Charles Goodwin, editor Salt Lake Tribune, puts into the mouth of
a figurative John Bull, who is lecturing his children, the
following sentence:
"Why, ours is an old family. One of our ancestors was knighted
by Henry VII for stealing cattle from the Scotch some time in the
fifteenth century. I am tracing up the lineage, and I believe we
are all barons. I expect to get the title confirmed, and then
each one of you boys must sell himself to a beautiful American
girl for from 75,000 to 250,000 pounds. Under the rose, it will
help the stock damnably, for your mother was a barmaid. Things
are working all right, my lads. Our conquest of the United States
still goes on."
Apropos of a snub given the Prince of Wales by an American girl,
Lillian Russell--even our much-married Lillian--raises her voice
in protest at international marriages, and incidentally American
snobbery.
What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the
international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public
opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and
personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to
the physically and financially anaemic nobility across the water,
to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and
into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage.
The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly
chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead
solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their
Fifth Avenue Christ.
And yet, to go back to first principles, is it not that the time
are out of joint, and the America herself is responsible for her
daughters' shame? America has blinded her eyes with avarice and
glutted her brain with greed. She has starved her intellect and
gorged her ambition. She has bartered her birthright of nobility
and sold her soul to crawling sycophants. She has prostituted her
sceptre of power to trusts for tinsel and cowers under the lash
of corporations because they bind her brow with a cap of bells
that tinkle an empty song of "Freedom." In the mad rush for gain,
America has forgotten its greatness, and in their blind struggle
for gold Americans forget what is grand. We have sold our freedom
to Britain, we have sold our pride, our individuality, our
independence, our self-respect, our power, our dignity and our
daughters.
The gods have given us brains to make of our country a brawny
one, and we have used our talent to corrupt what was once
equality into the unequal factions of power and poverty. The gods
have given us genius to soften the crudities of the early century
and to brighten our homes and our lives, and instead the
inventions and the creations but serve to gild the mansions of
the monopolist and to gird the iron more tightly on the wrist of
the toiler. We are avaricious, we are vulgar, and we are base. We
have lost the dignity of Nature that gave to a fragile lily a
royalty before which Solomon's grandeur paled. We have piled
stone and brick where the forest oak towered, and voice our
strident city cries where the imperious roar of the forest king
once startled the echoes. We have turned the oil and filth of our
refineries into the streams that once crept purling and laughing
through the wild-flowers and grasses, and the black smoke of our
factories has silenced the plaintive note of the thrush and
strangled the wondrous song of the nightingale. Our grandeur is
ostentation and our dignity a dead-letter. The greatness that
once longed for new worlds to conquer has degenerated into
yellow-fingered grasping for ginger-bread display. The powerful
figure of the pioneer could swing its mighty as into the forest
root, but in the rythm of labor there was time to pause and rest
and listen where "soft music ripples along shore, as the lake
breathes." In the stillness Nature's god speaks, and in the
patient face of the woman, shading her eyes where she watches him
from the cabin door, is sweeter and nobler dreaming than ever
finds resting place in the sharpened and querulous features of
our modern rushed society woman.
In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath
their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's
religion--"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the
one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of
friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a
kindergarten. Thus have we grown avaricious and vulgar and in
their weariness of things as they are, have our women grown base.
They know that their lives miss something, they know that their
fierce rivalry and feverish straining for precedence bring them
no nearer the Mecca that closes its austere gates to their aching
eyes. And for the dignity and pride their lives have lacked, they
give their fortunes and sell their bodies and exchange, for a
title, the name of which they have grown ashamed. They perhaps
shrink, in physical repulsion, from the man who they feel
despises while he endures them. They perhaps hunger, with all the
woman- nature their pitiful lives have left them, for other lips
murmuring in slumber beside them. But over their burning eyes
they press the metal circle for which they have crushed their
hearts and outraged their sex, and around the delicate limbs they
draw the ermines that cannot hide their shame, and in all their
poor, empty glory they only read in the cold eyes of the
patrician women around them the chill contempt that stamps them
as among, but not of their order. "I sometimes think it wisest
not to think," and this warped and twisted human nature has a
pathos in all its chasing after a gilded butterfly that has
always a grinning skull peering through the gold of its wings.
The hunger that finds but Apples of Sodom, the life-labor that
wins but the gold of Midas, the ambition that crushes its toy
baloon--"and man plods his way through thorns to ashes."
America freed her blacks but rests her social aegis on barter far
more hideous. Optimists prate of the world growing better, with
their eyes on the mountain tops, but when one reads of frail Lais
fined ten dollars in the court- room for earning her daily bread
in the only manner possible to a nature in which sin has been
bred in the bone by generations of ancestors, and then pictures
Dr. Brown of exclusive St. Thomas', New York, murmuring
"Benedicite!" over an international marriage ceremony, his
handsome face and melodious voice and aristocratic bearing doing
full justice to the grandeur of the occasion--it is a contrast in
which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is
something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house.
Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and
misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the
shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving?
Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the
curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the
great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it
covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida.,
October 1.
* * *
SALMAGUNDI.
My attention has been several times called by the citizens of
Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little
boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named
Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been
written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb,
Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most
brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of
anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant
and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a
diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds,
but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman
sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not
imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying
scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print,
defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an
abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds
appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected
anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I
was in the federal army and know something about the South. I
learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making,
blatherskites ought to have their d----d tongues cut out."
Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow
Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in
China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios,
contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned
and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his
little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit,
but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says
about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling
of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally
tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.
Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic
Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a
d--n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during
the dark of the moon, spawned in a dry goods box and raised on
bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a
Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating
school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by
dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and
exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a
half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or coon I
cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to
town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some
kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the
Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and
wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is
cock-sure--"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.
. . .
The suspicion is growing that Dr. Gutieras, the government
expert, has a pint of yellow fever baccilli in his cerebrum. He
carries the plague with him, just as a man suffering with mania a
potu carries his cargo of monkeys. Had he been called to see
Simon's wife's mother, he would have declared that she had a case
of Yellow Jack and spread a panic through all Judea. Should he
find a man suffering with katzenjammer he would pronounce him a
"suspect." As Barney Gibbs says, all the yellow fever patients
Gutieras discovered during his tour of South Texas were up
"hunting either a drink or a job" ere this peripatetic expert was
well out of town. I'll gamble four dollars that there is not in
the United States to-day a genuine case of Yellow Jack. There's
every indication that the cases at Mobile, New Orleans and Biloxi
are identical with the disease discovered by Gutieras at
Galveston--nothing under heaven but the dengue. Who the devil
ever heard of the mortality in a yellow fever epidemic averaging
only about 6 per cent.? Why la grippe will beat that as an
angel-maker and beat it blind. When good old- fashioned yellow
fever reaches for people they begin to sing "Heaven is my home,"
I'd rather have the "plague" now rioting in New Orleans than to
contract the buck ague or the itch. These "experts" make my soul
aweary. An insanity expert thinks everybody crazy but himself,
while a yellow fever expert would isolate a case o' cucumber
colic. What the South needs to do is to quarantine against these
special doctors.
A few American newspapers and magazines of the genus mugwump,
enemies of Cuban liberty and apologists for the Weylerian
butcheries and brutalities, are now busily engaged in belittling
those who enabled Senorita Cisneros to escape from her captors,
are heaping their feculence upon Mesdames Jefferson Davis, Jno.
A. Logan and the other "old women" who had the temerity to appeal
to the Spanish Queen Regent in behalf of the young heroine--are
even repeating the stale lies of Weyler's understrappers
reflecting upon her chastity. What brave American journalists!
How proud of such sons Columbia should be! It is quite possible
the New York Journal undertook the young lady's rescue for
advertising purposes only; but just the same, she is on American
soil, and she can well afford to ignore the petty malice of
emasculated mugwump editors, knowing as she must, that the
chivalry of this country is with her to the last man. I do not
believe the statement of the Spanish official whom Senorita
Cisneros accused of insulting her, and who retorted that she had
thrown herself at his head. A gentleman could not make such an
assertion even though it were true, for a woman's illicit favors
set upon the lips of the recipient the seal of eternal silence.
The defamer of Senorita Cisneros is but another Don Matthias de
Silvae of Le Sage. . . .
The coon seems to be forging rapidly to the front in some
portions of this country. On October 2, Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes, a
wealthy white woman and owner of one of the largest stock farms
in Kentucky, gave a ball and banquet near Lexington to 300
colored people and filled 'em full of beer. Whether Mrs. Stokes
danced with the bucks the dispatches do not state. . . .
My attention has been several times called to one W. D. McKinstry
of Watertown, N. Y., by people of that place. They plead with me
that he is really spoiling for a "roast." McKinstry is publishing
a little paper which somewhat resembles an over-ripe dish-rag, or
an unlaundered sheet from the bed of a colored baby; but I have
no idea why he is so unpopular. It may be because he possesses
the physique of a bull elephant and the brains of a doodle-bug.
It may be that the appearance of such an animal outside a dime
museum, or a pig sty, angers the people. I can see nothing in his
editorials at which to take offense. Reading them were like
drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle or filling one's belly
with the east wind. McKinstry is trying to settle the "negro
problem" for the South; but that has so long been a favorite
occupation of Smart Alec editors who never saw a cotton patch
that no one minds it any more. Waco has the coon and Watertown
has McKinstry, hence it is in order for the two towns to mingle
their tears instead of animadverting each upon the other's
misfortune. If I might advise the mighty McKinstry I would
suggest that he change his occupation. As an editor he is a
dismal failure, but he would be a dazzling success as ballast for
a canal boat. . . .
A correspondent notes that the New York World devotes two
illustrated pages to the Vanderbilt-Marlborough brat, and wants
to know what I think about it? Why, I think that old Josef
Phewlitzer has succeeded in elongating the Vanderbilt leg. No
editor ever publishes such tommyrot unless paid therefor, because
he knows that no sane person will read it. It was an
advertisement, ordered and paid for by somebody, probably
Consuelo's rather gay mother, who, albeit divorced from her first
husband for cause, has the distinguished honor to be gran'dam to
an incipient duke, who will probably grow up to be as utterly
worthless as his daddy. . . .
Jno. H. Holmes, editor of the Boston Herald, writing on the "New
Journalism." says: "Huge circulation is extremely profitable. It
produced revenue from the sale of the paper, and a still greater
revenue from the volume of advertising." In other words, the
average "great daily" is simply a mercenary advertising graft. It
may "produce revenue," but seldom profit from circulation, for
the price to agents is frequently below the cost of white paper
and expressage. The subscription price is usually placed below
the profit line, and extra inducements offered in the way of
"premiums." Somehow, a circulation, bona fide or fake, must be
worked up as an excuse for elongating the business man's leg. And
he is a "dead easy mark." The yap who purchases checks of
strangers and bets on monte is no more gullible than the average
victim of the advertising grafter. A sucker is said to be born
every minute; and strange to say, most of them are produced in
the cities. The business man who makes an advertising contract
without investigating the circulation claims of the publisher,
would invest in confederate bonds or buy gold bricks. If he
suffered the loss it would not much matter--would be simply
another case of the fool and his money soon parted; but it is
shifted to the consumer. The people must pay the merchant's
advertising bills, just as they pay his rent and insurance; and
the amount of which they are annually fleeced to pay for what has
no actual existence, would meet all expenses of government and
leave a tremendous surplus in the treasury. This nation wastes
annually for worthless fake advertising more than it pays for
education. . . .
A Galveston traveling man writes me as follows:
"I have been for two years past gathering up scraps of your
history, and now have the honor to advise you that according to
the testimony of many very pious people, among whom are not a few
preachers, you are an avowed anarchist who was suspected of being
concerned in the Haymarket massacre; that you served two terms in
the penitentiary before you were born; that you are a renegade
Jew and an Italian Jesuit, that for 30 years you were a Baptist
preacher, but were bounced out of the ministry for drunkenness
and immorality; that you have been a blasphemous Atheist from
your youth up; that you deserted from the federal army in the
same year that you were four years old; that you have been
discharged from all the Texas dailies for incompetency, and are
the author of editorials in the Chicago Inter-Ocean slandering
the South; that you are a big over-grown bully who abuses weaker
people, and a miserable little poltroon who has been kicked by
every cripple between New York and Denver. All this is doubtless
correct as far as it goes; now will you please inform me whether
you have been guilty of anything else?"
This is a fairly correct list of my crimes thus far; but being
still a young man, I may reasonably hope to add to it
considerably if not shut off by the sheriff. The greatest
drawback to my career as a criminal is my inability to lie so
consistently as some of my dear brethren in Christ. . . .
The ICONOCLAST'S recent comments on Dean Hart of Denver, provoked
the following poetic outburst on the part of a singer of that
city:
Do you mind him as he walks the street,
The Dean?
With his highly elevated nose,
The Dean.
And his old imported hat
And his time worn black cravat,
Any one could tell that
He's the Dean.
He is "furnist" this country,
Is the Dean,
"It's nothing like old Hingland,"
Says the Dean.
In language somewhat torrid,
With a countenance quite florid,
He says our schools are "orrid,"
Does the Dean.
To many it's a mystery why
The Dean
Doesn't leave us and for England hie away;
No doubt he can explain it,
In England he's not "in it,"
But in this "blooming" country
He's a Dean. . . .
All the sycophantic little sassiety sheets are now engaged in the
delectable task of belittling Miss Edna Whitney, selected by
Chillicothe, Mo., as maid of honor to the Kween of the Kansas
City Karnival, but objected to by the snob management on the
ground that she was a working girl. The sheets aforesaid have
discovered that since that event brought her into public notice
Miss Whitney has accepted $500 from a cigarette firm for the use
of her photo, and are now industriously arguing that a young
woman who will permit her portrait to be so employed is not a
proper person to be brought for a moment into contract with the
eminently respectable sassietyest. Rats! ditto rodents. The
Karnival was not a "social function," but a commercial scheme
gotten up by the merchants of Kansas City to draw trade to that
enterprising town. It was a blowout for everybody; the world was
invited--the gates thrown open to the Canary in his Canaryism as
well as to Sir Alymer in his Alymerism. Lady Vere de Vere and the
chambermaid in the dollar-a-day hotel were alike invited to make
themselves at home, enjoy the show and spend their siller.
Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an
incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned
her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the
patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers,
thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all
the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of
her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is
infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly
society women of paying for the publication of decollete
portraits and sickening "write-ups" of themselves. Miss Whitney
is poor and, I am told, supports a widowed mother. To a girl so
situated $500 is a great sum. She could scarce be expected to
have the fine aesthetic feelings of a highly educated woman
reared in the lap of luxury. Her portrait had already been hawked
about in the daily papers,--like those of the swell society
set--and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and
bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her
picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a
prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public
prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets
would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose
portrait is found in a cigarette package--I have seen Queen
Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' in the
same place. These pitiful sheets, which are belittling Miss
Whitney to ingratiate themselves with the snobocracy of Kansas
City, are entirely destitute of shame. Their editors are, in most
instances, a cross between Jeames de la Pluche and Caliban. Their
presence at "social functions" is tolerated for the same reason
that nigger waiters are admitted. They are used by the parvenues
and heartily despised by the very people whom they so
obsequiously serve. . . .
MR. BRANN: You state in a recent issue of the ICONOCLAST that
McKinley's popular plurality "represents the votes of niggers and
the scavangers of Europe's back alleys." I denounce that
statement as a falsehood. The votes of native-born Americans
elected Mr. McKinley. AMERICUS. Waco, Texas, September 10.
My correspondent is indeed "A Merry Kuss" else he could find no
pleasure in calling a man a liar in an anonymous letter. To call
that creature a cur who flings an insult which he fears to
father, were a damning libel on every decent dog in Christendom.
My correspondent is probably a mongrel cross between a male hyena
and a gila monster, begotten in a nigger grave-yard, suckled by a
sow and educated by an idiot. But, perhaps, being familiar with
his own birth and breeding he will consider this a compliment.
McKinley coralled more than 90 per cent. of the nigger vote and
carried every state in which foreign-born people exceeds 21 per
cent. of the entire population. He received his largest
majorities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota,
Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey,
one-third of whose people, collectively considered, are of
foreign birth; his smallest majorities in Kentucky, Indiana, West
Virginia and Maryland, where those of foreign birth amount to
about 8 per cent. of the entire population. Virginia, North and
South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas,
Missouri, Kansas constituted Bryan's strongholds and their people
collectively considered, show a foreign birth of less than 5 per
cent. Colorado is the only state having a considerable foreign-
birth population that stands in the Democratic columns, all the
others having gone for McKinley. While it is true that thousands
of our foreign-born citizens are intelligent, honest and
patriotic--a credit to the land of their adoption--it is likewise
true that following in their wake we find Huns, Pollocks,
Sicillians, "Souwegian" and other undesirable offscourings of the
old world, imported by Mark Hanna and other "industrial
cannibals" to degrade our labor and debauch our politics. It is
the vote of this latter class, and the scarcely less corrupt and
ignorant "coons" which constitute McKinley's popular plurality.
McKinley was the candidate of the assisted immigrant and the
Ethiopian, Bryan of the native-born Americans; and I submit it to
a candid world which of these two parties was likely to have the
good of this country most at heart, or know best how to promote
it. . . .
I am obliged to my friends for divers and surdry scraps of
information regarding the cur-ristian trustee of Baylor who led
the last assault upon me in the name of a long-suffering Savior.
It would make interesting reading for Waco Baptists no doubt, but
I can put these columns to better use than rehashing ancient
history. Those who are anxious to learn what kind of an animal
this member of Baylor's board of managers actually is, are
referred to the Galveston News of July 26th, 1883. Any one can
secure access to the files of that paper for the asking. I cannot
afford to "damn to everlasting fame" every backwoods hypocrite
who raises a howl. The ICONOCLAST leaves such cattle to the bill
collectors. . . .
I would like to have a flash-light photo of W. S. Densickr of
Lebanon, Ind. Ter., not for publication, but to add to my private
gallery of hypocritical rogues. Densickr wants to build a temple
of pure gold twelve miles square and 60,000 high for some
backwoods congregation, but of what denomination he has evidently
not yet discovered. He insists, however, that the Redeemer
demands such a temple, and that the general public should be
forthcoming with the necessary cash. He is working what he calls
a "church chain"--all for Christ. He writes you a letter asking
you to contribute 5 cents to the cause and thereby obtain the
blessing of God. He requests also that you send an exact copy of
his letter to three of your friends whom you deem most likely to
invest their small change in heavenly grace. The "chain" of
letters runs from 1 to 100, and a Cleburne gentleman who was
"touched" figures it out that the 25th No. means more than 282
billion letters and more than 21 millions of money if every
sucker bites at the bait. If the "chain" doesn't break before the
100th number is played it will corral all the wealth of this
world. Mr. Densickr hath a great head. He's a church financier
for your galways. Still I opine that the man who complies with
his apparently modest request is one large piebald ass who ought
to be saddled, bridled and ridden around the block, then turned
loose to do the Nebuchadnezzer act.