Brann is dead! The blow that wrung our hearts with unavailing anguish but ushered him into the company of Shakespeare, Carlyle, Hugo and Wagner. And there, whether it be in the light that beats on God's great throne, or in the serbonian darkness of a hell more horrible than that pictured by Dante—is the true Heaven.—Abbott Graphic.
* * * BRANN'S BRAVE BATTLE.
With humble soul and heavy heart we take up our pen to chronicle the death, yea the murder of one of the brightest and purest noblemen that God ever created—W. C. Brann. A few years ago he, W. H. Ward and the writer each occupied desks, side by side, in the editorial rooms of The Waco Morning News. There budded a friendship between that trio that we full believe shall blossom into ripe fraternal love on a shore as yet unknown to Mr. Ward and the writer. Mr. Brann was editor of the ICONOCLAST, and as its name indicates it is a smasher of idols from Tadmor in the Wilderness to the mountains of Hepsedam. Scorning the sensual, always against the vulgar, in much the same manner as Carlyle, Brann stuck the gaffles of truth deep into the sides of wrong in high places, and exposed rottenness wherever found. With rugged English, twisted into sentences more cutting than whips of scorpions' tails, he stood up and fought for right as opposed to might. He tore off the plaster of moral cancerous ulcers, now so prolific on the body politic of the world, and held high the treachery, the bigotry, the superstition, the damnably dirty doings of a generation that accepts hidebound dogmas for the ultima thule of reasoning and truth; precept for right and in reality worships at the shrine of exploded fables and crowns, by its own acts, the parrot as its preceptor—lives and dies, having no desire to do anything that somebody has not done before! Is it any wonder that such a man as W. C. Brann should fall a victim to such a populace? He was hounded to his death—mobbed, spat upon, shot and murdered, by several thousand pin-headed obstreperous patrons and followers of a little pee-wee college, that turns young ladies out enceinte almost yearly and hires its professors for less salaries than a railroad brakeman gets.
Brann's good work will live, his fame will survive and an intellectual race yet will rise up and bless his name when the lying epitaphs of the assassin sent to the d—— by him shall have crumbled to earth ten thousand years. We cannot close this faint tribute of respect to our dead friend without acknowledging the worth of such true men as Mr. W. H. Ward and Judge G. B. Gerald, both of whom are able, brave, high-toned gentlemen, and both of whom came near dying, and both were willing to die, or see that Mr. Brann got fair play while he lived.—S. M. Scruggs, in the Tribune.
* * * BRANN IS NO MORE.
On the first of April—All Fools' Day—W. C. Brann, of the ICONOCLAST, and T. M. Davis riddled each other with bullets in Waco, Texas. Both of them died the following day. The trouble between them grew out of the attack made by Brann in his paper on the Baylor University, a Baptist institution attended by the daughter of Davis. At the time that Brann accused the students of the college of immorality, he was assaulted by them, and barely escaped lynching at their hands. He was forced to make a retraction and was ordered to leave town. Being a courageous man Brann refused to emigrate.
The Irish Standard chronicles the untimely and awful death of Mr. Brann with poignant regret, and tenders its condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways he won the admiration of the American people. He was a man of great mental endowments, and in the use of invective, often degenerating into billingsgate, he stood without a rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and he despised religious intolerance. As an American he loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo- American alliance. He held hypocrites in supreme contempt and lashed the pharisees unmercifully. When Catholic priests and sisters were misrepresented by sectarian bigots, he used his tongue and pen in their defense. So ably did he vindicate the Catholic church from their aspersions that many supposed him to be a Jesuit in disguise. In the last issue of the ICONOCLAST he told a correspondent what he thought of Mrs. Shepard and ex- priest Chiniquy. Had Brann lived in a more civilized community than among the bigoted Baptists of Texas, he would have used more elegant language in his magazine than it contained for the past few months.
We entirely disagree with the Pioneer Press in its characterization of the deceased journalist when it says: "From attacking the private lives of the prominent and successful men of every quarter of the union and levying blackmail as the price of silence from those whose slips or frailties his keen hyena-like appetite for filth had enabled him to scent, it was an easy step to the most scurrilous assaults on men and women whose only offending lay in their uprightness and virtue."
Brann never attacked men and women for their "uprightness and virtue," and our St. Paul contemporary is guilty of calumny when it says so. Every evildoer and hypocrite feared him, while upright men and virtuous women had a champion in him. His bitterest enemies never accused him of being a blackmailer, and the editor of the Pioneer Press took care he was dead before he made the unwarrantable charge.—The Irish Standard.
* * * BRAVE AND BRAINY BRANN