STATUS OF THE AMERICAN CITIZEN.

[Synopsis of an address delivered by Mr. Brann,

August 10, 1895.]

FELLOW CITIZENS: If I had a million o' money--carefully

protected from the income tax by a plutocratic supreme

court--I would probably not be here to inquire whether

you are Slaves or Sovereigns. And if you could draw your

check for seven figures--with any probability of getting it

cashed--you would not be here to answer. You'd do just

as Dives did: lean back in your luxurious chair and absorb

your sangaree, while Lazarus scratched his Populist fleas

on your front steps and exploited your garbage barrels for

bones. You'd turn up your patrician nose at the lowly

proletaire, and if he did but hint that, having created this

world's wealth, he was entitled to something better than

hand-outs, you'd have an anti-communistic cat-fit and

denounce him as an insolent hoodlum who should be

comfortably hanged. That's human nature to a hair, and you

are all human,--I suppose--even if the politicians do buy

you with gas and sell you for gold.

I tell you frankly that I'm complaining, not because of

the other fellow's colossal fortune, but because I can't

strike the plutocratic combination. I'm dreadfully anxious

to accumulate a modest fortune--of about fifty millions--

that I may build a comfortable orphan asylum for that

vast contingent of Democratic politicians whom the next

election will deprive of their "pap."

I'm no philanthropist who's trying to reform the world

for the fun of the thing--who's willing to starve to death

for the sake of an attractive tombstone. I want to so

amend industrial conditions that I won't have to hustle so

hard--and so long--between meals; and when they are

bettered for me they will be bettered for you, and for

every man who--with pick or pen, brain or brawn--

honestly earns his daily bread.

I want more holidays; more time to sit down and reflect

that it is good to be alive; more time to go fishing--not

fishing for men, but for sure--enough suckers. Here in

America if the average mortal aspires to fill a long-felt

want with first-class fodder, he's got to chase the almighty

dollar on week-days like a hungry coyote camping on the

trail of a corpulent jack-rabbit, and spend Sunday figuring

how to circumvent his fellow-citizen. Life with the

American people is one continental hurry, and rush from

the cradle to the grave. We're born in a hurry, live by

electricity and die with scientific expedition. Half of us don't

take time to become acquainted with our own families.

We've even got to courting by telephone, and I expect to

see some enterprising firm put up lover's kisses in tablet

form, so that they can be carried in the vest pocket and

absorbed while we figure cent per cent. or make out a

mortgage.

. . .

For a score of years I had been listening to the boast

of the American people that they were Sovereigns by right

divine, and at last it occurred to me to swear out a search

warrant for my crown and go on a still-hunt for my

scepter; but soon found that the jewels of my throne-room,

the rod of my authority and my purple robe of office

were conspicuous by their absence and I wasn't married at

the time either. The American citizen is a sovereign, not

to the extent of his voice and vote, but to the exact amount

of Uncle Sam's illuminated mental anguish plasters at his

command. Money is lord paramount, Mammon our

prophet, our god the golden calf.

The dollar is indeed "almighty." It's the Archimedean

lever that lifts the ill-bred boor into select society and

places the ignorant sap-head in the United State Senate.

It makes presidents of "stuffed prophets," governors of

intellectual geese, philosophers of fools and gilds infamy

itself with supernal glory. It wrecks the altars of

innocence and pollutes the fanes of the people, breaks the

sword of Justice and binds the Goddess of Liberty with

chains of gold. It is lord of the land, the uncrowned king

of the commonwealth, and its whole religious creed is

comprised in the one verse, "To him that hath shall be given

and he shall have abundance, while from him that hath

not shall be taken even that which he hath."

"We, the people, rule"--in the conventions; but our

delegated lawmakers have a different lord. In 1892 we

demanded "tariff reform" with a whoop that shook the

imperial rafters of heaven, and declared for the minting

of gold and silver without discrimination against either

metal. But our so-called "public servants," instead of

hastening to obey our behests, spent months manufacturing

excuses for disregarding their duty. Placed between

the devil of the money power and the deep sea of public

opinion, they wobbled in and they wobbled out like a

drunken boa-constrictor taking its jag to a gold cure

joint. They were like the little boy who put his trousers

on t'other side to--we couldn't tell whether they were

going to school or coming home. But our doubts were all

dispelled last November. They are the fellows who were

going to school--to that school of experience where fools

are educated.

. . .

Slave or Sovereign? The last is an individual entity, a

controlling power, his will is law. The first goes and

comes, fetches and carries at the command of a master;

creating wealth he may not possess, bound by laws he

does not approve, dependent upon the pleasure of others

for the privilege of breaking bread. Is not the latter

condition that of a majority of the American people to-day?

Are they not at the subsequent end of a financial hole, the

sides soaped and never a ladder in sight?

In a country so favored--a veritable garden of the gods,

where every prospect pleases and not even the politician

is wholly vile--the lowliest laborer should be a lord, and

each and all find life well worth the living. But it is not

so. People starve while sunny savannas, bursting with

fatness, yield no food; they wander houseless through

summer's heat and winter's cold, while great mountains of

granite comb the fleecy clouds and the forest monarch

measures strength with the thunderstorm; they flee naked

and ashamed from the face of their fellow-men while fabrics

molder in the market-place and the song of the spindle is

silent: they freeze while beneath their feet are countless

tons of coal--incarnate kisses of the sun-god's fiery youth;

they have never a spot of earth on which to plant a vine

and watch their children play--where they may rear with

loving hands lowly roof and rule, lords of a little world

hemmed in by the sacred circle of a home; yet the common

heritage in the human race lies fair before them and

there is room enough.

The people of Texas do not realize how terrible is the

industrial condition of the world to-day--how wide the

gulf that separates Dives and Lazarus, how pitiful the

poverty of millions of their fellowmen. The Texas merchant

complains of dull trade, the farmer of low prices,

the mechanic of indifferent wages; yet Texas is the most

favored spot on the great round earth to-day. I defy you

to find another portion of the globe of equal area and

population where the wealth is so well distributed, where so

few people go hungry to bed without prospect of breakfast.

But the grisly gorgon of Greed and the gaunt

specter of Need are coming West and South in the wake of

the Star of Empire. Already Texas has begun to breed

millionaires and mendicants, sovereigns and slaves.

Already we have an aristocracy of money, in which WEALTH

makes the man and want of it the fellow, and year by year

it becomes easier for Dives to add to his hoard and for

Lazarus to starve to death.

We appeal to New York for capital with which to

develop our resources; and New York has it in abundance--

countless millions she is eager to let out at usury; yet it is

estimated that ten thousand children perish in that city

every year of the world for lack of food--and how many

are kept alive by the bitter bread of a contemptuous

charity God only knows. In one year 3,000 children were

debarred from the public schools of Chicago because of lack

of clothing to cover their nakedness--and Chicago boasts

herself "the typical American city." The despised

Salvation Army trying to feed a thousand homeless and hungry

men on the sandlots of San Francisco proves that already

the curse has travelled across the continent.

And people who are not only permitted to run at large,

but actually elected to office, prattle of "overproduction"

--while people are starving in nakedness; proposes to

eliminate pauperism and inaugurate the industrial

millennium by placing fiddle-strings on the free-list or

increasing the tariff-tax on toothpicks--to relieve the country

of the commercial jim-jams by means of the gold cure. And

the fool-killer still procrastinates!

. . .

The American citizen is called a sovereign--by those

patriots who are preparing to sacrifice themselves on the

altar of a nice fat office. And perhaps he is; but I'm free.

We are frequently told that the condition of labor is

better to-day than a century ago. That is half a truth,

yet wholly a falsehood. A century ago the workman knew

naught of many comforts and conveniences he now enjoys

--when he happens to have a job; but that was one

age, this quite another. Progress gives no man new wants,

and the luxuries of one generation become the necessities

of the next. To deny this--to limit the laborer to actual

necessaries as measured by a former age--were to relegate

him back to barbarism, to nomadism and nakedness. If

we should be content with what our fathers had, then they

should have been satisfied with the comforts enjoyed by

THEIR progenitors, and so on back until man digs roots

with his finger nails, attires himself in a streak of red

paint for winter overcoat and a few freckles for summer

ulster. It is by comparison with his fellows and not with

his fathers that man determines whether he's fortunate or

unfortunate--whether he's receiving his proper proportion

of the world's increase of wealth. A century ago there

was no such glaring inequality as now exists. There were

no fifty million dollar fortunes and no free-soup joints. If

the workman's piano was a jews-harp and his Pullman

car a spavined cayuse, his employer was not erecting

palaces in which to stable his blood stock, nor purchasing

dissolute princes for his daughters to play at marriage and

divorce with. If the farmer's wife wore linsey-woolsey and

went barefoot to save her shoes, her neighbor did not

import $5,000 gowns from "Paree" and put jeweled

collars on her pet cur. The difference in the condition of

Dives and Lazarus is more sharply defined than ever

before. It is not so much the pitiful poverty of the many

as the enormous wealth of the few that is fostering

discontent. Pride dallying with Sin begot Death; willful

waste is breeding Anarchy in the Womb of Want. The

lords and ladies of the house of Have revel in luxury such

as Lucullus never knew, while within sound of their feasting

gaunt children fight like famished beasts for that which

the breakfast garbage barrels afford. Private fortunes

make the famed wealth of Lydia's ancient kings appear but

a beggar's patrimony, while brawny giants must beg or

steal and starving mothers give the withered breast to

dying babes.

Labor now seeks employment, not as a right, but as a

privilege. It has come to such a pitiful pass in this

"land of liberty," this "refuge of the world's oppressed,"

that to afford a man an opportunity to employ his strength

or skill in the creation of wealth, a portion of which he

may retain for his own support, is regarded rather as a

privilege than a free contract between American Sovereigns

--an act of charity, for which the recipient should be duly

grateful.

No man can be a freeman while dependent upon the

good will of an other for his bread and butter. He may be

a Sovereign dejure, but he's a Slave defacto. And under

present conditions the more labor-saving machinery he

invents, the tighter he rivets his chains.

We had hoped and believed that human ingenuity was

about to lift the curse laid on Adam by his angry Lord;

the angel of Intellect to reimparadise the poor slave, place

his fetters on nature's tireless forces and declare that

never again should bread be eaten in the sweat of the brow;

but man proposes--and is sued for breach of promise.

Were a man to declare labor-saving machinery and the

general development of the country a curse to the poor, he

would be branded as a "moss-back" or budding candidate

for Bedlam; yet it is unquestionably true that the further

the average individual gets from the so-called blessings of

civilization--the less he is affected by our boasted industrial

system--the smaller his danger of starving to death.

Many of us can remember when we had little labor-

saving machinery in Texas; when railways were scarce as

consistent Christians at a colored camp-meeting, goods

were carried down from coast on the backs of burros and a

full-dress suit consisted chiefly of buckskin breeches and

a brace of angel makers. And we remember also that a

pauper was a curiosity; that the very cowboys played

poker at $10 ante with the sky for limit, the common

laborer carried coin in his belt and the merchant had

money to burn. Texas has developed wonderfully during

the last few decades. We now have improved machinery

--and extensive poor-farms; railways--and political

rings; a $3,000,000 capitol--and an army of unemployed.

We have built fine schools and finer churches, made the

black man our political brother and bought his vote. We

have exchanged our buckskin for broadcloth, our hair-

raising profanity for the hypocrite's whine, straight corn-

juice for the champagne-jag and the hip-pocket court for

the jackass verdict of the petit jury. But the cowboy now

plays penny-ante on credit or shoots craps for small coin;

the common laborer carries in his belt only a robust

appetite, while the merchant who dodges bankruptcy for

a dozen years considers himself the special favorite of

fortune.

And what is true of Texas is true in greater or less

degree of every State in the Union. Development, so dear

to the heart of the patriotic and public-spirited citizen, has

a tendency to transform an independent and moderately

prosperous people into masters and slaves. But this is

not the fault of labor-saving machinery, nor of capital,

nor of development by itself considered. The more wealth

labor creates, the more it should enjoy. When the reverse

is the case distribution is at fault.

The substitution of expensive machinery for hand-labor

eliminated the independent artisan. His productive power

was multiplied; but his independence--his ability to care

for himself without the cooperation of large capital--

was gone. The wheelwright could not return to his shop

nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort.

Competition with the iron fingers of the great factory were

impossible. Labor must now await the pleasure of capital--

the creature has become lord of its creator. The fierce

competition of idle armies forces wages down, and slowly

but surely the workman is sinking back to the level

occupied before the cunning brain of genius harnessed the

lightning to his lathe and gave him nerves of steel and

muscles of brass with which to fight his battle for bread.

With the improved machinery with which he is provided,

the American workman can create as much wealth in a

week as he need consume in a month; but he goes down

on his knees and thanks God and the plutocracy for an

opportunity to toil 300 days in the year for a bare

subsistence.

. . .

Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial

ill--but the political drug-stores are full of 'em. All

you've got to do is to select your panacea, pull the cork

and let peace and plenty overflow a grateful land--so we're

told. Instead of the cure-me-quicks prescribed by the

economic M.D.'s, I believe that our industrial system has

been doped with entirely too many drugs. I'd throw

physic to the dogs, exercise a little common-sense and

give nature a chance. There's an old story of an Arkansaw

doctor who invariably threw his patients into fits

because he was master of that complaint; but the economic

M.D.'s can't even cure fits. When they attempt it the

patient goes into convulsions.

Instead of going to so much trouble to bar out cheap

goods by means of tariff walls, I'd bar out cheap men. If

you're making monkey-wrenches at $2 a day and some

fellow abroad is building 'em for 50 cents, your boss

comes to you and says:

"Jim, we've got to have a tariff to keep out the product

of pauper labor or our nether garment's ripped from

narrative to neck-band. I can't pay you $2 and compete with

an employer who pays but 50 cents."

That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the

G.O.P. tow-line and lay a tariff-tax on monkey-wrenches

that looms up like an old-time Democratic majority in

Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar-barrels

and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror

at the Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 cent fellow crosses

the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer

is protected all right, but where do you come in? You

don't come in; you simply stand out in the industrial

norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town

while your wife takes in washing, your daughter goes to

work in a factory at two dollars a week and your son

grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into ward politics

or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation,

because you've been bred to a higher standard of

living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper

at breakfast and a new book--or the ICONOCLAST

--after supper. You must have your plunge bath and

spring bed, your clean shave and Sunday shirt. How can

you hope to hold your job when a man is bidding for it

who takes up his belly-band for breakfast, dines on slum-

gullion and sucks his breath for supper; to whom literature

is an unknown luxury, a bath a deplorable accident,

and a crummy old blanket a comfortable bed? You can't

do it, and if you'll take the Apostle's advice you'll quit

trying.

No; I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy

Europeans--men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have

millions such in America, and they are most estimable

citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that

man who is not proud of his parentage should have been

born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy's kite

the theory that America should forever be the dumping-

ground for foreign filth--that people will be warmly

welcomed here whom no other country wants and the devil

wouldn't have.

We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap.

We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs

and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American

Sovereignty--to become an important factor in the formation

of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on

the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the

other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable

tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince

and the poor man a Populist--why we are "great only in

that strange spell, a name."

In this work of reform we've got to begin at the bottom

--with the body politic itself. You can't make a silk

purse of a sow's ear, nor Sovereigns of men who were born

to be Slaves. We've got to grade up or we're gone. Only

superior Intelligence is capable of self-government--

Ignorance and Tyranny go hand in hand. You may theorize

until the Bottomless Pit is transformed into a skating

park; you may vote tariffs high or low and money hard or

soft; you may inaugurate the Single-Tax or transform the

American Republic into a commune, but the condition of

the hewers of wood and the drawers of water will never be

permanently bettered while Ignorance and Vice have access

to the ballot-box.

We have carried the enchanting doctrine of "political

equality" entirely too far and are paying the penalty.

The rebound from the monstrous doctrine of the divine

right of monarchs has hurried us into equal error. Disgusted

with the rottenness of the established religion, the

French people once crowned a courtesan as Goddess of

Reason; maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism,

our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlum's

reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless

nescience Columbia's imperial crown. That the greater

must guide the lesser intelligence is nature's immutable

law. To deny this were to question our right to rule the

beast and God's authority to reign King of all mankind.

Self-preservation will yet compel us to guard the sacred

privileges of American sovereignty as jealously as did

Rome her citizenship.

. . .

Do this, and all other needed reforms will follow as

surely and as swiftly as the day-god follows the dawn.

Knowledge is power. When those who vote fully understand

that every dollar expended by government, federal,

state or municipal, must be created by the common people

--that first or last, labor must furnish it forth--we'll cease

having billion-dollar Congresses. We'll cease paying a

hundred and forty millions per annum in federal pensions;

we'll cease wasting a King's ransom annually in pretending

to "improve" intermittent creeks and impossible harbors

solely for political navigation; we'll cease borrowing

money in time of peace to bolster up that foolish financial

fetich known as the "gold-reserve"; we'll cease making so

many needless laws and paying aspiring patriots fat

salaries to harass us with their enforcement; we'll cease

exempting from taxation the half-million dollar church

and laying a heavier mulct on the mechanic's cottage and

the widow's cow; we'll cease paying preachers five dollars

a minute to stand up in our legislative halls and insult

Almighty God with perfunctory prayers; we'll cease building

so many palatial prisons where thieves and thugs

may be cared for at the expense of honest people, but

will divide criminals into classes--those who should be

peremptorily hanged, and those who should be whipped and

turned loose to hustle their own hash. Nothing knocks

the sawdust out of false sentiment so quickly as the

realization that it's an expensive luxury and that we must pay

the freight.

Billion-dollar Congresses, eh? Do you know what that

means? There are less than fifteen million wealth creators

in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of

their pockets--something over $66 apiece! If you had it

in silver dollars--and I suppose that most of you would

accept silver--you couldn't count it in a century. Lay the

coins edge to edge and they'll belt the world. Pile them

on top of each other and you'll have a silver shaft more

than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it.

Perchance from the top you'll see many things--among

others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that

rarefied atmosphere, where the vision is good and thinking

probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids

of expense annually erected by state, county and

municipal government, then come down firm in the faith

that if this isn't a great government it ought to be,

considering what it costs. No wonder the workman carries in

his pocket only an elegant assortment of holes!

We're governed entirely too much--Officialism is

becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's

Sinbad. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant

of some sort, and you cannot get married or buried,

purchase a drink or own a dog except with a by-your-leave

to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states suicide

itself is an infraction of the criminal code, and if the

police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail the

preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law this

state and county and city needs can be printed in a book

no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that so plain that he

who runs may read and reading understand. And when

so printed and so understood, without the possibility of

misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the

cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many

laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a

man into the judicial hopper not even an astrologer can

tell whether he'll come out a horse-thief or only a homicide

--or whether the people will weary of waiting on the

circumlocution office and take a change of venue to Judge

Lynch.

This can never be a land of religious liberty--the atheist

can never be considered as on a political parity with his

ultra-orthodox brother--until we compel church property

to bear its pro rata of the public burdens.

And right here let me say a word about the "Apostle."

I have been accused by people--for whom no cherry-tree

blooms or little hatchet is ground--of being a rank atheist

and a red-flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated

that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the

roots, rob trusting hearts of their hope and deprive the

preacher of his daily bread. Now I might just as well

confess to you that I'm no angel. If I were I'd fly out of

Texas till the bifurcated Democratic party has another

"harmony" deal. When you hear people denouncing me

as an atheist, just retire to your closet and pray, "Father

forgive them, for they know not what they do." And you

might add, that nobody cares. No mortal son of Adam's

misery can produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one

sentence I ever uttered, disrespectful of ANY religion--and

that's more than you can say of most of the ministers.

But it is not right, it is not just that the little holdings

of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples

exempted--palatial edifices in which polite society pretends

to worship One who broke bread with beggars and

slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither

good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified

selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries, and a costly

church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so,

for he never built one.

Congregations that can afford to erect fine churches and

export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes, can

afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern

out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing

our streets in grim despair; a million children coming

up in ignorance and crime; a million women hesitating

between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy,

and the church--supposed to be God's ministering angel--

crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little.

Remember the widow's mite"--so acceptable to a pauper

deity.

Give for what? To build fine temples in whose sacred

shadows will lurk the gaunt specter of Famine and the

grisly gorgon of Crime. To buy grand organs and costly

bells to peal praises to One who had nowhere to lay his

head. To pay stall-fed preachers five, ten, twenty thousand

dollars a year to expound the doctrine of a poor

carpenter who couldn't have kept a silver dollar in his

jeans a single day while there was poverty and suffering

in the world.

While the wealth-producer is robbed to pension

millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft,

and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount

so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle

if labor was steadily employed and reaped its just reward.

With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and

the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give

even all the candidates an office, with plenty to get and

little to do, and still have pie in the pantry and corn in

the crib. There is something more the matter than governmental

waste--there's something RADICALLY wrong.

. . .

In tracing the causes of panics and periods of business

depression, we invariably find our currency more or less at

fault. Now don't get frightened. I'm not going to dose

you with free silver nor give you the gold cure. This is

neither Coin's Financial School nor a gold-bug incubator.

The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody

does--especially the corner-grocery politician. He

understands it from A to Izzard--knows almost as much

about it as a hello-girl does of the nature of electricity.

Prof. Jevon truly says that "a kind of intellectual vertigo

appears to seize people when they talk of money." Perhaps

the Goddess of Liberty on the silver dollar has 'em

Trilbyized.

We hear a great deal of late about the "science of

money." It's supposed to be something very esoteric--

something that a fellow can only master by drawing heavily

on his gray matter, by working his think-machine up

to the limit and sweating blood. Now let me tell you that

there is no "science of money," any more than there's a

science of harvesting hoop poles or fighting flies. When a

man begins to give you an interminable song and dance

about the science of money, just you send for the police

and have him locked up as a dangerous lunatic.

Here's a ticket good for so many meals at a restaurant

--an order for so much wealth; and here's a silver dollar

--no 'tisn't; it's a check on a--er--on a "resort"; in fact,

on a saloon; an I.O.U. for 11 cents, the price of a

cigar--or something--I suppose. "Man should not live

by bread alone." Now what's the difference between this

ticket and check and the currency issued by the government?

Simply this: These are the I.O.U.'s of individual's

money, the I.O.U.'s of the entire American people. These

are orders for certain kinds of wealth at particular places;

money is an order for all kinds of wealth at any place

within the jurisdiction of the federal government. This

ticket is the check of one American, drawn against his

personal wealth and credit; this bill is the check of all

Americans, drawn against the collective wealth and credit

of the nation. That's all the difference between a cocktail

check and a coin, between a meal ticket and a ten

dollar bill. Neither is worth a rap unless it can be

REDEEMED. Like sanctification caught at a camp-meeting,

there must be a hereafter to it or its a humbug. But don't

you metallists take that as a premise and jump at conclusions

or you're liable to sprain your logical sequence.

What kind of redemption did I have in view when I

acquired this che--I mean this ticket? I expected that it

would be redeemed in something that would expand my

surcingle and enable me to cast a shadow--in eggs and

oleomargarine, corn-bread and buttermilk. And if so

redeemed on demand, is it not a GOOD TICKET--is it not

WORTH ITS FACE? What kind of redemption did I expect

when I acquired this bill? I expected it to be redeemed

in the necessaries of life--or possibly the luxuries. Who

issued it? The government. Who's the government?

The people. And when the people have given me bread

and butter, tobacco and transportation, clothing and

cocktails, and afforded me police protection to the extent

of my ten dollars hasn't it been REDEEMED in the manner

I anticipated--in the only way in which money can be

redeemed? If I exchange this bill for a gold eagle what

have I got? Another governmental drink-check or meal-

ticket that awaits redemption. And there you have the

whole "science of money," over which politicians have so

long puzzled their brains that their think-tanks have got

full of logical wiggletails. A dollar, whether it be made of

gold, silver or paper, is simply an order which the people

in their official capacity give against all the wealth, actual

and potential, of the nation; and unless the holder can

get it promptly redeemed in food and clothing, he's in a

terribly bad fix.

. . .

Every few years our industrial system gets the jim-jams.

Capital flies to cover, factories close and labor goes

tramping across the country seeking honest employment and

receiving a warm welcome--from militia companies with

shotted guns. Cheerful idiots begin to prattle of "over-

production," the economic M.D.'s to refurbish all the old

remedies, from conjure bags to communism. They all

know exactly what caused the "crisis" and what to do for

it; but despite the doctors the patient usually--survives.

And the M.D. who succeeds in cramming his pet panacea

down its throat claims all the credit for the recovery. We

are slowly emerging from the crash of '93, and the cuckoos

are cock-sure that Cleveland hoodooed with that financial

rabbit-foot known as the gold-reserve--that a country

fairly bursting with wealth was saved from the demnition

bowwows by the blessed expedient of going into debt; that

labor found salvation by shouldering an added burden in

the shape of interest-bearing bonds. Hereafter when a

burro tries to lie down beneath a load that's making him

bench-legged, we'll just pile a brick house or two on top

of him, and, with ears and tail erect, he'll strike a Nancy

Hanks gait and come cavorting down the home stretch.

When a statesman can see such things as that while wide

awake and perfectly sober, he ought to consult a doctor.

No wonder the Democratic party spilt wide open--transformed

from an ascendent sun into a bifurcated Biela's

comet, wandering the Lord knows whither.

The gold reserve, we are told, is to "protect the credit

of our currency." Protect it from whom? You and I

are making no assault upon it--wouldn't hurt it for the

world. When we get a paper or silver dollar we don't trot

around to the treasury to have it "redeemed" in a slug of

yellow metal--we make a bee line for the grocery store

and have it redeemed in a side o' bacon. Who is it that

chisels desolation into the blessed gold reserve--the so-

called "bulwarks of our currency?" The fellows who

want bonds--the capitalistic, the creditor class; the men

who own the mortgages and have millions of dollars corded

up in bank--the men who have most to LOSE by any bobble

in the credit of our currency. And every time the capitalist

tries to hoist himself with his own petard, the

administration smothers the blaze with a block of interest-

bearing bonds. If he wants to make a sky-rocket of himself,

let him kerosene his coat-tails and apply the match.

If the gold reserve were really necessary to the credit of

our currency, capitalists would no more make war upon

it than they would bestride a buzz-saw making a million

revolutions a minute. Instead of systematically draining

it they would, whenever it struck "the danger-line,"

gather all the gold they could get and send it on to

Washington. The capitalists are not crazy; they've simply got

a soft snap in that "bulwark" business and are working

it for an it's worth.

Calico is sold by the yard, kerosene by the gallon, coffee

by the pound. These measures are immutable, and those

who buy and sell by them make their contract in perfect

confidence. But suppose they altered from day to day

or from year to year,--the yard ranging from 25 to 50

inches, the pound from 10 to 20 ounces; would our

exchanges be effected without much friction, think you?

Would not such a ridiculous system of weights and

measures paralyze exchange and demoralize industry?

Would not those who could juggle the system to suit

themselves--buying by a long and selling by a short yard--

accumulate colossal fortunes at the expense of the common

people? Would we not have "panics" in plenty and

"depressions" galore? Well, that is exactly what is

happening to the dollar, our measure of value, the most

important of all our trade tools. And mark you, a change

in the purchasing power of the dollar is equivalent to an

alteration of every weight and measure employed by

commerce. Understand? When the purchasing power of the

dollar expands or contracts it has the same effect on

exchange as would the expansion or contraction of the yard,

the gallon and the pound.

A shifting measure of value is the nigger in our

industrial woodpile. We have got to have a measure of value

that's as immutable as our measure of quantity; a dollar

as reliable as an official pound; a dollar that's the same

yesterday, and to-day and forever, before we see the last

of these panics and periods of business depression. We

have got to have a currency that will adapt itself

automatically and infallibly to the requirements of commerce--

that will constitute an ever-effective exchange medium--

before we can obtain a smooth working industrial machine

and the maximum employment of labor.

We know from experience that gold will not supply us

with such a currency, that silver will not do it, that bi-

metallism will not do it--that greenbackism, as we understand

the term, will not come within a mile of it. Then

what will do it? That's the problem. Solve it, and you

forever put an end to commercial panics in a land of

plenty; you deprive capital of its power to oppress labor;

you assure industry a constant friend where it has so often

found an insidious foe. Solve it and Columbia can furnish

happy homes for half the world--homes unhaunted by the

wolf of want, but crowned with sweet content and gilded

with freedom's glory.

For a century economists have been seeking the solution

of this all-important problem. Even conservative old

Adam Smith dreamed of the emancipation of the world

from the multifarious ills of metallic money; but we still

cling with slavish servility to the silver of Abraham and

the gold of Solomon.

I do not claim to have found the philosopher's stone, for

which so many wiser men have sought in vain; but the

currency plan I proposed in 1891--and which was again

outlined in the ICONOCLAST for May of this year--has

been carefully examined by the ablest financiers of Europe

and America, and they have been unable to point out a

fundamental fault. It is known as the interconvertible

bond-currency plan, by which our circulating media would

be bottomed on the entire wealth of the nation instead of

upon fragments of metal of fluctuating value; by which the

volume of the currency would depend, not upon the

fecundity of the mines, the fiat of Congress or the greed

of Wall street, but upon the needs of commerce itself.

By this plan the proportion between the money-work to be

done and the money available to do it is always the same;

hence it would afford an immutable measure of value. In

studying the plan it is well to bear in mind that our foreign

trade--that bogy man of the metallists--has no more to

do with our currency than with our pint cups and bushel-

baskets--no more than with our language and religion;

that we can pay our foreign debts and collect our foreign

credits only in commodities; that the prattle indulged in

by the metallists anent "money that is good the world

over" is mere goose-speech--that there is no such money.

We buy and sell with England and France to the extent

of tens of millions annually; yet I haven't seen a British

guinea or a French franc in fifteen years. And if you

had a foreign coin and should go around to a resort, and

call for a glass of--er--of buttermilk, and plank the little

stranger down on the counter, the party in the white apron

and Alaska dazzler would say:

"Wot yer givin' us?"

You'd reply: "I'm givin you gold--money good the

world over."

"Wot is it--watch charm? Dis ain't no pawn shop."

"But that's money."

"Eh?"

"Money--gold coin that maketh the heart glad."

"Wot kind o' money?"

"It's a British guinea."

"Well, why don't you go to Great Britain to blow yourself?"

"But my dear sir, this is money of final payment. This

is value itself. This does not depend on the stamp of

government, but circulates throughout the world on its

intrinsic merit."

"Well, it don't circulate in this joint. See?"

Slam your THEORIES up against CONDITIONS before you tie

to them.

. . .

You all know that in this country there should be no

such thing as able-bodied pauperism. You know that until

the last arable acre is brought to the highest possible

cultivation, every mine developed, every forest made to

contribute to the creature comfort of man, there should be

remunerative work for all. You know that, with the aid

of wealth-creating machinery every laborer should be able

to acquire a competence to comfort his declining days.

You know that until Need is satisfied and Greed is gorged

there can be no such thing as overproduction--that under

normal conditions when there's a plethora of necessaries,

the surplus energy of the nation turns to the creation of

luxuries and the standard of living advances. You know

that with such wonderful resources, touched by the magic

wand of genius, the golden age of which poets have dreamed

and for which philanthropists have prayed, should be even

at our doors.

I hope to contribute in some slight degree to the

establishment of conditions that will enable us to utilize to the

utmost the free gifts of a gracious God; to the proper

distribution of wealth; to the emancipation of labor, not by

the law of blind force, but enlightened self-interest--not

by riotous revolution, but peaceful evolution. I want to

see every American Citizen in very truth a Sovereign, to

whom life is a joy instead of a curse. I want to see every

rag transformed into a royal robe, every hovel into a cultured

home. I want to hasten, if by ever so little, the day

when we can boast with the proud sons of imperial Rome,

that to be an American is greater than to be a king.

And when we so amend industrial conditions that each

can find employment at profitable prices, we do more to

eliminate crime and foster morality than have all the

prophets and preachers, from Melchizedeck the mythical to

Talmage the turgid.

No man can be either a patriot or a consistent Christian

on an empty stomach--he's merely a savage animal, a

dangerous beast. You must get a square meal inside of a

man and a clean shirt outside of him before he's fit subject

for saving grace. You must give him a bath before

he's worth baptizing. And when you get him clean and

well clothed, fed and housed as a reward of his own honest

industry, he's not far from the Kingdom of God. But

if you want to degrade a people beyond redemption; if you

want to transform them into contemptible peons and whining

hypocrites who encumber the earth like so much unclean

vermin, educate them to feed on the crumbs from

Dives' banquet-board and accept his cast-off clothing with

obsequious thankfulness.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and

the impoverishment of the common people until it was the

bread of charity or the blood of the revolution, has ever

been the herald of moral decay and of national death. So

passed the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and,

if we may judge the future by the past, so will perish the

greatest republic that ever gleamed like a priceless jewel

on the skeleton hand of Time. Self-interest, humanity,

patriotism, religion itself, admonish us to weigh well the

problem of the hour--a problem born of human progress,

forced upon us by the mighty revolution wrought in the

industrial world by the giant Steam--and that problem is:

Shall the average American Citizen be a Slave or a

Sovereign?

Don't imagine for a moment that I'm an anarchist--

that I'm going to wind up this seance by unfurling the red

flag and throwing a hatful of bombs. I admit that I

haven't much respect for law--there's so much of it that

when I come to spread my respect over the entire lot it's

about as thin as one of Sam Jones's sermons. Still, I don't

believe in strikes, and riots and bloodshed. I'm for peace

--peace in its most virulent form. I've had a sneaking

respect for Cleveland ever since he employed a substitute

to put a kibosh on the Southern Confederacy while he

remained at home to play pinochle with the pretty girls. He

may not be much of a statesman in time of peace, but

there's no picnic ants on his judgment in time of war.

It is time that capital and labor realized that their

interests are really commutual, as interdependent as the

brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal

strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of

Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed

Poverty, Ignorance and Vice--hell's great triumvirate--to

banishment eternal. Unless labor is employed, capital

cannot increase--it can only concentrate. Unless property

rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged

to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with

which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to

barbarism.

It is time that American citizens of alleged intelligence

ceased trailing blindly in the wake of partisan band-

wagons and began to seriously consider the public welfare

--time they realized that the people were not made for

parties, but parties for the people, and refuse to sacrifice

their patriotism on the unclean altar of partisan slavery.

Blind obedience to party fiat; the division of the people

of one great political family into hostile camps; subjection

of the public interest to partisan advantage; placing

the badge of party servitude above the crown of American

sovereignty--the ridiculous oriflamme of foolish division

above Old Glory's star-gemmed promise of everlasting

unity--have brought the first nation of all world to the

very brink of destruction.

. . .

It is difficult for people here in Texas to understand the

industrial condition of the American nation today; to

appreciate the dangers upon which it is drifting. We are

too apt to imagine everybody as prosperous and conservative

as ourselves; or if not so, it's because they do not

vote the Democratic ticket--that panacea for all the ills

that flesh is heir to. Here in Texas we have hung our

second providence on the Democratic party--it has become

a religion with us. If a man is orthodox in his political

faith all things are forgiven him; but if there's any doubt

about his Democracy we are inclined to regard him as an

alien, if not an anarchist. Most of us enjoy the shadow

of our own vine and fig tree--which it is impossible to

mortgage. We feed three times a day, have a cocktail

every morning, a clean shirt occasionally and even when

cotton goes so low it doesn't pay for the paris-green to

poison the worms, we blame it on the Lord instead of on

our political leaders. But it's different in other sections

of the Union.

America contains more than a million as desperate men

as ever danced the Carmagnole or shrieked with brutal

joy when the blood of French aristocrats reddened the

guillotine. The dark alleys and unclean dives of our great

cities are crowded with dangerous sans-culotte, and our

highways with hungry men eager for bread--though the

world blaze for it. Pauperism is rampant, the criminal

classes increasing and everywhere the serpent of Socialism

is leaving it's empoisoned slime. Suppose that these

desperate elements find a determined leader--a modern Marat,

who will make the most of his opportunities for evil: how

many of that vast contingent now clinging with feeble

grasp to the rotten skirts of a doubtful respectability,

would be swept into the seething vortex of unbridled

villainy? Note the failure of public officials to protect

corporate property; the necessity of calling for federal

bayonets and batteries to suppress labor riots; the

dangerous unrest of the common people; the sympathy of the

farmer--that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders rests our

political and industrial world--with every quasi-military

organization that throws down the gage of battle to the

powers that be, then tell me, if you can, where Dives may

look for defenders should the rabble rise in its wrath, the

bullet supplant the ballot in the irrepressible conflict

between the Cormorant and the Commune! And what are

we doing to avert the danger? Distributing a little dole

and preaching patience to starving people; quarreling

about the advisability of "counting a quorum" or coining

a little silver seigniorage; wrangling over the "rights" of

a mid-Pacific prostitute to rule Celts and Saxons, and

trying to so "reform" the tariff that it will yield more

revenue with less taxation! We are bowing down before

various pie-hunting political gods and electing men to

Congress who couldn't tell the Federal Constitution from

Calvin's Confession of Faith. We are sending street-

corner economists to state and national conventions to

evolve from their innate ignorance and gild with their

supernal gall political platforms which we are pledged

beforehand to accept as the essence of all worldly wisdom.

Our patriotism has been supplanted by partisanship, and

now all are for a 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.

And while our ship of state is threading with unsteady

course the stormy straits between the Scylla of Greed

and the Charybdis of Need; its canvas torn by contending

winds; its decks swept by angry waves, we boast of the

strength of our "free institutions"--as though Republics

had never fallen nor revolutions erased from the map of

the world proud Empires that imagined themselves immortal.

But before God I do believe this selfish and unpatriotic

age will pass, as passed the age of brutish ignorance, as

passed the age of tyranny. I believe the day will come--

oh blessed dawn!--when the angel of Intellect will banish

the devil of Demagogy; when Americans will be in spirit

and in truth a band of brothers, the wrongs of one the

concern of all; when labor will no longer fear the Cormorant

nor capital the Commune--when all men will be equal

before the law wherever falls the shadow of our flag.

* * *

RAINBOW-CHASERS.

[This is the lecture that Mr. Brann delivered and was

to continue on his lecture tour, which was cut short by his

death.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: There are many things which I

very cordially dislike; but my pet aversion is what is known

as a "set" lecture--one of those stereotyped affairs that

are ground out with studied inflection and practiced gesture

and suggest the grinding of Old Hundred on a hurdy-

gurdy; hence I shall ask permission to talk to you tonight

as informally and as freely as though we were seated in

friendly converse around the soda fount of a Kansas drug

store; and I want you to feel as free to talk back as

though we had gotten into this difficulty by accident

instead of design. Ask me all the questions you want to, and

if I'm unable to answer offhand I'll look the matter up

later and telegraph you--at your expense. With such

unbounded liberty there's really no telling whither we will

drift, what subjects we may touch upon; but should I

inadvertently trample upon any of your social idols or

political gods, I trust that you will take no offense--will

remember that we may honestly differ, that none of us are

altogether infallible. Lest any of you should mistake me

for an oratorical clearing-sale or elocutionary bargain-

counter, expect a Demosthenic display and be disappointed,

I hasten to say that I am no orator as Brutus

was, but simply a plain, blunt man, like Mark Antony,

who spoke right on and said what he did know, or thought

he knew, which was just as satisfactory to himself. He's

dead now, poor fellow! Woman in the case, of course.

Shakespeare assures us that "men have died from time to

time and worms have eaten them, but not for love." However

that may be, Antony's just as dead as though he had

died for love--or become a gold-bug "Democrat." Yes,

Mark Antony's gone, but we still have Mark Hanna. One

threw the world away for Cleopatra's smile, the other

threw Columbia's smile away for a seat in the Senate, and

so it goes. Of the two Marks, I think Antony was the

easiest.

. . .

But let us take a look at our text. The rainbow is a

sign, I believe, that the Prohibitionists once carried the

country and would have made a complete success of the

cold water cure had not the Rum Demon engineered the

Ark. Still it does not necessarily follow that a rainbow

chaser is a fellow on the hot trail of a blind tiger. He

may be one who hopes to raise the wage rate by means

of a tariff wall, or expects John Bull to assist Uncle Sam

in the remonetization of silver. A rainbow-chaser, in the

common acceptance of the term, is a fellow who mistakes

shadow for substance and wanders off the plank turnpike

into bogs and briar patches. Satan appears to have been

the first victim of the rainbow-chasing fad--to have bolted

the Chicago convention and run for president on the reform

ticket. At a very early age I began to doubt the

existence of a personal devil, whereupon my parent on my

father's side proceeded to argue the matter in the good old

orthodox way, but failed to get more than half the hussy

out of my hide. But we will not quarrel about the existence

or non-existence of a party who Milton assures us slipped

on a political orange peel. We know that frauds and

fakes exist, that hypocrites and humbugs abound.

Whether this be due to the pernicious activity of a horned

monster or to evil inherent in the human heart, I will not

assume to say. We may call that power the devil which

is forever at war with truth, is the father of falsehood,

whether it be an active personality or only a vicious

principle.

. . .

Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the

world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the

Slough of Despond. Conditions have become so desperate

that it were well for you and I, who are in the world and

of it, to abate somewhat our partisan rancor, our sectarian

bitterness, and take serious counsel together. Desperate,

I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more

difficult for the workman to win his modicum of bread

and butter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to

go to hades--or elsewhere; but that honor, patriotism,

reverence--all things which our fathers esteemed as more

precious than pure gold--have well-nigh departed, that the

social heart is dead as a salt herring; that all is becoming

brummagem and pinch-beck, leather and prunella; that a

curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world, and it no

longer produces heaven-inspired men but only some pitiful

simulacra thereof, some worthless succedona for such, who

strive not to do their god-given duty though the world

reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and

grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They

aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous

ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron,

but of some pitiful sectarian mud-puddle or political goose

pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers we

have abandoned the Ark of the Covenant with its Brotherhood

of Man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities,

and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis

of brute selfishness, with a conscience or a creed of following

the foolish rainbow of a fatuous utilitaria and getting

even deeper into the bogs.

. . .

I have frequently been called a "chronic kicker," but do

not object to the epithet. There's need of good lusty

kickers, those whose No. 1 tootsie-wootsies are copper-

toed, for the world is lull of devilish things that deserve

to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of

using slang, and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say

that the Bible twice employs the word "kick" in the same

sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of

our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source,

being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite

good enough for God. Some complain that I should build

instead of tearing down, should preserve and not destroy.

The complaint is well founded if it be wrong to attack

falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social

rottenness, to destroy the tares sown by the devil and give

dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In

determining what should be preserved and what destroyed,

we may honestly disagree; but I think all will concede that

what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we

should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or

loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is pre-eminently

an age of artificiality--that there is little genuine

left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even

that has been called in question by certain unchivalrous

old bachelors, those unfortunates whom the ladies of Boston

propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty.

Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow;

not because he looks like one in the least, but rather

because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes.

He also reminds me of a rainbow-chaser, because what he

is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope

deferred hath made him heart-sick he begins to growl at

the girls--and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at

the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks

much at anything he can get hold of and bite.

. . .

We are solemnly assured that the world is steadily

growing better; and I suppose that's so, for in days of

old they crucified men head downwards for telling the

truth, while now they only hammer them over the head

with six-shooters and drag 'em around a Baptist college

campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a

hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the

optimist, is forever prating of the world's progress.

Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the

right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaped

plank into wild ocean depths; or it may be with painful

steps and slow toward the eternal mountain tops where

breaks the great white light of God, and there's no more

of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the

productive power of labor multiplied by two, by ten; and

with such improved weapons for waging war upon the

grisly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the

industrial army in India alone died upon their shields.

Hosannahs mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe

tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there!--

and we send to the famine-sufferers many bibles and hymn-

books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn-books

are excellent things in their ways, but do not possess an

absorbing interest for the man with an aching void

concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian

world for grub, and it gives them forty'leven different

brands of saving grace--each warranted the only genuine

--most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired

missionaries who serve God for the long green, and who are

often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a

religious thesis from an ichthyosaurian.

Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine

message from on high, no God in Israel; only a fashionable

pulpiteering to minister to languid minds, the cultivation

of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers--

the church becoming a mere Vanity Fair or social clearing-

house, a kind of esthetic forecourt to hades instead of the

gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme we find blatant

blackguardism by so-called evangelists, who were educated

in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma, yet

who set up as instructors of the masses in the profound

mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get shipwrecked

in the poetry of Shakespeare, or lost in the philosophy

of one of his fools, pretend to interpret the plans

of Him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the

papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire.

Progress in science until we learn that the rainbow was

not built to allay the fears of the roachin family, but is

old as the sun and the sea; that bourbon whisky drills

the stomach full o' blow-holes and that the purest spring

water is full o' bacteria and we must boil it or switch to

beer; that Havana cigars give us tobacco heart, pastry is

the hand-maid of dyspepsia, while even the empurpled

grape is but a John the Baptist for appendicitis; that a

rich thief has kleptomania and should be treated at a

fashionable hospital instead of a plebian penitentiary,

while even the rosebud of beauty is aswarm with bacilli,

warning the sons of men to keep their distance on pain of

death. If all the doctors discovered be true then life isn't

half worth living--is stale, flat and unprofitable as a

Republican nomination in Texas. When the poet declared

that men do not die for love, the doctors had not yet

learned that a cornfed kiss that cracks like a dynamite

gun may be equally dangerous. I think the bolus-builders

are chasing rainbows--that if I wait for death until I'm

killed with kisses old Methuselah won't be a marker.

Our car of progress, of which we hear so much, has

carried us from the Vates' vision of Milton and Dante to

Alfred Austin's yaller doggerel--to the raucous twitterings

of grown men who aspire to play Persian bulbul

instead of planting post-holes, who mistake some spavined

mule for Bellerophon's Mount and go chasing metrical

rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind

adown the shining blade of a bucksaw; from the flame sighs

of Sappho, that breed mutiny in the blood, to the green-

sick maunderings of atrabilarious maids who are best

qualified to build soft-soap or take a fall out of the

corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry,

so-called, everywhere--in books and magazine innumerable,

even sandwiched in between reports of camp-meetings,

political pow-wows and newspaper ads. for patent liver

pills. O, that the featherless jaybirds now trying to

twitter in long-primer type would apply the soft pedal

unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance

and despair! Most of our modern poets are bowed down

with more than Werterean woe. Their sweethearts are

cruel or fate unkind; they've got cirrhosis of the liver or

palpitation of the heart, and needs must spill their

scalding tears over all humanity. It seems never to have

occurred to the average verse architect that not a line of

true poetry was ever written by mortal man; that even

the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacreon are but as

the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the

divine harmony; that you can no more write poetry than

you can paint the music of childhood's laughter, or hear

the dew-beaded jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume

to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose

hearts are harps of a thousand strings, ever swept by

unseen hands--those whose lips are mute because the soul

of man hath never learned a language. Those we call

master-poets and crown with immortelles but caught and

fixed some far off echo of deep calling unto deep--the lines

of Byron or a Burns, a Tasso or a Tennyson are but the

half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of

its own imaginings.

But we were speaking of progress when diverted by the

discordant clamor of featherless crows. I am no pecterist

with my face ever to the past. I realize that there has

been no era without its burden of sorrow, no time without

its fathomless lake of tears; that the past seems more

glorious than the present because the heart casts a glamour

over days that are dead. From the dust and glare of the

noon of life we cast regretful glances back to the dewy

morn, and as eve creeps on the shadows reach further

back until they link the cradle and the grave and all is

dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor

mock one earnest effort of mankind; but I would warn

this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going

forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead

to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power--these

by thy gods, O! Israel--mere fly-specked eidolons worthy

no man's worship.

. . .

When we have adopted higher ideals; when success is

no longer a synonym for vain show; when the man of

millions who toils and wails for more is considered mad;

when we realize that all the world's wealth cannot equal

the splendor of the sunset sky 'neath which the poorest

trudge, the astral fire that flames at night's high noon

above the meanest hut; that only God's omnipotence can

recall one wasted hour, restore the bloom of youth, or bid

the loved and lost return to glad our desolate hearts with

the lambent light of eyes that haunt all our waking

dreams, the music of laughter that has become a wailing

cry in memory's desolate halls; when we cease chasing

lying rainbows in the empty realm of Make-Believe and

learn for a verity that the kendal green of the workman

may be more worthy of honor than the purple of the prince

--why then the world will have no further need of iconoclasts

to frankly rehearse its faults, and my words of censure

will be transformed into paeans of praise.

"Sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet

And soft as their parting tear."

We have "progressed" from the manly independence

and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby

foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek

protection of the consuls of other countries from the

spirit that made our flag respected in every land and

honored on every sea, to the anserine cackle of "jingoism"

whenever an American manifests a love of country or

professes a national pride. What is "jingoism?" It is

a word coined by enemies of this country and used by

toad-eaters. It is a term which, under various titles, has

been applied to every American patriot since our gran'-

sires held the British lion up by the caudal appendage and

beat the sawdust out of the impudent brute--since they

appealed from a crack-brained king to the justice of

heaven and wrote the charter of our liberties with the

bayonet on the back of Cornwallis' buccaneers. Its synonym

was applied to Thomas Paine, the arch-angel of the

Revolution, whose pen of fire made independence

imperative--who through seven long years of blood and tears

fanned Liberty's flickering flames with his deathless faith

that the Omnipotent arm of God would uphold the banner

of the free. From the brain of that much-maligned and

long-suffering man Columbia sprang full-panoplied, like

Minerva from the brow of Olympian Jove. And what has

been his reward? In life he was bitterly belied by the

foes of freedom and the slaves of superstition; in death a

mighty wave of calumny rolls above his grave. Greater

men have lived and died and been forgotten, but a nobler

heart ne'er beat and broke--grander soul ne'er struggled

toward the light or bowed before the ever-living God.

When the colonists stood debating whether to bear their

present ills or fly to other they knew not of, he seized

the gage of battle and flung it full and fair in Britain's

haughty face. When defeat followed defeat, when the

new-born nation was bankrupt and its soldiers starving

in the field; when coward lips did from their color fly

and men brave as Roman tribunes wept tears of grim

despair, his voice rang out again and again like that of

some ancient prophet of Israel cheering on the fainting

legions of the Lord, and again, and again, and yet again

the ragged barefoot Continentals set their breasts against

the bayonet, until from the very ashes of defeat dear

Liberty arose Phoenix-like, a goddess in her beauty, a

titan in her strength.

The term "jingoist;" or its equivalent, was applied to

Washington and Henry, to Jefferson and Jackson. It

was applied to James G. Blaine, the typical American of

his time--a man from beneath whose very toe-nails enough

intellect might be scraped to make an hundred Clevelands

or McKinleys. All were jingoes in their day and generation,

because all preferred the title of sovereign to that

of subject; because all believed that Columbia should be

mistress of her own fate, the architect of her own fortune,

instead of an appendage of England, or political orphan

under a European protectorate, because all believed that

she should protect her humblest citizen from wrong and

outrage wheresoever he may be, though it cost every dollar

of the nation's treasure and every drop of the nation's

blood--and if that be jingoism then I, too, am a jingo

from alpha to omega, from beginning to end.

. . .

Who are those who recalcitrate about jingoism? They

are people who have never forgiven Almighty God for

suffering them to be born American sovereigns instead

of British subjects. They are those whose ideal man is

some stupid, forked, radish "stuck o'er with titles, hung

'round with strings," and anxious to board with a wealthy

American wife to avoid honest work. They are the people

whose god is the dollar, their country the stock exchange,

and who suspect that a foreign policy with as much

backbone as a scared rabbit would knock some of the

wind and water out of their bogus "securities." It is

those who would sell their citizenship for a copper cent

and throw in their risen Lord as lagniappe, who are forever

prating of "jingoism" and pleading for peace at

any price. And these unclean harpies of greed and gall

have been too long permitted to dominate this government.

The result is that the greatest nation known to

human history--the sum and crown of things--is an

object of general insult. If it be rumored that we

contemplate protecting American citizens in Cuba, every

European government emits a growl--there's talk of

rebuking Uncle Sam's "presumption," of standing him in

a corner to cool. If it be suggested that we annex an

island--at the earnest request of all its inhabitants worth

the hanging--there more minatory caterwauling by the

European courts, while even the Mikado of Japan gets

his little Ebenezer up, and the Ahkound of Swat, the

Nizan of Nowhere and the grand gyasticutus of Jimple-

cute intimate that they may send a yaller-legged policeman

across the Pacific in a soap-box to pull the tail-

feathers out of the bird o' freedom if it doesn't crawl

humbly back upon its perch. If a fourth-class power

insults our flag we accept a flippant apology. If our

citizens are wrongfully imprisoned we wait until they are

starved, shot, or perish of blank despair in dungeons so

foul that a hog would die therein of a broken heart; then

humbly ask permission to investigate, report that they

are dead, and feel that we have discharged our duty.

Why? Because this nation is dominated by the dollar--is

in the hands of those who have no idea of honor unless

it will yield somewhat to eat, no use for patriotism unless

it can be made to pay. When we concluded to protect

our citizens from Weylerian savagery, instead of sending

a warship to Havana to read the riot act if need be in

villainous saltpetre we had our ambassador crawling about

the European courts humbly begging permission of the

powers, and as we got no permission we did no protecting.

When the church people elect me president of this

Republic I'll have ante-mortem investigations when

American citizens are held prisoners by foreign powers, and

those entitled to Old Glory's protection will get it in

one time and two motions if Uncle Sam has to shuck his

seer-sucker and fight all Europe to a finish. I shall

certainly ask no foreign prince, potentate or power for

permission to protect American citizens in the western world.

There'll be one plank in my platform as broad as a

boulevard and as long as a turnpike, and it will be to the

effect that the nation which wrongs an American citizen

must either apologize with its nose in the sand or reach

for its six-shooter. I'd rather see my country made a

desolation forever and a day, its flag torn from the heavens,

its name erased from the map of the world and its people

sleeping in heroes' sepulchres, than to see it a mark for

scorn, an object of contempt.

In continually crying "Peace! Peace!" Uncle Sam is

chasing a rainbow that has a dynamite bomb under either

end. If history be philosophy teaching by example what

is the lesson we have to learn? In little more than a

century we've had four wars, and only by the skin of our

teeth have we escaped as many more, yet we not only

refuse to judge the future by the past, but ignore the

solemn admonitions of Washington and Jefferson and stand

naked before our enemies. We have no merchant marine

to develop these hardy sailors who once made our flag

the glory of the sea. We have a little navy, commanded

chiefly by political pets who couldn't sail a catboat into

New York harbor without getting aground or falling

overboard. We have an army, about the size of a comic

opera company, officered largely by society swells who

cannot even play good poker, are powerful only on dress

parade. We have a few militia companies, scattered from

Sunrise to Lake Chance, composed chiefly of boys and

commanded by home-made colonels, who couldn't hit a

flock o' barns with a howitzer loaded to scatter; who show

up at state encampments attired in gaudy uniforms that

would make Solomon ashamed, and armed with so-called

swords that wouldn't cut hot butter or perforate a rubber

boot. And that's our immediate fighting force. Uncle

Sam is a Philadelphia tenderfoot flourishing a toy pistol

at a Mexican fandango. When I succeed Mr. McKinley

I'll weed every dude and dancing master out of the army

and navy and put on guard old war dogs who can tell

the song of a ten-inch shell from the boom-de-aye of a

sham battle. I'll call the attention of my Hardshell

Baptist Congress to Washington's advice that while avoiding

overgrown military establishments, we should be careful

to keep this country on a respectable defensive posture,

and that if that advice is not heeded, I'll distribute the

last slice of federal pie among the female Prohibitionists

of Kansas. If this is to be a government of, for and by

a lot of nice old ladies, I'll see to it that none of my

official grannies grow a beard or wear their bronchos

clothespin fashion. And I'll warrant you that were this

nation ruled by sure-enough women instead of by a lot

of anaemic he-peons of the money-power, Columbia would

not be caught unprepared when "the spider's web woven

across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears in

the wind no more."

. . .

To the American patriot familiar with the rapid development

of this country it seems that the hour must assuredly

come when its lightest wish will be the world's law--

when foreign potentates will pay homage to the sovereigns

of a new and greater Rome; but let us not be too

sanguine, for nations, like individuals, have their youth,

their lusty manhood and their decay; and despite the rapid

increase in men and money there are startling indications

that Uncle Sam has already passed the zenith of

his power.

"First freedom, then glory, when that fails,

Wealth, vice, corruption--barbarism at last."

Freedom we have won, and glory, yet both have failed--

we have become, not the subjects of native Caesars, but

the serfs of foreign Shylocks. Wealth we now have, and

Oriental vice, and corruption that reaches even from the

senate chamber through every stratum of society. That

we are approaching barbarism may be inferred from the

magnificence of the plutocrat and the poverty of the

working people. The first reaps where he has not sown

and gathers where he has not strewn, while if the latter

protest against this grievous injustice they are branded

as noisy Bryanites or lampooned as lippy Populists. To

the superficial observer, a nation seems to be forging

forward long after it has really begun to retrograde.

There's an era of splendor, of Lucullus feasts, of Bradley-

Martin balls and Seeley dinners; there's grand parade of

soldiery and ships, miles of costly palaces, and wealth

poured out like water in foolish pageantry; there's

refinement of manners into affectation, dilettantism,

epicureanism--but 'tis "the gilded halo hovering 'round decay."

The heart of that nation is dead, its soul hath departed,

and no antiseptic known to science will prevent putrefaction.

How is it with us? Forty thousand people own

one-half of the wealth between two oceans, while 250,000

own more than 80 per cent. of all the values created by

the people. What is the result? Money is omnipotent.

Power is concentrated in the hands of a little coterie of

plutocrats--the people are sovereigns de jure and slaves

de facto. A mongrel Anglomaniaism is spreading among

our wealthy, like mange in a pack o' lobo wolves. Our

plutocrats have become ashamed of their country--probably

because it permits them to practice a brutal predacity

--and now cultivate foreign customs, ape foreign fashions,

and purchase as husbands for their daughters the upper-

servants of European potentates--people who earned their

titles of nobility by chronic boot-licking or sacrificing

their female relatives to the god of infamy. Year after

year these titled paupers--these shameless parodies on

God's masterpiece--paddle across the pond to barter their

tawdy dishonor for boodle, to sell their shame-crested

coronets to porcine-souled American parvenues, who if spawned

by slaves and born in hell would disgrace their parentage

and dishonor their country. Our toadies and title-

worshippers now have a society called the "Order of the

Crown," composed of puppies who fondly imagine that

they have within their royal hides a taint of the impure

blood that once coursed through the veins of corrupt and

barbarous kings. Perchance these dudelets and dudines

will yet discover that they are descended in a direct line

from King Adam the First and are heirs to the throne

of Eden. Our country is scarce half developed, yet it is

already rank with decadence and smells of decay. Our

literature is "yellow," our pulpit is jaundiced, our society

is rotten to the core and our politics shamefully corrupt

--yet people say there's no need of iconoclasts! Perhaps

there isn't. The iconoclasts used hammers, while those

who purify our social atmosphere and make this once

again a government of, for and by the people may have

to empty gatling guns and load them with carbolic acid.

National decay and racial retrogression may be inferred

from the fact that alleged respectable white women have

been married to black men by eastern ministers who insist

on solving the race problem for God and the South by

giving to the typical American of the future the complexion

of a new saddle and the perfume of a Republican powwow.

When these ethnological experts tire of life, they should--

come to Texas. When white people lose their racial pride

they've nothing left that justifies the appointment of a

receiver. We hear a great deal about "race prejudice,"

and I want to say right here that there's just enough of it

in my composition to inspire an abiding faith that the

white man should be, must be, will be, lord paramount of

this planet. I promise you that when you elect me to the

presidency, nothing that's black, yaller or tan gets an

office under my administration. I shall certain not follow

Mark Hanna's understudy and fill the departments at

Washington with big, fat, saucy blacks, to employ white

women as stenographers and white men as messenger boys.

There's lots of good in the Senegambian--lots of it; but

not in a thousand years will he be fit for American

sovereignty. Half the white people are not fit for it, else

instead of a wooden-headed hiccius doctius we'd have Billy

Bryan in the presidential chair today. Whenever I look

at McKinley, I think of Daniel Webster--not because Bill

resembles old Dan, but because he doesn't. I like the

negro in his place and his place is in the cotton patch,

instead of in politics, despite the opinion of those who have

studied him only through the rose-tinted lorgnette of

"Uncle Tom's Cabin." I also like the Anglomaniac in

his place, and that is the geographical center of old

England, with John Bull's trade-mark seared with a hot iron

on the western elevation of his architecture as he faces

the rising sun to lace his shoes. As between the nigger

and the Anglomaniac, I much prefer the former. The

full-blooded nigger is a fool positive, but the Anglomaniac

is an ass superlative. The first is faithful to those

who feed him; the latter is a sneaking enemy to the

country that has conferred upon him every benefit.

Despite the optimistic cackle anent the march of science,

industrial progress, and all that sort o' thing, it appears

to be the general consensus of opinion that there's something

radically wrong. There's no lack of remedies--

the political drug store is full of panaceas, each with the

trade-mark of some peculiar school of therapeutics blown

in the bottle. Strange that all these catholicons for

earthly ills propose to inaugurate the millennium by

improving the pecuniary condition of the people--as though

the want of money in this or the other pocket were the

only evil. Certainly a better distribution of wealth were

desirable, but a general dissemination of God's grace were

far preferable. Given that, all worthy reforms will

follow; without it we will continue to chase foolish

rainbows to our fall, Dives becoming more insolent, Lazarus

left more and more to the care of the dogs. I do not

mean that by acquiring a case of the camp-meeting jerks

we will solve the riddle which the Sphinx of Time is

propounding to this republic--that we will find the solution

of all life's problems in the amen-corner. Not exactly.

The average church is about the last place to which we

need look for relief. It's too often a lying rainbow painted

on the dark mist of ignorance by the devil's own artist.

It promises more and performs less than a Republican

candidate for Congress. I've noticed that shouting

hosannahs has little tendency to make one more truthful

--that when a man professes himself the chief of sinners,

he may feel obligated to substantiate his statement. I've

never known a man to borrow any money of the bank

on the unctuosity of his amen, but I have known people

who could double-discount Satan himself at dodging an

honest debt, to weep real water because I declined to come

into their sectarian penfold and be measured for a suit of

angelic pin-feathers. There are many church people who

will slander you unmercifully for dissenting from their

religious dogma, then seize the first opportunity to stick

you with a plugged dime or steal your dog. There are

worshippers who do not consider in outward rites and

specious forms religion satisfied; but these never

accumulate vast fortunes. The path to heaven is too steep to

be scaled by a man weighted down with seven million

dollars. He may be long on hope and faith, but he's

short on charity, and without charity religion is as big

a fraud as McKinley's international bimetallism. Charity

is a word that is awfully misunderstood. If a man's

income be $5,000 a year and he gives half of it to the

less fortunate, he's a pretty decent fellow, but if he

reserves for himself half of a $100,000 income while people

are going hungry to bed, he's simply a brute. With a

world full of woe and want, what right has any professed

follower of Jesus to shove $50,000 a year down his jeans?

The true test of a man's charity is the sum which he

reserves for himself; hence when Jno. D. Rockefeller--my

good Baptist brother who's building collegiate monuments

to his own memory with other people's money--reserves

tens o' millions in excess of his needs and imagines himself

full to the muzzle with the grace of God, he's simply

chasing a rainbow that may land him in Malebolge with the

dull sudden plunk of a Republican campaign promise hitting

the tidal wave of prosperity. Imagine Jesus Christ

with John D.'s money--loaning it at 5 per cent. a month!

Why if he'd had half so much cash he'd never have been

crucified. Those who clamored for his death would have

run him for mayor of Jerusalem on the reform ticket

and tried to work him for his last dollar.

. . .

If all who call themselves Christians were Christlike,

then indeed might there be hope for humanity; but what is

there to inspire belief that the church will ever win the

world from a foolish quest of rainbows? What hope in

Talmage, with his nightmare visions and stertorous dreams,

his pilgrimings to Palestine and rummaging among the

mummified cats and has-been kings of ancient Egypt for

"Scriptural evidence?" What hope for a people so mentally

emasculate that they can patiently listen to his

jejune wind-jamming, can read and relish his irremediable

tommyrot? What hope in Sam Jones and other noisy

ignorami of that ilk, with their wild war on dancing and

the euchre deck, the drama and decollete? Be these the

strongholds of Abriman in his ceaseless war on Oromasdes?

Does the Prince of Darkness, who once did fill the wondering

cosmos with the clangor of celestial steel, now front

the hosts of Heaven armed with a euchre-deck? Is Tara

Boom-de-aye the battle-hymn and the theater hat the

blazing gonfalon of him who strove with Omnipotence for

universal empire? Does Lucifer expect to become lord

paramount of all the gleaming worlds that hang like

jewels pendant in heaven's imperial concave by persuading

some miserable son of Adam to work his toes on Sunday,

dance with the girls on Monday or play seven-up for the

cigars? O Jonesy, Jonesy! would to heaven that thou

and all thy brother blabsters and bubblyjocks would go

hang yourselves, for you know naught of the war that

rages ever like a sulphurous siroc in the human soul. Ye

are but insects that infest great Igdrasyl, the ash tree

that upholds the universe. One atheistical Stephen

Girard playing Good Samaritan in a plague-swept city

while the preachers hit the turnpike; one deistical Tom

Paine, braving the guillotine for the rights of man; one

Father Damien, freely laying down his life for the miserable

lepers of Molokai; one sweet-faced sister of charity

bravely battling with the reeking slums of a great city,

striving to drag souls from that seething maelstrom of

sin, were worth legions of those sanctified lollypops who

prate of sacrificing all for their Savior, yet never risk life

or gold in the service of their God.

. . .

"Work is worship," said the old monks who carried the

cross into the Western wilds despite all hardships, in

defiance of all dangers--men for whom life was no Momusmasque,

but a battle and a march, men who sacrificed all

for other's sake, accepting without a sigh disease and

death as worldly reward. Those monks were real men,

and real men are ever the world's heroes and its hope.

The soul of a real man is never hidden behind the cowardly

superficies of policy or expediency--his heart is an open

book which he who runs may read. Deceive he cannot, for

the lie blooms only on the lips of cowards. Public opinion

he may treat with kingly contempt, but self-respect is

dearer to him than life, though dowered with a monarch's

scepter and all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. There's

something in the words of a woman, spoken during the civil

war, which indicates that despite all artificiality and folly,

beneath the cheap gilding and showy lacquer of life, the

heart of the race still beats steady and strong; that above

the infinitude of goose-speech and the trumpeting of tin-

horns on the housetops may still be heard "the ever-pealing

tones of old Eternity." From out the mad hell of the

fight a wounded hero was borne to the hospital. Neither

pain nor approaching death could break the courage of

that heart of oak, but a prurient little preacher, one of

those busy smooth-bore bigots whose mission seems to be

to cast a shadow on the very sun, convinced the stricken

man that he was an awful sinner, whereupon he began

crying out that he was doomed to be damned. The nurse,

a muscular woman who believed with the old monks that

"work is worship," took the parson by the pendulous

8 x 10 ear, led him aside and sweetly said: "Mr. Goody

Two-Shoes, if I catch you in this ward again I'll

throw you out of the window." The brimstone

peddler felt that he had an urgent "call" to other fields.

He stood not upon the order of his going, but hit the dim

and shadowy distance like Nancy Hanks. He couldn't

even wait to pray for his persecutor or take up a collection.

In vain the nurse strove to soothe her patient by

telling him that the man who gave his life for his native

land cannot miss heaven's mercy--he but wailed the louder

that he was lost. "You came to me a hero," she cried,

"and you shall not leave me a coward. If you must go

to hell, go like a man." If Romans nursed by a she-wolf

became demigods, what might not Americans be sprung

from the loins of such a lioness! Milton has almost made

Satan respectable by endowing him with an infernal heroism,

by making him altogether and irremediably bad,

instead of a moral mugwump--by giving him a heart for

any fate instead of picturing him as willing to wound

and yet afraid to strike.

. . .

By God's grace, I mean not the kind you catch at camp-

meetings with sand-fleas, wood-ticks and other gifts of the

Holy Ghost; but rather an end everlasting to brummagem

and make-believe, a return to the Ark of the Covenant,

a recognition of that fact that the soul is not the stomach

--that a man owes debts to his fellows which cannot be

cast up at the end of the month and discharged with a

given number of dollars. Man was not made for himself

alone, but all were made for each and each for all. The

doctrine which now prevails of "every man for himself,"

is the dogma of the devil. It means universal war, shameful

wrong and brutal outrage--the strong become intolerable

tyrants, the weak go to the wall. It transforms

this beautiful world into a basket of adders, each biting,

hissing, striving to get its foolish head above its fellows.

If the Christian religion contained naught else of worth,

its doctrine of self-sacrifice should earn for it the respect

of every Atheist in the universe. Through the fogs of

ignorance and the clouds of superstition that enshrouded

the Biblical ages that touch of the divine shines like a

pilot star.

. . .

That Persian poet who prated of "the sorry scheme of

things" would deserve pity were he not beneath contempt.

He imagined that there was a screw loose in the universe

because his quest of pleasure slipped its trolley-pole and

could not make the bubble Joy to dance in Folly's cup.

Millions make continual moan that they are not happy

when they ought to be thankful that they are not hanged.

They shake their puny hands at heaven because not provided

with a terrestrial Paradise, when they ought to be

giving thanks that I'm not the party who holds the sea in

the hollow of his hand. I'd make good Baptists of the

whole caboodle--would hold them under water long enough

to soak out the original sin. A man complains because

Fortune doesn't empty her cornucopia into the pockets of

his pantalettes while he whittles a pine box and talks

municipal politics instead of humping himself behind an

enterprising mule in the cotton-patch. If his sweetheart

jilts him, he's in despair, and if she marries him he wishes

he were dead. He has the mulligrubs because he cannot

plant himself on a Congressional cushion, or because he

finds his wife awake and nursing a curtain lecture to keep

it warm when he falls through the front fence at 5 o'clock

in the morning. It seems never to have occurred to these

Werterian wailers that the happiest existence is that of

the lower animals--that the human being of fine brain and

keen sensibilities cannot possibly be content. It is this

very unrest, this heart-hunger that drives a man on to

noble deeds--that lifts him out of the gutter where wallow

the dull, dumb beasts and places him among the gods. Of

suffering and sorrow were born all life's beauty. The kiss

of Pyramus and Thisbe is an ecstasy of pain. The hope

of immortality sprang from breaking hearts. Nations rise

through a mist of tears. Every great life-work is an

agony. Behind every song there lurks a sigh. There's

an element of sadness in humor itself. The Virgin Mother

is known as Our Lady of Pain. The cult of Christ is

hallowed by the blood of self-sacrifice and known as the

Religion of Sorrow. The first breath of life and the last

gasp are drawn in suffering; and between the cradle and

the grave there lies a monster-haunted Sahara. Yet men

choose the ignis-fatuus called Happiness, and mourn that

they cannot cover it with a No. 6 hat. They should pray

the gods to transform them into contented goats and turn

them out to grass. People who cannot find happiness here

begin to look for it in heaven. Eternal beatitude is

another ridiculous rainbow. Nirvana is nonsense. If there

be a life beyond the grave, it means continued endeavor,

and there can be no endeavor unless there's dissatisfaction.

The creature cannot rise superior to its creator--and the

universe is the result of God's unrest. Had he been

perfectly content he would not have made me.

Carlyle--not Mugwump Carlisle of Kentucky, but Thos.

Carlyle of Great Britain-the lord of modern literature--

says the hell most dreaded by the English is the hell of not

making money. We have imported this English Gehenna,

duty free, despite Mr. Dingley, and now the man who

doesn't succeed in accumulating dollars is socially damned.

How many of this generation can understand the remark

of Agassiz that he had no time to make money?--can

realize that such occupation is not the sole end of man?--

that time expended in the accumulation of wealth beyond

the satisfaction of simple wants is worse than wasted?

It is so because from our numbered days we have stolen

years that should have been devoted to soul-development,

filled with the sweets of knowledge; hallowed by the

perfume of love, made gracious by noble deeds--because we

have blasted life's fair fruitage with the primeval eldest

curse. Omar strikes one true chord when he doth sing:

"A book of verses, underneath the bough,

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou

Singing beside me in the wilderness--

O wilderness were Paradise enow!"

. . .

Diogenes was content with a tub while Alexander sat him

down by the ever-moaning sea and wept his red bandanna

full of brine because he didn't know that the empire of

Czar Reed yet remained unconquered. And now both

Diogenes and Alexander have "gone glimmering through

the dream of things that were," and little it matters to

them or to us whether they fed on honey of Hymettus and

wine of Falernus or ate boarding house hash off a pewter

plate and guzzled Prohibition busthead out of a gourd.

The cynic who housed in a tub and clothed himself with

a second-hand carpet is as rich to-day as he that reveled

in the spoil of Persia's conquered king and kicked the

bucket while enjoying a case of katzenjammer. King and

cynic, tub and palace, lantern and scepter--all have

perished; and he that butchered thousands to glut his

greed for what fools call glory, shines less brightly through

the murky shadows of the century than he that made a

nobler conquest of himself. The haughty empires one did

rear have long since crumbled into dust; the wild goat

browses in their deserted capitals, the lizard sleeps upon

their broken thrones, and the owl hoots from their forgotten

altars and ruined fanes; but the philosophy of the

other lives on from age to age, to point the folly of such

mad rainbow-chasing as that of him who thought to make

the world his monument.

. . .

Know ye not that the poorest beggar is an earth-

passenger also, that thy brother, traveling his millions of

miles per day?--where, think you? Among the stars.

For him as for thee does Aurora gild the morning and

Apollo hang the evening sky with banners of burnished

gold; for him as for thee doth Selene draw the limpid

waters behind her silver car around the rolling world

and Bootes lead his hunting dogs afield in their leash of

celestial fire. Ten centuries hence the dust of the

millionaire will have mingled with that of the mendicant, both

long forgotten of men; ten centuries hence the descendants

of those now peddling hot wiener-wurst may proudly wear

the purple, while the posterity of present monarchs creep

through life as paupers. A thousand years are but as one

tick of the mighty horologe of time--and the allotted life

of man but three score years and ten! And this brief

period we expend, not in living, but in providing the means

of life; not as creation's lords, but as slaves to our own

avarice, the most pitiful passion that ever cursed mankind.

If there be a God, be thou his messenger unto men;

if there be no God, then have thy unfortunate fellows the

more need of thee. Wait not until a man is driven to

crime by the iron law of necessity, a woman to dishonor, a

child to beggary, then organize some fake relief society for

thine own glory, but put forth a helping hand in time to

avert the sin and shame. The most pitiful failure in all

God's universe is the man who succeeds only in making

money. A thieving fox will grow fat by predacity while

an honest dog starves in the path of duty. And we have

too many sleek Reynards prowling 'round the sheep-pens

and dove-cotes of this people, too few faithful Gelerts

doing stubborn battle with predaceous beasts.

There's one class of people whom we cannot brand as

arrant knaves and put in the pillory, yet who are a curse

to any country. These are your Laodiceans in religion

and politics, your luke-warms, your namby-pamby milk-

and-cider set who are neither cold or hot. These are your

eminently proper people, your stereotyped respectables.

They accept the Gospel as true, not that they can comprehend

it, but rather because they lack sufficient mental

vigor to deny it. They join the church and align themselves

with that political party to which the local nabobs

belong. "What will people say?" is to them the all-

important problem. They have followed some old bell

weather or lead-gander into the wire-grass pasture of

Respectabilia. They observe all the proprieties--at least

in outward appearance. These are the animals whose vis

inertia perpetuates all the abuses of wealth and power--

whatsoever has the approval of two or more generations

of infamous rascals is so eminently respectable. These

are the people who are so profoundly shocked by the

alleged slang of Hugo and vulgarities of Goethe, while

compelling their daughters to read the Canticles. They

have a conniption fit and fall in it because some shapely

danseuse kicks up her rhythmic heels on the vaudeville

stage, then organize Trilbys auctions, kissing bees and

garter raffles for the glory of God. Their ideal is

expediency and their moral law the Eleventh Commandment--

Don't get caught. These are the people who stone the

prophets of progress. They are to the social organism

what a pound of putty would be to the stomach of a

dyspeptic. They are a mill-stone slung about the neck of

the giant of civilization. "What will people say?"

Well, if you tell them a new truth, they will say that you

are a demagogue or a blasphemer, an anarchist or a

Populist; but when your new truth has been transformed by

Time's great alembic into an old falsehood, they will have

absorbed it--it will have become respectable--and you

couldn't purge it from their soggy brain with Theodorus'

Auticyrian hellebore. They said of Galileo, "Imprison

him!" because he denied the old falsehood that the world

is flat; of Servetus, "Burn him!" because he dissented

from the ipse dixit of another heretic; of Socrates,

"Poison him!" because he laughed at the too amorous

gods of Greece; of Robert Emmett, "Hang him!" because

he wasn't a Cleveland-Bayard Anglomaniac; and

they said of Jesus Christ, "Crucify him!" because he

intimated the fashionable preachers of his time were a set

of splenetic-hearted hypocrites. That's what people say;

but occasionally there's one to answer that 'tis not in the

power of all Xerxes' hosts to bend one thought of his

proud heart--"they may destroy the case of Anaxarchus,

himself they cannot reach." It is not what foolish sound

is shaped by a deal of stinking breath and blown adown

the wind to be forgotten like the bray of an asthmatic

burro, to perish like the snows of yesteryear, that should

be our concern--not what the idle gabble of Mrs. Grundy

proclaims us, but what we actually are. Public opinion

is an ever-shifting rainbow. The "heretics" of one age

are the saints of the next: the "cranks" of our own time

may be the philosophers of the future; the despised rebels

of a century ago are the men whose graves we bedeck with

our garlands. Soon or late, those who court the many-

headed monster, who "flatter its rank breath and bow

to its idolatries a patient knee," are trampled beneath its

iron heel; but those who take duty for guiding star and

are strong enough to withstand the gibes of malice and the

jeers of ignorance will find that the years are seldom

unjust. It has been well said that one eternity waited for

us to be born, that another waits to see what we will do

now that we are here. Do what thou canst and do it

with all thy might, remembering that every fice that doth

bark at thee this day, every goose that stretches forth its

rubber neck to express its disapproval, will be dead in hell

a hundred years hence, its foolish yawp gone silent

forevermore, but that thy honest act affects in greater or less

degree all God's universe.

I am neither a Jeremiah with a lung full o' lamentations,

nor a Jonah rushing round like a middle of the roader

and proclaiming, "Yet forty days and the woods will

be on fire." I do not believe that we can pick ourselves

up by our own embroidered boot-straps and hop blithely

astride a millennium built to order by McKinley, Bryan,

or any other man; but I do believe that the human race

is slowly but surely working the subsoil out of its system,

is becoming ever less the beast and more the god. Nations

grown corrupt with wealth and age may fall, but others

strong in youth and innocence will arise. Old faiths may

be forgotten, but from other and purer altars will ascend

the smoke of sacrifice. Freedom may be wounded grievously

in her very temple by Anglomaniacs who needs must

have a royal master, yet her banner, torn but flying, will

stream triumphant over the grave of tyranny. The black

night of barbarous ignorance may often engulf the world,

but "Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to

dawn." The Star of Bethlehem cannot go down in everlasting

darkness--the bow of promise gleams softly luminous

behind the thunderbolt. I care not whether the

Noahian tale be true that never again will the shifting

axis of the earth pour the sea upon the plain--the rainbow

is nature's emblem of peace, her cestus of love, and in its

splendor I read a promise that never again will this fair

earth of ours be swept with sword and fire, deluged with

blood and tears. Not to the past, but to the future, do

I look for the Saturnian age, when the demons of need and

greed will be exorcised, when love will be the universal

law, the fatherhood of God the only faith. Such, my

friends, is the rainbow to which I have turned my feet.

It lies afar, across dismal swamps o'er whose icy summits

only the condor's shadow sweeps--across arctic vast and

desert isles beyond tempestuous ocean rank with dead men's

bones and the rotting hulls of ships. I shall not attain

it, nor shall you; but he that strives, though vanquished,

still is victor. A dreamer, say you? Ah yes, but all life is

but a dream, mystic, wonderful, and we know not when we

sleep nor when we wake. I love to dream so when the

storm beats upon the great oaks, hoary with their hundred

years, and they put forth their gnarled arms and grapple

with the blast, when the lightning cleaves the inky sky

with forked flame and the earth rocks neath the thunder's

angry roar. When the dark clouds roll muttering unto

the East and the evening sun hangs every leaf and twig

and blade of grass with jewels brighter than e'er gleamed

in Golconda's mines; when the mock-birds renew their

melody and every flower seems drunken with its own incense,

I look upon the irisate glory that seems to belt the

world with beauty and my heart beats high with hope that

in years to be the storm-clouds that o'ershadow the souls

of men will recede also--that time shall come when the

human race will be one universal brotherhood, containing

neither a millionaire nor a mendicant, neither a master

nor a slave.