The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

A KANSAS CITY ARISTOCRAT.

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

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

* * * A PICTORIAL PAIN KILLER.

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

* * * MAN'S GUST FOR GORE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * TEXAS TOPICS.

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

* * * THE RETORT COURTEOUS.

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

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

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

* * * BRANN VS. BAYLOR.

REVOLVERS, ROPES AND RELIGION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

. . .

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

* * * SPEAKING OF SPIRITUALISM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * * SOME GOLD-BUG GUFF.

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

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

* * * "THE TYPICAL AMERICAN TOWN."

BY THE COLONEL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More men to tell the truth are needed. More men willing to lead clean lives. One object lesson is worth a hundred told from books. More women are wanted who will hold their virtue as God-given and a priceless gem. Such men and such women would be laughed at for a while as oddities in Chicago, but even the modern Gomorrah would be affected by them in time. Missionary boards are spending thousands every year in endeavors to induce highly moral Chinamen to become immoral Christians; but right before their eyes in the county of Cook, state of Illinois, is a more fruitful field than they have ever plowed, a field that is lying fallow, although there are ministers enough camped on it, God knows. It is the fashion of the snug missionary board, however, to see only those things which are far off. It has been so since missionary boards first tortured savages whose chief offense was that they worshipped God in their own way, and it will continue to be so until the last missionary has taken up his last collection and laid in his winter's coal therewith. The ICONOCLAST has done its level best to snatch the Chicago brand from the burning and now and then some Chicago man walks straight for a little way under the influence of its teaching, but one journal cannot do the work of a hundred, nor is the whole of heathendom to be saved by one preacher. Until the great sweeping time comes around and Chicago is purified in the most cleansing of all liquids, though each quart of it means a human life, the money changers will sit in the temple and the bawds and lovers of bawds drink in the sanctuary.

. . .

Not long ago Chicago had a celebration. It placed a statue to "Black Jack Logan" on the lake front. This statue, which is by St. Gaudens, represents a large-moustached man on a slimly-built horse that has his right hoof elevated to his ear, apparently endeavoring to paw a fly therefrom. Of course, it is understood that any natural horse which stood in that way, would fall down and skin his pasterns and hocks and stifles and barrel and withers and other parts of him known to the veterinarians. I am no horse doctor.

The large-moustached man has on cavalry boots which are dug into the stirrups and his legs are very stiff and calm. He holds a flag in his right hand—holds it far up and away and its folds are blown by the wind. Every child knows that a United States flag and staff weigh only two ounces and a man on horse-back can swing it around as if it were a feather. These things do not enter into the rapt dream of St. Gaudens. Nothing enters into his dream save poetry to be expressed in bronze and the dollars that are to come therefrom. The statue is well enough in its way. Let it go at that.

. . .

There was a celebration. Troops came and marched from many states. Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic tramped along and the people cheered them. I suppose that one quarter of the heroes who are drawing $160,000,000 a year in pensions from the government were on hand. I have been unable to find out anything that "Black Jack" did, other than the fact that he came back from the front in 1863, and legged for Abraham Lincoln, thereby getting into politics and staying in until he died. Also he scoured the country carefully and found everybody that was connected with him by blood or marriage and put him or her into office. At one time Logan and family were drawing enough money from Uncle Sam to draw a respectable navy. As the orators were orating and the cannon were barking and the sweating people on the sidewalks were shouting, they knew not and cared not for what, I thought of some lines which opened a Washington letter in the Boston Globe many years ago, when John A. Logan was in the United States Senate. There was a tariff discussion on and he took a part. These were the lines: "Pranced there in, on the arena of the great debate, like a trick mule in a circus or a spavined nightmare on the track of a beautiful dream, Logan of Illinois." They fitted him.

A part of that celebration consisted of fireworks which were given at the Coliseum, a large building which stands in the southern part of the city and is used as a place of entertainment. John T. Dickinson, formerly of Texas, and now of the earth, is the president of the Coliseum Company, and engineered the display. It takes money to have fireworks and the company of "big-bugs" who bossed the entire marksman's contest, told him so. With that hustle which made him a marked man in Austin and other large cities in which he lived before he broke into Chicago, Dickinson rushed out and raised the money. He got subscriptions from prominent merchants, collected the funds and turned them over to William R. Harper, who was chairman of the committee on arrangements and committee on glory and pretty nearly everything else. The fireworks were touched off and fizzed and banked and spluttered, and the people cheered some more.

The fellows who furnished the Catherine wheels and sky rockets and so forth, sent in their bills, which were audited and marked correct and Harper was requested to settle. He refused. The fireworks were not a success, he said. The fireworks men represented to him that whether the display was a success or a heart-breaking failure sawed no frozen water whatever. They were not entrusted with the management of the affair. They had furnished the goods and wanted their money. Harper refused. Dickinson jumped in once more and carried to Harper testimonials from the men who had furnished the money, saying that there never had been any fireworks so good as those fireworks. Harper refused. Harper was then bombarded with orders from the subscribers directing him to pay out the $2,500 which he held to their credit. He refused.

So the matter stands. The fire-cracker men are desolate. Dickinson has lost thirty of his 250 pounds. Harper has the money. Chicago has the scandal of a lot of unpaid workmen and manufacturers who helped to celebrate the unveiling of the pawing horse and big moustache out on the lake front-the bronze memorial of "Black Jack" Logan, who never did anything but wed a smart woman and hold office and beget a son who married money in Ohio.

. . .

These are the components of the Chicago newspaper trust, of which many people have heard: The Tribune, the Record, the Times-Herald, the Chronicle, the Post, the Journal and the News. The object of the trust is to advance the interests of the proprietors and swell their bank accounts at the expense of individuals and the public in general. It is an offensive alliance against decency and fair play. It is powerful. Such enterprises as it elects to boom are boomed. Such as it elects to destroy are destroyed. Such men as it cares to advance are advanced. Such men as it cares to attack are viciously lampooned day after day and week after week and month after month. It does not lampoon anyone who pays it. In each of these papers the editorial room is utterly and thoroughly dominated by the counting room. It gets its order day by day from the business counter and it obeys them with a slavish servility. The merchant with a display advertisement in their columns is safe from attack, no matter what his crime. From end to end it is one man journalism, and each of the papers is run for the benefit of the one man who is its proprietor. The Tribune is owned by Joe Medill, the Times-Herald and Post are owned by H. H. Kohlsast, the Record and News are owned by Victor Lawson, the Journal is owned by the McRae- Scripps league and the Chronicle is owned by John R. Walsh, a banker.

The effects of the newspaper trust upon the public are so well known that they need not be further enumerated. Its effects upon the individual worker in journalism are damnable.

The Chicago journalist belongs to the man who hires him, or he moves away, or he starves. That is all there is to it. If discharged by one, he cannot be hired by another. He is blacklisted until the man who discharges him chooses to reinstate him. If employed by one paper and does exceptional work, he cannot go to another one at an increase of salary. This is one of the strongest rules of the trust. His only chance to get approximately what his work is worth is to resign and risk being hired elsewhere, and he will be hired elsewhere in Chicago only if his former owner does not object. He can, too, go to another paper at the same wages and take his chance of a raise.

The result of this is not only to peon men, but to pay them merely living wages. There has never been a time in the history of America when the pay of a competent newspaper man was so low as it is in Chicago. Reporters run from $10 to $25 a week, copy readers get $25 on morning papers, telegraph editors about the same, editorial writers and paragraphers are paid from $30 to $35. Wages in other parts of the business "up-stairs" are formed on a like model. These wages are from one-third to one-half of what are paid in New York. There is no newspaper trust in New York. As it is, the list of unemployed newspaper men in Chicago numbers more than 200. Any one of them would be glad to take a place at starvation wages if he could get it.

There is one gleam of hope for the Chicago newspaper man. It is rumored that W. R. Hearst of the New York Journal intends to start a morning paper there. I do not believe that he will, but if he does he will force some of the trust members to publish newspapers or get out of the business. Hearst is called a "yellow journalist," and what not, and may be he is, but he is a boon to the workers. There can be no manner of doubt about that. Chicago, October 15.

* * * THE AUTHOR OF EPISCOPALIANISM. VERSAILLES, Mo., August 31.—Editor, ICONOCLAST: Will you please inform me who was the father of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry the Eighth, giving citations. JOHN D. BOHLING.

Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Henry VIII. of England, and Lady Boleyn. This is so well known to every student of history that "giving citations" seems superfluous; but of the first that comes to my mind I'll furnish a few: Dr. Bayley ("Life of Bishop Fisher") says that before the wedding of King Henry to Anne occurred, Lady Boleyn addressed to the former these words: "Sir, for the reverence of God, take heed what you do in marrying my daughter, for, if you record your own conscience well, she is your own daughter as well as mine"; to which the king replied: "Whose daughter soever she is, she shall be my wife." Dr. Sander ("Anglican Schism") says that Henry VIII. was the father of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Dr. D. Lewis, in his introduction to the book, says that both Lady Boleyn and her daughter Mary were King Henry's mistresses, and adds: "Nothing remains but to accept the fearful story told, not by Dr. Sander only, nor by him before all others, and say that, at least by the confession of the King and both Houses of Parliament, Anne Boleyn was Henry's child." Van Ortroy (Vic de B. Martyr Jean Fisher") says that Anne was the daughter of Henry, and that the fact was so generally known that it was the subject of ribald songs in continental capitals. William Cobbett ("History of the Protestant Reformation") says that Anne Boleyn became first the mistress and then the wife of her father. Gasquet, in his notes on that work, endorses the statement. By act of Parliament (28 Henry VIII C. 7) Elizabeth, daughter of Henry and Anne, was declared a bastard; that "certain just and lawful impediments" were unknown to the King when the marriage occurred, but had since been officially "confessed by the said Lady Anne." Archbishop Cranmer, who divorced Henry from Catherine, also divorced him from Anne, declaring in his latter decree "in the name of Christ and for the honor of God, the marriage was and always had been null and void." This sentence was signed by both houses of Convocation. It was approved by Parliament. Yet Cranmer, the Convocation and Parliament recognized Henry's divorce from Catherine as valid. According to English law, both religious and secular, Henry had no other wife when he married Anne, she no other husband. The only "lawful impediments" to the marriage were those stated by Anne's mother. They were positively known before Anne's marriage to Henry, the first official head of the Church of England, and who formulated and enforced its first body of doctrine, and there is every reason to believe that they were known at that time to Cranmer, the first archbishop of the parent of Episcopalianism, the sweet-scented author of the "Book of Common Prayer."

* * * Dr. Rufus C. Burleson is not a perfect man. He has not always treated the ICONOCLAST either with Christian charity or courtesy; but as men go, he's far above the average. While he was president of Baylor University its students did not get drunk. They were not encouraged to arm themselves and commit lawless acts of violence. All the good that is in Baylor University is due to his untiring efforts and self-sacrifice. There would be no Baylor University to-day but for Dr. Burleson; yet after nearly half a century of service, he has been pitched out and humiliated and lied about by creatures who are not worthy to breathe the same atmosphere. The Baptist fight is none of mine; but I am the champion of fair play; and I say here that even in his so-called "dotage," Dr. Burleson has more brains, more good morals, more manhood, than have Carroll, Cranfill, and all their scurvy crew. If the enemies of Burleson triumph at the coming state convention, then the Baptist sect ought to perish from the earth. Shake, Doctor; Baylor has treated you a damned sight worse than it has treated me.

* * * A GIPSY GENIUS.

BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

Men are the only things worth while, in this world, and I purpose to write briefly of a man, who, though living in these, our own, so-called, degenerate days, would have found a perfect setting in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth." He would have been a worthy companion of Raleigh, half-pirate and half-poet. He had in his time but one soul-kinsman, and that man was at once England's shame and glory, embalmed forever in the ominous work, Khartoum.

Sir Richard Burton was the last of the English "gentleman adventurers." He came late into the world, but he had in him the large, strong qualities that have made England master of the world. He was a Gypsy genius, though his utmost research could never find more clew to a Romany ancestry than the fact that there was a Gypsy family of the same name. He looked the Gypsy in ever feature, and he had upon him such an urging restlessness as no man ever had, save, perhaps, the Wandering Jew. His life was an epic of thought, of investigation and of adventure. The track of his wanderings laced the globe. He loved "the antres vast and deserts idle," and he had the FLAIR, the houndscent, as it were, to find the hearts of strange peoples. His "Life," by his wife, is the most interesting biography since that of Boswell, and strangely enough, it is, like the famous "Johnson," as interesting for its revelation of the biographer as for its portrayal of the subject. Burton's wife was the loving-est slave that ever wedded with an idol. The story of the courtship is ridiculous almost to the verge of tragic. As a girl, a gypsy woman named Burton, told Isabel Arundell that she would marry one of the palmist's name, would travel much, and receive much honor.

One day, at Boulogne, she was on the ramparts, with companions, when she saw Burton. She describes him raptuously; tall, thin, muscular, very dark hair, black, clearly-defined, sagacious eye-brows, a brown weather-beaten complexion, straight Arab features, a determined looking mouth and chin. And then she quotes a clever friend's description, "That he had the brow of a God, the jaw of a Devil."

His eyes "pierced you through and through." When he smiled, he did so "as though it hurt him." He had a "fierce proud melancholy expression," and he "looked with contempt at things generally." He stared at her, and his eyes looked her through and through. She turned to a friend and said in a whisper, "That man will marry ME." The next day they walked again. This time this man wrote on the wall, "May I speak to you?" She picked up the chalk and scrawled, "No, mother will be angry." A few days later they met in formal manner, and were introduced. She started at the name, Burton. Her naif rhapsodies on the meeting are refreshing. One night he danced with her. She kept the sash and the gloves she wore that night as sacred mementoes. Six years passed before she saw her Fate again. He had been in the world though, and she had kept track of his actions. In 1856 she met him in the Botanical Gardens "walking with the gorgeous creature of Boulogne—then married." They talked of things, particularly of Disraeli's "Tancred." He asked her if she came to the Gardens often. She said that she and her cousin came there every morning. He was there next morning, composing poetry to send to Monkton-Milnes. They walked and talked and did it again and again. "I trod on air," wrote the lady in her old, old age. Why not? She was one woman who had found a real hero. He asked her if she could dream of giving up civilization, and of going to live there if he could obtain the Consulate of Damascus. He told her to think it over. She said, "I don't WANT to think it over—I've been thinking it over for six years, ever since I first saw you, at Boulogne, on the ramparts. I have prayed for you every day, morning and night. I have followed all your career minutely. I have read every word you ever wrote, and I would rather have a crust and a tent with YOU than to be Queen of all the world. And so I say now, yes, yes, yes." She lived up to this to the day of his death, and long after it.

In 1859 she was thinking of becoming a Sister of Charity. She had not heard from Burton in a long time. He had left her without much ceremony to search for the sources of the Nile with Speke. Speke had returned alone, Burton remained at Zenzibar, and she says, "I was very sore "because Burton, according to report, was not thinking of coming home, to his love, but of going for the source of the Nile once more. She called on a friend. The friend was out. She waited, and while waiting Burton popped in upon her. He had come to see the friend to get her address. Her description of the meeting is a pitifully exact reproduction of her emotions over the reunion. He was weakened by African fevers. Her family, ardent Catholics, opposed the idea of marriage. The lovers used to meet in the Botanical Gardens, whence she often had to escort him fainting, to the house of sympathetic friends, in a cab. He was poor. He was out of favor with the government. Speke had pre-empted the honors of the expedition. But she was happy.

Then one day, in April, 1860, she was walking with some friends when "a tightning of the heart" came over her, that "she had not known before." She went home, and said to his sister, "I am not going to see Richard for some time." Her sister re-assured her. "No, I shall not," she said, "I don't know what is the matter." A tap came at the door, and a note was put in her hand. Burton was off on a journey to Salt Lake City, to investigate Mormonism. He would be gone nine months and then he was to come back, to see if she would marry him. He returned about Christmas, 1860. In the later part of January they were married, the details of the affair being appropriately unconventional, not to say exciting. The marriage was, practically, an elopement. Lady Burton's description of the event, and of every event in their lives, ever after, discloses an idolatry of the man that was almost an insanity. She reveals herself as a help-mate, with no will but her husband's, no thought that was not for, and of, him. She annihilated herself as an individual, and she has left in her own papers a set of "Rules For a Wife," that will make many wives, who are regarded as models of devotion, smile contemptuously at her. She was utterly happy in complete submission to his will. She described how she served him almost like an Indian squaw. She packed his trunks, was his amanuensis, attended to the details of publishing his books, came, or went, as he bade, suffered long absence in silence, or accompanied him on long journeys of exploration, uncomplainingly, was proud when he hypnotized her for the amusement of his friends. One can but feel deeply sorry for her, for with all her servility, she was a woman of the finer order of mind. The pity of her worship grows, as the reader of his life, and hers, realizes how little return in demonstrative affection she received as the reward for her vast, and continuous lavishment of love. She strikes me, in this, as a strange blend of the comic and the tragic. The world neglected Burton. He almost deserved it; so great a sacrifice as his wife consecrated of her life to him would compensate for the loss of anything. You admire it; but you catch yourself suspecting that this consecration must have been, at times, an awful bore to him. He was unfaithful to her, it is said, with ethnological intent, in all the tribes of the earth. He had no morals to speak of. He had no religion, having studied all. He was a pagan beyond redemption, though his wife maintained that he was a Catholic. Unfortunately, for her, his masterpiece refutes her overwhelmingly. He wrote the most remarkable poem of the last forty years, one that is to be classed only with Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. By this poem, and, probably, by the revelation of the love he excited in one woman, he will live. This poem expresses himself, and his conclusion, after years spent in wandering, fighting, studying languages, customs and religions. To understand the man and his poem, we must understand what he did, and since the time of the Old Romance, no man surpassed him in "deeds of derring-do." He was a modern, a very modern, Knight of the Round Table. He was the possessor of innumerable abstruse, and outlandish accomplishments. He was a scientist, a linguist, a poet, a geographer, a roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a polyhedric personality, that caught and gave, something from and to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890, at the age of sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for him that was almost worth dying for.

What he did is hard to condense into an article. I can do no more than skim over his career, and make out a feature here and there. He was an unstudious youth. He was not disciplined. He grew as he might, and he absorbed information at haphazard from any book he found to his liking, but he was a sort of intellectual Ishmael. He studied things not in the curriculum. He plunged into Arabic and Hindustani, and was "rusticated." He cared nothing for the classics, yet he left a redaction of Catullus that is a splendid exposition of that singer's fearful corruption, and with all of his art. He entered the Indian Army, and he became so powerful, though a subordinate, that he was repressed. His superiors feared, that in him, they would find another Clive or Hastings. Then he joined the Catholic church, but he joined many a church thereafter to find its hidden meaning. He was trusted to a limited extent by Sir Charles Napier, and he so insinuated himself with the natives, that he was one of them, and sharer of their mysterious powers. Kipling has pictured him under the name of "Strickland" as an occultly powerful personage in several of his stories. He was close to the Sikh war, and he mingled with the hostile natives in disguise, until he knew their very hearts. His pilgrimage to Mecca was a feat that startled the world. He was the first "infidel" to kiss the Kaabba. To do this he had to become a Mohammedan, and to perform almost hourly minute ceremonials, in which, had he failed of perfection, he would have been torn to pieces. His book on this journey is a narration that displays the deadly cold quality of his courage, and indeed a stupendous consciencelessness in the interest of science. Next we find him in the Crimea in the thick of things, and always in trouble. He said that all his friends got into trouble, and Burton was, usually, "agin the government." It was after the Crimea that he met the lady who became his remarkable wife, in the remarkable manner I have sketched. Then he went off to discover the sources of the Nile, and with Speke navigated Lake Tanganyika. He knew that he had not discovered the source, and he wanted to try again, but he and Speke quarreled, and pamphleteered against each other in the press. Burton, deficient in money, and in sycophancy, was discredited for a time, although now his name is immortal in geography as a pioneer of African travel. We have seen how he left his betrothed to study the Mormons, and he studied them more closely than his wife's book intimates, for she everything extenuated and ignored for her God-like Richard.

After his experiences of marriage in Mormondom, undertaken it now seems, in a desire to ascertain if polygamy were not better for him than monogamy, he returned to London, and was married despite the objections of Isabel Arundell's Catholic family. The lot of the couple was poverty, although now and then, thoughtful friends invited them to visit, and they accepted to save money. After a long wait he was appointed Consul at Fernando Po, on the West African coast. This was a miserable place, but Burton made it lively; he disciplined the negroes, and he made the sea captains fulfill their contracts under threat of guns. He went home, and then went back to Fernando Po, and undertook delicate dealings with the king of Dahomey, and explored the west coast. He went to Ireland, but Ireland was too quiet for him, but he found there were Burtons there, which accounted to himself for much of himself. After that he went to Brazil as Consul at Santos, Sao Pablo, another "Jumping off place." He explored. He found rubies, and he obtained a concession for a lead mine for others. He met there the Tichborne Claimant, and invented a Carbine pistol. He visited Argentina. All this time he was writing upon many things, or having his wife take his dictation. She went into the wilds, down into the mines, everywhere with him. Next he was transferred to Damascus, where his honesty got him into trouble, and his wife's Catholicity aroused great sentiment against him. He went into Syria, and he created consternation among the corrupt office holders in Asia Minor. One can scarcely follow his career without dizziness. By way of obliging a friend, who wanted a report on a mine, he went to Iceland, and came back to take the Consulship at Trieste. He went back to India and into Egypt, and then returned to Trieste to die. He wrote pamphlets, monographs, letters and books about everything he saw, and every place he visited. He had information exact, and from the fountain head about innumerable things; religions, races, ruins, customs, languages, tribal genealogies, plants, geology, archaeology paleontology, botany, politics, morals, almost everything that was of human interest and value, and besides all this, he was familiar with Chaucer's vocabulary, with recondite learning about Latin colloquialisms, and read with avidity everything from the Confessions of Saint Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus is familiar to students, but not edifying. He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales. He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the catalogue of a small library. All the world knows about his book, "The Scented Garden," which he translated from the Persian, and which, after his death, his wife burned rather than permit the publication of its naked naturalism. It was in the same vein as his "Arabian Nights," and contained much curious comment upon many things that we Anglo Saxons do not talk about, save in medical society meetings, and dog Latin.

When such a man sat down to write a poem, embodying his view of "the Higher Law," what could have been expected but a notable manuscript. With his poem, "the Kasidah," we shall now concern ourselves. It purports to be a translation from the Arabic of Haji Abdu El Yezdi. Its style is like that of the Rubaiyat. It is erude, but subtile. It is brutal in its anti-theism, and yet it has a certain tender grace of melancholy, deeper than Omar's own. It is devoid of Omar's mysticism and epicureanism, and appallingly synthetic. It will not capture the sentimentalists, like the Rubaiyat, but, when it shall be known, it will divide honors with the now universally popular Persian poem. Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has issued it in beautiful and chaste form, for the edification of his clientele of searchers for the literature that is always almost, but never quite completely forgotten. The "Kasidah" was written in 1853, and it is, in its opening, much like Fitz Gerald's Rubaiyat, though Burton never saw that gem of philosophy and song, until eight years after. "The Kasidah" was not printed until 1880. It is difficult to interpret, because it so clearly interprets itself. It must be read. It cannot be "explained."

The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived, and it holds forth the writer's own view. He maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided, and distributed in this world. Self cultivation is, in his view, the sole sufficient object of human life, with due regard for others. The affections, the sympathies, and "the divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments. He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions." This is pure agnosticism. There runs all through the poem a sad note that heightens the courage with which the writer faces his own bleak conclusion, and, "the tinkling of the camel bell" is heard faint and far in the surge of his investive, or below the deepest deep of his despair. In Arabia, Death rides a camel, instead of a white horse, as our occidental myth has it, and the camel's bell is the music to which all life is attuned. Burton reverts from time to time to this terrifying tintinnabulation, but he blends it with the suggested glamour of evening, until the terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power, of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts, Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus the vine and the rose, and ali Persian silkiness. The problem he sets out to solve, and he solves it by a petitio principii, is

Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke
of Must,
Without our leave or ask or given, by tyrant Fate on victim
thrust?

The impermanence of things oppresses him, for he says in an
adieu,

. . . Haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same man
shall meet; the years shall make us other men.

He crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread."

There is an echo of Koleleth in his contempt for the divinity of the body. It is unclean without, impure within. The vanity of vanity is proclaimed with piteous indignation.

"And still the weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is
wretched Man,
Weaving the unpattern'd, dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a
plan.
Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears and
blood,
Man say thy mercy made what is, and saw the made and said 'twas
good?"

And then he sings:

Cease Man to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy the shining hour of
sun;
We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of
fun?

In sweeping away the old philosophies and religions, he is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the Greek paganism runs:

And when at length, "Great Pan is dead" uprose the loud and
dolorous cry,
A glamour wither'd on the ground, a splendor faded in the sky.
Yes, Pan is dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath
the sun,
The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three, whose three is
one. . . .

Then the lank Arab, foul with sweat, the drainer of the camel's
dug,
Gorged with his leek-green, lizard's meat, clad in his filmy rag
and rug,
Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands
Where, he asks, are all the creeds and crowns and scepters, "the
holy grail of high Jamshid?"
Gone, gone where I and thou must go, borne by the winnowing
wings of Death,
The Horror brooding over life, and nearer brought with every
breath.
Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they rose and reigned,
they fought and fell,
As swells and swoons across the wold the tinkling of the camel's
bell.

For him "there is no good, there is no bad; these be the whims of mortal will." They change with place, they shift with race. "Each Vice has borne a Virtue's crown, all Good was banned as Sin or Crime." He takes up the history of the world, as we reconstruct it for the period before history, from geology, astronomy and other sciences. He accepts the murderousness of all processes of life and change. All the cruelty of things

"Builds up a world for better use; to general Good bends special
Ill."
And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in the time to be
Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari-men another falling star shall
see:
Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone,
no Thought can tell,—
Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling of the
camel-bell.
Yet follow not the unwisdom path, cleave not to this and that
disclaim;
Believe in all that man believes; here all and naught are both
the same.
Enough to think that Truth can be; come sit me where the roses
glow,
Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also
how to unknow.

He denies the Soul and wants to know where it was when Man was a savage beast in Primeval forests, what shape it had, what dwelling place, what part in nature's plan it played. "What men are pleased to call the Soul was in the hog and dog begun."

Life is a ladder infinite-stepped that hides its rungs from
human eyes:
Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the
skies.

The evolution theory he applies to the development of reason from instinct. He protests against the revulsion from materialism by saying that "the sordider the stuff, the cunninger the workman's hand," and therefore the Maker may have made the world from matter. He maintains that "the hands of Destiny ever deal, in fixed and equal parts their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and weal" to all that breathe our upper air. The problem of predestination he holds in scorn. The unequality of life exists and "that settles it" for him. He accepts one bowl with scant delight but he says "who drains the score must ne'er expect to rue the headache in the morn." Disputing about creeds is "mumbling rotten bones." His creed is this:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect
applause:
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his
self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phanton's
dwell,
A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a tinkling of the Camel's
bell.

He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first is "eternal war with Ignorance." He says: "Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against a myriad giants. The end is to "learn the noblest lore, to know that all we know is naught." Self-approval is enough reward. The whole duty of man is to himself, but he must "hold Humanity one man" and, looking back at what he was, determine not to be again that thing. "Abjure the Why and seek the How." The gods are silent. The indivisible puny Now in the length of infinite time is Man's all to make the best of. The Law may have a Giver but let be, let be!

Thus I may find a future life, a nobler copy of our own, Where
every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be
known;
Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on earth he sees
a part;
Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope
deferred shall hurt the heart.
But—faded flower and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent
tree;
A man once dropt by Tree of Life, what hope of other life has
he?
The shattered bowl shall know repair; the riven lute shall sound
once more;
But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man
restore?
The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed
shall pipe again;
But we, we die and Death is one, the doom of brutes, the doom of
men.
Then, if Nirvana round our life with nothingness, 'tis haply
blest;
Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won
their guerdon—Rest.
Cease, Abou, cease! My song is sung, nor think the gain the
singer's prize
Till men hold Ignorance deadly sin till Man deserves his title,
"Wise."
In days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns to dwell
with men,
These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake responsive
strain:
Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to
tell—
The whispers of the Desert wind: the tinkling of the Camel's
bell.

So ends the song. The notes appended thereto by Burton are a demonstration of his learning and his polemic power. The poem is his life of quest, of struggle, of disappointment coined into song more or less savage. It seems to me that he overlooked one thing near to him that would have lighted the darkness of his view, while looking To Reason for balm for the wounds of existence. He ignored his wife's love which, silly and absurd as it seems at times, in the records she has left us, is a sweeter poem than this potent plaint and protest he has left us. He explored all lands but the one in which he lived unconsciously—the Land of Tenderness. This is the pity of his life and it is also its indignity. He was crueler than "the Cruelty of Things." He "threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe"—a woman's heart. But—how we argue in a circle!—that he, with his fine vision could not see this, is perhaps, a justification of his poem's bitterness. Even her service went for naught, seeing it brought no return of love from its object.

Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife's life was one continuous act of love for him that he ignores and her life was a failure, too, since she never succeeded in making the world worship him as she did. Still "the failures of some the infinities beyond the successes of others" and all success is failure in the end. Still again, it is better to have loved in vain than never to have loved at all, and fine and bold and brave as was Richard Francis Burton, his wife, with her "strong power called weakness," was the greater of the two. She wrote no "Kasidah" of complaint, but suffered and was strong. St. Louis, August 16th, 1897.

* * * MARRIAGE AND MISERY.

BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

Charles Goodwin, editor Salt Lake Tribune, puts into the mouth of a figurative John Bull, who is lecturing his children, the following sentence:

"Why, ours is an old family. One of our ancestors was knighted by Henry VII for stealing cattle from the Scotch some time in the fifteenth century. I am tracing up the lineage, and I believe we are all barons. I expect to get the title confirmed, and then each one of you boys must sell himself to a beautiful American girl for from 75,000 to 250,000 pounds. Under the rose, it will help the stock damnably, for your mother was a barmaid. Things are working all right, my lads. Our conquest of the United States still goes on."

Apropos of a snub given the Prince of Wales by an American girl, Lillian Russell—even our much-married Lillian—raises her voice in protest at international marriages, and incidentally American snobbery.

What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to the physically and financially anaemic nobility across the water, to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage. The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their Fifth Avenue Christ.

And yet, to go back to first principles, is it not that the time are out of joint, and the America herself is responsible for her daughters' shame? America has blinded her eyes with avarice and glutted her brain with greed. She has starved her intellect and gorged her ambition. She has bartered her birthright of nobility and sold her soul to crawling sycophants. She has prostituted her sceptre of power to trusts for tinsel and cowers under the lash of corporations because they bind her brow with a cap of bells that tinkle an empty song of "Freedom." In the mad rush for gain, America has forgotten its greatness, and in their blind struggle for gold Americans forget what is grand. We have sold our freedom to Britain, we have sold our pride, our individuality, our independence, our self-respect, our power, our dignity and our daughters.

The gods have given us brains to make of our country a brawny one, and we have used our talent to corrupt what was once equality into the unequal factions of power and poverty. The gods have given us genius to soften the crudities of the early century and to brighten our homes and our lives, and instead the inventions and the creations but serve to gild the mansions of the monopolist and to gird the iron more tightly on the wrist of the toiler. We are avaricious, we are vulgar, and we are base. We have lost the dignity of Nature that gave to a fragile lily a royalty before which Solomon's grandeur paled. We have piled stone and brick where the forest oak towered, and voice our strident city cries where the imperious roar of the forest king once startled the echoes. We have turned the oil and filth of our refineries into the streams that once crept purling and laughing through the wild-flowers and grasses, and the black smoke of our factories has silenced the plaintive note of the thrush and strangled the wondrous song of the nightingale. Our grandeur is ostentation and our dignity a dead-letter. The greatness that once longed for new worlds to conquer has degenerated into yellow-fingered grasping for ginger-bread display. The powerful figure of the pioneer could swing its mighty as into the forest root, but in the rythm of labor there was time to pause and rest and listen where "soft music ripples along shore, as the lake breathes." In the stillness Nature's god speaks, and in the patient face of the woman, shading her eyes where she watches him from the cabin door, is sweeter and nobler dreaming than ever finds resting place in the sharpened and querulous features of our modern rushed society woman.

In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's religion—"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a kindergarten. Thus have we grown avaricious and vulgar and in their weariness of things as they are, have our women grown base. They know that their lives miss something, they know that their fierce rivalry and feverish straining for precedence bring them no nearer the Mecca that closes its austere gates to their aching eyes. And for the dignity and pride their lives have lacked, they give their fortunes and sell their bodies and exchange, for a title, the name of which they have grown ashamed. They perhaps shrink, in physical repulsion, from the man who they feel despises while he endures them. They perhaps hunger, with all the woman- nature their pitiful lives have left them, for other lips murmuring in slumber beside them. But over their burning eyes they press the metal circle for which they have crushed their hearts and outraged their sex, and around the delicate limbs they draw the ermines that cannot hide their shame, and in all their poor, empty glory they only read in the cold eyes of the patrician women around them the chill contempt that stamps them as among, but not of their order. "I sometimes think it wisest not to think," and this warped and twisted human nature has a pathos in all its chasing after a gilded butterfly that has always a grinning skull peering through the gold of its wings. The hunger that finds but Apples of Sodom, the life-labor that wins but the gold of Midas, the ambition that crushes its toy baloon—"and man plods his way through thorns to ashes."

America freed her blacks but rests her social aegis on barter far more hideous. Optimists prate of the world growing better, with their eyes on the mountain tops, but when one reads of frail Lais fined ten dollars in the court- room for earning her daily bread in the only manner possible to a nature in which sin has been bred in the bone by generations of ancestors, and then pictures Dr. Brown of exclusive St. Thomas', New York, murmuring "Benedicite!" over an international marriage ceremony, his handsome face and melodious voice and aristocratic bearing doing full justice to the grandeur of the occasion—it is a contrast in which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house.

Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving? Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida., October 1.

* * * SALMAGUNDI.

My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d——d tongues cut out." Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.

Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a d—n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during the dark of the moon, spawned in a dry goods box and raised on bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or coon I cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is cock-sure—"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.

. . .

The suspicion is growing that Dr. Gutieras, the government expert, has a pint of yellow fever baccilli in his cerebrum. He carries the plague with him, just as a man suffering with mania a potu carries his cargo of monkeys. Had he been called to see Simon's wife's mother, he would have declared that she had a case of Yellow Jack and spread a panic through all Judea. Should he find a man suffering with katzenjammer he would pronounce him a "suspect." As Barney Gibbs says, all the yellow fever patients Gutieras discovered during his tour of South Texas were up "hunting either a drink or a job" ere this peripatetic expert was well out of town. I'll gamble four dollars that there is not in the United States to-day a genuine case of Yellow Jack. There's every indication that the cases at Mobile, New Orleans and Biloxi are identical with the disease discovered by Gutieras at Galveston—nothing under heaven but the dengue. Who the devil ever heard of the mortality in a yellow fever epidemic averaging only about 6 per cent.? Why la grippe will beat that as an angel-maker and beat it blind. When good old- fashioned yellow fever reaches for people they begin to sing "Heaven is my home," I'd rather have the "plague" now rioting in New Orleans than to contract the buck ague or the itch. These "experts" make my soul aweary. An insanity expert thinks everybody crazy but himself, while a yellow fever expert would isolate a case o' cucumber colic. What the South needs to do is to quarantine against these special doctors.

A few American newspapers and magazines of the genus mugwump, enemies of Cuban liberty and apologists for the Weylerian butcheries and brutalities, are now busily engaged in belittling those who enabled Senorita Cisneros to escape from her captors, are heaping their feculence upon Mesdames Jefferson Davis, Jno. A. Logan and the other "old women" who had the temerity to appeal to the Spanish Queen Regent in behalf of the young heroine—are even repeating the stale lies of Weyler's understrappers reflecting upon her chastity. What brave American journalists! How proud of such sons Columbia should be! It is quite possible the New York Journal undertook the young lady's rescue for advertising purposes only; but just the same, she is on American soil, and she can well afford to ignore the petty malice of emasculated mugwump editors, knowing as she must, that the chivalry of this country is with her to the last man. I do not believe the statement of the Spanish official whom Senorita Cisneros accused of insulting her, and who retorted that she had thrown herself at his head. A gentleman could not make such an assertion even though it were true, for a woman's illicit favors set upon the lips of the recipient the seal of eternal silence. The defamer of Senorita Cisneros is but another Don Matthias de Silvae of Le Sage. . . .

The coon seems to be forging rapidly to the front in some portions of this country. On October 2, Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes, a wealthy white woman and owner of one of the largest stock farms in Kentucky, gave a ball and banquet near Lexington to 300 colored people and filled 'em full of beer. Whether Mrs. Stokes danced with the bucks the dispatches do not state. . . .

My attention has been several times called to one W. D. McKinstry of Watertown, N. Y., by people of that place. They plead with me that he is really spoiling for a "roast." McKinstry is publishing a little paper which somewhat resembles an over-ripe dish-rag, or an unlaundered sheet from the bed of a colored baby; but I have no idea why he is so unpopular. It may be because he possesses the physique of a bull elephant and the brains of a doodle-bug. It may be that the appearance of such an animal outside a dime museum, or a pig sty, angers the people. I can see nothing in his editorials at which to take offense. Reading them were like drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle or filling one's belly with the east wind. McKinstry is trying to settle the "negro problem" for the South; but that has so long been a favorite occupation of Smart Alec editors who never saw a cotton patch that no one minds it any more. Waco has the coon and Watertown has McKinstry, hence it is in order for the two towns to mingle their tears instead of animadverting each upon the other's misfortune. If I might advise the mighty McKinstry I would suggest that he change his occupation. As an editor he is a dismal failure, but he would be a dazzling success as ballast for a canal boat. . . .

A correspondent notes that the New York World devotes two illustrated pages to the Vanderbilt-Marlborough brat, and wants to know what I think about it? Why, I think that old Josef Phewlitzer has succeeded in elongating the Vanderbilt leg. No editor ever publishes such tommyrot unless paid therefor, because he knows that no sane person will read it. It was an advertisement, ordered and paid for by somebody, probably Consuelo's rather gay mother, who, albeit divorced from her first husband for cause, has the distinguished honor to be gran'dam to an incipient duke, who will probably grow up to be as utterly worthless as his daddy. . . .

Jno. H. Holmes, editor of the Boston Herald, writing on the "New Journalism." says: "Huge circulation is extremely profitable. It produced revenue from the sale of the paper, and a still greater revenue from the volume of advertising." In other words, the average "great daily" is simply a mercenary advertising graft. It may "produce revenue," but seldom profit from circulation, for the price to agents is frequently below the cost of white paper and expressage. The subscription price is usually placed below the profit line, and extra inducements offered in the way of "premiums." Somehow, a circulation, bona fide or fake, must be worked up as an excuse for elongating the business man's leg. And he is a "dead easy mark." The yap who purchases checks of strangers and bets on monte is no more gullible than the average victim of the advertising grafter. A sucker is said to be born every minute; and strange to say, most of them are produced in the cities. The business man who makes an advertising contract without investigating the circulation claims of the publisher, would invest in confederate bonds or buy gold bricks. If he suffered the loss it would not much matter—would be simply another case of the fool and his money soon parted; but it is shifted to the consumer. The people must pay the merchant's advertising bills, just as they pay his rent and insurance; and the amount of which they are annually fleeced to pay for what has no actual existence, would meet all expenses of government and leave a tremendous surplus in the treasury. This nation wastes annually for worthless fake advertising more than it pays for education. . . .

A Galveston traveling man writes me as follows:

"I have been for two years past gathering up scraps of your history, and now have the honor to advise you that according to the testimony of many very pious people, among whom are not a few preachers, you are an avowed anarchist who was suspected of being concerned in the Haymarket massacre; that you served two terms in the penitentiary before you were born; that you are a renegade Jew and an Italian Jesuit, that for 30 years you were a Baptist preacher, but were bounced out of the ministry for drunkenness and immorality; that you have been a blasphemous Atheist from your youth up; that you deserted from the federal army in the same year that you were four years old; that you have been discharged from all the Texas dailies for incompetency, and are the author of editorials in the Chicago Inter-Ocean slandering the South; that you are a big over-grown bully who abuses weaker people, and a miserable little poltroon who has been kicked by every cripple between New York and Denver. All this is doubtless correct as far as it goes; now will you please inform me whether you have been guilty of anything else?"

This is a fairly correct list of my crimes thus far; but being still a young man, I may reasonably hope to add to it considerably if not shut off by the sheriff. The greatest drawback to my career as a criminal is my inability to lie so consistently as some of my dear brethren in Christ. . . .

The ICONOCLAST'S recent comments on Dean Hart of Denver, provoked the following poetic outburst on the part of a singer of that city:

Do you mind him as he walks the street,
The Dean?
With his highly elevated nose,
The Dean.
And his old imported hat
And his time worn black cravat,
Any one could tell that
He's the Dean.

He is "furnist" this country,
Is the Dean,
"It's nothing like old Hingland,"
Says the Dean.
In language somewhat torrid,
With a countenance quite florid,
He says our schools are "orrid,"
Does the Dean.

To many it's a mystery why
The Dean
Doesn't leave us and for England hie away;
No doubt he can explain it,
In England he's not "in it,"
But in this "blooming" country
He's a Dean. . . .

All the sycophantic little sassiety sheets are now engaged in the delectable task of belittling Miss Edna Whitney, selected by Chillicothe, Mo., as maid of honor to the Kween of the Kansas City Karnival, but objected to by the snob management on the ground that she was a working girl. The sheets aforesaid have discovered that since that event brought her into public notice Miss Whitney has accepted $500 from a cigarette firm for the use of her photo, and are now industriously arguing that a young woman who will permit her portrait to be so employed is not a proper person to be brought for a moment into contract with the eminently respectable sassietyest. Rats! ditto rodents. The Karnival was not a "social function," but a commercial scheme gotten up by the merchants of Kansas City to draw trade to that enterprising town. It was a blowout for everybody; the world was invited—the gates thrown open to the Canary in his Canaryism as well as to Sir Alymer in his Alymerism. Lady Vere de Vere and the chambermaid in the dollar-a-day hotel were alike invited to make themselves at home, enjoy the show and spend their siller. Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying for the publication of decollete portraits and sickening "write-ups" of themselves. Miss Whitney is poor and, I am told, supports a widowed mother. To a girl so situated $500 is a great sum. She could scarce be expected to have the fine aesthetic feelings of a highly educated woman reared in the lap of luxury. Her portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,—like those of the swell society set—and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package—I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' in the same place. These pitiful sheets, which are belittling Miss Whitney to ingratiate themselves with the snobocracy of Kansas City, are entirely destitute of shame. Their editors are, in most instances, a cross between Jeames de la Pluche and Caliban. Their presence at "social functions" is tolerated for the same reason that nigger waiters are admitted. They are used by the parvenues and heartily despised by the very people whom they so obsequiously serve. . . .

MR. BRANN: You state in a recent issue of the ICONOCLAST that McKinley's popular plurality "represents the votes of niggers and the scavangers of Europe's back alleys." I denounce that statement as a falsehood. The votes of native-born Americans elected Mr. McKinley. AMERICUS. Waco, Texas, September 10.

My correspondent is indeed "A Merry Kuss" else he could find no pleasure in calling a man a liar in an anonymous letter. To call that creature a cur who flings an insult which he fears to father, were a damning libel on every decent dog in Christendom. My correspondent is probably a mongrel cross between a male hyena and a gila monster, begotten in a nigger grave-yard, suckled by a sow and educated by an idiot. But, perhaps, being familiar with his own birth and breeding he will consider this a compliment. McKinley coralled more than 90 per cent. of the nigger vote and carried every state in which foreign-born people exceeds 21 per cent. of the entire population. He received his largest majorities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, one-third of whose people, collectively considered, are of foreign birth; his smallest majorities in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and Maryland, where those of foreign birth amount to about 8 per cent. of the entire population. Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas constituted Bryan's strongholds and their people collectively considered, show a foreign birth of less than 5 per cent. Colorado is the only state having a considerable foreign- birth population that stands in the Democratic columns, all the others having gone for McKinley. While it is true that thousands of our foreign-born citizens are intelligent, honest and patriotic—a credit to the land of their adoption—it is likewise true that following in their wake we find Huns, Pollocks, Sicillians, "Souwegian" and other undesirable offscourings of the old world, imported by Mark Hanna and other "industrial cannibals" to degrade our labor and debauch our politics. It is the vote of this latter class, and the scarcely less corrupt and ignorant "coons" which constitute McKinley's popular plurality. McKinley was the candidate of the assisted immigrant and the Ethiopian, Bryan of the native-born Americans; and I submit it to a candid world which of these two parties was likely to have the good of this country most at heart, or know best how to promote it. . . .

I am obliged to my friends for divers and surdry scraps of information regarding the cur-ristian trustee of Baylor who led the last assault upon me in the name of a long-suffering Savior. It would make interesting reading for Waco Baptists no doubt, but I can put these columns to better use than rehashing ancient history. Those who are anxious to learn what kind of an animal this member of Baylor's board of managers actually is, are referred to the Galveston News of July 26th, 1883. Any one can secure access to the files of that paper for the asking. I cannot afford to "damn to everlasting fame" every backwoods hypocrite who raises a howl. The ICONOCLAST leaves such cattle to the bill collectors. . . .

I would like to have a flash-light photo of W. S. Densickr of Lebanon, Ind. Ter., not for publication, but to add to my private gallery of hypocritical rogues. Densickr wants to build a temple of pure gold twelve miles square and 60,000 high for some backwoods congregation, but of what denomination he has evidently not yet discovered. He insists, however, that the Redeemer demands such a temple, and that the general public should be forthcoming with the necessary cash. He is working what he calls a "church chain"—all for Christ. He writes you a letter asking you to contribute 5 cents to the cause and thereby obtain the blessing of God. He requests also that you send an exact copy of his letter to three of your friends whom you deem most likely to invest their small change in heavenly grace. The "chain" of letters runs from 1 to 100, and a Cleburne gentleman who was "touched" figures it out that the 25th No. means more than 282 billion letters and more than 21 millions of money if every sucker bites at the bait. If the "chain" doesn't break before the 100th number is played it will corral all the wealth of this world. Mr. Densickr hath a great head. He's a church financier for your galways. Still I opine that the man who complies with his apparently modest request is one large piebald ass who ought to be saddled, bridled and ridden around the block, then turned loose to do the Nebuchadnezzer act.