It has been suggested that the friends and admirers of
Mr. Brann join in a contribution to mark the spot where
he sleeps. It is proposed, if this meets the approval of
friends, that it be a granite vase, some four or five feet
high, surmounted either by a life size statue in bronze or
marble of the dead, holding in his hand a copy of the
ICONOCLAST, as if offering it to the passer-by, and the
word ICONOCLAST upon it in letters sufficiently large to
be read at a distance of twenty feet. It is said by those
who claim to know that such a memorial can be erected
at a cost of some $3,000 or $4,000.
Many of his friends would not approve, and neither
would he if he could express himself, of anything that
would require any large expenditure of money while so
many thousands of worthy men and women are struggling
in vain to secure the bare necessities of life, these holding
that costly monuments can do the dead no good, and are
in bad taste in the living. There can be no doubt that
thousands in the years to come will seek his grave to lay
their offerings upon the shrine of genius, and while his
will be marked I wish to say in this connection to those
asking in what condition Mrs. Brann is left financially
that while she will have sufficient to keep the wolf from
hers and her children's door if properly managed, that
she will not have over a tithe of what it has been published
that she would.
Submitting these few words for the consideration of
his friends, I can say if a response sufficiently favorable
come, then the proper steps will be taken to carry it out;
if not, nothing more will be said, at least not from me;
and as his friend I would not approve of keeping standing
in the ICONOCLAST a list of subscribers to the fund; if
the suggestion is carried out it will be time enough to
publish it when the work is finished and the statue
unveiled. G. B. GERALD.
. . .
The man who takes up Brann's work will only succeed,
not replace him. He was a star of the first magnitude,
and such bodies are not created in an hour--not always
in an age. He who attempts an imitation, however clever
his work, would stand before the world, self-confessed, a
failure from the first. Booth, in his favorite character
inspired us--Joe Jefferson could only prompt us to
laughter. Yet, is not Jefferson without genius in his way?
There is no reason, however, why he who follows may
not be as loyal to the faith, as courageous in the fight,
as Brann was known and acknowledged to be. The Chief
is dead, but did not die until he had blazoned the way
for those who dare follow where he so bravely led.
. . .
In life Brann often said he wanted no mourning worn
for him, save that which enshrouded the hearts of his
family and friends--that the mere trappings of woe were
but its "limbs and outward flourishes," which, too often,
failed to reach the heart.
* * *
SPEAKING OF BRANN.
Died Fighting April 2, 1898.
Where now is all his thundering?
He has "fall'n on stillness" in the Spring,
And even echo answers not,
"In that dim land where all things are forgot,"
His surging sentences, his cadenced chimes
Of speech that through the seven climes
Wooed the many to rapt listening.
Soothed by the wind of the dead men's feet,
He lies in slumber senseless-sweet.
His fame, his wife's and children's tears,
The issue that made up his manly years,
His hates and loves the burgeoning Earth receives,
And list, "a little noiseless noise among the leaves"
Of southern springtime pity does entreat.
A fighter's faults were his, but strong
The blows he struck at throned Wrong;
Beauty he loved as ever love the brave;
The April air breathes beauty o'er his grave.
Truth he pursued. Lo, he has found her now:
She kissed the kiss of peace upon his brow.
His ears are filled with Silence's sweet song.
Fighting he died, marched into the Night,
His banner blazing with his bravery's light.
"Shot from behind," the story goes,
To glorify him and to damn his foes.
The foes he fought were Cowardice and Fraud;
They have prevailed again, but, O Lord God,
Thou wilt raise up still others for Thy fight.
Rejoicing loud is in the House of Sham,
Bigots to themselves make deep salaam,
Shoddydom rubs its ringed hands in glee,
The Ogre's scandal-scourged at each pink tea,
Pecksniff's pray that he has gone to swell
The galaxy of bravery and brains in Hell--
Great joy in small souls all not worth a damn!
But where men think, feel, as men can,
"Bon voyage through the dark, good man!"
They call and take up his pen-lance
And brandish it again 'gainst Ignorance
In power fortified with a myriad lies
And every great-heart, fine-soul cries
As pledge of fealty, "Here's to you, Brann!"
What tho' he hear no rumor of our hail!
What tho' we follow searching for that Grail
A bettered world with less of woe and pain,
And better gods than Privilege and Gain,
Out in the darkness, by assassins sped,
'Tis better far to join defeated dead
Than share success with him whose soul's for sale.
--WILLIAM MARION REEDY, in St. Louis Mirror.
* * *
DEATH OF W. C. BRANN.
What a sable pall was flung over the spirits of countless
thousands who heard last week that Editor W. C. Brann,
of the ICONOCLAST, was no more. "The heavens seem
hung in black and the clouds are wrung of their stars,"
wrote a St. Paul friend who idolized the apostolic seer.
The world is dark with excess of grief for the immortal
soul of an illimitable genius has been sent to its maker
and scattered with the star dust of the eidouranion
William C. Brann was an apostle. Like Christ, like Lincoln
and others whom we deify, he was misunderstood and
reviled, and a cowardly bullet pierced him in the back, a
martyrdom of which he had a premonition.
The head and front of his offending was strict adherence
to the truth, though the heavens fall. He knew no fear,
but was never the aggressor.
The lamented Brann was an educator, and an emancipator
of human liberty and human thought. The hypocrite
stood in awe of his judgment. When he indicted him
to be arraigned before the great bar of public opinion he
dipped his pen in acid that seared the eyeballs, and wrote
their sentence diluted with worm-wood and gall. It is
not small wonder that the Judas Iscariots and the lemurs
trembled at his power.
Brann's tragic exit from this vale of tears is
inspiration now for jackals to attack his name. Like the dull,
dull ass they are not afraid to kick the dead lion, while
their ears wave to the seventh heaven of delight. In earth
life they feared his name, but like ghouls they now go
down into the grave to besmirch his memory. And this,
too, from those who profess to follow the teachings of the
meek and lowly Nazarene.
Strange as it may seem to the hypocrite, Brann was a
religious man. His creed was the religion of humanity.
His biographers, if they do him justice, will write his
name with the blood of the lamb high up on the flying scroll.
Brann's friends, and they are legion, should not repine
if he is not canonized as his bones are hearsed in death,
for "whenever was a god found agreeable to everybody?
The regular way is to lynch, as the Baylorites did, to
hang, to kill, to crucify and excoriate and trample them
under their stupid hoofs, cloven or webbed, as the case may
be, for a century or two; and then take to braying over
them when you discover their divine origin, still in a very
long-eared manner!" So speaks the sarcastic man, in
his wild way, very mournful truths.
Brann was as the "life-tree, Igdrasil, wide-waving and
many-toned, with fimbriated tendrils down deep in the
Death-Kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men and
with boughs reaching always beyond the stars and ever
changeless as the immutable empyrean of eternal hope."
They could better spare the whole State of Texas than
William C. Brann. While the galled jades winced beneath
the scorpion whips of his satire, and would have preferred
fireballs, they felt the potency of his dynamics and scurried
to the soldier works of the masters for a glint of mental
pabulum they had never known before.
The editor of The Sunday Eye is in receipt of many
letters from admirers of the late lamented genius. They
are rich in anathema and maranatha of Brann's heartless
and cruel detractors. With one accord they have expressed
the wish that I excoriate the revilers who desecrated
by bludgeon words the sacrosanct acre of God in
which reposes the mortal tenement of the sacred scribe.
I do not believe as Mr. Charles Campbell, of Anchor,
does, that they should be gibbeted high as Haman. Nor
do I think as Mr. C. E. Stewart, of Minier, does, that they
should be lashed naked through the world and lambasted
till death ends the heart throbs. I believe that they should
be permitted to live until they have read the great genius
and learned to understand and exalt him. It would make
them better for it, religion would not suffer by it, though
Baylor sank a thousand leagues beneath the seven-hued
regions of Tartarus.
The ICONOCLAST minced no words. When it dealt body
blows they landed in the brisket and affected the solar
plexus in a very apprehensive way.
Lincoln was gentle and generous, Ingersoll was brilliant
and broad, but Brann was all this and greater. His
untimely death was a distinctive loss to the march of
civilization and a gain to the shams of hypocrisy which takes
now a new grip on the English language to batter down
the shackles Brann had welded about them with public opinion.
Brann was a reformer who meant reform. He wore
his heart upon his sleeve, but would be cruel to be just.
He endured mental anguish great as was suffered in the
garden of Gethsemane. As the sweetest perfume exhales
from a crushed, blooming rose so the sweeter and nobler
sentiments welled up from the perennial spring of his
fountains of love when most bruised and racked with pain.
I have no fear of his acceptance on the right hand up
there where men are judged by their deeds and not by
semblance of better things that a canting world may
simulate. He is in Valhalla with the other battling heroes
where the alabaster boxes of eternal love are showered
upon the halo of their brighter radiance. Brann wrote
to catch the wide world's attention that he might teach
them gentler things than feculent shocks. He was essentially
an ascetic devoted to uplifting in his own sure way.
All the classes came trippingly to his and all the dogmas,
all the purlieus of sociology and political economy were
as an open book to him. When he soared to the sun
he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His
iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and
the expurgation of money power which he believed was
the ne plus ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolic
perfidy. He preached as he felt, tender and terrible,
loving and vehement, a strange commingling of Titanic
vulgate and cooing peace. Brann was eccentric but all
genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed
Quixotic. He was a man whose loftiest ideality was purity
in womanhood. He adored children and was in many
respects child-like. He was as
"The long light that shakes across the lake,
Where the cataract leaps in its glory."
Friend Brann, through blinding mist of sympathetic
tears, I say adieu.--Geo. L. Hutchin, in the Bloomington
Eye.
* * *
A PEN PICTURE OF BRANN
It is hard for me to realize that Brann is dead. It seems
only yesterday night that he sat opposite me at table,
and talked of his plans and projects and spoke so hopefully,
so boyishly of the future that he was never to realize.
For a long time I had a curiosity to see Brann, of the
ICONOCLAST. His pyrotechnic vocabulary, his strange
admixture of erudition and slang, his almost womanly
sympathy and the more than Apache ferocity with which
he pursued his enemies, the tender and poetic metaphor
that gemmed his iron prose, and the singular blending of
optimism and pessimism that characterized most of his
work suggested an anomaly that appealed to the imagination,
and I was anxious to see what Brann looked like.
I had an opportunity when he came here to lecture. I
knew his business manager, Mr. Ward, who figured in the
dreadful duel in which he lost his life, and who was, at
that time, arranging his lecture dates. Ward is a big
Texan, over six feet high, and I suppose he weighs all
of two hundred pounds. He is a lawyer who drifted into
journalism years ago, and under a somewhat rough-and-
ready exterior there is not much trouble in finding the
gentleman and the scholar. Well, Ward introduced me to
Brann, and after a while the three of us foregathered in
a private room of a down-town cafe, and stayed there for
several hours that I remember with unmixed delight.
Looking back at the episode, I have difficulty in framing
my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the
principal thing that struck me was his lack of pose and
affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits
and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful
naivete.
"I want to pull out of the ICONOCLAST as much as I
can," he said. "And since we have made enough money
to do so, I have bought a great many outside contributions.
My idea," he continued, "is this: As long as I
wrote most everything in the publication myself it was
strictly a one-man paper; and if anything should have
happened to me it would have been worth nothing to my
wife and family. What I am trying to do now is to
organize a corps of contributors who can keep it up if I
should be taken away."
Had he any suspicion of the prophecy that lurked in
these words? Perhaps he had; for when I suggested to
him the advisability of leaving Waco, with its petty local
dissensions and the personal dangers incident to them, he
shook his head.
"I got together $11,000 not long ago," he said, "and
put it into a house. It is the first money worth talking
about that I ever had, and I feel that the investment ties
me, more or less, to Waco. But aside from that," he went
on to say, "I am a little afraid that the ICONOCLAST
would lose its characteristic flavor if I moved it to one
of the big Eastern cities. You will remember that that
experiment was tried with the Arkansas Traveller, which
was moved from Little Rock to Chicago, and promptly fell
flat. The same thing happened to the Texas Siftings,
when it was taken from Austin to New York. I am inclined
to believe that a publication acquires a savor of the
soil in which it springs, and it is a mighty risky business
to try to transplant it."
He told me of Col. Gerald, who had killed the Harris
brothers only a few weeks before. "Gerald is a wonderful
old man," he said. "He is over sixty, but he is as straight
as a pine. He has a light mustache and chin beard, and
eyes the color of the blue you see in old china. He don't
know what fear is. He thinks it is some kind of a disease
like smallpox or appendicitis, and only know that he has
never had it." Between talk we ate oysters and drank a little
beer. Brann impressed me as being a very temperate man.
The conversation drifted frequently to his plans for the
future. "I've been roasted a good deal for the go-as-you-
please style of the ICONOCLAST," he said, "and, between
ourselves, wish I could have refined its style a trifle. But
if I had done so we would never have gone over the 100,000
mark as we did last week. However, I'm tired of it," he
said slowly, "most infernally tired. I am anxious next
year to devote myself to a higher class of work. I have
a novel about half done, and also a play, and I am very
hopeful that they may both succeed."
It was long after midnight when we parted. He said
that he expected to be back "one of these days."
Poor Brann! It sickens one's soul to think of the value
of such a life as his as against that of his slayer. Good
God! His little finger was worth all the Texas pot-house
politicians and Baylor University pharisees that could
be lined up between her and Orion.--O. H. S., in the
Looking Glass.
* * *
SEMPER VIVAT IN MEMORIAM.
Now that partisan hate has succeeded in hounding to his
death America's most eloquent champion of humanity; has
driven to the verge of insanity an adoring wife, and
thrown o'er the roseate lives of two tender, clinging
children the black pall of a sorrow that will forever embitter
their hearts, perchance it will pause; will remember the
teachings of that other "friend of humanity" who, nearly
nineteen hundred years ago, was crucified for daring to
fight what he believed to be wrong; whose religion may be
summed up in one word--"forgiveness."
Brann's enemies were professed followers of this Christ.
With tearful eyes and uplifted, supplicating faces they
besought the God of Justice to--in the beautiful language
of the prayer left us by his Son--"lead us not into temptation"
and "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those
who trespass against us"; and the next day passed
resolutions congratulating a mob of brutal ruffians for
frightening a sick woman nearly to death, kidnaping her
defenseless husband and forcing him--under threats of
instant death--to retract what they knew to be the truth.
A few weeks later, they were "resoluting" and
"sympathizing" and formulating plans for the erection of a
monument to the memory of two would-be assassins who
were killed while attempting to carry out their cowardly
work. Oh, Christianity!--that thy cloak--pure as polar
snow--must cover such infamy!
Brann's death blots from the firmament of American
journalism its brightest star. He was an intellectual
titan. In him was embodied the philosophy of Carlyle--
the brilliancy of Voltaire,--the withering sarcasm of
Desmoulins--the poetry of Ingersoll. His genius,
universal as that of Shakespeare, was ever aligned on the
side of the weak and oppressed; ever, with god-like
fearlessness, he stood for Right against Might--for purity
against corruption. In church, in state, in society--
he tore the painted mask from the face of hypocrisy and
exposed it, in all its festering hideousness, to the world's
ridicule.
Brann has been damned as an atheist--by people who
have never read, and are incapable of reading and
understanding, a single paragraph from his pen. The author of
"Tiens ta Foi," "Charity," "Man's Immorality"--was
not an atheist. He refused to bend the knee to superstition--
to lend a patient ear to earth's self-constituted vice-
gerents of Omniscience. But God spoke to him through
nature. The flowers he so passionately loved were
reminders of His loving tenderness; in the divine music of
Wagner, Liszt and Chopin, he recognized the voice of God.
His faith was broad as the universe--deep as infinity.
He loved purity; he hated hypocrisy; and for this he died
--a martyr.
Inspiration comes from God. The children of genius
needs must be the favorites of Omniscience. Yet
theologians vilify Brann from the pulpit--teachers denounce
him to their pupils. For nearly ten years he has been the
target of vindictive spite--such spite as only a narrow,
bigoted mind can be capable of. This is the greatest
compliment mediocrity can pay to genius.
Brann is dead! Still forever is the pen whose wondrous
alchemy transposed the English language--with all its
inherent harshness--into music sweet as song of Israfil.
Stilled is the heart that stood alone, defiant, a bulwark
'gainst the wave of corruption that is engulfing our land.
Brann is dead! But when Baylor University has sunk
beneath the wave of oblivion; when the very bones of the
splenetic-hearted hypocrites--who goaded to his death
the grandest man America has ever produced--have crumbled
into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust--
Brann's name will live--a beacon light for those who love
truth for truth's sake.
Brann is dead! The blow that wrung our hearts with
unavailing anguish but ushered him into the company of
Shakespeare, Carlyle, Hugo and Wagner. And there,
whether it be in the light that beats on God's great throne,
or in the serbonian darkness of a hell more horrible than
that pictured by Dante--is the true Heaven.--Abbott
Graphic.
* * *
BRANN'S BRAVE BATTLE.
With humble soul and heavy heart we take up our pen to
chronicle the death, yea the murder of one of the brightest
and purest noblemen that God ever created--W. C. Brann.
A few years ago he, W. H. Ward and the writer each
occupied desks, side by side, in the editorial rooms of The
Waco Morning News. There budded a friendship between
that trio that we full believe shall blossom into ripe
fraternal love on a shore as yet unknown to Mr. Ward and
the writer. Mr. Brann was editor of the ICONOCLAST,
and as its name indicates it is a smasher of idols from
Tadmor in the Wilderness to the mountains of Hepsedam.
Scorning the sensual, always against the vulgar, in much
the same manner as Carlyle, Brann stuck the gaffles of
truth deep into the sides of wrong in high places, and
exposed rottenness wherever found. With rugged English,
twisted into sentences more cutting than whips of
scorpions' tails, he stood up and fought for right as opposed
to might. He tore off the plaster of moral cancerous
ulcers, now so prolific on the body politic of the world,
and held high the treachery, the bigotry, the superstition,
the damnably dirty doings of a generation that accepts
hidebound dogmas for the ultima thule of reasoning and
truth; precept for right and in reality worships at the
shrine of exploded fables and crowns, by its own acts, the
parrot as its preceptor--lives and dies, having no desire
to do anything that somebody has not done before! Is
it any wonder that such a man as W. C. Brann should
fall a victim to such a populace? He was hounded to his
death--mobbed, spat upon, shot and murdered, by several
thousand pin-headed obstreperous patrons and followers
of a little pee-wee college, that turns young ladies out
enceinte almost yearly and hires its professors for less
salaries than a railroad brakeman gets.
Brann's good work will live, his fame will survive and an
intellectual race yet will rise up and bless his name when
the lying epitaphs of the assassin sent to the d---- by him
shall have crumbled to earth ten thousand years. We cannot
close this faint tribute of respect to our dead friend
without acknowledging the worth of such true men as Mr.
W. H. Ward and Judge G. B. Gerald, both of whom are
able, brave, high-toned gentlemen, and both of whom came
near dying, and both were willing to die, or see that Mr.
Brann got fair play while he lived.--S. M. Scruggs, in
the Tribune.
* * *
BRANN IS NO MORE.
On the first of April--All Fools' Day--W. C. Brann,
of the ICONOCLAST, and T. M. Davis riddled each other
with bullets in Waco, Texas. Both of them died the
following day. The trouble between them grew out of the
attack made by Brann in his paper on the Baylor University,
a Baptist institution attended by the daughter of Davis.
At the time that Brann accused the students of the
college of immorality, he was assaulted by them, and barely
escaped lynching at their hands. He was forced to make
a retraction and was ordered to leave town. Being a
courageous man Brann refused to emigrate.
The Irish Standard chronicles the untimely and awful
death of Mr. Brann with poignant regret, and tenders its
condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways he won
the admiration of the American people. He was a man
of great mental endowments, and in the use of invective,
often degenerating into billingsgate, he stood without a
rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and
he despised religious intolerance. As an American he
loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo-
American alliance. He held hypocrites in supreme
contempt and lashed the pharisees unmercifully. When
Catholic priests and sisters were misrepresented by
sectarian bigots, he used his tongue and pen in their defense.
So ably did he vindicate the Catholic church from their
aspersions that many supposed him to be a Jesuit in
disguise. In the last issue of the ICONOCLAST he told a
correspondent what he thought of Mrs. Shepard and ex-
priest Chiniquy. Had Brann lived in a more civilized
community than among the bigoted Baptists of Texas, he
would have used more elegant language in his magazine
than it contained for the past few months.
We entirely disagree with the Pioneer Press in its
characterization of the deceased journalist when it says:
"From attacking the private lives of the prominent and
successful men of every quarter of the union and
levying blackmail as the price of silence from those whose
slips or frailties his keen hyena-like appetite for filth
had enabled him to scent, it was an easy step to the most
scurrilous assaults on men and women whose only offending
lay in their uprightness and virtue."
Brann never attacked men and women for their
"uprightness and virtue," and our St. Paul contemporary is
guilty of calumny when it says so. Every evildoer and
hypocrite feared him, while upright men and virtuous
women had a champion in him. His bitterest enemies
never accused him of being a blackmailer, and the editor
of the Pioneer Press took care he was dead before he made
the unwarrantable charge.--The Irish Standard.
* * *
BRAVE AND BRAINY BRANN
The killing of W. C. Brann in a duel at Waco, Texas, a
few days ago, is but a repetition of the punishment that
generally falls to newspaper men who persistently print
the truth. Brann was an intellectual giant. The rarest
accomplishments possible for a human mind to acquire
were not too intricate for him to master. His versatility
was as boundless as his originality was unique. Absolutely
fearless and utterly indifferent regarding his personal
safety, he dared to expose the charlatan and the
trickster in whatever walk of life he chanced to meet
him. Endowed with a mind that was only circumscribed
by the Infinite itself and fortified with a thorough classical
education, he held the hypocrite up to contempt and public
scorn and deservedly lashed him with the lash of sarcasm.
True, some of our erudite(?) members of the press have
presumed to pass judgment upon him; men as incapable
of rendering a just criticism of his talents as they have
found it impossible to rise to his standard of excellence.
One who is especially in love with himself has said that
had Brann been less soulless he might have been an
ornament to his trade. Trade! When men attain Brann's
intellectual standing, and they are as rare as the
intellectual sloven is numerous, the TRADE evolves into a
profession. It is indeed disheartening to see one devote his
life and his talents to truth and justice, only to be
belittled after death by those whose poverty-stricken
understandings render them incapable of half-appreciating the
man's genius, to say nothing of his nobility of purpose in
endeavoring to elevate mankind. He has been accused of
blasphemy by another who has probably been as startled
by Brann's truthful declarations as he himself would have
been had he at some time dared to commit such a rash
act. Despite these intellectual "pee-wees" Brann's
writings will live long after the surf of eternity has carried
the penny-a-liners out upon the sea of oblivion. In the
tragic death of W. C. Brann the world has lost the most
versatile pen the century has produced and it is with
sincere grief that we chronicle his sudden taking away.--The
Gilroy (Cal.) Telegram.
* * *
BRANN, OF THE ICONOCLAST.
W. C. Brann, the fearless editor of the ICONOCLAST, is no
more. The ICONOCLAST is published at Waco, Texas, and
was started but a few years ago by its gifted author with
no more capital than his genius and the courage of his
convictions. The ICONOCLAST assailed every form of
avarice, hypocrisy and infamy; in a few months the
publication gained a world-wide reputation and amassed for its
editor a handsome fortune because it was bought and read
by thousands of people who love truth, when boldly proclaimed,
for truth's sake. Some time ago the ICONOCLAST
laid bare the iniquities of some white-sepulchral hypocrites
having charge of a young ladies' seminary under the
auspices of a religious denomination. The pious and
lecherous scoundrels, and their ilk, who felt aggrieved by
the publication of the sensational facts, instead of resorting
to the law and proving that they had been libeled, and
vindicating themselves by the imprisonment of Brann,
resorted to mob violence, and what they lacked in courage
they supplied with numbers, and beat their helpless victim
into insensibility. In the very next issue of the
ICONOCLAST, Brann, its outraged but incomparably fearless
editor, in speaking of his cowardly assailants, used the
following defiant and sadly prophetic words: "Truth to
tell there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's
worth a charge of buckshot who deserve so much honor
as being sent to hell by a white man's hand! If Socrates
was poisoned, and Christ was crucified, for telling
unpalatable truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of
their time, it would ill become me to complain of martyrdom
for a like offense." Brann was shot in the back by a
drunken "local" politician, who doubtless had as much
conception of morality and honor as did those whom Brann
had assailed openly and above-board in the ICONOCLAST.
Brann, though mortally wounded, turned and shot his
assassin, wounding him fatally--Brann and his assassin
have both died--one, mourned as a martyr in the cause
of truth; the other mourned by the "splenetic-hearted
hypocrites" of Waco and elsewhere.--Charleston Enterprise.
* * *
A MARTYR TO FREE SPEECH.
Poor Brann has fallen a martyr to Baptist bigotry. The
foul minded crowd who imported Slattery to Waco ran a
university whose iniquities Brann exposed. The deacons
of the church and the preachers combined against him and
his life was attacked again and again because he was
not afraid of telling the truth. The last attempt was
successful and his blood is on the head of the bigots of
Waco.
We have not read in any of our "American" dailies
nor have we seen in any of our Evangelical weeklies a
condemnation of this outrage on free speech. If the
conditions had been reversed, if a Catholic had shot down
the defamer of Catholic women, the country would have
rung with denunciations of Catholic bigotry. But the
Baptist beetle-browed can for months plan the death of a
man who has exposed their hypocrisy and the assassination
is taken as one of the few "occurrences" which
diversify life in those monotonous Texas towns.
Brann was not a Catholic. In the eyes of the majority
Baptists of Waco he was an infidel. He had no sympathy
with any creed as a creed; but as far as we can
judge he loved truth and justice and hated wrong and
hypocrisy. It was this natural feeling for right and fair
play which led him into the battle with the A.P.A., the
battle in which he perished. We believe that he acted
according to his lights, and to those who live by the law
as it is shown to them, God will not deny grace. Many a
man and woman who never saw Brann, and do not sympathize
with the extreme views he held on certain religious
matters, and might perhaps take exception to his style of
conveying his opinions, will yet because of his manly
defense of ladies slandered without cause by the vilest of the
vile, breathe a silent prayer that God may have mercy
on his soul. As long as ye did it unto these you did it
unto Me. Even a cup of cold water shall not lose its
reward.--The Monitor, San Francisco, Cal.