Brann the Iconoclast Volume 10 Part 10

Once upon a time I boarded in a little German hotel in this city.

Near it was the great Madison Square Garden. In consequence, the little hotel, which was very German--that is to say, clean and cheap,--was patronized by many actors and actresses. They had little rooms upstairs, got their morning coffee in the little restaurant and after the evening's performance sat in the little apartment off the bar, where the floor was sanded and drank beer until the small hours. These men were representatives of their profession so far as America is concerned. There were no stars among them and none of the lowest stratum. They were of the middle cla.s.s of the people of the footlights. Nearly all of them were married and a few of them had children. They had the small ambitions and the small amus.e.m.e.nts of their cla.s.s.

At that time I worked upon one of New York's yellow journals. I reached the hotel each morning between 12 and 1 o'clock, and always found the theatrical symposium in full blast. I was with these people for three months for an hour or two each night and think that I formed a fair idea of what the American stage is like. In those months I heard just two general subjects discussed--grease-paint and copulation. That was all of it. No science, no literature, no art in its higher sense, no news of the day, no politics, no sports, no history, no travel, not anything that goes to make up the intellectual life of the ordinary man. From first to last it was the business of acting, the demerits of some actor not present, the merits of those present, the pursuit of woman and the unholy pleasures of indiscriminate s.e.xual l.u.s.t. The dominating pa.s.sion of these people was a petty jealousy. I never heard from them a good word for a successful brother artist. I never heard them breathe one generous hope that other men or women would grow happy and prosperous. I never heard them speak a kindly sentence for one of their ranks who had fallen upon evil days. They were selfish, they were brutally abusive, they were ridiculously conceited, they were all geniuses held down by a conspiracy of managers, they were card and dice sharpers, they were willing at any time to act the part of procurer or procuress for a consideration of drinks and suppers. I was rejoiced at the opportunity to study a type that was new to me, and when I got enough of it I moved out.

I have met these people and their kind many times since then. I have seen them in Philadelphia, Boston, Was.h.i.+ngton, Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco. They are everywhere the same. They do not differ in any degree. On the road they are slightly more restrained, for fear of corporal punishment or jail, but the impulse of gluttony and lechery is always there. Any keeper of a second or third-cla.s.s hotel in a town that is on one of the big circuits is apt to grow eloquent upon the subject of theatrical folk if given the chance. They are noted for a brazen effrontery in demanding everything that is in sight and the laxity with which they regard a debt incurred. I have no doubt that the first man to let his valise down from the second-story window of a hotel, slide down the rope himself and thus square his bill was the leading comedian of that sterling bit of humor, "Hot Times in the Tenderloin." Meantime his soubrette, who was another man's wife, was waiting for him outside, and they went away together.

I do not know that the baleful fire of unchaste amour runs more fiercely in the veins of stage people. I only know that they give it more of a free field. You sometimes hear some bar-room comedian and booze recitationist, who draws a hamfatter's salary in a continuous vaudeville, declare to half drunken listeners that there are good women on the stage. So there are--some. But they are so rare that when they are found they s.h.i.+ne like the jewel in the Ethiop's ear. It would be within the bounds of truth to say that for every virtuous woman behind the foot-lights there are ten prost.i.tutes. Even those who try to keep their feet from the mire and succeed are given no credit for chast.i.ty by their fellow professionals. One night, in my never to be forgotten German hotel, I was a.s.sured in a thing in loud-patterned trousers and a snow-white overcoat with deep black collar and cuffs, that he knew Emma Abbott, then dead, was unfaithful to her husband, Eugene Wetherell, also dead. This was spoken of "honest little Emma." A purer woman never lived. I knew that he was lying and told him so, but he was ready with a tale of time, place and circ.u.mstance and brazened it out. In like manner I have been told tales of Mary Anderson and Modjeska and Viola Allen--all of them lies. They were the tributes which my gentle friends, male and female, paid to success in their beautiful but risky profession.

It is not to be wondered that women who go on the stage lose their virtue. The wonder is that some of them preserve it, in spite of the life they lead and the company they are forced to keep. The very talents they possess render them susceptible to adulation and applause. They keep late hours. They are thrown constantly with conscienceless males. They breathe an atmosphere of excitement. If they display unusual capabilities, they are intoxicated nightly with the deep, rich, moving roar of high acclaim. Their nerves need bracing and they take to late suppers and champagne with absinthe in the mornings. From the woman who drinks to the woman who falls is not a far cry. I once asked Lizzie Annandale, the contralto, to tell me why so many stage girls surrendered their most precious possession within a year after their first night behind the scenes. She was a frank old party, willing to talk to a friend:

"Aw," she said, "that's easy. Women are only human. The girls are cut off from a.s.sociation with decent people. They have to live with stage folks. Society is barred to them. Stage men marry only when they can't help it. The girl must have somebody to look after her, some man to see that her trunks are checked, that she gets a decent seat in a crowded train, that she doesn't get the worst of it all around. A man expects pay of some kind and she hasn't anything to give except herself. That is what he wants.

Take our own company, for instance. We are carrying twenty chorus girls. We are bound for the southern circuit. After we play New Orleans we play Texas. After we leave Texas we make a jump straight across the continent to 'Frisco. The girls don't get wages enough to enable them to take berths in the sleepers. They will be forced to herd day and night in the other coaches with the men. You will see the chorus people, male and female, asleep two and two on the seats. The exhausted woman's head rests on the shoulder of her companion, the man's arm around her to hold her steady. What do you suppose happens when a thing like that is kept up for awhile? Aw! W'at t'ell."

Despite the constant efforts of the cla.s.ses mentioned in the opening paragraph of this story, the American stage is not being elevated to any extent. It is steadily sinking lower. Year after year its plays grow worse, its players more reckless and debased.

This, it has been said, is the fault of the public and, to a great extent, this is so. The managers are in the business for money. They give the people that which the people will pay to see. n.o.body cares anything for tragedy any longer. Stage cla.s.sics have become stage stalenesses. Shakespeare is out of date. "The Gaiety Girls," "In Gay New York," "The Merry World," Hoyt's buffooneries, "Problem Plays," social eraticisms have become the rage. Translations from the French, with all of the French immorality reduced to English grossness, pack the theaters. In New York a manager named Doris put on a pantomime which represented the scene in a bridal chamber. The police closed it up after half the bald-headed men and nearly all the boys in town had seen it. That pantomime, I understand, is now drawing crowded houses in Chicago, having been introduced to the citizens of the western metropolis by Sam Jack of "Adamless Eden" game.

Continuous performances are proving mines of gold for their conductors and in the continuous performance the vulgar song and ribald jest meet with readiest applause. Your wife or your daughter, who goes down town for her morning shopping, gets lunch with a gla.s.s of absinthe, drops into the continuous show for an hour and comes home with memories in her little head of a song which should be interdicted by law, or of a dialogue that ought to land the speakers in jail, or of Hope Booth, posing in imitation nudity as Venus Aphrodite, or some beefy actor, also an imitation nude, as Ajax defying the lightning, or Antinous, facing the audience full front without a st.i.tch of clothing on him. This is pleasant for the wife and daughter, but how about you? You do not look anything like Ajax and your daughter's brothers bear no resemblance to Antinous.

Thousands of men and women are actors and actresses, but they do not differ in type. They are to be recognized anywhere in any crowd. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are invested in the business, and it is the business of the owners to make them pay.

The public wants filth and it gets it. The plays given to patrons have only the purpose to make money. They are not written to educate, to uplift, to enn.o.ble. The men who make them look only to the collection of their royalties. The best play of the year is Gillette's "Secret Service." It is trifling. It does not teach anything. It inculcates no moral. It does not deviate in any way from the well known "war play." In these days there is always some snipe of a federal lieutenant, who gets shot in the heel, or under his coat tail, or somewhere behind, and is quartered on the family of a southern planter, and the daughter falls in love with him, and her brother is in the Confederate army, and there is a whole lot of trouble and everything comes out all right in the end. Gillette's hero is a Federal spy instead of a lieutenant, but that is about the only difference. I imagine that he must have been many times to see Bronson Howard's "Shenandoah," whose favorite novelist in turn, I think, must have been E. P. Roe, of "Barriers Burned Away." The next success, it is supposed, will be something in the line of Mr. Howard's "Aristocracy." This play, its author a.s.sures us, was written to demonstrate the danger that lies in an American girl marrying an European n.o.bleman. Instead, it administers a solar plexus blow to American womanhood. The heroine marries a German prince, merely because he is a Prince, discarding her honest and true lover in a scoundrelly fas.h.i.+on, while her beautiful stepmother comes within an ace of surrendering her person to her son- in-law, and is prevented only by the inopportune arrival of her idiotic husband. It is all very "elevating," and a good thing to take your wife and daughter to see.

We arrive at this formula: The American stage is debasing; American stage people are dead beats and women of scarlet. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule. The business is Jew-ridden. They do not act, but they handle the dollars.

Everybody knows that your Jew drummer and your Jew theatrical manager are incapable of anything s.e.xually wrong. The big syndicate which has its home in this city and is endeavoring to control the theatrical business of more than half the country is composed of Jews. One of them is an undersized Silenus named Erlanger, who used to be a pensioner upon the personal and mental abilities of the ill-fated Louise Balfe and repaid her for her bread and favors by brutally a.s.saulting her in Arkansas.

Yes, Brother Iconoclast, the 2 x 4 newspaper men and the sensational preachers and the prurient prudes who write novels and the unfructified old maids and the narrow-beamed self-elected evangelists are talking, but they do not elevate the American stage to any great extent. It bids fair to remain the same excellent school of preparation for the penitentiary and the bagnio. New York, November 20, 1897.

"THE CHRISTIAN."

BY JULIA TRUITT BISHOP.

If one may judge by the effect it has produced in arousing a storm of criticism, the book of the year is undoubtedly "The Christian," by Hall Caine. Not only the book of the year, perhaps, but of more years than one cares to count, for of books worth reading or remembering, there has been the fewest number within these latter days. And it must be conceded, in the beginning, that Hall Caine has written a book--a live book--and that no one will dissect it without finding blood on his rapier's point.

As for the critics themselves, they have had much to say, after their fas.h.i.+ons, and have wasted vast quant.i.ties of good ink in giving the author of "The Christian" meanings which he never meant. One of them has found that John Storm was intended to represent Christ himself, come back to earth in this most unbelieving Nineteenth century; a construction which seems to have been as far as possible from anything that was in the novelist's thought. Another finds the plot weak and the motif--it is the custom to use French in this connection--strained; and can endure nothing in the book but Glory, who is "altogether delightful." Still another is furious because of the "nurses'

ball," and thinks it is reflection upon the whole sisterhood of trained nurses; and there are others who cannot recover from that still further insult to the sisterhood conveyed in the fact that Polly was a nurse.

I have read the criticisms--all I could find--with weariness of spirit, and have felt that the real meaning of the author lay deeper than any of these shallow comments could reach. What difference does it make whether Polly was or was not a trained nurse? The real thing at issue was this--that she was a woman, ruined and played with and tossed aside. For this book is, above all, an earnest book, with bitter protest and lofty purpose running through it, and in such a light as this the paltry errors sink into nothingness. Hall Caine has had something to say to the world, and has said it. The world has waited long enough for a writer with a message. When it comes, let the s.p.a.ce-writers and all the horde of small spirits retire for a little while, or go on sounding the praises of this or that "society novel" by Mrs.

Van Kortland Van Kordtland, or other of that ilk.

And while there may be lay-figures in the book, as has been charged, the people around whom the interest centers are so terribly real that they cannot stay in the book. They come out of it, and become part of our lives. Glory is a vivid creature, with her moods and fancies, her dual nature, with the one side of her in love with John Storm and his work, and the other side--and so much the stronger side, alas! in love with the world, and filled with merry, buoyant life. One follows her through every step of her course, and feels the moral deterioration coming upon her so gradually and yet so surely. Splendid, wholesome, Glory, pure-eyed and frank-hearted, going through the wild rout of music-halls and theatrical successes, suggestive songs, Derby days and midnight suppers; one follows her with dread as though she were the child of a loved friend, and finds the smell of fire gathering upon her garments. Nothing could so show Hall Caine's art as this. If he had written nothing else worth reading, Glory should make him immortal, for this sweet, wild nature is more a living being to us than many whom we meet every day.

But the real character of the book is John Storm, one of the finest portrayals that the English language has yet given to fiction; a Christian, but not Christ. Nothing could be more human than this man, full of faults, and yet so earnest, so brave, so intense. His love for Glory is the dominant feeling that leads him into many strange paths, for he loves as intensely as he works; but above even this he is a Christian, and trying to do the work of Christ. How natural it is that a man like this, filled with enthusiasm and eager to begin work among the poor and the suffering, should find the shallow hypocrisies and shams of a fas.h.i.+onable church abhorrent to his soul. And the asceticism of the Brotherhood was as far from the possibilities of this man as long-faced and comfortable hypocrisy would have been. It was the fall of poor, ignorant Polly that gave him his life-work; and the discharge of the girl from her position in the hospital, while the man who had accomplished her ruin remained a member of the Board which presided over the destinies of that same hospital.

And Hall Caine could have given no more conclusive proof of his courage and his earnestness of purpose than in selecting as the motif of this book that outrage upon justice, that travesty on morality; the condemnation of woman for a crime that is readily ignored or as readily forgiven in man. It is really such an outworn theme that the very mention of it is greeted with smiles or supercilious shrugs, and even lovers of their kind have grown apologetic about it. If any man like John Storm, fired with the best and truest principles of Christianity, steady of eye and bold of heart and fearless of speech, dared to utter such principles as his in any social circle of any one of our cities, what a consternation he would create; and here as in London he would be called a madman and avoided as an outcast. Yet what was his creed? "Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone at her." We have heard it before, have we not?--but in leaving it out of our Revised Version we have taken care to leave it out of our practice as well, and are very busy casting stones, though in truth not one of us is without sin.

The author of "The Christian" has loosed many a shaft that will surely pierce between the joints of the armor; and not the least of these is the story of a young girl's marriage to the abandoned young lord, the man who had dragged Polly to ruin which ended in suicide. We see such things every day, and it is not polite to call them by their names. For that is the bitterness of it; that ruin and disgrace and the swift downward road to h.e.l.l are set by society before the feet of the woman who errs, while for the man who was at least her equal partner in crime, there are cordial greetings, and a thousand doors, opened by women, alas!--and he may have some pure girl for a wife, if he likes, and go serenely every evening to a happy home, untroubled by remorse. Is it any wonder, with the scales so unevenly balanced as this, with a premium put on corruption among men, that new and ever new recruits from womanhood are marching down into the infected quarter of our cities, and that the wretched army grows and will grow?

True, there are good women, here and there, making earnest effort to "rescue" some of this miserable horde; and here and there one is gathered into some house of refuge, and is helped to give up her evil life. But even there, are the hopes held out before them such brilliant hopes? One goes back to her old home and her mother, and is thenceforward a marked creature among all the people who have known her, doomed to cold avoidance or impudent familiarity. One succeeds in getting work, of some menial kind, and must live a life of utter subjection of self and utter abnegation of pleasure, or will be suspected that she has a secret longing for the old life. Many hide themselves in convent walls, knowing what kind of welcome the world would have for them if they went forth. If they could look over those walls, and could be gifted with some far-seeing vision, they could see the men who helped them to become criminals, abroad and at ease, riding or driving in the free sunlight, bending over jeweled fingers or whispering pretty nothings into dainty ears, as much approved by all the world as though their records were as pure as snow. Servitude or convent walls for one, even after she has repented; the world and its gaieties for the other, to whom remorse is unknown. No doubt the woman should be punished, and her punishment should be as great as her sin has been; but one would like to see the man who was guilty, equally with her, at least avoided a little; at least made to know that there were circles of society sufficiently refined to shut him out.

"The first stone." Many of these women have fallen through their adoring love for men, for whom they would willingly have given life itself, and would have counted it well lost. Wretched, sinful women, no doubt, but is that any less a prost.i.tution which leads a woman to marry a man she does not love, whose very presence is repulsive to her? Yet that is done every day, to the music of the wedding march, with all the world there to see. If there be any justice in heaven, the unfortunate who falls through love is less a criminal than is the silk-robed bride who became a prost.i.tute under the holy cloak of marriage.

The first stone! The workers of all our large cities have among them hundreds of girls who are doing their faithful best to earn an honest living; who work long hours and endure fatigue, and wear poor clothes, and surrender all girlish pleasures for the simple right to exist. Once in a while comes a lull in business, and scores of these girls are turned off. The employer makes no effort to learn how they will live, meanwhile. "Am I my brother's keeper?"--the old cry, many times repeated in these latter days.

How subtle, how alluring are the temptations that come in the weeks and months of idleness; how inexorable seems the choice held out to these helpless working girls--starvation or infamy.

It takes so long to starve, and life, after all, is sweet; so they make their choice, s.h.i.+rking from death while age is still so far away, and hope is bounding in the pulses; and having so chosen are shut out from hope forever more. Yet there are items in the society columns of the morning papers only too often, which, if the truth could stand out through the flattering lines, would tell how this or that fas.h.i.+onable girl has sold herself for money, her mother standing by well-pleased, and all her five hundred friends sending presents to commemorate the occasion.

There was no bitter hunger urging her to the sacrifice--there was not the slightest excuse or necessity for it in any way. Which was the greater prost.i.tution?

And yet, women who have sinned these gilded sins of society, or who have at least condoned the offense in their friends and intimates, unite in shutting the fallen unfortunate away from light and hope; and women of blameless life and pure name stretch welcoming hands to men who have helped to recruit the army of the fallen and make them outcasts and pariahs in the earth.

An outworn theme, doubtless; but there is enough in it still to thrill the heart and bring tears to the eyes. It is well for the world that a Christian, even in a book, has stood up among men and told them of their crimes, and has told it face to face, in the old Apostolic way; for we have come upon a Christianity, in these latter days, which is silent when the Magdalene is brought out for stoning if it casts no stones itself. New Orleans, La., November 14.

SALMAGUNDI.

Bishop Wilyum Doane hath an abiding place at Albany, N. Y., a village on the Hudson where the peons of the political bosses most do congregate to leg for bribes. In his recent annual address to the clergy the Bish. lamented bitterly that the American "jingo" was provoking dear patient Christian England to put on her war-paint. "The English press," quoth he, "has been most patient." Yea, it hath--in the optic of ye animal yclept the hog. For two years past nearly every English paper, large and small, has systematically insulted Uncle Sam--has belched upon him all the feculent bile it could rake from its putrid bowels, all the moldy mucus it could snort from its beefy brain. Even the press of Canada--that Christ-forsaken land of bow-legged half-breeds which continues to lick the No. 7 goloshes of old Gilly Brown's leavings because it lacks sufficient sand to set up for itself--barks across the border like a mangy fleabitten fice yawping at a St. Bernard. But Doane would have America swallow it all--just as the Thibetans swallow pastiles made of the excrement of their Dalai Lama. The Bish. evidently has John Bull's trademark branded on the rear elevation of his architecture. So Hingland is growing blawsted tired of our Hawmewikan himpudence.

Aw! Vewy likely, don-cherknow. But we shoved it down the old harlot's throat twice with the business end of a bayonet, and we'll fill her pod again with the same provender whenever she pa.s.ses her plate. Doane ought to amputate his ears and send them to the British monarch to be used as door-mats.

My old friend, Major-General Whistletrigger Vanderhurst, of the Amazonian Guard, minister plenipotentiary of the Gal-Dal News, has just run a superb "scoop" on all his contemporaries. He rustled out one morning all by his lone self and discovered that prosperity had arrived--that every Texan afflicted with chronic hustle hath greenbacks to burn, and blue yarn socks galore stuffed to the bursting point with "yellow boys," while ye farmer simply slings the silver dollar of our sires at marauding blackbirds. Whistletrigger turns up his patrician nose at all "pessimists" and broadly intimates that the man who hasn't a new silk cady, seventeen pair o' tailor-made "pants," a silken nights.h.i.+rt and sufficient provender in his pantry to run a Methodist camp-meeting for a month, would starve to death in a Paradise whose springs run Pomery Sec, and whose trees grew pumpkin pies, hot weinerwurst and pate de foie gras. Texas, according to this Columbus of prosperity, is a veritable Klond.y.k.e bowered with roses instead of imbedded in s...o...b..nks--a place where every financial prospect pleases and only the popocrat is vile. But I note with pained surprise that the farmers are still selling middling cotton below six cents, buying bacon and wearing pea-green patches on the bust of their blue jeans two-dollar hand-me-downs; that I can hire all the common labor I want at 75 cents a day despite the advance in flour; that scores of mechanics are idle; that there is no longer a wage rate in any trade; that the streets are full of able-bodied beggers, while merchants offer me 2 per cent a month for the use of a little money. I note that in every Texas city realty is being cast upon the bargain counter, while great newspapers are cutting down the pay of their employees. There's prosperity and prosperity.

Perhaps Whistletrigger has been talking to the agent of some mortgage company or to Colonel Hogg--who's making so much money compromising railroad cases with the Chollie Boy Culberson administration and suppressing prize-fights for $2,500 fees that he really cannot afford to serve Texas in the United States Senate.

Now that Henry George is dead, those papers and politicians that were wont to abuse and misrepresent him most brutally are fairly falling over each other to do him honor. The post-mortem gush is sickening because of its insincerity. If Henry George was not a great man living he is not a great man dead. If his economic views were fatuous while he was among us they are folly forevermore. I am not of those jacka.s.ses that delight in kicking dead lions; I insist that simple justice be done a man while he is in the land of the living--that we should not hound him to the grave with gross misrepresentation then try to make rest.i.tution by placing him among the stars. Henry George was a good man, but he was not great. He was an advocate, not an originator. He created no new epoch; he added nothing of importance to the world's knowledge; but he did stimulate most wonderfully economic investigation. He was a thought-compeller. He brushed the mold of prejudice and the cobwebs of partisans.h.i.+p from many a brain. By so doing he rendered the world invaluable service and is ent.i.tled to its profoundest grat.i.tude. So long as men can be induced to THINK there is hope for the race. Although his Single Tax theorem will perish, it has served a good purpose.

A Denver party wants to know if I would KNEEL if given an audience by the Pope of Rome. I would be pretty apt to do so if such action on my part was expected. I would ascertain beforehand what conduct was required, then prove myself a gentlemen by either observing the proprieties or declining the audience. What would the Denver man do? Waltz up to the august head of the Catholic church, slap him on the back and offer to shake him for the drinks? Novalis says: "There is but one temple in the world and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than this form.

Bending before men is a reverence done to this revelation in the flesh." We, whose ancestors for so many centuries bowed, not only to the Pope, but to 2 x 4 kings and petty princelings, should not unduly exalt our Ebenezer--should not become so stiff in the joints that we prove ourselves boors by declining when in Rome to do as the Romans do. Were I to seek the presence of Queen Victoria I would observe all the court etiquette.

It is said that Miss Rebecca Merlindy Johnson, editress of the Houston Post, and winner of the ICONOCLAST'S $500 prize as the most beautiful woman in the world, will be a candidate for the office of lieutenant-governor. If this be true she can depend on the unswerving support of the ICONOCLAST. If there be const.i.tutional objections to her holding the office with both lily-white hands we will amend that remarkable instrument. I will take it upon myself to elect Rebecca and ask no other reward than the privilege of dancing with her at the inaugural ball. She was my first, if not my only love; and although she threw me over for Pinkie Hill, by whose effulgent aurora borealis she was hypnotized, and took to wearing pantaloons in public despite my protest, she has since repented and given all her maidenly heart to me; hence it will be my duty and my pleasure to manage her campaign. Rebecca may safely consider herself elected and discount her salary whenever the Post gets into a pinch. I am willing to do anything for Rebecca except pay off the mortgage on her paper.

Because a young man was killed while playing football, the lower house of the Georgia legislature pa.s.sed a bill prohibiting that game under severe penalties. To be consistent the same body should now prohibit swimming because some boys are drowned, and possum hunting because some nocturnal sportsmen are killed.

Georgia appears to take it for granted that nature makes no mistake--when she finds a man who's good for nothing else in the universe she sends him to the legislature to make laws. There's an element of danger in foot-ball as in all other athletic exercises; but that is no reason why we should confine the youngsters to croquet, mumble-peg and finger-billiards, and allow the race to degenerate into a lobeliaceous aggregation of lollipops. That Georgia legislature is full o' goobers and red lemonade.

I am rejoiced to learn that the two factions of Texas Baptists, after having for months past denounced each other in language that smelled of sulphur and would have disgraced opposing parties of Parisian gamins--after resorting to all the petty meanness of peanut politics to control the flesh-pots--have kissed and hugged, s...o...b..red and boohooed each on the other's brisket. "How sweet it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" That's whatever. I'm glad the ruction is over, for it was becoming a rank stench in the nostrils of the Protestant religion. It was enough to drive an intelligent man to Atheism, to make him not only suspicious of religion but ashamed of his race. It seems to me that the ICONOCLAST should have had a reserved seat at the love-feast--should have been forguv and s...o...b..red over with the rest of the sinners, for it had not said nearly as hard things about its dear brethren in Christ as they had urged against each other. It might at least have been permitted to collect the tears of the penitents. That flood of brine, if carefully evaporated, would have supplied Scholtz's Garden with beer salt for a century. And it all went to waste! Doc Hayden and myself were the only Baptist parsons who didn't get hugged. Hayden was made a scape-goat for the sins of both factions and sent to wander in the wilderness, and it was decided to no longer recognize the ICONOCLAST as the official organ of the Baptist faith. It looks as though Hayden and I would have to start a little Baptist h.e.l.l of our own.

J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, one of those "village Hampdens"

whom G. Cleveland discovered when raking the country with a fine-tooth comb in a frantic search for intellectual insects even smaller than himself, says the Bryan Democracy is composed of fanatics, bigots and idiots. He must have seen that brilliant bon mot in the Chicago Inter-Ocean. Poor J. Sterling Morton. Not being born great, nor having the ability to achieve greatness, it was his misfortune to have it driven into him with a maul. And he's never gotten over it. Had Cleveland done naught else evil he would have d.a.m.ned himself everlastingly by pulling this intumescent jay out of a Nebraska turnip- patch to make him a cabinet clerk. I say cabinet-clerk, for the so-called secretaries of the Cleveland regime were merely stool-pigeons for the Stuffed-Prophet. And now this erstwhile seneschal of the Buffalo Beast, this pitiful stool-hopper for the d--est fool that ever disgraced the presidency, turns up his beefy proboscis at the intellectuality of the Bryanites. If J. Sterling Morton would only shave his head he could get four dollars a day for playing What-Is-It in a dime museum. As an anthropological curio Oofty-Gofty or the Wild Man of Borneo wouldn't be "in it."