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;
and I want you to feel as free to talk back as
though we had gotten into this difficulty by accident
instead of design. Ask me all the questions you want to, and
if I'm unable to answer offhand I'll look the matter up
later and telegraph you—at your expense. With such
unbounded liberty there's really no telling whither we will
drift, what subjects we may touch upon; but should I
inadvertently trample upon any of your social idols or
political gods, I trust that you will take no offense—will
remember that we may honestly differ, that none of us are
altogether infallible. Lest any of you should mistake me
for an oratorical clearing-sale or elocutionary bargain-counter, expect a Demosthenic display and be disappointed,
I hasten to say that I am no orator as Brutus
was, but simply a plain, blunt man, like Mark Antony,
who spoke right on and said what he did know, or thought
he knew, which was just as satisfactory to himself. He's
dead now, poor fellow! Woman in the case, of course.
Shakespeare assures us that "men have died from time to
time and worms have eaten them, but not for love." However
that may be, Antony's just as dead as though he had
died for love—or become a gold-bug "Democrat." Yes,
Mark Antony's gone, but we still have Mark Hanna. One
threw the world away for Cleopatra's smile, the other
threw Columbia's smile away for a seat in the Senate, and
so it goes. Of the two Marks, I think Antony was the
easiest.
. . .
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
may be one who hopes to raise the wage rate by means
of a tariff wall, or expects John Bull to assist Uncle Sam
in the remonetization of silver. A rainbow-chaser, in the
common acceptance of the term, is a fellow who mistakes
shadow for substance and wanders off the plank turnpike
into bogs and briar patches. Satan appears to have been
the first victim of the rainbow-chasing fad—to have bolted
the Chicago convention and run for president on the reform
ticket. At a very early age I began to doubt the
existence of a personal devil, whereupon my parent on my
father's side proceeded to argue the matter in the good old
orthodox way, but failed to get more than half the hussy
out of my hide. But we will not quarrel about the existence
or non-existence of a party who Milton assures us slipped
on a political orange peel. We know that frauds and
fakes exist, that hypocrites and humbugs abound.
Whether this be due to the pernicious activity of a horned
monster or to evil inherent in the human heart, I will not
assume to say. We may call that power the devil which
is forever at war with truth, is the father of falsehood,
whether it be an active personality or only a vicious
principle.
. . .
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
precious than pure gold—have well-nigh departed,
that the
social heart is dead as a salt herring; that all is becoming
brummagem and pinch-beck, leather and prunella; that a
curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world, and it no
longer produces heaven-inspired men but only some pitiful
simulacra thereof, some worthless succedona for such, who
strive not to do their god-given duty though the world
reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and
grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They
aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous
ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron,
but of some pitiful sectarian mud-puddle or political goose
pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers we
have abandoned the Ark of the Covenant with its Brotherhood
of Man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities,
and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis
of brute selfishness, with a conscience or a creed of following
the foolish rainbow of a fatuous utilitaria and getting
even deeper into the bogs.
. . .
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
rottenness, to destroy the tares sown by the devil
and give
dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In
determining what should be preserved and what destroyed,
we may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that
what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we
should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or
loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently
an age of artificiality—that there is little genuine
left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even
that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous
old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston
propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty.
Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow;
not because he looks like one in the least, but rather
because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes.
He also reminds me of a rainbow-chaser, because what he
is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope
deferred hath made him heart-sick he begins to growl at
the girls—and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at
the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks
much at anything he can get hold of and bite.
. . .
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
breaks the great white light of God, and there's no
more
of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the
productive power of labor multiplied by two, by ten; and
with such improved weapons for waging war upon the
grisly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the
industrial army in India alone died upon their shields.
Hosannahs mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe
tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there!—
and we send to the famine-sufferers many bibles and hymn-books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn-books
are excellent things in their ways, but do not possess an
absorbing interest for the man with an aching void
concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian
world for grub, and it gives them forty'leven different
brands of saving grace—each warranted the only genuine
—most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired
missionaries who serve God for the long green, and who are
often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a
religious thesis from an ichthyosaurian.
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,
political pow-wows and newspaper ads. for patent
liver
pills. O, that the featherless jaybirds now trying to
twitter in long-primer type would apply the soft pedal
unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance
and despair! Most of our modern poets are bowed down
with more than Werterean woe. Their sweethearts are
cruel or fate unkind; they've got cirrhosis of the liver or
palpitation of the heart, and needs must spill their
scalding tears over all humanity. It seems never to have
occurred to the average verse architect that not a line of
true poetry was ever written by mortal man; that even
the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacreon are but as
the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the
divine harmony; that you can no more write poetry than
you can paint the music of childhood's laughter, or hear
the dew-beaded jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume
to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose
hearts are harps of a thousand strings, ever swept by
unseen hands—those whose lips are mute because the soul
of man hath never learned a language. Those we call
master-poets and crown with immortelles but caught and
fixed some far off echo of deep calling unto deep—the lines
of Byron or a Burns, a Tasso or a Tennyson are but the
half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of
its own imaginings.
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
morn, and as eve creeps on the shadows reach further
back until they link the cradle and the grave and all is
dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor
mock one earnest effort of mankind; but I would warn
this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going
forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead
to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power—these
by thy gods, O! Israel—mere fly-specked eidolons worthy
no man's worship.
. . .
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.
"Sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet
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
protection of the consuls of other countries from the
spirit that made our flag respected in every land and
honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism"
whenever an American manifests a love of country or
professes a national pride. What is "jingoism?" It is
a word coined by enemies of this country and used by
toad-eaters. It is a term which, under various titles, has
been applied to every American patriot since our gran'-sires held the British lion up by the caudal appendage and
beat the sawdust out of the impudent brute—since they
appealed from a crack-brained king to the justice of
heaven and wrote the charter of our liberties with the
bayonet on the back of Cornwallis' buccaneers. Its synonym
was applied to Thomas Paine, the arch-angel of the
Revolution, whose pen of fire made independence
imperative—who through seven long years of blood and tears
fanned Liberty's flickering flames with his deathless faith
that the Omnipotent arm of God would uphold the banner
of the free. From the brain of that much-maligned and
long-suffering man Columbia sprang full-panoplied, like
Minerva from the brow of Olympian Jove. And what has
been his reward? In life he was bitterly belied by the
foes of freedom and the slaves of superstition; in death a
mighty wave of calumny rolls above his grave. Greater
men have lived and died and been forgotten, but a nobler
heart ne'er beat and broke—grander soul ne'er struggled
toward the light or bowed before the ever-living God.
When the colonists stood debating whether to bear their
present ills or fly to other they knew not of, he seized
the gage of battle and flung it full and fair in Britain's
haughty face. When defeat followed defeat, when the
new-born nation was bankrupt and its soldiers starving
in the field; when coward lips did from their color fly
and men brave as Roman tribunes wept tears of grim
despair, his voice rang out again and again like that
of
some ancient prophet of Israel cheering on the fainting
legions of the Lord, and again, and again, and yet again
the ragged barefoot Continentals set their breasts against
the bayonet, until from the very ashes of defeat dear
Liberty arose Phœnix-like, a goddess in her beauty, a
titan in her strength.
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
backbone as a scared rabbit would knock some of the
wind and water out of their bogus "securities." It is
those who would sell their citizenship for a copper cent
and throw in their risen Lord as
lagniappe, who are forever
prating of "jingoism" and pleading for peace at
any price. And these unclean harpies of greed and gall
have been too long permitted to dominate this government.
The result is that the greatest nation known to
human history—the sum and crown of things—is an
object of general insult. If it be rumored that we
cantemplate protecting American citizens in Cuba, every
European government emits a growl—there's talk of
rebuking Uncle Sam's "presumption," of standing him in
a corner to cool. If it be suggested that we annex an
island—at the earnest request of all its inhabitants worth
the hanging—there more minatory caterwauling by the
European courts, while even the Mikado of Japan gets
his little Ebenezer up, and the Ahkound of Swat, the
Nizan of Nowhere and the grand gyasticutus of Jimple-cute intimate that they may send a yaller-legged policeman
across the Pacific in a soap-box to pull the tail-feathers out of the bird o' freedom if it doesn't crawl
humbly back upon its perch. If a fourth-class power
insults our flag we accept a flippant apology. If our
citizens are wrongfully imprisoned we wait until they are
starved, shot, or perish of blank despair in dungeons so
foul that a hog would die therein of a broken heart; then
humbly ask permission to investigate, report that they
are dead, and feel that we have discharged our duty.
Why? Because this nation is dominated by the dollar—is
in the hands of those who have no idea of honor unless
it will yield somewhat to eat, no use for patriotism unless
it can be made to pay. When we concluded to protect
our citizens from Weylerian savagery, instead of sending
a warship to Havana to read the riot act if need be
in
villainous saltpetre we had our ambassador crawling about
the European courts humbly begging permission of the
powers, and as we got no permission we did no protecting.
When the church people elect me president of this
Republic I'll have ante-mortem investigations when
American citizens are held prisoners by foreign powers, and
those entitled to Old Glory's protection will get it in
one time and two motions if Uncle Sam has to shuck his
seer-sucker and fight all Europe to a finish. I shall
certainly ask no foreign prince, potentate or power for
permission to protect American citizens in the western world.
There'll be one plank in my platform as broad as a
boulevard and as long as a turnpike, and it will be to the
effect that the nation which wrongs an American citizen
must either apologize with its nose in the sand or reach
for its six-shooter. I'd rather see my country made a
desolation forever and a day, its flag torn from the heavens,
its name erased from the map of the world and its people
sleeping in heroes' sepulchres, than to see it a mark for
scorn, an object of contempt.
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
overboard. We have an army, about the size of a
comic
opera company, officered largely by society swells who
cannot even play good poker, are powerful only on dress
parade. We have a few militia companies, scattered from
Sunrise to Lake Chance, composed chiefly of boys and
commanded by home-made colonels, who couldn't hit a
flock o' barns with a howitzer loaded to scatter; who show
up at state encampments attired in gaudy uniforms that
would make Solomon ashamed, and armed with so-called
swords that wouldn't cut hot butter or perforate a rubber
boot. And that's our immediate fighting force. Uncle
Sam is a Philadelphia tenderfoot flourishing a toy pistol
at a Mexican fandango. When I succeed Mr. McKinley
I'll weed every dude and dancing master out of the army
and navy and put on guard old war dogs who can tell
the song of a ten-inch shell from the boom-de-aye of a
sham battle. I'll call the attention of my Hardshell
Baptist Congress to Washington's advice that while avoiding
overgrown military establishments, we should be careful
to keep this country on a respectable defensive posture,
and that if that advice is not heeded, I'll distribute the
last slice of federal pie among the female Prohibitionists
of Kansas. If this is to be a government of, for and by
a lot of nice old ladies, I'll see to it that none of my
official grannies grow a beard or wear their bronchos
clothespin fashion. And I'll warrant you that were this
nation ruled by sure-enough women instead of by a lot
of anaemic he-peons of the money-power, Columbia would
not be caught unprepared when "the spider's web woven
across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears in
the wind no more."
. . .
To the American patriot familiar with the rapid development
of this country it seems that the hour must assuredly
come when its lightest wish will be the world's law—
when foreign potentates will pay homage to the sovereigns
of a new and greater Rome; but let us not be too
sanguine, for nations, like individuals, have their youth,
their lusty manhood and their decay; and despite the rapid
increase in men and money there are startling indications
that Uncle Sam has already passed the zenith of
his power.
"First freedom, then glory, when that fails,
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
own more than 80 per cent. of all the values created
by
the people. What is the result? Money is omnipotent.
Power is concentrated in the hands of a little coterie of
plutocrats—the people are sovereigns
de jure and slaves
de facto. A mongrel Anglomaniaism is spreading among
our wealthy, like mange in a pack o' lobo wolves. Our
plutocrats have become ashamed of their country—probably
because it permits them to practice a brutal predacity
—and now cultivate foreign customs, ape foreign fashions,
and purchase as husbands for their daughters the upper-servants of European potentates—people who earned their
titles of nobility by chronic boot-licking or sacrificing
their female relatives to the god of infamy. Year after
year these titled paupers—these shameless parodies on
God's masterpiece—paddle across the pond to barter their
tawdy dishonor for boodle, to sell their shame-crested
coronets to porcine-souled American parvenues, who if spawned
by slaves and born in hell would disgrace their parentage
and dishonor their country. Our toadies and title-worshippers now have a society called the "Order of the
Crown," composed of puppies who fondly imagine that
they have within their royal hides a taint of the impure
blood that once coursed through the veins of corrupt and
barbarous kings. Perchance these dudelets and dudines
will yet discover that they are descended in a direct line
from King Adam the First and are heirs to the throne
of Eden. Our country is scarce half developed, yet it is
already rank with decadence and smells of decay. Our
literature is "yellow," our pulpit is jaundiced, our society
is rotten to the core and our politics shamefully corrupt
—yet people say there's no need of iconoclasts! Perhaps
there isn't. The iconoclasts used hammers, while those
who purify our social atmosphere and make this once
again a government of, for and by the people may have
to empty gatling guns and load them with carbolic
acid.
National decay and racial retrogression may be inferred
from the fact that alleged respectable white women have
been married to black men by eastern ministers who insist
on solving the race problem for God and the South by
giving to the typical American of the future the complexion
of a new saddle and the perfume of a Republican powwow.
When these ethnological experts tire of life, they should—
come to Texas. When white people lose their racial pride
they've nothing left that justifies the appointment of a
receiver. We hear a great deal about "race prejudice,"
and I want to say right here that there's just enough of it
in my composition to inspire an abiding faith that the
white man should be, must be, will be, lord paramount of
this planet. I promise you that when you elect me to the
presidency, nothing that's black, yaller or tan gets an
office under my administration. I shall certain not follow
Mark Hanna's understudy and fill the departments at
Washington with big, fat, saucy blacks, to employ white
women as stenographers and white men as messenger boys.
There's lots of good in the Senegambian—lots of it; but
not in a thousand years will he be fit for American
sovereignty. Half the white people are not fit for it, else
instead of a wooden-headed hiccius doctius we'd have Billy
Bryan in the presidential chair today. Whenever I look
at McKinley, I think of Daniel Webster—not because Bill
resembles old Dan, but because he doesn't. I like the
negro in his place and his place is in the cotton patch,
instead of in politics, despite the opinion of those who have
studied him only through the rose-tinted lorgnette of
"Uncle Tom's Cabin." I also like the Anglomaniac in
his place, and that is the geographical center of old
England, with John Bull's trade-mark seared with a hot iron
on the western elevation of his architecture as he faces
the rising sun to lace his shoes. As between the
nigger
and the Anglomaniac, I much prefer the former. The
full-blooded nigger is a fool positive, but the Anglomaniac
is an ass superlative. The first is faithful to those
who feed him; the latter is a sneaking enemy to the
country that has conferred upon him every benefit.
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
never known a man to borrow any money of the bank
on the unctuosity of his amen, but I have known people
who could double-discount Satan himself at dodging an
honest debt, to weep real water because I declined to come
into their sectarian penfold and be measured for a suit of
angelic pin-feathers. There are many church people who
will slander you unmercifully for dissenting from their
religious dogma, then seize the first opportunity to stick
you with a plugged dime or steal your dog. There are
worshippers who do not consider in outward rites and
specious forms religion satisfied; but these never
accumulate vast fortunes. The path to heaven is too steep to
be scaled by a man weighted down with seven million
dollars. He may be long on hope and faith, but he's
short on charity, and without charity religion is as big
a fraud as McKinley's international bimetallism. Charity
is a word that is awfully misunderstood. If a man's
income be $5,000 a year and he gives half of it to the
less fortunate, he's a pretty decent fellow, but if he
reserves for himself half of a $100,000 income while people
are going hungry to bed, he's simply a brute. With a
world full of woe and want, what right has any professed
follower of Jesus to shove $50,000 a year down his jeans?
The true test of a man's charity is the sum which he
reserves for himself; hence when Jno. D. Rockefeller—my
good Baptist brother who's building collegiate monuments
to his own memory with other people's money—reserves
tens o' millions in excess of his needs and imagines himself
full to the muzzle with the grace of God, he's simply
chasing a rainbow that may land him in Malebolge with the
dull sudden plunk of a Republican campaign promise hitting
the tidal wave of prosperity. Imagine Jesus Christ
with John D.'s money—loaning it at 5 per cent. a month!
Why if he'd had half so much cash he'd never have been
crucified. Those who clamored for his death would
have
run him for mayor of Jerusalem on the reform ticket
and tried to work him for his last dollar.
. . .
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
Girard playing Good Samaritan in a plague-swept city
while the preachers hit the turnpike; one deistical Tom
Paine, braving the guillotine for the rights of man; one
Father Damien, freely laying down his life for the miserable
lepers of Molokai; one sweet-faced sister of charity
bravely battling with the reeking slums of a great city,
striving to drag souls from that seething maelstrom of
sin, were worth legions of those sanctified lollypops who
prate of sacrificing all for their Savior, yet never risk life
or gold in the service of their God.
. . .
"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
that heart of oak, but a prurient little preacher,
one of
those busy smooth-bore bigots whose mission seems to be
to cast a shadow on the very sun, convinced the stricken
man that he was an awful sinner, whereupon he began
crying out that he was doomed to be damned. The nurse,
a muscular woman who believed with the old monks that
"work is worship," took the parson by the pendulous
8 x 10 ear, led him aside and sweetly said: "Mr. Goody
Two-Shoes, if I catch you in this ward again I'll
throw you out of the window." The brimstone
peddler felt that he had an urgent "call" to other fields.
He stood not upon the order of his going, but hit the dim
and shadowy distance like Nancy Hanks. He couldn't
even wait to pray for his persecutor or take up a collection.
In vain the nurse strove to soothe her patient by
telling him that the man who gave his life for his native
land cannot miss heaven's mercy—he but wailed the louder
that he was lost. "You came to me a hero," she cried,
"and you shall not leave me a coward. If you must go
to hell, go like a man." If Romans nursed by a she-wolf
became demigods, what might not Americans be sprung
from the loins of such a lioness! Milton has almost made
Satan respectable by endowing him with an infernal heroism,
by making him altogether and irremediably bad,
instead of a moral mumwump—by giving him a heart for
any fate instead of picturing him as willing to wound
and yet afraid to strike.
. . .
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
cast up at the end of the month and discharged with a
given number of dollars. Man was not made for himself
alone, but all were made for each and each for all. The
doctrine which now prevails of "every man for himself,"
is the dogma of the devil. It means universal war, shameful
wrong and brutal outrage—the strong become intolerable
tyrants, the weak go to the wall. It transforms
this beautiful world into a basket of adders, each biting,
hissing, striving to get its foolish head above its fellows.
If the Christian religion contained naught else of worth,
its doctrine of self-sacrifice should earn for it the respect
of every Atheist in the universe. Through the fogs of
ignorance and the clouds of superstition that enshrouded
the Biblical ages that touch of the divine shines like a
pilot star.
. . .
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
he were dead. He has the mulligrubs because he
cannot
plant himself on a Congressional cushion, or because he
finds his wife awake and nursing a curtain lecture to keep
it warm when he falls through the front fence at 5 o'clock
in the morning. It seems never to have occurred to these
Werterian wailers that the happiest existence is that of
the lower animals—that the human being of fine brain and
keen sensibilities cannot possibly be content. It is this
very unrest, this heart-hunger that drives a man on to
noble deeds—that lifts him out of the gutter where wallow
the dull, dumb beasts and places him among the gods. Of
suffering and sorrow were born all life's beauty. The kiss
of Pyramus and Thisbe is an ectasy of pain. The hope
of immortality sprang from breaking hearts. Nations rise
through a mist of tears. Every great life-work is an
agony. Behind every song there lurks a sigh. There's
an element of sadness in humor itself. The Virgin Mother
is known as Our Lady of Pain. The cult of Christ is
hallowed by the blood of self-sacrifice and known as the
Religion of Sorrow. The first breath of life and the last
gasp are drawn in suffering; and between the cradle and
the grave there lies a monster-haunted Sahara. Yet men
choose the
ignis-fatuus called Happiness, and mourn that
they cannot cover it with a No. 6 hat. They should pray
the gods to transform them into contented goats and turn
them out to grass. People who cannot find happiness here
begin to look for it in heaven. Eternal beatitude is
another ridiculous rainbow. Nirvana is nonsense. If there
be a life beyond the grave, it means continued endeavor,
and there can be no endeavor unless there's dissatisfaction.
The creature cannot rise superior to its creator—and the
universe is the result of God's unrest. Had he been
perfectly content he would not have made me.
Carlyle—not Mugwump Carlisle of Kentucky, but Thos.
Carlyle of Great Britain-the lord of modern
literature—
says the hell most dreaded by the English is the hell of not
making money. We have imported this English Gehenna,
duty free, despite Mr. Dingley, and now the man who
doesn't succeed in accumulating dollars is socially damned.
How many of this generation can understand the remark
of Agassiz that he had no time to make money?—can
realize that such occupation is not the sole end of man?—
that time expended in the accumulation of wealth beyond
the satisfaction of simple wants is worse than wasted?
It is so because from our numbered days we have stolen
years that should have been devoted to soul-development,
filled with the sweets of knowledge; hallowed by the
perfume of love, made gracious by noble deeds—because we
have blasted life's fair fruitage with the primeval eldest
curse. Omar strikes one true chord when he doth sing:
"A book of verses, underneath the bough,
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
bucket while enjoying a case of katzenjammer. King
and
cynic, tub and palace, lantern and scepter—all have
perished; and he that butchered thousands to glut his
greed for what fools call glory, shines less brightly through
the murky shadows of the century than he that made a
nobler conquest of himself. The haughty empires one did
rear have long since crumbled into dust; the wild goat
browses in their deserted capitals, the lizard sleeps upon
their broken thrones, and the owl hoots from their forgotten
altars and ruined fanes; but the philosophy of the
other lives on from age to age, to point the folly of such
mad rainbow-chasing as that of him who thought to make
the world his monument.
. . .
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;
if there be no God, then have thy unfortunate fellows
the
more need of thee. Wait not until a man is driven to
crime by the iron law of necessity, a woman to dishonor, a
child to beggary, then organize some fake relief society for
thine own glory, but put forth a helping hand in time to
avert the sin and shame. The most pitiful failure in all
God's universe is the man who succeeds only in making
money. A thieving fox will grow fat by predacity while
an honest dog starves in the path of duty. And we have
too many sleek Reynards prowling 'round the sheep-pens
and dove-cotes of this people, too few faithful Gelerts
doing stubborn battle with predaceous beasts.
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
danseuse kicks up her rhythmic heels on the
vaudeville
stage, then organize Trilbys auctions, kissing bees and
garter raffles for the glory of God. Their ideal is
expediency and their moral law the Eleventh Commandment—
Don't get caught. These are the people who stone the
prophets of progress. They are to the social organism
what a pound of putty would be to the stomach of a
dyspeptic. They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of
the giant of civilization. "What will people say?"
Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you
are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a
Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by
Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have
absorbed it—it will have become respectable—and you
couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus'
Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison
him!" because he denied the old falsehood that the world
is flat; of Servetus, "Burn him!" because he dissented
from the
ipse dixit of another heretic; of Socrates,
"Poison him!" because he laughed at the too amorous
gods of Greece; of Robert Emmett, "Hang him!" because
he wasn't a Cleveland-Bayard Anglomaniac; and
they said of Jesus Christ, "Crucify him!" because he
intimated the fashionable preachers of his time were a set
of splenetic-hearted hypocrites. That's what people say;
but occasionally there's one to answer that 'tis not in the
power of all Xerxes' hosts to bend one thought of his
proud heart—"they may destroy the case of Anaxarchus,
himself they cannot reach." It is not what foolish sound
is shaped by a deal of stinking breath and blown adown
the wind to be forgotten like the bray of an asthmatic
burro, to perish like the snows of yesteryear, that should
be our concern—not what the idle gabble of Mrs. Grundy
proclaims us, but what we actually are. Public opinion
is an ever-shifting rainbow. The "heretics" of one
age
are the saints of the next: the "cranks" of our own time
may be the philosophers of the future; the despised rebels
of a century ago are the men whose graves we bedeck with
our garlands. Soon or late, those who court the many-headed monster, who "flatter its rank breath and bow
to its idolatries a patient knee," are trampled beneath its
iron heel; but those who take duty for guiding star and
are strong enough to withstand the gibes of malice and the
jeers of ignorance will find that the years are seldom
unjust. It has been well said that one eternity waited for
us to be born, that another waits to see what we will do
now that we are here. Do what thou canst and do it
with all thy might, remembering that every fice that doth
bark at thee this day, every goose that stretches forth its
rubber neck to express its disapproval, will be dead in hell
a hundred years hence, its foolish yawp gone silent
forevermore, but that thy honest act affects in greater or less
degree all God's universe.
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
stream triumphant over the grave of tyranny. The
black
night of barbarous ignorance may often engulf the world,
but "Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to
dawn." The Star of Bethlehem cannot go down in everlasting
darkness—the bow of promise gleams softly luminous
behind the thunderbolt. I care not whether the
Noahian tale be true that never again will the shifting
axis of the earth pour the sea upon the plain—the rainbow
is nature's emblem of peace, her cestus of love, and in its
splendor I read a promise that never again will this fair
earth of ours be swept with sword and fire, deluged with
blood and tears. Not to the past, but to the future, do
I look for the Saturnian age, when the demons of need and
greed will be exorcised, when love will be the universal
law, the fatherhood of God the only faith. Such, my
friends, is the rainbow to which I have turned my feet.
It lies afar, across dismal swamps o'er whose icy summits
only the condor's shadow sweeps—across arctic vast and
desert isles beyond tempestous ocean rank with dead men's
bones and the rotting hulls of ships. I shall not attain
it, nor shall you; but he that strives, though vanquished,
still is victor. A dreamer, say you? Ah yes, but all life is
but a dream, mystic, wonderful, and we know not when we
sleep nor when we wake. I love to dream so when the
storm beats upon the great oaks, hoary with their hundred
years, and they put forth their gnarled arms and grapple
with the blast, when the lightning cleaves the inky sky
with forked flame and the earth rocks neath the thunder's
angry roar. When the dark clouds roll muttering unto
the East and the evening sun hangs every leaf and twig
and blade of grass with jewels brighter than e'er gleamed
in Golconda's mines; when the mock-birds renew their
melody and every flower seems drunken with its own incense,
I look upon the irisate glory that seems to belt the
world with beauty and my heart beats high with hope
that
in years to be the storm-clouds that o'ershadow the souls
of men will recede also—that time shall come when the
human race will be one universal brotherhood, containing
neither a millionaire nor a mendicant, neither a master
nor a slave.
