THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS GIFT OF FREDERICK L. GRIFFIN NET: BRANN THE ICONOCLAST A COLLECTION OF THE WRITINGS OF W. C BRANN IN TWO VOLUMES WITH BIOGRAPHY BY J. D. SHAW VOLUME ONE Published by HERZ BROTHERS Waco, Texas, U. S. A. WJ TY OF CALIFOUMEX DAVIS COPYRIGHTID, 1898, BY HERZ BROTHERS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS PAGE WILLIAM COWPER BRANN 5 WOMAN'S WICKEDNESS 9 A FINANCIAL FETISH 16 THE BEAUTEOUS REBECCA 22 THE BUCK NEGRO 24 A VISION OF HEAVEN 29 APOSTLE vs. PAGAN 33 FAITH AND FOLLY 37 THE AGE OF CONSENT 39 JONAH'S GOURD 42 A CARNIVAL OF CRIME 46 THE APOSTLE'S BIOGRAPHY . 48 BLUE AND GRAY 50 A MAID'S MISTAKE 55 OPTIMISM vs. PESSIMISM 58 BALAAM'S Ass 62 A TOUCH OF HIGH LIFE 75 EVOLUTION OR REVOLUTION 81 SPEAKING OF GALL . 87 INCOME TAX DECISION 108 SANCTIFICATION AND THE SWORD 109 No CROSS-EYED CLERGYMEN 114 THE MONROE DOCTRINE 116 THE LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER 119 BRANN vs. SLATTERY . 124 TRILBY AND THE TRILBYITES 138 THE AMERICAN DRUMMER 146 CASH vs. COIN .- . 155 TEXAS AND INTOLERANCE 164 A DAMNABLE DECISION . 170 A BIBLICAL BEAR STORY 173 BEAUTY AND THE BEAST 176 PUGILISM vs. HYPOCRISY 184 ANTONIA TEIXEIRA 187 DANCING TO THE DEVIL 192 THE A. P. A. IDIOCY 201 GROVER'S NEW GIRL . . . . 207 BAYLOR IN BAD BUSINESS 212 THE JURY SYSTEM 216 POLITICIANS AND PENSIONERS 220 CONTENTS PAGE TRUE LOVE'S TRIALS 222 JINGOES AND JOHN BULL 226 THE SINGLE TAXERS 230 THE GRAMMAR SHARP 244 HEAVEN AND HELL . . . ....... 247 ISRAEL As IT Is . 249 THE CURSE OF KISSING . .'. . . . . . . . 256 THE MAN IN THE MOON . . . . . . . . . 259 THE NEW WOMAN. . - . . . . . . . . . 268 SLAVE OR SOVEREIGN . , . . . .\ . . . 272 MARLBOROUGH-VANDERBILT MARRIAGE . . - . . .' . 292 HUMBUGS AND HUMBUGGERY . 297 THE TEIXEIRA-MORRIS CASE . . . . . . . . 320 BEANS AND BLOOD . . . . . . .... 325 THE REPUBLIC IN DANGER . . . . . . . . . 332 MARRIAGE AND MISERY . . . . . . . . . 336 WAR OR WIND ...... . . . . . .340 THE COMMON COURTESAN . . . . . . . . 348 THE "COUNTESS" CASTELLANE . . . . . , . . 353 THE MORMONS IN MEXICO . ... ... . 356 POTIPHAR'S WIFE . . . . . . . . . . . 360 BRO. EARLY'S BAZOO . . . ... .. . . 371 GOLD, SILVER AND GAB . , . . . . ' . . . 375 WOMAN IN JOURNALISM . . . . . . . . . 381 ADAM AND EVE . ..-...-. . . . . 383 THE LOCAL OPTION LUNACY . ...... . 388 OLD GLORY . . . ... ... : . . 398 OUR AMERICAN CZARS . . ... . . . . 403 AN OLD MAID'S AUCTION . . . . . . . " . . 413 "THE WEDDING OF THE SEASON" . . . . . . . 417 LOVE As AN INTOXICANT . . y . . .... 423 A NATIONAL POEM . _ . . . .... . i 426 BRANN ON HUMBUGS . . . / . ; . . .... 428 A NEW YORK SAWCIETY SHEET . . . . ... 435 GODY'S MAGAZINE FOR MOKES . . . r/ . . . : . . 438 DEAN HART OF DENVER . . . ' . . . .. . . 441 "UNCLE WILLIAM" CAMERON . . . .. ... . 445 THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT . . 448 "Quo VADIS" . . . . . . - 457 WILLY WALLY TO WED . .... 461 WILLIAM COWPER BRANN William Cowper Brann was born in Htimboldt Township, Coles County, Illinois, January 4, 1855. He was not raised in the home of his parents, though his father, Rev. Noble Brann, survived him, and is still living. His mother having died when he was two and a half years old, he was within the next six months placed in the care of Mr. William Haw- kins, a Coles County farmer, with whom he lived about ten years. As to his childhood experiences on the Hawkins' farm nothing is now known. They were probably such as are common to children raised in the country. Of Mr. Hawkins he always spoke kindly, referring to him as "Pa Hawkins." His nature was not suited to farm life, however, and he finally made up his mind to see more of the world, hence without ever having disclosed his resolution to any one, he quietly walked away one dark and cheerless night, carrying in a small box under his arm all that he then pos- sessed, and leaving behind him the friends of his childhood in the only place he had ever known as his home, thus enter- ing upon the active struggle of life at thirteen years of age, without friends, destitute of means, and almost entirely un- educated. The first position he obtained was that of bell boy in a hotel. Later on he learned to be a painter and grainer, then a printer, a reporter, and finally an editorial writer. He was energetic, industrious and painstaking in whatever he un- dertook to do, therefore always employed. Early in his struggle he realized the need of an education, in the acquire- ment of which he applied himself with eager diligence. Na- ture had endowed him with keen perceptive powers, a reten- tive memory and great mental vigor, by means of which he soon accumulated considerable knowledge. Every moment that could be spared from his daily toil was spent in reading 6 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST books of science, philosophy, history, biography and general literature. In this way he became thoroughly informed on almost every important subject, as will be seen by the con- tents of this volume. On March 3. 1877, at Rochelle, Illinois, he was married to Miss. Carrie Martin, who, with their two children, Grace Gertrude and William Carlyle, is now living in the beautiful home, here at Waco, from which he was buried April 3, 1898. During all the years, from the time he left the hospitable home of Mr. Hawkins, in 1868, until after he had success- fully launched "Brann's Iconoclast," he suffered the harass- ing annoyances of extreme poverty, in the endurance of which he was cheerful, hopeful and diligent in the equip- ment of his mind preparatory to the work he always be- lieved he would some day be able to accomplish. Beginning his literary career as a reporter, he was soon made an editorial writer, in which capacity he became well- known throughout Illinois, Missouri and Texas. As such he was versatile, forceful and direct. There was no needless repetition or tiresome circumlocution in his composition. He possessed an inexhaustible vocabulary, from which he could always find the words best fitted to convey his mean- ing at the moment they were most needed, and every sen- tence was resplendent with an order of wit, humor and satire peculiar to a style original with himself. In July, 1891, he issued at Austin, Texas, the first number of "Brann's Iconoclast." Only a few numbers appeared, when it was suspended and he resumed his editorial work, then on the "Globe-Democrat," of St. Louis, Missouri, and later on the "Express" of San Antonio, Texas. It was in connection with his first attempt to establish the "Icono- clast" that he delivered a few lectures that were well re- ceived. In later years he went upon the platform again with every prospect of a successful career in the lecture field. In the summer of 1894 he settled here in Waco, and, in February of the following year, revived the "Iconoclast," BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 7 which was successful from the first issue, having reached, at the time of his death, a circulation of ninety thousand copies. It was through the "Iconoclast" that his genius found full scope for development, and that he became best known to the public. In its columns he dared to be himself. There was now no restraint imposed upon him by timorous publishers. It belonged to him, and in it he gave full wing to his own thought. It was this intellectual freedom, sus- tained by the magic power and personality of a real genius, that gave to it such widespread popularity. Mr. Brann has been classed as a humorist. This he was, and of a type peculiar to himself, but he was not content with merely having amused or entertained the people, he aspired to arouse public sentiment in the interest of certain reforms. He was a hater of shams and defied every form of fraud, hypocrisy and deceit. He made of his humor a whip with which to scourge from the temple of social purity every intruder there. He joined in no partisan schemes for place or power, but, confident of his own ground, he would stand alone in the defiance of popular humbugs and frauds. This heroic independence, while admired by many, made him a mark for the envy and hatred of such as feared him, and in the end proved to be the cause of his death. But with all his uncompromising hatred of shams, there beat in the bosom of W. C. Brann a warm and generous heart for the world at large, and no man was ever a more devoted friend to the poor and needy. No beggar was ever turned away from his door empty handed, and no worthy cause ever asked his help in vain. His religion was to do whatever he believed to be right, and to defy the wrong even though it should be found parading in the garb and liv- ery of righteousness. Mr. Brann was fond of nature. He loved the mountains, the lakes, the rivers and the billowy sea. He loved to walk amid forest trees and watch the birds fly from bough to bough and warble their songs of love, but in all the wide, wide world, his home life was the most sacred object of his devotion, and when prosperity gave him the means to do so 8 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST he found great delight in making it beautiful and pleasant. He was fond of his friends, but the love he bore his wife and children was sublimely beautiful, tender and affectionate. His sudden death was a shock not only to his immediate friends, but to the hundreds of thousands who knew him through the "Iconoclast." Walking quietly along the street, talking with a friend, the bullet of an assassin pierced his body, entering through the back, and, although he had the courage, with strength enough, to turn and fatally wound his antagonist, he lived but a few hours, when all that re- mained of one of the most brilliant journalists on the Ameri- can continent was followed to Oakwood Cemetery by prob- ably the largest funeral procession ever witnessed in this city. There he was tenderly laid to rest in the embrace of our common mother earth, and under a mound of floral of- ferings, which though profuse and costly were but a feeble expression of the sincere grief that struck dumb with awe the thousands upon thousands who had learned to love him with an affection accorded to few men. J. W. SHAW. Waco, Texas, Sept, loth, 1898. WOMAN'S WICKEDNESS. By the "social evil" is commonly understood illicit inter- course of the sexes, a violation of law or custom intended to regulate the procreative passion. . The "evil" is probably as old as society, coeval with man- kind. History tradition itself goes not back to a time when statutes, confessedly human, or professedly divine, were capable of controlling the fierce fires that blaze within the blood when all-consuming Love was cold Reason's humble slave and Passion yielded blind obedience unto Pre- cept. Although the heavens have been ever peopled with threatening gods and the great inane filled with gaping hells; although kings and courts have thundered their inhi- bitions forth, and society turned upon illicit love Medusa's awful frown, the Paphian Venus has flourished in every age and clime, and still flaunts her scarlet flag in the face of heaven. The history of humanity its poetry, its romance, its very religion is little more than a Joseph's coat, woven of Love's celestial warp and Passion's infernal woof in the loom of Time. For sensuous Cleopatra's smiles Mark Antony thought the world well lost ; for false Helen's favors proud Dion's temples blazed, and the world is strewn with broken altars and ruined fanes, with empty crowns and crumbling thrones blasted by the selfsame curse. In many cities of every land abandoned women are so numerous, despite all these centuries of law-making and moralizing, that they find it impossible to earn a livelihood by their nefarious trade are driven by sheer necessity to seek more respectable employment. The supply of public prostitutes is apparently limited only by the demand, while the number of "kept women" is constantly increasing, and society becoming day by day more lenient to those favor- ites of fortune who have indulged in little escapades not in strict accord with the Seventh Commandment. It is now a common occurrence for a female member of the "Four Hundred" who has confessedly gone astray, to be received back on an equality with her most virtuous sisters. In ancient Sparta theft was considered proper, but getting 10 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST caught a crime. Modern society has improved upon that peculiar moral code. Adultery if the debauchee have wealth is but a venial fault, and to be found out a trifling misfortune, calling for condolence rather than condemnation. It is not so much the number of professed prostitutes that alarms the student of sociology, as the brutal indifference to even the semblance of sexual purity which is taking posses- sion of our social aristocracy, and which poison, percolating through the underlying strata, threatens to eliminate wom- anly continence from the world. If, despite all our safeguards of law and the restraining force of religion, society becomes more hopelessly corrupt ; if, with our advancing civilization, courtesans increase in number; if, with our boasted progress in education and the arts, women of alleged respectability grow less chary of {heir charms if the necessities of poverty and the luxury of wealth alike breed brazen bawds and multiply cuckolds it is a fair inference that there is something radically wrong with our social system. It might be well, perhaps, for priests and publicists to cease launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many bright young women into dens of infamy, for those good souls who are laboriously striving to drag their fallen sisters out of the depths, to study the causes of the disease before attempting a cure. I say disease, for I cannot agree with those utilitarians who profess to regard prostitution as a "necessary evil ;" who protest that the brute passions of man must be sated, that but for the Scarlet Woman he would debauch the Vestal Virgin. I do not believe that Almighty God decreed that one-half the women of this world should be sacrificed upon the unclean altar of Lust that the. others might be saved. It is an infamous, a re- volting doctrine, a damning libel of the Diety. All the .courtesans beneath heaven's blue concave never caused a single son of Adam's miserv to refrain from tempting, so far as he possessed the power, one virtuous woman. Never. Governor Fishback, of Arkansas, recently declared that "houses of ill-fame are necessary to city life," and added: "If you close these sewers of men's animal passions you overflow the home and spread disaster." This theory has been adopted by many municipalities, courtesans duly licensed, their business legitimatized and accorded the protection of the law. If houses of ill-fame be "necessary to city life;" if they prevent tne overflow of BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 11 the home of bestial lust and the spread of disaster, it fol- lows as a natural sequence that the prostitute is a public benefactor, to be encouraged rather than condemned, de- serving of civic honor rather than social infamy. Will Governor Fishback and his fellow utilitarians be kind enough to make a careful examination of the quasi-respect- able element of society and inform us how large an army of courtesans will be necessary to enable it to pass a baking powder puritv test? Governor Fishback does not appear to have profited by Pope's suggestion that "The proper study of mankind is man," or he would know full well that the presence in a city of prostitutes but serves to accentuate the dangers that environ pure womanhood. He would know that they add fuel to Lust's unholy fires, that thousands of them are procuresses as well as prostitutes, and that one bad woman can do more to corrupt her sex than can any libertine since the days of Sir Launcelot. He would likewise know that so perverse is the nature of man that he would leave a harem filled with desirous houris more beautiful than ever danced through Mohammedan dream of Paradise, to dig pitfalls for the unwary feet of some misshapen country wench who was striving to lead an honest life. As a muley cow will turn from a manger filled with new-mown hay, and wear out her thievish tongue trying to coax a wisp of rotten straw through a crack in a neighbor's barn, so will man turn from consenting Venus' matchless charms to solicit scornful Dian. What is it that is railroading so large a portion of the young women to hell? What causes so many to forsake the ''straight and narrow path" that is supposed to lead to everlasting life, and seek the irremediable way of eternal death? What mad phantasy is it that leads so many wives to sacrifice the honor of their husbands and shame their chil- dren? Is it evil inherent in the daughters of Eve them- selves? Is it lawless lust or force of circumstances that adds legion after legion to the cohorts of shame? Or has our boasted progress brought with it a suspicion that female chastity is, after all, an overprized bauble that what is no crime against nature should be tolerated by this eminently practical age? We have cast behind us the myths and miracles, proven the absurdity of our ancestors' most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and intel- lectual house-cleaning have we consigned virtue to the rubbish heap or at best relegated it to the garret with 12 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST the spinning-wheel, hand-loom and other out of date trumpery? Time was when a woman branded as a bawd hid her face for shame, or consorted only with her kind; now, if she can but become sufficiently notorious she goes upon the stage, and men take their wives and daughters to see her play "Camille" and kindred characters. This may signify much; among other things that the courtesan is creeping into social favor even that a new code of morals 'is now abuilding, in which she will be the grand exemplar. As change is the order of the day, and what one age damns its successor ofttimes deifies, who knows but an up-to-date religion may yet be evolved with Bacchic revels for sacred rites and a favorite prostitute for high priestess? Were I called upon to diagnose the social disease; did any duly ordained committee from the numerous "Re- form" societies, Ministerial Associations, secular legisla- tures or other bodies that are taking unto themselves great credit for assiduously making a bad matter worse call upon me for advice anent the proper method of restoring to healthy life the world's moribund morality, I would probably shock the souls out of them by stating a few plain facts without troubling myself to provide polite trimmings. You cannot reform society from the bottom; you must begin at the top. Man, physically considered, is merely an a.nimal, and the law of his life is identical with that of the brute creation. Continence in man or woman is a violation of nature's edicts, a sacrifice made by the individual to the necessities of civilization. Like the beast of the field, man formerly took unto him- self a mate, and with his rude strength defended her from the advances of other males. Such, reduced to the last analysis, is the basis of marriage, of female chastity and family honor. Rape and adultery were prohibited under pains and penalties, and behind the sword of the criminal law grew up the moral code. As wealth increased man multiplied his wives and added concubines ; but woman was taught that while polygamy was pleasing to the gods polyandry was the reverse that while the husband was privileged to seek sexual pleasure in a foreign bed, the wife who looked with desiring eyes upon other than her rightful lord merited the scorn of earth and provoked the wrath of heaven. For long ages woman was but the creature of man's caprice, the drudge or ornament of his home, mistress of neither her body nor her mind. But as the world advanced BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 13 and matter was made more subject unto mind as divine Reason wrested the sceptre from brute Force woman began to assume her proper place in the world's economy. She is stepping forth into the garish light of freedom, is realizing for the first time in the history of the human race that she is a moral entity that even she, and not another, is the arbiter of her fate. And, as ever before, new-found freedom is manifesting itself in criminal folly liberty has become a synonym for license. The "progressive" woman the woman who is not only well "up-to-date," but skirmishing with the future is ask- ing her brother: "If thou, why not I? If man is forgiven a score of mistresses must woman, blessed with like reason and cursed with kindred passions, be damned for one lover?" And while the question grates upon her ear, the answer comes not trippingly to the tongue. I do not mean that all women who imagine themselves progressive are eager to assume the same easy morals that from time imme- morial have characterized the sterner sex; but this line of argument, peculiar to their class, while not likely to make men better, is well calculated to make foolish women worse. The sooner they realize that he-Dians are scarce in the country as brains in the head of a chrysanthemum dude; that such sexual purity as the world is to be blessed withal must be furnished by the softer sex, the better for all con- cerned. That they will eventually cease their altogether useless clamor that bearded men become as modest as blushing maids, and agree with the poet that "Whatever is, is right," the lessons of history bid us hope. When the French people threw off the yoke of the royalist and aris- tocrat they likewise loudly clamored for equality, fraternity and other apparently reasonable but utterly impossible things, until the bitter school of experience taught them better. The progressive women have not yet set up la Belle Guillotine in Washington or elsewhere for the decapita- tion of male incorrigibles ; which significant fact confirms our old faith that the ladies rather like a man who would not deliberately overdo the part of Joseph. But the female "reformer," with her social board of equalization theories, is but a small factor in that mighty force which is filling the land with unfaithful wives and the potter's field with degraded prostitutes. When the people of a nation are almost universally poor, sexual purity is the general rule. Simple living and severe toil keep in check the passions and make it possible to mould the mind with moral precepts. But when a nation 14 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST becomes divided into the very rich and the extremely poor; when wilful Waste and woful Want go hand in hand; when luxury renders abnormal the passions of the one; and cupidity, born of envy, blunts the moral perceptions of the other, then indeed is that nation delivered over to the world, the flesh and the devil. When all alike are poor, contentment reigns. The son grows up a useful, self- reliant man, the daughter an industrious virtuous woman. From this class comes nearly every benefactor of mankind. It has ever been the great repository of morality, the bal- ance-wheel of society, the brain and brawn of the majestic world. Divided into millionaires and mendicants, the poor man's son becomes feverish to make a showy fortune by fair means or by foul, while his daughter looks with en- vious eye upon m'lady, follows her fashions and too often apes her morals. The real life is supplanted by the artifi- cial, and people are judged, not by what thev are, but by what they have. The ''true-love match" becomes but a reminiscence the blind god's bow is manipulated by brutish Mammon. Men and women make "marriages of convenience," consult their fortunes rather than their affec- tions seek first a lawful companion with a well-filled purse, and then a congenial paramour. The working girl soon learns that beyond a few stale platitudes fired off much as a hungry man says grace she gets no more credit for wearing honest rags than flaunting dishonest silks; that good name, however pre- cious it may be to her, is really going out of fashion that when the world pretends to prize it above rubies it is lying is indulging in the luxury of hypocrisy. She likewise learns that the young men really worth marrying, knowing that a family means a continual striving to be fully as fash- ionable and artificial as those better able to play the fool, seek mistresses rather than wives. She becomes discour- aged, desperate, and drifts into the vortex. Much is said by self-constituted reformers of the lach- rymose school anent trusting maids "betrayed" by base- hearted scoundrels, and loving wives led astray by de- signing villains ; but I could never work my sympathies up to the slopping over stage for these pathetic victims of man's perfidy. It may be that my tear-gflands lack a hair- trigger attachment, and my sob-machine is not of the most approved pattern. Perchance woman is fully as big a fool as these reformers paint her that she has no better sense than a blind horse that has been taught to yield a ready obedience to any master to submit itself without question BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 15 to the guidance of any hand. Will the "progressive" wo- man who is just now busy boycotting Col. Breckinridge and spilling her salt tears over his discarded drab kindly take a day off and tell us what is to become of this glorious country when such incorrigible she-idiots get control of it? It is well enough to protect the honor of children with severe laws and a double-shotted gun; but the average young woman is amply able to guard her virtue if she really values it, while the married woman who becomes so intimate with a male friend that he dares assail her con- tinence, deserves no sympathy. She is the tempter, not the victim. True it is that maids, and matrons too, as pure as the white rose that blooms above the green glacier, have been swept too far by the fierce whirlwind of love and pas- sion; but of these the world doth seldom hear. The wo- man whose sin is sanctified by love who staked her name and fame upon a cowardly lie masquerading in the garb of eternal truth never yet rushed into court with her tale of woe or aired her grievance in the public prints. The world thenceforth can give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded, pharisaical female, whose heart never thrilled to love's wild melody, yet who marries for money puts her frozen charms up at auction for the highest bidder, and having obtained a fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself pre-eminently respectable ! In the name of all the gods at once, which is the fouler crime, the greater "social evil :" For a woman to deliberately barter her person for gold and lands, for gew-gaws, social position and a pre- ferred pew in a fashionable church even though the sale be in accordance with law, have the benediction of a stupid priest and the sanction of a corrupt and canting world or, in defiance of custom and forgetful of cold precept, to cast the priceless jewel of a woman's honor upon the altar of illicit love? Give the latter woman a chance, forget her fault, and she will become a blessing to society, an ornament to heaven; the former is fit inhabitant only for a hell of ice. She has deliberately dishonored herself, her sex and the man whose name she bears, and Custom can no more ab- solve her than the pope can pardon sin. She is the most dreadful product of the "Social Evil," of unhallowed sex- ual commerce is the child of Mammon and Medusa, the blue-ribbon abortion of this monster-bearing age. 16 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST A FINANIAL FETICH. CLEVELAND AND THE CURRENCY. The gold reserve is at present making life a burden to the powers that be. No African tribe deprived of its stuffed snake, or maid forlorn despoiled of her virginity, ever rilled the circumambient ether with clamor more dol- orous than that with which the Cleveland administration is rending heaven's imperial concave because its blessed finan- cial fetich is endangered. Its doleful jeremiads mount heavenward night and day, while its piteous appeals to Congress to come to the rescue of its god of gold and thereby save the country from its impending doom, are sufficient to melt a heart of adamant. The round earth reels beneath its burden of agony and the tom-tom wildly beats to frighten from its sacrilegious feast the omnivorous demon that is devouring the great monetary his head and curdle his brains. More than a moiety of our so-called great men are but featherless geese, possessing a superabundance of Gall creatures of chance who ride like driftwood on the crest of a wave raised by forces they cannot comprehend ; but they ride, and the world applauds them while it tramples better men beneath its brutal feet. Greatness and Gall, genius and goose-speech, sound and sense have become syno- nyms. If you fall on the wrong side of the market men will quote the proverb about a fool and his money ; if on the right side you're a Napoleon of finance. Lead a suc- cessful revolt and you are a pure patriot whose memory should be preserved to latest posterity; head an unsuc- cessful uprising and you are a miserable rebel who should have been hanged. "Nothing succeeds like success." Had the Christian religion failed to take root, Judas Iscariot would have been commemorated in the archives of Rome as one who helped stamp out the hateful heresy, and had Washington got the worst of it in his go with Cornwallis he would have passed into history as a second Jack Cade. Alexander of Macedon was great, as measured by the world's standard of eminence. After two-and-twenty cen- turies our very babes prattle of this bloody butcher, and BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 93 even his horse has been enshrined in history. In our own day Father! Damien left kindred and country and went forth to die for the miserable lepers in the mid-Pacific, but he is already forgotten his name and fame have faded from the minds of men. Yet greater and grander than all the blood-stained princes and potentates of earth; nobler, more god-like than all the proud prelates that ever aired their turgid eloquence at Christian conference or ecumenical council was that young priest; but no ceno- taph rises to commemorate his sacrifice silent as his own sealed lips is the trumpet of fame. But for Gall of the Ai, triple X brand, commend me to the little pot-house politician who poses as a political prophet and points out to wiser men their public duties. We have to-day in this land of the free and home of the crank, thousands of self-important little personages who know as little of political economy as a parrot of the power of prayer, prating learnedly of free-trade or pro- tection, greenbackism or metallic money. Men who couldn't tell a fundamental principle from their funny- bone, an economic thesis from a hot tamale who don't know whether Ricardo was an economist or a corn-doc- tor evolve from their empty ignorance new systems of ''saving the country," and defend them with the dogmatic assurance of a nigger preacher describing the devil make gorgeous displays of their Gall. I have noticed that, as a rule, the less a man knows of the science of government the crazier he is to go to congress. About half the young states- men who break into the legislature imagine that Roger Q. Mills wrote the Science of Economics, and that Jefferson Davis was the father of Democracy. But the Gall is not confined to the little fellows the big political M D's have their due proportion. The remedies they prescribe for Uncle Sam's ailments remind me of the panaceas put on the market by the patent-medicine men warranted to cure everything, from a case of cholera-mor- bus to an epidemic of poor relations. We have one school of practitioners prescribing free-trade as a sure-cure for every industrial ill, another a more drastic system of protection. One assures us that the silver-habit is dragging us down to the demnition bow-wows, another that only an heroic dose of white dollars will save us from industrial death. Politi- cal claptrap to corral the succulent pie "issues" to get of- fice. We have had high and low tariff, the gold and silver standard, greenbackism and "wild-cat" currency; we have had presidents of all shades of political faith and congresses 94 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST of every kind of economic folly; yet in a single century America has risen from the poorest of nations to the wealth- iest in all the world. True it is that wealth is congested that willful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand that the land is rilled with plutocrats and paupers ; but this dis- tressing fact is due to the faults of our industrial system it- self, and can never be reformed by placing fiddle-strings on the free list or increasing the tariff on toothpicks. Gall? Ye gods! Look at the platform promises of the blessed Democratic party then at its performances ! Look at the party itself a veritable omnium-gatherum of political odds and ends, huddled together under the party blanket like household gods and barn-yard refuse after a hurricane. High and low tariffs and free-traders ; gold-bugs, green- backers and bi-metallists ; Cleveland and Croker, Altgekl and Olney, Hill and Hogg, Waco's Warwick and Colonel Culberson's kid, all clamoring to be dyed-in-the-wool Dem- ocrats ! When I get a new main-spring put in my vocabu- lary I'm going to tackle the Gall of the Populists and Re- publicans. * * * Some specimens of Gall amaze me by their greatness, some amuse me, while others only spoil my appetite. Of the latter class is the chronic kicker who is forever fuming about feminine fashions. If the hoop-skirt comes in this critic is in agony; if the "pull-back" makes its appearance he has a fit and falls in it. Ever since Eve attired herself in a few freckles and fig-leaves he's been reforming the fash- ions. Don't mind him, ladies. Like a peacock crying in the night, he's disagreeable, but not dangerous. Adorn yourselves as you see fit ; follow such fashions as seem good in your sight, and have no fear that the sons of men will ever forsake you because of your clothes. When you find a man dictating to the ladies what they shall wear you're pret- ty apt to see his head housed in a stove-pipe hat the most inartistic and awkward monstrosity ever designed by the devil to make the Almighty ashamed of his masterpiece. In all history there's no record of a great idea being born in a beegum. I never saw a statue of a hero or picture of a martyr with a plug hat on. Imagine the Lord laying aside a silk cady preparatory to preaching that Sermon on the Mount or Napoleon apostrophizing the pyramids in a plug! Before finding fault with the fashions of the ladies just imagine Apollo in the make-up of a modern society swell, loafing into court on High Olympus ! Why Jove would hit him with a thunderbolt so hard there'd be nothing BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 95 left of him but a wilted chrysanthemum and a pair o' yaller shoes ! * * * For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to him who had nowhere to lay his head ; who pay a preacher $15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in the great cities of every Christian country children must steal or starve and women choose between death and dis- honor. New York is crowded with costly churches that lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the clouds with golden fingers monuments which Mammon rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value mounts up into the millions ; yet I learn from a religious paper, mark you that 100.000 men, women and children were evicted in New York alone last year for the non-payment of rent; turned into the streets to suffer summer's heat or winter's cold to beg, or starve, or steal, as they saw fit. I find these startling statistics in the same column with a tearful appeal for more money to send missionaries to black bar- barians on the same page with a description of a new church that must have cost a cold half-million of cash. That's what I call sanctified assurance gall masquerading as grace. And what is true of New York is true, in greater or less degree, of every town from Plymouth Rock to Poker Flats, from Tadmor-in-the-Wilderness to Yuba Dam. Everywhere the widow is battling with want, while we send Bibles and blankets, prayer-books and pie, salvation and missionary soup to a job-lot of lazy niggers whose souls aren't worth a soumarkee in blocks-of-five who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates were wide open, but once inside would steel the eternal throne if it wasn't spiked down. Let the heathen rage; we've got our hands full at home. I'd rather see the whole black-and-tan aggregation short on Bibles than one white child crying for bread. While Europe and America are peddling saving grace in pagan lands and incidentally extending the market for their cheap tobacco, snide jewelry and forty-rod bug- juice they are also building warships and casting cannon pre- paring to cut each other's throats while prating of the prince of peace ! The idea of countries that have to build forts on their frontiers and keep colossal standing armies to avoid being butchered by their own Christian brethren; that are full of divorce courts and demagogues, penitentiaries and poorhouses, sending young theological goslings, who be- 96 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST lieve that all of divine revelation can be found in one book, to teach the philosophic Hindu the road to heaven! Gall! Why the men we are trying to convert were preaching the immortality of the soul when the Hebrew prophets were putting people to the sword for accepting it; they were familiar with all the essential features of the Christian faith a thousand years before the crucifixion of Christ. Charity begins at home. In our own country children are coming up in ignorance and crime, while sect vies with sect in the erection of proud temples in which polite society may dis- play its Parisian finery while pretending to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. I haven't much use for gold-plated godliness. Christ never built a church, or asked for a vacation on full pay, never. He indulged in no political harangues never told his parishioners how to vote never posed as a professional Prohibitionist. He didn't try to reform the fallen women of Jerusalem by turning them over to the police, a la Park- hurst. Although gladitorial shows were common in his country and that without gloves he didn't go raging up and down the earth like some of our Texas dominies, de- manding that these awful crimes against civilization should cease. There is no record of his engineering a boycott against business men who dissented from his doctrine. I think he could have read a copy of the Iconoclast with far more patience than some of his successors. Human or divine, he was the grandest man that ever graced the mighty tide of time. His was a labor of love, instead of for lucre. The groves were his temples, the mountain-side his pulpit, the desert his sacristy and Jordan his baptismal font. * * * Then there's the unconscious Gall of the pious parrot who is quite sure that the only highway to the heavenly hereafter is outlined by his- little sect, macadamized by his creed; that you've got to travel that or get into trouble, perhaps fall into the fire. Just imagine that dear Lord, who so loved sinners that he died to save them from death eternal, looking over heaven's holy battlements and observing a miserable mortal plunging downward to his doom, leaving behind him a streak of fire like a falling star, his face distorted with fear, his every hair erect and singing like a jewsharp. He asks St. Peter: "Who's that?" "Oh," says the man on the door, "that's old John Smith." The Lord goes over to the office of the Recording Angel BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 97 and turns the leaves of the great ledger. He finds the name, "John Smith, No. 11027," and on the credit page these entries: "He was fearless as Caesar, generous as Macaenas, tender as Guatama and true to his friends as the stars to their appointed courses. He was a knight of nature's nobility, a lord in the aristocracy of intellect, cour- tier at home and a king abroad. On the debit page he reads : "Went fishing on Sunday. There was a miscue on his baptism. He knew a pretty woman from an ancient painting, a jack-pot from a prayer-book, and when smitten on one cheek he made the smacker think he'd been smuck by a cyclone." Good-bye, John ! * It may be that the monarch of the majestic universe marches around after every inconsequential little mortal, note-book in hand, giving him a white mark when he prays for the neighbor who poisons his dog, or tells his wife the truth regardless of consequences ; a black one when he bets his money on the wrong horse or sits down on the sidewalk and tries to swipe the front gate as it goes sailing by ; but I doubt it. If I could make the sun, moon and stars in one day and build a beautiful. woman of an old bone, I'd just like to see the color of that man's hair I'd waste much time and attention on. * * * Why should we quarrel about our faiths and declare that this is right and that is wrong, when all religions are, and must of necessity ever be, fundamentally one and the same the worship of a superior power, the great "Father of all, in every age, in ev'ry clime adored, By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Man's cool assumption that the Almighty made him as his "master-piece" should be marked Exhibit A in the mighty aggregation of Gall. That after millions of years experience in the creation business after building the arch- angels and the devil ; after making the man in the moon and performing other wondrous miracles, the straddling six-foot biped who wears a spike-tail coat and plug hat, a silk sur- cingle and sooner tie; who parts his name on the side and his hair in the middle ; who sucks a cane and simpers like a school-girl struggling with her first compliment ; who takes it for granted that he knows it all, when his whole life including his birth, marriage and death is a piece of ridicu- lous guess-work ; who insists that he has a soul to save, yet labors with might and main to lose it ; protests that there's 98 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST a better land beyond the grave, yet moves heaven and earth to keep from going- to it so long as he can help it the assumption, I say, that this was the best the Creator could do, is prima facie evidence of a plentitude of Gall of the purest ray serene. The calm assurance of man that the earth and all it con- tains were made for his especial benefit; that woman was created solely for his comfort; that the sun was made to give him light by day and the moon to enable him to find his way home from the lodge at night without the aid of a policeman ; that the heavens were hung with a resplendent curtain of stars and the planet:; sent whirling thro' space in a majestic dance about the God of Day, simply to afford him matter for wonder or for amusement when too tired to talk politics or too bilious to drink beer, evinces an egotism that must amuse the Almighty. Master-piece indeed ! Why, God made man, and, finding that he couldn't take care of himself, made woman to take care of him and she proposes to discharge her heaven- ordained duty or know the reason why. Tennyson says that, "as the husband is the wife is ;" but even Tennyson didn't know it quite all. When wives take their hubbies for measures of morality, marriage will become an enthusiastic failure and Satan be loosed for a little season. We acknowl- edge woman's superiority by demanding that she be better than we could if we would, or would be if we could. We are fond of alluding to woman as "the weaker ves- sel;" but she can break the best of us if given an oppor- tunity. Pope calls man the "great lord of all things" but Pope never got married. We rule with a rod of iron the creatures of the earth and air and sea ; we hurl our wither- ing defi in the face of Kings and brave presidential light- ning; we found empires and straddle the perilous political issue, then surrender unconditionally to a little bundle of dimples and deviltry, sunshine and extravagance. No man ever followed freedom's flag for patriotism (and a pension) with half the enthusiasm that he will trail the red, white and blue that constitute the banner of female beauty. The mon- arch's fetters cannot curtail our haughty freedom, nor nature's majestic forces confine us to this little lump of clay; we tread the ocean's foam beneath our feet, harness the thunderbolts of imperial Jove to the jaunting car, and even aspire to mount the storm and walk upon the wind; yet the bravest of us tremble like cowards and lie like Cre- tans when called to account by our wives for some of our cussedness. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 99 But you will say that I have wandered from my text have followed the ladies off and got lost. Well, it's not the first time it's happened. But really, I'm not so inconsistent as I may seem ; for if the gentler sex exceeds us in goodness it likewise surpasses us in Gall. Perhaps the most colossal exhibit of polite and elegant audacity this world can boast is furnished by that female who has made a marriage of convenience; has wedded money instead of a man, prac- tically put her charms up at auction for the highest bidder yet who poses as a paragon of purity; gathers up her silken skirts the price of her legalized shame lest they come in contact with the calico gown of some poor girl who has loved, not wisely, but too well. Marriage is the most sacred institution ever established on earth, making the father, mother and child a veritable Holy Trinity; but it is rapidly degenerating into an un- clean Humbug, in which Greed is God and Gall is recog- nized high-priest. We now consider our fortunes rather than our affections, acquire a husband or wife much as we would a parrot or a poodle, and get rid of them with about as little compunction. Cupid now feathers his arrows from the wings of the gold eagle and shoots at the stomach instead of the heart. Love without law makes angels blush ; but law without love crimsons even the brazon brow of infamy. * * * But the fact that so many selfish, soulless marriages are made is not altogether woman's fault. Our ridiculous social code is calculated to crush all sentiment and sweet- ness out of the gentler sex to make woman regard herself as merchandise rather than as a moral entity, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The average woman must select a husband from a narrow circle; must make choice among two or three admirers or elect to live a loveless old maid to forego the joys of motherhood, the happiness of a home. Man is privileged to go forth and seek a mate. The world is before him, a veritable "Dream of Fair Women." He wanders at will, as amid a mighty parterre of flowers, sweet as the breath of morn, and finally, before some fair blossom he bows the knee pours forth the incense of his soul to the one woman in all the world he would make his wife. True, she may refuse him and marry some other fellow ; but he is at least privileged to approach her, to plead his cause, to employ all the art and eloquence of love to bring her into his life. Woman en- joys no such privilege. She must wait to be wooed, and if 100 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST her king comes not she must take the best that offers and try to be content. Every daughter of Eve dreams of an ideal, of a man tender and true, who will fill her life with love's own melo- dy; his word her law, his home her heaven, his honor her glory and his tomb her grave. And some day, from these castles in the clouds he comes these day-dreams, golden as the dawn, become the halo of a mortal man, to whom her heart turns as the helianthus to the sun. At last the god of her idolatry doth walk the earth; but she must stand afar, must not, by word or act, betray the holy passion that's consuming her, lest "that monster custom, of habits devil," doth brand her bold and bad. Love ofttimes begets love, as the steel strikes fire from the cold flint, and a word from her might bring him to her feet ; but she must stand with dumb lips and assumed indifference and see him drift out of her life, leaving it desolate as the Scythian desert, when it should have budded and blossomed like the great blush rose. So she drifts desolate into old maidenhood and the company of Maltese cats ; else, when hope is dead in her heart when the dream of her youth has become dust and ashes she marries for money and tries to feed her famished heart with Parisian finery, to satisfy her soul with the Dead Sea fruit of fashion. No ; I wouldn't give woman the ballot not in a thousand years. I want no petticoats in politics no she-senators or female presidents ; but I'd do better by woman ; I'd repeal that ridiculous social law survival of female slavery which compels her to wait to be wooed. I'd put a hundred leap-years in every century, give woman the right to do half the courting to find a man to her liking and capture him if she could. Talk about reforms! Why, the bachelors would simply have to become Benedicts or take to the brush, and there'd be no old maids outside the dime museums. But I was speaking of Gall. Gall is usually unadulterated impudence ; but sometimes it is irremediably idiocy. When you find a man pluming himself on his ancestors you can safely set it down that he's got the disease in its latter form, and got it bad. I always feel sorry for a man who's got nothing to be proud of but a dead gran'daddy, for it appears to be a law of nature that there shall be but one great man to a tribe that the lightning of genius shall not twice strike the same family tree. I suppose that Cleveland and Jim Corbett, Luther BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 101 and Mrs. Lease, Homer and J. S. Hogg had parents and gran 'parents ; but we don't hear much about 'em. And while the ancestors of the truly great are usually lost in the obscurity of the cornfield or cotton-patch, their children seldom succeed in setting the world on fire. Talent may be transmitted from father to son ; but you can no more in- herit genius than you can inherit a fall out of a balloon. It is the direct gift of that God who is no respecter of per- sons, and who sheds his glory on the cotter's child as freely as on those of monarchs and of millionaires. We have in this country three aristocracies: The aris- tocracy of intellect, founded by the Almighty; the aristoc- racy of money, founded by Mammon, and the aristocracy of family, founded by fools. The aristocracy of brains differs from those of birth and boodle as a star differs from a jack-o'-lantern, as the music of the spheres from the bray of a burro, as a woman's first love from the stale affection hashed up for a fourth husband. To the aristocracy of money belong many worthy men; but why should the spirit of mortal be proud ? The founder of one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of American families skinned beeves and made weinerwurst. The calling was an honest and useful one. His sausages were said to be excellent, and at a skin game he was exceptionally hard to beat : but his descendants positively decline to put a calf's head regardant and a cleaver rampant on their coat-of-arms. A relative much addicted to the genealogical habit once assured me that he could trace our family back 600 years just as easy as following the path to the drugstore in a Prohibition town. I was delighted to hear it, to learn that I too had ancestors that some of them were actually on the earth before I was born. While he was tracing I was figuring. I found that in 600 years there should be 20 gen- erations if everybody did his duty and that in 20 genera- tions a man has 2,093,056 ancestors! Just think of it! Why, if he had gone back 600 years further he might have discovered that I was a lineal descendant of Adam, perhaps distantly related to crowned monarchs if not to the Duke cf Marlborough. As my cousin couldn't account for this job-lot of kinsmen had no idea how many had been hanged, gone into politics or written poetry, I rang him off. Those people who delight to trace their lineage through several generations to some distinguished man should be tapped for the simples. When John Smith starts out to found a family and marries Miss Jones, their son is half Smith and half Jones*. The next crop is nearly one-fourth Smith and at the 102 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST end of a dozen generations the young Smiths bear about as much relation to the original as they do to a rabbit. There are various grades of Gall; but perhaps the super- lative brand is that which leads a man to look down with lofty scorn upon those of his fellow mortals who have tripped on Life's rugged pathway and plunged into a shore- less sea of shame. I am no apologist for crime I would not cover its naked hideousness with the Arachne-robe of sentiment; but I dp believe that many a social out-cast, many a branded criminal, will get as sweet a harp in the great hereafter as those who have kept themselves un- spotted from the world. It is easy enough to say grace over a good square meal, to be honest on a fat income, to praise God when full of pie; but just wait till you get the same razzle-dazzle the devil dished up for Job and see how your halle-hallelujahs hold out before exalting your horn. Victory does not always proclaim the hero nor virtue the saint. It were easy enough to sail with wind and tide to float over fair seas, mid purple isles of spice; but the cap- tain who loses his ship mid tempests dire, mid wreck and wrath, may be a better sailor and a braver than the master who rides safe to port with rigging all intact and every ensign flying. With "The boast of heraldry, the j -mp of power, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave," it were easy enough to be a good citizen and a consistent Christian. It is poverty and contempt, suffering and dis- appointment that try men's souls that proclaim of what metal they are made. Faith, Hope and Charity are man's triune transcendent "and the greatest of these is Charity." A pharisee is either a pious fraud or a hopeless fool he's either short on "gumption" or long on Gall. Half the alleged honesty of this world is but Gall, and must be particularly offensive to the Almighty. We have oodles of men in every community who are legally honest, but morally rotten. Legal honesty is the brand usually proclaimed as "the best policy." Only fools risk the pen- itentiary to fill their purse. The smart rogue is ever "honest within the law" infamous in strict accord with the criminal code. Dives may attire himself in purple and fine linen and BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 103 fare sumptuously every day, while Lazarus lies at his door for the dogs to lick, vainly craving the crumbs that fall from the millionaire's table, and still be legally honest, even a church member in good standing ; but his loyalty to legal forms will avail him but little when he finds his coat-tails afire and no water \\ithin forty miles. The girl who flirts with a featherless young gosling till he doesn't know whether he's floating in a sea of cham- pagne to the sound of celestial music, sliding down a greased rainbow or riding on the ridge-pole of the aurora borealis, then tells him that she can only be a kind of Christmas- present, opera-ticket sister to him; who steals his unripe affections and allows 'em to get frost-bitten carries him into the empyrean of puppy-love, only to drop him with a dull plunk that fills his callow heart with compound frac- tures well, she cannot be prosecuted for petit larceny nor indicted for malicious mischief; but the unfortunate fellow who finally gets her will be glad to go to heaven, where there's neither marrying nor giving in marriage. The man who preaches Prohibition in public and pays court to a gallon jug of corn-juice in private; who damns the saloon at home and sits up with it all night abroad, may not transcend the law of the land, but if his Gall should burst the very buzzards would break their necks trying to get out of the country. The druggist who charges a poor dunderhead a dollar for filling a prescription that calls in Latin for a spoonful of salt and an ounce of water, may do no violence to the criminal code, but he plays ducks and drakes with the moral law. The little tin-horn attorney, whose specialties are divorce cases and libel suits ; who stirs up good-for-naughts to sue publishers for $10,000 damages to lo-cent reputations; who's as ready to shield Vice from the sword of Justice as to defend Virtue from stupid violence; who's ever for sale to the highest bidder and keeps eloquence on tap for who- soever cares to buy ; who would rob the orphan of his patri- mony on a technicality or brand the Virgin Mary as a bawd to shield a black-mailer well, he cannot be put into the penitentiary, more's the pity! but it's some satisfaction to believe that, if in all the great universe of God there is a hell where fiends lie howling, the most sulphurous section is reserved for the infamous shyster that if he cannot be debarred from the courts of earth he'll get the bounce from those of heaven. The woman who inveigles some poor fool perhaps old enough to be her father into calling her his tootsie-wootsie 104 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST over his own signature, then brings suit for breach of prom- ise or the Seventh Commandment; who exhibits her broken heart to the judge and jury and demands that it be patched up with Uncle Sam's illuminated anguish plasters ; who plays the adventuress, then poses in the public prints as an injured innocent sends a good reputation to join a bad character in hope of monetary reward well, she too may be legally honest; but it's just as well to watch her, for no woman worth powder to blow her to perdition ever did or ever will carry such a case into court. When a woman's heart is really hurting her money is not going to help it; when she's truly sorry for her sin she tells her troubles to the Lord instead of to policemen and reporters. The man who sues a fellow-citizen for alienating his wife's affections, instead of striking his trail with a bell- mouthed blunderbuss and a muzzle-loading bulldog; who asks the court to put a silver lining in the cloud of infamy that hangs over his home ; who tries to make capital of his shame and heal with golden guineas the hurt that honor feels well, he too may be a law-abiding citizen ; but ten thousand such souls, if separated from their Gall, might play hide-and-seek on the surface of a copper cent for a hundred years and never find each other. Dignity is but a peculiar manifestation of Gall. It is the stock in trade of fools. If Almighty God ever put up great dignity and superior intellect in the same package it must have got misplaced. They are opposing elements, as an- tagonistic as the doctrines of infinite love and infant damna- tion. Knowledge makes men humble; true genius is ever modest. The donkey is popularly supposed to be the most stupid animal extant excepting the dude. He's dso the most dignified since the extinction of the dodo. No pope or president, rich in the world's respect; no prince or oo- tentate reveling in the pride of sovereign power ; no poet or philosopher bearing his blushing honors thick upon him ever equaled a blind donkey in impressive dignity. As a man's vision broadens ; as^ he begins to realize what a miserable little microbe he is in that mighty immensity, studded with the stupendous handiwork of a power that transcends his comprehension, his dignity drains off and he feels like ask- ing to be recognized just long enough to apologize for his existence. When I see a little man strut forth in the face of heaven like a turkey-cock on dress parade ; forgotten aeons behind BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 105 him, blank time before him, his birth a mystery, his death a leap in the dark; when I see him pose on the grave of forgotten races and puff himself up with pomposity like the frog in the fable; when I see him sprinkled with the dust of fallen dynasties and erecting new altars upon the site of forgotten fanes, yet staggering about under a load of dignity that would spring the knee-joints of an arch-angel, I don't wonder that the Lord once decided to drown the whole lay- out like a litter of blind puppies. A lecture on Gall were woefully incomplete without some reference to the press, that "archimedean lever" and ''mould- er of public opinion." The average newspaper posing as a "public educator" is a specimen of Gall that cannot be prop- erly analyzed in one evening. Men do not establish news- papers for the express purpose of reforming the world, but rather to print what a large number of people in a particular community want to read and are willing to pay for. A newspaper is simply a mirror in which the community sees itself, not as it should be, but as it actually is. It is not the mother, but the daughter of public opinion. The printing press is a mighty phonograph that echoes back the joy and the sorrow, the glory and the shame of the generation it serves. I have no more quarrel with editors for filling their columns with inanities than casting shadows when they stand in the sun. They know what kind of mental pabulum their people crave, and they are no more in business for their health than is the merchant. They know that should they print the grandest sermon that ever fell from Massillon's lips of gold not 20 per cent., even of the professedly pious, would read it; but that a detailed account of a fragrant di- vorce case or international prize-fight will cause 99 per cent, of the very elect of the Lord to swoop down upon it like a hungry hen-hawk on an unripe gosling and fairly devour it, then roll their eyes to heaven like a calf with the colic and wonder what this wicked old world is coming to. The editor knows that half the people who pretend to be filled to overflowing with the grace of God are only perambulating pillars of pure Gall. He knows that the very people who criticise him for printing accounts of crimes and making spreads on sporting events, would transfer their patronage to other papers if he heeded their howling that they are talking for effect thro' the crown of their felts. Speaking of prize-fights reminds me that a governor who, after winking at a hundred brutal slugging matches, puts his 106 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST state to the expense, of a legislative session to prevent a pair of gladiators pounding each other with soft gloves, is not suffering for lack of Gall ; that those pious souls who never suspected that pugilism was an insult to our civilization un- til they got a good opportunity to make a grand-stand play, then whereased and resoluted themselves black in the face anent its brutality, should be presented with a medal of pure brass. Politics is said to make strange bed-fellows, but I scarce expected to see a shoe-string gambler and would-be Don Juan lauded by ministerial associations as "our heroic young Christian governor." Gall? Why, Geo. Clark presumes to give Bismarck pointers and congress advice. Nobody knows so well how to manage a husband as an old maid. A bachelor can give the father of a village pointers on the training of boys. Our Northern neighbors know exactly how to deal with the nigger. The man who would starve but for the industry of his wife feels competent to manage the finances of the coun- try. People who couldn't be trusted to wean a calf, tell us all about the Creator of the Cosmos. Sam Jones wants to debate with Bob Ingersoll, and every forks-of-the-creek economist takes a hard fall out of Henry George. The A. P. A. agitators prate loudly of freedom of conscience and insist on disfranchising the Catholics. We boast of reli- gious liberty, then enact iron-clad Sunday laws that compel Jew and pagan to conform to our creed or go to prison. The prohibs want to confine the whole world to cold water because their leaders haven't sufficient stamina to stay sober. Men who fail to make a living at honest labor insist on entering the public service. Political parties charge up to each other the adverse decrees of Providence. Atheists deny the existence of God because he doesn't move in their set, while ministers assume that a criticism of themselves is an insult to the Creator. But to detain you longer were to give a practical illustra- tion of my text. I will be told that Gall is a necessary evil ; that a certain amount of audacity, of native impudence, is necessary to success. I deny it. Fame and wealth and power constitute our ideal of success folly born of false- hood. Only the useful are successful. Father Damien was the grandest success of the century ; Alexander of Macedon the most miserable failure known to human history with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland. Alexander employed his genius to conquer the Orient and Cleveland BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 107 his stupidity to ruin the Occident. The kingdom of the one went to pieces, and the party of the other is now posing as the lost tribe of the political Israel ! Success? A Gould must give up his gold at the grave, the sovereign surrender his sceptre, the very gods are in time forgotten are swallowed up in the voiceless, viewless past, hidden by the shadows of the centuries. Why should men strive for fame, that feather in the cap of fools, when nations and peoples perish like the flowers and are forgotten when even continents fade from the great world's face and the ocean's bed becomes the mountain's brow. Why strive for power, that passes like the perfume of the dawn, and leaves prince and pauper peers in death? Why should man, made in the mortal image of immortal God, become the subservient slave of Greed and barter all of time for a handful of yellow dross to cast upon the threshold of eter- nity? "Poor and content is rich," and rich enough. With a roof to shelter those his heart holds dear, and table fur- nished forth with frugal fare; with manhood's dauntless courage and woman's deathless love, the peasant in his lowly cot may be richer far than the prince in his imperial hall. Success ? I would rather be a fox and steal fat geese than a miserly millionaire and prey upon the misfortunes of my fellows. I would rather be a doodle-bug burrowing in the dust than a plotting politician, trying to inflate a second- term gubernatorial boom with the fetid breath of a foul hy- pocrisy. I would rather be a peddler of hot peanuts than a President who gives to bond-grabbers and boodlers privi- lege to despoil the pantries of the poor. I would rather be a louse on the head of a lazar than lord high executioner of a theological college that, to preserve its reputation and fill its coffers with filthy lucre, brands an orphan babe as a bawd. I would rather watch the stars shining, down thro' blue immensity, and the cool mists creeping round the pur- ple hills, than feast my eyes on all the tawdry treasures of Ophir and of Ind. I would rather play a corn-stalk fiddle while pickaninnies dance, than build, of widows' sighs and orphans' tears, a flimsy bubble of fame to be blown adown the narrow beach of Time into Eternity's shoreless sea. I would rather be the beggar lord of a lodge in the wilderness, dress in a suit of sunburn and live on hominy and hope, yet see the love-light blaze unbought in truthful eyes, than to be the marauding emperor of the mighty world, and know not who fawned upon the master and who esteemed the man. 108 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST INCOME TAX DECISION. The Supreme Court of the United States has taken a whirl at the income tax law and left it looking like a picnic suit after a shower. The bigwigs agreed to disagree on pretty nearly every point in controversy, deciding only two, and these in utter disregard of the laws of logic and the dic- tates of common sense. Chief Justice Fuller gravely declares that incomes derived from state, county and municipal bonds, (amounting to $65,000,000 per annum) "are not proper sub- jects for the taxing powers of Congress.'' If not, why not? The federal government is supported by revenues drawn from the people who constitute the various local govern- ments, and upon whom congress is empowered by the con- stitution to levy a direct tax. Any property is depreciated in value by the amount of the tax laid upon it. Then where- in is it more objectionable for Congress to depreciate the value of Texas bonds than the value of the property pledged for their redemption? The difference would seem to con- sist in the fact that state, county and municipal securities yielding a revenue of $65,000,000 per annum have passed into the hands of the monied aristocracy who must be pro- tected, while the property from which so much interest is yearly wrung is largely in the possession of the masses who are "proper subjects for the taxing power of Con- gress." If I own a little home in Waco I am taxed to pay interest on bonds issued by state, county and municipality, and may be mulcted for the support of the federal govern- ment ; but the millionaire into whose plethoric purse the in- terest goes must not be troubled by Uncle Sam's tax collect- ors. So says the court. The income of A, derived from culti- vating cotton or planting hogs, is a "proper subject for the taxing power of Congress," while the income of B, derived from state, county or municipal six per-cents, is not ! Had the law been upheld, buyers of future bond issues would unquestionably shift the tax upon the people emitting them ; but to urge their exemption on that account were a plea for the exemption of merchants and manufacturers, telegraph companies and common carriers. Had the law been upheld the tax upon that $65,000,000 per annum now derived from state, county and municipal bonds, and amounting to more than $1,300,000, would have been borne exclusively by the holders would have constituted a true income tax as in- tended by Congress, because it could not have been shifted to other shoulders. The best clause in the entire law BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 109 granting the wisdom of an income tax has been knocked out, not because it was unconstitutional, (for the Chief Jus- tice did not so declare it), but because it displeased the court, which appears to have made the plutocrat its especial protege. The second point decided by the court was that a tax on incomes derived from land were equivalent to a direct tax upon the land itself, therefore, inadmissible unless apportioned as provided by the Constitution. If this be sound logic, then the Supreme Court has stricken out the enacting clause of the law in question; it is dead from nozzle to narrative, and we might just as well call off the col- lectors. With this utterance of Chief Justice Fuller for premise, the conclusion must inevitably follow that a tax on income derived from any class of property whatsoever is equivalent to a direct tax, therefore, unless apportioned, un- constitutional and void. It were clearly absurd to say that a tax on income derived from land is "direct," while that on incomes derived from buildings, mines, cattle, newspapers, professions, etc., is "indirect." That kind of hair-splitting would disgrace a forks-of-the-creek economist or profes- sional shyster. If a tax on rent is a direct tax, what the devil is a tax on salary the reward of individual effort? "What," asks Chief Justice Fuller, "is the land but the profit on it?" And what, we ask, is any class of property, profession or occupation but "the profit on it ?" The idea of the framers of the income tax law was to compel every man to contribute to the support of government according to his abilities rather than his necessities; but the Supreme Court has practically declared that "Unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." SANCTIFICATION AND THE SWORD.' ANOTHER "TEA PARTY" PENDING. One of the leaders of the crusade for disestablishment in Wales writes the Iconoclast from Manchester, England, as follows : "I hope to live to see the complete separation of church and state throughout the civilized world. I am a churchman, but the church and state should be kept as far apart as possible. America is my ideal. There the government of man and the government of God are separate and distinct, the one compulsory, the other entirely a matter of conscience." 110 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST I much fear that my English friend is not a close student of American institutions or he would look elsewhere for his "ideal." He has yet to learn that even here in this boast- ed land of liberty "the government of man and the gov- ernment of God" are still starring as Siamese twins and that the latter is no less compulsory than its companion. He has evidently not heard that the American citizen, whether he be Jew or Gentile, Christian or Atheist, is compelled to cough up an extra sum to the tax collector in order that hundreds of millions of dollars worth of church property may escape the government mulct and legislative bodies be provided with matin prayers paid for at the rate of $5 a minute from the public purse. He has probably never seen a great American state selling a widow's home or auc- tioning off her cow to satisfy a tax assessment, while the bells of a costly church in the same block pealed merrily^as tho' praising God that it had a "pull" on the government. Nor has he carefully examined the Sunday laws here in force or he would not assert that with us "the government of God is entirely a matter of conscience." Uncle Sam has evidently deceived our correspondent and has well nigh humbugged himself with his foolish boasts of "religious liberty," "freedom of conscience," etc. Our states are prac- tically theocracies, our legislatures ecumenical councils by which those religious dogmas entertained by the majority are declared the law of the land and enforced by judicial process, the posse comitatus and the entire military force at the command of the government. We might at least expect that beneath the Lone Star, that especial child of liberty, the state would eschew the sacerdotal character and confine it- self strictly to secular matters ; yet our legislatures are fully persuaded that they are in duty bound to guard both the spiritual and temporal welfare of the citizen that they have been duly ordained to administer the government of both man and God. Texas plumes herself on being "the banner democratic state," has much to say anent personal liberty and local self-government and never tires of pointing the finger of scorn at sumptuary laws ; yet her statutes make it a misdemeanor punishable by fine which the offender must lay out in prison if he cannot pay to labor, sell goods, or open a place of amusement in any section of the state, regardless of the religious predilections of the people. Here we have a conservation of the spirit of the Spanish Inquisition showing itself as boldly as it dares, the fag-end of that early New England fanaticism and tongue-boring cropping out where a big democratic majority is swinging BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 111 its sombrero and cracking its lungs howling for personal liberty ! Think of throwing an American citizen into jail in this, the last decade of the Nineteenth century, for shaving a "sovereign" or selling a cigar on Sunday; for an offense, not against his fellow man but against that great God who created the heavens and the earth and incidentally "made the stars also" threw them in as lagniappe ! Yes, think of it; then contemplate a people boasting their independence and posing as the very apotheosis of progress, tamely sub- mitting to such a flagrant infringement of their divine rights and constitutional prerogatives ! But "the old order changeth, yielding place to new." Our English correspondent has probably heard that it changed in 1776. At this time there was in Great Britain a fat-headed fellow who played the divine racket on the American peo- ple much as the priests and preachers are doing to-day. He assumed that he had been divinely ordained to decide what was best for them that they were in duty bound to obey, pay taxes and look pleasant. They took his presump- tion in good part for a great many years, but when he got to rubbing it in they grew restless and began to file pro- tests much as they are doing now, and with the same un- satisfactory results. At that time to question the preroga- tive of princes to do as they pleased with the common people was regarded as almost as great a sin as "Sabbath desecra- tion" is to-day, and as King George was in the majority he simply sneered at the recalcitrants, rubbed a little more holy oil on his divine right and went ahead with his hog-killing. Finally the famous tea party, which had been so long brew- ing, was held in Boston harbor and for eight long years there was h 1 to pay and a distressing stringency in the money market. Another tea party is rapidly getting ripe, and when it is over and the cups and saucers returned to the cupboard there'll be no "blue laws" in Uncle Sam's baili- wick, costly churches will be taxed just the same as the poor man's cottage, and legislators who desire to indulge in the luxury of $5~a-minute Protestant prayers will not rob Cath- olic, infidel and Jewish pantries to pay the sacred wind- jammer, but go down into their own jeans for the price of saving Grace. We could stand taxation for church purposes without representation in the amen corner if our sanctified brethren would refrain from adding injuries that benefit nobody, then presenting us with choice specimens of unprovoked inso- lence simply to reduce their superabundant stock ; but when 112 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST a man cheerfully puts up his pro-rata for perfunctory pray- ers and the exemption of church property from all taxation, then finds himself persistently boycotted both in politics and business by the people he has befriended, denounced from the pulpit as an emissary of the devil by flannelmouthed preachers who are indirectly fattening- upon his substance, and rendered an abject slave one-seventh of his life by the laws of his native land simply because an emperor who died 1,500 years ago was an unmitigated ass, he feels like ex- changing his stock of Christian charity for a stuffed club and asserting his rights as a free-born American citizen. Nearly nineteen centuries ago Christ informed the Phar- isees that "the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," but that extensive sect of sacred mummers still cling tenaciously to the interdicted dogma. They de- clare it criminal to do on Sunday what is eminently proper on other days, and, being in a majority, they enact an iron- clad law compelling Jew and Gentile to conform to their theological faith. And what excuse have they to offer for this insolent interference with individual liberty, the abro- gation of that "freedom of conscience" guaranteed us by the Conscript Fathers? Sam Jones sums it up when he says: "The citizen has no right to do wrong." True, oh reverend blather-skite ; but who authorized you to decide for the American citizen what is right and wrong, theologically considered? Produce your credentials, Sir Garrulity, or come off the grass. Another lippy member of the black army Talmage, I believe has told us that "the majority has a right to say how the Sabbath shall be observed." In- deed? Then it also has a right to say what day shall be accepted as the Sabbath by the entire people ; hence it fol- lows that if the Jews and Seventh Day Adventists should eventually find themselves in the majority they would be privileged to make Saturday the legal Sabbath and compel its rigid observance as such by all other sects. The con- sistent Christian could then harvest his hooppoles or dig fishbait on the first day of the week "in the fear of the Lord." Having issued his ipse dixit, we invite Brother Talmage to loaf around^it and see how he likes it. This being the country of majority rule in religion as well as in matters mundane, it follows that what is sauce for the Chris- tian goose is sauce for the Hebrew gander. Good soul, who made thee thy brother's keeper? Where in the constitution of your country or the teachings of your Saviour do you learn it to be your duty to lay violent hands upon a worldling and drag him, squirming and kicking BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 113 perhaps cursing to the Throne of God? Produce your authority for employing the jails of this country to propa- gate the Christian religion for cramming its forms and symbols down the throat of thy fellow man with a police- man's bludgeon. What is it to thee if I till my field, sell my goods or list to some aspiring Roscious spout Eurip- ides on Sunday? Does it compel thee to do likewise? Does it interfere with your freedom or abridge your prero- gatives, endanger your health or cost you a copper? Will the blessed Saviour compel you to answer for my sins and send you to hades as a "vicarous atonement" while I roost on some roseate cloud in company with a halo and a harp and attended by a choice assortment of she-angels! No? Then please to forbear further interference in my affairs. If I feel the need of your assistance to reach the Throne of Grace I'll so inform you. I may prefer to deal with the Almighty direct and without the officious intervention of a middle-man to map out my own path to the heavenly here- after without the assistance of a theological surveyor. Your religion is really bile instead of benevolence. Instead of a crown you need a cathartic. You have mistaken an abnor- mal itch for meddling for the promptings of the Holy Spirit. You prattle about the "desecration of the Sabbath" when the very niggers know that Christ had no more to do with its establishment than Moses with making the Fourth of July an American holiday that it was not sanctioned by the Father, the Son or any of the original Saints. You would, if clothed with plenary power, compel every son of Adam to accept your narrow-gauge creed and "worship God accord- ing to the dictates of your so-called conscience instead of his own. You have altogether mistaken the spirit and ignored the letter of that message which Christ brought to mankind. It was a message of Love and Liberty, while you are the apostle of Slavery, the apotheosis of Persecution. "Come unto me, all ye that labor, and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," saith the Lord. "Jog along to your Jesus or go to jail," says the state. When encom- passed by his enemies in the Garden of Gethsemane Christ rebuked that follower who employed force in his defense. "Put up again thy sword into his place ; for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword." Yet his so-called followers here in Texas rely upon the sword, not to protect their dear Lord from ignominious death, but to prevent some impecunious publican wrecking the New Jerusalem and throwing Omnipotent God into a fit of the sulks by selling a popcorn ball on Sunday. 114 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST assume that every utterance of the Saviour was a divine truth which must, perforce, be fulfilled to the very letter, yet persist in playing with edge-tools. That religion which must rely upon secular law is inher- ently rotten. That religion which appeals to brute force to secure respect is not of God but the devil, therefore, not worthy of the devotion of a yaller dog. "But Sunday laws are necessary as a police regulation," I am told. Indeed? Is there aught in the Lord's day cal- culated to multiply criminal deeds? Is it possible that 'extra precautions must be taken on Emperor Constantine's "Holy Sabbath" to stay the hand of the homicide? Can it be that when a million Christian prayers are ascending like incense to the Throne of God and ten thousand preachers turning an honest penny that people are seized with an unnatural impulse to despoil their neighbors ? This being the conceded effect of the Christian Sabbath it would appear desirable to abolish it altogether "as a police regulation," and the quicker the better. NO CROSS-EYED CLERGYMEN. The Methodist Episcopal Conference, recently assembled in New York, created something of a sensation by rejecting a candidate for clerical honors because he was cross-eyed. He had studied three years for the ministry and outstripped all his classmates, was admittedly intelligent and of unex- ceptionable morals ; but strabismus was regarded by the theo- logical solons as an insuperable objection, and he was re- jected. Many worthy brethren have sharply criticised the action of the conference, but The Iconoclast is inclined to commend it. No man who can look two "ways at once has any business in the Methodist ministry; he might see too much for a successful exponent of sectarianism. Further- more, those sanctified gentlemen who assembled in the me- tropolis of the most enlightened nation the world ever knew, were obeying the imperative command of the Creator as expressed in the Bible, hence a criticism of their action were akin to blasphemy. In the Twenty-first chapter of Leviticus we learn that "The Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God; for whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 115 A blind man ; or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous; or a man that is broken-footed, or broken-handed, or crook-backed, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken ... he shall not go into the vail nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries." No intellectual qualifications whatever were suggested, they evidently being considered as superfluous it was sim- ply stipulated that the priest, like the sacrificial bull, should be a perfect animal, and that he attire himself in "garments for glory and beauty." To the credit of the various relig- ious denominations be it said that in selecting their priests and preachers they have adhered pretty closely to the orig- inal plans and specifications. Whenever they have departed therefrom in any marked degree a heresy trial has been sent to trouble them a swift and awful "judgment" for their sin. Whether the Lord really gave such a command to Moses, or the latter dreamed it while lying in the dusky arms of his Ethiopian wife, it is not my province to determine; but as a general law, intended to cull out the slick stock for the clergy, it has much to commend it. It were clearly absurd to select the finest specimens of physical manhood to defend the country from fellow mortals, leaving the "scurvy" and the "scabbed" to lead the scattering army of the Lord against the legions of the devil. Whether flat heads be preferable to flat noses, crooked morals to curved backs and spavined intellect to procreative impotence, can not be considered by the truly orthodox as a debatable ques- tion. Now that the Methodist church has undertaken to make its ministry conform to the Mosaic standard we trust that it will not weary in well-doing, but make thorough work of it. The Iconoclast, as the unswerving friend of religious reform, suggests that each candidate be subjected to a rigid medical examination and a system of physical tests in order that the ministerial stud may consist exclusively of thoroughbreds. It would first be necessary to take the aspirant's altitude, as "Little Giants" were not considered eligible by the God of the Jews. Having found that his coat-tails hung sufficiently far from the earth, the next step will be to bring him in purls naturalibus before the board of examiners, who will determine whether he has "'anything superfluous," then either fire him out or forward him on to the officiating Muldoon to be tested in "wind and limb. Hav- ing passed this ordeal successfully, his eyes will be exam- 116 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST ined by an expert oculist, and if it be found that he can look through a keyhole with both at once, this fact will be duly certified and a civil engineer appointed to survey his proboscis and make report. If he finds that it is an incipient mountain peak instead of a lowly campagna the candidate will be duly licensed to preach to carry saving grace to godless sinners. It is imperative that we have in our fashionable pulpits preachers who will harmonize with their recherche sur- roundings. Placing a hunchback, a cross-eyed man or one with an amorphous snout like that of old Socrates amid the gorgeous trappings of a hundred thousand dollar tem- ple were an insufferable sin against the estheticism of the age. True, Christ was no brute, if we may believe Isaiah, who we are assured was referring to the Saviour when he said: "His visage was more marred than any man, and his form than the sons of men." The Jews "saw no beauty in him," and the Rev. George C. Needham, in his appendix to the Bible, intimates that physically he was a fright. St. Paul was so horribly homely that the ladies avoided him, and he played for even by putting- a time-lock on their mouths and discountenancing marriage. None of the Apostles, so far as we can gather, were calculated to adorn a fashionable pulpit or cause the hearts of the sisters to pal- pitate with suspicious piety. They traveled extensively, but not on their shape. But we are building neither churches nor ministers on the model supplied us by the Son of Mary. This is "a progressive age" and the Metho- dist church has at last caught up with Moses. THE MONROE DOCTRINE. The so-called Monroe Doctrine has kept Uncle Sam in hot water for three-quarters of a century and bids fair to embroil him in one of the bloodiest wars known to the world's history if he persists in exploiting it. In 1823, when it was^ suspected that the Holy Alliance would attempt to ^ re-establish Spain's dominion over her revolted col- onies, President Monroe, in a message to Congress, enunci- ated the "doctrine" that bears his name, but which doubt- less emanated from that eminent jingoist, John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State. Monroe declared that the American continents "are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European Power," BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 117 and particularly warned the respective members of the Holy Alliance that "we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of the west- ern hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." Then, to make his meaning so plain that none might mis- take it, he added, referring to the cisatlantic governments then struggling for life, that "we could not view any inter- position for the purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European Power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." If that means anything whatsoever it means that the United States has established a quasi-protectorate over the smaller American governments, so far as Europe is con- cerned that Uncle Sam is the self-constituted bouncer of the western hemisphere and proposes to serve without salary. Several Texas dailies have consumed considerable editorial space trying to give it a different construction; but unless we agree with Talleyrand that "language was made to conceal thought," we must concede that the Mon- roe pronunciamento means exactly what it says. Jefferson was consulted on the subject by the Monroe administration before the delivery of the message and he declared, after referring to the importance of the question, that "we should never suffer Europe to intermeddle with cisatlantic affairs." Webster, who certainly understood the English tongue, gave it this interpretation and his hearty endorsement so far as those countries bordering on the Mexican gulf are concerned. It is urged by certain political sophists that, even conceding the message to have meant all it said, and to constitute our policy to-day, it does not follow that we would take up arms to enforce it. To assume that Uncle Sam would solemnly warn European governments to keep off the cisatlantic grass, then fail to back his bluff with powder and ball ; that he would suffer his "peace and safety" to be endangered without writing his protest in blood if need be, were to brand him a cowardly bully. The Monroe Doctrine declares in diplomatic but unequi- vocal language that if Europe monkeys with any portion of the western hemisphere which has set up political house- keeping for itself, she will run afoul of the American eagle, and there'll be, as Sam Jones would say in his aesthetic pulpit vernacular, "blood and hair and the ground tore up." It assumes our right to inquire into such controversies as that of England vs. Venezuela, and to interfere, if need be, to prevent "oppression" by the transatlantic Power, or 118 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST any tampering with the "destiny" of the little Republic. Such is the common-sense construction of the Monroe Doc- trine by the world's diplomats; so it has been understood for two-and-seventy years by the people of every American government. The Monroe Doctrine, like a defunct feline in the family cistern, can not be explained away ; it must be removed. It is illogical, useless, productive of nothing but interna- tional ill-will. A protectorate implies responsibilities. If we will not permit European Powers to forcibly collect their dues of our neighbors or chastise their insolence, we become morally bound for their debts and responsible for their be- havior. The Monroe Doctrine not only denies to Spain the right to reconquer Mexico, but would prevent the latter again becoming a Spanish province by the expressed will of her people, hence it is the tool of tyranny as well as the aegis of Liberty. What can this country hope to gain by playing continent- al policeman at its own expense? Monroe declares that we must consider the extension of European authority "to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety." But that was seventy-two years ago, when Uncle Sam was in his swaddling clothes and, quite naturally, much concerned about the character of his neighbors. But time has amply demonstrated the uselessness of Monroe's anxiety. England owns everything to the north and other European Powers once controlled everything to the south and west of us, including a large tract of our present terri- tory, yet the bird o' freedom never moulted a feather. If John Bull should put all South America into his capacious political pocket it would in nowise endanger the "peace and safety" of Uncle Sam. The Briton could not turn the wild beasts and reptiles of that practically unpopulated region loose upon us as he did the redskins during the Revolution. In case of war such possession would weaken him, and he would be unable to hold it after it became worth the having. As soon as the American colonies quit calling on him for troops to defend their frontier they arose and smote him in the umbilicus, and we have to close the door to keep Canada from coming into the Union and bringing her sky-scraping Dominion debt with her. Spain lost Mexico and her South American possessions and is having a hades of a time holding Cuba. Brazil slipped through the fingers of Portugal like a greased pig, France has practically faded from the map of the New World, and BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 119 even the kindly offices of Grover Cleveland could not keep monarchy alive in the mid-Pacific. Really we need not worry about any seed the European monarchies may sow in American soil. The climate is not adapted to that kind of a political crop. About the time it gets a good start and promises to make a bale to the acre a revolutionary cyclone rips it up by the roots. It is not necessary that this government the most powerful on the globe should "view with alarm" every European foot- print in the western world, nor is it under any obligation to afford protection at its own expense to opera bouffe Repub- lics. About the first thing a Spanish American government does after donning its initial diaper, is to flagrantly insult the American flag. Uncle Sam had serious trouble with Mexico, and the heteroscian pismires are continually crawl- ing up the old man's pants. There is not a country between our southern boundary and the Antartic circle in which an American citizen is safe from official insult ; yet whenever a European Power proposes to hold one of these single-shovel "Republics" up by the ear and pound the impudence out of it, it turns to us for protection. They are Republics de jure but despotisms de facto, and the cause of Liberty would suffer no loss if they were all made subject to the Russian czar. Madame Roland truly said that many crimes are committed in the name of Liberty, but even she never dreamed of aught so damnable as the wholesale sacrifice of Anglo-Saxons at the foolish shrine of a mongrel despotism masquerading in the robe of Freedom. Uncle Sam has been starring in the ridiculous role of Don Quixote quite long enough, and should now give the Spanish cavaleros and half-civilized Aborigines to the south of us to distinctly understand that they must work out their own salvation ; that he desires "Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none." THE LOCOMOTIVE ENGINEER. The locomotive engineer is to the village-bred boy of to- day what the stage-driver was to the youth of his grandsire. The brakeman who can ride all day on top of a box car, and the passenger-train conductor, with his gaudy cap and Mardi Gras lantern, pale into insignificance beside the man who manages the iron horse. Machinery possesses a weird fascination for the American youth, and the locomotive is 120 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST to all other mechanism what a shotgun is to a "nigger- shooter." It adds to its attractions the romance of travel is to the boys of the interior what a ship is to those reared within the sound of the sea. At the age of ten I was so infatuated with locomotives that to get possession of one I stole an entire freight train. It was standing on the main track in my native village, the crew had abandoned it to investigate a big watermelon which the station agent had opened, and I improved the opportunity to penetrate the mysteries of the engineer's cab. I had no intention of meddling with the iron monster, but when I got my hand on the lever the temptation to set the big drivers in motion was too strong to be resisted. The train started so easily that it did not attract the attention of the hilarious crew in the freight-house until it went roar- ing across Flat Branch bridge and on towards Mattoon at a good round gait. I decided that I might as well be hanged for an old sheep as a lamb, and pulled the throttle open a little wider, whistling and ringing the bell for all the crossings and pretty much everything else in sight. A mule got on the track in front of me, and I was so fearful he would escape that I gave the lever another lusty pull. The train fairly bounded forward and the telegraph poles seemed thick as fence posts. I got the mule spread him all over the smoke-stack. By this time I had the lever down among the tallow pots was making the highest speed the machine was capable of. The great iron monster swayed and groaned, the cars seemed bowing to both sides of the right-o'-way, and I was delirious with joy. Mattoon was in sight, and I determined to go through the town like a whirlwind, on to Cairo and take a look at the two big rivers. I was leaning out of the cab window trying to make out the figures on the mile-posts when I was suddenly pulled by the ear. Instead of joining the watermelon debauch the conductor had lain down in the caboose and gone to sleep. When the "dog house" began to dance on one wheel he awoke and realized that there was something wrong. He crawled over the boxes at the imminent risk of his life to expostulate with the engineer. While he was bringing the train to a standstill I debated whether I should run away or go back home and take the worst licking of my life. The conductor solved the problem for me ; I went back. I have a very vivid recollection of the events immediately sub- sequent thereto, but as they could not possibly possess that absorbing interest for the general public that they did for me I will let them pass. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 121 The locomotive engineers constitute a peculiar class that is neither understood nor appreciated by the general public. Sober, silent, alert, with the time-table for their Bible and the train dispatcher's written orders for their creed, they dis- charge their dangerous duty. If a soldier loses his little finger in the service of his country he is voted a hero and given a pension. When a locomotive engineer deliberately goes to his death to protect the lives of others and the prop- erty committed to his care, his reward is a few lines in the daily press. Such occurrences are too common to excite comment. If all the dangers of the rail were as patent to the public as to the man at the throttle there would be precious little traveling for "pleasure." The public hears only of the ac- cidents that occur, not of the thousands averted by the cool judgment and leonine courage of the man in the cab. Mounted upon his iron steed, with its heart of fire and breath of flame, he goes rushing through the midnight storm at the rate of 50 miles an hour, dragging in his "wake a heavy train filled with precious human freight. He may know that the speed is too rapid for either the track or rolling stock, but the time-table calls for it and it must come. Per- haps around the next curve he will find a culvert washed out or the track obstructed by a "cave-in." The rails may spread out at any moment, or the next switch be misplaced. Sleepy dispatchers sometimes blunder and a collision may occur; but he can only keep his eye on the slippery track, his hand on the lever, and go plunging on. If an accident occurs those in the coaches must escape with only a shak- ing up, regardless of what happens to him. He must stand at his post like a Roman sentinel tho' the heavens rain fire. To the man at the throttle his engine is no dull, dead piece of mechanism, but a living, sentient creature, to be praised when it does well and rebuked when it does ill. It responds to his touch like a well trained steed and he be- comes devotedly attached to it talks to it as a good jockey does to his horse. It is the end of a long night run with a heavy train, on a sinuous, ill-constructed ' track a veritable serpent of rust resting upon rotten ties. The engineer has scarce spoken a word except to quote a little sacred blank verse when the new brakeman, who had turned a switch to let him in on a siding, turned it back to let him out. Even his orders to the fireman are given by a motion of the hand. But as we strike the stiff home grade his demeanor changes. He 122 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST uncurls from his bench and looks back at the train, then surveys his engine as though measuring its strength. "Now, old girl, you've got to hustle for it. Pull yourself together and sand your feet. Here, here ! no skirt-dancing, madam! This is no John Bell joint. Steady, old girl steady/' The great machine plunges at the grade and struggles like a living creature, the sharp puffs waking the echoes far and wide amid the sombre pines, upon whose tall tops rests the morning mist, reddened by the rising sun. The engineer coaxes, as a driver might a willing horse, and the machine, which seems to understand him, responds with greater exertions, but the heavy loads roll slower and slow- er, the drivers slip despite the sand, emitting a million me- tallic sparks the "old girl" is stalled. A short, sharp whistle, that sounds like the shriek of some sentient animal for aid, the three rear brakes are hard set, and up on this buttress the train rolls slowly back. The engineer is pre- paring to "take the slack." His engine is no longer "old girl" and "sweatheart," but the most disreputable drab that ever inhabited Happy Hollow or got listed in the blue book of New York's Four Hundred. Locomotive en- gineers are not much addicted to gab they are nothing if not epigrammatic and when they speak are liable to say something. The engine stands for a minute as tho' heartily ashamed of itself, panting like a brown roadster, then springs forward with a bound. The cars follow, each in its turn, with a rattling jerk that tests the drawheads, until the last are reached, when the brakes are quickly released, and "madam," having retrieved her moral character, goes puffing proudly into port. A year later I sat by the bedside of the same engineer while he breathed his life away crushed and scalded at the post of duty. Again he was out on his "run," striving desperately to make time with a heavy train. "The last grade, my girl; climb that and we're home. Molly's waiting, and so are the kids, to see you come round the curve. What! Can't keep your feet? You must do better than that or we'll never get in. How dark it is ! Tom, did you douse that glim ? I can't see the rails ! There's the station light now we roll now we " and he had climbed the "last grade." No one troubled with what is sometimes called "nerves" has the least business with a locomotive. To manage one and at the same time enjoy good health requires not only superior courage, but a stoicism worthy of a Sioux warrior. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST -123 The locomotive engineers shoulder graver responsibilities and face more dangers than almost any other class of men that could be mentioned. And this for a salary that would not satisfy a competent book-keeper. One night, while northbound with the Fast Mail, we re- ceived orders to look out for a brakeman "who was supposed to have fallen from a southbound freight. "Who is it?" asked the engineer. "Damfino," replied the pert young operator. "Think it's the Scotchman they call Sandy. What's the matter, old man? Seen a ghost?" But the engineer climbed into the cab without a word. There was something in his throat that would not permit of words. "You d d fool, Sandy's his son," said the conductor as he gave the signal to go ahead. I offered to handle the en- gine, but he only shook his head. We are an hour late and are expected to move as fast as "66" can turn a wheel. A heavy fog is hugging the earth and at a hundred yards the headlight resembles a splotch of luminous vapor* a tallow dip whose flame had liquified. We tear through the fog like a thunderbolt rending the clouds, the buildings gliding by like ghosts, the engineer's eyes fixed steadily upon the dripping rails that come rush- ing out of the gloom. He knows to an inch what space he can stop, to a foot how far he can see into the fog. San- dy is safe so far as "66" is concerned. Ten miles, twenty, thirty, and still no sign of the missing man, and I can see the father is beginning to hope that it is a false alarm ; but suddenly a prostrate figure, lying right across the rails, comes rushing into view, so near that an involuntary cry bursts from the lips of the fireman and he averts his face. Quick as the lightning's flash the engine is reversed and the air applied but the latter will not work ! The engineer shrieks for the hand brakes, but it is too late. The re- versed drivers churn the rails to a red heat, but the terrible momentum of the heavy train cannot be overcome. Sandy waves his hand to us, he half rises, his white face showing ghastly beneath the headlight's glare. The sire dashes thro' the cab window as tho' to snatch the son from the very jaws of death, but ere he can reach the pilot it strikes the upturned face, and we feel the jar of the engine and hear the hiss of blood on the fire-box as he is ground beneath the wheels. 124 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST BRANN VS. SLATTERY. [Ex-Priest Joseph Slattery, in his lectures at Waco, Texas, in the interests of the A. P. A., having bitterly denounced the Iconoclast, Mr. Brann replied to him as follows:] Fellow Americans: The Iconoclast does not please ex- Priest Slattery, "Baptist minister in good standing," and I am not surprised. Its mission, as its name implies, is to expose Frauds and abolish Fakes, to make unrelenting war upon Humbugs and Hypocrites; hence it is not remark- able that Slattery should regard its existence as a personal affront. It is ever the galled jade that winces; or, to bor- row from the elegant pulpit vernacular of the Rev. Sam Jones, "it's the hit dog that yelps." Slattery would have you believe that I'm a rank atheist who's trying to rip religion up by the roots and bang it across a barbed wire fence in close companionship with the hides of Protestant preachers This charge has been hurled at me by various sectarian papers and malicious min- isters ; but not one iota of evidence has ever been submitted. It is simply a bald assertion born of sanctified malice, a brazen libel, similar to that which charges the Pope with trying to subvert the American government. I defy Slat- tery and all that unclean brood of moral vultures, assassins of character and thieves of reputation which trail in his wake and applaud his infamies, to produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered disrespectful of any religion, Pagan, Protestant or Catholic. If in the wilds "of Central Africa I should find a man bowing down to a dried toad, a stuffed snake or a Slattery, I'd remove my hat as a tribute of respect, not to his judgment, but to his honesty. I have no word of condemnation for any re- ligious faith, however fatuous it may appear to me, that has comforted the dying or consoled the living that has cast one gleam of supernal sunshine into the dark vale where grope, each beneath his burthen of sorrow, the sons of men. I am not warring upon religious faith, but on falsehood ; not upon Christ, but on those who disgrace his cause who mistake bile for benevolence, gall for godliness and chronic laziness for "a call to preach." Nor have I taken the Pope of Rome under my apostolic protection. The Popes managed to exist for a great many years before I was born, and, despite the assaults of Slattery, will doubtless continue in business at the old stand for sev- eral years to come. I was raised a Protestant, and thank BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 125 God ! Fin i no apostate. I learned Protestantism at my mother's knee, and from my father's pulpit; but I did not learn there that the Church of Rome is the "Scarlet Woman," nuns unclean creatures and priests the sworn enemies of my country. I learned that but for the Church of Rome the "glad tidings of great joy," which Christ brought to a dying world, would have been irredeemably lost in that dismal intellectual night known as the Dark Ages. I was taught that for centuries the Church of Rome was the repository, not only of the Christian faith, but of civilization itself. I was taught that the Catholic is the mother of the Protestant church, and that no matter how un- worthy a parent may be, a child should not become the her- ald of its mother's shame. And while being taught my duty as a Protestant, my ed- ucation as an American citizen was not neglected. I was taught that this was a land of religious liberty, where every man is privileged to worship God in his own way, or ignore him altogether; that it was my 'duty to insist upon this right, both for myself and for my fellows. That is why I am the uncompromising enemy of the A. P. A. Any attempt to debar an American citizen from the hon- ors and emoluments of a public office 'because of his reli- gious faith, or non-faith, is a flagrant violation of a funda- mental principle of this Republic. And no patriot; no man in whose veins there pulses one drop of the blood of the Conscript Fathers, or who would recognize the Goddess of Liberty if he met her in the road ; no man imbued with the tolerant spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ will aid or abet such an un-Christian and un-American movement. The A. P. A. is the bastard spawn of Ignorance and Intolerance, was conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. There may be some honest men connected with the move- ment; but if honest they should get their heads trepanned to give their brains room to grow. They are as unable as a mule-eared rabbit to comprehend either the broad princi- ples upon which this government is grounded, or its polit- ical and religious history. No man not even Judas Iscariot Slattery is to blame for his ignorance; so we should humbly pray, Father forgive them, they know not what they do. Nor is the Church of Rome responsible for the shameless apostate's lack of information. It did all that it could to transform him from an ignorant little beggar into an educated gentleman but even the Pope cannot make a silk purse of a sow's ear. It is no fault of the 126 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST Church of Rome that he's densely ignorant of the very text- book truths of history ; that he knows less than nothing of that Reformation of which he talks so glibly ; that he is un- able to comprehend the genius of the government upon which he has conferred his more or less valuable citizenship. The fault, if fault it be, lies with the Almighty, who gave him a bad heart and a worse head. American Protective Association, eh? That signifies that Uncle Sam is in need of protection. I had hitherto supposed that the gentleman in the highwater pants and star-bespangled cutaway was able to protect himself; but it now appears that unless he crawls under the aegis of the re- doubtable Slattery he is to again borrow from the most popular of all Protestant divines "a gone sucker." Think of placing Uncle Sam under the protection of a man who is an apostate in religion and a renegade in politics of an Irishman who apostrophizes the British flag ! Think of that kind of a bird presuming to tell the grand-sons of Revolu- tionary soldiers their duties as American citizens. Slattery assures us that we need protection from the Pope. There was a time when the proudest monarchs of Europe trembled at the Papal nod ; but gradually the Pope has been shorn of temporal power, confined ever more to the realm of spiritual, until to-day he exerts about as little influence on the political destiny of this world as does Dr. Cranfill with his little Prohibition craze. But Slattery will have it that the Pope is gradually undermining American institutions leads us to infer that, sooner or later, he'll blow our blessed constitution at the moon and scatter fragments of the Goddess of Liberty from Dan to Beersheba, from Cape Cod to Kalamazoo. The Pope, it appears, is a veri- table Guy Faux, who is tunnelling beneath our national capitol with a keg of giant powder in one hand and a box of lucifer matches in the other. What's the evidence? Why, out in San Francisco, so Slattery says but as Slattery's been convicted of lying it were well to call for papers a Catholic school-board was elected and employed only Cath- olic teachers. The same awful thing happened in Detroit if Slattery's telling the truth, which is doubtful in the extreme. Then what? With a pride worthy a more American act, this illogical idiot informs us that "when the Protestants cap- tured the school-boards of those cities they discharged every one of the Catholic teachers and put only good Protestants on guard." And at that Baptist brethren with water on BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 127 the brain who boast of Roger Williams, cheered so loudly as to be in danger of lockjaw. In the exuberant imagina- tion of Slattery and his dupes there appears to be a wonder- ful difference between tweedledum and tweeclledee. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that what is sauce for the Protestant goose should be sauce for the Catholic gander. They damn the Catholics for doing the very thing for which they commend the Protestant. That's the logic of the A. P. A. the Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. In my humble opinion both were engaged in very small business. The only difference in the offenders that I can see is that while the Catholics are saying nothing, the Pro- testants are loudly boasting of their vicious subversion of the American principle of religious liberty. The circum- stance is a sharp reminder that if we are to preserve a gov- ernment of the people, for the people and by the people, we've got to keep religion of all kinds out of our politics, just as the framers of the federal constitution intended that we should do. Mixing religion and politics is like mixing whisky and water it spoils both. Slattery would have you believe that our Catholic citizens are simply emissaries of the Pope, to whom they owe alle- giance both spiritual and temporal, and that they will, at the first opportunity, subvert American institutions and make this Nation simply a satrapy of the Vatican. The American Catholic takes his theology from Rome ; he takes his politics from the ecumenical council of his party from the national convention of that partisan organi- zation to which he may chance to belong. That there can be no "Catholic conspiracy" against the free institutions of this country must be evident to every man of common sense from the simple fact that Catholics are divided among all the political parties are continually voting against each other. Now I appeal to your judg- ment lay aside your religious prejudices for the moment and look at the matter from a non-partisan, non-sectarian standpoint: If our Catholic fellow citizens be under the thumb of the Pope politically, as the apostate now evange- lizing for the A. P. A. would have us believe; and if the Pope desires to make himself temporal ruler of this land, or in any manner direct its affairs, would they not be found voting as a unit a mighty political machine instead of being as badly divided on secular questions as the Baptists themselves? San Antonio is a Catholic stronghold, yet a prominent Roman Catholic was overwhelmingly defeated in the last mayoralty election. And I could cite you hun- 128 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST dreds of instances where Catholics have voted against men of their own religious faith and elected Protestants or in- fidels. Again: If the Pope is plotting against America; and if all manner of crime be considered a virtue when committed by Catholics in furtherance of his ends, as Slattery would have you believe, then it were well to keep a sharp eye on apostate priests. How are we to know that they are not emissaries of the Vatican, commissioned to stir the Protest- ants up to persecute their brethren in Christ and thereby solidify the Catholic vote? No one, not even Slattery, has accused the Pope of being a fool ; and certain it is that the A. P. A. movement, if persisted in, will have the effect of driving the Catholics of this country to political unity in self-defense. Persecution, political ostracism for religious opinion's sake, will infallibly bring about those very condi- tions which Slattery, Hicks, et al. declare that the Pope de- sires. The communicants of the Church of Rome will no longer vote as Democrats or Republicans, but as Catholics and then? With unlimited wealth, and such a political machine at the command of a man so ambitious and unscru- pulous as we are asked to believe the Pope to be, the cap- ture of the federal government and the political domination of this country were as easy as lying ! The Protestants, di- vided into a hundred warring factions, many of them far- ther apart theologically than Episcopalianism and Catholic- ism, could offer no resistance to such a political machine, and they would receive but cold comfort from the liberal element, which has suffered so long from their petty perse- cutions. And I tell you Protestants right here, that if it be the intention of the Church of Rome to transform this govern- ment into a theocracy by fair means or by foul, then the Pope is the real founder of the A. P. A. and Slattery's a Papal spy. According to the story of this self-constituted protector of the American government, he studied Roman Catholic theology for years, then officiated as a priest for eight more before discovering anything immoral in the teachings of the Mother Church, when it suddenly occurred to him that it was but a tissue of falsehoods, a veritable cesspool of rot- tenness. His transformation appears to have been almost as sudden as that of Saul of Tarsus or that of Judas Iscar- iot. I have no objection to his leaving the Catholic priest- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 129 hood his bishop stopped his pay. Like the servant maid caught pilfering, he "gave notice, with the missus a pintin' at the door." If Slattery believes that the Protestant Through Line runs more comfortable cars to the great here- after, he's welcome to take his ticket over that route; but I would have thought better of him had he made the change quietly and refrained from assaulting with the vindictiveness of a renegade that church to which he owes his education, such as it is ; had he treated the religion of his mother with decency if not with respect. I thought I had met all manner of men ; men hardened in crime men destitute of even a semblance of shame; but never before did I behold one with the hardihood to stand up before American women and boast that he had incurred a mother's curse. When a man falls so low in the scale of human degradation that his own mother disowns him it were well to watch him. When a creature asks strangers to accept him because his relatives have rejected him; when, for the sake of gain, he snaps like a mangy fice at the hand that once fed him, and stings like a poisonous adder the bosom that once nurtured him; when, to promote his per- sonal ends, he will use his best endeavors to exterminate religious liberty and precipitate a bloody sectarian war, I tell you he was not born a man but begotten a beast. From the very foundation of this government the Catho- lics have been its firm defenders. Their wisdom and elo- quence have adorned its councils from the signing of the Declaration of American Independence to this good day, and its every battlefield, from Lexington to the Custer mas- sacre, has been wet with Catholic blood. Nine Roman Catholics signed the Declaration of Independence, and the Roman Catholics of New York contributed so liberally of their blood and treasure to the cause of the new-born Nation that Washington wrote them a letter praising their patriot- ism. Several Roman Catholics helped frame the Federal Constitution, and the interpretation of that wonderful in- strument by a Roman Catholic chief-justice to-day consti- tutes the fundamental law of the land. Yet Slattery and that ridiculous organization of which he boasts himself a mem- ber, would have you believe that the American Catholics would, at a nod from the Pope, ruthlessly trample under foot that flag in whose defense they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor that they would wreck without remorse and ruin without regret that Nation they helped place on the map of the world. How do you old Confederates, who followed Pat Cleburne, relish having this 130 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST blatant tramp defame your dead commander? Can you believe, on the unsupported testimony of this mendacious mountebank, that Father Ryan's tribute to the Stars-and- Bars was rank hypocrisy that the poet-priest was the polit- ical tool of a foreign power? Sherman died a Catholic. Fighting Phil Sheridan was a Catholic. Old Pap Thomas, "the Rock of Chickamauga," was a Catholic. The "Bloody Sixty-ninth" New York was a Catholic regiment, and its heroism at the Battle of Bull Run forms one of the brightest pages in the military history of this nation. Strange it never occurred to those demoralized Protestant regiments which took refuge behind the bayonets of the Sixty-ninth that they were throwing the Vatican between themselves and the Confederate forces! Slattery assures us that the number of Irish Catholics on the police force of our great cities is evidence that the Church of Rome is on mischief bent. I am not surprised that an Irish Catholic with a club in his hand should prove rather alarming to Bro. Slattery. But, although he says, "meet a policeman and you'll see the map of Ireland in his face," those same policemen have several times saved his worthless bacon. When he was mobbed in St. Louis for defaming Catholic nuns, the police formed a cordon around his infamous carcass and saved him from a well-merited trouncing at the hands of the slandered women's relatives. Probably the police did not relish the job overmuch, but they had sworn to uphold the laws, and although Slattery insists that a Catholic oath amounts to nothing, they risked their lives in his defense. We have many nationalities in this country, and each of them, as every observant man well knows, manifests a pre- dilection for some special occupation. Thus the Jews take to trade, the Germans to agriculture, the Norwegians to lumbering, the French to catering and the Irish to politics. Make a Freewill Baptist or a Buddhist of an Irishman and you do not change his nature he'll turn up at the next po- litical convention just the same. And the man who's too good to take a hand in practical politics ; who's too nice to mingle with the horny-handed at the ward primaries ; who's too busy to act as delegate to the convention who deliber- ately neglects his duty as an American citizen finds that Pat's activity has been rewarded with a place on the police force, and blames it all on the Pope. It is not my province to defend Roman Catholic theology BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 131 I suppose that Slattery said all that could be urged in its behalf before the apostatized. Perhaps the Catholics really believe the Pope infallible ; and if they do, it is certainly no worse than for certain Waco Protestants to believe that Slat- tery's infallible. I noticed that at his lecture last week they cheered every charge he preferred against either the Pope or the "Apostle," and that without asking for an iota of evidence. When I arose at the stag party with which he wound up the intellectual debauch, and questioned his in- fallibility, the good brethren cried, "Throw him out !" Why did they so unless they believed that to question the supernal wisdom and immaculate truth of aught a Baptist minister might say, were sacrilege a sin against the Holy Ghost ? Here was I, their fellow citizen of Waco. I had done them no harm; yet when a strolling vagabond, wearing God's livery, and whose forte is the defamation of women, made a statement, which if true, would forever disgrace me in the eyes of the world; when he preferred this charge against me within two blocks of where my babies lay sleep- ing, they wanted to mob me for branding him then and there as an infamous liar and a cowardly blackguard. Mark you, I'm no tramp in America. This is the house of my fathers. They helped hew it out of the Virginia wil- derness. They helped put Old Glory in the heavens, and to keep it there for more than a hundred years; still it ap- pears that I have no rights in this country which a foreigner with the smell of the steerage still upon him is bound to re- spect, if he chances to be a Baptist preacher. Talk to me about the Church of Rome muzzling free speech when the A. P. A. would mob an American citizen for defending his character from the infamous falsehoods of a foreign tramp ! "Throw him out !" Why throw him out ? I'll tell you : The sanctified buzzards had gone there with appetites sharpened for a mess of carrion, and they were afraid I'd kill their cook. "Throw him out!" But I noticed that those who were splitting their faces as wide as Billy Kersands' were glued to their seats. They wanted somebody else to throw him out. They were anxious to see a gang of three or four hundred sanctified hoodlums trample upon me, but there was not one among the self-constituted protectors of this mighty American Nation with sufficient "sand" to lead the mob. If there were no better Americans than those trailing in the wake of the Rev. Joseph Slattery, like buzzards following a bad smell, I'd take a cornstalk, clean out the whole shooting-match and stock the country with niggers and yaller dogs. If such cattle were sired by 132 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST Satan, dammed by Sycorax and born in hell they would dis- honor their parents and disgrace their country. Slattery insists that Catholics believe thus-and-so, and that no man with such a faith concealed about his person can be a good American citizen. I don't know about that; but I do know that if the Catholic, act in strict accordance with their religious creed they are the only people in this country that do so. I've learned that you can't judge a man by his catechism. Slattery assures us that he has dis- carded the Pope and taken Christ for his immediate guide. The latter commands his followers to pray for those who despitefully use them ; but if Slattery did any praying for the "Apostle" during his sojourn in this city he managed to keep that fact a profound secret. Christ enjoins patience and humility. He tells his followers to turn the other cheek to the smiter; yet Slattery assured the ladies Wednesday night that he was "a great believer in muscular Christian- ity." Then he placed his 250 pounds of stall-fed beef in fighting attitude and declared he'd "like to have his enemies come at him one at a time" to be prayed for, I presume. If Christ taught "muscular Christianity" I have inadvertent- ly overlooked a bet. Christ commands us to love our ene- mies, but doesn't suggest that we should manifest our affec- tion by lying about 'em. He rebuked those who tattled about a common courtesan, yet Slattery defamed decent women. No, you can't judge a man by his creed. If the allegiance of the Catholics to the Pope is of the same charac- ter as that of Slattery to the Lord Jesus Christ, Uncle Sam need not lie awake o' nights to worry about "Papal plots." Had Slattery been truly a Christian, instead of black- guarding me when protected by the presence of ladies, he would have put up a fervent prayer for my immediate con- version to the Baptist faith. But his milk of human kind- ness had soured he was short on Christian charity and long on gall. "Faith, hope and charity," says St. Paul ; "and the great- est of these is charity." And he might have added that it's also the scarcest. Perhaps that's what makes it so valuable the supply is never equal to the demand. Speaking of .charity reminds me of my experience "with the Protestant preachers of San Antonio, some of whom, I understand, are aiding and abetting this A. P. A. movement, "designed to preserve the priceless liberty of free speech." While editor of the morning paper of that city I was in the habit of writing a short sermon for the Sunday edition, for the benefit of those who could not go to church, I supposed BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 133 that the ministers would sanction my clerical efforts, but they didn't. They wanted no assistance in saving souls, considered that they should be accorded a monopoly in that line and were entitled to all the emoluments. They pro- ceeded to thunder at me from the pulpit, and sometimes three or four perspiring pulpiteers were pounding away at me at the same time and incidentally making me very pop- ular. I dropped into a swell church one Sunday morning to get a little grace a building that cost up in the six figures while people were living in $4 jackals and subsisting on 50 cents a week within sound of its bells and the minister was holding a copy of the Express aloft in one hand and a Bible in the other and demanding of his congregation: "Which "will you take Brann or God?" Well, they seemed to think that if they couldn't have both they'd best take God, tho' some of the sinners on the back seats were a trifle subsequent in making up their minds. I kept hammering away preaching to my little congre- gation of fifteen or twenty thousand readers every Sunday, as I now do to ten times that many a month until finally the Ministerial Association met, perorated, whereased, resoluted and wound up by practically demanding of the proprietor of the Express that I be either muzzled or fired. And all this time the Catholic priests said never a word and San An- tonio is a Catholic city. But the Baptist ministers were running a sneaking boycott! Yet the Church of Rome is the boa-constrictor that's trying to throttle the American right of free speech ! The Y. M. C. A. invited me to lecture on Humbugs, and that scared the Ministerial Association nearly to death. They thought I was after 'em now sure, so they went to the officials of the Y. M. C. A. and made them cancel the date. And the only Protestant minister in the entire city who did not join in this attempt to throttle free speech was an Episcopalian and the Episcopalians are not Protestants to hurt. Yet when these ministers, who are now so fearful that the Church of Rome will muzzle somebody, found that they couldn't drive me out of town ; that they couldn't take the bread from the mouths of my babes because I had dared utter my honest thoughts like a freeman; that I was to continue to edit the Express so long as I liked, they came fawning about me like a lot of spaniels afraid of the lash ! But not one of them ever tried to convert me. Not one of them ever tried, by kindly ar- gument, to convince me that I was wrong. N'ot one of them ever invited me to church or prayed for me, so far 134 BRANN, THE. ICONOCLAST as I could learn. Perhaps they, thought I was past re- demption. Slattery cautions you not to send your children to con- vent schools, declaring- that he ''never yet saw a nun who was an educational woman." That statement, standing alone, ought to convince every one blessed with a thinking ap- paratus that Slattery's a fraud. Some of the best edu- cated women in this world have entered convents. Wo- men upon whose tuition fortunes have been expended are now making convent schools deservedly popular with the intelligent people. He says ignorance is the correlative of Catholicism, and points to Spain as proof of this startling assertion. There was a time when Spain stood in the very forefront of civ- ilization, in the van of human progress, the arbiter of the world's political destiny, and Spain was even more Catholic then than it is to-day. Nations and civilizations have their youth, their lusty manhood and their decay, and it were idle to attribute the decline of Spain to Catholi- cism as the decadence of Greece to Paganism. The Catho- lic church found Spain a nation of barbarians and brought it up to that standard of civilization where a Spanish mon- arch could understand the mighty plans of Columbus. It was her Catholic Majesty, Queen Isabella, who took from her imperial bosom the jewels with which to buy a world who exchanged the pearls of the Orient for the star of Empire. The Catholic church found England a nation of barbarians and brought it up, step by step, until Catholic barons wrung from King John at Runnymede the Great Charter the mother of the American Constitution. It found Ireland a nation of savages and did for it what the mighty power of the Caesars could not brought it within the pale of civilization. But for the Roman Catholic Church Slattery might be wearing a breech clout, digging roots with his finger nails and gorging himself with raw meat in Ireland to-day instead of insulting the intelli- gence of American audiences and wringing money from fanatics and fools by warring upon the political institu- tions of their fathers. Slattery was horrified to learn that some of the nun.s were inclined to talk about each other. I sincerely trust BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 135 that he will find none of the Baptist sisters addicted to the same bad habit. From what I could gather of his discourse, before I was "put out" and from the report of his alleged wife's lectures, I infer that this delectable twain impeach the virtue of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods. Malice, like death, loves a shining mark, and there is no hate so veno- mous as that of the apostate. But before giving credence to such tales, let me ask you : Why should a woman ex- change the brilliant parlor for a gloomy cell in which to play the hypocrite? Why should a cultured woman of gentle birth deliberately forego the joys of wife and motherhood, the social triumph and the freedom of the world and con- demn herself to a life of labor, a dreary round of drudgery, if her heart's impure? For shame! Who is it that visits the slums of our great cities min- istering to the afflicted, comforting the dying, reclaiming the fallen? When pestilence sweeps over the land and mothers desert their babes and husbands their wives, who is it that presses the cup of cold water to the feverish lip and closes the staring eyes of the deserted dead? Who was it that went upon the Southern battle-fields to min- ister to the wounded soldiers, followed them to the hospi- tals and tenderly nursed them back to life? The Roman Catholic sisterhoods, God bless them ! One of those angels of mercy can walk unattended and unharmed thro' our "Reservation" at midnight. She can visit with impunity the most degraded dive in the White- chapel district. At her coming the ribald song is stilled and the oath dies on the lips of the loafer. Fallen crea- tures reverently touch the hem of her garments, and men steeped in crime to the very lips involuntarily remove their hats as a tribute to noble womanhood. The very atmosphere seems to grow sweet with her coming and the howl of hell's demons to grow silent. None so low in the barrel-house, the gambling hell or the brothel as to breathe a word against her good name ; but when we turn to the Baptist pulpit there we find an inhuman monster clad in God's livery, saying, "Unclean, unclean !" God help a religious denomination that will countenance' such an infamous cur! As a working journalist I have visited all manner of places. I have written up the foulest dives that exist on this continent, and have seen Sisters of Charity enter them unattended. Had one of the inmates dared insult them he would have been torn in pieces. And I have sat 136 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST in the opera house of this city boasting itself a center of culture and heard a so-called man of God speak flip- pantly of the Catholic sisterhoods, and professing Christ- ians applaud him to the echo. Merciful God ! if heaven is filled with such Christians, send me to hell, with those whose sins are inhuman ! Bet- ter everlasting life in a lake of fire than enforced compan- ionship in Paradise for one hour with the foul harpies that groaned "awmen" to Slattery's infamous utterances. God of Israel ! to think that those unmanly scabs, those psalm- singing vultures are Americans and our political brethren ! I know little about the private lives of the Catholic priesthood; but this I do know: They were the first to plant the standard of Christian faith in the New World. They were the first to teach the savages something of the blessings of civilization. I do know that those of them who were once Protestants are not making a specialty of defaming the faith of their fathers. I do know that neither hardship nor danger can abate their holy zeal and that hundreds of them have freely given their lives in the serv- ice of the Lord. And why should a man devote his body to God and his soul to the devil ? I do know that one of them has given us the grandest example of human sacri- fice for others' sake that this great world affords. Even Christ prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "If it be pos- sible, let this cup pass from me;" but Father Damien pressed a cup even more bitter to his own lips and drained it to the dregs died for the sake of suffering mortals a death to which the cross were mercy. The Protestants admit that they are responsible for the inoculation of the simple Sandwich Islanders with the leprosy; yet when those who fell victims to the foul dis- ease were segregated, made prisoners upon a small island in the mid- Pacific, not a Protestant preacher in all the earth could be found to minister to them. The Lord had "called" 'em all into his vineyard, but it appears that he didn't call a blessed one of them to that leper colony where people were rotting alive, with none to point them to that life beyond the grave where all the sins and cor- ruptions of the flesh are purged away and the redeemed stand in robes of radiant white at the rigfht hand of God. I blame no man for declining the sacrifice. To set foot upon that accursed spot was to be declared unclean and there confined until death released you death by leprosy, BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 137 the most appalling disease in all the dreadful catalogue of human ills, the most dreaded arrow in the quiver of the grim Destroyer. Yet Father Damien, a young Roman Catholic priest, left home and country and all that life holds dear, and went deliberately forth to die for afflicted barbarians. There he reared an humble temple with his own hands to the God of his fathers, there, thro' long years of confinement, he ministered to the temporal and spiritual wants of the afflicted; there he died, as he knew he must die, with his fingers falling from his hands, his flesh from his bones, a sight to appall the very imps of hell. No wonder the Protestant ministers held aloof. Merciful God. I'd rather be crucified! We are all brave men when the war-drum throbs and the trumpet calls us to do battle beneath the eyes of the world, when, touching elbows with our fellows and clad in all the glorious pomp and circumstance of war we seek the bubble of fame e'en at the cannon's mouth. When the music of the battery breeds murder in the blood, the elec- tric order goes ringing down the line, is answered by the thrilling cheer, the veriest coward drives the spur deep into the foaming flank and plunges, like a thunderbolt, into the gaping jaws of death, into the mouth of hell ; but when a man was wanted to go forth alone, without blare of trumpet or drum, and become a life-prisoner in a leper colony, but one in all the world could be found equal to that supreme test of personal heroism, and that man was a Roman Catholic priest. And what was his reward? Hear what Thos. G. Sherman, a good Protestant, says in the New York Post: "Before the missionaries gained control of the islands leprosy was unknown. But with the introduction of strange races, leprosy established itself and rapidly in- creased. An entire island was properly devoted to the lepers. No Protestant missionary would venture among them. For this I do not blame them, as, no doubt, I should not have had the courage to go myself. But a noble Catholic priest consecrated his life to the service of the lepers, lived among them, baptized them, educated 'them, and brought some light and happiness into their wretched lives. Stung by the contrast of his example, the one remaining missionary, a recognized and paid agent of the American Board, spread broadcast the vilest slanders against Father Damien." So it appears that the world is blessed with two Slat- terys. 138 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST There are three kinds of liars at large in the land : The harmless Munchhausen who romances for amusement, and whose falsehoods do no harm ; the Machiavellian liar, whose mendacity bears the stamp of original genius, and the stupid prevaricator, who rechews the fetid vomit of other villains simply because he lacks a fecund brain to breed falsehoods to which he may play the father. And Slavery's a rank specimen of the latter class. When he attempts to branch out for himself he invariably comes to grief. After giving a dreadful account of how Catholics persecute those who renounce the faith, declaring that they were a disgrace to the church while within its pale, he produced a certificate from a Philadelphia minister to the effect that he the Phil- adelphian had visited Slattery 's old parish in Ireland and the Catholics there declared that he was a good and faithful priest !' What Slattery seems to lack to become a first-class fraud is continuity of thought. He lies fluently, even en- tertainingly, but not consistently. The apostate priest would have the various Protestant de- nominations throw down the bars that separate them and mark off their theological bailiwicks "with little beds of flowers." The idea is a good one and I can but w r onder where Slattery stole it. Still I can see no cogent reason for getting all the children together in happy union and leaving their good old mother out in the cold. Throw down all the bars, and let every division of the Great Army of God, whether wearing the uniform of Budd- hist or Baptist, Catholic or Campbellite, Methodist or Mo- hammedan, move forward, with Faith its sword, Hope its ensign and Charity its shield. Cease this foolish interne- cine strife, at which angels weep, swing into line as sworn allies and, at the command of the Great Captain, advance your standards on the camp of the common foe. Wage war, not upon each other, but on Poverty, Ignorance and Crime, hell's great triumvirate, until this beautiful world's redeemed and bound in very truth, "With gold chains about the feet of God." TRILBY AND THE TRILBYITES. The Trilby craze has overrun the land like the ''grip" bacillus or the seven-year locust. Here in America it has become almost as disgusting as the plague of lice sent upon Egypt to eat the chilled steel veneering off the heart of BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 139 Pharaoh the fickle. Everything is Trilby. We have Tril- by bonnets and bonbons, poses and plays, dresses and drinks. Trilby sermons have been preached from promi- nent pulpits, and the periodicals, from penny-post to preten- tious magazine, have Trilbyismus and have it bad. One \vould think that the world had just found Salvation, so loud and unctious is its hosannah that Trilby was some new Caaba-stone or greater Palladium floated down from heaven on the wings of Du Maurier's transcendant genius; that after waiting and watching for six thousand or million years, a perfect exemplar had been bequeathed to the world. I have read Du Maurier's foolish little book as a disa- greeable duty. The lot of the critic is an unenviable one. He must read everything, even such insufferable rot as "Coin's Financial School," and those literary nightmares turned loose in rejoinder veritable Rozinantes, each bear- ing a chop-logic Don Quixote with pasteboard helmet and windmill spear. I knew by the press comments I had al- ready surmised from its popularity with upper-tendom that "Trilby" was simply a highly spiced story of female frailty ; hence I approached it with "long teeth" like a politician eating crow, or a country boy absorbing his first glass of lager beer. I had received a surfeit of the Camillean style of literature in my youth, before I learned with Ecclesiastes the Preacher or even with Parkhurst that "all is vanity." So far as my experience goes the only story of a fallen woman that was worth the writing and the reading is that of Mary Magdalen ; and it is not French. Her affaires d' amour appear to have ended with her repentance. She did not try to marry a duke, elevate the stage or break into swell society. After closing her maison de joie she ceased to be "bonne camarade ct bonne fille" in the tough de tough quarter of the Judean metropolis. There were no more strolls on the Battery by moonlight alone love after exchang- ing her silken robe de chambre for an old-fashioned night- gown with never a ruffle. When she applied the soft pedal the Bacchic revel became a silent prayer. So far as we can gather, the cultured gentlemen of Judea did not fall over each other in a frantic effort to ensnare her with Hymen's noose. If the Apostles recommended her life to the ladies of their congregations as worthy emulation the stenograph- ers must have been nodding worse than Homer. If the elite of Jerusalem named their daughters for her and made her the subject of public discussion, that fact has been for- gotten. And yet it is reasonably certain that she was beau- 140 . BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST tiful even more beautiful than Trilby, the bones of whose face were so attractive, the pink of whose tootsie- wootsies so irresistible. The Magdalen of St. Luke appears to have been in many respects the superior of the Magdalen of Du Maurier. She does not appear to have been an ignorant and coarse-grained she-gamin who frequented the students' quarter of the sacred city, posing to strolling artists for "the altogether," being, in the crowded atelier like Mother Eve in Eden, "naked and not ashamed." We may suppose that the sensuous blood of the Orient ran riot in her veins that she was swept into the fierce maelstrom by love and passion and would have' perished there but for the infinite pity of our Lord, who cast out the seven devils that lurked within her heart like harpies in a Grecian temple, and stilled the storm that beat like sulphurous waves of fire "within her snowy breast. "And behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and anointed them with ointment." How stale, flat and unprofitable the modern stories of semi-repentant prostitutes beside that pathetic passage, which shears down into the very soul penetrates to the profoundest depths of the sacred Lake of Tears! And yet this ultra orthodox age which would suppress the Icono- clast if it could for poking fun at Poll Parrot preachers has not become crazed over Mary Magdalen has not so much as named canal-boat or a cocktail for her. Du Maurier says of his heroine : "With her it was lightly come and lightly go and never come back again. * * * * Sheer gaiety of heart and genial good fellowship, the difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading * * * so little did she know of love's heartaches and raptures and torments and clingings and jealousies," etc. A woman, who had never been in love, yet confessed to criminal intimacy with three men and was not yet at the end of her string! Not even the pride of dress, the scourge of need, the fire-whips of passion to urge her on, she sinned, as the Yankees would say, simply "to be a-doin' " broke the Seventh Command- ment "more in a f rolicksome spirit of camaraderie than any- thing else." That's the way we used to kill people in Texas. Still I opine that when a young woman gets so awfully jolly that she distributes her favors around promiscuously just to put people in a good humor, she's a shaky piece of furniture BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 141 to make a fad of a doubtful example to be commended from the pulpit to America's young- daughters. The French enthusiasts once crowned a courtesan in Notre Dame as Goddess of Reason and worshipped her; but I was hardly prepared to see the American people enthrone another as Goddess of Respectability and become hysterical in their de- votion. I am no he-prude. I have probably said as many kindly things of fallen humanity as Du Maurier himself, but I dislike to see a rotten drab deified. I dislike to see a great publishing house like that of Harper & Bros, so indif- ferent to decency, so careless of moral consequences, that, for the sake of gain, it will turn loose upon this land the foul liaisons of the French capital. I dislike to see the mothers of the next generation of Americans trying to "make up" to resemble the counterfeit presentment of a brazen bawd. It indicates that our entire social system is sadly in need of fu- migation such as Sodom and Gomorrah received. Trilby, the child of a bummy preacher and a bastard bar-maid, was born and bred in the slum of the wickedest city in the world. Little was to be expected of such birth and breeding. We are not surprised that she regards forni- cation as but a venial fault like cigarette smoking and sins "capriciously, desultorily, more in a frolicksome spirit of camaraderie than anything else." Girls so reared are apt to be a trifle frolicksome. We are not shocked to see her stripped stark naked in Carrel's atelier in the presence of half a hundred hoodlums of the Latin quarter seeming as unconcerned as a society belle at opera or ball with half her back exposed, her bust ready to spill itself out of her corsage if she chance to stoop. We even feel that it is in perfect ac- cord with the eternal fitness of things when these wild sprouts of Bohemia, "with kindly solicitude, help her on with her clothes." We can even pause to admire the experienced skill with which they put each garment in its proper place nnd deftly button it.' That she should have the ribald slang of the free-and-easy neighborhood at her tongue's end and be destitute of delicacy as a young cow might be expected ; but we are hardly prepared to see one grown up among such surroundings so unutterably stupid as not to know when her companions are "guying" her. Trilby croaking "Ben Bolt" for the edification of les trois Angliches were a sight worthy of a lunatic asylum. It was even more ridiculous than the social performance of that other half-wit, Little Billee, in Carrel's atelier. Stupidity covers even more sins than charity, hence we should not judge Du Maurier's heroine too harshly. As weak intellects yield readily to 142 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST hypnotic power, Svengali had an easy victim. I have no word of criticism for the poor creature. I do not blame Du Maurier for drawing her as he found or imagined her, nor can I blame popular preachers, "able editors" and half- wit women for worshiping the freckled and faulty grisette as a goddess ; for does not Carlyle truly tell us that "what we see, and cannot see over, is good as Infinity?" Still I can- not entertain an exalted opinion of either the intelligence or morals of a people who will place such a character on a pedestal and prostrate themselves before it. I confess my surprise at the phenomenal popularity of the book among people familiar with Dickens, Scott and Thack- erary, triune transcendent of fiction. I had hoped when "Ben Hur" made its great hit that the golden age of flash fiction was past that it could henceforth count among its patrons only stable boys and scullions ; but the same nation that received "Ben Hur" with tears of thankfulness thank- fulness of a priceless jewel of spotless purity ablaze with the immortal fire of genius has gone mad with joy over a dirty rale of bawdry that might have been better told by a cheap reporter bordering on the jimjams. Has the American na- tion suddenly declined into intellectual dotage reached the bald-head and dizzy soubrette finale in the mighty drama of life? I can account for the success of Du Manner's book only on the hypothesis that "like takes to like" that the world is full of frail Trilbys and half-baked duffers like Little Billee, who, Narcissus-like, worship their own image. They don't mind the contradictions and absurdities with which the book abounds ; in fact, those who read up-to-date French novels are seldom gifted with sufficient continuity of thought to detect contradictions if they appear two pages apart. The book is ultra-bizarre, a thin intellectual soup served in grotesque, even impossible dishes and highly flavored with vulgar animalism just the mental pabulum craved by those whose culture is artificial, mentality weak, and morals mere matter of form. The plot was evidently loaded to scatter. It is about as probable as Jack and the Beanstalk, and is worked out with the skill of a country editor trying to "cov- er" a national convention. The story affords about as much food for thought as one of Talmage's plate-matter sermons is fully as "fillin' " as drinking the froth out of a pop-bot- tle, and equally as exhilarating. Like other sots, the more the literary bacchanal drinks the more he thirsts appetite increased by what it feeds upon. We can forgive Byron and Boccaccio the lax morals of their productions because BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 143 of their literary excellence, just as we wink at the little social lapses of Sarah Bernhardt because of her unapproachable genius ; but Du Maurier's book is wholly bad. It could only have been made worse by being made bigger. It is a moral crime, a literary abortion. The style is faulty and the narrative marred if a bad egg can be spoiled by slang lugged in from the slums of two continents with evident labor. Employed naturally, slang may serve in a pinch for Attic salt ; but slang for its own sake is smut on the nose instead of a "beauty-spot" on the cheek of Venus sure evi- dence of a paucity of ideas. A trite proverb, a non-transla- table phrase from a foreign tongue may be permissible ; but the writer who jumbles two languages together indiscrimi- nately is but a pedantic prig. It were bad enough if Du Maurier mixed good English with better French ; but he em- ploys in his bilingual book the very worst of both obsolete American provincialisms and the patois of the quartier latin side by side. To the cultured American who knows only the English of Lindley Murray and scholastic French, the book is about as intelligible as Greek to Casca or the "dog- latin" of the American school-boy to Julius Caesar. His characters resemble the distorted freaks of nature in a dime museum. They may all be possible, but not one of them probable. Taffy and Gecko are the best of the lot. The first is a big, good-natured Englishman who wants to see his sweetheart married to his friend, weds another and supports her quite handsomely by painting pictures he can- not sell ; the latter a Pole with an Italian's temperament, yet who sees the woman he loves in the power of a demon by whom she is presumably debauched and makes no effort to rescue her, is not even jealous. Svengali is the greatest musician in the world, yet cannot make a living in Paris, the modern home of art. He is altogether and irretrievably bad despite the harmony in which his soul is steeped! Think of a hawk outwarbling a nightingale of a demon flooding the world with melody most divine ! We may now expect Mephistopheles to warble "Nearer My God to Thee" between the acts! Trilby can sing no more than a burro. Like the useful animal, she has plenty of voice, and, like him, she can knock the horns off the moon with it or send it on a hot chase after the receding ghost of Hamlet's sire ; but she is "tone-deaf" can't tell Ophelia's plaint from the perform- ance of Thomas' orchestra. Svengali hypnotizes her, and, beneath his magic spell she becomes the greatest cantatrice in Europe. Hypnotism is a power but little understood; so we must permit Du Maurier to make such Jules Verne's 144 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST excursions into that unknown realm as may please him. Had Svengali made a contortionist of the stiff old Devon- shire vicar we could not cry "impossible." The Laird of Cockpen is a good-natured fellow to whom Trilby tells her troubles instead of pouring them into the capacious ear of a policeman. He is a kind of bewhiskered Sir Galahad who goes in quest of Trilby instead of the Holy Grail, and hav- ing found her, sits down on her bed and cheers her up while she kisses and caresses him. As she is in love with his friend, the performance is eminently proper, quite platonic. The Laird advises Trilby to give up sitting for "the altogeth- er;" yet Du Maurier assures us that "nothing is so chaste as nudity" that "Venus herself, as she drops her garments and steps on to the model-throne, leaves behind her on the floor every weapon by which she can pierce to the grosser passions of men." Then he informs us that a naked "woman is such a fright "that Don Juan himself were fain to hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." How thank- ful Cupid must be that he was born blind ! Still the most of us are willing to risk one eye on the average "altogether" model. Du Maurier who is a somewhat better artist than author illustrates his own book. He gives us several por- traits of Trilby, all open-mouthed, with a vacant stare. Strange that he did not draw his heroine nude as she sat on the bed hugging and kissing the Laird that he did not hang up "on the floor every weapon" by which even Venus herself "can pierce to the grosser passions of men." But perchance he was afraid the Laird would "hide his eyes in sorrow and disenchantment and fly to other climes." He could not be spared just yet. Despite his plea for the nude, I think he exercised excellent judgment in leaving Trilby "clothed and in her right mind" such as it was while the Laird roosted on her couch in that attic bed-room and was to use a Tennysonianism mouthed an-d mumbled. Even New York's "400" might have felt a little squeamish at see- ing this pair of platonic turtle doves hid away in an obscure corner of naughty Paris in puris naturalibus even if "there is nothing so chaste as nudity." Du Maurier says that Trilby never sat to him for "the al- together," and adds : "I would as soon have asked the Queen of Spain to let me paint her legs." If nudity be so chaste, and Trilby didn't mind the exposure even a little bit, why should he hesitate? And why should he not paint the legs of the Queen of Spain or even the underpinning of the Queen of Hawaii as well as her arms ? But if we pause to BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 145 point out all the absurd contradictions in this flake of ultra- French froth we shall wear out more than one pencil. Little Billee is a very nice young man who has been kept too close to his mother's apron-strings for his own good a girlish, hysterical kind of boy, who should be given spoon- victuals and put to bed early. Of course he wants to marry Trilby, fcr he is of that age when -the swish of a petticoat makes us sea-sick. She is perfectly willing to become his mistress although she had "repented 1 ' of her sins and been "forgiven" but a few days before. She has sense enough despite Du Manner's portraits of her to know that she is unworthy to become a gentleman's wife, to be mated with a he-virgin like Little Billee. But she is over-persuaded as usual and consents. Then the young calf's mother comes on the scene and asks her to spare her little pansy blossom not to blight his life with the frost of her follies. And of course she consents again. She's the great con- senter always in the hands of friends, like an American pol- itician. "The difficulty of saying nay to earnest pleading" prevents a mesalliance. Trilby skips the trala and Little Billee who has no chance to secure a reconsideration cries himself sick, but recovers, comes up smiling like a cotton- patch after a spring shower. He is taken to England, but fails to find that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." He gets wedded to his art quite prettily, and even thinks of turning Mormon and taking the vicar's daughter for a second bride, but slips up on an atheistical orange peel, something has gone wrong with his head. Where his bump of amativeness should stick out like a walnut there is a dis- couraging depression which alarms him greatly, and "worries the reader not a little. But finally he sees Trilby again, and, the wheel in his head, which has stuck fast for five years, begins to whizz around like the internal economy of an alarm clock or a sky terrier with a clothes-pin on his tail. Of course there is now nothing for Trilby to do but to die. They could be paired off in a kind of morganatic mar- riage ; but it is customary in novels where the heroine has been too frolicsome, for her to get comfortably buried instead of happily married, and perhaps it is just as well. Even a French novelist must make some little mock con- cession to the orthodox belief that the wage of sin is death. So Trilby sinks into the grave with a song like the dying swan, and Little Billee follows suit upsets the entire Christian religion by dying very peaceably as an atheist, without so much as a shudder on the brink of that outer darkness where there's supposed to be weeping and 146 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST wailing and gnashing of teeth. Svengali has also fallen by the wayside, a number of characters have been very happily forgotten, so the story drags along to the close on three not very attractive legs, Taffy, the Laird and Gecko. It is a bad drama worse staged, with an ignorant bawd for heroine, a weak little thing for leading man, an impossible Caliban for heavy villain and atheism for moral. Such is the wonderful work that has given this al- leged land of intelligence a case of literary mania a potu, set it to singing the praises of a grimy grisette more me- lodiously than she warbled, "mironton, mirontaine" at the bidding of the villainous Svengali. Such is this new lion of literature who has set American maids and' ma- trons to paddling about home barefoot and posing in pub- lic with open mouths flattering themselves that they re- semble a female whom they would scald if she ventured into their back yard. THE AMERICAN DRUMMER. THE APOSTLE OF CIVILIZATION. The "Drummer" is distinctively an American institu- tion. If we did not invent we developed him. He is not unknown to other lands, but the practice of "drumming trade" has been brought to the highest perfection in this hustling, pushing Republic of the West. The American merchant, like Mahomet, will go to the mountain if the altitudinous realty declines to skate over to him. Instead of bestriding a gum stump, like Patience on a monument, and waiting for some accommodating cow to back up to the milk-pail, he sends his agents out to round up the pro- crastinating bovine. He agrees with the poet that "all things come to him who waits" including unpaid bills and bankruptcy. The day has gone by when it were pos- sible to build up a profitable business without hard and persistent hustling and that's what the Drummer is here for. But he is more than an important trade factor ; he is an apostle of civilization, nay, of religion itself the religion of humanity. He penetrates every city, town and hamlet, bringing the people of the various sections of our com- mon country into closer fellowship, making stupid provin- cialism impossible. He has wiped out Mason and Dixon's BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 147 line, and had he been so progressive and powerful a cen- tury ago, would have prevented the growth of that sec- tional bitterness which culminated in blood. He is a pub- lic educator, a disseminator of new ideas, an inculcator of tolerance for the opinion of others, which, with the fear of God, is "the beginning of wisdom." He binds the people of the North and the South, the East and the West, to- gether with the golden chains of commerce, of mutual in- terest, which are stronger than sentiment, paramount even to patriotism. He carries into the country the polish of the city, into the city the vigor of the country. With all due respect to the "cloth," I believe that we could bet- ter spare the D. D's for a thousand years than the Drum- mers for one day. The labor of the first has a tendency to produce faction, that of the latter to bring the entire people into a common brotherhood. If the books were bal- anced it would perhaps be found that every copper cent contributed by the ministers of America to feed the or- phan and shelter the widow has been covered by the Drummers with a silver dollar. While the preacher has prayed the commercial pilgrim has worked and "faith without works is dead." To catalogue the noble deeds of the American Drum- mers would require a volume larger than Webster's Un- abridged or the Bible. Their purses have ever been open to the needy, they are the knights-errant of the new civilization, ever ready to succor the distressed, to shelter the weak and uplift the fallen. Nearly a score of them have laid down their lives for others, not for relatives or friends, but for men whose hands they had never pressed, for children whose lips they had never touched, for wo- men whose names they did not know. No cenotaph rises to commemorate their sacrifice, no flowers are strewn by a grateful nation upon their graves. No orator with lips of gold commends their heroism, no poet with heart of fire trills forth their praise the muse of history passes in si- lence the lowly mounds where reposes the dust of men whose names should be immortal. It is a popular superstition that the life of the Drum- mer is one dizzy round of pleasure that his time is about equaly divided between paying attention to charming young ladies met on the train and picking his teeth in front of swell hotels, drawing on his house and being en- tertained by progressive merchants who are delighted to see him, and who give him carte blanche to stock 'em up. I dislike to bring the Drummer down from that ecstatic 148 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST empyrean where public opinion has placed him ; but really, the road angel's wings were not intended for Icarian flights. Should he go sailing "up among the little stars, all around the moon," he'd soon get a note from the head of his house intimating that he might as well fly across the ocean, birdie. He is expected to keep very close to the grass, but to avoid its growing under his feet. Will Carleton's catalogue of the qualities necessary to make a competent editor aptly summarizes those of a successful Drummer. "Is your son an unbound edition of Moses and Solomon both? Can he compass his spirit with meekness and strangle a natural oath? Can he courteously talk to an equal and browbeat an impudent dunce ? Can he keep things in apple-pie order and do half a dozen at once? Does he know how to spur up his virtue and put a check-rein on his pride? Can he carry a gentleman's manners within a rhinoceros' hide?" The prospective purchaser who's the pink of politeness cannot pay his bills, while the cash customer's a veritable porcupine who must be approached by siege and parallel. The railway sandwich and gutta-percha pie smite him by day, while the pestilence that walketh in darkness crawls out of its lair and besieges him by night. One day he fares as sumptuously as Dives ever did, and he next dines on bull beef, stale bread and Pefferian butter, then biv- ouacs in a stuffy room, furnished with a three-legged chair and mouldy bed that smells like a second-hand coffin from a nigger cemetery. One day he is cared for like a king and charged two dollars, the next he is required to cough up three-cart wheels for being treated as an intruder and fed like a tramp. The servants in one hotel are paid by the proprietor, required to show guests every possible attention and told to use their Trilbys if caught angling for a tip ; in the next they are mere slot-machines into which the Drummer is expected to drop four-bits to get a second-class dinner for which he's afterwards required to pay a dollar. Just about the time he gets his stomach educated to accept anything- without a protest, and has become able to sleep on a corn-cob mattress without get- ting kicked out of his pajamas by a prowling nightmare, he falls in love with some sweet-faced girl, and the thought that he can visit her but once in 90 days, while his rival's fluttering about her four times a week, makes his heart as heavy as his sample-case at the subsequent end of a summer's day. Finally he is wedded and at once BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 149 begins to look forward to the time when he can leave the road and enjoy the shade of his own vine and fig tree where he can hear the whistle of a train at 2 o'clock in the morning without instinctively reaching for his clothes; but he now has a valuable trade established, which as a man of family he cannot afford to sacrifice. So he kisses the semi-widowed wife and the babes who regard him almost as an alien, and goes plodding over the old route, ever longing for the day of his emancipation, which too often comes only with a summons to exhibit his samples to St. Peter. Comparatively few Drummers are to be found in Amer- ican prisons, which proves that even the semi-homeless life they lead has not demoralized them, as it would the majority of men. In fact, were they not men of sterling honesty, brains and culture they could not retain their present responsible positions. I think it will be conceded by all careful students of sociology that the intelligence of the commercial travelers, as a class, is higher than the average in any other occupation. This is not the result of accident; it is the natural effect of a well-defined cause. There was a time and especially here in the South when the tendency of the best intelligence was to the pro- fessions and politics. The class spirit inherited from Eu- ropean ancestors was still strong within us, and the "tradesman," no matter how cultured or prosperous, was assigned to a lower position than the veriest mutton-head among professional men. The learned professions consti- tuted the nobility of the New World, and, as Pride is ususally the handmaid of Intellect, drew to them the best minds of the Nation. Socially the merchant ranked with the mechanic, the mechanic the laborer, and all the jour- nalist, who was regarded as a ne'er-do-weel a mere lit- erary scullion. But class distinction, grounded on voca- tion, was a European cult, in nowise adapted to the Amer- ican atmosphere, which vibrated to the cry of "liberty, equality and fraternity." It perished, and for a nobility founded on occupation was substituted one of brains, and now men are expected to adorn their vocation instead of vice versa. Not only has the "tradesman" been placed on a social equality with his professional brother, but the me- chanic has also taken his place in the "American house of lords," the once despised journalist become a multi-mil- lionaire and, in his own opinion at least, arbiter of the des- ISO BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST tiny of the Nation. Our successful merchants and miners, inventors and journalists are even crowding the D. D's, M. D's and LL. D's for social pre-eminence. The rewards of commerce are greater than those of the professions, and the better intelligence of the country, being in nowise in- different to the almighty dollar nor restrained by social scruples, "goes into trade" and prospers, instead of hang- ing its shingle on the outer wall and sitting down to semi- starvation. And the very best and brightest minds that commerce can command are put "on the road." There's where they are needed. The most stupid blockhead may learn routine duty in a great mercantile establishment; but the man sent out in these days of sharp competition and close margins to extend trade, must not only know a hawk from a handsaw and the cost of each, but have an accurate knowledge of human nature. He must be a strategist be able to win the confidence, even friendship of men of antithetical dispositions, tastes and habits, for the proverb that "there's no sentiment in trade" is far from true. Other things being equal, our custom and our affections keep close company. Pope was probably viewing the Drummer with prophetic eye when he de- clared that, "The proper study of mankind is man." We have carried the division of labor too far for the per- fect intellectual development of the race. If it once took nine tailors to make a man, it now requires even more "spe- cialists." Each devotes himself to some particular line, whether it be the curing of corns or the expounding of con- stitutional law, and follows it so assiduously that he usually knows little of anything else. It now requires about a dozen different kinds of doctors to keep the human mechan- ism in perfect running order each of the important organs must have its specialist and the same rule of subdivision obtains in every trade and profession. The specialist usu- ally becomes a one- faculty man instead of a fully developed intellectual athlete. One may know comparatively noth- ing beyond theology, or some single division of law or med- icine, and become wealthy and distinguished if he but know that one thing well; but the drummer who attempts to do business without a good supply of general information is going to get strung at the quarter-pole. It is an important part of his stock-in-trade he must be able to interest the prospective purchaser, no matter what his hobby. Shake- speare assures us that "home-keeping youths have ever homely wits." However that may be, certain it is that the intellect of man is sharpened by frequent contact with his BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 151 fellows, is strengthened by that stubborn "battle of life" in which the weakest go to the wall. The Travelers' Protective Association of America was or- ganized in 1882, "For the purpose of furthering the interest of commercial travelers, by giving them better hotel accom- modations, cheaper rates of travel and greater allowance of baggage." It got considerably in debt after eight years' ex- istence, and at the convention in Denver in 1890, St. Louis merchants offered to pay the indebtedness, amounting to $2200, if the headquarters were located in that city, and this offer was accepted. That year the annual membership fee was raised from $2 to $10 and an insurance feature added, allowing $3000 in case of death by accident and $15 a week in case of partial disability. At the reorganization Texas had about four times the membership of any other state. It was, in fact, greater than all the rest combined. Texas was "the banner state" at the close of the first year after re- organization, when the total membership of the National Association amounted to some 1800. Next year the con- vention met at Little Rock, and the membership approxi- mated 2500. The following year it was held at Old Point Comfort, Va., and the membership was about 3000. In 1893 it was held at Peoria, 111., and the membership had increased to nearly 4000. The death indemnity was raised to $4000 and the weekly indemnity, in case of disability 'resulting from accident, made $25. In 1894 the National convention was held at Milwaukee, Wis., and the membership had in- creased to over 7000. The death benefit was raised to $5000, the weekly indemnity remaining as before, $25. It is believed that the membership now exceeds 11,000 a mighty army of "hustlers" marshalled beneath the banner of Com- merce, keeping step to the music of Progress. The National Convention of the T. P. A. will be held this month in San Antonio, the metropolis of Texas, the most interesting city on the American continent. The "boys" will fall in love with San Antonio, because, like themselves, it is broad-gauged, hospitable, little addicted to the vice of hypocrisy. Many of them who come from the older states will probably expect to find a wild and woolly frontier town, where bad whisky's four-bits a drink and the festive cowboy chases the elusive longhorn through the principal streets, shoots out the kerosene street-lamps, and rides his broncho up to the bar when yearning for a compound of tarantula- juice and creosote ; to be met at the train by a deputation of 152 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST leading citizens who wear their pants in their boots and boy- cott their barbers, and welcomed by Mayor Elmendorf from the hurricane deck of a cayuse with an oration somewhat as follows : "Well, fellers, y're at the end o' the trail. We've got y' corraled an' we're agoin to treat y' white. That's what. We've laid in two dozen skins o' mescal fur the occasion, histed the American flag an' fixed to hang a horsethief fer your amusement. After he's swung off and has quit kick- ing we'll rope a steer jist to show you how it's done, have a bull-fight in Main Plaza an' then adjourn t' the saloon of Alkali Ike an' enjoy a fandango. If any o' youens feel like chancin' yer pile y'll find the squarest poker game at Ike's you ever sot into. Play 'er stiff as y' like. Make your- selves t' home. If Broncho Pete or Grizzly Bill goes to shootin' holes in yer plug hats without an invite jist report t' me, alcalde of the burg, an' me'n Bryan Callaghan '11 straighten the cusses out in two shakes of a maverick's tail. We'll now have some music by the Jewsharp quartette, with Mesquite Charlie workin' in the lead. You'll then take a drink with his-zonner, which is me, after which we'll ad- journ to my hacienda over on the Nueces and hist in a few slugs o' Kansas bacon and biled yerbs." But those who come expecting to "rough it" will be hap- pily disappointed. They will find a cultured city possess- ing all the modern improvements, including a municipal debt a grand old commonwealth gleaming in the glorious sunlight of West Texas, a jewel pendant from the fringe of Civilization's robe. They will find there, as nowhere else in the New World, a romantic blending of the past and present the Sixteenth and Nineteenth centuries existing side by side "in harmonious discord." They will find that San Antonio is not so ultra-progressive as some of her sister cities that her people have not yet cast aside humanity and anointed themselves with hypocrisy, like ancient runners with oil, for that race whose guerdon is gold. San Antonio puts on few frills. Her hospitality is of the old-fashioned sort that may be felt as well as seen. She does not give the stranger a stereotyped two-for-a-quarter smile, an ice-cream handshake and expect to be repaid with a paean of praise that will send the price of real estate up ten per cent. If he is worthy she takes him to her great warm heart and treats him so well and so often that, like the worn voy- ageurs in the lotos-eaters' land, he's loth to longer roam. Of course there are whining Uriah Keeps with itching fin- gers, and hypocrites with frappe hearts in the Alamo City, BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 153 as elsewhere; but she has put them on a "Reservation," figuratively speaking", with other disreputable characters banished them to a social trans-San Pedro, so to speak, and franied her rule of conduct without their assistance. San Antonio possesses for the poet, the philosopher and the student an inexpressible charm. Its skies are brighter than those of France, its airs softer than those of Italy. There Anglo-Saxon chivalry rose to its glorious zenith. There was fought America's Thermopylae, there Ben Milam led his Spartan band against the fortifications and five-fold force of General Cos, and fell, crowned with the victor's wreath. There was planted the standard of Christian faith when Texas was peopled by wild beasts and still more sav- age men. On the ancient battlements of San Antonio have floated^ the banners of six nations, and through her streets for an hundred and fifty years has ebbed and flowed the crimson tide of war. We must have several days and nights for sight-seeing in San Antonio. We must dream about the ruined mis- sions where, before our grand-sires' day, the savage was taught to humble himself before the sacred cross ; about the Alamo, that charnel house of chivalry. We will be shown a dozen different places where Bowie bled and Crockett died; but no matter it's all holy ground. We must have a Mexican supper in the open air and a talk with the chile queens. We must have hot tamales, with ice cold beer on the side to temper the internal fires, listen to the music in Alamo Plaza and witness the Battle of Flowers. And above all, we must see San Antonio by moonlight see it from the roof of some tall building when, bathed in the silver flood it becomes a veritable vision of beauty, the apotheosis of romance, a fairy city which, like the baseless fabric of a dream, we expect to fade from sight with the coming of the sun. Beneath the magic rays of the southern moon the grimiest adobe is transformed into Parian marble, the mean- est jacal becomes an Edenic bower. The turreted postofHce looms up a mighty mediaeval castle, the placid river a tangled ribbon of burnished silver, a magic mirror, reflect- ing the unreal. A brace of mocking-birds call to each other from the depths of umbrageous foliage, then pour forth a flood of melody such as Orpheus never equaled ; the fire- flies gleam in the cool gardens; there comes the rhythmic pulse of dancing feet on oaken floors ; the sensuous perfume of dew-bespangled flowers hangs heavy in the air and sinks into the blood like voluptuous music, while overhead rides serene the silver Queen of Night, midway between the 154 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST sleeping- earth and "the star-domed City of God." But, as the governor of North Carolina remarked to the chief exe- cutive of Here's hopin'. I once attempted to become a road angel, but found the flying a trifle too laborious for my feeble wings. I had attained to the mature age of seventeen years when I deter- mined to become a knight of the grip and go forth conquer- ing and to conquer. I noticed that they usually wore good clothes and rode in the ladies' coach ; so, with a sigh, I surrendered my cherished ambition to become President of this great Republic and pass my name down to posterity as one of the numerous stepfathers of my country, and devoted all my energies to the accomplishment of my new destiny. I secured a position with an Indianapolis printing house on commission and sallied forth into the small towns. I was a Drummer at last and felt, with Monte Cristo, that the world was mine. But it wasn't at least not just yet. The first merchant I tackled seemed delighted to see me. His "What can I do for you to-day," was unctious as the Song of Solomon, as oily as a keg of cotton seed butter; but my reply seemed to freeze the genial current of his soul. His encouraging smile faded like artificial beauty in a pic- nic shower, his suavity slipped its trolley-pole, his milk of human kindness shrunk from a gallon an hour to half a pint a day. I talked to him and he listened with the ennuied air of a man to whom life is a burden and heaven not his hope. I learned that he was a Presbyterian, and rung in a few impromptu remarks on original sin without seeming to interest him. Even a short disquisition on foreordination failed to fetch him. I persuaded him to examine my samples and he finally gave some faint signs of life, gradually grew interested and asked for prices. After an hour's seance I was sure of a big C. O. D. order, but he was called to serve a customer, and I waited trembling on the verge of my first triumph. I was glad that I hadn't killed him during the first ten minutes. I said to myself that with patience for a lever and good-nature for a fulcrum I could move the world. While I was congratulating myself my prospective patron slipped out the back door and went to dinner, leaving a stuttering clerk in charge, who tried to tell me what had become of the boss, but sprung his pneumatic-tire at the half-way house and had to withdraw. When the merchant returned with his surcingle extended a notch or two he told me that he had more stationery than he knew BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 155 what to do with had no intention of placing an order. Then I was sorry that I hadn't killed him when 1 could have proved justifiable homicide. As I slowly packed my sam- ples I resolved never to be polite and patient again and I haven't. I began to inspect the clothing with which his tables were piled. He at once became interested. Did I want to buy a suit? I hardly knew. I became distant, re- served, and he set to work to thaw me out. I asked for prices and his politeness fairly oozed out at the pores his milk of human kindness increased momentarily in geometri- cal ratio. I was persuaded to try on various suits became well nigh enthusiastic in the matter of dress. For two 'hours he perspired and tumbled his stock, trying to find something that would satisfy my McAllisterian taste, then I told him I was overstocked with clothes had no intention of ordering more, and departed, feeling that I had tied in the ears of an unconscionable ass a double bcw-knot that wouldn't come out in a hurry. By working hard the rest of the day I managed to take one order for a pack of visiting cards. I told the merchant that I would ship them f. o. b. and draw on him in 30 days. Then I threw my sample-case in the river and hoofed it home. If I ever become a successful Drummer it will be as a member of the Salvation Army. CASH VS. COIN. Coin, a free silver advocate, and Cash, a hardshell gold- bug, have been conducting suppositions schools for the in- struction of the common people in the so-called "science of money." When first informed that their foolish little books were having an extensive sale, I supposed that the people regarded them simply as satires and read them to be amused; for not even a controversy between Mesdames Partington and Malaprop across the back-yard fence anent the proper method of making soft-soap or skinning eels could be more excruciatingly funny. But I learned some- what to my surprise, that many people take them seriously -even study them with attention, hoping to gain valuable information therefrom. I would not now be surprised to hear that Munchausen and Mother Goose had been adopted as text-books by our universities. Coin should be soundly spanked for his presumption and placed in the A B C class of economics, and Cash sentenced to the dunce-block for 156 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST at least a dozen years. There is some hope for the first he may outgrow his vagaries; but the latter signs a dozen certificates to his own irremediable idiocy. He begins with a false premise and closes with a stolen currency plan. He brazenly makes misleading statements, then appears to take a fiendish delight in exposing his own falsehoods. Not being a metallist, I might be expected to regard the merry war now raging between the gold and silverites much as the old woman did the controversy between her husband and the bear; but of two evils there is always a least. If we must have a money that will either scale the mighty fortunes of the millionaires or ruthlessly despoil the pantries of the poor, in God's name give us the first. A depreciating cur- rency is always an evil. It has ever been the bete-noire of the ultra conservative economists ; but I defy them to point to one nation it has irremediably ruined, to one people it has hopelessly impoverished. Yet the strand of Time is thick-strewn with wreck and ruin wrought by an appreci- ating currency, a currency that concentrated the wealth of mighty nations in the hands of a favored few and made of Mie masses miserable bondmen compelled them to choose between the bread of charity and the blood of revo- lution. The free and unlimited coinage of silver would be a mis- take per se, but wisdom personified compared with gold monometallism. It would not induct the toiling millions into an economic millenium; but it would constitute a step in the emancipation of the industrial Israel. It were better to wander forty years in the monetary wilderness, and at last reach a fair Canaan, than to content ourselves with Egyptian bondage and the making of bricks without straw. Such being the case, it were well to look with a tolerant eye on the "mistakes of Moses" who means well and align our batteries full upon old Pharaoh. I have no doubt that selfish monarch and his obsequious ministers talked to the groaning Israelites much as the money kings of to-day talk to the slaves of our industrial system. I can easily imagine them saying: "What would ye; leave the flesh-pots of Egypt whose savor ye are permitted to smell and take to the desert? Would ye follow to your certain destruction this bewhisk- ered fanatic, this foolish Midianite whose calamity clacking hath made ye discontent? Behold the plagues already brought upon the land by him ! See how much better off ye are than was labor four centuries ago. Why, we can prove it by the government statistics ! Jacob and his sons lived in BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 157 tents and came near starving to death, while ye inherit houses which ye have builded for yourselves, and for which ye pay rent and there's a free soup joint in every city. Talk about being oppressed ! Why, the value of farm prop- erty has doubled, and there was never a time when ye could purchase so much with a talent of gold if ye have the talent." The continual cry of the plutocrats through their news- papers and bipedal phonographs that the condition of labor is better to-day than in times past, is calculated to give sen- sible people a chronic case of ennui. It should be better much better. The workman of today can create more wealth in a week than could his grandsire in a month, and the more he creates the more he should enjoy. The con- dition of the laborer, the farmer and the mechanic should have improved more than 300 per cent during the past cent- ury. But has it? A century ago there was work for all and labor was sure of its reward. There was no such thing as able-bodied pauperism. How is it to-day? The Chicago Tribune, an ultra-conservative paper of the gold-bug school, estimated not long ago that a million American workmen were out of employment subsisting on the crumbs that fall from Dives' banquet-board and accepting his cast-off cloth- ing with obsequious thankfulness. Cash opens his school with an object lesson intended to be very impressive. He informs us by means of diagrams that the wage of labor well-nigh doubled and its purchasing power almost trebled from 1860 to 1892. I had no idea the workman *was getting along so well ! If he keeps up that lick for a few years he will be living in brown stone fronts and clipping bond coupons instead of going hungry to bed and wondering where in the Devil's name he is to get the money to meet the interest on his mortgage or make the monthly payment on the little jag of cheap furniture he purchased on the installment plan. With Cash's dia- grams before us it is difficult to understand how it chanced that a million men were taking up their belly-bands a notch for breakfast, dining on free soup and sucking their breath for supper. The average of wages is higher to-day than in 1890, but lower than in 1870. From 1875 to 1892 the average advanced one-half of one per cent then dropped fully 15 per cent? You can hire labor cheaper to-day than a quarter of a century ago, and there are more men waiting for jobs. Yet in a quarter of a century the wealth- creating power the value of labor has almost doubled. Does not that clearly demonstrate that there's something radically 158 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST wrong? Despite the fact that the wealth-creating power of labor has more than trebled during the century, the fact remains a fact as gross to sense as the sun at noon to-day that never before in the history of this nation, barring the acute stages of two or three panics, was it so difficult for the laborer, the mechanic and the farmer to make an honest living, or for the debtor to discharge his obligations. The gulf that separates Dives and Lazarus is wider than ever before and this despite the fact that the average of wages is higher and their purchasing power greater than forty years ago. As civilization advances the standard of living rises. Our ancestors lived on roots and raw meat, inhabited caves and hollow trees and attired themselves in a streak, of red paint for winter overcoat and a few freckles for sum- mer ulster; but as the world made progress from pure animalism the luxuries of one generation became the neces- sities of the next a fact which Cash has not dreamed of in his philosophy. He assures us that the principal cause of the panic of 1893 was "the decreased cost of production." In other words, when the people discovered that they could produce two bushels of wheat and two bolts of cloth with the expenditure of the same energy that was required in former times to produce one bushel of wheat and one bolt of cloth, they became panic-stricken were so badly scared that they proceeded to go naked and hungry! He first points to the increased purchasing power of wages as a boon enjoyed by the workingman, then assures him that the decrease in the cost of commodities was what turned him into a tramp! It seems almost like cruelty to animals to criticise such a consummate idiot. It is only a lurking suspicion that Cash is more knave than fool that he has been duly employed to pull wool over the eyes of the ignor- ant that leads the Iconoclast to dignify his ridiculous book with this review. I have some respect for an honest ignor- amus, but when a man possessing the faintest adumbration of intellect employs it in assisting Greed to despoil Need, he deserves to have his shirt-tail set on fire. Cash "admits that we are in the midst of a great financial and industrial depression" precipitated by an increased ability to create wealth but would not have us become discouraged. He assures us that "this panic will not always last." Let us hope not; but if we may judge the future by the past and cuckoo economics still prevail it will scarce have blown itself out before another is ripe. In twenty years we have had three panics, and the depression which follows these crashes usually lasts from three to seven BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 159 years. In other words, the workman can depend upon being employed at fair wages and the planter confidently expect to purchase with his cotton enough Paris green to poison the worms, about one year in four! And it is the occasional oasis in the industrial desert which Cash employs to prove that labor is fairly reveling in Lucullean luxury that those who are striving to emancipate it from poverty are a pack of pestiferous demagogues. To illustrate how rapidly the man with the hoe is becoming a gold-plated plutocrat, he points out that the increase of the value of farm property in Minnesota during the past ten years amounts to more than $176,000,00x3, while the mortgage debt increased but $4,000,000 during the same time. He neglects, however, to mention that Minnesota is a new state, that the immigra- tion, has been very large and the increase in farm values chiefly due to augmented population. According to his figures the increase in land values represents about five- sixth of the total, but as he fails to state how much of this represents improvements and how much "unearned incre- ment" his statistics are utterly worthless. The increase in land values may be entirely due to increase in population for aught he shows to the contrary, which would leave about $30,000,000 to represent the reward of labor in one of the greatest agricultural states for a period of ten years. Had Cash been seeking the truth instead of something to bolster up a preconceived theory, he would have taken for illustration one of the older agricultural States. He might as well have selected Oklahoma and argued from the rapid increase of farm values that the American agriculturalists are becoming veritable Astors ! Having given the increase in farm debt, he should have given the amount of mortgage foreclosure. There is nothing in his statistics to show that half the arable area of Minnesota has not passed into the ownership of Eastern capitalists during the decade. Fig- ures do not lie, to be sure, but to quote from Cash "they are the best friends a financial liar ever had." He tells us, and quite truly, that "the credits of the coun- try are based on the property of the country" that the debts of the country are paid with the products of the soil and the handicrafts of the people." To the query, How can we repay the wealth we have borrowed from John Bull, he re- plies : "We will send the Englishman something to eat and to wear." That being the case, what has our currency to do with our foreign trade? Yet he tells us to reject cur- rency plans "when they propose a money good enough to use at home, but which the foreigner will not take." Did 160 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST we ever make a money that the foreigner would "take?" Has the foreigner made money since the establishment of a purely American currency system that we would "take?'' If Cash had a hatful of British guineas he couldn't buy a beer with them in the entire city of Chicago. He could doubtless find some one to purchase them by weight, just as he could go on the market and dispose of a carload of pork or pig-iron. Cash undertakes to demonstrate to a doubting world that gold, instead of increasing, is actually decreasing in value. He assures us that a day's labor is the measure of value, in fact the only one declares that "it will buy more than one and a half times as much gold as it would forty years ago, and closes with the triumphant cackle of an old hen that, by laborious effort, has succeeded in lay- ing a new egg. Accepting a day's labor as the best pos- sible measure of value, what does Cash, prove by it? Simply that gold, instead of having diminished in value, has greatly increased. His assumption that a day's labor will buy a third more gold than it would forty years ago might be easily disproved ; but granting that his premise is correct, his conclusion is wrong. Labor is valuable only as it is productive, and Cash assures us that a given amount of human effort will produce three times as much wheat and more than three times as much cotton cloth as it would forty years ago. We know that the same rule ap- plies to almost every line of human endeavor because Cash has told us so. What does this signify? Simply that in forty years labor has about trebled in value; yet a given amount, instead of buying three times as much gold, will purchase but a trifle more than one and-half times as much. Does Cash catch the idea? If his conclu- sion that gold has decreased in value more than 50 per cent in forty years be correct, I submit that as a measure of value it is a miserable failure and we had best find a better one. A suspicion that gold and paper currency bottomed thereon do not constitute the best possible exchange me- dium seems to have occurred to Cash, for he suggests one composed of greenbacks "convertible into a 2 per cent government bond an intercontrovertible bond which may be exchanged for the greenbacks again upon the de- mand of the holder/' then adds: "The proposed credit money would constitute a flexible currency which would always answer the demands of business. It would in- crease and decrease according to demand, and no cur- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 161 rency famine could occur so long as there were outstand- ing bonds." Cash has appropriated, without so much as by-your- leave, the currency plan which I proposed in the Icono- clast for December, 1891, and elaborated in a widely circulated pamphlet entitled "Dives and Lazarus," pub- lished June i, 1894. It was this plan which the financiers of Germany discussed and approved at Berlin in 1893. I would feel highly gratified by an endorsement of my in- terconvertible bond-currency plan by the spokesman put forward by the American gold monometalists had he not taken the precaution to spoil it by stipulating that we "keep as the standard of value the gold dollar of pres- ent weight and fineness" which he assures us has fluctu- ated more than 50 per cent in forty years! Still I am grateful for the direct admission by the gold-bugs that it is not necessary to bottom our paper money on metal, and for the tacit admission that a currency so constituted can- not possibly be a flexible currency, answering to the de- mands of business and preventing money famines. But just how we are to retain the fluctuating gold dollar as the standard of value when we have a currency in nowise dependent upon the yellow metal is beyond my philoso- phy. L fear that Cash has brooded over the money prob lem until his little think-tank has got full of logical wig- gletails. If the bond-currency plan works it will soon be adopted by all enlightened nations and the monetary oc- cupation of gold will be gone. The decreased demand will cause a slump in price greater than Cash figures out has occurred in the last forty years. To emancipate our measures of value from the laws which govern commodities and make it as immutable as the multiplication table, I suggested the plan which Cash seems unable to comprehend. For his benefit I will re- state it as briefly as possible : Let the government sell just as many one per cent inter- convertible bonds as the people desire, the proceeds con- stituting a redemption fund. Any one having United States currency of any kind could exchange it for these bonds redeemable on demand. Add full legal tender treasury notes to the volume of currency just so long as the increase will remain in the channels of trade. When people are buying bonds the currency is redundant ; when they are selling bonds the volume of currency is too small to properly serve the ends of commerce. In the bond re- demption fund we have an infallible indicator of the cur- 162 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST rency requirements of the country. When the volume of currency is too small its purchasing power increases un- til equal to the work required of it; when redundant its purchasing power decreases until all is employed. By this system the volume of currency would adapt itself auto- matically and infallibly to the requirements of commerce and our measure of value remain immutable." Cash lays it down as a fundamental principle that "in- trinsically valuable money only is a measure of value," yet commends a currency plan that would either prove a flat failure or drive all intrinsically valuable money out of existence. He prides himself on ''disagreeing with all the great economists of the world" regarding the quantitive theory of money, yet approves a currency plan based ex- clusively upon that theory. The bond-currency plan would make our measure of value a theoretical dollar purely a trade tool. Its value would not depend upon cost of pro- duction but on utility on supply relative to demand. Cash has something to say about "the science of money." They all do. It is supposed to be something very esoteric, quite beyond the comprehension of the hoi polloi. The metalists prattle of "redemption money," and "money of final payment," and "gold as a standard of value," until, like a half-baked sophist, they become completely lost in a fog of their own making and proceed to inflict a suffering public with books filled from imprimus to finis with foolish contradictions and self-evident absurdities. I have neither space nor inclination for a dissertation on money, but will drop the befuddled Cash a line to enable him to find his way out of the labyrinth in which he is lost. Should he inadvertently hang himself with it after- ward "the science of money" will not have lost much. A dollar, whether it be of gold, silver or paper, is simply a check which the people in their official capacity gave against the entire wealth and credit of the nation. Unless it be redeemed on demand in the necessaries or luxuries of life it is absolutely worthless. There can be no "money of final payment." When you exchange a paper dollar for a gold dollar you have simply traded one government check for another the gold dollar awaits redemption in commodities. One dollar is simply a figure of speech by which we express the commercial relation which one com- modity bears to others. Every exchange made is upon this basis, but by using metal as an exchange medium all deferred payments become speculations deals in futures. One great fault of Cash is jumping at conclusions, sprain- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 163 ing his logical sequence in mid-air and landing on both sides of the goal. He has heard that the "per capita cir- culation of money is approximately two and one-half times as much in France as it is in England, while the prices of the great staples do not vary very much in the two countries." That is what causes him to joyfully bestride the celluloid collars of "all the great economists of the world" on the quantitive theory of money. It is another sad illustration of the axiom that "a little learn- ing 1 is a dangerous thing." Cash has heard of improved machinery in agriculture and the industrial arts, but is evidently not aware that in some portions of the world it is applied to exchange. A given quantity of currency will do double the money work, in England that it will in France, perhaps ten times what it- will in China. Ex- changes to the amount of hundreds of millions sterling are effected without the handling of a single coin or the passing of a pound note. If we would abolish our banks and clearing houses here in the United States we would require a currency of at least $250 per capita to expedi- tiously transact our present volume of business. In every civilized country money is becoming ever less an ex- change medium, while retaining its attribute as a meas- ure of value. If we could so perfect our exchange system as to transact all our business without the use of money there would be no need of the interconvertible bond- currency plan, for the very thing at which it aims to take currency altogether out of the control of politicians and place it in the hands of commerce would be accom- plished. But this is probably as large a lesson as Cash can digest in a single year. When he has thoroughly mas- tered it I will explain to him, in words adapted to his understanding, that while the free and unlimited coinage of silver is an awkward and uncertain step, it is still a step forward ; but that gold monometalism is an unequiv- ocal step backward. The first is a misdirected blow for liberty ; the last a strengthening of the chains that bind America's industrial slaves. 164 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST TEXAS AND INTOLERANCE. CRANFILL SUPERSEDES CHRIST. A subscriber at Savannah, Ga., sends me a newspaper containing an account of the attempt made by the min- isters of Hoboken, N. J., to prevent Col. Robt. G. Inger- soll delivering a lecture in that city, and asks, "Can't you touch up those intolerant Jerseyites?" I could, and it would afford me some satisfaction to do so ; but it would be firing away ammunition without effect. Professing Christians who believe that God Almighty needs their guardianship that he can be injured by the ablest agnos- tic on the earth are not amenable to reason, and the Iconoclast is not so well provided with pearls that it can afford to cast them before iswine. 'When ministers imagine that the religion planted by the toil and watered by the tears of the Immaculate Son of God can be up- rooted by a single scoffer; that it cannot stand the fierce light which beats upon Reason's forum and defy all the ballistae and battering-rams of human logic ; that it must be sheltered from the puny attacks of mortal men lest they prove it a fraud and make it a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations, their faith must be wofully weak or their lives a brazen fraud. Truth does not hide away in dark corners, but seeks the garish light of the noonday sun. It does not fear the attacks of Falsehood, but stands ever in the world's arena, courting the con- flict. The Christian religion is true or it is false. It is of God or it is of the devil. If true it will stand the severest test. If of God it is indestructible as the law of gravita- tion. Then why do its ordained defenders take refuge behind long forgotten laws born of brutish ignorance, and with the policeman's bludgeon strive to close the mouth of honest criticism? The poet assures us that "Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just" ; yet the leaders of the armies of the Lord will not fight, even on compulsion. Instead of meeting logic with logic and the fallible reason of man with the authoritative decrees of God, they answer every attack of infidelity with a tirade of foul calumny, then appeal to the laws of the land to protect them in their pitiful weakness. They shriek "in- fidel" when it was infidels whom Christ toiled and suf- fered to save. They howl "blasphemer," when their great Master forgave even those who nailed him to the cross BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 165 and mocked his agonies. The tactics adopted by the church to crush those who presume to question or dare to differ is making infidels by the million. The day has gone by when men of intelligence were content to close their eyes, open their mouths and swallow without ques- tion every foolish assertion of clerical fatheads. Formerly they builded their Reason on their Faith; now they are grounding their Faith upon their Reason that infinitesi- mal fragment of Godhood which burns, more or less brightly, in every human brain. They are demanding that the Christian religion be cast into the crucible where every assumption of science is tried by fire, and either comes forth in deathless splendor or is relegated to the rubbish heap. Yes, it were a real comfort to "touch up those intolerant Jerseyites" ; but my correspondent must excuse me. There's an old adage to the effect that those who live in glass houses should not throw stones and Texas can furnish forth more hidebound dogmatists, narrow-brained bigots and intolerant fanatics in proportion to population than can any other section of these United States. That is why the Iconoclast located in Texas. It came, not to call the righteous, but sinners -to repentance. When it has thoroughly reformed the Texas ministry it will be time enough for it to tackle that of other States. We are somewhat inclined to sneer at the old-time Puritans of New England and the exuberant cranks of Kansas. Ever and anon some able editor mounts to the roof garden of his donjon keep and thanks God that we are not as other people ; but the cold hard fact remains that Massachusetts and Kansas combined cannot furnish so large a contin- gent whom it were unsafe to trust with power to perse- cute for religious opinion's sake. Of course Texas has many as broad-gauged and progressive people as any land or clime can boast ; but she is cursed with a grand army of Me-and-god creatures of the Cranfillian type, who would, if invested with plenary power, establish a strict censor- ship of the press and permit nothing to be published that was not considered ultra-orthodox that did not begin with hypocritical groans and end with blasphemous "amens"; who would require Jews and Catholics to recant on pain of death and place heretics under harrows of iron. In most States the church has made grand prog- ress, broadened, become more tolerant, more Christ-like calling science, art and education to its aid while cast- ing non-essentials aside ; has realized that 166 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST "New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth ; They must upward still and onward Who would keep abreast of truth." But the Texas division seems to have become hopelessly stuck in the Serbonian bogs of a brainless bigotry. It is not content to care for the spiritual welfare of man, but insists upon usurping the functions of the State and pro- viding for his temporal well-being also. It would make him devout, not by God's love, but by due process of law. Having made it a criminal offense for him to pursue his usual vocation on Emperor Constantine's "holy Sabbath, " it now aspires to close all fairs and other places of in- struction on that day, and we may soon expect it to send a constable after those who fail to attend divine service and cannot furnish a doctor's certificate of inability so to do. It has banded itself together in a political party with the avowed purpose of dictating; what man shall drink, and will doubtless next prescribe the cut of his clothing and limits his library to Slattery's and Sam Jones' ser- mons, a Protestant Bible and the "Baptist Standard." And the most remarkable phase of it all is that Cranfill has become infinitely more sacred than Christ, the politi- cal tenets of the church militant holier than the Ten Commandments. You may declare the Garden of Eden episode a myth, and even hint that the Immaculate Con- ception is but an old pagan legend in a new dress, and be allowed to live ; but one doubt regarding the efficiency of Prohibition were sufficient to damn you, while to sug- gest that either Cranfill, Jones or Slattery are out for the long green and have as little religion as a rabbit, were rankest blasphemy a sin against the Holy Ghost. Fortunately the liberal element dominates in Texas, as it does in every civilized country, and the fiendish wolf of fanaticism can only tug at its chain and show its venomous teeth. Not being permitted to put men and women to the torture for uttering their honest convic- tions in a land of so-called religious liberty; to flay them alive for daring to dissent from some ridiculous dogma cooked up by half-crazed dunderheads during the Dark Ages; to drag them at the cart's tail and bore their tongues with hot irons in the name of a beneficent Deity, these professed followers of the Man of Galilee resort to sneaking boycotts, petty annoyances and cowardly calumnies. They prove in every way possible that their hearts, instead of being full to overflowing with the grace BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 167 of God and the catholic charity of Christ, are bitter little pools in whose poisonous waters and fetid scum writhe and wriggle unclean reptiles such as Dante saw in t the desolate regions of the damned. That the picture is not overdrawn every one who has chanced to provoke the ire of the ultra-religious element of Texas knows too well. It were equivalent to invading a den of rattlesnakes or stirring up a rabid skunk. Tom Paine was a devout Deist. At the shrine of the Most High God he humbly bowed the knee. He never penned an irreligious line nor uttered an immoral sentiment. He was an intellectual Colossus, towering head and shoulders above even the Titans of his time. He was the unfaltering champion of freedom, the guide, philosopher^ and friend of the new- born nation. But for his fearless pen, whose path of fire led on to liberty, the sword of Washington might have slumbered in its sheath. Paine did more than all the preachers of his day to nerve the eagle's wing for its imperial flight to fling Freedom's banner, like a burst of glory, into the leaden sky. But he chanced to disagree with the orthodoxy of his day, and for a hundred years he has been denounced and damned as an enemy of God and a curse to mankind. Even his dying bed has been heaped with brutal lies, and across his grave still beat and break the accursed waves of "Christian" calumny. In many portions of the country the church has ceased to belittle and belie Tom Paine ; but the ultra-orthodox of Texas still insist that he was an atheist and an outlaw who repented of his foul crimes too late to escape the horrors of hell. The New England Puritans who hanged witches and persecuted Quakers felt that they were discharging a disa- greeable duty. They were the creatures of an ignorant and superstitious but God-fearing age, and their cruelties, which have left so dark a stain upon the annals of the Christian church, were performed more in sorrow than in anger. If they inflicted tortures in the name of religion they were will- ing to suffer death in its most terrible form in defence of their faith. With them religion was a serious thing and morality its synonym. If ignorant they were honest, and if brutal they "were brave. They despised the rewards of this world, trampled its frivolities beneath their iron-shod feet, loved God with their whole hearts and hated a liar and a hypocrite as they did the imps of hell. How is it with the Texas intolerants? Instead of fixing their eyes stead- fastly upon the Kingdom of God, they are the most per- 168 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST sistent seekers after the almighty dollar, the most eager for social preferment and political advancement of 'any class in the commonwealth. They will give blows, but will not stand to receive them, and instead of regarding with kingly contempt that man who would swerve one iota from the truth to preserve his life, they have made of lying a power- ful lever "with which they hope to overthrow religious liber- ty, transform the state into a theocracy and force free-born American citizens to submit to the petty slavery of sumptu- ary laws. Their preachers, instead of serving without salary and looking forward to a heavenly reward as did the Apostles, are ever seeking "calls" to fatter financial pas- tures. When the legislature is to select a brace of chaplains to insult Almighty God with perfunctory prayers paid for at the rate of $5 a minute by men glad of an opportunity to earn a dollar a day there's a wild rush of the sanctified time-servers to the capital city, and the methods they adopt to corral the succulent sinecure would disgrace a railroad lobby or cause a bunco-steerer to blush. They have di- vorced morality from religion and substituted unadulterated gall for the fear of God. Had the religious fervor of the Puritans dominated the world we would have had men of mistaken methods but of iron mould ; should the fashionable politico-religiosity of Texas prevail we would have, to bor- row from Macaulay, "the days of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot and the slave." Unquestionably there are many worthy church commu- nicants in Texas, as elsewhere; but they appear to be in a hopeless minority a few grains of sound corn in a pile of compost. There are broad-gauged men in the Protestant ministry here men who serve the Lord in spirit and in truth, and by their kindly acts, progressive ideas and noble tolerance dignify his cause; but they are the exception in- stead of the rule and are almost invariably unpopular with the great body of church communicants, whose ideal ap- pears to be a preacher "with just ability enough to deceive and just religion enough to persecute." During the recent Prohibition campaign in McLennan county a minister of the gospel, believing sumptuary laws violative both of the spirit of the Christian Bible and the American constitution, spoke and worked against it. What happened? Did a commit- tee of his brethren in Christ wait upon him and strive by kindly argument to convince him that he was wrong? Did the other preachers offer up public prayers that he be brought within the pale of their political party? Not a bit BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 169 of it. They poured out upon him the seven vials of their wrath attacked him with the vindictive hatred of a pack of demons torturing a lost soul, or a drove of mangy jackasses kicking a dead lion. They belabored him from the pulpit and the rostrum, and turned the sectarian press into a reek- ing sewer that emptied upon him the foulest filth. These "Christians," these professed followers of the meek and lowly Nazarene, who was all love and charity and gentle- ness, reached for his vitals with beaks and claws like fam- ished vultures, then served him as the unclean Yahoos did the hapless Gulliver when they found him beneath their roost in Houyhnhnm land. And so they serve every man who declines to permit them to do both his religious and political thinking for him ; who refuses to take his place among the intellectual goslings and trail blindly in the wake of some flat-headed old ministerial gander, squawking when he squawks and fluttering when he flies. There are min- isters occupying prominent Texas pulpits who haven't orig- inated an idea in forty years, and who would not recognize the Incarnate Son of God if they met him in the road. It is not necessary that a man should possess an iota of intellect to become a popular preacher. In fact, brains are but in his way, for in orthodoxy there is absolutely no room for reason. He needs only to become a prohibitionist not nec- essarily a teetotaler cultivate a sanctified whine calculated to curdle milk, grab the crank of some pitiful little gospel mill and begin to grind. Let him but select the heavenly turnpike on which he suspects there will be the most travel, set up his little toll-gate, do the Jeremiah act and he'll soon have a mob of sanctified nonentities about him who shame the devil at his own game on week-days and try to bunco the blessed Saviour on Sunday. I have noticed that those who were most fearful that I would commit the awful sin of blasphemy, or "desecrate the Christian Sabbath" by play- ing ball with the boys or dancing with the girls were the people I had to watch closest in a trade; but those who sat up nights to agonize lest the young be led astray by some awful atheist, could tell the smoothest falsehood with the straightest face ; that those who wept the most copiously be- cause the heathen of foreign lands had no Bible, were a trifle backward in supplying the heathen right here at home with bread; that those who cried "awmen" the loudest at camp-meetings were usually expert circulators of calumnies. If we could trade our ham-fat preachers for Good Samari- tans at a ratio of 16 to I, our brass-collar orthodoxy for pure morality, and about three hundred thousand brainless 170 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST bigots and canting hypocrites for a yaller dog and lose him, Texas would be infinitely better off. A DAMNABLE DECISION. The decision of the Supreme Court in the income-tax case has placed this nation twenty years nearer a revolu- tion that may terminate in a Reign of Terror. It has issued to the plutocrat a patent of nobility declared that he belongs to a privileged class in nowise amenable to the laws that govern the proletarian. It has erected a barrier between Dives and Lazarus, drawn the line of battle be- tween the Cormorant and the Commune. It has trans- formed the Federal Constitution from a palladium of liberty into an instrument of oppression, the tool of tyranny. That decision is a challenge to destiny, a red blanket in the face of an infuriated bull, a mockery of Samson by foolish Philistines as he stands, blind and desperate, his brawny arms encircling the pillars of our political temple. It is a crime against the common people, a poisoned dirk driven into the very vitals of the American Republic, a foul blas- phemy of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the terrestrial Trinity of our fathers. Doubtless the occupants of the Supreme Bench resemble Brutus in that they are "all honorable men ;" but if such a halting, illogical and every way infamous verdict had been brought in by a petit jury there would have been more than a suspicion of bribery. The decision as handed down by Chief Justice Fuller reads like the special pleading of a jack- leg lawyer, employed to defend a rich but notorious robber caught despoiling the pantries of the poor. Talleyrand de- clares that language was made to conceal thought ; but even the opaque verbal flood in which the decision floats like a grisly skeleton in a sea of slime, cannot conceal the fact that Fuller knew the ruling was both dangerous and damnable. Like the lady in the play, he doth protest too much con- sumes an hour in a dismal failure to establish a radical dif- ference between tweedledum and tweedledee. It reminds one of the plea of Queen Elizabeth that she possessed a cavalry regiment of which neither horse nor man could be hurt, viz., a regiment of tailors on mares. He is too evi- dently arguing to his own conscience, which, like the dead Banquo, will not down. The four dissenting justices did not accuse their asso- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 171 ciates of corruption ; but they did charge them with having committed a crime with having instituted a despotism of wealth, with having deliberately endangered the existence of the American government by an abortive science of defi- nition. Never before in the history of the Supreme Court did the dissenting justices express such indignation over a decision or intimate so plainly that their associates were either fools or knaves. The vigorous, almost insulting protests of the dissenting justices; the tremendous mone- tary interests at stake, together with the scholastic hair- splittings, argumentative writhing and illogical twistings and turnings that distinguish the decision, may mean much or little according to the strength of the critic's confidence in the incorruptibility of the court. For my own part, 1 do not believe that the betrayal of the people was the result of direct bribery, as in the case of Benedict Arnold ; but I do believe that such pressure was brought to bear by the plutocracy upon our court of last resort as to shamefully de- feat the ends of justice. All men are more or less malle- able, and several members of our Supreme Court excep- tionably so veritable Trilbys in pants, who find it "difficult to say nay to earnest pleadings." The decision is simply an official notification that upon the shoulders of the poor must continue to rest the burthen of taxation. The court decided, by a vote of 5 to 4, that a tax on income arising from interest or rent is ''direct," there- fore unconstitutional unless apportioned among the several states on a basis of population; while a tax on income de- rived from labor, professional service or merchandizing is "indirect" and may be imposed at the pleasure of Congress and without apportionment. The gross injustice of such a ruling is too palpable to require comment, while its utter absurdity must be evident to every man capable of reason- ing from a premise to the simplest conclusion. A has an annual income of $1,000,000, derived from the rental of real estate or interest on capital invested in securities ; B has an income of $1000, derived from the occupation of merchant or machinist, butcher or baker. Congress, according to the Supreme Court, may, by a simple "Be it enacted," tax the petty income of B, but is forbidden to touch the colossal income of A, except by apportionment, when it becomes the province of each State to say how its pro rata shall be pro- vided. A tax on the individual earnings of B is "indirect," while a tax on the revenues of A, drawn second-hand from the efforts of others, is "direct" perhaps on the theory that "two negatives make a positive." The Federal gov- 172 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST ernment can shove its hand as deeply as it likes into the pocket of labor, but cannot touch one penny in the thousand pounds in the overflowing coffers of the capitalist. So says the court. How is that for the fundamental law of a land that poses in the face of heaven as "the refuge of the world's oppressed?" And what is the reply to this complaint? "Apportion- ment." Apportion hell between the West and South! Justice Harlan truly says that "No such apportionment can possibly be made without doing monstrous, wicked injustice to the many for the benefit of the favored few in particular States." Do those "able editors," short-horse politicians and other intellectual animaculae now echoing the word like lost burros braying for company, know what constitu- tional apportionment of the public burden means? It means that when the Federal government desires to raise a sum of money by such method each State must contribute thereto, not in proportion to its taxable wealth, but accord- ing to its population, no matter how poverty-stricken its people. It means that one state must put up as much for a mechanic out of employment, or a farmer with a mort- gaged crop, as another for a Rockefeller or a Gould. The privilege of taxing the great incomes by the method of ap- portionment simply means that labor is at perfect liberty to bite off its nose to spite its face, then leap from the frying pan into the fire. No political party will ever dare per- petrate such an infamy as the apportionment of the income tax. Not even the Supreme Court that pitiful cat's-paw of the plutocracy had the audacity to indorse it. While a portion of the law was declared constitutional, it was all killed the tail was permitted to go with the hide. The law was aimed at large incomes, many of which are drawn neither from rent nor interest; but the court denied the axiom that "half a loaf is better than no bread." It practically decided that should the government draft two men for war, and one escape, it would hasten to discharge the other, instead of mustering him in and sending a ser- geant after the runaway. The decision means that we can- not compel men to contribute to the support of government according to their means until we have a constitution which the plutocrat, with friends at court, cannot possibly pervert or the people decide that patience has ceased to be a virtue. It means that Wealth has decreed that Consump- tion- shall bear the burden that tariff reform and reduced excises are, for the present at least, "an irridescent dream." It means that no matter how imminent the peril of the gov- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 173 ernment, or pressing its need, it is powerless to compel the plutocrat to contribute of his means to the defense of our flag. It means, as Justice Brown expressed it, "The sub- mergence of the liberties of the people in a sordid despotism of wealth." It means that the people who have ever looked to the Supreme Court for protection from outrage and oppression, will henceforth regard it as the slave of their enemies. It means general dissatisfaction and growing un- rest, until, despairing of righting his wrongs in the name of reason, the Titan will put forth his terrible strength, and the government of the United States of America will thence- forth live "only in the tomb of the world's history." A BIBLICAL BEAR STORY. The Bible is fruitful of snake and fish stories, replete with dreadful tales of ghosts and goblins, giants and chimerae dire; but no biblical narrative possessed for my childhood such absorbing interest as that of Elisha and his brace of anthropophagous bears. In early youth, as in later years, I resembled the Lord in that I was no respecter of persons. There may have been other points of resemblance, but they were not sufficiently pronounced to excite remark. I had a bad habit of giving "back talk" to my elders, believing that youth has some rights which even age is bound to respect; hence I was frequently warned to beware the sad fate of those bad little boys who made ribald remarks anent Elisha J s seldom hair. This interesting animal appears to have long been Elijah's under-study, his man Friday, so to speak. Like Mary and her little lamb, everywhere that Elijah went Elisha was sure to go. He stuck to him like a cockle-burr to a merino buck, or an importunate creditor to a bankrupt. I rather suspect that Elijah went on that celestial excursion to get rid of him. I think that I would have ridden in a chariot of fire, or even straddled a streak of lightning to cut such bad company. Elijah tried to side-track his prophetic shadow at Gilgal, but it was no go. Elisha trotted along to Beth-el wherever that may be to Jericho and beyond the Jordan, despite the express orders of his master, much as a persistent pup trails its expostulating human property, but whether for genuine love of Elijah, or to appropriate his garments when the latter put on celestial raiment, deponent saith not. He got his master's mantle 174 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST when the latter was swiped by a marauding- whirlwind, and seems to have been well content, to have shed no tears over the enforced absence of its former occupant. Several other people who witnessed the ascension were quite sure that Elijah was the victim of an infant cyclone and insisted on searching for the body, but to this Elisha strenuously ob- jected. He may have considered it wasted effort; and, again, he may have feared that it would endanger his story anent that chariot of fire which had inadvertently escaped the notice of the other eye-witnesses. Having parted the river Jordan with his second-hand mantle the waters fleeing affrighted from the unusual vis- itor he was accepted by the simple people of Jericho as Elijah's legitimate successor and honored accordingly. He had tramped so long, however, that the spirit of the pro- fessional hobo as well as the spirit of prophesy was upon him, and he longed to be jogging along the dusty lanes and foraging his fodder, so he set out for Beth-el afoot. He does not appear to have had any business in Beth-el, but that was all the more reason why the old vagabond should go there. The prophets of his time were not in the habit of tarrying very long in one place, but kept swinging round the circle and living on the country, much like the modern evangelists. The children of Jericho appear to have resembled the Nineteenth century youngsters in their unappeasable ap- petite for fireworks. They had heard about Elijah going up like a Fourth of July rocket, but had not been permitted to witness the pyrotechnic display. They knew that Elisha had fallen heir to the business and raiment of the original aeronaut, and naturally watched him with considerable in- terest, fully expecting that he would eventually take a header into the blue empyrean with a pair of flaming horses, scattering a stream of sparks behind them. But Elisha has packed his red bandana and is leaving the city they are about to be disappointed. They cannot surrender the long anticipated circus without a protest, at least an appeal, so they follow him beyond the gates of the city, crying in their shrill treble. "Go up, thou old baldhead ! Go up, thou old baldhead !" They doubtless do not mean to be disrespectful, but are dreadfully eager to see the show. They have discussed it and dreamed of it for many days, have trailed every little whirlwind to see if it was hunting for Elisha and scrutinized each horse headed in his direction, to see if it was on fire. They have heard that Elijah went out into the wilderness BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST. 175 beyond Jordan to make his ascent instead of doing the aeronautic act from the market-place and getting all the caravans to give excursion rates, and they suspect that Elisha is sneaking out to board a whirlwind at some obscure way-station. What wonder that they grow clamorous and cry: "Go up, thou old baldhead !" But the duly ordained prophet of God does not take the curtain calls of the gallery in a kindly spirit. He is evi- dently sensitive about his scarcity of hair and considers their remarks not only an affront to his dignity but an insult to the Deity. Perhaps while dozing at the town pump the godless gamins had painted a face on the rear elevation of his cranium, so that it was difficult for people to determine in what direction the prophet was steering. Or the ped- dlers of hair rejuvenators may have persecuted him until his naturally sunny disposition had soured. Anyway, the allusion to his opera bouffe certificate was too much for his Christian charity. Instead of gathering the little gamins about him and explaining the significance of Elijah's trans- lation, instructing them to lead worthy lives and thereby become an honor to their parents and a blessing to the world ; instead of carrying with him to Beth-el the love and best wishes of the little ones and praying God to protect them from evil; "He turned back and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she- bears out of the wood and tare forty and two' children of them." Then Elisha continued on his mission of love, recking not the blood of the butchered babes left the poor little bodies for the bears and buzzards. Forty and two little children lie torn and mangled in the wild-wood, their white faces upturned to an angry God. There is woe and wail in Jericho as the sun goes down that day, mothers weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted because they are not : men who have led the forlorn hope and looked un- awed into the lion's angry eyes, are prostrate in the dust, bewailing their first born ; the Lord of the universe is brand- ed as a bloodthirsty beast, whose company a self-respecting devil would decline to keep, but the bald head of Israel's peripatetic prophet is avenged! I sincerely trust that I will not be burned as a heretic, or even expelled from the church if I declare my doubts anent the Rev. Mr. Elisha's bear story. It is just possible that such a personage existed ; tho' there does not appear to have 176 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST been any necessity for his creation. It is conceivable that the gamins of Jericho regarded him as a harmless half-wit hobo, used him for their support until they got him "raw." It may be that while they were plaguing him a brace of ravenous bears set upon them. I can scarce blame the prowlers for preferring the tender children to the tough old prophet; still I regret that they didn't dally with him long enough to abate the insufferable nuisance. Elisha's bear story is one of those barbarisms which I shall cut out of the Bible when I re-write it, as I intend one of these days to do. It is not only a criminal libel of the Creator, but an insult to common sense. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. OR THE LADIES AND THE APOSTLE. [A synopsis of Mr. Brann's address to the Ladies' Reading Club, San Antonio, Texas.] I have been asked to lecture to the ladies of the Reading Club, but shall do nothing of the kind. That were to admit that you require improvement, and I would not have you better than you are. We would have to clip your wings or keep you in a cage. Besides, I never saw a woman whom I could teach anything she already knew it. I have been going to school to the ladies all my life. My mother carried me through the kindergarten, lady preceptors through the intermediate grade, and my wife is patiently rounding off my education. When I graduate I expect ^to go direct to heaven. As near as I can figure it out, the in- habitants of the New Jerusalem will consist of several mil- lion women and just men enough to fill the municipal offices. "I would not live always, I ask not to stay." No lecture then, but an informal talk, without text or sub- ject a vagrant ramble thro' such fields as tempt us. If we should find fruit, or even flowers, let us be thankful. If we encounter only briars, it will not be the first half hour we have wasted. The fact that you are members of the Reading Club indi- cates that you are seeking knowledge. I trust that you are finding it, that every stroke of the intellectual pick turns up a golden nugget; but do not make the mistake of sup- posing that all the wisdom of the world is bound in calf. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 177 You may know all that was ever penned in papyrus or graved on stone, written on tablets of clay or preserved in print and still be ignorant not even know how to manage a husband. As a rule people read without proper discrim- ination, and those who are most careful often go furthest astray. I once knew a woman with no more music in her soul than a rat-tail file, who spent three laborious years learning to play the piano, then closed the instrument and never touched it again. One day I said to her: "Mary, what good did all the patient practice do you?" "Lot's o' good," she replied ; "I used to be dreadfully ashamed to have people know that I couldn't play." And a great deal of laborious reading is undertaken on the same principle that Mary learned to play the piano and is of just as little benefit. Many people are with books as with med- icine imagine that whatever is hardest to get down will do them the most good. No mortal man and, as the preach- er correctly stated, the men embrace the women ever yet got any permanent good out of a book unless he enjoyed its perusal. Jno. J. Ingalls says that everybody praises Mil- ton's Paradise Lost, but nobody reads it. Ingalls is mis- taken. Everybody making any pretension to culture has read the book as a disagreeable duty; but that man don't live at least outside of the lunatic asylum who can quote a dozen lines of it. Same with Dante's Divine Comedia and a host of other books with which people are expected to inflict their brains. Read few books and those of the very best, books that you enjoy. Read them thoroughly; make them your very own then forget them as soon as possible. Having submitted to the mental or moral disci- pline of another, decline to lean on him, but stand up in your own independent individuality. Don't be a copy. There is on earth no more pitiable person than "The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head." Do not interpret too literally. What I warn you against is the habit, all too common, of imagining ourselves rich be- cause we have counted the golden hoard of others. One may admire the Medicean Venus without becoming a sculp- tor, or have Plato at his fingers' ends and ever remain a fool. Were I an artist I would study with attention the works of all the great masters ; but when I put my hand to my own task I would turn my back upon them all and my face to nature. My work would then be a "creation," not a copy. Did I aspire to be truly learned I would study the words of 178 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST the world's wisest then dig for wisdom on my own behoof, I would thus become a philosopher instead of a parrot. I have been frequently called an iconoclast, and bad as the title is popularly supposed to be, I trust it is not altogether undeserved. I have striven to break foolish idols and shat- ter false ideals, to hurl unclean gods from their pedestals in the public pantheon. A work of destruction is not, I ad- mit, of a high order. Anybody may destroy ; it requires genius to build up. The wonder of the ancient world sank to ruin irremediable beneath the torch of a morbid dude who had rather be "damned to everlasting fame" than altogether forgotten. A hungry wolf may destroy a human life which Almighty God has brought to perfection thro' long years of labor. But destruction is sometimes necessary. The seas must be cleared of pirates before commerce can flourish ; the antiquated and useless building must come down before the schoolhouse or business block can occupy the site. In the great cities are men who do nothing but destroy old build- ings professional wreckers of those works of man that have outlived their usefulness. They build nothing; but are they, therefore, to be condemned? So in the social world, a man may be a professional wrecker, without the constructive ability to build a political platform on a pie- crate, and still be useful, indispensable. The wrecker of bad buildings does not contract to put good ones in their places; nor is the iconoclast under any obligation to find a heavenly grace for every false god that falls beneath his hammer, a saint for every sinner he holds up to scorn, a new truth for every old falsehood he fells to earth. He may, if he thinks proper, leave that labor to others and go on, with brand and bomb, bludgeon and bill-hook, wrecking, destroy- ing playing John the Baptist to a greater to come after. A great many good people have taken the trouble to in- form me that I am a pessimist. Perhaps so; but I am not worrying much about it. A pessimist is a person somewhat difficult to define. The fool who smokes in powder-house, or believes that his neighbors always speak well of him be- hind his back ; the wife who encourages her husband to pay court to other women on the supposition that no harm can ensue; the banker who accepts a man's unsecured note be- cause he is a church member and powerful in prayer, and the servant girl who lights the fire with kerosene then goes to join the angels taking your household goods and gods with her are certainly not pessimists ; they are only idiots. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 179 It is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person af- flicted with an incurable case of mulligrubs one whom nothing in all earth or heaven or hades pleases ; one who us- ually deserves nothing, yet grumbles if he gets it. But we should not forget that every reform this world has known ; every effort that has lifted man another notch above the brute level ; every star in our flag of freedom ; every line and letter in our constitution of human liberty; every gem of knowledge that gleams in the great world's intellectual crown of glory ; every triumph of science and religion, phil- osophy and mechanics was the work of pessimists, so-called of men who were not satisfied with the world's condition and set determinedly to work to better it. They strove with their full strength against those conditions panegyrized and poetized by the smirking optimists of their time, and thereby incurred the enmity of pedants and self-sufficient purists, were denounced and denied, belittled and belied. But, says the enthusiastic optimist, things are not what they used to be. When a college of cardinals gave Galileo to the gaoler for maintaining that "the world do move;" when Christ cast forth the money manipulators and purged the porches of the temple of the disreputable dove dealers; when Luther raised the standard of revolt and the Puritan packed his grip there were cruel wrongs to right. But look at us now ! We've got a constitution and a Confession of Faith, prize rings and Parisian gowns, sent missionaries to Madagascar and measured Mars' two moons. Of course we've made some mendicants, but please admire the multi- farious beauty of our millionaires ! Who can doubt that we've triumphed over the world, the flesh and the devil? Have not the Spanish inquisition and the English Court of High Commission gone glimmering? Do we bore the tongues of Quakers or amputate the ears of non-conformists as in Auld Lang Syne? Do we not run troublesome wives into the divorce court instead of into the river, as was once our wont, scientifically roast our criminals with electricity instead of pulling their heads off with a hair halter ? Do we not fight our political battles with wind instead of war clubs ? Have not our great partisan paladins substituted gall for Greek fire ? Progressing we certainly are, but the devil has adapted the Fabian tactics and is leading us a wild dance thro' un- profitable deserts. While we have been shattering ethnic images he has been building new idols. While we have been dragging the Phalaris Bull from its pedestal the Golden Calf of ancient Israel has reached maturity and maternity 180 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST and its progeny is now worshipped in a thousand panthe- ons. Everywhere the false and the true, the good and the evil, the lambent light of heaven and the sulphurous shadows of hell meet and blend. Nowhere, yet everywhere, floats the white veil and flaming ensign of the modern Mokanna and we stand wrangling about the proper cut of a collar ; de- bating whether the Gadarenes, whose swine the outcasc devils drowned, were Jews or Gentiles; dogmatizing anent the proper form of baptism ; doubting with which hand we should tip the hat; wondering if Joseph's coat were a sack or a swallow-tail ninety-and-nine out of every hundred wasting upon childish trifles the strength given us to do the work of demi-gods and every foolish breath, every heart- beat bearing us across Time's narrow sands into the broad bosom of that sea which hath no shore ! What does the all-seeing sun that has for so many cen- turies glared down upon this wretched farce-tragedy, think of it all? And yet man boasts that he is the mortal image of immortal God ! It was for this trifling, straddling biped, intent only upon getting his goose-head above other foolish geese, that the Regent of the universe suffered ignominy and death! I sometimes think that had the Almighty cast the human horoscope he would never have given Noah a hint to go in out of the wet. I am no perfectionist. I do not build the spasmodic sob nor spill the scalding tear because all men are not Sir Gala- hads in quest of the Holy Grail, and all women angels with two pair o' reversible wings and the aurora borealis for a hat-band. I might get lonesome in a world like that. I do not expect to see religion without cant, wealth without want, and virtue without vice ; but I do hope to see the hu - man race devote itself to grander aims than following the fashions and camping on the trail of the cart-wheel dollar. I want to see more homes and fewer hovels, more men and fewer dudes. I want to see more women with the moral courage to brave the odium of being old maids rather than the pitiful weakness to become loveless wives. I want to see more mothers who would rather be queens of their homes than the favorites of fashionable circles ; women who would rather have the love of their husbands than the in- solent admiration of the whole he-world women who do not know too much at 15 and too little at 50. I want to see more men who are not a constant reminder BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 181 of a monkey ancestry. Some philosopher once remarked: "As between men and dogs, give me dogs." I have been often tempted to indorse the sentiment and I am not much of a lover of dogs either. I want to see men who are not fops in their youth, fools in their prime and egotists in their old age a race of manly men to whom life is not a lascivi- ous farce; whose god is not gold; who do not worship at the shrine of the Pandemian Venus nor devote their lives to the service of Mammon, "the least erect of all the angelic host that fell from heaven." I want to see men who scorn the pusillanimity of the policy-prayer, who, like Caesar, dare tell greybeards the truth e'en tho' it cost a crown ; men of leonine courage, men of iron mould, men strong of hand and heart, who defiantly throw down the gage to destiny who can trample hell itself beneath their proud feet, even while it consumes them. The dream may be Utopian, I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has be- come ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because we no longer live in caves and fight naked with the wild beasts of the forest for our food we are away up at the head of the procession, with Greek civ- ilization distanced and all the other times and half times nowhere. Human development, like the earth, the sun, the stars- like all things brought into being by the breath of Omni- potent God travels ever in a circle. Savagery and ignor- ance, barbarism and ambition, civilization and sybaritism, dudeism and intellectual decay; then once more savagery and ignorance proclaim the complete circle, that we have traveled from nadir to zenith and from zenith to nadir when once again we begin with painful steps and slow to repace the path which carries us to the very verge of godhood and wreathes our brows with immortal bays, then brings us down even while we think we mount until we touch a level beneath the very brute. Such has ever been the world's history, and such it will ever be until a force is found that can transform this circle into a straight line that can blend the rugged manhood of the barbarian with the graces of our higher civilization and give us wisdom without weakness and culture without cowardice; that can incorporate us as corpuscles in the social organism without eliminating every spark of God-like individuality, making 182 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST us helpless dependents upon social, political and religious precedent. If the Car of Progress travels in a circle and history says it does; if neither science, philosophy nor religion can de- flect it from its seemingly predestined path and the condi- tion of their birth-place proclaims their failure so to do where is hope ? Must the human race forever go the weary round of birth and death, like Buddhist souls wandering thro' all that's fair and foul, until it finds Nirvana in the destruction of the world? Not so, for there is a hope a blessed hope that like "A poising eagle burns above the unrisen morrow." That hope is in the union of all the mighty forces that make for the emancipation of mankind, a union of religion and philosophy, science and woman. And of these the first is the last and the last is the first in point of power and im- portance. When I reflect that until within comparatively recent times women were slaves, I don't much wonder that the old civilizations went to the dogs that the millennium is not yet due. Trying to make a civilization that would stick without the help of woman were like building a cock-tail with a basis of buttermilk. God gave her to man to be an helpmeet, not a plaything. I don't think that she can help him much by going into politics, or becoming a crusading she-Peter-the-Hermit while her own children need her care , but I do believe that the wife and mother that erstwhile ignorant drudge, raised by God's great mercy to royalty made Queen of the home, and thereby absolute Empress of the great round earth is to be the dynamics of a new and grander civilization that can never recede ; that the woman- ly woman, self-poised as a star, pure as the polar snows, fit companion for the true nobleman of nature, is to be the Providence that will lead humanity, step by step, ever on- ward and upward, until our cruel age of iron is transformed into an age of gold in which there'll be neither millionaire nor mendicant, master nor slave in which Selfishness will be considered the worst of crimes and Love the all-powerful law. Such, ladies, is my dream of the future. You see, with true mannish instinct, I throw the work o? the world's salva- tion upon the women. I don't know, however, but it's re- tributive justice. If you got us fired out of the first Para- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 183 disc it is your duty to find another and put us in possession. But really with all due respect to Sacred Writ, I could never accept that serpent story without considerable salt. My observation and experience has been that men are much more addicted to the snake habit than are women. I gath- er from Genesis that after the Edenic reptile had done the damage it was condemned to go upon its belly all the days of its life. That indicates that it was not only a good conver- sationalist, but had legs. Now I submit it to you in all seriousness : which member of the original family was most likely to see such a serpent as that? I think I should have given Adam the Keeley cure, then crossexamined him a little before laying the burden of the blame on Eve. If the latter was really the tempter she was probably trying to reach the heart of her hubby by that direct route, the stom- ach lost heaven for love, as too many of her daughters have since done. The fact that Adam was not willing to father her fault proved him unworthy his wife, and the bad example he set is too often followed by many of his sons who attribute all their trials and tribulations to the patient wives whose watchful care keeps them out of the peniten- tiary. Whatever may have been Eve's fortune, Adam was no great loser by being ejected from Eden, for the man who possesses the love of a good woman carries Paradise with him wherever he goes. A woman's love can transform a hovel into a heaven and fill it with supernal sunshine and her scorn can make perdition of a palace and put in all the fancy touches. Woman is the only thing extant, if Genesis be believed, that was not evolved from a solid slug of nothing. That I presume, is why she amounts to something. Nothing was good enough raw material of which to make the father of mankind; but when the Almighty came to create our common mother he required something more substantial than a hole in the atmosphere. I always bank on a boy who has a good mother, regard- less of what the old man may be. The fathers of philoso- phers have sometimes been fools, but their mothers never. A wise man may beget dudes or a good man practical poli- ticians; but it's his misfortune, not his fault. The good Lord expects no man to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. I have yet to hear of a single man who became dis- tinguished in any line of human endeavor according to his father the credit for his greatness. Character is moulded at the mother's knee, and in the light of her loving eyes is born that ambition which buoys man up in a sea of troubles 184 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST that drives him on thro' dangers and difficulties, straight to the shining goal. The Nineteenth century marks the culmination of an era of human triumphs, a brilliant coruscation of victories over the cohorts of Ignorance and Prejudice; but its crown of imperishable glory is the recognition that woman was creat- ed to be man's companion and co-laborer instead of his chattel, his joint sovereign of the earth instead of his slave. Fronting the dawn of a grander day, her hand ungyved and her brain unfettered ; with broader opportunities for useful- ness and boasting a nobler beauty than during the dark and dreary centuries that lie behind her like a hideous dream such is the woman of the Nineteenth century, and upon the shapely shoulders of this new Pallas I hang my second Providence, to her loving hands I commit the destiny of the race, to her true heart the salvation of the world. PUGILISM VS. HYPOCRISY. The announcement that Corbett and Fitzsimmons will meet in the fistic arena at Dallas to determine which is the better man, has, as might have been expected, provoked a veritable deluge of sanctified "gush" and sentimental "rot." The press and pulpit of Texas were immediately seized with moral jimjams and began to cut fantastic capers before high heaven. One would suppose from their doleful jeremiads and frantic protests that the bottom was about to be knocked out of the Christian cosmos, mortality sent careening over the ropes, civilization swiped from the face of the shrinking earth and chaos come again. Consistency is a jewel not found in the casket of the latter-day Jonahs. For years past slugging-matches have been of frequent occurrence in Texas, and have provoked scarce a protest from those goody-goodies who are now having a conniption fit every fifteen minutes over the Corbett-Fitzsimmons affair. It is a well-known fact that the less science fistic combatants possess the more liable they are to dp each other serious bodily harm. A "mill" between unskilled sluggers resem- bles nothing so much as a kicking match between a brace of vicious mules, in which the beast that can stand the most punishment wins the battle, while a contest by well- trained athletes were like the fine sword-play of expert fencers. The pending bout is not likely to be nearly so "brutal" as many "mills" fought in Texas during the past BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 185 half-dozen years, and duly reported by the very papers that want the visiting champions put in the penitentiary. The professional "moral element" is entirely too subsequent in getting its Ebenezer up, and I suggest that it be pulled down before a disgusted world expectorates upon it. Hav- ing swallowed a whole herd of mangy camels, the self- styled "moral element" should not employ a brass band to call attention to the fact that it is now straining so hard at a gnat that its umbilical cord is in danger of collapse. The abuse heaped upon the progressive city of Dallas because it made a bid for the great contest, is but the dishonest vapor- ings of a canting hypocrisy, accentuated by morbid minds and bilious livers. If Dallas were making deliberate prepa- ration to violate a well-established law of the land it were well enough to criticise her; but the statute anent prize- fighting, like many other enactments by Texas legislatures, is not considered by competent lawyers as one whit more reliable than a camp-meeting certificate of conversion. And it is reasonable to suppose that if the law in question would stand the crucible of the courts, those busy little souls who consider themselves pious because they dislike to see other people enjoy themselves, would have clamored for its en- forcement long ere this. The Iconoclast is not the apologist of pugilism. Its voice is ever for peace peace in its most virulent form. I have had a sneaking respect for Grover Cleveland ever since he sent a substitute to fight the Southern Confederacy while he remained at home to play pinocle with the pretty girls. It proved that while he may not be much of a statesman in time of peace, there's no picnic ants on his judgment in time of war. But I do insist that if we are to have prize fights here in Texas they should be contests between expert boxers instead of awkward clowns who pound each other to a pulp to make a hoodlum holiday. Nor is a fistic encounter between first-class athletes altogether an unmixed evil. It inoculates our young men with a desire for physi- cal development, and is a splendid object lesson 'in the very necessary art of self-defence. Every boy should learn to box; it is a manly accomplishment, necessary to the per- fect physical development of the race. It is infinitely better that a boy should get a black eye or a bloody nose occa- sionally, and grow up masculine and self-reliant, than run to chrysanthemums and creased twousahs, flash dickeys and effeminate dudeism. Those who make super-goodness a paying profession sneer at the claim that pugilism is a "manly sport." However that may be it is certainly pre- 186 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST ferable to employing brazen apostates to defame Catholic nuns or raping infants in Baptist universities. Nothing is more conducive to continence than severe athletic train- ing: hence it might not be a bad plan to make a hot whirl with the gloves a part of the daily devotional exercise of all professing he-Christians. While boxing does not insure morality, it is infinitely more profitable than empty dogma- tizing. While the world may not fully approve of Corbett and Fitzsimmons facing each other in the "squared circle" like contending Titans, it will certainly esteem them above the cymling-headed lollipops whose highest .accomplish- ment is the nursing of canes. The proposed '"mill," while not so elevating, perhaps, as a slumgullion editorial in the Houston Post, or an official $5-a-minute prayer, is calculated to inspire respect for nature's weapons and thereby assist in relegating the six-shooter to the rear. Personal encounters will be of occasional occurrence so long as man inhabits the earth; hence it might not be amiss for even "Christian Texas" to take an occasional lesson in the art of self-defense from men who do not gouge out eyes, chew off ears or be- stride the brisket of a fallen foe and pound his face to a pumice. Whatever may be said against the "ring," it is one place where a man gets absolutely fair play, and that is more than can be said of the journalistic arena or a mob of Baptist brethren assembled to hear one of their number back-cap his betters and descant upon the awful iniquity of the Church of Rome. Striving to eliminate these contests of strength and skill were much like trying to tie up John Barleycorn with a Prohibition string. Man is naturally combative. As far back as we can trace his history he has rejoiced in trials of physical force. The Greeks of Homer's day fought with the terrible cestus ; when Rome ruled the world every citi- zen was expected to be a soldier ; the English could not get fighting enough in the tented field and resorted to tilt and tourney. Despite our so-called civilization man is very much a savage. "The glory of the young man is his strength," just as it was when Solomon sat upon the throne of ancient Israel, and it is well. There is hope for a war- like and aggressive people. Such are the characteristics of an advancing civilization, while dudeism is certain evidence of decay. That man who doesn't relish a rattling fight e'en tho' it be only a dog fight should be put in petticoats and his place in the world's economy supplied by the "com- ing: woman." He is better qualified to lead a pug around with a pink ribbon and deodorize diapers than to sway the BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 187 sceptre of American sovereignty. Half those who damn prize-fighting in public would swim a river to obtain a news- paper containing a write-up of an important "mill" by rounds. When Sullivan bested Kilrain I chanced to be stopping with a devout deacon who was particularly severe on pugilism. He said an editor who would print an ac- count of a prize fight ought to be put in the penitentiary meaning me; yet on the morning after the mill I found that good old man with his nose buried in a newspaper, and he wasn't reading the religious column, either. He was fairly wallowing in counters and uppercuts, stingers and stand-offs. He swooped down upon it like a hungry hen- hawk on an unripe gosling, read it through to the last line, then rolled his eyes to heaven like a calf with the colic and wondered what this wicked old world "was coming to. Had I declined to print it he would have written me a compli- mentary letter and transferred his patronage to some other paper. There must be some vent for the combative spirit which permeates the American people, and the glove contest is the most satisfactory and the least dangerous yet discovered. Statistics prove that a dozen men are killed and as many crippled at football where one is seriously injured in the fistic arena. At inter-collegiate football games it is cus- tomary to have a surgeon present to care for the wounded ; but I have yet to see one in attendance in his official capac- ity at a prize fight. In view of these facts the sanctified hullabaloo now heard because of the pending event in the world of pugilism is calculated to make sensible people long for the coming of the fool-killer. ANTONIA TEIXEIRA. The Iconoclast is not in the habit of commenting on par- ticular social ulcers and special sectarian scandals. It pre- fers to deal with broad principle rather than individual of- fenders. To even catalogue the sexual crimes of professing Christians and people of social pre-eminence to turn the calcium for even a moment into all the gruesome closets of "respectability" and upon every sectarian cesspool redolent with "the odor of sanctity" would consume the space of such a periodical, while proving about as profitable as point- ing out each festering pustule on the person of a Hot Springs habitue trailing blindly in the wake 'of the Pande- 188 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST mian Venus ; but once or twice in a decade a case arises so horrible in conception, so iniquitous in outline, so damnable in detail that it were impossible to altogether ignore it. Such a case has just come to light, involving Baylor University, that Bulwark of the Baptist Church. I fain would pass it by, knowing as I do that a criticism, however dispassionate and just, will be misconstrued by those good Baptist breth- ren who tried to muzzle me while ex-Priest Slattery foully defamed me, and whose religion teaches them that "with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged ; and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." But on this point they have naught to fear. Had they, for every sneaking lie they have told about me, spawned a thousand ; and had "Brother" Slattery, in the fullness of his Baptist Charity, branded me as a horse-thief and proved it, I could not, tho' vindictive as Thersites and gifted with the vocabu- lary of a Carlyle, do even and exact justice to the case of Antonia Teixeira. Crimes similar in some respects have been committed in White Chapel and on Boiler avenue; but, to borrow from Macaulay, "When we put everything together sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, men- dacity, barbarity the result is something which in a novel we should condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can be found in history. It is a case wherein "the qualities which are the proper objects of ha- tred, and the qualities which are the proper objects of con- tempt," preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. Three times I have essayed to write of this enormous iniquity, this subter-brutish crime against the chastity of childhood, and thrice I have laid down my pencil in despair. As there is a depth of the sea to which the plummet will not descend, so are there depths of human depravity which mind cannot measure. Language hath its limits, and even a Dante could only liken the horrors of hell to earthly symbols. It were as impossible to describe in print the case of Antonia Teix- eira as to etch a discord or paint a stench. Before justice can be done to such a subject a new language must be in- vented a language whose words are coals of juniper-wood; whose sentences are woven with a warp of aspics' fangs and a woof of fire. We all remember the coming to Texas of Antonia Teix- eira, the dove-eyed heteroscian, and the brass-band display made of the modest little thing by the Baptist brethren, whose long years of missionary labor in Brazil had snatched her from the Papal power a veritable brand from the burn- ing. A tardy consent had been wrung from her widowed BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 189 mother that Antonia should be brought to Texas. The child was to be given five years' schooling, then returned to her native land to point out to her benighted Catholic coun- trymen the water route to the Celestial City. Relying upon this promise, the simple Brazilian woman consigned her lit- tle wild-flower to the bosom of the Baptist church. Five years ! What an eternity ! How they would miss her at home how they would count the days until she returned to them, a cultured lady, as wise even as the strange priests who spoke the English tongue ! It must be for the best, she thought ; so the poor woman crushed her heart in the name of Christ and took up her cross. And Antonia? How bright the world before her ! To be educated, and useful and honored both in this world and the world to come, in- stead of an ignorant little beggar about the streets of Bahia. Bearded men prayed over her and sentimental women wept to know that she was saved saved from the purgatorium of Popery ! And then she was "consecrated" and began her studies at Baylor, the duly ordained "ward of the Baptist church." Not yet 13 years old, and such honors paid her what might she not expect in the years to be? How the poor little heart must have swelled with gratitude to the good Baptist brethren, and how she must have loved every- thing, animate and inanimate, that the good God had made. But ere long she found herself in Dr. Burleson's kitchen in- stead of the class-room. Instead of digging Greek roots she was studying the esculent tuber. Instead of being pre- pared for missionary work, this "ward of the Baptist church" was learning the duties of the scullion and Dr. Burleson has informed the world through the public prints that as a servant she was not worth her board and clothes. But then she was not brought hither to sling pots, but to pre- pare for the saving of souls. Surely the blessed Baptist church will provide its little "ward" with board and clothes. Perhaps the poor child thought that scrubbing floors and playing under-servant was part of a liberal education, for she made no complaint to her self-constituted guardians. After some three years of the kitchen curriculum she was examined in the office of a secular official and it was there found that she had not made much progress toward effective missionary work. She had heard something of the Prot- estant faith and salvation by water, but did not understand it. And in two years more her "education" would be com- plete the promise made to her mother redeemed! But suddenly it was discovered that the "ward of the Baptist church" was about to give birth to a babe. Day by day this 190 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST mournful fact became more in evidence, and finally her dish-rag and scrub-broom studies were suspended because of a press of more important business. She was sneaked off to a private house and nothing said about her condition to the secular authorities no steps taken to bring the destroy- er of this child in short dresses to justice. But the meddle- some officials concluded to look after the "ward of the Bap- tist church" a little, and the poor child told them, reluctant- ly enough, how she had been dragged from her culinary class-room, drugged and three times criminally assaulted how she complained, "but nothing was done about it." A medical examination demonstrated conclusively that she had been the victim of foul play. What did the aged presi- dent of Baylor, that sanctum sanctorum of the Baptist church, do about it? Did he assist in bringing to justice the man who had dared invade the sanctity of his household and despoil the duly ordained "ward of the Baptist church?" Not exactly. He rushed into print with a statement to the effect that the child was a thief and "crazy after the boys" that he had "prayed and wept over her" without avail. Are prayers and tears the only safeguards thrown around four- teen-year-old girls at Baylor ? They do those things differ- ently in Convent schools supplement prayers and tears with a watchful care that makes illicit intercourse practical- ly impossible. No matter how "crazy after the boys" a girl in short dresses may be, she is not permitted to go headlong to the devil to be torn to pieces and impregnated by some lousy and lecherous male mastodon. Dr. Burleson con- sidered the idea that Antonia had been ravished as ridicu- lous, yet the doctors declare it one of the most damnable cases of outrage and laceration within their knowledge and in matters of this kind a wicked and perverse genera- tion is more likely to believe doctors of medicine than doctors of divinity. The students at Baylor declare that instead of being "crazy after the boys" Antonia was particularly mod- est and womanly. But had she been the brazen little thing which Dr. Burleson hastened to brand her, what were his duties in the premises : to guard her with especial care, or give the "boys" an opportunity to work their will, then turn her out with a Baptist bastard at the half-developed breast ? Enciente at 14, among strangers who had promised her mother that no harm should befall her. A mother while still in short dresses, and branded in the public prints as a bawd by people who worship One who forgave Mary Magdalen! We might have expected the very devils in hell to weep for the pity of it, but "Christian charity" had BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 191 not yet reached its ultima thule. Another Baptist reverend had to have his say. He was somewhat interested in the matter, his brother having been named by Antonia as her ravisher. This reverend gentleman tried to make it appear that the father of her unborn child was a negro servant and her accepted paramour. Had this been true, what an "ad." for Baylor University that fourteen-year-old girls com- mitted to its care conceived children by coons! But even Baylor did not deserve the terrible censure of Dr. Burle- son's pious son-in-law, and Antonia replied to this insult added to injury by putting a white child in evidence a child with the pale blue eye and wooden face characteristic of those who thus defamed her. When the girl's condition became known the men about town "publicans and sin- ners" such as Christ sat with, preferring their society to that of the pharisees raised a handsome purse to provide for her and the young Baptist she was about to bring into the world, while those who should have guarded and protected her were resorting to every artifice human ingenuity could devise to blacken her name, to forestall pity, prevent chari- ty and make an impartial trial of the case impossible. While men who never professed religion, who never expect to wear feathers and fly thro' Elysian fields, could not talk to each other about the case without crying, those wearing God's livery were eager to trample her down to the deepest hell to preserve the credit of their denomination. If there is anything on earth calculated to make a public prostitute of an unfortunate girl it is the treatment the Baptist brethren have accorded Antonia Teixeira. At this writing (June 27) the preliminary trial awaits the convalescence of the child mother. I would not pre-judge the case. I know not who is the guilty man ; but I do know that this child was brought from her faraway home by men who promised to protect her and transform her into a cul- tured and useful woman, and who so far neglected their duty that she was debauched at Baylor University and her young life forever blighted. Better a thousand times that she should have remained in Brazil to say her pater nosters in the Portugese tongue; better that she should have wedded a water-carrier in her native land and reared up sturdy sons and daughters to the Church of Rome, than to have been transported to Texas to breed illegitimate Baptists. I do know that at the very time "Brother" Slattery was writing us against the awful dangers of convent schools and im- peaching the chastity of the Catholic sisterhoods and the Waco Baptists were crying "awmen" this 14-year-old girl 192 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST was growing great with child at Baylor University! I do know that while we were being assured that among all the nuns there was not one educated woman not one compe- tent to superintend the education of a child a girl was completing her third year in the greatest educational insti- tute the Baptists of Texas can boast, and in all that time she had learned but little, and that little she could have acquired almost as well in "Hell's Half-Acre." I do know that An- tonia is not the first young girl to be sent from Baylor in dis- grace that she is not the first to complain of criminal as- sault within its sanctified "walls. I do know that should a girl meet with a mishap at a convent school the Catholic priests would not turn against her and insult her family and her race by trying to fasten the fatherhood of her un- born babe upon a negro servant. I do know that instead of trying to drive the unfortunate girl to the "Reservation" with cowardly calumnies, they would draw around her the sacred circle of the Church of Rome, and if there remained within her heart one spark of noble womanhood it would be fanned by the white wings of love and charity into ethereal flame. I do know that if Antonia Teixeira was a Catholic instead of a half-baked Baptist, every man within that church would be her brother, every woman her sister, that every church bearing the cross would be her house of refuge. I do know that so far as Baylor University is con- cerned the day of its destiny is over and the star of its fate hath declined; that the brutal treatment the Brazilian child received at its hands will pass into history as the colossal crime of the age, and that generations yet to be will couple its name with curses deep as those which Roman matrons heaped on the head of Sextus Tarquinius "he that wrought the deed of shame." DANCING TO THE DEVIL. THE GRSAT SALTATORIAL SIN. Just at present many "progressive" preachers are bring- ing all their powers to bear upon what they denominate the dance evil. Even before Sam Jones began to blackguard the ball-room in his so-called sermons, various Protestant divines were vociferously denouncing this species of divert- isement as a worship of that trinity of wickedness the World, the Flesh and the Devil ; but the Cracker peddler BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 193 of pseudopiety is the recognized Peter-the-Hermit of the anti-saltatorian crusade. There was a time when it was considered a mortal sin to be merry when professing Christians refrained from harmless jest and healthful laughter lest they displease the Deity. Some ultrapietistic people eschewed ornament, wore unbecoming clothes and cultivated an expression such as pertains to those afflicted with cramp colic or torpid livers. The idea appears to have been that by making themselves and everybody else unnecessarily miserable in this world their ecstacy would be enhanced in the great hereafter. The theater was tabooed, the ball-room placed under the ban, the euchre-deck banished and young people expected to do their courting with a solemnity befitting the making of contracts in a coffin-factory. All the joy and sweetness was crushed out of life by the iron hand of a pessimistic orthodoxy; the sunshine of the heart turned into clammy London fog by spectres born in the chaotic brain of pious fools ; the pleasant valleys and purple hills transformed into monster-bearing deserts, the refreshing springs into bitter pools, the fragrant flowers into cruel throngs by those too blind to see that the cult of Christ is the law of love, the unfailing fount of joy, the bloom of eternal spring, the song of birds and the merry laughter of men and maids. But eventually the world rebelled against the pessimistic brand of piety concessions were made, perforce, to the re- naissance of reason. Gradually the dark clouds fled from the hills and the dismal mists from the valleys ; the crash of cymbals and the rythmic pulse of dancing feet supplanted groans and moans again birds sang, flowers bloomed and perfumed fountains cast their grateful spray in Hie terrestrial vineyard of our God. It was no longer a crime to be happy, laughter ceased to be a sin a sunny face came to be regard- ed as an outward evidence of an inward grace. Toleration born of intelligence budded and burgeoned like the prover- bial green bay tree, and men whose fathers thought a fiddle but another Red Piper to lure souls to hell, felt their hearts swell with paternal pride as they looked on happy sons and graceful daughters marking time with nimble feet to music that swept with Orpheus-figures every chord of the human heart. But as there still be men who believe the world is flat, so are there others, even in this enlightened age, who take it for granted that a loving God revels in the sweet incense of sighs, is pleased with a paean of groans that a beneficent Deity looks with dire displeasure on every bright oasis 194 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST Life's worn voyageur finds between the cradle and the grave. They are preachers and teachers who have failed to keep pace with the procession who can not realize that religion, like all else called into being by the Creator, must be progressive. Poor preterists, with their faces to the past, they would repace every step in the path of human progress, and across the sunlight of the noon cast the shadows of the night. Most of these anti-dancing dominies make uncompromis- ing war upon the so-called evil in all its forms, from the stately minuet to the Irish jig, from the stomach contortions of the Midway Plaisance to the nervous "jerks" of the Methodist camp-meeting ; but the latest preacher to declaim against the ballroom is not quite so bigoted as his crusading brethren. We gather from the Galveston News that Rev. J. W. Lowber has been holding forth on the subject in the Central Christian Church of that city, and some of his pious observations may be worth attention by this, the ministerial organ of Texas. We approach him with considerable cau- tion, however, for, by whatever name they are known whether as Christians, Disciples or Campbellites the mem- bers of that disorganized organization are great " 'sputers," and relish nothing so much as an interminable debate, whether anent forms of baptism or the shortcomings of other sects. Parson Lowber is evidently harboring the hal- lucination that when he has eliminated dancing, as now in- dulged in by the sons and daughters of men, the world will be redeemed and the millennium due. Like the Prohibi- tionist who approved of punch if the spirits were left out, he can tolerate dancing if each sex will but indulge in terpsi- chorean exercise by itself. He has ascertained, in some mys- terious manner which he does not divulge, that when Miriam, the sister of Moses, tripped the light fantastic she had no partner to caress her patent health corset, and that David, the son of Jesse, indulged in the stag-dance. That would appear to most people about as unsatisfactory as a single-handed game of baseball or a boxing bout with one's own shadow pre-eminently stale, flat and unprofitable. Parson Lowber has decided, in the goodness of his heart, to permit that kind of gayety, but when "youth and beauty meet To chase the glowing hours with flying feet," he becomes alarmed for the morals of the community and relieves Jeremiah of his job. He assures us that "if men and women will dance apart no harm can ensue." We fear BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 195 the worthy parson is theorizing in utter ignorance of con- ditions that he has never accompanied Dr. Parkhurst in his nocturnal visits to the Tenderloin district, and witnessed the can-can as danced for the special delectation of doctors of divinity. Evidently he has never participated in the hila- rious "stag-party," observed the "Midnight shout and revelry, Tipsy dance and jollity," that characterize these gatherings, and compared the wild orgies with the Chesterfieldian courtesy and princely bear- ing of the same men when subjected to the mild censorship of woman's eyes. Each sex values the good opinion of the other, and right acting begets right thinking. The cor- rectness of this premise conceded, the conclusion is plain that the good of the race demands that the sexes be brought together as much as possible, whether at work or play that it were unwise if not unsafe to leave either to its own re- sources. Parson Lowber assures us that "the modern dance is a great waste of time and money." Perchance he has never heard that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" has not suspected that some preachers toil so hard to attain a little cheap notoriety that they can not comprehend the plain teachings of Christ. Is time expended in social pleas- ures really wasted ? Is it not rather true that time is wasted when devoted to the attainment of wealth in excess of our needs, to foolish dogmatizing, to denouncing a harmless custom as old as the human race while children are suf- focating in the slums of our great cities, men are hesitating between beggary and crime, and the face of the world is wet with tears ? Oh ye pitiful triflers who would be teachers heaven-ordained doctors who give a moribund world bread pills to ward off the Black Death ! Ye Davids of the new Israel, are there no Goliaths of Gath, that ye must stone sheep? These soldiers of the Lord who are valiantly charging down upon the dance and euchre-deck remind me of a hound with which I once hunted wolves. His lust for blood before we flushed our quarry was terrible to contemplate, and every cow and calf along his route was made to feel his fangs ; but when the great black beast turned savagely at bay the hound would neither bark nor bite. So some preachers assail society's venial faults with fury, but when the host of hell stands forth beneath the blood-red banner 196 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST of Greed, these lions of the Lord ''roar as softly as suck- ing doves." Is money wasted when employed to bring elasticity to the limb, brightness to the eye and happiness to the heart? A greater than Parson Lowber has assured us that "the spend- thrift saves, the miser is prodigal." The man who devotes every shining hour to the service of Mammon, "the least erect of all the angelic host that fell from heaven," begrudg- ing every moment claimed by the goddess of Joy, is the real spendthrift. He squanders, not his substance, but his life turns his back upon the fond delights of the Vale of Tempe and wanders to the end of his days in the burning desert. I fear that Parson Lowber is more pedant than philosopher that he has overlooked the true significance of life. While doctors of medicine are beseeching us to abate that unre- mitting toil which wears out hand and heart and brain before their time, here is a doctor of divinity reproving us for every breathing spell in the "demnition grind." While philosophers insist that a life ungemmed with social pleas- ures is not worth the living, here is a preacher pleading that every hour is "wasted" if not burthened with a care. Parson Lowber objects to the sexes dancing together be- cause it has, he thinks, a tendency to sensuality and is a severe strain on the Seventh Commandment. That a man should take hold of a young lady's hand, touch her waist with his finger tips and guide her thro' the mazes of the dreamy waltz, fills the good doctor's head with foolish dreams of a world forever lost in the wild chaos of lust. He has somewhere heard of mesmerism, and fears the dancer will exercise that strange power on his fair compan- ion to her hurt. If he will but reflect a little he may con- clude that there's infinitely more danger in the "sitting-down waltz" in a darkened parlor than in the salutations of the brilliantly lighted ball-room. Dancing may be of the devil, but there is no intimation in Holy Writ that the Prince of Darkness ever danced. He did not cause the downfall of Mother Eve by the "arm-clutch" or the poetry of motion. According to Milton, Ithuriel found him "squat like a toad," distilling poison in the ear of Adam's credulous mate, and we may safely assume that most of the wreck and ruin since wrought among the gentler sex has been by the quiet distillment of poison by human toads in the ears of confid- ing maids. The truth is there is a tendency to sensuality in most things which minister either to the physical or spiritual life of men. Even that good living of which the average BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 197 preacher is so fond inflames the passions, and the sacred music which throbs thro' our great churches makes volup- tuaries as well as votaries. While it is true, as Parson Low- ber points out, that some girls trace their downfall to danc- ing, others attribute it to singing in fashionable choirs and the hypnotic influence of popular preachers. The ancient Greeks recognized two kinds of music that which makes soldiers and that which makes sybarites. The savagery in man may be refined away by education and religion; but sensuality grows with civilization's growth and strengthens with its strength. Generally speaking, that which tends to make man less a servant of Mars tends to make him more a slave of Venus. No savage nation was ever noted for licentiousness that is the curse of civilization. The bewildering beauty of a summer night's high noon; the melody of a half-awakened mocking-bird calling to its mate ; the sensuous perfume of dew-bespangled flowers, were lost upon the savage, solely animal ; but they sink into the supersensitive soul like Cleopatra's mad'ning kiss and burn within the blood with celestico-infernal fire. In such moods when the whole being is ablaze with passion, half demoniac, half divine man climbs Parnassus' rugged steeps and stands, poised in mid-heaven, like a star. In such moods the orator is gifted with lips of gold and in the poet's heart there rings the melody of the spheres. In such moods man hears the still small voice of Omnipotent God giving a new message to mankind, and lo! another sacred book is born another Mecca established as finger- post for toiling millions treading, with bleeding feet, the path of Life! But not every man may drive Apollo's steeds and safely guide the chariot of the sun. The same strange power that lifts man to the highest heaven may dash him to the deepest hell. Love that should illume the world may become lawless as that of a Grecian god, and Promethean fire perverted is a destructive brand the Star of Bethlehem becomes a blighting thunderbolt and man a demon instead of a demi-god. Clearly we cannot exterminate everything which causes the sexes to gravitate to each other, else were the Song of Solomon hushed, beauty banished, poetry forbidden and the grander rhythm of the great prose masters that sensuous tide which bears us away on its bosom "O'er the ocean wild and wide " placed under the ban. The great sun itself that parent and perennial store-house of passion were blotted from the 198 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST heavens, and a lawless universe reduced to cosmic dust go floating once more thro' space in snow-cold purity ! Marriage is a good or it is an ill. If good, those things which lead man to choose a mate and rear up sons to per- petuate his name, should be encouraged rather than re- pressed. If the dance drives some to lawless love, it must, in the very nature of things, impel more to matrimony. If contact of the sexes in the waltz, the music, the mesmeric touch of hands and wild thrill of heart pulsing against heart arouse those longings common to all animate nature, then indeed is the ball-room the enemy of celibacy and the builder of homes ; for we must concede that in a country pro- fessedly Christian and which sends missionaries to the heathen the procreative passion will go right as the rule and wrong as the exception. I know that it v/ill be urged by some pseudo-psychologists who have but a vague sus- picion of what really ails them that love and passion are as distinct as the daylight and the dark ; that, to borrow from Plato, there is a Uranian as well as a Pandemian Venus. Love purified of all earthly dross is a pretty conception, but it's a barren ideality. ''Love is love forevermore," and, refine it as we may, disguise it as we will, the basic principle of that force which draws the sexes together is the procrea- tive passion. When drunk with the perfume and beauty of the blush-rose we think not of the compost in which its roots lie buried. When the wine of Samos sparkles in the crystal cup, or the must foams "'Round the white feet of laughing girls" we forget the mouldering bones that nurtured the purple clusters. But compost and bones are there, and right well the gardener knows that but for them the great white light of the moon and the red glory of the sun would beat and break in vain that the rose would not enrich the vagrant air, nor the vine pour its empurpled tide into the veins of kings. We think not of the Creator's divine com- mand to be fruitful and multiply nor of the method he em- ploys to compel obedience when, amid a wilderness of flowers, the fair bride and gallant groom accept the sacred vows ; but the command is there, and the wedding-bells send answer back "God's will be done." The sexes must be brought together under circumstances mutually agreeable ere Hymen's torch be lit at glowing eyes and fanned to flame with the soft sighs of desiring souls; so "On with the dance." Having formally taken the ministers of America under BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 199 my apostolic protection, I feel that I am, in some degree, responsible for their errors that it is my duty to give Brother Lowber a little gratuitous advice. If all other ministers who are denouncing dancing and kindred social customs whose significance they cannot comprehend should hear and heed, so much the better. I have thought seriously of calling them together for a course of lectures on the mortal sin of trying to nullify the teachings of the great Nazarene ; but the time is not yet opportune. Do not take it for granted that whatever pleases the peo- ple originated in perdition. As the whole is greater than a part, so is it wiser. The cumulative wisdom of sixty centuries the customs of both savagery and civilization approves the dance as a healthy method of diversion. True piety does not consist in preventing other people enjoying themselves. If you realize that you cannot indulge in pro- gressive euchre without becoming a shoe-string gambler or bunco-steerer, or visit a ball-room without contracting an uncontrollable desire to see what Parkhurst saw and feel what Parkhurst felt, just spread your pin-feathers and fly from temptation instead of imitating the Son of Man by val- iantly facing and overcoming it ; but bear ever in mind that in the making of man the Almighty employs more than one kind of clay. Instead of wasting your strength trying to abolish the ball-room an institution whose good equals its evil turn your batteries upon those which are wholly bad. Battle against Frauds and Fakes, Hypocrites and Hum- bugs. Assail Poverty, Ignorance and Crime, hell's great triumvirate. When these arch-angels of evil are driven from the earth it will be time enough to abolish the social dance, burn the euchre-deck, destroy the stage and protect the Christian Sabbath from "desecration" by peddlers of hokey- pokey and popcorn balls. Doubtless the devil sometimes lurks in the ball-room ; but before seeking him there, oh my brethren, let us be sure he is riot snugly ensconced in the church, unctuously crying amen to the utterances of some perspiring pulpiteer who is trying to lead the armies of Is- rael off on a wild chase after some harmless jack-o'-lantern while the legions of evil overrun the earth. Don't make grand-stand plays from the pulpit. Notoriety may be nec- essary to an actor, but does not increase the sphere of use- fulness of a Campbellite preacher. If you really desire to enlarge the Lord's vineyard so as to include the unprofitable soil of Galveston Island and are quite sure the Wharf com- pany will not seize the Ship of Zion in part payment of the dockage squeeze the groans and moans and chronic heart- 200 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST aches out of your faith and fill it to overflowing with sun- shine and with flowers. Millions of tender-hearted people remain away from church simply because they cannot bear to witness the chronic gloom of those who have made their peace with God the unhappiness of those poor creatures who are doomed to inherit an orthodox heaven. Preach that God is love ; that our Father in Heaven, who watches over the very sparrows, wants his children to enjoy them- selves even here on earth, and gives the means if they will but wisely employ them. Teach the religion of good liv- ing, which is also right living the religion of beauty and joy and use. Hitch your chariot to a star instead of to a mole, and fill the land with light instead of darkness, with hope instead of despair. Think you the Creator poured his splendors forth on land and sea for eyes all dimmed with tears? that he filled the bul-bul's pulsing throat with mel- ody divine and composed old ocean's never ceasing anthem for those deafened with their own moans ? I wouldn't preach five minutes to a man who looked as tho' his religion was hurting him who seemed sorry he was going to be saved. When I deliver the "glad tidings of great joy" to a fellow mortal I want him to act like a poor miserable pariah who's just drawn the capital prize in a lot- tery, instead of treating the message as tho' it were a pro- tested draft. And when I get thro' pumping saving grace into him I want him to go out into the world and add to its gladness instead of its gloom. I want him to object to bear- baiting because it hurts bruin, and not because it pleases the boys. No matter whether I make a Campbellite of him or a sure-enough Baptist, I want him to recognize a brother Christian in every man who is trying, in spirit and in truth, to serve the Lord. And having expended my time and en- ergy to snatch him as a brand from the burning and for- mally enroll him in the army of Israel, if I find that he's such a consummate ass as to keep blazing away with his little escopeta at progressive euchre, the arm-clutch, the stage, ball-room and other unimportant social beetles, while the legions of Lucifer, with visors down and spears in rest are crowding us to the wall, I'll take a club and kill him. BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 201 THE A. P. A. IDIOCY. DEFAMATION OF AMERICAN DAILIES. Perhaps the most ominous of the signs of the times, so far as this Republic is concerned, is the birth of that organi- zation known as the American Protective Association. True, the order is not formidable as yet is of but little impor- tance in the world of politics ; but history teaches that the more ridiculous a craze or foolish a fad, the more readily it finds a following-. Of course the A. P. A. cannot long survive. It's a child of Darkness and must perish with the coming of the Dawn. There is no valid reason for its ex- istence, and the law of social as well as of physical evolution makes it imperative that the useless and unfit should perish from the earth. So perished Know-nothingism, and so will pass this new avatar of religious bigotry and political folly which has found a temporary lodgment in a land boast- ing liberty of conscience, beneath the flag of the free. But, though the days of the A. P. A. be few and full of trouble, it may, like the cholera scourge, or an epidemic of diarrhoea, do an infinite deal of harm before it is eradicated. Its ten- dency is to promote a religious war and wreck the mightv political fabric bequeathed us by our fathers, to crush reli- gious liberty and turn back the hands on the dial of time a thousand years. Its avowed object is the practical dis- franchisement of Catholics, not only in this country, but throughout Jhe world. The movement has already become "international," if we may credit the boasts of its leaders, which proves that it was not begotten of American patriot- ism, as at first pretended, but born of religious bigotry. The following paragraph, taken from the illiterate and intolerant address of the president of the supreme council of the order, delivered at Milwaukee last May, is suggestive: li coming generations are to be secure in the enjoyment of their liberties, we must drive the enemy not from the United States to Canada, nor from Canada to the United States not from the new world to the old, nor from the old to the new we must drive them off the face of the earth; must destroy the devil's brood, root and branch, by the mighty power of A. P. A.ism. Think of an "international," of an "universal American Protective Association" of Americans, interested only in preserving intact the liberties bequeathed them by those sworn enemies of monarchy, the Revolutionary heroes, as- sisting the Czar of Russia to preserve his crown and the Ak- 202 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST hoond of Swat his harem! The movement is not "Ameri- can ;" it is Protestant, pure and simple. Its raison d'etre is religious instead of political. Its object is not the en- forcement of the fundamental law of the land, which de- clares that "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office of public trust under the United States ;" but, by uniting all Protestant denominations in an "anti-Papist" crusade, to "destroy the devil's brood, root and branch" to "drive them off the face of the earth." Un- less all signs be misleading and the utterances of its duly accredited leaders mere doting jargon, it is the spiritual rather than the supposed temporal power of the Pope that is troubling the A. P. A. That organization is warring upon Roman Catholic theology far more vindictively than upon "Roman Catholic corruption" in politics. Its agony is fully as great when a Protestant sends his child to a convent school as when "Papal emissaries" capture a municipal gov- ernment. Pat's sister in a nunnery gives it as much con- cern as Pat himself on the police force. It harangues with far more gusto of the immortality of some unworthy priest than of the election of a "Papist" constable in a Catholic pre- cinct. Patriotic Americans have much to say anent the necessity of suppressing such blatant anarchists as Herr Most and Lucy Parsons ; yet the doctrines enunciated by the A. P. A. are infinitely more dangerous to the peace and perpetuity of the Republic. Their avowed object is the division of the American people into two hostile classes and Christ as- sures us that "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation." If this be true, either the A. P. A. or the government born of our fathers' blood and sanctified by our mothers' tears, must be destroyed. If we accept the dicta of the Deity we must class the A. P. A. organizers with Johann Most and Benedict Arnold. Nor are these enemies of the American government willing to wait for the disfranchisement of their Catholic fellow citizens by due process of law the change of the federal constitution by peaceful methods and passage of a disabling act by a fanat- ical congress. They are already preaching war a war of extermination ! Here is a paragraph clipped at random from the most pretentious A. P. A. journal extant, the official organ of the order at San Francisco : In Rochester, New York, a bad A. P. A. man shot and killed a good Catholic. The chief regret is that he had not a magazine gun instead of a single shooter. A thousand similar expressions might be culled from the BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 203 utterances of A. P. A. orators and editors, signifying that the Protestant who murders a Catholic pleases God and renders his country a service that having killed one Cath- olic he should be encouraged to slaughter more. Evident- ly we would have a delightful Christian love-feast should the A. P. A. become strong enough to safely embark in the wholesale butchery business in the name of a loving Christ and the federal constitution! But let an American citizen who sees the plan of salvation thro' a different tele- scope and who has a sister or daughter in a convent shy a brick at some foul-mouthed blackguard for calumniat- ing the Roman Catholic sisterhoods, and forthwith a terri- ble wail goes up from this "noble order of Christian pa- triots" that the Pope is trying to throttle free speech by means of a pretorian guard of brutal bulldozers. The A. P. A. willfully and with malice prepense provokes the Cath- olic until forbearance ceases to be a virtue, then points to his violence as an evidence of Papal iniquity. A large pro- portion of American Catholics are of the combative Irish blood. The terrible injustice which Ireland has for centu- ries suffered at the hands of orthodox England has not made them particularly friendly to the Protestant faith; yet so deeply are they imbued with American ideas; such respect have they for the right of free speech, that A. P. A. orators and editors may defame them in every possible manner may question their patriotism and revile their religion and do so in comparative safety. The patience of the American. Catholics under the jeers and sneers, the willful calumnies and cowardly insults of the A. P. A. has no parallel in reli- gious history since the persecutions suffered by the primi- tive Christians. Why they do not procure a few "maga- zine guns" and fill the hides of their persecutors so full of holes that they couldn't be stuffed with stove wood, I am unable to understand. In the greatest exponent of A. P. Aism in which Pro- testant Christianity and American patriotism are supposed to be united for the attainment of salvation here and hereaf- ter, we find such headlines as the following: "Pap for Papist Pugs ;" "A Specimen Catholic Brute ;" "Fearful Ro- man Catholic Immorality ;" "Papists and False Oaths ;" "Jerked to Jesus ;" "Illegitimacy in Rome ;" "Romanists Lie with Impunity," etc., and the articles are worthy of their captions. Such is religious toleration and Christian charity as interpreted by the A. P. A. such its idea of the cult es- tablished by Christ for the purpose of securing "peace on earth, good will to men." The proceedings of every ecumen- 204 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST ical council, the official acts of every Pope, the utterances of every writer of Roman Catholic theology for a thousand years have been scanned for evidence that the Mother Church is the enemy of both civil and religious liberty and that by men who would disfranchise American citizens for worship- ping God according to the dictates of their own conscience, and murder them with "magazine guns" because of a dif- ference of opinion anent the Real Presence ! I am not much in favor of a press censorship nor the abridgement of the right of free speech ; but I do think that men who persist in a deliberate attempt to precipitate a civil war should be hanged for treason. My bump of veneration is not so ab- normal that it wears holes in the steeple crown of my Mex- ican hat ; still I hold that the orator or editor who flagrantly defames and systematically vilifies any religious cult con- sidered sacred by millions of law-abiding men, is a blasphe- mous brute, and that it would be entirely consistent with the American idea of liberty to clap a cast-iron muzzle on him and lose the key. It has been charged by the A. P. A. that the Iconoclast is a "Baptist periodical," hence "its utterances should be re- garded with suspicion by all patriotic Americans/' Of course every journal that declines to act as cat's-paw to pull political chestnuts out of the fire, for the "Ape/' is trying to supplant an American President with an Italian Pope. I am not surprised that, having demonstrated their ignorance of the history of the Church of Rome and their utter inabil- ity to comprehend the genius of the American government, the A. P. A. bosses should accuse a journal bearing the suggestive title of Iconoclast of being a "Papal periodical." A Catholic Iconoclast w r ere almost as great a curiosity as a feathered elephant or an English organization for the pro- tection of American liberties! With the controversy be- tween Protestantism and Catholicism I have no more to do than with that between Buddhism and Brahmanism. I care never a copper whether a man takes his theology from the Pope or Dalai-Lama, John Calvin or Joseph Smith, so long as he doesn't persist in mixing it with American poli- tics. But when one religious body presumes to monopo- lize the honors and emoluments of this government to the exclusion of another ; when an attempt is made in the name of any religious cult or creed to override the constitution of our common country; when a conspiracy is entered into by malicious busy-bodies and aspiring demagogues to disfran- chise worthy American citizens because of their religious opinions, somebody is going to get the iconoclastic gaffles BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 205 driven into them so deep that the protruding points may be utilized as a hat rack. But the Iconoclast does not stand alone to receive the destructive thunderbolts and sizzling scorn of that "noble order of Christian patriots" which proposes to play smash with the Pope and "destroy the devil's brood, root, and branch" by a combination of "open Bibles" and breech- loaders. The leading article in the A. P. A. Magazine for July whose politico-religious mission is ladling out a very disgusting brand of 'Tap for Papist Pugs" is an "Address by Rev. J. Q. A. Henry, San Francisco." From it I clip the following paragraph : Time forbids that I should give the extent to which the Papacy has subsidized the press. There is scarcely a daily of note through- out the entire country whose staff is not controlled by the Jesuits. At the elbow of reporter and editor sits the Jesuitical inquisitor to see that nothing is reported or published detrimental to the Papal church. It is shocking how unfair to Protestantism and diabolically sectarian the press has become. It cringes in the presence of the hierarchy, and enforces its unscrupulous bidding with the servility of a whipped spaniel. I dislike very much to say anything disrespectful of a preacher; still, respect for "the cloth" does not overcome my suspicion that the reverend gentleman is an unmitigated liar. In fact I know from personal experience in daily journalism that such is the case. I have served on nine daily papers ranging in importance from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat to the Houston Post; have occupied every position from police reporter to editor, and never did a Catholic priest attempt to shape one sentence of the ten thousand columns that have passed from my pencil into print. I have treated of many questions in which Catholics \vere deeply interested, and never did I catch a glimpse of that "Jesuitical inquisitor." Never did Catholic priest or layman suggest what I should say or leave unsaid; but I have had the Protestant inquisitors at my elbow often enough, God knows. They have been persistent, meddle- some, dictatorial ; and whenever I declined to allow them to manage my department they tried to get me discharged. In all my journalistic experience I was never told by a Catho- lic priest of a scandal in a Protestant church; but just let a Catholic priest go wrong, and four-fifths of the Protestant preachers make it their business, not only to inform the press, but to insist that the affair be "shown up" in its most unfavorable aspect. These are facts with which every daily newspaper man is familiar. Call up the editors and report- 206 BRANtt, THE ICONOCLAST ers of this country and they will tell you that the Catholic priests and Jewish Rabbis meddle with their work but little; but that, with the possible exception of the pot-house politi- cians and crank scribblers, the Protestant clergy is the greatest nuisance with which they have to deal. That poli- ticians and monopolists sometimes subsidize a daily paper is doubtless true; but this corruption is not carried to the extent popularly supposed. The press is often foolish, but usually honest. Of course there are corrupt men on the press, as w.ell as in the pulpit. I have 'heard jackleg re- porters boast of tips received from Protestant preachers to secure spread-eagle reports of their sermons ; but never did I hear either editor or reporter intimate that he had re- ceived a dollar from a priest except in the way of legitimate business that would bear the light of publicity. Of course this does not prove that priests never influence the utter- ances of the press ; but it does signify that the preachers are not in a position to point the finger of scorn. My opinion is that the Rev. Jeremiah Querulous Ana- nias Henry is guilty of a deliberate calumny, and were I now editing a daily paper I would have him indicted for criminal libel and put into the penitentiary where such reckless liars and assassins of reputation properly belong. Such a gratu- itous insult offered the American press simply proves that I sized the order up correctly when I labeled it the Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. No organization that has undertaken such a herculean task as the practical disfranchisement and reduction to political peonage of one- seventh of the American people, will, if it possess as much sense as an acephalous louse, deliberately antagonize a pow- er that can ridicule it out of existence, that can drive it off the earth with goosequills despite its "magazine guns." The A. P. A. has taken plenty of rope, and! if it have suffi- cient sense to tie a knot will inevitably hang itself. And the daily press will, if it possess one glimmering spark of American manhood, assist at the obsequies. Here is an organization which has defied its power and spat in its face. What will the daily press do about it? Will it play the "whipped spaniel" and lick the feet that trample upon it? Or will it hit this politico-religious monstrosity one biff be- tween the eyes and send it back to the foul shades of hell from which it sprung? BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 207 GROVER'S NEW GIRL. BABIES AND BOOT-LICKS. We gather from the press dispatches that "at precisely 4:30 p. m. by the doctor's watch," on the seventh day of the seventh month of the year of grace, 1895, a third girl baby was born to President and Mrs. Cleveland. Regardless of the Malthusian theory of population and the existence of more girls in America! than can reasonably hope to acquire dutiful husbands we hasten to extend congratulations. It is possible that a male heir would have better pleased our "liege, lord and sovereign born ;" still, the man who holds three queens in the game of life with the privilege of call- ing for cards should feel encouraged. The new addition to the President's household appears to have taken the Nation by surprise, and it is but now slowly recovering from the shock. The Clevelands have evidently learned something by ex- perience. They have learned that many daily newspapers have no appreciation of the sanctity of the family circle or respect for the modesty which is the glory of motherhood that common decency demands that these literary vultures and foolish Boswells be kept resolutely at bay. Ere Pres- ident Cleveland had been married six months, the daily press that "professional educator" and self-styled "moulder of public opinion" began to speculate on paternal possibili- ties. It was recalled that before becoming President he had acquired a procreative record of which he appeared not a little proud, and that he was not a man to weary in well- doing: hence, if by any chance, a Peeping Tom reporter caught a glimpse of Mrs. Cleveland clad in a maternity gown, or even a hot-weather Mother Hubbard, the great American Commonwealth was thrown into a state of pain- ful expectancy bordering hysteria. The family physi- cian was beset by interrogation points wherever he turned, while seamstresses and house-servants were subjected to rigid cross-examination by enterprising Washington corre- spondents who should have been humanely killed. If a midwife or obstetrician was seen about the premises the world was advised thereof by wire. If a haberdasher's boy delivered a p'ackage at the White House he was fairly mobbed by reporters eager to learn if it contained safety- pins or material available for diapers. The physique of the "first lady of the land" was observed as closely and com- 208 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST mented upon, as freely as that of a Blue Grass brood-mare, and the slightest tendency to embonpoint called forth col- umn telegrams, editorial leaders and "smart" paragraphs. Speculation anent the probable sex of the new-comer was freely indulged in by papers of professed respectability, 'and the approaching accouchement became the subject of con- versation alike in the gilded drawing-room and the dingy "doggery." I am told that bets were laid on the sex -of the babe to be, and pools sold on the date of its debut. Time after time the wiseacres of the press were disap- pointed, but that only redoubled their vigilance. It is said that a watched kettle never boils; but to even this rule, there are exceptions, and the Cleveland household was eventually blessed with a babe a fuzzy-wuzzy little barba- rian, in no wise distinguishable from a thousand other babes born on the same day. But if the little bundle of bawl that lay mewling and puking in its nurse's arms h'ad been a rein- carnation of the Buddha, or even the Christ re-born in a mansion instead of a manger, of pseudo-patrician instead of unquestioned proletarian parentage* the American press could not have expressed more concern. Hourly bulletins informed the awe-struck universe of the condition of the mother, the state of mind of the father and progress made by the young* pilgrim. "Baby Cleveland awoke at 11.30 and wept softly." "The baby smiled intelligently and coo-cooed to her happy f ather." These are specimen bits of the intellectual goose-liver pie served up by our journalistic caterers to a public boasting itself "heir of all the ages and foremost in the files of time." What caused Baby Ruth to indulge in that soft wailing cry which echoed and re-echoed round the world by wire, has never been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps some faint adumbration of 'an idea that, through no fault of hers, she had been precipitated into a world where fools predominate broke her heart. Her "coo-coo" remains as much a mys- tery as her tears, the attempt of etymologists to prove it an infantile form of "cuckoo" having signally failed. By unre- mitting attention to duty, the doctors manager to save both mother and child even pulled the old man through with- out much difficulty; but for a long time the general public languished. The strain upon its nervous forces had been abnormal; but the wonderful recuperative powers of nature at length asserted themselves and society was safe. Had the first Cleveland baby been a boy, excess of joy might have proved fatal to a nation founded by those who taught BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 209 the equality of men and held kings in contempt. Had it been two boys the sun would not only have stood still upon some occidental Gibeon and the moon in a cisatlantic valley of Ajalon, but have stuck fast and refused thenceforth to shine upon the other half of the earth. That Mrs. Cleve- land did not. die of vexation, nor the male progenitor of the young "princess" go gunning for various press correspond- ents, "able editors" and other purveyors of such godless gush over an accomplishment to which most married couples are equal, argues a patience beside which the patii- arch of Uz were but a querulous dyspeptic. The third can- didate for colic and carpet tacks to appear in the "Stuffed Prophet's" household was not heralded by "scare" head- lines. No pools were sold on the day it would appear, no sesterces laid by chivalrous American soverigns on the question of its sex. "Silently as the daylight comes when night is done, And the crimson streak on ocean's cheek grows into the great sun," the little wanderer from No Man's Land entered this vale of tears and unostentatiously took up life's trials. The sacred pre-natal secret was guarded as closely as tho' it were some hideous crime, lest the reporters once more come pry- ing about kitchen windows, "pumping" garrulous serving- maids and listening at key-holes to catch the first faint cry of a new-born babe. A modest matron dislikes to have a tribe of hoodlums measuring her girdle and speculating on the probabilities of parturition; so it was not until a do- mestic, finding the secret too hard to hold, "told a neigh- bor's girl" of the new arrival that the press correspondents realized that another crisis in the world's history was at hand. But although the public was spared the vulgar spec- ulation and barbaric horn-blowing that preceded the arrival of other babes "born in the purple," it could by no possible precaution on the part of the modest mother escape the de- luge of post-natal ditch-water and disgusting hog- wash. Kere is a specimen, clipped from that owl of American journalism and representative "public educator," the Dallas News : Cosy Gray Gables was batned in warm sunlight to-day and the early existence of the new Miss Cleveland, the personage in whom the residents of Buzzard's Bay are most interested, is marked by bright, pleasant weather. Dr. Bryant reported that Mrs. Cleveland and the little one are resting quietly and that everything is progres- sing finely. He will add nothing except that the newcomer is a "fine little girl." In company with Joseph Jefferson, Mr. Cleveland spent nearly all day trout fishing at East Sandwich, where Mr. Jefferson 210 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST has a private stream. The party left early in the day and did not return until nearly 6 o'clock. Ruth and Esther did not drive with their nurses to the village this noon, as they have done almost every day since their arrival at Gray Gables, nor were the horses sent to the postoffice ; but a messenger was dispatched on foot after the mail. The children remained at their play, often chattering as they ran about the piazzas and lawn over the little sister so recently in- troduced to them. Both children seem delighted with the idea of having another little one in the household. The existence of "warm sunlight" on a July day will strike the average reader as a phenomenon well worth re- cording even wiring across the continent. Warm sun- light and wet water prove that nothing is impossible in Na- ture. We are pleased to learn that the omens were auspi- cious at the birth of the Cleveland babe, portending pros- perity and a life all whose paths are peace. Had one J. S. Hogg been born while the warm sunlight gilded the pa- ternal cabin with supernal glory and rested like a benedic- tion upon the softly murmuring pines, instead of in the midst of a March storm that knocked the pillows out of broken window panes and piled the cow-path with broken boughs and general rubbish until it resembled an interior view of Riggins' head, or the English language after a cri- minal assault upon it by " J. K. Street, journalist" who- ever that may be, what a, world of woe and worry, trials and tribulations might have been spared the Lone Star State ! That Dr. Bryant declines to give it further informa- tion than that the babe may some day wear bloomers and "everything is progressing finely" is the apology which the press offers the public for not furnishing full particulars. The doctor's curt refusal to divulge all the delicate secrets of the sick-room to be exploited in dduble-leaded type is probably a great disappointment to many people ; still it en- titles him to the eternal gratitude of every mother, present and potential. The same spirit of morbid curiosity which caused crowds to assemble to see le Grande Monarque dress and undress himself largely prevails even among the Ameri- can people, where it has been SO' prurient that the daily press finds it profitable to violate the canons of common decency. That President Cleveland should almost immedi- ately leave the house, not to devote a few moments to im- portant public business, but to spend the entire day trout- fishing in a play-actor's "private stream" (where is Henry George?) while his new-born babe was battling for a hold on life and the mother far within the pale of danger, would suggest subterbrutishness to any but a press correspondent. But then we must not judge by the highest altruistic stand- BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST 211 ard a man who runs largely to bowels and little to brains. The gander carefully guards his unfledged goslings, the tiger keeps watch and ward over his pur-blind progeny, but who ever saw Taurus take an active interest in the new- born bovine? But more important than all else, perhaps, is the informa- tion afforded us by an enlightened public press to the effect that Ruth and Esther did not drive to the village with their nurses, as was their wont, but remained at play, "chattering as they ran about the piazzas and lawn over the little sister so recently introduced to them." (Lindley Murray being already dead, the architect of the foregoing sentence in our "great public educator" cannot be indicted for homicide.) We might have expected them to discuss Mother Goose's Melodies, Coin's Financial School, the latest society novel and other light literature adapted to nascent minds. The fact that they preferred to talk of something tangible to discuss conditions rather than theories proves that they have risen above that photoplasmic or rudimentary state of the mental faculties occupied by the Trilbyites, the patrons of the Houston Post and those semi-vegetable polyps who absorb a kind of intellectual circus lemonade with a sock in it from that great tank of orthodox wiggletails yclept the Baptist Standard. We are pleased to learn that Ruth and Esther approved of the newcomer. Had they decided that it was de trop of course it would be instantly killed or perhaps consigned to the tender care of Baylor University to be "educated for Baptist missionary work in Brazil." We are further informed that "the horses were not sent to the postoffice, but a messenger was dispatched on foot after the mail." How fortunate that in raking the great round earth for rubbish, the Associated Press that busy collector of compost caught this important item! Other- wise, should the world wobble in its orbit and "planets and suns flame lawless thro' the sky," we might never suspect the reason. Given a cause, even Dr. Burleson might figure out an effect. We know now that the nigger employed at Gray Gables to go errands actually hoofed it to the post- office and "toted" the presidential mail-pouch, instead of driving that he did not even ride a bike or bestride a brin- dle mule. Thus day by day does the diurnal press add to the mighty domain of human Knowledge and drive the monster Ignorance further into the desert. Knowledge is power, if we may believe the old copy-books, and the Archi- medean lever may yet move the world. But why criticise the press for performing its legitimate 212 BRANN, THE ICONOCLAST function 'that of industriously catering to a depraved public appetite for toads ? If the people did not crave and pay for such intellectual ditch-water it would not be collected at great expense and pumped into them much as the Lagado doctor inflated the colicky canine!" The birth of babies in the Cleveland household is of no more importance than the appearance on this planet of what a high official of the present plutocratic administration calls "the spawn of the wayside cabin" of which Lincoln was an example. In fact, if we may judge the future by the past, the "spawn" is likely to fill a larger niche in this world's economy