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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann · English · Gutenberg #568 · 589,546 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

Author: William Cowper Brann


        
Release date: June 1, 1996 [eBook #568]
                Most recently updated: April 1, 2015

Language: English

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THE COMPLETE WORKS OF BRANN THE ICONOCLAST


VOLUME X



CONTENTS

DOLCE FAR NIENTE AND DOLLARS
SALMAGUNDI
A KANSAS CITY ARISTOCRAT
A PICTORIAL PAIN-KILLER
MAN'S GUST FOR GORE
A RIGHT ROYAL ROAST
TEXAS TOPICS
THE RETORT COURTEOUS
BRANN VS. BAYLOR
SPEAKING OF SPIRITUALISM
SOME GOLD-BUG GUFF
"THE TYPICAL AMERICAN TOWN"
TEE AUTHOR OF EPISCOPALIANISM
A GYPSY GENIUS
MARRIAGE AND MISERY

SALMAGUNDI
THE GOO-GOOS AND TAMMANY'S TIGER
THE HON. BARDWELL SLOTE, OF COHOSH
MONDE AND DEMI-MONDE
MACHIAVELLI
THE AMATEUR EDITOR
SPEAKING FOR MYSELF
AS I WAS SAYING
TOMMIE WATSON'S TOMMYROT
PILLS AND POLITICS
BEHIND TEE SCENES IN ST. LOUIS
THE STAGE AND STAGE DEGENERATES
"THE CHRISTIAN"
SALMAGUNDI
SOME ECONOMIC IDIOCY
AN EPISCOPALIAN MISTAKE
GLORY OF THE NEW GARTER
TWO OF A KIND
THE SAW-MILL CHECK SYSTEM
LOVE AS AN INTOXICANT
THE SWORD AND THE CROSS
A COUPLE OF UNCLEAN COYOTES
COINING BLOOD INTO BOODLE
A BIGOTED ARCHBISHOP
SALMAGUNDI
THE FOOTLIGHT FAVORITES
GINX'S BABY
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH MISSOURI




DOLCE FAR NIENTE AND DOLLARS.

The dispatches state that during the three weeks George Gould was
lazing and luxuriating in a foreign land "the business revival
added at least $15,000,000 to the value of the Gold securities."
Gadzooks! how sweet idleness must be when sugared with more than
$714,000 per day! I'm willing to loaf for half the lucre. How
refreshing it is to contemplate our plutocrats lying beside their
nectar like a job lot of Olympian gods--"careless of
mankind"--while

 "--they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
sands,
Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying
hands."

 One of Mr. Gould's employees, who was toiling at risk of life
and limb for about $2 a day while his imperial master was doing
the dolce far niente act for $714,000 per diem and his board,
comments as follows in a letter to the ICONOCLAST:

 "W. C. BRANN: It might be pertinent for you to find out how the
festive George, of yacht-racing, Waler-hob-nobbing fame, has
managed to reap such pronounced benefits from the revival in
business. It is notorious among railroad men that one of the
first moves of Superintendent Trice, who succeeded Tim Campbell
as manager of the I. & G. N., was to inaugurate a series of
'reforms,' the chief feature of which was the cutting salaries of
from 20 to 40 per cent, especially among the office men, and at
the same time covering it by swapping the men around as much as
possible. Forces were reduced by compelling the half-starved
employees to do overtime at less pay, and the poor devils can
only grin and bear it. Suppose you write down, and get the true
data from the various places where the I. & G. N. touches, and
then show the true source, or the real 'revival' that has given
the festive George such a boost in his cash box."

In the first place, "the business revival" has not "added
$15,000,000 to the value of the Gould securities"--it is a
political falsehood which George can be depended upon to promptly
repudiate when the tax assessor calls around to tender
congratulations. It is eleven to seven that Georgie assures him
that the Gould estate is in a very bad way, that only by the most
heroic self-sacrifices in this period of business depression can
he succeed in remaining solvent; that there was a slight advance
in railway values while crops were moving, only to be succeeded
by a doleful slump, caused by the high tariff, which cuts so
dreadfully into tonnage. If he refrains from putting up some such
game of talk as that I'll take up a collection among the
bootblacks of Texas to help pay his taxes. Fifteen millions in
three weeks! Oh my! Since "Count" Castellane pulled one leg off
the estate it is no larger than it was when old Jay went to
He-aven. Now Jay was an honorable man--at least he wouldn't steal
the buttons off your undershirt while you had it on, and hotel
keepers; did not take the precaution to chain his knife and fork
to the table; but in his palmiest days he paid taxes on but
$75,000 worth of personal property--railway securities and
"sich." Heavy crops, for which Providence and the industry of the
American people are alone responsible, have added somewhat to the
present earning power of railway properties, but it is doubtful,
if the total mileage and equipment owned by the Goulds would sell
for as much actual cash as before the election of McKinley. The
great bulk of the boasted advance in Gould securities consists of
wind pumped in by the "pulls"; but just the same the American
people will be bled to pay dividends on this speculative
boodle--both patrons and employees will suffer that interest
may be collected on "invested capital" which never had an
existence. But even were the dispatches true, what must be said
of a "business revival" that reduces wages, that adds enormously
to the wealth of the plutocrats while making economic conditions
harder for the great mass of the American people? The general
trend of wages is downward, while the cost of living is enhanced
by the Dingley tariff and the advance in flour caused by foreign
crop failures. Why? Because, despite the pumping of the
Republican press about the "return of prosperity," the country is
full of idle men, and the inevitable tendency of the gold
standard and high tariff is to increase their number and further
lower wages by the pressure of these people for employment.
Railway securities have advanced a little despite the repressive
effect of Republican policy, have beaten up somewhat against the
adverse winds, impelled by speculators whose vis vitalis was the
crops of the country--the great bulk of which were produced by
men who voted for Bryan. The necessary sequence of an
appreciating standard of value is depreciation in the selling
price of property, whether such property be Gould securities or
Irish potatoes; while a high tariff inevitably reduces tonnage
below what it would otherwise be--chisels a yawning hiatus into
the revenues of every American railroad. This fact is so
self-evident that it may seem unnecessary to say more on the
subject--that arguing the matter were like wasting time proving
that water is wet; but as a number of Republican papers are
having a serious of violent epeliptoid convulsions because I
recently asserted that a nation can only be paid for its exports
with its imports, it may not be amiss to make a few remarks
adapted to the understanding of the kindergarten class. Trade,
whether between the people of this republic, or those of Europe
and America, is, when reduced to the last analysis, nothing more
than an exchange of commodities. It may happen that we sell
largely to a country of which we buy but little; but the nations
that purchase of our debtor pay for our products. Our exports
usually exceed our imports, and for the simple reason that we owe
vast sums abroad, the surplus being employed in the payment of
interest and the discharge of our foreign indebtedness. When we
become a great creditor nation like England, our imports will
exceed our exports--we will begin to absorb the labor products of
foreign lands. If America received foreign gold for all her
exports it would be nothing more than a commodity weighed to her
at so much per ounce and which she might exchange at her good
pleasure for foreign goods, just as she does her cotton and corn.
Some gold crosses the sea; but it goes and comes just as go other
commodities--seeks the most advantageous market. A tariff wall,
by keeping foreign products OUT keep American products IN,
thereby narrowing our market and limiting production. If the
workman does not produce he cannot consume, and production
and consumption are the basis of railway business. But why, it
may be asked, would the railway corporations cut their own
throats by helping elect McKinley? Surely they understand their
business much better than does a Texas maverick-brander who
writes economic editorials while astride a mustang. Possibly so;
but it were well to remember that while it is evidently to the
interests of the stockholders of such a corporation that it
should prosper, the bond-owner, who is a kind of wholesale
pawnbroker and flourishes best during periods of business
depression, also has something to say. Whether the former
receives any dividends or not the latter must have his interest,
and the more of labor products required to pay it the more he is
enriched. The railway bondholder is usually the party who holds a
$500 mortgage on a $10,000 farm. Crops may fail, the hogs get the
cholera and the poultry die of the pips; cotton may go down and
cloth go up; but the sorrows of others cause him to lose no
sleep. As I have hitherto pointed out, we have it on the
authority of Mark Hanna's newspaper organ "lower wages are
certainly a feature of the new prosperity"--that the American
workman need not hope for permanent employment until willing to
accept the same wages paid "the pauper labor of Europe," from
whose disastrous competition the Republicans solemnly promised
him protection. If Supt. Trice is reducing wages and overworking
his men it may be accepted as certain that he is compelled
thereto by a higher power--that the edict has gone forth that the
employees of the I. & G. N. must work longer hours for less money
that interest be paid on the $15,000,000 which the blessed
"business revival" added to the value of Mr. Gould's securities
while he was idling about Europe.

 * * *
SALMAGUNDI.

 The daily press announces that there is to be another Cleveland
baby. It is to make its debut some time this month. "Mrs.
Cleveland has been sewing dainty garments all summer." "Presents
of beautiful baby clothes are arriving from friends and
relatives." Same old gush, gush, gush! slop, slop, slop! that has
set the nation retching three times already. Good Lord! will it
never end? The fecundity of that family is becoming an American
nightmare. Will the time ever come when a married woman of social
prominence can get into "a delicate condition" without having the
fact heralded over the country as brazenly as though she had
committed a crime? There being little hope that the daily
press--"public educator," "guardian of morality," etc.--will
suffer a renascence of decency, we can only appeal to Grover not
to let it happen again. He certainly owes it to the nation to
apply the soft pedal to himself. In no other way can he protect a
long-suffering nation from seasickness, or his estimable wife
from the unclean harpies of the press. I do not believe that Mrs.
Cleveland is particeps criminis in these pre-natal proclamations
to which the h'upper suckkles of New York are so shockingly
addicted. I do not believe that she cares to have the public
contemplating her profile portrait just previous to a
confinement. Of course it will be urged that a woman of much
native delicacy could never have married so crass an animal as
Grover Cleveland, have taken him fresh from the embraces of an
old harlot like Widow Halpin; but these forget that he held the
most exalted position of any man on earth, and his $50,000 per
annum had been touched by the genie-wand jobbery--forget that

 "--pomp and power alone are woman's care And where these are
light Eros finds a feere; Maidens like moths, are eer caught by
glare, And Mammon wins his way where Seraphs might despair."

Probably she has regretted a thousand times that she bartered
her youth and beauty for life companionship with a tub of tallow,
mistaken at the time for a god by a purblind public, but even
though it be true, as often asserted, that the old boor gets
drunk and beats her, a woman could scarce apply for divorce from
a man who has twice been president. Furthermore, association with
such a man will lower the noblest woman to his level. Every
physiognomist who saw Frances Folsom's bright face, its
spirituelle beauty, and who looks upon it now and notes it
stolid, almost sodden expression, must recall those lines of
Tennyson's:

 "As the husband is the wife is; thou art mated with a clown,
And the grossness of his nature will have weight to drag thee
down.
Cursed be the sickly forms that err from honest Nature's rule,
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten'd forehead of the
fool."

 Last month it was announced with typographical and pictorial
trumpet blasts that Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney was about to present
her gilded dudelet with a family edition de luxe, and the Duchess
of Marlborough to find an heir to that proud title whose
foundation was laid with a sister's shame, the capstone placed by
the pander's betrayal of his rightful prince; and now before the
world can recover from its nausea, flaming headlines announce
that the Clevelands are about to refill the family cradle. Hold
our head, please, until we puke! Lord, Lord, is there nothing
sacred about motherhood any more? Is a married woman no better
than a brood-mare, her condition fair subject for comment by
vulgar stable-boys? We thank thee, O God, that the South has not
kept pace with New York's super-estheticism--that when our women
find themselves in an "interesting condition" they seek the
seclusion of the home instead of telephoning for a reporter and a
chalk artist and exploiting their intumescence in the public
prints.

 . . .

Thomas M. Harris, who claims to be 84 years old, has writ a
little yellow pamphlet entitled, "Rome's Responsibility for the
Assassination of Abraham Lincoln." I have expended almost 5
minutes glancing over Mr. Harris labored lucubations, and must
confess that I have in that time acquired more information--of
its kind--than I ever did in 5 hours before. Of the reliability
of his statements there can be no question, as most of them are
grounded on the testimony of "Father" Chiniquy--conceded to be
the most accomplished liar since Ananias gave up the ghost. It
was Chiniquy who first started the story that the Pope was
responsible for the assassination of President Lincoln, and I am
expecting him to prove that Guiteau who gave the death-wound to
Garfield, was a Jesuit in disguise and acted on orders received
from Rome. Harris says that agents of the Confederacy in
Canada--whom he admits were not Catholics--employed Booth and his
accomplices to do the bloody business; that John Wilkes Booth was
a Catholic; that the priests were all Southern sympathizers; that
but 144,000 Irishmen enlisted in the Federal army, of whom
104,000 deserted; that the cellars of Catholic cathedrals are
filled with munitions of war to be used against the government,
that Catholics hold the bulk of the offices and dominate the
American press. Harris says other things equally awful and
interesting. I much fear that he got to thinking how many of his
A. P. Apes have broken into the penitentiary, and dreamed a bad
dream.

 . . .

I once mentioned a little saweiety sheet, published in New York,
under the title of Town Topics, because it afforded me a kind of
languid pleasure to kick the feculent sewer-rat back into the
foul cloaca from which it had crawled to beslime the ICONOCLAST.
I must beg the patient reader's pardon for again soiling my
sandal-shoon with what should only be touched with a shovel. I
have been receiving through the mails for some time past, both
from disgusted Northerners and indignant Southerners, a paragraph
clipped from its epecine columns where in some mental misfit
eager to do the Smart Alex act begs to be informed what right
Mrs. Jefferson Davis had "to address a peculiar letter to the
Queen Regent of Spain, demanding the release of a party accused
of a serious crime," then adds: "If Miss Cisneros is released it
will be because she is innocent, and not because her case has
been meddled with by a party of irresponsible old freaks." I
sometimes wish the ICONOCLAST had no lady readers, that I might
freely express my opinion of such pestiferous pole-cats. I dearly
love the ladies, but they are awfully in the way when only
full-grown adjectives will do a subject justice. If the Tee-Tee
editor had half the gumption of a Kansas Gopher he would know
that neither Mrs. Davis nor any other American woman made
such "demand." Perhaps he did not know it,--if it be possible for
the editor of such a quintessential extract of utter idiocy to
know anything--but couldn't resist the boorish impulse to insult
an aged woman, because he's built that way. The case of Senorita
Cisneros appealed to the sympathy of every manly man and noble
woman throughout the world--to every living creature within whose
hide there pulses one drop of human blood unblended with that of
unclean breasts. Mrs. John A. Logan, Mrs. Jefferson Davis and
other magnificent types of American womanhood, HUMBLY PETITIONED
the Queen Regent of Spain in behalf of the Cuban heroine. And
these noble women, whose names are respected in the very brothels
and boozing kens of Boiler Avenue, are referred to by this foul
parody on God's masterpiece as "a party of irresponsible old
freaks." Christ! is it possible that aught born of woman--that
any animal that can learn to walk on its hinder legs--should sink
to such infamous depths of degradation! Yet this is the fellow
who was so concerned for the feelings of certain sawciety she-
males who personated French prostitutes at the Bradley-Martin
debauch, that when I criticized their brazen bid for "business"
he came near having hydrophobia. Did the Tee-Tee trogolodyte
contain within his anthropodial diaphragm a single diatom of
decency he would have applauded Mrs. Davis' womanly act, else
blocked the yawning hole in his prognathic head with a flat-car
load of compost. If Mrs. Davis is permitted to petition the King
of Kings to have mercy on the miserable journalistic
piano-pounder for Gotham's high-toned honk-a-tonks, certainly she
may with propriety appeal to the substitute sovereign of a nation
of bankrupt assassins to spare Senorita Cisneros.

 . . .

Lawd Chelmsfold, now inspecting the Canadian border to ascertain
what resistance it could offer in case of a brush with Uncle Sam,
is out with an interview in which he says one great element of
John Bull's strength is to be found in the fact that our
Anglomaniacs could never be convinced "of the justice of any war
that might spring up between America and Britain." Lawd
Chelmsford, like most Englishmen, is a large, juicy chump. Of
course our Anglomaniacs are all traitors in posse, as their Tory
forbears were in esse, and would sympathize with "deah old
England, dontcherknow," should war be precipitated by her burning
all our coast cities without provocation; but as Chimmie Fadden
would say, "Dat cuts no ice." They are but a few thousand in
number, and in the whole caboodle there's not a chappie who would
fight should a Digger Indian fill his ear with a bushel of
buffalo chips, squirt tobacco juice on his twousahs and throw
alkali dust in his optics. Lawd Chelmsford has suffered himself
to be deceived by the bloodless hermaphrodites employed on such
papers as Josef Phewlitzer's Verrult and Belo's double-barreled
Benedict Arnold. Still it is just as well to know that John Bull
considers that he can depend upon the sympathy and assistance of
our Anglomaniacs in case of war with this country. While these
fellows are slobbering over "the mother country," the leading
papers of London are sneering at the United States as "a
fourth-class power" and proclaiming that if it doesn't conduct
itself more to John Bull's liking, "it will soon feel the iron
hand beneath the velvet glove." Turn loose your "iron hand," you
old he-bawd--and you'll soon stick it further under your own
coat-tails than you did at Yorktown. . . .

The New York Wail and Distress approves the scheme of Spain,
Italy and Germany, to establish a penal colony for anarchists.
Yes, yes, granny dear; but would it not be much better to alter
those conditions that produce anarchists. Anarchy is simply a
protest against oppression. When enough people in a revolt
against tyranny it becomes a successful revolution and its
promoters are enshrined in history as worthy patriots. When a few
men strike blindly but desperately at the hydra and are over-
powered, they are traitors or anarchists, rebels or rioters. The
Wail and Distress was once edited by a party who, according to
his father-in-law, "could be more kinds of a d--n fool than any
other man in the country," and it is evidently maintaining its
old-time reputation.

 . . .

It is reported that a British company is about to secure control
of the Panama Canal. If it does so, John Bull will practically
have Uncle Sam surrounded, and it is worthy of remark that,
despite his tearful protestations of friendship, he fortifies
every strategical point regardless of expense. What does he want
with such Gibraltars as those at Van Couver, Halifax, Bermuda,
St. Lucia and half a dozen other points if he loves us so dearly
as Anglomaniacs would have us imagine? It costs hundreds of
millions to construct and equip these fortifications, yet they
are not worth a dollar to him except in case of war with this
country. The fact is that he expects another tussle with the
Western Titan--intends to precipitate it in his own good
time--when India is quieted and he has naught to fear from the
continental powers of Europe. Arbitration is the soothing lullaby
which Anglomaniacs are to sing to his unsuspecting "cousin" until
he gets his "iron hand" in order--weaves about him an
anaconda-coil of cannon. Despite all the milk-sick drivel anent
"ties of blood, language and literature," "community of interest
of the ger-ate and gal-orious Anglo-Saxon race, ad
infinitum, ad nauseam, the cold facts of history prove that for
more than a century, England has been our implacable enemy. Why?
Wounded pride in the first place, commercial rivalry in the
second; but the chief reason is that England desires to
perpetuate its supremacy as a world power, and sees growing up
here a giant who will sooner or later, as Napoleon said, "clip
the lion's claws." The best thing this nation can do is to
quietly "fix" itself, and then at the first provocation compel J.
B. to pull his freight completely out of the Western world. Uncle
Sam is an idiot to go practically unarmed while British guns are
pointing at his head from all directions. Arbitration the devil!
Dismantle that cordon of forts which you have built for our
benefit, and we may take some stock in your Pecksniffian
professions of friendship. "Actions speak louder than words,"
says the old adage; and while J. B.'s words are those of Achates,
his acts are those of an enemy. The voice is the voice of Jacob,
but the hand is the hand of Esau.

 . . .

If the dispatches from Hogansville, Ga. be correct, the present
federal administration is depriving American citizens of their
rights to an extent that suggests the impudence of Germany's
swell-head emperor or the petty tyranny of the Turk. It appears
that a nigger postmaster was appointed at that place who was
persona non grata, and the people employed at their own expense
the ex-postmaster to receive their mail for them from the moke.
Although a man has an inalienable right to appoint what agent he
pleases to receive his money or his mail, the ex-p. m. is to be
prosecuted for "conducting a post-office." They then ordered
their mail to an adjacent town and sent a private messenger for
it, but this was prohibited on the plea that a only government
has the right to establish a mail route." To crown the infamy the
people were not permitted to mail their letters on postal cars.
Here are three flagrant violations of the rights of American
citizens, and to compel them to patronize a nigger Republican
postmaster. The first agent employed by the people was no more
"conducting a post-office" than is the ICONOCLAST, which receives
and distributes the mail of a dozen or more people. The messenger
sent to the adjacent town was no more running a mail route than
is the farmer who brings to town the letters written by his
neighbors and carries back those intended for them. The postal
department has discharged its entire function when it receives
mail, by whosoever presented, and delivers it to those for whom
it is intended or to those duly authorized to receive it, and the
postmaster-general who permits the department to exceed that
simple duty and intermeddle with the rights of the people should
not only be impeached and removed from office in one time and two
motions, but taken by the slack of the pantalettes and pitched
headlong into the penitentiary. It appears that the indignant
people assaulted the nigger postmaster. That is indeed to be
regretted; still I can but wonder that they do not shoot the
whole umbilicus out of every impudent tool of a petty tyranny who
attempts to prevent them mailing letters on postal cars while
that right is freely accorded to others. The whole affair serves
to accentuate the contention of the ICONOCLAST that postmasters
should not be appointed by successful politicians, but elected by
the people. If the latter can be trusted to choose presidents,
congressmen, etc. they can certainly be trusted to select
competent men to lick stamps and shuffle postal cards. As matters
now stand the wishes of the people, who "pay the freight," are in
no wise respected--the pie is shoveled out to a horde of hungry
political heelers, not because of services rendered their
country, but as payment for their pernicious activity in
promoting the interests of a corrupt and conscienceless party.
Thus it happens that in about half the cases federal officials
are regarded with aversion by the people they are supposed to
serve. It is to be hoped that every Southern white man who
hereafter votes the Republican ticket will have his billets de
amour clapper-clawed and liberally scented by some big fat coon.

 . . .

The Buffalo (N.Y.) Distress, commenting on the acquittal of a
negro near Barton, Ark., who killed another negro for having
criminally assaulted a woman of their own race, wants to know if
the law of justification would have held good had the rapist been
a white man. Had the Distress but paused to reflect that the
white men of Arkansas are free silver Democrats, it would not
have indulged in a supposition so far-fetched and foolish. Now in
Buffalo, which gave Cleveland to the country, and permits a
nigger-loving lazar like the editor of the Distress to run at
large, almost anything in petticoats, from old Sycorax to a
malodorous coon, might be in some danger of assault by so-called
Caucasians.

 . . .

There's every indication that another gigantic prize fight fake
will soon make a swipe for the long green of the cibarious
sucker. Were it not a violation of the law of the land and the
canons of the Baptist church to wager money that we should give
to the missionaries, I'd risk six-bits that Corbett and
Fitzsimmons get together within a year and that the gamblers who
are on the inside "make a killing." For six months or more before
their last mill these two worthies chewed the rag, making
everybody believe that the battle was to be for berlud. The odds
were on Corbett, and he got lost in the shuffle as a matter of
course--just as Fitz did when he mixed it with Sharkey. Now the
rag-chewing has begun over again, and Bob is doing the lordly
contempt act just as Jeems did before the late unpleasantness. He
has "retired"--wants Corbett to "go get er repertashun"--says
"Corbett quit in the last go like er cowardly cur." It will take
time to work the thing up, to resuscitate the old excitement, to
set fools to betting wildly on their favorite; but when the
pippin's ripe it will be pulled. There's not the slightest reason
for the existence of any personal ill will between these
pugs--it's all in the play, and being bad actors they overdo the
part of Termagant, do protest too much. It is quite noticeable
that in the "big fights" nowadays nobody gets seriously bruised.
It's easy enough to start the claret, and an ounce o' blood well
smeared satisfies the crowd as well as a barrel. The result of
the "fight" will be determined beforehand--as soon as the
managers learn how they can scoop the most money. The best thing
you can do with your ducats is to send them to me with
instructions to bet them even that Bill McKinley's job will soon
fit Bryan. The man who bets on the result of a prize-fight ought
to have a guardian appointed.

 . . .

A Los Angeles, Cal., correspondent informs me that the editor of
the Times of that town, who I trimmed up last month for
permitting impudent coons to insult Southern white women through
his columns, is named "Col." H. G. Otis, and that during the war
he commanded a negro company. He also sends me the following
extract from the alleged newspaper published by the ex-captain of
the Darktown Paladins:

 In considering the crimes of which some negroes are frequently
guilty it should not be forgotten that these traits of violent
sensuality are undoubtedly inherited from mothers and
grandmothers who were subjected to the lust of their masters
under the slavery system. In other words, the sins of the fathers
are being visited upon their children to the third and fourth
generation.

 That is a vast improvement over the original statement published
by Coon-Captain Otis to the effect that Southern white women seek
black paramours, and that most lynchings are caused by the guilty
parties getting caught. It is a matter of utter indifference to
the ex-slaveholders what this calumnious little fice says about
them, if he will but refrain from voiding his fetid rheum upon
their families. Doubtless some slaveholders were degraded
sensualists, but such were exceptions to the rule. Not one yaller
nigger in a hundred is the child of its mother's old master.
There were comparatively few mulattoes in the South before the
war, most of these were the offspring of white overseers--and it
is a notorious fact that a majority of our professional
"nigger-drivers" were from the North. This is no reflection on
the character of the Northern people--these fellows were simply
the feculent scum, the excrementitious offscourings of
civilization. And now I remember that a second-cousin of mine in
Kentucky has an overseer from Ohio named Otis. A very thrifty and
choleric man was my cousin, and considering a yaller nigger less
valuable than a black one, he threatened to subject his overseer
to a surgical operation if another half-breed pickaninny appeared
on the place. I do wonder if this "Col." Otis--who knew so much
about the management of coons that he was placed in command of a
colored company--can be the same fellow; also what was the result
of my relative's ultimatum? Can anybody in Los Angeles tell me
what state this "Col." Otis came from, or send me a good picture
of the ex-commander of coons?

 . . .

While the preachers were hustling out of the fever infected
districts of Louisiana, the Sisters of Charity were hurrying in
from points as far distant as San Francisco. And what were the A.
P. Apes doing? They were standing afar off, pointing the finger
of scorn at these angels of mercy and calling them "prostitutes
of the priesthood." In this land every man has a perfect right to
entertain such religious views as he likes; but those who defame
women who cheerfully risk their lives for others' sake should be
promptly shot. "By their fruits ye shall know them," says the
Good Book; and while the Church of Rome is producing Good
Samaritans to wrestle with the plague, the A. P. Ape is filling
the penitentiaries. I care nothing for the apostolic pretensions
of the Pope or the dogmas of the Priesthood; but I'm strongly
tempted to make a few off-hand observations with a six-shooter
should these papaphobes speak disrespectfully of the Sisters of
Charity in my presence.

 . . .

Justice Van Fleet of the supreme court of California recently
rendered an opinion which indicates the utter emptiness of our
boast that in this land all men are equal before the law. Because
of the confusion or ignorance of a new motorman, the young child
of a plumber, playing upon the track, was killed by an electric
car. The parents sued the company and were awarded damages in the
sum of six thousand dollars. Defendant took an appeal, which the
supreme court sustained, and the cause was remanded on the ground
that the damages awarded were excessive--that the boy would
probably have followed his father's occupation, and an embryo
workman is not, in Justice Van Fleet's opinion, worth so much
money! Measured by this standard, what would have been the
average "value" of American presidents when they were boys? Now
that Justice Van Fleet is measuring human life solely by the gold
standard, perhaps he can tell us what a juvenile Shakespeare or
Webster is "worth." I have held to the opinion heretofore that
blood could not be measured by boodle, that the children of the
common people were of as much importance in the eye of the law as
the progeny of the plutocrat--that the anguish of parents did not
depend on the length of the purse; but Justice Van Fleet seems to
agree with Kernan's weeping Canuck, that the more siller one has
the more deeply he feels the loss of a son. He seems to need a
powerful cardac for his heart and a hot mush poultice for his
head, being as fine a combination of knave and fool, as one can
easily find. Had the supreme court declared that the plaintiffs
in the case were not entitled to a dollar I would heartily
approve the opinion; but to measure the "value" of a son by the
gain-getting capacity of its sire is simply monstrous. A statute
should be enforced impartially, without regard to persons; but I
should like to see the law so amended that people could not trade
upon their tears, could not coin the blood of their relatives to
fill their pockets. A child should not be considered a piece of
property for which the accidental destroyer must PAY, just as a
railway company must cough up the cash value of the cow it kills.
As not one child in a thousand ever returns to its parents the
cost of its rearing it cannot be urged that the plaintiffs in
this case were pecuniarily damaged one penny. All they had to
sell was "mental anguish," and that should never be made a
merchantable commodity. We have criminal courts to deal with
those who, through criminal negligence or otherwise occasion
death. It may be argued that when the party killed has dependants
for whom he or she is providing, the slayer should be compelled
to make good the damage in so far as money can do it. I say
NO--that if there be blood guiltiness let the offender be
punished in accordance with our criminal code; if there be none
then is he blameless, and to deprive a person of his property
because of a harmless act is a crime. "But the dependants should
be provided for." Certainly they should; but not through rank
injustice to others. We are carrying entirely too far the theory
that the principal is responsible for the acts of his agents. If
the agent is guilty of criminal negligence he is punished by one
law and his principal by another; if the agent blunders he is
found not guilty and discharged, yet his principal is punished
for being a co-partner in his innocence. It should not be
forgotten that the agent of a private company is also a
representative of that larger and more powerful corporation which
we call the state. The private company can do no more than
outline his duty and discharge him for dereliction; the public
corporation not only prescribes his duty but imprisons or hangs
him for neglect; the private company is itself but a creation of
the state which exercises over it autocratic power while shirking
responsibility. If I loosen a rail on the "Katy" road and cause
the destruction of $100,000 worth of property the company must
pocket the loss, notwithstanding the fact that it is paying the
state for protection. If a dozen people are killed in the wreck
the relatives of the last one of them will sue for damages and
the state compel it to pay for its own failure to afford that
protection to which it is clearly entitled. What then? Let the
state issue life insurance at cost and compel every person who
has dependants to carry a policy payable on the annual
installment plan. For 5 or 6 cents a day it can, without loss,
issue a policy to every man in America that will provide his
family with the necessaries of life for at least ten years after
his death, and the man who cannot pay that premium is worth
precious little to anybody considered purely from an economic
standpoint. If the state wants to bring damage suits for the
slaughter of its citizens, well and good; but for God's sake let
us get rid of the degrading spectacle of people hawking the
corpses of their relatives through the courts.


A KANSAS CITY ARISTOCRAT.

I sometimes rejoice with an exceeding great joy and take
something on myself that the ICONOCLAST is read by a million
truth-loving Americans, as I am thereby enabled not only to make
it uncomfortable for frauds and fakes, but to hold an occasional
bypedal puppy up by the subsequent end that Scorn may sight him
and stick her cold and clammy finger so far through his miserable
carcass that Goliah might hang his helmet on the protruding
point. Sometime ago I found America's meanest man in
Massachusetts: I have just discovered the most contemptible of
all God's creatures in Kansas City. Some may suppose that the
first discovery excludes the last; but such forget that there is
the same difference between cussedness and contemptibility that
exists between the leopard and the louse, between a Cuban
hurricane and the crapulous eructations of a chronic hoodlum. I
want the world to take an attentive look at one Walter S.
Halliwell, to make a labored perscrutation of this priorient
social pewee, this arbiter eligantarium of corn-fed aristocracy,
this Beau Brummel of the border, for though Argus had a compound
microscope glued to his every eye he might never look upon the
like again. He resembles a pigmy statue of Priapus carved out of
a guano bed with a muck rake and smells like a maison d'joie
after an Orange Society celebration of the Battle of the Boyne.
Mr. Halliwell evidently has an idea rumbling round in his
otherwise tenantless attic room that he's a Brahmin of the
Brahmins, an aristocrat dead right, a goo-goo for your Klondyke
galways, a Lady Vere de Vere in plug hat and "pants." He's the
Ward McAllister of Kay-See, the model of the chappies, and traces
his haughty lineage back in an unbroken line to the primordial
anthropoid swinging by his prehensile tail to a limb of the Ash
tree Ygdrasyl and playfully scratching the back of the hungry
behemoth with the jawbone of an erstwhile ichthyosaurian. Walter
S. Halliwell was born when quite young, where or why deponent
saith not, and had gotten thus far on life's tow-path, absorbing
such provender as he could come at, before I chanced to hear of
him. As there be tides in the affairs of men which taken at the
flood lead on to fortune, so there be waves which straddled at
the proper time will bear a Halliwell on their niveous crest to
the dizzy heights of fame, quicker'n the nictitation of a
thomas-cat. Walter made connection with the climbing wave, and
here he is, bumping the macrencephalic end of himself against the
milky-way and affrighting the gibbous moon. His opportunity to
make an immortal ass of himself, to earn catasterism and be
placed among the stars as an equine udder, thus happened to hap:
Kay-See was to have a "Karnival" modeled upon the pinchbeck rake
with which Waco worked the gullible country folk once upon a
time--when she so far forgot herself as to trade on womanly
beauty to make it a bunco-steerer for her stores. The chief
attraction wass to be a "Kween Karnation" and her maids of honor,
the latter consisting of the most beautiful young ladies of the
various Missouri towns. I presume that these fair blossoms were
(or will be, for I know not the date of the brummagen blowout)
paraded through the streets bedized in royal frippery to make a
hoodlum holiday while the megalophanous huckster worked the
perspiring mob with peanuts and soda pop, and the thrifty
merchant marked his shopworn wares up 60 per cent, and sold them
to confiding country men "at a tremendous sacrifice." I infer
from the dispatches that Halliwell was made lord high executioner
of the "Karnival"--at least accorded ample space in which to
wildly wave his asinine ears. Miss Edna Whitney, described as
being "one of the most beautiful young ladies of Chillicothe,"
was put forward by her friends as a candidate for the honor of
representing that city at the royal court of "Kween Karnation,"
the citizens to determine the matter by a voting contest. Now
Miss Whitney, while dowered with great beauty, popular and of
good repute, is a working girl instead of a fashionable
butterfly, being employed in a cigar factory. When it appeared
certain that she would bear off the honor, the snobocracy of
Chillicothe, furious at being "trun down" by a working girl,
appealed to Halliwell to exclude her from the contest, and this
miserable parody of God's masterpiece promptly wired that her
business occupation was an insuperable barrier. How's that for a
country boasting of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity"--its press
and politicians ever prating of "the dignity of labor"! The
contest, I'm told, was open to all "respectable young women"; but
a working girl, though pure as the lily and fair as the rose, is
not considered "respectable" by the would-be patricians of
Corncob Corners and the grand panjandrum of the Kay-See Karnival!
Working girls must not presume to be pretty or popular or enter
into contests for holiday honors with the high-born daughters of
successful swindlers, but will be kindly permitted by the lordly
Halliwell to stand on the curb and see beauts who are only by the
grace of boodle, roll by like triumphant Sylla on Fortune's bike.
During the Saturnalia in ancient Rome the master acknowledged the
brotherhood of man by ministering to his slave; but Kansas City,
thanks to the omnipotent Halliwell, has cut the working class off
from mankind--the hewers of wood and drawers of water are no
longer considered human! Surely we are making rapid
"progress"--are nearing that point in time when the working
people will enter a protest against insult added to injury by
tying a few bow-knots in the rubber necks of presumptuous
parvenues. If it be a disgrace for a woman to work then is this
nation in a very bad way, for few of us are the sons or daughters
"of an hundred earls"--can go back more than a generation or two
without finding a maternal ancestor blithely swinging the useful
sad-iron or taking a vigorous fall out of the wash-tub. The
parents of some of the wealthiest people of Kansas City, the
bon-ton of the town, smelled of laundry soap, the curry-comb or
night-soil cart. Some made themselves useful as hash- slingers in
cheap boarding houses or chambermaids in livery stables, nursery
maids or barbers, while others kept gambling dens, boozing-kens
or even run variety dives. There is now a bright young woman
working for a wealthy man in Kansas City for six dollars a week.
The wife of her employer was once her mother's servant and
laundered her infantile linen. The ex-servant, scarce able to
read or write, ugly by nature and gross by instinct, is now a
glorious star in Fashion's galaxy, while the child whose diapers
she used to deodorize, compelled by poverty to accept employment,
is socially ostracized. People of gentle blood--those who for
many generations back have been educated men and cultured women,
do not act as do Halliwell and the snobocrats of Chillicothe.
These are giving a very exact imitation of people who lately came
up from the social gutter, and it were interesting to know how
far we would have to trace their "genealogical tree" before
finding something much worse than a working woman. It is said
that "three generations make a gentleman"; and if that be true
there is some hope of Halliwell's great-grandsons--granting, of
course, that the pusillanimous prig is not too epicene to provide
himself with posterity. Day by day it becomes more evident that
the purse-proud snobocracy of New York's old rat- catchers and
sprat peddlers is fast getting a foothold in the West, that the
social gulf between the House of Have and that of Have-Not, is
steadily widening and deepening--that we have reached that point
in national decay where gold suffices to "gild the straitened
forehead of the fool," where WEALTH instead of WORTH" makes the
man and want of it the fellow." Of course it is not to be
expected that working girls, however worthy, will be generally
carried on the visiting list of wealthy women, that their society
will be sought by the followers of Fashion. None expect this, and
few desire it. King Cophetua's beggar maid would have cut a sorry
figure at court ere his favor raised her to fortune. For
Cinderella to attend the Bradley-Martin ball clothed in rags
would be embarrassing both to herself and the company. The woman
who must work for a living has little time for the diversions of
the wealthy; and is usually too proud to accept costly social
courtesies which she cannot repay in kind. Society divides
naturally into classes, dilettantism and pococurantism
dawdling luxuriously here, labor at hand-grip with Destiny there.
"Birds of a feather flock together," say the old copy-books, and
Fortune gives to each such plumage as she pleases. Still, boodle
does not map out all the social metes and bounds. It was said of
old that every door opens to a golden key, but this is not
altogether true. The honest working girl shuns the society of the
wealthy wanton, and the stupid ignoramus, whatsoever his fortune,
is accorded no seat at the symposiac--is blackballed by the
brotherhood of brains. Imagine Goethe giving Richter the "marble
heart" or Byron snubbing Burns because of his lowly birth! The
world would be quick to rebuke their arrogance, would assure them
that a singer was not esteemed for his siller, but for his song.
In the carnival case it was a question of beauty not of boodle,
of popularity instead of purses, and to exclude from the contest
a candidate of the working class was to acknowledge her
superiority and avenge defeat with brutal insult that would shame
the crassest boor. The King of Syracuse was not ashamed to
contend with the humblest for Olympian honors, nor the Emperor of
Rome to measure swords with Thracian gladiators to prove his
skill at arms. Ever does genius sympathize with folly and the
truly learned with the unlettered; but Mammon "least erect of all
the angelic host that fell from heaven," puts the mark of the
beast on the brazen foreheads of all who bow down to his
abominations. When working-girls are treated thus, what wonder
that some of them become imbittered, discouraged, and go
head-long to the devil--affording the wretched pharisees whose
brutality wrought their ruin, an opportunity to "rescue" them and
pose before the world as Christian philanthropists! What
inducement has a young and beautiful woman to toil early and late
for an honest livelihood when by so doing she forfeits the right
to be called respectable--is flouted by even the paltry
plutocracy of a country town and proclaimed a social pariah by
such a headless phthirius pubis as Halliwell! If labor be no
longer respectable wherein are our thousands of virtuous working
girls superior to prostitutes? Clearly if the dictum of Halliwell
be correct it were better for the daughter of poverty to regard
her face as her fortune and hasten to sell herself--with approval
of law and blessings of holy church--to some old duffer with
ducats and be welcomed by the "hupper sukkle" as a bright and
shining ornament. Or if no beducated old duffer can be come at,
she might marry the first shiftless he-thing that offers itself
and pick up a luxurious livelihood for her family among her
gentlemen friends, as so many enterprising society women now do,
and be "respectable" to her heart's content--even a devout church
member and prominent in "rescue" work among fallen women. Somehow
I cannot help wondering whether Halliwell's respectability be not
due to some ancestor who was too lazy to work and too cowardly to
steal. To the grand army of working women I would say, Be not
discouraged by such gross affronts, prompted by splenetic hearts
and spewed forth by empty heads. You may be flouted on the one
hand by a few purse-proud parvenues and pitied on the other hand
by bedizened prostitutes, but the great world, which learned long
ago that the reptile as well as the eagle can reach the apex of
the pyramid, estimates you at your true worth and binds upon your
pure brows the victor's wreath, while ringing ever in your ears
like a heavenly anthem are the words of Israel's wisest--"A good
name is more precious than fine gold."

 P.S.--Since the foregoing was put in print I have received
Kansas City papers giving a fuller account of the affair, and it
is in every way more miserable than I had imagined. Halliwell,
who is bossee of the whole business, says he sent the telegram at
the request of the board of lady managers of the flower
parade--in other words, that, at the solicitation of a lot of
snobby old females, he made even a greater ass of himself than
nature had originally intended. Mrs. J. K. Cravens, chairman of
the aforesaid board, denies that the ladies had anything to do
with the matter, then flies into a towering passion "cusses out"
the newspapers, figuratively speaking, rips her silk lingerie to
ribbons, and otherwise conducts herself like a woman educated in
a logging camp. I shall not attempt to decide the question of
veracity between Halliwell and Mrs. Cravens, but that one is a
mental vacuum and the other a ripsnortin' old virago is
established beyond the peradventure of a doubt. Everybody
connected with the Karnival is doing the Artful Dodger act to
escape the withering storm of indignation which the pitiful
episode called forth from the American people. The most
encouraging feature of the whole affair is the withdrawal of
several of Chillicothe's society girls from the contest because
of the gratuitous insult tendered Miss Whitney in the Halliwell
telegram, thus indicating that the old town's upper ten is not
composed exclusively of pudding heads and parvenues.

 * * *
A PICTORIAL PAIN KILLER.

Puck is what the erstwhile Artemous Ward would call a "yewmerous"
paper, and is published solely for the benefit of bad barbers.
When you take your seat in the butcher's shambles he provides you
with a copy of Puck because its jokes are so excruciatingly
painful that it pulls your piligerous annex out with a
stump-extractor and rubbed aqua fortis into your face with a bath
brick, the physical ill would be forgotten in the mental agony. I
never saw anybody but a barber purchase a copy of Puck not any
son of Adam reading it outside a "tonsorial parlor." Should the
Populists carry the country and barbers be tabooed Puck's mission
on earth would be ended--unless it could persuade dentists to
adopts it as an anaesthetic, and sheriffs to read it to condemned
criminals to make them yearn for death. The last time I was
shaved the razor pulled so dreadfully that I sought refuge in
this pictorial pain-killer's editorial page. I there learned,
much to my surprise, that the rise in the price of wheat had
killed the silver cause; also that W. J. Bryan had "said, in that
pose of easy omniscience for which he became remarkable, that 'a
bushel of wheat and an ounce of silver were ordained by nature to
become equal each to the other'--'wheat cannot rise unless silver
rises.' " If W. J. Bryan said that, even in his salad days, he's
a hopeless damphool, unfit to be pound-master, much less
president; but I'll pay two-bits for incontestable evidence that
he ever made such an idiotic remark. My private opinion is that
the malice of Puck's mendacity is equalled only by its
awkwardness. It is possible that its editor mistakes falsehood
for fun. Or he may have heard somewhere the statement he parrots
and really supposed it true, for a man capable of conducting so
jejune a journal might easily believe anything. Another article
in his paper says that Cardinal Wolsey managed all "Bluff King
Hal" divorce business, while the fact is that his hostility to
that feculent old tub of tallow's matrimonial crimes was the
efficient cause of his downfall. As a historian Puck is about as
reliable as Mark Twain's acerbic old sea captain; hence his
asservations anent Bryan's utterances should be taken with
considerable chloride of sodium. Every man who knows as much
about political economy as a terrapin does of the Talmud is well
aware that a rise in the price of one commodity simultaneous with
the decline in price of another commodity has nothing whatever to
do with the currency question. Those who cackle about a rise in
wheat synchronously with the fall of silver make a very indecent
exposure of their own ignorance. If I had a ten-year old boy who
was such a hopeless idiot I'd drown him as not worth honest grub,
then seek a surgeon and make sure that I'd never again inflict
the world with progeny cursed with cretinism. Wheat went up and
silver down, as Mr. Bryan recently explained to the satisfaction
of every man possessing an ounce of brains, simply because the
demand for the one was increased by foreign crop failures, the
demand for the other decreased by Anglo-Cleveland skull-duggery.
"Law of supply and demand," bawls Puck and all the other
journalistic puppets of an impudent plutocracy. You miserable
little hiccius doctius, do you expect to deceive an intelligent
people with that kind of howl, while the trade in wheat is left
untrammeled and the demand for silver arbitrarily limited by law?
Suppose that while the world's wheat fields were producing
abundantly the leading nations should prohibit their people
purchasing any more of that cereal for food production; would any
macrocephalous donkey ascribe the decline in the price of wheat
to "the immutable law of supply and demand?" When silver is
placed on an equality with all other commodities; when the people
are permitted to freely employ it as they please, then will the
natural law of supply and demand apply to the white metal, and
New York editors cease to jabber financial nonsense with the
stupid persistence of a poll-parrot praising its own personal
pulchritude. The editor of Puck should avoid political economy as
a subject a trifle too large for the knot on the end of his neck,
and confine himself to his threadbare specialty, that of
belittling the Jews with his watery wit and atribilarious art.
The only funny thing I find in his paper is its solemn "notice to
publishers" that all its raccous rot is copyrighted, that
infringement will be "promptly and vigorously prosecuted." The
editor who would steal from Puck would walk through
Stringfellow's fruit farm to crib a wilted cabbage leaf from a
blind cow. The best things in Puck scarce rise to the dignity of
Slob Snots' milk-sick drivel in the Gal-Dal, while Texas has a
hundred country editors pulling a Washington hand press and
building stallion poster, who could write brighter things if they
were drunk--or dead. "Promptly and vigorously prosecuted" O the
devil! Why don't you say that you'll have any fool who attempts
to father your hand-made yermer sent to an insane asylum to be
treated for prolapsus of the intellect?

* * *
MAN'S GUST FOR GORE.

Hon. Chas. P. Johnson has written for the Globe-Democrat an
article that will doubtless receive the careful consideration of
every sociologist, for he therein assumes that man's instincts
are as brutal and bloody to-day as in those far times when, clad
only in his "thick natural fell," and armed with a stone, he
struggled for food with the wild beasts of the forest--that the
prevalence of lynchings is not due to incompetency of our
criminal courts, but to an alarming revival of savagery in man
himself. He declares that our courts are more effective than ever
before, but that Judge Lynch continues active without other cause
than the inability of the people to restrain their murderous
proclivities. He assures us that the entire suppression of the
savage instinct is impossible by any civilization whatever, and
adds that "its control and regulation is as difficult to-day as
it has been at any period since the historical birth of man." Why
this is so he does not directly say, but the following paragraph
is significant:

 "Perhaps the statesmanship which looks solely to the development
of our material resources and the accumulation of wealth is
overlooking the growth and development of many social vices which
may yet engulf us in a vortex of anarchical passion or
governmental revolution."

Thus Mr. Johnson endorses the position of the ICONOCLAST that
the getting of gain should not constitute the sole aim of man;
that society cannot long exist with self- interest for "sole
nexus," as the French physiocrats would say--that the worship of
Mammon is dragging us back to barbarism. It is quite true that
man's savage instincts cannot be wholly eradicated; and it is
likewise true that could you drain all the Berserker out of his
blood he would sink to the level of an emasculated simian. A man
in whom there's no latent savagery were equivalent to mint julep
in which buttermilk were used as a succedaneum for bourbon. Life,
we are told, is "a battle and a march," and an indispensable
prerequisite for such stubborn work, call it by what name you
will, is but a refinement of the barbaric gust for blood. Whether
he be poet or philosopher, priest or prophet, it is the combative
man--the man who would find a wild fierce joy in a bayonet
charge--who wins new territory from the powers of Darkness and
the Devil. Man IS a savage, and civilization but a cloak with
which he covers his ferocity as best he can. If the cloak be
scant--as with the Turk--or frayed by time--as with the
Spaniard--we may expect to catch frequent and shocking glimpses
of the predacious animal. But Mr. Johnson is mistaken in
supposing that the lynchings of which he complains evidence an
abnormal thirst for blood on the part of the American people. He
says:

"As the masses of ancient Rome enjoyed the carnage of the
amphi-theater; as the populace of Paris crowded with eager
avidity around the guillotine to see the blood gush from the
heads and trunks of the victims of the revolutionary tribunal; as
the Spaniard in holiday attire followed over the plaza the
procession and rapturously looked upon the execution of the
wretches of the auto da fe; as in all ages the spirit of savagery
has made men to enjoy scenes of suffering, brutality and
death--so does the modern mob look with frenzied delight upon
like exhibitions to-day."

For a man so erudite and earnest, Mr. Johnson comes painfully
near being ridiculous. The evidence is ample that never since the
first settlement of this country have the people found LESS
pleasure in the effusion of blood and scenes of brutality.
Instead of the savage instinct becoming dominant, we are fairly
open to the charge of effeminacy, of super-estheticism. Our very
sports are becoming namby pamby as those of the Bengalese, the
element of danger which gave zest to them in auld lang syne being
all but eliminated. Bear-baiting, cocking- mains, shin-kicking,
bulldog-fighting, etc., all greatly enjoyed by the general public
a generation or so ago, are now quite generally tabood. Many of
us can remember when pugilism was practiced with bare-knuckles
and every fight to a finish; it is practiced now with feather
pillows "for points," and under police supervision. About the
only game left us that is more dangerous than playing
Presbyterian billards with an old maid from Boston is college
football, and even that will soon be stripped of its vigor on the
plea that it is barbarous. When our fathers quarreled they took a
pot-shot at each other at ten paces; now disagreements involving
even family honor are carried into the courts--the bloody Code
Duello has been relegated to "innocuous desuetude." Texas is
supposed by our Northern neighbors to be the "wurst ever," the
most bloodthirsty place this side the Ottoman Empire; yet the
Houston Post, leading paper of Harris county, is crying its poor
self sick because some peripatetic Ananias intimated to an
Eastern reporter that our wildest and wooliest cowboys would even
think of shooting the pigtail off a Chinaman bowling along on a
bike. Our governor earned the title of "heroic young Christian"
by calling a special session of the legislature to prevent Prof.
Fitzsimmons giving it to Prof. Corbett "in de slats" with a buggy
cushion--was re-elected on the proposition that a boxing- match
is "brutal"--which proves that our people are not ahunger and
athirst for gore, do not yearn for the sickening scenes of the
Roman amphitheatre, where holy virgins by turning their thumbs up
or down, decided questions of life and death. "Bloodthirsty?"
Good Lord! The average American would grow sick at the stomach if
required to slaughter a pullet with which to regale the palate of
his favorite preacher. During the past two decades we have
practically become Quakers, and now suffer foreign powers to vent
their rheum upon us and rub it in, because to maintain our
dignity might precipitate a war, and bloodshed is so very brutal.
Mr. Johnson seems to imagine that the usual method of procedure
in Judge Lynch's court is for the mob to trample its victim to
death, bray him in a mortar, kerosene him and set him on fire,
then dance the carmagnole around his flaming carcass. This, I am
pleased to remark, is simply a mid-day nightmare which should be
subjected to hydropathic treatment, reinforced with cracked ice
and bromo-seltzer. As a rule lynchings are conducted in quite as
orderly and humane a manner as legal esecutions. It is true that
cases have occurred, when the public patience had become
exhausted by repeated offenses, or the crime committed was
peculiarly atrocious, wherein respectable God-fearing men were
seized with a murderous frenzy, and whole communities noted for
their culture, united in torturing or burning at the state the
object of their displeasure; but these were usually instances
where failure to enforce the law was notorious, or it did not
provide an adequate penalty. The courts imprison the man who
steals a mule, or even a loaf of bread to feed a starving family.
They hang the man who in a fit of rage of jealousy or drunken
frenzy commits a homicide: they can do no more to the brutal buck
negro who ravishes and murders a white babe--so Judge Lynch takes
cognizance of his case and builds for him a beautiful bonfire;
but the average lynching appeals no more strongly to the savage
instincts of man than does a hanging by the sheriff. Then, it may
be asked, why do lynchings occur. I have treated this subject at
considerable length in former issues of the ICONOCLAST, hence
will but recapitulate here and add a few observations suggested
by Mr. Johnson's very able but sadly mistaken article. Lynchings
occur because, whatsoever be the efficiency of our courts, they
are a trifle shy of public confidence; because there are some
offenses for which the statutes do not provide adequate
penalties; because the people insist that when a heinous crime is
committed punishment follow fast upon the offense instead of
being delayed by a costly circumlocution office and perhaps
altogether defeated by skillful attorneys--men ready to put their
eloquence and tears on tap in the interest of worse criminals. I
will not take issue with so distinguished an authority as Mr.
Johnson regarding the competency of our courts to deal with
criminals in accordance with the laws of the land; but the people
see that despite the vigilance of officers, the erudition of
judges and the industries of juries, murders multiply, rapes
increase and portable property remains at the mercy of the
marauder. If my memory of statistics does not mislead me, we have
in the United States something like 10,000 homicides per annum,
while every newspaper teems with accounts of robbery and rape.
When we consider this in connection with the further fact that
the courts continue to increase in cost--are already a veritable
Old Man of the Sea about the neck of the Industrial Sinbad--can
we wonder at the impatience of the people? But there is another
feature which Mr. Johnson has quite overlooked in his vision of a
brutal mob drunk with blood--like most lawyers, he stands too
close to his subject to see more than one side, views it from
beneath rather than from above. We set a higher value on human
life than did our ancestors of the old dueling days. This may be
called the Age of Woman--the era of her apothesis. She occupies a
higher intellectual, social and political level than ever before
in human history, and as she increases in importance crimes
against her person assume more gravity. A generation ago such a
thing as the criminal assault of a white woman by a negro was
almost unknown, but now it is of every day occurrence; thus as
womanhood becomes more sacred in our eyes it is subjected to
fouler insult. Nor is this all: The American people are becoming
every year more mercurial. The whole trend of our
civilization--of our education, our business, even our
religion--is to make us neurotic, excitable, impatient. In our
cooler moments we enact laws expressive of mistaken mercy rather
than of unflinching justice. Some of the states have even
abolished capital punishment and in but one can a brute be tied
up and whipped for the cowardly crime of wife-beating. We
establish courts rather to acquit than to convict by
disqualifying intelligence for jury service and enforcing the
stupid unit rule. We provide convicts with comforts unknown to
millions of honest working men and regard them as poor
unfortunates to be "reformed rather than as malefactors to be
punished. And when our misguided mercy has borne its legitimate
fruit we take fire, curse the laws and the courts, seize and hang
the offender, and have the satisfaction of knowing that there's
one less monster alive in the land. Mr. Johnson suggests no
remedy for what he regards as the evil of the age, and is
therefore like unto the doctor who volunteers the entirely
superfluous information that you "have a misery in your innards,"
but provides neither pill nor poultice. As Judge Lynch probably
makes fewer mistakes than do the courts; as those he hangs
usually deserve hemp and he renders no bill of costs to the
country; and as the people are the creators and not the creatures
of the courts, I am not particularly interested in his
suppression, notwithstanding the fact that he seriously
interferes with the material welfare of the professional juror
and my lawyer friends. But were I duly ordained to perform that
duty I would not begin by creating new deputies or calling out
local militia companies to shoot down their neighbors and
friends, to protect the miserable carcass of a rape-fiend. I
would wipe out our entire penal code and frame a new one in which
there would be no comfortable penitentiaries. If a man were found
guilty of rape or homicide I'd promptly hang him, if of a less
heinous offense I'd give him stripes proportionate to his crime
and turn him loose to earn a livelihood and thus prevent his
family becoming a public burden. For the second offense in crimes
like forgery, perjury, theft, arson, etc., I'd resort to the
rope. I would abolish fines in misdemeanor cases, thereby putting
the rich and poor on a parity, and set the offenders in the
stocks. I'd get rid of the costly delays which are the chief
cause of lynchings, by elective jurors and the majority rule, by
appointing one man well learned in the law to see that all the
evidence was properly placed before the court, and advise the
rest of the legal fraternity now making heaven and earth resound
with their eloquence and weeping crocodile tears at so much per
wope, that it were better to make two fat shoats flourish where
one hazel- splitter pined in the hitherto, than to employ their
talents and energies securing the conviction of the innocent and
the aquittal of the guilty. By such a system almost any criminal
case could be fairly tried in a couple of hours. If the defendant
desired to appeal from the sentence of the court, instead of
sending the case up to a higher tribunal thereby entailing heavy
cost and vexatious delay, I would empanel a new jury then and
there, composed of reputable citizens of the community, retry the
case, and if the first verdict was confirmed, the sentence should
be executed within the hour. The quicker the courts "get action"
on an offender the more terror they inspire in the criminal
classes and the better they please the people. If a murderer or
rape-fiend captured at daylight could be fairly tried and
executed by sundown Judge Lynch would speedily find himself
without an occupation.

 * * *
A RIGHT ROYAL ROAST.
THE ICONOCLAST MADE HARD TO CATCH.

Galveston, Tex., August 12, 1897.
MR. W. C. BRANN:

In your editorial on the "Henry George Hoodoo," which appears in
the August number of the ICONOCLAST, the following passage
occurs: "It seems to me that I have treated the Single Taxers as
fairly as they could ask, and if I now proceed to state a few
plain truths about them and their faith they will have no just
cause to complain." From the tone and tenor of these words it is
fair to assume that in the editorial referred to you have
discharged against the Single Taxers and their faith the heaviest
broadsides of which your ordnance is capable. If, notwithstanding
all the time you have wasted "crucifying the economic mooncalf"
which has played such sad havoc with the wits of Single Taxers,
it should turn out that the monstrous concept, far from being
crucified, annihilated, or even "dying of its own accord," only
gathers strength, energy, and renewed activity from the healthful
exercise with which you provide it, must it not seem the part of
prudence for you, even if occasion of regret for us, that you
should abandon the war and leave the calf to his fate? Your
belated and apparently desperate resolve to "tell some plain
truths" about us, Single Taxers, justifies the inquiry, what were
you telling before? The fact that it seems to yourself that you
have treated Single Taxers fairly is not absolutely irrefragible
proof that they have been so treated at least it has not brought
conviction of the fact to them. That the offer of your space to
Mr. George was courteously declined affords no just ground for
refusing it to those "whose matin hymn and vesper prayer reads,
there is no God but George," etc. I'll warrant you that if you
and the Single Taxers had access on equal terms to a journal
which neither controlled, and whose space both were bound to
respect, you would not have to go outside the limits of your own
state to find a dozen foemen worthy of your steel, and I'd stake
my life on it that you'd find not a few to unhorse you. This is
not claiming that any one of them, or all of them together, can
come anywhere near you in the artistic manipulation of words or
the construction of ear-tickling phrases; but it is claiming, and
that without any false pretense of modesty, that they have yet
seen no reason to fear you in rigidly logical argument when the
Single Tax is the question at issue. Their cause is so palpably
just, its underlying principle so transparently simple and
elementary, its practical application so direct, feasible and
efficient that no mere wizardry of words, no thimble-riggery or
language, can by any possibility obscure the principle--or
confuse the advocates. Of course there are among Single Taxers,
as among other enthusiasts, men who indiscreetly use abuse for
argument, and of these you may have some reason to complain; but
should not your great talents and the immense advantages which
the undisputed control of your own journal give you, enable you
to rise above their abuse, to ignore it completely, and to
grapple with only those who present you with argument? I have no
right to expect from you more consideration than has been meted
out to better men; still, you can but refuse this rejoinder to
your August editorial, which is respectfully offered for
publication in your journal. If you are quite sure of your
ground, you can only gain strength from exposing my weakness, but
even if you are not sure of it, both the requirements of simple
justice and the amende honorable to Single Taxers would still
plead for the publication of this article.

You say that Mr. George has obtained no standing of consequence
in either politics or economics "because his teachings are
violative of the public concept of truth." Do you really believe
that the fact that he has obtained no standing of consequence in
politics is in any way derogatory to his character or his
teaching? Do you not know full well that a Bill Sykes, a Jonas
Chuzzlewit, or a Mr. Montague Tigg would have a hundred chances
to attain that distinction to-day to the one chance that Henry
George, Vincent de Paul or even Jesus Christ would have? Don't
you know this well, and if you do, why do you use it as an
argument against Henry George? As to his standing in economics,
that, I submit, is a matter of opinion. You think he has no
standing of consequence; I think his teaching is the most active
ferment in the economic thought of to-day. We may be both
mistaken, but whether we are or not cuts no figure in the truth
or falsity of the Single Tax. But it is worth while to point out
that the reason you have given for his lack of "standing" lends
neither weight nor force to your argument. "Because," you say,
"his teachings are violative of the public concept of truth."
When did the public concept of truth become the standard by which
to test it? The public concept of the best form of money is, and
has been for thousands of years, gold and silver coins. I am much
mistaken if that be your concept. By the way, why did you not say
"violative of truth," instead of "violative of the public
concept," etc.? I guess you had an inward consciousness that a
thing is not true or false by public concept, but by being
inherently so. What Henry George taught was inherently true or
false before he ever taught it, and would be so still if he had
been never born. The only difference would be that so many of us
who now bask in the blessed light of inward, if not of outward,
freedom would, in that event, be still barking with the great
blind multitude over every false trail along which blinder
teachers might be leading them and us.

You admit that Mr. George is a polemic without a peer, and you
say that "no other living man could have made so absurd a theory
appear so plausible, deceived hundreds of abler men than
himself." Surely there is something very faulty in the position
you assume here. If what you say be so, how do you know that you
are not yourself the victim of deception at the hands of some
inferior? Or is it only men who have "gone daft on Single Tax"
that possess the extraordinary power of leading abler men than
themselves by the nose? Surely that were too much honor for an
antagonist to concede to them. More surely still, if a man's
intelligence is not proof against deception by inferiors in
argument, he can never reach finality in a process of reasoning,
and logical proof for him there is none.

"He mistakes the plausible for the actual and by his sophistry
deceives himself." O pshaw! We all say things sometimes that just
do for talk, but this hasn't even that poor excuse. I might just
as well say, "He takes the conceivable for the supposable and by
his logic enlightens himself. One statement would be as valuable
as the other and neither would be worth a pinch of snuff. Come,
let us argue with dignity and composure, like honest men
sincerely searching after truth, and eager to lend a hand in
abolishing this social Inferno of legalized robbery which fairly
threatens to consume us all.

There is, you'll admit, such a thing as land value, i. e. value
attaching to land irrespective of improvements made in or on it
by private industry. This value arises from the presence of a
community and can never actually exist without it. If the
exclusive creator or producer of a thing is its rightful owner,
land belongs to the community that creates or produces it, and
can never, in the first instance, rightly belong to any other
owner. The Single Tax is the taking of this value for this
community. Is it just? The highest homage, the highest act of
faith which the human mind and heart can offer to God is to say
that He could not be God and pronounce the Single Tax unjust!
Here now is a gage of battle cast at the feet of whoever wishes
to take it up, be the same logician, metaphysician or theologian.
(Pardon me, Mr. Brann, for momentarily turning aside from you.)

The justice of the Single Tax is beyond all question of
refutation. What about its efficiency for the cure of social
ills? Here, I think, is where we are widest apart. You say, "the
unearned increment is already taken for public use under our
present system of taxation." If by "unearned increment" you mean
what I have defined as land value (and I think you do) your
statement is the wildest and most astounding I ever heard or read
from a sane man making an argument. Is it possible you have not
learned that where all the land value is taken in taxation there
can be no selling value? And where is the land to-day with a
community settled upon it that has not selling value? If land
value is already absorbed by taxation, what is it that goes to
maintain landlordism? Perhaps you'll contend that landlordism
doesn't exist. What value is it that a man pays for when he buys
an unimproved lot in the heart of a city? What is it that the
boomer booms and the land speculator gambles on when he adds acre
to acre and lot to lot without any intention of productive use?
What, if not the community value which he expects to attach to
his land as a result of increase of population? And what
advantage to him as a speculator would this community value be
if, as you claim, it is now being absorbed in taxation and should
continue to be so absorbed as fast as it arises? Do landlords in
cities and towns retain for themselves only the rent of buildings
and hand over to the government the full amount of their ground
rents as tax? I know an old eye-sore of a building in this city
not worth $150, whose occupant pays $100 a month rent. Do you
seriously believe that all of this $1,200 a year which does not
go to the city and state in taxes is rent on the old $150
rat-warren? Why, the thing is too childish for serious
discussion; and to have discussed it with you without having been
driven to it by yourself, I should have regarded as in the nature
of a slight on your intelligence. If what you claim as a fact
were true, we would have the Single Tax in full swing now and
would be fretting ourselves to fiddle-strings, not to bring it
about, but to get rid of it for its evil fruit.

As to whether the Single Tax, in full force, would provide enough
revenue for municipal, county, state and federal governments, we,
Single Taxers, are not greatly concerned. We have our own
opinions on that question and can give better reasons for them
than our opponents can give for theirs. But the question is not
essential to our argument. What we hold to is that until land
values fully taxed prove inadequate for the expenses of
government economically administered, not one cent should be
levied on labor products, no matter in whose possession found.
This, however, belongs to the fiscal side of our reform. Of
infinitely more importance is the social side. Here our end and
aim is to secure to all the sons of Adam an equal right to life,
liberty and pursuit of happiness by securing to them an equal
right in the bounties of nature--and passing strange it certainly
is that men who would not dream of denying this right in the
abstract are ever ready to anathematize it in the concrete.

With the Single Tax in force, that is, with the plain behest of
nature observed and respected, no man will hold land out of use
when, whether he uses it or not, he must pay to the community its
annual value for the privilege of monopolizing it. No man will
hold land for a rise in community value when that value is taken
from him for the use of the community as fast as it arises. No
man will need to mortgage his home and the earnings of his
most vigorous years to a boomer or speculator for the privilege
of living on the earth for there will be no boomer or speculator
to sell him the privilege, and the privilege itself will have
ceased to be such and become an indefeasible right.

"He (Mr. George) is a well-intentioned man who confidently
believes he can make the poverty-stricken millions prosperous by
revoking the taxes of the rich and increasing the burthens of the
poor." Fie, fie! What is to be gained by such transparent,
palpable misrepresentation as this? Do you verily believe that
land values, which Mr. George proposes to tax, are mainly in
possession of the poor? Did you not see--of course you did--a
diagrammatic exhibit made not long ago by the New York Herald of
the holdings of twenty New York real estate owners? Let me quote
a passage from an article in the New York Journal on this
exhibit:

 "The reason 170 families own half of Manhattan Island, as stated
in the Herald, and that 1,800,000 out of the two million
residents of Manhattan Island, until very recently, had no
interest whatever, except as renters, in this superb property, is
because, until the last few years, it required a fortune to own
the smallest separate parcel of this great estate. Only the rich
could participate in its ownership, its income, its profits."

 Now is it your view that all this is but clumsy lying, and that
in reality it is the poor people of New York as of other large
cities that own the bulk of its land values? Again you say, "He
would equalize the conditions of Dives and Lazarus by removing
the tax from the palace of the one and laying it upon the potato
patch of the other." This statement is much more artistic than
the preceding one. It wears a jaunty semblance of truth. Indeed
it is true in a sense as far as it goes. But it is vague and
incomplete, and for that reason as deceptive and misleading as
half truths always are. With your permission I will fill it out
in parenthesis and convert it into an honest whole truth: "He
would equalize the conditions of (both freedom and justice for)
Dives and Lazarus by removing the tax from the palace of the one
(and from the labor products of the other) and laying it upon
(the community value of the land occupied by the palace and) the
potato patch of the other." Now, if the potato patches of the
poor occupy, as a rule, more valuable land than the palaces of
the rich, there might be some apparent ground for your
contention. It would be only apparent, however, for in such a
case the potato patch would be as much out of place as a public
school on a wharf front. To devote highly valuable land to
ordinary potato culture would be about as sensible as to print
the Sunday edition of the Galveston News on costly linen paper.
One of the virtues of the Single Tax is its potency to prevent
such stupid waste of opportunity. Your way of stating the case,
however, has this virtue that it is a welcome variation of the
old wearisome chestnut about the poor widow owning a valuable
lot, etc.

You believe Progress and Poverty inspired by the plutocracy,
"250,000 of whom own 80 per cent. of the taxable wealth of the
country, while the land is largely in possession of the great
middle class." Passing over the source of the inspiration, you
have come pretty close to the truth here! Unfortunately for you,
however, the statement has no value in the argument. Single
Taxers do not need to deny that the great middle class largely
own the land, but they do claim, and you won't have the hardihood
to deny it, that the plutocracy own the vast bulk of the land
values. You will perceive the distinction when you reflect that
the land is nearly all out in the country, while the land values
are nearly all in the cities and towns. To tax land according to
area is the bug-a-boo you are putting up your guards to; to tax
it according to community value is what we invite you to smash if
you can. You "cannot understand how a man possessed of common
sense could fail to see that removing taxation from the class of
property chiefly in the hands of the rich and placing it
altogether on property chiefly in the hands of the comparatively
poor, could fail to benefit the millionaire at the expense of the
working man." Neither can I, if you tax it according to quantity,
but that is not the Single Tax and it is time you knew it. Let me
tell you now something that I can't understand--why a man who has
the means and the ability to strike giant blows for the cause of
the blind, stupid, plundered humanity prefers to waste his time,
his talents, his opportunities making himself a straw man and,
with that silly-looking thing for antagonist, belaboring all
about him like a bull in a china shop. You sincerest
well-wishers, of whom I claim to be one, earnestly hope you will
soon change your tactics.

You ask some practical questions which it may be well to answer:
"How will you prevent the Standard Oil Company forcing weaker
concerns to the wall by the simple expedient of selling below
cost of production?" The Standard Oil trust is maintained (1) by
monopoly of oil lands; (2) by monopoly of pipe lines; (3) by
collusion with railroads. The Single Tax and its corollaries
would absolutely destroy each of these advantages; (1) by
throwing unused oil lands open to all on equal terms; (2) by
government ownership or complete control of pipe lines to all
distributing points, such lines being open for use to all oil
producers on equal terms; (3) by exactly analogous treatment of
railroads. With the three-fold monopoly of oil lands, pipe line,
and railroad abolished, the Standard Oil trust would find no wall
against which to crush weaker concerns. As to the trust, we hope
that the abolishment of the thieves' compact, i.e. the protective
tariff, will make the trusts sick unto death. Absolute free
trade, a necessary concomitant of the Single Tax, will leave 99
per cent. of the trusts stranded. If any survive it will not be
the fault of the Single Tax. Be it remembered that the evils
which the Single Tax is guaranteed to cure are, primarily, land
monopoly, and, secondarily, all the other monopolies based upon
it; as those of the coal, iron and lumber trust, the Standard Oil
trust, etc.

"With coal fields leased to the operators by Uncle Sam, how would
you prevent Hanna organizing a pool, limiting production, raising
prices and reducing wages?" Coal fields are included in the
economic term, land. When unused land is free for occupancy,
unused coal fields will also be free. If Mark sought to limit
production by shutting down his mines, one of two things would
happen. Either somebody else would start in to mine coal, or
Mark's tax would be raised till the wisdom of either letting go
or resuming would dawn on his fat wits. Unless he owned or
controlled the coal fields he could not limit production, raise
prices, or cut down wages. "How will you prevent the Standard Oil
company forcing weaker concerns to the wall by the simple
expedient of selling below cost of production?" We wouldn't
prevent them. But if they afterwards tried to recoup their losses
by raising prices as they do now, we might get after them with a
tax commensurate with their asinine generosity, and keep after
them till other concerns got well on their feet. If they became
too refractory, what's to prevent the government from taking hold
itself and working the oil wells for the benefit of the whole
people? Remember the government is theoretically the people's
servant, and it could be actually so if the people only had a
little intelligence and moral courage.

You very needlessly tell your Ft. Hamilton friend that land is
the primal source of all wealth; that it does not produce wealth,
but simply affords man an opportunity to produce it; you forgot
to add--provided the landlord doesn't prevent him. You say in
another place, "Figure it as you will, adjust it as you may, a
tax is a fine on industry and will so remain until you get blood
from turnips," etc. This very objection in protean form is
continually being raised by a class of shallow-thinking men with
whom the editor of the ICONOCLAST should not be proud to herd.
"What difference docs it make," they say, "whether I pay rent to
the government or to a landlord when I've got to pay it anyhow?
And what difference does it make whether taxes are levied on my
land or my improvements, or both, so long as I've got to pay them
with the products of my labor?"

Now, it is quite true that all taxes of whatever nature are paid
out of the products of labor. But must they be for that reason a
tax on labor products. Let us see. I suppose you won't deny that
a unit of labor applies to different kinds of land will give very
different results. Suppose that a unit of labor produces on A's
land 4, on B's 3, on C's 2 and on D's 1. A's land is the most,
and D's is the least, productive land in use in the community to
which they belong. B's and C's represent intermediate grades.
Suppose each occupies the best land that was open to him when he
entered into possession. Now, B, and C, and D have just as good a
right to the use of the best land as A had. Manifestly then, if
this be the whole story, there cannot be equality of opportunity
where a unit of labor produces such different results, all other
things being equal except the land. How is this equality to be
secured? There is but one possible way. Each must surrender for
the common use of all, himself included, whatever advantages
accrues to him from the possession of land superior to that which
falls to the lot of him who occupies the poorest. In the case
stated, what the unit of labor produces for D, is what it should
produce for A, B and C, if these are not to have an advantage of
natural opportunity over D. Hence equity is secured when A pays
3, D, 2 and C, 1 into a common fund for the common use of all--to
be expended, say in digging a well, making a road or bridge,
building a school, or other public utility. Is it not manifest
that here the tax which A, B and C pay into a common fund, and
from which D is exempt, is not a tax on their labor products
(though paid out of them) but a tax on the superior advantage
which they enjoy over D, and to which D has just as good a right
as any of them. The result of this arrangement is that each takes
up as much of the best land open to him as he can put to gainful
use, and what he cannot so use he leaves open for the next.
Moreover, he is at no disadvantage with the rest who have come in
ahead of him, for they provide for him, in proportion to their
respective advantages, those public utilities which invariably
arise wherever men live in communities. Of course he will in turn
hold to those who come later the same relation that those who
came earlier held to him. Suppose now that taxes had been levied
on labor products instead of land; all that any land-holder would
have to do to avoid the tax is to produce little or nothing. He
could just squat on his land, neither using it himself nor
letting others use it, but he would not stop at this, for he
would grab to the last acre all that he could possibly get hold
of. Each of the others would do the same in turn, with the sure
result that by and by, E, F and G would find no land left for
them on which they might make a living. So they would have to
hire their labor to those who had already monopolized the land,
or else buy or rent a piece of land from them. Behold now the
devil of landlordism getting his hoof on God's handiwork! Exit
justice, freedom, social peace and plenty. Enter robbery,
slavery, social discontent, consuming grief, riotous but unearned
wealth, degrading pauperism, crime breeding, want, the beggar's
whine, and the tyrant's iron heel. And how did it all come about?
By the simple expedient of taxing labor products in order that
precious landlordism might laugh and grow fat on the bovine
stupidity of the community that contributes its own land values
toward its own enslavement! And yet men vacuously ask, "What
difference does it make?" O tempora! O mores! To be as plain as
is necessary, it makes this four-fold difference. First, it robs
the community of its land values; second, it robs labor of its
wages in the name of taxation; third, it sustains and fosters
landlordism, a most conspicuously damnable difference; fourth, it
exhibits willing workers in enforced idleness; beholding their
families in want on the one hand, and unused land that would
yield them abundance on the other. This last is a difference that
cries to heaven for vengeance, and if it does not always cry in
vain, will W. C. Brann be able to draw his robe close around him
and with a good conscience exclaim, "It's none of my fault; I am
not my brother's keeper."

It will not do, my dear friend; you must think again on the
Single Tax, even though, in doing so, you might make men suspect
that you are not infallible. The sublimest act it will ever be
given you to perform is to candidly confess to your grand and
ever-growing constituency that you were mistaken in your estimate
of the Single Taxers and their faith. "Government must compel
each to pay toll in proportion the amount of wealth it has
produced--and this is the only equitable law of taxation." Just
reflect for a moment what a monstrous conclusion flows from these
premises. Labor applied to land produces all wealth. Landlordism
as such produces nothing. Therefore labor should bear the whole
burden of taxation, while landlordism and all other forms of
monopoly should go scot free. The iniquity of our present system
of taxation is that a portion of it is levied on land instead of
being all levied on labor products, like the tariff! To be
strictly just, we must quit taxing land and exact no royalty from
owners of coal mines and oil wells! That your view?

"There is every indication that his cult has had its day and is
rapidly going to join the many other isms, political and
religious, that have been swallowed up like cast off clothes and
other exuviae by the great mother of dead dogs." This is fine,
incontestably fine! Also forcible, impressibly forcible--with the
force of a squirt of tobacco juice. If "the Single Tax party will
not long survive its creator," perhaps it is because it has not
as much attraction for the great sovereign voter as the blessed
protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression,
you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid
success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle
of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill
McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving
your presence) brought Grover Cleveland, and then contemplate the
ignominy and obscurity has brought George and free silver has
brought Bryan. Evidently George isn't a mouse to McKinley, while
Bryan is but a brindle pup compared to the great and only Grover.
Yes, the "public concept of truth" makes it plain that protection
is all right and Single Tax all wrong. "George is a reformer who
can't reform because he took issue with the wisdom of the world,"
just like the man who said that the earth was round and that the
sun didn't go round it every twenty-four hours, contrary to what
the wisdom of the world had long ago decided.

You are not mistaken in saying that "Mr. George was unable to
keep one of these expounders of his doctrine (a S.T. paper) from
running on the financial rocks." It is a very logical deduction
to draw from this fact that the teachings of the paper were
worthless. Why should anybody teach what does not, in the
teaching, promote his financial prosperity? See what fools
Professors Bemis and Andrews have made of themselves. Because
they did not have due regard for the "public concept of the
truth" they are cashiered; and it serves them right, for the
truth must be vindicated--if it pays. On the other hand, see what
splendid financial successes the ICONOCLAST, the Galveston News
and the so-called yellow journalism of New York all are.
"Deserve, in order to command success," the old copy-book
headline used to say, from which it follows as mud does rain,
that whatever succeeds deserves it, and whatever doesn't,
doesn't. It doesn't take much besides capital to succeed,
however, "where the conditions for the propagation of empiricism
are more favorable than ever before." All you have to do is to
propagate and expound the "public concept of truth" and let the
truth itself alone. The Single Taxers respectfully solicit some
more plain truths on the "Mumbojumboism of George." THOMAS
FLAVIN.

 . . .

Ever since the appearance of my first courteous critique of the
Single Tax theory the followers of that faith have been pouring
in vigorous "replies"; but as my articles were directed to Mr.
George and not to his disciples, I saw no occasion for the latter
to intermeddle in the matter, and the tide of economic wisdom
went to waste. Although a publisher is supposed to be privileged
to select his own contributors, and Mr. George had been requested
to make reply at my expense, the Single Taxers raised a terrible
hue and cry that the ICONOCLAST was unfair in that it "permitted
one side to be presented." In order to cast a little kerosene
upon the troubled waters I decided that they should be heard, and
selected Dr. Flavin as their spokesman, believing him to be the
ablest of those who have followed this particular economic
rainbow into the bogs. So much by way of prolegomenon; now for
the doctor.

My very dear sir, I shall heed your advice to "rise above" the
abuse of those who mistake impudence for argument, and ignore the
discourteous remarks with which you have so liberally interlarded
your discourse. Doubtless you include yourself among that
numerous tribe of Texas titans who can "unhorse" me as easily as
turning a hen over; and having accorded you unlimited space in
which to acquire momentum, I would certainly dread the shock were
I cursed with an atom of polemical pride. Frankly, I wish you
success--trust that you can demonstrate beyond a peradventure of
a doubt that all my objections to the Single Tax are fallacious,
that it is indeed the correct solution of that sphinx riddle
which we must soon answer or be destroyed. At a time when the
industrial problem is pressing upon us with ever increasing
power, it is discouraging to hear grown Americans prattling of
"unhorsing" economic adversaries--priding themselves on polemical
fence, like shyster lawyers, and seeking victory through
sophistry rather than truth by honest inquiry. That is not
patriotism, but a picayune partisanship which I profoundly pity.

Regarding "the public concept of truth" which seems to irritate
you sorely, I will simply say that the people are slow to accept
new and startling truths like those promulgated by Galileo,
Newton and Harvey; but a truth, howsoever strange, GROWS year by
year and age by age, while a falsehood creates more or less
flurry at its birth, then fades into the everlasting night of
utter nothingness. That Mr. George's theory, after several
years of discussion, is declining in popular favor, and has never
made a convert among the careful students of political economy,
is strong presumptive evidence that it is not founded on fact.
The more you hammer truth the brighter it glows; the more you
hammer Georgeism the paler it gets. It is not for me to prove the
fallacy of the Single Tax theory--the onus probandi rests with
its apostles, and they but saltate from mistaken premises to
ridiculous conclusions. Like the German metaphysicians, they are
abstract reasoners who do not trouble themselves about
conditions. It is not well to sneer at "the great blind
multitude" because it fails to see the beauty or wisdom in the
Single Tax, for many a great man before Lincoln's time had
profound respect for the judgment of the common people. "Truth,"
say the Italians, "is lost by too much controversy;" and while
the Georges and Flavins split hairs and spute and spout
themselves into error, the hard- headed farmer and mechanic,
exercising their practical common-sense, arrive at correct
conclusions. In saying that Mr. George has, by his sophistry,
"deceived hundreds of abler men than himself," I simply
accredited him with a feat that has been a thousand times
performed. Carliostro was an ignoramus and possessed very
ordinary intellect, yet for several years he succeeded in
deceiving some of the wisest men of his day with his Egyptian
Masonry idiocy. Thousands of fairly intelligent people believed
poor looney Francis Schlatter a kind of second Messiah, some of
the ablest men of Europe were misled by half-crazy Martin
Luther--and Dr. Flavin regards Henry George's economic
absurdities as omniscience. The latter has "mistaken the
plausible for the actual," has deceived himself with his own
sophistry, else he and his few score noisy followers are wiser
than all the rest of the world, or, for the sake of gain or cheap
notoriety, he's peddling what he knows to be arrant nonsense. You
may take as many "pinches of snuff" on that proposition as you
please.

All your remarks about land values, their origin and rightful
ownership--the tiresome old piece de resistance of every Single
Tax discourse--I answered fully in my two former articles on this
subject, wherein I also explained how the "unearned increment" is
at present appropriated by the public, and I cannot afford to
rethresh old straw for the benefit of Single Taxers who WILL
write and WON'T read. I will remark en passant, however, that by
"unearned increment" I mean exactly what I suppose Mr. George to
mean--increase in the market value of land for which the
proprietor is not responsible. This, I have explained, is already
appropriated by the public, because the total annual increase in
land values in this country--barring betterments of course--does
not exceed the total annual tax levied upon the land. There's
always a boom in land values here and there; but hundreds of
millions of acres, urban and suburban, have not increased a penny
in selling price during the past decade. The owners are reaping
no unearned increment, but they are paying taxes regularly into
the public till. "The exclusive creator or producer of a thing is
the rightful owner," says Dr. Flavin. Quite true; and as the only
thing the community creates for the land owner is the unearned
increment, it has no moral right to take anything more. The
Single Taxers persist in ignoring the fact that there is an
EARNED as well as an UNEARNED increment, and that the former is
as much the property of the individual as the barn he builds or
the calf he breeds. Of this earned increment more anon.

"The highest homage, the highest act of faith which the human
mind and heart can offer to God is to say he could not be God and
pronounce the Single Tax to be unjust!" O hell! That's not
argument, but simply empty declamation intended to tickle the
ears of the groundlings--to raise a whoop among the gallery gods.
As you have suggested, "Come, let us argue with dignity and
composure," instead of emitting fanatical screeches like fresh
converts at a Methodist campmeeting, let's see about this God of
Justice business: About 200 years ago a party whom we will call
Brann, as that happened to be his name "cleared" a farm in the
wilds of Virginia, enduring all the hardships and dangers of the
frontier. He built roads and bridges, drained swamps,
exterminated Indians and wild animals. His descendants helped
drive out the British butchers, some of them being scalped alive
by John Bull's red allies, while their wives and children were
tomahawked. They contributed in their humble way to secure the
blessings of free government which the present inhabitants of
Virginia enjoyed. They helped support schools, churches and
charities and otherwise make the district desirable as a place of
residence. Finally railways were built and stores opened, not to
enrich these people, but to be enriched by them. These
conveniences added to the value of the land, but were paid for at
a good round price, as such things ever are by the users. The
land is now worth about $30.00 an acre, and while this value is
unquestionably due to the presence of populatoin,{sic} it is fair
to assume that in two centuries the estate has yielded that much
in the shape of taxes. As the present owner, I ask, has the Old
Dominion against that property for unearned increment? I say it
has not; that the $30.00 an acre represents the savings of seven
generations of my ancestors; that while the community created the
land value, said value has been duly purchased and paid for--that
it represents EARNED increment. Unearned increment is not what
Dr. Elavin is after; he would confiscate the RENT of my
patrimony; he would deprive me of the VALUES created by my
people--would allow me no larger share therein than he accords to
the newly arrived immigrant from that damned island we call
England. If our God says THAT is just, then I want no angelic
wings--prefer to associate with Satan. Has the son a just right
to wealth created and solemnly bequeathed him by his sire? That
land is as much mine as the gold would be mine, had my people
their savings in that shape, and the rent is mine as justly as
the interest on the gold would be. It is quite true that none of
my clan CREATED that land; it is true that I cannot show a title
to it signed by God Almighty and counter- signed by the Savior,
any more than I can show a title from the same high source to the
watch I hold in my hand; but I have a title to all the rights,
conveniences and profits appertaining to control of the land,
issued by their creator, the community, for value received. I
have the same title to the land that I have to the watch; not to
the material made by the Almighty, but to whatsoever has been
added of desirability thereto by the action of man. The community
has been settled with up-to-date for both the land and the watch,
but has a continuing claim against them so long as it enables me
to employ them advantageously than I could without its
assistance. If I sell my land the purchaser receives in return
for his money all those advantages which it required so many
years of toil and danger to win--he pays for the sacrifices made
by others in preference to going into the wilderness and making
them himself. The market value of my land is a "labor product,"
just as my watch is a labor product, hence all this prattle about
relieving industry of governmental burdens by any economic
thaumaturgy whatsoever is the merest moonshine.

It is quite true that "the great middle class" does not own the
most valuable lots in New York and London; but I have the
"chilled steel" hardihood to affirm that not only the bulk of the
land but of the land values are in the possession of people who
are poor as compared with the occupants of those sumptuous
palaces which the George conspiracy for the further enrichment if
Dives and the starvation of Lazaras would exempt from taxation.
The total wealth of this nation is not far from 75 billions,
while all the land, exclusive of improvements, would not sell for
more than 20 billion. The naked land of our 5 million farms is
estimated at about 10 billion, so that leaves but about 10
billion for urban lands--less than one-seventh of the total
value. I have no reliable statistics at hand showing what
proportion of urban inhabitants own their homes; but we may
safely assume that one-half do so. Now, if this be true, we may
also assume that the land values held by the very wealthy--the
people whom the Single Taxers profess to be after,--do not exceed
one-fourth of all land values, or one-fifteenth of total property
values. Hence you see it is quite possible for 250,000 to own 80
per cent of ALL values, while the bulk of the LAND values remain
with the common people. And it is these common people that the
Single Tax will crush for the benefit of these 250,000
plutocrats, the bulk of whose wealth is in personal property.

Sit down and think it over, doctor; you are really too bright a
man to be led astray by the razzle-dazzle of Single Tax
sophistry. You do your enviable reputation for intelligence a
rank injustice by mistaking poor old George for an economic
Messiah, and if you are not careful somebody will try to sell you
a gold-brick or stock in a Klondike company. Suppose that you and
Hon. Walter Gresham occupy residence lots worth $1,000 each, but
that you inhabit a $1,500 cottage and he a $150,000 mansion; and
suppose that your income is $2,000 a year while his is $20,000:
Do you think there is any necessity for tearing your balbriggan
undershirt because not compelled to put up as much for the
maintenance of government as your wealthy neighbor? Is it at all
probable that Gresham will become discouraged, refuse to longer
serve the corporations and sit in the woodshed and sulk, even
jump off the bridge, because taxed in proportion to the property
in his possession rather than according to the land he occupies?
If Col. Moody builds a million dollar cotton mill on suburban
land worth but $500 why should you refuse to sleep o' nights
because not required to pay double the taxes of that old duffer?
As a worthy disciple of Aesculapius you should know that too
heavy a burden on your own back is liable to make you bow-legged.

I suspected all along that the Single Tax would require several
able-bodied "corollaries" to enable it to effect much of a
reformation, to usher in the Golden Age. It were very nice to
throw unused coal and oil lands "open to all on equal terms,"
have the government pipe off all their products for equal pay,
then compel operators by piling on taxes to maintain high prices
to consumers "till other companies got well on their feet"--and a
combination was effected. If Rockefeller, Hanna, Carnegie, et id
genes omnes tried any of their old tricks "we might get after
them"--just as we HAVE long been doing. These plutocrats are so
afraid of our politicians that there is danger of their dying of
neuropathy. If the coal, iron and oil operators advance prices
we'll advance their taxes--for the people to pay. And I suppose
that when the whiskey trust get gay, the doctor will raise the
rent of corn land, when the cotton-seed oil trust becomes too
smooth, he'll knock it on the head by adding a dollar an acre to
cotton land, and so on until we get the cormorant fairly by the
goozle. It's all dead easy when you understand it--works as
smoothly as an "iridescent dream" on a toboggan slide! We are
continually discovering new coal, iron and oil districts, and
these are "open to all on equal terms"--I can acquire them just
as cheaply as can Rockefeller or Carnegie. Then what's the
matter? I lack the capital to properly develop them, to produce
so cheaply as my wealthy competitors. Or if able to become a
thorn in the side of the great corporations they either lower
prices and freeze me out or make it to my advantage to enter the
syndicate. When Rockefeller lowers the price of oil he lowers his
rent; when I am either crushed by competition or taken in out of
the cold, he advances the price of oil. His rent is regulated by
competition for the use of oil lands--you cannot make him pay
more than the market price. When you raise his rent you raise
that of all the other operators in proportion, and the same is
the same as an increase of the excise on whisky--the people get a
meaner grade of goods at a higher price. If an ordinary man
cooked up such a scheme as that for the benefit of the people,
I'd feel justified in calling him a "crank," and I cannot
conceive how a man like Dr. Slavin can tack his signature to such
tommy-rot. Before we can make the Single Tax "a go" we've got to
have government ownership of telegraphs, railways, pipe-lines,
etc., etc., and use the taxing power to regulate prices just as
the Republicans do the tariff--and for what? To humble the
haughty landlord? Oh no; to knock the stuffing out of capital--so
long wept over by Single Taxers as a fellow sufferer with toil.
Why not call the George system Communism?--"a rose by any other
name," etc.

When the doctor get matters arranged it will really make no
difference whether a farmer is located in the black-waxy
district, or on the arid cactus-cursed lands of the trans-Pecos
country, as he will have to surrender to the public all he
produces in excess of what the poorest land in use will yield. He
will have no incentive to study the capabilities of his land and
bring to bear upon it exceptional industry, for he will be
deprived of all the increase he can make it yield by such
methods. A will be placed on a parity with D because he took the
best land he could get instead of the poorest he could find.
Intelligence and enterprise are to have no reward under the new
regime. You can squat on a sand-bank or pile of rocks in any
community and be on a financial parity with the man whose black
soil reaches to the axis of the earth--no need to bundle the old
woman into a covered wagon, tie the brindled cow to the feed-box
and head for a country where better land is to be had. There will
be no temptation to carve out a home in the wilderness, for later
immigrants will set at naught your toil and sacrifices and
deprive your children of their patrimony--the best situated
merchant in Waco will have no advantage of the keeper of a tent
store on a side street of Yuba Dam or Tombstone. A tax will not
longer be "a fine on industry"--it will be a fine on fools.

My Galveston friend should not work himself into a fit of
hysteria because I declared that the George doctrine has had its
day, it being sheer folly to quarrel with a self-evident fact.
When Henry George first flamed forth he made a great deal of
money out of his writings, and has thus far shown no more
aversion to the silver than has your humble servant. His paper
was doubtless launched with a view of promoting his financial and
political fortunes, for he did not go broke publishing it "for
the good of the cause," but promptly rung off when he found that
it did not PAY, hence I fail to see that he is entitled to any
more credit than Col. Belo or myself. I called attention to the
failure of his paper, not in a spirit of rejoicing over its
downfall, but simply to accentuate the fact, after giving
some years to consideration of his rather pretty platitudes, that
people condemned them--that his heroic attempt to reclothe with
living flesh the bones of the impot unique had proven a dismal
failure. Now, my dear doctor, I have not undertaken in this hasty
article to fully expose this Single Tax fallacy, having attended
to that heretofore, but simply to answer a few of your arguments
which I had not hitherto heard. Let's drop the subject--let the
dead go bury its dead, while we devote our energies to LIVING
issues.


* * *
TEXAS TOPICS.

I note with unfeigned pleasure that, according to claims of
Baylor University, it opens the present season with a larger
contingent of students, male and female, than ever before. This
proves that Texas Baptists are determined to support it at any
sacrifice--that they believe it better that their daughters
should be exposed to its historic dangers and their sons
condemned to grow up in ignorance than that this manufactory of
ministers and Magdalenes should be permitted to perish. It is to
be devoutly hoped that the recent expose of Baylor's criminal
carelessness will have a beneficial effort--that hence forth
orphan girls will not be ravished on the premises of its
president, and that fewer young lady students will be sent home
enciente. The ICONOCLAST would like to see Baylor University, so
called, become an honor to Texas instead of an educational
eye-sore, would like to hear it spoken of with reverence instead
of sneeringly referred to by men about town as worse than a
harem. Probably Baylor has never been so bad as many imagined,
that the joint-keepers in the Reservation have been mistaken in
regarding it as a rival, that the number of female students sent
away to conceal their shame has been exaggerated; still I imagine
that both its morale and educational advantages are susceptible
of considerable improvement. The ICONOCLAST desires to see Baylor
a veritable pantechnicon of learning--at least a place where the
careful student may acquire something really worth
remembering--instead of a Dotheboys (and girls) hall, a
Squeeritic graft to relieve simple Baptist folk of their
hard-earned boodle by beludaling the brains of their bairns with
mis-called education. Unfortunately there is more brazen
quackery in our sectarian colleges than was every dreamed of by
Cagliostro. The faculty of such institutions is usually composed
of superficially educated people who know even less than is
contained in the text-books. As a rule they are employed because
they will serve at a beggarly price, but sometimes because their
employers are themselves too ignorant to properly pass upon the
qualifications of others. You cannot estimate a man's intellect
by the length of his purse, by the amount of money he has made
and saved; but it is quite safe to judge a man's skill in his
vocation by the salary he can command. I am informed that there
has never been a time when the salary of the president of Baylor
University exceeded $2,000 per annum--about half that of a good
whisky salesman or advertising solicitor for a second-class
newspaper. If such be the salary of the president, what must be
those of the "professors"? I imagine their salaries run from $40
a month up to that of a second assistant book-keeper in a
fashionable livery-stable. Judging by the salaries which they are
compelled to accept, I doubt if there be a member of the Baylor
faculty, including the president, who could obtain the position
of principal of any public high school in the state. People
cannot impart information which they do not possess; hence it is
that the graduates of Baylor have not been really educated, but
rather what the erstwhile Mr. Shakespeare would call
"clapper-clawed." There is no reason, however, why the
institution should be in the future so intellectually and morally
unprofitable as in the past. Change is the order of the universe,
and as Baylor cannot very well become worse it must of
necessity become better. It will have the unswerving support
of the ICONOCLAST in every effort to place itself upon a higher
educational plane, to honestly earn the money it pockets as
tuition fees. I am even willing to conduct a night school free of
charge during three months in the year for the instruction of its
faculty if each member thereof will give bond not to seek a
better paying situation elsewhere as soon as he learns something.
In any event, when Baylor can send me a valedictorian fresh from
its walls who is better informed than the average graduate of our
public schools, I'll give it a thousand dollars as evidence of my
regard, and half as much annually thereafter to encourage it in
the pursuit of common sense.

 . . .

I greatly regret that my Baptist brethren, Drs. Hayden and
Cranfill, Burleson and Carroll, should have gotten into a
spiteful and un-Christian snarl over so pitiful a thing as
Baylor's $2,000 presidency--that they should give to the world
such a flagrant imitation of a lot of cut-throat unregenerates
out for the long green. If one-half that Hayden and Cranfill are
saying about each other in their respective papers be true--that
I presume that it is--then both ought to be in the penitientiary.
Brethren, please to remember that ye are posing as guardians of
morals, as examples for mankind--as people out of whom the
original sin has been soaked in the Baptist pool and whose paps
are filled to the bursting point with the milk of human kindness.
If you must fight and scratch like a brace of Kilkenny cats, why
the hell don't you sneak quietly into the woods and fight it out
instead of exhibiting your blatant jackasserie to the simple
people of Dallas and McLennan counties and thereby bringing our
blessed church into contempt! Gadzooks! if you splenetic-hearted
old duffers don't sand your hands and take a fresh grip on your
Christian charity I'll resign my position as chief priest of the
Baptist church and become a Mormon elder. I'll just be
cofferdamned if I propose to remain at the head of a church whose
educators, preachers and editors are forever hacking away at each
other's goozle with a hand-ax and slinging slime like a lot of
colored courtesans.

 . . .

Our little boiler-plate contemporary, the Austin Statesman,
prints a court docket containing 69 divorce cases--side by side
with 12 church notices. Which is cause and which effect I will
not assume to say; but Austin is headquarters for
camp-meetings--and every neurologists endorsed the ICONOCLAST'S
theory that emotional religion is a terrible strain on the
Seventh Commandment.

 . . .

"Our heroic young," etc., etc., announces himself a candidate for
the United States Senate to succeed Roger Q. Mills. The young
man's modesty is really monumental. Having succeeded by all
manner of petty chicanery in capturing the governorship, I am
surprised that he isn't seeking the job of Jehovah. Displacing
Mills with Culberson were much like substituting a Chinese joss
for the Apollo Belvedere or an itch bacillus for a bull-elephant.
I really cannot consent that the little fellow be sent to
Washington lest some hurdy gurdy man should swipe him. Chawles
says: "Next spring and summer I shall canvas the state
thoroughly, presenting my views of public questions to the
people." Which is to say that while we are paying him a good
stiff salary for doing his little best to discharge the duties of
one office, he will "canvas the state thoroughly" chasing
another. If he attempts to perpetuate such a brazen swindle on
the tax-payers of Texas, I'll camp on his trail to some extent,
and see that he has a hot time in at least a few old towns. I
cannot afford to trail him at my own expense all spring and
summer, while he's cavorting around on free passes and drawing
$11 a day from the public purse for unrendered services; but I'll
trump his card in all the large Texas towns as quick as it
strikes the table. I'm getting dead rotten tired of helping pay
the salaries of Texas officials for time devoted to
fence-building, and it will afford me considerable SATISFACTION
to place this cold-blooded little ward on the body politic
properly before the people. The duties of the governor's office
were supposed to be so onerous that a board of pardons was
created at the tax-payers' expense to lighten his labors; yet Mr.
Culberson proposed to spend the spring and summer, not in a
reasonable effort to earn his salary, but in explaining why he
should be sent to the senate. Coming before us thus
self-evidently unfaithful over a few things, this "heroic young
Christian" poker-player and red-light habitue has the supernal
gall to ask us to make him lord over many things,--to accord him
political promotion for dereliction of duty! In the name of
Balaam's she-ass, does this snub-nosed little snipe suppose that
we are all hopeless idiots? You are the state's hired hand,
Charlie boy--duly employed to remain at Austin and display your
anserine ignorance in the governor's office. The people don't
care two whoops in hades what your "opinions" may be on any
subject within the purview of the United States Senate. If you
want to spend the "spring and summer" rainbow chasing, a proper
sense of duty to your employers, even a slight conception of
commercial honor, would induce you to resign your present
position. If you are destitute of both honor and decency you will
probably campaign at our expense as you have promised; but I
opine that I can pour enough hot shot under your little
shirt-tails in a few engagements to drive you back to your duty,
and that you will go in a gallop. What the devil do you suppose
that Texans want with a two- faced little icicle like yourself in
the United States Senate? What taxpayer has asked you to become a
candidate? Despite all your wire-pulling, your trading and
self-seeking, and the further fact that you are employing the
state machinery to strengthen your pull, you really stand no more
show of succeeding Roger Q. Mills than you do of succeeding the
Czar of Russia. You have managed to get thus far, not on your own
merits, but solely because you are "Old Dave" Culberson's son.
Yours is simply a case of magni nominis umbra, and the umbra is
getting deuced thin at the edges, is no longer capable of
concealing the ass. For many years past we have been paying men
fat salaries for gadding about the country exploiting their
supposed "opinions." It is high time we put an end to such
idiocy, and I have selected you, as probably the worst specimen
of these political malefactors, of which to make an example in
the interest of honesty.

 . . .

A correspondent writes me from Nacogdoches, Texas: "The Baptists
of this town have forced your agent to promise to discontinue
selling the ICONOCLAST under penalty of expulsion from the
church." That's all right; having purchased and paid for a
Baptist ticket to the heavenly henceforth, he doesn't want to be
bounced from the boat. Being thrown overboard in a canal two feet
wide and four feet deep is not so bad by itself considered, but
contumacious recalcitrants are invariable boycotted in business
by the hydrocephalous sect which boasts that it was the first to
establish liberty of conscience and freedom of speech in this
country, yet which has been striving desperately for a hundred
years to banish the last vestige of individuality and transform
this nation into a pharisaical theocracy with some priorient
hypocrite as its heierach. The ICONOCLAST is in its seventh
volume and has never yet been caught in a falsehood or published
an unclean advertisement. I am proud to say that no honest man or
virtuous woman was ever its enemy, but that holy hypocrites and
sanctified harlots regard it with the same aversion that a
pickpocket does a policeman. Yes; the action of the Baptists of
Nacogdoches was perfectly natural. What they want is a paper that
will afford them a charming mixture of camp-meeting notices and
syphilitic nostrums, prayer-meetings and abortion pills,
Prohibition rallies and lost manhood restorers. I cheerfully
recommend the Baptist Standard to their kindly consideration.

 . . .

When J. S. Hogg was governor of Texas he compelled the Southern
Pacific road to move a train-load of Coxey-ites, whom it had,
carried in from California and side tracked west of San Antonio
to starve. As counsel for that impudent corporation--whose
officials seem to have been formed of the quintessential extract
of the exerementitious matter of the whole earth--he now makes a
"compromise" with the Culberson crew whereby it is some $975,000
IN and the state that much OUT. James Stephen can scarce be
blamed for securing every possible advantage for his client, even
tho' it be such a notorious criminal as the "Sunset"; but had he
been attorney for the state instead of for the corporation there
would have been no compounding of a felony "for the good of the
people," no sacrifice of both dignity and dollars. It is amusing
to see Culberson and Crane making a house of refuge of the coat
tails of Reagan. "He approved it! he approved it!" Of course he
approved it--Attorney General Crane "not having time during his
term of office to prosecute all the cases." But he'll "have time"
just as hard to spend half of next year chasing the governorship
on time paid for by the people. Reagan was compelled to accept
the compromise because the Culbersonian crew were too busy
office-chasing to prosecute the corporation. If the Culbersonian
crowd lined their pockets by that compromise they are a set of
thieves; if they didn't line their pockets they simply suffered
the corporation to play 'em for a pack of damphools. As neither a
thief nor a fool is fit to hold a public office, I move that we
build a large zinc-lined political coffin and bury the whole
crowd.

 . . .

The St. Louis Mirror, the brightest weekly in the world, recently
had a remarkably interesting article on Texas politics; but
somehow it suggested to my mind that German metaphysician who,
having never seen a lion or read a description of one, undertook
to evolve a correct idea of the king of beasts from his own inner
consciousness.

. . .

It were interesting to know what kind of a swindle W. L. Moody &
Co. have in soak this season for the guileless cotton grower. I
have provided this office with a car-load of nickel-plated
tear-jugs for the benefit of cotton men who will call later to
tell me their troubles. My idea is to build a condenser, start a
wholesale salt store and supply Baptist dipping-tanks with water
free of wiggletails. Say! There's millions in it. Col. Mulberry
Seller's eye-water enterprise were as nothing to my graft when I
get it agoing.

 . . .

I note that the Wrong-Reverend E. H. Harman, formerly presiding
elder of the Methodist church at Brenham, but given the grand
bounce for getting too gay at Galveston, where, in company with
another sanctified ministerial hypocrite named Wimberly, he had
"a hot time in the old town," with hacks, harlots and
barrel-house booze, has been converted to the Christian (or
Campbellite) faith and proposes to preach. Possibly his
conversion is genuine; but it is worthy of remark that he saw
nothing attractive in the Christian cult until no longer allowed
to occupy a Methodist pulpit--until reduced to the necessity of
either seeking a job in a new corner of the Lord's vineyard or
taking a fall out of the lowly cotton patch. He ought to make an
excellent running mate for the "Rev." Granville Jones, the poorty
preacher who puts his picture on his evangelical guttersnipes to
show the people how a holy man of God looks after confessing to
having forged a letter derogatory to a poor motherless working
girl's reputation. As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I
have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical
parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of
two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the
Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that
the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a
nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity of his rear elevation
with a vigorous application of pine plank.

* * *
THE RETORT COURTEOUS.

F. L. Lewis writes from San Antonio to an obscure sheet called
the Railway Age, that Brann is not an Englishman as the Age
editor in one of his elephantine efforts to be humorous seems to
have suggested, and that "all Englishmen in this country
repudiate his every utterance." Thanks, awfully; that's the
highest compliment ever paid an American sovereign by a British
subject. When I next visit San Antonio I'll testify my gratitude
by giving Lewis 50 cents instead of the usual two-bits for toting
my grip from the "Sap" depot to the Menger hotel. I once said,
"There are some very decent and brainy Englishmen;" but as all
Englishmen in this country repudiate the soft impeachment, I
hasten to acknowledge my error. As the editor of the Age is quite
anxious to ascertain my nationality he probably suspects that I
may be his father.

 . . .

The Independent, which I infer from the date-line of a letter
calling attention to its existence, is published at Pomeroy,
Wash., proposes, bumbye, to "give a history of the robberies
committed by Brann during the war." H----;! I can do that myself.
Attired in a triangular strip of birds-eye linen and emitting
savage yells, I repeatedly stormed and captured the most
magnificent breast-works ever built in Kentucky and ravenously
appropriated whatsoever I found therein without so much as a
thankee mum. Yes sirree, I was a robber dead-right in those old
days; but the Independent editor is safe: he's got nothing but a
shirt-tail full o' pied type and a card of membership in the
A.P.A.--Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. I have no use for his
"plant," and God knows I would not be caught dead in a Chinese
opium den with his certificate of infamy concealed in my clothes.

 . . .

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch of August 20, contains a half-page
puff of one John Morrissey, who seems to be a peripatetic
iconoclast who has started out with a Bible in one hand, and a
free lunch in the other to abolish preachers. According to
Morrissey he was a Roman Catholic until he learned better, a
drunkard until "the Spirit of God entered his heart" and caused
his reformation, and used to write sermons for St. Louis
preachers who palmed them off as their own. I don't know about
that; but I know that of the interview he gave the Pee-Dee a
column was cribbed without credit from the article on "Charity"
in "Brann's Scrap-Book." "The Spirit of God" may have done much
for Morrissey, but it hasn't cured him of the thieving habit, and
I would advise people to keep a sharp eyes on their portable
property until this religious reformer succeeds in breaking into
the penitentiary.

 . . .

The Texas Republican, which appears semi-occasionally at
Greenville, Tex., denounces in what Dorenus was wont to term
"livid language," my statement to the effect that a nation pays
for its imports with its exports. He says it is all "iconoclastic
foolishness," declares that a nation does nothing of the kind,
and proceeds to animadvert in an unchristian spirit on the
density of my economic ignorance. My contemporary's criticism is
clearly unconstitutional in that it is cruel and unusual
punishment. Now that its editor has annihilated my poor little
theory, it is his duty as a great public educator and charter
member of the Markhanna Illuminati, to inform me what the hades a
nation DOES pay for its imports with, instead of
permitting me, as he seems inclined, to "burst in ignorance." You
have the floor, my sweet little man, and the shades of all the
standard economists from Smith to Walker are waiting to see you
raise one of their favorite dogmas over the ropes. Call Prof.
Jevons a jackass, give Ricardo a tremendous rap, have no mercy on
John Stuart Mill, make old Adam Smith's bones to rattle, take a
terrible fall out of Turgot--then flap your ears and bray until
the welkin rings again. That's the way to settle a political
adversary who goes galivanting off after false economic gods. In
the meantime it might be a good idea to take your brains out,
brush the cobwebs off its cogs and apply a little kerosene with a
corncob.

 . . .

It is seldom indeed that I give any attention to insulting
letters, but I cannot refrain from paying my respects to one
Byron Jassack Wales, who, with gray goose-quill for Pelian spear,
charges down on the ICONOCLAST as blithely as a gay moss-trooper
making an English swine-herd hard to catch. Such insults usually
come unsigned--are simply crass insolence which their cowardly
authors fear to father; but Byron sets down all the dreaful
things he thinks of Brann, boldly signs his name and adds an
ornamental flourish of defiance. The possibility of some long-
legged, slouch-hatted, wire-moustached cowboy ambling into his
august presence armed with a shooting iron carrying iron bullets
as big as goose-eggs and hurling him with a flash and whoop into
the problematical hitherto, does not shake to its base the heroic
fortitude of the man whose mother named him for the most
notorious chippy-chaser known to history. Byron proposed to
express his opinion, to say what he dad-burned pleases, though
the redoubtable Lieutenant-Colonel Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, of
Houston, who does all the ICONOCLAST'S fighting under yearly
contract, should swoop down upon him like a double-barreled besom
of destruction,

 "With death-shot glowing in his fiery hand And eye that
scorcheth all it looks upon."

 Byron is offended because I saw fit to criticize New York's
priorient parvenues for exploiting the pregnancy of their wives
in the public-prints, and he lets me know where he can be found
in case his remarks offend, by daringly dating his letter "New
York." True, he refrains from giving his street and number--even
tears the printed headings off the letter paper he employs; but
that does not matter, as in a little village like New York a
Texan with a hair-trigger temper has only to inquire of the first
man he meets to be directed to the one he wants. Byron insists
that I print his letter to show people what a desperate
dare-devil he is; but I refrain lest it scare all the cattle off
the range and cause Bill Fewell and Doc Yandell of EL Paso to
move over into Mexico. Among other dreadful things he promises to
have my paper suppressed by the postal authorities if I speak of
him disrespectfully, which proves that he has a tremendous
political pull concealed about his person. I guess I'm safe so
far as he is concerned for a careful inspection of his letter
makes apparent the utter impossibility of speaking of Lord Byron
Jassack Wales disrespectfully--indicates that it were fulsome
flattery to refer to him as a blind pile on the body politic, a
suppurating sore on the hedonistic society of Sodom.

 . . .

T. Shelley Sutton, of Boise City, Idaho, has "writ a pome"
entitled "That Man Brann," and the proud author sends me an
A.P.A. paper containing his production. It is an excellent
composition--of its kind; and I am gratified to learn that it has
at least gravitated to its proper level. Some six months ago a
commercial traveller sent me substantially the same thing, saying
that he had copied from the walls of a water closet in a Kentucky
hotel. It appears that it was too foul to harmonize with the
place in which it was composed, so it was stolen by a thieving
yahoo in search of carrion and puked into the putrid columns of
an A.P.A. paper. T. Shelley Sutton can probably find more
"original poetry" in the same place.

 . . .

"Rev." Bill Homan, who conducts a little pecasmman paper
somewhere in North Texas for the long green and the misguidance
of three or four hundred fork-o'-the-creek Campbellites, devotes
two more columns of his raucous tommyrot and brainless balderdash
to the Howell-Jones imbroglio. Although he manages to tell at
least three deliberate lies in his idiotic eructation, he dares
not deny that the trial committee, of which he was a member,
permitted Jones to continue belching his fetid bile in the
Christian pulpit after being cornered and compelled to confess to
a cowardly crime which should be rewarded with a rope. Until this
corticiferous little cur explains why he is defending a
fourth-class preacher who confesses to having foully insulted, by
a base forgery, a motherless young girl committed to his care,
the ICONOCLAST must, for the sake of its own self-respect,
decline further controversy.

* * *
BRANN VS. BAYLOR.

REVOLVERS, ROPES AND RELIGION.

I have just been enjoying the first holiday I have had in fifteen
years. Owing to circumstances entirely beyond my control, I
devoted the major part of the past month to digesting a couple of
installments of Saving Grace presented by my Baptist brethren,
and carefully rubbed in with revolvers and ropes, loaded canes
and miscellaneous cudgels--with almost any old thing calculated
to make a sinner reflect upon the status of his soul. That
explains the short-comings of the present issue of the
ICONOCLAST. One cannot write philosophic essays while dallying
with the Baptist faith. It were too much like mixing Websterian
dignity with a cataleptoid convulsion, or sitting on a red ant
hill and trying to look unconcerned. Here in Waco our religious
zeal registers 600 in the shade, and when we hold a love-feast
you can hear the unctuous echoes of our hosannahs from Tadmor in
the Wilderness to the Pillars of Hercules. We believe with St.
Paul that faith without works is dead; hence we gird up our loins
with the sweet cestus of love, grab our guns and go whooping
forth to "capture the world for Christ." When we find a
contumacious sinner we waste no time in theological controversy
or moral suasion, but promptly round him up with a rope and bump
his head, and we bump it hard. Why consume our energies
"agonizing with an emissary of Satan," explaining his error and
striving by honeyed phrases to lead him into the light, when it
is so much easier to seize him by the pompadour and pantelettes
and drag him bodily from the abyss? Some may complain that our
Christian charity carries a razor edge, that we skim the cream
off our milk of human kindness then put the can under an alkali
pump before serving it to our customers as a prime article; but
bless God! they can scarce expect to

 ". . . be carried to the skies
 On flowery beds of ease,
 Whilst others fight to win the prize
 And sail through bloody seas."

My Baptist brethren desired to send me as a missionary to
foreign lands, and their invitation was so urgent, their
expressions of regard so fervent that I am now wearing my head in
a sling and trying to write with my left hand. Although they
declared that I had an imperative "call" to go, and would tempt
Providence by loitering longer than one short day, I concluded to
remain in Waco and preach them a few more of my popular sermons
from that favorite text, "If ye forgive not men their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." It is quite
possible that a few heathen will go to hell whom I might enable
to find the river route to heaven, but I believe in doing the
duty that lies next my hand--in first saving the heathen right
here at home.

But enough of persiflage; now for cold facts. In all candor, I
would cheerfully ignore the recent disgraceful occurrences in
this city could I do so in justice to the South in general and to
Texas in particular. I have no revenge to gratify, no more
feeling in the matter than though the assaults had been made upon
an utter stranger. It is quite true that for a time I was eager
to call my assailants out one by one and settle the affair after
the manner of our fathers; but being creditably informed that
instead of honoring a cartel, they would make it the basis of a
legal complaint and send me to the penitentiary, and having no
desire to enact the role of the street assassin, I became once
more a law-abiding citizen. Truth to tell, there's not one of the
whole cowardly tribe who's worth a charge of buckshot, who
deserves so much honor as being sent to hell by a white man's
hand. If Socrates was poisoned and Christ was crucified for
telling unpalatable truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of
their time, it would ill become me to complain of a milder
martyrdom for a like offense. It may be urged that having been
twice accused of the heinous crime of slandering young ladies,
and twice beset on that pretext by armed thugs, I owe it to
myself to make some explanation satisfactory to the public. Not
at all; from my youth up noble womanhood has been the very god of
my idolatry; and now that I have reached the noon of life, if the
reputation which I have honestly earned as a faithful defender of
the vestal fires can be blown adown the wind by the rank breath
of lying rascals, I would not put forth a hand to check its
flight. If old scars received while defending woman's name and
fame in paths of peril which my traducers dare not tread, fail to
speak for me, then to hell with the world, and let its harlot
tongue wag howsoever it will. Never but once did I stoop to
refute a cowardly falsehood circulated about myself. I was
younger then--had not learned that public opinion is a notorious
bawd, that "nailing a lie" but accentuates its circulation.
Unfortunately, the recent assaults upon me are not altogether my
private concern. They were armed protests against a fundamental
principle of this Republic--freedom of the press. They are being
citied by ill advised or malicious persons as evidence of
"Southern Savagery." They are calculated, if suffered to go
unexplained, to cast reproach upon revealed religion. They were
futile but brutal attempts in the last decade of the Nineteenth
century to suppress truth by terror, to conceal the iniquities of
a sectarian college by beating to death the only journalist who
dared to raise his voice in protest. They were appeals to Judge
Lynch to strangle exposure, hence it is imperative that the blame
be placed where it properly belongs; not upon the South, which
unqualifiedly condemns it; not upon the Baptist church, which
indignantly repudiates it; but upon a little coterie of
white-livered black-hearted hypocrites, any of whom could look
thro' a keyhole with both eyes at once, a majority of whom are
either avowed sympathizers with or active members of that
unamerican organization known to infamy as the A.P.A. The same
old God-forsaken gang of moral perverts and intellectual misfits
who more than two years ago brought a Canadian courtesan and an
unfrocked priest to Waco to lecture on A.P.A'ism, and who
threatened at one of these buzzard-feasts to mob me for calling
the latter a cowardly liar, were responsible for my being dragged
with a rope by several hundreds hoodlums up and down a Baptist
college campus in this city Oct. 2, and for the brutal assault
upon me five days later by a pack of would-be assassins who had
waited until my back was unsuspectingly turned before they had
the nerve to get out their guns. I can overlook the assault made
by the college students, although most of them were grown men,
because they were encouraged thereto by their elders. I have
positively refused to prosecute them; but the last assault was
led by a shyster lawyer of middle-age, a so-called "judge," a
member of the board of managers of Baylor. I am seeking no
trouble with any of them--they are perfectly safe in so far as I
am concerned; still if the latter gang are not satisfied with
their cowardly crime, if they regret that they were beaten off
ere they quite succeeded in sending me to Kingdom Come, they have
only to notify me where and when they can be found alone, and
I'll give the whole accursed mob a show for their money. I'm too
slight for a slugger--cannot lick a herd of steers with one pair
o' hands; but I can make a shot-gun sing Come to Christ. I am
credibly informed that "at least half a dozen" of my meek and
lowly Baptist brethren are but awaiting an opportunity to
assassinate me, and that if successful they will plead in
extenuation that I "have slandered Southern women." I walk the
streets of Waco day by day, and I walk them alone. Let these
cur-ristians shoot me in the back if they dare, then plead that
damning lie as excuse for their craven cowardice. If the decent
people of this community fail to chase them to their holes and
feed their viscera to the dogs, then 'd rather be dead and in
hades forever than alive in Waco a single day.

The claim set up by my assailants that I had slandered the female
students of Baylor University is a malicious calumny, that was
but made a lying pretext for the attacks. That my article in the
October ICONOCLAST did NOT impeach the character of the Baylor
girls is amply evidenced by the fact that my offer to leave the
matter to the decision of a committee of reputable business men,
to abjectly apologize and donate $500 to any charity these
gentlemen might name in case the decision was against me, was
flatly refused. "The honor of young ladies is not a proper
subject for arbitration," I was told. Quite true; but the proper
construction of an article which is made a pretext for mob
violence, IS a proper matter for cool-headed and disinterested
parties to pass upon. The Baylorians insisted upon being judge,
jury and executioner--proof positive that they well knew the
article would not stand the arbitrary construction they had
placed upon it. After the first outbreak the Baylor bullies of
the lost manhood stripe and their milk-sick apologists held a
windy powwow in a Baptist church, and there bipedal brutes with
beards, creatures who have thus far succeeded in dodging the
insane asylum, whom an inscrutable Providence has kept out of the
penitentiary to ornament the amen-corner--many of whom do not
pretend to pay their bills--some of whom owe me for the very meat
upon the bones of their scorbutic brats--branded me as a
falsifier while solemnly protesting that they had never read a
line of my paper. They proclaimed in stentor tones and
pigeon-English that would have broken the heart of Lindley
Murray, that I was a defamer of womanhood--while confessing that
they didn't know whether I had ever mentioned a female. They
howled that they "were willing to sign Brann's death-
warrant"--on mere hearsay. These intellectual eunuchs, who
couldn't father an idea if cast bodily into the womb of the
goddess of wisdom, declared positively that I would be permitted
to print nothing more about their beloved Baylor--and that
without knowing whether I had advertised it over two continents
as an oasis in a moral Sahara or a snakehole in the Dismal Swamp.
It was a beautiful, a refreshing sight, this practical approval
of mob violence by unfledged ministers on the campus of a Baptist
college, this raucous tommyrot about death-warrants and ropes,
this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so d----d
ignorant that they couldn't find either end of themselves in the
dark, this chortling over the fact that one desk-emaciated
welter-weight had been caught unawares and trampled upon by a
sanctified mob--a refreshing sight, I say, in a temple
consecrated to that Christ who forgave even his enemies from the
cross. But every man at that meeting who said he never read the
ICONOCLAST deliberately lied. The Baptists all read it. Some
subscribe and pay for it like gentlemen, some buy it, some borrow
it, and the rest steal it from the newsstands. The greatest
trouble I have is to prevent, Baptist preachers spoiling my local
sale by telling everybody in town what the ICONOCLAST contains
before the revised proof-sheets are read. It is but fair to say,
however, that the Baptists were not alone to blame. Much of the
noise was made by a lot of tickey-tailed little politicians who
have no more religion than a rabbit, but who were trying to open
a popular jack-pot with a jimmy. Some of the brawlers were
self-seeking business men, willing to coin blood into boodle,
ready to slander Deity for a plugged dime, anxious to avert a
Baptist boycott by emitting a deal of stinking breath. These
bloated financial ducks in a provincial mud-puddle have had
entirely too much to say. When the present lecture season is
over; when I get the Baptist mob thoroughly cowed; when I can
walk the streets without expecting every moment to get shot from
a stairway or double-banked by the meek and lowly followers of
the Messiah; when I have time to amuse myself with trifles, I'll
sue this brace of Smart Alecs for $20,000 each for deliberate
defamation of character, and if I recover the money I'll use it
to make a partial payment on the grocery bills of the rest of the
gang. Intellectual pigmies who accumulate much cash by trading in
cash or tripe in a country town are quite apt to become too big
for their britches and require to be taken down a peg or two, to
be taught their place. They sometimes have the nickel-plated
nerve to play Rhadamanthus to the purveyors of brains--swell up
like unclean toads and conceive themselves to be in "select
society." Some of them actually imagine themselves of more
importance to this community than Judge Gerald and Waller Baker;
yet you could scrape enough intellect from under Gerald's
toe-nails to build the crew, while Baker forgets more every
fifteen minutes than they have learned since they were born. The
meeting held at the Baptist church to ratify the outrage was
composed of a lot of self-seekers and whining hypocrites, half of
whom would sell their souls for a copper cent and throw in their
risen Lord as lagniappe. It was a mob that writhed and wriggled
in its own putridity like so many maggots, while the local press
cowered before its impotent wrath like young skye-terriers
before a skunk. If I couldn't beget better men with the help of a
digger Indian harem I'd take to the woods and never again look
upon the face of woman. It was a glorious sight to see these
"pore mizzuble wurrums of the dust" spraining their yarn galluses
trying to hurl the writhen bolts of Olympian Jove--and now
bellyaching because hit in the umbilicus with their own
boomerang. The second assault, more brutal and cowardly than the
first, followed as the logical sequence of that powwow of
pietists, peddlers and politicians. The utterances of that
congregation of unclean adders, the resolutions adopted by that
sanctified body of dead-beats in the sanctum sanctorum of the
Baptists, was a bid for blood-injected the idea into the warty
heads of a trio of thugs that by way-laying and beating me to
death they would pass into history as heroes. Then the real
manhood of Waco rose en masse and laid down the law in no
uncertain language to the hungry hypocrites and their Baylorian
hoodlums. They declared that religious intolerance would no
longer be permitted to terrorize this town. Fearing just
retribution at the hands of the citizens, Baylor called out its
three military companies and mounted guard with rifles furnished
by the government, while the very girls in whose name they had
dragged me around the college campus with a rope, laughed them to
scorn and sent me flowers--and the password of the bold sojer
boys. One young lady writes: "The password for the night is
'Napoleon.' Our bold soldiers halted a milk wagon at daylight
this morning. Probably they thought Brann was concealed in one of
the cans with his bowie-knife." Half a dozen men armed with
cannon-crackers could have chased the brave mellish into the
Brazos and danced with the Baylor girls till daybreak--and I
suspect that the latter would have enjoyed the lark. For a third
of a century the bigotry of a lot of water moccasins had been the
supreme law of this land. To obtain an office the politician had
to crawl to it on his marrow bones and slavishly obey its
behests. To obtain trade the merchant had to sneeze whenever it
took snuff. To obtain patronage the local publisher had to make
it the absolute dictator of his policy. Like Jehushran, it "waxed
fat and kicked"--until it got its legs tide in a double bow knot
about its OWN neck. Its tyranny became insupportable, murderous,
there was a new declaration of American independence, and now
this J. Caesar that erstwhile did bestride Central Texas like a
colossus, is more humble than Uriah Heep. And what were the
A.P.Apes of Waco doing while honest men were raising the standard
of revolt and chasing the Baptist hierarchy into its hole? Were
they in the front rank shouting their war-cry of "no union of
church and state"--the "little red school-house" rampant on their
orange-colored rag? Not exactly. They had sneaked off to some bat
cave to plot against the whites, to protest against the
proceedings of their fellow citizens. Had a Baptist editor been
mobbed on the campus of a Catholic college they would have howled
a lung out about Popish tyrannys stood on their heads and fanned
themselves with their own shirt-tails.

The faculty of Baylor protest that they did all in their power to
prevent the brutal outbreak. They confess, however, that it had
been brewing all day, yet they neglected to notify either myself
or the sheriff. Before me is a Lake Charles, La. paper, in which
a letter from one of the scabs who participated in the first
attack is published. He says: "The faculty did not say do it, or
not do it." And that's about the size of it. That the students
were encouraged by one or more members of the board of trustees
can be demonstrated beyond the peradventure of a doubt. All the
stale bath water in all the Baptist tanks this side Perdition
cannot wash the conviction from the public mind that the Baylor
management was behind that howling mob. The second assault was
led by a trustee, a member of the board of managers; and this
after I had stated positively in the local press that I meant no
disparagement of the young ladies--that it was the administration
of the University I was after. In the October ICONOCLAST I
expressed the fervent hope that no more young ladies would be
debauched at Baylor. That constituted the ostensible casus
belli.. Do the trustees of Baylor dare deny that such things HAVE
occurred at that "storm center of misinformation" and ministerial
manufactory? If so, they are a precious long time putting me to
the proof in the courts of this country. Texas has an iron-clad
criminal libel law, and I suspect that I could pay a judgment for
damages in any reasonable sum without spraining my credit or
bankrupting the ICONOCLAST. If they have not the chilled-steel
hardihood to deny that girls have been debauched at Baylor--if by
their resounding silence anent this matter they mean to give
assent--what then? Do they hope that more girls WILL be ruined
there? They may take either horn of the dilemma they like, but I
beg to state that the issue here raised cannot be obscured by
dragging me around with a rope. When Jonah was caught in a scheme
of vindictive rascality he thought he "did well to be angry." The
best thing the Baylorites can do is to 'fess up and reform--it's
too late in the century to suppress truth with six-shooters. I
have heard of no "deplorable accidents" at Add-Ran, the Christian
college, consequently it has no complaints to file against the
ICONOCLAST. The Convent of the Sacred Heart gets along somehow
without "mishaps," and even Paul Quinn, the colored college, is
graduating no "missionaries" for Hungry Hill. Because some girls
go wrong at an institution for the promotion of ignorance, it by
no means follows that all, or any considerable number thereof are
deficient in morality. I doubt not that a vast number of the
female students of Baylor, past and present, are pure as the
flowers that bloom above the green glacier; but some have fallen,
and the conclusion is inevitable that they were not properly
protected from the wiles of the world. I care not how
noble-minded, how pure of heart a girl may be, if she is
committed when young and inexperienced to a college where both
sexes are received, it becomes the imperative duty of the
management to render one false step impossible. When the
president of a pretentious sectarian institute must plead with
the public that he had "wept and prayed over" a 14-year old girl,
but was powerless to prevent her rushing headlong to ruin; when
at a grand rally of the faithful to condemn a well-meant
criticism and encourage mob violence, an old he-goat who couldn't
get trusted at the corner grocery for a pound of soap, confesses
to more than the ICONOCLAST had charged, by saying that some
ACCIDENTS had occurred at the college, it were well for mothers
to look carefully to its management and note its discipline
before entrusting it with their young daughters. "Accidents,"
indeed! Criminal negligence would be a more appropriate name. A
university consecrated to the Baptist Christ, whose trustees lead
cowardly assaults upon law-abiding citizens and beat them with
bludgeons after they are insensible; whose faculty know that mob
violence is contemplated yet fail to report it to the police;
whose students enter the home of a man for the purpose of
dragging him by force and with drawn pistols from the presence of
his family (the Baylor thugs had the impudence to invade my home
in search of me before finding me in the city)--such an
institution, I say, is not a proper guardian for any youth whose
father doesn't desire to see him land in the Baptist pulpit or
the penitenitary. I have been publicly warned on pain of death,
and heaven alone knows what hereafter, not to speak
"disrespectful" of Baylor; but I feel in duty bound to caution
parents against committing their children to such a pestiferous
plague-spot, such a running sore upon the body social.

 . . .

Not only has Baylor demonstrated its unworthiness to be the
custodian of young people of either sex, but such unworthiness
has been proclaimed in the public prints by Dr. Rufus C.
Burleson, who served as its president for almost half a century.
I insisted that the salaries paid the faculty at Baylor were
insufficient to command the services of first class educators,
and that those entrusted with the duty of selecting teachers were
incapable of correctly estimating the educational qualifications
of others Dr. Burleson goes far beyond that, expressly declaring
in the Dallas News that a majority of the present board of
managers are not college educated, that for them to properly
administer discipline and make wise selection of teachers "is
simply impossible." What, in God's name, can be expected of an
institution containing several hundred young people of both
sexes, if it be deficient in dissipline? Of what earthly use is a
University if it be not provided with a wisely selected faculty?
It now remains to be seen whether the Baptist brethren will mob
Dr. Burleson--or sneak up behind him with an assortment of clubs
and six-shooters! But that is not the worst that Dr. Burleson
says. In a published letter of his now before me he denounces Dr.
B. H. Carroll, chairman of the board of trustees and present high
muck-a-muck of Baylor, as an ingrate, a self-seeker, a mischief
maker and an irremediable liar! Now if Burleson is telling the
truth--and I am not prepared to dispute his statements--what can
we expect of a University managed by such a man? I am frank to
confess that I did not suspect Bro. Carroll to be quite so bad. I
knew that he was an intellectual dugout spreading the canvas of a
seventy-four, that there was precious little to him but gab and
gall; but I did not suppose that he was an habitual falsifier and
guilty of base ingratitude. I really hope that Dr. Burleson may
be mistaken--that the new boss of Baylor has not contracted such
a habit of lying that it is utterly impossible for him to tell
the truth. I should dislike to believe all that is said about
each other by the two factions of my Baptist brethren now
struggling for the control of Baylor. According to Carroll, Dr.
Burleson, president emeritus, ought to be in the penitentiary;
according to Burleson, Carroll is not a fit associate for a
brindle cow. "Speak disrespectfully of Baylor and die!" Good
Lord! were I to repeat one-half the Baylor factions are saying
about each other I'd wreck the state. Time was when the faculty
of Baylor was the pride of the South. Those were the days when
many of the noblest men and women of Texas were educated within
its walls. They love their alma mater, not for what she is, but
for what she was. The old professors are gone, have been
supplanted in great part by a lot of priorient little preachers,
selected by a board of trustees, half of whom couldn't tell a
Greek root from a rutabaga, pons asinorum from Balaam's ass. Dr.
Burleson seems to be of the opinion that a majority of the
Baylorian managers were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed
without a diploma--couldn't tell whether a man were construing
Catullus into Sanskrit or pronouncing in Piute a panegeric on a
baked pup. Were I not persona non grata I would like to witness
the classroom performances of these young professors--chosen with
owlish gravity by men who cannot write deer sur without the
expenditure of enough nervo-muscular energy to raise a cotton
crop, chewing off the tips of their tongues and blotting the
paper with their proboscides. Yet for offering to open a night
school for the benefit of the Baylorian faculty I was mobbed; for
intimating that the hoard of managers had not socked with old
Socrates and ripped with old Euripides I was assaulted by one of
their number and his brave body guard and beaten with
six-shooters and bludgeons until I was insensible.

 . . .

It is not my present purpose to drag forth all the grisly
skeletons of Baylor and make them dance for the amusement of the
multitude. I have yielded to the urgent appeals of my friends to
let the institution down easy, to cast a little kerosene on the
troubled waters, to hold out the olive branch to Baylor. Besides,
I already have more holes in my head than nature intended, and am
not particularly anxious to increase the assortment. Let what is
hidden from public ken so remain until that great incubator of
Christian charity, that ganglion of brotherly love, attempts to
redeem its long-standing promise to land me in the penitentiary
for criminal libel. It could serve no good purpose at present to
trace out here the history of those "accidents" so feelingly
referred to at the ratification of the Brann round-up--would but
cause cheeks to flame and hearts to break. I would not destroy
Baylor; I would make it better. I would deprive the ignorant and
vicious of control. I would expel all the hoodlums whose
brutality and cowardice have disgraced it. I would place at its
head a thorough educator and strict disciplinarian, a man of
broad views and who sets a good example by paying his bills. I
would make its diplomas badges of honor as in the old days,
instead of certificates of illiteracy at which public school
children laugh. No, I do not want the presidency--there are
enough perspiring Christians for revenue only quarreling and
lying about each other because of that beggarly plum already. For
months past it has given every Baptist journal in the state a
hot-box, has filled every little preacher's head with all the
petty intrigues of peanut politics. If one-half that the leaders
of the factions, now warring over this $5 per diem bone, say
about each other be true--and I have no evidence to the
contrary--they would disgrace a boozing ken on Boiler avenue. I
do not mean to say that all Texas Baptists are bad; at least 50
per cent. of them are broad-gauge, tolerant, intelligent; the
remainder are small-bore bigots upon whom nature put heads, as
Dean Swift would say, "Solely for the sake of conformity."

 . . .

Baylor and the Baptists complain that the ICONOCLAST has
"persecuted them until it has become unbearable." Bless God! who
began this thing? Before the ICONOCLAST was three days old it was
boycotted by the hydrocephalous sect. As it grew fat on that kind
of fodder, ex-Priest Slattery and his ex-nun wife were brought
hither to lecture on A.P.Aism, and incidentally make the town too
caloric for my comfort. The Baptists took their wives and
daughters to listen to Slattery's foul lies about the convents
and the confessional, the Pope and "his Waco Apostle," and his
most infamous utterances were applauded to the echo. They sent
their wives and daughters to hear the Slattery female defame
women who had given up the pleasures of the world and were
devoting their lives to the reclamation of such unclean creatures
as herself. Slattery's last harangue was delivered to men only
and the house was packed with Baptists and Baylorites at
half-a-dollar a head. The so-called lecture was the foulest thing
that ever fell from the lips of mortal man, yet his audience
gloated over it and rolled his putrid falsehoods as sweet morsels
under its tongue.[1] Unable to restrain my indignation, I arose
and denounced his every utterance as a malicious lie. Immediately
the audience yelled, "Throw him out! Down with him! Smash him!" I
chanced to have my back near the side-wall, and that's why I
wasn't mobbed--the cowardly crew couldn't get BEHIND me. They
suspected that I'd make an angel of the first sanctified galoot
who attempted to place his paws upon me, and none cared to draw
on his celestial bank account. That's the identical gang which
has the immaculate gall to accuse me of defaming virtuous
women--the same gang which applauded Slattery for calling
convents priestly harems wants me killed for expressing the hope
that no more young girls will be debauched at Baylor.

 [1] Brann's reply to Slattery appears in Vol. XII.

 . . .

Scarce had Baylor's applause of Slattery and his woman died
away, scarce had it ceased to gloat over the "iniquities" of
convent schools and priestly harems, scarce had it ceased
chuckling over the crimes of "the Scarlet Woman," ere the police
discovered that the duly ordained "ward of the Baptist church,"
who was being educated at Baylor University for missionary work
among the heathen Catholics of Brazil, was in a dreadfully
"delicate condition." She was brought from Brazil at the tender
age of 11 years by a returning missionary, she was formally
adopted by the Baptist church, she was consecrated to the
salvation of souls and placed at Baylor to be educated. She was
under the special supervision of the president and was a member
of his household--yet at 14 years of age she became enciente. Did
Baylor pity and protect her? Did it strive to secure the
punishment of her seducer? Not exactly. It fired her out and made
no complaint to the police. When the latter discovered her and
she was required by the court to account for her condition, she
stated that she had been forcibly despoiled by a young man about
town on the premises of Baylor's president. It chanced that this
young man was brother to the president's son-in-law, and the
whole influence of Baylor was brought to bear to clear the
accused! The son-in-law, who is a Baptist preacher and editor (as
well as other things not necessary to mention) strove to make her
confess that her guilty paramour was a pickaninny--wanted the
world to believe that orphan girls committed to the care of that
great Baptist college might become enciente by coons! Yet the
Baylor students didn't mob him--none of its trustees laid in wait
for him and slammed him over the head with a six-shooter. The
girl soon put a white babe in evidence--a pretty little 2-pound
Baylorian diploma. The doctors declared that she had been raped
and the case looked ugly for the accused. The child died. The
ignorant little mother wanted money to go to Memphis--and first
thing we knew she had signed a "retraction" and had a ticket to
Mike Conolly's town. Who bought it--and why! Damfino. The
defendant was acquitted of the charge of rape--the age of consent
in Texas being 12 years at that time; but whether she was raped
or seduced, the infamy occurred at Baylor University. That's ONE
of the "deplorable accidents"; but it is not the only one you
will please not forget to remember. Reads like a fairy story,
doesn't it? But the law doesn't permit Texas editors to tell
fairy tales of that type. No doubt the man who has the audacity
to breathe a hope that no more girls will be debauched at Baylor
deserves to die. Dr. Burleson, in the fullness of his Baptist
charity, branded the unfortunate girl as a natural bawd. I don't
know about that; but I do know that after she got beyond
Baylorian influences she married and began leading a respectable
life.

 . . .

Defamer of womanhood? Get the sawlogs out of your own eyes,
brethren, before howling over the micrococci in the optics of
others. For three years past Baptist preachers all over the land
of Christ have been telling their congregations that the
ICONOCLAST is read only by depraved people,--chiefly criminals
and courtesans--and that despite the fact that the names of
thousands of the noblest men and women of America are on its
subscription books. During the past three years the ICONOCLAST
has had upon its books the names of more than a thousand
ministers, representing every denomination. Are these men
criminals and their wives courtesans? Has any busy little Baptist
parson been rounded up with a rope for proclaiming them as such
from the pulpit? When a deserted babe was found in the street and
carried by the Sisters into the convent, was Jehovah Boanerges
Cranfill--organ-grinder for the Baylor bosses--mobbed by the
Catholics for saying that it probably came OUT of the convent?
Now, you people keep down the narrative of your nether garment
and apply a hot mush poultice to your impudence. The ICONOCLAST
is only tickling you with snipe-shot now; but don't forget for
one moment that it has buck a-plenty in its belt.

 . . .

 A word to the lady students of Baylor: Young ladies, this
controversy does not in the least concern you. The ICONOCLAST has
never questioned your good character. You are young, however, and
mischievous people have led some of you to believe that it has
done so. If you so believe, I am as much in duty bound to
apologize as though I had really and intentionally wronged you. A
gentleman should ever hasten to apologize to ladies who feel
aggrieved; hence I sincerely crave your pardon for having printed
the article which gave you offense. Upon learning that you read
into it a meaning which I did not intend, I stopped the presses
and curtailed the circulation of the October number as much as
possible, proving my sincerity by a pecuniary sacrifice. I would
not for the wealth of this world either do you a wilful
injustice, or have you believe me capable of such a crime. May
you prosper in your studies, graduate with honor and bestow your
hands upon men worthy of noble women.

 . . .

 P.S. In looking over the foregoing since it was put in type, I
suspect that I have been a trifle too hard on some of those who
met to ratify the action of the first mob and publicly brand me
as a defamer of women. I would not do my deadliest enemy an
injustice. Two wrongs do not make a right; hence I concede that
perhaps half of those present pay their debts and make a
reasonable effort to be decent. If God neglected to bless them
with brains that is their misfortune instead of their fault. Let
it go at that. They have had their say, I've had mine, and right
here I drop the subject until another attempt is made to run me
out of town. I make this concession, not that Baylor deserves it,
but at the earnest request of the law-abiding element of this
city.

 * * *
SPEAKING OF SPIRITUALISM.

A correspondent seizes his typewriter (the machine, not the maid)
with both hands, and peremptorily demands to be informed why I
"don't jump on that fake called Spiritualism." O I don't know,
unless it's because more corporeal things than spooks continue to
jump on me. It seems a waste of energy to criticize disembodied
spirits who do no worse than "revisit the pale glimpses of the
moon." I have never heard of a ghost robbing other than its own
grave. They are not addicted to despoiling widows and orphans,
then putting up long-winded prayers. They do not sing "Jesus
lover of my soul" on Sunday, then sell that same soul to the
devil for six-bits on Monday. No ghost, so far as I know, was
ever accused of lying about his neighbor, fracturing the Seventh
Commandment or beating his butcher-bills. They appear to be quite
harmless creatures, therefore not legitimate game for the
ICONOCLAST. Furthermore, I am not fully convinced that
Spiritualism is a "fake." There appears to be as good biblical
and natural reasons for belief in Spiritualism as for belief in
the Immaculate Conception or the efficacy of baptism. Doubtless
some of the professors are frauds, but as much can be said for
the professors of all other faiths. I confess that I haven't much
confidence in "mejums," who find employment for the shades of G.
Washington, J. Caesar, and others of that ilk, at table-tipping,
slate-writing and such unproductive enterprises; nor in the class
of spooks who "materialize" in dark rooms, come prancing out of
"cabinets" and other uncanny corporeal incubators for no other
apparent purpose than to enable their mundane manipulators to
realize two dollars in the coin of the realm. I opine that a
ghost who must retire to a "cabinet" to pull himself together is
no honest ghost; that those who consent to tip tables and indulge
in crude telegraphy for the entertainment of a lot of long-haired
hemales and credulous females must find time hang very heavy on
their hands in the great henceforth, and heartily wish themselves
back here wrestling with Republican prosperity, doctor bills and
other blessings. It seems to me that were I a ghost I would float
about on cloud banks and bathe in the splendors of the morning,
instead of hiding in bat-caves all day and snooping about all
night seeking an unsalaried situation at some dark-lantern
seance. When America's greatest lexicographer writes me an
ungrammatical message on a double-barreled slate, signs it "noeh
webstur," and instructs his terrestial to deliver it to me on
payment of one cart-wheel dollar, I suspect that there's
something sphacelated in the psychological Denmark. Of course
they may have the phonetic system of orthography in Elysium, but
in dealing with mortals I scarce think the old man would
discredit his own dictionary. A spook manipulator once solemnly
assured me that the spirit of Tecumseh was my guardian angel,
that the old Shawnee chief was ever at my elbow. I don't believe
it; had he been there on recent occasions he would have hit
sundry and various Baptists on the head with his tomahawk. If old
Tecum is trailing me around I want to give him a pointer right
here that as a guardian angel he's utterly no good in a clime

   "Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle,
   Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime,"

and he had best cast his aegis over some Boston editor. It by no
means follows, however, that because many professional fakirs and
intellectual fuzziewuzzies have "gone in for Spiritualism," it is
all a fraud. If the morad floating in a sunbeam be
indestructible, existing in some shape from everlasting to
everlasting, it is inconceivable that mind, the lord of matter,
should perish utterly--should fade like an echo into the great
inane. That were a reversal of the law of the survival of the
fittest--casting away a priceless jewel while preserving its
tawdry setting. That the lesser should survive the greater; that
the case of Anaxarchus should continue and Anaxarchus' proud self
become nonexistent, were to leave matter without law and wreck
the universe, for law itself presupposes prescience. "Natural
law," so called, must either be an act of intelligence compelling
order, or a freak of nescience entailing chaos; hence if order be
eternal mind must necessarily be immortal, for it is an axiom of
science that "Nature wastes nothing." What becomes of the mighty
life-force of a Milton? If it be utterly extinguished; if it
becomes a forceless shade on Acheron's shore, or an "angel"
withdrawn from active influence in the universe, it is certainly
wasted, in so far as what we call nature is concerned. In his
lecture on "Evolution," Henry Ward Beecher said: "I believe there
is a universal and imminent constant influence flowing directly
from the bosom of God, and that is the inspiration of the human
race." Is God continually giving out this "influence," this
life-force, this vis vitalis, to the people of this planet, and
with each death withdrawing a portion thereof and either casting
it into the waste-basket of Perdition or cording it up, like
back- number newspapers, in the New Jerusalem, never to be again
employed? If it "flows directly from the bosom of God" is it not
God? And if Nature waste nothing can Nature's Prince be such a
prodigal? Is he not rather the great psychological heart of the
universe through which the same life-current, the same intellect
flows back and forth forever? But here! We are drifting into
metempsychosis--are in a fair way to get ourselves
excommunicated. Furthermore, we are actually predicating a
probability that the editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean is a
reincarnation of Balaam's ass. I am not prepared to assert that
Spiritualism is all brazen charlantry or foolish self-deception.
It may be that the "inspiration" of which Beecher speaks as an
emanation from God himself, is but a higher wisdom taught the
longing heart by those it has loved and lost. The souls of the
dead scratch no messages on greasy slates for stupid eyes, shout
none across the Styx that can be heard by vulgar ears; but there
be men who can hear in the silent watches of the night the music
of lips long mute. There be those for whom the veil that
separates the two eternities is no black inpenetrable pall, but
an Arachne's web, a sacred shadow through which comes sweeping,
not the roar of myriad voiced hosannahs and the rustle of
countless wings of dazzling white beating the everlasting blue;
but the soft incense of love, bringing healing to broken hearts,
calm to rebellious souls. These seek no thaumaturgic incantations
to secure messages from the other shore, for they are coming
continually. They do but listen, and interpret as best they may
to their dull-eared brethren, the celestial wisdom. The latter
protest that they "inspired," and the trumpet Fame casts upon
them her purple robe. It is not the peripatetic "mediums," but
the poets and prophets who "call up the spirits" and bid them
speak to us; those who find all the dead Past living in the
Present; who are themselves so spirituelle that they can
understand Nature's finer tones--who realize that

 "Life is but a dome of many-colored glass
 That stains the white radiance of eternity."

 All truly great men are spiritualists--even mystics. A
materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way;
but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an
intellectual Antaeus--the moment his feet leave the sodden clay
he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly
whose sweet waters make men mad. Parnassus is but an Egyptian
pyramid to be scaled with ladders, and by the aid of guides who
serve for salary. Fancy has no wings to waft him among the stars.
He sees in the Bible only its errors, never its wild beauty. For
him Villon was only a sot and Anacreon a libertine. In his cosmos
there's neither Garden of the God, nor Groves of Daphne. He can
understand neither the platonic love of Petrarch nor the
psychological ferocity of Rousseau.

 "The Apostle of affliction, he who threw
 Enchantment over passion, and from
 Woe wrung overwhelming eloquence."

For him all, all is clay--even the laughter of childhood is a
cunning mechanism, and the Uranian Venus but a lump of animated
earth. The flowers bring him messages only from the muck in which
their roots are buried, the "concord of sweet sounds" is but a
disturbance of the atmosphere. Such men do not live; they merely
exist. They do not enjoy life; they do not even suffer its pangs.
They know naught of that sweetness "for which Love is indebted to
Sorrow." God pity them.

 * * *

The gang of mutton-heads whose duty it was to select twelve poets
whose names should be commemorated in the new congressional
library, excluded that of Tom Moore on the plea that he wasn't
much of a poet, and now the Irish-Americans are fairly seething
with indignation. Take it easy; Tom Moore doesn't need a memorial
tablet. He will be read and honored centuries after the library
building with its poet's corner has perished of old age. He is
the poet of the people, and has more readers than any ten of
those honored by the committee.


 * * *
 SOME GOLD-BUG GUFF.

If it is gold that has appreciated, as the silverites claim,
aren't the farmers now getting two dollars a bushel for their
wheat?--Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser.

 The foregoing is irrefutable evidence that the fool-killer is
enacting the role of cunctator. Only a gold-bug editor could
insult the people of Alabama with such an exhibition of idiocy. I
am heartily tired of this whole currency question; but the
Advertiser has been fairly stinking for attention a long
time--its Smart Alecism has become simply insupportable.
Politically considered, the Advertiser has been all things to all
men and "nothing to nobody." It is a journalistic George Clark,
mistaking political treachery for diplomacy and impudence for
intellect. As Clark cannot interview himself to the extent of
half a column for the Morning Bazoo without getting his goozle
entangled in the skein of his own intorted argument, so the
Advertiser cannot grind out an editorial of equal length without
getting hoist with its own logical sequence, split from vermiform
appendix to occipitofrontalis by the recoil of its own
syllogisms. The Advertiser is unreliable as Proteus; the base
vulpine instinct serves it in lieu of brains; the clink of cash
in the counting room is the keeper of its conscience. At least
such is the pen-portrait drawn of it by the best men in Alabama.
Its allusion to $2 wheat is a trick that would disgrace the
sophists who practice in our municipal courts with drunks and
courtesans for clients. Such a horse-play for the benefit of the
political gallery gods would be contemptuously ignored by the
ICONOCLAST were not the Advertiser's betters indulging in the
same unmitigated bosh. Our Alabama contemporary is but an anile
echo of the New York Tribune, a faint adumbration of the Chicago
Inter-Ocean. The bigwigs cut out the work for the journalistic
wiggletails. They pitch the tune and all the intellectual eunuchs
come in on the chorus. The editorials of all such sheets as the
Advertiser are but a stale re-hash of Eastern utterances. They
pick up these things and "work 'em over," just as the Herald of
Astoria, Ore., revamps articles from the ICONOCLAST and runs them
as original. The farmer IS now receiving $2 a bushel for his
wheat. That is to say, the dollar with which he is paid has
double the purchasing power of the dollar two decades ago. He is
exactly as well off as though he received two old-time
dollars--if he chances to be out of debt. If he is not out of
debt, if he must discharge old scores with these 200-cent
dollars, he is being deprived of his adventitious good fortune
resulting from foreign crop failures. It makes no earthly
difference what the measure of value may be if it is immutable.
The purchasing power of the dollar might be safely increased or
decreased 90 per cent. were the whole business of this country on
a cash basis. Under such conditions we might contract our volume
of money to a million dollars or expand it to five billions, and
harm nobody; but it seems to me that any fool on earth--even the
editor of the Advertiser could comprehend the following
unequivocal facts: (1) that a majority of the American people owe
money; (2) that an enhancement of the purchasing power of the
dollar must work grievous injury to the debtor; (3) that unless
the volume of money keeps pace with the increase in the money
work to be done the unit of value must inevitably appreciate. Let
us state the case in kindergarten language for the benefit of
intellectual infants; while the demand for money is increasing in
a ratio of geometrical progression we have eliminated one great
source of supply--have cast upon gold alone the money work which
from time immemorial had been done by two metals. The gold
product has not kept pace with the growth of the world's
business; the law of supply and demand is irrevocable; ergo, gold
HAS appreciated and the debtor HAS been despoiled. The temporary
rise in price of one or two or a score of American products in
obedience to the laws of trade cannot obscure these
incontrovertible facts. WHILE THE PRICE OF WHEAT HAS ADVANCED THE
PRICE OF LABOR HAS DECLINED. The wage-worker now receives LESS
than formerly, while it costs him MORE to feed his family. And
this is what the Republican press and its mugwump echo call
prosperity! The wheat-growers, numerically unimportant, are
prospering despite the gold standard, just as the placer-miner
who washes out ten dollars each day and gives up five of it
nightly to cut-throat gamblers; but in this prosperity the great
body of the American people have neither lot nor part. Texas is
selling middling cotton at 5 1/2 and paying $3 for flour. Adult
male operatives are working in Massachusetts cotton mills for 50
cents a day, and their families doing without flour. Pennsylvania
miners are braving subterranean dangers for 90 cents a day and
living on potatoes and point. Although this is the busiest season
of the year--the time when the Republican tidal wave of
prosperity is supposed to buss the very clouds--there is scarce a
town or city in the United States where able-bodied men are not
begging for employment. If you don't think so put a 3-line "ad"
in your morning paper that you want to employ a man for any
purpose, and offer ONE-HALF the salary that such service would
have commanded before the demonetization of silver, and see how
quickly your office will be jammed! Texas has probably suffered
less than any other American state from hard times, Waco less
than any other Texas city, for here we can subsist on climate and
sanctification. Waco is a city of but 30,000 souls--conceding
that the Baptists are supplied with that immortal annex; yet when
it was reported the other day that the ICONOCLAST needed another
book- keeper applications were filed before night by a score of
men competent in the craft. Men apply a month ahead for
employment on mailing day, because at that time a dozen or so
extras can each earn a dollar. I have in hand an article by one
of the brightest journalists of Chicago, who states that
reporters are paid $10 to $25, editorial writers $25 to $35 per
week, and that a man who offends the newspaper trust can get no
further employment in the town. Twenty years ago a scribe who
could turn a bright editorial paragraph or manufacture an
interesting falsehood was worth $50 to $75 a week in Chicago, and
if lost one situation he'd find two more before he got half-
sober--but that was before Markhanna and his peon took charge of
this country's prosperity. Will the Advertiser or any other
mugwump organ, kindly explain why it is, if the gold standard is
making this country to flourish like a green-bay horse, the idle
money of Europe and New England continues to pour across the
state of Texas, ignoring its matchless resources, to find
employment in free-silver Mexico! Why wages are slowly but
steadily rising in that country and are steadily declining in
this? Why is it that when a man cannot obtain employment here he
turns his face to "the Land of God and Liberty" if he has the
price of passage, feeling assured that there he has but to ask
for a job to obtain it? Why is that above all this cackle about
prosperity can be heard the stentor tones of Markhanna's organ
advising American workmen that they must come squarely down to
the European wage level before they can hope for permanent
employment? Perhaps I could find answers to these questions
myself had not my Baptist brethren lately pounded my head to a
pulp. As it is, I humbly ask for information, beseech the
Advertiser to uncork its omniscience. Will the millions of
Americans who can barely make a living of it during the busy
season, thank God and the gold-buggers for manifold mercies when
the fall trade is over and the crops are all in?

 * * *
"THE TYPICAL AMERICAN TOWN."

BY THE COLONEL.

It is worth a man's life in Chicago to state his unbiased opinion
of Chicago. The city is filled with dirt and vanity. Its
population is the most complex in the world. It has more than
300,000 people who do not speak, read or write the English
language. In certain of its west side districts a sound of the
mother tongue is not heard from year's end to year's end. The
number of bodies within its limits closely approximates
1,500,000. It will be noticed that I do not say "souls." Not a
daily paper published in the city has a bonafide circulation of
100,000 copies, which is, in itself, a striking commentary upon
the character of the people who live in the largest town of Cook
county. A circulation of that size is not thought to be a thing
to be bragged about in New York. In Chicago, its attainment is
the ambition and heart's desire of every newspaper publisher in
the town.

A traveling man who was not from St. Louis, once summarized
Chicago as "a big, dirty, noisy roaring bluff." He was a fellow
who had a just appreciation of the value of adjectives. That is
what it is. It is said of the merchants that in the summer time
they load wagons with empty barrels and drive them about the
streets to simulate business. I don't doubt it. If they haven't
done it, they forgot it. There is no shady trick of commercial
competition that they will not stoop to, nothing short of a
penitentiary offense that they will balk at. Sometimes they do
not stop there.

Chicago has been called "the representative American city." It
is. It represents the America of to-day, because more than any
other municipality, its life is wrapped in the pursuit of the
dollar. A man in Chicago is weighed by dollars. The attractions
of his wife and daughters are judged by dollars. His value as a
citizen, his worthiness as an American, his fitness for public
service, his chances of heaven are measured by the standard of
the dollar.

There is a merchant prince in Chicago whose private life contains
a scandal that is absolutely unprintable. He is looked up to by
men and admired by women. His name is often upon the lips of the
good, although I cannot learn that he gives freely to charity, or
to the city's advancement. He is held up as a model for young men
struggling in the race of life. He is pointed out to girls as an
epitome of brainy American manhood. It cost him $500,000 to hush
up this scandal, or rather to keep it out of print. It is known
to thousands of course, because a matter of this kind can no more
be stilled than the winds and the waves can be stilled. But the
dollars did the work they were designed to do. Not a paper of the
newspaper trust contained a line in reference to it. The man
advertises, you see.

There is another man high in Chicago financial circles. Men tip
their hats to him on the streets. His name appears on the
prospectuses and in the lists of directors in many powerful
institutions. He is a prominent figure at many social functions.
His hair is white with age, but he still has a lust for tender
maidenhood. This man has served a term in the penitentiary for
stealing from his government. As a result of that theft he has
many dollars.

When a man hears of Chicago he is pretty apt to hear of Yerkes.
Yerkes owns all of the north side street railways and is a
dictator in a dozen enormous enterprises. It is the fashion to
regard Yerkes as an octopus who has Chicago grasped in his
strangling arms. It is the custom to hurl abuse at Yerkes and
hold Yerkes responsible for all the many ills of the city. In the
popular mind Yerkes is the Chicago exemplar of the grasping,
soulless, blood-sucking monopolist. This is because the newspaper
trust does not like Yerkes. He began fighting it a long time ago,
holding war to be cheaper than tribute. Up to date Yerkes has a
long way the best of the contest. He has a thick skin. Abuse
glides off him like water off an oiled board. Yerkes, too, is a
jail bird. He has served, it is said, a term in a Pennsylvania
penitentiary. Yerkes went to the penitentiary, it is further
said, because he would not betray his fellow robbers. He took his
punishment, but he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he "did
not peach on his pals." It will be seen that there is a good deal
of a man in Yerkes--much more, in fact than is to be found in any
one of his newspaper publishing traducers; but even his fondest
intimates have never denied that he is a rascal.

There are women high in the society of Chicago who know more
about the services of unscrupulous midwives than they would care
to tell. There are girls still wearing their maiden names whose
white arms and throats flash with the ransoms of princes who will
feel no blush stealing over neck, cheek and chin when they lie
waiting in the bridal bed. Three are mothers of children--many of
them--who have "graduated" from Dwight and whose breaths still
reek with the fumes of whiskey. There are wives whose annual
flitting to the summer resorts means six weeks of unrestrained
lechery. Meanwhile the old man, who is left in the city to
wrestle for some more of the dollars, is not overlooking any
bets. It is possible that he knows his wife is unchaste.
Certainly he makes no pretensions to chastity himself.

Things have reached this pass in "the representative American
city": A youth born, reared and educated there believes that it
is his mission and his duty to get dollars and has no other idea.
A girl born and reared there thinks it her mission and her duty
to marry dollars. If her parents are poor, if she is compelled to
"work out" as stenographer, typewriter, shop-lady, or whatnot,
and if she keeps her virtue, she is a phenomenon. The vaudeville
stage is recruited from her ranks. The bawdy houses are recruited
from her ranks. The fetid river's yearly burden of corpses is
recruited from her ranks.

What is to become of it? What is the natural fruit of such a
tree? What is the legitimate of a million and a half of such
humanity cooped into one space and boiling and seething with ten
million different aims and passions? What part in the drama of
the future is to be played by the 300,000 non-English speaking
residents, many of whom are voters? Men say that the signs of the
times point to revolution. Men behind the scenes say that this
country was dangerously near it in 1896. It needs no prophet to
foresee trouble when the rich are becoming richer, through
scoundrelism, and the poor are becoming poorer, through
drunkenness, idleness, dirt and all viciousness. Of that
revolution when it comes Chicago will be the fountain and the
center. I dare to say that if there are 5,000 open anarchists in
Chicago to-day there are 50,000 anarchists unconfessed. The
trouble is that their indictment against the wealthy ruling
classes contain true counts. They are not worth the powder and
lead necessary to their execution, but are those who sit in the
high places any better?

Preachers on fat salaries may preach in rich churches, scrolled
and cavern and mullion-windowed, then form laisons with
choir-singers; hired writers may write of the goodness of the
times, then pose in beer-joints and denounce God and the
universe. Christian Endeavorers and all the other bands of inane
asses may shout their mawkish hymns, but facts are facts. T

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