The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12

by William Cowper Brann

I want to see more men who are not a constant reminder of a monkey ancestry. Some philosopher once remarked: "As between men and dogs, give me dogs." I have been often tempted to indorse the sentiment—and I am not much of a lover of dogs either. I want to see men who are not fops in their youth, fools in their prime and egotists in their old age—a race of manly men to whom life is not a lascivious farce; whose god is not gold; who do not worship at the shrine of the Pandemian Venus nor devote their lives to the service of Mammon, "the least erect of all the angelic host that fell from heaven." I want to see men who scorn the pusillanimity of the policy-prayer, who, —like Caesar, dare tell greybeards the truth e'en though it cost a crown; men of leonine courage, men of iron mould, men strong of hand and heart, who defiantly throw down the gage to destiny—who can trample hell itself beneath their proud feet, even while it consumes them.

. . .

The dream may be Utopian. I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has become ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because we no longer live in caves and fight naked with the wild beasts of the forest for our food we are away up at the head of the procession, with Greek civilization distanced and all the other times and half times nowhere.

Human development, like the earth, the sun, the stars— like all things brought into being by the breath of Omnipotent God—travels ever in a circle. Savagery and ignorance, barbarism and ambition, civilization and sybaritism, dudeism and intellectual decay; then once more savagery and ignorance proclaim the complete circle,—that we have traveled from nadir to zenith and from zenith to nadir— when once again we begin with painful steps and slow to repace the path which carries us to the very verge of godhood and wreathes our brows with immortal bays, then brings us down—even while we think we mount—until we touch a level beneath the very brute. Such has ever been the world's history, and such it will ever be until a force is found that can transform this circle into a straight line —that can blend the rugged manhood of the barbarism with the graces of our higher civilization and give us wisdom without weakness and culture without cowardice; that can incorporate us as corpuscles in the social organism without eliminating every spark of God-like individuality, making us helpless dependents upon social, political and religious precedent.

If the Car of Progress travels in a circle—and history says it does; if neither science, philosophy nor religion can deflect it from its seemingly predestined path—and the condition of their birth-place proclaims their failure so to do—where is hope? Must the human race forever go the weary round of birth and death, like Buddhist souls wandering through all that's fair and foul, until it finds Nirvana in the destruction of the world? Not so, for there is a hope—a blessed hope—that like.

"A poising eagle burns above the unrisen morrow."

That hope is in the union of all the mighty forces that make for the emancipation of mankind,—a union of religion and philosophy, science and woman. And of these the first is the last and the last is the first in point of power and importance.

. . .

When I reflect that until within comparatively recent times women were slaves, I don't much wonder that the old civilizations went to the dogs—that the millennium is not yet due. Trying to make a civilization that would stick without the help of woman were like building a cocktail with a basis of buttermilk. God gave her to man to be an helpmeet, not a plaything. I don't think that she can help him much by going into politics, or becoming a crusading she-Peter-the-Hermit while her own children need her care, but I do believe that the wife and mother—that erstwhile ignorant drudge, raised by God's great mercy to royalty— made Queen of the home, and thereby absolute Empress of the great round earth—is to be the dynamics of a new and grander civilization that can never recede; that the womanly woman, self-poised as a star, pure as the polar snows, fit companion for the true nobleman of nature, is to be the Providence that will lead humanity, step by step, ever onward and upward, until our cruel age of iron is transformed into an age of gold in which there'll be neither millionaire nor mendicant, master nor slave—in which Selfishness will be considered the worst of crimes and Love the all-powerful law.

Such, ladies, is my dream of the future. You see, with true mannish instinct, I throw the work of the world's salvation upon the women. I don't know, however, but it's retributive justice. If you got us fired out of the first Paradise it is your duty to find another and put us in possession. But really with all due respect to Sacred Writ, I could never accept that serpent story without considerable salt. My observation—and experience—has been that men are much more addicted to the snake habit than are women. I gather from Genesis that after the Edenic reptile had done the damage it was condemned to go upon its belly all the days of its life. That indicates that it was not only a good conversationalist, but had legs. Now I submit it to you in all seriousness: which member of the original family was most likely to see such a serpent as that? I think I should have given Adam the Keeley cure, then crossexamined him a little before laying the burden of the blame on Eve. If the latter was really the tempter she was probably trying to reach the heart of her hubby by that direct route, the stomach—lost heaven for love, as too many of her daughters have since done. The fact that Adam was not willing to father her fault proved him unworthy of his wife, and the bad example he set is too often followed by many of his sons—who attribute all their trials and tribulations to the patient wives whose watchful care keeps them out of the penitentiary. Whatever may have been Eve's fortune, Adam was no great loser by being ejected from Eden, for the man who possesses the love of a good woman carries Paradise with him wherever he goes. A woman's love can transform a hovel into a heaven and fill it with supernal sunshine—and her scorn can make perdition of a palace and put in all the fancy touches.