.
Why, if I had a woman of that kind to wife—a fashionable butterfly whose heart was in her finery and her feathers; who neglected her home to train with a lot of intellectual tomtits whose glory was small-talk; who saved her sweetest smiles for society and her ill-temper for the family altar—I say were I tied to that kind of a female,
There are some Humbugs, however, who merit our respect
if not our reverence—men who are infinitely better
than they would have the world believe. As the purest
pearl is encased in an unseemly shell, so, too, is many a
god-like soul enshrined in a breast of seeming adamant.
Many a man swears because he's too proud to weep, hides
a quivering soul behind the cynic's sneer, fronts the world
like a savage beast at bay while his heart's a fathomless
lake of tears. Tennyson tells us of a monstrous figure of
complete steel and armed cap-a-pie, that guarded a castle
gate, and by its awful name and warlike mien affrighted
the fearful souls of men. But one day a dauntless knight
unhorsed it and clove thro' the massy helm, when forth
from the wreck there came not a demon armed with the
seythe of death, but a beardless boy scarce old enough to
break a pointless lance upon the village green. So, too,
when with the sword Excalibur of human sympathy you
shear down thro' the helm and harness of some rough-spoken man who seems to hate all human kind, you find
the soul of a woman and the heart of a little child.
. . .
Even our religion is ofttimes a Humbug, else why is it that the good Christian woman—who says her prayer as regularly as she looks under the bed for burglars—says to the caller whom she cordially detests, "I am delighted to see you;" when she's wondering why the meddlesome old gadabout don't stay at home when she's not wanted elsewhere? Why is it that when a good brother puts a five-dollar bill in the contribution box he flashes it up so all may see the figures, but when he drops a nickel in the slot to get a little grace he lets not his right hand know what his left hand doeth? Why is it that when you strike a
Too many people presume that they are full of the grace of God when they're only bilious; that they are pious because they dislike to see other people enjoy themselves; that they are Christians because they conform to certain creeds, just as many men imagine themselves honest because they obey the laws of the land—for the purpose of keeping out of the penitentiary. They put up long prayers on Sunday; that's piety. They bamboozle a green gosling out of his birthright on Monday; that's business. They have one face with which to confront the Lord and another with which to beguile their brethren. They even acquire two voices—a brisk business accent and a Sunday whine that would make a cub wolf climb a tree. I am always suspicious of a man's piety when it makes him look as tho' he had cut a throat or scuttled a ship and was praying for a commutation of the death sentence. I could never understand why a man who can read his title clear to mansions in the skies—who holds a lien on a corner lot in the New Jerusalem—should allow that fact to hurt him.
I have great respect for true religion; but for the brand of holiness that's put on with the Sunday shirt—that makes a man cry ahmen with unction, but doesn't prevent him selling 5 and 10-cent cigars out of the same box, oleo-margarine and creamery butter out of the same bucket, benzine and bourbon whiskey out of the same barrel; which makes long prayers on Sunday and gives short
That religion which sits up o'nights to agonize because
a few naked niggers in equatorial Africa never heard Eve's
snake story, how Job scratched himself with a broken pie-plate or the hog happened to be so full of the spirit of
hades; that robs childhood of its pennies to send prayer-books to people whose redemption should begin with a bath,
while in our own country every town from Cattaraugus to
Kalamazoo—every city from the Arctic ocean to the Austral
sea—is overrun with heathen who know naught of the
grace of God or the mystery of a square meal; who prowl
in the very shadow of our temples of justice, build their
lairs in proximity to our public schools and within sound
of the collect of our churches, is an arrant Humbug, a
crime against man, an offense to God, a curse to the
world.
. . .
People frequently say to me, "Brann, your attacks are too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less pizen." Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter. Persuasion is well enough is you're acourting—or in the hands of the vigilantes; but turning it loose on the average fraud were too much like a tenderfoot trying to move a string of freight steers with moral suasion. He takes up his whip, gently snaps it as tho' he feared it were loaded, and talks to his cattle like a Boston philanthropist to a
. . .
Oh, it's possible that you may disagree with me on some minor points of doctrine. That's your blessed privilege and I wouldn't deprive you of it if I had the power. A pompous old fellow once called at the office of my religious monthly to inform me that I was radically wrong on every possible public question. He seemed to think that I had committed an unpardonable crime in daring to differ from him. I asked him to be seated and whistled for the devil—the printer's devil, the only kind we keep in the office of the ICONOCLAST. I told him to procure for me a six-shooter, a sledge hammer and a boat. My visitor became greatly alarmed.
"Wh-what are you g-going to d-do?"
"Do?" I replied. "I'm going to shoot the printers, smash the press and throw the type into the river. What in the name of the great Sanhedrim, is the use o' me printing a paper if I can't please you?"
Mr. Pomposity subsided somewhat, and I proceeded to talk United States to him.
"You say I'm wrong. Perhaps I am; but how in Halifax"—
He was one of those egotistical mental microbes or intellectual animalculae who imagine that a man must be in the wrong if he disagrees with him. And the woods are so full of that class of fellows that the fool-killer has become discouraged and jumped his job.
Those who chance to think alike get together and form a political party, a society or a sect and take it for granted that they've got all the wisdom of the world grabbed—that beyond their little Rhode Island of intellect are only gibbering idiots and plotting knaves. When a man fears to subject his faith to the crucible of controversy; when he declines to submit his ideas to the ballistae and battering-rams of cold logic, you can safely set it down that he's either a hopeless cabbage-head or a hypocritical Humbug—that he's a fool or a fraud, is full of buncombe or bile.
It is a difference of opinion that keeps the world from going to the dogs. Independence of thought, doubt of accepted dogmas, the spirit of inquiry—the desire to know —is the mighty lever that has lifted man so far above the brute level that he has begun to claim kinship with the Creator. Yet we say to our brother, "Thou fool," because he takes issue with us on the tariff, or the proper time in the moon to plant post-holes—even insist on sending people to perdition who cannot see "the plan of salvation" thro' our little sectarian telescope.
Men of a mind flock together just like so many gabbling geese, or other foolish fowl of a feather, each group waddling in the wake of some flat-headed old gander,
. . .
I am sometimes inclined to believe that Life itself is a Humbug—that the man who makes the best of it is the one who escaped being born. We know not whence we came or what for, whither we go or what we'll do when we get there. True it is that life is not altogether labor and lees—there's some skittles and beer; but the most of us get more shadow than shunshine, more cholera-morbus than cream. Man born of woman is of few days and full of politics. The moment he hits the globe he starts for the grave, and his only visible reward for long days of labor and nights of pain is an epitaph he can't read and a tombstone he don't want. In the first of the Seven Ages of man he's licked, in the last he's neglected, and in all the others he's a fair mark for the shafts of falsehood. If he don't marry his first love, he's forever miserable, and if he does, he wishes he were dead. By the time he has learned wisdom he leaves the world, is hustled into a hell of fire or an orthodox heaven, and for forty years I've been trying to figure out which of these appalling evils to avoid.
I suspect that the orthodox heaven and hell, of which we hear so much, are Humbugs. I should know something of those interesting ultimates—be qualified to speak ex cathedra—for a doctor of divinity recently denounced me as a child of the devil. In that case you behold in me a prince imperial, heir-apparent to the throne of Pluto, the potential master of more than a moiety of mankind. But don't tell anybody that I've got a title, that I belong to the oldest nobility, or all the Goulderbilts will be trying to buy me.
I promise you that when I come into my kingdom I'll devise a worse punishment than physical pain. A soul is an immaterial thing. You cannot flay it with aspic's fangs nor kerosene it and set it on fire. A material hell for immaterial mind were too ridiculous for a progressive
The orthodox heaven is a pageant of barbaric splendor, of gaudy tinsel and flaming gold to dazzle the eyes of infants. It is a land of lotus-eaters, where ambition's star is blotted from the firmament and the wild ecstacy of passion beats no longer in the blood; an Oriental heaven, a Paradise for tired people eternal dolce far niente for niggers and yaller dogs. No Celt or Saxon with aspiring mind, with swelling muscles and heart that flames with the fierce joy of strong endeavor, that thrills with the sweetness of sacrifice for others' sake that swells with the mad glory of triumph in the forum or the field, could have conceived such a futile farce.
Give me a land whose skies are lead and soil is sand, yet
everlasting life with those I love; give me a lodge in some
vast wilderness hallowed by children's laughter; give me
a cave in the mountain crag to house those dearest to my
heart; give me a tent on the far frontier, where, by the
lambent light of their mother's eyes, I may watch my
children grow in grace and the truth of God, and I'll build
a heaven grander, nobler, sweeter than was ever dreamed
of by the gross materialists of bygone days.
. . .
Life is a Humbug only because we make it so. We are frauds because we are fools. This is a beautiful, a glorious world, fit habitation for sons of the Most High God. It
. . .
Perhaps it is unnecessary to state that I'm not posing as a saint. I may eventually become an angel—of some sort—but I'll wear no wings. We are accustomed to think of seraphs flying from heaven to earth, flitting from star to star—irrespective of the fact that feathers are useless where there's no atmosphere. An angel working his wings to propel himself through a vacuum were as ridiculous as a disembodied spirit riding a bike down a rainbow.
I do not expect to reform all Humbugs, to banish all Fakes, to exterminate all Folly. If the world should get too good, I might have to hunt another home. I can understand every crime in the calendar but the crime of greed, every lust of the flesh but the lust for gain, every sin that ever damned a soul but the sin of selfishness. By all the sacred bugs and beasts of ancient Egypt, I'd rather be a witch's cat—or even a politician—and howl in sympathy
When I think of the three thousand children in the single city of Chicago without rags to shield their nakedness from the keen north wind; of the ten thousand innocents, such as Christ blessed, who died in New York every year of the world for lack of food; of the millions in every country whose cries go up night and day to God's great throne —not for salvation, but for soup; not for the robe of righteousness, but for a second-hand pair of pants—and then contemplate those beside whose hoarded wealth the riches of Lydia's ancient kings were but a beggar's patrimony, praying to Him who reversed the law of nature to feed the poor, I long for the mystic power to coin sentences that sear like sulphur-flames come hot from hell, and weave of words a whip of scorpions to lash the rascals naked through the world.
We humbug our parents, the public, and then, as far as possible, our wives; though the latter are seldom so blind as they seem. The wife who cannot tell when her lord and master is lying—whether he's been sitting up with a sick friend or nursing a Robert-tail flush—well, she must be the newest kind of a "New Woman," with a brain built for bloomers and bike. The New Woman is—she is all right; just the Old Woman in disguise, a paradox and a coat of paint.
Whenever I tackle this subject I'm reminded of a broth of a boy who in days agone drove the team afield on my father's farm. One rare June day, when the sun was slowly sinking in the west, as the novelists say—and I believe
"Sure, now, they didn't do a thing t' me," he said. "An ould bumblebug came a bizzin' an' a buzzin' aluken fer all the wurruld like an' Orangeman wid wings, so I up an' hit him a biff. Thin all the 'rist av the haythen tuk up his foight—an' Oi kem home."
Hit one Humbug and every Fraud and Fake in Christendom is ready for the fray. They attempt to crush their critic with calumny, to defeat him with falsehood. When you hear a fellow railing at the ICONOCLAST, just look through its stock of caps and you'll find one that will fit the knot on the end of his neck.
Truth and only truth is eternal. It was not born and it cannot die. It may be obscured by the clouds of falsehood, or buried in the debris of brutish ignorance, but it can never be destroyed. It exists in every atom, lives in every flower and flames in every star. When the heavens and the earth shall pass away and the universe return to cosmic dust, divine truth will stand unscathed amid the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds.
Falsehood is an amorphous monster, conceived in the brain of knaves and brought forth by the breath of fools. It's a mortal pestilence, a miasmic vapor that passes, like a blast from hell, over the face of the world and is gone forever. It may leave death in its wake and disaster dire; it may place on the brow of purity the brand of the courtesan and cover the hero with the stigma of the coward;
[The following remarks, apropos local politics, were included in Mr. Brann's Lecture on Humbugs, as delivered at the Dallas, Texas Opera House, Oct. 17, 1895.]
A DISCOURSE on political humbugs were incomplete without some reference to the young man whom Texas, in a moment of mental aberration, raised to the chief magistracy. I learn from a sermon recently inflicted on the long-suffering inhabitants of this city, that Son Charles is "our heroic young Christian governor." How he must have changed during the last few months! Shakespeare was probably viewing the Texas politician with prophetic eye when he declared that in the great Drama of Life a man plays many parts. Culberson is the only one, however, who has yet succeeded in playing them all at one and the same time. A man who can run with the hare politically while holding with the hounds personally, is almost too versatile to be virtuous. "Our heroic young Christian governor!" That preacher evidently doesn't know Charles. Or if he does his idea of Christianity is not so altitudinous that he can stand on its apex and keep the flies off the man in the moon. Culberson is a politician who enjoyed excellent health before he entered the public service. He is all things to all men and—"nothing to nobody." He's so slippery that he couldn't stand on the partisan platform to which he owes his political elevation. In the last gubernatorial election pretty much every man
Now I want it distinctly understood that I am not the
apologist of pugilism; I am the apostle of the white-winged Goddess of Peace. I always carry a cruse of oil
in my hip-pocket to cast upon the troubled waters. I have
a pacific effect on all with whom I come in contact.
Children quit crying when they see me coming, women speak
well of their neighbors, men respect each other's political
opinions, preachers engage in silent prayer and the lion
and the lamb lie down together. And that's no lie. But
as between pugilism and hypocrisy I prefer the former.
I would rather see men pound each other for a fat purse
than play the canting Pharisee to promote their political
fortunes.
. . .
Let us look to the record of "our heroic young Christian governor." During the four years he officiated as attorney-general he made no determined effort to enforce the law then in effect prohibiting pugilism. Prizefights were pulled off at Galveston, San Antonio, El Paso and other Texas points after having been duly advertised in the daily press. He was elevated to the chief magistracy of the state, and the slugging matches continued—mills between brawny but unskilled boxers, who relied upon brute strength, and pounded each other to a pumice to
And the ministerial associations were too busy taking up collections to send Bibles and blankets, salvation and missionary soup to the pagans of the antipodes to pay much attention to these small-fry pugs. They let our blessed "Texas civilization" take care of itself, while they agonized over a job lot of lazy negroes whose souls ain't worth a sou-markee in blocks of five; who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates were wide open, but once inside would steal the eternal throne if it wasn't spiked down. No Epworth Leaguers or Christian Endeavorers whereased, resoluted or perorated until their tongues were worn to a frazzle, trying to "preserve the honor of our ger-rate and gal-orious State by suppressing feather-pillow pugilism." Why? I don't know; do you? Of course some carping critics declare it was because the world was not watching these brutal slugging matches between youths to pugilistic fortune and fame unknown; that it was because the professionally pious had no opportunity to make a grandstand play and get their names in print— no chance to pose in the eye of the universe as the conservators of our fin de siècle civilization. But then these Doubting Thomases are ever ready to make a mock of the righteous and put cockleburrs in the back hair of the godly. I dislike to criticize "the cloth." I am prone to believe that the preachers always do the best they know how; still, I must confess that I am unable to muster up much admiration for the brass band variety of "religion" or the tutti-frutti trademark of "respectability."
Had the belief not been bred in my bones that there
Now don't get the idea that I am antagonistic to the preachers. Far from it. I am something of a minister myself; and we who have been called to labor in the Lord's vineyard—at so much per annum—must stand together. I admire the ministers in a general way—and "whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." I feel that it is my duty to pull them tenderly but firmly back by the little alpaca coat-tails whenever they have made mistakes —to reprove them in all gentleness when I find them fanning themselves with their ears for the amusement of the mob.
But to return to "our heroic young Christian governor." When it was first proposed to bring the great fistic carnival and a million dollars to Dallas, Gov. Culberson had nothing to say. It was popularly supposed that he understood the law and would respect it. The impression got abroad that he felt rather friendly to the enterprise because it would put 500 scudi in the depleted coffers of the public and turn a great deal of ready money loose within the confines of Texas. He may not have been directly responsible for this popular idea, but he certainly did nothing to discourage it. Arrangements were perfected, important contracts entered into, a vast amount of money
. . .
But the wrath of "our heroic young Christian governor" did not abate with the enactment of a law forbidding prizefights—such a law as he had flagrantly failed to enforce. The promoters of what the court of criminal appeals declared a lawful enterprise were arrested and dragged before the grand jury of Travis county, which appears to have taken the entire earth under its protectorate. Failing an opportunity to prosecute them for an offense against the laws of the land, the powers at Austin proceeded to prosecute them on the hypothesis that they were conspiring to wreck the universe.
And what was their offense? They had "conspired" to pay $500 into the public treasury and bring a million more to Dallas. They had "conspired" to bring several thousand respectable business men to Texas from all parts of the Union and furnished employment at good wages for hundreds of hungry men.
While I do not much admire pugilism as a profession, I must say that the promoters of the enterprise conducted themselves much better than did "our heroic young Christian governor," and those alleged saints who proposed to shoulder their little shotguns and help him override the courts—to butcher their brethren in cold blood to prevent an encounter between brawny athletes armed with pillows;
. . .
Curious, this modern civilization of which we hear so
much. During the palmy days of Roman grandeur and
Grecian glory, their athletes fought with the terrible
cestus to win a crown of oak or laurel; but then Rome never
produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser.
The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a
Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a
Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber-whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the
sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a
large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the
approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching
the æsthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers
of Greece and the god-like senators of Rome! Think of
Perry J. Lewis pulling the Conscript Fathers over the
coals—of Senator Bowser pointing out civic duties to
Socrates; of Attorney-General Crane giving Julius Cæsar
a piece of his mind; of Charley Culberson turning up his
little two-for-a-nickel nose at the Olympian games! But
perhaps that is not the game "our heroic young Christian
governor" is most addicted to.
. . .
Prizefighting—even with pillows, for points—is bad enough, no doubt; but there are worse things. Making the Texas people pay for an abortive little second-term gubernatorial boom is one of them, and canting hypocrisy by sensation-seeking preachers is another. Can the church and state find no grander work than camping on the trail
. . .
But to recur for a moment to the fistic carnival: Have any of you been able to determine how the Dallas News stood in regard to that great enterprise? Sometimes, when I want to go on an intellectual debauch, I read the News— or Ayer's Almanac. It appears to entertain but two opinions, namely, that Uncle Sam should black the boots of John Bull, and that Grover Cleveland carries the brains of the world in his beegum. This brace of abortive ideas constitute its confession of faith—the only things of which it feels absolutely certain. When it tackles anything else it wobbles in and it wobbles out like an unhappy married man trying to find his way home at five o'clock in the morning. A great diplomat once declared that language was made to conceal thought; but the Dallas News employs it to disguise an intellectual vacuum. It can use more language to say less than any other publication on earth. In this particular it is like Napoleon—it stands wrapt in the solitude of its own originality.
The eating of thirty quail in thirty days was once a popular test of human endurance; but I can propose a more crucial one—one that will attract more people to Dallas than would even the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. Let the people of this city offer a fat purse for the man who can read the editorial page of the Dallas News thirty days in succession without degenerating into a driveling idiot. It is a mental impossibility, of course; but perhaps my good friend "Dorry" can be persuaded to attempt it—to hoist himself with his own petard. No man born
The News is troubled with a chronic case of Anglo-mania. Whenever Columbia has a controversy of any kind with Britannia, the News hastens to ally itself with the Britisher; but in matters concerning the welfare of the city of Dallas it has little to say. It did manifest a slight inclination to take up for the fistic enterprise— fearfully slid one foot to terra-firma; but when the success of the carnival became doubtful the News hastened to resume its time-honored position astride the fence, and it has hung there ever since—like a foul dish-rag across a wire clothes line. It's the greatest journalistic 'Fraid on the face of the earth. It doesn't dare to risk the opinion that water is wet. But probably it isn't sure of it. It is just as well, however, for if it did know, it couldn't leak the information in less than a column. The editorial page of the Dallas News reminds me of the Desert of Sahara after a simoon—it is such an awful waste of space. If I had a five-year-old boy who couldn't say more in fifteen minutes than the Dallas News has said in the last dozen years, I'd refuse to father him.
One of the greatest frauds of modern times is the policy-playing newspaper. The "Archimedean lever," as applied to daily journalism is a fake of the first magnitude. There is not a morning newspaper in Texas possessing sufficient political influence to elect a pound-master. In fact, their support will damn any politician eternally, for the people wisely conclude that what the alleged "great dailies" support is a pretty good thing for them to oppose. Hogg would not have reached the governorship but for the blatant opposition of the morning press. Its
Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels;
Let him fearlessly face, 'twill leave him alone;
But 'twill fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone."
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
OR THE LADIES AND THE APOSTLE.
[A synopsis of Mr. Brann's address to the Ladies' Reading Club, San Antonio, Texas.]
I HAVE been asked to lecture to the ladies of the Reading Club, but shall do nothing of the kind. That were to admit that you require improvement, and I would not have you better than you are. We would have to clip your wings or keep you in a cage. Besides, I never saw a woman whom I could teach anything—she already knew it. I have been going to school to the ladies all my life. My mother carried me through the kindergarten, lady preceptors through the intermediate grade, and my wife is patiently rounding off my education. When I graduate I expect to go direct to heaven. As near as I can figure it out, the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem will consist of
No lecture then, but an informal talk, without text or subject—a vagrant ramble through such fields as tempt us. If we should find fruit, or even flowers, let us be thankful. If we encounter only briars, it will not be the first half hour we have wasted.
The fact that you are members of the Reading Club indicates that you are seeking knowledge. I trust that you are finding it,—that every stroke of the intellectual pick turns up a golden nugget; but do not make the mistake of supposing that all the wisdom of the world is bound in calf. You may know all that was ever penned in papyrus or graved on stone, written on tablets of clay or preserved in print and still be ignorant—not even know how to manage a husband. As a rule people read without proper discrimination, and those who are most careful often go furthest astray. I once knew a woman with no more music in her soul than a rat-tail file, who spent three laborious years learning to play the piano, then closed the instrument and never touched it again. One day I said to her:
"Mary, what good did all the patient practice do you?"
"Lot's o' good," she replied; "I used to be dreadfully ashamed to have people know that I couldn't play." And a great deal of laborious reading is undertaken on the same principle that Mary learned to play the piano—and is of just as little benefit. Many people are with books as with medicine—imagine that whatever is hardest to get down will do them the most good. No mortal man—and, as the preacher correctly stated, the men embrace the women— ever yet got any permanent good out of a book unless he
With loads of learned lumber in his head."
Do not interpret too literally. What I warn you against
is the habit, all too common, of imagining ourselves rich
because we have counted the golden hoard of others. One
may admire the Medicean Venus without becoming a sculptor,
or have Plato at his fingers' ends and ever remain a
fool. Were I an artist I would study with attention the
works of all the great masters; but when I put my hand to
my own task I would turn my back upon them all and my
face to nature. My work would then be a "creation,"
not a copy. Did I aspire to be truly learned I would
study the words of the world's wisest—then dig for wisdom
on my own behoof, I would thus become a philosopher
instead of a parrot.
. . .
I have been frequently called an iconoclast, and bad as the title is popularly supposed to be, I trust it is not al
A great many good people have taken the trouble to inform me that I am a pessimist. Perhaps so; but I am not worrying much about it. A pessimist is a person somewhat difficult to define. The fool who smokes in a powder-
It is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person afflicted with an incurable case of mulligrubs—one whom nothing in all earth or heaven or hades pleases; one who usually deserves nothing, yet grumbles if he gets it. But we should not forget that every reform this world has known; every effort that has lifted man another notch above the brute level; every star in our flag of freedom; every line and letter in our constitution of human liberty; every gem of knowledge that gleams in the great world's intellectual crown of glory; every triumph of science and religion, philosophy and mechanics was the work of pessimists, so-called—of men who were not satisfied with the world's condition and set determinedly to work to better it. They strove with their full strength against those conditions panegyrized and poetized by the smirking optimists of their time, and thereby incurred the enmity of pedants and self-sufficient purists,—were denounced and denied, belittled and belied.
But, says the enthusiastic optimist, things are not what they used to be. When a college of cardinals gave Galileo to the gaoler for maintaining that "the world do move;" when Christ cast forth the money manipulators and purged the porches of the temple of the disreputable dove dealers; when Luther raised the standard of revolt and the Puritan packed his grip there were cruel wrongs to right. But look
Progressing we certainly are, but the devil has adapted the Fabian tactics and is leading us a wild dance through unprofitable deserts. While we have been shattering ethnic images he has been building new idols. While we have been dragging the Phalaris Bull from its pedestal the Golden Calf of ancient Israel has reached maturity and maternity and its progeny is now worshipped in a thousand pantheons.
Everywhere the false and the true, the good and the evil, the lambent light of heaven and the sulphurous shadows of hell meet and blend. Nowhere, yet everywhere, floats the white veil and flaming ensign of the modern Mokanna— and we stand wrangling about the proper cut of a collar; debating whether the Gadarenes, whose swine the outcast devils drowned, were Jews or Gentiles; dogmatizing anent the proper form of baptism; doubting with which hand we should tip the hat; wondering if Joseph's coat were a sack or a swallow-tail—ninety-and-nine out of every hundred
What does the all-seeing sun that has for so many centuries glared down upon this wretched farce-tragedy, think of it all? And yet man boasts that he is the mortal image of immortal God! It was for this trifling, straddling biped, intent only upon getting his goose-head above the foolish geese, that the Regent of the universe suffered ignominy and death. I sometimes think that had the Almighty cast the human horoscope he would never have given Noah a hint to go in out of the wet.
I am no perfectionist. I do not build the spasmodic sob nor spill the scalding tear because all men are not Sir Galahads in quest of the Holy Grail, and all women angels with two pair o' reversible wings and the aurora borealis for a hat-band. I might get lonesome in a world like that. I do not expect to see religion without cant, wealth without want, and virtue without vice; but I do hope to see the human race devote itself to grander aims than following the fashions and camping on the trail of the cart-wheel dollar. I want to see more homes and fewer hovels, more men and fewer dudes. I want to see more women with the moral courage to brave the odium of being old maids rather than the pitiful weakness to become loveless wives. I want to see more mothers who would rather be queens of their homes than the favorites of fashionable circles; women who would rather have the love of their husbands than the insolent admiration of the whole he-world—women who do not know too much at 15 and too little at 50.
I want to see more men who are not a constant reminder of a monkey ancestry. Some philosopher once remarked:
. . .
The dream may be Utopian. I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has become ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because we no longer live in caves and fight naked with the wild beasts of the forest for our food we are away up at the head of the procession, with Greek civilization distanced and all the other times and half times nowhere.
Human development, like the earth, the sun, the stars— like all things brought into being by the breath of Omnipotent God—travels ever in a circle. Savagery and ignorance, barbarism and ambition, civilization and sybaritism, dudeism and intellectual decay; then once more savagery and ignorance proclaim the complete circle,—that we have traveled from nadir to zenith and from zenith to nadir— when once again we begin with painful steps and slow to repace the path which carries us to the very verge of godhood
If the Car of Progress travels in a circle—and history says it does; if neither science, philosophy nor religion can deflect it from its seemingly predestined path—and the condition of their birth-place proclaims their failure so to do—where is hope? Must the human race forever go the weary round of birth and death, like Buddhist souls wandering through all that's fair and foul, until it finds Nirvana in the destruction of the world? Not so, for there is a hope—a blessed hope—that like.
. . .
When I reflect that until within comparatively recent times women were slaves, I don't much wonder that the old civilizations went to the dogs—that the millennium is not yet due. Trying to make a civilization that would stick without the help of woman were like building a cock-tail
Such, ladies, is my dream of the future. You see, with true mannish instinct, I throw the work of the world's salvation upon the women. I don't know, however, but it's retributive justice. If you got us fired out of the first Paradise it is your duty to find another and put us in possession. But really with all due respect to Sacred Writ, I could never accept that serpent story without considerable salt. My observation—and experience—has been that men are much more addicted to the snake habit than are women. I gather from Genesis that after the Edenic reptile had done the damage it was condemned to go upon its belly all the days of its life. That indicates that it was not only a good conversationalist, but had legs. Now I submit it to you in all seriousness: which member of the original family was most likely to see such a serpent as that? I think I should have given Adam the Keeley cure, then crossexamined him a little before laying the
Woman is the only thing extant, if Genesis be believed, that was not evolved from a solid slug of nothing. That I presume, is why she amounts to something. Nothing was good enough raw material of which to make the father of mankind; but when the Almighty came to create our common mother he required something more substantial than a hole in the atmosphere.
I always bank on a boy who has a good mother, regardless of what the old man may be. The fathers of philosophers have sometimes been fools, but their mothers never. A wise man may beget dudes or a good man practical politicians; but it's his misfortune, not his fault. The good Lord expects no man to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. I have yet to hear of a single man who became distinguished in any line of human endeavor according to his father the credit for his greatness. Character is moulded at the mother's knee, and in the light of her loving eyes is born that ambition which buoys man up in a sea of
The Nineteenth century marks the culmination of an era of human triumphs, a brilliant coruscation of victories over the cohorts of Ignorance and Prejudice; but its crown of imperishable glory is the recognition that woman was created to be man's companion and co-laborer instead of his chattel, his joint sovereign of the earth instead of his slave. Fronting the dawn of a grander day, her hand ungyved and her brain unfettered; with broader opportunities for usefulness and boasting a nobler beauty than during the dark and dreary centuries that lie behind her like a hideous dream—such is the woman of the Nineteenth century, and upon the shapely shoulders of this new Pallas I hang my second Providence, to her loving hands I commit the destiny of the race, to her true heart the salvation of the world.
BRANN'S REPLY TO SLATTERY.
[Ex-Priest Joseph Slattery, in his lecture at Waco, Texas, in the interest of the A.P.A., bitterly denounced the ICONOCLAST. During the Slattery lecture Brann rose, pointed his finger at Slattery and said: "You lie and you know it, and I refuse to listen to you." Brann then turned on his heel and walked out. He then hired the same opera house at his own expense and replied to Slattery.]
Fellow Americans: The ICONOCLAST does not please ex-Priest Slattery, "Baptist minister in good standing," and I am not surprised. Its mission, as its name implies, is to expose Frauds and abolish Fakes, to make unrelenting war upon Humbugs and Hypocrites, hence it is not remarkable
Slattery would have you believe that I'm a rank atheist who's trying to rip religion up by the roots and bang it across a barbed wire fence in close companionship with the hides of Protestant preachers. This charge has been hurled at me by various sectarian papers and malicious ministers; but not one iota of evidence has ever been submitted. It is simply a bald assertion born of sanctified malice, a brazen libel, similar to that which charges the Pope with trying to subvert the American government. I defy Slattery and all that unclean brood of moral vultures, assassins of character and thieves of reputation which trail in his wake and applaud his infamies, to produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered disrespectful of any religion, Pagan, Protestant or Catholic. If in the wilds of Central Africa I should find a man bowing down to a dried toad, a stuffed snake or a Slattery, I'd remove my hat as a tribute of respect, not to his judgment, but to his honesty. I have no word of condemnation for any religious faith, however fatuous it may appear to me, that has comforted the dying or consoled the living —that has cast one gleam of supernal sunshine into the dark vale where grope, each beneath his burthen of sorrow, the sons of men. I am not warring upon religious faith, but on falshood; not upon Christ, but on those who disgrace his cause—who mistake bile for benevolence, gall for godliness and chronic laziness for "a call to preach."
Nor have I taken the Pope of Rome under my apostolic protection. The Popes managed to exist for a great many years before I was born, and, despite the assaults of Slattery, will doubtless continue in business at the old
And while being taught my duty as a Protestant, my education as an American citizen was not neglected. I was taught that this was a land of religious liberty, where every man is privileged to worship God in his own way, or ignore him altogether: that it was my duty to insist upon this right, both for myself and for my fellows.
That is why I am the uncompromising enemy of the A.P.A.
Any attempt to debar an American citizen from the honors and emoluments of a public office because of his religious faith, or non-faith, is a flagrant violation of a fundamental principle of this Republic. And no patriot; no man in whose veins there pulses one drop of the blood of the Conscript Fathers, or who would recognize the Goddess of Liberty if he met her in the road; no man imbued with the tolerant spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ will aid or abet such an un-Christian and un-American movement. The A.P.A. is the bastard spawn of Ignorance and Intolerance, was conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity.
There may be some honest men connected with the
movement; but if honest they should get their heads
trepanned to give their brains room to grow. They are as
unable as a mule-eared rabbit to comprehend either the
broad principles upon which this government is grounded,
or its political and religious history. No man—not even
Judas Iscariot Slattery—is to blame for his ignorance;
so we should humbly pray, Father forgive them, they
know not what they do. Nor is the Church of Rome
responsible for the shameless apostate's lack of information.
It did all that it could to transform him from an
ignorant little beggar into an educated gentleman—but
even the Pope cannot make a silk purse of a sow's ear. It
is no fault of the Church of Rome that he's densely ignorant
of the very text-book truths of history; that he knows
nothing of that Reformation of which he talks so glibly;
that he is unable to comprehend the genius of the government
upon which he has conferred his more or less valuable
citizenship. The fault, if fault it be, lies with the
Almighty, who gave him a bad heart and a worse head.
. . .
American Protective Association, eh? That signifies that Uncle Sam is in need of protection. I had hitherto supposed that the gentleman in the highwater pants and star-bespangled cutaway was able to protect himself; but it now appears that unless he crawls under the ægis of the redoubtable Slattery he is—to again borrow from the most popular of all Protestant divines—"a gone sucker." Think of placing Uncle Sam under the protection of a man who is an apostate in religion and a renegade in politics—of an Irishman who apostrophizes the British flag! Think of that kind of a bird presuming to tell the grandsons of Revoltionary soldiers their duties as American citizens.
Slattery assures us that we need protection from the
Slattery would have you believe that our Catholic citizens are simply emissaries of the Pope, to whom they owe allegiance both spiritual and temporal, and that they will, at the first opportunity, subvert American institutions and make this Nation simply a satrapy of the Vatican.
The American Catholic takes his theology from Rome; he takes his politics from the ecumenical council of his party—from the national convention of that partisan organization to which he may chance to belong.
That there can be no "Catholic conspiracy" against the free institutions of this country must be evident to every man of common sense from the simple fact that Catholics are divided among all the political parties— are continually voting against each other. Now I appeal to your judgment—lay aside your religious prejudices for the moment and look at the matter from a non-partisan, non-sectarian standpoint: If our Catholic fellow-citizens be under the thumb of the Pope politically, as the apostate now evangelizing for the A.P.A. would have us believe; and if the Pope desires to make himself temporal ruler of this land, or in any manner direct its affairs, would they not be found voting as a unit—a mighty political machine —instead of being as badly divided on secular questions
Again: If the Pope is plotting against America; and if all manner of crime be considered a virtue when committed by Catholics in furtherance of his ends, as Slattery would have you believe, then it were well to keep a sharp eye on apostate priests. How are we to know that they are not emissaries of the Vatican, commissioned to stir the Protestants up to persecute their brethren in Christ and thereby solidify the Catholic vote? No one, not even Slattery, has accused the Pope of being a fool; and certain it is that the A.P.A. movement, if persisted in, will have the effect of driving the Catholics of this country to political unity in self-defense. Persecution, political ostracism for religious opinion's sake, will infallibly bring about those very conditions which Slattery, Hicks, et al. declare that the Pope desires. The communicants of the Church of Rome will no longer vote as Democrats or Republicans, but as Catholics —and then? With unlimited wealth, and such a political machine at the command of a man so ambitious and unscrupulous as we are asked to believe the Pope to be, the capture of the federal government and the political domination of this country were as easy as lying! The Protestants, divided into a hundred warring factions, many of them farther apart theologically than Episcopalianism and Catholicism, could offer no resistance to such a political machine, and they would receive but cold comfort from the liberal element, which has suffered so long from their petty persecutions.
And I tell you Protestants right here, that if it be the
. . .
According to the story of this self-constituted protector of the American government, he studied Roman Catholic theology for years, then officiated as a priest for eight more before discovering anything immoral in the teachings of the Mother Church, when it suddenly occured to him that it was but a tissue of falsehoods, a veritable cesspool of rottenness. His transformation appears to have been almost as sudden as that of Saul of Tarsus—or that of Judas Iscariot. I have no objection to his leaving the Catholic priesthood—his bishop stopped his pay. Like the servant maid caught pilfering, he "gave notice, with the missus a pintin' at the door." If Slattery believes that the Protestant Through Line runs more comfortable cars to the great hereafter, he's welcome to take his ticket over that route; but I would have thought better of him had he made the change quietly and refrained from assaulting with the vindictiveness of a renegade that church to which he owes his education, such as it is; had he treated the religion of his mother with decency if not with respect.
I thought I had met all manner of men; men hardened in crime—men destitute of even a semblance of shame; but never before did I behold one with the hardihood to stand up before American women and boast that he had incurred a mother's curse. When a man falls so low in the scale of human degradation that his own mother disowns him it were well to watch him. When a creature asks strangers to accept him because his relatives have rejected him; when, for the sake of gain, he snaps like a mangy fice at
From the very foundation of this government the Catholics have been its firm defenders. Their wisdom and eloquence have adorned its councils from the signing of the Declaration of American Independence to this good day, and its every battlefield, from Lexington to the Custer massacre, has been wet with Catholic blood. Nine Roman Catholics signed the Declaration of Independence, and the Roman Catholics of New York contributed so liberally of their blood and treasure to the cause of the new-born Nation that Washington wrote them a letter praising their patriotism. Several Roman Catholics helped frame the Federal Constitution, and the interpretation of that wonderful instrument by a Roman Catholic chief-justice to-day constitutes the fundamental law of the land. Yet Slattery and that ridiculous organization of which he boasts himself a member, would have you believe that the American Catholics would, at a nod from the Pope, ruthlessly trample under foot that flag in whose defense they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor— that they would wreck without remorse and ruin without regret that Nation they helped place on the map of the world. How do you old Confederates, who followed Pat Cleburne, relish having this blatant tramp defame your dead commander? Can you believe, on the unsupported testimony of this mendacious mountebank, that Father Ryan's tribute to the Stars-and-Bars was rank hypocrisy —that the poet-priest was the political tool of a foreign power? Sherman died a Catholic. Fighting Phil Sheridan
Slattery assures us that the number of Irish Catholics on the police force of our great cities is evidence that the Church of Rome is on mischief bent. I am not surprised that an Irish Catholic with a club in his hand should prove rather alarming to Bro. Slattery. But, although he says, "meet a policeman and you'll see the map of Ireland in his face," those same policemen have several times saved his worthless bacon. When he was mobbed in St. Louis for defaming Catholic nuns, the police formed a cordon around his infamous carcass and saved him from a well-merited trouncing at the hands of the slandered women's relatives. Probably the police did not relish the job overmuch, but they had sworn to uphold the laws, and although Slattery insists that a Catholic oath amounts to nothing, they risked their lives in his defense.
We have many nationalities in this country, and each of them, as every observant man well knows, manifests a predilection for some special occupation. Thus the Jews take to trade, the Germans to agriculture, the Norwegians to lumbering, the French to catering and the Irish to politics. Make a Freewill Baptist or a Buddhist of an Irishman and you do not change his nature—he'll turn up at the next political convention just the same. And the man who's too good to take a hand in practical politics; who's too nice to mingle with the horny-handed at the
. . .
It is not my province to defend Roman Catholic theology —I suppose that Slattery said all that could be urged in its behalf before he apostatized. Perhaps the Catholics really believe the Pope infallible; and if they do, it is certainly no worse than for certain Waco Protestants to believe that Slattery's infallible. I noticed that at his lecture last week they cheered every charge he preferred against either the Pope or the "Apostle," and that without asking for an iota of evidence. When I arose at the stag party with which he wound up the intellectual debauch, and questioned his infallibility, the good brethren cried, "Throw him out!" Why did they so unless they believed that to question the supernal wisdom and immaculate truth of aught a Baptist minister might say, were sacrilege —a sin against the Holy Ghost?
Here was I, there fellow citizen of Waco, I had done them no harm; yet when a strolling vagabond, wearing God's livery, and whose forte is the defamation of women, made a statement, which if true, would forever disgrace me in the eyes of the world; when he preferred this charge against me within two blocks of where my babies lay sleeping, they wanted to mob me for branding him then and there as an infamous liar and a cowardly blackguard.
Mark you, I'm no tramp in America. This is the house of my fathers. They helped hew it out of the Virginia wilderness. They helped put Old Glory in the heavens, and to keep it there for more than a hundred years, still it appears that I have no rights in this country which a
Talk to me about the Church of Rome muzzling free speech when the A.P.A. would mob an American citizen for defending his character from the infamous falsehoods of a foreign tramp! "Throw him out!" Why throw him out? I'll tell you: The sanctified buzzards had gone there with appetites sharpened for a mess of carrion, and they were afraid I'd kill their cook. "Throw him out!" But I noticed that those who were splitting their faces as wide as Billy Kersands' were glued to their seats. They wanted somebody else to throw him out. They were anxious to see a gang of three or four hundred sanctified hoodlums trample upon me, but there was not one among the self-constituted protectors of this mighty American Nation with sufficient "sand" to lead the mob. If there were no better Americans than those trailing in the wake of the Rev. Joseph Slattery, like buzzards following a bad smell, I'd take a cornstalk, clean out the whole shooting-match and stock the country with niggers and yaller dogs. If such cattle were sired by Satan, damned by Sycorax and born in hell they would dishonor their parents and disgrace their country.
Slattery insists that Catholics believe thus-and-so, and that no man with such a faith concealed about his person can be a good American citizen. I don't know about that; but I do know that if the Catholics act in strict accordance with their religious creed they are the only people in this country that do so. I've learned that you can't judge a man by his catechism. Slattery assures us that he has discarded the Pope and taken Christ for his immediate guide. The latter commands his followers to pray for those who despitefully use them; but if Slattery did any praying for the "Apostle" during his sojourn in this city he
Had Slattery been truly a Christian, instead of black-guarding me when protected by the presence of ladies, he would have put up a fervent prayer for my immediate conversion to the Baptist faith. But his milk of human kindness had soured—he was short on Christian charity and long on gall.
"Faith, hope and charity," says St. Paul; "and the greatest of these is charity." And he might have added that it's also the scarcest. Perhaps that's what makes it so valuable—the supply is ever equal to the demand.
Speaking of charity reminds me of my experience with the Protestant preachers of San Antonio, some of whom, I understand, are aiding and abetting this A.P.A. movement, "designed to preserve the priceless liberty of free speech." While editor of the morning paper of that city I was in the habit of writing a short sermon for the Sunday edition, for the benefit of those who could not go to
I kept hammering away—preaching to my little congregation of fifteen or twenty thousand readers every Sunday, as I now do to ten times that many a month—until finally the Ministerial Association met, perorated, whereased, resoluted and wound up by practically demanding of the proprietor of the Express that I be either muzzled or fired. And all this time the Catholic priests said never a word—and San Antonio is a Catholic city. But the Baptist ministers were running a sneaking boycott! Yet the Church of Rome is the boa-constrictor that's trying to throttle the American right of free speech!
The Y.M.C.A. invited me to lecture on Humbugs, and that scared the Ministerial Association nearly to death. They thought I was after 'em now sure, so they went to the officials of the Y.M.C.A. and made them cancel the date. And the only Protestant minster in the entire city
Slattery cautions you not to send your children to convent schools, declaring that he "never yet saw a nun who was an educated woman." That statement, standing alone, ought to convince every one blessed with a thinking apparatus that Slattery's a fraud. Some of the best educated women in this world have entered convents. Women upon whose tuition fortunes have been expended are now making convent schools deservedly popular with the intelligent people.
He says ignorance is the correlative of Catholicism, and points to Spain as proof of this startling assertion. There was a time when Spain stood in the very forefront of civilization, in the van of human progress, the arbiter of the world's political destiny,—and Spain was even more Catholic then than it is to-day. Nations and civilizations have their youth, their lusty manhood and their decay, and it were idle to attribute the decline of Spain to Catholicism as the decadence of Greece to Paganism. The
. . .
Slattery was horrified to learn that some of the nuns were inclined to talk about each other. I sincerely trust that he will find none of the Baptist sisters addicted to the same bad habit.
From what I could gather of his discourse,—before I was "put out"—and from the report of his alleged wife's lectures, I infer that this delectable twain impeach the virtue of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods. Malice, like death, loves a shining mark, and there is no hate so venomous as that of the apostate. But before giving credence to such tales, let me ask you: Why should a woman exchange the brilliant parlor for a gloomy cell in which to play the hypocrite? Why should a cultured woman of gentle birth deliberately forego the joys of wife and
Who is it that visits the slums of our great cities ministering to the afflicted, comforting the dying, reclaiming the fallen? When pestilence sweeps over the land and mothers desert their babes and husbands their wives, who is it that presses the cup of cold water to the feverish lip and closes the staring eyes of the deserted dead? Who was it that went upon the Southern battle-fields to minister to the wounded soldiers, followed them to the hospitals and tenderly nursed them back to life? The Roman Catholic sisterhoods, God bless them!
One of those angels of mercy can walk unattended and unharmed through our "Reservation" at midnight. She can visit with impunity the most degraded dive in the White-chapel district. At her coming the ribald song is stilled and the oath dies on the lips of the loafer. Fallen creatures reverently touch the hem of her garments, and men steeped in crime to the very lips involuntarily remove their hats as a tribute to noble womanhood. The very atmosphere seems to grow sweet with her coming and the howl of hell's demons to grow silent. None so low in the barrel-house, the gambling hell or the brothel as to breathe a word against her good name; but when we turn to the Baptist pulpit there we find an inhuman monster clad in God's livery, saying, "Unclean, unclean!" God help a religious denomination that will countenance such an infamous cur!
As a working journalist I have visited all manner of places. I have written up the foulest dives that exist on this continent, and have seen Sisters of Charity enter them unattended. Had one of the inmates dared insult them he would have been torn in pieces. And I have sat
Merciful God! if heaven is filled with such Christians,
send me to hell, with those whose sins are human! Better
everlasting life in a lake of fire than enforced companionship
in Paradise for one hour with the foul harpies that
groaned "awmen" to Slattery's infamous utterances.
God of Israel! to think that those unmanly scabs, those
psalm-singing vultures are Americans and our political
brethren!
. . .
I know little about the private lives of the Catholic priesthood; but this I do know: They were the first to plant the standard of Christian faith in the New World. They were the first to teach the savages something of the blessings of civilization. I do know that those of them who were once Protestants are not making a specialty of defaming the faith of their fathers. I do know that neither hardship nor danger can abate their holy zeal and that hundreds of them have freely given their lives in the service of the Lord. And why should a man devote his body to God and his soul to the devil? I do know that one of them has given us the grandest example of human sacrifice for others' sake that this great world affords. Even Christ prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "If it be possible, let this cup pass from me"; but Father Damien pressed a cup even more bitter to his own lips and drained it to the dregs—died for the sake of suffering mortals a death to which the cross were mercy.
The Protestants admit that they are responsible for the inoculation of the simple Sandwich Islanders with the leprosy; yet when those who fell victims to the foul disease
We are all brave men when the war-drum throbs and the trumpet calls us to battle beneath the eyes of the world, —when, touching elbows with our fellows and clad in all the glorious pomp and circumstance of war we seek the bubble of fame e'en at the cannon's mouth. When the music of the battery breeds murder in the blood, the electric order goes ringing down the line, is answered by the thrilling cheer, the veriest coward drives the spur deep into the foaming flank and plunges, like a thunderbolt,
"Before the missionaries gained control of the islands; leprosy was unknown. But with the introduction of strange races, leprosy established itself and rapidly increased. An entire island was properly devoted to the lepers. No Protestant missionary would venture among them. For this I do not blame them, as, no doubt, I should not have had the courage to go myself. But a noble Catholic priest consecrated his life to the service of the lepers, lived among them, baptized them, educated them, and brought some light and happiness into their wretched lives. Stung by the contrast of his example, the one remaining missionary, a recognized and paid agent of the American Board, spread broadcast the vilest slanders against Father Damien."
So it appears that the world is blessed with two Slatterys.
There are three kinds of liars at large in the land: The harmless Munchausen who romances for amusement, and whose falsehoods do no harm; the Machiavellian liar, whose mendacity bears the stamp of original genius, and the stupid prevaricator, who rechews the fetid vomit of other villains simply because he lacks a fecund brain to breed falsehoods to which he may play the father. And Slattery's a rank specimen of the latter class. When he attempts to branch out for himself he invariably comes to grief. After giving a dreadful account of how Catholics
The apostate priest would have the various Protestant denominations throw down the bars that separate them and mark off their theological bailiwicks "with little beds of flowers." The idea is a good one—and I can but wonder where Slattery stole it. Still I can see no cogent reason for getting all the children together in happy union and leaving their good old mother out in the cold.
Throw down all the bars, and let every division of the Great Army of God, whether wearing the uniform of Buddhist or Baptist, Catholic or Campbellite, Methodist or Mohammedan, move forward, with Faith its sword, Hope its ensign and Charity its shield. Cease this foolish internecine strife, at which angels weep, swing into line as sworn allies and, at the command of the Great Captain, advance your standards on the camp of the common foe. Wage war, not upon each other, but on Poverty, Ignorance and Crime, hell's great triumvirate, until this beautiful world's redeemed and bound in very truth,
THE LOCAL OPTION LUNACY.
[Mr. Brann was billed to lecture at Hillsboro, Texas, on the eve of the local option election. The Antis took possession of the opera house and changed his subject. Following is a synopsis of his address.]
LADIES and Gentlemen: I came here to talk on "Gall," and I find that I must speak on "Prohibition"—a distinction without a difference. I hold in my hand a printed challenge from the Prohib committee to meet Hon. W. K. Homan in joint debate to-night—a challenge issued when they were well aware that I was to lecture here this evening. They felt certain that I would not forego a lecture fee to mix it with them without money and without price; but they didn't know their man. I'm always willing to make some sacrifice to secure the luxury of a red-hot intellectual scrapping match. We proposed to make it a Midshipman Easy duel, a three-cornered fight—Brothers Homan and Benson vs. the "Apostle," but they wiggled in and they wiggled out, they temporized and tergiversated until we saw there wasn't an ounce of fight in the whole Prohibition crew—that, after their flamboyant defi, we couldn't pull 'em into a joint debate with a span of mules and a log-cabin. I last saw Bro. Bill Homan at Hubbard City. He was getting out of town on the train I got in on —after promising that he would remain over and meet me. In his harangue the night before he told his auditors that I'd simply "abuse the church and make ugly faces." Well, I didn't abuse the church on that occasion, nor upon any other, albeit I sometimes make it a trifle uncomfortable for some of its unworthy representatives. I cannot help "making ugly faces." It's my misfortune, not my fault. I was born good and Bro. Bill was born beautiful.
I'm no professional anti-Prohibition spouter, and have been jumped up here without preparation; but it occurs to me that it requires no careful rehearsal of set orations before an amorous looking glass, no studied intermingling of pathos, bathos and blue fire to demolish the Prohibition fallacy. Liberty is ever won by volunteers; the shackles of political and religious slavery are forged by the hands of hirelings. Prohibition cannot withstand the light of logic, the lessons of experience, nor the crucible of the commonest kind of common sense.
Milton tells us that the angel Ithuriel found the devil "squat like a toad," distilling poison in the ear of sleeping Eve; that he touched the varmint with his spear, and forthwith Satan resumed his proper shape and fled shrieking out of Paradise. Prohibition is another evil spirit that is breeding trouble in man's Eden; but when touched by the spear-point of legitimate criticism its disguise falls away, and we see, instead of a harmless toad, a malicious Meddlesome Mattie stirring up strife and bitterness among brethren.
Whenever a man opposes the plans of the Prohibs he is forthwith denounced as an enemy of morality, a slave of the saloons, a hireling of the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. Well, I had rather be the emissary of the
I have noticed that, as a rule, men who speak against Prohibition have never been in the gutter, while those who pick up a precarious livelihood by chasing the "Rum Demon" around a stump have usually been his very humble slaves. I have noticed that the men who oppose Prohibition are usually the solid, well-to-do men of the community, the heavy tax-payers the men upon whom the schools, the churches and the state chiefly depend for support, while those who champion it on the rostrum are usually living in some way upon the industry of others. The man who
And yet we are told that licensing the saloons is a bad business investment; that it costs more than it comes to; that the way to abolish poverty is to abrogate the liquor license law. Strange that the Prohibs should possess such transcendent business heads and such empty stomachs! Doubtless the drinking of liquor adds to the cost of our judiciary; doubtless it is responsible for some crime; but the question at issue is not one of liquor-drinking vs. teetotalism—it is a question of drinking licensed liquor or Prohibition aquafortis. It is not a question of reducing the cost of our courts, but of making liquor bear its due proportion of the burdens it foists upon the people.
I am neither the friend nor enemy of liquor, any more than I am the enemy or friend of buttermilk. I have drunk both a third of a century and have been unable to see that they did me any especial good or harm. I was never befuddled on the one nor foundered on the other, and have managed to get along very well with both. Whether in eating or drinking, a man should keep his brains above his belt, and if he cannot do that he's a precious poor excuse for an uncrowned King, an American Sovereign.
The statistics furnished by the Prohibition orators are fearfully and wonderfully made. It has been asserted in this campaign that a million Americans die every year of the world from the effects of strong drink—and all this
The theory that strong drink is an unmixed evil that must be abolished, is not in accord with the genius of this government, which would give to the individual untrammeled liberty in matters concerning only himself. Experience has proven Prohibition a rank failure and the customs of mankind from the very dawn of history brand it a rotten fraud. The people of every age and clime have used stimulants, and we may safely conclude that, despite the Prohibs, they will be employed so long as man exists upon the earth. Banish liquor and man will find a substitute even though it be opium, morphine or cocaine. It is said that Thor, the great northern god of war, once tried to lift what he supposed was an old woman, but found to his sorrow that it was a mighty serpent which, in Norse mythology, encircles the world. The Prohibs are warring upon what they foolishly imagine to be frivolous habit of man, but will yet learn that they are running counter to an immutable decree of God—are trying to alter the physical constitution of the human race by means of local option elections.
So far as I am personally concerned, I would care but little if every ounce of liquor was banished from the earth and its method of manufacture forever be forgotten; but I object to having a lot of he-virgins and female wall-flowers sit at my muzzle and dictate how I shall load myself. If I'm an American sovereign I propose to be supreme autocrat of my own stomach. When I want advice regarding what I shall eat and what I shall drnik I'll consult a doctor of medicine instead of a doctor of divinity.
I do not oppose Prohibition because I am the friend
But, the Prohibs inform us, the brightest men of the world are ruined by strong drink. They assure us that "it is not a question of intellect, but of appetite." What was judgment given us for if not to control our appetites? If Appetite be paramount to judgment why do we hang rape-fiends? Let me tell you the idea that the brainiest men of the world die drunkards is the merest moonshine. If only men of genius drank liquor a one-horse still would supply the demand and be idle six months in the year. Take the thousand greatest men the world has produced —the Thousand Immortelles—and not 2 per cent. of them died drunkards, yet 98 per cent. of them drank liquor. If the Prohibs have ever produced an intellect of the first class they must have hidden it under a bushel. Its possessor is probably one of those village Hampdens or mute inglorious Miltons of whom the poet sings. The Prohibs don't run to great men—they run to gab.
Stripped of all its superfluous trappings, the thesis of Prohibition is simply this: "Some men drink to excess; therefore no one should be permitted to drink at all. The human race must reserve its inherent tastes and time-honored habits lest some wild-eyed jay get on a jag." The question at issue, the riddle for us to unravel, is simply this: Can we afford to sacrifice human liberty to save the sots? Is the game worth the candle, and if we burn the candle will we win the game?
The Pros assure you that Prohibition prohibits. It does. It prohibits the sale of liquor and supplies its place with coffin paint. It prohibits the sale of good, ice cold beer and gives us forty-rod bugjuice. Theories are not worth a continental when slammed up against conditions. What I hear I take with a grain of salt; but what I see that I do know. I tell you candidly that next to a pretty woman I love a cocktail. If the liquor is good and the barkeeper understands his business, I consider it a thing to thank God for—occasionally. Like religion, a little of it is an excellent thing, but an overdose will put wheels in your head. I have never yet been in a Prohibition precinct where I needed to go thirsty if I had the price of a pint flask concealed about my person—and my stomach could stand the poison.
When high license prevailed in Hillsboro you had a dozen saloons, each contributing to the revenues of the state, the country, the municipality and the school fund. You voted local option in, and now you've thirty-two unlicensed and unregulated doggeries selling rot-gut to schoolboys and contributing not one cent to the public revenues. The cost of your courts has increased, drunkenness was never so common, brawls never so frequent. It is said that even fools can learn in the bitter school of experience; but there be idiots upon whom even such lessons
That liquor has done a vast amount of damage I freely concede; but shall we banish everything that has added to the mighty tide of human ills? Then what have we left? A hole in the atmosphere, God has not bequeathed to man an unmixed blessing since he expelled him from Paradise. Even woman, his last, best gift, hath grievous faults. The very first one brought into this world, according to Pagan
Woman has filled the world with war's alarms, and the bacchic revel has ended in the brawl. Troy flamed because Menelaus' wife was false, and Philip's all-conquering son surrendered to the brimming bowl. Ever is our dearest joy wedded to our direst woe. The same air that comes stealing round our pillow, laden with the sensuous perfume of a thousand flowers, rips our towns to pieces and turns our artesian wells inside out. The same rains that fructify the earth pour the destructive flood. The same intellectual power that bends nature's mighty forces to man's imperial will, enables him to trample upon his brethren. The same reckless courage that breaks the tyrant's chain ofttimes stains the hand with a brother's blood. The same longing for woman's sweet companionship that leads these to rear happy homes—sacred shrines from which incense mounts night and day to the throne of Omnipotent God—goads those to lawless love. The empurpled juice that warms the cold heart and stirs the sluggish blood that gives to the orator lips of gold, to the poet promethean fire abused doth breed the hasty quarrel and make the god a beast.
It was said of old that a middle course is safest and best, and the axiom still holds good. All the Utopias thus
The Prohibs declare that 999 out of every 1,000 crimes are caused by liquor. Suppose this to be true: Does it take the cussedness out of liquor to drive it from the front room into the back alley? Is it not a fact that the worst brand of "fighting booze" is dispensed at the illicit doggery? But the Prohibs are as badly at sea anent their criminal statistics as in the mortuary report. Comparatively few of the great criminals of this country ever drank liquor to excess. But a small per cent. of those in our penitentiaries were confirmed drunkards when accorded the hospitality of the state. When a man is convicted of crime he naturally seeks a scapegoat. Adam threw all the blame of that apple episode on Eve, simply because liquor had not then been invented and he could not plead an Edenic jag in extenuation. I was once interviewing a man who had just been sentenced to the penitentiary for horse-theft. I thought that perhaps a cocktail would cause him to talk freer, and had one smuggled to his cell. He declined it, saying that he had never taken but one drink of liquor in his life, and that made him sick.
"But," said I, "you told the court that you were crazy drunk when you committed the crime."
"Yes," he replied, "I'd rather be thought a drunkard than a natural born d——d thief."
That led me to investigate. I interviewed the recorder of Galveston, the chief of police, the sheriff of the county, the district attorney and several other officials. We went over the records, and the habits of each offender were carefully inquired into. As a matter of course the "drunks and disorderlies" made an imposing list; but we were unable to trace the influence of liquor in more than 3 per cent. of the serious crimes committed in Galveston city and county during five years.
The great cry of the Prohibs is, "Save the boys; remove temptation from their path." Well, that's all right, if you've got a putty boy; but if I had a boy who wanted to go on a whizz and wasn't smart enough to find the means despite all the Prohibs in Christendom, I'd send him to the insane asylum. I was reading the other day of some college youths who were watched so closely that they couldn't obtain liquor, and proceeded to fill up on illuminating gas. If the supply of gas holds out those youngsters are likely to develop into great Prohibition orators. If you want to keep your boy from filling a drunkard's grave, begin by getting a sure-enough boy— one whose brain-pan lies above instead of below his ears. Then raise him right. Don't tell him that every man who sells liquor is an emissary of hell, and that every man who drinks it is a worthless sot. If you do, he'll soon find out that you are a liar without sufficient intelligence to build a dangerous falsehood, and he'll take off the muzzle. Tell him the truth and thereby retain his confidence. Tell him that liquor is a pretty good thing to let alone, but that millions of better men than his daddy have drank it and lived and died sober and useful citizens.
Prohibition was first tried in the Garden of Eden. It proved a failure there, and it has proven a failure ever
I have been asked why, if as much liquor is sold under Prohibition as under high license, the saloonists insist upon contributing to the public revenues. The answer's dead easy. The men who engineer blind tigers vote the Prohibition ticket. They contribute to the campaign fund. They help pay the fees of the cold water spouters and sputers. More liquor is sold under local option than under high license, because of man's natural hankering for forbidden fruits; but it is sold by a different class of men and is a different kind of booze. It is sold by chronic law-breakers, by men who have little to lose, by toughs for whom the bat-cage hath no terrors. The man who is capable of straddling an unlicensed keg of bug-juice in a
Legalize the sale of liquor and you will have some crime, no doubt. You will have paupers and criminals to provide for, but you'll have a revenue to help bear the burdens. Prohibit it and you'll have the burdens without the revenue. Permit its sale and you will have law-abiding citizens engaged in the traffic, men who will try to make it decent, who will take a pride in the purity of their wares and the orderliness of their places; prohibit it, and you will have a lot of law-breakers on the one hand selling slumgullion made of cheap chemicals and general cussedness, and a gang of spies and informers on the other stirring up strife and entailing costly litigation.
When driven to the wall; when it is clearly demonstrated that their doctrine does not accord with the genius of this government; when it is amply proven that wherever tried it has proven an expensive failure, an arrant fraud, the Prohibs fall back upon the Bible. You may prove five hundred different religious dogmas by the Bible, but Prohibition is not one of them. Bro. Homan declares that the Old Testament prohibits the drinking of wine. It does not; but it does not make circumcision obligatory, and a sin of omission is as bad as a sin of commission. If Bro. Homan proposes to be guided by the Old Testament I beg to suggest that he is overlooking a very important bit. The Old Testament commands no class of people to abstain from wine, except the Jewish priesthood, and they only while performing their sacred offices. An angel of the Lord did command the barren Manoah to stay sober
OLD GLORY.
(Address at San Antonio, July 4, 1893.)
FELLOW CITIZENS—I have done pretty much everything that a man may do and dodge the penitentiary, except run for office and make Fourth of July speeches. Eulogizing the Goddess of Liberty were much like adding splendor to
I shall make a bid for your gratitude by being brief. In July weather the song of an electric fan and the small voice of the soda fount were more grateful to the soul than the grandest eloquence that ever burned on a Grady's lips of gold. It is customary, I believe on July 4th, to "make the eagle scream,"—to fight o'er again all the gory battles of the Republic, from Lexington's defeat to the glorious victory of the last election; but I am no Gov. Waite, and blood to horses' bridles delights me not. I would rather at any time talk of love's encounters than of war's alarums —rather bask in the smiles of beauty than mount barbed steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries. I have ever had a sneaking respect for Grover Cleveland for sending a subtsitute to remonstrate with the Southern Confederacy while he played progressive euchre with the pretty girls. His patriotism may not have soared above par, but there were no picnic ants on his judgment. Much as I love my country, I would rather be a living president than a dead hero.
I address you as "fellow Americans," for in this land no man of Celtic or of Saxon blood can be an alien. Whether he was born on the banks of the blue Danube or by Killarney's lovely lakes, 'mid Scotia's rugged hills or on the sunny vales of France, he is bound to us with ties of blood; he hath a claim upon our country, countersigned by those brave souls who, in the western wilds, gave to Liberty a habitation and a name—who declared that Columbia should ever be the refuge of the world's oppressed,—that all men, in whatever country born, should be equal before the law wherever falls the shadow of our flag. There has of late arisen a strange new doctrine that
On occasions such as this we of America are apt to glorify ourselves too much,—to overlook the origin of those elements that made us great. When exulting over our victories in war and our still more glorious triumphs in peace, our progress and our prosperity, we should not forget that had there been no Europe there would be no great American nation; that all the courage that beats in the blood of Columbia's imperial sons, and all the wondrous beauty with which her daughters are dowered; that all the tireless energy of which she proudly boasts, and all the genius that gilds her name with glory were nurtured for a thousand years at white bosoms beyond the ocean's brine.
The American nation is the fair flower of European civilization, the petted child of the world's old age. Princes may be jealous of her progress and tyrants read in her rise their own downfall; but the great heart of the people of every land and clime is hers; to her they turn their faces as the helianthus to the rising sun,—she is their beacon light, their star of hope, guiding them to the glories of a grander day.
It is natural, it is right that on the nation's natal day we should felicitate ourselves on the sacred privileges we enjoy—should pay the tribute of our respect to those whose courage crowned us with sovereignty and made us
I sometimes dream that God has, in his mercy, raised this nation up unto the world's salvation,—the immediate instrument of His grace to usher in that age of gold,
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world."
I delight to trace in the rise and fall of nations the finger of God, and strive to read the Almighty's plan in the historic page. In the farthest east appeared the first faint light of civilization's dawn, and westward ever since the star of empire hath ta'en its way, while each succeeding nation that rose in its luminous paths like flowers in the footsteps of our dear Lord, has reached a higher plane and wrought out a grander destiny. The cycle is complete— the star now blazes in the world's extreme west and by the law of progress which has preserved for forty centuries, here if anywhere, must we look for that millennial dawn of which poets have fondly dreamed and for which philanthropists have prayed.
The awful responsibility of leadership rests upon us. We have shattered the scepter of the tyrant and broken the shackles of the slave; we have torn the diadem from the prince's brow and placed the fasces of authority in the hands of the people; we have undertaken to lead the human race from the Slough of Despond to the Delectable Mountains, where Justice reigns supreme and every son of
It is an important rôle which God hath assigned to us in the great drama of life, yet into a part so pregnant with fate we too often inject the levity of the farce. While preaching equal rights to all and special privileges to none, we pass laws that divide the people of this land into princes and paupers, into masters and slaves. On July 4th we shout for the old flag, and all the rest of the year we clamor for an appropriation. While boasting that we are sovereigns by right divine and equal unto kings, we hasten to lay our hair beneath the feet of every scorbutic dude who hither drifts,
The soldier who serves the state demands a pension, and every burning patriot wants an office. We boast that the people rule, and office-holders are but public servants; yet more than a moiety of us would hang our crowns on a hickory limb and swim a river to break into official bondage. Here in Texas seven distinguished citizens are already chasing the governorship like a pack of hungry wolves after a wounded fawn, while the woods are full of brunette equines who have taken for their motto,
Yes, our office-holders are indeed our public servants— and my experience with servants has been that they usually run the whole shebang.
Theoretically we have the best government on the globe, but it is so brutally mismanaged by our blessed public servants that it produces the same evil conditions that have damned the worst. Even Americans whose forefathers dined on faith at Valley Forge, or fought at Lundy's Lane, have become so discouraged by political bossism, so heartsick with hope deferred that they quote approvingly those lines of Pope,
Whate'er is best administered is best."
While boasting of popular government, we suffer ourselves to be led about by self-seeking politicians like a blind man by a scurvy poodle; we made partisanship paramount to patriotism—have reserved the poet's line, and now
It were well for us to make July 4th less an occasion for self-glorification than for prayerful consideration of the dangers upon which we are drifting in these piping times of peace—dangers that arise, not in foreign courts and camps, but are conceived in sin by the American plutocracy and brought forth in iniquity by our own political bosses. We have no longer aught to fear from the outside world. Uncle Sam can, if need be, marshal forth to battle eight million as intrepid sons as those who crowned old Bunker Hill with flame or bathed the crests of Gettysburg with blood. Upon such a wall of oak and iron
No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach; no country can be secure, I care not if Moses makes its constitution and Solon frame its laws, when half its people are homeless and brawny giants must beg their bread. As far back as history's dawn the rise of the plutocracy and the impoverishment of the common people have heralded the downfall of the state. Thus fell imperial Rome, that once did rule the world, and Need and Greed are the ballistae and battering-rams that are pounding to-day with tremendous power upon every throne of Europe and rocking the very civilization of the world from turret to foundation stone.
We have achieved liberty, but have yet to learn in this strange new land the true significance of life. We have made the dollar the god of our idolatry, the Alpha and Omega of our existence, and bow the knee to it with a servility as abject as that of courtiers kissing the hand of Kings. As the old pagans sometimes incorporated their lesser in their greater deities that they might worship all at once, so have we put the Goddess of Liberty and Saving Grace on the silver dollar that we may not forget them.
But before God, I do believe that this selfish, this Mammon-serving and unpatriotic age will pass, as passed the age of brutish ignorance, as passed the age of tyranny. I believe the day will come—oh blessed dawn!—when we'll no longer place the badge of party servitude above the crown of American sovereignty, the ridiculous oriflamme of foolish division above Old Glory's star-gemmed promise of everlasting unity; when Americans will be in spirit and
THE LONE STAR.
THESE balmy days, I often recall my ideas of Texas before I had the pleasure of mingling with its people,—of becoming myself a Texan. I regret to say that I had accepted Phil Sheridan's estimate of the State—an opinion that still prevails in too many portions of our common country.
"So, young man, you're living in Texas?"
"Yes, paw."
"Fell kinder t'hum 'mong them centerpedes, cowboys 'n other varments, I s'pose?"
"Y-y-yes, paw."
"Well, Billy, you allers was a mighty bad boy. I kinder cackalated as how you'd go t'hell some day; but, praise God, I never thought y' was bound fer Texas!"
I assured him that were I certain hell were half as good as Texas, I wouldn't worry so much about my friends who were in politics for their health.
Texas could well afford to spend a million dollars a year for a decade to disabuse the minds of the Northern people—to work it through their hair that the southwest produces something besides hades and hoodlums, jack-rabbits and jays. Were it generally known exactly what Texas is,—what her people, climate and resources—there are not railroads enough running into the state to handle the men and money that would seek homes and investments here. The year 1900 would see ten million prosperous people between the Sabine and Rio Grande; and it would be a people to be proud of,—the young blood of America, the cream of Christendom, the brain and brawn of the Western World.
The light of the Lone Star cannot be much longer hidden; it is breaking even now upon the earth. True knowledge of Texas is spreading,—spreading over the icy North, spreading over the barren East, spreading over crowded Europe—and knowledge of Texas is power unto her salvation.
I was north last summer, and talked Texas, of course.
"Great state, that Texas, I 'spose?"
"Rather."
"Purty big, I heer'n tell?"
"Look at the map."
"Gewhillikins, Maria! 'Tis purty dogon gosh-all-fired big, haint she?"
"That's whatever."
" 'Spose you're a gineral, or a corporal, or suthin nuther when you're t'hum?"
"Nop."
"N-no? Jedge, p'haps?"
"No, sir; I am simply a plain, every-day citizen of Texas,—not even a member of the legislature or candidate for congress."
"Hump! Say, Maria, I kinder thought as how that slab-sided galoot was a lyin' when he said he was frum Texas."
He could not conceive of a Texan without a title. But Texas will come out all right. I have faith in her future, for many reasons; but chiefly because she has unbounded confidence in herself—because nowhere will you find such local patriotism, such state pride, such love of home as beneath the Lone Star. There are rivalries, but they are not born of bitterness. A Texas is all for Texas.
Within the memory of living men, Oppression's fangs wounded Freedom's snowy breast, and from the ruddy drops Almighty God did make a star, the brightest that ever blessed the world; but ever have the clouds of calumny and the mists of malice obscured its matchless beauty. Slowly but surely the rank vapors are rolling by, and brighter and ever brighter blazes our astral emblem —born in the field of battle, its lullaby the cannon's
SLAVE OR SOVEREIGN.
STATUS OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN.
[Synopsis of an address delivered by Mr. Brann, August 10, 1895.]
FELLOW CITIZENS: If I had a million o' money—carefully protected from the income tax by a plutocratic supreme court—I would probably not be here to inquire whether you are Slaves or Sovereigns. And if you could draw your check for seven figures—with any probability of getting it cashed—you would not be here to answer. You'd do just as Dives did: lean back in your luxurious chair and absorb your sangaree, while Lazarus scratched his Populist fleas on your front steps and exploited your garbage barrels for bones. You'd turn up your patrician nose at the lowly proletaire, and if he did but hint that, having created this world's wealth, he was entitled to something better than hand-outs, you'd have an anti-communistic cat-fit and denounce him as an insolent hoodlum who should be comfortably hanged. That's human nature to a hair, and you are all human,—I suppose—even if the politicians do buy you with gas and sell you for gold.
I tell you frankly that I'm complaining, not because of the other fellow's colossal fortune, but because I can't
I'm no philanthropist who's trying to reform the world for the fun of the thing—who's willing to starve to death for the sake of an attractive tombstone. I want to so amend industrial conditions that I won't have to hustle so hard—and so long—between meals; and when they are bettered for me they will be bettered for you, and for every man who—with pick or pen, brain or brawn— honestly earns his daily bread.
I want more holidays; more time to sit down and reflect
that it is good to be alive; more time to go fishing—not
fishing for men, but for sure—enough suckers. Here in
America if the average mortal aspires to fill a long-felt
want with first-class fodder, he's got to chase the almighty
dollar on week-days like a hungry coyote camping on the
trail of a corpulent jack-rabbit, and spend Sunday figuring
how to circumvent his fellow-citizen. Life with the
American people is one continental hurry, and rush from
the cradle to the grave. We're born in a hurry, live by
electricity and die with scientific expedition. Half of us don't
take time to become acquainted with our own families.
We've even got to courting by telephone, and I expect to
see some enterprising firm put up lover's kisses in tablet
form, so that they can be carried in the vest pocket and
absorbed while we figure cent per cent. or make out a
mortgage.
. . .
For a score of years I had been listening to the boast of the American people that they were Sovereigns by right divine, and at last it occurred to me to swear out a search
The dollar is indeed "almighty." It's the Archimedean lever that lifts the ill-bred boor into select society and places the ignorant sap-head in the United State Senate. It makes presidents of "stuffed prophets," governors of intellectual geese, philosophers of fools and gilds infamy itself with supernal glory. It wrecks the altars of innocence and pollutes the fanes of the people, breaks the sword of Justice and binds the Goddess of Liberty with chains of gold. It is lord of the land, the uncrowned king of the commonwealth, and its whole religious creed is comprised in the one verse, "To him that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance, while from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath."
"We, the people, rule"—in the conventions; but our delegated lawmakers have a different lord. In 1892 we demanded "tariff reform" with a whoop that shook the imperial rafters of heaven, and declared for the minting of gold and silver without discrimination against either metal. But our so-called "public servants," instead of hastening to obey our behests, spent months manufacturing excuses for disregarding their duty. Placed between the devil of the money power and the deep sea of public opinion, they wobbled in and they wobbled out like a drunken boa-constrictor taking its jag to a gold cure joint. They were like the little boy who put his trousers
. . .
Slave or Sovereign? The last is an individual entity, a controlling power, his will is law. The first goes and comes, fetches and carries at the command of a master; creating wealth he may not possess, bound by laws he does not approve, dependent upon the pleasure of others for the privilege of breaking bread. Is not the latter condition that of a majority of the American people to-day? Are they not at the subsequent end of a financial hole, the sides soaped and never a ladder in sight?
In a country so favored—a veritable garden of the gods, where every prospect pleases and not even the politician is wholly vile—the lowliest laborer should be a lord, and each and all find life well worth the living. But it is not so. People starve while sunny savannas, bursting with fatness, yield no food; they wander houseless through summer's heat and winter's cold, while great mountains of granite comb the fleecy clouds and the forest monarch measures strength with the thunderstorm; they flee naked and ashamed from the face of their fellow-men while fabrics molder in the market-place and the song of the spindle is silent: they freeze while beneath their feet are countless tons of coal—incarnate kisses of the sun-god's fiery youth; they have never a spot of earth on which to plant a vine and watch their children play—where they may rear with loving hands lowly roof and rule, lords of a little world hemmed in by the sacred circle of a home; yet the common heritage in the human race lies fair before them and there is room enough.
The people of Texas do not realize how terrible is the industrial condition of the world to-day—how wide the gulf that separates Dives and Lazarus, how pitiful the poverty of millions of their fellowmen. The Texas merchant complains of dull trade, the farmer of low prices, the mechanic of indifferent wages; yet Texas is the most favored spot on the great round earth to-day. I defy you to find another portion of the globe of equal area and population where the wealth is so well distributed, where so few people go hungry to bed without prospect of breakfast. But the grisly gorgon of Greed and the gaunt specter of Need are coming West and South in the wake of the Star of Empire. Already Texas has begun to breed millionaires and mendicants, sovereigns and slaves. Already we have an aristocracy of money, in which wealth makes the man and want of it the fellow, and year by year it becomes easier for Dives to add to his hoard and for Lazarus to starve to death.
We appeal to New York for capital with which to develop our resources; and New York has it in abundance— countless millions she is eager to let out at usury; yet it is estimated that ten thousand children perish in that city every year of the world for lack of food—and how many are kept alive by the bitter bread of a contemptuous charity God only knows. In one year 3,000 children were debarred from the public schools of Chicago because of lack of clothing to cover their nakedness—and Chicago boasts herself "the typical American city." The despised Salvation Army trying to feed a thousand homeless and hungry men on the sandlots of San Francisco proves that already the curse has travelled across the continent.
And people who are not only permitted to run at large, but actually elected to office, prattle of "overproduction" —while people are starving in nakedness; proposes to
. . .
The American citizen is called a sovereign—by those patriots who are preparing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of a nice fat office. And perhaps he is; but I'm free.
We are frequently told that the condition of labor is better to-day than a century ago. That is half a truth, yet wholly a falsehood. A century ago the workman knew naught of many comforts and conveniences he now enjoys —when he happens to have a job; but that was one age, this quite another. Progress gives no man new wants, and the luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next. To deny this—to limit the laborer to actual necessaries as measured by a former age—were to relegate him back to barbarism, to nomadism and nakedness. If we should be content with what our fathers had, then they should have been satisfied with the comforts enjoyed by their progenitors, and so on back until man digs roots with his finger nails, attires himself in a streak of red paint for winter overcoat and a few freckles for summer ulster. It is by comparison with his fellows and not with his fathers that man determines whether he's fortunate or unfortunate—whether he's receiving his proper proportion of the world's increase of wealth. A century ago there was no such glaring inequality as now exists. There were no fifty million dollar fortunes and no free-soup joints. If the workman's piano was a jews-harp and his Pullman car a spavined cayuse, his employer was not erecting palaces in which to stable his blood stock, nor purchasing dissolute princes for his daughters to play at marriage and
Labor now seeks employment, not as a right, but as a privilege. It has come to such a pitiful pass in this "land of liberty," this "refuge of the world's oppressed," that to afford a man an opportunity to employ his strength or skill in the creation of wealth, a portion of which he may retain for his own support, is regarded rather as a privilege than a free contract between American Sovereigns —an act of charity, for which the recipient should be duly grateful.
No man can be a freeman while dependent upon the good will of an other for his bread and butter. He may be a Sovereign dejure, but he's a Slave defacto. And under present conditions the more labor-saving machinery he invents, the tighter he rivets his chains.
We had hoped and believed that human ingenuity was about to lift the curse laid on Adam by his angry Lord; the angel of Intellect to reimparadise the poor slave, place
Were a man to declare labor-saving machinery and the general development of the country a curse to the poor, he would be branded as a "moss-back" or budding candidate for Bedlam; yet it is unquestionably true that the further the average individual gets from the so-called blessings of civilization—the less he is affected by our boasted industrial system—the smaller his danger of starving to death.
Many of us can remember when we had little labor-saving machinery in Texas; when railways were scarce as consistent Christians at a colored camp-meeting, goods were carried down from coast on the backs of burros and a full-dress suit consisted chiefly of buckskin breeches and a brace of angel makers. And we remember also that a pauper was a curiosity; that the very cowboys played poker at $10 ante with the sky for limit, the common laborer carried coin in his belt and the merchant had money to burn. Texas has developed wonderfully during the last few decades. We now have improved machinery —and extensive poor-farms; railways—and political rings; a $3,000,000 capitol—and an army of unemployed. We have built fine schools and finer churches, made the black man our political brother and bought his vote. We have exchanged our buckskin for broadcloth, our hair-raising profanity for the hypocrite's whine, straight corn-juice for the champagne-jag and the hip-pocket court for the jackass verdict of the petit jury. But the cowboy now plays penny-ante on credit or shoots craps for small coin; the common laborer carries in his belt only a robust appetite, while the merchant who dodges bankruptcy for a dozen years considers himself the special favorite of fortune.
And what is true of Texas is true in greater or less degree of every State in the Union. Development, so dear to the heart of the patriotic and public-spirited citizen, has a tendency to transform an independent and moderately prosperous people into masters and slaves. But this is not the fault of labor-saving machinery, nor of capital, nor of development by itself considered. The more wealth labor creates, the more it should enjoy. When the reverse is the case distribution is at fault.
The substitution of expensive machinery for hand-labor eliminated the independent artisan. His productive power was multiplied; but his independence—his ability to care for himself without the cooperation of large capital— was gone. The wheelwright could not return to his shop nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort. Competition with the iron fingers of the great factory were impossible. Labor must now await the pleasure of capital— the creature has become lord of its creator. The fierce competition of idle armies forces wages down, and slowly but surely the workman is sinking back to the level occupied before the cunning brain of genius harnessed the lightning to his lathe and gave him nerves of steel and muscles of brass with which to fight his battle for bread.
With the improved machinery with which he is provided,
the American workman can create as much wealth in a
week as he need consume in a month; but he goes down
on his knees and thanks God and the plutocracy for an
opportunity to toil 300 days in the year for a bare
subsistence.
. . .
Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial ill—but the political drug-stores are full of 'em. All you've got to do is to select your panacea, pull the cork and let peace and plenty overflow a grateful land—so we're
Instead of going to so much trouble to bar out cheap goods by means of tariff walls, I'd bar out cheap men. If you're making monkey-wrenches at $2 a day and some fellow abroad is building 'em for 50 cents, your boss comes to you and says:
"Jim, we've got to have a tariff to keep out the product of pauper labor or our nether garment's ripped from narrative to neck-band. I can't pay you $2 and compete with an employer who pays but 50 cents."
That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the G.O.P. tow-line and lay a tariff-tax on monkey-wrenches that looms up like an old-time Democratic majority in Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar-barrels and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror at the Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 cent fellow crosses the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer is protected all right, but where do you come in? You don't come in; you simply stand out in the industrial norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town while your wife takes in washing, your daughter goes to work in a factory at two dollars a week and your son grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into ward politics or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation, because you've been bred to a higher standard of living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper
No; I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy Europeans—men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have millions such in America, and they are most estimable citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that man who is not proud of his parentage should have been born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy's kite the theory that America should forever be the dumping-ground for foreign filth—that people will be warmly welcomed here whom no other country wants and the devil wouldn't have.
We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap. We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American Sovereignty—to become an important factor in the formation of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince and the poor man a Populist—why we are "great only in that strange spell, a name."
In this work of reform we've got to begin at the bottom —with the body politic itself. You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear, nor Sovereigns of men who were born to be Slaves. We've got to grade up or we're gone. Only
We have carried the enchanting doctrine of "political
equality" entirely too far and are paying the penalty.
The rebound from the monstrous doctrine of the divine
right of monarchs has hurried us into equal error. Disgusted
with the rottenness of the established religion, the
French people once crowned a courtesan as Goddess of
Reason; maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism,
our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlum's
reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless
nescience Columbia's imperial crown. That the greater
must guide the lesser intelligence is nature's immutable
law. To deny this were to question our right to rule the
beast and God's authority to reign King of all mankind.
Self-preservation will yet compel us to guard the sacred
privileges of American sovereignty as jealously as did
Rome her citizenship.
. . .
Do this, and all other needed reforms will follow as surely and as swiftly as the day-god follows the dawn. Knowledge is power. When those who vote fully understand that every dollar expended by government, federal, state or municipal, must be created by the common people —that first or last, labor must furnish it forth—we'll cease having billion-dollar Congresses. We'll cease paying a hundred and forty millions per annum in federal pensions;
Billion-dollar Congresses, eh? Do you know what that means? There are less than fifteen million wealth creators in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of their pockets—something over $66 apiece! If you had it in silver dollars—and I suppose that most of you would accept silver—you couldn't count it in a century. Lay the coins edge to edge and they'll belt the world. Pile them on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Perchance from the top you'll see many things—among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county and
We're governed entirely too much—Officialism is becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's Sinbad. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant of some sort, and you cannot get married or burried, purchase a drink or own a dog except with a by-your-leave to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states suicide itself is an infraction of the criminal code, and if the police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail the preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law this state and county and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that so plain that he who runs may read and reading understand. And when so printed and so understood, without the possibility of misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a man into the judicial hopper not even an astrologer can tell whether he'll come out a horse-thief or only a homicide —or whether the people will weary of waiting on the circumlocution office and take a change of venue to Judge Lynch.
This can never be a land of religious liberty—the atheist can never be considered as on a political parity with his ultra-orthodox brother—until we compel church property to bear its pro rata of the public burdens.
And right here let me say a word about the "Apostle." I have been accused by people—for whom no cherry-tree blooms or little hatchet is ground—of being a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the
But it is not right, it is not just that the little holdings of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples exempted—palatial edifices in which polite society pretends to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries, and a costly church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so, for he never built one.
Congregations that can afford to erect fine chuches and export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes, can afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing our streets in grim despair; a million children coming up in ignorance and crime; a million women hesitating between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy, and the church—supposed to be God's ministering angel— crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little. Remember the widow's mite"—so acceptable to a pauper deity.
Give for what? To build fine temples in whose sacred shadows will lurk the gaunt specter of Famine and the grisly gorgon of Crime. To buy grand organs and costly
While the wealth-producer is robbed to pension
millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft,
and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount
so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle
if labor was steadily employed and reaped its just reward.
With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and
the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give
even all the candidates an office, with plenty to get and
little to do, and still have pie in the pantry and corn in
the crib. There is something more the matter than governmental
waste—there's something radically wrong.
. . .
In tracing the causes of panics and periods of business depression, we invariably find our currency more or less at fault. Now don't get frightened. I'm not going to dose you with free silver nor give you the gold cure. This is neither Coin's Financial School nor a gold-bug incubator. The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody does—especially the corner-grocery politician. He understands it from A to Izzard—knows almost as much about it as a hello-girl does of the nature of electricity. Prof. Jevon truly says that "a kind of intellectual vertigo appears to seize people when they talk of money." Perhaps the Goddess of Liberty on the silver dollar has 'em Trilbyized.
We hear a great deal of late about the "science of money." It's supposed to be something very esoteric— something that a fellow can only master by drawing heavily
Here's a ticket good for so many meals at a restaurant —an order for so much wealth; and here's a silver dollar —no 'tisn't; it's a check on a—er—on a "resort"; in fact, on a saloon; an I.O.U. for 12½ cents, the price of a cigar—or something—I suppose. "Man should not live by bread alone." Now what's the difference between this ticket and check and the currency issued by the government? Simply this: These are the I.O.U.'s of individual's money, the I.O.U.'s of the entire American people. These are orders for certain kinds of wealth at particular places; money is an order for all kinds of wealth at any place within the jurisdiction of the federal government. This ticket is the check of one American, drawn against his personal wealth and credit; this bill is the check of all Americans, drawn against the collective wealth and credit of the nation. That's all the difference between a cocktail check and a coin, between a meal ticket and a ten dollar bill. Neither is worth a rap unless it can be redeemed. Like sanctification caught at a camp-meeting, there must be a hereafter to it or its a humbug. But don't you metallists take that as a premise and jump at conclusions or you're liable to sprain your logical sequence. What kind of redemption did I have in view when I acquired this che—I mean this ticket? I expected that it would be redeemed in something that would expand my surcingle and enable me to cast a shadow—in eggs and oleomargarine, corn-bread and buttermilk. And if so
. . .
Every few years our industrial system gets the jim-jams. Capital flies to cover, factories close and labor goes tramping across the country seeking honest employment and receiving a warm welcome—from militia companies with shotted guns. Cheerful idiots begin to prattle of "over-production," the economic M.D.'s to refurbish all the old remedies, from conjure bags to communism. They all know exactly what caused the "crisis" and what to do for it; but despite the doctors the patient usually—survives. And the M.D. who succeeds in cramming his pet panacea down its throat claims all the credit for the recovery. We are slowly emerging from the crash of '93, and the cuckoos
The gold reserve, we are told, is to "protect the credit of our currency." Protect it from whom? You and I are making no assault upon it—wouldn't hurt it for the world. When we get a paper or silver dollar we don't trot around to the treasury to have it "redeemed" in a slug of yellow metal—we make a bee line for the grocery store and have it redeemed in a side o' bacon. Who is it that chisels desolation into the blessed gold reserve—the so-called "bulwarks of our currency?" The fellows who want bonds—the capitalistic, the creditor class; the men who own the mortgages and have millions of dollars corded up in bank—the men who have most to lose by any bobble in the credit of our currency. And every time the capitalist tries to hoist himself with his own petard, the administration smothers the blaze with a block of interest-bearing bonds. If he wants to make a sky-rocket of himself, let him kerosense his coat-tails and apply the match. If the gold reserve were really necessary to the credit of our currency, capitalists would no more make war upon
Calico is sold by the yard, kerosene by the gallon, coffee by the pound. These measures are immutable, and those who buy and sell by them make their contract in perfect confidence. But suppose they altered from day to day or from year to year,—the yard ranging from 25 to 50 inches, the pound from 10 to 20 ounces; would our exchanges be effected without much friction, think you? Would not such a ridiculous system of weights and measures paralyze exchange and demoralize industry? Would not those who could juggle the system to suit themselves—buying by a long and selling by a short yard— accumulate colossal fortunes at the expense of the common people? Would we not have "panics" in plenty and "depressions" galore? Well, that is exactly what is happening to the dollar, our measure of value, the most important of all our trade tools. And mark you, a change in the purchasing power of the dollar is equivalent to an alteration of every weight and measure employed by commerce. Understand? When the purchasing power of the dollar expands or contracts it has the same effect on exchange as would the expansion or contraction of the yard, the gallon and the pound.
A shifting measure of value is the nigger in our industrial woodpile. We have got to have a measure of value that's as immutable as our measure of quantity; a dollar as reliable as an official pound; a dollar that's the same yesterday, and to-day and forever, before we see the last
We know from experience that gold will not supply us with such a currency, that silver will not do it, that bi-metallism will not do it—that greenbackism, as we understand the term, will not come within a mile of it. Then what will do it? That's the problem. Solve it, and you forever put an end to commercial panics in a land of plenty; you deprive capital of its power to oppress labor; you assure industry a constant friend where it has so often found an insidious foe. Solve it and Columbia can furnish happy homes for half the world—homes unhaunted by the wolf of want, but crowned with sweet content and gilded with freedom's glory.
For a century economists have been seeking the solution of this all-important problem. Even conservative old Adam Smith dreamed of the emancipation of the world from the multifarious ills of metallic money; but we still cling with slavish servility to the silver of Abraham and the gold of Solomon.
I do not claim to have found the philosopher's stone, for which so many wiser men have sought in vain; but the currency plan I proposed in 1891—and which was again outlined in the ICONOCLAST for May of this year—has been carefully examined by the ablest financiers of Europe and America, and they have been unable to point out a fundamental fault. It is known as the interconvertible bond-currency plan, by which our circulating media would be bottomed on the entire wealth of the nation instead of
"Wot yer givin' us?"
You'd reply: "I'm givin you gold—money good the world over."
"Wot is it—watch charm? Dis ain't no pawn shop."
"But that's money."
"Eh?"
"Money—gold coin that maketh the heart glad."
"Wot kind o' money?"
"It's a British guinea."
"Well, why don't you go to Great Britain to blow yourself?"
"But my dear sir, this is money of final payment. This
"Well, it don't circulate in this joint. See?
Slam your theories up against conditions before you tie
to them.
. . .
You all know that in this country there should be no such thing as able-bodied pauperism. You know that until the last arable acre is brought to the highest possible cultivation, every mine developed, every forest made to contribute to the creature comfort of man, there should be remunerative work for all. You know that, with the aid of wealth-creating machinery every laborer should be able to acquire a competence to comfort his declining days. You know that until Need is satisfied and Greed is gorged there can be no such thing as overproduction—that under normal conditions when there's a plethora of necessaries, the surplus energy of the nation turns to the creation of luxuries and the standard of living advances. You know that with such wonderful resources, touched by the magic wand of genius, the golden age of which poets have dreamed and for which philanthropists have prayed, should be even at our doors.
I hope to contribute in some slight degree to the establishment of conditions that will enable us to utilize to the utmost the free gifts of a gracious God; to the proper distribution of wealth; to the emancipation of labor, not by the law of blind force, but enlightened self-interest—not by riotous revolution, but peaceful evolution. I want to see every American Citizen in very truth a Sovereign, to whom life is a joy instead of a curse. I want to see every rag transformed into a royal robe, every hovel into a cultured home. I want to hasten, if by ever so little, the day
And when we so amend industrial conditions that each can find employment at profitable prices, we do more to eliminate crime and foster morality than have all the prophets and preachers, from Melchizedeck the mythical to Talmage the turgid.
No man can be either a patriot or a consistent Christian on an empty stomach—he's merely a savage animal, a dangerous beast. You must get a square meal inside of a man and a clean shirt outside of him before he's fit subject for saving grace. You must give him a bath before he's worth baptizing. And when you get him clean and well clothed, fed and housed as a reward of his own honest industry, he's not far from the Kingdom of God. But if you want to degrade a people beyond redemption; if you want to transform them into contemptible peons and whining hypocrites who encumber the earth like so much unclean vermin, educate them to feed on the crumbs from Dives' banquet-board and accept his cast-off clothing with obsequious thankfulness.
The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of the common people until it was the bread of charity or the blood of the revolution, has ever been the herald of moral decay and of national death. So passed the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and, if we may judge the future by the past, so will perish the greatest republic that ever gleamed like a priceless jewel on the skeleton hand of Time. Self-interest, humanity, patriotism, religion itself, admonish us to weigh well the problem of the hour—a problem born of human progress, forced upon us by the mighty revolution wrought in the industrial world by the giant Steam—and that problem is: Shall the average American Citizen be a Slave or a Sovereign?
Don't imagine for a moment that I'm an anarchist— that I'm going to wind up this seance by unfurling the red flag and throwing a hatful of bombs. I admit that I haven't much respect for law—there's so much of it that when I come to spread my respect over the entire lot it's about as thin as one of Sam Jones's sermons. Still, I don't believe in strikes, and riots and bloodshed. I'm for peace —peace in its most virulent form. I've had a sneaking respect for Cleveland ever since he employed a substitute to put a kibosh on the Southern Confederacy while he remained at home to play pinochle with the pretty girls. He may not be much of a statesman in time of peace, but there's no picnic ants on his judgment in time of war.
It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really commutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice—hell's great triumvirate—to banishment eternal. Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase—it can only concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism.
It is time that American citizens of alleged intelligence ceased trailing blindly in the wake of partisan band-wagons and began to seriously consider the public welfare —time they realized that the people were not made for parties, but parties for the people, and refuse to sacrifice their patriotism on the unclean altar of partisan slavery. Blind obedience to party fiat; the division of the people of one great political family into hostile camps; subjection of the public interest to partisan advantage; placing the badge of party servitude above the crown of American
. . .
It is difficult for people here in Texas to understand the industrial condition of the American nation today; to appreciate the dangers upon which it is drifting. We are too apt to imagine everybody as prosperous and conservative as ourselves; or if not so, it's because they do not vote the Democratic ticket—that panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. Here in Texas we have hung our second providence on the Democratic party—it has become a religion with us. If a man is orthodox in his political faith all things are forgiven him; but if there's any doubt about his Democracy we are inclined to regard him as an alien, if not an anarchist. Most of us enjoy the shadow of our own vine and fig tree—which it is impossible to mortgage. We feed three times a day, have a cocktail every morning, a clean shirt occasionally and even when cotton goes so low it doesn't pay for the paris-green to poison the worms, we blame it on the Lord instead of on our political leaders. But it's different in other sections of the Union.
America contains more than a million as desperate men as ever danced the Carmagnole or shrieked with brutal joy when the blood of French aristocrats reddened the guillotine. The dark alleys and unclean dives of our great cities are crowded with dangerous sans-culotte, and our highways with hungry men eager for bread—though the world blaze for it. Pauperism is rampant, the criminal classes increasing and everywhere the serpent of Socialism is leaving it's empoisoned slime. Suppose that these desperate elements find a determined leader—a modern Marat,
But before God I do believe this selfish and unpatriotic age will pass, as passed the age of brutish ignorance, as passed the age of tyranny. I believe the day will come— oh blessed dawn!—when the angel of Intellect will banish the devil of Demagogy; when Americans will be in spirit and in truth a band of brothers, the wrongs of one the concern of all; when labor will no longer fear the Cormorant nor capital the Commune—when all men will be equal before the law wherever falls the shadow of our flag.
RAINBOW-CHASERS.
[This is the lecture that Mr. Brann delivered and was to continue on his lecture tour, which was cut short by his death.]
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: There are many things which I very cordially dislike; but my pet aversion is what is known as a "set" lecture—one of those stereotyped affairs that are ground out with studied inflection and practiced gesture and suggest the grinding of Old Hundred on a hurdy-gurdy; hence I shall ask permission to talk to you tonight as informally and as freely as though we were seated in friendly converse around the soda fount of a Kansas drugstore;
. . .
But let us take a look at our text. The rainbow is a sign, I believe, that the Prohibitionists once carried the country and would have made a complete success of the cold water cure had not the Rum Demon engineered the Ark. Still it does not necessarily follow that a rainbow chaser is a fellow on the hot trail of a blind tiger. He
. . .
Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the Slough of Despond. Conditions have become so desperate that it were well for you and I, who are in the world and of it, to abate somewhat our partisan rancor, our sectarian bitterness, and take serious counsel together. Desperate, I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more difficult for the workman to win his modicum of bread and butter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to go to hades—or elsewhere; but that honor, patriotism, reverence—all things which our fathers esteemed as more
. . .
I have frequently been called a "chronic kicker," but do not object to the epithet. There's need of good lusty kickers, those whose No. 1 tootsie-wootsies are copper-toed, for the world is lull of devilish things that deserve to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of using slang, and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say that the Bible twice employs the word "kick" in the same sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source, being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite good enough for God. Some complain that I should build instead of tearing down, should preserve and not destroy. The complaint is well founded if it be wrong to attack falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social
. . .
We are solemnly assured that the world is steadily growing better; and I suppose that's so, for in days of old they crucified men head downwards for telling the truth, while now they only hammer them over the head with six-shooters and drag 'em around a Baptist college campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the optimist, is forever prating of the world's progress. Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaped plank into wild ocean depths; or it may be with painful steps and slow toward the eternal mountain tops where
Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine message from on high, no God in Israel; only a fashionable pulpiteering to minister to languid minds, the cultivation of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers— the church becoming a mere Vanity Fair or social clearing-house, a kind of esthetic forecourt to hades instead of the gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme we find blatant blackguardism by so-called evangelists, who were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma, yet who set up as instructors of the masses in the profound mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get shipwrecked in the poetry of Shakespeare, or lost in the philosophy of one of his fools, pretend to interpret the plans of Him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire.
Progress in science until we learn that the rainbow was not built to allay the fears of the roachin family, but is old as the sun and the sea; that bourbon whisky drills the stomach full o' blow-holes and that the purest spring water is full o' bacteria and we must boil it or switch to beer; that Havana cigars give us tobacco heart, pastry is the hand-maid of dyspepsia, while even the empurpled grape is but a John the Baptist for appendicitis; that a rich thief has kleptomania and should be treated at a fashionable hospital instead of a plebian penitentiary, while even the rosebud of beauty is aswarm with bacilli, warning the sons of men to keep their distance on pain of death. If all the doctors discovered be true then life isn't half worth living—is stale, flat and unprofitable as a Republican nomination in Texas. When the poet declared that men do not die for love, the doctors had not yet learned that a cornfed kiss that cracks like a dynamite gun may be equally dangerous. I think the bolus-builders are chasing rainbows—that if I wait for death until I'm killed with kisses old Methuselah won't be a marker.
Our car of progress, of which we hear so much, has carried us from the Vates' vision of Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel—to the raucous twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green-sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry, so-called, everywhere—in books and magazine innumerable, even sandwiched in between reports of camp-meetings,
But we were speaking of progress when diverted by the discordant clamor of featherless crows. I am no pecterist with my face ever to the past. I realize that there has been no era without its burden of sorrow, no time without its fathomless lake of tears; that the past seems more glorious than the present because the heart casts a glamour over days that are dead. From the dust and glare of the noon of life we cast regretful glances back to the dewy
. . .
When we have adopted higher ideals; when success is no longer a synonym for vain show; when the man of millions who toils and wails for more is considered mad; when we realize that all the world's wealth cannot equal the splendor of the sunset sky 'neath which the poorest trudge, the astral fire that flames at night's high noon above the meanest hut; that only God's omnipotence can recall one wasted hour, restore the bloom of youth, or bid the loved and lost return to glad our desolate hearts with the lambent light of eyes that haunt all our waking dreams, the music of laughter that has become a wailing cry in memory's desolate halls; when we cease chasing lying rainbows in the empty realm of Make-Believe and learn for a verity that the kendal green of the workman may be more worthy of honor than the purple of the prince —why then the world will have no further need of iconoclasts to frankly rehearse its faults, and my words of censure will be transformed into paeans of praise.
And soft as their parting tear."
We have "progressed" from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek
The term "jingoist;" or its equivalent, was applied to
Washington and Henry, to Jefferson and Jackson. It
was applied to James G. Blaine, the typical American of
his time—a man from beneath whose very toe-nails enough
intellect might be scraped to make an hundred Clevelands
or McKinleys. All were jingoes in their day and generation,
because all preferred the title of sovereign to that
of subject; because all believed that Columbia should be
mistress of her own fate, the architect of her own fortune,
instead of an appendage of England, or political orphan
under a European protectorate, because all believed that
she should protect her humblest citizen from wrong and
outrage wheresoever he may be, though it cost every dollar
of the nation's treasure and every drop of the nation's
blood—and if that be jingoism then I, too, am a jingo
from alpha to omega, from beginning to end.
. . .
Who are those who recalcitrate about jingoism? They are people who have never forgiven Almighty God for suffering them to be born American sovereigns instead of British subjects. They are those whose ideal man is some stupid, forked, radish "stuck o'er with titles, hung 'round with strings," and anxious to board with a wealthy American wife to avoid honest work. They are the people whose god is the dollar, their country the stock exchange, and who suspect that a foreign policy with as much
In continually crying "Peace! Peace!" Uncle Sam is chasing a rainbow that has a dynamite bomb under either end. If history be philisophy teaching by example what is the lesson we have to learn? In little more than a century we've had four wars, and only by the skin of our teeth have we escaped as many more, yet we not only refuse to judge the future by the past, but ignore the solemn admonitions of Washington and Jefferson and stand naked before our enemies. We have no merchant marine to develop these hardy sailors who once made our flag the glory of the sea. We have a little navy, commanded chiefly by political pets who couldn't sail a catboat into New York harbor without getting aground or falling
. . .
To the American patriot familiar with the rapid development of this country it seems that the hour must assuredly
Wealth, vice, corruption—barbarism at last."
Freedom we have won, and glory, yet both have failed— we have become, not the subjects of native Caesars, but the serfs of foreign Shylocks. Wealth we now have, and Oriental vice, and corruption that reaches even from the senate chamber through every stratum of society. That we are approaching barbarism may be inferred from the magnificence of the plutocrat and the poverty of the working people. The first reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn, while if the latter protest against this grevious injustice they are branded as noisy Bryanites or lampooned as lippy Populists. To the superficial observer, a nation seems to be forging forward long after it has really begun to retrograde. There's an era of splendor, of Lucullus feasts, of Bradley-Martin balls and Seeley dinners; there's grand parade of soldiery and ships, miles of costly palaces, and wealth poured out like water in foolish pageantry; there's refinement of manners into affectation, dilettanteism, epicureanism—but 'tis "the gilded halo hovering 'round decay." The heart of that nation is dead, its soul hath departed, and no antiseptic known to science will prevent putrefaction. How is it with us? Forty thousand people own one-half of the wealth between two oceans, while 250,000
Despite the optimistic cackle anent the march of science, industrial progress, and all that sort o' thing, it appears to be the general consensus of opinion that there's something radically wrong. There's no lack of remedies— the political drug store is full of panaceas, each with the trade-mark of some peculiar school of therapeutics blown in the bottle. Strange that all these catholicons for earthly ills propose to inaugurate the millennium by improving the pecuniary condition of the people—as though the want of money in this or the other pocket were the only evil. Certainly a better distribution of wealth were desirable, but a general dissemination of God's grace were far preferable. Given that, all worthy reforms will follow; without it we will continue to chase foolish rainbows to our fall, Dives becoming more insolent, Lazarus left more and more to the care of the dogs. I do not mean that by acquiring a case of the camp-meeting jerks we will solve the riddle which the Sphinx of Time is propounding to this republic—that we will find the solution of all life's problems in the amen-corner. Not exactly. The average church is about the last place to which we need look for relief. It's too often a lying rainbow painted on the dark mist of ignorance by the devil's own artist. It promises more and performs less than a Republican candidate for Congress. I've noticed that shouting hosannahs has little tendency to make one more truthful —that when a man professes himself the chief of sinners, he may feel obligated to substantiate his statement. I've
. . .
If all who call themselves Christians were Christlike, then indeed might there be hope for humanity; but what is there to inspire belief that the church will ever win the world from a foolish quest of rainbows? What hope in Talmage, with his nightmare visions and stertorous dreams, his pilgrimings to Palestine and rummaging among the mummified cats and has-been kings of ancient Egypt for "Scriptural evidence?" What hope for a people so mentally emasculate that they can patiently listen to his jejune wind-jamming, can read and relish his irremediable tommyrot? What hope in Sam Jones and other noisy ignorami of that ilk, with their wild war on dancing and the euchre deck, the drama and decollete? Be these the strongholds of Abriman in his ceaseless war on Oromasdes? Does the Prince of Darkness, who once did fill the wondering cosmos with the clangor of celestial steel, now front the hosts of Heaven armed with a euchre-deck? Is Tara Boom-de-aye the battle-hymn and the theater hat the blazing gonfalon of him who strove with Omnipotence for universal empire? Does Lucifer expect to become lord paramount of all the gleaming worlds that hang like jewels pendant in heaven's imperial concave by persuading some miserable son of Adam to work his toes on Sunday, dance with the girls on Monday or play seven-up for the cigars? O Jonesy, Jonesy! would to heaven that thou and all thy brother blabsters and bubblyjocks would go hang yourselves, for you know naught of the war that rages ever like a sulphurous siroc in the human soul. Ye are but insects that infest great Igdrasyl, the ash tree that upholds the universe. One atheistical Stephen
. . .
"Work is worship," said the old monks who carried the cross into the Western wilds despite all hardships, in defiance of all dangers—men for whom life was no Momusmasque, but a battle and a march, men who sacrificed all for other's sake, accepting without a sigh disease and death as worldly reward. Those monks were real men, and real men are ever the world's heroes and its hope. The soul of a real man is never hidden behind the cowardly superficies of policy or expediency—his heart is an open book which he who runs may read. Deceive he cannot, for the lie blooms only on the lips of cowards. Public opinion he may treat with kingly contempt, but self-respect is dearer to him than life, though dowered with a monarch's scepter and all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. There's something in the words of a woman, spoken during the civil war, which indicates that despite all artificiality and folly, beneath the cheap gilding and showy lacquer of life, the heart of the race still beats steady and strong; that above the infinitude of goose-speech and the trumpeting of tin-horns on the housetops may still be heard "the ever-pealing tones of old Eternity." From out the mad hell of the fight a wounded hero was borne to the hospital. Neither pain nor approaching death could break the courage of
. . .
By God's grace, I mean not the kind you catch at camp-meetings with sand-fleas, wood-ticks and other gifts of the Holy Ghost; but rather an end everlasting to brummagem and make-believe, a return to the Ark of the Covenant, a recognition of that fact that the soul is not the stomach —that a man owes debts to his fellows which cannot be
. . .
That Persian poet who prated of "the sorry scheme of things" would deserve pity were he not beneath contempt. He imagined that there was a screw loose in the universe because his quest of pleasure slipped its trolley-pole and could not make the bubble Joy to dance in Folly's cup.
Millions make continual moan that they are not happy when they ought to be thankful that they are not hanged. They shake their puny hands at heaven because not provided with a terrestrial Paradise, when they ought to be giving thanks that I'm not the party who holds the sea in the hollow of his hand. I'd make good Baptists of the whole caboodle—would hold them under water long enough to soak out the original sin. A man complains because Fortune doesn't empty her cornucopia into the pockets of his pantalettes while he whittles a pine box and talks municipal politics instead of humping himself behind an enterprising mule in the cotton-patch. If his sweetheart jilts him, he's in despair, and if she marries him he wishes
Carlyle—not Mugwump Carlisle of Kentucky, but Thos.
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou
Singing beside me in the wilderness—
O wilderness were Paradise enow!"
. . .
Diogenes was content with a tub while Alexander sat him down by the ever-moaning sea and wept his red bandana full of brine because he didn't know that the empire of Czar Reed yet remained unconquered. And now both Diogenes and Alexander have "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were," and little it matters to them or to us whether they fed on honey of Hymettus and wine of Falernus or ate boarding house hash off a pewter plate and guzzled Prohibition busthead out of a gourd. The cynic who housed in a tub and clothed himself with a second-hand carpet is as rich to-day as he that reveled in the spoil of Persia's conquered king and kicked the
. . .
Know ye not that the poorest beggar is an earth-passenger also, that thy brother, traveling his millions of miles per day?—where, think you? Among the stars. For him as for thee does Aurora gild the morning and Apollo hang the evening sky with banners of burnished gold; for him as for thee doth Selene draw the limpid waters behind her silver car around the rolling world and Bootes lead his hunting dogs afield in their leash of celestial fire. Ten centuries hence the dust of the millionaire will have mingled with that of the mendicant, both long forgotten of men; ten centuries hence the descendants of those now peddling hot wiener-wurst may proudly wear the purple, while the posterity of present monarchs creep through life as paupers. A thousand years are but as one tick of the mighty horologe of time—and the allotted life of man but three score years and ten! And this brief period we expend, not in living, but in providing the means of life; not as creation's lords, but as slaves to our own avarice, the most pitiful passion that ever cursed mankind. If there be a God, be thou his messenger unto men;
There's one class of people whom we cannot brand as arrant knaves and put in the pillory, yet who are a curse to any country. These are your Laodiceans in religion and politics, your luke-warms, your namby-pamby milk-and-cider set who are neither cold or hot. These are your eminently proper people, your stereotyped respectables. They accept the Gospel as true, not that they can comprehend it, but rather because they lack sufficient mental vigor to deny it. They join the church and align themselves with that political party to which the local nabobs belong. "What will people say?" is to them the all-important problem. They have followed some old bell weather or lead-gander into the wire-grass pasture of Respectabilia. They observe all the proprieties—at least in outward appearance. These are the animals whose vis inertia perpetuates all the abuses of wealth and power— whatsoever has the approval of two or more generations of infamous rascals is so eminently respectable. These are the people who are so profoundly shocked by the alleged slang of Hugo and vulgarities of Goethe, while compelling their daughters to read the Canticles. They have a conniption fit and fall in it because some shapely
I am neither a Jeremiah with a lung full o' lamentations, nor a Jonah rushing round like a middle of the roader and proclaiming, "Yet forty days and the woods will be on fire." I do not believe that we can pick ourselves up by our own embroidered boot-straps and hop blithely astride a millennium built to order by McKinley, Bryan, or any other man; but I do believe that the human race is slowly but surely working the subsoil out of its system, is becoming ever less the beast and more the god. Nations grown corrupt with wealth and age may fall, but others strong in youth and innocence will arise. Old faiths may be forgotten, but from other and purer altars will ascend the smoke of sacrifice. Freedom may be wounded grievously in her very temple by Anglomaniacs who needs must have a royal master, yet her banner, torn but flying, will
The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 12 | ||