*Project Gutenberg's Etext of Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast*
#1 in our series by William Cowper Brann
Of the 12 volumes, we are currently doing 1, 10, and 12.


Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.


*Project Gutenberg's Etext of Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast*

by William Cowper Brann

June, 1996  [Etext #567]


*Project Gutenberg's Etext of Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast*
*****This file should be named bti0110.txt or bti0110.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, bti0111.txt.
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, bti0110a.txt.


We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
of the official release dates, for time for better editing.

Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
files per month:  or 400 more Etexts in 1996 for a total of 800.
If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
total should reach 80 billion Etexts.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.


We need your donations more than ever!


All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/IBC", and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law ("IBC" is Illinois
Benedictine College).  (Subscriptions to our paper newsletter go
to IBC, too)

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825

When all other email fails try our Michael S. Hart, Executive
Director:
hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (internet)   hart@uiucvmd   (bitnet)

We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
login:  anonymous
password:  your@login
cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET INDEX?00.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)


***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
Illinois Benedictine College (the "Project").  Among other
things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois
     Benedictine College" within the 60 days following each
     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Illinois Benedictine College".

*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*





The last 2/3 of this etext was:
Scanned with OmniPage Professional OCR software
donated by Caere Corporation, 1-800-535-7226.
Contact Mike Lough <Mikel@caere.com>





THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
BRANN
THE ICONOCLAST
                          
VOLUME I
                          
                          
                          

In putting into permanent form the complete works of
William Cowper Brann, twenty-one years after his death,
the sole purpose of the present publishers is to preserve in
its entirety the genius of a writer whose work, though
produced under the stress of journalism, is destined to
endure as literature.

Upon the issues discussed by Brann, the publishers take no
sides; they do not stand as sponsors for, nor do they desire
to appear in the light of either approving or disapproving his
opinions or methods.  They were friends and neighbors of
many years' standing of the men and institutions mentioned
in Brann's writings, but were in no way involved in the bitter
controversies and deplorable events which led to Brann's
untimely and dramatic death.

The plan and arrangement of this twelve-volume set of
Brann is simple.  The first volume is composed of articles of
various length gathered from miscellaneous sources, and
includes some of the better known articles from The
ICONOCLAST.  Volume II to XI inclusive are the files of
The ICONOCLAST (from February, 1895 to May, 1898,
inclusive), with the matter arranged approximately as it
appeared in the original publication.  Volume XII contains
the story of Brann's death and various biographical and
critical articles from the press of the day, together with
those of Brann's speeches and lectures which have been
preserved.  At the close of Volume XII you will find a
complete index of subjects and of titled articles for the
entire twelve volumes.


                   
                   
PREFACE
BY MILO HASTINGS

As I read the proofs of the last of these volumes, wherein is
told the story of Brann's death, my cup of the joy of love's
labor is embittered with the gall of an impotent, futile rage
against the Sower that flings with mocking hand the seed of
genius and recks not where it falls.  The germ of such a life
as Brann's we can but accept in worshipful, unquestioning
gratitude, for the process of its spawning is too entangled to
unravel.  But of the environment of his life we cannot refrain
from rebellious questioning, appreciative though we be of
that which was, and of our heritage of the unquenchable
spirit that is and shall be as long as our language shall last.

Genius he is, this only Brann we have; genius audacious,
defiant, and sublime; whose stature, though his feet be on
the flat of the Brazos bottom, towers effulgent over those
effigies placed on pedestals by orthodox popularity, and
sickly lighted by professorial praise.

Nor is my anger born of the fact that Brann, as warped by
his environment of time and place, wasted thought on free
silver economics, spent passion on prohibition and negro
criminals, lavished wrath on provincial preachers and local
politicians or alloyed his style by the so-called "vulgarities,"
which alone could shock into attention the muddle-headed
who paid his printer's bill for the privilege of seeing
barnyard phrases and dunghill words in type.

All this, I can conceive, may have been the particular
combination of circumstances that were needed to
bring to flower a germ of genius that, had it been planted in
last century's Boston, might have given us but another
Harvard classic--or environed in this century's Greenwich
Village only another free-versifier of souls a-jaunt amid
psycho-analytics and parlor Bolshevism.

The slouch-hatted, gun-toting, beer-drinking, woman-
worshiping, man-baiting Brann of Texas may have been the
particular and only Brann to have developed the colossal
courage and fighting fearlessness that gave his poet's soul
the reach and stature, the strength and vigor to raise
himself above the mere music of his words.

Brann as he was when he heard the shot that killed him, I
can accept and proclaim as beyond the need and reach of
apology or regret.  But what of the Brann that would have
written on throughout the twenty-one years that have since
elapsed, and that we would have with us still at the prime
age of sixty-four?

Had Brann lived!  We should have had the product of eight
times the period of his writing life that was; and an added
quality born of riper experience, more momentous themes,
more leisure for deliberate composition.  We should have
heard the man who against petty politicians and occasional
pugilists, out-thundered Carlyle, turn his roaring guns
against the blood-guilty heads that bade wholesale rape
and gaunt hunger stalk rampant in a gory world.

It is as if Hugo had written "Hans of Iceland" and no "Les
Miserables," as if Napoleon, the Lieutenant of Artillery, had
but stopped the mobs in the streets of Paris, and Austerlitz
and Waterloo had never been.

The world has not always profited by its martyrdoms. 
Samson, old and blind, toppled down the temple, and the
Philistines that he slew at his death were more than they
which he slew in his life.  Not so Brann.  His death was
as tragic and pitiable as the charge of the Light Brigade,
the sacrifice of men at the sunken road of Ohaine.

Waste, futile and planless, mere howling, empty, chaotic
waste, for no purpose under heaven but to serve as food
for idle fancies as to what might have been--such to me is
the death of Brann, and my throat chokes with sorrow and
my soul is sick with vain despair.

Brann's contribution to literature is the product of less than
three years of writing time.  There were previous years of
yearning and dreaming while he fretted beneath the yoke of
galling servitude to newspaper editors unworthy to loose the
latchets of Brann's shoes.   His own paper, The
Iconoclast, in which he first found freedom for utterance,
and from which ninety-eight per cent. of this present edition
is derived, ran for just forty months, and for six or eight
months of this period Brann was on lecture tours, during
which time his paper was largely filled with outside
contributions.

That a magazine could succeed at all in Waco is one of the
seven wonders of the literary world.  That a magazine so
located and written by one man, having but a paltry
advertising patronage, no illustrations, no covers, could in
three years' time rival the circulation of any magazine then
published is as much a miracle as the parting of the Red
Sea waters or the bountiful persistence of the widow's oil.

It is on this three years' work that Brann's fame must rest. 
Barring a few poets, the literary colossi have seldom had
less than the work of a score of years on which to base
their claims for greatness.  Goethe, Hugo, Tolstoi, Mark
Twain each wrote for more than fifty years.  But greater
range of variety and distance as well as span of time
contributed to their product.  They traveled up and down
the world of men, mingled with many races, sailed seas,
climbed mountains, lived in metropoles, and dined with
princes.

Brann's most notable personal acquaintances were country-
town editors and provincial politicians, very like the ilk of a
hundred other States and provinces in the raw corners of
the world.  He lived and died in that stale, flat, and literarily
unprofitable expanse of prairie between Lake Michigan and
the Rio Grande, where man's most pretentious achievement
was the Ead's Bridge at St. Louis, Nature's most
spectacular effort, the Ozark Mountains, and literature's
most worthy resident representative, William Marion Reedy.

So environed, in a time when the bicycle marked the acme
of progress and Bryan could be a hero, in a flat-roofed
Texas town, whose intellectual glory was a Baptist college
and whose answer to arguments, "ropes and revolvers,"
Brann wrote for only three years, and wrote as
Shakespeare wrote, unmindful alike of critics, binders and
bookworms.  Only by the doubtful faith that men are made
by their adversity can we reconcile our charge against the
Sower who cast the seed of genius to fall on such barren
ground, amid the stones of a sterile time and the briars of
bullet-answering bigotry.

But vain are the might-have-beens; and fortunate are we to
have as we have the stuff out of which far-ringing fame
resounds unto generations when teeth are no longer set on
edge--when men will have forgotten the taboos of a little
day and the dust of our Mrs. Grundys will be weeds to
choke the freedom of the grass.

The copies of The Iconoclast, read in their day till worn
to tatters, were ill adapted to preservation.  It were futile to
look for them in libraries, for Brann was about as welcome
in those formal repositories of the proper in literature as
matches in a powder mill.  So far as they are aware the file
of The Iconoclast possessed by the present publishers,
and from which this edition is reproduced, is the only
complete file in existence.

For twenty years this priceless literary heritage has been
waiting, precariously subjected to the vicissitudes of earthly
circumstance.  Like a lone great manuscript within the
cloister of a mediaeval monk, Brann's work might have
perished utterly soon after its creation, like a song of magic
music held but fleetingly within the heart that heard it.

But the blood of ink now flows again through the multiplying
presses and the flaming phrases of The Iconoclast, shot
like shafts of gold from over the mountains of El d'Orado by
the sun of genius, still live and will endure.  Again the
million words leap from the yellowed pages like tongues of
fire and beauty; and ten thousand voices will cry and sing
again before the hearths of those who once knew and
loved the Waco Iconoclast, and will sing and cry in the
homes of their children and their children's children who will
read and acclaim Brann as a God whose name is writ
forever in the stars.

These facts are here set down that they who read in days
to come may marvel as I do now that two score issues of a
provincial paper should consistently contain such a freight
of imperishable literature, revealing a learning positively
prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and
crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish
richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps,
of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ardent splendor of
poetic nights.

Whence came the towering intellect, the wealth of
knowledge, the mastery of words, the music of style, the
diapason of feeling?  It could only come from the sources
that are available to any American who can read.  The
most formal aid that could have contributed is the free
shelves of the St. Louis public library.

The miracle of Brann's growth and flowering is more
marvelous than that of Poe, less explainable than that of
Shakespeare.  That Brann knew the literary classics of the
world is obvious from his every line.  But, unless we invent
some theory of universal telepathy to have wafted
inspiration to Waco from all the canonized dead from
Homer to Carlyle, we can only conceive that Brann derived
his knowledge and his power, without encouragement and
without guidance, by poring over the printed page in lonely
hours bitterly wrested from the wolf of poverty that for forty
years held mortgage on his time.

What he possessed, however got, was a combination of all
those recognized elements of literary greatness--except one
thing; he heeded not the warning of cultured mediocrity that
commands most writers what to leave unsaid.  Brann left
nothing unsaid, and because of that fact was locked out of
colleges, libraries, encyclopaedias and halls of fame.

Where other writers waste half their energies in deciding
what may be written, Brann gave his full energy to writing
what he thought.  Whereas in all things else he matched
and equaled others, in this one fact of absolute audacity
and complete freedom from fear, he outmatched all and so
closed the pedants' mouths of praise.  Colossal, crude,
terrible and sublime, Brann opened the ears of the people
by the mighty power of his untamed language, by the
smashing fury of his wrath of words.

From the point of disadvantage of the little country town lost
in the immensity of the Texas prairie, Brann saw the world,
and saw it with the blazing eye of righteous wrath.  He saw
the sins of high society in New York and London, the
rottenness of autocracy in Russia, the world war boiling
beneath the surface in the cauldron of Europe's misery. 
But he saw also, with mingled humor and anger, the trivial
passing events of his own state and nation and the local
affairs of his home town.  Of all these things, great and
small, he wrote with equal fervor, equal venom and equal
power.

To-day the war is fought, the Czar is dead, free silver is
forgotten and the local animosities that Brann brewed in his
own State live only in the memories of a few old men.

With the roll of the years, the perspective of time, like a low
swung sun, casts the mountain's shadow ever farther
across the valley; and Brann the Waco journalist has
become Brann the American genius.  No matter how dead
the issues, how local to time and place the characters of
which he wrote, his writing is literature and the imperishable
legacy of the world.

The Biblical story of Joseph would be equally great if his
name had been Fu Chow, and Pharaoh had been the
Emperor Wu Wong Wang.  Hamlet would be immortal if his
name were L. Percy Smith and his uncle a pork packer in
Omaha.  The prodigal son has no name, the swine he fed
knew no country.  Particular names, local places, and
passing forms and institutions are not the essence of
literature.  For those who formerly read Brann in The
Iconoclast he was a Texas journalist in the free silver
days; but for those who shall read his work in these days
after the world war, New York might as well be Babylon,
Mark Hanna, Haman, and the files of The Iconoclast,
clay tablets dug from the ruins of some long-buried Waco of
the Euphrates Valley.

It is only the transcendent genius who can afford to be
careless of the preservation of his product.  Socrates
merely talked to chance disciples in the Groves of
Athens; other men wrote and preserved his words. 
Shakespeare wrote plays for his current theatrical business;
others gathered and printed his manuscripts.  While he
lived, Brann's writing never saw the dignity of a clothbound
book.  They were not written for carefully edited, thrice-
proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground out for the
unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily
set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and
patent medicine testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet
that could be rolled up and stuck through a wedding ring.

Brann's range of literary form was limited by his single
avenue of publication through the columns of a one-man
paper, and varied from the ten-word epigrams of
Salmagundi to the ten-thousand word article or published
lecture.  Within this range is evidenced at least three
distinct types of literary composition.

First and foremost in volume and effect is the Philippic or
iconoclastic article, mingling in varying proportions the
resounding musical cadences of Ingersollian oratory and
the pungent, audacious epigrammatic twists on which
Hubbard, with cleverer salesmanship, built a more
profitable, if not more noble, fame.

It was as the destroyer, the iconoclast, that Brann best saw
himself, and to this role he devoted a great preponderance
of his time and talent.  But there is another Brann, unknown
to many who have conceived him only as an idolsmasher,
an "apostle of the devil," an angry Christ driving out the
defilers of the temple with a lash of scorpion's tails.

Brann, the poet, the lover of beauty, speaks even amidst
the ruins of the houses of hypocrisy and shame which he
has wrecked.  There is scarce a page in all his writings in
which sheer beauty does not stand out amid the
ugliness of carnage and destruction--in which the strains of
celestial music are not heard above the roar of earthly
battle.

But more than this there are many articles that are wholly
cut from a cloth of gold.  Many of the finest of these gems
of pure literature were omitted from the early and
incomplete book-publication of Brann, for the compilers who
made that hasty and inadequate selection were too close to
the bitterness of his death to see this other Brann.

To cite from the first volume only:

Where have you heard a more beautiful sermon from a
Christian pulpit than "Charity" or "Throwing Stones at
Christ"?

Can you find in prose or poetry more melody of language
than in "Life and Death"?

In all our countless volumes of fiction, have you ever read a
more wondrous tale than "There Comes One After," or "A
Story of the Sea"?

To read only such as these is to know a very different
Brann from the author of "The Bradley-Martin Bal Masque"
or "Garters and Amen Groans."  The Brann who wrote
"Life and Death," by that work alone, wins to undying fame
as surely as does Grey by his "Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard."  I have combed my memory in vain to match
it from an American pen.  A few paragraphs from Ingersoll,
a few pages from Poe, a few stanzas from Whitman--but
make your own search and your own comparisons; and if,
in your final ranking, Brann stands not among the Titans
who number less than the fingers on God's hand, it will be
because you cannot divorce the sublime beauty of "Life
and Death" from the coyotes and the jackals that run
rampant through the pages of Brann the shocker of the thin
of skin.

Lastly, consider Brann the teller of stories--for laughter and
for tears.  Some of these tales are allegories as universal to
the life of man as "Pilgrim's Progress."  Elsewhere, as in
the fictional essay on the "The Cow" and in the delightful
lies that Brann in rollicking mischief attributed to his fellow
Texas journalists, we find the humorous tale enriched with
the bizarre and scintillating figure.  Nor was Brann
unconscious of his fictional gift, for he was working on a
novel at the time of his death.  That O. Henry's ambition to
write may be accredited to the influence of Brann seems
more than probable.  Brann's first attempt to start The
Iconoclast was made in Austin, Texas, but this first paper
survived for only a few issues.

O. Henry, then a drug clerk in Austin, being filled with
literary aspiration, bought the press and the name of The
Iconoclast for $250; but O. Henry's Iconoclast after two
issues also ceased to flutter.  Later, when Brann again
accumulated the necessary funds to permit him to throw off
the hireling's yoke, he asked for and received back from O.
Henry the legal right to the title of his own paper.

I relate this incident not to cast discredit upon O. Henry's
originality.  His unique mastery of story structure was all his
own, but that richness of figurative speech, particularly
those exaggerated humorous metaphors which make his
every paragraph so delightful, we may well believe to be an
Elijah's mantle fallen from the shoulders of Brann, and worn
over a new tunic.

Should any man create more than a rare few of the words
he uses his speech would be as meaningless as a doctor of
theology explaining the trinity.  Likewise that subtle thing
called "style," that revivifying of the dead ashes of
dictionary words, though more peculiar to the man, is most
potent when it borrows freely but wisely from all that has
gone before.

Stevenson read, and confessed to deliberate practice work
in imitation of, the masters that preceded him.  So we know
that Brann read, absorbed, transmuted, and transfigured
the style of the classic writers, and added a daring measure
of reckless originality.  As Brann read his Homer and his
Carlyle, his Shakespeare and his Ingersoll, so Hubbard and
O. Henry read their Brann; and Hubbard specifically
commends him to the would-be writer as Johnson commended Addison.

There is no ore that will assay more literary metal to the
page than Brann.  As a writer's writer no man of our time
surpasses him.  His vocabulary is conceded, even by his
most envious critics, to outrange that of any other
American.  His gift of figurative speech--that essential that
distinguishes literature from mere correct writing--rivals that
of any writer in any country, language or time.  Brann's
compass of words, idioms and phrases harks back to the
archaic and reaches forward to the futuristic.

If you wish merely to learn to appreciate literature so that
you may nod approval in polite society when an accredited
writer's name is mentioned, go to college and listen to the
lectures of literary Ph. D.'s.  But if you want to learn to
write, take your Bible, your Shakespeare and your Brann
and hie you to your garret, there to read, reread, study,
memorize, and imitate if you can.  And God be praised if
you can steal the best and to it add somewhat of your own.

Brann offends, shocks and outrages, is suppressed,
damned, forcibly ignored and laboriously forgotten, because
though the lark sings in his words, "the buzzard is on the
wing."  But Brann did not make the stench that offends the
nostrils of the nice; he only stirred up the cesspools to let
us know that they were there, and so enlist volunteers for
their abatement.  That riles the kept keepers of lesser
fames because they have agreed that the fine art of letters
should be to spray the attar of posies to counteract the
noisome smells of that which is rotten in the state of the
world, where the many reek and sweat in filth and poverty
that the few may live in perfumed palaces.

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, shouted Brann and died
shouting, while the well-fed and fatted sat on the lid to keep
it down.  But we who have lived to see the lid blown off
Russia and feel the growl and grumble of the bowels of all
the earth need not overstrain our ears to hear Brann
laughing now in that good Baptist Hell to which a bullet in
the back gave him the passport.



POTIPHAR'S WIFE.
STORY OF JOSEPH       
REVISITED

For more than six-and-thirty centuries the brand of the
courtesan has rested on the brow of Potiphar's wife.  The
religious world persists in regarding her as an abandoned
woman who wickedly strove to lead an immaculate he-virgin
astray.  The crime of which she stands accused is so unspeakably
awful that even after the lapse of ages we cannot refer to the
miserable creature without a moan.  Compared with her infamous
conduct old Lot's dalliance with his young daughters and David's
ravishment of Uriah's wife appear but venial faults, or even
shine as spotless virtues.

The story of Mrs. Potiphar's unrequited passion may be
strictly true; but if so the world has changed most
wondrously.  It transcends the probable and rests upon
such doubtful ex parte evidence that a modern court
would give her a certificate of good character.  It is not in
accord with our criminal code to damn a woman on the
unsupported deposition of a young dude whom she has had
arrested for attempted ravishment.  Had Joseph simply filed
a general denial and proven previous good character we
might suspect the madame of malicious prosecution; but he
doth protest too much.

Mrs. Potiphar was doubtless a young and pretty woman. 
She was the wife of a wealthy and prominent official of
Pharaoh's court, and those old fellows were a trifle exacting
in their tastes.  They sought out the handsomest
women of the world to grace their homes, for sensuous
love was then the supreme law of wedded life.  Joseph was
a young Hebrew slave belonging to Mrs. Potiphar's
husband, who treated him with exceptional consideration
because of his business ability.  One day the lad found
himself alone with the lady.  The latter suddenly turned in a
fire alarm, and Jacob's favorite son jogged along Josie in
such hot haste that he left his garment behind.  Mrs.
Potiphar informed those who responded to her signal of
distress that the slave had attempted a criminal assault. 
She is supposed to have repeated the story to her husband
when he came home, and the chronicler adds, in a tone of
pained surprise, that the old captain's "anger was kindled." 
Neither Mrs. Potiphar's husband nor her dearest female
friends appear to have doubted her version of the affair,
which argues that, for a woman who moved in the highest
social circles, she enjoyed a reasonably good reputation.

But Joseph had a different tale to tell.  He said that the
poor lady became desperately enamored of his beauty and
day by day assailed his continence, but that he was as deaf
to her amorous entreaties as Adonis to the dear
blandishments of Venus Pandemos.  Finally she became so
importunate that he was compelled to seek safety in flight. 
He saved his virtue but lost his vestments.  It was a narrow
escape, and the poor fellow must have been dreadfully
frightened.  Suppose that the she-Tarquin had
accomplished her hellish design, and that her victim had
died of shame?  She would have changed the whole
current of the world's history!  Old Jacob and his other
interesting if less virtuous sons, would have starved to
death, and there would have been neither Miracles nor
Mosaic Law, Ten Commandments nor Vicarious
Atonement.  Talmage and other industrious exploiters of
intellectual tommyrot, now ladling out saving grace for
fat salaries, might be as unctuously mouthing for Mumbo
Jumbo, fanning the flies off some sacred bull or bowing the
knee to Baal.  The Potiphar-Joseph episode deserves the
profoundest study.  It was an awful crisis in the history of
the human race!  How thankful we, who live in these latter
days, should be that the female rape fiend has passed into
the unreturning erstwhile with the horned unicorn and
dreadful hippogriff, the minotaur and other monsters that
once affrighted the fearful souls of men--that sensuous
sirens do not so assail us and rip our coat-tails off in a foul
attempt to wreck our virtue and fill our lives with fierce
regret.  True, the Rev. Parkhurst doth protest that he was
hard beset by beer and beauty unadorned; but he seems to
have been seeking the loaded "schooner" and listening for
the siren's dizzy song.  Had Joseph lived in Texas he could
never have persuaded Judge Lynch that the lady and not
he should be hanged.  The youngster dreamed himself into
slavery, and I opine that he dreamed himself into jail.  With
the internal evidence of the story for guide, I herewith
present, on behalf of Mrs. Potiphar, a revised and
reasonable version of the affaire d'amour.

Joseph was, the chronicler informs us, young "a goodly
person and well favored."  His Hebraic type of manly
beauty and mercurial temperament must have contrasted
strangely with Mrs. Potiphar's dark and stolid countrymen. 
Mistress and slave were much together, the master's duties
requiring his presence near his prince.  Time hung heavily
on the lady's hands and, as an ennui antidote, she
embarked in a desperate flirtation with the handsome
fellow, for Egypt's dark-eyed daughters dearly love to play
fast and loose with the hearts of men.  Of course it was
very wrong; but youth and beauty will not be strictly bound,
the opportunity seemed made for mischief, and Mrs. Potiphar cared
little for her lord--a grizzly old warrior who
treated her as a pretty toy his wealth had purchased, to be
petted or put aside at pleasure.

A neglected wife whose charms attract the admiring eyes of
men may not depart one step from the straight and narrow
path, but her husband's honor stands ever within the pale
of danger.  Let that husband whose courtship ceased at
Hymen's shrine, who is a gallant abroad and a boor at
home, keep watch and ward, for homage is sweet even to
wedded women.

While Potiphar played the petty tyrant and exacted of his
wife a blind obedience, Joseph sang to her songs she
loved--plaintive tales of tender passion, of enchanted
monarchs and maids of matchless beauty.  He culled the
fairest flowers from the great garden and wove them into
garlands to deck her hair, dark as that lingering night which
Moses laid upon the Valley of the Nile.  He gave her a
thousand little attentions so grateful to womankind, and
worshiped her, not presumptuously, but with the sacred
awe of a simple desert child turning his face to greet the
rising sun.  They were of the same age,--that age when the
heart beats in passionate rebellion against cold precepts,
the blood riots in the veins like molten rubies and all life
seems made for love, for day dreams golden as the dawn,
for sighs and sweet companionship.  What wonder that she
sometimes into the cool left her lord to his heavy slumbers
and crept into the cool gardens with the handsome Hebrew
boy; that they walked, hand clasped in hand, beneath the
tall palms that nodded knowingly, and whispered sweet
nothings while the mellow moonlight quivered on the Nile
and sad Philomela poured forth her plaintive song like a
flood of lover's tears?  All day long they were alone
together,--those children of the world's youth, when life was
strong and moral law was weak.  When the summer sun
rode high in heaven and sent his burnished shafts
straight down into the white streets and swooning gardens;
when the great house was closed to shut out the blinding
glare and in the court cool fountains cast their grateful
spray, what wonder that she bade him sit at her feet and
sing the love songs of his native land, wild prototypes of
those which Solomon poured from the depths of his
sensuous soul to his sweet Rose of Sharon?

 "Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair;
   Thou hast dove's eyes, thy lips are like a thread of scarlet,
   Thy breast like young roes that feed among the lilies.
   Set me as a seal upon thy heart, a seal upon thy arm,
   For love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."

The song dies out and the languorous stillness is broken
only by the splashing of the fountains in the great marble
basins and the drowsy hum of a bee among the blossoms. 
The lad's head has sunk down upon the lady's knee and
she is watching the tears trembling on his drooping lashes
and wondering, with a little thrill of pain, if he has a
sweetheart in his own land, of whom he is so sadly
dreaming.  She thanks him for the song in a voice low and
sweet as the musical ripple of the sacred river among the
reeds--she dazzles him with her great Egyptian eyes, those
ebon orbs in which ever lurks the sensuous splendor of a
summer night's high moon.  Her hand strays carelessly
among his curls as she punctuates with sighs and tears his
oft-told tale of unkind brethren, the gloomy cave, the coat of
many colors dipped in blood of the slaughtered kid, the
cruel goad of godless Midianite, driving him on and on
through burning sands and 'neath a blazing sun, far from
his tearful mother and mourning sire.  How cruel the fates
to consign to slavery one born to be a king!  His master
is a hard man and covetous, but her pleadings shall yet
purchase sweet liberty for old Jacob's son, that he may
fulfill the high dreams of which he has told her--may answer
the midnight messages of Israel's God and triumph over
those wicked brethren.  Perhaps--who knows?--in his own
land he will become a mighty prince and treat with proud
Pharaoh on equal terms.  Will he remember her, his only
friend in a land of foes?  Will he think of her when Ammon
is o'erthrown and proud Moab pays his tribute?  Ah, no! 
When a crown of jewels blazes on his brow and the sack-
cloth of the slave is exchanged for imperial purple, he'll
think no more of the lonely little woman by Nilus bank, who
prays that Isis will magnify his power, that Osiris will shield
him when the Hebrew sword rings on the Hivite spear.  He
will take to wife some fair cousin of Esau's house, a maid
more beauteous far than those who drink the sweet waters
of the south.  Old Abram's daughters are fair and have
dove's eyes; their lips are as threads of scarlet and their
breasts like young roes that feed among the lilies.  Does
not the song say so?  But those of Egypt--oh, unhappy
Egypt!

 "Love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave."

She bends low and whispers the line upon his lips, while
her fragrant breath, beating upon his cheek, sinks into his
blood like the jasmines' perfume,--more dangerous to the
soul than Aphrodite's kisses or Anacreon's drunken song. 
By such arts did Cleopatra win the master spirit of the world
and make the mailed warrior her doting slave, indifferent
alike to honor and to duty, content but to live and love. 
What wonder that the callow shepherd lad, unskilled in
woman's wile, believed that his mistress loved him?--
that his heart went out to the handsome coquette in a
wild, passionate throb in which all Heaven's angels sang
and Hell's demons shrieked!

A beautiful woman!  Not the beauty of Greece, on which we
gaze as upon some wondrous flower wafted from Elysian
Fields, and too ethereal for this gross world; nor that of
Rome, with Pallas' snow-clad bosom and retrospective eye;
but the sensuous beauty of the far south, that casts a
Circean spell upon the souls of men.  Her eyes are not
dove's eyes that softly shine along the path to Heaven, but
wandering fires that light the way to Hell.  Her lips are not a
thread of scarlet, chaste as childhood and dewy as the
dawn, but the deep sullen red of a city swept with flames. 
Her breasts are not like young roes that feed among the
lilies, but ivory hemispheres threaded with purple fire and
tinged with sunset's tawny gold.  Reverently as though
touching divinity's robe, Joseph caresses the wanton curls
that stream like an inky storm-cloud over the shapely
shoulders--he puts the little hands, heavy with costly gems,
back from the tearful face and holds them with a grasp so
fierce that the massy rings of beaten gold bruise the tender
flesh.  Mrs. Potiphar starts up, alarmed by his unwonted
boldness--she reads his face with a swift glance that tells
her he is no longer a lad, a pretty boy to be trifled with for
the amusement of an idle hour.  The Cupid's bow had
faded forever from his lip and childhood's innocence from
his eye; he has crossed life's Rubicon, has passed at one
stride from the Vale of Youth with its trifles and its idle
tears, its ignorance of sex and stainless love, to Manhood's
rugged mountains, where blazes Ambition's baleful star and
the fires of passion ever beat, fiercer than those that sweep
Gehenna's sulphurous hills.

Even while her cheek crimsons with anger and her heart
flutters with fear, the woman glories in Joseph's guilty
love, sweet incense to her vanity, evidence of her
peerless beauty's infernal power.  She retreats a step as
from the brink of an abyss, but farther she cannot fly, for
there is a charm in her companion's voice, potent as old
Merlin's mystic chant--tones low and sweet as music in
dreams by maids who sleep in Dian's bosom, yet wilder,
fiercer than trumpets blown for war.  As a sailor drawn to
his doom by siren song, or a bird spellbound by some
noxious serpent, she advances fearfully and slow until she
is swept into his strong arms and held quivering there like a
splotch of foam in a swift eddy of the upper Nile.  The room
swims before her eyes and fills with mocking demons
that welcome her to the realm of darkness; the fountains'
ripple sounds like roaring thunder, in which she reads the
angry warning of Egypt's gods, while beneath the accursed
magic of the kisses that burn upon her lips, her blood
becomes boiling wine and rushes hissing through a heart of
ice.  The mocking demons turn to angels with Joseph's
handsome face and crown her with fragrant flowers: the
threat'ning thunders to music sweet as Memmon's matin
hymn or accepted lover's sighs, heard 'neath the harvest
moon,--she is afloat upon a sapphire sea beneath a sunset
sky, the West Wind's musky wing wafting her, whither she
neither knows nor cares.

But the angels and the fragrant flowers, the music sweet as
lover's sighs and the sapphire sea, the sunset sky and
Zephyrus' musky wing are dreams; the blistered lips and
poor bruised bosom, the womanly pride humbled in the
dust and wifely honor wounded unto death--these alone are
real!  With an involuntary cry of rage and shame, a cry that
is half a prayer and half a curse--a cry that rings and
reverberates through the great sleepy house like a maniac's
shriek heard at midnight among the tombs--she flings
herself sobbing and moaning upon the marble floor. 
The drowsy slave starts up as from a dream, quivering in
every limb like a coward looking upon his death.  He tries to
raise the groveling victim of his unbridled lust, but she
beats him back; he pleads for mercy, but she calls him
ungrateful slave, base Hebrew dog and prays all Egypt's
gods to curse her conqueror.  There's a rush of feet along
the hall, there's a clash of weapons in the court, and here
and there and everywhere tearful maids are calling to their
mistress, the Sweet One and Beautiful, dear Daughter of
the Dawn, Lily of the Nile, while brawny eunuchs,
barelimbed and black as Hell's own brood, are vowing dire
vengeance even upon the King himself if he has dared to
harm her.  The culprit glances with haggard face and wildly
pleading eyes at the woman, once so imperial in her pride,
now cowering a thing accursed, clothed only with her
shame and flood of ebon hair.  The great sun, that hung in
mid-heaven like a disk of burnished brass when she first
forgot her duty, descends like a monstrous wheel of blood
upon the western desert and through the casement pours a
ruddy glow over the prostrate figure a marble Venus
blushing rosy red.  Joseph casts his coarse garment over
his companion as one might clothe the beauteous dead,
and turns away, the picture of Despair, the avatar of guilty
Fear.
     
. . .

Love is a dangerous game to play, and oft begun in wanton
mischief ends in woeful madness.  In the first flush of
shame and rage Mrs. Potiphar was eager to punish the
slave's presumption, even though herself o'erwhelmed in
his ruin; but hate, though fierce, is a fickle flame in the
female heart, and seldom survives a single flood of tears. 
Already Joseph's handsome face is haunting her--already
she is dreaming o'er the happy hours by Nilus' bank, where
first he praised her wondrous beauty--beneath the
nodding palms when the fireflies blazed and the bulbul
poured its song.  The love that has lain latent within her
bosom, or burned with friendship's unconsuming flame,
awakes like smoldering embers fanned by desert winds and
fed with camphor wood, enveloping all her world.  She
longs to leave the loveless life with her sullen lord; to cast
from her as things accursed the gaudy robes and glittering
gems; to fly with the shepherd lad to the deep cool forests
of the far east and dream her life away in some black tent
or vine-embowered cot--to take his hand in hers and
wander on to the world's extreme verge, listening to the
music of his voice.  The great house, once her pride, has
become a grewsome prison, the jailer a grizzly gorgon who
conjured her with the baleful gleam of gold to cast her
beauty on Mammon's brutish shrine.  She hardens her
heart against him and pities herself, as wives are wont to
do who have dragged the dear honor of their husbands in
the dust--she persuades herself that love has cast radiant
glory about her guilt and sanctified her shame.  Oh woman,
what a paradox thou art!  When the descending sun
touched the horizon's rim Mrs. Potiphar could have plunged
a poisoned dagger through the heart of her paramour and
mocked his dying moan; the great globe of fire has not bid
the world good night, yet she is weeping because of the
bitter words with which she drove him forth.

"Love is strong as death."

She repeats the line again and again.  Oh my Israel, is the
grave the limit of thy love?  Wert thou dead, fair boy, Egypt
would inclose thy sacred ashes in a golden urn and wear it
ever between her breasts--would make for thee a living
sepulcher and thou shouldst sleep in the vale of Love,
between the rosy mountains of Desire.  Wert thou dead--

The slaves!  They will tell their master the wild words
she spoke against her love--against his life.  She must
seal their lips, must command their silence.  Too late! 
Even as she lays her hand on the silver bell the heavy
tread of her husband's brass-shod feet is heard in the long
hall, ringing upon the bare stone floor in rapid, nervous
rhythm, so different from the usual majestic tread of
Pharaoh's chief slaughterman.  The slaves have already
spoken!  A faintness as of death falls upon her; but she is a
true daughter of false Egypt, and a wiser than Potiphar
would find in her face no shadow of the fear that lies heavy
on her heart.  The game is called and she must play not for
name and fame, but for love and life.  Her husband
confronts her, ferocity incarnate,--the great cord-like veins
of the broad, low brow and massive neck knotted and
black, his eyes blazing like the orbs of an angry lion seen
by the flickering light of a shepherd's fire.  He essays to
speak, but his tongue is thick, his lips parched as one
stricken with the plague, and instead of words there comes
through his set teeth a hoarse, hissing sound as of the
great rock serpent in its wrath.  His glance falls upon
Joseph's garment, the gleaming sword leaps from its
sheath and he turns to seek the slave.  She lays her hand
lightly upon his arm, great Egypt's shield, a pillar of living
brass; she nestles in the grizzly beard like some bright
flower in a weird forest; she kisses the bronzed cheek as
Judas did that of our dear Lord and soothes him with pretty
truths that are wholly lies.

Joseph is a good boy, but sometimes overbold.  Poor child! 
Perhaps her beauty charmed away his senses and made
him forget his duty.  She bade him sing to beguile a tedious
hour, and he sang of love and looked at her with such a
world of worship in his eyes that she grew angry and
upbraided him.  Let it pass; for, by the mystic mark of Apis,
she frightened the boy out of his foolish fever.

She laughs gleefully, and the gruff old soldier suffers her to
take his sword, growling meanwhile that he likes not these
alarms--that she has marshaled Egypt's powers to battle
with a mirage.  The game is won; but guilt will never rest
content, and oft reveals itself by much concealment.  It is
passing strange, she tells him tearfully, that every male who
looks upon her, whether gray-headed grand-sire or
beardless boy, seems smitten with love's madness.  She
knows not why 'tis so.  If there is in her conduct aught to
challenge controversy she prays that he will tell her.  The
old captain's brow again grows black.  He leads her where
the fading light falls upon her face, and, looking down into
her eyes as tho' searching out the secrets of her soul, bids
her mark well his words.  The wife who bears herself
becomingly never hears the tempter's tone or knows aught
of any love but that of her rightful lord.  Pure womanhood is
a wondrous shield, more potent far than swords.  If she has
been approached by lawless libertine, he bids her, for the
honor of his house, to set a seal upon her lips, instead of
bruiting her shame abroad as women are wont to do whose
vanity outruns their judgment.

. . .

Potiphar determines to watch his wife.  It had never
occurred to him that she could possibly go astray; but he
has learned from her own confession that she is a flirt, and
he knows full well that a married coquette is half a
courtesan.  Suspecting that Joseph's offense is graver than
his wife set forth, he casts him into prison.  The
inexperienced youth, believing the full extent of his guilt has
been blazoned to the world, and frightened beyond his wits
by armed men and clank of chains, protests with tears and
sighs that he is more sinned against than sinning.  It is
the old story of Adam improved upon--he not only damns
the woman, but denies the apple.

Joseph's posterity, hating Egypt with their whole heart and
intent on glorifying Israel and Israel's God, became the only
historians of this original scandal in high life; and thus was
a youth, probably neither better nor worse than his
brethren, raised to the dignity of a demi-god, while a vain
young wife is condemned through all the ages to wear a
wanton's name.  The story probably contains a moral--
which wives may look for if they will.

. . .

Of course this account of Mrs. Potiphar's seduction is a
fancy sketch; but it is a true pen-picture of what too often
happens in this fair land of ours, and may be perused with
profit by many a Benedict.  The number of unfaithful wives
whose sin becomes the public shame is simply appalling;
yet no criminal was ever so cautious, so adept in the art of
concealment as the woman who values her reputation
above her honor.  There is no secret a man will guard with
such vigilance as his amours, no copartner in iniquity he
will shield with such fidelity as a paramour.  The bandit may
turn state's evidence, and the assassin confess beneath the
noose; but the roue will die protesting that his mistress is
pure as the driven snow.

And yet woman is by nature as true to her rightful lord as
the needle to the magnetic north,--as faithful to her
marriage vows as the stars to their appointed courses. 
When a wife "goes astray" the chances are as one to
infinity that the misstep is her husband's fault.  Love is the
very life of woman.  She can no more exist without it than
the vine can climb heavenward without support,--than it can
blossom and bear fruit without the warm kiss of the summer
sun.  Woman's life is a flame that must find an altar upon
which to blaze, a god to glorify; but that sacred fire will
not forever burn 'mid fields of snow nor send up incense
sweet to an unresponsive idol, even though it bears the
name of husband.  The man who courts the wife as
assiduously as he did his sweetheart, makes the same
sacrifice to serve her, shows the same appreciation of her
efforts to please him, need never fear a rival.  He is lord
paramount of her heart, and, forsaking all others, she will
cleave unto him thro' good and thro' evil, thro' weal and
thro' woe, thro' life unto death.  But the man who imagines
his duty done when he provides food, shelter and fine
raiment for the woman he has won; who treats her as if she
were a slave who should feel honored in serving him; who
vents upon her hapless head the ill-nature he would like to
pour into the faces of his fellow-men, but dares not, were
wise to heed the advice which Iago gave to the Moor.

Woman is more subtle than her ancient enemy, the
serpent, and woe to the man who attempts to tread her
beneath his feet!  True it is that all women who find the
hymeneal rites but an unreading of that enchanted spell in
which they worshiped devils as demi-gods; between whose
eager lips the golden apples of Hesperides prove but Dead
Sea fruit; for whom the promised Elysium looms but a
parched Sahara, do not seek in forbidden fields to feed
their famished hearts; but it is well for the peace of mind of
many a husband who neither dotes nor doubts, that black
dishonor oft goes hand in hand with blissful ignorance.

The philosophic world rejects the story of Joseph, having
long ago learned that he-Dians live only in childish legend
and Della-Cruscan poetry.  As an ideal it reverses the
natural relation of the sexes; as an example it is worse than
worthless, for instead of inspiring emulation the young
Hebrew's heroic continence only provokes contempt. 
Men worship at the shrine of Solomon's wisdom, of
Moses' perseverance, of David's dauntless courage, but
crown the altar of Joseph with asses' ears.  Such foolish
Munchausenisms give to young girls a false idea of the
opposite sex, relax their vigilance and imperil their virtue. 
From such ridiculous romances, solemnly approved by an
owl-like priesthood, sprung that false code--so insulting to
womankind--that a wife's honor is not committed to her own
keeping, but to the tender care of every man with whom
she comes in contact.  When a wife goes wrong a
hypocritical world rises in well-simulated wrath--which is too
often envy--and hurls its anathema maranatha at the head
of the "designing villain," as tho' his companion in crime
were born without brains and reared without instruction! 
The "injured husband"--who probably drove his wife to the
devil by studied neglect that starved her heart and wounded
her vanity--is regarded with contempt if he does not "make
a killing" for a crime against the social code which he would
himself commit.

I paint man as I find him, not as I would have him.  I did not
create him, or did his Architect ask my advice; hence it is
no fault of mine that his virtue's frail as ocean foam--not
mine the blame that while half a god he's all a beast. 
Mentally and sexually man is a polygamist, and, whatever
its moral value may be, monogamy does violence to the
law of his being.  It is a barrier against which he ever beats
like some wild beast of prey against restraining bars.  Give
him Psyche to wife and Sappho for mistress and he were
not content--would swim a river to make mad love to some
freckled maid.  It is likely that Leander had at home a wife
he dearly loved when he lost his life trying to reach fair
Hero's bower.  That the Lord expects little even of the best
of men when subjected to beauty's blandishments is proven
by his partiality to various princes and patriarchs who,
in matters of gallantry, may be regarded as pace-setters.

I am not the apologist of the godless rake, the defender of
the roue; but I have small patience with those mawkish
purists who persist in measuring men and women by the
same standard of morals.  We might as well apply the
same code to the fierce Malay who runs amuck and to
McAllister's fashionable pismires.  We might as wisely bring
to the same judgment bar Bengal's royal beast, crazed with
lust for blood, and Jaques' wounded deer, weeping in the
purling brook.  Each sex and genus must be considered by
itself, for each possesses its peculiar virtues and inherent
vices.  In all nature God intended the male to seek, the
female to be sought.  These he drives with passion's fiery
scourge, those he gently leads by maternal longings, and
thus is the Law of Life fulfilled,--the living tide runs ever on
from age to age, while divine Modesty preserves her name
and habitation in the earth.  A man's crown of glory is his
courage, a woman's her chastity .  While these remain the
incense rises ever from Earth's altar to Heaven's eternal
throne; but it matters not how pure the man if he be a
cringing coward, how brave the woman if she be a brazen
bawd.  Lucrece as Caesar were infamous, and Caesar as
Lucrece were a howling farce.

* * *
CHARITY.

St. Paul SAYS:  "Though I speak with the tongues of
men and angels and have not charity, I am become as
sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.  And tho' I have the
gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all
knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing."

So it appears that chin-music without charity is not
calculated to pay very large dividends in the interesting
ultimate; that a man may be full of faith, and pregnant with
prophecy, and chock-a-block with knowledge and redolent
of religious mystery,--that he may leak sanctification in the
musical accents of an angel and still be "nothing"--a pitiful
hole in the atmosphere, a chimera circulating in a vacuum
and foolishly imagining itself a man.

But what is charity?  You people who have prayers and
Bible readings before breakfast, while your hearts vibrate
between holiness and hash--between Christ and the cook--
should know; but it's dollars to doughnuts you don't.  You
probably imagine that when you present your out-of-fashion
finery to your poor relations, then wait for a vote of thanks
or a resolution of respect; that when you permit a tramp to
fill a long-felt want with the cold victuals in your cupboard,
which even your pug dog disdains, that the Recording
Angel wipes the tears of joy from his eyes with his wing-
feathers and gives you a page, while all Heaven gets gay
because of your excessive goodness.  That's because your
religious education has been sadly neglected.  If you would
read the Bible--and the ICONOCLAST--with more care you
couldn't make such mistakes.  St. Paul says (and, as the
country preacher remarked, I fully agree with him):

"And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and
though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it
profiteth me nothing."

In other words, a man can't draw on his bank account for
the price of a corner lot in the New Jerusalem.  He cannot
acquire so much as a souphouse ticket in that city not
made with hands by dying for the faith in the auto-da-fe. 
Almsgiving and charity may have no more affinity than the
philosophy of Plato and the political conversation of a
poll parrot!  Had you ever made the acquaintance of that
idea?  If not, I advise you to exchange visiting cards with it
before you forget its address.  It is not a "Brannism," I beg
to state! it is part of the Pauline theology--is strictly
orthodox.  There's not a single heretical sign warning you to
keep off the grass.  Almsgiving, and even the martyr's fiery
death, may be animated solely by hope of heavenly reward
or terrestrial fame,--by unadulterated selfishness--may be
regarded as a good investment.  Too many people give to
the poor only because it's "lending to the Lord"--and they
expect Standard Oil stock dividends.  They drop a plugged
nickel in the slot expecting to pull out a priceless crown of
gold,--they expect the Lord to present them with a full suit
of heavenly raiment in exchange for a cold potato or a pair
of frazzled pantaloons.  I want no partnership with a man
who tries to beat the God of the Jews in a trade.

Some of you wealthy men who, like Dives, fare
sumptuously every day, may donate a hundred dollars to
relieve the distress of the people of Starr county.  I hope
you will.  If given unostentatiously--and not for advertising
purposes or in hope of a heavenly reward--it will constitute
an act of charity; but not of the highest, noblest type, for it
will cost you no great sacrifice.  It is just as well, however,
to have a receipt for such a gift to show St. Peter.  If it
does not enable you to divide Abraham's bosom with
Lazarus the beggar, it may save you from the post-mortem
discomforts of Dives.

The two mites cast into the treasury by the poor widow
o'erbalanced all the gifts of those who gave of their
abundance; and a cup of cold water may carry with it more
of true charity, more of the spirit of the Prince of Peace,
than the largesse of the proudest plutocrat.

During the Civil War a grizzly old Yankee sergeant and
a young Confederate soldier, both badly wounded, lay
near each other between the lines, while above their
prostrate forms the fierce flood of metal swept back and
forth, a whistling, screaming hurricane of death.  The
sergeant had lain long unconscious, and he awoke racked
with fever and perishing with thirst.  Do any of you know
the horror of that thirst which gunshot wounds, abetted by a
blazing summer sun and the stifling fumes of powder-
smoke, produce?  It is the concentrated agony of hell. 
Thirst will break the courage of the bravest.  Even great
Caesar, upon whose imperial brow fear was afraid to sit,
cried for drink "like a sick girl."  The sergeant found his
canteen almost empty,--just a few spoonfuls left,--drops
more precious to him than all the gold of Ophir, than all the
pearls of Ind.  He was lifting the canteen to his parched lips
when his neighbor begged to share it.  He glanced at the
gray uniform and hesitated.  The Confederate was but a
boy and in his breast there stood a broken bayonet.  The
sergeant crawled over to him amid the plunging shot and
shell.

"'Tain't much, Johnny, an' I'm dry as a mackerel; but I'll
whack up."

He divided the precious drops with rigid impartiality and
gave the young Confederate his portion.  Then he raised
the canteen to his own lips, but again he hesitated.  The
landscape swam before his eyes, the pounding of the great
guns fell but faintly upon his ear, the Angel of Death had
set his seal upon the bronzed brow.  He handed the
canteen to his companion untasted.

"Take the rest of it, Johnny; I kinder guess I won't miss it
long."

Yet we imagine we are wonderfully charitable if we give a
few dollars from our abundance to feed the starving, or
send our cast clothing to the Relief Society!  Charity is
not a virtue you can measure in money.  Its abiding
place is not in the vest pocket.  Its home is the heart, and
not the little 2 X 4 dog-kennel heart either.  It only takes up
its abode where there is a mighty temple in which to
circulate itself and make grand music that rolls and
reverberates through all eternity--a temple flooded with
God's own sunshine and peopled with beautiful thoughts
and noble aspirations--a temple whose spires pierce the
highest Heaven and whose foundations are broad and deep
as humanity.  Such is the home of Charity, queen of all the
virtues.  Hear St. Paul:

"Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not;
charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth."  Now do you comprehend
what charity really is?  It is toleration, it is kindness, it is
humanity, it is truth, it is the spirit of God made manifest in
man.  He that gives liberally to the poor, to the church, to
education, to the campaign fund, yet says to his brother,
"Thou fool," because he's followed off after a different
political folly, or differs from him on the doctrine of
transubstantiation, is not staggering about under a load of
charity calculated to give him flat feet.  The supreme test of
a charitable mind is toleration for the opinions of others,--an
admission that perchance we do not know it quite all.  It is
much easier to give a $5 bill to a beggar than to forgive a
brother who rides his pitiless logic over our prejudices.  The
religious world has contributed countless millions to feed
the hungry and clothe the naked, but has never forgiven
Tom Paine for brushing the Bible contemptuously aside and
looking

 "Through nature up to nature's God."

Perhaps some future age will do justice to the memory of
the man to whose daring pen we are so largely indebted
for those dearly-prized privileges of free government,
to the ablest advocate of human liberty the world has
known, and whose piety was deep and fervent as that of
St. Paul himself.  But that cannot be until the freedom for
which he toiled and prayed extends to the mind as well as
the body; until the shackles are stricken from the brain as
well as the hand,--until the sun of Knowledge dispels the
empoisoned mists of Ignorance and divine Charity
dethrones unreasoning Hate.  Then will the infidel freely
concede that Servetus' murder was rather the fault of his
age than Calvin's crime, and the Christian will find in Paine,
if not a guide, at least a learned philosopher and a loyal
friend.

Charity assumes as many shapes as Prospero's busy
sprite.  I was once waiting for a train in a small Missouri
town, where everybody turns out to "see the keers come
in."  A big, blustering fellow, well filled with booze, was
making himself generally obnoxious, and the village
constable approached him kindly and tried to quiet him. 
Instead of subsiding, the boozer whipped out a big six-
shooter and began blazing away at the representative of
the peace and dignity of the state.  The constable threw his
hand to his hip, but instead of pulling his gun sprang
forward, disarmed the hoodlum, cracked him over the head
with his own battery and sent him about his business.  The
officer looked as shamed after the melee as though he had
stolen a sheep or scratched the Democratic ticket.  I
remarked that he'd taken unnecessary chances.

"What would you have done, mister?" he inquired.  I
replied that I would have filled that fellow's hide so full of
holes that it couldn't be stuffed with straw.

"Well," said he slowly, "I kum purty nigh doin' it.  But I jes'
thought as how 'twan't Jim a shootin', but his jag, an' then I
seemed ter see his kids a hangin' on th' gate a waitin'
fer him t, come home, an' his wife a worritin' about him, an'
I jis couldn,t do it.  I took chances fer them."

Involuntarily I removed my hat.  I felt that I was in the
presence of a God-created king.  "You're a philanthropist,"
I said.

"I dunno what them ar' maybe, mister," said he; "but I'm
glad Jim's gone home alive,--d--d glad!"

That was charity of the broadest, deepest kind that ever
held its godlike sway in the human soul,--a charity that will
brave death itself rather than wring the heart of helpless
woman or cloud the sunny face of childhood with the
orphan's tears.

"Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies
they shall fail; whether there be tongues they shall cease;
whether there be knowledge it shall vanish away."

"Charity never faileth."  The real article will stand the most
crucial test,--is never weighed and found wanting.  It never
persecutes because of honest difference of opinion.  It
never back-caps or boycotts.  It turns a deaf ear to the
tongue of scandal and heals the hurts made by the
poisoned arrows of hate.  "Charity suffereth long and is
kind." Its supreme example was given us from the cross: 
"Father, forgive them; they know not what they do." 
Prophecies fail; tongues are forgotten, and knowledge
fades like the evening sunlight before the dusky wing of
night; but Charity endureth forever.  "And now abideth
Faith, Hope and Charity, and the greatest of these is
Charity."

Faith is founded upon fallible human judgment.  A man
believes thus and so, not necessarily because it is so, but
because his head is built on a particular pattern or has had
a peculiar class of phenomena filtered through it.  The
average human head, like an egg, or a crock of clabber,
absorbs the flavor of its surroundings.  It is chiefly a
question of environment whether we grow up Democrats or
Republicans, Protestants or Catholics, Mormons or religious
mugwumps.  As a man's faith is inherited, or formed for him
by circumstances, he deserves little more credit or blame
therefor than for the color of his hair or the size of his ears.

Hope is Fancy's child; oft branded as an illegitimate, yet
esteemed above and beyond all the royal progeny of the
proudest intellect, enshrined in the sanctum sanctorum,
the veritable holy-of-holies of the human heart.  Hope is not
a virtue; it is but a rainbow with which Fancy paints the
black o'erhanging firmament, a golden shaft of sunlight with
which she gilds Life's rugged mountain peaks,--a melody
most divinely sweet with which she cheers the fainting soul
of man.

But greater than Faith, grander than Knowledge, brighter
than the star of Hope which gilds the cradle and illumes the
grave, is Charity, for 'tis the incarnation of heavenly Law,
the bright essence increate of eternal Love.

 * * *
THE SEVEN VIALS OF WRATH.
                          
A WORLD-WIDE WAR.

Unless all signs fail, the world is on the eve of a war such
as was never known in all the mighty cycles of human
history.  Lucky indeed will it be if the twentieth century is
not born amid the shock of universal battle.

Is our boasted civilization breaking down beneath its own
ponderous weight--the rotting props and pillars unable to
sustain the gilded roof?  Are the prophecies of
Scripture about to be fulfilled--the world rushing
headlong to the final catastrophe?

A murderous mania hath everywhere seized upon the
minds of men.  The pulse of the race is beating the reveille;
the soul of the world is sounding "boots and saddles." 
Savagery is reasserting itself--the Christian nations are
further than ever before from that age of gold,

     "When the war-drum throbs no longer,
     And the battle-flags are furled
     In the parliament of man,
     The federation of the world."

Peace?  "There is no peace war is inevitable."  The ostrich
may avoid seeing the approach of the fierce simoon by
hiding his head in the sand, but cannot stay its onward
march.  The craze for slaughter, the lust for blood, is
abroad in the land.  The stars are evil, and Ate, ranging hot
from Hell, plants her burning feet on every brow.

For years the brute passions of man have had no outlet--a
prolonged peace hath become that good custom which doth
corrupt the world.  A new generation hath arisen in Europe
and America which knows naught of the horrors of war, but
is intoxicated by its glory.  Its superfluous energy must find
expression, its pent-up passions are ready for explosion.  It
is all aweary of these piping times of peace--wildly eager for
the glorious pomp and circumstance of war--the bullet's
mad hiss and the crash of steel.  Civilized man is but an
educated savage sooner or later his natural ferocity will
demand its pound of flesh.

. . . . . .

I know not whether Deity or Devil be the author of war.  All
human advancement is born of strife.  Only warlike
nations march in the van of the world's progress--prolonged
peace has ever meant putrefaction.  The civilizations of
Greece and Rome were brightest when their blades were
keenest.  When the sword was sheathed there followed
social degradation and intellectual decay.  When all Europe
trembled at the haughty tread of her matchless infantry,
Spain was empress in the realm of mind.  The Elizabethan
age in England was shaped by the sword.  America's
intellectual preeminence followed the long agony of the
Revolution, and blazed like a banner of glory in the wake of
the Civil War.  The Reign of Terror gave forth flashes of
true Promethean fire--the crash of steel in the Napoleonic
war studded the heavens with stars.  It required an eruption
of warlike barbarians to awaken Italy from her lethargy,
while Celt and Saxon struck sacred fire from the shields of
the intrepid Caesars.  The Israelites were humble and
civilized slaves in Egypt, cowering beneath the lash and
finding a sweet savor in the fleshpots of the Pharaohs. 
Thrust forth into the wilderness, they became the fiercest of
all barbarians before giving us the Psalms of David and the
Song of Solomon.  They had to become conquering
warriors--had to be heroized--before they could breed
inspired poets.

The age of "blood offering" has not yet passed.  Is it
possible that these awful rites are necessary to foster that
spirit of self-sacrifice which marks the highest reach of
humanity? to feed the golden lamp of love? to inculcate the
virtue of valor?  Can heroes be forged only with the
hammer of Thor?  Is genius the child of blood and tears? 
Are wars the tidal waves in the mighty social sea, ordained
by the Deity to prevent putrefaction?  Was the Phoenix of
the ancients but an old civilization, enervated by luxury and
corrupted by peace, that could only be purified of its foul
dross and infused with new energy by fire?  Was that
poet inspired who declared that, "Whatever is, is right?"  I
do not know.

. . . . . .

The trend of events points to a war that will involve the
world--will align the Old against the New.  I will be told the
idea that Europe will combine against America is sheer
madness.  Is it even so?  Has the time arrived when young
men dream idle dreams and old men see lying visions? 
Scan the European press for six months past, and you will
find such an event foreshadowed by the ablest editors and
most distinguished diplomats.  The probable necessity of
such a coalition has been seriously discussed by various
European cabinets.

Great Britain is the pariah of nations, feared by most,
detested by all.  Continental Europe would gladly see her
humbled in the very dust.  Had war resulted from the
Venezuelan complication, England would, in all probability,
have been left without allies, albeit the president's
ultimatum was not relished by other transatlantic powers. 
Realizing his inability to cope with the Giant of the
Occident, the world's bully stopped blustering and began
sniffling about his beloved cousin across the sea and the
beatitude of arbitration.  The American Congress passed
resolutions of sympathy with the Cuban insurgents, and
from so slight a spark the Spanish people took fire.  Instead
of acting as peace-makers, the official organs of most
European governments proceeded to fan the flames--
encouraged Spain to resent the fancied affront by assuring
her that she would not lack powerful allies.  There was no
recognition by this government of Cuban independence; no
recommendation that we wrest the island from the
moribund nation that has so long misgoverned it; but a
semi-official expression of concern for men striving to
achieve their liberty afforded Europe a pretext to "get
together" and work off on a distant people that war
spirit, so long suppressed at home, lest it disturb the
balance of power.  The British journals, which had warbled
so sweetly anent their American cousins and "the
indissoluble bond of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood," when there
was a fair prospect that John Bull would have to toe the
scratch alone, at once forgot the blessed ties of
consanguinity and assured the bombastic Spaniard that he
would have "plenty of help should he decide to humble
American impudence."  The press of France and Germany
discoursed in much the same manner, while the diplomats
of those countries agreed that "Europe would yet find it
necessary to materially modify the Monroe Doctrine."  But
the Spaniard, believing discretion to be the better part of
valor, had apologized for the acts of his undiapered babes
and the excesses of his hungry beggars before his
neighbors could stiffen his backbone with their ostentatious
insolence.

The Monroe Doctrine, literally interpreted, is simply a
warning to transatlantic powers to keep off the American
grass--an official notice that they will not be permitted to
overrun and parcel out this continent regardless of human
rights as they have done in Asia and are doing in Africa. 
The "Doctrine" is ridiculous, in that it establishes a quasi-
protectorate over a number of petty powers that have no
valid excuse for existing; still it works no injury to any
European government not bent on international
buccaneering.  Uncle Sam's promulgation of the Monroe
Doctrine proves him a fool; Europe's frantic objection to it
demonstrates that she is a knave.

The Spanish incident served to show that the war spirit is
rife throughout Europe, and that her mighty armaments
cannot much longer be kept inactive.  It proved conclusively
that Europe is feverishly eager to set limits to the growing
power of this government while such limitation is yet
possible--that she cannot view with composure the slightest
inclination on the part of America to take a hand in the
world's politics.  With wealth aggregating seventy-five
billions, and as many millions of warlike Americans back of
it, the Monroe Doctrine becomes something more than an
iridescent dream.  When such a nation decides upon "a
vigorous foreign policy," the balance of power problem
cannot be long confined to the European continent--a fact
which explains the pernicious activity of transatlantic
governments during our late unpleasantness.

But all the danger of an international complication does not
come from across the sea.  The war spirit is well-nigh as
rife in this country as at Barcelona and Cadiz.  The great
mass of the American people would welcome a controversy
with any country, with or without good cause.  "The glory
of the young man is in his strength," and Uncle Sam is
young and strong.  He longs to grapple with his
contemporaries, to demonstrate his physical superiority.  He
has a cypress shingle on either shoulder and is trailing his
star-spangled cutaway down the plank turnpike.  While a
few mugwumps, like Josef Phewlitzer and Apollyon
Halicarnassus Below, and tearful Miss Nancys of the Anglo-
maniacal school, are protesting that this country wants
peace, Congress, that faithful mirror of public opinion, if not
always the repository of wisdom, proves that it is eager for
war.  And just so sure as the Cleveland interpretation of the
Monroe Doctrine is insisted upon, we are going to get it,
and that before babes now nursing wear beards.  And the
"Doctrine," as applied by the administration, will not only be
insisted upon, but public opinion will force the hands of our
public servants and compel them to push it further.  The
fact that it is distasteful to our transatlantic brethren makes
it ridiculously popular with a people determined to burn
gunpowder.  Aside from the epidemic of murder which
seems to have girdled the globe, the spirit of petty jealousy
and assumed superiority with which Americans are treated
in many European countries, has imbued this people with
the idea that the quickest way to win the respect of their
supercilious neighbors is to slaughter them.  Uncle Sam is
in an ugly humor and will suffer no legitimate casus belli
to be side-tracked by arbitration.  He is "dead tired" of
having the European ants get on him--of being harried by
petty powers whom he knows full well he could wipe from
the map of the world.  He is just a little inclined to do the
Roman Empire act--to take charge of this planet and run it
in accordance with his own good pleasure.  Some of these
days he's going to drive his box-toed boot under John Bull's
coat-tails so far that the impudent old tub of tallow can taste
leather all the rest of his life.

We may deplore this spirit of contention, but to deny its
existence were to write one's self down an irremediable
ass.  It is in evidence everywhere, from the American
senate to the country clown.  To argue against the war
spirit were like whistling in the teeth of a north wind.  You
cannot alter a psychological condition with a made-to-order
editorial.  It is urged that we should sing small, as we are
"not prepared for war."  We are always prepared. 
Hercules did not need a Krupp cannon--he was capable of
doing terrible execution with a club.  Samson did not wait to
forge a Toledo blade--he waltzed into his enemies with an
old bone and scattered their shields of iron and helmets of
brass to the four winds of Heaven.  The mighty armaments
of Europe are costly trifles; whenever America has been
called to fight she has revolutionized the science of
destruction.  It hath been said, "In time of peace prepare
for war."  Europe bankrupts herself to build steel cruisers
and maintain gigantic standing armies; America
prepares by strengthening her bank account and
developing her natural resources.  When the crisis comes
she has "the sinews of war," and brains and industry
quickly do the rest.  It was not necessary for Gulliver to
sleep in the land of the Lilliputs with a gun at his side.

Vast armies and costly fleets of battleships in time of peace
are indication of conscious weakness.  The Western Giant
goes unarmed; but let the embattled world tread upon his
coat-tails if it dares!  The American does not have to be
educated to soldiership--he's to the manner born.  Those
who can build are competent to destroy.  Our Civil War was
fought by volunteers; yet before nor since in all the
struggles of mankind were such terrible engines of
destruction launched upon land or sea.  Never did so many
bullets find their billets.  Never did men set their breasts
against the bayonet with such reckless abandon.  Never
were the seas incarnadined with such stubborn blood.  The
"Charge of the Six Hundred" was repeated a thousand
times.  The Pass of Thermopylae was emulated by
plowboys.  The Macedonian Phalanx was as nothing to the
Rock of Chickamauga.  The Bridge of Lodi was duplicated
at every stream.  The spirit of the Old Guard animated raw
recruits.  The Retreat of the Ten Thousand became but a
holiday excursion.  Sailors fought their guns below the
water line and went down with flying colors and ringing
cheers.

We have been more than once dangerously near a rupture
with European powers because of the ridiculous Monroe
Doctrine, which assumes for Uncle Sam a quasi-
protectorate over a horde of Latin-American oligarchies
masquerading as Republics.  We have now been fairly
warned that should such a catastrophe occur, we would
have to contend with more than one European power.  We
must either recede from the position we have assumed or
prepare to do battle for the very existence of this
government.  Such a war would draw all nations of the
earth into the bloody vortex.  If Russia held aloof from the
anti-American coalition, she would seize the opportunity to
push her fortunes in the Orient, making a collision with the
Moslem inevitable.  At such a time the latter would be intent
upon the extension of territory.  Occupy Western Europe
with an American war, and the Mohammedan would rise
against their oppressors.  Unfurl the sacred banner of the
Prophet, and millions of murderous fanatics would erase
the raids of Goth and Visigoth from the memory of
mankind.  Turkey, jeered at even by Spain, flouted even by
Italy , yet potentially the most powerful nation for evil upon
the earth, would spread as by magic over Roumania and
Austro-Hungary, and pour through the Alpine passes like a
torrent of fire upon Germany and France.  Back of the
much contemned "Sick Man of the East"--whom combined
Christendom has failed to frighten--are nearly two hundred
million people, scattered from the Pillars of Hercules to the
Yellow Sea, all eager to conquer the earth for Islam.  They
are warriors to a man; their only fear is that they will not
find death while battling with "the infidel dog" and be
translated bodily to the realm of bliss.  Within the memory
of living men Christian nations have turned their eyes with
fear and trembling to the Bosphorus.  Islam is the political
Vesuvius of Europe, and is once again casting its lurid light
athwart the troubled sky.  For years the Moslem has been
robbed without mercy and persecuted without remorse. 
The bayonet has been held at his throat while strangers
reviled his religion.  It is no part of his creed to love his
enemies and pray for those who despitefully use him.  The
Koran does not adjure him to turn the other cheek to the
smiter.  He has nursed his wrath to keep it warm, and
prayed for an opportunity to wreak barbaric vengeance
upon his oppressors.  When Christian Europe marches
forth to do battle with America she will need to wear armor
upon her back as well as upon her breast, for while terror
stalks before, Hell will lurk behind.

* * *
A STORY OF THE SEA.

There have been mortals, favorites of the gods, to whom it
was given to understand the language of the lower animals,
and such I have ever envied, for

      "Beast and bird have seen and heard
        That which man knoweth not."

Never could I get beyond an imperfect knowledge of their
alphabet, enabling me to spell out here and there a word of
little meaning; but the great ocean's never-ceasing speech
was ever plain to me, and many a midnight hour I have
paced the cool sands that girt my island home, and listened
with reverential awe to the secrets it whispered to the
sensuous southern breeze that kissed its bosom--strange
stories of wreck and wraith, wild wars and desperate deeds,
mingled with those of love and honor, shame and sacrifice,
crowding upon each other like spectres in a dream.

One night when the new moon hung like a silver crescent
pendent from Venus' flaming orb, in a summer sky thick
inlaid with patines of pure gold, I heard the lazy waves
breaking like slumb'rous thunder upon the long, low beach,
and said, "The sea is calling me!" and I went.  Far out
upon the long pier, where the waves could dash their spray
like a shower of cool pearls in my face, I lingered long
and listened to a story, sad and strange as a sweet-voiced
woman telling in a foreign tongue, and punctuating with
tears and sighs, a tale of true love turned awry.

Upon the beach they walked in days that seem to man
long, long ago.  How brief and strange the little lives of
men, and so beset with customs framed to cramp the heart
and curse the soul before its time!  To me,--here since
Time began to build that bridge of sighs and tears that link
the two eternities--it seems but yesternight that, hand in
hand they wandered here, so wrapt in happiness born of
equal love that they heeded not my glories spread forth to
tempt their praise.  I curled my snowy spray about their
feet; flashed back the silver beams of harvest moon in one
long, shimmering sheet of mellow light; rolled waves of
brilliant phosphorescence, that seemed like silver billows,
diamond-studded, breaking on a beach of gold, and sang
the sweetest odes of the poets of ten thousand years; but
they heard nor saw aught but the beating of their hearts in
holy rhythm and the love-light flaming like fires celestial in
each other's eyes.

Anon, bare-armed, bare-limbed, shamed yet happy, they
sought the wave, and I cradled them on my bosom and
heard them whisper of laws defied and cruel customs set at
naught, and the higher law of love; but fearful she spoke
and sighed, yet clung the closer to him, as though the earth
and sea contained hut one perfect model of a man and that
were he.

Hour by hour they hovered near me, and a thousand times
she swore to him that their lives were so entwined that
separation were death to her, and kissed his lips, his eyes,
his hands, and wished she were his wife that they might
blazon to the great round world the love they fain would
hide from Heaven.

One little year went by and they came again, not walking
hand in hand.  He spoke to her and she answered with
bitter scorn.  He touched with trembling lips upon the old
days when love was lord of their two lives, but she mocked
at love and him and bade him leave her.  Then he that was
wont to rule first learned to sue, and vainly, for her heart
was cold as the ashes of long-forgotten kings, cruel as
wintry winds blown across icy northern seas.  "It is a guilty
love," she said, and he looked at her as if doubting that he
heard, then turned and went like one that dreamed; for
thought of wrong to her had dwelt not with him; he had but
worshiped her as devout Sabaean might the sun and
host of Heaven.

Again he came, but he was all alone.  Long and lonely he
paced the dreary beach beneath a wintry sky, until the cold
mists seemed changed to mellow light, the stormy sky to
one of summer, gemmed by myriad stars and queened by
harvest moon; the cool wind sweeping o'er the barren
waste to music and the merry laughter of men and maids;
and she was by his side, her love-lit eyes making the blood
dance through every vein.  He put forth his hand to her, but
the sky changed from gold to lead, the driftweed blew about
his feet, the cold mist settled down upon him and crept with
icy fingers into his heart, and he cursed the lying vision, the
shrieking wind, the cold mist and the leaden sky; cursed the
day that he first saw her, and said to the waves that
tumbled at his feet:  "I must be mad.  The curse of my
race hath fallen upon me; else why do I see that which is
not, hear voices that are far away?  Why do I cherish the
image of a fickle woman, who, swept along by a gust of
passion or sickly sentiment, thought for a day she loved
me, but did not, nor ever loved aught in life but her own
selfish self?"

And he called her name to the wind and waves but
coupled with it a curse, deep and bitter, as those that
burst in sulphur-breath from the parched lips of the
damned; and a voice came back from out the gloom that
seemed to mock him.  Furious as a demon disturbed at
some hellish rite, he turned and shrieked to the mocking
voice and bade it come to him that he might wreak upon its
owner such vengeance as would appall the world.

The far lights shone like pale ghosts of lights through the
driving mist, and in them loomed two weird forms that
seemed an hundred cubits high.  Furious he rushed upon
and smote them down upon the wet sand and trampled
them, and strove with feet and hands to kill; but they cried
out for mercy on their lives,--that they were honest
fishermen who, hearing a cry but faintly above the roaring
waves, had answered it, thinking some boatman might have
met mishap and called for aid.  The flood of anger spent in
blows, he helped them up, wiped the blood and sand from
their bronzed faces, gave them his scant purse, and bidding
them drink a bumper that hell-fiends might drag him from
the world before the morn sent them on their way.

The gray dawn found him sleeping with his face upon the
wet sand, once trodden by the feet that now trampled on
his heart.  Then I sent waves, cool and sweet, to kiss his
cheek, and he awoke, and waking, said:

"Kisses for me?  They are cold, great Mother Ocean; but
not so cold as love burned out, leaving but the bitter ashes
of contemptuous pity.  I dreamed that I was afloat upon thy
bosom with her I did so dearly love, and thou wast bearing
us beneath a sunset sky to a fair island, fringed with palms
and musical with songs of birds and rippling springs, where
we two should live forever; that as we floated thus Love's
goddess descended from a golden cloud and opening the
white bosom of my bride, yet not my bride, took
thence her heart and pressed from it a black drop that fell
upon the molten sea, and taking form became a hideous
monster that cried, 'My name is Selfishness,' and vanished
in the wave.  Then breathing upon the cold heart ethereal
flame that made it throb like a hero's pulse when trumpets
are blown for war, she replaced it, healed the snowy globe
with a touch, and, smiling upon me, was caught into the
golden cloud that seemed framed of music and the perfume
of a thousand flowers.  A round arm stole about my neck
and we floated heart to heart on to the haven that was to
be our Heaven.

"A curse upon your briny waters that seem a world of bitter
tears, rank with dead men's bones and the rotting hulls of
ships!  They have called me back to thy dreary, ever-
moaning verge to mock myself for loving one who scorns;
for wasting my hot heart upon a block of frozen stone,
hoping by foolish prayers and unmanly tears to move the
gods to breathe into it the breath of human life,--to prevail,
even as did that old Greek, who became enamored of a
statue, less divinely formed, but with the self-same heart.

"'Tis madness leads me to this folly,--the old, old curse that
hath hung about our house, like a baleful shadow, for thrice
a hundred years, bursting at times into bloody feuds without
apparent cause, and dreadful mutinies against the laws of
man and will of God.  'Tis vain to further fight with fate! 
'Twill drag me down, even as it did my great-grandsire, who
climbed fame's dizzy heights and stood, poised in mid-
Heaven, the master mind of Britain's mighty world; then,
like a tall mountain pine blasted at the top by the writhen
bolts of God, plunged, a falling star, to the depths of
everlasting darkness, and died a decade before his death. 
Nor iron will descended through my sire from a score of
barbarous kings; nor mother's prayerful amulets,
woven like golden threads through every low, sweet lullaby
that soothed my infancy, can avail me aught.  I can but
fight and fall.  She might have helped me beat back the
shadows; but would not--and 'tis well."

Then taking from a case a withered rose, he kissed it, cast
it far out upon the wave, watched it dance there, and said
with a bitter smile:

"The last link that binds me to other days, and it is broken. 
'The wage of sin is death,' and I am dead these long
months past and fathoms deep in Hell, yet walk the earth
because nor land nor sea will yield a resting-place among
its honored dead to one so ignobly slain."

* * *
APOSTLE VS. PAGAN.

COL. R. G. INGERSOLL:

My Dear Colonel:--I have not picked up my pen for the
express purpose of annihilating you at one fell swoop. 
Even were such the case, I do not flatter myself that your
impending doom would cause you to miss meals or lose
sleep, for you have become somewhat used to being
knocked off the Christmas tree by theological disputants
from the back districts.  At least once each lunar month for
long years past your quivering diaphragm has been
slammed up against the shrinking face of nature by mental
microbes, or walked on by ambitious doodle-bugs, who
wondered next day to learn that you were absorbing your
rations with clock-work regularity and doing business at the
same old stand.  I once saw an egotistical brindle-pup
joyfully bestride the collar of an adult wild-cat, and the
woeful result convinced me that Ambition and Judgment
should blithely foot it hand in hand.  That is why, my dear
Colonel, I approach you by siege and parallel, instead
of capering gayly down your right-o'-way like a youthful
William goat seeking a head-end collision with a runaway
freight train.

Without any view of paving the way for a future loan, I tell
you frankly that I admire you very much.  Your public
record and private life prove you to be one of God's
noblest--and rarest--works, an honest man.  That you are
the equal morally and the superior mentally of any man
who has presumed to criticize you must be conceded.  The
prejudices of honesty are entitled to consideration and the
judgment of genius to respect bordering on reverence; but
in this age of almost universal inquiry we cannot accept any
man, however wise, as infallible pope in the realm of
intellect and declare that from his ipse dixit there shall be
no appeal.  That were intellectual slavery, the most
degrading species of bondage, and it is your greatest glory
that you have ever been the apostle of liberty--liberty of the
hand and liberty of the brain.  More than all other men of
your generation you have fostered independence of thought
and the search for new truth; hence you cannot complain if
the fierce light which you have taught the world to turn full
and fair upon cults and creeds, should be employed to
discern the false logic of the great critic himself.

In your warfare upon hypocrisy and humbuggery I am with
you heart and soul.  I will set my foot as far as who goes
farthest in the exposure of frauds and fakes of every class
and kind, though hedged about with the superstitions of a
thousand centuries and licensed by prescriptive right to
perpetrate a brutal wrong; but it does not follow because
some church communicants are hypocrites that all religion
is a humbug; that because the Bible winks at incest and
robbery , murder and slavery, the book is but a tissue of
foolish falsehoods; that because Almighty God has not
seen proper to reveal Himself in all His supernal splendor to
Messrs. Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll the world
has no good reason for belief in His existence--that
because the dead do not come back to us with a diagram
of the New Jerusalem it were folly to believe the soul of
man immortal.

My dear Colonel, your mighty intellect has not yet
comprehended the philosophy of religion.  Oratorically you
soar like the condor when its shadow falls upon the highest
peaks of the Andes, but logically you grope among the
pestilential shadows of an intellectual Dismal Swamp, ever
mistaking shadow for substance.  You are frittering away
your mighty intellectual strength with the idiosyncrasies of
creeds and the clumsy detail of cults, instead of considering
the psychological phenomena of religion in its entirety.  You
descend from the realm of philosophy to assume the role of
scholastic--to dispute with little men anent points of
doctrine, to wrangle with dogmatists regarding their
conception of the Deity.

An ignoramus believes the Bible because of the miracles,
and because of the miracles an Ingersoll disbelieves it--and
both are equally blind .  A cult is simply an expression,
more or less crude, of the religious sentiment of a people,
the poor garment with which finite man clothes Infinity. 
Would you quarrel with Science because it is not yet made
perfect?  Would you condemn music because of an
occasional discord?  Would you reject history altogether
because amid a world of truth there are preserved some
fables such as tempted the satire of Cervantes?  Would
you banish the sun from Heaven because of its spots or
declare Love a monster because born of Passion?

The real question at issue is not whether the miracles
be fact or fable; Mahomet, the duly ordained prophet
of Allah, or an ignorant adventurer; Jonah, a delegate of the
Deity or the father of Populism--whether Christ was born of
an earthly father or drew his vigor direct from the loins of
omnipotent God.  Let us leave these details to the
dogmatists, these non-essentials to the sectarians.  Let us
consider the religion of the world in its entirety, with the full
understanding that all sects are essentially the same.

The core of all religion is the worship of a Supreme Power,
and the belief in man's immortality.  That is the central idea,
around which the imagination of man has woven many a
complicated web, some beautiful as Arachne's robe, some
barbaric and repulsive, but all of little worth.  The wise man,
the true philosopher, will not mistake the machinery of a
religion for the religious idea, the garment which ignorance
weaves for Omniscience, for God himself.

Even if we grant that the Creator never yet communicated
directly with the creature; that man has not seen with mortal
eyes beyond the veil that shrouds the two eternities, it does
not follow that religious faith is but arrant folly, that God is
non-extant and man but the pitiful creature of blind force. 
The dumb brute knows many things it was never taught,
and might not man, the greatest of the animal creation, be
gifted with a knowledge not based upon experience?  So
far as observation goes, there is provision for the
satisfaction of every passion, and the most powerful of all
passions is the dread of annihilation--the longing for
continual life.  If death ends all then here is a violation of
"natural law"--a miracle!  And you, my dear Colonel, do not
believe in miracles.  If we discard Revelation and take
Reason for our supreme guide, we must infallibly conclude
that the devotional instinct implanted in the heart of
the entire human race has its correlative that the longing for
immortal life which burns in the breast of man was not a
brutal mistake, else concede Nature a poor blunderer and
all this prattle anent her "immutable laws" mere nonsense.

Before ridiculing Revelation and mocking at Inspiration were
it not well to determine their true definition?  What is genius
but inspiration? and a new truth bodied forth to the world
but a revelation?  Were it not possible for a genius--an
inspired man--to trace the finger of God in the sunset's
splendor as easily as upon tables of stone? to hear the
voice of Omnipotence in the murmur of the majestic sea as
well as in the thunders of Sinai? to read a divine message
of undying love in a mother's lullaby as readily as in the
death and resurrection of a Deity?  If God can teach the
very insects wisdom and gift even the oyster with instinct,
can He communicate with man only by word of mouth or
the engraver's burin?  Examine the most beautiful woman
imaginable with a powerful microscope and you will turn
from her with a disgust similar to that of Gulliver when the
Brobdingnagian maid placed him astride the nipple of her
bosom.  Her skin, so fair to the natural eye and velvety to
the touch, becomes beneath the microscope suggestive of
the hide of a hairless Mexican dog.  Religion is a beautiful,
an enchanting thing if you do but look at it with the natural
eye; but when you employ the adventitious aid of the skeptic's
microscope you find flaws enough.  It were doubtful if even our
boasted American Government, of which you are so proud, could
stand such an examination and retain your confidence.

No, my dear Colonel; you will never banish worship from
the world by warring upon non-essentials.  You may
demonstrate that every recorded miracle is a myth--
that the founders of the various cults were but mortal men
and the writers of every sacred book but scheming priests. 
You may make it gross to sense that the Creator has never
held direct communication with the creature, and you have
but stripped religion of its tattered vestments--have not laid
the weight of your hand upon the impregnable citadel, the
universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man.  You
have never yet talked to the real question.  You reject
religion because Moses and Mahomet, Luther and Calvin
entertained crude ideas of the plans and attributes of the
Creator.  You pose as an agnostic--a religious Know-
nothing--because the Almighty has not taken you
completely into his confidence.  Because the blind have
sometimes led the blind and both have fallen into the foul
ditch of fanaticism and cruelty, you infer that not one gleam
of supernal glory has pierced the dark vale of human life. 
While posing as the apostle of light, you will obscure the
scintillations of the stars because the sun is hid; while
apotheosizing Happiness you would banish Hope, that
mother of which it is born.

But your labors have borne good as well as evil fruit.  While
your siren eloquence has led some doubting Thomases into
the barren desert of Atheism, you have driven others to
seek a better reason for their religious faith than barbarous
tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils.  Bigotry has
quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic
hammer, dogmatism become more humble and the
priesthood well-nigh forgotten to prate of a hell of fire in
which the souls of unbaptized babes forever burn.  Without
intending it, perhaps, you have done more to promote the
cause of true religion, more to intellectualize and humanize
man's conception of Almighty God, than any other reformer
since the days of Christ.


THE COW.

For the enlightenment of city milkmen who never saw a
cow, it may be well to state that this more or less useful
animal does not resemble a pump in the slightest particular. 
A cow has four feet, but the subsequent one on the right
side is her main reliance.  With this foot she can strike a
blow that no man or woman born can elude.  It resembles a
load of drunken chain-shot, and searches every cubic yard
of atmosphere in a two-acre lot for a victim before it stops. 
She is also provided with a caudal appendage that ends in
a patent fly-brush.  This she uses to wrap around the neck
of the milkmaid to prevent her getting away before she has
a chance to kick her health corset off and upset the milk.

A cow will eat anything she can steal, from an ear of corn
to a hickory shirt.  She will leave a square meal especially
ordered for her, and gotten up by an imported chef, to fill
her measly hide full of straw from a boarding-house bedtick,
if she can only steal it.  She will work at a crack in a
neighbor's barn for six mortal hours, and wear her tongue
as thin as a political platform to get an old corn-cob, when
she knows she can have a bushel of corn, all shelled, by
going home for it.  She is a born thief, a natural marauder. 
Any cow that has been given opportunities for gleaning
knowledge can open a gate that fastens with a combination
lock, get into a garden, do fifty dollars' worth of damage
and be six blocks away before the infuriated owner can ram
a charge of slugs into a muzzle-loading gun.

The man who has not lived in a small town, where one-half
the inhabitants keep cows and expect them to forage their
living off the other half, will never fully realize what he
has missed unless he starts a daily paper or falls down
stairs with the cook stove.  When Mrs. B. and I first went
into partnership we decided to raise our own garden truck. 
It is the usual mistake of youngsters.  During the long
winter evenings they sit by the fire and plan their garden.  A
640-acre farm, covered a foot deep with patent fertilizers,
mortgages and other modern improvements, would not
produce the amount of stuff two moonstruck young amateur
gardeners confidently expect to yank from a patch of dirt
but little bigger than a postage stamp.  Thirty dollars for
tools and seeds, ninety-seven dollars' worth of labor, and
four times that amount of worry and vexation of spirit,
results in some forty dollars' worth of "garden sass," which
is promptly referred to the interior department of the
neighbors' cows.

I soon learned that an ordinary gate catch was no bar to
the educated cattle in my neighborhood, so I added a bolt. 
That puzzled them for a night or two, but they soon learned
the combination and filled themselves so full of cabbage
that cost me two dollars a head to raise, that they couldn't
get out by way of the gate, and I had to knock down a
panel of fence to get rid of them.  That evening I brought
home a double-barreled shot gun, a log-chain and a
padlock that would have baffled a cracksman.  I chained up
the gate, gave the key to Mrs. B. to lose, loaded the gun
halfway to the muzzle with tenpenny nails and resolved to
hold the fort by main strength.  It was a bright moonlight
night, and I sat up with a corncob pipe and a robust
determination to have fresh beef for breakfast if that
padlock failed to do its duty.

About 9 o'clock an old brindle cow came browsing up to the
front gate.  She took a long survey of the house to see if
we had all gone to bed.  Having satisfied herself on that
point, she inserted her horns between the bars of the
front gate and gave it a gentle shake.  She looked at
the house again to see if the noise had aroused us. 
Finding all quiet, she went to work on the bolt, first with her
horns and then with her tongue.  In ten minutes she had it
drawn, and started to come in.  She was evidently
surprised to find herself still on the outside.  Two or three of
her companions came up and they held a consultation.

Old Brindle worked at the chain awhile, but it was no use. 
They were puzzled.  They took a long look at the gate,
shook it viciously with their horns, then turned impatiently
away, like a man who has run four blocks to a bank, only to
find "closed" staring him in the face.  Several more cows
came up, and when they were shown the new jewelry they
acted hurt and proceeded to hold an indignation meeting
and pass a vote of censure, after which one old she-pirate
broke a horn trying to lift the gate off its hinges.  After this
mishap they acted so discouraged that I concluded they
had given it up; but they hadn't.  Old Brindle returned to the
attack.  She spent half an hour "monkeying" with the gate,
and then stopped short and began to study.  She had more
gall than a ward heeler, more tenacity than an office-
seeker, more brains than a boodle alderman.  In just ten
minutes by the town clock she had the problem solved. 
With her horn she lifted the chain over the top of the gate-
post and walked in, as proud as a boy with a sore toe.  I
felt like a homicide as I raised the double-barreled gun and
pulled both triggers.  I felt worse after I had crawled out of
the cistern, where the perfidious gun had kicked me, and
learned that I had missed the whole drove and sent a hatful
of slugs and nails into a neighbor's china closet.  I broke
the gun over Old Brindle's vertebrae and followed up the
attack with the garden-fork.  After I had chased the entire
drove back and forth over the garden a dozen times, and
seen what was left of my summer's work inextricably
mixed with the sub-soil, fallen over the wheelbarrow and
ruined a $14 pair of trousers, a constable came and
arrested me for discharging firearms inside the corporate
limits.  A young theological gosling, who has since died of
excessive goodness, preferred a charge of cruelty to
animals against me, and my neighbor sued for the price of
his china and got judgment.  Old Brindle died and the court
decided that it was my duty to buy her.  I found her meat
too tough for eating and her hide too full of garden-fork
holes to be available for sole-leather.

If the retail butchers are to be believed, the cow is a calf
until there is no more room on her horn for rings.  She
seldom lives to be too old to be carved up with a buzz-saw
and a cold-chisel and sold as veal.

After she has passed her time of usefulness in the dairy;
when she has forgotten how to give four quarts of milk per
diem and then kick it over the dewy-lipped maid who has
carefully culled it from the maternal fount, the thrifty farmer
drives her upon the railway track, wrecks a train with her,
then sues the company for $150 damages.  Of course the
company kicks worse than ever the cow did, but the farmer
secures an intelligent jury of brother agriculturalists and the
soulless corporation has to come to taw.

Her consort is less brilliant and more impulsive.  He has a
surly, unsocial disposition and uncertain temper, but can be
very polite when he chooses.  He has been known to
neglect his regular business to assist an embarrassed
young man over a rail fence, or entertain a party of
picnickers from the city.  He has a natural antipathy for red
flags, and will cross a forty-acre field to make a mop rag of
one and rub its bearer's nose in the mud--an example that
might be advantageously followed by the Chicago authorities.

The calf is one of the most interesting studies in the
science of natural history.  In its earliest youth it wears long
wobbly legs and an expression of angelic innocence; but
before it is a week old it knows more than some men who
have been honored with high offices and expensive
funerals.  The calf will eat anything it can swallow, and what
it can't get through its neck it will chew and suck the juice. 
Tablecloths, hickory shirts, store pants, lace curtains, socks,
in fact the entire range of articles familiar to the laundry are
tid-bits to the calf.  A calf that has any ambition to
distinguish himself will leave the maternal udder any time to
chew one leg off a new pair of "boughten" pantaloons or
absorb the flowing narrative of a "biled" shirt.  The calf
learns bad habits as readily as an Indian, and the man who
did not have a youthful masculine bovine for partner in his
boyish deviltry looks back upon a barren and uneventful youth.

I remember one promising calf that I taught to "bunt" like a
William goat.  One day my eldest brother and my parent on
my father's side were cleaning out an open well, while the
calf and myself lingered near, waiting for a glorious
opportunity to merit killing.  The old gentleman
superintended the work and pulled up in an iron kettle the
mud which the son of his youth industriously scraped from
the bottom of an eighteen-foot well with much labor and an
old tin pan.  While he was leaning over the mouth of the
well, pulling up a kettle of slush, his suspender buttons
groaning and his tailor-made pantaloons strained to the
utmost tension, I called the calf's attention to him.  The
bovine grasped the situation, lowered his head, kicked up
his heels, emitted a triumphant bellow, shot forward like a
baseball reaching for the stomach of an amateur shortstop,
and struck the rear elevation of the head of our
distinguished house with the solid impact of an hydraulic
ram toying with a stone fence.  A moment later there
was a sound from the bowels of the earth, but it was not a
sound of revelry.  It resembled an able-bodied cyclone
ripping up four miles of plank road and driving it through the
pulsating heart of a colored camp-meeting.  The calf had
forgotten to remember the well, and while my respected
sire was chasing the kettle to the bottom, the calf was
chasing him.  Half a dozen robust neighbors armed with a
windlass and a two-inch rope dragged the youthful ox and
his unfortunate companions from the pit, and the volunteer
fire brigade was sent for to turn the hose on them.  I
haven't forgotten the sequel to this little story; but it would
not possess that lively interest for the great public that it did
for me, so I will let it pass.

* * *                          
CHRISTIAN ENGLAND IN INDIA.
                          
HER TEARS ANENT TURKISH ATROCITIES

"Christian England" is agonizing over the pitiful condition of
the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say
anent her own awful record in India.  It were well for John
Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making
frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem.  The
oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian
Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were
as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient
Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain.  The history of
every barbarous prince of the Orient, in those dark days
when might made right and plunder was the recognized
prerogative of royalty; the annals of every potentate who
has reigned by the grace of Allah and kneeled to kiss
the robe of the prophet, may be searched in vain for a
parallel in unbounded rapacity and calculating atrocity. 
England's despoilment of India constitutes the supreme
crime of all the ages, the acknowledged acme of infamy-
Europe never dreaded Alaric the Visigoth, nor hated Attila
the Scourge of God, as India dreads and detests John Bull,
"the white beast from over the black water."  He has not
persecuted because of difference of religious dogma, as
have the Mohammedan Sultans and the Christian Czars. 
That kind of enterprise doesn't pay, and John Bull never
wastes on theological sentiment one ounce of energy that
can be coined into cash.

A British trading company had leased land at Madras and
Calcutta, for which it paid rent to the native powers.  For
the protection of its warehouses it was permitted to built
forts and keep a few armed police, but was in no sense
independent.  Its position in India was analogous to that of
British capitalists in America who are operating a mine or
factory and have been authorized to police their property. 
The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political
nonentity, the empire of the Great Mogul was divided
among nominal viceroys who were really independent
sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent.  The teeming millions of
India were, for the most part, as unfitted by nature and
occupation for the fatigues of war, as were the countless
host which Xerxes led into Greece, or Darius hurled upon
the steel-crested phalanxes of that bloody prototype of John
Bull, Alexander the Macedonian marauder.  The
governments of India were showy rather than strong, and a
condition of semi-anarchy had been engendered by the
frequent incursions of fierce tribes of robbers, the jealousies
and ambitions of rival nabobs and the mischievous
schemes of a French adventurer named Dupleix.  The
company continued to augment its forces until strong
enough not only to protect its own property, but to
overawe the native governments.  Then, on one dishonest
pretext or another, it began the work of transforming India
into a British province.  Robert Clive succeeded in
accomplishing in Asia what Dr. Jamieson attempted with far
better excuse in South Africa.  Rival powers applied to the
company for assistance, and it mattered not with which it
allied itself, both were in the end destroyed or enslaved,
compelled to pour their wealth into the coffers of the British
corporations.  No crime was too horrible, no breach of faith
too brazen if it promised to further the ambition and
increase the gains of the company.  Its policy was to unite
with a weak government to plunder a strong one, then, by
subjugating its ally, to make itself master of both.  By
treasons and stratagems, by forged treaties and briberies,
by infamies planned in cold blood and executed with more
than Kurdish barbarity, the garden spot of the earth, with its
teeming millions and inestimable wealth, was made to pay
tribute to British greed.  Macaulay, the eulogist of both Lord
Clive and Warren Hastings, thus describes India when
Great Britain, without a shadow of excuse, laid her
marauding paw upon it in the same manner and for the
self-same purpose that Cortez invaded the halls of the
Montezumas:

"The people of India when we subdued them, were ten
times as numerous as the vanquished Americans (the
Indian subjects of Montezuma), and were at the same time
quite as highly civilized as the victorious Spaniards.  They
had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or
Toledo, and buildings more beautiful and costly than the
cathedrals of Seville.  They could show bankers richer than
the richest firms of Barcelona or Cadiz, Viceroys whose
splendors far surpassed that of Ferdinand the
Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery
which would have astonished the Great Captain.  It might
have been expected that every Englishman who takes any
interest in any part of history would be curious to know how
a handful of their countrymen, separated from their home
by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few
years, one of the greatest empires of the world.  Yet,
unless we greatly err, this subject is, to most readers, not
only insipid, but positively distasteful."  Good God!  Is it any
wonder that British readers should find the conquest of
India "positively distasteful?"  Is it not quite natural that
Englishmen had rather read of Turkish atrocities in Armenia
than of British atrocities in India?  Lord Macaulay rehearses
all the treacheries and cruelties and double-dealings by
which "a handful of his countrymen subjugated one of the
greatest empires of the world," then complains that British
readers find such a catalogue of horrors positively
distasteful!  Did he expect even Englishmen to become
enthusiastic over the hiring of British troops to the infamous
Surajah Dowlah for the massacre of the brave Rohillas? 
Did he expect them to peruse with pleasurable pride the
robbery of the Princesses of Oude, the brutal execution of
Nuncomar, or the forged treaty by which Ormichund was
entrapped?  Having painted the atrocities and craven
cowardice of Chief Justice Impey, could he reasonably
expect them to be proud of this representative Englishman
in India?  Having told us that Lord Clive was a freebooter in
his boyhood and a butcher in his prime, did he anticipate
that even Englishmen would be proud of this countryman of
theirs who founded the British Empire in India?  Lord
Macaulay gives us the following description of conditions in
Bengal under British Domination, then wonders that his
countrymen find its perusal "positively distasteful."

"They (the servants of the East India company) covered
with their protection a set of native dependents, who ranged
through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror
wherever they appeared.  Every servant of a British factor
was armed with all the power of his master.  And his
master was armed with all the power of the company. 
Enormous fortunes were thus accumulated at Calcutta,
while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the
last extremity of wretchedness.  They had been
accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like
this.  They found the little finger of the company thicker
than the loins of the Surajah Dowlah.  It resembled the
government of evil genii rather than the government of
human tyrants."

The people of India, it must be remembered, had
experienced the tyranny of the Brahman and Buddhist, of
Moslem and even the terrible Mahratta; they had groaned
beneath the exactions of the Great Moguls, plundering
viceroys and robber chiefs; they had paid tribute to
Aurungzebe and to Hyder Ali, but here we are told they
never experienced such tyranny and pitiless despoliation as
under the rule of Christian England, and this upon the
testimony of an Englishman!  Now that British preachers
and pamphleteers are agonizing over Mohammedan
atrocities in Armenia, let us see what the latter thought of
Christian domination in India.  "If," says the Mussulman
historian of those unhappy times, "if to so many military
qualifications, they (English) knew how to join the art of
government--if they exerted as much ingenuity and
solicitude in relieving the people of God, as they do in
whatever concerns their military affairs, no nation in the
world would be preferable to them, or worthier of command;
but the people under their dominion groan everywhere, and
are reduced to poverty and distress.  Oh God! come to
the assistance of thine afflicted servants, and deliver them
from the oppressions they suffer."

Lord Clive, having acquired an immense fortune, concluded
to round out his political career by inaugurating a reform
that would in some manner atone for his past excesses,
and did succeed in giving India more than a Roman peace
and abating some of the worst abuses; but the reform was
ephemeral.  In his essay on Warren Hastings, Lord
Macaulay--who wonders that the conquest of India is
"distasteful" reading to Englishmen--gives us the following
pen-picture of conditions under the administration of his
ideal:

"The delay and the expense, grievous as they are, form
the smallest part of the evil which English law, imported
without modifications into India, could not fail to produce. 
The strongest feelings of our nation, honor, religion, female
modesty, rose up against the innovation.  Arrest on mesne
process was the first step in most civil proceedings; and to
a native of rank arrest was not merely a restraint, but a foul
personal indignity.  That the apartments of a wo