Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 12

Gall? Why, Geo. Clark presumes to give Bismarck pointers and congress advice. n.o.body knows so well how to manage a husband as an old maid. A bachelor can give the father of a village pointers on the training of boys.

Our Northern neighbors know exactly how to deal with the n.i.g.g.e.r. The man who would starve but for the industry of his wife feels competent to manage the finances of the country. People who couldn't be trusted to wean a calf, tell us all about the Creator of the Cosmos. Sam Jones wants to debate with Bob Ingersoll, and every forks- of-the-creek economist takes a hard fall out of Henry George. The A.P.A. agitators prate loudly of freedom of conscience and insist on disfranchising the Catholics. We boast of religious liberty, then enact iron-clad Sunday laws that compel Jew and pagan to conform to our creed or go to prison. The prohibs. want to confine the whole world to cold water because their leaders haven't sufficient stamina to stay sober. Men who fail to make a living at honest labor insist on entering the public service. Political parties charge up to each other the adverse decrees of Providence. Atheists deny the existence of G.o.d because he doesn't move in their set, while ministers a.s.sume that a criticism of themselves is an insult to the Creator.

But to detain you longer were to give a practical ill.u.s.tration of my text. I will be told that Gall is a necessary evil; that a certain amount of audacity, of native impudence, is necessary to success. I deny it. Fame and wealth and power const.i.tute our ideal of success--folly born of falsehood. Only the useful are successful. Father Damien was the grandest success of the century; Alexander of Macedon the most miserable failure known to human history--with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland. Alexander employed his genius to conquer the Orient and Cleveland his stupidity to ruin the Occident.

The kingdom of the one went to pieces, and the party of the other is now posing as the lost tribe of the political Israel!

Success? A Gould must give up his gold at the grave, the sovereign surrender his sceptre, the very G.o.ds are in time forgotten--are swallowed up in the voiceless, viewless past, hidden by the shadows of the centuries. Why should men strive for fame, that feather in the cap of fools, when nations and peoples perish like the flowers and are forgotten-- when even continents fade from the great world's face and the ocean's bed becomes the mountain's brow.

Why strive for power, that pa.s.ses like the perfume of the dawn, and leaves prince and pauper peers in death? Why should man, made in the mortal image of immortal G.o.d, become the subservient slave of Greed and barter all of time for a handful of yellow dross to cast upon the threshold of eternity? "Poor and content is rich," and rich enough. With a roof to shelter those his heart holds dear, and table furnished forth with frugal fare; with manhood's dauntless courage and woman's deathless love, the peasant in his lowly cot may be richer far than the prince in his imperial hall.

Success? I would rather be a fox and steal fat geese than a miserly millionaire and prey upon the misfortunes of my fellows. I would rather be a doodle-bug burrowing in the dust than a plotting politician, trying to inflate a second-term gubernatorial boom with the fetid breath of a foul hypocrisy. I would rather be a peddler of hot peanuts than a President who gives to bond-grabbers and boodlers privilege to despoil the pantries of the poor. I would rather be a louse on the head of a lazar than lord high executioner of a theological college that, to preserve its reputation and fill its coffers with filthy lucre, brands an orphan babe as a bawd. I would rather watch the stars s.h.i.+ning down through blue immensity, and the cool mists creeping round the purple hills, than feast my eyes on all the tawdry treasures of Ophir and of Ind. I would rather play a corn-stalk fiddle while pickaninnies dance, than build, of widows' sighs and orphans' tears, a flimsy bubble of fame to be blown adown the narrow beach of Time into Eternity's sh.o.r.eless sea. I would rather be the beggar lord of a lodge in the wilderness, dress in a suit of sunburn and live on hominy and hope, yet see the love-light blaze unbought in truthful eyes, than to be the marauding emperor of the mighty world, and know not who fawned upon the master and who esteemed the man.

BLUE AND GRAY.

AN ADDRESS TO THE OLD VETERANS.

[The following is a summary of Mr. Brann's address to the United American Veterans, San Antonio, Feb. 22, 1894.]

It occurs to me that the time is not an appropriate one for lengthy speeches. This is a love-feast, and I have noticed that when people are much in love they are little inclined to talk. Perhaps I have been called upon because I'm a professional peacemaker, an expert harmony promoter.

Were I not as meek as Moses and patient as Job I certainly would weary in well-doing--become discouraged and give o'er the attempt to inaugurate an era of universal peace and general good will; for when I go North I am denounced by the partisan press as an unreconstructed rebel seeking to rip the federal government up by the roots, and when I come South I'm pointed out as a dangerous Yankee importation with the bluest of equators.

The Democrats insist that I'm a Republican, but that party declines the responsibility; the infidels call me a religious crank, the clergy an Atheist, and even the Mugwumps regard me with suspicion. But let me tell you right here that whatever I may or may not be, I am an American from the ground up--from Alpha to Omega, world-without- end. I may be a man without a party and without a creed; but so long as Old Glory blazes in G.o.d's blue firmament I will never be a man without a country.

I can no more imagine a man loving only the north or south half of his country than I can imagine him loving only the right or left side of his wife. If I had to love my country on the instalment plan I'd move out of it. The man who is really a patriot loves his country in a lump.

There's room in his heart for every acre of its sunny soil, its every hill upon which the morning breaks, its every vale that cradles the evening shadows, its every stream that laughs back the image of the sun.

When a man feels that way you can safely trust him with an office--and most of us are perfectly willing to be trusted.

As an American citizen I am proud of every man, of whatever section, who, by the n.o.bility of his nature or the majesty of his intellect, has added one jot or t.i.ttle to the fame of his fair land, has increased the credit of our common country, has contributed new power to the car of human progress. They are my countrymen, friends and brethren. Are you of the North? Then I claim with you a joint interest in your entire galaxy of intellectual G.o.ds.

At the shrine of Lincoln's broad humanity, of Webster's matchless power, of the cunning genius of your Menlo wizard I humbly bow. Are you of the South? Your Jefferson, Jackson and Lee are mine as well as thine, for they too were Americans--lords in that mighty aristocracy of intellect that has, in four generations, made the New World the wonder of the Old with its c.u.mulative greatness of forty centuries.

I have watched the progress of the United American Veterans' a.s.sociation with uncommon interest, because it is distinctively a national organization, in which shriveled sectionalism and party prejudice find no place. Its corner- stone is American manhood, its object fraternity, its principles broad as the continent upon which falls the shadow of our flag. Do you know what that a.s.sociation means?

--had you thought of its significance? It means that when brave men sheathe the sword the quarrel's done. It means that peace hath its triumphs no less than war.

The world's annals furnish forth no parallel to that a.s.sociation whose guests we are to-night. Men have fought ere this and patched up a peace; but where, in all the cycles of human history, have they waged war more relentless than did Rome and Carthage, then, without a murmur, accepted the arbitrament of the sword and swung into line, shoulder to shoulder, a band of brothers, one flag, one country, one destiny and that the highest goal of human endeavor?

My attention has been especially attracted to this a.s.sociation because it is a practical ill.u.s.tration of what I have so often urged in print: That the pitiful sectional prejudices which we see here and there coming to the surface both north and south; that the petty hatreds, which appear to transform some hearts into bitter little pools in which Justice perishes and divine Reason is quite overthrown, have no lot or part among the soldiers who made the civil war the grandest event in modern history--one from which the world will mark time for centuries yet to be. I have yet to hear an ex-federal who met Lee's veterans at the Wilderness or Gettysburg, speak disrespectfully of the man who wore the gray. I have yet to hear an ex-confederate who mixed it with "Old Pap"

Thomas at Chickamauga, or Joe Hooker above the clouds, speak disparagingly of those who wore the blue. It is those who stayed at home to sing, "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree," and those who d.a.m.ned "Old Abe"

Lincoln at long range who are doing all the tremendous fighting now. They didn't get started for the front until after Appomattox; but having once sailed in for slaughter all Hades can't head 'em off! If a merciful Providence doesn't soon interpose, these mighty post-bellum warriors will either break a lung or wreck the majestic world. They are more dreadful in their destructive awfulness than the farmer's two he-goats, that "fit an' fit" until there was nothing left of 'em but a splotch o' blood and two belligerent tails. Those who exchanged compliments at Corinth and Cold Harbor; those who received informal calls from Kilpatrick's cavalry, who we are told "rode like centaurs and fought like devils"; those who saw Grant's intrepid Westerners hurl themselves against Vicksburg's impregnable heights; those who were slammed up against Jackson's "Stone wall" or picnicked with Johnston's cartridge-biters on grapeshot pie and deviled minnie b.a.l.l.s, now treat each other with the studied respect which the Kansas farmer paid the cyclone. He felt sure that the Lord was on his side and that with such help he could more than hold his own; still he was in no wise anxious to steer his theory against a condition that was making a million revolutions a minute and hadn't yet brought up its reserves.

In commingling thus in a common brotherhood, those who followed the fortunes of the confederacy until human fort.i.tude could no further go, and those who, with the sword's keen point, held every gleaming star in Old Glory's field of blue, are furnis.h.i.+ng a commendable example to all our countrymen, to all humanity. It is an echo, nay, an incarnation of those words of Grant, the grandest that ever fell from victorious warrior's lips: "Let us have peace." The battlefield was sown long since with kindlier seed than dragon's teeth, has blossomed and borne the fruits of Life where Death reigned paramount. The flowers of our Southern fields are no longer dyed with the blood of the contending brave, but drip with heaven's own dews; the sullen battery has gone silent on our purple hills and the crash of steel resounds no more amid our pleasant valleys. No longer the Northern child waits and watches for the soldier sire whose lips have felt the touch of G.o.d's own hand; no longer the Southern woman wanders with bursting heart amid the wreck and wraith of the fierce simoon, brus.h.i.+ng the battle grime from cold brows, seeking among the mangled dead for all that life held dear. The curse has pa.s.sed: "Let us have peace."

The civil war was a national necessity. It was the fiery furnace in which Almighty G.o.d welded the discordant elements of the New World into one h.o.m.ogeneous people.

For generations the Puritan hated the Cavalier, and the latter gave back scorn for scorn and added compound interest. This mutual dislike was a rank, infectious weed that first took root across the sea and ripened into that revolution which sent Charles the First to the block and invested Cromwell with more than regal power. Some of this virus, distilled in stubborn hearts by religious and political intolerance, was carried by the Puritan to Plymouth and by the Cavalier to the banks of the James, and it survived even the fires of patriotism and the frosts of Valley Forge. Bone of the same bone and flesh of the same flesh, the religio-political doctrinaires had succeeded in casting our forefathers in different molds--each colossal, masculine, heroic, but radically antagonistic. Together they followed Was.h.i.+ngton through those eight long years of blood and tears of which human liberty was born.

Together they laid broad and deep the foundation of the Republic and reared thereon that wondrous superstructure which--please G.o.d--shall endure forever, and together they poured their blood in one unstinted tide upon its sacred shrine. But the Puritan was still a Cromwell and the Cavalier a lord. That people so widely divergent in customs and character could long dwell at peace as one political household were preposterous. The one had his "convictions," the other his "inst.i.tutions," and neither would yield the right-o'-way. When such opposing trains of thought try to pa.s.s on a single track there's going to be trouble sure. The friction, evident even in the early day of the Republic, grew and gathered fire until the nation burst forth in that mighty conflagration whose pathetic ashes repose in a million sepulchers. It had to come. Let us thank G.o.d that the fierce baptism of fire is in the past and not yet to be; that the bitter cup can never be pressed to our children's lips; that never again while the world stands and the heavens endure will Americans meet in battle- shock! that never again will our rivers run red with the blood of Columbia's brave, poured forth by her own keen blade--that the last stumbling-block hath been removed from our path of progress; that we can now move forward with a giant's stride to that high destiny for which the chastening hand of G.o.d hath fitted us, the greatest nation and the grandest people in all the mighty tide of Time!

I rejoice to see the veterans setting the example of reconciliation, for they, more than all others, have most to forgive and forget. I am doubly gratified that the good work should have begun in Texas, which has such cause to entertain the kindliest feeling toward every section of our common country, for each and all contributed to her past glory and present greatness. Among those who cast their lot in Texas when every step was a challenge to destiny and every hour was darkened by a danger; who faced unflinchingly the trials of frontier life and carved out an independent republic with the sword, were men from every State of the American union. One instance will suffice (though scores might be cited) to ill.u.s.trate the cosmopolitan character of that band of heroes who made the early history of Texas one of the n.o.blest cantos in the mighty Anglo-Saxon epic. The New Orleans Grays was the first military company to come from the States to the aid of the struggling Texans. It got its first baptism of fire in this city, being a part of that band of 300 Spartans who followed Old Ben Milam to attack General Cos and his 1,500 veterans. From the roster of the Grays I learn that the company numbered but sixty- four men, yet represented sixteen sovereign States and six foreign countries! Think of it! Twenty-five came from north of the Ohio, twenty-four from the Southern States, fourteen across far seas to fight for Texas liberty, while one brave lad came from G.o.d knows where, but he got there just the same! General Cos never inquired where Milam's men were born. He knew where his own were dying, decided that San Antonio had been overrated as a health resort and took to the chaparral.

As most of those daring spirits who flocked hither to fight for Texas remained, and ever since a steady human tide has poured in from all parts of the Union, and every country of Western Europe, we have become a mixed people, scarce daring to throw a rock in any direction lest we hit our relatives. And the cosmopolitan character of our people--the fact that the Puritan and the Cavalier have blended here as nowhere else--will be found a powerful factor in the attainment of a glorious future.

It is particularly appropriate that the Blue and the Gray should unite in observing the day that marks the birth of Was.h.i.+ngton, that soldier-statesman who marshalled our fathers under one flag and led them forth to the defense of human liberty. Whatever may have since mis- chanced, the trials and the triumphs of the Revolution are our common heritage. As the Greeks of old, divided among themselves, united to face a foreign foe, so did the American, North and South, unite beneath the banner of Was.h.i.+ngton and hurl down the gage of battle to Britain's mighty power, and no historian has yet presumed to say which was the better soldier. Was.h.i.+ngton belongs to no section. He was truly an American, pre-eminently a patriot. The n.o.bility of his character was his very own; the dazzling splendor of his undying fame is the brightest jewel in Columbia's crown of glory, for it was born of the dauntless valor and nurtured with the priceless blood of a people whom kings could not conquer nor sophists deceive.

A husband and wife, long estranged, met at the grave of their firstborn, the child of their youthful strength. Their strife had been bitter, their love had turned to hate, and they elected to tread life's path apart. They stood, one on either side, and looked coldly upon each other. Then they looked down upon the little mound that held the broken link with which G.o.d had bound their hearts. They knelt and bowed their faces upon the cold sod that covered the sacred dust of their dead. They stretched forth their hands across the little grave, each to the other, and the Angel of G.o.d washed all the bitterness of the years from their hearts with a rain of penitential tears, and sent them down life's pathway hand-in-hand, as in the old days when Love was lord of their two lives and the lost babe was cradled upon its mother's breast.

This day the North and the South kneel at the grave of Was.h.i.+ngton, their best beloved. The estrangement is forgotten, the bitterness of the years pa.s.ses like an uneasy dream, they reach their hands each to the other across the tomb, and the benediction of G.o.d falls upon a re- united people.

HUMBUGS AND HUMb.u.g.g.e.rY.

THE GREAT AMERICAN PRODUCT

Satan is supposed to have been the original Humbug; but he's a back number now--must feel dreadfully antiquated and useless among so many modern improvements.

That the American people love to be humbugged long since pa.s.sed into proverb. Humb.u.g.g.e.ry may be called our national vice, our besetting sin. Like liberty, it appears to be in the very air we breathe, and we take to it as naturally as we go into politics. Our entire social system has become saturated with it. It is the main-spring of many acts we loudly praise, the lode-star of men we apotheosize, is oftimes the warp and woof even of the mantle of charity, which, like a well-filled purse--or a tariff compromise--covers a mult.i.tude of sins.

There are various kinds and cla.s.ses of Humbugs; but reduced to the last a.n.a.lysis--stripped of the sugar- coating by which they impose on the public--they are one and all simply professors of falsehood.

I am sometimes inclined to the view that humb.u.g.g.e.ry is a disease, and that some doctor will yet discover a gold- cure for it--will demonstrate that the bad habit is due to microbes that get into a man's mind and make trouble trying to turn around, or to bacilli that bore holes in his moral character and let his honesty leak out; for the medical fraternity has gravely informed us that kleptomania (sneak-thievery by eminently respectable people) and dipsomania (sottishness by the social salt of the earth), are simply diseases that should be treated with pills and powders instead of with penitentiaries and whipping-posts.

Now if a man will steal a saw-mill and go back after the site simply because his pericardium is out of plumb or his liver has gone into politics; will nurse a juicy old jag until it develops into a combined museum and menagerie, because his circulation has slipped an eccentric or his stomach got out of its natural orbit, I submit, in all seriousness that he might be physically incapacitated for telling the truth by an insidious attack on his veracity by the dreadful falsehood fungi, and that the best way to restore his moral equilibrium--to remove him from the category of chronic Humbugs--would be to fumigate him.

The Lord once attempted to check the Humbug habit by striking liars dead; but soon saw that such a plan would prove more fatal than a second flood--that there wouldn't be even a Noah's Ark picnic of us left--and reluctantly relinquished it. Science has not yet succeeded in mastering the disease; but just give it time and it will save the world yet--will find a medical name for every human frailty; will be able to tell, by looking at a man's tongue, whether he's coming down with the mug-wump malaria or the office-holding hysteria, and do something for him before it's everlastingly too late.

The very best of people have a touch of the complaint --"the trail of the serpent is over us all." Even our young ladies are said to be, to a certain extent, Humbugs.

I have been told that many of them wear patent complexions, "boughten" bangs, and pad out scrawny forms until they appear voluptuous Junos, and thereby deceive and ensnare, bedazzle and beguile the unsuspecting sons of men. I have been told that many of them who are soft- voiced angels before marriage can give a rusty buzz-saw cards and spades and beat it blind after they have succeeded in landing the confiding sucker. But perhaps such tales are only the bitter complainings of miserable Benedicts who have been soundly beaten at their own game of humb.u.g.g.e.ry. Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players to lose. Too often, after much sugar-coated deception, and many premeditated misdeals on both sides, one draws a blank and the other a b.o.o.by. After patient angling in the matrimonial pool, one lands a stingaree and the other a bull-head. One expects to capture a demi-G.o.d who hits the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum who comes home from the lodge at 2 a.m. and whoops and howls for her to come down and help him hunt for the keyhole, and is then snailed in by a policeman before she can frame a curtain lecture or find the rolling pin.

False Pride is the father of humb.u.g.g.e.ry, the parent of Fraud. We are Humbugs because we desire that our fellows think us better, braver, brighter, perhaps richer than we really are. We practice humb.u.g.g.e.ry to attain social position to which we are ent.i.tled by neither birth nor brains, to acquire wealth for which we render no equivalent, to procure power we cannot wisely employ.

While proclaiming love of democracy we purchase peers for our daughters. While boasting liberty of speech we a.s.sail like demons those who presume to dissent from our opinions in either religion or politics.

History is full of Humbugs and liberty itself oftimes but a gilded lie. No man is really free who is dependent upon the good will of others for employment. There can be no true liberty where Prejudice usurps the throne of Reason. Men are slaves instead of sovereigns when they suffer themselves to be held in iron thrall by political dogma or religious creed, blindly accepting the ipse dixit of things instead of exercising to the utmost the intelligence which G.o.d had given them.

I have said that charity itself is ofttimes a Humbug. It is so when it becomes the handmaid of ostentation instead of the true almoner of the heart; or when men give to the poor only because it is "lending to the Lord," then expect compound interest.

That philanthropist is a fraud who, after piling up a colossal fortune at the expense of the common people, leaves it to found an educational or eleemosynary inst.i.tute when death calls him across the dark river. Knowing that Charon's boat is purely a pa.s.senger packet--that carries no freight, however precious--he drops his dollars with a sigh; but determined to reap some benefit from boodle his itching hand can no longer hold, he decrees that it be used to found some charitable fake to prevent himself being forgotten--some pitiful inst.i.tute where a few of the wretched victims of his rapacious greed may get a plate of starvation soup, or a prayer-book, and bless their benefactor's name. The very monument erected over bones of the sanctimonious old skin-flint is a fraud; flaunts a string of colossal falsehoods in the face of the world; piously points to heaven--perhaps to indicate that Satan refused to receive him and sent him back to St. Peter with a request that he make other arrangements.

Many of the martyrs whose memory we revere, of the saints we apotheosize, of the heroes we enshrine in history, are one-third fraud and two-thirds fake. The man who ran grow in grace while his pet corn's in chancery, or lose an election without spilling his moral character; who can wait an hour for his dinner without walking all over the nerves of his wife, or crawl out of bed in the middle of his first nap and rustle till the cold, gray dawn with a brace of colicky kids, without broadly insinuating that he was a copper-riveted, nickel-plated, automatic, double-cylinder idiot to ever get married, is a greater hero than he that taketh a city.

The place to take the true measure of a man is not the market-place or the amen-corner, not the forum or the field, but at his fireside. There he lays aside his mask and you may learn whether he's imp or angel, king or cur, hero or Humbug. I care not what the world says of him --whether it crown him with bays or pelt him with bad eggs; I care never a copper what his reputation or religion may be: If his babes dread his home-coming and his better-half swallows her heart every time she has to ask him for a five dollar bill, he's a fraud of the first water, even tho' he prays night and morn till he's black in the face and howls hallelujah till he shakes the eternal hills.

But if his children rush to the front gate to greet him, and love's own suns.h.i.+ne illumes the face of his wife when she hears his footfall, you can take it for granted that he's true gold, for his home's a heaven, and the Humbug never gets that near the great white throne of G.o.d. He may be a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist, a Mormon and a mugwump; he may buy votes in blocks-of-five and bet on the election; he may deal 'em from the bottom of the deck and drink beer till he can't tell a silver dollar from a circular saw, and still be an infinitely better man than the cowardly little Humbug who's all suavity in society, but who makes his home a h.e.l.l--who vents upon the hapless heads of wife and children the ill-nature he would like to inflict on his fellow-men, but dares not. I can forgive much in that fellow mortal who would rather make men swear than women weep; who would rather have the hate of the whole he-world than the contempt of his wife --who would rather call anger to the eyes of a king than fear to the face of a child.

The hero is not he that strives with the world for witness--who seeks the bubble fame at the cannon's brazen lip and risks his life that he may live forever.

"Think not that helm and harness are signs of valor true; Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battles ever knew."

To bear with becoming grace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; to find our heaven in others' happiness, and for their sake to sacrifice and suffer wrongs that might be righted with a thread of steel; to live an honest life in a land where Truth doth feed on crusts while Falsehood fattens at Lucullean feasts, requires more true manhood, more moral stamina, more unadulterated SAND than to follow a flag into the very jaws of h.e.l.l or die for the faith in the auto da fe. Heroes? Why unurn the ashes of the half-forgotten dead and pore o'er the musty pages of the past for names to glorify? If you would find heroes grander, martyrs more n.o.ble and saints of more sanct.i.ty than Rubens ever painted or immortal Homer sang; who, without Achilles' armor, have slain an hundred Hectors; without Samsonian locks have torn the lion; without the sword of Michael have thrown down the gage to all the embattled hosts of h.e.l.l, seek not in the musty tomes of history, but in the hearts and homes of the self-sacrificing wives and mothers of this great world.

"G.o.d could not be everywhere," says the proverb, "therefore he made mothers."