 37. A Synopsis of Mr. Brand's Address to the Ladies' Reading Club, San Antonio, Texas. I have been asked to lecture to the ladies of the Reading Club, but shall do nothing of the kind. That were to admit that you require improvement, and I would not have you better than you are. We would have to clip your wings or keep you in a cage. Besides, I never saw a woman whom I could teach anything. She already knew it. I have been going to school to the ladies all my life. My mother carried me through the kindergarten, lady preceptors through the intermediate grade, and my wife is patiently rounding off my education. When I graduate, I expect to go direct to heaven. As near as I can figure it out, the inhabitants of the New Jerusalem will consist of several million women and just men enough to fill the municipal offices. I would not live always. I ask not to stay. No lecture, then, but an informal talk without text or subject. A vagrant ramble through such fields has tempt us. If we should find fruit or even flowers, let us be thankful. If we encounter only briars, it will not be the first half hour we have wasted. The fact that you are members of the reading club indicates that you are seeking knowledge. I trust that you are finding it. That every stroke of the intellectual pick turns up a golden nugget. But do not make the mistake of supposing that all the wisdom of the world is bound in calf. You may know all that has ever penned in papyrus or graved on stone, written on tablets of clay or preserved in print, and still be ignorant. Not even know how to manage a husband! As a rule people read without proper discrimination, and those who are most careful often go furthest astray. I once knew a woman with no more music in her soul than a rat-tail file, who spent three laborious years learning to play the piano. Then closed the instrument and never touched it again. One day I said to her, Mary, what good did all that patient practice do you? Lots of good, she replied. I used to be dreadfully ashamed to have people know that I couldn't play. And a great deal of laborious reading is undertaken on the same principle that Mary learned to play the piano, and is of just as little benefit. Many people are with books as with medicine. Imagine that whatever is hardest to get down will do them the most good. No mortal man, and, as the preacher correctly stated, the men embrace the women, ever yet got any permanent good out of a book unless he enjoyed its perusal. Genoje Engel says that everybody praises Milton's paradise lost, but nobody reads it. Engels is mistaken. Everybody making any pretension to culture has read the book as a disagreeable duty. But that man don't live, at least outside of the lunatic asylum, who can quote a dozen lines out of it? Same with Dante's Divine Comedia and a host of other books with which people are expected to inflict their brains. Read few books, and those of the very best, books that you enjoy. Read them thoroughly. Make them your very own, then forget them as soon as possible. Having submitted to the mental and moral discipline of another, you can read a few books. Read them thoroughly. Make them your very own, then forget them as soon as possible. Having submitted to the mental and moral discipline of another, decline to lean on him. But stand up in your own independent individuality. Don't be a copy. There is on earth no more pitiable person than the bookful blockhead ignorantly read with loads of learned lumber in his head. Do not interpret too literally. What I warn you against is the habit, all too common, of imagining ourselves rich because we have counted the golden horde of others. One may admire the Medician Venus without becoming a sculptor, or have Plato at his fingers ends and ever remain a fool. Were I an artist, I would study with attention the works of all the great masters. But when I put my hand to my own task, I would turn my back upon them all, and my face to nature. My work would then be a creation, not a copy. Did I aspire to be truly learned? I would study the words of the world's wisest, then dig for wisdom on my own behoof. I would thus become a philosopher instead of a parrot. I have been frequently called an iconoclast. As bad as the title is popularly supposed to be, I trust it is not altogether undeserved. I have striven to break foolish idols and shatter false ideals, to hurl unclean gods from their pedestals in the public pantheon. A work of destruction is not, I admit, of a high order anybody may destroy. It requires genius to build up. The wonder of the ancient world sank to ruin irremediable beneath the torch of a morbid dude who had rather be damned to everlasting fame than altogether forgotten. A hungry wolf may destroy a human life which Almighty God has brought to perfection through long years of labor, but destruction is sometimes necessary. The seas must be clear to pirates before commerce can flourish. The antiquated and useless buildings must come down before the schoolhouse or business block can occupy the site. In the great cities are men who do nothing but destroy old buildings, professional wreckers of those works of man that have outlived their usefulness. They build nothing, but are they therefore to be condemned? So, in the social world a man may be a professional wrecker without the constructive ability to build a political platform on a pie crate and still be useful, indispensable. The wrecker of bad buildings does not contract to put good ones in their places, nor is the iconoclast under any obligation to find a heavenly grace for every false god that falls beneath his hammer. A saint for every sinner he holds up to scorn, a new truth for every old falsehood he fells to earth. He may, if he thinks proper, leave that labor to others and go on with brand and bomb, bludgeon and billhook, wrecking, destroying, playing John the Baptist to a greater to come after. A great many good people have taken the trouble to inform me that I am a pessimist. Perhaps so, but I am not worrying much about it. A pessimist is a person somewhat difficult to define. The fool who smokes in a powder house, or believes that his neighbors always speak well of him behind his back. The wife who encourages her husband to pay court to other women on the supposition that no harm can ensue. The banker who accepts a man's unsecured note because he is a church member and powerful in prayer. And the servant girl who lights the fire with kerosene, then goes to join the angels taking your household goods and gods with her, are certainly not pessimists. They are only idiots. It is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person afflicted with an incurable case of mulligrubs. One who nothing in all earth or heaven or Hades pleases. One who usually deserves nothing yet grumbles if he gets it. But we should not forget that every reform this world has known, every effort that has lifted man another notch above the brute level, every star in our flag of freedom, every line and letter in our constitution of human liberty, every gem of knowledge that gleams in the great world's intellectual crown of glory, every triumph of science and religion, philosophy and mechanics was the work of pessimists, so-called, of men who were not satisfied with the world's condition, and set determinably to work to better it. They strove with their full strength against those conditions, panagerized and poetized by the smirking optimists of their time, and thereby incurred the enmity of pedants and self-sufficient purists, were denounced and denied, belittled and belied. But, says the enthusiastic optimist, things are not what they used to be. When a college of cardinals gave Galileo to the goer for maintaining that the world do move, when Christ cast forth the money manipulators and purged the porches of the temple of the disreputable dove dealers, when Luther raised the standard of revolt and the Puritan packed his grip, there were cruel wrongs to write. But look at us now! We've got a constitution and a confession of faith. Prize rings and Parisian gowns sent missionaries to Madagascar and measured Mars' two moons. Of course we made some mendicants, but please admire the multifarious beauty of our millionaires. Who can doubt that we've triumphed over the world, the flesh and the devil? Have not the Spanish Inquisition and the English Court of High Commission gone glimmering? Do we bore the tongues of Quakers or amputate the ears of non-conformists as in old Langzine? Do we not run troublesome wives into the divorce court instead of into the river, as was once our want, scientifically roast our criminals with electricity instead of pulling their heads off with a hair halter? Do we not fight our political battles with wind instead of war clubs? Have not our great partisan Palladian's substituted gall for Greek fire? Progressing we certainly are, but the devil has adapted the Fabian tactics and is leading us a wild dance through unprofitable deserts. While we have been shattering ethnic images, he has been building new idols. While we have been dragging the phallus bull from its pedestal, the golden calf of ancient Israel has reached maturity and maternity, and its progeny is now worshiped in a thousand pantheons. Everywhere the false and the true, the good and the evil, the lambient light of heaven and the sulfurous shadows of hell meet and blend. Nowhere, yet everywhere, floats the white veil in flaming ensign of the modern mochana. And we stand wrangling about the proper cut of a collar, debating whether the Gadarenes, whose swine the outcast devils drowned, were Jews or Gentiles? Dogmatizing a nint the proper form of baptism, doubting with which hand we should tip the hat? Wondering if Joseph's coat were a sack or a swallow-tail? Ninety and nine out of every hundred wasting upon childish trifles and strength given us to do the work of demigods. And every foolish breath, every heartbeat bearing us across time's narrow sands into the broad bosom of that sea which hath no shore. What does the all-seen sun that has for so many centuries glared down upon this wretched farce tragedy think of it all? And yet man boasts that he is the mortal image of immortal God. It was for this trifling straddling biped intent only upon getting his goose-head above the foolish geese that the regent of the universe suffered ignomy and death. I sometimes think that had the Almighty cast the human horoscope he would never have given Noah a hint to go in out of the wet. I am no perfectionist. I do not build this spasmodic sob nor spill the scalding tear because all men are not Sir Galahad's in quest of the Holy Grail, and all women angels with two pair of reversible wings and the aurora borealis for a hat-band. I might get lonesome in a world like that. I do not expect to see religion without cant, wealth without want, and virtue without vice. But I do hope to see the human race devote itself to grander aims than following the fashions and camping on the trail of the cartwheel dollar. I want to see more homes and fewer hovels, more men and fewer dudes. I want to see more women with a moral courage to brave the odium of being old maids rather than the pitiful weakness to become loveless wives. I want to see more mothers who would rather be queens of their homes than the favorites of fashionable circles. Women who would rather have the love of their husbands than the insolent admiration of the whole he-world. Women who do not know too much at fifteen and too little at fifty. I want to see more men who are not a constant reminder of a monkey ancestry, some philosopher once remarked. As between men and dogs, give me dogs. I have been often tempted to endorse the sentiment, and I am not much of a lover of dogs either. I want to see men who are not fobs in their youth, fools in their prime and egotists in their old age, a race of manly men to whom life is not a lascivious farce, whose god is not gold, who do not worship at the shrine of the pandemian Venus, nor devote their lives to the service of Mammon, the least erect of all the angelic hosts that fell from heaven. I want to see men who scorn the pusillanimity of the policy prayer, who, like Caesar, dare tell greybeards the truth, and though it cost a crown, men of Leonine courage, men of iron mould, men strong of hand and heart, who defiantly throw down the gauge to destiny, who can trample hell itself beneath their proud feet even while it consumes them. The dream may be utopian. I much fear it will never be made a blessed reality by either philosophy or religion. We have had both for forty centuries, yet the fool has become ever more offensive and the liar has overrun the land. Yet we imagine that because we no longer live in caves and fight naked with the wild beasts of the forest for our food, we are a way up at the head of the procession with Greek civilization distanced and all the other times and half times nowhere. Human development, like the earth, the sun, the stars, like all things brought into being by the breath of omnipotent God, travels ever in a circle. Savagery and ignorism, barbarism and ambition, civilization and cyber-itism, dudism and intellectual decay, then once more savagery and ignorance proclaims the complete circle that we have travelled from Nader to Zenith and from Zenith to Nader, when once again we begin with painful steps and slow to repace the path which carries us to the very verge of godhood, and wreathes our brows with immortal bays, then brings us down, even while we think we mount until we touch a level beneath the very brute. Such has ever been the world's history and such it will ever be until a force is found that can transform this circle into a straight line, that can blend the rugged manhood of the barbarism with the graces of our higher civilization and give us wisdom without weakness and culture without cowardice. That can incorporate us in corpuscles in the social organism without eliminating every spark of godlike individuality, making us helpless dependents upon social, political and religious precedent. If the car of progress travels in a circle, and history says it does, if neither science, philosophy nor religion can deflect it from its seemingly predestined path and the condition of their birthplace proclaims their failure so to do, where is hope? Must the human race forever go to weary round of birth and death like Buddhist souls wandering through all that's fair and foul until it finds nirvana in the destruction of the world? Not so, for there is a hope, a blessed hope, that like a poisoning eagle burns above the unrizen morrow. That hope is in the union of all the mighty forces that make for the emancipation of mankind, a union of religion and philosophy, science and woman, and of these the first is the last and the last is the first in point of power and importance. When I reflect that until within comparatively recent times women were slaves, I don't much wonder that the old civilizations went to the dogs, that the millennium is not yet due. Trying to make a civilization that would stick without the help of women were like building a cocktail with a basis of buttermilk. God gave her to man to be in help meat, not a plaything. I don't think that she can help him much by going into politics or becoming a crusading she-peter the hermit while her own children need her care. But I do believe that the wife and mother, that erstwhile ignorant drudge raised by God's great mercy to royalty, made queen of the home and thereby absolute empress of the great round earth, is to be the dynamics of a new and grander civilization that can never recede. That the womanly woman, self-poised as a star, pure as the polar snows, fit companion for the true noblemen of nature, is to be the providence that will lead humanity step by step, ever onward and upward until our cruel age of iron is transformed into an age of gold, in which there will be neither millionaire nor mendicant, master nor slave, in which selfishness shall be considered the worst of crimes and love the all-powerful law. Such ladies is my dream of the future. You see, with true managed instinct, I throw the work of the world's salvation upon the women. I don't know, however, but it's retributive justice. If you got us fired out of the first paradise, it is your duty to find another and put us in possession. But really, with all due respect to sacred writ, I could never accept that serpent story without considerable salt. My observation and experience has been that men are much more addicted to the snake habit than our women. I gather from Genesis that after the Edenic reptile had done the damage, it was condemned to go upon its belly all the days of its life. That indicates that it was not only a good conversationalist, but had legs. Now, I submit it to you in all seriousness. Which member of the original family was most likely to see such a serpent as that? I think I should have given Adam the keelie cure, then cross-examine him a little before laying the burden of the blame on Eve. If the latter was really the tempter she was probably trying to reach the heart of her hubby by that direct route, the stomach. Lost heaven for love, as too many of her daughters have since done. The fact that Adam was not willing to father her fault proved him unworthy of his wife, and the bad example he set is too often followed by many of his sons, who attribute all their trials and tribulations to the patient wives whose watchful care keeps them out of the penitentiary. Whatever may have been Eve's fortune, Adam was no great loser by being ejected from Eden, for the man who possesses the love of a good woman carries paradise with him wherever he goes. A woman's love can transform a hovel into a heaven and fill it with supernal sunshine, and her scorn can make perdition of a palace and put in all the fancy touches. Woman is the only thing extant, if Genesis be believed, that was not evolved from a solid slug of nothing. That, I presume, is why she amounts to something. Nothing was good enough, raw material of which to make the father of mankind, but when the Almighty came to create our common mother, he required something more substantial than a hole in the atmosphere. I always bank on a boy who has a good mother, regardless of what the old man may be. The fathers of philosophers have sometimes been fools, but their mothers never. A wise man may beget dudes or a good man practical politicians, but it's his misfortune not his fault. The good Lord expects no man to gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles. I have yet to hear of a single man who became distinguished in any line of human endeavor. According to his father the credit for his greatness, character is molded at the mother's knee, and in the light of her loving eyes is born that ambition which boils man up in a sea of troubles, that drive him on through dangers and difficulties straight to the shining goal. The nineteenth century marks the culmination of an era of human triumphs, a brilliant coruscation of victories over the cohorts of ignorance and prejudice. But its crown of imperishable glory is the recognition that woman was created to be man's companion and co-laborer instead of his chattel, his joint sovereign of the earth instead of his slave. Fronting the dawn of a grander day, her hand unguide and her brain unfettered with broader opportunities for usefulness in boasting a nobler beauty than during the dark and dreary centuries that lie behind her like a hideous dream, such is the woman of the nineteenth century, and upon the shapely shoulders of this new palace I hang my second provenance. To her loving hands I commit the destiny of the race, to her true heart the salvation of the world. End of Section 37 This recording by William Jones, Beneva Springs, Florida The complete works of Bran the iconoclast of Volume 12, Section 38, Bran's reply to Saladerie Ex priest Joseph Saladerie, in his lecture at Waco, Texas, in the interest of the APA, bitterly denounced the iconoclast. During the Saladerie lecture, Bran Rose pointed his finger at Saladerie and said, You lie, and you know it, and I refuse to listen to you. Bran then turned on his heel and walked out. He then hired the same opera house at his own expense and replied to Saladerie. Fellow Americans, the iconoclast does not please ex priest Saladerie, Baptist minister in good standing, and I'm not surprised. Its mission, as its name implies, is to expose frauds and abolish fakes, to make unrelenting war upon humbugs and hypocrites. Hence it is not remarkable that Saladerie should regard its existence as a personal affront. It is ever the gold jade that winces. Or to borrow from the elegant pulpit vernacular of the Reverend Sam Jones, it's the hit dog that yelps. Saladerie would have you believe that I'm a rank atheist who's trying to rip religion up by the roots and bang it across a barbed wire fence in close companionship with the hides of protestant preachers. This charge has been hurled at me by various sectarian papers and malicious ministers, but not one iota of evidence has ever been submitted. It is simply a bald assertion, bored of sanctified malice, a brazen libel, similar to that which charges the Pope with trying to subvert the American government. By defy Saladerie and all that unclean brood of moral vultures, assassins of character and thieves of reputation which trail in his wake and applaud his infamies to produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered disrespectful of any religion, pagan, Protestant, or Catholic. If in the wilds of Central Africa I should find a man bowing down to a dried toad, a stuffed snake or a Saladerie, I'd remove my head as a tribute of respect, not to his judgment, but to his honesty. I have no word of condemnation for any religious faith, however fatuous it may appear to me, that has comforted the dying or consoled the living, that has cast one gleam of supernal sunshine into the dark veil where grope each beneath his burden of sorrow, the sons of men. I am not warring upon religious faith, but on falsehood, not upon Jesus Christ, but on those who disgrace his cause, who mistake bile for benevolence, gall for godliness, and chronic laziness for a call to preach. Nor have I taken the Pope of Rome under my apostolic protection. The Popes managed to exist for a great many years before I was born, and despite the assaults of Saladerie, will doubtless continue in business at the old stand for several years to come. I was raised a Protestant and, thank God, I'm no apostate. I learned Protestantism at my mother's knee and from my father's pulpit, but I did not learn there that the Church of Rome is the scarlet woman, nuns, unclean creatures, priests, disworn enemies of my country. I learned that but for the Church of Rome the glad tidings of great joy which Christ brought to a dying world would have been irredeemably lost in that dismal, intellectual night known as the Dark Ages. I was taught that for centuries the Church of Rome was the repository not only of the Christian faith, but of civilization itself. I was taught that the Catholic is the mother of the Protestant Church, and that no matter how unworthy a parent may be, a child should not become the herald of its mother's shame. And while being taught my duty as a Protestant, my education as an American citizen was not neglected. I was taught that this was a land of religious liberty where every man is privileged to worship God in his own way or ignore him altogether, that it was my duty to insist upon this right, both for myself and for my fellows. That is why I am the uncompromising enemy of the APA. Any attempt to debar an American citizen from the honors and emolience of a public office because of his religious faith or non-faith is the flagrant violation of a fundamental principle of this rebellion. And no patriot, no man in whose veins there pulses one drop of the blood of the conscript fathers, or who would recognize the goddess of liberty if he met her on the road, no man imbued with the tolerant spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ will aid or abet such an un-Christian and un-American movement. The APA is the bastard spawn of ignorance and intolerance, conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity. There may be some honest men connected with the movement, but if honest they should get their heads trippand to give their brains room to grow. They are as unable as a mule-eared rabbit to comprehend either the broad principles upon which this government is grounded or its political and religious history. No man, not even Judas Iscariot Solatari, is to blame for his ignorance, so we should humbly pray, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. Nor is the Church of Rome responsible for the shameless apostate's lack of information. It did all that it could to transform him from an ignorant little beggar into an educated gentleman, but even the Pope cannot make a silk purse out of his sows ear. It is no fault of the Church of Rome that he is densely ignorant of the very textbook truths of history, that he knows nothing of that reformation of which he talks so glibly, that he is unable to comprehend the genius of the government upon which he has conferred his more or less valuable citizenship. The fault, if fault it be, lies with the Almighty, who gave him a bad heart and a worse head. American Protective Association, eh? That signifies that Uncle Sam is in need of protection. I had hitherto supposed that the gentleman in the high-water pants and starby-spangled cutaway was able to protect himself, but it now appears that unless he crawls under the aegis of the redoubtable salary, he is, to again borrow from the most popular of all Protestant divines, a gone sucker. Think of placing Uncle Sam under the protection of a man who is an apostate in religion and a renegade in politics, of an Irishman who apostrophizes the British flag. Think of that kind of a bird presuming to tell the grandsons of revolutionary soldiers their duties as American citizens. Slattery assures us that we need protection from the Pope. There was a time when the proudest monarchs of Europe trembled at the papal nod. But gradually the Pope has been shorn of temporal power confined ever more to the realm of spiritual. Until today he exerts about as little influence on the political destiny of this world as the Dr. Cranfield with his little prohibition craze. But Slattery will have it that the Pope is gradually undermining American institutions and leads us to infer that sooner or later he will blow our blessed constitution at the moon and scatter fragments of the goddess of liberty from Dan Ubersheba from Cape Cod to Kalamazoo. The Pope it appears is a veritable guy foe who is tunneling beneath our national capital with a keg of giant powder in one hand and a box of Lucifer matches in the other. What's the evidence? Why out in San Francisco? So Slattery says. But as Slattery's been convicted of lying it for well to call for papers, a Catholic school board was elected and employed only Catholic teachers. The same awful thing happened in Detroit, if Slattery's telling the truth, which is doubtful in the extreme. But then what? With the pride worthy of a more American act this illogical idiot informs us that when the Protestants capture the school boards of those cities they discharge every one of the Catholic teachers and put only good Protestants on guard. And at that Baptist brethren with water on the brain who boast of Roger Williams cheered so loudly as to be in danger of lockjaw. In the exuberant imagination of Slattery and his dupes there appears to be a wonderful difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He doesn't seem to have occurred to them that what is sauce for the Protestant goose should be sauce for the Catholic gander. They damned the Catholics for doing the very thing for which they commend the Protestant. That's the logic of the APA, the aggregation of pusillanimous asses. In my humble opinion both were engaged in very small business. The only difference in the offenders that I can see is that while the Catholics are saying nothing the Protestants are loudly boasting of their vicious subversion of the American principle of religious liberty. The circumstance is a sharp reminder that if we are to preserve a government of the people, for the people and by the people, we've got to keep religion of all kinds out of our politics just as the framers of the federal constitution intended that we should do. Mixing religion and politics is like mixing whiskey and water. It spoils both. Slattery would have you believe that our Catholic citizens are simply emissaries of the Pope to whom they owe allegiance both spiritual and temporal and that they will at the first opportunity subvert American institutions and will make this nation simply a satrappy of the Vatican. The American Catholic takes his theology from Rome. He takes his politics from the ecumenical council of his party from the national convention of that partisan organization to which he may chance to belong. That there can be no Catholic conspiracy against the free institutions of this country must be evident to every man of common sense from the simple fact that Catholics are divided among all the political parties or continually voting against each other. Now I appeal to your judgment. Lay aside your religious prejudices for the moment and look at the matter from a nonpartisan non-sectarian standpoint. If our Catholic fellow citizens be under the thumb of the Pope politically as the apostate now evangelizing for the ABA would have us defeated and if the Pope desires to make himself temporal ruler of this land or in any manner affect its affairs would they not be found voting as a unit a mighty political machine instead of being as badly divided on secular questions as the Baptist themselves. San Antonio is a Catholic stronghold yet a prominent Roman Catholic was overwhelmingly defeated in the last mayorality election a few hundreds of instances where Catholics have voted against men of their own religious faith and elected Protestants or infidels. Again if the Pope is plotting against America and if all manner of crime be considered a virtue when committed by Catholics in furtherance of his ends as Fletchery would have you believe then it will well to keep a sure by on the apostate priests. How are we to know that they are not emissaries of the Vatican commissioned to stir the Protestants up to persecute their brethren in Christ and thereby solidify the Catholic vote. No one not even Solanary has accused the Pope of being a fool and certain it is that the ABA movement if persisted in will have the effect of driving the Catholics of this country to political unity in self-defense. Persecution political ostracism for religious communion's sake will infallibly bring about those very conditions which Solanary Hicks et al. declared that the Pope desires. The Communicants of the Church of Rome will no longer vote as Democrats or Republicans but as Catholics and then with unlimited wealth and such a political machine at the command of a man so ambitious and unscrupulous as we are asked to believe the Pope to be The capture of the federal government and the political domination of this country were as easy as lying. The Protestants divided into a hundred warring factions many of them further apart theologically than Episcopalianism and Catholicism would offer no resistance to such a political machine and they would receive but cold comfort from their liberal element which has suffered so long from their petty persecutions. And I tell you Protestants right here that if it be the intention of the Church of Rome to transform this government into a theocracy by fair means or foul then the Pope is the real founder of the APA and Solanaries of Papal Spy. According to the story of this self constituted protector of the American government he studied Roman Catholic theology for years then and created it as a priest for eight more before discovering anything immoral in teachings of the Mother Church when it suddenly occurred to him that it was but a tissue of falsehoods a veritable cesspool of rottenness his transformation appears to have been almost as sudden as that of Saul of Tarsus or that of Judas Iscariot I have no objection to his leaving Catholic priesthood his bishop stopped his pay like the servant maid caught pilfering he gave notice with the mrs. a python at the door if Solanary believes that the Protestant throughline runs more comfortable cars to the great hereafter he's welcome to take his ticket over that route but I would have thought better of him had he made the change quietly and refrained from assaulting with the distinctiveness of a renegade that the church to which he owes his education such as it is had he treated the religion of his mother with decency if not with respect I thought I had met all manner of men mean hardened in crime mean destitute of even a semblance of shame but never before did I behold one with the hardy hood to stand up before American women and boast that he had mother's curse when a man fall so low in the scale of human degradation that his own mother disowns him it were well to watch him when a creature ask strangers to accept him because his relatives have rejected him when for the sake of gain he snaps like a mangy lice at the hand that once fed him and stings like a poisonous adder the bosom that once nurtured him when to promote his personal ends he will use his best endeavors to exterminate religious liberty and precipitate a bloody sectarian war I tell you he was not born a man but begotten a beast from the very foundation of this government the Catholics have been its firm defenders their wisdom and eloquence have adorned its counsel from the signing of the declaration of American independence to this good day and its every battlefield from lexicon to the custom massacre has been wet with Catholic blood nine Roman Catholics signed the declaration of independence and the Roman Catholics of New York contributed so liberally of their blood and treasure to the cause of the newborn nation that Washington wrote them a letter praising their patriotism several Roman Catholics helped frame the Federal Constitution and the interpretation of that wonderful instrument by a Roman Catholic Chief Justice today constitutes the fundamental law of the land yet slattery and that ridiculous organization of which he boasts himself a member would have you believe that the American Catholics would at a nod from the pope ruthlessly trample underfoot that flag whose defense they pledged their lives their fortunes and their sacred honor that they would wreck without remorse and run without regret that nation they helped place on the map of the world how do you old Confederates who followed Pat Klebern relish having this blatant tramp defame your dead commander can you believe on the unsupported testimony of this mendacious muttabank that father contribute to the stars and bars was rank hypocrisy that the poet priest was the political tool of a foreign power Sherman died a Catholic fighting fuel Sheraton was a Catholic old Pap Thomas the rock of Chikamoga was a Catholic the bloody 69th New York was a Catholic regimen and its heroism at the battle of Bull Run forms one of the darkest pages in our military history of this nation strange it never occurred to those demoralized protested regiments which took refuge behind the bayonets of the 69th that they were throwing the Vatican between themselves and the Confederate forces assures us that the number of Irish Catholics on the police force of our great cities is evidence that the church of Rome is on mischief I am not surprised that an Irish Catholic with a club in his hand should prove rather alarming to brother Solatari but although he says meet a policeman and you'll see the map of Ireland in his face those same policemen have several times saved his worthless bacon when he was mobbed in St. Louis for a defaming Catholic nuns the police formed a cordon around his infamous carcass and saved him from a well merited frowning at the hands of the salandered women's relatives probably the police did not release the job over much but they had sworn to uphold the laws and although Solatari insist that a Catholic oath amounts to nothing they risked their lives in his defense we have many nationalities in this country and each of them as every observed man well knows manifests a predilection to national occupation thus the Jews take to trade the Germans to agriculture the Norwegians to lumbering the French to catering and the Irish to politics make a free will Baptist or a Buddhist of an Irishman and you do not change his nature he'll turn up at the next political convention just the same and a man who's too good to take a hand in practical politics who's too nice to deal with the horny handed at the ward primaries who's too busy to act as delicate to the convention who deliberately neglects his duty as an American citizen finds that Pat's activity has been rewarded with a place on the police force and blames it all on the pope it is not my province to defend Roman Catholic theology I suppose that Solatari said in its behalf before he apostasized perhaps the Catholics really believe the pope infallible and if they do it is certainly no worse than for certain Waco Protestants to believe that Solatari's infallible I noted that at his lecture last week they chaired every charge he preferred against either the pope or the apostle and that without asking for an iota of evidence an eye arose at the stag party with which he wound up the intellectual debauch and questioned his infallibility the good brethren cried throw him out why did they so unless they believe that to question the supernal wisdom and immaculate truth of auto-baptist miniature might say were sacrilege a sin against the holy ghost here was I there fell citizen of Waco I'd done them no harm yet when a strolling vagabond wearing God's livery and whose forte is the defamation of women made a statement which if true would forever disgrace me in the eyes of the world when he preferred this charge against me within two blocks of where my babies lay sleeping they wanted to mob me for branding him then and there as an infamous liar and a cowardly blackard mark you I'm no tramp in America this is the house of my father's they helped hew it out of the Virginia wilderness they helped put old glory in the heavens and to keep it there for more than a hundred years still it appears that I have no rights in this country which a foreigner with a smell of the steerage still upon him is bound to respect if he chances to be a Baptist preacher there's nothing about the church of Rome muzzling free speech when the APA would mob an American citizen for defending his character from the infamous falsehoods of a foreign tramp throw him out why throw him out I'll tell you the sanctified buzzards had gone there with appetites sharpened for a massive carrion and they were afraid I'd kill their cook throw him out for splitting their faces as wide as Billy Cursans were glued to their seats they wanted somebody else to throw him out they were anxious to see a gang of three or four hundred sanctified hoodlums travel upon me but there was not one among the self constituted protectors of this almighty American nation with sufficient sand to lead the mob if they were no better Americans than those in the wake of the Reverend Joseph Slattery like buzzers following a bad smell I'd take a corn stalk clean out the whole shooting match and stock the country with niggers and yellow dogs if such cattle were sired by Satan damned by sicker acts and born in hell they would dishonor their parents and disgrace their country Slattery insists that Catholics believe with us and so that no man with such a faith concealed about his person can be a good American citizen I don't know about that but I do know that if the Catholics act in strict accordance with a religious creed they are the only people in this country who do I've heard that you can't judge a man by his catechism Slattery assures us that he has discarded the Pope and taken Christ for his immediate guide the latter commands his followers to pray for those who despitefully use them but if Slattery did any praying for the apostle during his sojourn in this city he managed to keep that fact a profound secret Christ enjoins patience and humility he tells his followers to turn the other cheek to the smiter yet Slattery assured the ladies Wednesday night that he was a great believer in muscular Christianity then he placed his 250 pounds of stall fed beef in the fighting attitude and declared he would like to have his enemies command him one at a time to be prayed for I presume if Christ taught muscular Christianity I have inadvertently overlooked a bet Christ commands us to love our enemies but doesn't suggest that we should manifest our affection by lying about him he rebuked those who tattled about a common courtesan yet Slattery defamed decent women no you can't judge a man by his creed if the allegiance of the Catholics to the Pope is of the same character as that of Slattery to the Lord Jesus Christ Uncle Sam need not lie awake a nice to worry about papal plots had Slattery been truly a Christian instead of black guarding me when protected by the presence of ladies he should have put up a fervent prayer for my immediate conversion to the Baptist faith but his milk of human kindness had soured he was short on Christian charity and long on gall faith hope and charity says St. Paul and the greatest of these is charity and he might have added that it is also the scarcest perhaps that's what makes it so valuable the supply is ever equal to the demand speaking of charity reminds me of my experience with the Protestant preachers of San Antonio some of whom I understand are aiding and abething this APA movement designed to preserve the priceless liberty of free speech while the editor of that morning paper of this city I was in the habit of writing a short sermon for this Sunday edition for the benefit of those who could not go to church I suppose that the ministers would sanction my clerical efforts but they didn't they wanted no assistance in saving souls considered that they should be accorded a monopoly in that line and were entitled to all the emollience they proceeded to thunder at me from the pulpit and sometimes three or four perspiring puppeteers were pounding away at me at the same time and incidentally making me very popular I dropped into a swell church one Sunday morning to get a little grace a building that cost up in the six figures while people were living in four dollar jackets and subsisting on fifty cents a week within sounds of its bells and the minister was holding a copy of the express a loft in one hand and a Bible in the other and demanding of his congregation which will you take brand or God they seem to think that if they couldn't have both they had best take God though some of the centers on the back seats were a trifle subsequent in making up their minds I kept hammering away preaching to my little congregation of fifteen or twenty thousand readers every Sunday as I do now to ten times that many a month until finally the ministerial association met payroll rated whereas resoluted and wound up by practically demanding of the proprietor of the express that I be either muzzle or fired and all this time the catholic priests never said a word and San Antonio is a Catholic city but the Baptist ministers were running a sneaking boycott the church of Rome is the bull a constrictor that's trying to throttle the American bride of free speech the YMCA invited me to lecture on humbugs and that scared the ministerial association nearly to death they thought I was after him now for sure so they went to the officials of the YMCA and made them cancel the date and the only Protestant minister in the entire city who did not join the throttle free speech was an Episcopalian and the Episcopalians are not Protestants to hurt yet when these ministers who are now so fearful that the church of Rome will muzzle somebody found that they couldn't drive me out of town that they couldn't take the bread from the mouths of my babes because I had dared uttered my honest thoughts like a free man that I was to continue to edit the express so long as I liked they came fawning about me like a lot of Spaniels afraid of the lash but not one of them ever tried to convert me not one of them ever tried by kindly argument to convince me that I was wrong not one of them ever invited me to church or prayed for me so far as I could learn perhaps they thought I was past redemption solitary cautions you not to send your children to convent schools declaring that he never yet saw a nun who was an educated woman that statement standing alone ought to convince everyone blessed with a thinking apparatus that flatteries a fraud some of the best educated women in this world have entered conference women upon whose tuition fortunes have been expended are now making convent schools deservedly popular with the intelligent people he says ignorance is the correlative of Catholicism and points to Spain as proof of this startling assertion there was a time when Spain stood in the very forefront of civilization in the van of human progress the arbiter of the world's political destiny and Spain was even more Catholic than it is today nations and civilizations have their youth the manhood and their decay and it were idle to attribute the decline of Spain to Catholicism as the decadence of Greece to paganism the Catholic Church found Spain a nation of barbarians and brought it up to that standard of civilization where a Spanish monarch could understand the mighty plans of Columbus it was her Catholic majesty Queen Isabella who took from her imperial socialism the jewels with which to buy a world who exchanged the pearls of the Orient for the star of empire the Catholic Church found England a nation of barbarians and brought it up step by step until Catholic Barons rung from King John and the great charter the mother of the American Constitution it found Ireland a nation of savages it did for it but the mighty power of the Caesars could not brought it within the pale of civilization but for the Roman Catholic Church Slattery might be wearing a breach cloud digging roots with his fingernails and gorging himself with raw meat in Ireland today instead of insulting the intelligence of American audiences and ringing money from fanatics and fools by warring upon the political institutions of their fathers. Slattery was horrified to learn that some of the nuns were inclined to talk about each other I sincerely trust that he will find none of the Baptist sisters addicted to the same habit from what I could gather of his discourse before I was put out and from the report of his alleged wife's lectures I inferred that this delectable twain impeached the virtues of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods. Malice like death loves a shiny mark and there is no hate so venomous as that of the apostate but before giving creed to such tales let me ask you why should a woman exchange the brilliant prouder for a gloomy cell in which to play the hypocrite why should a cultured woman of gentle birth deliberately forego the joys of wife and motherhood the social triumph and the freedom of the world and condemn herself to a life of labor a dreary round of drudgery if her heart's impure for shame who is it that visits the slums of our great cities ministering to the afflicted comforting the dying reclaiming the fallen when pestilence sweeps over the land and mothers desert their babies who is it that presses the cup of cold water to the feverish lip and closes the staring eyes of the deserted dead who was it that went upon the southern battlefields to minister to the wounded soldiers follow them to the hospitals and tenderly nurse them back to life the Roman Catholic sisterhoods God bless them one of those angels of mercy can walk unattended and unharmed through our reservation at midnight she can visit with impunity the most degraded dive in the white chapel district at her coming the ribbled song is still and the oath dies on the lips of the loafer fallen creatures reverently touch the hem of her garments and men steeped in crime through the very lips involuntarily remove their hats as a tribute to noble womanhood the very atmosphere seems to grow sweet with her coming and the howl of hell's demons to grow silent none so low in the barrel house the gambling hell or the brothel as to breathe a word against her good name but when we turn to the Baptist pulpit there we find an inhuman monster clad in God's livery saying unclean unclean God help a religious denomination that will be fortunate such an infamous cur has a working journalist I have visited all manner of places I have written up the foulest dives that exist on this continent and have seen sisters of charity enter them unattended had one of the inmates dared insult them you would have been torn to pieces and I have sat in the opera house of this city boasting itself a center of culture and heard a so-called man of God speak of the catholic sisterhoods and professing Christians applaud him to the echo merciful God if heaven is filled with such Christians send me to hell with those who sins are human better everlasting life in a lake of fire and enforced companionship in paradise for one hour with the foul harpies that grown all man to slattery's infamous utterances God Israel to think of those unmanly scabs those psalms singing vultures are Americans and our political brethren I know little about the private lives of the Catholic priesthood but this I do know they were the first to plant the standard of Christian faith in the new world they were the first to teach the savages something of the blessings of civilization I do know that neither hardship nor pressure can abate their holy zeal and that hundreds of them have freely given their lives in the service of the Lord and why should a man devote his body to God and his soul to the devil I do know that one of them has given us the grandest example of human sacrifice for other's sake that this great world affords even Christ prayed in the Garden of Gistimony possible let this cup pass from me but father Damien pressed a cup even more bitter to his own lips and drained it to the draids died for the sake of suffering mortals a death to which the cross were mercy the Protestants admit that they are responsible for the inoculation in the simple sandwich islanders with leprosy yet when those who fill victims to the foul disease were segregated mean prisoners upon a small island in the mid-Pacific not a Protestant preacher in all of the earth could be found to minister to them the Lord had called them all into his vineyard but it appears that he didn't call a blessed one of them to that leper colony where people were rotting alive with none to point them to that life beyond the grave where all the sins and corruptions of the church are purged away and the redeemed stand in robes of radiant white at the right hand of God I blame no man for declining the sacrifice to set foot upon that accursed spot was to be declared unclean and there confined until death released you death by leprosy the most appalling disease in all the dreadful catalog of human ills the most dreadful arrow in the quiver of the grim destroyer yet father Damian a young Roman Catholic priest left home in country and all that life holds there and went deliberately forth to die for the afflicted barbarians there he reared and humble temple with his own hands to the God of his fathers there through long years of confinement he ministered to the temporal and spiritual wants of the afflicted there he died as he knew he must die with his fingers falling from his hands is flesh from his bones a sight to appall the very imps of hell no wonder the Protestant Ministers held a loof merciful God I'd rather be crucified we are all brave men when the war drum throbs and the trumpet calls us to battle beneath the eyes of the world when touching elbows with our fellows and clad in all the glorious pomp and circumstance of the war we seek the bubble of fame in at the cannons mouth when the music of the battery breeds murder in the blood the electric order goes bringing down the line is answered by the thrilling cheer the various coward drives the spur deep into the foaming flank and plunges like a thunderbolt into the gaping jaws of death and to the mouth of hell but when a man was wanted to go forth without Blair of trumpet or drum and become a life prisoner in a leper colony but one in all the world could be found equal to that supreme test of personal heroism and that man was a Roman Catholic priest and what was his reward here what Thomas G. Sherman a good Protestant says in the New York Post quote before the missionaries gained control of the islands leprosy was unknown but with the introduction of strange races leprosy established itself and rapidly increased and entire island was properly devoted to the lepers no Protestant missionary would venture among them for this I do not blame them as no doubt I should not have had the courage to go myself but a noble Catholic priest consecrated his life to the service of the lepers lived among them baptized them educated them and brought some light and happiness into their wretched lives stung by the contrast of his example the one remaining missionary a recognized and paid agent of the American board spread broadcast the vilest slanders against Father Damien so it appears that the world is blessed with two Salteries there are three kinds of liars at large in the land the harmless Moon Chousen who romances for amusement and whose falsehoods do no harm the Machiavellian liar whose mendacity bears the stamp of original genius and a stupid prevaricator who re-choose the fetid vomit of other villains simply because he lacks a feckin brain to breed falsehoods to which he may play the father and Salteries a rank as a specimen of the latter class when he attempts to branch out for himself he invariably comes to grief after giving a dental account of how Catholics persecute those who renounce the faith declaring that they were a disgrace to the church while within its pale he produced a certificate from a Philadelphia minister to the fact that he the Philadelphia had visited Salteries old parish in Ireland and the court declared that he was a good and faithful priest what Salteries seems to lack to become a first class fraud is continuity of thought he lies fluently even entertainingly but not consistently the apostate priest would have the various Protestant denominations throw down the bars that separate them and mark off their theological bailiwigs with little beds of flowers the idea is a good one but I can wonder where Salteries stole it still I can see no coach at reason for getting all the children together in happy union and leaving their good old mother out in the cold throw down all the bars and let every division of the great army of God whether wearing the uniform of Buddhist or Baptist, Catholic or Cambolite, Methodist or Mohamedon move forward with faith its sword, hope its ensign and charity its shield ceased this foolish internessing strife at which angels weep, swing into line as sworn allies and at the command of the great captain advance your standards on the camp of the common foe wage war not upon each other but on poverty ignorance and crime, hell's great triumph for it until this beautiful world's redeemed and bound in very truth with gold chains about the feet of God into section 38 brands reply to Salatery section 39 of the complete works of brand the iconoclast volume 12 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 by Michelle Fry Baton Rouge, Louisiana in October 2019 the complete works of brand the iconoclast volume 12 section 39 the local option lunacy Mr. Brand was billed to lecture at Hillsborough, Texas on the eve of the local option election the anti's took possession of the opera house and changed his subject following is a synopsis of his address ladies and gentlemen I came here to talk on Gaul and I find that I must speak on prohibition a distinction without a difference I hold in my hand a printed challenge from the pro-hereby committee to meet Honorable W.K. Holman in joint debate tonight a challenge issued when they were all well aware that I was to lecture here this evening they felt certain that I would not forego a lecture fee to mix it with them without money and without price but they didn't know their man I'm always willing to make some sacrifice to secure the luxury of a red-hot intellectual scrapping match we propose to make it a midshipman easy duel a three-cornered fight brothers Homan and Benson versus the apostle but they wiggled in and they wiggled out they temporized and to give a sated until we saw there wasn't an ounce of fight in the whole prohibition crew that after their flamboyant defy we couldn't pull him into a joint debate with the span of mules and a log cabin I last saw brother Bill Holman at Hubbard City he was getting out of town on the train I got in on after promising that he would remain over and meet me in his harangue the night before he told his auditors that I'd simply quote abuse the church and make ugly faces end quote well I didn't abuse the church on that occasion nor upon any other albeit I sometimes make it a trifle uncomfortable for some of its unworthy representatives I cannot help making ugly faces it's my misfortune not my fault I was born good and brother Bill was born beautiful he's the Adonis of the Rostrum the Apollo Belvedere of the Beema he so dodgast pretty that the children cry for him had he come to earth 2,000 years ago some Grecian goddess would have stolen him brother Bill couldn't make an ugly face if he tried if he ever catches sight of his own pulchretude as reflected in some translucent lake I much fear that he'll meet with the fate of Narcissus some of you pro-hibs don't know who Narcissus was well he was one of those fellows whom cold water killed I'm no professional anti-prohibition spouter and have been jumped up here without preparation but it occurs to me that it requires no careful rehearsal of set orations before an amorous looking glass no study the intermingling of pathos bathos and blue fire to demolish the prohibition fallacy liberty is ever won by volunteers the shackles of political and religious slavery are forged by the hands of hirelings prohibition cannot withstand the light of logic the lessons of experience nor the crucible of the commonest kind of common sense Milton tells us that the angel ethereal found the devil squat like a toad distilling poison in the ear of sleeping Eve that he touched the vomit with his spear and forthwith Satan resumed his proper shape and fled shrieking out of paradise prohibition is another evil spirit that is breeding trouble in man's Eden but when touched by the spear point of legitimate criticism its disguise falls away and we see instead of a harmless toad a malicious meddlesome matty stirring up strife and bitterness among brethren whenever a man opposes the plans of the pro-hibs forthwith denounced as an enemy of morality a slave of the saloons a hireling of the Anheuser-Busch booing association well I had rather be the emissary of the saloons than the assassin of liberty the slave of a brewer than the blind peon of ignorant prejudice while if morality consists in attending to my neighbor's business to the neglect of my own then I'm for an instant first last and all the time as a good German friend of mine once remarked dot peoples who live by stones of mine shouldn't throw some glass houses ain't it? who is making money out of this agitation the professional pro-hibs did you ever know of one of these gentry making a prohibition speech except for filthy lucre unless he was electioneering for office or taking subscribers for a cold water journal who are out for the stuff they are the mercenaries the men who pump foul air through their faces for a fee did you ever hear of a man getting paid for defending the doctrine of personal liberty did you ever see a collection taken up at an anti-prohibition meeting to pay some important spouter for pointing out to the people their political duty a voice in the crowd nicks and you never will these prohibition orators have the impudence to denounce me as the peon of the rum power while I am fighting the battles of personal liberty at my own cost yet not a dad burned one of them will open up his head unless paid for his wind power they are reformers for revenue only I have noticed that as a rule men who speak against prohibition have never been in the gutter while those who pick up the precarious livelihood by chasing the rum demons around a stump have usually been his very humble slaves I have noticed that the men who oppose prohibition are usually the solid well-to-do men of the community the heavy taxpayers the men upon whom the schools the churches and the state chiefly depend for support while those who champion it on the rostrum are usually living in some way upon the industry of others the man who has brains enough to make money it usually has too much sense to be a prohibitionist it is the fellows who have made a failure of life who live on donations who weep over the world's wickedness and take up a collection to enable them to get to the next town who haven't sufficient moral stamina to stay sober that are padding of prohibition if we required a property franchise you couldn't muster 5000 prohibition votes between the Sabine and the Rio Grande and yet we are told that licensing the saloons is a bad business investment that it costs more than it comes to that the way to abolish poverty is to abrogate the liquor license law strange that the pro-hib should possess such transcendent business heads and such empty stomachs doubtless the drinking of liquor adds to the cost of our judiciary doubtless it is responsible for some crime but the question at issue is not one of liquor drinking versus tea totalism it is a question of drinking licensed liquor or prohibition aquafortis it is not a question of reducing the cost of our courts but of making liquor bear its due proportion of the burdens it foists upon the people I am neither the friend nor the enemy of liquor any more than I am the enemy or friend of buttermilk I have drunk both a third of a century and have been unable to see that they did me any a special good or harm I was never befuddled on the one or a found on the other and have managed to get along very well with both whether in eating or drinking a man should keep his brains above his belt and if he cannot do that he's a precious poor excuse for an uncrowned king and American sovereign the statistics furnished by the prohibition orators are fearfully and wonderfully made it has been reported in this campaign that a million Americans die every year of the world from the effects of strong drink and all this great army goes direct to hell the man who made that statement is a preacher and presumably familiar with the Bible but he has evidently overlooked the story of an annias and sephira I learned from the United States census report which I hold in my hand that in the very year in which this prohibition apostle claims a million Americans were slain by strong drink the statistical experts could find but 1592 victims of John Barley corn the doctors have ever claimed that more people die of over eating than of over drinking and the census report bears out the assertion for in the year in which 1592 people were filed away by alcoholism 30,094 deaths are accredited to diseases the digestive organs what causes indigestion overeating or eating food difficult of digestion now I submit that if brothers Benson Haman et al are trying to save the people of this land from premature graves and bear the stock of the coffin trust they should direct their crusade against indigestible food reduce the people of this nation by means of statutory law to a diet of corn bread and buttermilk let them bring all their and battering rams to bear upon the tooth some mince pie the railway sandwich a hard boiled egg and pickled pigs feet that pestilence that walks in darkness indigestion is indeed a fruitful source of crime it casts the black shadow of chronic pessimism a thwart the sunnier soul and transforms happy homes into dens bear it makes men irritable morose and prompts them to homicide who can tell how much misery and crime the wretched cookery of female prohibitionists is responsible for how the cost of our criminal courts might be reduced if these she reformers would but attend to their kitchens and dish up for their lords and masters grub that would more easily assimilate with the gastric juices if a man be fit for treasons and stratagems and spoils when loaded with a half a pint of red liquor what must be the condition of his mind and morals when he's full of sodden pie half baked beans and soda biscuits that if fired from a cannon would kill a bull the theory that strong drink is an unmixed evil that must be abolished is not in accord with the genius of this government which would give to the individual untraveled liberty in matters concerning himself experience has proven prohibition a rank failure and the customs of mankind from the very dawn of history branded a rotten fraud the people of every age in decline have used stimulants and we may safely conclude that despite the prohibs they will be employed so long as man exists upon the earth banish liquor and man will find a substitute even though it be opium morphine or cocaine it is said that Thor the great northern God of war once tried to lift what he supposed was an old woman but found to his sorrow that it was a mighty serpent which in Norse mythology encircles the world the prohibs are warring upon what they foolishly imagine to be a frivolous habit of man but we'll yet learn that they are running counter to an immutable decree of God are trying to alter the physical constitution of the human race by means of local option elections so far as I am personally concerned I would care but little if every ounce of liquor was banished from the earth and its method of manufacture forever be forgotten but I object to having a lot of he virgins and female wallflowers sit at my muzzle and dictate how I shall load myself if I'm an American sovereign I propose to be supreme artichoke of my own stomach when I want advice regarding what I shall eat and what I shall drink I'll consult a doctor of medicine instead of a doctor of divinity I do not oppose prohibition because I am the friend of liquor but because I am the friend of liberty I would rather see a few boozers and a race of bondmen I am not interested in preserving the liquor traffic but I am interested in the perpetuation of those principles that ennoble people and make manly men men who rely upon themselves for their social salvation rather than upon a public policy which may change with the phases of the moon or the arrival of some new demagogue from distant parts I have but little use for men who must swing to the apron strings of a public grand dam or go to the dogs let us reserve the nursery for children men whom we cannot trust with the guardianship of their own appetites should not be allowed to run at large how would you young ladies like to marry American sovereigns who must be tied up like a lot of mangy causes when white clover is in blossom to keep them from catching the slobbers but the pro-hibs in Formus the brightest men of the world are ruined by a strong drink they assure us that it is not a question of intellect but of appetite what was judgment given us for if not to control our appetites if appetite be paramount to judgment why do we hang rape fiends let me tell you the idea that the brainiest men of the world died drunkards is the merest moonshine if only men of genius drank liquor a one horse still would supply the demand and be idle six months in the year take the thousand to greatest men the world has produced a thousand immortals and not two percent of them died drunkards yet ninety eight percent of them drank liquor if the pro-hibs had ever produced an intellect of the first class they must have hidden it under a bushel its possessor is probably one of those village hamptons or a mute and glorious militants of whom the poet sings the pro-hibs don't run to great men they run to gab stripped of all its marvelous trappings the thesis of prohibition is simply this some men drink to excess therefore no one should be permitted to drink at all the human race must reserve its inherent tastes and time honored habits lest some wild-eyed jay get on a jag the question at issue the riddle for us to unravel is simply this can we afford to sacrifice human liberty to save the sots is the game worth the candle and if we burn the candle will we win the game the pros assure you that prohibition prohibits it does it prohibits the sale of liquor and supplies its place with coffin paint it prohibits the sale of good ice cold beer and gives us forty-rod bug juice theories are not worth a continental when slammed against conditions what I hear I take with a grain of salt but what I see that I do know I tell you candidly that next to a pretty woman I love a cocktail if the liquor is good and the barkeeper understands his business I consider it a thing to thank God for occasionally like religion a little of it is an excellent thing but an overdose will put wheels in your head I have never yet been in a prohibition precinct where I needed to go thirsty if I had the price of a pint flask concealed about my person and my stomach could stand the poison when high license prevailed in Hillsborough you had a dozen saloons each contributing to the revenues of the state the country the municipality and the school fund you voted local option in and now you've 32 unlicensed and unregulated doggies selling rotgut to school boys and contributing not one cent to the public revenues the cost of your courts has increased drunkenness was never so common brawls never so frequent it is said that even fools can learn in the bitter school of experience but there be idiots upon whom even such lessons are lost but you say vote local option in again and we'll elect officers who will enforce the laws have you yet to learn that a law cannot be enforced that is not steadily upheld by public opinion and do you not know that there's not a considerable town in Texas where public opinion demands at all times a strict enforcement of such a law if you really desire to have a sober city raise a person hire the operators of your blind tigers to place their booze on the sidewalk in buckets accompanied by 10 dippers in signs help yourself funerals furnished free men would then run away from the very smell of the stuff who now dirty alleys and pay 15 cents for the privilege of poisoning themselves on the same principle some men and they're not all anti-prohibs either will leave a beautiful and charming wife to mope at home while they are flirting with some female whose space would frighten a freight train man is just like a dog only more so perhaps the marauding old muley cow would be a better comparison a muley cow will eat anything on this majestic earth that she can steal from a hickory shirt to a prohibition newspaper and if she can't get it through her neck she will chew it and suck the juice that's human nature to a hair man values most what is hardest to get and until you reverse the law of nature the legitimate effect of prohibition will be blind tigers and a backdoor sneaks the breeding of spies and the sale and consumption of an infinitely meaner brand of booze that liquor has done a vast amount of damage I freely concede but shall we banish everything that has added to the mighty tide of human ills then what have we left a hole in the atmosphere God has not bequeathed to man an unmixed blessing since he expelled him from paradise even woman his last best gift hath grievous faults the very first one brought into this world according to pagan legend and holy writ was the author of all our ills but for her we would be today in a blessed state of innocence where mothers in law and millenary bills political issues and itinerant preachers mental freaks and professional reformers jim jams and jag cure joints disturb us not instead of all this toil and trouble we would lie like gods reclining on banks of asphodel pull the heavenly bell cord when hungry and live on from age to age ever young apollos perhaps the almighty made a mistake when he gave to man a wife and another when he gave him the vine but when he corrects him I'll crawl off the earth woman has filled the world with war's alarms and the backick revel has ended in the brawl Troy flamed because melanosis wife was false and Phillips all conquering son surrendered to the brimming bowl ever is our dearest boy wedded to our direst woe the same air that comes stealing round our pillow laden with the sensuous perfumes of a thousand flowers rips our towns to pieces and turns our artesian wells inside out the same rains that fructify the earth poor the destructive flood the same intellectual power that bends nature's mighty forces to man's imperial will enables him to trample upon his brethren the same reckless courage that breaks the tyrant's chain off time stains the hand with a brother's blood the same longing for woman's sweet companionship that leads these to rear happy homes sacred shrines from which incense mounts night and day to the throne of omnipotent God goes those to lawless love the unpurpled juice that warms the cold heart and stirs the sluggish the orator lips of gold to the poet Promethean fire abused doth breed the hasty quarrel and make the God a beast it was said of old that a middle course is safest and best and the axiom still holds good all the utopias thus far inaugurated were grieved at the wrong end the fact that since the dawn of history I so far back that legend itself is lost in the shadows of the centuries the wine cup has circulated about the social board proves that it supplies a definite and inherent human want that it fills a niche in the world's economy one of the first acts of a people after passing the pale of savagery is to supply itself with stimulants why this is so I do not pretend to know but so it is and it argues that the prohibition apostles have tackled about as big a contract as did the name partington that they had best pluck a few feathers from the wing of their fancy where with to supply the tail of their judgment the pro-hibs declare that 999 out of every thousand crimes are caused by liquor suppose this to be true does it take the cussedness out of liquor to drive it from the front room into the back alley is it not a fact that the worst brand of fighting booze is dispensed at the illicit doggery but the pro-hibs are as badly at sea and end their criminal statistics as in the mortuary report comparatively few of the great criminals of this country ever drank liquor to excess but a small percent of those in our penitentiaries were confirmed drunkards when accorded the hospitality of the state when a man is convicted of crime he naturally seeks escape goat Adam through all the blame of the apple episode on eve simply because liquor had not then been invented and he could not plead and eaten a jag in extinuation I was once interviewing a man who had just been sentenced to the penitentiary for horse theft I thought that perhaps a cocktail would cause him to talk freer and had one smuggled to his cell he declined it saying that he had never taken but one drink of liquor in his life and that made him sick but said I you told the court that you were crazy drunk when you committed the crime yes he replied I'd rather be thought a drunkard than a natural born damn thief that led me to investigate I interviewed the recorder of Galveston the chief of police the sheriff of the county the district attorney and several other officials we went over the records and the habits of each offender were carefully inquired into as a matter of course the drunks and disorderlies made an imposing list but we were unable to trace the influence of liquor and more than 3% of the serious crimes committed in Galveston city and county during five years the great cry of the pro-hibs is save the boys remove temptation from their path well that's all right if you've got a putty boy but if I have a boy who wanted to go on a whiz and wasn't smart enough to find the means despite all the pro-hibs and Christendom I'd send him to the insane asylum I was reading the other day of some college youths who were watched so closely that they couldn't obtain liquor and proceeded to fill up on illuminating gas if the supply of gas holds out those youngsters are likely to develop into great prohibition orators if you want to keep your boy from filling a drunkard's grave begin by getting a sure enough boy one whose brain pan lies above instead of below his ears then raise him right don't tell him that every man who sells liquor is an emissary of hell and that every man who drinks is a worthless sought if you do he'll soon find out that you are a liar without sufficient intelligence to build a dangerous falsehood and he'll take off the muzzle tell him the truth and thereby retain his confidence tell him that liquor is a pretty good thing to let alone but that millions of better men than his daddy have drank it and lived and died sober and useful citizens prohibition was first tried in the Garden of Eden it proved a failure there and it has proven a failure ever since it is not in accord with the Christian Bible the fundamental law of the land or the lessons of history wine has been used in almost every religious right except mohammedinism and devil worship Saint Paul recommends it Christ made and used it and God saved Noah while letting all the good prohibitionists drown the savior came eating and drinking Abraham Lincoln declared prohibition quote a species of intemperance within itself end quote and a blow at the very principles on which our government was founded general Grant Thomas Jefferson Horatio Seymour and John Quincy Adams denounced it in unmeasured terms who's taking issue with these giants of the intellect red liquor Benson of ingenie who has come all the way to Texas to tell us barbarians what to do to be saved and incidentally pick up enough money to pay for another Jag who be calamity homin the pretty man of Dallas whose chief argument is that I abuse the churches which is an infernal falsehood and Jehovah Bonerges Cranfield an ex bomb who aspires to the presidency of the United States but couldn't be elected pound master in his own precinct I have been asked why if as much liquor is sold under prohibition as under high license the saloonists insist upon contributing to the public revenues the answers dead easy the man who engineer blind tigers vote the prohibition ticket they contribute to the campaign fund they help pay the fees of the cold water spouters and sputters more liquor is sold under local option than under high license because of man's natural hankering for forbidden fruits but it is sold by a different class of men and is a different kind of booze it is sold by chronic law breakers by men who have little to lose by toughs for whom the back cage hath no terrors the man who is capable of straddling an unlicensed keg of bug juice in a back room and ladling out liquid hell to little boys is quite naturally in favor of prohibition a man of respectability who is financially responsible for offenses desires to keep within the limits of law that's the reason that respectable saloon men are the enemies of prohibition legalize the sale of liquor and you will have some crime no doubt you will have poppers and criminals to provide for but you'll have a revenue to help bear the burdens prohibited and you'll have the burdens without the revenue permit its sale and you will have law abiding citizens engaged in the traffic men who will try to make it decent who will take a pride in the purity of their wares and the orderliness of their places prohibited and you will have a lot of law breakers on the one hand selling slum gullion made of cheap chemicals and general cussedness and a gang of spies and informers on the other stirring up strife and entailing costly litigation when driven to the wall when it is clearly demonstrated that their doctrine does not accord with the genius of this government when it is amply proven that wherever tried it has proven an expensive failure and Aaron fraud the prohibs fall back upon the Bible you may prove 500 different religious dogmas by the Bible but prohibition is not one of them brother Holman declares that the Old Testament prohibits the drinking of wine it does not but it does not make a circumcision obligatory and a sin of omission is as bad as a sin of commission if brother Holman proposes to be guided by the Old Testament I beg to suggest that he is overlooking a very important bit the Old Testament commands no class of people to abstain from wine except the Jewish priesthood and they only while performing their sacred offices an angel of the Lord did command the Baron Mano to stay sober a while and she should conceive and bear a son and I imagine that something equally as miraculous might happen to Luther Benson under similar circumstances David recounts this one of God's mercies that he giveth water to the wild ass and wine to make glad the heart of man Solomon sings to the wine cup with all the ardor of an acreon while the prophets kept the morals of Israel toned up by threats that elapsed from virtue would prove disastrous to the vineyards Saint Paul advised bishops and old women to take but little wine he also suggested to the first that they should not fly into a passion and to the latter that spreading false reports about their neighbors was not considered good form the Pro-Hibs as a last resort insist that the wine of biblical days was very different from our own a kind of circus lemonade but it seems to have gotten in its graft on old Noah in most elegant shape if the wine of biblical times was so harmless why did the sacred writers consider it necessary to caution people against drunkenness bid them be temperate in all things while avoiding teetotalism the only beverage I can find mentioned in the Bible that directed a man like a prohibition drink was that given Colonel Lott in the cave by his two daughters it accomplished what medical men assure me was a miracle and the Pro-Hibs run largely to the miraculous End of Section 39 The Local Option, Lunacy Section 40 of the Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast, Volume 12 This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Brian Keenan The Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast, Volume 12 Section 40 Old Glory Address at San Antonio, July 4, 1893 Fellow citizens I have done pretty much everything that a man may do and dodge the penitentiary except run for office on the 4th of July speeches eulogizing the goddess of liberty were much like adding splendor to the sunrise or fragrance to the breath of more She needs no encomias star-crowned she stands the glory of America the admiration of the world I shall make a bid for your gratitude by being brief In July whether the song of an electric fan and the small voice of the soda fount were more gentle to the soul than the grandest eloquence that ever burned on a grady's lips of gold It is customary, I believe, on July 4 to make the eagle scream to fight o'er again all the gory battles of the Republic from Lexington's defeat to the glorious victory of the last election but I am no governor wait and blood to horses bridles delights me not I would rather at any time talk of love's encounters rather bask in the smiles of beauty than mount barbed steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries I have ever had a sneaking respect for Grover Cleveland for sending a substitute to remonstrate with this other confederacy while he played progressive yooker with the pretty girls His patriotism may not have soared above par but there were no picnic ants on his judgment much as I love my country I would rather be a living president than a dead hero I address you as fellow Americans for in this land no man of Celtic or of Saxon blood can be an alien whether he was born on the banks of the Blue Danube or by Calarney's lovely lakes mid-scotches rugged hills or on the sunny veils of France he is bound to us with ties of blood he had the claim upon our country countersigned by those brave souls who, in the Western wilds, gave to liberty a habitation and a name who declared that Columbia should ever be the refuge of the world's oppressed that all men in whatever country born should be equal before the law wherever falls the shadow of our flag there has of late arisen a strange new doctrine that we should close our ports against the peoples of other lands however worthy they may be but I say unto you that such a policy were to betray a sacred trust confided to us by our fathers that every honest man beneath high heaven every worshiper at liberty's dear shrine hath an inheritance here and when with uplifted hand he pledges his life his fortune and his sacred honor to the defense of freedom's flag he becomes as much an American as though to the man are born on occasions such as this we of America are apt to glorify ourselves too much to overlook the origin of those elements that made us great when exalting over our victories in war and our still more glorious triumphs in peace our progress and our prosperity we should not forget that had there been no Europe there would be no great American nation that all the courage that beats in the blood of Columbia's imperial sons and all the wondrous beauty with which her daughters are dowered and all the tireless energy of which she proudly boasts and all the genius that guilds her name with glory were nurtured for a thousand years at white bosoms beyond the oceans brine the American nation is the fair flower of European civilization the petted child of the world's old age princes may be jealous of her progress and tyrants read in her eyes their own downfall but the great heart of the people of every land in this time is hers to her they turn their faces as the Helianthus to the rising sun she is their beacon light, their star of hope guiding them to the glories of a grander day it is natural it is right that on the nation's natal day we should felicitate ourselves on the sacred privileges we enjoy should pay the tribute of our respect to those whose courage crowned us with sovereignty and made us masters of our fate but we should not, as too often happens make it the occasion for senseless bravado and foolish bluster we should rather employ it to promote goodwill among the nations of the earth to link together in a kindlier brotherhood the various families of the great Caucasian race to beat the barbarous sword into peaceful plowshares and forever banish strife I sometimes dream that God has in his mercy raised this nation up unto the world's salvation the immediate instrument of his grace to usher in 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 I delight to trace in the rise and fall of nations the finger of God and strive to read the Almighty's plan in the historic page in the farthest east appeared the first faint light of civilization's dawn and westward ever since the love empire hath tamed its way while each succeeding nation that rose in its luminous paths like flowers in the footsteps of our dear Lord has reached a higher plane and wrought out a grander destiny the cycle is complete the star now blazes in the world's extreme west and by the law of progress which has preserved for 40 centuries here, if anywhere must we look for that millennial dawn of which poets have fondly dreamed and for which philanthropists have prayed the awful responsibility of leadership rests upon us we have shattered the scepter of the tyrant and broken the shackles of the slave we have torn the diadem from the prince's brow and placed the fascis of authority in the hands of the people we have undertaken to lead the human race from the slew of despond to the delectable mountains where justice reigns supreme and every son of Adam may find life worth living can we make good our glorious promises? are we equal to the task to which we have given our hand? ten thousand times the world has asked this question but there is neither Dodona oak nor Delphic oracle to make reply the future alone can answer all eyes are upon us in hope or fear in prayer or protest the fierce light that beats upon a throne whereas the fireflies dull flame to the lightning's flash compared with that which elumes the every act of this champion of human progress this night par excellence this Moses of the nations it is an important role which God hath assigned to us in the great drama of life yet into a part so pregnant with fate we too often inject the levity of the farce while preaching equal rights to all and special privileges to none we pass laws that divide the people of this land into princes and paupers into masters and slaves on July 4th we shout for the old flag and all the rest of the year we clamor for an appropriation while boasting that we are sovereigns by right divine and equal unto kings we hasten to lay our hair beneath the feet of every scorbudic dude who hither drifts stuck oar with titles and hung around with strings the soldier who serves the state demands a pension and every burning patriot wants an office we boast that the people rule and office holders are but public servants yet more than a moiety of us would hang our crowns on a hickory limb and swim a river to break into official bondage here in Texas seven distinguished citizens are already chasing the governorship like a pack of hungry wolves after a wounded fawn while the woods are full of brunette equines who have taken for their motto they also serve who only stand and wait yes our office holders are indeed our public servants and my experience with servants has been that they usually run the whole shebang theoretically we have the best government on the globe but it is so brutally mismanaged by our blessed public servants that it produces the same evil conditions that have damned the worst even Americans whose forefathers dined on faith at Valley Forge or fought at Lundy's Lane have become so discouraged by political bossism so heartsick with hope deferred that they quote approvingly those lines of Pope for forms government let fools contest what air is best administered is best while boasting of popular government we suffer ourselves to be led about by self-seeking politicians like a blind man by a scurvy poodle we may partisanship paramount to patriotism have reserved the poet's line and now all are for a party and none are for the state it were well for us to make July 4th less an occasion for self-glorification than for prayerful consideration of the dangers upon which we are drifting in these piping times of peace dangers that arise not in foreign courts and camps but are conceived in sin by the American plutocracy and brought forth in iniquity by our own political bosses we have no longer ought to fear from the outside world Uncle Sam can if need be marshal 4th to battle 8 million as intrepid sons as those who crowd Old Bunker Hill with flame or bathe the crests of Gettysburg with blood upon such a wall of oak and iron the powers of the majestic world would beat in vain our altars and our feigns are far beyond the reach of a foreign foe but the rock that wrecks not the thunderbolt nor bows to the fierce simoon is swept from its base by the unconsidered brook no man can be a patriot on an empty stomach no country can be secure I care not if Moses makes its constitution and Solon frame its laws when half its people are homeless and brawny giants must beg their bread as far back as history's dawn the rise of the plutocracy and the impoverishment of the common people have heralded the downfall of the state thus fell imperial Rome that once did rule the world and need and greed are the ballistic and battering rams that are pounding today with tremendous power upon every throne of Europe and rocking the very civilization of the world from turret to foundation stone we have achieved liberty but have yet to learn in this strange new land the true significance of life we have made the dollar the god of our idolatry the alpha and omega of our existence and bowed the knee to it with a servility as abject as that of courtiers kissing the hand of kings as the old pagans sometimes incorporated their lesser in their greater deities that they might worship all at once so have we put the goddess of liberty and saving grace on the silver dollar that we may not forget them but before god I do believe that this selfish this mammon-serving and unpatriotic age will pass as past the age of brutish ignorance as past the age of tyranny I believe the day will come O blessed dawn when we'll no longer place the badge of party servitude above the crown of American sovereignty the ridiculous aura-flam of foolish division above old glory's star-jumped promise of everlasting unity when Americans will be in spirit and in truth a band of brothers the wrongs of one, the concern of all when brains and patriotism will take precedence of bootle and partisanship in our national politics when labor will no longer fear the cormorants nor capital of the commune when every worthy and industrious citizen may spend his declining days not in some charity ward but in the grateful shadow of his own vine and fig tree the loving lord of a little world hammed in by the sacred circle of a home there was a time, we're told when to be a Roman was greater than to be a king yet there came a time when to be a Roman was to be the vassal of a slave change is the order of the universe and nothing stands we must go forward or we must go backward we must press on to grander heights to greater glories or see the laurels already won turn to ashes on our brow we may sometimes slip shadows may obscure our path the boulders may bruise our feet there may be months of mourning and days of agony but however dark the night hope, a poison eagle will ever burn above the unrizen moral trials we may have and tribulations soar but I say unto you, O brother's mind that while God reigns and the human race endures this nation, born of our father's blood and sanctified by our mother's tears shall never pass away