Satan is supposed to have been the original Humbug; but
he's a back number now--must feel dreadfully antiquated
and useless among so many modern improvements.
That the American people love to be humbugged long
since passed into proverb. Humbuggery may be called
our national vice, our besetting sin. Like liberty, it
appears to be in the very air we breathe, and we take to it
as naturally as we go into politics. Our entire social
system has become saturated with it. It is the main-spring
of many acts we loudly praise, the lode-star of men we
apotheosize, is oftimes the warp and woof even of the
mantle of charity, which, like a well-filled purse--or a
tariff compromise--covers a multitude of sins.
There are various kinds and classes of Humbugs; but
reduced to the last analysis--stripped of the sugar-
coating by which they impose on the public--they are one and
all simply professors of falsehood.
I am sometimes inclined to the view that humbuggery
is a disease, and that some doctor will yet discover a gold-
cure for it--will demonstrate that the bad habit is due
to microbes that get into a man's mind and make trouble
trying to turn around, or to bacilli that bore holes in his
moral character and let his honesty leak out; for the medical
fraternity has gravely informed us that kleptomania
(sneak-thievery by eminently respectable people) and
dipsomania (sottishness by the social salt of the earth), are
simply diseases that should be treated with pills and
powders instead of with penitentiaries and whipping-posts.
Now if a man will steal a saw-mill and go back after the
site simply because his pericardium is out of plumb or his
liver has gone into politics; will nurse a juicy old jag
until it develops into a combined museum and menagerie,
because his circulation has slipped an eccentric or his
stomach got out of its natural orbit, I submit, in all
seriousness that he might be physically incapacitated for
telling the truth by an insidious attack on his veracity by
the dreadful falsehood fungi, and that the best way to
restore his moral equilibrium--to remove him from the
category of chronic Humbugs--would be to fumigate him.
The Lord once attempted to check the Humbug habit
by striking liars dead; but soon saw that such a plan
would prove more fatal than a second flood--that there
wouldn't be even a Noah's Ark picnic of us left--and
reluctantly relinquished it. Science has not yet succeeded
in mastering the disease; but just give it time and it will
save the world yet--will find a medical name for every
human frailty; will be able to tell, by looking at a man's
tongue, whether he's coming down with the mug-wump
malaria or the office-holding hysteria, and do something
for him before it's everlastingly too late.
The very best of people have a touch of the complaint
--"the trail of the serpent is over us all." Even our
young ladies are said to be, to a certain extent, Humbugs.
I have been told that many of them wear patent complexions,
"boughten" bangs, and pad out scrawny forms until
they appear voluptuous Junos, and thereby deceive and
ensnare, bedazzle and beguile the unsuspecting sons of
men. I have been told that many of them who are soft-
voiced angels before marriage can give a rusty buzz-saw
cards and spades and beat it blind after they have
succeeded in landing the confiding sucker. But perhaps such
tales are only the bitter complainings of miserable
Benedicts who have been soundly beaten at their own game of
humbuggery. Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of
chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players
to lose. Too often, after much sugar-coated deception,
and many premeditated misdeals on both sides, one draws
a blank and the other a booby. After patient angling in
the matrimonial pool, one lands a stingaree and the other
a bull-head. One expects to capture a demi-god who hits
the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless
angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh
of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a
slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on
tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like
aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum
who comes home from the lodge at 2 a.m. and whoops
and howls for her to come down and help him hunt for
the keyhole, and is then snailed in by a policeman before
she can frame a curtain lecture or find the rolling pin.
. . .
False Pride is the father of humbuggery, the parent of
Fraud. We are Humbugs because we desire that our fellows
think us better, braver, brighter, perhaps richer than
we really are. We practice humbuggery to attain social
position to which we are entitled by neither birth nor
brains, to acquire wealth for which we render no equivalent,
to procure power we cannot wisely employ.
While proclaiming love of democracy we purchase peers
for our daughters. While boasting liberty of speech we
assail like demons those who presume to dissent from our
opinions in either religion or politics.
History is full of Humbugs and liberty itself oftimes
but a gilded lie. No man is really free who is dependent
upon the good will of others for employment. There can
be no true liberty where Prejudice usurps the throne of
Reason. Men are slaves instead of sovereigns when they
suffer themselves to be held in iron thrall by political
dogma or religious creed, blindly accepting the ipse dixit
of things instead of exercising to the utmost the intelligence
which God had given them.
I have said that charity itself is ofttimes a Humbug. It
is so when it becomes the handmaid of ostentation instead
of the true almoner of the heart; or when men give to the
poor only because it is "lending to the Lord," then expect
compound interest.
That philanthropist is a fraud who, after piling up a
colossal fortune at the expense of the common people,
leaves it to found an educational or eleemosynary institute
when death calls him across the dark river. Knowing
that Charon's boat is purely a passenger packet--that
carries no freight, however precious--he drops his dollars
with a sigh; but determined to reap some benefit from
boodle his itching hand can no longer hold, he decrees that
it be used to found some charitable fake to prevent himself
being forgotten--some pitiful institute where a few
of the wretched victims of his rapacious greed may get a
plate of starvation soup, or a prayer-book, and bless their
benefactor's name. The very monument erected over
bones of the sanctimonious old skin-flint is a fraud; flaunts
a string of colossal falsehoods in the face of the world;
piously points to heaven--perhaps to indicate that Satan
refused to receive him and sent him back to St. Peter with
a request that he make other arrangements.
Many of the martyrs whose memory we revere, of the
saints we apotheosize, of the heroes we enshrine in history,
are one-third fraud and two-thirds fake. The man who
ran grow in grace while his pet corn's in chancery, or lose
an election without spilling his moral character; who can
wait an hour for his dinner without walking all over the
nerves of his wife, or crawl out of bed in the middle of his
first nap and rustle till the cold, gray dawn with a brace
of colicky kids, without broadly insinuating that he was a
copper-riveted, nickel-plated, automatic, double-cylinder
idiot to ever get married, is a greater hero than he that
taketh a city.
The place to take the true measure of a man is not the
market-place or the amen-corner, not the forum or the
field, but at his fireside. There he lays aside his mask
and you may learn whether he's imp or angel, king or cur,
hero or Humbug. I care not what the world says of him
--whether it crown him with bays or pelt him with bad
eggs; I care never a copper what his reputation or religion
may be: If his babes dread his home-coming and his
better-half swallows her heart every time she has to ask
him for a five dollar bill, he's a fraud of the first water,
even tho' he prays night and morn till he's black in the
face and howls hallelujah till he shakes the eternal hills.
But if his children rush to the front gate to greet him,
and love's own sunshine illumes the face of his wife when
she hears his footfall, you can take it for granted that
he's true gold, for his home's a heaven, and the Humbug
never gets that near the great white throne of God. He
may be a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist, a Mormon
and a mugwump; he may buy votes in blocks-of-five and
bet on the election; he may deal 'em from the bottom of
the deck and drink beer till he can't tell a silver dollar
from a circular saw, and still be an infinitely better man
than the cowardly little Humbug who's all suavity in
society, but who makes his home a hell--who vents upon the
hapless heads of wife and children the ill-nature he would
like to inflict on his fellow-men, but dares not. I can
forgive much in that fellow mortal who would rather make
men swear than women weep; who would rather have the
hate of the whole he-world than the contempt of his wife
--who would rather call anger to the eyes of a king than
fear to the face of a child.
The hero is not he that strives with the world for
witness--who seeks the bubble fame at the cannon's brazen
lip and risks his life that he may live forever.
"Think not that helm and harness are signs of valor true;
Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battles ever knew."
To bear with becoming grace the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune; to find our heaven in others' happiness,
and for their sake to sacrifice and suffer wrongs that
might be righted with a thread of steel; to live an honest
life in a land where Truth doth feed on crusts while Falsehood
fattens at Lucullean feasts, requires more true manhood,
more moral stamina, more unadulterated SAND than
to follow a flag into the very jaws of hell or die for the
faith in the auto da fe. Heroes? Why unurn the ashes
of the half-forgotten dead and pore o'er the musty pages
of the past for names to glorify? If you would find heroes
grander, martyrs more noble and saints of more sanctity
than Rubens ever painted or immortal Homer sang;
who, without Achilles' armor, have slain an hundred
Hectors; without Samsonian locks have torn the lion; without
the sword of Michael have thrown down the gage to all
the embattled hosts of hell, seek not in the musty tomes
of history, but in the hearts and homes of the self-sacrificing
wives and mothers of this great world.
"God could not be everywhere," says the proverb,
"therefore he made mothers."
Let the heroes of history have their due; still I imagine
the world would have been much the same had Alexander
died of cholera-infantum or grown up a harmless dude.
I don't think the earth unbalanced would from its orbit
fly had Caesar been drowned in the Rubicon, or Cleveland
never been born. I imagine that Greece would have humbled
the Persian pride had there been no Thermopylae,
that Rome would have ruled the world had Scaevola's good
right hand not hissed in the Tuscan fire. It is even
possible that civilization would have stood the shocks had
"Lanky Bob" and "Gentleman Jim" met on Texas soil
--that the second-term boom of "our heroic young Christian
governor" would have lost no gas. One catfish does
not make a creek nor one hero a nation. The waves do
not make the sea, but the sea furnishes forth the waves.
Leonidas were lost to history but for the three hundred
nameless braves who backed his bluff. Had there been but
one Cromwell Charles the First would have kept his head.
In Washington's deathless splendor gleams the glory of
forgotten millions, and the history of Bonaparte is written
with blood of the unknown brave.
. . .
Humbuggery, fraud, deception everywhere.
"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players"--
Momus the major-domo, the millions en masque. Even
friendship is becoming a screaming farce, intended to promote
the social fortune or fill the purse. We fawn that
thrift may follow; are prodigal of sweet words because
they cost nothing and swell the sails of many a rich
argosy; but weigh every penny we put forth, and carefully
calculate the chance of gain or loss. It's heads I win,
tails you lose, and when we cannot play it on that principle
we promptly jump the game.
"Who steals my purse steals trash."
That's Shakespeare.
"He that filches from me my good name . . . makes
me poor indeed."
That's nonsense. Reputation is but the ephemeral dew
on character's everlasting gold; but he that steals a
human heart and tramples it beneath his brutal heel; he
that feigns a friendship he does not feel; he that fawns
upon his fellows and hugs them hard and after scandals
them, is the foulest fraud in all this land of fakes, the
most hideous Humbug in all hell's unclean hierarchy.
I am sometimes tempted to believe that the only
friendship that will stand fire is that of a yellow dog for a
pauper negro. Strike a friend for a small loan and his
affection grows suddenly cold; lose your fortune and your
sweetheart sends you word that she will be a sister to you;
your brother will betray you for boodle, your father fights
you for a foolish flag and your heirs-at-law will dance
when they hear of your death; but the devotion of a
yaller dog for a worthless nigger hath all seasons for its own.
. . .
But the Humbug for whom I have least use is the man
who assiduously damns the Rum Demon; makes tearful
temperance talks; ostentatiously votes the prohibition
ticket; groans like a sick calf hit by a battering-ram
whenever he sees a young man come out of a barroom; then
sneaks up a dirty alley, crawls thro' the side door of a
second-class saloon; calls for the cheapest whiskey in the
shop, runs the glass over trying to get the worth of his
money; pours it down at a gulp and scoots in a hurry lest
somebody ask him to treat; who has a chronic toothache
--in the stomach--which nothing but drugstore whiskey
will relieve; who keeps a jug of dollar-a-gallon bug-juice
hid under his bed and sneaks to it like a thieving hyena
digging up a dead nigger--rents his property for saloon
purposes, then piously prays the Lord to protect the
young from temptation.
. . .
But perhaps the prince of Humbugs, the incarnation of
fraud, the apotheosis of audacity, is the street-corner
politician. He towers above his fellow fakes like Saul above
his brethren. I have been time and again instructed in
the most intricate problems of public polity--questions
that have perplexed the wisest statesmen of the world--
by men who had never read a single standard work on
political economy, and who could not tell to save their
souls--granting that they possess such perishable property--
whether Adam Smith wrote the "Wealth of Nations"
or the Lord's Prayer; who were not familiar with
the constitution of their own state, or the face of a
receipted wash-bill; who could scarce tell a sloop from a ship,
a bill of lading from a sight draft; a hydraulic ram from
a he-goat unless they were properly labeled. Yet no
question can arise in metaphysics or morals, government or
generalship, upon which these great little men do not presume
to speak with the authoritative assurance of a Lord
Chief Justice--or a six-foot woman addressing a four-foot
husband. They invariably know it all. They could teach
Solomon and the Seven Wise Men wisdom, and had they
been on earth when Almighty God wrote the Ten
Commandments they would have moved an amendment or
drafted a minority report.
And these are the fellows who frame our political
platforms and dominate our elections--whose boundless
cupidity, colossal ignorance and supernal gall bring about
starvation in a land of plenty--divide the most industrious
and progressive people that ever graced the footstool of
Almighty God into bloated millionaires and groveling
mendicants.
Even patriotism has become a Humbug--has been supplanted
by partisanship, and now all are for party and
none are for the state. On July 4 we shout for the old
flag, and all the rest of the year we clamor for an
appropriation. The man who is kicked by a nightmare while
dreaming of the draft demands a pension and every burning
patriot wants an office. Twice, yea, thrice within the
memory of men now living, America has been on the very
verge of an industrial revolution, a Reign of Terror; yet
we continue to hang our second Providence on a job-lot of
political Jacksnipes who carry their patriotism in their
pockets and their sense under their surcingles. While we
who feed three times a day; who have a cocktail every
morning and a clean shirt occasionally, are boasting of our
allegiance to "the grand old party," or prating of the
principles of Jeffersonian democracy--are blindly trailing
in the wake of some partisan band-wagon like a brindle calf
behind a Kansas hay-cart-this nation, born of our
father's blood and sanctified by our mothers' tears, is
dominated by political self-seekers who have taken for their
motto, "After us the deluge."
Once after holding forth at some length on Humbugs,
a physician said to me:
"Ah-er--you-ah--didn't mention the medical profession."
"No," I replied, "the power of language hath its limits."
The medical, mark you, is the noblest of all professions.
It contains many learned and able men who devote their
lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I
much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people
to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell
what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he
transparent as glass and lit up by electricity. There are
doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell
whether a patient had a case of cholera-morbus or was
afflicted with an incurable itch for office--who have
acquired their medical information from the almanacs and
could not distinguish between a bunion and a stone-bruise
or find the joints in a string of sausage with a search-
warrant.
I have noticed that when the doctors took to writing
their prescriptions in Latin it quickly became a dead
language--that when I take the poet's advice and throw
physic to the dogs, their numbers rapidly decrease. But
the doctors are jolly good fellows. Let it be recorded to
their eternal credit, that, whatever may be their faults,
precious few of them will practice in their own families. I
have often wished that I was a doctor of medicine instead
of a doctor of divinity. There are several fellows for
whom I'd like to prescribe. There's a strong affinity
between the two professions. The D. D.'s deal in faith and
prayer, the M. D.'s in faith and pills.
I have been frequently asked why, in lecturing on
Humbugs, I skip the lawyers. There are some subjects to
which a lecturer must lead up gradually; so I discuss the
doctors in my discourse on Humbugs and save the attorneys
for my talk on Gall.
Even our boasted educational system is half a Humbug.
Too many of our professors fondly imagine that when
they have crammed the dry formulas of half a dozen
sciences into a small head--perhaps designed by the Deity
to furnish the directive wisdom for a scavenger cart; when
they have taught a two-legged moon-calf to glibly read in
certain dead languages things it can in nowise comprehend
--patiently pumped into it a whole congeries of things
that defy its mental digestive apparatus--that it is
actually educated, if not enlightened. And perhaps it is--
after the manner of the trick mule or the pig that plays
cards. The attempt of Gulliver scientists to calcine ice
into gunpowder were not more ridiculous than trying to
transform a fool into a philosopher by the alchemy of
education. If it be a waste of lather to shave an ass, what
must it be to educate an idiot? True education consist in
the acquirement of useful information; yet I have seen
college graduates--even men sporting professional sheep-
skins--who couldn't tell whether Gladstone's an English
statesman or an Irish policeman. They knew all about
Greek roots but couldn't tell a carrot from a parsnip.
They could decipher a cuneiform inscription, perhaps, and
state whether a pebble belonged to the paleozoic or some
other period; but couldn't tell a subpoena from a search-
warrant, a box of vermicelli from a bundle of fishworms.
We pore over books too much and reflect too little;
depend too much on others, too little upon ourselves. We make of
our heads cold-storage warehouses for other
people's ideas, instead of standing up in our own independent,
god-like individuality. Bacon says that reading makes a
full man. Perhaps so, but it makes a great deal of difference
what a fellow's full of. Too many who fondly imagine
themselves educated, much resemble Mark Twain's frog
with its stomach full of shot--they are crushed to earth
by the things they have swallowed.
Neither the public nor any other school system has ever
produced one really great man. Those who occupy the
dais-throne among the immortals, contended single-handed
with the darkness of ignorance and the devil of dogmatism.
Columbus scorned the schools and discovered a world.
Napoleon revolutionized the science of war and himself
master of Europe. Bismarck mocked at precedent, and
United Germany stood forth a giant. Jesus of Nazareth
ignored the learning of the Levites, and around the world
arose the fanes of a new faith.
Reading is the nurse of culture; reflection the mother
of genius. Our great religions were born in the desert.
Our grandest philosophers budded and burgeoned in the
wilderness. The noblest poesy that ever swept the human
harpsichord was born in the brain of a beggar, came bubbling
from the heart of the blind; and when all the magi
of the Medes, and all the great philosophers of Greece had
failed to furnish forth a jurisprudence just to all, semi-
barbarous Rome laid down those laws by which, even from
the grave of her glory, she still rules the majestic world.
I have been accused of being the enemy of education;
but then I have been accused of almost everything; so one
count more or less in the indictment doesn't matter. I
am not opposed to education that is useful; but why should
we pay people to fill the empty heads of fools with soap
and sawdust?
Perhaps the most aggressive fraud that infects the earth
is the professional atheist--the man whose chief mental
stock-in-trade consists of doubt and denial of revealed
religion, so-called.
About the time a youngster first feels an irresistible
impulse to make a fool of himself wherever a female smiles
upon him; when he's reached that critical stage in life's
journey when he imagines that he knows much more than
his father, he began to doubt the religion of his mother;
shrewdly asks his Sunday-school teacher who made God;
demonstrates by the aid of natural history diagrams, that
a large whale could in nowise swallow a small prophet--
that if he did succeed in relegating him to its internal
economy it were impossible for him to slosh around for three
days and nights in the gastric juices without becoming
much the worse for wear. He attempts to rip religion up
by the roots and reform the world while you wait, but soon
learns that he's got a government contract on his hands,
--that the man who can drive the Deity out of the hearts
and homes of this land can make a fortune turning artesian
wells inside out and peddling them for telegraph poles.
You can't do it, son. Religion is the backbone of the body
social. Sometimes it's unbending as a boarding-house biscuit,
and sometimes it's a bad quality of gutta-percha; but
we couldn't get far without it. Most youths have to pass
thro' a period of doubt and denial--catch the infidel
humor just as they do the measles and mumps, but they
eventually learn that the fear of God is the beginning of
wisdom.
There was never an atheistical book written; there was
never an infidel argument penned that touched the CORE of
any religion, Christian or Pagan. Bibles, Korans,
Zandevestas--all sacred books--are but the feeble efforts of
finite man to interpret the infinite; to speak forth the
unspeakable; to reduce to intelligible human characters
the flame-written hieroglyphs of the sky. Who made
God? Suppose, Mr. Atheist, that I find thee an answer?
Who will furnish thee with an intellect to understand it?
How will you comprehend the genesis of a God when the
wisest man for whom Christ died cannot tell why water
runs down hill instead of up--cannot understand the basic
principle of the law of gravitation--cannot even guess
why Gov. Culberson encouraged the managers of Corbett
and Fitzsimmons to bring the mill to Texas, then knocked
it out at a special session of the legislature at the expense
of the general public.
An atheist once solemnly assured me that he couldn't
possibly BELIEVE anything which he couldn't PROVE; but
when I asked him what led him to take such a lively
interest in the welfare of his wife's children, he became
almost as angry as a Calvinist whose confession of faith had
been called in question. Figure up how many things you
can PROVE of those you BELIEVE, and you'll find that you
have got to do a credit business or go into intellectual
bankruptcy.
But the man who denies the existence of the Deity
because he cannot comprehend his origin, is even less a
Humbug than the one who knows all about him--the pitiful
dogmatizer who devotes his life to the defense of some
poor little guess-work interpretation of the mysterious
plans of him who brings forth Mazaroth in his season and
guides Arcturus with his sons.
Dogmatism is the fecund mother of doubt, a manacle on
the human mind, a brake on the golden wheel of Christian
progress; and every dogmatizer, whether in science, politics
or religion, is consciously or unconsciously, a Humbug.
You KNOW, do you? Know what? And who told
you? Why, the man in whose mighty intellect was stored
the world's wisdom; whose words have come down to us
from the distant past as oracles, o'ershadowing even
Solomon and Shakespeare, wasn't quite sure of his own
existence. Men frequently tell me that what they SEE
they know. Well, they've got to drink mighty little
Prohibition whisky if they do; otherwise they are liable to
see things they'll need an introduction to. The wisest is
he that knows only that he knows nothing. Omniscient
God only knows. We--you and I--are only troubled with
morbid little-ideas, sired by circumstance and damned by
folly. We don't even know how the Democracy stands on
the silver question or what caused the slump in the late
election.
. . .
The average human head, like an egg--or a crock of
clabber--absorbs the flavor of its surroundings. It is
chiefly a question of environment whether we grow up
Catholics or Protestants, Republicans or Democrats,
Populists or political nondescripts. And yet we adhere to
opinions we have inherited with all the tenacity of a dog
to a bone or an American miser to a ten dollar bill. We
assume that our faith political and our creed religious are
founded upon our reason, when they were really made for
us by social conditions over which we had little control.
We even succeed in humbugging ourselves into the belief
that we are the people and that wisdom will die with us,
when the fact is that our head is loaded with out-of-date
lumber--our every idea moulded or modified by barbarians
who were in the bone-yard before Methusaleh was born.
Society is a vast organism in which the individual is but
an atom. It is a monstrous tree--a veritable Ygdrasyl--
penetrating both the region of darkness and the realm of
light. Whatever its peculiarities--whether monarchical
or republican, Christian or Pagan--it is a goodly tree
when it brings forth good fruit--when its boughs bend
with Apples of Hesperides and in its grateful shade is
reared the shrine of God. Be it of what shape it may, it
is an evil tree when its fruit is Apples of Sodom and it
casts a upas-shadow upon the earth. If we cannot gather
grapes of thorns or figs of thistles, how can a society that
is essentially false foster that which is literally true? The
body social, of which we proudly boast, is producing dodos
instead of King Davids, peanut-politicians instead of
heaven-inspired poets, cranks instead of crusaders,
Humbugs rather than heroes. Instead of exercising in the
campus martius our sons cultivate the Henglish hawkcent
and the London lope. In the olden days the glory of the
young man was his strength; now it is his chrysanthemum
and his collar. And it is going from bad to worse in a
ratio of geometrical progression; for how can effeminate
men--a canesucking, primping, mincing, affected
conglomeration of masculine inanity and asininity beget
world-compellers. How can women who care much what
is on the outside and little what is on the inside of their
heads, and whom a box of lily-white, a French novel, a
poodle-dog and another dude will make superlatively
happy, suckle aught but fops and fools?
Yet we boast of progress! Progress whither? From
the savage who knew nothing to the dude who know less.
From the barbarian who'd plundered your baggage, to the
civilized Shylock who'd steal the very earth from under
your feet. From that state wherein American sovereigns
however poor, considered themselves the equals of kings
and the superiors of princes, to that moral degradation
and national decay in which they purchase the scurvy
spawn of petty dukes as husband for our daughters. By
the splendor of God, I'd rather be a naked Fiji Islander,
dancing about a broiled missionary with a bull-ring in my
nose, than a simpering "sawciety" simpleton, wearing my
little intellectual apparatus to a frazzle with a study of
neckties!
. . .
Some of my critics have kindly suggested that the Lord
made a great mistake in not consulting me when he made
the world; thereby ascertaining just how I would like to
have it. I was not consulted anent the creation of the
Cosmos, and perhaps it is just as well for them that I
wasn't--they might not be here. Too many forget that
while the Lord made the world, the devil has been busy
ever since putting on the finishing touches. Why, he
began on the first woman before she was a week old, and he
has been playing schoolmaster to her sons ever since. I
confess to a sneaking respect for Satan, for he is pre-
eminently a success in his chosen profession. He's playing
a desperate game against omnipotent power and is
more than holding his own. He sat into the game with a
cash capital of one snake; now he's got half the globe
grabbed and an option on the other half.
I have been called a defender of the devil; but I hope
that won't prejudice the ladies against me, as it was a
woman that discovered him. I confess to the belief that
Satan is a gentleman compared with some of his very
humble servants. We are told that he is a fallen angel
who found pride a stumbling-block--that he tripped over
it and plunged down to infinite despair; but tho' he fell
further than a pigeon could fly in a week, the world is
full of frauds who could not climb up to his level in a
month; who can no more claim kinship with him in their
cussedness than a thieving hyena can say to the royal
beast of Bengal, "Thou art my brother." They are not
fallen angels; they are risen vermin. They didn't come
down from thrones in heaven like falling stars; they
crawled up from holes in the earth like vicious little
pismires. What can proud Lucifer have in common with
the craven hypocrite, who prays with his lips while
plotting petty larceny in his heart? Imagine the lord of the
lower world seeking the microscopic souls of men who
badger, brow-beat and bully-rag their better halves for
spending a dollar for a new calico dress, then blow in a
dozen times as much with the dice-box in a bar-room, trying
to beat some other long-eared burro out of a thimble-
full of bug-juice or a schooner o' beer! I don't believe
Satan wants 'em. I think if they dodged the quarantine
officers and got in amongst those erstwhile angels now
peopling the dark regions of the damned, the doctors of
that black abode would decide that they were cholera
microbes or itch-bacilli and order the place fumigated.
. . .
But speaking of the devil--were any of you ever in love?
I'm talking about the sure-enough, old-fashioned complaint
that makes a man miss meals and lose sleep, write spring
poetry and misplace his appetite for plug tobacco; not
of the new-fangled varioloid that yields to matrimonial
treatment. There's a great deal of sugar-coated hum-
buggery about this thing we call love. It reminds me of
the sulphur and molasses my careful Presbyterian parents
used to pour into me in the gentle springtime. I
don't remember why they gave it to me; but it was
probably because they didn't want it themselves. Perhaps
they thought foreordination hadn't done much for me, and
they had best get me used to sulphur gradually. I remember,
however, that, like the average case of matrimony,
it usually contained a good deal more sulphur than syrup.
Matches, we are told, are made in heaven; and I think
it likely, for Satan himself is said to have originated there.
I'll tell you how matches are usually made: By some
horrible accident John Henry and Sarah Jane become
acquainted. They have no more affinity than a practical
politician and pure spring water; but they dance and flirt,
fool around the front gate in the dark of the moon, sigh
and talk nonsense. John Henry begins to take things for
his breath and Sarah Jane for her complexion. The
young goslings get wonted to each other, and first thing
you know they're tied up until death or divorce doth them
part. And, had they missed each other altogether, they
would have been just as well--perhaps better--content
with other mates and made as enthusiastic a failure of
married life.
Most people marry without really knowing whether
they're in love or not--mistake the gregarious habit for
the mystic fire of Hymen's torch, the pangs of a bad
digestion for the barbed arrows from the love-god's bow.
But when a couple's really got what ailed Romeo and
Juliet they're in no more doubt about it than was the
man after he sat down on the circular saw to see if it was
running and found it the sole proprietor of a South American
revolution. They don't have to send their feelings
to a chemist for analysis and classification, nor take an
invoice of their affections to see if any have got away.
Love is really a very serious thing. Like sea-sickness,
everybody laughs at it but those who have got it. When
Cupid lets slip a sure-enough shaft it goes thro' a fellow's
heart like a Kansas cyclone thro' a colored camp-meeting,
and all the powers of hades can never head it off.
Love is the most sacred word ever framed by celestial
lips. It's the law of life, the harmony of heaven, the
breath of which the universe was born, the divine essence
increate of the ever-living God.
But love is like all other sweet things--unless you get
the very best brand it sours awful easy.
. . .
Of all the pitiful Humbugs beneath high heaven
commend me to those intellectual doodle-bugs who have
become Dame Fashion's devotees and devote all their
intellectuality to the science of dress--to the art of being
miserable a la mode. Thousands are today sailing about
in silk hats who are guiltless of undershirts; bedecked with
diamonds while in debt to the butcher for the meat on
their bones. Families that can scarce afford calico flaunt
Parisian finery, keep costly carriages while there's a
chronic hiatus in their cupboards, go hungry to bed six
nights in the week that on the seventh they may spread
a brave feast for fashionable fools. God have mercy on
all such muttonheads. They are the natural breeders of
good-for-naughts, for in such an atmosphere children
grow up mentally dwarfed and morally debased.
Fashionable mothers commit their children to the care
of serving-maids while they sail out to soirees and
receptions--put their babes on a bottle while they swing round
the social circle. No wonder their sons grow up sapheads,
as destitute of backbone as a banana, as deficient in moral
force as a firkin of fish. Think of an infant Napoleon
nursing a rubber nozzle, of rearing a Brutus on patent
baby food, of bringing a Hannibal up by hand! You
can't do it.
Why, if I had a woman of that kind to wife--a fashionable
butterfly whose heart was in her finery and her feathers;
who neglected her home to train with a lot of intellectual
tomtits whose glory was small-talk; who saved her sweetest smiles
for society and her ill-temper for the family altar--I say were I
tied to that kind of a female, do you know what I'd do? Eh? You
don't? Well--neither do I.
There are some Humbugs, however, who merit our respect
if not our reverence--men who are infinitely better
than they would have the world believe. As the purest
pearl is encased in an unseemly shell, so, too, is many a
god-like soul enshrined in a breast of seeming adamant.
Many a man swears because he's too proud to weep, hides
a quivering soul behind the cynic's sneer, fronts the world
like a savage beast at bay while his heart's a fathomless
lake of tears. Tennyson tells us of a monstrous figure of
complete steel and armed cap-a-pie, that guarded a castle
gate, and by its awful name and warlike mien affrighted
the fearful souls of men. But one day a dauntless knight
unhorsed it and clove thro' the massy helm, when forth
from the wreck there came not a demon armed with the
seythe of death, but a beardless boy scarce old enough to
break a pointless lance upon the village green. So, too,
when with the sword Excalibur of human sympathy you
shear down thro' the helm and harness of some rough-
spoken man who seems to hate all human kind, you find
the soul of a woman and the heart of a little child.
. . .
Even our religion is ofttimes a Humbug, else why is it
that the good Christian woman--who says her prayer as
regularly as she looks under the bed for burglars--says to
the caller whom she cordially detests, "I am delighted to
see you;" when she's wondering why the meddlesome old
gadabout don't stay at home when she's not wanted elsewhere?
Why is it that when a good brother puts a five-
dollar bill in the contribution box he flashes it up so all
may see the figures, but when he drops a nickel in the slot
to get a little grace he lets not his right hand know what
his left hand doeth? Why is it that when you strike a
devout deacon for the loan of ten dollars he will swear
by all the gods he hasn't got it, when his pockets are fairly
bursting with bills? If his religion is not hypocrisy--if
he is not a Humbug--why doesn't he tell you in plain
United States that he would rather have Uncle Sam's
promise to pay than yours? Oh, people are becoming such
incorrigible liars that I've about quit trying to borrow
money.
Too many people presume that they are full of the
grace of God when they're only bilious; that they are
pious because they dislike to see other people enjoy
themselves; that they are Christians because they conform to
certain creeds, just as many men imagine themselves honest
because they obey the laws of the land--for the purpose
of keeping out of the penitentiary. They put up
long prayers on Sunday; that's piety. They bamboozle a
green gosling out of his birthright on Monday; that's
business. They have one face with which to confront the
Lord and another with which to beguile their brethren.
They even acquire two voices--a brisk business accent and
a Sunday whine that would make a cub wolf climb a tree.
I am always suspicious of a man's piety when it makes him
look as tho' he had cut a throat or scuttled a ship and was
praying for a commutation of the death sentence. I could
never understand why a man who can read his title clear
to mansions in the skies--who holds a lien on a corner lot
in the New Jerusalem--should allow that fact to hurt him.
I have great respect for true religion; but for the brand
of holiness that's put on with the Sunday shirt--that
makes a man cry ahmen with unction, but doesn't prevent
him selling 5 and 10-cent cigars out of the same box, oleo-
margarine and creamery butter out of the same bucket,
benzine and bourbon whiskey out of the same barrel;
which makes long prayers on Sunday and gives short
weights on Monday; which worries over the welfare of
good-looking young women, but gives the old grandames
the go-by; which fathers the orphan only if he's rich and
husbands the widow only if she's handsome--for that kind
of Christianity I have no more use than for a mugwump
governor who saddles his state with the expense of a
legislative session to gratify a private grudge against a brother
gambler.
That religion which sits up o'nights to agonize because
a few naked niggers in equatorial Africa never heard Eve's
snake story, how Job scratched himself with a broken pie-
plate or the hog happened to be so full of the spirit of
hades; that robs childhood of its pennies to send prayer-
books to people whose redemption should begin with a bath,
while in our own country every town from Cattaraugus to
Kalamazoo--every city from the Arctic ocean to the Austral
sea--is overrun with heathen who know naught of the
grace of God or the mystery of a square meal; who prowl
in the very shadow of our temples of justice, build their
lairs in proximity to our public schools and within sound
of the collect of our churches, is an arrant Humbug, a
crime against man, an offense to God, a curse to the
world.
. . .
People frequently say to me, "Brann, your attacks are
too harsh. You should use more persuasion and less
pizen." Perhaps so; but I have not yet mastered the
esoteric of choking a bad dog to death with good butter.
Persuasion is well enough is you're acourting--or in the
hands of the vigilantes; but turning it loose on the average
fraud were too much like a tenderfoot trying to move a
string of freight steers with moral suasion. He takes up
his whip, gently snaps it as tho' he feared it were loaded,
and talks to his cattle like a Boston philanthropist to a
poor relation. The steers look round at him, wonder, in
a vague way, if he's worth eating, and stand at ease. An
old freighter who's been over the "divide" and got his
profanity down to a fine art, grabs that goad, cracks it
like a rifled cannon reaching for a raw recruit and spills
a string of cuss words calculated to precipitate the final
conflagration. You expect to see him struck dead--but
those steers don't. They're firmly persuaded that he's
going to outlive 'em if they don't get down and paw gravel
and they get a Nancy Hanks hustle on 'em. Never attempt
to move an ox-team with moral suasion, or to drown the cohorts of
the devil in the milk of human kindness. It won't work.
. . .
Oh, it's possible that you may disagree with me on
some minor points of doctrine. That's your blessed
privilege and I wouldn't deprive you of it if I had the power.
A pompous old fellow once called at the office of my
religious monthly to inform me that I was radically wrong
on every possible public question. He seemed to think
that I had committed an unpardonable crime in daring to
differ from him. I asked him to be seated and whistled
for the devil--the printer's devil, the only kind we keep
in the office of the ICONOCLAST. I told him to procure for
me a six-shooter, a sledge hammer and a boat. My visitor
became greatly alarmed.
"Wh-what are you g-going to d-do?"
"Do?" I replied. "I'm going to shoot the printers,
smash the press and throw the type into the river. What
in the name of the great Sanhedrin, is the use o' me
printing a paper if I can't please you?"
Mr. Pomposity subsided somewhat, and I proceeded to
talk United States to him.
"You say I'm wrong. Perhaps I am; but how in Halifax"--
I think I said Halifax; anyhow we'll let it go at
that--"how in Halifax did you find it out? Who
installed you as infallible pope in the realm of intellect and
declared it rank folly to run counter to the ideas that
roost in your nice fat head?"
He was one of those egotistical mental microbes or
intellectual animalculae who imagine that a man must be in
the wrong if he disagrees with him. And the woods are
so full of that class of fellows that the fool-killer has
become discouraged and jumped his job.
Those who chance to think alike get together and form
a political party, a society or a sect and take it for
granted that they've got all the wisdom of the world
grabbed--that beyond their little Rhode Island of intellect
are only gibbering idiots and plotting knaves. When
a man fears to subject his faith to the crucible of
controversy; when he declines to submit his ideas to the
ballistae and battering-rams of cold logic, you can safely set
it down that he's either a hopeless cabbage-head or a
hypocritical Humbug--that he's a fool or a fraud, is full of
buncombe or bile.
It is a difference of opinion that keeps the world from
going to the dogs. Independence of thought, doubt of
accepted dogmas, the spirit of inquiry--the desire to KNOW
--is the mighty lever that has lifted man so far above the
brute level that he has begun to claim kinship with the
Creator. Yet we say to our brother, "Thou fool," because
he takes issue with us on the tariff, or the proper
time in the moon to plant post-holes--even insist on
sending people to perdition who cannot see "the plan of
salvation" thro' our little sectarian telescope.
Men of a mind flock together just like so many
gabbling geese, or other foolish fowl of a feather, each group
waddling in the wake of some flat-headed old gander,
squawking when he squawks and fluttering when he flies.
Because I decline to get in among the goslings and be
piloted about the intellectual goose-pond, I'm told that I
have no POLICY. Well, I hope I haven't. If I thought I
had I'd take something for it, dontcherknow! When I cannot
live among my fellows without surrendering my independence--
forswearing freedom of speech and liberty of
thought; without having to play the canting hypocrite or
go hungry--to fawn like a flea-bitten fice to win public
favor--I'll make me a suit of leather, take to the woods
and chop bee trees. I'd rather my babes were born in a
cane-brake and reared on bark and wild berries, with the
blood of independence burning in their veins, than spawned
in a palace and brought up bootlicks and policy players.
. . .
I am sometimes inclined to believe that Life itself is a
Humbug--that the man who makes the best of it is the
one who escaped being born. We know not whence we
came or what for, whither we go or what we'll do when
we get there. True it is that life is not altogether labor and
lees--there's some skittles and beer; but the most of us
get more shadow than shunshine, more cholera-morbus
than cream. Man born of woman is of few days and full
of politics. The moment he hits the globe he starts for
the grave, and his only visible reward for long days of
labor and nights of pain is an epitaph he can't read and
a tombstone he don't want. In the first of the Seven
Ages of man he's licked, in the last he's neglected, and in
all the others he's a fair mark for the shafts of falsehood.
If he don't marry his first love, he's forever miserable, and
if he does, he wishes he were dead. By the time he has
learned wisdom he leaves the world, is hustled into a hell
of fire or an orthodox heaven, and for forty years I've been
trying to figure out which of these appalling evils to avoid.
In one place the climate is hot and unhealthy, in the other
the inhabitants never entertained an original idea--believed
everything they were told. Think of having to live
through all eternity with the strictly orthodox--people
who regard freedom of thought as foul blasphemy, millions
of immaculate bricks cast in the same mold! No
wonder there's neither marrying nor giving in marriage in
heaven. Just imagine a couple of love-sick loons having
nothing to do but spoon from everlasting to everlasting,
to talk tutti-frutti through all eternity--never a break
or breathing spell in the lingering sweetness long drawn
out! Amelia Rives Chanler or Ella Wheeler Wilcox
couldn't stand it. Nor could I. By the time I had lived
ten thousand years with a female who could fly, and had
nothing in God's world to do but watch me, I'd either raise
a revolution or send in my resignation. It is said that
Satan had an affaire d'amour while he was playing Seraph.
If the object of his affections wore feathers I don't much
wonder that he went over the garden wall.
I suspect that the orthodox heaven and hell, of which
we hear so much, are Humbugs. I should know something
of those interesting ultimates--be qualified to speak ex
cathedra--for a doctor of divinity recently denounced me
as a child of the devil. In that case you behold in me a
prince imperial, heir-apparent to the throne of Pluto, the
potential master of more than a moiety of mankind. But
don't tell anybody that I've got a title, that I belong to
the oldest nobility, or all the Goulderbilts will be trying to
buy me.
I promise you that when I come into my kingdom I'll
devise a worse punishment than physical pain. A soul is
an immaterial thing. You cannot flay it with aspic's
fangs nor kerosene it and set it on fire. A material hell
for immaterial mind were too ridiculous for a progressive
devil. But it is not necessary to be a son of Satan to build
a hell in which demons dance and sulphur-fumes asphyxiate
the soul. You may transform your own home into a valley
of Hinnom, a veritable Gehenna; or you may make of the
humblest cot a heaven, illumed by love and gilded with
God's own glory--a Beulah land where flowers forever
bloom, where perfumed censors swing and music throbs
and thrills sweeter far than Orphean lyre or song of
Israfeel.
The orthodox heaven is a pageant of barbaric splendor,
of gaudy tinsel and flaming gold to dazzle the eyes of
infants. It is a land of lotus-eaters, where ambition's star
is blotted from the firmament and the wild ecstasy of
passion beats no longer in the blood; an Oriental heaven, a
Paradise for tired people eternal dolce far niente for
niggers and yaller dogs. No Celt or Saxon with aspiring
mind, with swelling muscles and heart that flames with the
fierce joy of strong endeavor, that thrills with the sweetness
of sacrifice for others' sake that swells with the mad
glory of triumph in the forum or the field, could have
conceived such a futile farce.
Give me a land whose skies are lead and soil is sand, yet
everlasting life with those I love; give me a lodge in some
vast wilderness hallowed by children's laughter; give me
a cave in the mountain crag to house those dearest to my
heart; give me a tent on the far frontier, where, by the
lambent light of their mother's eyes, I may watch my
children grow in grace and the truth of God, and I'll build
a heaven grander, nobler, sweeter than was ever dreamed
of by the gross materialists of bygone days.
. . .
Life is a Humbug only because we make it so. We are
frauds because we are fools. This is a beautiful, a glorious
world, fit habitation for sons of the Most High God. It
is a fruitful mother at whose fair breast all her children
may be filled. There should be never a Humbug nor a
hypocrite, never a millionaire nor a mendicant on the great
round globe. Labor should be but healthful exercise to
develop the physical man--to furnish forth a fitting casket
for the godlike mind, appropriate setting for the immortal
soul. The curse of life arises from a misconception of its
significance. We delve in the mine for paltry gems, explore
old ocean's deep for pearls; we toil and strive for gold
until the hands are worn and the heart is cold; we attire
ourselves in Tyrean purples and silks of Ind and strut
forth in our gilded frippery on the narrow bridge of time,
between the two eternities; we despoil the thin purse of the
poor to erect brazen altars and priceless fanes, when the
whole earth's a sacred shrine, the universe a temple through
which rings the voice of God and rolls the eternal melody
of the spheres.
. . .
Perhaps it is unnecessary to state that I'm not posing
as a saint. I may eventually become an angel--of some
sort--but I'll wear no wings. We are accustomed to think
of seraphs flying from heaven to earth, flitting from star
to star--irrespective of the fact that feathers are useless
where there's no atmosphere. An angel working his wings
to propel himself through a vacuum were as ridiculous as
a disembodied spirit riding a bike down a rainbow.
I do not expect to reform all Humbugs, to banish all
Fakes, to exterminate all Folly. If the world should get
too good, I might have to hunt another home. I can
understand every crime in the calendar but the crime of
greed, every lust of the flesh but the lust for gain, every
sin that ever damned a soul but the sin of selfishness. By
all the sacred bugs and beasts of ancient Egypt, I'd rather
be a witch's cat--or even a politician--and howl in sympathy
with my tribe; I'd rather be a tramp and divide my
handouts with one more hungry; I'd rather be a mangy
yellow dog without a master and keep the company of my
kind, than to be a multi-millionaire, with the blood of a
snake, the heart of a beast, and carry my soul, like Pedro
Garcia, in my purse.
When I think of the three thousand children in the single
city of Chicago without rags to shield their nakedness
from the keen north wind; of the ten thousand innocents,
such as Christ blessed, who died in New York every year
of the world for lack of food; of the millions in every
country whose cries go up night and day to God's great throne
--not for salvation, but for soup; not for the robe of
righteousness, but for a second-hand pair of pants--and then
contemplate those beside whose hoarded wealth the riches
of Lydia's ancient kings were but a beggar's patrimony,
praying to Him who reversed the law of nature to feed
the poor, I long for the mystic power to coin sentences
that sear like sulphur-flames come hot from hell, and weave
of words a whip of scorpions to lash the rascals naked
through the world.
We humbug our parents, the public, and then, as far as
possible, our wives; though the latter are seldom so blind
as they seem. The wife who cannot tell when her lord and
master is lying--whether he's been sitting up with a sick
friend or nursing a Robert-tail flush--well, she must be
the newest kind of a "New Woman," with a brain built
for bloomers and bike. The New Woman is--she is all
right; just the Old Woman in disguise, a paradox and a
coat of paint.
Whenever I tackle this subject I'm reminded of a broth
of a boy who in days agone drove the team afield on my
father's farm. One rare June day, when the sun was
slowly sinking in the west, as the novelists say--and I
believe that's where Old Sol usually sinks--he got mixed up
with a bevy of industrious bumble-bees who were no
respecters of persons--would sting an honest delver as
quickly as they'd put the gaffles to a scorbutic duke. In
about two minutes Mike came over the hill a-whooping like
a segment of the Southern Confederacy reaching for a
nigger regiment, his head the size and shape of a red peck
measure that had been kicked by a roan mule.
"Sure, now, they didn't do a thing t' me," he said. "An
ould bumblebug came a bizzin' an' a buzzin' aluken fer all
the wurruld like an' Orangeman wid wings, so I up an'
hit him a biff. Thin all the 'rist av the haythen tuk up his
foight--an' Oi kem home."
Hit one Humbug and every Fraud and Fake in Christendom
is ready for the fray. They attempt to crush
their critic with calumny, to defeat him with falsehood.
When you hear a fellow railing at the ICONOCLAST, just
look through its stock of caps and you'll find one that will
fit the knot on the end of his neck.
Truth and only truth is eternal. It was not born and
it cannot die. It may be obscured by the clouds of falsehood,
or buried in the debris of brutish ignorance, but it
can never be destroyed. It exists in every atom, lives in
every flower and flames in every star. When the heavens
and the earth shall pass away and the universe return to
cosmic dust, divine truth will stand unscathed amid the
crash of matter and the wreck of worlds.
Falsehood is an amorphous monster, conceived in the
brain of knaves and brought forth by the breath of fools.
It's a mortal pestilence, a miasmic vapor that passes, like
a blast from hell, over the face of the world and is gone
forever. It may leave death in its wake and disaster dire;
it may place on the brow of purity the brand of the courtesan
and cover the hero with the stigma of the coward;
it may wreck hopes and ruin homes, cause blood to flow
and hearts to break; it may pollute the altar and disgrace
the throne, corrupt the courts and curse the land, but the
lie cannot live forever, and when it's dead and damned
there's none so poor as to do it reverence.
* * *
[The following remarks, apropos local politics, were
included in Mr. Brann's Lecture on Humbugs, as delivered
at the Dallas, Texas Opera House, Oct. 17, 1895.]
A discourse on political humbugs were incomplete without
some reference to the young man whom Texas, in a
moment of mental aberration, raised to the chief
magistracy. I learn from a sermon recently inflicted on the
long-suffering inhabitants of this city, that Son Charles
is "our heroic young Christian governor." How he must
have changed during the last few months! Shakespeare
was probably viewing the Texas politician with prophetic
eye when he declared that in the great Drama of Life
a man plays many parts. Culberson is the only one,
however, who has yet succeeded in playing them all at one
and the same time. A man who can run with the hare
politically while holding with the hounds personally, is
almost too versatile to be virtuous. "Our heroic young
Christian governor!" That preacher evidently doesn't
know Charles. Or if he does his idea of Christianity is not
so altitudinous that he can stand on its apex and keep the
flies off the man in the moon. Culberson is a politician who
enjoyed excellent health before he entered the public service.
He is all things to all men and--"nothing to nobody."
He's so slippery that he couldn't stand on the
partisan platform to which he owes his political elevation.
In the last gubernatorial election pretty much every man
who voted for Culberson felt that he had a lead-pipe
cinch on a fat office, and the remainder were certain he
would work four-and-twenty hours a day to put in effect
their pet reforms. They are wiser now. In 1890 Charlie
sailed into the attorney-generalship on the ample coat-
tails of one J. S. Hogg, and in less than thirty days he
was conspiring to retire his chief after one term and slip
into his official shoes. The trouble appears to be that the
youngster was pulled before he was ripe--before his
political integrity had time to harden, or his crop of wild
oats was well in the ground.
Now I want it distinctly understood that I am not the
apologist of pugilism; I am the apostle of the white-
winged Goddess of Peace. I always carry a cruse of oil
in my hip-pocket to cast upon the troubled waters. I have
a pacific effect on all with whom I come in contact.
Children quit crying when they see me coming, women speak
well of their neighbors, men respect each other's political
opinions, preachers engage in silent prayer and the lion
and the lamb lie down together. And that's no lie. But
as between pugilism and hypocrisy I prefer the former.
I would rather see men pound each other for a fat purse
than play the canting Pharisee to promote their political
fortunes.
. . .
Let us look to the record of "our heroic young Christian
governor." During the four years he officiated as attorney-
general he made no determined effort to enforce the
law then in effect prohibiting pugilism. Prizefights were
pulled off at Galveston, San Antonio, El Paso and other
Texas points after having been duly advertised in the
daily press. He was elevated to the chief magistracy of
the state, and the slugging matches continued--mills
between brawny but unskilled boxers, who relied upon
brute strength, and pounded each other to a pumice to
make a hoodlum holiday. Some of these meetings were
especially brutal--as matches between amateur athletes
are likely to be; but "our heroic young Christian
governor" saw no occasion to get his Ebenezer up. He
simply sawed wood--didn't care a continental whether there
was a law prohibiting bruising bouts or not.
And the ministerial associations were too busy taking
up collections to send Bibles and blankets, salvation and
missionary soup to the pagans of the antipodes to pay
much attention to these small-fry pugs. They let our
blessed "Texas civilization" take care of itself, while they
agonized over a job lot of lazy negroes whose souls ain't
worth a sou-markee 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.
No Epworth Leaguers or Christian Endeavorers whereased,
resoluted or perorated until their tongues were
worn to a frazzle, trying to "preserve the honor of our
ger-rate and gal-orious State by suppressing feather-
pillow pugilism." Why? I don't know; do you? Of
course some carping critics declare it was because the world
was not watching these brutal slugging matches between
youths to pugilistic fortune and fame unknown; that it
was because the professionally pious had no opportunity
to make a grandstand play and get their names in print--
no chance to POSE in the eye of the universe as the
conservators of our fin de siecle civilization. But then these
Doubting Thomases are ever ready to make a mock of
the righteous and put cockleburrs in the back hair of the
godly. I dislike to criticize "the cloth." I am prone to
believe that the preachers always do the best they know
how; still, I must confess that I am unable to muster up
much admiration for the brass band variety of "religion"
or the tutti-frutti trademark of "respectability."
Had the belief not been bred in my bones that there
is a God in Israel, these little 2x4 preachers, with their
great moral hippodrome--their purblind blinking at
mountains and much-ado about molehills--would drive
me to infidelity. By their egregious folly, their fiery
denunciation of all men who dare disagree with them, their
attempt to make the State subservient to the church, to
establish an imperium in imperio--by their mischievous
meddling in matters that in nowise concern them, they
are bringing the beautiful religion of Christ into contempt--
are doing more to foster doubt than did all the
Humes and Voltaires and Paines that ever wielded pen.
Now don't get the idea that I am antagonistic to the
preachers. Far from it. I am something of a minister
myself; and we who have been called to labor in the
Lord's vineyard--at so much per annum--must stand together.
I admire the ministers in a general way--and
"whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." I feel that it is
my duty to pull them tenderly but firmly back by the
little alpaca coat-tails whenever they have made mistakes
--to reprove them in all gentleness when I find them
fanning themselves with their ears for the amusement of
the mob.
But to return to "our heroic young Christian governor."
When it was first proposed to bring the great fistic carnival
and a million dollars to Dallas, Gov. Culberson had
nothing to say. It was popularly supposed that he
understood the law and would respect it. The impression got
abroad that he felt rather friendly to the enterprise
because it would put 500 scudi in the depleted coffers of the
public and turn a great deal of ready money loose within
the confines of Texas. He may not have been directly
responsible for this popular idea, but he certainly did
nothing to discourage it. Arrangements were perfected,
important contracts entered into, a vast amount of money
invested that would prove a complete loss if the enterprise
collapsed. Then Culberson began to complain. He suddenly
discovered that pugilism was a brutal sport, which
should be suppressed. His conversion was as instantaneous
as that of Saul of Tarsus. It were an insult to the
intelligence of a hopeless idiot to say he did not know the
Corbett-Fitzsimmons affair would prove far less brutal
than a hundred fistic encounters which he, as attorney-
general and governor, had tacitly encouraged--but his
jewel of consistency had evidently gone to join his diamond
stud. Col. Dan Stuart didn't appear inclined to do
anything to ease the young man's agony, and it rapidly went
from bad to worse. The Hurt decision was rendered, and
the moral volcano of "our heroic young Christian governor"
began to erupt in earnest. He declared that he
would override the court of criminal appeals "if men
enough can be found in Texas to do it"--gave an excellent
imitation of an anarchist who is hungering for canned
gore. After this blood-to-horses'-bridles bluff he grew
quiescent--waited, Micawber-like, for something to turn
up. And still Dan Stuart didn't say a word. Then "our
heroic young Christian governor" broke out in a new
place. The legislature was convened in extraordinary
session to prevent a brace of pugilists smashing the immortal
ichor out of modern civilization. It was a great moral
aggregation--almost equal to Artemus Ward's Wax
Wurx! I am convinced of this, for it employed two doctors
of Divinity--at public cost, of course--to pray over
it a minute each morning, for $5 per diem each. Everybody
expected the president of the Florida Athletic Club
to go to Austin and make an earnest free silver speech.
Even the lawmakers were looking for him; but he didn't
go--and the result was what might have been expected.
The law-builders with the worst private records had the
most to say about public morality. Men whose I.O.U.'s
are not good in a game of penny ante; whose faces are
familiar to the inmates of every disreputable dive between
the Sabine and the Rio Bravo; who go to their legislative
duties from the gambling-room and with six-shooters in
the busts of their breeches, grew tearful over the
prospective "disgrace of Texas" by a manly boxing bout.
Hell hath no fury like a legislative humbug scorned--
while he's holding his hand behind him.
. . .
But the wrath of "our heroic young Christian governor"
did not abate with the enactment of a law forbidding
prizefights--such a law as he had flagrantly failed
to enforce. The promoters of what the court of criminal
appeals declared a lawful enterprise were arrested and
dragged before the grand jury of Travis County, which
appears to have taken the entire earth under its
protectorate. Failing an opportunity to prosecute them for an
offense against the laws of the land, the powers at Austin
proceeded to prosecute them on the hypothesis that they
were conspiring to wreck the universe.
And what was their offense? They had "conspired" to
pay $500 into the public treasury and bring a million more
to Dallas. They had "conspired" to bring several thousand
respectable business men to Texas from all parts of
the Union and furnished employment at good wages for
hundreds of hungry men.
While I do not much admire pugilism as a profession,
I must say that the promoters of the enterprise conducted
themselves much better than did "our heroic young Christian
governor," and those alleged saints who proposed to
shoulder their little shotguns and help him override the
courts--to butcher their brethren in cold blood to prevent
an encounter between brawny athletes armed with pillows;
to sustain "modern civilization" by transforming the
metropolis of Texas into a charnel-house--to prevent, by
brutal homicide in the name of Christ, their neighbors
exercising those liberties accorded them by the laws of
the land.
. . .
Curious, this modern civilization of which we hear so
much. During the palmy days of Roman grandeur and
Grecian glory, their athletes fought with the terrible
cestus to win a crown of oak or laurel; but then Rome never
produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser.
The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a
Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a
Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber-
whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the
sake of the $2 a day--imagine these fellows, each with a
large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the
approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress--teaching
the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers
of Greece and the god-like senators of Rome! Think of
Perry J. Lewis pulling the Conscript Fathers over the
coals--of Senator Bowser pointing out civic duties to
Socrates; of Attorney-General Crane giving Julius Caesar
a piece of his mind; of Charley Culberson turning up his
little two-for-a-nickel nose at the Olympian games! But
perhaps that is not the game "our heroic young Christian
governor" is most addicted to.
. . .
Prizefighting--even with pillows, for points--is bad
enough, no doubt; but there are worse things. Making
the Texas people pay for an abortive little second-term
gubernatorial boom is one of them, and canting hypocrisy
by sensation-seeking preachers is another. Can the church
and state find no grander work than camping on the trail
of a couple of pugilists? Are Gentleman Jim and Kangaroo
Bob the upper and nether millstones between which
humanity is being ground? Are these the only obstacles
to the inauguration of the Golden Age--that era of Peace
on Earth and Good Will to Men? The world is honey-
combed with crime. Brother Seasholes says there are 800
fallen women in this city alone--and I presume he knows.
But if there be half so many, what a terrible story of
human degradation--more appalling even than soft-glove
pugilism! Our streets swarm with able-bodied beggars--
young men, most of them, whom want may drive into
wickedness. Human life is cheap. Men are slain in this
alleged Christian land for less silver than led Judas to
betray Christ. Young girls are sold to shame, and from
squalid attics comes the cry of starving babes. The Goths
and Visigoths are once more gathering, imperiling civilization
itself, and belief in God is fading slowly but surely
from the earth. Want and wretchedness skulk in the
shadows of our temples, ignorance and crime stalk abroad
at high noon--the legions of Lucifer are overrunning the
land, transforming God's beautiful world into a veritable
Gehenna. The Field of Blood is filling, the prisons and
poorhouses are overflowing--crowded with wretched
creatures who dared dream of fame and fortune. The
great Sea of Life is thick-strewn with wrecks--millions
more drifting helpless and hopeless upon the rocks. From
out the darkness there come cries for aid; men pleading
for employment, women shrieking in agony of soul, little
children wailing with hunger and cold. And the winds
wax ever stronger, the waves run higher and higher, the
wreck and wraith grow ever more pitiful, more appalling.
And church and state pause in this made vortex of chaos
to prate of the ills of pugilism; to legislate and perorate
anent bloodless boxing bouts; to prosecute a brace of
harmless pugs. The people ask bread of the church and
it gives them a stone; they ask of the state protection of
their lives and liberties, and it gives them a special session
of the legislature--shoots doodle-bugs with a Gatling gun
--and sends them the bill!
. . .
But to recur for a moment to the fistic carnival: Have
any of you been able to determine how the Dallas News
stood in regard to that great enterprise? Sometimes, when
I want to go on an intellectual debauch, I read the News--
or Ayer's Almanac. It appears to entertain but two
opinions, namely, that Uncle Sam should black the boots
of John Bull, and that Grover Cleveland carries the brains
of the world in his beegum. This brace of abortive ideas
constitute its confession of faith--the only things of which
it feels absolutely certain. When it tackles anything else
it wobbles in and it wobbles out like an unhappy married
man trying to find his way home at five o'clock in the
morning. A great diplomat once declared that language
was made to conceal thought; but the Dallas News
employs it to disguise an intellectual vacuum. It can use
more language to say less than any other publication on
earth. In this particular it is like Napoleon--it stands
wrapt in the solitude of its own originality.
The eating of thirty quail in thirty days was once a
popular test of human endurance; but I can propose a
more crucial one--one that will attract more people to
Dallas than would even the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight.
Let the people of this city offer a fat purse for the man
who can read the editorial page of the Dallas News thirty
days in succession without degenerating into a driveling
idiot. It is a mental impossibility, of course; but perhaps
my good friend "Dorry" can be persuaded to attempt
it--to hoist himself with his own petard. No man born
of woman will ever accomplish it. Massillon would
become a mental bankrupt within the month and Socrates
have to be tapped for the simples before reaching the half-
way house.
The News is troubled with a chronic case of Anglo-
mania. Whenever Columbia has a controversy of any
kind with Britannia, the News hastens to ally itself with
the Britisher; but in matters concerning the welfare of
the city of Dallas it has little to say. It did manifest a
slight inclination to take up for the fistic enterprise--
fearfully slid one foot to terra-firma; but when the success
of the carnival became doubtful the News hastened to
resume its time-honored position astride the fence, and it
has hung there ever since--like a foul dish-rag across a
wire clothes line. It's the greatest journalistic 'Fraid on
the face of the earth. It doesn't dare to risk the opinion
that water is wet. But probably it isn't sure of it. It is
just as well, however, for if it did know, it couldn't leak
the information in less than a column. The editorial page
of the Dallas News reminds me of the Desert of Sahara
after a simoon--it is such an awful waste of space. If I
had a five-year-old boy who couldn't say more in fifteen
minutes than the Dallas News has said in the last dozen
years, I'd refuse to father him.
One of the greatest frauds of modern times is the policy-
playing newspaper. The "Archimedean lever," as applied
to daily journalism is a fake of the first magnitude.
There is not a morning newspaper in Texas possessing
sufficient political influence to elect a pound-master. In
fact, their support will damn any politician eternally, for
the people wisely conclude that what the alleged "great
dailies" support is a pretty good thing for them to
oppose. Hogg would not have reached the governorship
but for the blatant opposition of the morning press. Its
friendship for George Clark was the upas-shadow in
which he perished politically. There hasn't been an
important law enacted in Texas during the last ten years
that it didn't oppose. And yet men actually imagine that
they cannot succeed in politics, business or letters without
the assistance of that great "molder of public opinion!"
Let me tell you that every success this country has
witnessed during the past three decades was achieved despite
the morning press. To paraphrase Owen Meredith:
"Let a man once show the press that he feels
Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels;
Let him fearlessly face, 'twill leave him alone;
But 'twill fawn at his feet if he flings it a bone."
* * *
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.