And I sez, “Yes, that is so, the United States is doin’ a 132 great and noble work in educating and civilizing the natives, if it wuzn’t for the one great mistake she is making and duz make wherever she plants her banner in a new country amongst a new people.
“Side by side with her schoolhouses and churches that are trying to lift humanity heavenward the American Saloon is found lowering humanity and undoing the work these ministers and teachers have so faithfully tried to do.”
I guess he didn’t hear me, but ’tennyrate he went right on: “Oh, yes, oh, yes, our Christian nation goes to these benighted islands, carrying Christianity and civilization in its hand. Of course they may not ever come up to the hite of our own perfect, matchless civilization, but they will approach it, they will approach it.”
Sez Arvilly: “Our nation won’t come up to them in years and years, if it ever duz!”
He jumped as if he had been shot; he thought we wuz alone, and sez: “Why––why, Sister Arvilly––you must admit these savages are behind us in knowledge.”
“So much the worse for us; the sin of ignorance is goin’ to be winked at, but if we know better we ort to do better.” Elder Wessel wuz stunted, but he murmured instinctively sunthin’ about our carryin’ the Bible and the knowledge of heaven to ’em.
Arvilly snapped out: “What good will that do if we carry private hells to burn ’em up before they die? A pretty help that is! What is the use of teachin’ ’em about heaven if our civilization makes sure the first thing it duz to keep ’em out of it, for no drunkard shall inherit heaven. What’s the use of gittin’ ’em to hankerin’ after sunthin’ they can’t have.”
The Elder wuz almost paralyzed, but he murmured instinctively sunthin’ about our duty to the poor naked heathen hanging like monkeys from the tree tops, like animals even in their recreation. And Arvilly bein’ so rousted up and beyend reasonable reason, sez: “That’s their bizness about not bein’ clothed, and anyway it is jest as the Lord 133 started the human race out in the Garden of Eden, and they do wear enough to cover their nakedness, and that’s more than some of our fashionable wimmen do, and ’tennyrate they don’t suffer so much as our wimmen do with their torturin’ tight shoes and steel instruments of agony bound round their waists, compressin’ their vital organs into a mass of deformity.”
Elder Wessel wuz so browbeat that he kinder got offen his subject, and with a dazed look he murmured sunthin’ about “the wicked religion of Cuba when the Americans took it––the Papal indulgences, the cruel bull fights, the national recreations––you could always tell the low state of a nation’s civilization by the brutish recreations they indulged in.”
Sez Arvilly, in a loud, mad axent, “Talk about brutal amusements, why they ort to send missionaries to America to reform us as fur up in decency as to use animals to fight fur our recreation instead of human bein’s. Bulls hain’t spozed to have immortal souls, and think how America pays two men made in the image of God so much an hour––high wages, too––to beat and pound and maim and kill each other for the amusement of a congregation of Christian men and wimmen, who set and applaud and howl with delight when a more cruel blow than common fells one on ’em to the earth. And then our newspapers fight it all over for the enjoyment of the family fireside, for the wimmen and children and invalids, mebby, that couldn’t take in the rare treat at first sight. Every blow, every cruel bruise that wuz made in the suffering flesh reproduced for Sunday reading. And if one of the fighters is killed and his mangled body taken out of the fighting ring forever, taken home to his wife and children with the comfortin’ peticulars that he wuz killed for the amusement of men and wimmen, most on ’em church members, and all citizens of our Christian republic by special license of the government, why then the newspapers, which are the exponents of our civilization and the teachers of our 134 youth, have a splendid time relating the ghastly story under staring headlines. After all this, talk to me about our country’s dastin to have the face to reform any other country’s amusement. Our prize fights that our nation gives licenses for its people to enjoy are as much worse than bull fights, in view of America’s professions of goodness, as it would be for an angel to fly down ’lection day amongst a drunken crowd and git drunk as a fool, and stagger round and act with her wings dirty and a-floppin’.”