The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01

by William Cowper Brann

The schoolteacher has doubtless played no unimportant part in the rehabilitation of the South; but he should not set up as Autocrat of the Universe on a salary of $40 a month, and burden the Asses' Bridge with the idea that he "maketh all things, and without him was nothing made that is made." His ferula may be an Aaron's rod which buds and blossoms; but it does not bear sufficient fruit to furnish a hungry world with necessary aliment. We still crave manna from Heaven and grapes from Hebron. The public pedagogue does not make the laws of trade. His province is to interpret them; and proud may he be of his labor if his proteges do not find it necessary to forget, at the very gateway of a commercial career, that he ever had a name and habitation on the earth. Nor does he frequently alarm the plodding natives by the "introduction of new systems of thought and action." Such "systems" do not spring completely panoplied from the cerebrum of our educational Jove, and stand about on one foot like a lost goose, or country lad, awaiting an introduction. New systems of thought and action are usually the growth of ages, the seed often sown by men we hear not of. When of such sudden development that they require a formal introduction, they are apt to be received with the scant courtesy of a poor relation, the introducer reviled as a crank or condemned as a heretic and crucified. Generally speaking, the professional educator confines himself pretty closely to his birch and his textbooks, being quite content to propagate, as best he may, the ideas of others. Neither the birch nor the text-book, it may be well to remark, constitutes the world's stock of wisdom, but only an incidental furtherance thereto—the key, as it were, by which the treasure is more readily come at. When the schoolmaster has put his pupil in possession of the open sesame he considers his duty done—that he has earned his provender. And perhaps he has. In this day and age it is all that is expected of him, all that he is paid for. He is not required to inculcate wisdom, which is well; for that can no man do. He is not even expected to impart much knowledge; but to put his pupil through a course of mental calisthenics, miscalled education. But even this is by no means to be despised. With mind strengthened by exercise, even in a desert, and lungs developed by football, the youth may be able to delve the harder for knowledge when happily released from the "gerund-grinder," to pray the more lustily to the immortal gods for understanding, which transmutes what were else base metal into ingots of fine gold. There was a time when more was expected of a teacher; but that was before the application of labor-saving machinery to spiritual matters; before colleges became known as places "where coals are brightened and diamonds are dimmed"— before it became customary to cast potential Homers and Hannibals, Topsies and Blind Toms into the same educational hopper, and hire some gabby-Holofernes from God knows where to manipulate the mill. It was a time when men considered qualified to teach declined to waste effort on numskulls, no matter whose brats they might be. It was a time when the fame of a great, the honor of a good and the infamy of a bad man were shared by their preceptors. Those were the days of individualism which President Winston so much deplores—the era which fashioned those men whom the world for twenty centuries has been proud to hail as masters. As the doctors have decided that all human frailties are but diseases, I do not despair of our 'varsity president. Some Theodorus may yet arise to "purge him canonically with Anticryan hellebore," and thus clear out the perverse habit of his brain and make him a man of as goodly sense as the rejuvenatedGargantua.

* * * PUFFERY OF THE PRESS.

The "able editor" is perhaps the only quack doctor extant who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly imagines that it does him good.

Puffery is the "able editor's" invariable prescription, no matter whether the patient be a moss-grown town, a broken-down political roue—the victim of early indiscretions—or a Cheap-John merchant suffering the first paroxysms of financial dissolution. Although he knows how his medicine is made,—knows that it is a nauseous compound of rank hypocrisy and brazen mendacity—he actually believes that, if taken in liberal doses, it is potent to cure commercial paralysis or put new life into a political corpse. When the first experiment fails to prove satisfactory, instead of changing the treatment he doubles the dose.

One would suppose that, like most Cagliostros who pick up a precarious livelihood by pumping the bellies of their betters full of the east wind, the "able editor" would laugh in his sleeve at his dupes; but not so. He is more in earnest than the Lagado doctor, described by Gulliver, who had discovered a short-cut for the cure of colic,—as little discouraged when a patient bursts under the somewhat peculiar treatment. So greedy is he for his own medicine, so fond of working the bellows for the expansion of his own bowels, that he can scarce find time to attend to his patients. Pick up any newspaper, big or little, "great daily," with fake voting contest annex, or country weekly shot full of ads. of city swindling concerns and note what the "able editor" thinks of himself; how he twists and turns to find some pretext for parading his own transcendent greatness! See how he greedily seizes upon every little chunk of "taffy" and rolls it as a sweet morsel under his tongue; how he places in his cap every foolish feather which the idle wind of puffery wafts within his clutch, and then struts in the face of Heaven, a sight to provoke the contempt of men, the pity of the gods! Let the Boomerville Broadaxe but intimate that the Bungtown Boomer knows a thing or two, and forthwith the latter transfers the saccharine slug to its own columns, and perchance, "points to it with pride,"—bids the Bungtown world behold what the world of Boomerville thinks of it! Then the Bungtown Boomer intimates that the Boomerville Broadaxe likewise knows a thing or two, and the latter, which has been eagerly watching for this Roland for its Oliver, swoops hungrily down upon this delectable morsel and cries ha! ha! It has obtained value received, has tickled and been tickled in return! Then the editors of these two great "public educators" begin a cross-fire of sugar-plums, much to the edification of the world and their own mutual satisfaction!

What would we think of that lawyer, doctor or merchant who went about assiduously proclaiming with sound of trumpet what his fellows said about him? Would we not vote him a fool? at best a conceited prig, lacking in taste and good manners?

Commendation is sweet to all; but it is just as permissible for a belle to boast her conquests in the ballroom; the lawyer to inform judge and jury what his fellow-disciples of Blackstone think of him; the scholar to parade his erudition or the merchant his integrity, as for an editor to reproduce in his own paper fulsome compliments paid him for no other purpose under Heaven than to get a puff in return.

* * * THE BIKE BACILLUS.

The Women's Rescue League met recently at Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the bicycle craze "the alarming increase" in the number of courtesans, and call upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by the sex as "vulgar and indecent." Nor do they stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is irremediably bad. While destroying the morals of the maid, it wreeks the prospective motherhood of the matron. It is provocative of diseases peculiar to women, and calculated to transform the sex into a grand army of invalids. These are a few of the reasons why the Women's Rescue League is scattering tacks in the pathway of the pneumatic tire. There are others.

Those whose specialty is the conservation of virtue should carefully study the causation of vice. In dealing with the red-light district, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To remove the causes which produce courtesans were a nobler work than to drag debased womanhood out of the depths. Doubtless the Rescuers imagine they have made a new discovery of inestimable benefit to society—have laid the ax to the root of that evil of which the bawdy-house is the flower and Hell the fruitage. After patient research in the science of sexual criminology, they have determined that the bicycle is naughty without being nice. It is perversity personified. It is the incarnation of cussedness, the avatar of evil. Turn it which way you will, it rolls into the primrose path of dalliance, whose objective point is the aceldama. No more do woman's feet "take hold on Hell": she goes scorching over the brink with her tootsies on the handle-bar. So say the ladies of the Rescue League.