Gall is a bitter subject, and I shall waste no time selecting
sweet words in which to handle it. There's no surplus
of sweet words in my vocabulary anyhow. I have
never yet been able to rent my mouth for a taffy mill.
Webster gives several definitions of Gall; but the good
old etymologist was gathered to his fathers long before
the word attained its full development and assumed an
honored place in the slang vernacular of the day. It was
needed. It fills what editors sometimes call a "long-felt
want." Gall is sublimated audacity, transcendent
impudence, immaculate nerve, triple-plated cheek, brass in
solid slugs. It is what enables a man to borrow five
dollars of you, forget to repay it, then touch you for twenty
more. It is what makes it possible for a woman to borrow
her neighbor's best bonnet, then complain because
it isn't the latest style or doesn't suit her particular type
of beauty. It is what causes people to pour their troubles
into the ears of passing acquaintances instead of reserving
them for home consumption. It is what makes a man
aspire to the governorship, or to air his asininity in the
Congress of the United States when he should be fiddling
on a stick of cordwood with an able-bodied buck-saw. It
is what leads a feather-headed fop, with no fortune but
his folly, no prospects but poverty--who lacks business
ability to find for himself bread--to mention marriage to
a young lady reared in luxury, to ask her to leave the
house of her father and help him fill the land with fools.
Gall is what spoils so many good ditchers and delvers to
make peanut politicians and putty-headed professional
men. It is what puts so many men in the pulpit who
could serve their Saviour much better planting the mild-
eyed potato or harvesting the useful hoop-pole. It is what
causes so many young ladies to rush into literature
instead of the laundry--to become poets of passion instead
of authors of pie.
Gall is a very common ailment. In fact, a man without
a liberal supply of it is likely to be as lonesome in this
land as a consistent Christian at a modern camp-meeting,
or a gold-bug Democrat in Texas. Nearly everybody has
it and is actually proud of it. When a young man is first
afflicted with the tender passion; when he is in the throes
of the mysterious mental aberration that would cause him
to climb a mesquite bush and lasso the moon for his
inamorata if she chanced to admire it, he is apt to think
it love that makes the world go round. Later he learns
that Gall is the social dynamics--the force that causes
humanity to arise and hump itself.
Gall has got the world grabbed. Politics is now a high-
class play, whose pawns are power and plunder; business
is becoming but a gouge-game wherein success hallows
any means. Our mighty men are most successful
marauders; our social favorites minister in the temple of
Mammon, our pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night
the follies and foibles of the "Four Hundred," our God the
Golden Calf. The standard by which society now measures
men is the purse; that by which it gauges greatness
the volume of foolish sound which the aspirant for
immortal honors succeeds in setting afloat, little caring
whether it be such celestial harp music as caused Thebe's
walls to rise, or the discordant bray of the ram's horn
which made Jericho's to fall. This century, which proudly
boasts itself "heir to all the ages and foremost in the files
of time," doffs its beaver to brazen effrontery, burns its
sweetest incense on the unhallowed shrine of pompous
humbuggery, while modest merit is in a more pitiable
predicament than the traditional tomcat in Tartarus without
teeth or toenails.
We make manifest our immeasureable Gall by
proclaiming from the housetops that, of all the ages which
have passed o'er the hoary head of Mother Earth, the
present stands preeminent; that of all the numberless
cycles of Time's mighty pageant there was none like unto
it--no, not one. And I sincerely hope there wasn't. Perhaps
that which induced the Deity to repent him that he
had made man and send a deluge to soak some of the
devilment out of him, was the nearest approach to it. We
imagine that because we have the electric telegraph and
the nickel-plated dude, the printing press and the campaign
lie, the locomotive and the scandal in high life; that
because we now roast our political opponent instead of
the guileless young missionary, and rob our friends by
secret fraud instead of despoiling our foes by open force,
that we are the people par-excellence and the Lord must
be proud of us.
Progress and improvement are not always synonyms. A
people may grow in Gall instead of grace. I measure a
century by its men rather than by its machines, and we
have not, since civilization took its boasted leap forward,
produced a Socrates or a Shakespeare, a Phidias or an
Angelo, a Confucius or a Christ. This century runs
chiefly to Talmages and Deacon Twogoods, pauper dukes
and divorce courts--intellectual soup and silk lingerie.
. . .
The poets no longer sing of the immortal gods, of war
and sacrifice, while the flame mounts to manhood's cheek,
red as the fires of Troy: They twitter of lovies and
dovies, of posies and goose-liver pie, while pretty men
applaud and sentimental maids get moonsick. Cincinnatus
no longer waits for the office to seek the man: He sells
his brace of bullocks and buys a political boom. No more
the Spartan mother gives her long black hair for bow-
strings: She blondines it, paints, powders and tries to
pass as the younger sister of her eldest daughter. The
Norse viking no longer plows the unknown wave, his
heart wilder than the wat'ry waste, his arm stronger than
tempered steel: He comes to America and starts a
saloon. No more the untamed Irish king caroms on the
Saxon invader with a seasoned shillalah: He gets on the
police force and helps "run the machine," or clubs the
head off the harmless married man who won't go home
till morning. In these degenerate days the philosopher
retires not to the desert, and there, by meditation most
profound, wrings from the secret treasure-house of his own
superior soul, jewels to adorn his age and enrich the
world: He mixes an impossible plot with a little pessimism,
adds a dude and a woman whose moral character has seen
better days, spills the nauseous compound on the public
as a "philosophical novel" and works the press for puffs.
Indeed we're progressing; going onward and upward--
like the belled buzzard dodging a divorce scandal. Greece
had her Pericles, but it was left for us to produce a
Parkhurst. Rome had her Cicero and her Caesar, but was never
equal to a Culberson or a Corbett. The princes of old
conquered the earth, but the modern plutocrats put a
mortgage on it. Cleopatra drank pearls dissolved in wine, but
whisky straight is said to be good enough for some of her
successors. Samson slew the Philistines with a jawbone of
an ass; but a modern politician, employing the self-same
weapon, would have got 'em to elect him governor. We've
got no Helen of Troy; but our "Hell'n Blazes" is a bird
o' the same feather. We've got to yield the palm in poetry
and philosophy, art and architecture; but when it comes
to building political platforms that straddle every important
issue and slinging princely style on a pauper income
we're out of sight.
How can the acorn become a mighty forest monarch if
planted in a pint pot and crossed with a fuzzy-wuzzy
chrysanthemum? How can the Numidian lion's whelp become
a king of beasts if reared in a cage and fed on cold
potatoes, muzzled and made to dance to popular music? How
can the superior soul expand until it becomes all-embracing,
god-like, a universe in itself, in which rings sweet
sphere-music and rolls Jovinian thunder--in which blazes
true Promethean fire instead of smolders the sulphurous
caloric of the nether world--when its metes and bounds are
irrevocably fixed for it--when it can only grow in certain
prescribed directions, painfully mapped out for it by
bumptious pismires who imagine that their little heads
constitute the intellectual Cosmos?
. . .
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, lamented that he lacked
Gall; but the melancholy Dane was dead years before the
present generation of titled snobs appeared upon the scene.
None of the princes or dukes of the present day appear to
be short on Gall; none of the nobility seem to be suffering
for lack of it. Not long ago a little Duke who owes his
title to the fact that his great-grand-aunt was the paramour
of a half-wit prince, kindly condescended to marry an
American girl to recoup his failing fortunes. A little
French guy whose brains are worth about two cents a
pound--for soap-grease--put up a Confederate-bond title
for the highest bidder and was bought in like a hairless
Mexican pup by an American plutocrat. Now half-a-dozen more
little pauper princelings and decadent dukelings
are trying to trade their worthless coronets for
American cash. But the fact that many a man boasting
of his American sovereignty will dicker with a titled young
duke, instead of using the forecastle of a No. 9 foot to
drive his spinal column up through his plug-hat like a
presidential lightning-rod; will actually purchase for his
daughter some disgusting little title upon which rests the
fateful bar-sinister of a woman's shame, and is encumbered
by a dizzy young dude, too lazy to work and too cowardly
to steal--too everlastingly "ornery" to raise a respectable
crop of wild oats-proves that the young lollipop
lordlings haven't a monopoly of the Gall of the Globe.
A most shameful exhibition of Gall is the practice now
coming into vogue with certain society ladies of encouraging
newspapers to puff their charms--even paying them so
much a line for fulsome praise. Not a few metropolitan
papers reap a handsome profit by puffing society buds
whom their fond parents are eager to place on the matrimonial
market, hoping that they will "make good
matches"; in other words, that they will marry money--
its possessors being thrown in as pelon. Even married
women, who are long on shekels but short on sense,
sometimes pay big prices to get their portraits in the public
prints--accompanied by puffs that would give a buzzard
a bilious attack.
But the Gall of the girl who puts her picture in the
papers, accompanied by a paid puff of her "purty," scarce
equals that of the conceited maid who imagines she has
only to look at a man and giggle a few times to "mash
him cold"--to get his palpitating heart on a buckskin
string and swing it hither-and-yon at pleasure. How the
great he-world does suffer at the hands of those heartless
young coquettes--if half it tells 'em be true! David said
in his haste that all men are liars. And had he carefully
considered the matter he would have come to the same
conclusion. Washington may have told his father the
truth about that cherry-tree; but later in life he became
entirely too popular with the ladies for a man unable to lie.
It is natural for men to pay court to a pretty woman
as for flies to buzz about a molasses barrel; but not every
fly that buzzes expects to get stuck, I beg to state. The
man who doesn't tell every woman who will listen to him
--excepting, perhaps, his wife--that she's pretty as a peri,
even though she be homely enough to frighten a mugwump
out of a fat federal office; that she's got his heart grabbed;
that he lives only in the studied sunshine of her store-
teeth smile and is hungering for an opportunity to die for
her dear sake--well, he's an angel, and he-seraphs are
almighty scarce I beg of you to believe. Since Adonis
died and Joseph was gathered to his fathers none have
appeared that I am aware of. These young gentlemen were
all right, I suppose; but I'd like to see either of them
get elected nowadays on the Democratic ticket in Texas.
But feminine conceit, fed on flattery, were as milk-shake
unto mescal, as a kiss by mail to one by moonlight compared
with the insufferable egotism of the "pretty man"
who puts his moustache up in curl-papers and perfumes
his pompadour; who primps and postures before an amorous
looking-glass and imagines that all Eve's daughters
are trying to abduct him. Whenever I meet one of these
male irresistibles I'm forcibly reminded that the Almighty
made man out of mud--and not very good mud at that.
The two-legged he-thing who makes a clothes-horse of
himself and poses on the street-corner perfumed like an
emancipation day picnic; who ogles a pretty woman until
the crimson creeps into her cheek, then prides himself on
having captured her heart like the boy caught the itch,--
because he couldn't help it--when she's only blushing for
the mother who bore the pitiful parody on manhood; who
imagines that every maid who deigns to waste a smile on
him is sighing her soul out for his sweet sake, has allowed
his Gall to go to his head and curdle his brains.
. . .
More than a moiety of our so-called great men are but
featherless geese, possessing a superabundance of Gall--
creatures of chance who ride like driftwood on the crest of
a wave raised by forces they cannot comprehend; but they
ride, and the world applauds them while it tramples better
men beneath its brutal feet. Greatness and Gall, genius
and goose-speech, sound and sense have become synonyms.
If you fall on the wrong side of the market men
will quote the proverb about a fool and his money: if on
the right side you're a Napoleon of finance. Lead a
successful revolt and you are a pure patriot whose memory
should be preserved to latest posterity; head an unsuccessful
uprising and you are a miserable rebel who should
have been hanged. "Nothing succeeds like success." Had
the Christian religion failed to take root, Judas Iscariot
would have been commemorated in the archives of Rome
as one who helped stamp out the hateful heresy, and had
Washington got the worst of it in his go with Cornwallis
he would have passed into history as a second Jack Cade.
Alexander of Macedon was great, as measured by the
world's standard of eminence. After two-and-twenty
centuries our very babes prattle of this bloody butcher, and
even his horse has been enshrined in history. In our own
day Father Damien left kindred and country and went
forth to die for the miserable lepers in the mid-Pacific,
but he is already forgotten--his name and fame have
faded from the minds of men. Yet greater and grander
than all the blood-stained princes and potentates of earth;
nobler, more god-like than all the proud prelates that ever
aired their turgid eloquence at Christian conference or
ecumenical council was that young priest; but no cenotaph
rises to commemorate his sacrifice--silent as his own
sealed lips is the trumpet of fame.
But for Gall of the A1, triple X brand, commend me to
the little pot-house politician who poses as a political
prophet and points out to wiser men their public duties.
We have to-day in this land of the free and home of the
crank, thousands of self-important little personages who
know as little of political economy as a parrot of the
power of prayer, prating learnedly of free-trade or
protection, greenbackism or metallic money. Men who
couldn't tell a fundamental principle from their funny-
bone, an economic thesis from a hot tamale--who don't
know whether Ricardo was an economist or a corn-doctor--
evolve from their empty ignorance new systems of
"saving the country," and defend them with the dogmatic
assurance of a nigger preacher describing the devil--make
gorgeous displays of their Gall. I have noticed that, as a
rule, the less a man knows of the science of government the
crazier he is to go to congress. About half the young
statesmen who break into the legislature imagine that
Roger Q. Mills wrote the Science of Economics, and that
Jefferson Davis was the father of Democracy.
But the Gall is not confined to the little fellows--the big
political M.D.'s have their due proportion. The remedies
they prescribe for Uncle Sam's ailments remind me of the
panaceas put on the market by the patent-medicine men--
warranted to cure everything, from a case of cholera-morbus
to an epidemic of poor relations. We have one school
of practitioners prescribing free-trade as a sure-cure for
every industrial ill, another a more drastic system of
protection. One assures us that the silver-habit is dragging
us down to the demnition bow-wows, another that only an
heroic dose of white dollars will save us from industrial
death. Political claptrap to corral the succulent pie--
"issues" to get office. We have had high and low tariff,
the gold and silver standard, greenbackism and "wild-cat"
currency; we have had presidents of all shades of political
faith and congresses of every kind of economic folly; yet
in a single century America has risen from the poorest of
nations to the wealthiest in all the world. True it is that
wealth is congested--that willful Waste and woeful Want
go hand in hand--that the land is filled with plutocrats and
paupers; but this distressing fact is due to the faults of
our industrial system itself, and can never be reformed by
placing fiddle-strings on the free list or increasing the
tariff on toothpicks.
Gall? Ye gods! Look at the platform promises of the
blessed Democratic party--then at its performances!
Look at the party itself--a veritable omnium-gatherum of
political odds and ends, huddled together under the party
blanket like household gods and barn-yard refuse after a
hurricane. High and low tariffs and free-traders; gold-
bugs, green-backers and bi-metallists; Cleveland and
Croker, Altgeld and Olney, Hill and Hogg, Waco's Warwick
and Colonel Culberson's kid, all clamoring to be dyed-
in-the-wool Democrats! When I get a new main-spring
put in my vocabulary I'm going to tackle the Gall of the
Populists and Republicans.
. . .
Some specimens of Gall amaze me by their greatness,
some amuse me, while others only spoil my appetite. Of
the latter class is the chronic kicker who is forever fuming
about feminine fashions. If the hoop-skirt comes in this
critic is in agony; if the "pull-back" makes its appearance
he has a fit and falls in it. Ever since Eve attired
herself in a few freckles and fig-leaves he's been reforming
the fashions. Don't mind him, ladies. Like a peacock
crying in the night, he's disagreeable, but not dangerous.
Adorn yourselves as you see fit; follow such fashions as
seem good in your sight, and have no fear that the sons of
men will ever forsake you because of your clothes. When
you find a man dictating to the ladies what they shall
wear you're pretty apt to see his head housed in a stove-
pipe hat--the most inartistic and awkward monstrosity
ever designed by the devil to make the Almighty ashamed
of his masterpiece. In all history there's no record of a
great idea being born in a beegum. I never saw a statue
of a hero or picture of a martyr with a plug hat on.
Imagine the Lord laying aside a silk cady preparatory to
preaching that Sermon on the Mount--or Napoleon
apostrophizing the pyramids in a plug! Before finding fault
with the fashions of the ladies just imagine Apollo in the
make-up of a modern society swell, loafing into court on
High Olympus! Why Jove would hit him with a thunderbolt
so hard there'd be nothing left of him but a wilted
chrysanthemum and a pair o' yaller shoes!
. . .
For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods
commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously
offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to
him who had nowhere to lay his head; who pay a preacher
$15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in
the great cities of every Christian country children must
steal or starve and women choose between death and
dishonor. New York is crowded with costly churches that
lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the
clouds with golden fingers--monuments which Mammon
rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value
mounts up into the millions; yet I learn--from a religious
paper, mark you--that 100,000 men, women and children
were evicted in New York alone last year for the non-
payment of rent; turned into the streets to suffer summer's
heat or winter's cold--to beg, or starve, or steal, as they
saw fit. I find these startling statistics in the same column
with a tearful appeal for more money to send missionaries
to black barbarians--on the same page with a description
of a new church that must have cost a cold half-million of
cash. That's what I call sanctified assurance--gall
masquerading as grace. And what is true of New York is
true, in greater or less degree, of every town from
Plymouth Rock to Poker Flats, from Tadmor-in-the-
Wilderness to Yuba Dam. Everywhere the widow is battling
with want, while we send Bibles and blankets, prayer-
books and pie, salvation and missionary soup to a job-lot
of lazy niggers whose souls aren't worth a soumarkee in
blocks-of-five--who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates
were wide open, but once inside would steal the eternal
throne if it wasn't spiked down. Let the heathen rage;
we've got our hands full at home. I'd rather see the whole
black-and-tan aggregation short on Bibles than one white
child crying for bread.
While Europe and America are peddling saving grace
in pagan lands--and incidentally extending the market for
their cheap tobacco, snide jewelry and forty-rod bug-juice
--they are also building warships and casting cannon--
preparing to cut each other's throats while prating of the
prince of peace! The idea of countries that have to build
forts on their frontiers and keep colossal standing armies
to avoid being butchered by their own Christian brethren;
that are full of divorce courts and demagogues, penitentiaries
and poorhouses, sending young theological goslings,
who believe that all of divine revelation can be found in
one book, to teach the philosophic Hindu the road to
heaven! Gall! Why the men we are trying to convert
were preaching the immortality of the soul when the
Hebrew prophets were putting people to the sword for
accepting it; they were familiar with all the essential
features of the Christian faith a thousand years before the
crucifixion of Christ. Charity begins at home. In our
own country children are coming up in ignorance and
crime, while sect vies with sect in the erection of proud
temples in which polite society may display its Parisian
finery while pretending to worship One who broke bread
with beggars and slept in the brush.
I haven't much use for gold-plated godliness. Christ
never built a church, or asked for a vacation on full pay,
--never. He indulged in no political harangues--never
told his parishioners how to vote--never posed as a professional
Prohibitionist. He didn't try to reform the fallen
women of Jerusalem by turning them over to the police,
a la Parkhurst. Although gladiatorial shows were common
in his country--and that without gloves--he didn't go
raging up and down the earth like some of our Texas
dominies, demanding that these awful crimes against
civilization should cease. There is no record of his
engineering a boycott against business men who dissented from his
doctrine. I think he could have read a copy of the ICONOCLAST
with far more patience than some of his successors.
Human or divine, he was the grandest man that ever
graced the mighty tide of time. His was a labor of love,
instead of for lucre. The groves were his temples, the
mountain-side his pulpit, the desert his sacristy, and
Jordan his baptismal font.
. . .
Then there's the unconscious Gall of the pious parrot
who is quite sure that the only highway to the heavenly
hereafter is outlined by his little sect, macadamized by his
creed; that you've got to travel that or get into trouble,
perhaps fall into the fire.
Just imagine that dear Lord, who so loved sinners that
he died to save them from death eternal, looking over
heaven's holy battlements and observing a miserable mortal
plunging downward to his doom, leaving behind him a
streak of fire like a falling star, his face distorted with
fear, his every hair erect and singing like a jewsharp.
He asks St. Peter:
"Who's that?"
"Oh," says the man on the door, "that's old John
Smith."
The Lord goes over to the office of the Recording Angel
and turns the leaves of the great ledger. He finds the
name, "John Smith, No. 11,027," and on the credit page
these entries: "He was fearless as Caesar, generous as
Macaenas, tender as Guatama and true to his friends as the
stars to their appointed courses. He was a knight of
nature's nobility, a lord in the aristocracy of intellect,
courtier at home and a king abroad. On the debit page
he reads: "Went fishing on Sunday. There was a miscue
on his baptism. He knew a pretty woman from an ancient
painting, a jack-pot from a prayer-book, and when smitten
on one cheek he made the smacker think he'd been smuck
by a cyclone." Good-bye, John!
It may be that the monarch of the majestic universe
marches around after every inconsequential little mortal,
note-book in hand, giving him a white mark when he prays
for the neighbor who poisons his dog, or tells his wife the
truth regardless of consequences; a black one when he bets
his money on the wrong horse or sits down on the sidewalk
and tries to swipe the front gate as it goes sailing by; but
I doubt it. If I could make the sun, moon and stars in
one day and build a beautiful woman of an old bone, I'd
just like to see the color of that man's hair I'd waste much
time and attention on.
. . .
Why should we quarrel about our faiths and declare that
this is right and that is wrong, when all religions are, and
must of necessity ever be, fundamentally one and the same
--the worship of a superior power, the great
"Father of all, in every age, in ev'ry clime adored,
By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or
Lord."
. . .
Man's cool assumption that the Almighty made him as
his "masterpiece" should be marked Exhibit A in the
mighty aggregation of Gall. That after millions of years
experience in the creation business--after building the
archangels and the devil; after making the man in the
moon and performing other wondrous miracles, the straddling
six-foot biped who wears a spike-tail coat and plug-
hat, a silk surcingle and sooner tie; who parts his name
on the side and his hair in the middle; who sucks a cane
and simpers like a school-girl struggling with her first
compliment; who takes it for granted that he knows it
all, when his whole life--including his birth, marriage and
death--is a piece of ridiculous guess-work; who insists
that he has a soul to save, yet labors with might and main
to lose it; protests that there's a better land beyond the
grave, yet moves heaven and earth to keep from going to
it so long as he can help it--the assumption, I say, that
this was the best the Creator could do, is prima facie
evidence of a plentitude of Gall of the purest ray serene.
The calm assurance of man that the earth and all it
contains were made for his especial benefit; that woman was
created solely for his comfort; that the sun was made to
give him light by day and the moon to enable him to find
his way home from the lodge at night without the aid of a
policeman; that the heavens were hung with a resplendent
curtain of stars and the planets sent whirling through
space in a majestic dance about the God of Day, simply to
afford him matter for wonder or for amusement when too
tired to talk politics or too bilious to drink beer, evinces an
egotism that must amuse the Almighty.
Masterpiece indeed! Why, God made man, and, finding
that he couldn't take care of himself, made woman to take
care of him--and she proposes to discharge her heaven-
ordained duty or know the reason why. Tennyson says
that, "as the husband is the wife is"; but even Tennyson
didn't know it quite all. When wives take their hubbies for
measures of morality, marriage will become an enthusiastic
failure and Satan be loosed for a little season. We
acknowledge woman's superiority by demanding that she be
better than we could if we would, or would be if we could.
We are fond of alluding to woman as "the weaker
vessel"; but she can BREAK the best of us if given an
opportunity. Pope calls man the "great lord of all
things"--but Pope never got married. We rule with a
rod of iron the creatures of the earth and air and sea;
we hurl our withering defi in the face of Kings and brave
presidential lightning; we found empires and straddle the
perilous political issue, then surrender unconditionally to
a little bundle of dimples and deviltry, sunshine and
extravagance. No man ever followed freedom's flag for
patriotism (and a pension) with half the enthusiasm that
he will trail the red, white and blue that constitute the
banner of female beauty. The monarch's fetters cannot
curtail our haughty freedom, nor nature's majestic forces
confine us to this little lump of clay; we tread the ocean's
foam beneath our feet, harness the thunderbolts of imperial
Jove to the jaunting car, and even aspire to mount the
storm and walk upon the wind; yet the bravest of us
tremble like cowards and lie like Cretans when called to
account by our wives for some of our cussedness,
But you will say that I have wandered from my text--
have followed the ladies off and got lost. Well, it's not the
first time it's happened. But really, I'm not so
inconsistent as I may seem; for if the gentler sex exceeds us
in goodness it likewise surpasses us in Gall. Perhaps the
most colossal exhibit of polite and elegant audacity this
world can boast is furnished by that female who has made
a marriage of convenience; has wedded money instead of a
man,--practically put her charms up at auction for the
highest bidder--yet who poses as a paragon of purity;
gathers up her silken skirts--the price of her legalized
shame--lest they come in contact with the calico gown
of some poor girl who has loved, not wisely, but too well.
Marriage is the most sacred institution ever established
on earth, making the father, mother and child a veritable
Holy Trinity; but it is rapidly degenerating into an
unclean Humbug, in which Greed is God and Gall is recognized
high-priest. We now consider our fortunes rather
than our affections, acquire a husband or wife much as we
would a parrot or a poodle, and get rid of them with about
as little compunction. Cupid now feathers his arrows
from the wings of the gold eagle and shoots at the stomach
instead of the heart. Love without law makes angels
blush; but law without love crimson even the brazen brow
of infamy.
. . .
But the fact that so many selfish, soulless marriages are
made is not altogether woman's fault. Our ridiculous
social code is calculated to crush all sentiment and sweetness
out of the gentler sex--to make woman regard herself
as merchandise rather than as a moral entity, entitled to
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The average
woman must select a husband from a narrow circle; must
make choice among two or three admirers or elect to live
a loveless old maid--to forego the joys of motherhood,
the happiness of a home. Man is privileged to go forth
and seek a mate. The world is before him, a veritable
"Dream of Fair Women." He wanders at will, as amid
a mighty parterre of flowers, sweet as the breath of morn,
and finally, before some fair blossom he bows the knee
--pours forth the incense of his soul to the one woman in
all the world he would make his wife. True, she may
refuse him and marry some other fellow; but he is at least
privileged to approach her, to plead his cause to employ
all the art and eloquence of love to bring her into his life.
Woman enjoys no such privilege. She must wait to be
wooed, and if her king comes not she must take the best
that offers and try to be content.
Every daughter of Eve dreams of an ideal,--of a man
tender and true, who will fill her life with love's own
melody; his word her law, his home her heaven, his honor
her glory and his tomb her grave. And some day, from
these castles in the clouds he comes--these day-dreams,
golden as the dawn, become the halo of a mortal man, to
whom her heart turns as the helianthus to the sun. At last
the god of her idolatry doth walk the earth; but she must
stand afar,--must not, by word or act, betray the holy
passion that's consuming her, lest "that monster custom
of habits devil," doth brand her bold and bad. Love
ofttimes begets love, as the steel strikes fire from the cold
flint, and a word from her might bring him to her feet;
but she must stand with dumb lips and assumed indifference
and see him drift out of her life, leaving it desolate
as the Scythian desert, when it should have budded and
blossomed like the great blush rose. So she drifts
desolate into old maidenhood and the company of Maltese cats;
else, when hope is dead in her heart--when the dream of
her youth has become dust and ashes--she marries for
money and tries to feed her famished heart with Parisian
finery, to satisfy her soul with the Dead Sea fruit of
fashion.
No; I wouldn't give woman the ballot--not in a thousand
years. I want no petticoats in politics--no she-senators
or female presidents; but I'd do better by woman; I'd
repeal that ridiculous social law--survival of female
slavery--which compels her to wait to be wooed. I'd put
a hundred leap-years in every century, give woman the
right to do half the courting--to find a man to her liking
and capture him if she could. Talk about reforms! Why,
the bachelors would simply have to become Benedicts or
take to the brush, and there'd be no old maids outside the
dime museums. But I was speaking of Gall.
. . .
Gall is usually unadulterated impudence; but sometimes
it is irremediably idiocy. When you find a man pluming
himself on his ancestors you can safely set it down that
he's got the disease in its latter form, and got it bad. I
always feel sorry for a man who's got nothing to be proud
of but a dead gran'daddy, for it appears to be a law of
nature that there shall be but one great man to a tribe--
that the lightning of genius shall not twice strike the same
family tree. I suppose that Cleveland and Jim Corbett,
Luther and Mrs. Lease, Homer and J. S. Hogg had
parents and gran'parents; but we don't hear much about
'em. And while the ancestors of the truly great are
usually lost in the obscurity of the cornfield or cotton-
patch, their children seldom succeed in setting the world
on fire. Talent may be transmitted from father to son;
but you can no more inherit genius than you can inherit
a fall out of a balloon. It is the direct gift of that God
who is no respecter of persons, and who sheds his glory on
the cotter's child as freely as on those of monarchs and of
millionaires.
We have in this country three aristocracies: The
aristocracy of intellect, founded by the Almighty; the
aristocracy of money, founded by Mammon, and the aristocracy
of family, founded by fools. The aristocracy of brains
differs from those of birth and boodle as a star differs from
a jack-o'-lantern, as the music of the spheres from the bray
of a burro, as a woman's first love from the stale affection
hashed up for a fourth husband.
To the aristocracy of money belong many worthy men;
but why should the spirit of mortal be proud? The
founder of one of the wealthiest and most exclusive of
American families skinned beeves and made weinerwurst.
The calling was an honest and useful one. His sausages
were said to be excellent, and at a SKIN game he was
exceptionally hard to beat; but his descendants positively
decline to put a calf's head regardant and a cleaver
rampant on their coat-of-arms. A relative much addicted to
the genealogical habit once assured me that he could trace
our family back 600 years just as easy as following the
path to the drugstore in a Prohibition town. I was
delighted to hear it, to learn that I too had ancestors--that
some of them were actually on the earth before I was born.
While he was tracing I was figuring. I found that in 600
years there should be 20 generations--if everybody did
his duty--and that in 20 generations a man has 2,093,056
ancestors! Just think of it! Why, if he had gone back
600 years further he might have discovered that I was a
lineal descendant of Adam, perhaps distantly related to
crowned monarchs--if not to the Duke of Marlborough.
As my cousin couldn't account for this job-lot of kinsmen
--had no idea how many had been hanged, gone into politics
or written poetry, I rang off. Those people who delight
to trace their lineage through several generations to
some distinguished man should be tapped for the simples.
When John Smith starts out to found a family and marries
Miss Jones, their son is half Smith and half Jones.
The next crop is nearly one-fourth Smith and at the end of
a dozen generations the young Smiths bear about as much
relation to the original as they do to a rabbit.
. . .
There are various grades of Gall, but perhaps the
superlative brand is that which leads a man to look down with
lofty scorn upon those of his fellow mortals who have
tripped on Life's rugged pathway and plunged into a
shoreless sea of shame. I am no apologist for crime--
I would not cover its naked hideousness with the Arachne--
robe of sentiment; but I do believe that many a social
outcast, many a branded criminal, will get as sweet a harp in
the great hereafter as those who have kept themselves
unspotted from the world. It is easy enough to say grace
over a good square meal, to be honest on a fat income, to
praise God when full of pie; but just wait till you get the
same razzle-dazzle the devil dished up for Job and see how
your halle-hallelujahs hold out before exalting your horn.
Victory does not always proclaim the hero nor virtue the
saint. It were easy enough to sail with wind and tide to
float over fair seas, mid purple isles of spice; but the
captain who loses his ship mid tempests dire, mid wreck and
wrath, may be a better sailor and a braver than the master
who rides safe to port with rigging all intact and every
ensign flying. With
"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,"
it were easy enough to be a good citizen and a consistent
Christian. It is poverty and contempt, suffering and
disappointment that try men's souls--that proclaim of what
metal they are made. Faith, Hope and Charity are man's
triune transcendent--"and the greatest of these is
Charity." A pharisee is either a pious fraud or a hopeless
fool--he's either short on "gumption" or long on Gall.
. . .
Half the alleged honesty of this world is but Gall, and
must be particularly offensive to the Almighty. We have
oodles of men in every community who are legally honest,
but morally rotten. Legal honesty is the brand usually
proclaimed as "the best policy." Only fools risk the
penitentiary to fill their purse. The smart rogue is ever
"honest within the law"--infamous in strict accord with
the criminal code.
Dives may attire himself in purple and fine linen and
fare sumptuously every day, while Lazarus lies at his door
for the dogs to lick, vainly craving the crumbs that fall
from the millionaire's table, and still be legally honest, even
a church member in good standing; but his loyalty to legal
forms will avail him but little when he finds his coat-tails
afire and no water within forty miles.
The girl who flirts with a featherless young gosling till
he doesn't know whether he's floating in a sea of champagne
to the sound of celestial music, sliding down a
greased rainbow or riding on the ridge-pole of the aurora
borealis, then tells him that she can only be a kind of
Christmas-present, opera-ticket sister to him; who steals
his unripe affections and allows 'em to get frost-bitten--
carries him into the empyrean of puppy-love, only to drop
him with a dull plunk that fills his callow heart with
compound fractures--well, she cannot be prosecuted for petit
larceny nor indicted for malicious mischief; but the
unfortunate fellow who finally gets her will be glad to go to
heaven, where there's neither marrying nor giving in
marriage.
The man who preaches Prohibition in public and pays
court to a gallon jug of corn-juice in private; who damns
the saloon at home and sits up with it all night abroad,
may not transcend the law of the land, but if his Gall
should burst the very buzzards would break their necks
trying to get out of the country.
The druggist who charges a poor dunderhead a dollar
for filling a prescription that calls in Latin for a spoonful
of salt and an ounce of water, may do no violence to the
criminal code, but he plays ducks and drakes with the
moral law.
The little tin-horn attorney, whose specialties are
divorce cases and libel suits; who stirs up good-for-naughts
to sue publishers for $10,000 damages to 10-cent reputations;
who's as ready to shield Vice from the sword of
Justice as to defend Virtue from stupid violence; who's
ever for sale to the highest bidder and keeps eloquence on
tap for whosoever cares to buy; who would rob the orphan
of his patrimony on a technicality or brand the Virgin
Mary as a bawd to shield a black-mailer--well, he cannot
be put into the penitentiary, more's the pity! but it's some
satisfaction to believe that, if in all the great universe of
God there is a hell where fiends lie howling, the most
sulphurous section is reserved for the infamous shyster--that
if he cannot be debarred from the courts of earth he'll get
the bounce from those of heaven.
The woman who inveigles some poor fool--perhaps old
enough to be her father--into calling her his tootsie-
wootsie over his own signature, then brings suit for breach
of promise--or the Seventh Commandment; who exhibits
her broken heart to the judge and jury and demands that
it be patched up with Uncle Sam's illuminated anguish
plasters; who plays the adventuress, then poses in the
public prints as an injured innocent--sends a good reputation
to join a bad character in hope of monetary reward
--well, she too may be legally honest; but it's just as well
to watch her, for no woman worth powder to blow her to
perdition ever did or every will carry such a case into
court. When a woman's heart is really hurting her money
is not going to help it: when she's truly sorry for her sin
she tells her troubles to the Lord instead of to policemen
and reporters.
The man who sues a fellow-citizen for alienating his
wife's affections, instead of striking his trail with a bell-
mouthed blunderbuss and a muzzle-loading bulldog; who
asks the court to put a silver lining in the cloud of infamy
that hangs over his home; who tries to make capital of his
shame and heal with golden guineas the hurt that honor
feels--well, he too may be a law-abiding citizen; but ten
thousand such souls, if separated from their Gall, might
play hide-and-seek on the surface of a copper cent for a
hundred years and never find each other.
. . .
Dignity is but a peculiar manifestation of Gall. It is
the stock in trade of fools. If Almighty God ever put up
great dignity and superior intellect in the same package it
must have got misplaced. They are opposing elements, as
antagonistic as the doctrines of infinite love and infant
damnation. Knowledge makes men humble; true genius is
ever modest. The donkey is popularly supposed to be the
most stupid animal extant--excepting the dude. He's
also the most dignified--since the extinction of the dodo.
No pope or president, rich in the world's respect; no prince
or potentate reveling in the pride of sovereign power;
no poet or philosopher bearing his blushing honors thick
upon him ever equaled a blind donkey in impressive dignity.
As a man's vision broadens; as he begins to realize what a
miserable little microbe he is in that mighty immensity,
studded with the stupendous handiwork of a power that
transcends his comprehension, his dignity drains of and
he feels like asking to be recognized just long enough to
apologize for his existence.
When I see a little man strut forth in the face of heaven
like a turkey-cock on dress parade; forgotten aeons behind
him, blank time before him, his birth a mystery, his death
a leap in the dark; when I see him pose on the grave of
forgotten races and puff himself up with pomposity like
the frog in the fable; when I see him sprinkled with the
dust of fallen dynasties and erecting new altars upon the
site of forgotten fanes, yet staggering about under a load
of dignity that would spring the knee-joints of an archangel,
I don't wonder that the Lord once decided to drown
the whole layout like a litter of blind puppies.
. . .
A lecture on Gall were woefully incomplete without some
reference to the press, that "archimedean lever" and
"molder of public opinion." The average newspaper posing
as a "public educator" is a specimen of Gall that cannot
be properly analyzed in one evening. Men do not establish
newspapers for the express purpose of reforming the
world, but rather to print what a large number of people
in a particular community want to read and are willing
to pay for. A newspaper is simply a mirror in which the
community sees itself, not as it should be, but as it actually
is. It is not the mother, but the daughter of public
opinion. The printing press is a mighty phonograph that
echoes back the joy and the sorrow, the glory and the
shame of the generation it serves. I have no more quarrel
with editors for filling their columns with inanities than
casting shadows when they stand in the sun. They know
what kind of mental pabulum their people crave, and they
are no more in business for their health than is the
merchant. They know that should they print the grandest
sermon that ever fell from Massillon's lips of gold not
20 per cent., even of the professedly pious, would read it;
but that a detailed account of a fragrant divorce case or
international prize-fight will cause 99 per cent. of the
very elect of the Lord to swoop down upon it like a hungry
hen-hawk on an unripe gosling and fairly devour it, then
roll their eyes to heaven like a calf with the colic and
wonder what this wicked old world is coming to. The
editor knows that half the people who pretend to be filled
to overflowing with the grace of God are only perambulating
pillars of pure Gall. He knows that the very people
who criticize him for printing accounts of crimes and
making spreads on sporting events, would transfer their
patronage to other papers if he heeded their howling--
that they are talking for effect through the crown of their
felts.
Speaking of prize-fights reminds me that a governor
who, after winking at a hundred brutal slugging matches,
puts his state to the expense of a legislative session to
prevent a pair of gladiators pounding each other with soft
gloves, is not suffering for lack of Gall; that those pious
souls who never suspected that pugilism was an insult to
our civilization until they got a good opportunity to make
a grandstand play, then whereased and resoluted themselves
black in the face anent its brutality, should be presented
with a medal of pure brass. Politics is said to make
strange bed-fellows, but I scarce expected to see a shoe-
string gambler and would-be Don Juan lauded by ministerial
associations as "our heroic young Christian governor."
Gall? Why, Geo. Clark presumes to give Bismarck
pointers and congress advice. Nobody knows so well how
to manage a husband as an old maid. A bachelor can give
the father of a village pointers on the training of boys.
Our Northern neighbors know exactly how to deal with
the nigger. The man who would starve but for the industry
of his wife feels competent to manage the finances of
the country. People who couldn't be trusted to wean a
calf, tell us all about the Creator of the Cosmos. Sam
Jones wants to debate with Bob Ingersoll, and every forks-
of-the-creek economist takes a hard fall out of Henry
George. The A.P.A. agitators prate loudly of freedom of
conscience and insist on disfranchising the Catholics. We
boast of religious liberty, then enact iron-clad Sunday laws
that compel Jew and pagan to conform to our creed or go
to prison. The prohibs. want to confine the whole world to
cold water because their leaders haven't sufficient stamina
to stay sober. Men who fail to make a living at honest
labor insist on entering the public service. Political
parties charge up to each other the adverse decrees of
Providence. Atheists deny the existence of God because he
doesn't move in their set, while ministers assume that a
criticism of themselves is an insult to the Creator.
. . .
But to detain you longer were to give a practical
illustration of my text. I will be told that Gall is a necessary
evil; that a certain amount of audacity, of native
impudence, is necessary to success. I deny it. Fame and
wealth and power constitute our ideal of success--folly
born of falsehood. Only the useful are successful. Father
Damien was the grandest success of the century; Alexander
of Macedon the most miserable failure known to
human history--with the possible exception of Grover
Cleveland. Alexander employed his genius to conquer the
Orient and Cleveland his stupidity to ruin the Occident.
The kingdom of the one went to pieces, and the party of
the other is now posing as the lost tribe of the political
Israel!
Success? A Gould must give up his gold at the grave,
the sovereign surrender his sceptre, the very gods are in
time forgotten--are swallowed up in the voiceless, viewless
past, hidden by the shadows of the centuries. Why should
men strive for fame, that feather in the cap of fools, when
nations and peoples perish like the flowers and are forgotten--
when even continents fade from the great world's
face and the ocean's bed becomes the mountain's brow.
Why strive for power, that passes like the perfume of the
dawn, and leaves prince and pauper peers in death? Why
should man, made in the mortal image of immortal God,
become the subservient slave of Greed and barter all of
time for a handful of yellow dross to cast upon the threshold
of eternity? "Poor and content is rich," and rich
enough. With a roof to shelter those his heart holds
dear, and table furnished forth with frugal fare; with
manhood's dauntless courage and woman's deathless love,
the peasant in his lowly cot may be richer far than the
prince in his imperial hall.
Success? I would rather be a fox and steal fat geese
than a miserly millionaire and prey upon the misfortunes
of my fellows. I would rather be a doodle-bug burrowing
in the dust than a plotting politician, trying to inflate a
second-term gubernatorial boom with the fetid breath of
a foul hypocrisy. I would rather be a peddler of hot
peanuts than a President who gives to bond-grabbers and
boodlers privilege to despoil the pantries of the poor. I
would rather be a louse on the head of a lazar than lord
high executioner of a theological college that, to preserve
its reputation and fill its coffers with filthy lucre, brands
an orphan babe as a bawd. I would rather watch the stars
shining down through blue immensity, and the cool mists
creeping round the purple hills, than feast my eyes on all
the tawdry treasures of Ophir and of Ind. I would rather
play a corn-stalk fiddle while pickaninnies dance, than
build, of widows' sighs and orphans' tears, a flimsy bubble
of fame to be blown adown the narrow beach of Time into
Eternity's shoreless sea. I would rather be the beggar
lord of a lodge in the wilderness, dress in a suit of
sunburn and live on hominy and hope, yet see the love-light
blaze unbought in truthful eyes, than to be the marauding
emperor of the mighty world, and know not who fawned
upon the master and who esteemed the man.
* * *
BLUE AND GRAY.