 CHAPTER IV. A Story of the Sea. There have been mortals, favourites 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. Ever 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 oceans, never ceasing speech, was ever plain to me. And many a midnight hour I have past 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 wrath, wild wars and desperate deeds, mingle with those of love and honour, shame and sacrifice, crowded upon each other like specters in a dream. One night when the new moon hung like a silver crescent pendant from Venus flaming orb in the summer sky thick and laid with patines of pure gold, I heard the lazy waves breaking like slumberous thunder upon the long, low beach in a 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 seemed to man long, long ago. A 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 yesterday night, that hand in hand they wandered here, so wrapped 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, diamonds studded, breaking on a beach of gold, and sang the sweetest odes of the poets of ten thousand years. But they heard, nor saw, ought but the beating of their hearts in the holy rhythm, and the love-light flaming like fire's celestial in each other's eyes. A nun, bare-armed, bare-limbed, shamed, yet happy, they sought the wave, and I cradled them on my bosom, and heard them whisper of law's defied, and cruel customs set at not, 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 but 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 intertwined that separation were death to her, and kissed his lips, his eyes, his hands, and wished she were his wife, that they might blazin' to the great round world the love they fain' would hide from the 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 want 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 worshipped her, as devout Sabian might the sun and host of heaven. Again he came, but he was all alone. Long and lonely he paced the dreary beach beneath the wintry sky, until the cold mists seemed changed to mellow light, the stormy sky to one of summer, gemmed by mirrored stars, and queened by harvest moon, the cool winds sweeping o'er the barren wastes to music, and the merry laughter of men and maids, and she was by his side her lovely 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 mists settled down upon him and crept with icy fingers into his heart, and he cursed the lying vision, and shrieking wind, the cold mist, and the leavened 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, ought in life but her own selfish self? Then he called her name to the wind and waves, but coupled with it a curse, deep and bitter, as those that burst in sulfur breath from parched lips of the damned. A voice came back from out of 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 light through the driving mist, and in them loomed two weird forms that seemed a hundred cubits high. Furious he rushed upon them and smote them down upon the wet sand and trampled them and stove with feet and hands to kill, but they cried out for mercy on their lives, but 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 bronze faces, gave them his scant purse, and bidding them drank a bumper that hellfiends might drag him from the world before the morn sent them on their way. The grey dawn found him sleeping with his face upon the wet sand, once troddened by 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 wasst bearing us beneath the sunset sky to a fair island, fringed with palms and musical with songs of birds and rippling springs where we too 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 vents 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 waves. 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 with a 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. Around arms stole about my neck and we floated, heart to heart, on the haven that was to be our haven, a curse upon your briny waters that seemed 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 bayful 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, to will drag me down even as it did my great-grandsire who climbed famed, dizzy heights and stood poised in mid-heaven, the mastermind of Britain's mighty world. Then like a tall mountain, pine blasted at the top by the rithin' 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 scorn of barbarous kings, nor mother's prayerful amulets woven like golden threads through every low, sweet lullaby that soothed my infancy can avail me ought. I can but fight and fall, she might have helped me beat back the shadows but would not entiz well. Then, taking from a case a withered rose, he kissed it and 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 honor dead to one so ignobally slain. End of Chapter 4 A Story of the Sea Recorded by Brett Boone Chapter 5 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Capper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Michelle Fry, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Chapter 5 Apostle Vs. Pagan Colonel Robert 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 clockwork regularity and doing business at the same old stand. I once saw an egotistical brindle pup joyfully bestride the collar of an adult wildcat, 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 gaily down your right away like a youthful William Goat seeking a head on collision with a runaway freight train. Without any view of paving the way for our future alone, 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 ipsay 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 supernatural splendor to Mr. 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. And Ignoramus believes the Bible because of the miracles and because of the miracles and 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. Muhammad 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 to 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 arachnese 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 aren't folly, that God is non-extant and man but a 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 and then her immutable laws mere nonsense. Before ridiculing revelation and mocking at inspiration, were it not well to determine their two 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 and inspired man to trace the finger of God in the sunset splendor as easily as upon tablets 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 an oyster with instinct, can he communicate with man only by word of mouth or the engraver's buran? 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 brab Dignagian 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 and enchanting thing if you do but look at it with the natural eye. But when you employ the adventitious aid of the skeptics' microscope, you find flaws enough. It were doubtful if ever 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 Mohammed, 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 veil 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 Thomas' 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 now forgotten to pray 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. End of Chapter 5 Apostle vs. Pagan Chapter 6 of The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Cowper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Josh Kibbe. Chapter 6, 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 allude. It resembles a load of drunken chainshot and searches every cubic yard of atmosphere in a two-acre lot for a victim before it stops. She is also provided with a cauldron appendage that ends in a patent flybrush. 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 bed-tick if she can only steal it. She will work at a crack in a neighbor's barn for six mortal hours and where her tongue is thin is 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 luck, get into a garden, do fifty dollars worth of damage and be six bucks 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 forge their living off the other half will never fully realize what he has missed unless he starts a daily paper or falls downstairs with the cook stove. When Mrs. B&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 to Moonstruck Young Amateur Gardeners confidently expect to yank from a patch of dirt but a 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 neighbor's 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 ahead 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 to them a double-barreled shotgun, 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 tin-penny nails and resolved to hold the fort by main strength. It was a bright moonlight night, and I set up with a corn cob pipe and a robust determination to have fresh beef for breakfast if that padlock failed to do its duty. About nine 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 a while, 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 a 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 in Passavotov-Sinsher, after which one old sheep 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 healer, or tenacity than an office seeker, more brains than a bootle alderman. In just ten minutes by the town clock, she had the problem solved. With her horns, she lifted the chain over the top of the gatepost 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 crawled out of the cistern, where the perfidious gun had kicked me, and learned that I had missed the hole, drove, and sent a hateful 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 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 subsoil, fallen over the wheelbarrow, and ruined a $14 pair of trousers, a constable came and arrested me for discharging firearm inside the corporate limits. A young theological gozzling 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 god-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 horns for rings. She seldom lives to be too old to be carved up with the buzzsaw 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 cooled 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 tow. 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 embarrassing 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 bearers' 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 tidbits 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 botan pantaloons or absorb the flowing narrative of a bile 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 devil tree 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 18-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 a 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 forth 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. End of Chapter 6 The Cow Chapter 7 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast, Volume 1 by William Cowper Bran This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. This recording is by Michelle Frye, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Chapter 7 Christian England in India Her Tears Anant Turkish Atrocities Christian England is agonizing over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Muslim rule, but has nothing to say anant 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 moat in the optic of the Muslim. 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 Bengalis at the hands of Great Britain. The history of every barbarous prince of the Orient in those dark days when might made right in plunder was a 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 build 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 were operating a mine or a factory and have been authorized to police their property. The mighty house of Tamerlane had become a political non-entity, the Empire of the Great Mogul was divided among nominal vicerars who were really independent sovereigns, gorgeous but indolent. The teaming 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 Xerces led into Greece. Ardarius 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 the French adventurer named duplex. The company continued to augment its forces until strong enough not only to protect its own property but to overaw 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. Jameson 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 to 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. Makalay, 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 Cortes invaded the halls of the Montezuma's. Quoting Makalay, 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, Viceroy's 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 Saraja Daula for the massacre of the brave Rohilas? Did he expect them to peruse with pleasurable pride the robbery of the princesses of Udh, the brutal execution of Nun Kamar, or the forged treaty by which Armishund was entrapped? Having painted the atrocities and craven cowardice of Chief Justice Impeh, 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 countrymen 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 30 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 Sarajadala. It resembled the government of evil genie rather than the government of human tyrants. The people of India, it must be remembered, had experienced the tyranny of the Brahmin and Buddhist, of Muslim, and even the terrible Maratha. They had grown beneath the exactions of the great Moguls, plundering viceroys and robber-chiefs. They had paid tribute to Aurangzeba and to Haida Ali, but here we are told they never experienced such tyranny and pitiless desolation 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 I see what the latter thought of Christian domination in India. If, says the Muslim 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 worthy or of command, but the people under their dominion grown 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 successes 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 this tasteful 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. A rest on mean process was the first step in most civil proceedings, and to a date of a rank, a rest was not merely a restraint, but a foul personal indignity. That the apartments of a woman of quality should be entered by strange men, or that her face should be seen by them, are in the East intolerable outrages, outrages which are more dreaded than death and which can be expiated only by the shedding of blood. To these outrages, the most distinguished families of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa were now exposed. A reign of terror began, a reign of terror heightened by mystery. No man knew what was next to be expected from this strange tribunal. It had collected round itself an army of the worst part of the native population, in farmers and false witnesses, and common bariters, and agents of chican and above all, a banditie of Bailev's followers, compared with whom the retainers of the worst English sprung houses in the worst times might be considered as upright and tenderhearted. There were instances in which men of the most venerable dignity, persecuted without cars by extortioners, died of rage and shame in the grip of the vile Al-Wazil's of Impey. The harems of noble Mohammedans, sanctuaries respected in the East by governments that respected nothing else, were burst open by gangs of Bailev's. The Muslims, braver and less accustomed to submission than the Hindus, sometimes stood on their defense and shed their blood in the doorway, while defending sword in hand the sacred apartments of their women. No Maratha invasion had ever spread through the province such dismay as the inroad of English lawyers. All the injustice of former oppressions, Asiatic and European, appeared as a blessing when compared with the justice of the Supreme Court. No wonder that Christian England is horrified by the atrocities of the Muslims in Armenia. She cannot understand persecution for the sake of religious opinion, having done her dirty work for the sake of the Almighty Dollar. It is true that a Hastings with his forged treaties and dispoilment of ancient B-gums is no longer Governor General of India. It is true that an impay no longer deals out justice in that unhappy land, but the industrial condition of the toiling millions is worse today than when they were being dispoiled to erect the peacock throne at Delhi, adorned with its mountain of light. Sir David Wetterbun, who will be accepted as authority even by our Anglo-Maniacs, says, quote, our civil courts are regarded as institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor and many are feigned to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction in native territory, end quote. And a quote from Florence Nightingale, we do not care for the people of India. The saddest sight to be seen in India, nay, probably in the world, is the peasant of our eastern empire, end quote. Ms. Nightingale declares that the Indian Feminists, which every few years cost millions of lives, are due to British taxation, which deprives the riots of the means of cultivation and reduces them to a condition far worse than the worst phases of American slavery. Mr. H. M. Hindemann, an English writer of repute, declares that in India, men and women cannot get food because they cannot save money to buy it, so terrible are the burdens laid by Christian England on that unhappy people. Just as Ireland exported food to England during her most devastating famines, so does India send food to the mother country in the discharge of governmental burdens while her own people are starving by millions. Henry George, who has never been suspected of anti-English tendencies, says, quote, the millions of India have bowed their necks beneath the yokes of many conquerors, but worst of all is the steady grinding weight of English domination, a weight which is literally crushing millions out of existence, and as shown by English writers is inevitably tending to the most frightful and widespread catastrophe, and, quote, Christian England wouldn't murder a Muslim because of his religion. She's too good for that. But she starves millions to death to fill her purse, then tries to square herself with God and man by singing psalms and pointing the finger of scorn at the barbarities of Islam. End of Chapter 7 Christian England and India LibriVox.org This recording is by Jim Gallagher Chapter 8 Man's Immortality Is there a life beyond the grave? Ten thousand thousand times this question has been answered, yet answer there is none that satisfies the soul. Never yet did man look into the cold face to one he loved and not feel creeping like a thousand-fanged adder into his desolate heart, the awful fear that deaths the end of it all. Never yet did mother stand by her first-born buyer and say, quote, Thank God for death that bringeth to my beloved eternal life, unquote. Though Bibles were piled as high as Helicon, and every son of Adam a white-stole priest, proclaiming the grave the gate to glorious life, still would doubt twin brother of despair, linger ever at that dread portal, and love long to terrify futurity's awful veil, to see and know is only those can't know who see, that death is but life's messenger. O love, thou art at once the sweetest blossom that ever perfumed the bowers of paradise, and the most poignant thorn that grows in the empoisoned shadows of everlasting pain. But for thee, mad sorceress, every individual life were a microchasm, complete within itself. We would live but our own life, suffer our own pangs, and dying descend without a sigh to ever dreamless sleep. But thy soft fingers do sweep the human harpsichord, the ego-death, quote, pass in music out of sight, unquote. The single note of life is blended with others, and holy thy apaisan, sweeter than fabled song of Israel. But alas, the penalty of this terrestrial paradise, this blending of human hearts and heavenly harmony. The added pleasures bring redoubled pains of symphony so sweet is born the discord of despair. Loving others more than our proper selves, their wounds are deeper far than our own hurts, and death to them is death and hell to us. Of love was born the hope of immortality. We part tonight from those so near and dear that they seem our better selves, looking with longing eyes to the glad tomorrow when we shall meet again. But when comes the sleep of death and reason, that pitiless monarch of the mind, proclaims that all the tomorrows in time's feckin' womb will come and go and bring them never back to our fond embrace, the heart revolts and wars on destiny. Hope, dear daughter of the gods, angel of light, what ceramic visions dost thou we for us in thy celestial loom? How beautiful and bright the star that places upon thy ethereal brow, yet alas, how oft obscured by the deadly vapours of doubt and dark despair. Is thy enchanted world a world indeed where love is lord and death is driven forth, or dost thou seek to soothe us with lying pictures of paradise, such as the shipwrecked mariner and tropic seas beholds beneath the sultry brine? Is thy beacon in very truth a star, shining eternal in our Samarian sky, a guide infallible to life's worn voyager, or a wandering fire such as the foolish follow, a lying flame that leads the trusting traveller to his loss? Since man first placed his foot upon this earth, he hath been listening with greedy ear to thy sweet song. Since death first did show his horrid front, thou hast been whispering to the stricken heart that love could never die, that there is not, cannot be in nature a pain so cruel as love's farewell forever. Thou hast been the world's comforter in all ages past, will faithful prove through the long ages yet to be. Is there a life beyond the grave? Aye, it must be so, but what that life will be boots not to inquire. Even a land of sand and thorns with grinding toil, yet everlasting life with those we love, were heaven and heaven enough. Perhaps, who knows, the sweet blending of our lives with other and dearer ones upon this earth is but an earnest of what will be in the great hereafter. That when every spark or that bright efflugence and create is released from its thrall or clay, all life and light and love will forever blend in one. That husband, wife, and child, in each and all the human heart holds dear, will be resolved into one perfect life, and thus at once in God and self, and paradise in each other's souls in heaven, as in the loving arms of each on earth, let eternity roll on. END OF CHAPTER VIII. MAN'S IMMORTALITY RECORDING by Jim Gallagher In evolution or revolution, the plutocrat and the pauper. For Christ's sakes, Cap, gave me the price of a sandwich. I stopped and surveyed the speaker, not because the request was unusual, but because the applicant for aid had not acquired the beggar's wine. He was a large, powerful man, evidently a mechanic, for every trade leaves its peculiar stamp upon its followers. Why should I give you a dime? You're far more able to work than I. A man with half your strength should be ashamed to beg. Work, he retorted bitterly. Give me a job at anything and see if I do not prove myself a man. But I have nothing for you to do. A dozen men have told me that today. You sneer at me because I do not earn the bread I eat, yet decline to give me an opportunity to do so. I steered him against a lunch counter and watched him chisel desolation into a silver dollar, then listened to his story, one that I had heard a hundred times within the year. Throne out of employment by the business depression, he had tramped in search of work until he found himself penniless, starving in the streets of a strange city. He handed me a letter dated St. Louis, written by his wife. Some of the words were misspelled, and the bad choreography was blotted as if by falling tears, but it breathed the spirit of a Roman matron of a Spartan mother. Both the children were ill. She had obtained a little sewing and provided food and some medicine, but two months' rent was due, and the landlord would turn them out unless it was promptly paid. She would do the best she could and knew that her husband would do the same. Then through the blinding tears came a flash of netherfire. Transformed into respectable English, it read, Were I a man I would not trample from city to city, begging employment only to be refused? Were I a man I would not see my baby starve while people are piling up millions of money which they can never need? In this country there should be an opportunity for every man to make a living. Were I a man I would make an effort to release myself and my unhappy fellows from this brutal industrial bondage, this chronic pauperism, if it cost my life? I have two sons whom God knows I do dearly love, but I would consecrate them to the holy cause of human liberty if I knew they would perish on the scaffold. I would rather see them die like dogs than live like slaves. He sat a long time silent after returning the letter to his pocket, then said as though speaking to himself, I wonder if the rich people ever paused to reflect that there's a million brawny men in my condition tonight, a million men who only lack a leader. I wonder if they think we'll stand this kind of thing forever. Don't talk to me about patriotism, he interrupted fiercely. No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach. Why should I care for the preservation of a government for and by the plutocrat? Let it go to the devil across lots. Damn the flag beneath which a competent and industrious mechanic cannot make a living. Anarchy is anarchy worse than starvation. When conditions become such that a working man is half the time an ill fed surf and the other half a wretched vagabond, he's ready for a change of any kind by any means. I am supposed to be entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I have liberty to starve and I can pursue happiness or rainbows to my heart's content. There's absolutely no law prohibiting my using the horns of the moon for a hat rack if I feel so disposed. End of letter. The optimists who are depending on the conservatism of the American people to maintain intact are political and industrial systems who proclaim that the present to apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few professional agitators are of the same myopic brood as those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until the crust over the Tarterian fires, steadily eaten away from beneath, steadily hammered upon from above, gave way with a crash like the crack of doom, and that fair land was transformed as if by infernal magic into a high flaming vortex of chaos engulfing all forms and formulas threatening the civilization of a world. After us, the deluge cried those court parasites who with more understanding than their fellows read or write them, méné, méné, tequel oufarsen, traced upon the walls of royalty. This is from Daniel 525, meaning numbered, numbered, weighed, divided. But the deluge weighted not upon their convenience, like another avatar of death gendered by pride in the womb of sin, it burst forth to appall the world. But the American multimillionaires mock at the deluge can in no wise understand how it were possible for the thin crust that holds enthrall the fierce Guihana fires to give way beneath their feet, then stay upon it never so hard. The American nation is trembling on the verge of an industrial revolution, a revolution that is inevitable, that will come peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must. So ripe are the American working men for revolt against the existing order of things, so galled are they by the heavy yoke laid upon them, so desperate have they become that it but needs a strong man to organize and lead them, and our present industrial system, perhaps our political also, would crumble like an eggshell in the grip of an angry titan. Nor is the dissatisfaction confined to the industrial class, the farmer that atlas upon whose broad shoulders the great world rests is in full sympathy with every attack made upon the cormorant by the commune. While not ready for a revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the assaults of the proletariat, yet the American press proclaims that all is well. The Abel editor looks into his leather spectacles, free trade or high tariff brand, and with Al like gravity announces that if the import tax on putty be increased somewhat, or fiddle strings be placed on the free list, the American mechanic will have money to throw at the birds, that mortgages and mendicanny will pass like a hideous nightmare, and the farmer gaily bestride his sulky plow attired like unto Solomon in all his glory. What is wrong? In God's name, what is right? Here we have the most fertile land upon the globe, the best supplied with all things necessary to a prosperous people. Our resources are not half developed. There is no dearth of capital. Our working people are the most intelligent energetic and capable upon which the sun ever shown. Man for man, the world never contained their equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet with every nerve strange to its utmost tension, toiling, saving at very death grips with destiny, they are sinking year by year deeper into the slough of despond, into that most frightful of all gehenna's the hell of want. Nor is this all. While those who toil are but fighting a losing battle wearing out hand and heart and brain for a crust that becomes ever scantier, ever more bitter, there are thousands and tens of thousands who cannot even obtain the poor privilege of tramping in this brutal treadmill, but must stand with folded arms and starve, else beg or steal. All this might be born, would be endured with heroic fortitude, if such were the lot of all, but while the opportunity to wear out one's strength for a bare existence is becoming ever more a privilege to be grateful for, we are making millionaires by the hundreds. While the many battle desperately for life, the few are piling up fortunes beside which the famed wealth of ancient Lydia's kings were but a beggar's petrimony. The employer is becoming ever more an autocrat, the employee ever more dependent on his good pleasure for the poor privilege of existing upon the earth. To say that the conservatism of the American working man will cause him to patiently endure all this is to brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but the shackles and the knot. He will not endure it much longer and when his patience reaches its utmost limit, when he tires of filling his belly with the east wind, supplied him in such plentitude by aspiring politicians and able editors, look ye to see something break. The problems for our statesmen to solve are first, how to ensure to every person able and willing to work, an opportunity to earn an honest livelihood. Second, to effect a more equitable distribution of the wealth created among the factors engaged in its production. All other problems now engaging the attention of publicists sink into insignificance beside these. They are to practical state craft what the immortality of the soul is to theology. They must be solved. At least some progress must be made in that direction or force will air long attempted. The trouble with such convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil but do not always compensate it with permanent good. They are a kind of social mania apatou racking the whole organism debilitating it, good chiefly as frightful examples of what evil customs lead to. To diagnose the disease and prescribe a remedy were no easy task. There is infinitely more of the matter than a maladjustment of the tariff, inflated railway stocks or a dearth of white dollars. It is the most difficult, a wonderfully intricate problem one entirely without precedent. The rapid development of America the still more remarkable advancement in the science of mechanics conjoined to a political organism not yet fully developed but half understood yet marking an epic in man's social progress commercial customs of bygone days surviving in the midst of much that is new. Really when you come to think of it you may well wonder that we have got thus far without more than one great convulsion. Clearly it is no place for catholicons. That a comparatively small class of men are absorbing the wealth of the country as fast as it is produced leaving to those who created scarce a bear subsistence is patent to all that the vast body of the people clothed with political power and imbued with the spirit of equality will not permit such conditions to long continue any thoughtful man will concede. Even in European countries where the working people have come to regard privileged classes as a matter of course there are mutterings of a coming storm that will only gather fresh terrors by delay. In Europe the change will probably be wrought by revolution. In America it may be achieved by peaceful evolution if the money aristocracy does not with its checks and repressions with its corrupted judiciary purchased legislators and obsequious press drive a people already sorely vexed to unreasoning madness. What shall we do? We must avoid the two extremes that of the radical reformer and the apostle of laissez-faire. We will find a middle course safest and best. We need to proceed with caution but by no means with cowardice. The Politico-economic school that would have once changed the existing order of things with as much sang-fois as a Miller substitute steam for water power forgets that society is not a machine. That it was not made to order like a newspaper editorial and that to attempt by a radical process to make it other than what it is to change its genius arbitrarily were as fatuous as trying to transform a wolf into a watchdog by a chemical process or surgical operation. But while the radical reformer the man who would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism is one dangerous extreme we must remember that it is not the only one. In avoiding Silla we must not forget Carimbas If we are to look ever to the past to make no experiments to become the Bond slaves of precedent then progress is at an end and society must petrify retrograde or consume itself in fierce fire whirlwinds. When the American people emancipate themselves from party slavery than which there is nothing more debasing when they cease to fight the battles of ambitious place-hunters and begin in true earnest to fight their own then and not till then will the faults of our social organism be rapidly reduced to the minimum. When the common people of this country decline to be divided into two or more hostile camps by issues carefully concocted by political hurricanes then will the combined wisdom purified of partisan prejudice evolve the best possible national polity. How many of the hardworking people of this nation who are now assiduously assailing or defending the dogma of protection or free trade are any other of the many issues evolved from time to time by professional politicians as a kind of pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into power ever carefully considered the question in all its bearings studied it from a national sectional or even individual standpoint. Questions upon which Adam Smith and Auguste Kant Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention composed chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums with less trouble than a colored wench selects a calico gown. The American people as P.T. Barnum long ago pointed out have a weakness for humbugs. They are the natural prey of the charlatan and in nothing more so than in matters political. Despite their boasted intelligence they will follow with the trust that partakes of the pathetic the amount of bank who can perform the most sleight of hand tricks the demagogue who can make the most noise. They think but are too busy or indifferent to think deeply to reason closely. They jump at conclusions assert their correctness stubbornly and prove the courage of their convictions by their ballots. They demonstrate their independence by choosing their political fetish their confidence in the infallibility of their judgment by worshiping it blindly. Herein lies the chief danger. Danger that the American workingmen will follow this or that igneous fatus hoping thereby to find a shorter northwest passage to impossible spice islands until poverty has degraded him from a self-respecting sovereign into a volcanic Saint-Coulotte until he loses hope of bettering his condition by where as is resolutions trades unions acts of congress etc and like another blind and desperate Samson lays his brawny hands upon the pillars of the temple and pulls it down about his ears. End of Chapter 9 Evolution or Revolution Chapter 10 The Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast Volume 1 by William Calper Brand This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org This recording is by William Jones Chapter 10 The Woman Thou Gave Us to Me Now that the clarion voice of the Reformer is heard in the land demanding for a woman all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the sterner sex perhaps it would be well to ask the fair client to come into court and establish that natural equality so vigorously claimed for her as well as the fact if facted be that she is being wronged and cruelly oppressed by the tyrant man. Is it possible that the dear creature has for some thousands of years been robbed of her birthright and relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply because her biceps are not so large as those of her big brother and she has no warlike whiskers as her attorneys in the suit to try title to this world's wardship clamor for truth without tremmings and rest their case upon principles of justice untainted by prescription or pre-munary suppose we grant their prayer and proceed to the consideration of their cause unhandicapped by chivalric sentiment that the greater intelligence should control the lesser must be conceded to deny it would be to deny man's right to the life and labor of inferior animals to question God's authority to govern man or beast if the experience of several thousand years may be admitted in evidence the subserviency of the minor to the major intelligence is an immutable law of nature only equal minds can be accorded equal authority without doing violence to this law is woman man's intellectual peer entitled to share equally with him the wardship of this world the simple fact that for thousands of years man has been able to hold her in that state of subjection of which her attorneys so bitterly complain is sufficient answer to this question is proof positive that he is as much her superior mentally as physically this sounds unshivalrous but she will please remember that her attorneys insist that this cause be tried solely upon its merits brute force does not rule the world if it did the lion or elephant would be creation's lord and the Ethiopian the red Indian drive the Caucasian into the waste places of the earth or reduce him to slavery knowledge is power brain not brawn is master throughout the world had all eaves fair daughters been blessed with more than masculine strength their position would have been practically the same they would have sung lullabies to the little ones adorn themselves and dreamed of love and loves conquests while their brothers founded empires subdued the forces of nature and measured the stars and both sexes would have been well content as they have ever been despite the protests of self constituted reformers of the order established by the infinite man is creation's lord de facto and de jure the immutable laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a duty the voice of prophecy proclaims him keen he wears his crown by divine ordination and right of conquest woman was created to be and help meet undue man not his co-ruler it matters not whether Genesis be fact or fiction that such was her destiny she has proven by fulfilling it whatever rights and privileges she enjoys must be man's free gift man asserts his position woman can but ask to share the fruits of his victories these he can divide with her but he could not if he would share with her his sovereignty his power because he cannot endow her with his judgment his mental vigor his courage and enterprise whether he wills it or not man must perforce remain the master of the world God's sole vice-regent on this earth in very few civilized countries does man manifest such opposition to the enfranchisement of woman many favor it heartily and those who object do so chiefly on the ground that woman does not want it let a majority of the women in any state of the American Union ask enfranchisement and it will be accorded them let them unite and demand in any particular legislation and it will be enacted let them ask any possible thing whatsoever of their husbands and brothers and it will not be denied them woman does not demand the ballot because her interest centers in her home rather than her country because she shrinks from responsibility because she knows that she may safely trust her destiny to those who would die for her paradoxical as it may appear woman is at once the subject and the sovereign of man his inferior and superior mentally and physically his inferior in strength she is his superior in beauty woman is the paragon of physical perfection it is small wonder that the simple people of bygone days believe that gods and angels became enamored of the daughters of men and left heaven to bask in their sunny smiles the mental differences of the sexes correlate with the physical woman's mind is not so comprehensive her intellect not so strong is that of man but it is of a finer texture what it lacks in vigor it gains in subtlety if the mind of man is a coreless engine throbbing with resistless strength and energy that of a woman is a Geneva watch by which the mightier machine is regulated occasionally a woman enters the field of masculine endeavor and keeps pace with the strongest but such cases are rare exceptions the women who have really taken high rank in art or literature may be counted on the fingers of one hand and those who have achieved anything remarkable in the field of invention science or government upon the fingers of the other it is not good that man should be alone and it would not be did he like Cadmus soldiers spring full grown from the earth man is the brain woman the heart of the human race she is the color and fragrance of the flower the bright bow in the black or hanging firmament of life the sweet cord that makes complete the human diapasin if woman is kept in a state of subjection as those who are trying to drag her into court and force her to file a bill of grievances against her companion assert she is certainly the proudest of earthly subjects if she is a slave she is bound with chains of her own forging and wears them because she wills it in obeying the rules in serving she leads captive her captor really she is the autocrat of earth the power behind the throne the rudor of those who rule in all life's battles woman's love is man's chief incentive his greatest girden of victory for woman he bears his bosom to every peril braves every danger it is for her that he subdues the elements and searches out the hidden treasures of earth for her that he measures the stars and determines the procession of the planets for her that he fills the world with art and luxury for her that he is a creative god rather than a destructive demon woman is with us but not of us she is in very truth but little lower than the angels and we should not drag her down to our level under pretense of lifting her to greater heights give to her every possible advantage open to her every calling and profession that she cares to enter accord her all she asks not grudgingly but cheerfully but do not force upon her rights she does not want duties she would shun and which that beneficent god who gave her to us to civilize and humanize us destined for our own strong hands end of chapter 10 the woman thou gavest me chapter 11 of the complete works of brand the iconoclast volume 1 by William Calper Brand this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org this recording is by William Jones Christ comes to Texas and calls on the iconoclast the editor was reading a report of the regular meeting of the Dallas pastors association at which the second coming of Christ was learningly considered Dr. C. Scholes declared that all good people will rise into the air like so many larks to meet the lord and conduct him to earth with flying banners and a brass band I suppose where he will reign a thousand years at the conclusion of this felicitous period Satan is to be loosed for a little season and after he has piled up the gravel with his long toenails and given us a preliminary touch of purgatory we are to have the genuine pyrotechnics some of the divines did not agree with the spectacular ceremonies arranged by Dr. C. Scholes for the second coming but he seems determined to carry out his program or enjoin the procession the editor was musing on this remarkable controversy and wondering in a vague tired way while the fool killer did not take a pot shot at the Dallas pastors association when there came a gentle rap at his door and a strange figure stood before him it was that of a man of perhaps three and thirty years barefoot bareheaded and clothed in a single garment much worn and sadly soiled peace on this house he said in a voice soft and sweet as that of a well bred woman a cup of cold water I pray you water certainly stir yourself over against the cooler over there you look above the weary willy business sit down until I find a jumping off place in this article on monetary situation and perhaps I can fish up a stray quarter that's dodged the foreign mission fund he bowed his thanks and set weirdly into the proffered seat in five minutes he was sleeping softly and the editor made a careful study of his face it was of the Jewish type strong but tender the beard was glistening black and had evidently never been to a barber's while a shock of unkempt hair burned by the sun hung around his shoulders like the mane of a lion hello said the business manager as he helped himself to the editor's plug tobacco another of your bohemian friends a some fellow who's crimping around the world on a wager of steen million dollars good face but a bath wouldn't hurt him the stranger roused himself and the bm continued neighbor we're just about to crack a bottle of beer have you any conscientious scruples about joining us he winked at the bookkeeper and the stranger bowed his thanks accepting the amber fluid scrutinized it curiously and drank it off with evident relish that is very refreshing he commented as he wiped the foam from his black beard with his sleeve will it intoxicate he was informed that if taken on the alophatic plan it would make one drunk some but not the wild eyed murderous mania peculiar to prohibition booze he declined a second class saying gently we should not abuse the good things of life the bookkeeper was so startled that he missed his face with a pint cup and the mailing clerk did up a package of him books for a dealer who wanted potter for his wife but the stranger was evidently unconscious that he had forever queered himself with the bohemian club he took a dry crust from a leathern wallet and blessing it offered a portion to the editor Jesus Christ you don't eat that do you the visitor rose a startled look on his face you know me then yes it is I Jesus of Nazareth I have walked the earth an entire year clad as I was 18 centuries ago living as I did then mingling with those called by my name conversing with those who profess to teach my doctrine and none knew me naymore they sometimes spurned me from their doors and even delivered me into the minions of Caesar as a vagabond you look incredulous behold the nail prints in my hands and feet the spear wound in my side the scars made by the crown of thorns upon my brow but I thought your second coming would be in power and glory and all the righteous would rise up into the atmosphere to meet you and show you a soft spot to light Dr. Scholz says so and if he doesn't know who does I attended the discussion by the Dallas Pastors Association he said weirdly they permitted me to sweep out the room and stand down in the hall it may appear incredible but there are just a few things that the Dallas Pastors Association doesn't know of course you couldn't make those gentlemen believe it but it is a lamentable fact the world is young it must run its course our heavenly father did not create it as the Chinese make firecrackers just to hear it pop not until its power to produce and nourish life is exhausted will the end be your poet Campbell was a true prophet the sun itself must die and not until that mighty source of light and heat becomes a flickering lamp will those fateful words be spoken time was but time shall be no more I am not come as yet to judge the world but to mingle once again with the sons of men and observe how they keep my laws an expression of unutterable sadness stole into his face and he said a long time silent I have suffered and sacrificed much for this people he said at length as though speaking to himself and it has borne so little fruit the world misunderstood me the church planted by toil and nurtured with my blood has split up into hundreds of warring factions despite my warning that a house divided against itself cannot stand nor has it stood the temple of Zion is a ruin the habitation of sanctified owls and theological bats the army of Israel is striving in its camp tribe against tribe or wandering desolate in the desert while the legions of Lucifer overrun the land here and there among the simple poor I find traces of the truths I taught here and there a heart that is a holy temple in which abide faith hope and charity but the shepherds do not keep my sheep he leaned his head upon his hands and wept while the editor shifted uneasily in his chair and strove in vain to think of something appropriate to say during his repertorial career he had interviewed Satan and the Archangel Gabriel he had even inserted the journalistic pump into Governor Colberson and Dr. Cranville without being overwhelmed by their transcendent greatness but this was different the city hall clock chimed ten the hour when the saloon set out the mock turtle soup and potato salad the bull beef and sour beans as lanyap to the heavy laden schooner the editor remembered that Christ first came eating and drinking set with the publicans and sinners and was denounced therefore as a wine-bibber and a glutton by the prohibitionists and other Miss Nancy's of Palestine still he hesitated he wanted to do the elegant but was afraid of making a bad impression a glance at the dry and moldy crust determined him he tapped the visitor on the shoulder and said let's go get some grub I wouldn't worry about the world if I were you I continued as he led the way to the elevator it is really not worthwhile if the devil wants it I let him have it I can think of no greater punishment you could inflict upon him than to make him a president of it it were equivalent to England giving candidate to the United States for meddling in the Venezuelan matter perhaps you know your business best but I have lived the longest I used to think that perhaps the world would pay the salvage for saving it but that was before I moved to Waco I tell you frankly that if I had your job in the new Jerusalem I had nurse it and let Bob Ingersoll doc tell me and the rest of the noisy blather skites scrap it out there to suit themselves he did not reply and the editor remembering that his advice had not been asked changed the subject I'm not going to steer you against a first-class hotel Jim I Moore wouldn't let you into his dining room with your shoes off even though you brought a letter of credit from the creator Jim loves you dearly but business is business there's a place down here however run by a man who doesn't trot with the sanctified set for you can waltz up to the feed trough in the same suit you wore when you preached this sermon on the mount and that without giving the ultra fashionables a case of the phantons ah there we will doubtless meet with many of the good brethren who do not observe empty forms and foolish ceremonies rather but perhaps I should tell you that the church does not approve of the place we are going they are uh sell wine there you know also that amber liquid with the uh froth on it when why not wine damn final I mean oh you'll have to ask brother Cranville I suppose because old Noah jagged up on it Noah who why just Noah that old Steph I mean that good man who was saved for seed when the overflow came and who's the great granddaddy of all the niggers is it possible that the church is retailing that wretched old myth which my Hebrew brothers borrowed of the barbarians Noah there was no such man by the shifting of the earth's axis about 16 000 years ago a portion of the isiatic continent was overflowed but the normal story is in the bible so is the story of Adam and Eve and many other absurdities which really intelligent people would purge it of oh men will be mental children ever he ate sparingly but scanned the visitors closely at the next table a quartet of Texas kernels were absorbing mint juleps through rye straws the Nazarene nudge the editor and inquired what the barrage consisted of the latter explained the mystery and would have placed one before his guest but the latter insisted that a little wine for the stomach's sake would suffice several entered into conversation with him and would have given him money but he gently declined to accept it saying that the good father would provide that he was seeking to do good not to lay up treasures are these people sinners he was informed that according to the theology of the pro-hebs they would occupy the hottest corner of perdition but they give to the poor speak kindly to the stranger even though he be clothed in rags I'm sure they would not lie or steal or kill but they will blaspheme a little sometimes just listen to these kernels didn't you hear them say damn and hell's fire and devil oh according to our theology there's no hope for him a man made to fraud a widow or swindle an orphan and make a landing but when he talks about the devil and hell he's sure to be damned is Satan a sacred person or hell a place to be mentioned reverently blasphemy is speaking evil of God the priesthood of every religious cult has manifested a propensity to magnify venial faults into cardinal sins and thereby bring worship into contempt by trifling to hell with those who make religion a trade and thrive thereby we were on the street and a chance that a well-fed silk-headed dominey sporting a diamond stud was dawdling by as the man of Galilee uttered his emphatic protest against gain-grabbing preachers his face flushed with anger and turning upon the ill-clad stranger he said do you mean to insult me fellow the Nazarene faced his heated interlocutor and replied with quiet dignity assuredly not I did not suspect you of being a minister you are not clad like one of the apostles surely you are not one of those disputatious sectaries who wear purple and fine linen and fair sumptuously every day while countless thousands cry to their father in heaven give us to eat and to drink lest we die I want no lectures from you sir I know my business exclaimed the man of God with rising color ah but I fear that business is to coin the blood of Jesus of Nazareth into golden guineas the infinite pity in the speaker's voice cowed the pugnacious preacher and he was about to pass on but a brown, toil-stained hand the hand of a carpenter was laid upon his shoulder wait my brother let not the sun go down upon thy wrath him ye serve was even as I am poor and friendless he spake as I speak the truth that welled up in his heart cruel things were said of him but he resented it not he was beaten with many stripes and mocked and crucified but he freely forgave be thou humble as he was humble be thou forgiving even as he forgave love God and thy fellow men that is the whole law given by him ye serve words are but a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal but a good example endureth forever Lord Lord exclaimed the editor why didn't you reveal yourself to him ah he would not have believed me no though I performed before him miracles more wonderful than those accredited to me in Palestine I have resumed my earthly raiment and adopted my old mode of life as the best possible disguise believing me a vagabond those pretending to worship with all their heart and all their soul showing to me what they really are now as ever do men polish the outside of the cup while within is all uncleanliness have you interviewed many big preachers many almost all I attended Sam Jones's recent services at Austin he is simply a product of the evil times upon which the church has fallen in religion as in ardent letters decadence is marked by sensationalism the trouble with Sam is that he mistakes himself for me thinks he has been called to judge the world I was pained to hear him consign about 15 different classes of people to perdition without sifting them to see if per chance there might not be one in the lot worthy of salvation I presented him with a copy of my sermon on the mount he took a fresh chew of tobacco and remarked that he was inclined to think he had read it before or somewhere then he took up a collection uh Sam represents the rebound from the old religious belly ache for years preachers had an idea that there is nothing of gladness in the worship of God that it consisted simply of a chronic case of the snuffles Jones has simply gone to the opposite extreme and transformed the temple of the deity a variety dive Nero fiddled while Rome burned but Jones indulges in the levity of the buffoon while consigning millions of human beings to hell alas that so few preachers understand the pity which permeates all true religions all true religions even so all are true and of God that make people better nobler more pitiful the father is all wise he tempers the wind to the shorn lamb he gives to teach people a religion commensurate with its mentality I had hoped that the church established nearly 19 centuries ago would suffice until the end of the world that the simple theology I taught would grow with the world's mental growth and strengthen with its intellectual strength it was a religion of love I bound its devotees to no specific forms and ceremonies these were after-growth I expected them the child must have something to lean upon until it can walk the barbaric worshiper must have symbols and ceremonies to aid his comprehension these should have passed here this in Europe and America a religious right appropriate to semi-savages becomes when injected into an age of civilization that good custom which doth corrupt the world the people seeing these savage non-essentials insisted upon by the priesthood as something sacred and necessary into salvation turn skeptic and reject religion altogether because it is encumbered by ridiculous rubbish oh when will men understand that the full world is a temple and all right living is worship the editor was becoming really alarmed he was fearful that his visitor was frightfully heterodox hence he broke in with if you're not careful doc Talmadge will denounce you as an infidel brother Talmadge is likened to the west wind he blew it whether so ever he lists death and no man knoweth once his blow cometh or whether it goeth I tried to have a talk with him while in Washington but he was too busy writing a syndicate sermon on the political situation demonstrating that dives had already done too much for Lazarus and peddling hallelujahs at two dollars a piece I had heard much of him and expected to find him toiling early and late amongst the poor and wretched the suffering of the capital city when I called at his residence the servant told me that his master could not be disturbed said there had been a dozen tramps there that morning I asked him what salary his master received in a city filled with homeless vagabonds for preaching Christ and him crucified but she vouchsafed me no answer I went to hear the great man preach but the usher told me there was a mission church around the corner where my spiritual wants would be attended to if I failed to find a seat there I could stand on the street corner and hear the salvation army beat the bass drum and sing come to Jesus I lingered in the vestibule however and heard his sermon I asked for bread and he gave me wind pudding I was sorry that I didn't attend the salvation army exercises I prefer the bass drum to the doctor yet may be equally noisy but hardly so empty I saw men attired in fine cloth and women ablaze with jewels kneel on velvet cushions and pray to me then the choir sang oh how I love Jesus for Jesus died for me and dr. Talmadge exclaimed come dear lord oh come and I came I walked down the center aisle expecting that a mighty shout of joy would shake the vaulted roof of heaven and be echoed back by the angels I suppose that dr. Talmadge would advance and embrace me but no the men stared their disapproval the women drew back their perfumed skirts of glistening silk and dr. Talmadge thundered Sarah who are you I raised my hand and exclaimed in a loud voice Jesus Christ the editor started up from his siesta and rubbed his eyes the foreman of the baptist standard had pied of form end of chapter 11 christ comes to texas