If I might presume to tender a few words of advice to so
high and mighty a personage as the president of the
University of Texas, I should recommend that he carefully
study the Solomonic proverb: "Even a fool, when he
holdeth his peace, is counted wise; and he that shutteth
his lips is esteemed a man of understanding." In
other words, never pull your trigger until sure you're loaded;
for while a fizzle causes the unskillful to laugh, it cannot but
"make the judicious grieve." Every man capable of tracing
effects to their efficient causes, who chanced to hear or
read President George T. Winston's address before the
Association of Superintendents and Principals of Public
Schools, must have sighed in bitterness of soul, "Poor Old
Texas!" These gentlemen, assembled for the ostensible
purpose of enhancing their proficiency by the interchange of
ideas, had a right to expect valuable instruction from the
lips of a man who occupies the post of honor in the chief
educational institute of the State; but were regaled with a
cataclysm of misinformation, precipitated from an
amorphous mind, which seemed to be a compromise
between Milton's unimaginable chaos and that "land of
darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as
darkness." That such an address could proceed from the
president of a State University is most remarkable; that it
should be received as an oracle by the men at whose feet
sit the youth of Texas is simply astounding. I read the
address in no unfriendly or hypercritic spirit, for none rejoice
more than I in whatsoever contributes, even a little, to the
luster of the Lone Star. Every laurel won by Texas in the
forum or the field is worn by all her citizens; her every
failure in the arena of the world is shame to all her sons.
President Winston evidently appreciated the importance of
the occasion but was unable to rise to it. Instead of an
address at once philosophic and practical, conveying to his
auditors a clear concept of duty and the best method of
discharging it, he indulged in a rambling country lyceum
discourse, wherein worthless conclusions were drawn by
main strength and awkwardness from false premises,
interlarded with glaring misstatements and seasoned
with Anglomaniacal slop. It is not pleasant to think of
hundreds of bright young minds being molded by a man
who is a living vindication of Sheridan, long accused of
libeling nature in his character of Mrs. Malaprop. "What,"
says Pope, "must be the priest when the monkey is a
god?" And what, the taxpayers of Texas well may ask,
must be the day-drudges of an educational system wherein
a Winston occupies the post of honor? Where Texas found
the party whom she has made president of her boasted
university, I cannot imagine, but he talks like an Anglicized
Yankee--one of those fellows who try to conceal the
cerulean hue of their equators by wearing the British flag
for a belly-band. It is but mournful consolation to reflect
that the chiefs of pretentious educational institutes
elsewhere have proven by their parroting that they have as
little conception of the social contract and true position of
the pedagogue in "the scheme of things," as has our own
'varsity president. Texas' educational system is probably up
to the average, and President Winston as wise as many
other pompous "gerund-grinders" who look into leather
spectacles and see nothing, yet imagine that, like the
adventurer in the Arabian tale, they are gazing upon all the
wealth of the world; but that is no reason why we should
continue to waste the public revenue on Lagado professors
who would extract sunbeams from cucumbers and calcine
ice into gunpowder. While nothing short of a perusal of the
complete text of the oration in question can give an
adequate ides of how much folly a 'varsity president can
pump through his face in a given period, its salient features
can be summed up in a brief paragraph:
"The schoolmaster represents the two greatest factors in
modern progress--education and organization. These two
factors are really one, for education is a means to
organization. Power unorganized is no longer power.
Organization means strength and progress; individualism
means weakness and decay. The English people have
risen by organized effort to the mastery of the globe. They
have created the cheapest and most efficient government,
combining in the highest degree individual liberty and
national power. They have created the greatest store of
things contributing to the welfare, happiness and refinement
of humanity, and in education, literature, science and art
have lifted humanity upon the highest plane of civilization.
The Irish race is deficient in the faculty of organization, and
will be crushed out with the Indian and Negro, by the more
highly organized races. Football requires better
organization than do other games, a higher order of
intellect, hence its popularity with the people. The best
universities may be expected to furnish the best football
teams. The superior organization of the North enabled it to
surpass the South in peace and crush it in war. The public
schoolteacher, being the chief factor in organization, to him
must be given the credit for the quick recovery of the South
from the ravages of civil war. He is the chief power in
things material as well as in matters intellectual. He alone
can introduce new systems of thought and action in any
province of human endeavor."
Having thus seined President Winston's rhetorical sea, let
us examine our catch and determine what is valuable food
and what mere jelly-fish. That the schoolmaster is a very
important factor in the social system there can be no
question. Let him have all the honor to which he is entitled;
but let him not seek to appropriate that which belongs to
others. The pedagogue is not the fount of wisdom: he is
but the pipe--of large or small caliber as the case may be--
through which the wisdom of others flows to fertilize the
intellectual fields. How much, prithee, have all the
public pedagogues of America--including the president of
the Texas 'varsity--added to the world's stock of wisdom
during the last decade? Does it begin to dawn upon
President Winston that there is another very important
factor in the world's progress, viz., the Newtons, Bacons,
Koperniks, Watts, Edisons, Shakespeares, Burkes, Keplers,
Platos, Jeffersons and others who, by patient research or
the outpourings of super-gifted minds have furnished forth
the pedagogue's stock-in-trade? Science and Art,
Philosophy and Religion--all that contributes to man's
welfare, material or spiritual, originated in obscure closets
and caves, in the open fields, beneath the star-domed vault
of night, and during all these ages have received chief
furtherance from individual genius or application, the
schools but recording the progress made, spreading abroad
more or less skillfully, the sacred fire wrested from Heaven
by intellectual Titans. Still the pedagogue may well be
proud of his profession, for it is a privilege to think--or even
think at--the thoughts of men of genius, to officiate as their
messengers to mankind. Let these royal heralds flourish
their birchrods in every bypath, cry "The King!" and thereby
get much honor. Winston says that education and
organization are really the same, because one is a means
to the other. How that may be I know not. An avowal of
love is usually a means to a baby; still it were a work of
supererogation to put diapers on a proposal of marriage.
Organization is ever education of a certain sort; but
education is not always organization. Many of the world's
wisest have stood, like Byron, AMONG men, but not OF
them--"In a shroud of thoughts which were not their
thoughts."
Oxen organized in teams may accomplish more than
working single; but you cannot yoke Pegasus and a plow-
horse--Bellerophon's winged mount peremptorily refuses
to be "organized" and turn rectilinear furrows, but
plunges through Time and Space in an orbit of its own
making--often mistaken by the patient organizers for a
lawless comet, its appearance a dire portent. You cannot
drive Shakespeare and Charles Hoyt in double harness, nor
make the mock-bird and night-hawk sing in harmony.
The public pedagogue does not go out every morning
before breakfast and, with ferula for Archimedean lever and
Three R's for fulcrum, prize open the gates of day. The
organization of infants of every conceivable degree of
intellectuality into classes, and their formal elevation
through successive "grades" by means of cunningly
devised educational jack-screws or block-and-tackle, does
not constitute the complete dynamics of the universe,
President Winston to the contrary, notwithstanding.
Knowledge must exist somewhere before there be any
pedagogue to impart it; and though, under the name of
Truth, it hide in Ymir's Well, those whose souls are athirst
therefore will assuredly find it, though denied all mechanical
furtherance. Education is simply the acquirement of useful
information, it matters not how nor where nor when.
Deprive any man--even a 'varsity president--of all
knowledge but that obtained in the schools and he were
helpless as an infant abandoned in mid-ocean. He could
not so much as distinguish between peas and beans,
between dogs and wolves, by the descriptions furnished by
naturalists. That man who has lived to learn wisely and
well has reached the Ultima Thule of terrestrial knowledge,
the ne plus ultra of human understanding. More can no
college professor or 'varsity president impart. If he know
not this he is uneducated, though he be graduate of every
university from Salamanca to the Sorbonne, and from
Oxford to Austin.
Organization connotes mutual interdependence of the
component parts, limitation of individualism, the
circumscription of personal liberty. To a certain extent this
is advantageous to man--without it civilization, human
progress, were impossible; but to draw a line between wise
use and abuse were a task of some difficulty. President
Winston assures us that the British Government is the best
in the world, yet it is a chaos compared to the organization
of the Russian autocracy. Because we find beneficial that
organization which makes cooperation possible, would he
carry it to the extent of communism? Because
concentration of capital reduces cost of production, does he
approve of that organization which enables trusts to juggle
prices? When organization has reached that point where
one-third of our wealth-producers must stand idle because
denied the privilege of producing the wherewithal to feed
and clothe and house themselves, it might be well for
'varsity presidents to apply the soft pedal to their paean
of praise and inquire diligently whether it be possible to get
entirely too much of a good thing. Too many accept St.
Paul's concession of a little wine for the stomach's sake for
license to become sots.
Thomas Carlyle, who could see almost as far into a
millstone as the average 'varsity president, was of the
opinion that the tendency to ever more compact
organization was transforming both education and religion
into farces, blighting the spiritual and intellectual life of man
and precipitating in the world of industry the most important
and complex question with which political economists had
ever been called upon to deal. That was nearly seventy
years ago, when vast organization of capital had just
begun--when the age of machinery, both for the grinding of
corn and the inculcation of knowledge, was but nascent.
Hear him growl:
"Though mechanism, wisely contrived, has done much for
man, we cannot be persuaded that it has ever been
the chief source of his worth or happiness. . . . We have
machines for education. Instruction, that mysterious
communing of Wisdom and Ignorance, is no longer an
indefinable, tentative process, requiring a study of individual
aptitude, and a perpetual variation of means and methods
to attain the same end; but a secure, universal,
straightforward business to be conducted in the gross, by
proper mechanism, with such intellect as comes to
hand. . . . Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend
on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now
discovers the system of the world by the falling of an apple;
but some quite other than Newton stands in his Museum,
his Scientic Institution, and behind whole batteries of
retorts, digesters and galvanic piles imperatively
'interrogates nature'--who, however, shows no haste to
answer. In defect of Raphaels, and Angelos, and Mozarts,
we have Royal Academies of Painting, Sculpture, Music;
whereby the languishing spirit of Art may be strengthened
by the more generous diet of a Public Kitchen. . . . Hence
the Royal and Imperial Societies, the Bibliotheques,
Glypthotheques, Technotheques, which front us in all
capital cities, like so many well-finished hives, to which it is
expected the stray agencies of Wisdom will swarm of their
own accord, and hive and make honey! . . . Men have
grown mechanical in head and heart as well as in hand.
They have lost faith in individual endeavor and in natural
force of any kind. Not for internal perfection, but for
external combination and arrangement, for institutions,
constitutions--for Mechanism of one sort or another, do they
hope and struggle. . . . Science and Art have derived only
partial help from the culture or manuring of institutions--
often have suffered damage."
Of course Carlyle may have been mistaken; still the fact
that since he uttered his warning the world has not
produced one man of genius except in the department of
mechanics--that intellectually the last half of the present
century is to the first half as "moonlight unto sunlight and
as water unto wine"; that religion is becoming even more
materialistic, patriotism passing and poetry dying or already
dead; that millionaires are multiplying while the legion of
idle labor grows larger, suggests that important inferences
may be drawn from this ever-increasing organization of
powers spiritual and material; and, like Quintius Fixlien, I
"invite the reader to draw them."
If "the English race" be indeed "rising to the mastery of
the globe," there is no cause for immediate alarm, for, at
his present rate of progress, it will be some ages yet before
John Bull succeeds in stealing it all. Nations, like
individuals, have their youth, their lusty manhood and their
decline; and there is every indication that Britain has
passed the meridian of her power, while Russia and
America, her equals in the arena of the world, still find their
shadows falling toward the west. Persia, Assyria, Rome
and Spain have aspired to the lordship of the world; and
each in turn has been brought low by that insidious power
that for a century has been draining the iron from the blood
of England--the love of luxury, the subjection of Glory to
Greed. If history be "philosophy teaching by example," the
lion of Britain is senescent, if not already dead and stuffed
with sawdust; but let the world look well to that savage
brute known as the Russian bear. No: England is not
"master of the globe," nor can she ever be; for her home
territory is trifling and distant provinces are a source of
weakness in war.
It were idle to discuss with a confirmed Anglomaniac the
respective merits of the British and American governments.
It may be that the former is "cheapest," despite the
maintenance of an established church, a great army and
navy and a sovereign who, with her worthless spawn, costs
the taxpayers $3,145,000 per annum, while our president
requires less than one-sixtieth of that sum. England does
not pension the adult orphan children of men who sprained
their moral character in an effort to dodge the draft, nor
does Queen Victoria sell government bonds to banker
syndicates on private bids; hence I will have no controversy
with the learned Theban on the question of economy. The
British subject may enjoy greater "individual liberty" than
does the American sovereign, for aught I am prepared to
prove. True, he is taxed to support a church founded by
that eminent Christian Apostles Henry VIII, and whose next
fidei defensor will be the present worshipful Prince of
Wales; is represented in but one branch of Parliament and
has no voice in the selection of his chief executive officer.
If the sovereign and hereditary house of lords refuse to do
his bidding, he must grin and bear it, while we can "turn
the rascals out"--even if we turn a more disreputable crew
of chronic gab-traps and industrial cut-throats in. He enjoys
one privilege which is denied us, much to the dissatisfaction
of our Anglomaniacs, that of purchasing titles of nobility; but
we can acquire a life tenure of the title of Judge by
arbitrating a horse-trade or officiating one term as justice of
the peace, while by assiduous bootlicking we may, like
Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, obtain a lieutenant-colonelcy--or
even a gigadier-brindleship--on the gilded staff of some 2 x
4 governor, and disport in all the glorious pomp and
circumstance of war at inaugural balls or on mimic
battlefields; hence honors are easy.
. . . . . .
That the Irish race is deficient in the organizing faculty is a
great discovery, and I would advise President Winston
to apply for a patent. John Bull will prove himself
ungrateful indeed if he neglects to pension him for having
demonstrated that those Irish organizations which, for half a
century have kept his public servants looking under their
beds o' nights for things neither ornamental nor useful,
were mere Fata Morganas, Brocken specters or disease of
the imagination. Winston has evidently been misled by a
mere than Boeotian ignorance blithely footing it hand-in-
hand with a vivid anti-Celtic imagination. He does not know
that Ireland was the seat of learning and the expounder of
law, both human and divine, when the rest of Europe was a
wide-weltering chaos in which shrieked the demons
Ignorance and Disorder. He was oblivious of the fact that
the American people--the master organizers of the age--are
far more Irish than English. You can scarce scratch an
American babe of the third generation without drawing
Celtic blood. Strange that the only Federal regiment which
did not go to pieces at the Battle of Bull Run, though
occupying the hottest part of the field--was composed of
these very Irishmen who are incapable of organization!
McClellan, the greatest military organizer of modern times--
though by no means the ablest commander--was of Celtic
extraction, as was the Duke of Wellington, as are the men
at the head of the British and American armies to-day.
Were President Winston better informed he would not talk
so glibly of what the "English race" has done for literature.
No Englishman of pure Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Saxon-
Norman lineage has ever reached the front rank in the
great Republic of Letters. In Art and Science, in Oratory
and Music--even in War and Commerce--they have had to
content themselves with walking well to the rear of the
band-wagon. Shakespeare was of Welsh descent, but
whether of Celtic or Cimbric stock it were difficult to
determine. The Cimbri and Celts are both very ancient
races. A remnant of the former is found in Wales, while the
survivors of the latter are the Irish and Scotch Highlanders.
Northern France and Wales have strong Celtic contingents.
Byron, "Rare" Ben Jonson, Christopher North, Oliver
Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Lawrence Sterne and Louis
Stevenson were Celts by blood. Scott, Burns, Carlyle and
Macaulay were Scots of Celtic extraction. Tom Moore,
Brinsley Sheridan and Edmund Burke were Irishmen, as are
Balfe and Sullivan, the musical composers. Disraeli was a
Jew. The genealogy of Pope and Tennyson remain to be
traced. That the original Duke of Marlborough was an
Englishman by birth and breeding "goes without saying."
He acted like one. No Celtic commander could have
robbed his dead soldiers. In the province of belles-lettres
John Bull can at least claim Alfred Austin, his present poet-
laureate, and Oscar Wilde, the dramatic decadent. Dr.
Jameson is England's military lion and President George T.
Winston of the Texas 'varsity her representative of learning!
The English proper are but "a nation of shopkeepers," and
the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons.
England's great manufacturers are Scots, her merchant
princes are Irishmen, her leading bankers are Jews and her
reigning family an indifferent breed of Low Dutch. The
Romans overran England, but unable to subjugate either
Scotland or Ireland, abandoned "perfidious Albion," as a
worthless conquest. Everybody took a turn at robbing it
whenever it had anything worth carrying off, until the
Norman buccaneers appropriated it bodily and reduced the
Saxons to serfdom. By amalgamation with the inferior race
they produced the Tudors, who gave them 'An'some 'Arry
and a Virgin (?) Queen. Then the Scotch Stuarts took a
turn at ruling and robbing England, and were followed by
the religious bigots and witch-burners. The French
ruled it awhile through their puppets and were succeeded
by the Dutch, who held it in such contempt that they would
not permit its language to be spoken at court. They are still
milking it for more than three millions per annum, with an
extra pull at the udder whenever one of the seventy-odd
descendants of the Sovereign concludes to found a family.
The Scotch, the Welsh and Dutch enabled England to
enslave and plunder Ireland, and upon this meat John Bull,
the J. Caesar of pawnbrokers, is growing great.
I much fear that President Winston studied sports under the
tuition of Referee Earp, else he could have scarce given a
decision to the favorite of the college campus. Football
requires neither the intellect nor the perfect organization
which is a sine qua non to success in our great "national
game." Its chief requisites are long hair, leathery lungs and
abnormally developed legs. The game owes its popularity
to the average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent
animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game with
savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I am not
decrying football--I incline to the view that an occasional
rough-and-tumble scrapping match in which there is
imminent danger of black eyes, and even of broken bones,
is good for a boy I simply point out that as an intellectual
game it not only ranks far below chess, billiards and
baseball, but does not rise to a parity with pugilism. It is a
mistake to assume that an intellectual divertisement must
be popular with an intellectual people. The highest culture
is but a film cast over a fathomless sea of savagery. The
most learned of the Greeks, the most cultured of the
Romans gloried in brutal games, and to-day a dog fight, a
slugging match or even a college football game is relished
by the Titan of intellect as keenly as by the Bowery tough.
I cannot imagine where President Winston absorbed the
idea that lack of organization has been the curse of the
South. It may surprise him to be told that in ante-bellum
days it was not only the chief repository of culture, but
possessed a fair proportion of the nation's wealth. The
South has ever been chiefly an agricultural country, and will
so remain despite the frantic efforts of enthusiasts to
subvert natural laws. Not until the resources of our soil are
in great measure exhausted, or increase of population
forces people from the fields, can the South become a
great manufacturing country. Such is the lesson of history,
which we can only ignore to our loss. Wealth accumulates
at large manufacturing and trade centers as it cannot
elsewhere, and naturally seeks to further its interest by
organization. The concentration of forces, intellectual and
industrial, on that stupendous scale which has won
President Winston's admiration, is a post-bellum
development both North and South. The greatest of
American organizers have been Southern men.
Washington and Jefferson were types of the individualism
which is supposed to have been our bane; yet one
organized the Continental Army which won our
independence, the other organized the Federal
Government. It is not true that the Southern Confederacy
was crushed by superior organization. Better disciplined
troops than the veterans of Lee and Jackson never faced a
battery. "Hardee's Tactics," one of the most highly
esteemed of military manuals, was the work of a
Confederate general. The assault on the heights of
Gettysburg has become historic as much because of the
wonderful organization displayed by the Confederate troops
as because it marked the supreme hour of a nation's
agony. It was the only time in the history of this world
when an assaulting column was greeted with cheers of
admiration by the soldiers who stood to receive the shock.
That fact alone should suffice to make an American
college president proud of his country--should purge him of
every atribilarious taint of Anglomaniacism. Only once have
the sons of men in any age or clime displayed a grander
heroism than did those who hurled themselves against the
heights of Gettysburg, and that when the Federals silenced
their guns to cheer the dauntless courage of their foe. It is
not my present purpose to refight the Civil War, and trace
every effect to its efficient cause; I have simply undertaken
to make good my original proposition--that President
Winston is, as Thersites says of Patroclus, "a fool
positive," and should, therefore, hold his peace.
The schoolteacher has doubtless played no unimportant
part in the rehabilitation of the South; but he should not set
up as Autocrat of the Universe on a salary of $40 a month,
and burden the Asses' Bridge with the idea that he
"maketh all things, and without him was nothing made that
is made." His ferula may be an Aaron's rod which buds
and blossoms; but it does not bear sufficient fruit to furnish
a hungry world with necessary aliment. We still crave
manna from Heaven and grapes from Hebron. The public
pedagogue does not make the laws of trade. His province
is to interpret them; and proud may he be of his labor if his
proteges do not find it necessary to forget, at the very
gateway of a commercial career, that he ever had a name
and habitation on the earth. Nor does he frequently alarm
the plodding natives by the "introduction of new systems of
thought and action." Such "systems" do not spring
completely panoplied from the cerebrum of our educational
Jove, and stand about on one foot like a lost goose, or
country lad, awaiting an introduction. New systems of
thought and action are usually the growth of ages, the seed
often sown by men we hear not of. When of such sudden
development that they require a formal introduction,
they are apt to be received with the scant courtesy of a
poor relation, the introducer reviled as a crank or
condemned as a heretic and crucified. Generally speaking,
the professional educator confines himself pretty closely to
his birch and his textbooks, being quite content to
propagate, as best he may, the ideas of others. Neither the
birch nor the text-book, it may be well to remark, constitutes
the world's stock of wisdom, but only an incidental
furtherance thereto--the key, as it were, by which the
treasure is more readily come at. When the schoolmaster
has put his pupil in possession of the open sesame he
considers his duty done--that he has earned his provender.
And perhaps he has. In this day and age it is all that is
expected of him, all that he is paid for. He is not required
to inculcate wisdom, which is well; for that can no man do.
He is not even expected to impart much knowledge; but to
put his pupil through a course of mental calisthenics,
miscalled education. But even this is by no means to be
despised. With mind strengthened by exercise, even in a
desert, and lungs developed by football, the youth may be
able to delve the harder for knowledge when happily
released from the "gerund-grinder," to pray the more lustily
to the immortal gods for understanding, which transmutes
what were else base metal into ingots of fine gold. There
was a time when more was expected of a teacher; but that
was before the application of labor-saving machinery to
spiritual matters; before colleges became known as places
"where coals are brightened and diamonds are dimmed"--
before it became customary to cast potential Homers and
Hannibals, Topsies and Blind Toms into the same
educational hopper, and hire some gabby-Holofernes from
God knows where to manipulate the mill. It was a time
when men considered qualified to teach declined to waste
effort on numskulls, no matter whose brats they
might be. It was a time when the fame of a great, the
honor of a good and the infamy of a bad man were shared
by their preceptors. Those were the days of individualism
which President Winston so much deplores--the era which
fashioned those men whom the world for twenty centuries
has been proud to hail as masters. As the doctors have
decided that all human frailties are but diseases, I do not
despair of our 'varsity president. Some Theodorus may yet
arise to "purge him canonically with Anticryan hellebore,"
and thus clear out the perverse habit of his brain and make
him a man of as goodly sense as the rejuvenatedGargantua.
* * *
PUFFERY OF THE PRESS.
The "able editor" is perhaps the only quack doctor extant
who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly
imagines that it does him good.
Puffery is the "able editor's" invariable prescription, no
matter whether the patient be a moss-grown town, a
broken-down political roue--the victim of early
indiscretions--or a Cheap-John merchant suffering the first
paroxysms of financial dissolution. Although he knows how
his medicine is made,--knows that it is a nauseous
compound of rank hypocrisy and brazen mendacity--he
actually believes that, if taken in liberal doses, it is potent
to cure commercial paralysis or put new life into a political
corpse. When the first experiment fails to prove
satisfactory, instead of changing the treatment he doubles
the dose.
One would suppose that, like most Cagliostros who pick up
a precarious livelihood by pumping the bellies of their
betters full of the east wind, the "able editor" would
laugh in his sleeve at his dupes; but not so. He is
more in earnest than the Lagado doctor, described by
Gulliver, who had discovered a short-cut for the cure of
colic,--as little discouraged when a patient bursts under the
somewhat peculiar treatment. So greedy is he for his own
medicine, so fond of working the bellows for the expansion
of his own bowels, that he can scarce find time to attend to
his patients. Pick up any newspaper, big or little, "great
daily," with fake voting contest annex, or country weekly
shot full of ads. of city swindling concerns and note what
the "able editor" thinks of himself; how he twists and turns
to find some pretext for parading his own transcendent
greatness! See how he greedily seizes upon every little
chunk of "taffy" and rolls it as a sweet morsel under his
tongue; how he places in his cap every foolish feather
which the idle wind of puffery wafts within his clutch, and
then struts in the face of Heaven, a sight to provoke the
contempt of men, the pity of the gods! Let the
Boomerville Broadaxe but intimate that the Bungtown
Boomer knows a thing or two, and forthwith the latter
transfers the saccharine slug to its own columns, and
perchance, "points to it with pride,"--bids the Bungtown
world behold what the world of Boomerville thinks of it!
Then the Bungtown Boomer intimates that the
Boomerville Broadaxe likewise knows a thing or two, and
the latter, which has been eagerly watching for this Roland
for its Oliver, swoops hungrily down upon this delectable
morsel and cries ha! ha! It has obtained value received,
has tickled and been tickled in return! Then the editors of
these two great "public educators" begin a cross-fire of
sugar-plums, much to the edification of the world and their
own mutual satisfaction!
What would we think of that lawyer, doctor or merchant
who went about assiduously proclaiming with sound of
trumpet what his fellows said about him? Would we
not vote him a fool? at best a conceited prig, lacking in
taste and good manners?
Commendation is sweet to all; but it is just as permissible
for a belle to boast her conquests in the ballroom; the
lawyer to inform judge and jury what his fellow-disciples of
Blackstone think of him; the scholar to parade his erudition
or the merchant his integrity, as for an editor to reproduce
in his own paper fulsome compliments paid him for no other
purpose under Heaven than to get a puff in return.
* * *
THE BIKE BACILLUS.
The Women's Rescue League met recently at Washington
and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female
bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the bicycle craze "the
alarming increase" in the number of courtesans, and call
upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to
denounce cycling by the sex as "vulgar and indecent." Nor
do they stop there. The bike, in their opinion, is
irremediably bad. While destroying the morals of the maid,
it wreeks the prospective motherhood of the matron. It is
provocative of diseases peculiar to women, and calculated
to transform the sex into a grand army of invalids. These
are a few of the reasons why the Women's Rescue League
is scattering tacks in the pathway of the pneumatic tire.
There are others.
Those whose specialty is the conservation of virtue should
carefully study the causation of vice. In dealing with the
red-light district, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure. To remove the causes which produce courtesans
were a nobler work than to drag debased
womanhood out of the depths. Doubtless the
Rescuers imagine they have made a new discovery of
inestimable benefit to society--have laid the ax to the root of
that evil of which the bawdy-house is the flower and Hell
the fruitage. After patient research in the science of sexual
criminology, they have determined that the bicycle is
naughty without being nice. It is perversity personified. It
is the incarnation of cussedness, the avatar of evil. Turn it
which way you will, it rolls into the primrose path of
dalliance, whose objective point is the aceldama. No more
do woman's feet "take hold on Hell": she goes scorching
over the brink with her tootsies on the handle-bar. So say
the ladies of the Rescue League.
What are we going to do about it? Clearly it were useless
to denounce a "craze," sheer folly to argue against a
"fad." We had better save our breath to cool our broth.
The ministers cannot be depended on to lend their moral
support to this new movement against the Magdalen
maker--they have bought bikes and are chasing the girl in
bloomers. One-half the great she-world's on wheels--the
other wondering how it feels to ride clothespin fashion.
Clearly the Women's Rescue League cannot stem the tide--
not even with the help of the ICONOCLAST and ex-
Governor Hogg; it must either straddle a bike and join in
the stampede, climb a fence or get run over. Hevings! is
there no help for us--no halting-place this side of hetairism?
Are we all pedaling at breakneck pace to the Grove of
Daphne, where lust is law? Is the bike transforming this
staid old world into one wild bacchic orgy or phallic revel?
Have we toiled afoot thus far up the social mountainside,
only to go bowling down on a pneumatic tire--"as low as to
the fiends?" Head us, somebody! Police!
Just why the bicycle affects woman so unfavorably, the
Leaguers do not inform us. We are left to surmise why
tramping a bike should make her more reckless than
treading a sewing-machine; why exercise in the open air
should be more deleterious to health and morals than the
round dance in a heated ball-room, or even the delightfully
dangerous back-parlor hug; why segregation on the cycle
should be more potent to evoke those passions which
make for perdition than the narrow-seated buggy, with its
surreptitious pressure of limb to limb and the moral
euthanasia which the man of the world knows so well how
to distill into the ear of womanhood. Why the bike should
be more dangerous to morals than the French fiddle
mentioned by Shakespeare appears to be a question solely
within the province of the pathologist. As pantagruelism is
proceeding almost exclusively on micrological lines, we may
expect that, sooner or later, some "eminent physician" will
startle the world by discovering the bicycle bacillus. All our
ills appear to be caused by minute insects that get inside of
us, demoralize our system of government and inaugurate a
reign of anarchy. Everything, from mugwumpery to the
meddler's itch, from corns to crime, is now traced to the
pernicious activity of some microbian. Even our currency
system is blasted by goldbugs, and Prohibition milk-
sickness is being treated with vermifuge. A Kansas M.D.
has succeeded in hiving the old-age microbe, and is now
treating the ballet girls whom Weis & Greenwall and Rigsby
& Walker will bring South next winter, while a New York
empiric has discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating
the brain of the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical
science go marching from conquest to conquest, reforming
and rejuvenating this wicked and suffering world. Clearly
the Rescue League should have cried for aid to the doctors
of medicine instead of to the doctors of divinity. If the
bicycle bacillus can be caught and killed, the red-light
district will disappear and the Rescuers turn their
wonderful energies in new directions. Once the existence
of this nymphomania-micrococcus--as we philomaths would
call it--is established, the rest will be dead easy. Whether
patients will be treated externally or internally depends, of
course, upon the habits of the infinitesimal vulture that is
feeding on our social vitals. We do not know as yet
whether it is a moral microbe or a physical phylloxera. If
the former, the mind will have to be taken out, sand-
papered, carefully rinsed in a strong aseptic solution and
treated with soothing antaphrodisiacs after each meet of the
bicycle brigade; if the latter, the evil can easily be obviated
by providing the softer sex with medicated cycling suits, or
half-soling their bloomers with asbestos. If the Rescuers
really have the good of their frail sisters at heart they
should cooperate with the physician--should provide
themselves with compound microscopes and search
assiduously for baccili, instead of appealing to preachers
who may themselves be veritable breeding grounds for the
most destructive of all bacteria. It may be necessary, in
order to compel success, for the Rescuers to sacrifice
themselves upon the altar of science, to become martyrs to
the cause. In striving to save others from the pestilence
that walketh in darkness, they may be themselves
destroyed; but the true reformer draws back from no
danger. Let them take their lives in their hands, if need be,
boldly seize the bicycle bacillus by the ears and bump his
head.
The crisis is indeed acute; still we may rely on science to
save us. It is possible that the first step in that direction
has been already taken, for is not the insanity germ
discovered by the New York doctor responsible for the
"bicycle craze" as well as the reform frenzy? And if a
"free-silver lunatic" or "goldbug crank" can be permanently
cured by the simple expedient of boring a hole in his
lumbar region and drawing off the cerebro-spinal fluid, and
in it the microbes that build wheels in his head, is there not
hope that the bicycle habit may be altogether abolished by
the return of the "fiends" to mental normality? Now that
Dr. Babcock has learned to cast out devils, will not the
world be redeemed? Cert! Let the Women's Rescue
League take courage, and bask in the sunny optimism of
the ICONOCLAST. We'll soon have all the various brands
of bacteria in the bouillon; then there'll be nobody to rescue,
nothing to reform, and the Leaguers and the public can
take a much needed rest.
In all seriousness, I opine that the bike is a harmless
instrument when properly handled. The trouble is not so
much with the evasive machine as with the woman who
straddles it. It will carry its rider to church as rapidly as to
the Reservation. Doubtless many women employ it to seek
opportunities for evil--as a means of attracting the attention
of libidinous men; but had the bike never been built, they
would find some other way into the path of sin--would get
there just the same. There were courtesans before it
came; there will be demimondaines ages after its
departure. Mary Magdalen either walked or rode a mule
Aspasia was a "scorcher," but she couldn't "coast." Helen
of Troy never saw a pneumatic tire. Semiramis preferred a
side-saddle. Cleopatra didn't attract Col Antony's attention
by mounting a machine in the market place. The bike is no
more an incentive to bawdry than is a wheelbarrow. It
doesn't make a woman depraved; it only renders her
ridiculous.