A few seasons ago when Audrey Beardsleyism was the rage and Oscar
Wilde a lion in "sassiety" gay plaid stockings in Persian or
Audrey Beardsley designs sold as high as $7.50 a pair, enough I
should say to enable a poor devil like me to live a week. But
this is not all. For spring or June brides of the "swell London
sassiety set," fine white silk stockings cost $22.50 a pair must
go with a wedding gown and trousseau equally as extravagant, the
climax of fashion's freakish ways being the rose-made garter worn
over said stockings. Parisian society which smells to heaven in
fashionable odors has now originated garters made of primroses,
harebells, narcissus, violets and lillies, the same being worn by
the ladies at balls and receptions in Paris. Knots of blossoms
are caught among the thick flouncings and ruches of the
petticoats; and even the embroidered corset has its little bouquet
attachment. The inside flounce of the most delicate evening gowns
is made entirely of flowers, and the newest garter is simply made
to conform to the general harmony of fragrance and color.
The appropriateness of a flower for garter-wearing purposes is
considered according to the degree and strength of its perfume,
the most highly perfumed being the most highly appropriate.
Violets are in great favor, and are used for garters worn with
lilac, lavander, delicate green or white costumes. Again, as
American women love to ape the fashionable society of gay Paris
it may not be very long before in the great cities of the country
we may not only have the American morphine fiend and
cologne-drinker, but also the perfume faddist. Not long ago a
Paris druggist communicated to a few French "sassiety" women the
plan of perfuming the skin by means of hypodermic injections. The
favorite distilled odors are violet and lavender. I know not how
true it is, but I heard that this fashion is already being taken
up by some of New York city's fashionable freaks of "sassiety"
women.
I have recently been engaged in reading two very interesting
histories, the one of the rose, the other of perfume, in reading
which I was deeply impressed with the fact that all the
civilizations of the past, previous to their downfall, had their
rose fetes, their festivals of flowers where luxury and license
ruled, where effeminacy ruled supreme, their perfumed halls and
extravagant balls and soirees. Before the fall of the Roman
Empire, the wealthy abandoned themselves to pleasure, luxury and
licentiousness and such expressions as "living in the midst of
roses," and "sleeping on roses" had a deep and tragic meaning.
Seneca speaks of Smyndiride who could not sleep if one of the
rose petals with which his bed was spread happened to be curled.
Cicero alludes to the then prevailing custom among the Romans of
reclining at the table on couches covered with roses. Ah, my
jeweled buddies, there were Adonises in those days!
When Cleopatra, the perfumed serpent of the Nile, went into
Cilicia to meet Mark Antony, she gave him for several days a
festival such as the gods themselves would not blush to
participate in. She had placed in the banqueting hall twelve
couches large enough to hold three guests. Purple tapestry
interwoven with gold covered the walls, golden vases admirably
executed and enriched with precious stones stood on a magnificent
gold floor. On the fourth day the queen carried her sumptuousness
so far as to pay a talent ($600.00 in our money) for a quantity
of roses, with which she caused the floor of the hall to be
covered to a depth of eighteen inches. These flowers were
retained in a very fine net, to allow the guests to walk over
them. According to Suetonius, Nero (the fiddler of burning Rome
and the tyrant par excellence of the ancient day) gave a fete at
one time on the Gulf of Baiae when inns were established on the
banks, and ladies of noble blood played hostesses to the
occasion, the roses alone costing more than four million of
sesterces, or $100,000. As the hag Tofana was the inventor of a
new and deadly poison, so Lucius Aurelius Verus was the inventor
of a new species of luxury. He had a most magnificent couch made,
on which four raised cushions closed in on all sides by a very
thin net, and made of leaves of roses. Heliogabalus, celebrated
for every kind of vice and luxury, caused roses to be crushed
with the kernels of the pine (pinus maritima) in order to
increase the perfume. Roses were, by the order of this same
emperor, scattered over the couches, halls and even the
portierres of the palaces were decorated with the same. A
profusion of flowers of every kind, lilies, violets, hyacinths,
narcissus, etc., filled great quantities of space. Gallien,
another cruel and luxurious princeling, lay under arbors of roses
sometimes varying the performance by reclining on beds of roses.
Before her downfall Rome could spend millions on her royal
tables, support the dignity of a single senator at $80,000 a
year, employ courts of sycophants and flatterers, impose taxes at
the pleasure of her ruler, declare any complaint treason, marry
her daughters for money and title, employ notaries to attest the
fatness of her banquet fowls, punish a servant for disobedience
and trivial offenses with death, while letting the monied thief
and murderer go free with a mild reprimand, and making slaves and
menials of the profoundest philosophers. The dancer and the
buffoon received the homage and the adoration which in the golden
age of Greece under the reign of Pericles only scholars,
philosophers and artists received. Poverty in those days was
crime, so in ours! Augustine of Rome was utterly ignored. "In
exact proportion to the sum of money a man keeps in his chest,"
says Juvenal, "is the credit given to his oath." Verily, reader,
these days at the end of the nineteenth century are greatly
similar to those last days of Rome. Yvette Gilbert, the
songstress of the vile, the recitationist of the vulgar, and Le
Loie Fuller, the dancer of the serpentine, live off the fat of
the land every day. The songstress and the kickeress get their
thousands of dollars per week, while "the poor devil of a
workingman" must be satisfied with a dollar a day cash and
barrels of unlimited confidence. Caligula's horse wore a collar
of pearls and drank from an ivory trough. Nero fiddled while Rome
was burning. Cleveland when president drank his morning coffee
from a cup worth $100 at least, and went fishing at Buzzard's Bay
while the ship of state was plunging among the rocks and breakers
of bonded indebtedness. Conde spent three thousand crowns to deck
his palace at Chantilly. The Duke of Albuquerque had forty silver
ladders. The expression then, as now, was often heard, "the rich
are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." San Pedro,
Cal., November 11.
* * *
TWO OF A KIND.
BY H. S. C.
The McKinley administration has been in power long enough to show
that the only material distinction between it and the Cleveland
administration lies in the fact that it is slightly more
extravagant. That is the characteristic of the Republican party
and no one is surprised. In addition to being the party of
violence, bigotry and fraud, it is also the party of gay
liberality with other people's money. In the matter of directing
the destinies of this country towards a higher and better
national existence, there is really nothing to choose between
Republicanism and Democracy. Both are equally unwilling and
incompetent, both, despite the prating of civil service snobs and
snivellers are dominated by spoils, and the managers of both
regard a campaign not as a battle for the betterment of America
but as a battle for boodle. The McKinley administration has
appointed some Negro postmasters in the South. This the
Democratic administration would not have done. The McKinley
administration has played openly into the hands of the trust.
This the Democratic administration would have done secretly. The
McKinley administration enacted a tariff law which robs the
people openly for the benefit of a few. This the Democratic
administration would have done in sly paragraphs here and there,
in the meanwhile declaiming loudly against the unrighteousness of
tariff barons. The McKinley administration has based its
contracted currency solely upon the gold product. This the
Democratic administration would have based, with almost equal
fatuity, upon the silver product. McKinleyism and the Democracy
with which the country has been cursed on two occasions since the
war, are six of one and half a dozen of the other. Practically
considered, the main difference between Republicanism and
Democracy, is the difference between the highwayman and the sneak
thief. This being so, the question naturally arises: What are we
going to do about it? Nothing. That is, not yet. The time may
come when the people will choose public servants for fitness, and
will demand that they keep the pledges made as a condition
precedent to election, but it is far from us. In many of the
years to come we will continue to build up an office- holding
class that is now so utterly idle, incompetent, impudent and
corrupt that the history of the world can show nothing like it.
This will be always so with universal suffrage. A government
which permits the ballot of a man who has not a dollar's interest
in the good conduct of the government, who can neither read nor
write, who cannot speak the English language, who is permitted to
vote merely upon the declaration that he intends at some time to
become a citizen, will continue to be a rotten government. The
wonder is not that the United States has had war internecine and
otherwise, but that it has existed at all. It carries within
itself the elements of its own damnation. It has within itself
the seeds of decay. Unless they are dug out, that which is now
one of the worst governments under the sun will be no government
at all.
* * *
THE SAW-MILL CHECK SYSTEM.
The ICONOCLAST receives frequent complaints from laboring people
in the lumber districts of Texas and Louisiana, that their
employers are robbing them by compelling them to accept orders on
mill stores, where they are charged exorbitant prices for all
they purchase. I have been unable to visit the lumber districts
and make personal investigation of these complaints, while
letters of inquiry have elicited conflicted evidence. The
following statement by a disinterested party, a gentleman of
unusual intelligence who has traveled extensively in the lumber
districts of the two states, is doubtless a fairly correct
account:
The system of issuing checks to saw-mill employees, as practiced
in some places, is, in my opinion, an advantage to the laborer.
Each mill has a pay-day, monthly, and the checks issued at
intervals between pay-days, redeemable in merchandise, pass
current among merchants at par. You can buy a big glass of beer
for a 5-cent check as you can for a nickel, and buy it anywhere
it is sold. You can, in fact, buy anything at any place in these
towns for mill checks. The merchants either use them in trading
at the mill stores, which are large and complete, or sell them,
at a discount of 5 per cent. to parties who engage in building
and who use them in paying for lumber, which is sold at the same
price for checks as for cash. No one is required to take these
checks, which are merely in the nature of an advance payment on
wages. Each employee can wait until pay-day and get all that is
due him in cash. Many of the mills are large concerns with A1
credit, and being able to buy as cheaply as anybody, can, and I
believe do, sell as cheaply. Such is the case with the Beaumont
mills and the mills on the Sabine and East Texas road owned by
Beaumont parties; but as much cannot be said for saw-mills at
some other points. There are some saw-mills in Texas that never
have a pay-day; they issue checks on the commissary and charge
enormous profits, so that the people who work at these mills are
virtually peons. A party told me some time ago that on the H. E.
& W. T. railway mill checks of reputable institutions can be
bought for 20 cents, 30 cents and 40 cents on the dollar. I do
not know that this is so, but I believe it. As for the mills at
Orange and Lake Charles, they have no commissaries attached, but
I have been told that certain merchants in those towns pay the
mill owners 10 per cent. on all orders sent them, and the mills
go so far as to turn in each evening to the merchant the time
made by each employee to govern them in giving credit. This looks
like a fraud on the employee and it is wrong for the employer to
pocket money which should rightfully go to his employee. But he
reasons that he has an established pay-day, and if his employees
will insist on demanding money or its equivalent every evening,
and thus force him to retain an extra man to attend to the
check-issuing business it is right that the employees should bear
that expense. I believe the mills at Westlake have commissaries,
but I know the mill-owners and do not believe they practice any
extortion. They pay off in checks. They have a monthly pay-day,
and if, like railway employees, these should wait until the first
Saturday after the 5th or 10th of each month they could draw
their wages in cash. No mill at either place mentioned pays off
in checks. You might roast such mills as those on the H. E. & W.
T. referred to, as they rob not only their employees, but, by
thus being able to manufacture lumber cheaper than those who pay
wages, force down the price in the open market and compel the
honest manufacturer to meet it."
* * *
LOVE AS AN INTOXICANT?
Seymour, Texas, Nov. 4, 1897.
MR. BRANN: Will you please answer the following question and
thereby settle a dispute in Seymour: Is love intoxicating? CHAS.
E. RUPE.
My correspondent neglects to state whether Seymour is a
Prohibition town. Of course if it is and love is listed as an
intoxicant, the blind god will be expatriated for the benefit of
the makers of Peruna, Hostetter's Bitters and and other palate
ticklers, popular only at blind tigers. Why the deuce didn't the
Seymourites set to work and settle this vexatious problem for
themselves? Must I undertake a system of scientific experiments
in order to obtain this information for the citizens of Seymour?
Suppose that I do so, find that love makes drunk come, and am run
in by the patrol wagon while supercharged with the tender
passion: don't you see that this would militate against my
usefulness as a Baptist minister? How the hell could I explain to
my congregation that I was full of love instead of licker?
Clearly I cannot afford to offer myself as a sacrifice upon the
altar of science. Should I proceed to fall in love just to see if
it would go to my head, and should it do so, my Dulcina del
Toboso might marry me before I recovered my mental equipoise, and
I would awaken to find my liberty a has-been and my night-key non
est. Of course I should mind it ever so little, but it would be
awfully hard on the lady. I have been baptized just to see if it
would soak out any original sin; I've gone up in a balloon and
down in a coal mine in the interest of science; I've ridden on
the pilot of a locomotive for the sake of the sensation; I've
permitted myself to be inoculated with the virus of Christian
charity just to see if it would "take"; I've tampered with almost
every known intoxicant, from the insidious mescal of the
erstwhile Montezumas to the mountain nectar of Eastern Tennessee,
but I draw the line at love. Will it intoxicate? Prithee, good
sirs, I positively decline to experiment. However, if hearsay
evidence be admissible I'm willing to take the stand. To the best
of my knowledge and belief love will pick a man up quicker and
throw him down harder than even the double-distilled brand of
prohibition busthead. Like champagne at 2 a.m., it is good to
look upon and pleasant to the palate; but at last it biteth like
a serpent and stingeth like an able-bodied bumble-bee in a pair
of blue-jean pants. Like alcoholism, love lies in wait for the
young and unwary--approaches the victim so insidiously that ere
he is aware of danger he's a gone sucker. The young man goeth
forth in the early evening and his patent leathers. His coat-tail
pockets bulge with caramels and his one silk handkerchief,
perfumed with attar of roses, reposeth with studied negligence in
his bosom. He saith unto himself, "I will sip the nectar of the
blind deity but I will not become drunken, for verily I know when
to ring myself down." He calleth upon the innocent damosel with
soft eyes and lips like unto a cleft cherry when purple with its
own sweetness, and she singeth unto him with a voice that hath
the low sweet melody of an aeolian harp, and squozeth his hand in
the gloaming, sigheth just a wee sigh that endeth in a blush. And
behold it cometh to pass that when the gay young man doth stagger
down the door-steps of her dear father's domicile he knoweth not
whether he is hoofing it to Klondyke or riding an erratic mustang
into Mexico. He is drunken with the sweetness of it all and glad
of it. And she? Oh she lets him down easy--sends him an engraved
invitation to her marriage with some guy with oodles of the long
green whom her parent on her mother's side has corraled at the
matrimonial bargain counter. Then the young man has a case of
what we Chermans call Katzenjammer, and swears an almighty swore
never to do so any more. But he does. When a man once contracts
the habit of being in love there's no help for him. It is a
strange stimulant which acts upon the blood like the oenanthic of
old wine, upon the soul like the perfume of jasmine buds. He has
felt its mighty spell, more potent than the poppy's juice or the
distillation of yellow corn that has waved its golden bannerets
on Kentucky's sun-kissed hills--more strangely sweet than music
heard at minight across a moonlit lake or the soul-sensuous dream
of the lotus eaters' land. For the spell of the poppy's dreamy
drug and the charm of the yellow corn whose spirit breeds
dangerous lightnings in the blood, the skill of man has provided
a panacea; but "love is strong as death," says David's wisest
son. Will love intoxicate? Rather! I should say that Solomon was
drunk with love when he wrote the Canticles:
"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is
better than wine."
When a man is drunken he sees strange varieties of serpents.
That's what ailed Adam and Eve. They kept intoxicated with their
own primordial sweetness until they got the jimmies and saw a
talking snake prancing around the evergreen aisles of Eden with
legs like unto a prima donna. At least I suppose the Edenic
serpent was built that way, for the Lord cursed it and compelled
it to go on its belly all the days of its life. Hence the Lord
must have pulled its leg. So to speak, or words to that effect.
As an intoxicant love affects one differently from liquor. A man
drunk on bourbon wants to trail his coat-tails down the middle of
the plank turnpike and advise the natives that he is in town. The
man drunk on love yearns to hide away from the busy haunts of men
and write poetry for the magazines. The one is sentenced to ten
days in the bat-cave and the other to pay some woman's board.
Verily the way of the transgressor is hard. Some people manage to
worry through life without ever becoming drunken on either liquor
or love. They marry for money, or to secure housekeepers, and
drink pink lemonade and iced buttermilk until there's clabber in
their blood. They "like" their mates, but do not love them, and
their watery babes grow up and become Baptists. Their affections
are to the real article what dengue is to yellow fever.
Temperance is a good thing in its way; but the man who is
temperate in love is not to be trusted. The true man or woman can
no more love moderately than a powder magazine can explode on the
installment plan. When the cup once touches their lips it is
drained to the very dregs. The chalice is not passed by human
hands--the gods give and the gods withhold. Hence it is that we
ever find Love's bacchanals beating against the social bars. We
laugh at the man who flushed with wine disregards the peace and
dignity of the state; but we frown upon the woman who drunk with
love sins against our social laws. Man's brewed enchantments may
be set aside by acts of human will; but the wine of love creeps
like a subtle perfume through all the senses whether we will or
no, filling the brain with madness, the heart with fire.
* * *
THE SWORD AND THE CROSS.
A correspondent asks "whether the great nations owe most to the
sword or the cross." That were much like asking whether the
usefulness of a watch be due most to the case or the works.
Religion has ever been the heart of the body social, the dynamics
of civilization. A great nation of Atheists is a practical
impossibility, because the basic principle of such a society must
needs be selfishness, and from such a foundation no mighty
superstructure can ever rise. "Ye cannot gather grapes of thorns
nor figs of thistles." War is but an incident in the history of a
nation, while religion is its very life. In the latter it moves
and breathes and has its being. From the standpoint of a
statesman it makes little difference what the religion of a
people may be so long as most of them believe it. History
abundantly demonstrates that when a nation begins to doubt its
gods, it begins to lose its glory. Without religion the contract
social is simply a rope of sand. "No union of church and state"
is simply a protest against the union of body and soul. The
greatest rulers of ancient and modern times regarded religion as
the palladium of national power. True it is that religion has
time and again strengthened the hands of the tyrant and stoned
the prophets of progress; but every good gift bequeathed to man
has been at times abused. The sword has been wielded by the
assassin; it has been employed to enslave and despoil the people;
yet we dare not break the blade. Men of narrow minds, seeing many
warring cults, imagine them to be disturbing factors in the human
brotherhood--that if they could be eliminated, the body politic
would have peace. They cannot understand that the discords of the
finite make the harmony of the infinite. They fail to see that
these warring creeds are but the necessary differentiations of a
common faith. Lay the winds, still the tides, and old ocean, that
perennial fount of health, becomes a stagnant pool of
putrefaction--a malodorous "mother of dead dogs." Force
presupposes friction. Let the sectaries fight, each doing valiant
battle for his own dogma, for when they all agree religion will
be dead and progress at an end. It is not necessary that you and
I should stand close enough to be stifled with the dust of
conflict, to taste all the bitterness of sectarian
controversy--we may mount above it all and watch it beat like the
convolutions of a mighty brain. We may take refuge in the
philosophy of religion and say that all are right in conception
and wrong in expression; we may call it blind superstition if we
will; but if we mount high enough to obtain a clear vision we
must confess that religion has ever been the dominant factor in
the forging of mighty peoples. Were I required to give a reason
for this fact I would say it is because man is not altogether a
machine--because he is not content to eat and sleep and propagate
his kind like the lower animals. Despite his thick veneer of
selfishness, man is at heart a creature of sentiment, and
religion is the poetry of the common people. Crude it may be, but
its tendency is toward the stars, while all else in man is
animalistic and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry,
out of a people, and you reduce them to the level of educated
animals. Annul the power that draws them upward and they must
sink back to primordial savagery. The individual may accept logic
as a substitute for sentiment, but a nation cannot do so. The
masses are not swayed through the head, but through the heart.
Sentiment is the divine perfume of the soul. Of sentiment was
born the dream of immortality. It is the efficient cause of every
sacrifice which man makes for his fellow man. It is the parent
duty, and duty pre-supposes the Divine. Could the materialists
inaugurate their belauded age of reason, sentiment would perish
utterly in that pitiless atmosphere, and the world be reduced to
a basis of brute selfishness. The word duty would disappear, for
why should man die for man in a world whose one sole god was the
dollar. Why should a Damien sacrifice himself if selfish ease be
the only divinity? If there be no Fatherhood of God there can be
no Brotherhood of Man--we are but accidents, spawn of the sun and
slime, each an Ishmel considering only himself. Atheism means
universal anarchy. It means a kingdom without a king, laws
without a legislator, a machine without a master. An Atheist is a
public enemy. He would not only destroy the state but wreck
society. He would render life not worth the living. He would rob
us of our garden roses and fill our hands with artificial
flowers. And why? Because, forsooth, he finds that some articles
of religious faith are impossible fables. He sits down with a
microscope to examine the tables of the law for tracks of the
finger of him whose sentences are astral fire. He finds a foolish
contradiction in some so-called sacred book and imagines that he
has proven either that man's a fool or God's a fraud. "By
geometric scale he takes the measure of pots of ale." He calls
himself a "liberal," while fanatically intolerant of the honest
opinions of others. He is forever mistaking shadow for substance,
the accidental for the essential. He "disproves" religion without
in the least comprehending it. He hammers away at the Immaculate
Conception and the miracles with a vigor that amuses those who
realize that cults and creeds are but ephemeral, while faith in
the Almighty endures forever. And of all the Atheists and
Agnostics Bob Ingersoll is the most insupportable. He is but a
mouthful of sweetened wind, a painted echo, an oratorical
hurdy-gurdy that plays the music of others. He's as innocent of
original ideas as a Mexican fice of feathers. He gets down on the
muddy pave and wrangles with the "locus" preachers. He's a
theological shyster lawyer who takes advantage of technicalities.
He is not a philosopher--he's emphatically "a critic fly." He
examines the Christian cult inch by inch, just as Gulliver did
the cuticle of the Brobdingnagian maid who sat him astride her
nipple. He never contemplates the tout ensemble. He learns
absolutely nothing from the cumulative wisdom of the world. He
doesn't even appreciate the fact that the dominant religions of
the world to-day are couched in the language of oriental poetry.
He wastes his nervo-muscular energy demolishing the miracles.
When he gets through with the Bible I presume that he'll take a
fall out of aesop's Fables. He doesn't understand that the soul
of man has never learned a language--that all sacred books are
but an outward evidence of an inward grace. He doesn't know that
religion, like love, cannot be analyzed. Because the orient
pearls are imbedded in ocean slime he denies their existence.
Ingersoll and the "plenary inspiration" people are welcome to
fight it out--it's none of my funeral. You may prove Zoroaster a
myth, Moses a mountebank, Gautama a priestly grafter and Christ
the prototype of Francis Schlatter and other half-witted frauds;
but adoration of a superior power will remain a living, pulsing
thing in the hearts of the people. It is this poetry, this
sentiment, this sense of duty, which transcends the dollar that
constitutes the adhesive principle of society and makes
civilization possible.