The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

MONDE AND DEMI MONDE.

BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

Once upon a time in the city of Detroit there lived a society woman who was very wealthy. Her home was one of the most regal of the Woodward avenue mansions. Her aristocratic limbs were clothed in the softest of silks, her delicate hands were weighed down with costliest jewels, her retinue of servants were worthy the princely hospitalities she extended to those of her august order, and her charities—upon occasion—were as munificent as the gifts of gods.

This woman was very fair to look upon, and her life seemed a path of rose leaves upon which all the graces smiled. But there was a canker at the heart of all this loveliness, the deadly breath of the Upas tree sometimes pierced its incense, the hidden head of a coiled asp now and then stirred the laces nestling at her breast. And the tiny asp that slept on her heart was Rumor, that she could not kill, yet whose sting meant death. And when it moved, her lips whitened with fear, but she soothed it back to the warmth of slumber and strewed lavish gifts on the altar of charity. And then for awhile, the asp slept. And so it was that upon one of these occasions the asp moved restlessly, through the soft music of the cultured voices around her there crept an ominous hiss as the little green head parted the perfumed lace.

And the woman knew that her frailties were many and the hiss was Truth, and that all her loveliness was but a whited sepulcher that hid the ghastly bones of a murdered womanhood.

So with her jeweled hand she soothed the asp and gathered about her the women of her kind and told them that as the man of Nazarath had walked among the fallen so ought they. And these women arranged that they should go to the Magdalens of their city and teach them the error of their way and lead them gently into the treadmill of factory and sweat-shop to earn their daily bread and butter and olives.

So in a holy band of six they sought the gilded haunt of sin and asked Madame R——if they might talk for a while with her-er-young ladies. The former smilingly acquiesced and they were courteously ushered into a stately drawing-room, where a number of the-er-young ladies listened with equally smiling interest to their dissertations on the beauties of a moral life. She of the asp moved to the rear of the drawing-room, where a woman with a delicate, refined face was sitting at a grand piano. Her eyes had a touch of tragedy and a great weariness in their depths, but as they rested gravely on her guest there was the faintest soupcon of amusement under their drooping lids. "My dear," quoth the grande dame, very gently, "forgive me if I intrude on delicate ground, but I want to ask—to know—that is—," very regretfully, "just tell me why do you lead a sinful life?"

The other woman was silent for a moment, then she spoke with equal gentleness:

"Madame, I was deserted when a girl-wife with a little child to support. I led this sinful life to support my baby and myself. And now, may I ask in return what is your reason?"

Here the chronicle ended, but the incident is still fresh in the memories of the City of the Straits' most exclusive 150. It is reluctantly admitted by those who labor sincerely among the world's unfortunates that the reformation of a fallen woman is more difficult than the twelve labors of Hercules. They are of two classes—the naturally depraved and the victim of circumstances. The former is utterly hopeless because her nature is too coarse-fibred to even realize, let alone heed, her own infamy. The latter is equally hopeless because she realizes too much. And how reform the half-world when society leads so gaily? "We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less fun?" If morals are lax for sheer amusement, among those of the purple, what wonder if Moses' tablet grew dim to the people! Did the glorious and glittering sin of the French patricians teach the grisette patience with her lowly lot? Or did not her frantic fingers twist in the soft, perfumed tresses of proud heads, with shrieks for the guillotine the more fierce because of the toil-worn hands?

But she of the monde draws her costly laces over the little asps and gives with the dainty hand of a pictured Lady Bountiful, while her word smiles approval. And she of the half-world, who realizes too much!—what she is, who gave heart and soul and body to a supreme self-abnegation only to be struck back from the blaze of her heaven with the brazen clamor of its closing gates clashing through her stunted brain—she gathers the rags of her life around her and flies, a haunted and a hunted thing to the blackest depths, that can strangle thought and memory and brain. She laughs, too, over her whited sepulchre, but it is a laugh with painted lips and a merriment whose end is madness. We do not ask her for charity,—when we remember her at all, it is to clutch her wages of sin from her grasp to add to the city's tax. And it is not the green asp of Rumor that sleeps in her breast, covered by jewelled fingers, but under her thin hand burns the flame of Vathek, eating always with its crimson torment till heart and reason are charred and black and dead.

We cannot forgive her, so we fine her. Her name is in the Black List, not the Blue Book. She sins and suffers, while the other sins and smiles, and we lash the woman while we laud the wanton.

Of what avail are our home and refuge and retreat—empty shells of stiff formula and strict red tape? Hospitals to the coarse class, perhaps, but is it there a racked soul would turn while in her tottering brain the armed hosts of heaven and hell wage war?

Of what avail are creed and dogma and ritual, when we ourselves "bow the knee to pomp that loves to varnish guilt"? Of what avail our benevolence that offers, not the Christ-touch of pity and understanding, but the bitter bread of craven servitude and Pharisaical condescension, that says "thou art vile and lost for all time?"

We laud the wanton because she has wealth and power. She buys our favor with her wines and feasts, and blinds our willing eyes with her gifts and charities, and we only murmur with pensive gentleness "who shall judge!"

We are such cultured black-mailers, such refined bribe-seekers, such sensitive sycophants, while she obeys the eleventh commandment and is properly discreet she feeds us epicurean favors as she feeds her English pug bon-bons. And we are careful that the face of the dog shall express the greater intelligence.

And the woman with the flame in her heart? From her we have nothing to gain so—what would you? Her nature was too great to be discreet. She sinned grandly, but the height of her sin made deeper the depths of her soul abasement and her self-torment was too horrible to clothe itself in the tawdry draperies of diplomacy. She bared herself to the whips of the avenging furies, she cowered before the wrath of outraged God, and to her there was no guerdon possible for the shattered chrystal of her girlhood. When her heaven thrust her out, to her there was only left the world's hell of lost souls. And we in our wisdom accept her own sentence and our lips are silent. We feast the wanton who is wise and bracket Marguerite with Messalina. We kiss the one and curse the other, because the one is a hypocrite in the halls of splendor and the other honest in the haunts of shame. We hover around the one with flatteries and soft courtesies, and we hound down the other with pitiless vengeance, human and divine.

And in all this does our world show its shallowness and its immeasurable stupidity. How dare woman say to her sister woman, "I am better than thou!" In how much has she been tried and tempted? How much does she know of life and its hideous tests? How much does she know woman's love that is at once her glory and her shame, her crown and her crucifix, her heaven and her Calvary? How dare she judge? Has she ever faced the uphill battle where her two hands alone fought the ravenous wolves of Want and Hunger? Has she ever slipped her bared arm thro' the iron staples and held it there, while they howled in fury outside, and this iron cut and bruised and tore flesh and nerve,—till her teeth sank through tongue and lips and her eyes grew misty and dim with torture worse than death? Has she ever done all this—while her strength reeled and failed and through it all she cursed God for the white fear in the faces of those who loved and lived upon her? Has she ever felt that sickening GIVE, as the hell-hounds swept her back and down, and in her blind despair she would clutch at aid though it were steeped in all the infamies from here to hades? Has she ever known all this?—she who would draw her silken shirts aside? Then if she have not, let her strip her heart of its stainless selfishness and her limbs of their ignorant ease; let her go out into the world where women live and strive and suffer, and let her humbly crawl to the feet of those women whose toil worn hands and weary faces and scarred hearts and souls shame her shallow usefulness, and let her lay her mouth in the dust and cry "Peccavi!"

How dare she judge! Who is she, with her pitiless eyes and useless hands and ignorant heart and narrow life,—who is she to question lives that in all their ruins are as grand, compared to hers, as a ruined temple compared to a child's painted toy. Would she write of Rome with the pearl and gold bauble on her dainty, inlaid desk? Would she measure the Pantheon with the little yardstick of her own intellect? Would she weigh Caesar's life and motives on the jeweled letter-scales of her own experience? Would she gauge Jove by the character of her curate?

If she can do this, then is she competent to voice her judgment on the most profound of all mysteries—human life. Boise City, Idaho, November 12.

MACHIAVELLI.

BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

One of the best books issued this year is the thin pamphlet, you might call it, which contains Mr. John Morley's lecture on Machiavelli. It will repay any reader from what standpoint soever he may approach the character. "The veering gusts of public judgment have carried incessantly along, from country to country, and from generation to generation, with countless mutations of aspect and of inuendo, the sinister renown of Machiavelli."

Truly this man of all men, since Judas, has attained an immortality of infamy. Long was it thought that the common domestic title of the devil, "Old Nick," was an abbreviation of Machiavelli's Christian name. Hudibras fathered that myth, but now we know, Mr. Morley says, that the familiar appellation of the Evil One is a remnant of Norse mythology, deriving from Nyke, the water- goblin.

For three centuries all the evils of all political systems and policies have been attributed to the evils of Machiavelli's logic. Church and State alike have claimed he was the champion of the other's cause. He was Jesuit and atheist as it suited the turn of any vituperative polemist. He was Reformer and "Romanist" as the advocates of Rome or Reformation happened to interpret him. His is, certainly, an unique greatness. There has been in his work, as in all great works, something for all men; but that something has been always, for three centuries, something bad. It is no wonder, therefore, that there prevailed once, a belief that the Devil himself had written his chief book. I have always had an idea that Goethe in drawing Mephistopheles, glanced from the tail of his mind's eye at Machiavelli for a model. Machiaveli appears to come nearer than any human being to realizing the Goethe conception of Intellectual Evil.

The man, still, may be infamous, but—he is intensely human. The baseness of him has its basal strength in his founding upon man. He is the only realist philosopher. Besides him Bacon is a dreamer. Machiavelli was and is the master misanthrope, and,—God help us!—we must admit that his misanthropy only too well is founded on fact. He seems to have been the most perfect incarnation of that "accomplished and infamous Italy," which gave us the Borgias and the terrible Elizabethan plays of Tourneur, Webster and Ford, with their plots of incest and murder, that Italy which was a veritable Hell out of which rose the Renaissance. He was the philosophy of that Italy. He first said, in effect, that nothing succeeds like success. He first cast aside Plato and his dreaming and Aristotle and his elements. He was the father of the philosophy of "practical politics." Francis Bacon learned of Machiavelli, who "wrote what men do and not what they ought to do." This is the philosophy of fact. He dealt with men as he found them. He was a sublime, almost a diabolical opportunist I have often thought Benjamin Franklin, with his "honesty is the best policy," is another Machiavelli, only touched a little with the pharisaism of the Puritan. With the Italian anything that would win is the best policy, and this is his honest estimate of men. The best policy was the policy adopted, after looking the facts of life and of human nature squarely in the face and finding that the end was to be attained easiest either by honesty or dishonesty. To "get there," as we say, was the faith of Machiavelli.

Idea and ideal meant nothing to the author of "The Prince." What we know as "moral forces" this Italian ignored. He judged humanity by its lowest average of motive or intelligence. There was but one general law, for him, and that was that it was right to deceive, if force were of dubious effect, in affairs of State. It were well to be honest, if one could, as a ruler of the State, but it was his duty to rule and triumph by any means between the extremes of simple lying on the one hand, and poisons or other assassination on the other.

Machiavelli was born in 1469. He was a governmental secretary in Florence and met many of the strangely fine and fiendish characters of that time. He went on four missions to the King of France; was an intimate of Caesar Borgia; was an emissary of the Florentine republic to Pope Julius II, and was with Maximilian to Innsbruck. Those were stormy times, and Machiavelli studied the storms. He belonged to the popular party—and his masterpiece is a manual for tyrants. After 1512, with the return of the Medici, he lost his place, was imprisoned, was put to the torture, was amnestied by Leo X and withdrew to San Casciano, where he lived a life almost idyllic in its manner, to judge by a description from his own pen which Mr. Morley has incorporated in his lecture. It was there he wrote the book "The Prince," at forty- five, dedicating it to Lorenzo the Magnificent. The dedication was a bit of palaver to the tyrant who had destroyed Florentine freedom. It was several years before he was rewarded by a small employment and then he was commissioned to write the history of Florence which he finished and dedicated to Leo X, in 1527. Here, also, it is supposed, he wrote a comedy, much praised and unremembered. He was a shrewd man, as his writings aver, yet he made a failure of his own life, to a large extent. He was cheerful in his ill-fortune, however, and he "clung to public things," and, after his comedy, wrote the dialogues of the "Art of War," to induce his countrymen to substitute for mercenary armies a national militia—to-day one of the organic ideas of the European system. Just as Machiavelli entered public life Savonarola had gone to the stake for an idea. The spirit of Dante touched him not at all. He was a man of his time, but not of the very best of his time. And yet he wrote that he loved his country with his whole soul. Mr. Morley says, "and one view of Machiavelli is that he was always the lion masquerading in the fox's skin, an impassioned patriot, under all his craft and jest and bitter mockery. Even Mazzini, who explained the ruin of Italy by the fact that Machiavelli prevailed over Dante, admits that he had 'a profoundly heart.' " Machiavelli died in 1527.

He was a man of affairs. He had read the ancients who dealt with politics, and he assimilated what he read, Mr. Morley says that it was as true of Florence in the Sixteenth Century as of Athens, Corinth, Corcyra in the Fifth Century before Christ, as set forth in Thucydides, that it was a prey to intestine faction and the ruinous invocation of foreign aid. "These terrible calamities," says Thucydides, "always have been and always will be, while human nature remains the same. Words cease to have the same relations to things, and their meanings are changed to suit the ingenuities of enterprise and the atrocities of revenge. Frantic energy is the quality most valued, and the man of violence is always trusted. That simplicity which is a chief ingredient of a noble nature is laughed to scorn. Inferior intellects succeed best. Revenge becomes dearer than self-preservation, and men even have a sweeter pleasure in the revenge that goes with perfidy than if it were open." If any reader of the ICONOCLAST desires a splendid picture of this Italy, I refer him to Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," which pictures the land as an inferno. Mr. Morley, too, gives a vivid picture of the time, saying that Italy of that date "presents some peculiarities that shed over her civilization a curious and deadly irridescence." How one thinks of Ingalls and his "honesty in politics is an iridescent dream." To resume our Morley. "Passions moved it in strange orbits. Private depravity and political debasement went with one of the most brilliant intellectual awakenings in the history of the western world. Another dark element is the association of merciless selfishness, violence, craft and corruption with the administration of sacred things. If politics were divorced from morals, so was theology." Hired crime, stealthy assassination, especially by poison, prevailed. Contempt of human life, the fury of private revenge and the spirit of atrocious perfidy were characteristic of the luxurious Italian renaissance. Genius, according to John Addington Symonds, it was assumed, "released man from the shackles of ordinary mortality." These Italian tyrants were touched with the Neronian malady. They were mad with power, with luxury, with ennui. Flowers of Evil bloomed profusely. In Italy, fair as it was, with the poets singing everlastingly of Spring, it seemed God has forgotten the world. The demonaic fascination of the land, then, is something the reader finds difficult to shake off. You move among and hold converse with splendid cultured monsters. The church alone kept alive purity, though it did not escape corruption. I think Dante and Michael Angelo proved that the pure religious spirit was not dead in a time when it was proclaimed that "it is best to sleep and be of stone, not to see and not to feel, while such misery and shame endure." There was a spirit recognizing the "misery and shame," and that spirit was in the church. Mr. Morley admits that Michael Angelo was such a spirit and Dante wrote in "La Vita Nuova" the first, pure, spiritual love-poem of the world.

Environed thus, and with a peculiarly Italian morbidezza, or plasticity we find Machiavelli. Others before had written of politics, but Machiavelli "had the better talent of writing." He wrote to tell things clearly. Imagination he had none, as an historian, and his comedy is in Limbo. He is all intellectual strength, but the moral influence is missing. He is, says Mr. Morley, simple, unaffected, direct, vivid, rational. He is as literal as a woman. His literal statement is his finest effect of irony. Mr. Morley's analysis of the Machiavellian style is itself a masterpiece of serene expression, rising with a solemn sense of the fearful absence of all principle, as we understand it, in the work, to a richly eloquent, and even tender, tribute to the moral beauty of life. I wish I might transcribe it and I hope that many will read it. It is rarer than anything you may remember of Macaulay's essay upon the everlastingly execrable Florentine.

"Men are a little breed" might have been Machiavelli's motto. Or he might have said "the more I see of men the better I like dogs." He is remorseless in seeing only that men are ungrateful, fickle, deceivers, greedy of gain, run-aways before peril, readier to pay back injury than kindness. "Worst of all they take middle paths." Upon these, his observations, he proceeds to tell a story of a State and he tells it icily. He lays bare the foulness of man. He doesn't lecture, he does not preach, he never laughs, never scolds, is never surprised. He shows, says Mr. Morley about "as good a heart as can be made out of brains." In my opinion, that sentence is the most terrible indictment in the book. It marks him as a monster worse than Frankenstein.

Machiavelli has no opinion to argue about; nothing but men's passions as they were and are. He is alive, always and everywhere, because he shows us men. He maintains, according to Mr. Morley, that the world grows no better and no worse. There is for him no "one far-off, divine event to which the whole creation moves." Nothing for him but Power. Good and evil concern him not. He recited what we call a crime as impassively as he recited a virtue. So-and-so did such and such. This followed. That is all. He is a fatalist with no more sound philosophy than this: "It is better to be adventurous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman, and to be mastered must be boldly handled. He was a republican, but he believed that strength was the secret of government—strength in itself and in mastery of those who make up the State. No half-measures for him. The State is his idol, if he have one. The State must be supreme in will, in vigor, in intelligence; unflinching, unsparing, remorseless. The humility of Christ has no part in his scheme. He knows no mercy and no justice. One almost can admire his inhuman disregard of men. He cared as little for them as Napoleon. He scorns all gentleness. And yet he thought well of the people, of their prudence and stability. He deemed them liable to err as to generalities but apt to be right as to particulars. Our experience, I dare say, is otherwise—no matter how we stand on the financial question. "Better far," he repeats an hundred times, "than any number of fortunes is not to be hated by your people." Not to be hated! That was as near as he could come to love. He is opposed to dictators and he speaks out plainly enough, in his discourses, about the unwisdom of slaying fellow-citizens, betraying friends, being without mercy, without religion. He is conventional enough in all this. When he comes to describe the Prince, who is to save the divided State, he does so in lines that make a picture at once to fascinate and affright mankind.

The Prince must save the State. He must be as good as he can be; at least, he must have no vices that will hurt the State, i. e. endanger his government. There are but two ways to govern, by law or force. The Prince must rule by one or the other, as necessity may dictate. He must mingle the lion and the fox. A Prince cannot keep faith, if keeping faith will hurt the State. Why? Because others will not keep faith with him. "It is frequently necessary—and here is the sentence that has done so much to damn its writer—for the upholding of the State, to go to work against faith, against Charity, against humanity, against religion; and a new Prince cannot observe all the things for which men are reckoned good." Reason of State is the only universal test for an action. Anything that may preserve the State is right. I wonder what Professor Felix Adler would think of this, with his proposal to make the State "take the place of the personal deity that is passing out of men's lives. Machiavelli was a fetich worshipper of the State. Preserve the State, say Machiavelli regardless of justice, or pity, or honor! As Diderot, quoted by Mr. Morley, said of this, it is an argument which should be headed, "The Circumstances under which it is right for a Prince to be a Scoundrel."

Caesar Borgia, the fiend, was Machiavelli's model, a man who rivalled all the atrocities of the worst Roman emperors. But Borgia failed. That matters not to Machiavelli. His failure was "due to the extreme malignity of fortune." Mr. Morley's rapid sketch of Caesar Borgia, ferocious, lustful in insane ways, treacherous, splendidly vile, is a glance into the Hell that was Italy. Machiavelli was in this man's train and frankly admired him and his methods. All the men of the times seemed to be wild beasts, and Borgia was as courageous, supple and sly as those with whom he dealt. Machiavelli, to do him justice, thought that Caesar Borgia and his father, the Pope, had design to pacify and to unify Italy. They worked with the material and with the tools to hand. Men did not shudder at treachery and assassination in those days. We must judge men by their surroundings. And it is difficult, even now, vide Turkey and Greece, "to govern the world by paternosters." As Mr. Morley says, "It is well to take care lest in blaming Machiavelli for openly prescribing hypocrisy, men do not slip unperceived into something like hypocrisy of their own. Each age has its own hypocrisy. Mr. Morley traces the influences of Machiavelli, and finds them strong in William the Silent, Henry of Navarre, and Good Queen Bess. All these rulers dallied with creeds and were diplomats to the Machiavellian limit of duplicity. They burned and hanged and tortured on the plea of the strong State. Frederick, the Great, too, Mr. Morley classes as a pupil of Machiavelli, though, once, the "crank" on tall grenadiers threatened to write a refutation of "The Prince" and thereby drew from Arouet de Voltaire a characteristic mot. Napoleon, with his "reasons of State," was Machiavellian. Machiavelli presided at the shooting of D'Engheim. It was one of the last things which showed "what reason of State may come to, in any age, in the hands of a logician with a knife in his grasp."

From the influence of Machiavelli upon the Absolutists, Mr. Morley comes down to his influence in the Republican camp. Mazzini, he says "could not curse the dagger" and yet Mazzini was "in some respects the loftiest moral genius of the century." Mr. Morley does not believe that Machiavellism has pervaded party politics in Europe or America. I wonder if this be not a sample of Mr. Morley's Machiavellism—a reason of state at this time. If not Machiavellism, what, in God's name, are our platform straddles, our expediency candidates, our deals and dickers in tariff-bills, our endeavors to catch all kinds of votes from all kinds of "interests." I am not a silverite, but the regular Democrats made and out-and-out platform and did not hedge. I am a Democrat and glad that, though it "split us wide open," we fought out the issue just as we fought out the slavery issue. True Democrats, gold or silver, despise only the Machiavellists who talk of compromise. Machiavelli seems to have seen but one side of life—the worse. He knew but one kind of men—Italians of the sixteenth century. They were not normal. It is true that Nature is not moral, but if Machiavelli be right it were just as well that we should return to the conditions of life in Stanley Waterloo's "Story of Ab." Whether Nature be moral or not, at least men are. We must look at the facts. We have civilized our code of warfare. The greatest living diplomat is Leo XIII, and no one deems that he succeeds by deceit. Bismark says there is no success in lying, in diplomacy. Reasons of State are not, in the common consent of mankind, good reasons per se. "Talleyrand was false to every one but true to France." He was an avatar of Machiavelli, and he is despised, universally.

The Roman State has passed away. The Venetian and the Florentine States have passed. All the supreme States have vanished and they begun to fade just as soon as the Machiavellian idea began to prevail. The State is not the end of the existence of people. The State must grow broader and broader until, let us hope, we shall see "the parliament of man, the federation of the world." Our sympathy with Cuba, with the Armenians, with Ireland, with Poland, rises up to refute Machiavelli and his right of the State to crush for mere pleasure of power. "If Machiavelli had been at Jerusalem two thousand years ago, he would have found nobody of importance save Pontius Pilate and the Roman legionaries," says Mr. Morley. He forgot the moral force of the world. Machiavelli's fault is the Renaissance fault. The Renaissance turned to the past to reconstruct everything, and it copied, save in its architecture, only Antiquity's faults. It became diseased, trying to adjust itself to dead things. Life itself became corrupted; the Renaissance was to a large extent a birth out of degeneration.

Machiavelli was a scientist—a vivisectionist I should say. He preached, with a vengeance, the survival of the fittest. He is vital in his books today because he stands for the vitality of men's passions. He saw them and studied them and knew them. But upon passions nothing ever was builded. They shift and change. They cannot give a foundation of permanency to a State. They were the essence of that chaos out of which he thought to bring order in anarchic Italy, working on them and on them alone. Cunning, jealousy, perfidy, ingratitude, dupery were the instruments with which he would fashion out a State. And he knew that the State so wrought could not last, for he said the world grew no better; what made his State destroyed it, inevitably. Machiavelli ignored charity, which is in itself, justice, fidelity, gratitude, honesty and all the virtues. He was a man without hope and a man without love. What a great sad mad man he was, indeed. St. Louis, November 15.

* * * THE AMATEUR EDITOR.

The country appears to be overrun at present with amateur editors. When a man learns by sad experience that he hasn't sufficient sense to successfully steer a blind mule through a cotton patch, where the rows are a rod apart, he exchanges his double-shovel plot for the editorial tripod and begins "moulding public opinion" and industriously exchanging advertising acreage for something to eat. When Will Carleton's old farmer discovered that his son Jim was good for nothing else on God's earth he concluded to "be makin' an editor outen o' him." That practice prevails throughout the country to a very considerable extent to-day—the sanctum divides with the pulpit and the stage those incompetents who aspire to mount above the plow, yet lack the necessary brains to succeed in business, in medicine or at the bar. When a man fails at everything else he is apt to be seized with a yearning ambition to become an editor. He gets trusted for a shirt-tail full o' pied type, a pre-Raphaelite press, lays in a job-lot of editorial "we's" and a sawdust cuspidore, girds up his loins and begins to commence. His first task is to reform the currency system and instruct the universe in the esoteric science of economics. He may not be able to successfully float a butcher's bill, but he writes of finance with all the assurance of Alexander Hamilton. He may not know whether Adam Smith or Tommy Watson wrote the "Wealth of Nations"; but he doesn't hesitate to take issue with every economist from Quesnay to Walter—to utilize his paste-pot for arc light and play at Liberty Enlightening the World. These amateur editors are the curse of the country. They Guldensuppe John Stuart Mill and play Leutgert to Lindley Murray. It is some consolation, however, to reflect that they seldom last long. They unfold their wing-like ears and make a frantic flutter at the sun, only to come down beam first on some rocky islet in the Icarian sea. Their creditors do not have even the mournful satisfaction of contemplating the hole—the amateur editor invariably pulls it in after him. But until his first notes fall due he is an iridescent glory. He adores himself with a long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward and carries the universe in his arms. He pokes his meddlesome proboscis into everything and gives oodles of advice, unasked. He may not have as much principle as a tomcat in rutting time, but he poses before all men as a "guardian of public morals." When he places the awful seal of his disapproval upon a fellow mortal he expects to see him shrivel ups like a fat angle-worm on a sea-coal fire. He's a modern Balaam, peddling God's blessings and curses—for the long green. He imagines that an eager multitude sit up every night to catch the first dank copy of his little matutinal mistake—to see what he's got to SAY. He's garrulous as a toothless gran dam at a sewing circle, as busy as a canine eunuch when his kind do congregate. He discourses of everything, from the creation of the universe to Farmer Brown's visit to Bugleville. He fairly riots in editorial "leaders." He gives his "moral support"—and nothing else—to those local enterprises whose promoters jack him up with gobs of taffy on the mistaken hypotheses that his "flooence" may be useful. He has an idea that his miserable little journalistic misfit is "making the town" and is entitled to great wads of gratitude—that should his towline break the whole community would go awhooping to hades, the bottom would fall out of realty values and the streets be overgrown with Johnson grass. So he toils and sweats and stinks—imagines that he is roosting on the top rung of the journalistic ladder when he hasn't even learned his trade. Finally he falls through the bosom of his pantalettes. The sheriff levies on his stock of editorial "we's" the paste sours, the office cat starves, spiders festoon the sawdust cuspidore and the dust settles like a pall on his collection of worn type and wood-base railway cuts. The second-hand engine ceases to snort, the rat printers disperse and the wheezy old cylinder press no longer alarms the neighborhood. But in a little while another yap scraps up $40 in cash, catches a sucker to endorse his note and there's a renascence of the old plant. It is from shyster lawyers without clients, quack doctors without patients and peanut politicians without pulls that the ranks of amateur journalism are constantly recruited. Such people always imagine it dead easy to "run" a paper—that it is only necessary to grab the editorial stylus and pour forth their inexhaustible fund of misinformation to set the woods on fire. Such papers usually manage to wiggle through the fall and winter, for they can then sell advertising space at a dollar an acre, take pay in soft-soap and second-hand sad-irons and still make a reasonable profit—the time of their manipulators being worth nothing a week; but when the long dull summer dawns they go "up agin it" with a dull hollow groan. Every town between Sunrise and Last Chance has had experience galore with the amateur editor. He is one of those unhung idiots who rush in where angels fear to tread. He is an incorrigible but an unabateable nuisance. He never succeeds in making money for himself; he always manages to lose it for somebody else. You may mark this; The quack cannot achieve permanent success in any profession, in journalism least of all, for there his shortcomings cannot be concealed. To become a successful newspaper man one must begin at the bottom and climb by pure strength through long days of labor and nights of agony. It is the most exacting profession in the world today. It is true that some so-called yellow journals succeed in making money; but while they employ perverts they have no use for Smart Alecs and amateurs. Amateur journalists, like dog-fennel and jimson weeds, usually blossom in Jayville. Most Southern towns have suffered from their reckless depredations and will hail their excoriation with delight; still it is a wicked waste of nervo-muscular energy—the amateur journalist, like the poor, and the megalophanous jackass, we have ever with us.

* * * SPEAKING FOR MYSELF.

The ICONOCLAST receives thousands of letters to which it is impossible for me personally to reply. Many of them refer to the attempts made to forcibly suppress the ICONOCLAST, and to the terrible tragedy resulting from those attacks. I take this opportunity of thanking my friends for their kindly interest, and to assure them that I have stood from the first solely upon the defensive. I have made a decent attempt to set an example of Christian forbearance for my religious brethren. To the kindly offers of other cities to afford the ICONOCLAST an asylum and protect its editor from outrage, I will simply say that I do not consider either my property or person in the slightest danger. A majority of the Texas people are both broad gauged and law-abiding. We probably have our proportion of intolerant bigots and splenetic-hearted little blatherskites who preach mob violence from the pulpit; but such people are not dangerous so long as they are well watched. My forbears helped make Texas a republic; they helped make it a state of the American union. I like the climate, and most of the people, and am in no hurry to move. I may have to seek a better distributing point for my publications, as they are already too extensive to be properly handled from any Texas town; but I shall not pull my tent stakes for a day or two. If I do move—sometime within the next twelve-month—it will be bruited throughout the universe that I was driven out of Waco,—just as my brethren in Christ say I was driven out of San Antonio; but that won't worry my soul a cent's worth. I've been lied about so d——n much, that I feel ill at ease and neglected unless the target of vindictive mendacity by tearful souls who fail to pay their debts. I've been kept so badly frightened all month by threats to drag me out of my home and hang me, or otherwise measure me up for a crop of angelic pin-feathers that I've been unable to write anything worth reading. But as soon as I can swallow my heart and quit shivering I will grab the English language by the butt-end and make it crack like a new bull-whip about the ears of hypocrites and humbugs. Meanwhile I desire to state that there is nothing the matter with the ICONOCLAST's contributors. They are a bouquet of pansy blossoms of whom any publisher might well be proud. Should the editor chance to swallow too much water the next time he is baptized, they can be depended upon to keep the flag of the ICONOCLAST afloat until the red headed heir-apparent learns to write with one hand and shoot with the other. Let it go at that. BRANN.

. . .

Princeton, N. J., is dreadfully disappointed because the "Stuffed Prophet" didn't call his kid Grover Cleveland. It is really pitiful to contemplate the agony of Princeton; but the average tax-payer is likely to conclude that one Grover Cleveland is quite enough in any country. It is to be hoped that the son will not resemble the sire—that he will not have the beefy mug of the booze-sodden old beast who disgraced the presidency by playing that high office for his personal profit. Let it never be forgotten that G. Cleveland was the only man to enter the presidency a pauper and leave it a plutocrat. And he managed to do this at a time when millions of better men were going hungry to bed.

AS I WAS SAYING.

BY M. W. CONNOLLY.

How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find.—Dr. Samuel Johnson.

There is something admirably rugged and encouragingly practical in the sentiments and philosophies of the older writers that acts on the mind as a potent tonic when wearied and weakened by the monotonous and anaemic outpourings of the so-called philanthropists of the present day. There is something energizing, thew-developing. This is the age of pulling literature, of crocodile tears, of simulated tenderness, of counterfeit sympathy, of cry and clamor and plaint and protest. In politics we call this practice calamity-howling, whether in tornado-swept Kansas, blizzard-bitten Iowa or boss-ridden New York. in literature it is mere charlatanry, mere scagliola, made for sale. Hamlin Garland makes imaginary journeys over "Traveled Roads" to tell us of the utter and intolerable miseries of the Western farmers who live in sod houses. Raising dollar wheat is not so bad, even in a sod house. George Cable and Albion Tourges write sentimental lies about the Southern negroes. Those at all familiar with the facts know that no people on earth are happier than the Southern negroes. Arthur Morrison writes about "The Child of the Jago" and draws tears from our eyes. Those who have seen the children of the Jago fight and play, romp and riot would probably be willing to trade health and peace of mind with any of them. The list is too long or it might be interesting to name others who write for the purpose of making people discontented, to inflame jealousy or arouse envy. It will be no trouble to recall a host of others. The politician seeks to "remove the inequalities of life by wise and salutary laws," meaning that he wants office. The "literary feller" seeks "to educate the public mind and raise the public conscience to a higher plane," meaning that he wants to do the educating, incidentally, and to sell his books, objectively. To complain that life is "often more than sad enough, with its inequalities confronting us, its gilded prizes and its squalors side by side, its burdens and its trivialties pressing in upon the soul," as does Marguerite Merington in a late and otherwise excellent magazine article, is to strike a popular chord, but the note is false and scabrous, the philosophy less than commendable. Men are but children of a larger growth and, like children of a smaller growth, they like to be petted and pitied and told that the world is not treating them fairly. No man, rich or poor, is contented, and he enjoys being told that his failure to reach the goal of his ambitions and fill to the brim his cup of pleasure is because of the great impersonal world, or untoward and oppugning circumstances have prevented him. He enjoys this sort of thing so much that he will pay handsomely for it and the charlatan finds a market for his wares. He does not like the plain truth bluntly stated. No one does. We do not admire those who wrestle and strive with us. Nevertheless, they alone strengthen our muscles and, hence—

. . .

Verily I say: "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom of hope—who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow," need not attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, except for the passing pleasure of the reading, because the story can be told in fewer words, to wit: Happiness is a personal equation—"what is one man's meat is another man's poison." Rasselas found the Happy Valley irksome and intolerable. There never has been a Happy Valley since that could furnish continuous content to any one. The nearest approach to happiness comes with juxtaposition to one's tastes and aspirations. The simpler the tastes and the less discursive the aspirations, the nearer happiness comes and the longer it remains. Happiness does not come from conditions or surroundings, nor are these conditions or surroundings always understood. Actual conditions do not reveal themselves to perspicacity much less to casual observation. The multi-millionaire in his mansion or the king on his throne, surrounded by all the comforts and conveniences, all the marvelous treasures, all that is pleasing to the eye and to the senses, may not be happy—may be unhappy. The rustic who follows the plow through furrowed fields, unkempt, clownish, toil-stained, weary and overworked, may brawl raucous roundelay at even-tide and enjoy the fullness of earthly bliss. His neighbor similarly situated may suffer agonies because his tastes and ambitions are higher. Those who imagine "plow hands" have no ambitions to gratify know little of life. Sometimes they aspire to be presidents, and sometimes they gratify those aspirations, but they never know happiness. They may be as wise as a dozen Solons, but they can not provide happiness by legislation. They may reach the summit of earthly glory and strive to seize the fulgurant prize that lured them on, only to find a penumbra—the shadow of a shade. And if conditions are actually known they prove nothing, generally. Each case must be specialized. Children and grown people, for that matter, are subjected to involuntary fasts and oftimes go hungry, in fact are always hungry, but they suffer less and are healthier than those who are stuffed and pampered and sated. The joy of eating when food comes compensates for the previous scantiness of the fare. There are deaths from insufficient alimentation; ten to one are the deaths traceable to over-feeding. There is suffering for lack of food. There is ten to one more suffering by gouty and dyspeptic gourmands. The beggar shivers in the cold for lack of clothing; there is ten to one more suffering from over-swathing. For pain, actual, excrutiating; for pain invincible, somber and unutterable, one proud woman reduced to a last season's frock suffers more than twenty arrayed in customary rags and tatters. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but not to the dowdy woman. The occupant of the cottage or cabin as he hurries home on Saturday night with his hard-earned store perhaps envies the occupant of the mansion where lights burn brightly and music fills the air, but the master of the mansion may be driven to the verge of insanity in an unequal contest to keep up appearances and a style of living that is grinding his heart into dust. Gladly, he thinks, he would court the modest shelter of the cottage or cabin but, alas! sorrow and suffering, want and wickedness might follow him there. From natal bed to mortuary box happiness escapes us—the faster, the more we pursue it.

We mistake appearances for realities and misbestow our sympathy. Had some of the more tender-hearted met Audubon when he returned from one of his trips in the forests, his clothing in shreds, his shoes gone, travel- stained and unkempt, alms would have been unhesitatingly bestowed. And how amused would the great man have been! He was too great to have been irritated. If, as it is claimed, human happiness is the aim and object of philanthropists, they seek the unattainable and destroy that which they would save. A sudden wrenching from the one condition to another is misery. The eagle would rather starve in his native forests than feast in a cage. The Indian maiden who graduates at Carlisle and who captures all the medals, returns to her blanket and the dirt, dogs and squalor of her tribe as soon as she reaches the reservation. There is a strain of the Huckleberry Finn in all natures that resents a too sudden metamorphosis and which will return to its rags, its back alley and empty cask. Charlatans of the law and of literature inculcate the idea that a change in conditions means the acquisition of unqualified bliss, and they assume that the poor are necessarily unhappy and endeavor to convince them—not a difficult task, that it is the fault of someone else that they are not rich! Folly! The hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them entrance into the society which they would affect, or, if it does, they find themselves ill at ease, out of place, miserable. Those who imagine that all bliss comes from lucre or legislation know little and are "ignorant of their own ignorance." They do not know that "our own felicity we make is final, and that through the cultivation of individual inherency and personal sufficiency. They listen to the charlatans who, on the plea of bringing balm, inflict incurable wounds; who would bring happiness by sowing the dragon's teeth of discontent. "Coal-Oil Johnny," who threw away hundreds of thousands of suddenly acquired dollars, was a philosopher. The money put him out of harmony with himself. It was to him a curse. And he wisely rid himself of it. There is peace and pleasure in the jangling discord and in the pains of effort, a peace which, otherwise, the world can not give, a pleasure found nowhere else; and this peace and pleasure are not to be sought by effort; are not to be attained by effort; but are found in the effort itself. There is pleasure in dressing a field or in painting a house, but not in the dressed field or in the painted house. In other words, there is pleasure in individual assertiveness and not in inertia. No doubt either Calypso or Circe was more attractive than Penelope, but Ulysses was not content. He had to continue his wanderings even to his own home, and when he had killed of all the suitors and was restored to his diplomatic spouse, there were doubtless days when he wished himself back with the enchantress on the lovely isle—days when he would have changed places with his father, Sisyphus, and rolled the ever returning stone with will and energy. Ease and passivity were a torture to him.

A picture of life is painted by that wonderful artist, Gabrielle d'Annunzio, in "The Triumph of Death." Yes, I hear the hurtling of such missles as "decadent," "obscene," "vulgar," "impious." Nevertheless d'Annunzio is one of the great masters. His pigments may be mud or muck. His brush is the brush of an Angelo. His finished product is life itself, breathing, pulsing life, through which the blood rushes loud enough to be heard. Life in all its phases, from the loftiest to the lowliest. Demetrius, wealthy, scholarly, meditative, one would suppose needed no legislation or literature to make him happy. He possessed all the world had to give. "A mild, meditative man, with a face full of virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the center of his forehead among the black hair, giving him an old appearance." He sought earnestly and sedulously for the secret meaning of life. He tried to reach and unravel its symbols and allegories; he tried to interpret the furtive gestures which he beheld in the shadows, and he passed into deeper shadows and more oppressive silences through the ghastly gates of suicide, while his idiotic sister remained to chatter and grimace. Jaconda remained gibbering and pleased with the world and with herself. George saw this and he saw many other things which he could not understand. He saw "Oreste of Chapelles" firing the simple minds of the people to fanaticism as he went up and down like a fury. He saw the pilgrims at the sanctuary and the beggars and cripples on his return from the sanctuary to Cassalbordino—horrible monsters, not fashioned, or scarce fashioned in God's image, and he saw that they had their families and their belongings with them, that they piteously plead for alms and that they danced and sung, cursed and caroused, made merry over the deformities of each other, and presented a phase of life wholly incomprehensible. Laws or literature could not increase their happiness. Their apparent miseries were not real. He saw Colas, ignorant, stupid, superstitious, but content. He saw Candia, proud of her fecundity, slaving, singing. He saw Favetta, the young singer with the falcon-like eyes, the idol of her friends, simple, modest, happy. He saw the peasants in their mysterious rites "consecrating the nativity of bread" in the harvest field. They needed neither laws nor literature to improve their condition. They were the happiest of mortals. And he saw the dark tragedies of this remote world. Liberata carrying her dead child on her head to the burial place. No laws or literature for her, poor woman: her baby was dead and her reason was gone. He saw Riccangela, the widow, on the beach, with her large rough hands, pouring forth her heart in a wild monody over the remains of her puny boy, who was drowned, while the homicidal sea chanted a lugubrious accompaniment or mocked the agony of the song. George sought the meaning and the key to life's mysteries and found them not. Subjective study and spiritual contemplation drove him mad. They had driven his uncle Demetrious mad. He recoiled from them and plunged into life as he found it, endeavoring to extract from it the honey of happiness, or at least, immunity from misery. If carnalism could furnish content, one would think George would have found it. Rich to opulence, young, idle, he met Hippolyte, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in which were mingled perhaps a few tints of faded roses." He won her and subjected her, "the bloodless, wounded creature who used to submit with profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened creature who had given him that fierce and divine spectacle—the agony of modesty felled by vicious passion." He idolized her and idealized her in the struggle for perfect bliss. He took her to the deserted abbey and placed on "the summit of the high marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries," where she burned before his eye in the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love, and, as he believed, illuminating the meditations of his soul. Folly! His apotheosis was a farce. She developed, but not spiritually. What he supposed was a pure flame of love proved to be a base erotic fever. The bloom of pudicity was brushed off. She acquired a strange power over him; she, the once innocent and frightened creature. "She possessed the infallible science and knew her lover's most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move them with a marvelous intuition of the physical conditions that depend on them and their corresponding sensations and their association and their alternatives." And from the thing of beauty and light, seen with enraptured eyes as she stood "on the summit of the marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries, she became a loved and hated thing, "the flower of concupiscence," "an instrument of low lasciviousness." The union of these two, perfect in all outward appearances, blessed with love and leisure, beauty and youth, and all that wealth could buy, was a mocking and a delusion because lacking in spirituality, because unsanctified and unholy. It was a monstrous tragedy, this union, presented on a stage of ashes over a volcano. (Unions in polite society, where forms are observed, laws obeyed and customs followed, but where the moving impulse is sordid, where the marriage is for money or for social position, do they, too, not drift toward mutual hate and abhorrence, to divorce or death? I only ask the question. There may be more Georges and Hippolytes in the world than we care to admit). When at last he discovered his true condition, when he realized that he was in her power that he could not live with her or without her, that she obstructed his way of life and his way to death, he caught her in his arms and hurled both over the precipice upon the rocks below, making a ghastly ending for a ghastly tragedy. No law or literature could have brought happiness to him. He sought it in the various ways, in every way but the one, simple and only right way—the effort to confer happiness on others. Frantic intoxications, the culminations of carnal pleasures, which amount to unspeakable ecstasies, are mere temporations which are followed by lassitude, exhaustion and disgust, and these soon turn to a fiercely implacable hate. The search for happiness, when carried to the extreme, becomes a torture. The desire for happiness is selfish, and selfishness is never happy. Happiness dispensed is like bread cast upon the water, and will return after many days. Those who seek it stray from it. All laws and all literature that arouse the spirit of discontent, of selfishness and of desire for happiness, are vicious because they defeat the very object which they seek to accomplish, and make people more miserable than they were by increasing their capacity for suffering without a coexistent power to gratify the desires aroused. What is this George Eliot puts into the mouth of the radical, Felix Holt? "This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up my mind it shan't be the worse for me if I can help it. They tell me I can't alter the world—that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't lie and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won't—I will never be one of the sleeks dogs—I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labor and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the rush and scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefitted by the push and scramble in the long run, but I care for the people who are alive now and will not be living when the long run comes. I prefer to go shares with the unlucky."

Irrefragible philosophy! The true and the wise proceed not to stir up the lees of passion and greed and avarice and ambition. They remain with the world, go with it in its devious ways and through its torturous windings, removing the thorns and briars from before naked feet, shielding the weak, sheltering the naked, encouraging and dispensing light and hope and love. The true and wise who love their fellows avoid strife and carnage, and conflict with the ineluctable, but they meet the inevitable calmly and courageously. They are superior to laws and literature. They are supremely blest. Memphis. Tenn., November 10.

* * * TOMMIE WATSON'S TOMMYROT.

Somebody whom I have never harmed sends me an A. P. A. tract entitled "A Good Catholic," and issued by Tommy Watson, who once tried to run for vice-president on the Middle-of-the-Muck ticket—for the purpose of turning back the reform tide and electing the humble peon of the gold-buggers, high-tariffites and trusts. Tommie's Ape tract is simply an "ad." for a weekly paper which he seems to be getting out all by his little self somewhere in Gooberdom. On the front elevation of this bombshell with which he expects to blow the Vatican across the yellow Tiber, the statement is made in display type that, for the trifling sum of one dollar in hand paid, "You can read the brilliant, patriotic editorials of Hon. Thos. E. Watson" for an entire year—granting, of course, that their Promethean brilliancy fail to set your shirt-tail afire in the meantime. There is no provision for the return of your money in case Tommie's exhuberant patriotism should overpower you. We are then assured that "no Roman Pope or American Cardinal can coerce" the architect of the "brilliant and patriotic editorials" aforesaid. Now that's the kind of a man I admire! Hang a Georgia editor, say I, who sells himself to the Pope of Rome for six bits, or rushed around to an American Cardinal every morning before breakfast with the proof-sheets of his labored lucubrations, humbly asking permission to print. The brilliant and patriotic editor of a Georgia paper having a paid circulation of 710 copies can not be too independent. It is his solemn duty to keep watch and ward over this country and promptly put a kibosh on every conspiracy of the Pope. Like most brilliant patriots, Tommie has sacrificed a very great deal for conscience sake. When he tried to save the country by playing second tail to the Bryan kite for the purpose of dividing the reform forces and electing a Republican president, the Pope and all his "priest-led citizens" straddled his collar, rode him into an open grave and piled a cathedral on top of him to hold him down—at least I suppose they did from the way in which this raucous little Buzfuz is chewing the rag. Had he been "A Good Catholic" he would have been elected with votes to burn; for did not Dick Bland have to hide out in the Ozark hills to escape the presidential nomination the moment it was rumored that his wife was a "Romanist"? Did not Generals Sherman and Sheridan have to insulate themselves to avoid the presidential lightnings which played around them continuously because they were Catholics? Sure! Tommie is doubtless correct in his assertion that the Pope controls American politics and dictates every act of congress. That is amply proven by the fact that after all these years the Catholics have a representative in the president's cabinet. That all Catholics are sworn enemies of this republic and peons of the Pope is demonstrated by the fact that the "Romish" attorney-general refused to permit his people to erect at their own expense a chapel on government ground at West Point—the general public being taxed meanwhile to maintain an Episcopal clergyman at that place. Tommy protests that he is both a Baptist and devoid of bigotry. If he can make this claim good I will undertake to secure for him an engagement at $1,000 a day in a dime museum as the greatest curio ever seen in this country. Doubtless there are many good people who are Baptists but God's sunlight never fell upon one who was not a bigot. The man who concedes that it is possible for one to reach heaven except he be soused bodily into some sacred slop-tub is not a Baptist. If he thinks he is, he has made a faulty diagnosis of his disease. The Baptist church breeds bigotry just as a dead mule does magots. It dominates politics wherever it is strong enough to do so. It boycotts every publisher who dares suggest that it doesn't hold the one only key to heaven. It is the sworn foe of Catholicism, yet not one of its members in a million has the remotest idea what Catholicism means. It assumes that the great body of Catholics are ignorant clowns, while itself absorbing 60 per cent. of the illiterates of this land. The more ignorant an animal is the more bigoted Baptist it is likely to be. I cannot at present think of a single American of distinction who was a member of that denomination. I have passed in mental review the great American statesmen, soldiers, authors and inventors, and find only one among them who was web-footed. Garfield was a Campbellite—and had he not been murdered no one would have suspected that he was a great man. If any of the immortelles was of the Baptist persuasion he was probably ashamed of that fact, as he kept it concealed. It is possible that in soaking the original sin out of a fellow any latent germs of genius he possesses may be extracted also. Tommie solemnly assures us that Catholics dare not read a book or paper that has not been formally approved by the Pope. What a foolish falsehood! I'll wager a pint of peanuts that Watson cannot name half a dozen American books, papers or magazines that bear the Papal imprimatur, and another pint of the same luscious circus fruit that even his own rabid A.P.A. rot has never been placed in the index prohibitorius. If it is not there every Catholic in this country is privileged to read it without consulting Rome. Of the most bigoted sect of pseudo- religious fanatics that ever cursed this country the Hon. Tommie Watson is perhaps the most intolerant and narrow-brained little blatherskite. And the worst of it all is that while in religion he's a fool, in politics he's a knave. While pretending that the cause of the common people was the apple of his eye, he lent himself to a scheme to defeat their tribune and elect a ligneous-headed hiccius-doctius owned soul and body by Mark Hanna, the "industrial cannibal." Bryan would be president to-day but for this busy little blabster whom accident placed in a position where he could betray the people. Avaunt! thou contumacious little coyote, thou pestiferous pole-cat. Benedict Arnold was a gentleman when compared to you, for his treason was open and avowed, while you stabbed the cause of the people in a friendly embrace, struck in the back. You have had no parallel since Judas Iscariot conspired with the plutocracy to betray the idol of the people—and even Judas had decency enough to hang himself as expiation for his infamy. Shut up, thou hatchet-faced, splenetic-hearted, narrow-headed little hypocrite, for verily the world is aweary of Tommie Watson. His "brilliant and patriotic editorials" are used only to underlay carpets, paper pantry shelvest and for purposes less polite. I cheerfully risk my reputation as a prophet on the prediction that in less than two years his windy little "reform" paper will go to the bone-pile. Tommie, you are the pin-worm of American politics—a more aggravating little parasite than even Miltonius Park. Take a gentleman's advice and apply the soft pedal to your wheezy calliope—get off the political stage in time to avoid the coming cataclysm of sphacelated cabbage and has-been cats. The day of your destiny's over and the star of your fate is in the mullagatawny. You are simply a fragment of worthless political seaweed cast with flabby jelly fish and dead sting rays upon an inhospitable shore, there to rot and befoul the atmosphere. You have "a very ancient and fishlike smell, a smell not of the newest." You may howl a lung out, but will only evoke laughter or disgust. Occasionally some lonely Middle-of-the-Roader, dragging his No. 12's painfully through the dust may turn to look at you, perhaps toss you a dime; but you are politically dead. You may play the Baptist racket for all it is worth; but the brethren while long on zeal are shy on boodle. Even Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill, the champion leg elongator of the universe, finds it hard work to keep fat in the Baptist field—must add professional beggary to his schemes of predacity. You may tie your abortive little paper to the tail of the "Ape," but that animal is too weak in the hinder legs to pull it out of a financial hole. Go plug yourself. Shuck your long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward, trade your paper for a double-shovel plow, gird up your yarn galluses and make a reasonable effort to earn an honest living. Had you expended half the nervo-muscular energy in the cotton patch that you have wasted in working your jaw-bone you would have money to burn. Mene mene tekel upharsim—which means that you are entirely too light at both ends.