Brann the Iconoclast Volume 10 Part 9

Verily I say: "Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantom of hope--who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow,"

need not attend to the history of Ra.s.selas, Prince of Abyssinia, except for the pa.s.sing pleasure of the reading, because the story can be told in fewer words, to wit: Happiness is a personal equation--"what is one man's meat is another man's poison."

Ra.s.selas found the Happy Valley irksome and intolerable. There never has been a Happy Valley since that could furnish continuous content to any one. The nearest approach to happiness comes with juxtaposition to one's tastes and aspirations. The simpler the tastes and the less discursive the aspirations, the nearer happiness comes and the longer it remains. Happiness does not come from conditions or surroundings, nor are these conditions or surroundings always understood. Actual conditions do not reveal themselves to perspicacity much less to casual observation.

The multi-millionaire in his mansion or the king on his throne, surrounded by all the comforts and conveniences, all the marvelous treasures, all that is pleasing to the eye and to the senses, may not be happy--may be unhappy. The rustic who follows the plow through furrowed fields, unkempt, clownish, toil-stained, weary and overworked, may brawl raucous roundelay at even-tide and enjoy the fullness of earthly bliss. His neighbor similarly situated may suffer agonies because his tastes and ambitions are higher. Those who imagine "plow hands" have no ambitions to gratify know little of life. Sometimes they aspire to be presidents, and sometimes they gratify those aspirations, but they never know happiness. They may be as wise as a dozen Solons, but they can not provide happiness by legislation. They may reach the summit of earthly glory and strive to seize the fulgurant prize that lured them on, only to find a penumbra--the shadow of a shade. And if conditions are actually known they prove nothing, generally. Each case must be specialized. Children and grown people, for that matter, are subjected to involuntary fasts and oftimes go hungry, in fact are always hungry, but they suffer less and are healthier than those who are stuffed and pampered and sated. The joy of eating when food comes compensates for the previous scantiness of the fare. There are deaths from insufficient alimentation; ten to one are the deaths traceable to over-feeding. There is suffering for lack of food. There is ten to one more suffering by gouty and dyspeptic gourmands. The beggar s.h.i.+vers in the cold for lack of clothing; there is ten to one more suffering from over-swathing. For pain, actual, excrutiating; for pain invincible, somber and unutterable, one proud woman reduced to a last season's frock suffers more than twenty arrayed in customary rags and tatters. G.o.d tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but not to the dowdy woman. The occupant of the cottage or cabin as he hurries home on Sat.u.r.day night with his hard-earned store perhaps envies the occupant of the mansion where lights burn brightly and music fills the air, but the master of the mansion may be driven to the verge of insanity in an unequal contest to keep up appearances and a style of living that is grinding his heart into dust. Gladly, he thinks, he would court the modest shelter of the cottage or cabin but, alas!

sorrow and suffering, want and wickedness might follow him there.

From natal bed to mortuary box happiness escapes us--the faster, the more we pursue it.

We mistake appearances for realities and misbestow our sympathy.

Had some of the more tender-hearted met Audubon when he returned from one of his trips in the forests, his clothing in shreds, his shoes gone, travel- stained and unkempt, alms would have been unhesitatingly bestowed. And how amused would the great man have been! He was too great to have been irritated. If, as it is claimed, human happiness is the aim and object of philanthropists, they seek the unattainable and destroy that which they would save. A sudden wrenching from the one condition to another is misery. The eagle would rather starve in his native forests than feast in a cage. The Indian maiden who graduates at Carlisle and who captures all the medals, returns to her blanket and the dirt, dogs and squalor of her tribe as soon as she reaches the reservation. There is a strain of the Huckleberry Finn in all natures that resents a too sudden metamorphosis and which will return to its rags, its back alley and empty cask.

Charlatans of the law and of literature inculcate the idea that a change in conditions means the acquisition of unqualified bliss, and they a.s.sume that the poor are necessarily unhappy and endeavor to convince them--not a difficult task, that it is the fault of someone else that they are not rich! Folly! The hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags, who fares on coa.r.s.est food, whose wife and children live in squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them entrance into the society which they would affect, or, if it does, they find themselves ill at ease, out of place, miserable.

Those who imagine that all bliss comes from lucre or legislation know little and are "ignorant of their own ignorance." They do not know that "our own felicity we make is final, and that through the cultivation of individual inherency and personal sufficiency. They listen to the charlatans who, on the plea of bringing balm, inflict incurable wounds; who would bring happiness by sowing the dragon's teeth of discontent. "Coal-Oil Johnny," who threw away hundreds of thousands of suddenly acquired dollars, was a philosopher. The money put him out of harmony with himself. It was to him a curse. And he wisely rid himself of it. There is peace and pleasure in the jangling discord and in the pains of effort, a peace which, otherwise, the world can not give, a pleasure found nowhere else; and this peace and pleasure are not to be sought by effort; are not to be attained by effort; but are found in the effort itself. There is pleasure in dressing a field or in painting a house, but not in the dressed field or in the painted house. In other words, there is pleasure in individual a.s.sertiveness and not in inertia. No doubt either Calypso or Circe was more attractive than Penelope, but Ulysses was not content. He had to continue his wanderings even to his own home, and when he had killed of all the suitors and was restored to his diplomatic spouse, there were doubtless days when he wished himself back with the enchantress on the lovely isle--days when he would have changed places with his father, Sisyphus, and rolled the ever returning stone with will and energy. Ease and pa.s.sivity were a torture to him.

A picture of life is painted by that wonderful artist, Gabrielle d'Annunzio, in "The Triumph of Death." Yes, I hear the hurtling of such missles as "decadent," "obscene," "vulgar," "impious."

Nevertheless d'Annunzio is one of the great masters. His pigments may be mud or muck. His brush is the brush of an Angelo. His finished product is life itself, breathing, pulsing life, through which the blood rushes loud enough to be heard. Life in all its phases, from the loftiest to the lowliest. Demetrius, wealthy, scholarly, meditative, one would suppose needed no legislation or literature to make him happy. He possessed all the world had to give. "A mild, meditative man, with a face full of virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the center of his forehead among the black hair, giving him an old appearance." He sought earnestly and sedulously for the secret meaning of life. He tried to reach and unravel its symbols and allegories; he tried to interpret the furtive gestures which he beheld in the shadows, and he pa.s.sed into deeper shadows and more oppressive silences through the ghastly gates of suicide, while his idiotic sister remained to chatter and grimace. Jaconda remained gibbering and pleased with the world and with herself. George saw this and he saw many other things which he could not understand.

He saw "Oreste of Chapelles" firing the simple minds of the people to fanaticism as he went up and down like a fury. He saw the pilgrims at the sanctuary and the beggars and cripples on his return from the sanctuary to Ca.s.salbordino--horrible monsters, not fas.h.i.+oned, or scarce fas.h.i.+oned in G.o.d's image, and he saw that they had their families and their belongings with them, that they piteously plead for alms and that they danced and sung, cursed and caroused, made merry over the deformities of each other, and presented a phase of life wholly incomprehensible.

Laws or literature could not increase their happiness. Their apparent miseries were not real. He saw Colas, ignorant, stupid, superst.i.tious, but content. He saw Candia, proud of her fecundity, slaving, singing. He saw Favetta, the young singer with the falcon-like eyes, the idol of her friends, simple, modest, happy. He saw the peasants in their mysterious rites "consecrating the nativity of bread" in the harvest field. They needed neither laws nor literature to improve their condition.

They were the happiest of mortals. And he saw the dark tragedies of this remote world. Liberata carrying her dead child on her head to the burial place. No laws or literature for her, poor woman: her baby was dead and her reason was gone. He saw Riccangela, the widow, on the beach, with her large rough hands, pouring forth her heart in a wild monody over the remains of her puny boy, who was drowned, while the homicidal sea chanted a lugubrious accompaniment or mocked the agony of the song. George sought the meaning and the key to life's mysteries and found them not. Subjective study and spiritual contemplation drove him mad.

They had driven his uncle Demetrious mad. He recoiled from them and plunged into life as he found it, endeavoring to extract from it the honey of happiness, or at least, immunity from misery. If carnalism could furnish content, one would think George would have found it. Rich to opulence, young, idle, he met Hippolyte, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in which were mingled perhaps a few tints of faded roses." He won her and subjected her, "the bloodless, wounded creature who used to submit with profound astonishment, the ignorant and frightened creature who had given him that fierce and divine spectacle--the agony of modesty felled by vicious pa.s.sion." He idolized her and idealized her in the struggle for perfect bliss. He took her to the deserted abbey and placed on "the summit of the high marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries," where she burned before his eye in the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love, and, as he believed, illuminating the meditations of his soul. Folly! His apotheosis was a farce. She developed, but not spiritually. What he supposed was a pure flame of love proved to be a base erotic fever. The bloom of pudicity was brushed off. She acquired a strange power over him; she, the once innocent and frightened creature. "She possessed the infallible science and knew her lover's most secret and subtle sensibilities and knew how to move them with a marvelous intuition of the physical conditions that depend on them and their corresponding sensations and their a.s.sociation and their alternatives." And from the thing of beauty and light, seen with enraptured eyes as she stood "on the summit of the marble candelabra which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries, she became a loved and hated thing, "the flower of concupiscence," "an instrument of low lasciviousness."

The union of these two, perfect in all outward appearances, blessed with love and leisure, beauty and youth, and all that wealth could buy, was a mocking and a delusion because lacking in spirituality, because unsanctified and unholy. It was a monstrous tragedy, this union, presented on a stage of ashes over a volcano. (Unions in polite society, where forms are observed, laws obeyed and customs followed, but where the moving impulse is sordid, where the marriage is for money or for social position, do they, too, not drift toward mutual hate and abhorrence, to divorce or death? I only ask the question. There may be more Georges and Hippolytes in the world than we care to admit). When at last he discovered his true condition, when he realized that he was in her power that he could not live with her or without her, that she obstructed his way of life and his way to death, he caught her in his arms and hurled both over the precipice upon the rocks below, making a ghastly ending for a ghastly tragedy. No law or literature could have brought happiness to him. He sought it in the various ways, in every way but the one, simple and only right way--the effort to confer happiness on others. Frantic intoxications, the culminations of carnal pleasures, which amount to unspeakable ecstasies, are mere temporations which are followed by la.s.situde, exhaustion and disgust, and these soon turn to a fiercely implacable hate. The search for happiness, when carried to the extreme, becomes a torture. The desire for happiness is selfish, and selfishness is never happy. Happiness dispensed is like bread cast upon the water, and will return after many days. Those who seek it stray from it. All laws and all literature that arouse the spirit of discontent, of selfishness and of desire for happiness, are vicious because they defeat the very object which they seek to accomplish, and make people more miserable than they were by increasing their capacity for suffering without a coexistent power to gratify the desires aroused. What is this George Eliot puts into the mouth of the radical, Felix Holt? "This world is not a very fine place for a good many of the people in it. But I've made up my mind it shan't be the worse for me if I can help it. They tell me I can't alter the world--that there must be a certain number of sneaks and robbers in it, and if I don't lie and filch somebody else will. Well, then, somebody else shall, for I won't--I will never be one of the sleeks dogs--I would never choose to withdraw myself from the labor and common burden of the world; but I do choose to withdraw myself from the rush and scramble for money and position. Any man is at liberty to call me a fool, and say that mankind are benefitted by the push and scramble in the long run, but I care for the people who are alive now and will not be living when the long run comes. I prefer to go shares with the unlucky."

Irrefragible philosophy! The true and the wise proceed not to stir up the lees of pa.s.sion and greed and avarice and ambition.

They remain with the world, go with it in its devious ways and through its torturous windings, removing the thorns and briars from before naked feet, s.h.i.+elding the weak, sheltering the naked, encouraging and dispensing light and hope and love. The true and wise who love their fellows avoid strife and carnage, and conflict with the ineluctable, but they meet the inevitable calmly and courageously. They are superior to laws and literature. They are supremely blest. Memphis. Tenn., November 10.

TOMMIE WATSON'S TOMMYROT.

Somebody whom I have never harmed sends me an A. P. A. tract ent.i.tled "A Good Catholic," and issued by Tommy Watson, who once tried to run for vice-president on the Middle-of-the-Muck ticket--for the purpose of turning back the reform tide and electing the humble peon of the gold-b.u.g.g.e.rs, high-tariffites and trusts. Tommie's Ape tract is simply an "ad." for a weekly paper which he seems to be getting out all by his little self somewhere in Gooberdom. On the front elevation of this bombsh.e.l.l with which he expects to blow the Vatican across the yellow Tiber, the statement is made in display type that, for the trifling sum of one dollar in hand paid, "You can read the brilliant, patriotic editorials of Hon. Thos. E. Watson" for an entire year--granting, of course, that their Promethean brilliancy fail to set your s.h.i.+rt-tail afire in the meantime. There is no provision for the return of your money in case Tommie's exhuberant patriotism should overpower you. We are then a.s.sured that "no Roman Pope or American Cardinal can coerce" the architect of the "brilliant and patriotic editorials" aforesaid. Now that's the kind of a man I admire! Hang a Georgia editor, say I, who sells himself to the Pope of Rome for six bits, or rushed around to an American Cardinal every morning before breakfast with the proof-sheets of his labored lucubrations, humbly asking permission to print. The brilliant and patriotic editor of a Georgia paper having a paid circulation of 710 copies can not be too independent. It is his solemn duty to keep watch and ward over this country and promptly put a kibosh on every conspiracy of the Pope. Like most brilliant patriots, Tommie has sacrificed a very great deal for conscience sake. When he tried to save the country by playing second tail to the Bryan kite for the purpose of dividing the reform forces and electing a Republican president, the Pope and all his "priest-led citizens" straddled his collar, rode him into an open grave and piled a cathedral on top of him to hold him down--at least I suppose they did from the way in which this raucous little Buzfuz is chewing the rag. Had he been "A Good Catholic" he would have been elected with votes to burn; for did not d.i.c.k Bland have to hide out in the Ozark hills to escape the presidential nomination the moment it was rumored that his wife was a "Romanist"? Did not Generals Sherman and Sheridan have to insulate themselves to avoid the presidential lightnings which played around them continuously because they were Catholics? Sure! Tommie is doubtless correct in his a.s.sertion that the Pope controls American politics and dictates every act of congress. That is amply proven by the fact that after all these years the Catholics have a representative in the president's cabinet. That all Catholics are sworn enemies of this republic and peons of the Pope is demonstrated by the fact that the "Romish"

attorney-general refused to permit his people to erect at their own expense a chapel on government ground at West Point--the general public being taxed meanwhile to maintain an Episcopal clergyman at that place. Tommy protests that he is both a Baptist and devoid of bigotry. If he can make this claim good I will undertake to secure for him an engagement at $1,000 a day in a dime museum as the greatest curio ever seen in this country.

Doubtless there are many good people who are Baptists but G.o.d's sunlight never fell upon one who was not a bigot. The man who concedes that it is possible for one to reach heaven except he be soused bodily into some sacred slop-tub is not a Baptist. If he thinks he is, he has made a faulty diagnosis of his disease. The Baptist church breeds bigotry just as a dead mule does magots. It dominates politics wherever it is strong enough to do so. It boycotts every publisher who dares suggest that it doesn't hold the one only key to heaven. It is the sworn foe of Catholicism, yet not one of its members in a million has the remotest idea what Catholicism means. It a.s.sumes that the great body of Catholics are ignorant clowns, while itself absorbing 60 per cent. of the illiterates of this land. The more ignorant an animal is the more bigoted Baptist it is likely to be. I cannot at present think of a single American of distinction who was a member of that denomination. I have pa.s.sed in mental review the great American statesmen, soldiers, authors and inventors, and find only one among them who was web-footed. Garfield was a Campbellite--and had he not been murdered no one would have suspected that he was a great man. If any of the immortelles was of the Baptist persuasion he was probably ashamed of that fact, as he kept it concealed. It is possible that in soaking the original sin out of a fellow any latent germs of genius he possesses may be extracted also. Tommie solemnly a.s.sures us that Catholics dare not read a book or paper that has not been formally approved by the Pope. What a foolish falsehood!

I'll wager a pint of peanuts that Watson cannot name half a dozen American books, papers or magazines that bear the Papal imprimatur, and another pint of the same luscious circus fruit that even his own rabid A.P.A. rot has never been placed in the index prohibitorius. If it is not there every Catholic in this country is privileged to read it without consulting Rome. Of the most bigoted sect of pseudo- religious fanatics that ever cursed this country the Hon. Tommie Watson is perhaps the most intolerant and narrow-brained little blatherskite. And the worst of it all is that while in religion he's a fool, in politics he's a knave. While pretending that the cause of the common people was the apple of his eye, he lent himself to a scheme to defeat their tribune and elect a ligneous-headed hiccius-doctius owned soul and body by Mark Hanna, the "industrial cannibal." Bryan would be president to-day but for this busy little blabster whom accident placed in a position where he could betray the people. Avaunt!

thou contumacious little coyote, thou pestiferous pole-cat.

Benedict Arnold was a gentleman when compared to you, for his treason was open and avowed, while you stabbed the cause of the people in a friendly embrace, struck in the back. You have had no parallel since Judas Iscariot conspired with the plutocracy to betray the idol of the people--and even Judas had decency enough to hang himself as expiation for his infamy. Shut up, thou hatchet-faced, splenetic-hearted, narrow-headed little hypocrite, for verily the world is aweary of Tommie Watson. His "brilliant and patriotic editorials" are used only to underlay carpets, paper pantry shelvest and for purposes less polite. I cheerfully risk my reputation as a prophet on the prediction that in less than two years his windy little "reform" paper will go to the bone-pile. Tommie, you are the pin-worm of American politics--a more aggravating little parasite than even Miltonius Park. Take a gentleman's advice and apply the soft pedal to your wheezy calliope--get off the political stage in time to avoid the coming cataclysm of sphacelated cabbage and has-been cats. The day of your destiny's over and the star of your fate is in the mullagatawny. You are simply a fragment of worthless political seaweed cast with flabby jelly fish and dead sting rays upon an inhospitable sh.o.r.e, there to rot and befoul the atmosphere. You have "a very ancient and fishlike smell, a smell not of the newest." You may howl a lung out, but will only evoke laughter or disgust. Occasionally some lonely Middle-of-the-Roader, dragging his No. 12's painfully through the dust may turn to look at you, perhaps toss you a dime; but you are politically dead. You may play the Baptist racket for all it is worth; but the brethren while long on zeal are shy on boodle. Even Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill, the champion leg elongator of the universe, finds it hard work to keep fat in the Baptist field--must add professional beggary to his schemes of predacity. You may tie your abortive little paper to the tail of the "Ape," but that animal is too weak in the hinder legs to pull it out of a financial hole. Go plug yourself. Shuck your long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward, trade your paper for a double-shovel plow, gird up your yarn galluses and make a reasonable effort to earn an honest living. Had you expended half the nervo-muscular energy in the cotton patch that you have wasted in working your jaw-bone you would have money to burn. Mene mene tekel upharsim--which means that you are entirely too light at both ends.

PILLS AND POLITICS.

My attention has been called by several disgusted doctors to one Jay Jay Lawrence who tacks A.M., M.D. to his patronymic, evidently as an anchor to hold it to the earth. Jay Jay and his vestibule-train t.i.tle are conducting a sickly concern at St.

Louis, sporting the euphonious cognomen of The Medical Brief, a monthly devoted to patent medicine and politics, blue ointment and economics, vermifuge and philosophy. Although Jay Jay finds it necessary to mix display ads with his reading matter to make the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine in the world"--thereby indicating that while his mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent. I have long noticed that journals having large bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns on the house-tops--they don't have to.

It is a species of journalistic quackery which every thorough-bred publisher regards with contemptuous pity. Brains win, in the journalistic world as elsewhere, and "blowing" a circulation were equivalent to employing a bra.s.s band to call attention to the abnormal size of the editorial encephalon. Still I wouldn't be without Jay Jay's truly remarkable magazine for ten times the money. I haven't a very high opinion of it as a medical authority, as it has "Cagliostro" written on it from cover to cover; but as a humorous journal it is 'way ahead of anything since the "Wax Wurx" of Artemus Ward. When I weary of the professional fun-makers, when I tire of laughing at Brer.

Rockefeller's heroic attempt to suppress the ICONOCLAST by excluding it from his little gate-system railroad; when the senatorial candidacy of Chollie-Boy Culberson becomes a weariness to the spirit, and the Texas Baptist convention, with its stage accessories of snuffles and snot develops into nux vomica, I can turn to Jay Jay's flamboyant cyclopedia of misinformation and observe with ever increasing interest the attempts of ye able editor to diagnose the disease of the body politic and steer it clear of the funeral director. Jay Jay is evidently not a progressive pract.i.tioner, for he is trying to save the country exactly as Gulliver's Lagado Galen tried to cure a dog of wind-colic. I note with unalloyed pleasure that the Brief has contributors to its medical department, at Purdon, Cove and Dilworth, Texas, Jones, Switch and Burnsville, Ala., Na.s.sawadox, Va., Salt Springs, Mo., Claypool, Ky. and other great centers of therapeutical information indicating that it spares no pains to give its patrons the worth of their money without adding any tea-store chromos or electric belly-bands by way of rebate. But it is not the startling discoveries of these doctors, not the soph.o.m.oric essays of new-fledged Hippocrati now struggling manfully with buck-ague, snake bite and new babies at Na.s.sawadox, Jones' Switch and elsewhere that const.i.tute the chief charm of Jay Jay's versatile journal. The feature of most interest to the lay reader is the political homilies of the editor himself. Not only are they deeply interesting to the hoi polloi, but invaluable from a therapeutical standpoint, being successfully employed in cases of itch, smallpox, etc. as a counter irritant.

I opine that one of these read in a loud voice to an Egyptian mummy would result in its immediate resurrection. If it had the faintest conception of humor it would wake up long enough to laugh, and if it hadn't it would come to life for the express purpose of hitting Jay Jay Lawrence, A.M., M.D., across the sterno cleidomastoidens with a well-seasoned obelisk. It is impossible to reproduce the flavor of this intellectual hippocampus' politico-economic emulsions, they being evidently compounded with thaumaturgis incantations while he is surrounded with jars of jalap, pile remedies, aphrodisiacs and patent liver pills. They should be labelled allopathic purgatives and kept tightly corked. In the copy before me Jay Jay a.s.sured his readers--who are supposed to be numerous as the sands of the sea, but are probably confined to himself and his country contributors--that there is a Russo-Franco-Germanic alliance against England and that it is the sacred duty of America to come to the rescue of her muchly-beloved "mother country," lest the 'orrid bawbawians make 'way with the old woman, overturn the civilization of all the centuries and rip human liberty up by the roots. What my contemporary seems to need is a mild cathartic that will move his brain--say about a tablespoonful of Theodorus'

Anticyrian h.e.l.lebore. The continental powers will not harm England so long as the old harlot behaves herself, but there's no denying that they are becoming dead-tired of her predacity and impudence. If the senescent old British lion attempts any funny business with the Russian bear it is liable to lose its umbilicus, and the surgical operation will be performed without the use of anaesthetics. If John Bull gets his proboscis ingloriously b.u.mped it will be none of Uncle Sam's business--unless the gentleman in the Star-spangled cut-a-way happens to be the party of the first part in the b.u.mping business. Just why we should expend blood and treasure fighting the battles of the old buccaneer only an Anglomaniacal doctor enervated by his own dope could possibly imagine. Russia has ever been our friend, England our foe. The sympathies of Russia are with Republican France, with Republican America--the hand of England has ever been against the world. She has ruthlessly despoiled wherever and whenever she possessed the power, while slavishly obsequious when confronted by equal force. "Human liberty," your gran-dam! How long has it been since England repealed the Test Act?--since she granted political equality to Jews?--to Catholics? In this respect she even legged behind the Ottoman Empire. She is the only "Christian" nation on earth to-day that sanctions human slavery. There are still fools extant who imagine that all the liberties enjoyed by Americans were inherited from "dear old England"; while the fact remains that in the matter of liberty England has been following 50 to 75 years behind the United States ever since the Flag o' Freedom first adorned the atmosphere. But it is when Jay Jay ribs himself up with a powerful nervine and tackles government by injunction that he really rises into the realm of pure humor--becomes serious, so to speak. He inadvertently leaks the information that labor organizations "are animated by anarchistic impulses, their chief desire is to force property owners to divide with them or lose their property"; and naively adds: "the injunction is really a guarantee of individual liberty." Sure! It guarantees to employers the right to combine to lower wages below the starvation point, while preventing those who are thus despoiled seeking the cooperation of their fellows in an attempt to right the wrong by the simple expedient of taking leave of their tools.

It guarantees to workmen the liberty to be shot down like dogs for peaceably a.s.sembling and walking unarmed on the public highway--for asking other men to cease work until there is a better adjustment of wages. Of course a man who isn't willing to work in a coal mine for 90 cents a day, who lays down his pick and asks better pay, is an anarchist who is trying to drive other people to divide with him their property. Jay Jay is so much wiser than all the labor organizations in the land, than the framers of our fundamental law, than a majority of the American judiciary, a--veritable Daniel come to judgment. Give him a crown as large as that of King Midas, which was designed to hide the ears of an a.s.s. It is, however, when he a.s.sails W. J. Bryan that he becomes intensely interesting. According to this learned Theban, Bryan is a Populist and Populists are people who do not pay their doctor bills. They call the M.D. out of his comfortable bed at 2 g.m., and after he has frozen his nose and toes to puke or purge 'em they refuse to even haul him a cord o' slippery-elm firewood or a load o' pumpkins in payment, but, accuse him of incompetence! 'Ow 'orrible! Jay Jay must have obtained his information from those forks of the creek medicos who const.i.tute the chief contributors to his columns--and who would probably encounter fewer charges of incompetence if they expended less time in scribbling "rot" and more in careful reading. Still I can scarce refrain from weeping over such a tale o' woe. In the terse vernacular of the "mother country," hit touches me 'eart--so much so that I hereby authorize anybody to whom W. J.

Bryan owes a doctor bill to draw on me for the amount. If he doesn't owe anybody a doctor bill it follows, according to Jay Jay's diagnosis, that he is not a Populist--may be a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. Cla.s.sing Bryan and his followers as Populists, then denouncing all Populists as chronic dead-beats, must be very soothing to a majority of the medical men of the West and South, but it is about what might be expected of a man so infamously ignorant that he calls England our mother country, so idiotic that he would have us take up arms for the international pirate in the name of human liberty. The best thing Jay Jay Lawrence, A.M., M.D., can do is to apply a ten-horse power poultice to his head and see if he cannot draw a few brains into that resounding hollow. In the meantime he should eschew politics and confine himself to the publication of essays by village doctors and the exploitation of patent medicines. When he next feels an impulse creeping on to invade the realm of economics he should chloroform it, or hit it with a club.

BEHIND THE SCENES IN ST. LOUIS.

BY ISEULT KUYK.

Col. Robert Ingersoll once said of the city of St. Louis that, as to Missouri, it was "a diamond pin in a dirty s.h.i.+rt." I will not maintain the immaculateness of the s.h.i.+rt; but the diamond has flaws, and is, in some respects, as a gem not far removed from the "phony."

They call St. Louis "the solid city." It is solid. Also stolid.

It's a little Chinese. It regards the stranger as the enemy. In St. Louis they don't gather in the stranger and skin him, as they do in Chicago; but if he happens to have four dollars to invest he is regarded as having designs upon the coagulated capital of a select a.s.sortment of "stiffs," known as leading citizens. If he have brains, they d.i.c.ker with him and let him in on their deals for a share in his. St. Louis is a close corporation. Less than twenty men run it. Jim Campbell, Dave Francis, Geo. A. Madill, Sam Kennard, Ed. Butler, Charlie Maffit, John Sculin, Edwards Wittaker, Thomas H. West, Julius S. Walsh, George E. Leighton and a few more own the town. They dare do anything. They control the banks, the trust companies, the street railroads, the gas works, the telephone franchises and the newspapers. Almost all the ability in the town is engaged in their service. They gather it in as it develops, and the mult.i.tude is made va.s.sal to them. They own everything in St. Louis worth owning. They are the local n.o.bility. They can crush anyone who ventures to oppose their desires. When they war among themselves they manage that no interloper shall come in for a share of the spoils. They unite against the newcomer and crucify him. They control munic.i.p.al legislation. They buy aldermen like cattle. The city is at their mercy. They are all religious and moral men; their crookedness is purely commercial and political. Their different monopolies oppress the town, and the press is their tool. Most newspaper warfares upon them are mere "blinds" to draw off public attention to one quarter, while they gobble up something valuable in another.

St. Louis has had a reputation for a long time, for public spirit. It's there all right, but it is public spirit for private gain. Take the exposition. A job. Public money built the structure. The city gave the ground, right in the heart of the business-district-to-be. All the subscribers are frozen out but a few shrewd ones own the whole business. They have a piece of property worth at least eight million dollars. It is untaxed.

They rake in the coin accruing from the exposition. They work the public up into supporting the venture, and three or four men in large retail stores get all the benefit. They advertise their private business by their public spirit, in capturing an enterprise that in its inception was somewhat communal in character.

St. Louis boasts of her fine Planters Hotel. Well, eight or ten men have confidenced the public out of that property, and its stupendous increment. Once there was subscribed $600,000 for what are known as the Fall Festivities. There were illuminations for a few years, and the Veiled Prophet pageant still survives; but there has been no accounting for the $600,000 that anyone has been able to understand. It is a legend in St. Louis that a large wad of the $600,000 was invested in the Planters Hotel, in the names of the individuals who made up the Fall Festivities a.s.sociation. They are drawing from the splendid inst.i.tution the earning upon money raised by miscellaneous public subscription.

No paper dare take up these matters and discuss them. If one were to do so, it would not have five advertis.e.m.e.nts of the leading retail dealers in anything in the whole city. Col. Charles H.

Jones, when editor of the Post-Dispatch, once criticized Mr. Sam Kennard for something, and forthwith Barr, Nugent, Crawford, Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney, and the other big dealers withdrew their patronage in order to prevent his making the sum of money each year prescribed in his contract with Joseph Pulitzer as the sine qua non to his retention of his place. They drove him out of journalism finally. You've got to stand in with all this gang, or go to the wall. The only person who gets anything from them is the person who will do their work.

You go to the city hall in St. Louis, the old one, which looks like a rickety tobacco warehouse, or the new one, which is a realization in material of a bad dream consequent upon too much rarebit, and you might as well be in Berlin. You are lost without an interpreter. You must talk German or a Joe Emmet dialect, to make yourself understood. Money only doesn't have to talk German at the city hall. That is transferred without being translated.

The mayor of the town talks, in his public addresses, a lingo that would make the fortune of a vaudeville comedian of the Dutch Daly stripe; and his son, who is his secretary, has the physiognomical symptoms of intellectuality that you might expect in a dude who eats with his knife, or any Brummel of "the bad lands." The lower branch of the munic.i.p.al legislature is a bedlam. Its sessions are eruptions of obscenity. Talk is indulged in that would cause the ejectment of the talker from a bawdy- house parlor. The august body never rouses into activity save over some measure with "stuff" in it. The combine will take as low as twenty-five dollars to beat or pa.s.s a bill. They introduce bills to induce the franchise holding syndicates to put up money to kill them, and business is at its best when two or three street railroad bosses can be led into bidding against each other for the pa.s.sage or defeat of some measure. The St. Louis house of delegates is as fine a gang of rapacious ruffians as ever invited mob law in an American city.

Politics in St. Louis is practiced by the pimps and pothouse habitues, just as in other cities. Two of the best known office holders in the city have been accused publicly of stealing $1,200 that was given them to support a measure for capitol removal at the last general election. They got the money to divide among the members of the city committee, and no member of that body ever saw a copper of it. The check was cashed, however. The governor appointed to their present offices the men who got the money.

It costs more to conduct the city government of St. Louis than it costs proportionately to govern New York. The town is overrun with an army of men drawing salaries, and few sober breaths, but doing nothing else. The present head of government when he left the office of city collector, lost or destroyed his books, that they might tell no tale of the monstrous malfeasance of his administration. Corporations were held up for sums that never appeared on the books. Instead of paying licenses and taxes, merchants, manufacturers, saloon keepers, brewers and others paid tribute to the then subordinates of the present mayor. Corruption is rampant all through the city government. Every one knows it; but no one feels like expressing it for the reason that such exposures are "chestnuts" to the St. Louisan. There have been reform waves in every large city in the Union, now and then. In St. Louis, never. The syndicate of snappers that holds the franchises won't have it. Reform doesn't go. They want the old gang they have been dealing with, in power. No matter which gang dominates, Democrat or Republican, the syndicate owns them. It doesn't like the prospect of dealing with strangers. It likes to buy over and over again the same old crowd to enact or defeat certain bills. When the gang in power is Democratic, Ed Butler does the buying. When the gang is Republican, Chauncey I. Filley takes the money and dictates what his creatures shall do. Butler disgorges something; Filley nothing. Butler deals with Filley when Filley has fooled the people into electing his men, and vice versa. It is Croker and Platt over again on a smaller scale.

These two men have all the corporations by their throats. They are both men of genius in their line, commanding an insane devotion among the slums and a certain amount of admiration and awe, from among the wealthy, if not the respectable, of that city.

The St. Louis police force is demoralized by politics. Robberies and burglaries multiply. Purse-s.n.a.t.c.hing from women by white and black ruffians is sunk to a mere commonplace in the daily newspaper reports. Thieves flourish, and are protected by petty politicians. Real estate dealers work the police department about once a year to chase the prost.i.tutes out of one section of town into another. It's all a job. The prost.i.tutes pay big rents, $60 per month for a house that would rent to decent people for $25.

One crowd of agents gets the upper hand and starts an agitation to get the "girls" out of the district they occupy into another, in which the agents interested have a great many empty houses.

After a time another real estate combination is made, and the poor bawds have to move again. Result of this? Many of the women open a.s.signation houses in the West End, or go "living decent"

under some man's care in that quarter, make the acquaintance of good women, and innocent girls, and collect a "maiden tribute"

from among the latter for numerous old rakes who prefer the s.e.xually initiative to the referendum in the case of women in the territory known as "tamale town." Kept women, the mistresses of men driven from downtown, have been known to ingratiate themselves, in the West End, with women moving in the very best society. And all this to enable a few real estate men to rent at exorbitant figures a few ramshackle houses to the women who must stay "on the town."

St. Louis society is not so bad and vulgar as society in some other cities. The city is so much like a village that no opportunity is afforded for intrigue or depravity among the swell set. Every one in St. Louis knows the business of every one else.

A woman cannot "go wrong" without being discovered. Most of the details that you hear about the corruption of St. Louis society are imagination wholly. There is a great deal of excessive drinking at functions among women, but it is said that this is notable rather because of the amount the girls can stand without showing it than because of its prompting them to ribald Terpsich.o.r.ean evolutions. The world outside the swell set hears occasionally of some girl who patronizes the punch bowl until she falls into hysterics, but as a rule the up-to-date St. Louis girl can "carry a load" with much dignity and grace.

St. Louis society is cheap and garish in spots. Some of the newly rich are unbearably sn.o.bbish. The Granite Mountain set carries its nose in the air most heinously and its chief female representative is celebrated for her absurd malapropisms. There is but one "fast" set in the town and that "fast" set is looked down upon quite generally and quite sincerely. It is composed of gay young married women who affect the Bohemian by drinking c.o.c.ktails in public and cutting up at the Jockey Club. One of the members of this last set is the daughter-in-law of a Missouri senator and a very pretty woman. Another of this set is the woman who was voted the best dressed woman at the horse show in a newspaper scheme. Her father is a millionaire doctor and her husband is a thoroughbred. It cannot be said even of this set, however, that it is fast in the immoral sense in which that word usually is employed. It is gay and the women are only unfortunate in having nothing to do and in dispelling weariness by silly and flashy pranks in a social way.

There are some awfully funny society people in St. Louis. For instance, I am told that one of the women who has recently blossomed into the society columns is the wife of a millionaire lumber man who lives in a swell place and whose stinginess is peculiar in that it applies to everything but the feeing of the reporters who write up his wife and daughter. There is another woman whose burst into society has occasioned a great deal of comment of late. She is the wife of a cattleman and certainly not well trained in the graces, but she has her name in the papers continually by virtue of presents of such things as bolts of silk to society editresses. The wife of one of the police commissioners, who used to be the widow of a former mayor, is a fearful and wonderful matron in her methods of attaining distinction. She dresses gorgeously at all public occasions and has more color than a spectacular show at the theater. St. Louis society is dull and unintellectual. As a rule, however, it does not mask any corruption. There are not enough men in society to give opportunity for corruption. Nowhere in the country are there so many pretty girls without admirers. They have to go to the theaters with their own fathers and brothers. The few men in society are a lot of "cheap skates" who can not repay their social obligations in the fas.h.i.+on supposed to prevail among them.

The St. Louis society belle has no good time of it. She doesn't get rushed to any great extent at any time, and this is the more remarkable because the wealthy girls are as much neglected as the poor but pretty ones. St. Louis is the finest field in the world for a man with nothing who wants to marry money. St. Louis society doesn't patronize the theaters extensively. It is not appreciative of music. It doesn't care for art. It is hopelessly unaesthetical as a whole. The picture dealers, music dealers and book sellers declare that their patrons come mostly from the people who are not in the swell set. A peculiarity of St. Louis society is that its members are as a rule procreative. There is no suppression of increase and multiplication such as prevail in the swell mob in other cities. A woman in St. Louis is not disgraced by having three or four babies. As a rule also St.

Louis society women are not disposed to set up a rigid standard of exclusiveness. They have taken up recently the wife of a young man who was a singer with the Bostonians and it is the fad at present to rave over her. The whole world knows, of course, that a St. Louis girl insulted the Prince of Wales by refusing to meet him, when he never had asked to have her presented. That, however, was the most glaring effort ever made by a St. Louis girl to get a lot of newspaper notoriety and at a cheap rate. To the credit of the local high society it must be said that it does not cultivate the newspaper habit of exploitation. It tolerates the journalistic abuses of papers and write-ups. To be perfectly just to society in St. Louis, about all that can be said of it is that it is dull, princ.i.p.ally, because it is decent. A man who is an authority upon such matters tells me that there is not in real society in St. Louis one woman of whom there has ever been any scandal. The very highest society in St. Louis--the old families are all Catholics, and very strict Catholics at that, and so there is not the taint of animalism about it that you find else where in the realm of the high flyers.

St. Louis cannot be said to be a moral city. It is as immoral as any in the country. I am told that the professional Social Evil in St. Louis is an unprofitable occupation "because of amateur compet.i.tion." I am quoting a gentleman who is interested in sociological questions very largely. From what he said I deduce the conclusion that the daughters of the poor are preyed upon by the men so successfully as to account for the prevalence of virtue in the wealthier circles. Fearful stories are current of the immorality of the working girls, but these, I suppose, may be discounted to a certain extent. I hesitate to tell you some things I have heard about the tribute exacted of the girls in some of the big dry goods emporiums. Suffice it to say that these stories are told of three of the great merchant princes. One of them is said to make it a rule that no girl shall be employed who fails to understand that she is liable to his advances. Another merchant prince, portly and domineering, who gained unenviable notoriety because of his attempt at political coercion of his employes, had a bad reputation in this same line. Still another merchant prince who runs a strictly cash store, had one of his girls arrested for stealing goods and refused to prosecute her when she threatened to tell all she knew about how girls held their places in his establishment. As I say, these stories should be discounted, in all probability, but where there is smoke there is fire and most of the stories come from the girls in the big stores.

The city of St. Louis is hopelessly monotonous. It is a big place. A great business is carried on there, but it seems to be done by people somnambulistically. The soporific atmosphere that the readers feel when perusing the "Globe-Democrat" or "Republic"

is characteristic of the town. The great majority of the people seem unable to arouse themselves to any action, even of viciousness. The crowd just lives as if it were soaked and sodden in the city's vast beer output. It is content to let a few men and a few big concerns monopolize all the business. It scarcely has energy enough to try to amuse itself. It goes to bed at half past nine, and never thoroughly wakes up. The town is sleepy, notwithstanding its size and its boasted progress. It grows because it can't help itself. The people appear to be good because they've not energy enough to be otherwise. St. Louis, Mo., November 10.

THE STAGE AND STAGE DEGENERATES.

BY ROBERT LEE WYCHE.

Here and there in the big and little towns of America cranks are busily working for the elevation of the stage. Every 2 x 4 newspaper man who thinks he has a mission, every preacher who desires to make a sensation in the pulpit, every maiden novelist whose feminine mind battens in pruriency, every old maid who has missed her opportunity to be manhandled and wishes to reform a race she has done nothing to increase, every two-for-a-quarter evangelist between Bangor and Los Angeles is talking a lung out for the public on the subject of making the stage higher and better. When Col. Hercules, not of Herculaneum, viewed the Augean stables he may have thought that he had a considerable job on hand, but he tackled it with a man's strength and brain. By the help of his good right arm and a river or two he got rid of some thousands of tons of filth which went to enrich the levels lower down. Col. Hercules died in time to save his reputation. If required to cleanse the modern stage, he would pull his beaver over his brows and sneak out of town. Col. Hercules was a man who knew when he was over-weighted. He entered the ring only with such opponents as he stood a chance to best.