The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12

by William Cowper Brann

In this work of reform we've got to begin at the bottom —with the body politic itself. You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear, nor Sovereigns of men who were born to be Slaves. We've got to grade up or we're gone. Only superior Intelligence is capable of self-government— Ignorance and Tyranny go hand in hand. You may theorize until the Bottomless Pit is transformed into a skating park; you may vote tariffs high or low and money hard or soft; you may inaugurate the Single-Tax or transform the American Republic into a commune, but the condition of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water will never be permanently bettered while Ignorance and Vice have access to the ballot-box.

We have carried the enchanting doctrine of "political equality" entirely too far and are paying the penalty. The rebound from the monstrous doctrine of the divine right of monarchs has hurried us into equal error. Disgusted with the rottenness of the established religion, the French people once crowned a courtesan as Goddess of Reason; maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism, our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlum's reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless nescience Columbia's imperial crown. That the greater must guide the lesser intelligence is nature's immutable law. To deny this were to question our right to rule the beast and God's authority to reign King of all mankind. Self-preservation will yet compel us to guard the sacred privileges of American sovereignty as jealously as did Rome her citizenship.

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Do this, and all other needed reforms will follow as surely and as swiftly as the day-god follows the dawn. Knowledge is power. When those who vote fully understand that every dollar expended by government, federal, state or municipal, must be created by the common people —that first or last, labor must furnish it forth—we'll cease having billion-dollar Congresses. We'll cease paying a hundred and forty millions per annum in federal pensions; we'll cease wasting a King's ransom annually in pretending to "improve" intermittent creeks and impossible harbors solely for political navigation; we'll cease borrowing money in time of peace to bolster up that foolish financial fetich known as the "gold-reserve"; we'll cease making so many needless laws and paying aspiring patriots fat salaries to harass us with their enforcement; we'll cease exempting from taxation the half-million dollar church and laying a heavier mulct on the mechanic's cottage and the widow's cow; we'll cease paying preachers five dollars a minute to stand up in our legislative halls and insult Almighty God with perfunctory prayers; we'll cease building so many palatial prisons where thieves and thugs may be cared for at the expense of honest people, but will divide criminals into classes—those who should be peremptorily hanged, and those who should be whipped and turned loose to hustle their own hash. Nothing knocks the sawdust out of false sentiment so quickly as the realization that it's an expensive luxury and that we must pay the freight.

Billion-dollar Congresses, eh? Do you know what that means? There are less than fifteen million wealth creators in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of their pockets—something over $66 apiece! If you had it in silver dollars—and I suppose that most of you would accept silver—you couldn't count it in a century. Lay the coins edge to edge and they'll belt the world. Pile them on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Perchance from the top you'll see many things—among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county and municipal government, then come down firm in the faith that if this isn't a great government it ought to be, considering what it costs. No wonder the workman carries in his pocket only an elegant assortment of holes!

We're governed entirely too much—Officialism is becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's Sinbad. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant of some sort, and you cannot get married or buried, purchase a drink or own a dog except with a by-your-leave to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states suicide itself is an infraction of the criminal code, and if the police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail the preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law this state and county and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that so plain that he who runs may read and reading understand. And when so printed and so understood, without the possibility of misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a man into the judicial hopper not even an astrologer can tell whether he'll come out a horse-thief or only a homicide —or whether the people will weary of waiting on the circumlocution office and take a change of venue to Judge Lynch.

This can never be a land of religious liberty—the atheist can never be considered as on a political parity with his ultra-orthodox brother—until we compel church property to bear its pro rata of the public burdens.

And right here let me say a word about the "Apostle." I have been accused by people—for whom no cherry-tree blooms or little hatchet is ground—of being a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the roots, rob trusting hearts of their hope and deprive the preacher of his daily bread. Now I might just as well confess to you that I'm no angel. If I were I'd fly out of Texas till the bifurcated Democratic party has another "harmony" deal. When you hear people denouncing me as an atheist, just retire to your closet and pray, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." And you might add, that nobody cares. No mortal son of Adam's misery can produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered, disrespectful of ANY religion—and that's more than you can say of most of the ministers.

But it is not right, it is not just that the little holdings of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples exempted—palatial edifices in which polite society pretends to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries, and a costly church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so, for he never built one.

Congregations that can afford to erect fine churches and export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes, can afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing our streets in grim despair; a million children coming up in ignorance and crime; a million women hesitating between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy, and the church—supposed to be God's ministering angel— crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little. Remember the widow's mite"—so acceptable to a pauper deity.