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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01

by William Cowper Brann · English · Gutenberg #567 · 590,382 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01

Author: William Cowper Brann


        
Release date: June 1, 1996 [eBook #567]
                Most recently updated: April 1, 2015

Language: English

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THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
BRANN
THE ICONOCLAST

VOLUME I




In putting into permanent form the complete works of
William Cowper Brann, twenty-one years after his death,
the sole purpose of the present publishers is to preserve in
its entirety the genius of a writer whose work, though
produced under the stress of journalism, is destined to
endure as literature.

Upon the issues discussed by Brann, the publishers take no
sides; they do not stand as sponsors for, nor do they desire
to appear in the light of either approving or disapproving his
opinions or methods.  They were friends and neighbors of
many years' standing of the men and institutions mentioned
in Brann's writings, but were in no way involved in the bitter
controversies and deplorable events which led to Brann's
untimely and dramatic death.

The plan and arrangement of this twelve-volume set of
Brann is simple.  The first volume is composed of articles of
various length gathered from miscellaneous sources, and
includes some of the better known articles from The
ICONOCLAST.  Volume II to XI inclusive are the files of
The ICONOCLAST (from February, 1895 to May, 1898,
inclusive), with the matter arranged approximately as it
appeared in the original publication.  Volume XII contains
the story of Brann's death and various biographical and
critical articles from the press of the day, together with
those of Brann's speeches and lectures which have been
preserved.  At the close of Volume XII you will find a
complete index of subjects and of titled articles for the
entire twelve volumes.




PREFACE
BY MILO HASTINGS

As I read the proofs of the last of these volumes, wherein is
told the story of Brann's death, my cup of the joy of love's
labor is embittered with the gall of an impotent, futile rage
against the Sower that flings with mocking hand the seed of
genius and recks not where it falls.  The germ of such a life
as Brann's we can but accept in worshipful, unquestioning
gratitude, for the process of its spawning is too entangled to
unravel.  But of the environment of his life we cannot refrain
from rebellious questioning, appreciative though we be of
that which was, and of our heritage of the unquenchable
spirit that is and shall be as long as our language shall last.

Genius he is, this only Brann we have; genius audacious,
defiant, and sublime; whose stature, though his feet be on
the flat of the Brazos bottom, towers effulgent over those
effigies placed on pedestals by orthodox popularity, and
sickly lighted by professorial praise.

Nor is my anger born of the fact that Brann, as warped by
his environment of time and place, wasted thought on free
silver economics, spent passion on prohibition and negro
criminals, lavished wrath on provincial preachers and local
politicians or alloyed his style by the so-called "vulgarities,"
which alone could shock into attention the muddle-headed
who paid his printer's bill for the privilege of seeing
barnyard phrases and dunghill words in type.

All this, I can conceive, may have been the particular
combination of circumstances that were needed to
bring to flower a germ of genius that, had it been planted in
last century's Boston, might have given us but another
Harvard classic--or environed in this century's Greenwich
Village only another free-versifier of souls a-jaunt amid
psycho-analytics and parlor Bolshevism.

The slouch-hatted, gun-toting, beer-drinking, woman-
worshiping, man-baiting Brann of Texas may have been the
particular and only Brann to have developed the colossal
courage and fighting fearlessness that gave his poet's soul
the reach and stature, the strength and vigor to raise
himself above the mere music of his words.

Brann as he was when he heard the shot that killed him, I
can accept and proclaim as beyond the need and reach of
apology or regret.  But what of the Brann that would have
written on throughout the twenty-one years that have since
elapsed, and that we would have with us still at the prime
age of sixty-four?

Had Brann lived!  We should have had the product of eight
times the period of his writing life that was; and an added
quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes,
more leisure for deliberate composition.  We should have
heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional
pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns
against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape
and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world.

It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les
Miserables," as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had
but stopped the mobs in the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz
and Waterloo had never been.

The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms.
Samson, old and blind, toppled down the temple, and the
Philistines that he slew at his death were more than they
which he slew in his life.  Not so Brann.  His death was
as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade,
the sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine.

Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic
waste, for no purpose under heaven but to serve as food
for idle fancies as to what might have been--such to me is
the death of Brann, and my throat chokes with sorrow and
my soul is sick with vain despair.

Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than
three years of writing time.  There were previous years of
yearning and dreaming while he fretted beneath the yoke of
galling servitude to newspaper editors unworthy to loose the
latchets of Brann's shoes.   His own paper, The
Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance,
and from which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition
is derived, ran for just forty months, and for six or eight
months of this period Brann was on lecture tours, during
which time his paper was largely filled with outside
contributions.

That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the
seven wonders of the literary world.  That a magazine so
located and written by one man, having but a paltry
advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in
three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then
published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red
Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil.

It is on this three years' work that Brann's fame must rest.
Barring a few poets, the literary colossi have seldom had
less than the work of a score of years on which to base
their claims for greatness.  Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoi, Mark
Twain each wrote for more than fifty years.  But greater
range of variety and distance as well as span of time
contributed to their product.  They traveled up and down
the world of men, mingled with many races, sailed seas,
climbed mountains, lived in metropoles, and dined with
princes.

Brann's most notable personal acquaintances were country-
town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a
hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of
the world.  He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily
unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and
the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement
was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most
spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's
most worthy resident representative, William Marion Reedy.

So environed, in a time when the bicycle marked the acme
of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed
Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college
and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers,"
Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as
Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and
bookworms.  Only by the doubtful faith that men are made
by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the
Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren
ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars of
bullet-answering bigotry.

But vain are the might-have-beens; and fortunate are we to
have as we have the stuff out of which far-ringing fame
resounds unto generations when teeth are no longer set on
edge--when men will have forgotten the taboos of a little
day and the dust of our Mrs. Grundys will be weeds to
choke the freedom of the grass.

The copies of The Iconoclast, read in their day till worn
to tatters, were ill adapted to preservation.  It were futile to
look for them in libraries, for Brann was about as welcome
in those formal repositories of the proper in literature as
matches in a powder mill.  So far as they are aware the file
of The Iconoclast possessed by the present publishers,
and from which this edition is reproduced, is the only
complete file in existence.

For twenty years this priceless literary heritage has been
waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly
circumstance.  Like a lone great manuscript within the
cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have
perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic
music held but fleetingly within the heart that heard it.

But the blood of ink now flows again through the multiplying
presses and the flaming phrases of The Iconoclast, shot
like shafts of gold from over the mountains of El d'Orado by
the sun of genius, still live and will endure.  Again the
million words leap from the yellowed pages like tongues of
fire and beauty; and ten thousand voices will cry and sing
again before the hearths of those who once knew and
loved the Waco Iconoclast, and will sing and cry in the
homes of their children and their children's children who will
read and acclaim Brann as a God whose name is writ
forever in the stars.

These facts are here set down that they who read in days
to come may marvel as I do now that two score issues of a
provincial paper should consistently contain such a freight
of imperishable literature, revealing a learning positively
prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and
crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish
richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps,
of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ardent splendor of
poetic nights.

Whence came the towering intellect, the wealth of
knowledge, the mastery of words, the music of style, the
diapason of feeling?  It could only come from the sources
that are available to any American who can read.  The
most formal aid that could have contributed is the free
shelves of the St. Louis public library.

The miracle of Brann's growth and flowering is more
marvelous than that of Poe, less explainable than that of
Shakespeare.  That Brann knew the literary classics of the
world is obvious from his every line.  But, unless we invent
some theory of universal telepathy to have wafted
inspiration to Waco from all the canonized dead from
Homer to Carlyle, we can only conceive that Brann derived
his knowledge and his power, without encouragement and
without guidance, by poring over the printed page in lonely
hours bitterly wrested from the wolf of poverty that for forty
years held mortgage on his time.

What he possessed, however got, was a combination of all
those recognized elements of literary greatness--except one
thing; he heeded not the warning of cultured mediocrity that
commands most writers what to leave unsaid.  Brann left
nothing unsaid, and because of that fact was locked out of
colleges, libraries, encyclopaedias and halls of fame.

Where other writers waste half their energies in deciding
what may be written, Brann gave his full energy to writing
what he thought.  Whereas in all things else he matched
and equaled others, in this one fact of absolute audacity
and complete freedom from fear, he outmatched all and so
closed the pedants' mouths of praise.  Colossal, crude,
terrible and sublime, Brann opened the ears of the people
by the mighty power of his untamed language, by the
smashing fury of his wrath of words.

From the point of disadvantage of the little country town lost
in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world,
and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath.  He saw
the sins of high society in New York and London, the
rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling
beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery.
But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial
passing events of his own state and nation and the local
affairs of his home town.  Of all these things, great and
small, he wrote with equal fervor, equal venom and equal
power.

To-day the war is fought, the Czar is dead, free silver is
forgotten and the local animosities that Brann brewed in his
own State live only in the memories of a few old men.

With the roll of the years, the perspective of time, like a low
swung sun, casts the mountain's shadow ever farther
across the valley; and Brann the Waco journalist has
become Brann the American genius.  No matter how dead
the issues, how local to time and place the characters of
which he wrote, his writing is literature and the imperishable
legacy of the world.

The Biblical story of Joseph would be equally great if his
name had been Fu Chow, and Pharaoh had been the
Emperor Wu Wong Wang.  Hamlet would be immortal if his
name were L. Percy Smith and his uncle a pork packer in
Omaha.  The prodigal son has no name, the swine he fed
knew no country.  Particular names, local places, and
passing forms and institutions are not the essence of
literature.  For those who formerly read Brann in The
Iconoclast he was a Texas journalist in the free silver
days; but for those who shall read his work in these days
after the world war, New York might as well be Babylon,
Mark Hanna, Haman, and the files of The Iconoclast,
clay tablets dug from the ruins of some long-buried Waco of
the Euphrates Valley.

It is only the transcendent genius who can afford to be
careless of the preservation of his product.  Socrates
merely talked to chance disciples in the Groves of
Athens; other men wrote and preserved his words.
Shakespeare wrote plays for his current theatrical business;
others gathered and printed his manuscripts.  While he
lived, Brann's writing never saw the dignity of a clothbound
book.  They were not written for carefully edited, thrice-
proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground out for the
unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily
set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and
patent medicine testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet
that could be rolled up and stuck through a wedding ring.

Brann's range of literary form was limited by his single
avenue of publication through the columns of a one-man
paper, and varied from the ten-word epigrams of
Salmagundi to the ten-thousand word article or published
lecture.  Within this range is evidenced at least three
distinct types of literary composition.

First and foremost in volume and effect is the Philippic or
iconoclastic article, mingling in varying proportions the
resounding musical cadences of Ingersollian oratory and
the pungent, audacious epigrammatic twists on which
Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship, built a more
profitable, if not more noble, fame.

It was as the destroyer, the iconoclast, that Brann best saw
himself, and to this role he devoted a great preponderance
of his time and talent.  But there is another Brann, unknown
to many who have conceived him only as an idolsmasher,
an "apostle of the devil," an angry Christ driving out the
defilers of the temple with a lash of scorpion's tails.

Brann, the poet, the lover of beauty, speaks even amidst
the ruins of the houses of hypocrisy and shame which he
has wrecked.  There is scarce a page in all his writings in
which sheer beauty does not stand out amid the
ugliness of carnage and destruction--in which the strains of
celestial music are not heard above the roar of earthly
battle.

But more than this there are many articles that are wholly
cut from a cloth of gold.  Many of the finest of these gems
of pure literature were omitted from the early and
incomplete book-publication of Brann, for the compilers who
made that hasty and inadequate selection were too close to
the bitterness of his death to see this other Brann.

To cite from the first volume only:

Where have you heard a more beautiful sermon from a
Christian pulpit than "Charity" or "Throwing Stones at
Christ"?

Can you find in prose or poetry more melody of language
than in "Life and Death"?

In all our countless volumes of fiction, have you ever read a
more wondrous tale than "There Comes One After," or "A
Story of the Sea"?

To read only such as these is to know a very different
Brann from the author of "The Bradley-Martin Bal Masque"
or "Garters and Amen Groans."  The Brann who wrote
"Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame
as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard."  I have combed my memory in vain to match
it from an American pen.  A few paragraphs from Ingersoll,
a few pages from Poe, a few stanzas from Whitman--but
make your own search and your own comparisons; and if,
in your final ranking, Brann stands not among the Titans
who number less than the fingers on God's hand, it will be
because you cannot divorce the sublime beauty of "Life
and Death" from the coyotes and the jackals that run
rampant through the pages of Brann the shocker of the thin
of skin.

Lastly, consider Brann the teller of stories--for laughter and
for tears.  Some of these tales are allegories as universal to
the life of man as "Pilgrim's Progress."  Elsewhere, as in
the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful
lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow
Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with
the bizarre and scintillating figure.  Nor was Brann
unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a
novel at the time of his death.  That O. Henry's ambition to
write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems
more than probable.  Brann's first attempt to start The
Iconoclast was made in Austin, Texas, but this first paper
survived for only a few issues.

O. Henry, then a drug clerk in Austin, being filled with
literary aspiration, bought the press and the name of The
Iconoclast for $250; but O. Henry's Iconoclast after two
issues also ceased to flutter.  Later, when Brann again
accumulated the necessary funds to permit him to throw off
the hireling's yoke, he asked for and received back from O.
Henry the legal right to the title of his own paper.

I relate this incident not to cast discredit upon O. Henry's
originality.  His unique mastery of story structure was all his
own, but that richness of figurative speech, particularly
those exaggerated humorous metaphors which make his
every paragraph so delightful, we may well believe to be an
Elijah's mantle fallen from the shoulders of Brann, and worn
over a new tunic.

Should any man create more than a rare few of the words
he uses his speech would be as meaningless as a doctor of
theology explaining the trinity.  Likewise that subtle thing
called "style," that revivifying of the dead ashes of
dictionary words, though more peculiar to the man, is most
potent when it borrows freely but wisely from all that has
gone before.

Stevenson read, and confessed to deliberate practice work
in imitation of, the masters that preceded him.  So we know
that Brann read, absorbed, transmuted, and transfigured
the style of the classic writers, and added a daring measure
of reckless originality.  As Brann read his Homer and his
Carlyle, his Shakespeare and his Ingersoll, so Hubbard and
O. Henry read their Brann; and Hubbard specifically
commends him to the would-be writer as Johnson commended Addison.

There is no ore that will assay more literary metal to the
page than Brann.  As a writer's writer no man of our time
surpasses him.  His vocabulary is conceded, even by his
most envious critics, to outrange that of any other
American.  His gift of figurative speech--that essential that
distinguishes literature from mere correct writing--rivals that
of any writer in any country, language or time.  Brann's
compass of words, idioms and phrases harks back to the
archaic and reaches forward to the futuristic.

If you wish merely to learn to appreciate literature so that
you may nod approval in polite society when an accredited
writer's name is mentioned, go to college and listen to the
lectures of literary Ph. D.'s.  But if you want to learn to
write, take your Bible, your Shakespeare and your Brann
and hie you to your garret, there to read, reread, study,
memorize, and imitate if you can.  And God be praised if
you can steal the best and to it add somewhat of your own.

Brann offends, shocks and outrages, is suppressed,
damned, forcibly ignored and laboriously forgotten, because
though the lark sings in his words, "the buzzard is on the
wing."  But Brann did not make the stench that offends the
nostrils of the nice; he only stirred up the cesspools to let
us know that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for
their abatement.  That riles the kept keepers of lesser
fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters
should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the
noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the
world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty
that the few may live in perfumed palaces.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, shouted Brann and died
shouting, while the well-fed and fatted sat on the lid to keep
it down.  But we who have lived to see the lid blown off
Russia and feel the growl and grumble of the bowels of all
the earth need not overstrain our ears to hear Brann
laughing now in that good Baptist Hell to which a bullet in
the back gave him the passport.



POTIPHAR'S WIFE.
STORY OF JOSEPH
REVISITED

For more than six-and-thirty centuries the brand of the
courtesan has rested on the brow of Potiphar's wife.  The
religious world persists in regarding her as an abandoned
woman who wickedly strove to lead an immaculate he-virgin
astray.  The crime of which she stands accused is so unspeakably
awful that even after the lapse of ages we cannot refer to the
miserable creature without a moan.  Compared with her infamous
conduct old Lot's dalliance with his young daughters and David's
ravishment of Uriah's wife appear but venial faults, or even
shine as spotless virtues.

The story of Mrs. Potiphar's unrequited passion may be
strictly true; but if so the world has changed most
wondrously.  It transcends the probable and rests upon
such doubtful ex parte evidence that a modern court
would give her a certificate of good character.  It is not in
accord with our criminal code to damn a woman on the
unsupported deposition of a young dude whom she has had
arrested for attempted ravishment.  Had Joseph simply filed
a general denial and proven previous good character we
might suspect the madame of malicious prosecution; but he
doth protest too much.

Mrs. Potiphar was doubtless a young and pretty woman.
She was the wife of a wealthy and prominent official of
Pharaoh's court, and those old fellows were a trifle exacting
in their tastes.  They sought out the handsomest
women of the world to grace their homes, for sensuous
love was then the supreme law of wedded life.  Joseph was
a young Hebrew slave belonging to Mrs. Potiphar's
husband, who treated him with exceptional consideration
because of his business ability.  One day the lad found
himself alone with the lady.  The latter suddenly turned in a
fire alarm, and Jacob's favorite son jogged along Josie in
such hot haste that he left his garment behind.  Mrs.
Potiphar informed those who responded to her signal of
distress that the slave had attempted a criminal assault.
She is supposed to have repeated the story to her husband
when he came home, and the chronicler adds, in a tone of
pained surprise, that the old captain's "anger was kindled."
Neither Mrs. Potiphar's husband nor her dearest female
friends appear to have doubted her version of the affair,
which argues that, for a woman who moved in the highest
social circles, she enjoyed a reasonably good reputation.

But Joseph had a different tale to tell.  He said that the
poor lady became desperately enamored of his beauty and
day by day assailed his continence, but that he was as deaf
to her amorous entreaties as Adonis to the dear
blandishments of Venus Pandemos.  Finally she became so
importunate that he was compelled to seek safety in flight.
He saved his virtue but lost his vestments.  It was a narrow
escape, and the poor fellow must have been dreadfully
frightened.  Suppose that the she-Tarquin had
accomplished her hellish design, and that her victim had
died of shame?  She would have changed the whole
current of the world's history!  Old Jacob and his other
interesting if less virtuous sons, would have starved to
death, and there would have been neither Miracles nor
Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious
Atonement.  Talmage and other industrious exploiters of
intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for
fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo
Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the
knee to Baal.  The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the
profoundest study.  It was an awful crisis in the history of
the human race!  How thankful we, who live in these latter
days, should be that the female rape fiend has passed into
the unreturning erstwhile with the horned unicorn and
dreadful hippogriff, the minotaur and other monsters that
once affrighted the fearful souls of men--that sensuous
sirens do not so assail us and rip our coat-tails off in a foul
attempt to wreck our virtue and fill our lives with fierce
regret.  True, the Rev. Parkhurst doth protest that he was
hard beset by beer and beauty unadorned; but he seems to
have been seeking the loaded "schooner" and listening for
the siren's dizzy song.  Had Joseph lived in Texas he could
never have persuaded Judge Lynch that the lady and not
he should be hanged.  The youngster dreamed himself into
slavery, and I opine that he dreamed himself into jail.  With
the internal evidence of the story for guide, I herewith
present, on behalf of Mrs. Potiphar, a revised and
reasonable version of the affaire d'amour.

Joseph was, the chronicler informs us, young "a goodly
person and well favored."  His Hebraic type of manly
beauty and mercurial temperament must have contrasted
strangely with Mrs. Potiphar's dark and stolid countrymen.
Mistress and slave were much together, the master's duties
requiring his presence near his prince.  Time hung heavily
on the lady's hands and, as an ennui antidote, she
embarked in a desperate flirtation with the handsome
fellow, for Egypt's dark-eyed daughters dearly love to play
fast and loose with the hearts of men.  Of course it was
very wrong; but youth and beauty will not be strictly bound,
the opportunity seemed made for mischief, and Mrs. Potiphar cared
little for her lord--a grizzly old warrior who
treated her as a pretty toy his wealth had purchased, to be
petted or put aside at pleasure.

A neglected wife whose charms attract the admiring eyes of
men may not depart one step from the straight and narrow
path, but her husband's honor stands ever within the pale
of danger.  Let that husband whose courtship ceased at
Hymen's shrine, who is a gallant abroad and a boor at
home, keep watch and ward, for homage is sweet even to
wedded women.

While Potiphar played the petty tyrant and exacted of his
wife a blind obedience, Joseph sang to her songs she
loved--plaintive tales of tender passion, of enchanted
monarchs and maids of matchless beauty.  He culled the
fairest flowers from the great garden and wove them into
garlands to deck her hair, dark as that lingering night which
Moses laid upon the Valley of the Nile.  He gave her a
thousand little attentions so grateful to womankind, and
worshiped her, not presumptuously, but with the sacred
awe of a simple desert child turning his face to greet the
rising sun.  They were of the same age,--that age when the
heart beats in passionate rebellion against cold precepts,
the blood riots in the veins like molten rubies and all life
seems made for love, for day dreams golden as the dawn,
for sighs and sweet companionship.  What wonder that she
sometimes into the cool left her lord to his heavy slumbers
and crept into the cool gardens with the handsome Hebrew
boy; that they walked, hand clasped in hand, beneath the
tall palms that nodded knowingly, and whispered sweet
nothings while the mellow moonlight quivered on the Nile
and sad Philomela poured forth her plaintive song like a
flood of lover's tears?  All day long they were alone
together,--those children of the world's youth, when life was
strong and moral law was weak.  When the summer sun
rode high in heaven and sent his burnished shafts
straight down into the white streets and swooning gardens;
when the great house was closed to shut out the blinding
glare and in the court cool fountains cast their grateful
spray, what wonder that she bade him sit at her feet and
sing the love songs of his native land, wild prototypes of
those which Solomon poured from the depths of his
sensuous soul to his sweet Rose of Sharon?

 "Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair;
   Thou hast dove's eyes, thy lips are like a thread of scarlet,
   Thy breast like young roes that feed among the lilies.
   Set me as a seal upon thy heart, a seal upon thy arm,
   For love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."

The song dies out and the languorous stillness is broken
only by the splashing of the fountains in the great marble
basins and the drowsy hum of a bee among the blossoms.
The lad's head has sunk down upon the lady's knee and
she is watching the tears trembling on his drooping lashes
and wondering, with a little thrill of pain, if he has a
sweetheart in his own land, of whom he is so sadly
dreaming.  She thanks him for the song in a voice low and
sweet as the musical ripple of the sacred river among the
reeds--she dazzles him with her great Egyptian eyes, those
ebon orbs in which ever lurks the sensuous splendor of a
summer night's high moon.  Her hand strays carelessly
among his curls as she punctuates with sighs and tears his
oft-told tale of unkind brethren, the gloomy cave, the coat of
many colors dipped in blood of the slaughtered kid, the
cruel goad of godless Midianite, driving him on and on
through burning sands and 'neath a blazing sun, far from
his tearful mother and mourning sire.  How cruel the fates
to consign to slavery one born to be a king!  His master
is a hard man and covetous, but her pleadings shall yet
purchase sweet liberty for old Jacob's son, that he may
fulfill the high dreams of which he has told her--may answer
the midnight messages of Israel's God and triumph over
those wicked brethren.  Perhaps--who knows?--in his own
land he will become a mighty prince and treat with proud
Pharaoh on equal terms.  Will he remember her, his only
friend in a land of foes?  Will he think of her when Ammon
is o'erthrown and proud Moab pays his tribute?  Ah, no!
When a crown of jewels blazes on his brow and the sack-
cloth of the slave is exchanged for imperial purple, he'll
think no more of the lonely little woman by Nilus bank, who
prays that Isis will magnify his power, that Osiris will shield
him when the Hebrew sword rings on the Hivite spear.  He
will take to wife some fair cousin of Esau's house, a maid
more beauteous far than those who drink the sweet waters
of the south.  Old Abram's daughters are fair and have
dove's eyes; their lips are as threads of scarlet and their
breasts like young roes that feed among the lilies.  Does
not the song say so?  But those of Egypt--oh, unhappy
Egypt!

 "Love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."

She bends low and whispers the line upon his lips, while
her fragrant breath, beating upon his cheek, sinks into his
blood like the jasmines' perfume,--more dangerous to the
soul than Aphrodite's kisses or Anacreon's drunken song.
By such arts did Cleopatra win the master spirit of the world
and make the mailed warrior her doting slave, indifferent
alike to honor and to duty, content but to live and love.
What wonder that the callow shepherd lad, unskilled in
woman's wile, believed that his mistress loved him?--
that his heart went out to the handsome coquette in a
wild, passionate throb in which all Heaven's angels sang
and Hell's demons shrieked!

A beautiful woman!  Not the beauty of Greece, on which we
gaze as upon some wondrous flower wafted from Elysian
Fields, and too ethereal for this gross world; nor that of
Rome, with Pallas' snow-clad bosom and retrospective eye;
but the sensuous beauty of the far south, that casts a
Circean spell upon the souls of men.  Her eyes are not
dove's eyes that softly shine along the path to Heaven, but
wandering fires that light the way to Hell.  Her lips are not a
thread of scarlet, chaste as childhood and dewy as the
dawn, but the deep sullen red of a city swept with flames.
Her breasts are not like young roes that feed among the
lilies, but ivory hemispheres threaded with purple fire and
tinged with sunset's tawny gold.  Reverently as though
touching divinity's robe, Joseph caresses the wanton curls
that stream like an inky storm-cloud over the shapely
shoulders--he puts the little hands, heavy with costly gems,
back from the tearful face and holds them with a grasp so
fierce that the massy rings of beaten gold bruise the tender
flesh.  Mrs. Potiphar starts up, alarmed by his unwonted
boldness--she reads his face with a swift glance that tells
her he is no longer a lad, a pretty boy to be trifled with for
the amusement of an idle hour.  The Cupid's bow had
faded forever from his lip and childhood's innocence from
his eye; he has crossed life's Rubicon, has passed at one
stride from the Vale of Youth with its trifles and its idle
tears, its ignorance of sex and stainless love, to Manhood's
rugged mountains, where blazes Ambition's baleful star and
the fires of passion ever beat, fiercer than those that sweep
Gehenna's sulphurous hills.

Even while her cheek crimsons with anger and her heart
flutters with fear, the woman glories in Joseph's guilty
love, sweet incense to her vanity, evidence of her
peerless beauty's infernal power.  She retreats a step as
from the brink of an abyss, but farther she cannot fly, for
there is a charm in her companion's voice, potent as old
Merlin's mystic chant--tones low and sweet as music in
dreams by maids who sleep in Dian's bosom, yet wilder,
fiercer than trumpets blown for war.  As a sailor drawn to
his doom by siren song, or a bird spellbound by some
noxious serpent, she advances fearfully and slow until she
is swept into his strong arms and held quivering there like a
splotch of foam in a swift eddy of the upper Nile.  The room
swims before her eyes and fills with mocking demons
that welcome her to the realm of darkness; the fountains'
ripple sounds like roaring thunder, in which she reads the
angry warning of Egypt's gods, while beneath the accursed
magic of the kisses that burn upon her lips, her blood
becomes boiling wine and rushes hissing through a heart of
ice.  The mocking demons turn to angels with Joseph's
handsome face and crown her with fragrant flowers: the
threat'ning thunders to music sweet as Memmon's matin
hymn or accepted lover's sighs, heard 'neath the harvest
moon,--she is afloat upon a sapphire sea beneath a sunset
sky, the West Wind's musky wing wafting her, whither she
neither knows nor cares.

But the angels and the fragrant flowers, the music sweet as
lover's sighs and the sapphire sea, the sunset sky and
Zephyrus' musky wing are dreams; the blistered lips and
poor bruised bosom, the womanly pride humbled in the
dust and wifely honor wounded unto death--these alone are
real!  With an involuntary cry of rage and shame, a cry that
is half a prayer and half a curse--a cry that rings and
reverberates through the great sleepy house like a maniac's
shriek heard at midnight among the tombs--she flings
herself sobbing and moaning upon the marble floor.
The drowsy slave starts up as from a dream, quivering in
every limb like a coward looking upon his death.  He tries to
raise the groveling victim of his unbridled lust, but she
beats him back; he pleads for mercy, but she calls him
ungrateful slave, base Hebrew dog and prays all Egypt's
gods to curse her conqueror.  There's a rush of feet along
the hall, there's a clash of weapons in the court, and here
and there and everywhere tearful maids are calling to their
mistress, the Sweet One and Beautiful, dear Daughter of
the Dawn, Lily of the Nile, while brawny eunuchs,
barelimbed and black as Hell's own brood, are vowing dire
vengeance even upon the King himself if he has dared to
harm her.  The culprit glances with haggard face and wildly
pleading eyes at the woman, once so imperial in her pride,
now cowering a thing accursed, clothed only with her
shame and flood of ebon hair.  The great sun, that hung in
mid-heaven like a disk of burnished brass when she first
forgot her duty, descends like a monstrous wheel of blood
upon the western desert and through the casement pours a
ruddy glow over the prostrate figure a marble Venus
blushing rosy red.  Joseph casts his coarse garment over
his companion as one might clothe the beauteous dead,
and turns away, the picture of Despair, the avatar of guilty
Fear.

. . .

Love is a dangerous game to play, and oft begun in wanton
mischief ends in woeful madness.  In the first flush of
shame and rage Mrs. Potiphar was eager to punish the
slave's presumption, even though herself o'erwhelmed in
his ruin; but hate, though fierce, is a fickle flame in the
female heart, and seldom survives a single flood of tears.
Already Joseph's handsome face is haunting her--already
she is dreaming o'er the happy hours by Nilus' bank, where
first he praised her wondrous beauty--beneath the
nodding palms when the fireflies blazed and the bulbul
poured its song.  The love that has lain latent within her
bosom, or burned with friendship's unconsuming flame,
awakes like smoldering embers fanned by desert winds and
fed with camphor wood, enveloping all her world.  She
longs to leave the loveless life with her sullen lord; to cast
from her as things accursed the gaudy robes and glittering
gems; to fly with the shepherd lad to the deep cool forests
of the far east and dream her life away in some black tent
or vine-embowered cot--to take his hand in hers and
wander on to the world's extreme verge, listening to the
music of his voice.  The great house, once her pride, has
become a grewsome prison, the jailer a grizzly gorgon who
conjured her with the baleful gleam of gold to cast her
beauty on Mammon's brutish shrine.  She hardens her
heart against him and pities herself, as wives are wont to
do who have dragged the dear honor of their husbands in
the dust--she persuades herself that love has cast radiant
glory about her guilt and sanctified her shame.  Oh woman,
what a paradox thou art!  When the descending sun
touched the horizon's rim Mrs. Potiphar could have plunged
a poisoned dagger through the heart of her paramour and
mocked his dying moan; the great globe of fire has not bid
the world good night, yet she is weeping because of the
bitter words with which she drove him forth.

"Love is strong as death."

She repeats the line again and again.  Oh my Israel, is the
grave the limit of thy love?  Wert thou dead, fair boy, Egypt
would inclose thy sacred ashes in a golden urn and wear it
ever between her breasts--would make for thee a living
sepulcher and thou shouldst sleep in the vale of Love,
between the rosy mountains of Desire.  Wert thou dead--

The slaves!  They will tell their master the wild words
she spoke against her love--against his life.  She must
seal their lips, must command their silence.  Too late!
Even as she lays her hand on the silver bell the heavy
tread of her husband's brass-shod feet is heard in the long
hall, ringing upon the bare stone floor in rapid, nervous
rhythm, so different from the usual majestic tread of
Pharaoh's chief slaughterman.  The slaves have already
spoken!  A faintness as of death falls upon her; but she is a
true daughter of false Egypt, and a wiser than Potiphar
would find in her face no shadow of the fear that lies heavy
on her heart.  The game is called and she must play not for
name and fame, but for love and life.  Her husband
confronts her, ferocity incarnate,--the great cord-like veins
of the broad, low brow and massive neck knotted and
black, his eyes blazing like the orbs of an angry lion seen
by the flickering light of a shepherd's fire.  He essays to
speak, but his tongue is thick, his lips parched as one
stricken with the plague, and instead of words there comes
through his set teeth a hoarse, hissing sound as of the
great rock serpent in its wrath.  His glance falls upon
Joseph's garment, the gleaming sword leaps from its
sheath and he turns to seek the slave.  She lays her hand
lightly upon his arm, great Egypt's shield, a pillar of living
brass; she nestles in the grizzly beard like some bright
flower in a weird forest; she kisses the bronzed cheek as
Judas did that of our dear Lord and soothes him with pretty
truths that are wholly lies.

Joseph is a good boy, but sometimes overbold.  Poor child!
Perhaps her beauty charmed away his senses and made
him forget his duty.  She bade him sing to beguile a tedious
hour, and he sang of love and looked at her with such a
world of worship in his eyes that she grew angry and
upbraided him.  Let it pass; for, by the mystic mark of Apis,
she frightened the boy out of his foolish fever.

She laughs gleefully, and the gruff old soldier suffers her to
take his sword, growling meanwhile that he likes not these
alarms--that she has marshaled Egypt's powers to battle
with a mirage.  The game is won; but guilt will never rest
content, and oft reveals itself by much concealment.  It is
passing strange, she tells him tearfully, that every male who
looks upon her, whether gray-headed grand-sire or
beardless boy, seems smitten with love's madness.  She
knows not why 'tis so.  If there is in her conduct aught to
challenge controversy she prays that he will tell her.  The
old captain's brow again grows black.  He leads her where
the fading light falls upon her face, and, looking down into
her eyes as tho' searching out the secrets of her soul, bids
her mark well his words.  The wife who bears herself
becomingly never hears the tempter's tone or knows aught
of any love but that of her rightful lord.  Pure womanhood is
a wondrous shield, more potent far than swords.  If she has
been approached by lawless libertine, he bids her, for the
honor of his house, to set a seal upon her lips, instead of
bruiting her shame abroad as women are wont to do whose
vanity outruns their judgment.

. . .

Potiphar determines to watch his wife.  It had never
occurred to him that she could possibly go astray; but he
has learned from her own confession that she is a flirt, and
he knows full well that a married coquette is half a
courtesan.  Suspecting that Joseph's offense is graver than
his wife set forth, he casts him into prison.  The
inexperienced youth, believing the full extent of his guilt has
been blazoned to the world, and frightened beyond his wits
by armed men and clank of chains, protests with tears and
sighs that he is more sinned against than sinning.  It is
the old story of Adam improved upon--he not only damns
the woman, but denies the apple.

Joseph's posterity, hating Egypt with their whole heart and
intent on glorifying Israel and Israel's God, became the only
historians of this original scandal in high life; and thus was
a youth, probably neither better nor worse than his
brethren, raised to the dignity of a demi-god, while a vain
young wife is condemned through all the ages to wear a
wanton's name.  The story probably contains a moral--
which wives may look for if they will.

. . .

Of course this account of Mrs. Potiphar's seduction is a
fancy sketch; but it is a true pen-picture of what too often
happens in this fair land of ours, and may be perused with
profit by many a Benedict.  The number of unfaithful wives
whose sin becomes the public shame is simply appalling;
yet no criminal was ever so cautious, so adept in the art of
concealment as the woman who values her reputation
above her honor.  There is no secret a man will guard with
such vigilance as his amours, no copartner in iniquity he
will shield with such fidelity as a paramour.  The bandit may
turn state's evidence, and the assassin confess beneath the
noose; but the roue will die protesting that his mistress is
pure as the driven snow.

And yet woman is by nature as true to her rightful lord as
the needle to the magnetic north,--as faithful to her
marriage vows as the stars to their appointed courses.
When a wife "goes astray" the chances are as one to
infinity that the misstep is her husband's fault.  Love is the
very life of woman.  She can no more exist without it than
the vine can climb heavenward without support,--than it can
blossom and bear fruit without the warm kiss of the summer
sun.  Woman's life is a flame that must find an altar upon
which to blaze, a god to glorify; but that sacred fire will
not forever burn 'mid fields of snow nor send up incense
sweet to an unresponsive idol, even though it bears the
name of husband.  The man who courts the wife as
assiduously as he did his sweetheart, makes the same
sacrifice to serve her, shows the same appreciation of her
efforts to please him, need never fear a rival.  He is lord
paramount of her heart, and, forsaking all others, she will
cleave unto him thro' good and thro' evil, thro' weal and
thro' woe, thro' life unto death.  But the man who imagines
his duty done when he provides food, shelter and fine
raiment for the woman he has won; who treats her as if she
were a slave who should feel honored in serving him; who
vents upon her hapless head the ill-nature he would like to
pour into the faces of his fellow-men, but dares not, were
wise to heed the advice which Iago gave to the Moor.

Woman is more subtle than her ancient enemy, the
serpent, and woe to the man who attempts to tread her
beneath his feet!  True it is that all women who find the
hymeneal rites but an unreading of that enchanted spell in
which they worshiped devils as demi-gods; between whose
eager lips the golden apples of Hesperides prove but Dead
Sea fruit; for whom the promised Elysium looms but a
parched Sahara, do not seek in forbidden fields to feed
their famished hearts; but it is well for the peace of mind of
many a husband who neither dotes nor doubts, that black
dishonor oft goes hand in hand with blissful ignorance.

The philosophic world rejects the story of Joseph, having
long ago learned that he-Dians live only in childish legend
and Della-Cruscan poetry.  As an ideal it reverses the
natural relation of the sexes; as an example it is worse than
worthless, for instead of inspiring emulation the young
Hebrew's heroic continence only provokes contempt.
Men worship at the shrine of Solomon's wisdom, of
Moses' perseverance, of David's dauntless courage, but
crown the altar of Joseph with asses' ears.  Such foolish
Munchausenisms give to young girls a false idea of the
opposite sex, relax their vigilance and imperil their virtue.
From such ridiculous romances, solemnly approved by an
owl-like priesthood, sprung that false code--so insulting to
womankind--that a wife's honor is not committed to her own
keeping, but to the tender care of every man with whom
she comes in contact.  When a wife goes wrong a
hypocritical world rises in well-simulated wrath--which is too
often envy--and hurls its anathema maranatha at the head
of the "designing villain," as tho' his companion in crime
were born without brains and reared without instruction!
The "injured husband"--who probably drove his wife to the
devil by studied neglect that starved her heart and wounded
her vanity--is regarded with contempt if he does not "make
a killing" for a crime against the social code which he would
himself commit.

I paint man as I find him, not as I would have him.  I did not
create him, or did his Architect ask my advice; hence it is
no fault of mine that his virtue's frail as ocean foam--not
mine the blame that while half a god he's all a beast.
Mentally and sexually man is a polygamist, and, whatever
its moral value may be, monogamy does violence to the
law of his being.  It is a barrier against which he ever beats
like some wild beast of prey against restraining bars.  Give
him Psyche to wife and Sappho for mistress and he were
not content--would swim a river to make mad love to some
freckled maid.  It is likely that Leander had at home a wife
he dearly loved when he lost his life trying to reach fair
Hero's bower.  That the Lord expects little even of the best
of men when subjected to beauty's blandishments is proven
by his partiality to various princes and patriarchs who,
in matters of gallantry, may be regarded as pace-setters.

I am not the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of
the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish
purists who persist in measuring men and women by the
same standard of morals.  We might as well apply the
same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to
McAllister's fashionable pismires.  We might as wisely bring
to the same judgment bar Bengal's royal beast, crazed with
lust for blood, and Jaques' wounded deer, weeping in the
purling brook.  Each sex and genus must be considered by
itself, for each possesses its peculiar virtues and inherent
vices.  In all nature God intended the male to seek, the
female to be sought.  These he drives with passion's fiery
scourge, those he gently leads by maternal longings, and
thus is the Law of Life fulfilled,--the living tide runs ever on
from age to age, while divine Modesty preserves her name
and habitation in the earth.  A man's crown of glory is his
courage, a woman's her chastity .  While these remain the
incense rises ever from Earth's altar to Heaven's eternal
throne; but it matters not how pure the man if he be a
cringing coward, how brave the woman if she be a brazen
bawd.  Lucrece as Caesar were infamous, and Caesar as
Lucrece were a howling farce.

* * *
CHARITY.

St. Paul SAYS:  "Though I speak with the tongues of
men and angels and have not charity, I am become as
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.  And tho' I have the
gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing."

So it appears that chin-music without charity is not
calculated to pay very large dividends in the interesting
ultimate; that a man may be full of faith, and pregnant with
prophecy, and chock-a-block with knowledge and redolent
of religious mystery,--that he may leak sanctification in the
musical accents of an angel and still be "nothing"--a pitiful
hole in the atmosphere, a chimera circulating in a vacuum
and foolishly imagining itself a man.

But what is charity?  You people who have prayers and
Bible readings before breakfast, while your hearts vibrate
between holiness and hash--between Christ and the cook--
should know; but it's dollars to doughnuts you don't.  You
probably imagine that when you present your out-of-fashion
finery to your poor relations, then wait for a vote of thanks
or a resolution of respect; that when you permit a tramp to
fill a long-felt want with the cold victuals in your cupboard,
which even your pug dog disdains, that the Recording
Angel wipes the tears of joy from his eyes with his wing-
feathers and gives you a page, while all Heaven gets gay
because of your excessive goodness.  That's because your
religious education has been sadly neglected.  If you would
read the Bible--and the ICONOCLAST--with more care you
couldn't make such mistakes.  St. Paul says (and, as the
country preacher remarked, I fully agree with him):

"And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and
though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it
profiteth me nothing."

In other words, a man can't draw on his bank account for
the price of a corner lot in the New Jerusalem.  He cannot
acquire so much as a souphouse ticket in that city not
made with hands by dying for the faith in the auto-da-fe.
Almsgiving and charity may have no more affinity than the
philosophy of Plato and the political conversation of a
poll parrot!  Had you ever made the acquaintance of that
idea?  If not, I advise you to exchange visiting cards with it
before you forget its address.  It is not a "Brannism," I beg
to state! it is part of the Pauline theology--is strictly
orthodox.  There's not a single heretical sign warning you to
keep off the grass.  Almsgiving, and even the martyr's fiery
death, may be animated solely by hope of heavenly reward
or terrestrial fame,--by unadulterated selfishness--may be
regarded as a good investment.  Too many people give to
the poor only because it's "lending to the Lord"--and they
expect Standard Oil stock dividends.  They drop a plugged
nickel in the slot expecting to pull out a priceless crown of
gold,--they expect the Lord to present them with a full suit
of heavenly raiment in exchange for a cold potato or a pair
of frazzled pantaloons.  I want no partnership with a man
who tries to beat the God of the Jews in a trade.

Some of you wealthy men who, like Dives, fare
sumptuously every day, may donate a hundred dollars to
relieve the distress of the people of Starr county.  I hope
you will.  If given unostentatiously--and not for advertising
purposes or in hope of a heavenly reward--it will constitute
an act of charity; but not of the highest, noblest type, for it
will cost you no great sacrifice.  It is just as well, however,
to have a receipt for such a gift to show St. Peter.  If it
does not enable you to divide Abraham's bosom with
Lazarus the beggar, it may save you from the post-mortem
discomforts of Dives.

The two mites cast into the treasury by the poor widow
o'erbalanced all the gifts of those who gave of their
abundance; and a cup of cold water may carry with it more
of true charity, more of the spirit of the Prince of Peace,
than the largesse of the proudest plutocrat.

During the Civil War a grizzly old Yankee sergeant and
a young Confederate soldier, both badly wounded, lay
near each other between the lines, while above their
prostrate forms the fierce flood of metal swept back and
forth, a whistling, screaming hurricane of death.  The
sergeant had lain long unconscious, and he awoke racked
with fever and perishing with thirst.  Do any of you know
the horror of that thirst which gunshot wounds, abetted by a
blazing summer sun and the stifling fumes of powder-
smoke, produce?  It is the concentrated agony of hell.
Thirst will break the courage of the bravest.  Even great
Caesar, upon whose imperial brow fear was afraid to sit,
cried for drink "like a sick girl."  The sergeant found his
canteen almost empty,--just a few spoonfuls left,--drops
more precious to him than all the gold of Ophir, than all the
pearls of Ind.  He was lifting the canteen to his parched lips
when his neighbor begged to share it.  He glanced at the
gray uniform and hesitated.  The Confederate was but a
boy and in his breast there stood a broken bayonet.  The
sergeant crawled over to him amid the plunging shot and
shell.

"'Tain't much, Johnny, an' I'm dry as a mackerel; but I'll
whack up."

He divided the precious drops with rigid impartiality and
gave the young Confederate his portion.  Then he raised
the canteen to his own lips, but again he hesitated.  The
landscape swam before his eyes, the pounding of the great
guns fell but faintly upon his ear, the Angel of Death had
set his seal upon the bronzed brow.  He handed the
canteen to his companion untasted.

"Take the rest of it, Johnny; I kinder guess I won't miss it
long."

Yet we imagine we are wonderfully charitable if we give a
few dollars from our abundance to feed the starving, or
send our cast clothing to the Relief Society!  Charity is
not a virtue you can measure in money.  Its abiding
place is not in the vest pocket.  Its home is the heart, and
not the little 2 X 4 dog-kennel heart either.  It only takes up
its abode where there is a mighty temple in which to
circulate itself and make grand music that rolls and
reverberates through all eternity--a temple flooded with
God's own sunshine and peopled with beautiful thoughts
and noble aspirations--a temple whose spires pierce the
highest Heaven and whose foundations are broad and deep
as humanity.  Such is the home of Charity, queen of all the
virtues.  Hear St. Paul:

"Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not;
charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."  Now do you comprehend
what charity really is?  It is toleration, it is kindness, it is
humanity, it is truth, it is the spirit of God made manifest in
man.  He that gives liberally to the poor, to the church, to
education, to the campaign fund, yet says to his brother,
"Thou fool," because he's followed off after a different
political folly, or differs from him on the doctrine of
transubstantiation, is not staggering about under a load of
charity calculated to give him flat feet.  The supreme test of
a charitable mind is toleration for the opinions of others,--an
admission that perchance we do not know it quite all.  It is
much easier to give a $5 bill to a beggar than to forgive a
brother who rides his pitiless logic over our prejudices.  The
religious world has contributed countless millions to feed
the hungry and clothe the naked, but has never forgiven
Tom Paine for brushing the Bible contemptuously aside and
looking

 "Through nature up to nature's God."

Perhaps some future age will do justice to the memory of
the man to whose daring pen we are so largely indebted
for those dearly-prized privileges of free government,
to the ablest advocate of human liberty the world has
known, and whose piety was deep and fervent as that of
St. Paul himself.  But that cannot be until the freedom for
which he toiled and prayed extends to the mind as well as
the body; until the shackles are stricken from the brain as
well as the hand,--until the sun of Knowledge dispels the
empoisoned mists of Ignorance and divine Charity
dethrones unreasoning Hate.  Then will the infidel freely
concede that Servetus' murder was rather the fault of his
age than Calvin's crime, and the Christian will find in Paine,
if not a guide, at least a learned philosopher and a loyal
friend.

Charity assumes as many shapes as Prospero's busy
sprite.  I was once waiting for a train in a small Missouri
town, where everybody turns out to "see the keers come
in."  A big, blustering fellow, well filled with booze, was
making himself generally obnoxious, and the village
constable approached him kindly and tried to quiet him.
Instead of subsiding, the boozer whipped out a big six-
shooter and began blazing away at the representative of
the peace and dignity of the state.  The constable threw his
hand to his hip, but instead of pulling his gun sprang
forward, disarmed the hoodlum, cracked him over the head
with his own battery and sent him about his business.  The
officer looked as shamed after the melee as though he had
stolen a sheep or scratched the Democratic ticket.  I
remarked that he'd taken unnecessary chances.

"What would you have done, mister?" he inquired.  I
replied that I would have filled that fellow's hide so full of
holes that it couldn't be stuffed with straw.

"Well," said he slowly, "I kum purty nigh doin' it.  But I jes'
thought as how 'twan't Jim a shootin', but his jag, an' then I
seemed ter see his kids a hangin' on th' gate a waitin'
fer him t, come home, an' his wife a worritin' about him, an'
I jis couldn,t do it.  I took chances fer them."

Involuntarily I removed my hat.  I felt that I was in the
presence of a God-created king.  "You're a philanthropist,"
I said.

"I dunno what them ar' maybe, mister," said he; "but I'm
glad Jim's gone home alive,--d--d glad!"

That was charity of the broadest, deepest kind that ever
held its godlike sway in the human soul,--a charity that will
brave death itself rather than wring the heart of helpless
woman or cloud the sunny face of childhood with the
orphan's tears.

"Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies
they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease;
whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away."

"Charity never faileth."  The real article will stand the most
crucial test,--is never weighed and found wanting.  It never
persecutes because of honest difference of opinion.  It
never back-caps or boycotts.  It turns a deaf ear to the
tongue of scandal and heals the hurts made by the
poisoned arrows of hate.  "Charity suffereth long and is
kind." Its supreme example was given us from the cross:
"Father, forgive them; they know not what they do."
Prophecies fail; tongues are forgotten, and knowledge
fades like the evening sunlight before the dusky wing of
night; but Charity endureth forever.  "And now abideth
Faith, Hope and Charity, and the greatest of these is
Charity."

Faith is founded upon fallible human judgment.  A man
believes thus and so, not necessarily because it is so, but
because his head is built on a particular pattern or has had
a peculiar class of phenomena filtered through it.  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 Democrats or
Republicans, Protestants or Catholics, Mormons or religious
mugwumps.  As a man's faith is inherited, or formed for him
by circumstances, he deserves little more credit or blame
therefor than for the color of his hair or the size of his ears.

Hope is Fancy's child; oft branded as an illegitimate, yet
esteemed above and beyond all the royal progeny of the
proudest intellect, enshrined in the sanctum sanctorum,
the veritable holy-of-holies of the human heart.  Hope is not
a virtue; it is but a rainbow with which Fancy paints the
black o'erhanging firmament, a golden shaft of sunlight with
which she gilds Life's rugged mountain peaks,--a melody
most divinely sweet with which she cheers the fainting soul
of man.

But greater than Faith, grander than Knowledge, brighter
than the star of Hope which gilds the cradle and illumes the
grave, is Charity, for 'tis the incarnation of heavenly Law,
the bright essence increate of eternal Love.

 * * *
THE SEVEN VIALS OF WRATH.

A WORLD-WIDE WAR.

Unless all signs fail, the world is on the eve of a war such
as was never known in all the mighty cycles of human
history.  Lucky indeed will it be if the twentieth century is
not born amid the shock of universal battle.

Is our boasted civilization breaking down beneath its own
ponderous weight--the rotting props and pillars unable to
sustain the gilded roof?  Are the prophecies of
Scripture about to be fulfilled--the world rushing
headlong to the final catastrophe?

A murderous mania hath everywhere seized upon the
minds of men.  The pulse of the race is beating the reveille;
the soul of the world is sounding "boots and saddles."
Savagery is reasserting itself--the Christian nations are
further than ever before from that age of gold,

     "When the war-drum throbs no longer,
     And the battle-flags are furled
     In the parliament of man,
     The federation of the world."

Peace?  "There is no peace war is inevitable."  The ostrich
may avoid seeing the approach of the fierce simoon by
hiding his head in the sand, but cannot stay its onward
march.  The craze for slaughter, the lust for blood, is
abroad in the land.  The stars are evil, and Ate, ranging hot
from Hell, plants her burning feet on every brow.

For years the brute passions of man have had no outlet--a
prolonged peace hath become that good custom which doth
corrupt the world.  A new generation hath arisen in Europe
and America which knows naught of the horrors of war, but
is intoxicated by its glory.  Its superfluous energy must find
expression, its pent-up passions are ready for explosion.  It
is all aweary of these piping times of peace--wildly eager for
the glorious pomp and circumstance of war--the bullet's
mad hiss and the crash of steel.  Civilized man is but an
educated savage sooner or later his natural ferocity will
demand its pound of flesh.

. . . . . .

I know not whether Deity or Devil be the author of war.  All
human advancement is born of strife.  Only warlike
nations march in the van of the world's progress--prolonged
peace has ever meant putrefaction.  The civilizations of
Greece and Rome were brightest when their blades were
keenest.  When the sword was sheathed there followed
social degradation and intellectual decay.  When all Europe
trembled at the haughty tread of her matchless infantry,
Spain was empress in the realm of mind.  The Elizabethan
age in England was shaped by the sword.  America's
intellectual preeminence followed the long agony of the
Revolution, and blazed like a banner of glory in the wake of
the Civil War.  The Reign of Terror gave forth flashes of
true Promethean fire--the crash of steel in the Napoleonic
war studded the heavens with stars.  It required an eruption
of warlike barbarians to awaken Italy from her lethargy,
while Celt and Saxon struck sacred fire from the shields of
the intrepid Caesars.  The Israelites were humble and
civilized slaves in Egypt, cowering beneath the lash and
finding a sweet savor in the fleshpots of the Pharaohs.
Thrust forth into the wilderness, they became the fiercest of
all barbarians before giving us the Psalms of David and the
Song of Solomon.  They had to become conquering
warriors--had to be heroized--before they could breed
inspired poets.

The age of "blood offering" has not yet passed.  Is it
possible that these awful rites are necessary to foster that
spirit of self-sacrifice which marks the highest reach of
humanity? to feed the golden lamp of love? to inculcate the
virtue of valor?  Can heroes be forged only with the
hammer of Thor?  Is genius the child of blood and tears?
Are wars the tidal waves in the mighty social sea, ordained
by the Deity to prevent putrefaction?  Was the Phoenix of
the ancients but an old civilization, enervated by luxury and
corrupted by peace, that could only be purified of its foul
dross and infused with new energy by fire?  Was that
poet inspired who declared that, "Whatever is, is right?"  I
do not know.

. . . . . .

The trend of events points to a war that will involve the
world--will align the Old against the New.  I will be told the
idea that Europe will combine against America is sheer
madness.  Is it even so?  Has the time arrived when young
men dream idle dreams and old men see lying visions?
Scan the European press for six months past, and you will
find such an event foreshadowed by the ablest editors and
most distinguished diplomats.  The probable necessity of
such a coalition has been seriously discussed by various
European cabinets.

Great Britain is the pariah of nations, feared by most,
detested by all.  Continental Europe would gladly see her
humbled in the very dust.  Had war resulted from the
Venezuelan complication, England would, in all probability,
have been left without allies, albeit the president's
ultimatum was not relished by other transatlantic powers.
Realizing his inability to cope with the Giant of the
Occident, the world's bully stopped blustering and began
sniffling about his beloved cousin across the sea and the
beatitude of arbitration.  The American Congress passed
resolutions of sympathy with the Cuban insurgents, and
from so slight a spark the Spanish people took fire.  Instead
of acting as peace-makers, the official organs of most
European governments proceeded to fan the flames--
encouraged Spain to resent the fancied affront by assuring
her that she would not lack powerful allies.  There was no
recognition by this government of Cuban independence; no
recommendation that we wrest the island from the
moribund nation that has so long misgoverned it; but a
semi-official expression of concern for men striving to
achieve their liberty afforded Europe a pretext to "get
together" and work off on a distant people that war
spirit, so long suppressed at home, lest it disturb the
balance of power.  The British journals, which had warbled
so sweetly anent their American cousins and "the
indissoluble bond of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood," when there
was a fair prospect that John Bull would have to toe the
scratch alone, at once forgot the blessed ties of
consanguinity and assured the bombastic Spaniard that he
would have "plenty of help should he decide to humble
American impudence."  The press of France and Germany
discoursed in much the same manner, while the diplomats
of those countries agreed that "Europe would yet find it
necessary to materially modify the Monroe Doctrine."  But
the Spaniard, believing discretion to be the better part of
valor, had apologized for the acts of his undiapered babes
and the excesses of his hungry beggars before his
neighbors could stiffen his backbone with their ostentatious
insolence.

The Monroe Doctrine, literally interpreted, is simply a
warning to transatlantic powers to keep off the American
grass--an official notice that they will not be permitted to
overrun and parcel out this continent regardless of human
rights as they have done in Asia and are doing in Africa.
The "Doctrine" is ridiculous, in that it establishes a quasi-
protectorate over a number of petty powers that have no
valid excuse for existing; still it works no injury to any
European government not bent on international
buccaneering.  Uncle Sam's promulgation of the Monroe
Doctrine proves him a fool; Europe's frantic objection to it
demonstrates that she is a knave.

The Spanish incident served to show that the war spirit is
rife throughout Europe, and that her mighty armaments
cannot much longer be kept inactive.  It proved conclusively
that Europe is feverishly eager to set limits to the growing
power of this government while such limitation is yet
possible--that she cannot view with composure the slightest
inclination on the part of America to take a hand in the
world's politics.  With wealth aggregating seventy-five
billions, and as many millions of warlike Americans back of
it, the Monroe Doctrine becomes something more than an
iridescent dream.  When such a nation decides upon "a
vigorous foreign policy," the balance of power problem
cannot be long confined to the European continent--a fact
which explains the pernicious activity of transatlantic
governments during our late unpleasantness.

But all the danger of an international complication does not
come from across the sea.  The war spirit is well-nigh as
rife in this country as at Barcelona and Cadiz.  The great
mass of the American people would welcome a controversy
with any country, with or without good cause.  "The glory
of the young man is in his strength," and Uncle Sam is
young and strong.  He longs to grapple with his
contemporaries, to demonstrate his physical superiority.  He
has a cypress shingle on either shoulder and is trailing his
star-spangled cutaway down the plank turnpike.  While a
few mugwumps, like Josef Phewlitzer and Apollyon
Halicarnassus Below, and tearful Miss Nancys of the Anglo-
maniacal school, are protesting that this country wants
peace, Congress, that faithful mirror of public opinion, if not
always the repository of wisdom, proves that it is eager for
war.  And just so sure as the Cleveland interpretation of the
Monroe Doctrine is insisted upon, we are going to get it,
and that before babes now nursing wear beards.  And the
"Doctrine," as applied by the administration, will not only be
insisted upon, but public opinion will force the hands of our
public servants and compel them to push it further.  The
fact that it is distasteful to our transatlantic brethren makes
it ridiculously popular with a people determined to burn
gunpowder.  Aside from the epidemic of murder which
seems to have girdled the globe, the spirit of petty jealousy
and assumed superiority with which Americans are treated
in many European countries, has imbued this people with
the idea that the quickest way to win the respect of their
supercilious neighbors is to slaughter them.  Uncle Sam is
in an ugly humor and will suffer no legitimate casus belli
to be side-tracked by arbitration.  He is "dead tired" of
having the European ants get on him--of being harried by
petty powers whom he knows full well he could wipe from
the map of the world.  He is just a little inclined to do the
Roman Empire act--to take charge of this planet and run it
in accordance with his own good pleasure.  Some of these
days he's going to drive his box-toed boot under John Bull's
coat-tails so far that the impudent old tub of tallow can taste
leather all the rest of his life.

We may deplore this spirit of contention, but to deny its
existence were to write one's self down an irremediable
ass.  It is in evidence everywhere, from the American
senate to the country clown.  To argue against the war
spirit were like whistling in the teeth of a north wind.  You
cannot alter a psychological condition with a made-to-order
editorial.  It is urged that we should sing small, as we are
"not prepared for war."  We are always prepared.
Hercules did not need a Krupp cannon--he was capable of
doing terrible execution with a club.  Samson did not wait to
forge a Toledo blade--he waltzed into his enemies with an
old bone and scattered their shields of iron and helmets of
brass to the four winds of Heaven.  The mighty armaments
of Europe are costly trifles; whenever America has been
called to fight she has revolutionized the science of
destruction.  It hath been said, "In time of peace prepare
for war."  Europe bankrupts herself to build steel cruisers
and maintain gigantic standing armies; America
prepares by strengthening her bank account and
developing her natural resources.  When the crisis comes
she has "the sinews of war," and brains and industry
quickly do the rest.  It was not necessary for Gulliver to
sleep in the land of the Lilliputs with a gun at his side.

Vast armies and costly fleets of battleships in time of peace
are indication of conscious weakness.  The Western Giant
goes unarmed; but let the embattled world tread upon his
coat-tails if it dares!  The American does not have to be
educated to soldiership--he's to the manner born.  Those
who can build are competent to destroy.  Our Civil War was
fought by volunteers; yet before nor since in all the
struggles of mankind were such terrible engines of
destruction launched upon land or sea.  Never did so many
bullets find their billets.  Never did men set their breasts
against the bayonet with such reckless abandon.  Never
were the seas incarnadined with such stubborn blood.  The
"Charge of the Six Hundred" was repeated a thousand
times.  The Pass of Thermopylae was emulated by
plowboys.  The Macedonian Phalanx was as nothing to the
Rock of Chickamauga.  The Bridge of Lodi was duplicated
at every stream.  The spirit of the Old Guard animated raw
recruits.  The Retreat of the Ten Thousand became but a
holiday excursion.  Sailors fought their guns below the
water line and went down with flying colors and ringing
cheers.

We have been more than once dangerously near a rupture
with European powers because of the ridiculous Monroe
Doctrine, which assumes for Uncle Sam a quasi-
protectorate over a horde of Latin-American oligarchies
masquerading as Republics.  We have now been fairly
warned that should such a catastrophe occur, we would
have to contend with more than one European power.  We
must either recede from the position we have assumed or
prepare to do battle for the very existence of this
government.  Such a war would draw all nations of the
earth into the bloody vortex.  If Russia held aloof from the
anti-American coalition, she would seize the opportunity to
push her fortunes in the Orient, making a collision with the
Moslem inevitable.  At such a time the latter would be intent
upon the extension of territory.  Occupy Western Europe
with an American war, and the Mohammedan would rise
against their oppressors.  Unfurl the sacred banner of the
Prophet, and millions of murderous fanatics would erase
the raids of Goth and Visigoth from the memory of
mankind.  Turkey, jeered at even by Spain, flouted even by
Italy , yet potentially the most powerful nation for evil upon
the earth, would spread as by magic over Roumania and
Austro-Hungary, and pour through the Alpine passes like a
torrent of fire upon Germany and France.  Back of the
much contemned "Sick Man of the East"--whom combined
Christendom has failed to frighten--are nearly two hundred
million people, scattered from the Pillars of Hercules to the
Yellow Sea, all eager to conquer the earth for Islam.  They
are warriors to a man; their only fear is that they will not
find death while battling with "the infidel dog" and be
translated bodily to the realm of bliss.  Within the memory
of living men Christian nations have turned their eyes with
fear and trembling to the Bosphorus.  Islam is the political
Vesuvius of Europe, and is once again casting its lurid light
athwart the troubled sky.  For years the Moslem has been
robbed without mercy and persecuted without remorse.
The bayonet has been held at his throat while strangers
reviled his religion.  It is no part of his creed to love his
enemies and pray for those who despitefully use him.  The
Koran does not adjure him to turn the other cheek to the
smiter.  He has nursed his wrath to keep it warm, and
prayed for an opportunity to wreak barbaric vengeance
upon his oppressors.  When Christian Europe marches
forth to do battle with America she will need to wear armor
upon her back as well as upon her breast, for while terror
stalks before, Hell will lurk behind.

* * *
A STORY OF THE SEA.

There have been mortals, favorites of the gods, to whom it
was given to understand the language of the lower animals,
and such I have ever envied, for

      "Beast and bird have seen and heard
        That which man knoweth not."

Never could I get beyond an imperfect knowledge of their
alphabet, enabling me to spell out here and there a word of
little meaning; but the great ocean's never-ceasing speech
was ever plain to me, and many a midnight hour I have
paced the cool sands that girt my island home, and listened
with reverential awe to the secrets it whispered to the
sensuous southern breeze that kissed its bosom--strange
stories of wreck and wraith, wild wars and desperate deeds,
mingled with those of love and honor, shame and sacrifice,
crowding upon each other like spectres in a dream.

One night when the new moon hung like a silver crescent
pendent from Venus' flaming orb, in a summer sky thick
inlaid with patines of pure gold, I heard the lazy waves
breaking like slumb'rous thunder upon the long, low beach,
and said, "The sea is calling me!" and I went.  Far out
upon the long pier, where the waves could dash their spray
like a shower of cool pearls in my face, I lingered long
and listened to a story, sad and strange as a sweet-voiced
woman telling in a foreign tongue, and punctuating with
tears and sighs, a tale of true love turned awry.

Upon the beach they walked in days that seem to man
long, long ago.  How brief and strange the little lives of
men, and so beset with customs framed to cramp the heart
and curse the soul before its time!  To me,--here since
Time began to build that bridge of sighs and tears that link
the two eternities--it seems but yesternight that, hand in
hand they wandered here, so wrapt in happiness born of
equal love that they heeded not my glories spread forth to
tempt their praise.  I curled my snowy spray about their
feet; flashed back the silver beams of harvest moon in one
long, shimmering sheet of mellow light; rolled waves of
brilliant phosphorescence, that seemed like silver billows,
diamond-studded, breaking on a beach of gold, and sang
the sweetest odes of the poets of ten thousand years; but
they heard nor saw aught but the beating of their hearts in
holy rhythm and the love-light flaming like fires celestial in
each other's eyes.

Anon, bare-armed, bare-limbed, shamed yet happy, they
sought the wave, and I cradled them on my bosom and
heard them whisper of laws defied and cruel customs set at
naught, and the higher law of love; but fearful she spoke
and sighed, yet clung the closer to him, as though the earth
and sea contained hut one perfect model of a man and that
were he.

Hour by hour they hovered near me, and a thousand times
she swore to him that their lives were so entwined that
separation were death to her, and kissed his lips, his eyes,
his hands, and wished she were his wife that they might
blazon to the great round world the love they fain would
hide from Heaven.

One little year went by and they came again, not walking
hand in hand.  He spoke to her and she answered with
bitter scorn.  He touched with trembling lips upon the old
days when love was lord of their two lives, but she mocked
at love and him and bade him leave her.  Then he that was
wont to rule first learned to sue, and vainly, for her heart
was cold as the ashes of long-forgotten kings, cruel as
wintry winds blown across icy northern seas.  "It is a guilty
love," she said, and he looked at her as if doubting that he
heard, then turned and went like one that dreamed; for
thought of wrong to her had dwelt not with him; he had but
worshiped her as devout Sabaean might the sun and
host of Heaven.

Again he came, but he was all alone.  Long and lonely he
paced the dreary beach beneath a wintry sky, until the cold
mists seemed changed to mellow light, the stormy sky to
one of summer, gemmed by myriad stars and queened by
harvest moon; the cool wind sweeping o'er the barren
waste to music and the merry laughter of men and maids;
and she was by his side, her love-lit eyes making the blood
dance through every vein.  He put forth his hand to her, but
the sky changed from gold to lead, the driftweed blew about
his feet, the cold mist settled down upon him and crept with
icy fingers into his heart, and he cursed the lying vision, the
shrieking wind, the cold mist and the leaden sky; cursed the
day that he first saw her, and said to the waves that
tumbled at his feet:  "I must be mad.  The curse of my
race hath fallen upon me; else why do I see that which is
not, hear voices that are far away?  Why do I cherish the
image of a fickle woman, who, swept along by a gust of
passion or sickly sentiment, thought for a day she loved
me, but did not, nor ever loved aught in life but her own
selfish self?"

And he called her name to the wind and waves but
coupled with it a curse, deep and bitter, as those that
burst in sulphur-breath from the parched lips of the
damned; and a voice came back from out the gloom that
seemed to mock him.  Furious as a demon disturbed at
some hellish rite, he turned and shrieked to the mocking
voice and bade it come to him that he might wreak upon its
owner such vengeance as would appall the world.

The far lights shone like pale ghosts of lights through the
driving mist, and in them loomed two weird forms that
seemed an hundred cubits high.  Furious he rushed upon
and smote them down upon the wet sand and trampled
them, and strove with feet and hands to kill; but they cried
out for mercy on their lives,--that they were honest
fishermen who, hearing a cry but faintly above the roaring
waves, had answered it, thinking some boatman might have
met mishap and called for aid.  The flood of anger spent in
blows, he helped them up, wiped the blood and sand from
their bronzed faces, gave them his scant purse, and bidding
them drink a bumper that hell-fiends might drag him from
the world before the morn sent them on their way.

The gray dawn found him sleeping with his face upon the
wet sand, once trodden by the feet that now trampled on
his heart.  Then I sent waves, cool and sweet, to kiss his
cheek, and he awoke, and waking, said:

"Kisses for me?  They are cold, great Mother Ocean; but
not so cold as love burned out, leaving but the bitter ashes
of contemptuous pity.  I dreamed that I was afloat upon thy
bosom with her I did so dearly love, and thou wast bearing
us beneath a sunset sky to a fair island, fringed with palms
and musical with songs of birds and rippling springs, where
we two should live forever; that as we floated thus Love's
goddess descended from a golden cloud and opening the
white bosom of my bride, yet not my bride, took
thence her heart and pressed from it a black drop that fell
upon the molten sea, and taking form became a hideous
monster that cried, 'My name is Selfishness,' and vanished
in the wave.  Then breathing upon the cold heart ethereal
flame that made it throb like a hero's pulse when trumpets
are blown for war, she replaced it, healed the snowy globe
with a touch, and, smiling upon me, was caught into the
golden cloud that seemed framed of music and the perfume
of a thousand flowers.  A round arm stole about my neck
and we floated heart to heart on to the haven that was to
be our Heaven.

"A curse upon your briny waters that seem a world of bitter
tears, rank with dead men's bones and the rotting hulls of
ships!  They have called me back to thy dreary, ever-
moaning verge to mock myself for loving one who scorns;
for wasting my hot heart upon a block of frozen stone,
hoping by foolish prayers and unmanly tears to move the
gods to breathe into it the breath of human life,--to prevail,
even as did that old Greek, who became enamored of a
statue, less divinely formed, but with the self-same heart.

"'Tis madness leads me to this folly,--the old, old curse that
hath hung about our house, like a baleful shadow, for thrice
a hundred years, bursting at times into bloody feuds without
apparent cause, and dreadful mutinies against the laws of
man and will of God.  'Tis vain to further fight with fate!
'Twill drag me down, even as it did my great-grandsire, who
climbed fame's dizzy heights and stood, poised in mid-
Heaven, the master mind of Britain's mighty world; then,
like a tall mountain pine blasted at the top by the writhen
bolts of God, plunged, a falling star, to the depths of
everlasting darkness, and died a decade before his death.
Nor iron will descended through my sire from a score of
barbarous kings; nor mother's prayerful amulets,
woven like golden threads through every low, sweet lullaby
that soothed my infancy, can avail me aught.  I can but
fight and fall.  She might have helped me beat back the
shadows; but would not--and 'tis well."

Then taking from a case a withered rose, he kissed it, cast
it far out upon the wave, watched it dance there, and said
with a bitter smile:

"The last link that binds me to other days, and it is broken.
'The wage of sin is death,' and I am dead these long
months past and fathoms deep in Hell, yet walk the earth
because nor land nor sea will yield a resting-place among
its honored dead to one so ignobly slain."

* * *
APOSTLE VS. PAGAN.

COL. R. G. INGERSOLL:

My Dear Colonel:--I have not picked up my pen for the
express purpose of annihilating you at one fell swoop.
Even were such the case, I do not flatter myself that your
impending doom would cause you to miss meals or lose
sleep, for you have become somewhat used to being
knocked off the Christmas tree by theological disputants
from the back districts.  At least once each lunar month for
long years past your quivering diaphragm has been
slammed up against the shrinking face of nature by mental
microbes, or walked on by ambitious doodle-bugs, who
wondered next day to learn that you were absorbing your
rations with clock-work regularity and doing business at the
same old stand.  I once saw an egotistical brindle-pup
joyfully bestride the collar of an adult wild-cat, and the
woeful result convinced me that Ambition and Judgment
should blithely foot it hand in hand.  That is why, my dear
Colonel, I approach you by siege and parallel, instead
of capering gayly down your right-o'-way like a youthful
William goat seeking a head-end collision with a runaway
freight train.

Without any view of paving the way for a future loan, I tell
you frankly that I admire you very much.  Your public
record and private life prove you to be one of God's
noblest--and rarest--works, an honest man.  That you are
the equal morally and the superior mentally of any man
who has presumed to criticize you must be conceded.  The
prejudices of honesty are entitled to consideration and the
judgment of genius to respect bordering on reverence; but
in this age of almost universal inquiry we cannot accept any
man, however wise, as infallible pope in the realm of
intellect and declare that from his ipse dixit there shall be
no appeal.  That were intellectual slavery, the most
degrading species of bondage, and it is your greatest glory
that you have ever been the apostle of liberty--liberty of the
hand and liberty of the brain.  More than all other men of
your generation you have fostered independence of thought
and the search for new truth; hence you cannot complain if
the fierce light which you have taught the world to turn full
and fair upon cults and creeds, should be employed to
discern the false logic of the great critic himself.

In your warfare upon hypocrisy and humbuggery I am with
you heart and soul.  I will set my foot as far as who goes
farthest in the exposure of frauds and fakes of every class
and kind, though hedged about with the superstitions of a
thousand centuries and licensed by prescriptive right to
perpetrate a brutal wrong; but it does not follow because
some church communicants are hypocrites that all religion
is a humbug; that because the Bible winks at incest and
robbery , murder and slavery, the book is but a tissue of
foolish falsehoods; that because Almighty God has not
seen proper to reveal Himself in all His supernal splendor to
Messrs. Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll the world
has no good reason for belief in His existence--that
because the dead do not come back to us with a diagram
of the New Jerusalem it were folly to believe the soul of
man immortal.

My dear Colonel, your mighty intellect has not yet
comprehended the philosophy of religion.  Oratorically you
soar like the condor when its shadow falls upon the highest
peaks of the Andes, but logically you grope among the
pestilential shadows of an intellectual Dismal Swamp, ever
mistaking shadow for substance.  You are frittering away
your mighty intellectual strength with the idiosyncrasies of
creeds and the clumsy detail of cults, instead of considering
the psychological phenomena of religion in its entirety.  You
descend from the realm of philosophy to assume the role of
scholastic--to dispute with little men anent points of
doctrine, to wrangle with dogmatists regarding their
conception of the Deity.

An ignoramus believes the Bible because of the miracles,
and because of the miracles an Ingersoll disbelieves it--and
both are equally blind .  A cult is simply an expression,
more or less crude, of the religious sentiment of a people,
the poor garment with which finite man clothes Infinity.
Would you quarrel with Science because it is not yet made
perfect?  Would you condemn music because of an
occasional discord?  Would you reject history altogether
because amid a world of truth there are preserved some
fables such as tempted the satire of Cervantes?  Would
you banish the sun from Heaven because of its spots or
declare Love a monster because born of Passion?

The real question at issue is not whether the miracles
be fact or fable; Mahomet, the duly ordained prophet
of Allah, or an ignorant adventurer; Jonah, a delegate of the
Deity or the father of Populism--whether Christ was born of
an earthly father or drew his vigor direct from the loins of
omnipotent God.  Let us leave these details to the
dogmatists, these non-essentials to the sectarians.  Let us
consider the religion of the world in its entirety, with the full
understanding that all sects are essentially the same.

The core of all religion is the worship of a Supreme Power,
and the belief in man's immortality.  That is the central idea,
around which the imagination of man has woven many a
complicated web, some beautiful as Arachne's robe, some
barbaric and repulsive, but all of little worth.  The wise man,
the true philosopher, will not mistake the machinery of a
religion for the religious idea, the garment which ignorance
weaves for Omniscience, for God himself.

Even if we grant that the Creator never yet communicated
directly with the creature; that man has not seen with mortal
eyes beyond the veil that shrouds the two eternities, it does
not follow that religious faith is but arrant folly, that God is
non-extant and man but the pitiful creature of blind force.
The dumb brute knows many things it was never taught,
and might not man, the greatest of the animal creation, be
gifted with a knowledge not based upon experience?  So
far as observation goes, there is provision for the
satisfaction of every passion, and the most powerful of all
passions is the dread of annihilation--the longing for
continual life.  If death ends all then here is a violation of
"natural law"--a miracle!  And you, my dear Colonel, do not
believe in miracles.  If we discard Revelation and take
Reason for our supreme guide, we must infallibly conclude
that the devotional instinct implanted in the heart of
the entire human race has its correlative that the longing for
immortal life which burns in the breast of man was not a
brutal mistake, else concede Nature a poor blunderer and
all this prattle anent her "immutable laws" mere nonsense.

Before ridiculing Revelation and mocking at Inspiration were
it not well to determine their true definition?  What is genius
but inspiration? and a new truth bodied forth to the world
but a revelation?  Were it not possible for a genius--an
inspired man--to trace the finger of God in the sunset's
splendor as easily as upon tables of stone? to hear the
voice of Omnipotence in the murmur of the majestic sea as
well as in the thunders of Sinai? to read a divine message
of undying love in a mother's lullaby as readily as in the
death and resurrection of a Deity?  If God can teach the
very insects wisdom and gift even the oyster with instinct,
can He communicate with man only by word of mouth or
the engraver's burin?  Examine the most beautiful woman
imaginable with a powerful microscope and you will turn
from her with a disgust similar to that of Gulliver when the
Brobdingnagian maid placed him astride the nipple of her
bosom.  Her skin, so fair to the natural eye and velvety to
the touch, becomes beneath the microscope suggestive of
the hide of a hairless Mexican dog.  Religion is a beautiful,
an enchanting thing if you do but look at it with the natural
eye; but when you employ the adventitious aid of the skeptic's
microscope you find flaws enough.  It were doubtful if even our
boasted American Government, of which you are so proud, could
stand such an examination and retain your confidence.

No, my dear Colonel; you will never banish worship from
the world by warring upon non-essentials.  You may
demonstrate that every recorded miracle is a myth--
that the founders of the various cults were but mortal men
and the writers of every sacred book but scheming priests.
You may make it gross to sense that the Creator has never
held direct communication with the creature, and you have
but stripped religion of its tattered vestments--have not laid
the weight of your hand upon the impregnable citadel, the
universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man.  You
have never yet talked to the real question.  You reject
religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin
entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes of the
Creator.  You pose as an agnostic--a religious Know-
nothing--because the Almighty has not taken you
completely into his confidence.  Because the blind have
sometimes led the blind and both have fallen into the foul
ditch of fanaticism and cruelty, you infer that not one gleam
of supernal glory has pierced the dark vale of human life.
While posing as the apostle of light, you will obscure the
scintillations of the stars because the sun is hid; while
apotheosizing Happiness you would banish Hope, that
mother of which it is born.

But your labors have borne good as well as evil fruit.  While
your siren eloquence has led some doubting Thomases into
the barren desert of Atheism, you have driven others to
seek a better reason for their religious faith than barbarous
tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils.  Bigotry has
quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic
hammer, dogmatism become more humble and the
priesthood well-nigh forgotten to prate of a hell of fire in
which the souls of unbaptized babes forever burn.  Without
intending it, perhaps, you have done more to promote the
cause of true religion, more to intellectualize and humanize
man's conception of Almighty God, than any other reformer
since the days of Christ.


THE COW.

For the enlightenment of city milkmen who never saw a
cow, it may be well to state that this more or less useful
animal does not resemble a pump in the slightest particular.
A cow has four feet, but the subsequent one on the right
side is her main reliance.  With this foot she can strike a
blow that no man or woman born can elude.  It resembles a
load of drunken chain-shot, and searches every cubic yard
of atmosphere in a two-acre lot for a victim before it stops.
She is also provided with a caudal appendage that ends in
a patent fly-brush.  This she uses to wrap around the neck
of the milkmaid to prevent her getting away before she has
a chance to kick her health corset off and upset the milk.

A cow will eat anything she can steal, from an ear of corn
to a hickory shirt.  She will leave a square meal especially
ordered for her, and gotten up by an imported chef, to fill
her measly hide full of straw from a boarding-house bedtick,
if she can only steal it.  She will work at a crack in a
neighbor's barn for six mortal hours, and wear her tongue
as thin as a political platform to get an old corn-cob, when
she knows she can have a bushel of corn, all shelled, by
going home for it.  She is a born thief, a natural marauder.
Any cow that has been given opportunities for gleaning
knowledge can open a gate that fastens with a combination
lock, get into a garden, do fifty dollars' worth of damage
and be six blocks away before the infuriated owner can ram
a charge of slugs into a muzzle-loading gun.

The man who has not lived in a small town, where one-half
the inhabitants keep cows and expect them to forage their
living off the other half, will never fully realize what he
has missed unless he starts a daily paper or falls down
stairs with the cook stove.  When Mrs. B. and I first went
into partnership we decided to raise our own garden truck.
It is the usual mistake of youngsters.  During the long
winter evenings they sit by the fire and plan their garden.  A
640-acre farm, covered a foot deep with patent fertilizers,
mortgages and other modern improvements, would not
produce the amount of stuff two moonstruck young amateur
gardeners confidently expect to yank from a patch of dirt
but little bigger than a postage stamp.  Thirty dollars for
tools and seeds, ninety-seven dollars' worth of labor, and
four times that amount of worry and vexation of spirit,
results in some forty dollars' worth of "garden sass," which
is promptly referred to the interior department of the
neighbors' cows.

I soon learned that an ordinary gate catch was no bar to
the educated cattle in my neighborhood, so I added a bolt.
That puzzled them for a night or two, but they soon learned
the combination and filled themselves so full of cabbage
that cost me two dollars a head to raise, that they couldn't
get out by way of the gate, and I had to knock down a
panel of fence to get rid of them.  That evening I brought
home a double-barreled shot gun, a log-chain and a
padlock that would have baffled a cracksman.  I chained up
the gate, gave the key to Mrs. B. to lose, loaded the gun
halfway to the muzzle with tenpenny nails and resolved to
hold the fort by main strength.  It was a bright moonlight
night, and I sat up with a corncob pipe and a robust
determination to have fresh beef for breakfast if that
padlock failed to do its duty.

About 9 o'clock an old brindle cow came browsing up to the
front gate.  She took a long survey of the house to see if
we had all gone to bed.  Having satisfied herself on that
point, she inserted her horns between the bars of the
front gate and gave it a gentle shake.  She looked at
the house again to see if the noise had aroused us.
Finding all quiet, she went to work on the bolt, first with her
horns and then with her tongue.  In ten minutes she had it
drawn, and started to come in.  She was evidently
surprised to find herself still on the outside.  Two or three of
her companions came up and they held a consultation.

Old Brindle worked at the chain awhile, but it was no use.
They were puzzled.  They took a long look at the gate,
shook it viciously with their horns, then turned impatiently
away, like a man who has run four blocks to a bank, only to
find "closed" staring him in the face.  Several more cows
came up, and when they were shown the new jewelry they
acted hurt and proceeded to hold an indignation meeting
and pass a vote of censure, after which one old she-pirate
broke a horn trying to lift the gate off its hinges.  After this
mishap they acted so discouraged that I concluded they
had given it up; but they hadn't.  Old Brindle returned to the
attack.  She spent half an hour "monkeying" with the gate,
and then stopped short and began to study.  She had more
gall than a ward heeler, more tenacity than an office-
seeker, more brains than a boodle alderman.  In just ten
minutes by the town clock she had the problem solved.
With her horn she lifted the chain over the top of the gate-
post and walked in, as proud as a boy with a sore toe.  I
felt like a homicide as I raised the double-barreled gun and
pulled both triggers.  I felt worse after I had crawled out of
the cistern, where the perfidious gun had kicked me, and
learned that I had missed the whole drove and sent a hatful
of slugs and nails into a neighbor's china closet.  I broke
the gun over Old Brindle's vertebrae and followed up the
attack with the garden-fork.  After I had chased the entire
drove back and forth over the garden a dozen times, and
seen what was left of my summer's work inextricably
mixed with the sub-soil, fallen over the wheelbarrow and
ruined a $14 pair of trousers, a constable came and
arrested me for discharging firearms inside the corporate
limits.  A young theological gosling, who has since died of
excessive goodness, preferred a charge of cruelty to
animals against me, and my neighbor sued for the price of
his china and got judgment.  Old Brindle died and the court
decided that it was my duty to buy her.  I found her meat
too tough for eating and her hide too full of garden-fork
holes to be available for sole-leather.

If the retail butchers are to be believed, the cow is a calf
until there is no more room on her horn for rings.  She
seldom lives to be too old to be carved up with a buzz-saw
and a cold-chisel and sold as veal.

After she has passed her time of usefulness in the dairy;
when she has forgotten how to give four quarts of milk per
diem and then kick it over the dewy-lipped maid who has
carefully culled it from the maternal fount, the thrifty farmer
drives her upon the railway track, wrecks a train with her,
then sues the company for $150 damages.  Of course the
company kicks worse than ever the cow did, but the farmer
secures an intelligent jury of brother agriculturalists and the
soulless corporation has to come to taw.

Her consort is less brilliant and more impulsive.  He has a
surly, unsocial disposition and uncertain temper, but can be
very polite when he chooses.  He has been known to
neglect his regular business to assist an embarrassed
young man over a rail fence, or entertain a party of
picnickers from the city.  He has a natural antipathy for red
flags, and will cross a forty-acre field to make a mop rag of
one and rub its bearer's nose in the mud--an example that
might be advantageously followed by the Chicago authorities.

The calf is one of the most interesting studies in the
science of natural history.  In its earliest youth it wears long
wobbly legs and an expression of angelic innocence; but
before it is a week old it knows more than some men who
have been honored with high offices and expensive
funerals.  The calf will eat anything it can swallow, and what
it can't get through its neck it will chew and suck the juice.
Tablecloths, hickory shirts, store pants, lace curtains, socks,
in fact the entire range of articles familiar to the laundry are
tid-bits to the calf.  A calf that has any ambition to
distinguish himself will leave the maternal udder any time to
chew one leg off a new pair of "boughten" pantaloons or
absorb the flowing narrative of a "biled" shirt.  The calf
learns bad habits as readily as an Indian, and the man who
did not have a youthful masculine bovine for partner in his
boyish deviltry looks back upon a barren and uneventful youth.

I remember one promising calf that I taught to "bunt" like a
William goat.  One day my eldest brother and my parent on
my father's side were cleaning out an open well, while the
calf and myself lingered near, waiting for a glorious
opportunity to merit killing.  The old gentleman
superintended the work and pulled up in an iron kettle the
mud which the son of his youth industriously scraped from
the bottom of an eighteen-foot well with much labor and an
old tin pan.  While he was leaning over the mouth of the
well, pulling up a kettle of slush, his suspender buttons
groaning and his tailor-made pantaloons strained to the
utmost tension, I called the calf's attention to him.  The
bovine grasped the situation, lowered his head, kicked up
his heels, emitted a triumphant bellow, shot forward like a
baseball reaching for the stomach of an amateur shortstop,
and struck the rear elevation of the head of our
distinguished house with the solid impact of an hydraulic
ram toying with a stone fence.  A moment later there
was a sound from the bowels of the earth, but it was not a
sound of revelry.  It resembled an able-bodied cyclone
ripping up four miles of plank road and driving it through the
pulsating heart of a colored camp-meeting.  The calf had
forgotten to remember the well, and while my respected
sire was chasing the kettle to the bottom, the calf was
chasing him.  Half a dozen robust neighbors armed with a
windlass and a two-inch rope dragged the youthful ox and
his unfortunate companions from the pit, and the volunteer
fire brigade was sent for to turn the hose on them.  I
haven't forgotten the sequel to this little story; but it would
not possess that lively interest for the great public that it did
for me, so I will let it pass.

* * *
CHRISTIAN ENGLAND IN INDIA.

HER TEARS ANENT TURKISH ATROCITIES

"Christian England" is agonizing over the pitiful condition of
the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say
anent her own awful record in India.  It were well for John
Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making
frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem.  The
oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian
Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were
as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient
Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain.  The history of
every barbarous prince of the Orient, in those dark days
when might made right and plunder was the recognized
prerogative of royalty; the annals of every potentate who
has reigned by the grace of Allah and kneeled to kiss
the robe of the prophet, may be searched in vain for a
parallel in unbounded rapacity and calculating atrocity.
England's despoilment of India constitutes the supreme
crime of all the ages, the acknowledged acme of infamy-
Europe never dreaded Alaric the Visigoth, nor hated Attila
the Scourge of God, as India dreads and detests John Bull,
"the white beast from over the black water."  He has not
persecuted because of difference of religious dogma, as
have the Mohammedan Sultans and the Christian Czars.
That kind of enterprise doesn't pay, and John Bull never
wastes on theological sentiment one ounce of energy that
can be coined into cash.

A British trading company had leased land at Madras and
Calcutta, for which it paid rent to the native powers.  For
the protection of its warehouses it was permitted to built
forts and keep a few armed police, but was in no sense
independent.  Its position in India was analogous to that of
British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or
factory and have been authorized to police their property.
The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political
nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided
among nominal viceroys who were really independent
sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent.  The teeming millions of
India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and
occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the countless
host which Xerxes led into Greece, or Darius hurled upon
the steel-crested phalanxes of that bloody prototype of John
Bull, Alexander the Macedonian marauder.  The
governments of India were showy rather than strong, and a
condition of semi-anarchy had been engendered by the
frequent incursions of fierce tribes of robbers, the jealousies
and ambitions of rival nabobs and the mischievous
schemes of a French adventurer named Dupleix.  The
company continued to augment its forces until strong
enough not only to protect its own property, but to
overawe the native governments.  Then, on one dishonest
pretext or another, it began the work of transforming India
into a British province.  Robert Clive succeeded in
accomplishing in Asia what Dr. Jamieson attempted with far
better excuse in South Africa.  Rival powers applied to the
company for assistance, and it mattered not with which it
allied itself, both were in the end destroyed or enslaved,
compelled to pour their wealth into the coffers of the British
corporations.  No crime was too horrible, no breach of faith
too brazen if it promised to further the ambition and
increase the gains of the company.  Its policy was to unite
with a weak government to plunder a strong one, then, by
subjugating its ally, to make itself master of both.  By
treasons and stratagems, by forged treaties and briberies,
by infamies planned in cold blood and executed with more
than Kurdish barbarity, the garden spot of the earth, with its
teeming millions and inestimable wealth, was made to pay
tribute to British greed.  Macaulay, the eulogist of both Lord
Clive and Warren Hastings, thus describes India when
Great Britain, without a shadow of excuse, laid her
marauding paw upon it in the same manner and for the
self-same purpose that Cortez invaded the halls of the
Montezumas:

"The people of India when we subdued them, were ten
times as numerous as the vanquished Americans (the
Indian subjects of Montezuma), and were at the same time
quite as highly civilized as the victorious Spaniards.  They
had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or
Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the
cathedrals of Seville.  They could show bankers richer than
the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, Viceroys whose
splendors far surpassed that of Ferdinand the
Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery
which would have astonished the Great Captain.  It might
have been expected that every Englishman who takes any
interest in any part of history would be curious to know how
a handful of their countrymen, separated from their home
by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few
years, one of the greatest empires of the world.  Yet,
unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not
only insipid, but positively distasteful."  Good God!  Is it any
wonder that British readers should find the conquest of
India "positively distasteful?"  Is it not quite natural that
Englishmen had rather read of Turkish atrocities in Armenia
than of British atrocities in India?  Lord Macaulay rehearses
all the treacheries and cruelties and double-dealings by
which "a handful of his countrymen subjugated one of the
greatest empires of the world," then complains that British
readers find such a catalogue of horrors positively
distasteful!  Did he expect even Englishmen to become
enthusiastic over the hiring of British troops to the infamous
Surajah Dowlah for the massacre of the brave Rohillas?
Did he expect them to peruse with pleasurable pride the
robbery of the Princesses of Oude, the brutal execution of
Nuncomar, or the forged treaty by which Ormichund was
entrapped?  Having painted the atrocities and craven
cowardice of Chief Justice Impey, could he reasonably
expect them to be proud of this representative Englishman
in India?  Having told us that Lord Clive was a freebooter in
his boyhood and a butcher in his prime, did he anticipate
that even Englishmen would be proud of this countryman of
theirs who founded the British Empire in India?  Lord
Macaulay gives us the following description of conditions in
Bengal under British Domination, then wonders that his
countrymen find its perusal "positively distasteful."

"They (the servants of the East India company) covered
with their protection a set of native dependents, who ranged
through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror
wherever they appeared.  Every servant of a British factor
was armed with all the power of his master.  And his
master was armed with all the power of the company.
Enormous fortunes were thus accumulated at Calcutta,
while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the
last extremity of wretchedness.  They had been
accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like
this.  They found the little finger of the company thicker
than the loins of the Surajah Dowlah.  It resembled the
government of evil genii rather than the government of
human tyrants."

The people of India, it must be remembered, had
experienced the tyranny of the Brahman and Buddhist, of
Moslem and even the terrible Mahratta; they had groaned
beneath the exactions of the Great Moguls, plundering
viceroys and robber chiefs; they had paid tribute to
Aurungzebe and to Hyder Ali, but here we are told they
never experienced such tyranny and pitiless despoliation as
under the rule of Christian England, and this upon the
testimony of an Englishman!  Now that British preachers
and pamphleteers are agonizing over Mohammedan
atrocities in Armenia, let us see what the latter thought of
Christian domination in India.  "If," says the Mussulman
historian of those unhappy times, "if to so many military
qualifications, they (English) knew how to join the art of
government--if they exerted as much ingenuity and
solicitude in relieving the people of God, as they do in
whatever concerns their military affairs, no nation in the
world would be preferable to them, or worthier of command;
but the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and
are reduced to poverty and distress.  Oh God! come to
the assistance of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them
from the oppressions they suffer."

Lord Clive, having acquired an immense fortune, concluded
to round out his political career by inaugurating a reform
that would in some manner atone for his past excesses,
and did succeed in giving India more than a Roman peace
and abating some of the worst abuses; but the reform was
ephemeral.  In his essay on Warren Hastings, Lord
Macaulay--who wonders that the conquest of India is
"distasteful" reading to Englishmen--gives us the following
pen-picture of conditions under the administration of his
ideal:

"The delay and the expense, grievous as they are, form
the smallest part of the evil which English law, imported
without modifications into India, could not fail to produce.
The strongest feelings of our nation, honor, religion, female
modesty, rose up against the innovation.  Arrest on mesne
process was the first step in most civil proceedings; and to
a native of rank arrest was not merely a restraint, but a foul
personal indignity.  That the apartments of a woman of
quality should be entered by strange men, or that her face
should be seen by them, are in the East intolerable
outrages--outrages which are more dreaded than death,
and which can be expiated only by the shedding of blood.
To these outrages the most distinguished families of
Bengal, Bahar and Orissa were now exposed.  A reign of
terror began--a reign of terror heightened by mystery.  No
man knew what was next to be expected from this strange
tribunal.  It had collected round itself an army of the worst
part of the native population--informers, and false
witnesses, and common barrators, and agents of chicane;
and above all, a banditti of bailiffs' followers compared
with whom the retainers of the worst English spunging-
houses, in the worst times, might be considered as upright
and tender-hearted.  There were instances in which men of
the most venerable dignity, persecuted without cause by
extortioners, died of rage and shame in the grip of the vile
alguazils of Impey.  The harems of noble Mohammedans--
sanctuaries respected in the East by governments that
respected nothing else--were burst open by gangs of
bailiffs.  The Mussulmans, braver and less accustomed to
submission than the Hindoos, sometimes stood on their
defense and shed their blood in the doorway, while
defending, sword in hand, the sacred apartments of their
women.  No Mahratta invasion had ever spread through the
province such dismay as this inroad of English lawyers.  All
the injustice of former oppressions, Asiatic and European,
appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of
the Supreme Court."

No wonder that "Christian England" is horrified by the
atrocities of the Moslems in Armenia!  She cannot
understand persecution for the sake of religious opinion--
having done her dirty work for the sake of the almighty
dollar.  It is true, that a Hastings, with his forged treaties
and despoilment of ancient "bee-gums," is no longer
governor-general of India; it is true that an Impey no longer
deals out "Justice" in that unhappy land; but the industrial
condition of the toiling millions is worse to-day than when
they were being despoiled to erect the Peacock throne at
Delhi, adorned with its "Mountain of Light." Sir  David
Wedderbun--who will be accepted as authority even by our
Anglomaniacs--says:  "Our civil courts are regarded as
institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the
poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their
jurisdiction in native territory."  "We do not care for
the people of India," writes Florence Nightingale; "the
saddest sight to be seen in India--nay, probably in the
world--is the peasant of our Eastern Empire."  Miss
Nightingale declares that the Indian famines, which every
few years cost millions of lives, are due to British taxation,
which deprives the ryots of the means of cultivation and
reduces them to a condition far worse than the worst
phases of American slavery.  Mr. H. M. Hyndman, an
English writer of repute, declares that in India men and
women cannot get food, because they cannot save money
to buy it, so terrible are the burdens laid by Christian
England on that unhappy people.  Just as Ireland exported
food to England during her most devastating "famines," so
does India send food to the "Mother Country" in the
discharge of governmental burdens, while her own people
are starving by millions.  Henry George, who has never
been suspected of anti-English tendencies, says:  "The
millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes
of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady grinding
weight of English domination--a weight which is literally
crushing millions out of existence, and, as shown by
English writers, is inevitably tending to a most frightful and
widespread catastrophe."

"Christian England" wouldn't murder a Moslem because of
his religion--she's too good for that; but she starves millions
to death to fill her purse, then tries to square herself with
God and man by singing psalms and pointing the finger of
scorn at the barbarities of Islam.


MAN'S IMMORTALITY.

Is there a life beyond the grave?

Ten thousand thousand times this question hath been
answered, yet answer there is none that satisfies the soul.

Never yet did man look into the cold face of one he loved
and not feel, creeping like a thousand-fanged adder into his
desolate heart, the awful fear that death's the end of all.

Never yet did mother stand by her first born's bier and say,
"Thank God for Death that bringeth to my beloved eternal
Life."  Though Bibles were piled as high as Helicon and
every son of Adam a white-stoled priest, proclaiming the
grave the gate to glorious life, still would Doubt, twin
brother of Despair, linger ever at that dread portal, and
Love long to tear aside Futurity's awful veil--to see and
know, as only those can know who see, that Death is but
Life's messenger.

Oh Love! thou art at once the sweetest blossom that ever
perfumed the bowers of Paradise, and the most poignant
thorn that grows in the empoisoned shadows of everlasting
Pain!  But for thee, mad sorceress, every individual life
were a microcosm, complete within itself.  We would live
but our own life, suffer our own pangs, and dying, descend
without a sigh to ever dreamless sleep; but thy soft fingers
do sweep the human harpsichord, the ego doth "pass in
music out of sight"; the single note of life is blended with
others in holy diapason, sweeter than fabled song of Israfil.

But alas! the penalty of this terrestrial Paradise, this
blending of human hearts in heavenly harmony!  The added
pleasures bring redoubled pains; of symphonies so sweet is
born the discord of Despair.  Loving others more than
our proper selves, their wounds are deeper far than our
own hurts, and death to them is death and hell to us.

Of love was born the hope of immortality.  We part to-night
from those so near and dear that they seem our better
selves, looking with longing eyes to the glad to morrow
when we shall meet again; but when comes the sleep of
Death, and Reason, that pitiless monarch of the Mind,
proclaims that all the to-morrows in Time's fecund womb
will come and go and bring them never back to our fond
embrace, the heart revolts and wars on Destiny.

Hope, dear daughter of the Gods, angel of Light, what
seraphic visions thou dost weave for us in thy celestial
loom!  How beautiful and bright the star that blazes upon
thy ethereal brow; yet alas! how oft obscured by the deadly
vapors of Doubt and dark Despair.

Is thy enchanted world a world indeed, where Love is lord
and Death is driven forth? or dost thou seek to soothe us
with lying pictures of Paradise, such as the shipwrecked
mariner in tropic seas beholds beneath the sultry brine?  Is
thy beacon in very truth a star; shining eternal in our
cimmerian sky, a guide infallible to life's worn voyager; or a
wandering fire such as the foolish follow,--a lying flame that
leads the trusting traveler to his loss?

Since man first placed his foot upon this earth he hath been
listening with greedy ear to thy sweet song; since Death
first did show his horrid front thou hast been whispering to
the stricken heart that Love could never die,--that there is
not, cannot be in nature a pang so cruel as Love's farewell
forever.  Thou hast been the world's comforter in all ages
past; will faithful prove through the long ages yet to be.

Is there a life beyond the grave?

Aye, it must be so; but what that life will be it boots not to
inquire.  Even a land of sand and thorns, with grinding
toil, yet everlasting life with those we love, were heaven
and heaven enough.

Perhaps--who knows?--the sweet blending of our lives with
other and dearer ones upon this earth is but an earnest of
what will be in the great hereafter; that when every spark of
that bright effulgence increate is released from its thrall of
clay, all Life, and Light and Love will forever blend in One;
that husband, wife and child, and each and all the human
heart holds dear will be resolved into one perfect Life, and
thus at once in God and self, emparadised in each other's
souls in Heaven as in the loving arms of each on earth, let
Eternity roll on!

* * *
EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION.

THE PLUTOCRAT AND THE PAUPER

"For Christ's sake, Cap, give me the price of a sandwich!"

I stopped and surveyed the speaker, not because the
request was unusual, but because the applicant for aid had
not acquired the beggar's whine.  He was a large, powerful
man, evidently a mechanic, for every trade leaves its
peculiar stamp upon its followers.

"Why should I give you a dime?  You are far more able to
work than I.  A man with half your strength should be
ashamed to beg."

"Work?" he retorted bitterly.  "Give me a job--at anything--
and see if I do not prove myself a man."

"But I have nothing for you to do."

"A dozen men have told me that to-day .  You sneer at me
because I do not earn the bread I eat, yet decline to give
me an opportunity to do so."

I steered him against a lunch counter and watched him
chisel desolation into a silver dollar, then listened to his
story--one that I had heard a hundred times within the year.
Thrown out of employment by the business depression, he
had tramped in search of work until he found himself
penniless, starving in the streets of a strange city.  He
handed me a letter, dated St. Louis, written by his wife.
Some of the words were misspelled and the bad
chirography was blotted as if by falling tears, but it breathed
the spirit of a Roman matron, of a Spartan mother.  Both
the children were ill.  She had obtained a little sewing and
provided food and some medicine, but two months' rent
was due and the landlord would turn them out unless it was
promptly paid.  She would do the best she could, and knew
that her husband would do the same.  Then through the
blinding tears came a flash of nether fire.  Transformed into
respectable English it read:

"Were I a man I would not tramp from city to city begging
employment only to be refused.  Were I a man I would not
see my babies starve while people are piling up millions of
money which they can never need.  In this country there
should be an opportunity for every man to make a living.
Were I a man I would make an effort to release myself and
my unhappy fellows from this brutal industrial bondage, this
chronic pauperism--if it cost my life.  I have two sons,
whom God knows I do dearly love; but I would consecrate
them to the holy cause of human liberty if I knew they
would perish on the scaffold.  I would rather see them die
like dogs than live like slaves."

He sat a long time silent after returning the letter to his
pocket, then said as though speaking to himself:

"I wonder if the rich people ever pause to reflect that
there's a million brawny men in my condition to-night--a
million men who only lack a leader?  I wonder if they
think we'll stand this kind o' thing forever?  Don't talk
to me about patriotism," he interrupted, fiercely.  "No man
can be a patriot on an empty stomach!  Why should I care
for the preservation of a government of, for and by the
plutocrat?  Let it go to the devil across lots!  D--n a flag
beneath which a competent and industrious mechanic
cannot make a living.  Anarchy?  Is anarchy worse than
starvation?  When conditions become such that a
workingman is half the time an ill-fed serf, and the other
half a wretched vagabond, he's ready for a change of any
kind--by any means.  I am supposed to be entitled to 'Life,
Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.'  I have Liberty--to
starve--and I can pursue Happiness--or rainbows--to my
heart's content.  There's absolutely no law prohibiting my
using the horns of the moon for a hatrack if I feel so
disposed!"

. . .

The optimists who are depending upon the "conservatism"
of the American people to maintain intact our political and
industrial systems; who proclaim that the present too
apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few
professional agitators, are of the same myopic brood as
those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until
the crust over the tartarean fires--steadily eaten away from
beneath, steadily hammered upon from above--gave way
with a crash like the crack of doom and that fair land was
transformed as if by infernal magic into a high-flaming
vortex of chaos, engulfing all forms and formulas,
threatening the civilization of a world.

"After us the deluge!" cried those court parasites, who, with
more understanding than their fellows, read aright the
mene, mene, tekel upharsin traced upon the walls of
royalty.  But the deluge waited not upon their convenience.
Like another avatar of Death gendered by Pride in the
womb of Sin, it burst forth to appall the world.  But the
American multi-millionaires mock at the "deluge"--can in
nowise understand how it were possible for the thin crust
that holds in thrall the fierce Gehenna fires to give 'way
beneath THEIR feet, dance they upon it never so hard.

The American nation is trembling on the verge of an
industrial revolution--a revolution that is inevitable; that will
come peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must.  So ripe are the
American workingmen for revolt against the existing order
of things; so galled are they by the heavy yoke laid upon
them; so desperate have they become that it but needs a
strong man to organize and lead them, and our present
industrial system--perhaps our political, also--would crumble
like an eggshell in the grip of an angry Titan.

Nor is the dissatisfaction confined to the industrial class, the
farmer, that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders the great
world rests, is in full sympathy with every attack made upon
the Cormorant by the Commune.  While not ready for a
revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense
of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the assaults
of the proletariat.  Yet the American press proclaims that all
is well!  The "able editor" looks into his leather spectacles--
free trade or high tariff brand--and with owl-like gravity
announces that if the import tax on putty be increased
somewhat, or fiddle-strings be placed on the free list, the
American mechanic will have money to throw at the birds--
that mortgages and mendicancy will pass like a hideous
nightmare, and the farmer gayly bestride his sulky plow
attired like unto Solomon in all his glory.

. . .

What is wrong?  In God's name, what is right?  Here we
have the most fertile land upon the globe, the best
supplied with all things necessary to a prosperous
people.  Our resources are not half developed; there is no
dearth of capital; our working people are the most
intelligent, energetic and capable upon which the sun ever
shone.

Man for man the world never contained their equal.  Their
productive capability is the marvel even of this age of
industrial miracles.  And yet, with every nerve strained to its
utmost tension; toiling, saving--at very death-grips with
destiny--they are sinking year by year deeper into the
Slough of Despond--into that most frightful of all Gehennas,
the hell of want!

Nor is this all.  While those who toil are but fighting a losing
battle wearing out hand and heart and brain for a crust that
becomes ever scantier, ever more bitter--there are
thousands and tens of thousands who cannot even obtain
the poor privilege of tramping in this brutal treadmill, but
must stand with folded arms and starve, else beg or steal.
All this might be borne--would be endured with heroic
fortitude--if such were the lot of all; but while the opportunity
to wear out one's strength for a bare existence is becoming
ever more a privilege to be grateful for, we are making
millionaires by the hundreds.  While the many battle
desperately for life, the few are piling up fortunes beside
which the famed wealth of ancient Lydia's kings were but a
beggar's patrimony.  The employer is becoming ever more
an autocrat, the employee ever more dependent upon his
good pleasure for the poor privilege of existing upon the
earth.

. . .

To say that the "conservatism" of the American
workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to
brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but
the shackles and the knout.  He will not endure it much
longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit--
when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied
him in such plentitude by aspiring politicians and "able
editors," look ye to see something break.

. . .

The problems for our statesmen to solve are, First, how to
insure to every person able and willing to work an
opportunity to earn an honest livelihood; Second, to effect a
more suitable distribution of the wealth created among the
factors engaged in its production.  All other problems now
engaging the attention of publicists sink into insignificance
beside these.  They are to practical statecraft what the
immortality of the soul is to theology.  They must be solved;
at least, some progress must be made in that direction or
force will ere long attempt it.  The trouble with such
convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil,
but do not always compensate it with permanent good.
They are a kind of social mania a potu, racking the whole
organism, debilitating it--good chiefly as frightful examples
of what evil customs lead to.

To diagnose the disease and prescribe a remedy were no
easy task.  There is infinitely more the matter than a
maladjustment of the tariff, inflated railway stocks or a
dearth of white dollars.  It is a most difficult, a wonderfully
intricate problem--one entirely without precedent.  The rapid
development of America; the still more remarkable
advancement in the science of mechanics, conjoined to a
political organism not yet fully developed, but half
understood, yet marking an epoch in man's social progress;
commercial customs of by-gone days surviving in the midst
of much that is new--really when you come to think of it you
may well wonder that we have got thus far without more
than one great convulsion!  Clearly it is no place for
catholicons.

That a comparatively small class of men are absorbing the
wealth of the country as fast as it is produced, leasing to
those who create it scarce a bare subsistence, is patent to
all; that the vast body of the people, clothed with political
power and imbued with the spirit of "equality," will not
permit such conditions to long continue, any thoughtful man
will concede.  Even in European countries, where the
working people have come to regard privileged classes as a
matter of course, there are mutterings of a coming storm
that will only gather fresh terrors by delay.  In Europe the
change will probably be wrought by revolution; in America it
may be achieved by peaceful evolution if the moneyed
aristocracy does not, with its checks and repressions--with
its corrupted judiciary, purchased legislators and
obsequious press--drive a people, already sorely vexed, to
unreasoning madness.

. . .

What shall we do?  We must avoid the two extremes--that
of the radical reformer and the apostle of laissez faire.
We will find a middle course safest and best--will need to
proceed with caution, but by no means with cowardice.
The politico-economic school that would at once change the
existing order of things with as much sang-froid as a
miller substitutes steam for water-power forgets that society
is not a machine; that it was not made to order like a
newspaper editorial, and that to attempt by a radical
process to make it other than what it is--to change its
genius arbitrarily--were as fatuous as trying to transform a
wolf into a watchdog by a chemical process or surgical
operation.  But while the radical "reformer"--the man who
would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out
upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism--is one
dangerous extreme, we must remember that it is not the
only one.  In avoiding Scylla we must not forget
Charybdis.  If we are to look ever to the past, to make no
experiments, to become the bondslaves of precedent, then
progress is at an end and society must petrify, retrograde
or consume itself in fierce fire whirlwinds.

When the American people emancipate themselves from
party-slavery--than which there is none more debasing;
when they cease to fight the battles of ambitious place-
hunters and begin in true earnest to fight their own, then,
and not till then, will the faults of our social organism be
rapidly reduced to the minimum.  When the common people
of this country decline to be divided into two or more hostile
camps by "issues" carefully concocted by political
harlequins, then will the combined wisdom, purified of
partisan prejudice, evolve the best possible national polity.

How many of the hard-working people of this nation who
are now assiduously assailing or defending the dogma of
protection or free trade or any other of the many "issues"
evolved from time to time by professional politicians as a
kind of Pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into
power--ever carefully considered the question in all its
bearings; studied it from a national, sectional or even
individual standpoint.  Questions upon which Adam Smith
and Auguste Compte, Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed,
are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention--composed
chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums--with
less trouble than a colored wench selects a calico gown.

The American people, as P. T. Barnum long ago pointed
out, have a weakness for humbugs.  They are the natural
prey of the charlatan, and in nothing more so than in
matters political.  Despite their boasted intelligence, they
will follow with a trust that partakes of the pathetic the
mountebank who can perform the most sleight-of-hand
tricks, the demagogue who can make the most noise.  They
think, but are too busy or indifferent to think deeply, to
reason closely.  They "jump at conclusions," assert their
correctness stubbornly and prove the courage of their
convictions by their ballots.  They demonstrate their
"independence" by choosing their political fetich, their
confidence in the infallibility of their judgment by worshiping
it blindly.  Herein lies the chief danger--danger that the
American workingman will follow this or that ignus fatuus,
hoping thereby to find a shorter northwest passage to
impossible spice islands, until poverty has degraded him
from a self-respecting sovereign into a volcanic sans
culotte; until he loses hope of bettering his condition by
whereases, resolutions, trades-unions, acts of Congress,
etc., and, like another blind and desperate Samson, lays his
brawny hands upon the pillars of the temple and pulls it
down about his ears.

* * *
THE WOMAN THOU GAVEST ME.

Now that the clarion voice of the reformer is heard in the
land, demanding for woman all the rights and privileges
enjoyed by the sterner sex, perhaps it would be well to ask
the fair client to come into court and establish that "natural
equality" so vigorously claimed for her, as well as the fact, if
fact it be, that she is being "wronged" and "cruelly
oppressed" by the tyrant man.

Is it possible that the dear creature has, for some
thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and
relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply
because her biceps are not so large as those of her
big brother, and she has no warlike whiskers?

As her attorneys in the suit to try title to this world's
wardship clamor for truth without trimmings, and rest their
case upon "principles of justice" untainted by prescription
or praemunire, suppose we grant their prayer and
proceed to the consideration of their cause unhandicapped
by chivalric sentiment.

That the greater intelligence should control the lesser must
be conceded.  To deny it would be to deny man's right to
the life and labor of inferior animals, to question God's
authority to govern man or beast.  If the experience of
several thousand years may be admitted in evidence the
subserviency of the minor to the major intelligence is an
immutable law of nature.  Only equal minds can be
accorded equal authority without doing violence to this law.

Is woman man's intellectual peer, entitled to share equally
with him the wardship of this world?  The simple fact that
for thousands of years man has been able to hold her in
that "state of subjection" of which her attorneys so bitterly
complain, is sufficient answer to this question,--is proof
positive that he is as much her superior mentally as
physically.  This sounds unchivalrous, but she will please
remember that her attorneys insist that this cause be tried
solely upon its merits.  Brute force does not rule the world.
If it did the lion or the elephant would be creation's lord,
and the Ethiop and the red Indian drive the Caucasian into
the waste places of the earth or reduce him to slavery.
Knowledge is power; brain not brawn is master throughout
the world.  Had all Eve's fair daughters been blessed with
more than masculine strength their position would have
been practically the same.  They would have sung lullabies
to the little ones, adorned themselves, and dreamed of
love and love's conquests while their brothers founded
empires, subdued the forces of nature and measured the
stars.

And both sexes would have been well content, as they
have ever been, despite the protests of self-constituted
"reformers" of the order established by the Infinite.  Man is
creation's lord de facto and de jure.  The immutable
laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a
duty.  The voice of prophecy proclaims him king; he wears
his crown by Divine ordination and right of conquest.
Woman was created to be "an help-meet unto man," not
his co-ruler.  It matters not whether Genesis be fact or
fiction; that such was her destiny she has proven by
fulfilling it.

Whatever "rights and privileges" she enjoys must be man's
free gift.  Man asserts his position; woman can but ask to
share the fruits of his victories.  These he can divide with
her; but he could not if he would, share with her his
sovereignty, his power, because he cannot endow her with
his judgment, his mental vigor, his courage and enterprise.
Whether he wills it or not, man must perforce remain the
master of the world, God's sole viceregent on this earth.

In very few civilized countries does man manifest much
opposition to the enfranchisement of woman.  Many favor it
heartily, and those who object do so chiefly on the ground
that woman does not want it.  Let a majority of the women
in any state of the American Union ask enfranchisement
and it will be accorded them.  Let them unite in demanding
any particular legislation and it will be enacted.  Let them
ask any possible thing whatsoever of their husbands and
brothers and it will not be denied them.

Woman does not demand the ballot, because her interest
centers in her home rather than her country; because she
shrinks from responsibility; because she knows that
she may safely trust her destiny to those who would die for
her.

Paradoxical as it may appear, woman is at once the subject
and the sovereign of man, his inferior and superior,
mentally and physically.  His inferior in strength she is his
superior in beauty.  Woman is the paragon of physical
perfection.  It is small wonder that the simple people of
bygone days believed that gods and angels became
enamored of the daughters of men and left heaven to bask
in their sunny smiles.  The mental differences of the sexes
correlate with the physical.  Woman's mind is not so
comprehensive, her intellect not so strong as that of man,
but it is of finer texture.  What it lacks in vigor it gains in
subtility.  If the mind of man is a Corliss engine, throbbing
with resistless strength and energy, that of woman is a
Geneva watch, by which the mightier machine is regulated.
Occasionally a woman enters the field of masculine
endeavor and keeps pace with the strongest; but such
cases are rare exceptions.  The women who have really
taken high rank in art or literature may be counted on the
fingers of one hand, and those who have achieved anything
remarkable in the field of invention, science or government,
upon the fingers of the other.

"It is not good that man should be alone;" and it would not
be did he, like Cadmus' soldiers, spring full grown from the
earth.  Man is the brain, woman the heart of the human
race.  She is the color and fragrance of the flower, the
bright bow in the black o'erhanging firmament of life, the
sweet chord that makes complete the human diapason.

If woman is kept in a "state of subjection," as those who
are trying to drag her into court and force her to file a bill of
grievances against her companion assert, she is certainly
the proudest of earthly subjects.  If she is a "slave"
she is bound with chains of her own forging and wears
them because she wills it.  In obeying she rules, in serving
she leads captive her captor.  Really she is the autocrat of
earth, the power behind the throne, the ruler of those who
rule.

In all life's battles woman's love is man's chief incentive, his
greatest guerdon of victory.  For woman he bares his
bosom to every peril, braves every danger.  It is for her that
he subdues the elements and searches out the hidden
treasures of earth; for her that he measures the stars and
determines the procession of the planets, for her that he
fills the world with art and luxury,--for her that he is a
creative god, rather than a destructive demon.

Woman is with us but not of us.  She is in very truth "but
little lower than the angels," and we should not drag her
down to our level under pretense of lifting her to greater
heights.  Give to her every possible advantage; open to her
every calling and profession that she cares to enter; accord
her all she asks, not grudgingly but cheerfully; but do not
force upon her "rights" she does not want, duties she
would shun, and which that beneficent God, who gave her
to us to civilize and humanize us, destined for our own
strong hands.


* * *
CHRIST COMES TO TEXAS.

AND CALLS ON THE ICONOCLAST.

The editor was reading a report of the regular meeting of
the Dallas Pastors' Association, at which the Second
Coming of Christ was learnedly considered.  Dr. Seasholes
declared that all good people will rise into the air, like so
many larks, to meet the Lord and conduct him to
earth--with flying banners and a brass-band, I suppose--
where he will reign a thousand years.  At the conclusion of
this felicitous period Satan is to be loosed for a little
season, and after he has pawed up the gravel with his long
toe-nails and given us a preliminary touch of Purgatory, we
are to have the genuine pyrotechnics.  Some of the divines
did not agree with the spectacular ceremonies arranged by
Dr. Seasholes for the Second Coming; but he seems
determined to carry out his program or enjoin the
procession.  The editor was musing on this remarkable
controversy and wondering, in a vague, tired way, why the
fool-killer did not take a pot-shot at the Dallas Pastors'
Association, when there came a gentle rap at his door and
a strange figure stood before him.  It was that of a man of
perhaps three-and-thirty years, barefoot, bareheaded and
clothed in a single garment, much worn and sadly soiled.

"Peace to this house," he said, in a voice soft and sweet
as that of a well-bred woman.  "A cup of cold water, I pray
you."  "Water?  Cert.  Steer yourself against the cooler
over there.  You look above the Weary Willie business.  Sit
down until I find a jumping-off place in this article on 'The
Monetary Situation,' and perhaps I can fish up a stray
quarter that's dodged the foreign mission fund."  He bowed
his thanks and sank wearily into the proffered seat.  In five
minutes he was sleeping softly, and the editor made a
careful study of his face.  It was of the Jewish type, strong
but tender.  The beard was glistening black and had
evidently never been to the barber's, while a shock of
unkempt hair, burned by the sun, hung around his
shoulders like the mane of a lion.

"Hello," said the business manager, as he helped
himself to the editor's plug tobacco; "another of your
Bohemian friends?  Some fellow who's tramping around the
world on a wager of 'steen million dollars?  Good face, but
a bath wouldn't hurt him."  The stranger roused himself and
the B. M. continued:  "Neighbor, we were just about to
crack a bottle of beer.  Have you any conscientious
scruples about joining us?"  He winked at the bookkeeper,
and the stranger bowed his thanks, accepted the amber
fluid, scrutinized it curiously and drank it off with evident
relish.

"That is very refreshing," he commented as he wiped the
foam from his black beard with his sleeve.  "Will it
intoxicate?"

He was informed that if taken on the allopathic plan it would
make one drunk some, but not the wild-eyed, murderons
mania peculiar to Prohibition booze.  He declined a second
glass, saying gently, "We should not abuse the good things
of life."  The bookkeeper was so startled that he missed his
face with a pint cup, and the mailing clerk did up a package
of hymn books for a dealer who wanted "Potiphar's Wife."
But the stranger was evidently unconscious that he had
forever queered himself with the Bohemian Club.  He took
a dry crust from a leathern wallet, and, blessing it, offered a
portion to the editor.

"Jesus Christ!  You don't eat that, do you?"

The visitor rose, a startled look on his face.

"You know me, then?  Yes, it is I--Jesus of Nazareth.  I
have walked the earth an entire year, clad as I was
eighteen centuries ago, living as I did then, mingling with
those called by my name, conversing with those who
profess to teach my doctrine, and none knew me.  Nay
more:  They sometimes spurned me from their doors, and
even delivered me to the minions of Caesar as a vagabond.
You look incredulous.  Behold the nail-prints in my hands
and feet, the spear wound in my side, the scars made
by the crown of thorns upon my brow."

"But I thought your second coming would be in power and
glory, and all the righteous would rise up into the
atmosphere to meet you and show you a soft spot to 'light.
Dr. Seasholes says so, and if he doesn't know, who does?"

"I attended the discussion by the Dallas Pastors'
Association," he said wearily.  "They permitted me to
sweep out the room and stand down in the hall.  It may
appear incredible; but there are just a few things that the
Dallas Pastors' Association doesn't know.  Of course you
couldn't make those gentlemen believe it; but it is a
lamentable fact.  The world is young; it must run its course.
Our Heavenly Father did not create it as the Chinese make
crackers--just to hear it pop.  Not until its power to produce
and nourish life is exhausted will the end be.  Your poet,
Campbell, was a true prophet.  The sun itself must die, and
not until that mighty source of light and heat becomes a
flickering lamp, will those fateful words be spoken.  'Time
was, but time shall be no more.'  I am not come as yet to
judge the world, but to mingle once again with the sons of
men, and observe how they keep my laws."

An expression of unutterable sadness stole into his face
and he sat a long time silent.

"I have suffered and sacrificed much for this people," he
said at length, as though speaking to himself, "and it has
borne so little fruit.  The world misunderstood me.  The
church planted by toil and nurtured with my blood has split
up into hundreds of warring factions, despite my warning
that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  Nor has it
stood--the Temple of Zion is a ruin, the habitation of
sanctified owls and theological bats.  The army of Israel is
striving in its camp, tribe against tribe, or wandering
desolate in the desert while the legions of Lucifer
overrun the land.  Here and there, among the simple poor, I
find traces of the truths I taught--here and there a heart that
is a holy temple in which abide Faith, Hope and Charity; but
the shepherds do not keep my sheep."

He leaned his head upon his hands and wept, while the
editor shifted uneasily in his chair and strove in vain to think
of something appropriate to say.  During his reportorial
career he had interviewed Satan and the arch-angel
Gabriel.  He had even inserted the journalistic pump into
Gov. Culberson and Dr. Cranfill without being overwhelmed
by their transcendent greatness; but this was different.  The
city hall clock chimed ten, the hour when the saloons set
out the mock-turtle soup and potato salad, the bull-beef and
sour beans as lagniappe to the heavy-laden schooner.
The editor remembered that Christ first came eating and
drinking, sat with publicans and sinners and was
denounced therefore as a wine-bibber and a glutton by the
Prohibitionists and other Miss Nancys of Palestine.  Still he
hesitated.  He wanted to do the elegant, but was afraid of
making a bad impression.  A glance at the dry and moldy
crust determined him.  He tapped the visitor on the
shoulder and said:

"Let's go and get some grub."

"I wouldn't worry about the world if I were you," I
continued, as he led the way to the elevator.  "It is really
not worth while.  If the devil wants it, I'd let him have it.  I
can think of no greater punishment you could inflict upon
him than to make him a present of it.  It were equivalent to
England giving Canada to the United States for meddling in
the Venezuelan matter.  Perhaps you know your business
best, but I have lived the longest.  I used to think that
perhaps the world would pay the salvage for saving it; but
that was before I moved to Waco.  I tell you frankly that if I
had your job in the New Jerusalem I'd nurse it and let
Bob Ingersoll, Doc Talmage and the rest of the noisy
blatherskites scrap it out here to suit themselves."

He did not reply, and the editor, remembering that his
advice had not been asked, changed the subject.

"I'm not going to steer you against a first-class hotel.  Jim
I. Moore wouldn't let you into his dining-room with your
shoes off, even though you brought a letter of credit from
the Creator.  Jim loves you dearly, but business is
business.  There's a place down here, however, run by a
man who doesn't trot with the sanctified set, where you can
waltz up to the feed trough in the same suit you wore when
you preached the Sermon on the Mount, and that without
giving the ultra-fashionables a case of the fantods."

"Ah, there we will doubtless meet with many of the good
brethren who do not observe empty forms and foolish
ceremonies."

"Rather.  But perhaps I should tell you that the church
does not approve of the place where we are going.  They
er--sell wine there you know; also that amber liquid with
the--er--froth on it."

"And why not wine?"

"Damfino--I mean--Oh, you'll have to ask Brother Cranfill.  I
s'pose because old Noah jagged up on it."

"Noah who?"

"Why just Noah; that old stiff--I mean that good man who
was saved for seed, when the overflow came, and who's
the great gran'daddy of all the niggers."

"Is it possible that the church is retailing that wretched old
myth which my Hebrew fathers borrowed of the barbarians.
Noah?  There was no such man.  By the shifting of the
earth's axis about 16,000 years ago a portion of the Asiatic
continent was overflowed."

"But the Noah story is in the Bible."

"So is the story of Adam and Eve, and many other
absurdities which really intelligent people would purge it of.
O will men be mental children ever!"

He ate sparingly, but scanned the visitors closely.  At the
next table a quartette of Texas colonels were absorbing
mint juleps through rye straws.  The Nazarene nudged the
editor and inquired what the beverage consisted of.  The
latter explained the mystery, and would have placed one
before his guest, but the latter insisted that a little wine for
the stomach's sake would suffice.  Several entered into
conversation with him and would have given him money,
but he gently declined to accept it, saying that the good
Father would provide that he was seeking to do good, not
to lay up treasures.

"Are these people sinners?"

He was informed that, according to the theology of the
Prohibs, they would occupy the hottest corner of Perdition.

"But they give to the poor, speak kindly to the stranger,
even though he be clothed in rags.  I am sure they would
not lie or steal or kill."

"But they will blaspheme a little sometimes.  Just listen to
those colonels.  Didn't you hear them say 'damn' and
'Hell's fire' and 'Devil'?  O, according to our theology
there's no hope for 'em.  A man may defraud a widow or
swindle an orphan and make a landing; but when he talks
about the Devil and Hell he's sure to be damned."

"Is Satan a sacred person, or Hell a place to be mentioned
reverently?  Blasphemy is speaking evil of God.  The
priesthood of every religious cult has manifested a
propensity to magnify venial faults into cardinal sins and
thereby bring worship into contempt by trifling.  To Hell with
those who make religion a trade and thrive thereby!"

We were on the street and it chanced that a well-fed,
silk-hatted dominie, sporting a diamond stud, was
dawdling by as the man of Galilee uttered this emphatic
protest against gain-grabbing preachers.  His face flushed
with anger, and turning upon the ill-clad stranger, he said:

"Do you mean to insult me, fellow?"

The Nazarene faced his heated interlocutor and replied with
quiet dignity:  "Assuredly not.  I did not suspect you of
being a minister.  You are not clad like one of the Apostles.
Surely you are not one of those disputatious sectaries who
wear purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day
while countless thousands cry to their Father in Heaven,
'Give us to eat and to drink lest we die'?"

"I want no lectures from you, sir.  I know my business,"
exclaimed the man of God, with rising color.

"Ah, I fear that 'business' is to coin the blood of Jesus of
Nazareth into golden guineas."

The infinite pity in the speaker's voice cowed the
pugnacious preacher, and he was about to pass on; but a
brown, toil-stained hand--the hand of a carpenter--was laid
upon his shoulder.  "Wait, my brother.  Let not the sun go
down upon thy wrath.  Him ye serve was even as I am--
poor and friendless.  He spake as I speak, the truth that
welled up in his heart.  Cruel things were said of him, but
he resented it not.  He was beaten with many stripes, and
mocked, and crucified; but he freely forgave.  Be thou
humble as he was humble; be thou forgiving even as he
forgave.  Love God and thy fellow-men.  That is the whole
law given by him ye serve.  Words are but as sounding
brass and a tinkling cymbal, but a good example endureth
forever."

"Lord! Lord!" exclaimed the editor.  "Why didn't you reveal
yourself to him?"

"He would not have believed me.  No; though I
performed before him miracles more wonderful than
those accredited to me in Palestine.  I have resumed my
earthly raiment and adopted my old mode of life as the best
possible disguise.  Believing me a vagabond, those
pretending to worship with all their heart and all their soul,
show unto me what they really are.  Now as ever do men
polish the outside of the cup while within is all
uncleanliness."

"Have you interviewed many of the big preachers?"

"Many, almost all.  I attended Sam Jones' recent services
at Austin.  He is simply a product of the evil times upon
which the church has fallen.  In religion, as in art and
letters, decadence is marked by sensationalism.  The
trouble with Sam is that he mistakes himself for me--thinks
he has been called to judge the world.  I was pained to
hear him consign about fifteen different classes of people to
Perdition without sifting them to see if, perchance, there
might not be one in the lot worthy of salvation.  I presented
him with a copy of my Sermon on the Mount.  He took a
fresh chew of tobacco and remarked that he was inclined to
think he had read it before somewhere.  Then he took up a
collection.  Sam represents the rebound from the old
religious belly-ache.  For years preachers had an idea that
there was nothing of gladness in the worship of God--that it
consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles.  Jones
has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed
the Temple of the Deity into a variety dive.  Nero fiddled
while Rome burned; but Jones indulges in the levity of the
buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to Hell.
Alas, that so few preachers understand the pity which
permeates all true religions."

"All true religions?"

"Even so.  All are true and of God that make people better,
nobler, more pitiful.  The Father is all-wise.  He
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.  He gives to each
people a religion commensurate with its mentality.  I had
hoped that the church established nearly nineteen centuries
ago would suffice until the end of the world; that the simple
theology I taught would grow with the world's mental growth
and strengthen with its intellectual strength.  It was a
religion of Love.  I bound its devotees to no specific forms
and ceremonies--these were after-growths.  I expected
them.  The child must have something to lean upon until it
can walk; the barbaric worshiper must have symbols and
ceremonies to aid his comprehension.  These should have
passed ere this in Europe and America.  A religious rite
appropriate to semi-savages becomes, when injected into
an age of civilization, that good custom which doth corrupt
the world.  The people, seeing these savage non-essentials
insisted upon by the priesthood as something sacred and
necessary unto Salvation, turn skeptic and reject religion
altogether because it is encumbered by ridiculous rubbish.
O, when will men understand that the whole world is a
temple and all right living is worship!"

The editor was becoming really alarmed.  He was fearful
that his visitor was frightfully heterodox, hence he broke in
with, "If you're not careful, Doc Talmage will denounce you
as an infidel!"

"Brother Talmage is like unto the west wind--he bloweth
whithersoever he listeth, and no man knoweth whence his
blow cometh or whither it goeth.  I tried to have a talk with
him while in Washington, but he was too busy writing a
syndicate sermon on the political situation, demonstrating
that Dives had already done too much for Lazarus, and
peddling hallelujahs at two dollars apiece.  I had heard
much of him and expected to find him toiling early and late
among the poor and wretched, the suffering of the
Capital city.  When I called at his residence the servant told
me that his master could not be disturbed--said there had
been a dozen tramps there that morning.  I asked him what
salary his master received in a city filled with homeless
vagabonds for preaching Christ and Him crucified, but he
vouchsafed me no answer.  I went to hear the great man
preach, but the usher told me there was a mission church
around the corner where my spiritual wants would be
attended to.  If I failed to find a seat there I could stand on
the street-corner and hear the Salvation Army beat the
bass drum and sing, 'Come to Jesus.'  I lingered in the
vestibule, however, and heard his sermon.  I asked for
bread and he gave me wind-pudding.  I was sorry that I
didn't attend the Salvation Army exercises.  I prefer the
bass drum to the doctor.  It may be equally noisy, but
hardly so empty.  I saw men attired in fine cloth and women
ablaze with jewels kneel on velvet cushions and pray to me.
Then the choir sang,

   " 'Oh, how I love Jesus, for Jesus died for me.'

"And Dr. Talmage exclaimed, 'Come, dear Lord, O come!' I
came.  I walked down the center aisle, expecting that a
mighty shout of joy would shake the vaulted roof of Heaven
and be echoed back by the angels.  I supposed that Dr.
Talmage would advance and embrace me.  But no; the
men stared their disapproval; the women drew back their
perfumed skirts of glistening silk, and Dr. Talmage
thundered, 'Sirrah! who are you?' I raised my hand and
exclaimed in a loud voice:

" 'Jesus Christ!' "

The editor started up from his siesta and rubbed his eyes--
the foreman of the Baptist Standard had "pied a form."


BRADLEY-MARTIN BAL-MASQUE.

"APRES MOI LE DELUGE!"

Mrs. Bradley-Martin's sartorial kings and pseudo-queens,
her dukes and DuBarrys, princes and Pompadours, have
strutted their brief hour upon the mimic stage, disappearing
at daybreak like foul night-birds or an unclean dream--have
come and gone like the rank eructation of some crapulous
Sodom, a malodor from the cloacae of ancient capitals, a
breath blown from the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots,
a stench from the sepulcher of centuries devoid of shame.
Uncle Sam may now proceed to fumigate himself after his
enforced association with royal bummers and brazen
bawds; may comb the Bradley-Martin itch bacteria out of
his beard, and consider, for the ten-thousandth time, the
probable result of his strange commingling of royalty-
worshiping millionaire and sansculottic mendicant--how best
to put a ring in the nose of the golden calf ere it become a
Phalaris bull and relegate him to its belly.  Countless
columns have been written, printed, possibly read, anent
the Bradley-Martin ball--all the preachers and teachers,
editors and other able idiots pouring forth voluminous
opinions.  A tidal wave of printer's ink has swept across the
continent, churned to atrous foam by hurricanes of lawless
gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab.  The empyrean
has been ripped and the tympana of the too patient gods
ravished with fulsome commendation and foolish curse,
showers of Parthian arrows and wholesale consignments of
soft-soap darkening the sun as they hurtled hither and yon
through the shrinking atmosphere.  A man dropping
suddenly in from Mars with a Nicaraguan canal scheme for
the consideration of Uncle Sam would have supposed
this simian hubbub and anserine to-do meant nothing less
than a new epocha for the universe, it being undecided
whether it should be auriferous or argentiferous--an age of
gold or a cycle of silver.  Now that the costly "function" has
funked itself into howling farce, an uncomfortable failure,
and the infuscated revellers recovered somewhat from royal
katzenjammer, we find that the majestic earth has not
moved an inch out of its accustomed orbit, that the grass
still grows and the cows yet calve that the law of gravitation
remains unrepealed, and Omnipotence continues to bring
forth Mazzaroth in his season and guide Arcturus with his
sons.  Perchance in time the American people may become
ashamed of having been thrown into a panic by the painful
effort of a pudgy parvenu to outdo even the Vanderbilts in
ostentatious vulgarity.  Rev. Billy Kersands Rainsford
cannot save this country with his mouth, nor can Mrs.
Bradley-Martin wreck it with her money.  It is entirely too
large to be permanently affected by the folly of any one
fool.  Preacher and parvenu were alike making a
grandstand play.  Now that the world has observed them,
and not without interest, let us hope that they will subside
for a little season.

This Dame DuBarry extravaganza was not without
significance to those familiar with history and its penchant
for repetition; but was by no means an epoch-maker.  It
was simply one more festering sore on the syphilitic body
social--another unclean maggot industriously wriggling in
the malodorous carcass of a canine.  It was another
evidence that civilization is in a continual flux, flowing now
forward, now backward--a brutal confession that the new
world aristocracy is oozing at present through the Armida-
palace or Domdaniel of DuBarrydom.  The Bradley-Martins
are henceforth entitled to wear their ears interlaced
with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their "set."
They won the burro pennant honestly, if not easily, daylight
being plainly visible between their foam-crested crupper and
the panting nostrils of the Vanderbilts.  They are now
monarch of Rag-fair, chief gyasticuti of the boundless realm
of Nescience and Noodledom.  Mrs. Bradley-Martin has
triumphed gloriously, raised herself by her own garters to
the vulgar throne of Vanity, the dais of the almighty dollar.
She is now Delphic oracle of doodle-bugs and hierophant of
the hot stuff.   Viva Regina! Likewise, rats!  Like most of
New York's aristocracy, she is of even nobler lineage than
Lady Vere de Vere, daughter of a hundred earls, having
been sired by a duly registered American sovereign early in
the present century.  His coat-of-arms was a cooper's adz
rampant, a beer-barrel couchant and the motto, "Two
heads are better than one."  By wearing his neighbors'
cast-off clothes and feeding his family on cornbread and
"sow-belly," he was able to lay the foundation of that
fortune which has made his daughter facile princeps of
New York's patricians.  John Jacob Astor, who acted as
royal consort to the cooper's regal daughter in the
quadrille d'honneur, is likewise descended from noble
Knights (of Labor) and dames of high degree.  He traces
his lineage in unbroken line to that haughty Johann Jakob
who came to America in the steerage, wearing a Limburger
linsey-woolsey and a pair of wooden shoes.  Beginning life
in the new world as a rat-catcher, he soon acquired a
gallon jug of Holland gin, a peck of Brummagem jewelry,
and robbed the Aborigines right and left.  He wore the
same shirt the year 'round, slept with his dogs and invested
his groschens in such Manhattan dirt as he could
conveniently transport upon his person.  Thus he enabled
his aristocratic descendants to wax so fat on "unearned
increment" that some of them must forswear their
fealty to Uncle Sam and seek in Yewrup a society whose
rough edges will not scratch the varnish off their culchah.
Mrs. Bradley-Martin does not exactly "look every inch a
queen," her horizontal having developed at the expense of
her perpendicular, suggesting the rather robust physique of
her father's beer barrels.  Still, she is an attractive woman,
having the ruddy complexion of an unlicked postage stamp
and the go-as-you-please features of a Turkish carpet.  Her
eyes are a trifle too ferrety, but the osculatory power of her
mouth in auld lang syne must have been such as to give
Cupid spinal curvature.  Her nose retreats somewhat
precipitately from the chasm; but whether that be its original
pattern, or it has been gradually forced upwards by eager
pilgrims to her shrine of adjustable pearls, is a secret
hidden in her own heart.  Like Willy Wally Astor, she finds
the customs of this country too crass to harmonize with her
supersensitive soul, and spends much time dangling about
the titled slobs "on the other side."  Some time ago she
purchased the epicene young Earl of Craven as husband
for her daughter, in the humble hope of mixing cooperage
and coronets, and may yet be gran'ma to some little Lord
Bunghole or fair Lady Firkin.  As a "pusher" in society she
can give points to Mrs. Potter Palmer or the wife of a
millionaire pork-packer .  Although she has "seen" the bluff
of the notorious Smith-Vanderbilt-Belmont female and
"raised" her out of her bunion repositories, she has
probably not yet reached the summit of her social ambition.
Bred to shabby gentility , Miss Alva Smith proceeded to
"splurge" when she captured a Vanderbilt.  She had
probably never seen a hundred dollar bill until permitted to
finger the fortune of the profane old ferryman who founded
her husband's aristocratic family.  She was a parvenu, a
nouveau riche, and could not rest until she had
proclaimed that fact by squandering half a million of the
man's money whom she subsequently dishonored, on the
ball which Mrs. Bradley-Martin set herself to beat.  Having
been divorced "for cause," she proceeded to crown her
gaucheries by purchasing for her ligneous-faced daughter a
disreputable duke who owes his title to a grand-aunt's
infamy--is the descendant of a plebeian who rose to power
by robbing dead soldiers and prostituting his sister to a
prince.  Mrs. Bradley-Martin has trumped two of her rival's
cards--and a social game, like seven-up, "is never out till
it's played out."

The denunciation of the ball by Dr. Rainsford proved him
not only a notoriety-seeking preacher, but a selfish parasite
who lacks sufficient sense to disguise his hypocrisy.  It
contained not one word of protest against the amassing of
enormous fortunes by the few at the expense of the many,
not a single plea for justice to a despoiled people, not one
word of Christian pity for their woes.  It was simply a
warning--foolishly flung from the housetop instead of
whispered in the closet--that such reckless waste would
breed discontent in the home of want--would "make
demagogues and agitators dangerous!"  Dr. Rainsford
would not alter, but conceal, existing conditions.  His theory
is that robbery is all right so long as the people do not rebel
thereby imperiling the system by which they are despoiled.
From his fashionable pulpit and sumptuous home he hurls
forth his anathema-maranatha at those who would presume
to abridge the prescriptive rights of the plutocracy--who
doubt that grinding penury in a land bursting with fatness is
pleasing to the All-Father!  He would by no means curtail
the wealth of Dives or better the condition of Lazarus; but
thinks it good policy for the former to refrain from piling his
plate so high in the presence of the hungry plebs, lest the
latter cease crying for crumbs and swipe the
tablecloth!  Dr. Rainsford is a paid servant of Dives, his
duly ordained Pandarus.  His duty is to tickle his masters
jaded palate with spiritual treacle seasoned with Jamaica
ginger, to cook up sensations as antidotes for ennui.  If
the "agitators" cause a seismic upheaval that will wreck the
plutocracy, what is to become of the fashionable
preachers?  Dr. Rainsford would not abolish Belshazzar's
feast--he would but close the door and draw the blinds, that
God's eye may not look upon the iniquity, nor his finger
trace upon the frescoed walls the fateful Mene Mene
Tekel Upharsin!  Save thy breath, good doctor, to cool thy
dainty broth; for, mad with pride, thy master hears nor
heeds the gabble of the goose beneath his walls, nor the
watchdog's warning.  Gnaw thy bone in peace, for the
people, schooled to patience and amused with panaceas,
will scarce resent the trampling of one more parvenu upon
their necks, be she ever so broad of beam.  If some years
hence they should rise against the robbers, led on by
"dangerous demagogues," repine not, for every dog,
sacerdotal or otherwise, can but have his day.

Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who
presumes to teach not only theology but political economy;
who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven,
dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to
make a people terrestrially prosperous.  He, like thousands
of "able editors," apologizes for such vulgar extravagance
by urging that it "puts money in circulation, makes
business better, and helps the people by supplying
employment!"  Has the world passed into its dotage, or
simply become an universal asylum for idiots?  If wanton
waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam has but to
squander in bal-masques, or other debauchery, his
seventy-five billions of wealth to inaugurate an industrial
boom!  To gratify their taste for the barbaric, to
advertise themselves to all the earth as the eastern termini
of west-bound equines, the Bradley-Martins wiped out of
existence $500,000 of the world's wealth, leaving just that
much less available capital for productive enterprises.  They
might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of
that value.  It is urged that "labor was employed and paid."
Quite true; but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum,
thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product?
What has society to show for the expenditure of this
energy?  A hole in its working capital--a hiatus in its larder
caused by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce
but to destroy.  Prodigality on the part of the rich personally
benefits a few parasites, just as the bursting of a molasses
barrel fattens useless flies; but waste, by reducing the
amount of wealth available for reproduction, breeds general
want.  A thousand editors have screamed in leaded type
that it were "worse for the wealthy to hoard than waste."
Thou lunatics, go learn the difference between a car and its
load of cotton, a bolt of muslin and that wherewith it is
measured, a nation's wealth and its exchange media.  What
does a man with the wealth he "hoards?"  Does he not
seek to make it earn an increment?  Concentration of capital
may be bad for the people, but destruction of capital takes
the tools from their hands and the food from their lips.  The
court of Louis XV., which American snobs have just
expended half-a-million trying to imitate, likewise, "made
business better" by wasting wealth--Madame DuBarry
posing as "public benefactress," and receiving no end of
encomiums from Paris shopkeepers, jewel merchants and
mantua-makers.  Much money was "put in circulation and
labor employed" in furnishing forth the transient splendors
of players and prostitutes; but somehow France did not
prosper.  Finally not even the pitiless screws of the
tax-farmer could wring blood from the national turnip.  The
working capital of France was so far consumed that her
people stood helpless, perishing of hunger.  Finally
Madame DuBarry was supplanted as "public benefactress"
by one with an even sharper tang to her tongue, namely,
la Belle Guillotine, who blithely led the quadrille
d'honneur, with a Robespierre for consort, to music
furnished gratis by the raucous throats of ragged sans-
culottes.  Instead of lords and ladies treading the stately
minuet in Versailles saloons adorned with beauty roses, the
bare feet of hungry men beat time to the fierce Carmagnole
on Parisian pavements.

It is not a little suggestive that the participants in this
foolish fandango should have turned for inspiration to the court
of Louis XV., whose debauchery and depravity, the historian
declares, had not been paralleled since the year of Tiberius
and Commodus--that the Bradley-Martin "function" should
have been copied from the extravaganzas of a harlot!
What glorious exemplars for New York's Four Hundred!--a
dissolute king, and a woman thus apostrophized by Thomas
Carlyle:  "Thou unclean thing, what a course was thine:
from that first truckle-bed, where thy mother bore thee to an
unnamed father; forward, through lowest subterranean
depths, and over highest sunlit heights of harlotdom and
rascaldom--to the guillotine-axe, which shears away thy
vainly whimpering head!"  Of the 350 male revelers more
than 100 were costumed as Louis XV., while but three
considered Washington worthy of imitation.  Was this the
result of admiration in New York's "hupper sukkles" for this
wretched Roi Faineant, or King Donothing, whose palace
was a brothel, and whose harlots stripped his subjects of
their paltry earnings and left them to perish?  Louis XV.,
who permitted his country to be wined, its revenues
squandered, its provinces lost, and half-a-million men sent
to an untimely death that a prostitute might be revenged for
an epigram!  Is that the kind of man our money lords
admire?  Louis lived until the fleur-de-lis of France was
struck down in every land and dishonored on every sea,
then died, deserted by his drabs, cursed by his country,
and was consigned to the grave and the devil as
unceremoniously as though he were a dead dog!  And now
more than one hundred men who have stripped the people
to enhance the splendor of palaces, don the royal robes of
this godless rake and do homage to bogus DuBarrys!
Small wonder that Dr. Rainsford feared such colossal
impudence might serve to remind Americans how France
got rid of royalty; might evoke a hoarse growl from the
many-headed monster; might cause some "dangerous
demagogue" to stir--perchance a Danton!  Fit patron saint
for our own plutocracy is this swinish king, once called
Bien aime, the Well-beloved; but after some thirty years
of Bradley-Martinism, named Ame de boue--A soul of
mud!  How much our super-select society resembles the
Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays,
who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his
reign a crime, himself a hissing and a shaking of the head
of the nations!

Suggestive indeed that at the swellest of all swell affairs in
the American metropolis there should appear, according to
the press dispatches, "ten Mme. de Pompadours, eight
Mme. de Maintenons, four Mme. de la Vallieres, and three
Catherines of Russia."  Good God!  Has our "best society"
come to such a pass that its proudest ladies delight to
personate notorious prostitutes?"  There was no Racine or
Moliere, no Charlotte Corday or Mme. de Stael"--the
men posed as profligate kings, the women as
courtesans!  Yet in that same city young Mr. Seeley is
arrested for looking at a naked dancing-girl, and "Little
Egypt" has to "cut it" when she hears the cops!  And what
is the difference, pray, between a Pompadour and a Five
Points nymph du pave?  Simply this:  The one rustles in
silks for diamonds, the other hustles in rags for bread, their
occupation being identical.  New York was Tory even in
Revolutionary times.  From its very foundation it has been
at the feet of royalty and mouthing of "divine right."  It is
ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its
idolatry--its knees and nose on the earth, its tail-feathers in
the air; but we had yet to learn that it considered "that
divinity which doth behedge a king" capable of sanctifying a
woman's shame, transforming a foul leman into an angel of
light!  Catherine of Russia was an able woman, but a
notorious harlot, foul as Milton's portress of Hell; a woman
who, as Byron informs us, loved all he-things except her
husband.  Is that why the masqueraders preferred the
character of Empress Catherine to that of Martha
Washington?  Did they consider it more in keeping with the
company?  Strange that each Russian empress was not
attended by a few of her favorite grenadiers, with "the fair-
faced Lanskoi," her boy-lover, thrown in as lagniappe.
More than one hundred Louis XVths and only ten
Pompadours!  What a pity!  But we may presume that each
Pompadour, like the frail original, was "in herself a host"!
Eight Maintenons, four Vallieres, and only one Louis XIVth
present to look after his personal property!  How proud a
genuine American gentleman--one untainted with royalist
fever--would have felt to see his wife or daughter posing as
the leman of Lanskoi, of Louis XVth, or le Grande
Monarque--of whom Three-Eyed Billy of England once said
that he selected young men for his ministers and corrupt
old cats for his mistresses!

Half a million dollars gone up in frippery and flowers, and
the bedizened gang didn't get half the fun out of it that a
party of country yaps will extract from a candy-pulling or a
husking-bee.  The Pompadours and DuBarrys didn't know
how.  Louis XVth went around by himself in droves, stiff
and uncomfortable as a Presbyterian Sunday-school,
wishing every time his rapier galled his kibes or tangled his
royal legs that he had remained comfortably dead in that
dog-hole at St. Denis.  There was entirely too much
formality for fun.  The next time New York's toad-eaters
give a bal-masque they should disguise themselves as
American sovereigns and their consorts.  Of course it will
be a trifle difficult for them to play the part of respectable
people; but they will find even awkward effort in that
direction refreshing, and calculated to inspire them with
respect for their country's flag.


* * *
A PILGRIMAGE TO PERDITION.

Sir Edwin Arnold is a profound optimist, and
apparently not a little proud of it.  He recently said to a
reporter:

"The course of mankind is constantly towards perfection.  I
believe in humanity.  I believe in the world's great future.
The trend of human events emphasizes the truth of this
statement; though we may be horrified to-day by reading of
a brute who butchers his wife, these events should not
shake our faith.  If we look at the matter philosophically we
will see that they are a diminishing series, and that the
world is growing grander and nobler,"

Optimism is a delightful thing, but is too frequently the
result of ignorance.  Sir Edwin is a learned and talented
man, but he is evidently a stranger to the great world
which he discusses so complacently and approvingly.  The
savant reposing in a palace-car, which is rushing through
the midnight storm at a rate of fifty miles an hour, regards
his situation with composure; but the unlettered engineer,
whose eye is on the track,--who notes every slippery curve,
swollen stream and overhanging bowlder,--who feels the
motive power of that proud train swaying and plunging like
a restless demon beneath his feet, is apt to be anxious
enough.

Sir Edwin is a palace-car passenger on the great world-
train, and knows little of the perils of the track.  His coach
rolls smooth, he takes his ease and indulges in optimistic
moralizing, while those who serve him look death in the
face so frequently that they learn to mock him,--to take
desperate chances that may plunge them down to
destruction and drag all else after.  It has been my lot to
look at life from the cab-windows, from the point of view of
the man with the grimy hand and the soiled jacket.  While
Sir Edwin has been contemplating with dreamy interest the
faraway purple hills, I have been compelled to scrutinize
less giant objects closer at hand; hence it is not strange
that my opinion of the world should differ somewhat from
that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of
Asia."  In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth
and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I
something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that
make it a Purgatory for the many.  That world to which Sir
Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly,
is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on
the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a
chaos of fierce despair,--which will some day rip it into a
million ribbons, enact an all-embracing French Revolution
that will sweep our boasted "Car of Progress" back a
thousand years on the crimson crest of a wave of blood
and fire!  If Sir Edwin had explored the infernal vortex
beneath his feet he would not talk so complacently of the
"trend of human events."  For the benefit of Sir Edwin and
many other wealthy and cultured palace-car passengers
who amuse themselves with theories; who infer that
because human slavery is abolished in the Occident and
the thrones of the Orient are beginning to totter before the
might of democracy; because science is marching on to
triumph after triumph, and no Spanish Inquisition or English
Court of High Commission longer casts its upas-shadow
athwart the hearts of men, the great world is "growing
nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot
them through that Perdition which does not hover
indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology,
but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual,
tactual,--in which untold millions of mankind writhe and
shriek from the cradle to the grave!

. . .


It is no long journey to the portals of the nether world.  In
many a costly church the worshipers may hear during the
rests in the doxology the shrieks of the damned.  A walk of
a few blocks at most in any of our great, and many of our
smaller American cities will enable us to enter that earthly
Gehenna whose horrors the pen of Dante could scarce
picture, which threatens to engulf the world.  Even in
Texas, a land so favored by the gods, so blest with brave
men and noble women, we may enter the purlieus of the
place of pain, across whose portal is inscribed the legend o'
dark despair; may commune with all Gehenna's grisly
gorgons and witness the writhings of thousands of wretched
creatures beneath the fierce fire-whips of the infernal furies.

Let us take a typical American city; not that here we are
nearer the great red heart of Hell than are the people of
other lands.  What is true of one is true in greater or less
degree of every city throughout the world.  We will suppose
the city we are to examine to contain a million inhabitants.
We will pause to contemplate its miles of broad streets and
magnificent buildings; its imposing schools and scores of
costly churches that rear their symmetrical spires far into
the empyrean and fill the great dome with their melodious
chimes; its marble fountains and costly plants which ravish
the senses with sweet perfumes; its wealth and wisdom,
luxury and learning, its philanthropic people and happy
homes were Peace reigns and Plenty ever smiles.  That is
one side of the shield,--the one upon which the Arnolds and
Talmages have looked so long that they forget there is any
other,--that a golden veil may hide the face of a Fury or a
Fiend.

The clock is proclaiming Night and Sin's high noon; follow
me and I will show you why I do not believe in "humanity"
quite so implicitly as does Sir Edwin; why even Dr. Talmage
has failed to wean me from "the awful sin of pessimism."
It is not necessary to linger long in the low concert halls
and brothels where girls scarce in their teens are made the
prey of the rum-inflamed passions of brutes old enough to
he their grandsires; where old roues, many of whose
names are a power "on 'change," bid against each other
for half-developed maids whose virginity is certified to by a
physician; where green gawks from the country are made
drunk with cheap wines sold to them at fancy prices by
courtesans, plucked and turned over to a subsidized police
if they protest; where hundreds of pure girls are entrapped,
drugged and ruined every day of the world.  These social
ulcers are so protrusive, have been written up so frequently
by enterprising young reporters who naively supposed that
to expose was to suppress, that even optimistic Dr.
Talmage must at least be cognizant that such places
exist,--even in Brooklyn, which enjoys the supernal blessing
of his direct ministrations, and from which moral Mecca his
sounding sentences are transmitted by the vicarious
apostles of the press to all men,--who possess a penchant
for light literature!

One glance into the low gambling dens, where haggard
creatures, created in God's image, but long ago degraded
below the brute level, nightly waste the few pence which
they pick up Heaven alone knows how,--perhaps by selling
the virtue of their daughters, robbing their wives of ill-got
gains or plundering the pockets of drunken laborers.  We
may pass by the opium joints where women of all ages and
classes lie for hours, stupid with filthy fumes, at the mercy
of bestial orientals and drunken negroes; also those dives
devoted to forms of debauchery so debased that many a
blase man of the world does not believe their existence
more than a demoniacal dream.  These are vortices of vice
too fearfully foul for eyes of aught but fiends; the air too
putrid for lungs that inhale that of pure and happy homes.
We must shun those plague spots, else bear false witness
to the world, for any true pen-picture of their hell-born
horrors would, like Medusa's awful face, turn all who gazed
thereon to stone!

. . .

We must content ourselves with traveling the purlieus of
Perdition, the sulphur-fumes of those profounder depths of
degradation being too strong for lungs accustomed to chant
optimistic lays; the glare of the burning marl too fierce for
eyes used only to vernal meads and still waters; but even
here, in the Purgatorium as it were, sights and sounds
calculated to appall the stoutest heart are not wanting.
Here stalks the demon Poverty.  He is by no means
so hideous as some of his brethren in the infernal
hierarchy, and perchance we may inspect his dominions
without succumbing to moral hysteria.

Poverty?  What do you know of it, my well-fed optimistic
friends?  You pay your taxes, give a few pence to the
beggar at the street corner, perhaps contribute a few
dollars to this or the other relief fund that does not relieve,--
and wonder that people do not go to work and earn their
bread.  "There is always work for those who really want it,"
one of you complacently informs me.  Are you quite sure?
In a city like this we are traversing I have seen fifty
thousand men who "really wanted work," and could not find
it.  Fifty thousand unemployed, destitute and desperate
people in one city.  I was one of the number.  Why didn't
they scatter? you will ask.  Whither should they go, and
how?  Take to the snow-clad country, be arrested as vags,
and herded as criminals?  For my part I did "scatter,"--
tramped one hundred miles in a northern winter without
food, and found three days' employment,--loading ice into
box cars!  Many of those fifty thousand idle men had
families to support.  How did they do it?  Now you are
getting into Hell!

Come with me and I will show you thousands of families in
this city alone who have not had in six months as good a
meal as could be picked out of your garbage barrel;
hundreds of families that sleep this winter night on the bare
floor of filthy tenements or huddled like swine on an armful
of foul rags and straw; delicate women and children dying
for lack of proper warmth and nourishment; hundreds of
men who regard it as a godsend to get arrested that they
may have shelter from the piercing winds of the night and a
bite to eat in the morning.  Put your head into this 10-cent
lodging house if you want to get some new ideas regarding
the "trend of humanity." Glance into this low
groggery--but one of several thousand in this great
city--and "size up the gang" before being too sure that a
"pessimist" is simply a person troubled with a
superabundance of black bile.  Of the million people who
make up this great city, probably six hundred thousand are
already plunged deep in the abyss where lurk Want and
Crime, or trembling on its verge, and the number who thus
"live from hand to mouth," who feel that they have "no
stake in the country,"--that God and man are against them--
is ever on the increase.  That verdant, sunkissed crust
upon which Arnolds complacently saunter and Talmages
proudly strut, grows thinner year by year, while the fires
below wax ever hotter, more turbulent, more explosive!

Would you know how thin this crust actually is; how fissured
and honey-combed from beneath, until it can scarce sustain
its own weight, and the sulphur fumes ever rise through it
like steam through a sieve, inspect the city government and
note how and what constitutes the controlling power.  When
you learn, as you will if you examine carefully, that those
thousands of vile drinking dens dictate who shall be our
public servants, and what laws we shall live under; that the
"madam" of the fashionable bagnio is more potent at police
headquarters than any delegation of the Y.M.C.A.; that no
whereas or resolution of philanthropists can withstand the
fiat of the ward bosses; that everywhere there is collusion
with criminals and jobbery, perhaps you will not be quite so
certain of "the world's great future."

. . .

Do you turn to the church to make good the promise of the
optimist?  Let us explore the "amen corner" and see how
many pious souls we shall there find whose incomes are
chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral
purposes.  Even while I write I see an old white-haired
man, whose power in prayer is the pride of his church,
making his rounds, collecting his monthly stipend from the
keepers of negro brothels and the lowest grade of drinking
dens,--places where nightly assemble people of all ages,
colors and sexes and enact scenes that might bring a blush
to even the brazen front of Belial!

The church?  What is it doing to extinguish the well-nigh
shoreless Gehenna that threatens to engulf it?  Drilling an
augur-hole here and there in the thin crust and pouring in a
few drops of water,--or oil, as the case may be; founding a
few missions; distributing a little dole; sending a few Bibles
to the heathen to offset the much bad whisky supplied them
by "Christian countries"; perfecting its choir and sending its
pastor to the Orient to hunt for "confirmation of Holy
Scripture "amid the mummified cats of Egypt or the hoary
trash of Palestine!

What is true of the city is true, though in lesser degree, of
the country.  If you think our agricultural brethren have no
taste of Hell examine the list of mortgages!  If you do not
believe that Moloch is the presiding deity of commerce visit
Trafalgar Square, the Place de la Concorde, or, worst of all,
our own Wall Street.  In old times men who despoiled
others were called pirates and banditti; were execrated by
honest men, anathematized by the church, a price set upon
their heads by the State; yet they never pretended to be
other than what they were; they did their devilish work
openly, with the strong hand.  Wall Street is a den of
banditti who rob, not by open force, but by secret fraud.
The tool of the seventeenth century freebooter was the
flashing sword; that of his nineteenth century successor the
cowardly and sneaking lie.  The first pillaged a few ships,
towns and castles; the latter plunders hundreds of
thousands every year of the world, and then has the
sublime audacity to come into court and plead that his
business is both legitimate and necessary.  And so rotten is
society,--so prostrate does it cower before the golden calf--
that the buccaneer, instead of being bastinadoed or
beheaded, is crowned with bays!  How can we harmonize
these stubborn facts with Sir Edwin's view that "the course
of mankind is constantly toward perfection?"  Of course we
should "look at the matter philosophically"; the trouble is
that too many content themselves merely with
philosophizi

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