The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10

by William Cowper Brann

. . .

Justice Van Fleet of the supreme court of California recently rendered an opinion which indicates the utter emptiness of our boast that in this land all men are equal before the law. Because of the confusion or ignorance of a new motorman, the young child of a plumber, playing upon the track, was killed by an electric car. The parents sued the company and were awarded damages in the sum of six thousand dollars. Defendant took an appeal, which the supreme court sustained, and the cause was remanded on the ground that the damages awarded were excessive—that the boy would probably have followed his father's occupation, and an embryo workman is not, in Justice Van Fleet's opinion, worth so much money! Measured by this standard, what would have been the average "value" of American presidents when they were boys? Now that Justice Van Fleet is measuring human life solely by the gold standard, perhaps he can tell us what a juvenile Shakespeare or Webster is "worth." I have held to the opinion heretofore that blood could not be measured by boodle, that the children of the common people were of as much importance in the eye of the law as the progeny of the plutocrat—that the anguish of parents did not depend on the length of the purse; but Justice Van Fleet seems to agree with Kernan's weeping Canuck, that the more siller one has the more deeply he feels the loss of a son. He seems to need a powerful cardac for his heart and a hot mush poultice for his head, being as fine a combination of knave and fool, as one can easily find. Had the supreme court declared that the plaintiffs in the case were not entitled to a dollar I would heartily approve the opinion; but to measure the "value" of a son by the gain-getting capacity of its sire is simply monstrous. A statute should be enforced impartially, without regard to persons; but I should like to see the law so amended that people could not trade upon their tears, could not coin the blood of their relatives to fill their pockets. A child should not be considered a piece of property for which the accidental destroyer must PAY, just as a railway company must cough up the cash value of the cow it kills. As not one child in a thousand ever returns to its parents the cost of its rearing it cannot be urged that the plaintiffs in this case were pecuniarily damaged one penny. All they had to sell was "mental anguish," and that should never be made a merchantable commodity. We have criminal courts to deal with those who, through criminal negligence or otherwise occasion death. It may be argued that when the party killed has dependants for whom he or she is providing, the slayer should be compelled to make good the damage in so far as money can do it. I say NO—that if there be blood guiltiness let the offender be punished in accordance with our criminal code; if there be none then is he blameless, and to deprive a person of his property because of a harmless act is a crime. "But the dependants should be provided for." Certainly they should; but not through rank injustice to others. We are carrying entirely too far the theory that the principal is responsible for the acts of his agents. If the agent is guilty of criminal negligence he is punished by one law and his principal by another; if the agent blunders he is found not guilty and discharged, yet his principal is punished for being a co-partner in his innocence. It should not be forgotten that the agent of a private company is also a representative of that larger and more powerful corporation which we call the state. The private company can do no more than outline his duty and discharge him for dereliction; the public corporation not only prescribes his duty but imprisons or hangs him for neglect; the private company is itself but a creation of the state which exercises over it autocratic power while shirking responsibility. If I loosen a rail on the "Katy" road and cause the destruction of $100,000 worth of property the company must pocket the loss, notwithstanding the fact that it is paying the state for protection. If a dozen people are killed in the wreck the relatives of the last one of them will sue for damages and the state compel it to pay for its own failure to afford that protection to which it is clearly entitled. What then? Let the state issue life insurance at cost and compel every person who has dependants to carry a policy payable on the annual installment plan. For 5 or 6 cents a day it can, without loss, issue a policy to every man in America that will provide his family with the necessaries of life for at least ten years after his death, and the man who cannot pay that premium is worth precious little to anybody considered purely from an economic standpoint. If the state wants to bring damage suits for the slaughter of its citizens, well and good; but for God's sake let us get rid of the degrading spectacle of people hawking the corpses of their relatives through the courts.

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."