* * *
Reference has been made by Judge Gerald to the pathetic tragedy in Brann's life because of the loss of his daughter. The burden of sorrow which he bore is beautifully revealed: in the following account of that tragedy which was written by Brann.
THE LAST LESSON.
"Is there no stoning save with flint and rock?
Yes, as the dead we weep for testify—
No desolation but by sword and fire?
Yes, as your moanings witness, and myself
Am lonelier, darker, earthier for my loss."
Poor in gold and goods yet richer than fancy ever fabled in home and happiness, the young father toiled and hoarded his scant wage; the little mother denied herself a thousand things that women covet, and they said: "It is for her, our Inez, our fairy queen. Her feet shall find no thorns in life's path; a father's strength a mother's love shall fill it with sweetest flowers."
Beautiful to their eyes, and other eyes, was she, as Grecian sculptor's dream and still more beautiful when childhood's early years flashed by and the bud was bursting into womanhood's glorious bloom. No crowned empress so imperial seemed, yet pride so womanly and softened by such grace that each and all yielded sweet allegiance to her sway.
And they would sit and watch her at her books or play, drinking with greedy ear her admiring teacher's oft-told tale of triumphs won in classroom or on the green, and watched her comrades,—loving subjects they—weave crowns of flowers for her fair brow and hail her queen.
And so the days went by, toilsome yet happy days until, when scarce passed to her 'teens, the youthful swains began to sigh for her and bashful cast their tribute of flowers—such as they knew she loved—into the open door, then blushingly retreat, fearing cold comfort from her imperious eyes. And one there was of her own age, who seemed to haunt the street, until the mother noticed it and said:
"Daughter, what does he ever near the house?"
And the father fretted and spoke harshly of the boy, and sharply to his child saying: "You do encourage the little fool to haunt the place. Speak to him no more." And the daughter made reply:
"Father, I never spoke to him, nor he to me." And she arose, and taking her music roll went forth and the boy followed her.
"Our daughter deceives us!" cried the father fierce with rage; and he followed the twain.
"You have deceived me, Daughter!"
His voice was sharp, and, quailing before his wrath as though it were a blow, she gasped, "Oh, Father!" and returned with him in silence to their home.
And the little mother fretted and lectured her; but she sat silent, brooding upon the great wrong, and the queenly eyes were full of tears that seemed frozen by her pride and could not fall.
They never fell. The gust of anger from the doting father's lips, the breath of doubt of her dear word, and her little heart seemed broken quite; the world seemed desolate. The father's good-night kiss; the mother's tender solicitude were in vain,—the wound was too deep to heal. And while they slept and dreamed sweet dreams of her fair future she poured her heart out to the good God, who never doubted her, and leaving a little note that was a wailing cry of hopeless pain, passed by her own fair hand to the great beyond.
And the father kissed the dead lips of his first born and knew that he had killed her. And ever in his heart there is a cry, "I killed her!" And night and day that cold, sweet face doth haunt him; and day and night he hears that piteous cry, wrung from his child when he broke her heart, "Oh, Father!" and ever the little mother's lamentation goes up to heaven, "Our house is left unto us desolate!"
SALMAGUNDI.
There is a class of men who take especial delight in pistol practice—when the "other fellow" furnishes the target. They shut their eyes and literally feel what is going on —see pistols flashing, as the man, with a well-developed Texas "jag," sees keyholes in the door at 3 o'clock A.M. —just legions of them. As a matter of fact when pistols are really cracking, powder actually burning and bullets sweetly singing "Nearer my God to Thee," these are the first to seek the sheltering arms of a two-foot wall— "most any old wall," so it won't leak lead.
. . .
I wish to call attention of the readers of the ICONOCLAST to the pack of journalistic jackals who are raising their illfamous howl over the body of Brann. As usual, when the lion is dead the hyena comes forth for a feast. Life is too short and the game too mean to justify individual firing, so I will take a pot-shot at the pock; these animals are so much alike in tastes, character and habits that one will typify all. I therefore call attention to "Majah" Burbanks of the New Orleans Picayune. The state Constitutional Convention has eliminated the negro from Louisiana politics. Had that body also placed journalism under the color ban they would have disposed of the "Majah" most effectively, and, I might add, to the entire satisfaction of all concerned; unless, indeed, the coons had objected to their company. So help me God, I would rather be a yellow dog, with an abbreviated narrative, and belong to a disreputable negro, than go around with my cowardly heart in my throat, fearing to look a man in the face while alive, then mercilessly assail his character after death. Bah! the mere existence of such creatures revolutionizes Darwin's theory—argues the survival of the unfittest.
. . .
It is well for the public to understand that the murder of W. C. Brann did not remove all of the abuses from which this country suffers, and the frauds and fakes which prey upon it. Assassination may shatter an instrument, but it cannot conquer a cause. There is still work for the iconoclast to do, and it will be done. It will continue to place its brand upon the forehead of the seducer, the whining hypocrite, the sniveling rogue, the confidence man, the fakir and the fool. It is proposed to show this country that the pistol is unconvincing as an argument and useless as a brake upon reform. Brann is dead; but there are men alive who lack his phenomenal ability, perhaps, but who share his deathless hatred of the rotten in morals and in politics. The mission for the ICONOCLAST is unchanged and unended. Its field is its own. It will be filled.
. . .
The man who seeks the American spirit must look for it in the South and West. He will not find it in the East. That part of our common country is inhabited by a nation of shopkeepers as distinct from the peoples of the other sections as the lion is distinct from the jackal. They are smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogues, tied to the counter and till, dollar-marked niederlings of the department stores, jack rabbits of wall street, coyotes of the boards of trade. If every man who has traded upon the distress of his country and the peril of his kinsfolk were to be shot this morning, the air of the North Atlantic states would be heavy with powder smoke. From that well kept and wearisome prostitute and buffoon, Chauncey Depew, down to the smallest operator of a bucket-shop, they are all tarred with the same brush—things in trousers who would sell their souls for coin. They own the President of this country, and they own many of the congressmen, having bought and paid for them.
. . .
America, I suppose, is as religious as its neighbors, but it is for the dollar first and for Christ afterward. Easter is a period devoted to commemoration of the saddest and noblest event in human history, the highest and most important event. It is used by thousands of our merchants, however, as a time specially devoted to making money. From the manufacturer of "Easter cards," to the maker of hot cross buns, the signs and symbols of religion are made the means of chasing the nimble 10-cent piece. The cross is the hall mark of printed sentiment, to be sold for a quarter, and the crucifixion is done over and over again in gingerbread. The ICONOCLAST may not get to heaven by the Baptist route or the Methodist route, or by any one of the thousand routes which "Christians" have been pleased to blaze out for sinners in the centuries since Christ died, but it is a long way above that kind of impiety— sacrilege is a better word for it.
. . .
How does the Republican party—the party of gold —look now, from fat Tom Reed at its head down to "Nancy" Green, son of Hetty Green, at its tail? Is it the party of patriotism? May it be trusted to uphold the honor of the nation? Is it honest? Is it even decent? Nay. I say that nine out of every ten Republican congressmen who voted for the intervention resolutions did so because they were driven to it by fear of outraged citizens, Democrats and Republicans alike, not because they were patriots. I say that the representatives of the Republican party are bound hand and foot to the millionaires of America. I say that the leaders of that party are without principle. The polls next November will show what the honest money and honest patriotism people of the nation think of the Republican party.
. . .
From the time that Fitzhugh Lee reached Washington the myrmidons of William McKinley sought to detract from his services to the country and to belittle his rugged patriotism and love of truth. The popinjay in the White House could not bear to listen to the roar of welcome that greeted him as he stepped from the train. It was like the oleaginous Ohio poltroon to inspire detraction of one who is his official inferior, and his superior in everything that goes to make a man. The Virginian is not intellectually great. He is plain of speech and manner. But he has carried high the unstained banner of the lees. He has stood to his post in the face of danger. He has bearded the traitorous Spaniard in his stronghold. He has demonstrated once that God never made a more courageous animal than the Southern gentleman. Beside such a man, the purchasable McKinleys and gross scoundrelly Hannas of the nation are dwarfs.
. . .
Dr. Dowie, of the Chicago "Zion," a place where faith cure fools who have cirrhosis of the liver are allowed to die for a consideration, has written a circular and sent out a million or two of copies. He wants every adult person in the United States to send him 50 cents, so that he can have money to send out more literature with which to catch more fools. The people of Chicago can confer a favor upon themselves and humanity at large by taking Dowie five miles out into Lake Michigan, tying three hundred pounds of scrap iron to his heels and dumping him overboard.
. . .
Mrs. Henrotin, president of the Federation of Women's Clubs, has telegraphed McKinley from Chicago that she, as the representative of that influential band of hens, cordially and heartily indorses everything he has ever done or thought of doing. It is proper to say that Mrs. Henrotin no more represents her sisters than I represent the W. C. T. U. She is only another instance of the modern highly developed female, eaten by an itch for writing and getting her name into the newspapers. The mothers, sisters, wives, daughters and sweethearts of America no more indorse William McKinley than they indorse any other coward. The women of the federated clubs are much like other women when they stop playing upon the ink bottle and begin playing upon the cook- stove. They have taken off Mrs. Henrotin's back hair, and she now eats her meals from the mantelpiece. All of which is proper.
. . .
Little Jimmy Eckles, Cleveland's undersized underling, got some handclaps and whoops from the Chicago Credit Men's Association when he addressed the members at the Grand Pacific Hotel on the night of April 12th. He talked about the business men's longing for war when the country is insulted, and these snipes and jack bailiffs of the big mercantile houses, warmed into drunken courage by gallons of cheap wine, yelped in unison. This auriferous insect, who was for four years comptroller of the currency, is remembered in Washington chiefly for a remarkable burst of speed displayed one night when his timorous mind conceived the idea that a somnolent hackman was going to rob him. He had his dress suit case in one hand and his plug hat in the other, and he covered three blocks in ten seconds. The cabby, whom he had hired, waked in time to discover the meteoric dash, and was the most puzzled man in the capital. Eckles is a warrior, and his credit giving, or refusing, listeners are all warriors.
. . .
J. Guy Smith, of Cotulla, was locally called, so I am informed, "Brann No. 2." Like most other men, he was far behind W. C. Brann in wealth of intellect, in largeness of heart, in charity, in his hatred of wrong and the oppressor. It appears, however, that he had the habit of speaking his mind and he was shot for it. Also that he was shot in the back.
. . .
Joe Leiter, the wheat speculator of Chicago, is followed about all day by detectives whom he has hired to protect him. I do not know if anyone contemplates giving him his deserts, but since he has used his inherited millions to make bread dearer in thousands of poor mouths, he should be whipped twice a day for a month. Under a properly constituted and administered government, Leiter and his kind would be sent to the penitentiary at hard labor. He is as much a robber as any brigand of the Italian passes, and as much of a thief as any pickpocket in America.
. . .
A great many people imagine that "your Uncle Sam" will frazzle hell's bells out of Spain in one word and two motions, that all of this preparation for threatened conflict with Spain is much ado about little; that the United States will get up early some morning and administer the paternal slipper to the Spanish pantaloon, simply by way of diversion or to get up an appetite for breakfast. The result of the scrap may show that the job had best be undertaken after a square meal.
. . .
As the war is not yet on I rise to remark that it is my sincere wish that those who have lost a scrap may find it —that those who have clamored so hard and so long for hostilities to begin, may find standing room only in the theater of war, and be given positions in the full glare of the footlight, with a corporal's guard behind them, to see that they do not strike a retrograde motion when the curtain rises on the first act.
[This completes the last issue of the ICONOCLAST. The publication of the paper was not continued, though evidently this was intended when the May issue was printed. The following articles were written shortly after the death of Brann but did not appear in the ICONOCLAST.]
THE DEATH OF BRANN.
BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.
Mr. Brann, who was killed in Waco last Friday, was a much greater man than even his admirers knew. He had many virtues which, in a way, his peculiar tactics in journalism belied. For instance, his paper was read, for the most part, by people who took a delight in his calling a spade a spade, and, in fact, in his seeking out spades to write about. This was not the true Brann at all. The man was clean-minded in his conversation. He thought cleanly. He lived cleanly as a gentleman should, though he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous ruffian, reveling in the slums. He was essentially a family man and a student who "scorned delights and lived laborious days." His regard for the purity of women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up to his own preachment on all the various forms of integrity with much more strictness than people who affected to believe he was leper. Furthermore the man was an ascetic in his essential spirit. He had the true taste for the finely done thing in letters and if he did not devote himself to what might be called the more refined literary artistry, it was because he felt that there was danger of drawing too fine the lessons he thought it his duty to impart. There was no use, he said, in writing to the few. One should write so that all might read, running. He maintained that the way to instill principles in the people was to secure their attention first, and he did not hesitate to secure their attention by any device that seemed available. Therefore he felt himself justified in appealing to the lower instincts in men in order that, while they were all unsuspecting, he might inculcate something better. And so there ran through his publication the strangest contrasts of sweetness and salacity, of eloquence and bombast, of purity and pornography, of jewel-phrases and gutter slang, excerpts of enthralling poetry and brothel billingsgate. He pointed his morals with putridity and he adorned his really beautiful style with barbarities and banalities which make one shudder. He set his fine thoughts like jewels in compost. He ravished the classics to mix them up with sentences that stunk of the stews. The man seemed to indulge in special flights of poesy with no other purpose than to achieve a disgusting anti-climax of muckery and mockery. The person who read Brann intelligently was impressed most by this habit of irony in the Waconian. It was of the essence of his iconoclasm. He had something in his effects in this line that was piteous. There was no denying his appreciation of the pure air, of the beautiful in life and nature, of the truth as thinkers see and feel it. It seemed to me that when he had soared up towards the ever vanishing ideal, he reached a point whereat he turned in disgust and hurled himself madly back to the dungiest part of this dungy earth. There was a mighty dissatisfaction, even a despair, in Brann, and a touch of sadness in his writing as in his face. The more I read of his deliberate pandering to the literarily excrementitious appetite, the more I saw, or thought I saw, that he was afflicted with a mighty ennui, and was chiefly trying to escape from his own torture as one who knew not whether solace was to be found either in the spiritual or the earthly nature of man. Such a one as he might have been expected to take up any cause that assailed the existing condition of things politically and sociologically. While he was an ascetic his asceticism was only a wreaking of his own bitterness upon himself. He was a man in whom strong emotions were easily excited and he put into his writing all the passion which he suppressed in his dealings with his fellows socially. He never felt malice towards people whom he assailed most maliciously. He saw them simply as representatives of some fault in our social or political system, and he felt that he was doing his duty by his own conception of what the world should be, by pillorying them as object lessons of characters to be eliminated in his good time coming. When he saw a foul wrong he saw it personified in some man or woman. Then he went abroad in search of foul things to say about it. And he found them and he hurled them at the object, and he polluted the atmosphere for a mile around. When he wrote about the abstractions of poetry and philosophy he wrote with a sweeping, swinging rhythm that thrilled anyone. He was master of the diapason. His ear was not attuned particularly to minor chords. He loved cyclonic clashes of words and he would strike out fecal flashes to illuminate them. His correggiosity was at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him often, bore him away from his thought and landed him in some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself, to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephitic. Thus would he, metaphorically, throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brann believed that the country was, if not in itself decadent and degenerate, under the control of decadent, degenerate and depraved men. He believed that society was a social cesspool. He thought that most religion was hypocrisy. He believed that most wealth represented nothing more than the superior and diabolic genius of dishonesty. So believing he so preached and he preached with a vehemence that was in a sense vicious. His terribly irony made his work an engine of anarchy. Not that he meant anarchy at all, but because the people who were caught by his banalities could not differentiate sufficiently to extract the core of truth from the great superstructure of extravagances with which he hid it. Mr. Brann meant only to lift the world up, and one of his queer conceptions was, that his own dragging down of things pure to the lowest levels of life and thought and feeling was calculated to make his multitudinous clientele look upward. He was mistaken. He came to know it, too, for he said to me one evening, "I am only a fad." "I'll pass away when my vogue is done, like brick pomeroy." He wished he could believe that the best way to help people up was to take a stand and view a little above them. He said, when it was suggested that he try this tack, that he feared it was too late. Not that he wholly abandoned his belief in his own plan, but it seemed to me that he felt sorry that once attention could be attracted by being shocking it could only be held by a continuance of the shocks.
. . .
In my personal dealings with Mr. Brann I found him a person of almost feminine fineness. It was amusing to meet him after some particularly atrocious issue of the ICONOCLAST, either personally or by letter, and have him "roar as gently as a sucking dove." In such moods he revealed a character that was really sweet—though I must apologize for that misused word. He was impressed with the pity of life. He loved to toy intellectually with subtleties of thought. He had intuitions in art and poetry, and music touched him truly and deeply. I never have seen such a gentle man with women and his estimate of woman, either in conversation or writing, was a high and noble one. If at times he wrote so that his conception of virtuous womanhood was unpleasantly associated with ideas that revolted you, it was his peculiar belief that purity was all the purer for the contrast and antithesis. He loved children, too, and in his more familiar moods, according to his intimates, he was like one whose heart was as a little child. He cared no more for money after he began to make it than he cared in his bohemian days when he was readier to give than to take. He loved his friends blindly. He did not hate his enemies, he despised them. He had all the manly virtues, courage, generosity, modesty. Yes, modesty; for egoism such as he had was not foolish pride. His egotism was only his own force asserting itself. His friendship was almost foolish. He praised too generously. He was inclined to help everybody he could and I am sure that he never assailed anyone or anything that did not represent to him uncharity and snobbery. He was not envious. His mind was on the Texas scale; he knew no meanness. His was Kentucky origin and he was tainted with Kentucky's quixotism. He loved liberty and he loved love. He was the friend of the people as he dreamed they should be. He was the advocate of the greatest enlargement of rights. With little of what he strove for in immediate political issues did I sympathize. He believed more in what is called socialism than I do, but he believed it most earnestly. He was the greatest force in this country, with his 80,000 issues of his magazine per month, for all the things that go with free silver. His following included all the thinking followers of Bryan and his work had no little effect, in its powerful music and color, upon many people to whom Bryanism represented the political abomination of desolation.
. . .
As to the manner of Mr. Brann's death there is only to be said that he expected it. He judged from the characters of those he attacked, that they would assassinate him. He died as he expected to die, without any cringing to his enemies. Some people he attacked who did not deserve his vitriolic attentions, but he thought they did. In the main he scourged and sacrificed only those who deserved. The manner in which he was killed and the cause in which he was killed—the cause of an institution in which a girl was debauched in the name of Christ and turned out of doors to starve to the glory of religion—glorify him. He who fought in the open was shot by a sneak from behind. The sneak himself was shot in his act of cowardice. Mr. Brann was brilliant and brave. He partook of the qualities of the men who immortalized the Alamo. He was the first man who identified Texas with thought. He loved Texas so well that he defended the code of private and public mobbery for righting wrongs. To that cruel coward code he fell a victim. With all his faults as I see them, I can think of him only as worthy of being buried in some high place, to the strains of Sigfried's Funeral March, and can only say, with Browning of the dead "grammarian"—
Here, here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
lightnings are loosened
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
peace let the day send!
Lofty designs must close in life effects:
loftily lying,
Leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
living and dying.
—The Mirror for April 7, 1898.
PRIVATE VENGEANCE.
A CONSIDERATION OF ALLEGED CHIVALRY.
Some person has sent me a marked copy of the New
Orleans Picayune, the marked matter being an editorial
substantially approving the manner of the taking off of
Mr. Brann, the editor of the Iconoclast.
Granted that, as the Picayune declares, Mr. Brann wantonly attacked spotless reputation, that decency and purity were not sacred to him—an assumption, by the way, that is a rank injustice to Mr. Brann's memory— let us see about this matter of private vengeance which the Picayune approves.
Are there not laws in all the states against libel? Are there not laws against publishing obscene and defamatory matter? If there be, then what justification can there be for private vengeance? What is the use of laws if men on any provocation may set aside those laws and set themselves above them and execute the person who may have offended, or who may be imagined to have offended them? If private vengeance is to prevail what is to prevent any person construing any criticism into a mortal offense and assassinating the critic, even though the critic be palpably and undeniably criticizing for the public good? When the individual is made the judge, jury and executioner of whomsoever displeases him, what becomes of law, of order, of civilization? There is not a day in the year that one could not justify the murder of a hundred editors, if the rightfulness of the killing were determinable solely by what the killers thought of the criticisms against them in the papers controlled by those one hundred editors.
If we can tolerate a state of society in which any man, for what seems to him good and sufficient reason, for anything from biting the thumb at him to jesting about his whiskers, may take the life of another, why shall we not tolerate the man who will take another's property because the taker deems the other has too much or has unjustly accumulated what he has?
What is the result of this sanction of private vengeance? It is anarchy. Pursued to the ultimate of its logic it means that every man is a law unto himself and the justice of an execution rests upon nothing but the opinion, or delusion, of the executioner. What one man might call a trifle might, to another man, call for blood. You could kill a man because his boots creaked or his eyes squinted or he wore the wrong shade of your favorite color in his necktie. Ridiculous? Not at all. Liking or disliking any of these trifling things is only a matter of personal preference. They may be as distasteful to one person as the tone of an editorial is to another. If a man may rightly kill a writer, like Mr. Brann, why would it not be right for someone to kill any editor? At one time there was talk in the south of killing the late Joseph B. McCullagh for his editorials. How if Senator Hanna were to "go gunning" for the editorial "roasters" of himself, or for the malevolent cartoonist? Mr. Brann attacked hypocritic preachers, snide politicians, shoddy society people, shyster lawyers. He did it in, to me, an exaggerated manner, but he felt that such manner was necessary to arouse the people. Were Brann's blasts against Baylor University intrinsically worse, more a license of the press than let us say the assaults of the New York World, the New York Journal or the Post Dispatch upon Pierpont Morgan and the trusts? And yet, if any trust magnate, crucified as a blood-sucker on the poor, were to shoot the editor of one of these sheets, he would be howled to the hangman's noose. The trust magnate would be told he should have had recourse to law. But in the south, no—Mr. Brann was rightfully assassinated. No law for him! Why? Because Mr. Brann assailed a few southern "josses." If Mr. Brann were justly slain then the next person who may dislike an editorial in the Picayune may kill its editor on the ground that the editorial—no matter how trifling in its imputation—is "carrion journalism." This law of chivalric private vengeance would justify a saturnalia of murder in every large city where gossip circulates in society. The chivalry of it! A man has written something he deems to be true and comments upon it as he deems it his duty in a quasi public capacity. Everyone who does not like the article can "take a pop at him." But, says the chivalrous Picayune, the law of private vengeance does not apply to anything save grave offenses in scurrility. Ah! The offensiveness of a criticism is only a matter of individual capacity for pain or humiliation. The trifle is only a trifle, because a man thinks it so. It may become a thing of importance at any time if you leave the decision of its importance solely to the judgment of the man who is going to resent it.
Private vengeance makes for the creation of a caste of bulldozers. Let it become known in a community that criticism is an invitation to death, and who profit? Not the men of spotless reputation. Not the decent and pure elements of the community. Not at all. The ruffian gang in politics profits. The sanctimonious crooks profit. The seducer and betrayer, who is a dead-shot, profits. Every social and civic iniquity flourishes under this dominance of the law of private vengeance. All the people who deserve criticism are ready to shoot. They are the judges of their own spotless reputations. They will kill the man who spots it. So it is that in almost every southern city there has grown up a class of political brahmins absolutely secure from criticism that counts. Take New Orleans. The papers feared for years to breathe a breath of attack against the "spotless reputations" of its leaders. The story of the corruption that developed is too well known to require telling. After all, it is not the people of spotless reputation who are assailed in the papers. Whenever anyone is assailed the chances are there is ground for the assault, and there is at least a prima facie evidence that attack or exposure is necessary in the interest of public morality. Any reputation would be spotless if no one dared attack it. If it were high crime to assail people vigorously how would dishonor, debauchery, fraud and crime in high places ever be brought to light. If the right of private vengeance shall prevail in any community then the ruffians and blackguards may pursue their nefarious ends unhampered because of the terror they inspire by threats to shoot their critics. This recognition of the right of the individual to punish, by the infliction of death, the person who has injured him, puts the community at the mercy of the worst elements in it. It is the extension of the barbarism of lynch law. It makes every man, who wants to be one, a mob. It develops the idea of savagery in revenge to such an extent that the individual executioner of the offender against himself does not hesitate to wreak his vengeance from behind. It promotes assassination.
Aspersions upon the virtue of women are certainly indefensible on any imaginable ground. They demand often a punishment which the law is inadequate to provide. They cannot be ignored. They constitute the exceptions which confirm the rule that it is well to let the law punish slanderers. And in general men are expected to protect to the last extremity the reputations of the women of their family and their acquaintance. The person who attacks publicly or privately the virtue of a woman deserves the limit of vengeance, for the publicity of legal proceedings toward punishment only aggravates the original wrong. Mr. Brann did not attack the virtue of girl-students at Baylor University. He attacked the administration of that institution and the killing of him was the result of a distorted view of the trend of his criticisms. If it were believed that he assailed the virtue of girl-students at Baylor he would not have a single mourner in the southwest. And no man in any part of the United States can have a following of respectable people, if he defames women. The feeling of reverence for woman is so general that it is often a defense for personal violence against writers who never dream of attacking feminine honor. Aside from the fact that death is too light a punishment for the man who attacks womanly chastity, the law of private vengeance is not sweepingly and invariably to be condemned. I am not liberal enough in recognition of the great fact of human nature to admit that the objection to private vengeance is mainly an objection to the recognition of the right of individual execution of the death penalty for any criticism. Men ought not to be shot for criticisms of public institutions. It would be foolish to argue against the fact that men occasionally feel called upon to resent criticism by an appeal to battle without weapons. The killing of critics at the whim of the criticized is the evil against which protest is made. Plain assault and battery is easily defensible on the ground that no one can be expected always to have his temper in control. It makes writers careful, and it is not followed by the regret which follows killing. Writers are expected to keep within bounds in their criticisms, and even then they are certain to generate ill feeling in the criticized and their friends, but so long as the offense is not murderous of reputation and mortally malevolent the private execution of writers is an offense not to be condoned on a mistaken interpretation of chivalry. For all sins of journalistic criticism, outside of the diabolism of blasting reputations for virtue, the law provides adequate remedy, and if it does not, then it were idle to say that the exasperated victims of criticism should not have recourse to their fists, although decent criticism, free from malice, addressed to people in position semi-public would not seem to call for violence under pretense of resenting something much worse. As a rule I should say that the criticism which does not call for extreme and desperate punishment calls for no notice at all, or if it does, in the case of men, there are laws, civil and criminal, that cover the case, with ample punishment for the offense. This is the practical view of the remedies against "carrion journalism."
A public sentiment strong enough to support private vengeance is strong enough to support the law. There are laws for the punishment of slander. More rigorous laws could be enforced. If the people hate slanderers bitterly enough to kill them, then they should hate them enough to see that the laws against slander are enforced. The moral sentiment that can sustain the one could sustain the other. But the individual execution of vengeance is a turning away from the law. It is the fostering of the bully and the killer for drunken pastime. It is a bulwark for boodlers, blackguards, frauds and lechers. It gives rein to individual passion without limit. Such chivalry is barbarism.—Pasquin.
BRANN, THE FOOL.
BY ELBERT HUBBARD, EDITOR OF THE PHILISTINE.
It's a grave subject. Brann is dead. Brann was a fool. The fools were the wisest men at court; and Shakespeare, who dearly loved a fool, placed his wisest sayings into the mouths of men who wore the motley. When he adorned a man with a cap and bells it was as though he had given bonds for both that man's humanity and intelligence. Neither Shakespeare nor any other writer of books ever dared to depart so violently from truth as to picture a fool whose heart was filled with perfidy.
The fool is not malicious. Stupid people may think he is, because his language is charged with the lightning's flash; but they are the people who do not know the difference between an incubator and an egg plant.
Touchstone, with unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk, into exile. When all, even his daughters, have forsaken King Lear, the fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak. And when in our own day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, Mercutio and Jacques, we find they are men of tender susceptibilities, generous hearts and intellects keen as a rapier's point.
Brann was a fool.
Brann shook his cap, flourished his bauble, gave a toss to that fine head, and with tongue in cheek, asked questions and propounded conundrums that stupid hypocrisy could not answer. So they killed Brann.
. . .
Brann was born in obscurity. Very early he was cast upon the rocks and nourished at the she-wolf's teat.
He graduated at the university of hard knocks and during his short life took several post-graduate courses.
He had been wage-earner, printer's-devil, printer, pressman, editor.
He knew the world of men, the struggling, sorrowing, hoping, laughing, sinning world of men. And to those whom God had tempted beyond what they could bear, his heart went out. He read books with profit, and got great panoramic views out into the world of art and poetry; dreaming dreams and sending his swaying filament of thought out and out, hoping it would somewhere catch and he would be in communication with another world.
Discreet and cautious little men are known by the company they keep. The fool was not particular about his associates; children, sick people, insane folks, rich or poor —it made no difference to him. He sometimes even sat at meat with publicans and sinners.
He was a mystic and lived in the ideal. This deeply religious quality in his nature led him into theology, and he became a clergyman—a Baptist clergyman.
But no church is large enough to hold such a man as this; the fool quality in his nature outcrops, and the jingle of bells makes sleep to the chief pew-holder impossible.
So the fool had to go.
Then he founded that unique periodical, which, in three years, attained a circulation of 90,000 copies. This paper was not used for pantry shelves, lamp lighters, or other base utilitarian purposes. It cost ten times as much as a common newspaper, and the people who bought it read it until it was worn out. All the things in this paper were not truth; mixed up amid a world of wit were often extravagance and much bad taste. It was only a fool's newspaper!
In this periodical the fool railed and jeered and stated facts about smirking complacency, facts so terrible that folks said they were indecent. He flung his jibes at stupidity, and stupidity sought to answer criticism by assassination.
Texas has a libel law patterned after the libel law of the State of New York. If a man takes from you your good name you can put him behind prison bars and place shutters over the windows of his place of business.
The people who thought Brann had injured them did not invoke the law. They invoked Judge Lynch——
A mob seized the fool, and, placing a rope about his neck, led him naked through the October night, out to the theological seminary, which they declared he had traduced.
There they smote him with the flat of their hands, and spat upon him. It was their intention to hang the fool, but better counsel prevailed, and on his signing, in terrorem, a document they placed before him, they gave him warning to depart to another state. And on his promising to do so, they let him go.
But the next day he refused to leave; and his flashing wit still filled the air, now embittered through the outrage visited upon him.
His enemies held prayer-meetings, invoking divine aid for the fool's conversion—or extinction. One man quoted David's prayer concerning Shimmei: "bring thou down his hoar head to the grave in blood!" And others still, prayed, "let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."
But still the fool flourished his bauble.
Then they shot him.
That hand which wrote the most Carlylean phrase of any in America is cold and stiff. That teeming brain which held a larger vocabulary than that of any man in America is only clay that might stop a hole to keep the wind away. That soul through which surged thoughts too great for speech has gone a-journeying.
Brann is dead.
No more shall we see that lean, clean, homely face, with its melancholy smile. No more shall we hear the fool eloquently, and oh! so foolishly, plead the cause of the weak, the unfortunate, the vicious. No more shall we behold the tears of pity glisten in those sad eyes as his heart was wrung by the tale of suffering and woe.
His children are fatherless, his wife a widow.
Brann the Fool is dead.—The Mirror.
April 14th, 1898.
* * * WILLIAM COWPER BRANN.
BY J. D. SHAW.
William Cowper Brann was born in Humboldt Township, Coles County, Illinois, January 4, 1855. He was not raised in the home of his parents, though his father, Rev. Noble Brann, survived him, and is still living. His mother having died when he was two and a half years old, he was within the next six months placed in the care of Mr. William Hawkins, a Coles County farmer, with whom he lived about ten years. As to his childhood experiences on the Hawkins' farm nothing is now known. They were probably such as are common to children raised in the country. Of Mr. Hawkins he always spoke kindly, referring to him as "Pa Hawkins." His nature was not suited to farm life, however, and he finally made up his mind to see more of the world, hence without ever having disclosed his resolution to any one, he quietly walked away one dark and cheerless night, carrying in a small box under his arm all that he then possessed, and leaving behind him the friends of his childhood in the only place he had ever known as his home, thus entering upon the active struggle of life at thirteen years of age, without friends, destitute of means, and almost entirely uneducated.
The first position he obtained was that of bell boy in a hotel. Later on he learned to be a painter and grainer, then a printer, a reporter, and finally an editorial writer. He was energetic, industrious and painstaking in whatever he undertook to do, therefore always employed. Early in his struggle he realized the need of an education, in the acquirement of which he applied himself with eager diligence. Nature had endowed him with keen perceptive powers, a retentive memory and great mental vigor, by means of which he soon accumulated considerable knowledge. Every moment that could be spared from his daily toil was spent in reading books of science, philosophy, history, biography and general literature. In this way he became thoroughly informed on almost every important subject, as will be seen by the contents of his writings.
On March 3, 1877, at Rochelle, Illinois, he was married to Miss Carrie Martin, who, with their two children, Grace Gertrude and William Carlyle is now living in the beautiful home, here at Waco, from which he was buried April 3, 1898.
During all the years, from the time he left the hospitable home of Mr. Hawkins, in 1868, until after he had successfully launched "Brann's ICONOCLAST," he suffered the harassing annoyances of extreme poverty, in the endurance of which he was cheerful, hopeful and diligent in the equipment of his mind preparatory to the work he always believed he would some day be able to accomplish.
Beginning his literary career as a reporter, he was soon made an editorial writer, in which capacity he became well-known throughout Illinois, Missouri and Texas. As such he was versatile, forceful and direct. There was no needless repetition of tiresome circumlocution in his composition. He possessed an inexhaustible vocabulary, from which he could always find the words best fitted to convey his meaning at the moment they were most needed, and every sentence was resplendent with an order of wit, humor and satire peculiar to a style original with himself.
In July, 1891, he issued at Austin, Texas, the first number of "Brann's ICONOCLAST." Only a few numbers appeared, when it was suspended and he resumed his editorial work, then on the Globe-Democrat, of St. Louis, Missouri, and later on the Express of San Antonio, Texas. It was in connection with his first attempt to establish the ICONOCLAST that he delivered a few lectures that were well received. In later years he went upon the platform again with every prospect of a successful career in the lecture field.
In the summer of 1894, he settled here in Waco, and, in February of the following year, revived the ICONOCLAST, which was successful from the first issue, having reached, at the time of his death, a circulation of ninety thousand copies. It was through the ICONOCLAST that his genius found full scope for development, and that he became best known to the public. In its columns he dared to be himself. There was now no restraint imposed upon him by timorous publishers. It belonged to him, and in it he gave full wing to his own thought. It was this intellectual freedom, sustained by the magic power and personality of a real genius, that gave to it such widespread popularity.
Mr. Brann has been classed as a humorist. This he was, and of a type peculiar to himself, but he was not content with merely having amused or entertained the people, he aspired to arouse public sentiment in the interest of certain reforms. He was a hater of shams and defied every form of fraud, hypocrisy and deceit. He made of his humor a whip with which to scourge from the temple of social purity every intruder there. He joined in no partisan schemes for place or power, but, confident of his own ground, he would stand alone in the defiance of popular humbugs and frauds. This heroic independence, while admired by many, made him a mark for the envy and hatred of such as feared him, and in the end proved to be the cause of his death.
But with all his uncompromising hatred of shams, there beat in the bosom of W. C. Brann a warm and generous heart for the world at large, and no man was ever a more devoted friend to the poor and needy. No beggar was ever turned away from his door empty handed, and no worthy cause ever asked his help in vain. His religion was to do whatever he believed to be right, and to defy the wrong even though it should be found parading in the garb and livery of righteousness.
Mr. Brann was fond of nature. He loved the mountains, the lakes, the rivers and the billowy sea. He loved to walk amid forest trees and watch the birds fly from bough to bough and warble their songs of love, but in all the wide, wide world, his home life was the most sacred object of his devotion, and when prosperity gave him the means to do so he found great delight in making it beautiful and pleasant. He was fond of his friends, but the love he bore his wife and children was sublimely beautiful, tender and affectionate.
His sudden death was a shock not only to his immediate friends, but to the hundreds of thousands who knew him through the ICONOCLAST. Walking quietly along the street, talking with a friend, he was shot in the back by one T. E. Davis, a partisan on the Baylor side of the Brann-Baylor trouble.
After receiving, without warning, his death wound, Mr. Brann turned upon his assailant, drew a revolver and vindicated his courage by delivering his fire with such deadly aim as to leave Davis in the throes of death, which came to his relief about twenty hours after the fray.
Mr. Brann received three wounds, from the first of which he died at 1:55 a.m., April 2nd, surrounded by his family and many sympathizing friends.
The impression has gone abroad that Mr. Brann was without friends and admirers in Waco. The falsity of this impression was made manifest, by the funeral attendance, said, and generally believed, to have been the largest ever seen here.
He was a believer in religion, therefore, it was not improper that a religious service was held, conducted by Rev. Frank Page, D.D., of the Episcopal church, though the writer, acting in according with the wishes of the family, spoke a few words at the grave.
In Oakwood Cemetery the body of Brann was laid to rest in the embrace of our common mother earth, and under a mound of floral offerings, which though profuse and costly were but a feeble expression of the sincere grief that struck dumb with awe the thousands upon thousands who had learned to love him with an affection accorded to few men.
. . .
My position as to Mr. Brann's style of journalism has been freely expressed, and while he was still alive. I do not approve of all he saw fit to write, nor of the spirit in which he wrote, but that he was a real genius and a benefactor of his race cannot be denied. It was with him, as it is with all men of his type, he made strong and bitter enemies, still his friends and admirers were numbered by thousands, I may safely say hundreds of thousands.
The purposes, direction and character of the ICONOCLAST were in many respects different from those of this Pulpit, nevertheless there was between Mr. Brann and myself a strong tie of friendship that, so far as I know, never suffered the breach of a single moment, and I sincerely mourn his loss as a personal friend whose kindly greetings were to me as glimpses of the sun on a winter's day.
Of humble birth, beset by poverty and environed by many difficulties, he applied himself to the study of literature with such diligence as to acquire abilities possessed by few, and when once equipped for the field he occupied with such consummate skill, no power of prejudice could keep him from rising like a star of the first magnitude. Alas! how soon that star has been obscured and by what ignoble means! But, against great odds, its brief existence was characterized by a brilliancy that no prejudice or hatred can ever obliterate.
Having dealt candidly with Mr. Brann while living, I will not now ignore the fact that he had faults, and his inability to overcome these marred, here and there, the splendor of his intellectual achievements. His faults, though, were of a kind that may be permitted to pass into the grave with his body. His virtues were many, and for these he was loved, despite the imperfections he could not always control. His services to mankind were numerous and they were rendered with a devotion as ardent as that of a lover; for these he will be remembered, nor can any power rob him of his fame as a literary genius—a poet, a humorist and a satirist.
Lectures and Addresses of Brann.
SPEAKING OF GALL.
Gall is a bitter subject, and I shall waste no time selecting sweet words in which to handle it. There's no surplus of sweet words in my vocabulary anyhow. I have never yet been able to rent my mouth for a taffy mill. Webster gives several definitions of Gall; but the good old etymologist was gathered to his fathers long before the word attained its full development and assumed an honored place in the slang vernacular of the day. It was needed. It fills what editors sometimes call a "long-felt want." Gall is sublimated audacity, transcendent impudence, immaculate nerve, triple-plated cheek, brass in solid slugs. It is what enables a man to borrow five dollars of you, forget to repay it, then touch you for twenty more. It is what makes it possible for a woman to borrow her neighbor's best bonnet, then complain because it isn't the latest style or doesn't suit her particular type of beauty. It is what causes people to pour their troubles into the ears of passing acquaintances instead of reserving them for home consumption. It is what makes a man aspire to the governorship, or to air his asininity in the Congress of the United States when he should be fiddling on a stick of cordwood with an able-bodied buck-saw. It is what leads a feather-headed fop, with no fortune but his folly, no prospects but poverty—who lacks business ability to find for himself bread—to mention marriage to a young lady reared in luxury, to ask her to leave the house of her father and help him fill the land with fools. Gall is what spoils so many good ditchers and delvers to make peanut politicians and putty-headed professional men. It is what puts so many men in the pulpit who could serve their Saviour much better planting the mild- eyed potato or harvesting the useful hoop-pole. It is what causes so many young ladies to rush into literature instead of the laundry—to become poets of passion instead of authors of pie.
Gall is a very common ailment. In fact, a man without a liberal supply of it is likely to be as lonesome in this land as a consistent Christian at a modern camp-meeting, or a gold-bug Democrat in Texas. Nearly everybody has it and is actually proud of it. When a young man is first afflicted with the tender passion; when he is in the throes of the mysterious mental aberration that would cause him to climb a mesquite bush and lasso the moon for his inamorata if she chanced to admire it, he is apt to think it love that makes the world go round. Later he learns that Gall is the social dynamics—the force that causes humanity to arise and hump itself.
Gall has got the world grabbed. Politics is now a high- class play, whose pawns are power and plunder; business is becoming but a gouge-game wherein success hallows any means. Our mighty men are most successful marauders; our social favorites minister in the temple of Mammon, our pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night the follies and foibles of the "Four Hundred," our God the Golden Calf. The standard by which society now measures men is the purse; that by which it gauges greatness the volume of foolish sound which the aspirant for immortal honors succeeds in setting afloat, little caring whether it be such celestial harp music as caused Thebe's walls to rise, or the discordant bray of the ram's horn which made Jericho's to fall. This century, which proudly boasts itself "heir to all the ages and foremost in the files of time," doffs its beaver to brazen effrontery, burns its sweetest incense on the unhallowed shrine of pompous humbuggery, while modest merit is in a more pitiable predicament than the traditional tomcat in Tartarus without teeth or toenails.
We make manifest our immeasureable Gall by proclaiming from the housetops that, of all the ages which have passed o'er the hoary head of Mother Earth, the present stands preeminent; that of all the numberless cycles of Time's mighty pageant there was none like unto it—no, not one. And I sincerely hope there wasn't. Perhaps that which induced the Deity to repent him that he had made man and send a deluge to soak some of the devilment out of him, was the nearest approach to it. We imagine that because we have the electric telegraph and the nickel-plated dude, the printing press and the campaign lie, the locomotive and the scandal in high life; that because we now roast our political opponent instead of the guileless young missionary, and rob our friends by secret fraud instead of despoiling our foes by open force, that we are the people par-excellence and the Lord must be proud of us.
Progress and improvement are not always synonyms. A people may grow in Gall instead of grace. I measure a century by its men rather than by its machines, and we have not, since civilization took its boasted leap forward, produced a Socrates or a Shakespeare, a Phidias or an Angelo, a Confucius or a Christ. This century runs chiefly to Talmages and Deacon Twogoods, pauper dukes and divorce courts—intellectual soup and silk lingerie.
. . .
The poets no longer sing of the immortal gods, of war and sacrifice, while the flame mounts to manhood's cheek, red as the fires of Troy: They twitter of lovies and dovies, of posies and goose-liver pie, while pretty men applaud and sentimental maids get moonsick. Cincinnatus no longer waits for the office to seek the man: He sells his brace of bullocks and buys a political boom. No more the Spartan mother gives her long black hair for bow- strings: She blondines it, paints, powders and tries to pass as the younger sister of her eldest daughter. The Norse viking no longer plows the unknown wave, his heart wilder than the wat'ry waste, his arm stronger than tempered steel: He comes to America and starts a saloon. No more the untamed Irish king caroms on the Saxon invader with a seasoned shillalah: He gets on the police force and helps "run the machine," or clubs the head off the harmless married man who won't go home till morning. In these degenerate days the philosopher retires not to the desert, and there, by meditation most profound, wrings from the secret treasure-house of his own superior soul, jewels to adorn his age and enrich the world: He mixes an impossible plot with a little pessimism, adds a dude and a woman whose moral character has seen better days, spills the nauseous compound on the public as a "philosophical novel" and works the press for puffs. Indeed we're progressing; going onward and upward— like the belled buzzard dodging a divorce scandal. Greece had her Pericles, but it was left for us to produce a Parkhurst. Rome had her Cicero and her Caesar, but was never equal to a Culberson or a Corbett. The princes of old conquered the earth, but the modern plutocrats put a mortgage on it. Cleopatra drank pearls dissolved in wine, but whisky straight is said to be good enough for some of her successors. Samson slew the Philistines with a jawbone of an ass; but a modern politician, employing the self-same weapon, would have got 'em to elect him governor. We've got no Helen of Troy; but our "Hell'n Blazes" is a bird o' the same feather. We've got to yield the palm in poetry and philosophy, art and architecture; but when it comes to building political platforms that straddle every important issue and slinging princely style on a pauper income we're out of sight.
How can the acorn become a mighty forest monarch if planted in a pint pot and crossed with a fuzzy-wuzzy chrysanthemum? How can the Numidian lion's whelp become a king of beasts if reared in a cage and fed on cold potatoes, muzzled and made to dance to popular music? How can the superior soul expand until it becomes all-embracing, god-like, a universe in itself, in which rings sweet sphere-music and rolls Jovinian thunder—in which blazes true Promethean fire instead of smolders the sulphurous caloric of the nether world—when its metes and bounds are irrevocably fixed for it—when it can only grow in certain prescribed directions, painfully mapped out for it by bumptious pismires who imagine that their little heads constitute the intellectual Cosmos?
. . .
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, lamented that he lacked Gall; but the melancholy Dane was dead years before the present generation of titled snobs appeared upon the scene. None of the princes or dukes of the present day appear to be short on Gall; none of the nobility seem to be suffering for lack of it. Not long ago a little Duke who owes his title to the fact that his great-grand-aunt was the paramour of a half-wit prince, kindly condescended to marry an American girl to recoup his failing fortunes. A little French guy whose brains are worth about two cents a pound—for soap-grease—put up a Confederate-bond title for the highest bidder and was bought in like a hairless Mexican pup by an American plutocrat. Now half-a-dozen more little pauper princelings and decadent dukelings are trying to trade their worthless coronets for American cash. But the fact that many a man boasting of his American sovereignty will dicker with a titled young duke, instead of using the forecastle of a No. 9 foot to drive his spinal column up through his plug-hat like a presidential lightning-rod; will actually purchase for his daughter some disgusting little title upon which rests the fateful bar-sinister of a woman's shame, and is encumbered by a dizzy young dude, too lazy to work and too cowardly to steal—too everlastingly "ornery" to raise a respectable crop of wild oats-proves that the young lollipop lordlings haven't a monopoly of the Gall of the Globe.
A most shameful exhibition of Gall is the practice now coming into vogue with certain society ladies of encouraging newspapers to puff their charms—even paying them so much a line for fulsome praise. Not a few metropolitan papers reap a handsome profit by puffing society buds whom their fond parents are eager to place on the matrimonial market, hoping that they will "make good matches"; in other words, that they will marry money— its possessors being thrown in as pelon. Even married women, who are long on shekels but short on sense, sometimes pay big prices to get their portraits in the public prints—accompanied by puffs that would give a buzzard a bilious attack.
But the Gall of the girl who puts her picture in the papers, accompanied by a paid puff of her "purty," scarce equals that of the conceited maid who imagines she has only to look at a man and giggle a few times to "mash him cold"—to get his palpitating heart on a buckskin string and swing it hither-and-yon at pleasure. How the great he-world does suffer at the hands of those heartless young coquettes—if half it tells 'em be true! David said in his haste that all men are liars. And had he carefully considered the matter he would have come to the same conclusion. Washington may have told his father the truth about that cherry-tree; but later in life he became entirely too popular with the ladies for a man unable to lie.
It is natural for men to pay court to a pretty woman as for flies to buzz about a molasses barrel; but not every fly that buzzes expects to get stuck, I beg to state. The man who doesn't tell every woman who will listen to him —excepting, perhaps, his wife—that she's pretty as a peri, even though she be homely enough to frighten a mugwump out of a fat federal office; that she's got his heart grabbed; that he lives only in the studied sunshine of her store- teeth smile and is hungering for an opportunity to die for her dear sake—well, he's an angel, and he-seraphs are almighty scarce I beg of you to believe. Since Adonis died and Joseph was gathered to his fathers none have appeared that I am aware of. These young gentlemen were all right, I suppose; but I'd like to see either of them get elected nowadays on the Democratic ticket in Texas.
But feminine conceit, fed on flattery, were as milk-shake unto mescal, as a kiss by mail to one by moonlight compared with the insufferable egotism of the "pretty man" who puts his moustache up in curl-papers and perfumes his pompadour; who primps and postures before an amorous looking-glass and imagines that all Eve's daughters are trying to abduct him. Whenever I meet one of these male irresistibles I'm forcibly reminded that the Almighty made man out of mud—and not very good mud at that. The two-legged he-thing who makes a clothes-horse of himself and poses on the street-corner perfumed like an emancipation day picnic; who ogles a pretty woman until the crimson creeps into her cheek, then prides himself on having captured her heart like the boy caught the itch,— because he couldn't help it—when she's only blushing for the mother who bore the pitiful parody on manhood; who imagines that every maid who deigns to waste a smile on him is sighing her soul out for his sweet sake, has allowed his Gall to go to his head and curdle his brains.
. . .
More than a moiety of our so-called great men are but featherless geese, possessing a superabundance of Gall— creatures of chance who ride like driftwood on the crest of a wave raised by forces they cannot comprehend; but they ride, and the world applauds them while it tramples better men beneath its brutal feet. Greatness and Gall, genius and goose-speech, sound and sense have become synonyms. If you fall on the wrong side of the market men will quote the proverb about a fool and his money: if on the right side you're a Napoleon of finance. Lead a successful revolt and you are a pure patriot whose memory should be preserved to latest posterity; head an unsuccessful uprising and you are a miserable rebel who should have been hanged. "Nothing succeeds like success." Had the Christian religion failed to take root, Judas Iscariot would have been commemorated in the archives of Rome as one who helped stamp out the hateful heresy, and had Washington got the worst of it in his go with Cornwallis he would have passed into history as a second Jack Cade.
Alexander of Macedon was great, as measured by the world's standard of eminence. After two-and-twenty centuries our very babes prattle of this bloody butcher, and even his horse has been enshrined in history. In our own day Father Damien left kindred and country and went forth to die for the miserable lepers in the mid-Pacific, but he is already forgotten—his name and fame have faded from the minds of men. Yet greater and grander than all the blood-stained princes and potentates of earth; nobler, more god-like than all the proud prelates that ever aired their turgid eloquence at Christian conference or ecumenical council was that young priest; but no cenotaph rises to commemorate his sacrifice—silent as his own sealed lips is the trumpet of fame.
But for Gall of the A1, triple X brand, commend me to the little pot-house politician who poses as a political prophet and points out to wiser men their public duties. We have to-day in this land of the free and home of the crank, thousands of self-important little personages who know as little of political economy as a parrot of the power of prayer, prating learnedly of free-trade or protection, greenbackism or metallic money. Men who couldn't tell a fundamental principle from their funny- bone, an economic thesis from a hot tamale—who don't know whether Ricardo was an economist or a corn-doctor— evolve from their empty ignorance new systems of "saving the country," and defend them with the dogmatic assurance of a nigger preacher describing the devil—make gorgeous displays of their Gall. I have noticed that, as a rule, the less a man knows of the science of government the crazier he is to go to congress. About half the young statesmen who break into the legislature imagine that Roger Q. Mills wrote the Science of Economics, and that Jefferson Davis was the father of Democracy.
But the Gall is not confined to the little fellows—the big political M.D.'s have their due proportion. The remedies they prescribe for Uncle Sam's ailments remind me of the panaceas put on the market by the patent-medicine men— warranted to cure everything, from a case of cholera-morbus to an epidemic of poor relations. We have one school of practitioners prescribing free-trade as a sure-cure for every industrial ill, another a more drastic system of protection. One assures us that the silver-habit is dragging us down to the demnition bow-wows, another that only an heroic dose of white dollars will save us from industrial death. Political claptrap to corral the succulent pie— "issues" to get office. We have had high and low tariff, the gold and silver standard, greenbackism and "wild-cat" currency; we have had presidents of all shades of political faith and congresses of every kind of economic folly; yet in a single century America has risen from the poorest of nations to the wealthiest in all the world. True it is that wealth is congested—that willful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand—that the land is filled with plutocrats and paupers; but this distressing fact is due to the faults of our industrial system itself, and can never be reformed by placing fiddle-strings on the free list or increasing the tariff on toothpicks.
Gall? Ye gods! Look at the platform promises of the blessed Democratic party—then at its performances! Look at the party itself—a veritable omnium-gatherum of political odds and ends, huddled together under the party blanket like household gods and barn-yard refuse after a hurricane. High and low tariffs and free-traders; gold- bugs, green-backers and bi-metallists; Cleveland and Croker, Altgeld and Olney, Hill and Hogg, Waco's Warwick and Colonel Culberson's kid, all clamoring to be dyed- in-the-wool Democrats! When I get a new main-spring put in my vocabulary I'm going to tackle the Gall of the Populists and Republicans.
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Some specimens of Gall amaze me by their greatness, some amuse me, while others only spoil my appetite. Of the latter class is the chronic kicker who is forever fuming about feminine fashions. If the hoop-skirt comes in this critic is in agony; if the "pull-back" makes its appearance he has a fit and falls in it. Ever since Eve attired herself in a few freckles and fig-leaves he's been reforming the fashions. Don't mind him, ladies. Like a peacock crying in the night, he's disagreeable, but not dangerous. Adorn yourselves as you see fit; follow such fashions as seem good in your sight, and have no fear that the sons of men will ever forsake you because of your clothes. When you find a man dictating to the ladies what they shall wear you're pretty apt to see his head housed in a stove- pipe hat—the most inartistic and awkward monstrosity ever designed by the devil to make the Almighty ashamed of his masterpiece. In all history there's no record of a great idea being born in a beegum. I never saw a statue of a hero or picture of a martyr with a plug hat on. Imagine the Lord laying aside a silk cady preparatory to preaching that Sermon on the Mount—or Napoleon apostrophizing the pyramids in a plug! Before finding fault with the fashions of the ladies just imagine Apollo in the make-up of a modern society swell, loafing into court on High Olympus! Why Jove would hit him with a thunderbolt so hard there'd be nothing left of him but a wilted chrysanthemum and a pair o' yaller shoes!
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For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to him who had nowhere to lay his head; who pay a preacher $15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in the great cities of every Christian country children must steal or starve and women choose between death and dishonor. New York is crowded with costly churches that lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the clouds with golden fingers—monuments which Mammon rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value mounts up into the millions; yet I learn—from a religious paper, mark you—that 100,000 men, women and children were evicted in New York alone last year for the non- payment of rent; turned into the streets to suffer summer's heat or winter's cold—to beg, or starve, or steal, as they saw fit. I find these startling statistics in the same column with a tearful appeal for more money to send missionaries to black barbarians—on the same page with a description of a new church that must have cost a cold half-million of cash. That's what I call sanctified assurance—gall masquerading as grace. And what is true of New York is true, in greater or less degree, of every town from Plymouth Rock to Poker Flats, from Tadmor-in-the- Wilderness to Yuba Dam. Everywhere the widow is battling with want, while we send Bibles and blankets, prayer- books and pie, salvation and missionary soup to a job-lot of lazy niggers whose souls aren't worth a soumarkee in blocks-of-five—who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates were wide open, but once inside would steal the eternal throne if it wasn't spiked down. Let the heathen rage; we've got our hands full at home. I'd rather see the whole black-and-tan aggregation short on Bibles than one white child crying for bread.
While Europe and America are peddling saving grace in pagan lands—and incidentally extending the market for their cheap tobacco, snide jewelry and forty-rod bug-juice —they are also building warships and casting cannon— preparing to cut each other's throats while prating of the prince of peace! The idea of countries that have to build forts on their frontiers and keep colossal standing armies to avoid being butchered by their own Christian brethren; that are full of divorce courts and demagogues, penitentiaries and poorhouses, sending young theological goslings, who believe that all of divine revelation can be found in one book, to teach the philosophic Hindu the road to heaven! Gall! Why the men we are trying to convert were preaching the immortality of the soul when the Hebrew prophets were putting people to the sword for accepting it; they were familiar with all the essential features of the Christian faith a thousand years before the crucifixion of Christ. Charity begins at home. In our own country children are coming up in ignorance and crime, while sect vies with sect in the erection of proud temples in which polite society may display its Parisian finery while pretending to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush.