 Section 12 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 Frye, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in October 2019. The Complete Works of Brand the Iconoclast, Volume 12, Section 12. Rest, Rest in Peace by W. H. Ward. There comes, I think, in the life of every man, a time when feeble words come faintly up for utterance, when the human soul refuses to ease, tells its agony in empty phrases, when neither tongue can tell nor pen portray the gloom which overshadows the spirit engulfed in woe. This suffering may be selfish or be merged in a general sorrow. As I write the simple sentence, Brand is dead, a pall settles over my spirit, and, groping blindly in the dark, I feel the remains on earth scarce a single ray of light. I knew this man, and to know him was to love him, knew his faults and his virtues, loved him in spite of the one and for the other. His faults were human, his virtues were godlike. For years we tried to gather life's unequal pathway. At times I felt that I stayed his falling steps, and my own feet have strayed off, and again has his firm hand led me back into the light. He was to me a delightful study for which I found never a failing recompense. I have watched his majestic mind expand as the florist watches the budding beauty of a flower ever growing in its unfolding loveliness. I have lived with him in his home surrounded by those whom he loved, seeing him joy with their gladness, while his heart contracted with every pain that approached his loved ones, have stood with him on the banks of some mighty river, and watched the evening sun throw its chain of fire across the bosom of the waters, while his poetic spirit reveled in the beauties of the sunset sky. Under the shadow of lookout I have gazed with him upon those betelene crags where the fate of a nation was in part decided, while he thanked God fervently that the heart of the nation yet beats steady and strong, have strolled with him in the forests when vernal nature spread its glorious carpet for the foot of man, have felt his great heart expand to receive every subtle impression of beauty and tenderness from nature's matchless canvas, have seen this man against whom the anathema of infidelity and atheism have gone forth humbly bowed to worship God in his handiwork. For him, as for us all, there were times when the earth was darkened with doubt, but there were moments I know when his aspiring soul mounted the clouds and caught some reflex of the great white light that breaks on the throne of God. It has been charged that he had neither faith nor religion, injustice to the memory of the dead, I deny that charge. He had a faith as noble as it was on faltering, that truth was eternal and the love of justice could never utterly fade from the hearts of men. His religion was simple still, though confined by neither church nor creed, to as the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. As he loved truth and justice, even so did he despise falsehood, declaring that he hated all who loveth or maketh a lie. He loved his fellows as few men have done. The great desire of his heart and no small part of his life work was devoted to the alleviation of human suffering. In his nature, he was frank and open as the day, generous to a fault. I do not believe that he gave his affection fondly or foolishly. If those whom he loved failed to reach his high standard, it was not his fault. His was a great heart and he gave its tenderness with a princely hand, feeling himself rich in giving, glorying in his own munificence. No man could have been the recipient of this rich bounty without feeling himself ennobled by the gift. He had the faculty of attracting to him all whom he considered worthy of his affection. He possessed in a rare degree that which for want of a better name, we term personal magnetism. Intellectually, he was a meteor that shot a thwart, the literary firmament, leaving a train of fire behind to mark his course. Within a period of four years in an inland Texas town, he built up a magazine which was read by a large percentage of the English-speaking people. He had at the time of his death a larger clientele of readers than any living writer. For years he did all of the work of the iconoclast himself, but of late he had gathered about him a core of contributors in whose genius he himself reveled. A bunch of pansy blossoms he fondly termed them, whose beauty and fragrance would, he declared, delight the literary world. The hand that held these blossoms is now folded across a pulseless breast. But the silken skein of his affection will yet serve to bind the flowers together. The bright particular star of the iconoclastic galaxy is dimmed, but the blended light of the others may still serve to illumine the dark places of life, and in so doing help to achieve that betterment of man for which their chief toiled so earnestly, battled so bravely, and hoped so ardently. The poor and oppressed have lost a friend and a protector. True womanhood has lost one of its ablest defenders. Liberty, its bravest champion, his country a hero ever ready to fight for a redress of her wrongs. He was a humanitarian in the broadest and best sense of the word. In his heart there lived ever a hope that the time might yet come in this fair land of ours, where there would be neither a millionaire, nor a mendicant, a master, nor a slave. In life he was dear to me. His memory is dearer still, nay, to sacred. I would not play Boswell to any Johnson, but this was my friend. Tender, loving, and loyal to me, and now that he is dead I come to lay this tribute in the dust at his feet. He has been judged oftenest and most unjustly, as men usually are, by those who knew him least. Beneath iron carcelet which confronted the eyes of the world there beat in this man's breast a heart tender as a child, and as loving as a woman's, but throbbed in agony for every ill to which humanity is air. I remember in the early morning once he came into my room and silently beckoned me to his study. There in the vines at the window, scarce three feet from his desk sat one of our southern Orioles, a feathered songster, trilling forth the gladness of his heart in song. Bran watched the bird and drank in the music of his song. I saw his face light up with exquisite tenderness, and I knew that he accepted this matinsong of the bird as a message from his maker. I trust I may be pardoned for relating this simple incident, but it served to show me the man as few things could have done. I note is true that, quote, as snowflakes fall to the earth unperceived and are gathered together in a pile, so do the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. No single flake creates a sensible change on the pile, and no single act constitutes however much it may exhibit a man's character, end quote. But it is from simple things that the sum of life is made up from those acts which are most spontaneous and usually least observed that human nature may best be determined and most justly estimated. This man made no preachment of his virtues, believing that the years are seldom unjust. He was the Navarre of modern journalism and his white plume ever showed in the thickest of the fight. It was his strong hand that taught the doubtful battle where to rage, towards his to enchain friendship and inspire followers. Had he battled for a creed as he fought for a faith, his bones would have been canonized. Had he struggled for a party as he stood for the state, no political preferment would have been held beyond his reach. Had he lived in another age, among other people, his body would have been inearned in the Valhalla of the Brave. As it is, all that is mortal of him occupies only so much of Texas soil as may serve as, quote, paste and cover of his bones, end quote. Little does he wreck of this, and his friends should not repine, for the same prairie breezes that waft incense of flowers over the graves of Travis, Bowie and Crockett, sing a sad requiem over the final resting place of Bran. The aspiring soul has found its fixed abode among the stars. His titanic intellect, which here on earth ever struggled for the light, now bathes in the effulgence of the sun. His heart ever unquiet because of the woes of his kind, now knows that peace which passeth the understanding of man. The hand of the all father has forever soothed the heart hunger and unrest of life from his troubled breast. That hand which swept at will every cord of the harp of life has fallen nervous, but its music will yet linger in the hearts of men until love of truth and beauty shall utterly fade from the earth. A long good night to thee, brave heart, thy better part has found the better place. To that which is mortal and remains with us we say rest, rest in peace. End of section 12. Section 13 of the complete works of Bran 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 Frye Baton Rouge, Louisiana in October 2019. The complete works of Bran the Iconoclast volume 12 section 13. This section is comprised of three articles, a memorial to WC Bran, a poem entitled Speaking of Bran, and an essay entitled Death of WC Bran. We begin with a memorial to WC Bran. It has been suggested that the friends and admirers of Mr. Bran join in a contribution to mark the spot where he sleeps. It is proposed, if this meets the approval of friends, that it be a granite vase, some four or five feet high, surmounted either by a life-sized statue in bronze or marble of the dead, holding in his hand a copy of the Iconoclast, as if offering it to the passer-by, and the word Iconoclast upon it in letters sufficiently large to be read at a distance of twenty feet. It is said by those who claim to know that such a memorial can be erected at a cost of some three to four thousand dollars. Many of his friends would not approve, and neither would he if he could express himself, of anything that would require any large expenditure of money, while so many thousands of worthy men and women are struggling in vain to secure the bare necessities of life. These holding that costly monuments can do the dead no good and are in bad taste in the living. There can be no doubt that thousands in the years to come will seek his grave to lay their offerings upon the shrine of genius, and while his will be marked, I wish to say in this connection to those asking in what condition Mrs. Bran is left financially, that while she will have sufficient to keep the wolf from hers and her children's door if properly managed, that she will not have over a tithe of what it has been published that she would. Submitting these few words for the consideration of his friends, I can say if a response sufficiently favorable come, then the proper steps will be taken to carry it out. If not, nothing more will be said, at least not from me. And as his friend I would not approve of keeping standing in the iconoclast, a list of subscribers to the fund, if the suggestion is carried out it will be time enough to publish it when the work is finished and the statue unveiled. G. B. Gerald. The man who takes up Bran's work will only succeed not replace him. He was a star of the first magnitude, and such bodies are not created in an hour, not always in an age. He who attempts an imitation, however clever his work, would stand before the world self-confessed a failure from the first. Booth and his favorite character inspired us, Joe Jefferson could only prompt us to laughter. Yet is not Jefferson without genius in his way? There is no reason, however, why he who follows may not be as loyal to the faith as courageous in the fight as Bran was known and acknowledged to be. The chief is dead, but did not die until he had blazoned the way for those who dare follow where he so bravely led. In life Bran often said he wanted no mourning worn for him, save that which enshrouded the hearts of his family and friends, that the mere trappings of woe were but its limbs and outward flourishes, which too often failed to reach the heart. And now a poem speaking of Bran by William Marion Reedy published in the St. Louis Mirror. Died Fighting, April 2, 1898. Rare now is all his thundering, he has fallen on stillness in the spring, and even Echo answers not in that dim land where all things are forgot, his surging sentences, his cadence to chimes, of speech that through the seven climbs, wooed the many to rapt listening. Soothed by the wind of the dead men's feet, he lies in slumber, senseless sweet, his fame, his wives and children's tears, the issue that made up his manly years, his hates and loves the burgeoning earth receives, and list a little noiseless noise among the leaves of southern springtime pity does entreat. A fighter's faults were his, but strong the blows he struck get thrown and wrong. Beauty he loved is ever loved the brave, the April air breathes beauty or his grave. Truth he pursued, lo he has found her now, she kisses the kiss of peace upon his brow. His ears are filled with silences, sweet song. Fighting he died, marched into the night, his banner blazing with his bravery's light, shot from behind the story goes, to glorify him and to damn his foes. The foes he fought were cowardice and fraud, they have prevailed again, but oh Lord God, thou wilt raise up steel others for thy fight. Rejoicing loud is in the house of sham, bigots to themselves make deep salam, shoddy dumb rubs its ringed hands in glee, the ogre's scandal scourged at each pink tea. Peck sniffs pray that he has gone to swell the galaxy of bravery and the brains in hell. Great joy and small souls, all not worth a damn. But where men think, feel as men can, bon voyage through the dark good man, they call and take up his pen lance and brandish it again against ignorance. In power fortified with the myriad lies and every great heart fine soul cries as pledge of fealty hears to you, Bran. What though he hear no rumor of our hail, what though we follow searching for that grail, a bettered world with less of woe and pain and better gods than privilege and gain, out in the darkness by assassins sped, it is better far to join defeated dead than share success with him whose souls for sale. Thirdly, we have an essay by George L. Hutchin published in The Bloomington Eye. Death of W.C. Bran What a sabre Paul was flung over the spirits of countless thousands who heard last week that editor W.C. Bran of the iconoclast was no more. The heavens seem hung in black and the clouds are rung of their stars, wrote a St. Paul friend who idolized the apostolic seer. The world is dark with excess of grief for the immortal soul of an illimitable genius has been sent to its maker and scattered with the stardust of the Iterinian. William C. Bran was an apostle. Like Christ, like Lincoln, and others whom we deify, he was misunderstood and reviled, and a cowardly bullet pierced him in the back, a martyrdom of which he had a premonition. The head in front of his offending was strict adherence to the truth, though the heavens fall. He knew no fear, but was never an aggressor. The lamented Bran was an educator and an emancipator of human liberty and human thought. The hypocrite stood in awe of his judgment. When he indicted him to be arraigned before the great bar of public opinion, he dipped his pen in acid that seared the eyeballs and wrote their sentence diluted with wormwood and gall. It is not small wonder that the Judas Iscariots and the lemurs trembled at his power. Bran's tragic exit from disveil of tears is inspiration now for Jekylls to attack his name. Luke the dull, dull as they are not afraid to kick the dead lion while their ears waved to the seventh heaven of delight. In earth life they feared his name, but like ghouls they now go down into the grave to besmirch his memory. And this too from those who profess to follow the teachings of the meek and lowly Nazarene. Strange as it may seem to the hypocrite, Bran was a religious man. His creed was the religion of humanity. His biographers, if they do him justice, will write his name with the blood of the lamb high up on the flying scroll. Bran's friends and they are legion should not repine if he is not canonized as his bones are hurst in death. For, quote, whenever was a god found agreeable to everybody. The regular way is to lynch, as the Balerites did, to hang, to kill, to crucify and excoriate and trample them under their stupid hooves, cloven or webbed, as the case may be, for a century or two, and then take to braying over them when you discover their divine origin, still in a very long-eared manner, end quote. So speaks the sarcastic man in his wild way, very mournful truths. Bran was as the life tree, Yggdrasil, wide-waving and many toned, with fimbriated tendrils down deep in the death kingdoms. Among the oldest dead, dust of men and with boughs reaching always beyond the stars and ever changeless as the immutable Imperian of eternal hope, end quote. They could better spare the whole state of Texas than William C. Bran. While the galled jades winced beneath the scorpion whips of his satire and would have preferred fireballs, they felt the potency of his dynamics since scurried to the soldier works of the masters for a glint of mental pablum they had never known before. The editor of the Sunday Eye is in receipt of many letters from admirers of the late lamented genius. They are rich in anathema and marinatha of Bran's heartless and cruel detractors. With one accord, they have expressed the wish that I excoriate the revilers who desecrated by bludgeon words the sacrosanct acre of God in which reposes the mortal tenement of the sacred scribe. I do not believe, as Mr. Charles Kemple of Anchor does, that they should be gibbeted high as Hammond, nor do I think, as Mr. C. E. Stewart of Miniere does, that they should be lashed naked through the world and lambasted till death ends the heartthrobs. I believe that they should be permitted to live until they have read the great genius and learned to understand and exalt him. It would make them better for it. Religion would not suffer by it, though Baylor sank a thousand leagues beneath the seven huge regions of Tartacus. The iconoclast minced no words. When it dealt body blows, they landed in the brisket and affected the solar plexus in a very apprehensive way. Lincoln was gentle and generous, Ingersoll was brilliant and broad, but Bran was all this and greater, his untimely death was a distinctive loss to the march of civilization and a gain to the shams of hypocrisy which takes now a new grip on the English language to batter down the shackles Bran had welded about them with public opinion. Bran was a reformer who meant reform. He wore his heart upon his sleeve, but would be cruel to be just. He endured mental anguish great as was suffered in the garden of Gethsemane. As the sweetest perfume exhales from a crushed blooming rose, so the sweeter and nobler sentiments welled up from the perennial spring of his fountains of love when most bruised and wracked with pain. I have no fear of his acceptance on the right hand up there, where men are judged by their deeds and not by semblance of better things that a canting world may simulate. He is in Valhalla with the other battling heroes where the alabaster boxes of eternal love are showered upon the halo of their brighter radiance. Bran wrote to catch the wide world's attention that he might teach them gentler things than feculent shocks. He was essentially an ascetic devoted to uplifting in his own sure way. All the classes came trippingly to his and all the dogmas. All the perlius of sociology and political economy were as an open book to him. When he soared to the sun he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and the expurgation of money power, which he believed was the nape plus ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolical perfidy. He preached, as he felt, tender and terrible, loving and vehement, a strange commingling of titanic vulgate and cooing peace. Bran was eccentric, but all genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed a quixotic. He was a man whose loftiest ideality was purity in womanhood. He adored children and was, in many respects, childlike. He was as, quote, the long light that shakes across the lake where the cataract leaps in its glory, end quote. Friend Bran, through blinding mist of sympathetic tears, I say, I do. This ends Section 13, Chapter 14 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 12. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by William Jones. The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 12, Chapter 14, a pin picture of Bran. It is hard for me to realize that Bran is dead. It seems only yesterday night that he set opposite me at table and talked of his plans and projects and spoke so hopefully, so boyishly, of the future, that he was never to realize. For a long time I had a curiosity to see Bran of the Iconoclast, his pyrotechnic vocabulary, his strange admixture of erudition and slang, his almost womanly sympathy, and the more than apache ferocity with which he pursued his enemies, the tender and poetic metaphor that gemmed his iron prose and the singular blending of optimism and pessimism that characterized most of his work suggested an anomaly that appealed to the imagination, and I was anxious to see what Bran looked like. I had an opportunity when he came here to lecture. I knew his business manager, Mr. Ward, who figured in the dreadful duel, in which he lost his life, and who was at that time arranging his lecture dates. Ward is a big Texan over six feet high, and I suppose he weighs all of two hundred pounds. He is a lawyer who drifted into journalism years ago, and under a somewhat rough and ready exterior there is not much trouble in finding the gentleman and the scholar. Well, Ward introduced me to Bran, and after a while the three of us foregathered in a private room of a downtown cafe and stayed there for several hours that I remember with unmixed delight. Looking back at the episode I have difficulty in framing my impressions of the famous Texan editor. I think the principal thing that struck me was his lack of pose and affection. All through his talk, and he was in high spirits and talked a great deal, there were sparks of delightful naivety. Quote, I want to pull out of the iconoclast as much as I can, he said, and since we have made enough money to do so I have bought a great many outside contributions. My idea, he continued, is this. As long as I wrote most everything in the publication myself, it was strictly a one-man paper, and if anything should have happened to me it would have been worth nothing to my wife and family. What I am trying to do now is to organize a core of contributors who can keep it up if I should be taken away. Close quote. Had he any suspicion of the prophecy that lurked in these words? Perhaps he had, for when I suggested to him the advisability of leaving Waco with its petty local distinctions and the personal dangers incident to them he shook his head. I got together eleven thousand dollars not long ago, he said, and put it into a house. It is the first money worth talking about that I ever had, and I feel that the investment ties me more or less to Waco. But aside from that, he went on to say, I am a little afraid that the iconoclast would lose its characteristic flavor if I moved it to one of the big eastern cities. You will remember that that experiment was tried with the Arkansas traveler, which was moved from Little Rock to Chicago, and promptly fell flat. The same thing happened to the Texas siftings when it was taken from Austin to New York. I am inclined to believe that a publication acquires a saver of the soil in which it springs, and it is a mighty risky business to try to transplant it. He told me of Colonel Gerald, who had killed the Harris brothers only a few weeks before. Gerald is a wonderful old man, he said. He is over sixty, but he is as straight as a pine. He has a light mustache and chin beard, and eyes the color of the blue you see in old China. He doesn't know what fear he is. He thinks it is some kind of a disease like smallpox or appendicitis, and only know that he has never had it. Between talk we ate oysters and drink a little beer. Brand impressed me as being a very temperate man. The conversation drifted frequently to his plans for the future. I've been roasted a good deal for the go-as-you-please style of the iconoclast, he said. And between ourselves I wish I could have refined its style a trifle. But if I had done so we would never have gone over the one hundred thousand mark as we did last week. However, I'm tired of it, he said slowly, most infernally tired. I am anxious next year to devote myself to a higher class of work. I have a novel about half done and also a play, and I am very hopeful that they may both succeed. It was long after midnight when we parted. He said that he expected to be back one of these days. Poor Bran. It sickens one soul to think of the value of such a life as his, as against that of his slayer. Good God, his little finger was worth all the Texas Pot House politicians and Baylor University Pharisees that could be lined up between us and Orion. Signed OHS in the Looking Glass. End of Chapter 14 Section 15 of The Complete Works of Bran 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 Kenan. The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 12 Section 15 Death of W. C. Bran What a sable Paul was flung over the spirits of countless thousands who heard last week that editor W. C. Bran of the Iconoclast was no more. The heavens seem hung in black and the clouds are rung of their stars, wrote a St. Paul friend who idolized the apostolic seer. The world is dark with excess of grief for the immortal soul of an ill-imitable genius has been sent to its maker and scattered with the star dust of the Iteranian. William C. Bran was an apostle. Like Christ, like Lincoln, and others whom we deify, he was misunderstood and reviled, and a cowardly bullet pierced him in the back, a martyrdom of which he had a premonition. The head and front of his offending was strict adherence to the truth, though the heavens fall. He knew no fear, but was never the aggressor. The lamented Bran was an educator, and an emancipator of human liberty and human thought. The hypocrite stood in awe of his judgment. When he indicted him to be arraigned before the great bar of public opinion, he dipped his pen in acid that seared the eyeballs, and wrote their sentence diluted with warm wood and gall. It is not small wonder that the Judas Iscariots and the Lemurs trembled at his power. Bran's tragic exit from this Vale of Tears is inspiration now for Jackals to attack his name. Like the dull, dull ass, they are not afraid to kick the dead lion, while their ears wave to the seventh heaven of delight. In earth life, they feared his name, but like ghouls, they now go down into the grave to besmirch his memory. And this, too, from those who profess to follow the teachings of the meek and lowly Nazarene. Strange as it may seem to the hypocrite, Bran was a religious man. His creed was the religion of humanity. His biographers, if they do him justice, will write his name with the blood of the lamb high up on the flying scroll. Bran's friends, and they are legion, should not repine if he is not canonized as his bones are hurst in death, for whenever was a god found agreeable to everybody. The regular way is to lynch, as the Balerites did, to hang, to kill, to crucify and excoriate, and trample them under their stupid hoofs, cloven or webbed, as the case may be, for a century or two. And then take to brain over them when you discover their divine origin, still in a very long-eared manner. So speaks the sarcastic man, in his wild way, very mournful truths. Bran was as the life-tree, ig-drasil, wide-waving and many-toned, with fimbriated tendrils down deep in the Death Kingdoms, among the oldest dead dust of men, and with boughs reaching always beyond the stars, and ever changeless as the immutable Imperian of eternal hope. They could better spare the whole state of Texas than William C. Bran, while the galled jades winced beneath the scorpion whips of his satire, and would have preferred fireballs, they felt the potency of his dynamics, and scurried to the soldier works of the masters, for a glint of mental pabulum they had never known before. The editor of The Sunday Eye is in receipt of many letters from admirers of the late lamented genius. They are rich in anathema and maranatha of Bran's heartless and cruel detractors. With one accord they have expressed the wish that I excoriate the revilers, who desecrated by bludgeon words the sacrosanct acre of God, in which reposes the mortal tenement of the sacred scribe. I do not believe, as Mr. Charles Campbell of Anchor does, that they should be jibbeted high as Haman. Nor do I think, as Mr. C. E. Stewart of Minier does, that they should be lashed naked through the world, and lambasted till death ends the hearthrops. I believe that they should be permitted to live, until they have read the great genius, and learned to understand and exalt him. It would make them better for it. Religion would not suffer by it, though Baylor sank a thousand leagues beneath the seven huge regions of Tartarus. The iconoclast minced no words. When a dealt body blows, they landed in the brisket, and affected the solar plexus in a very apprehensive way. Lincoln was gentle and generous. Ingersoll was brilliant and broad, but Bran was all this and greater. His untimely death was a distinctive loss to the March of Civilization, and a gain to the shams of hypocrisy, which takes now a new grip on the English language to batter down the shackles Bran had wilted about them with public opinion. Bran was a reformer, who meant reform. He wore his heart upon his sleeve, but would be cruel to be just. He endured mental anguish great as was suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane. As the sweetest perfume exhales from a crushed blooming rose, so the sweeter and nobler sentiments welled up from the perennial spring of his fountains of love when most bruised and wracked with pain. I have no fear of his acceptance on the right hand up there where men are judged by their deeds and not by semblance of better things that a canting world may simulate. He is in Valhalla with the other battling heroes where the alabaster boxes of eternal love are showered upon the halo of their brighter radiance. Bran wrote to catch the wide world's attention that he might teach them gentler things than feculent shocks. He was essentially an ascetic, devoted to uplifting in his own sure way. All the classes came trippingly to his and all the dogmas. All the purlews of sociology and political economy were as an open book to him. When he soared to the sun, he never dropped into the sea from Icarian wings. His iconoclasm was the decadence of the social cesspool and the expurgation of money power, which he believed was the nape-less ultra of anarchy and the genius of diabolic perfidy. He preached as he felt, tender and terrible, loving and vehement, a strange co-mingling of titanic vulgate and cooing peace. Bran was eccentric, but all genius must have a certain leeway without being dubbed quixotic. He was a man whose loftiest ideality was purity in womanhood. He adored children and was in many respects childlike. He was as the long light that shakes across the lake, where the cataract leaps in its glory. Friend Bran, through blinding mist of sympathetic tears, I say adieu. George L. Hutchin in The Bloomington Eye. Chapter 16. Semper Vivat in Memorium Now that partisan hate has succeeded in hounding to his death America's most eloquent champion of humanity, has driven to the verge of insanity and adoring wife and thrown o'er the rosy eight lives of two tender clinging children the black pawl of a sorrow that will forever embitter their hearts, per chance it will pause. We'll remember the teachings of that other friend of humanity, who nearly 1900 years ago was crucified for daring to fight what he believed to be wrong, whose religion may be summed up in one word, forgiveness. Bran's enemies were professed followers of this Christ. With careful eyes and uplifted, supplicating faces, they be sought the God of justice too, in the beautiful language of the prayer left to us by his son. Lead us not into temptation, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And the next day passed resolutions congratulating a mob of brutal ruffians for frightening a sick woman nearly to death, kidnapping her defenseless husband, and forcing him under threats of instant death to retract what they knew to be the truth. A few weeks later they were resoluting and sympathizing, and formulating plans for the erection of a monument to the memory of two would-be assassins who were killed while attempting to carry out their cowardly work. O Christianity, that thy cloak, pure as polder snow, must cover such infamy. Bran's death blossomed from the firmament of American journalism, its brightest star. He was an intellectual titan, in him was embodied the philosophy of Carlisle, the brilliancy of Voltaire, the withering sarcasm of Desmoulin's, the poetry of Ingersoll, his genius, his genius, universal as that of Shakespeare, was ever aligned on the side of the weak and oppressed, ever with godlike fearlessness he stood for right against might, for a purity against corruption. In church, in state, in society he tore the painted mask from the face of hypocrisy and exposed it in all its festering hideousness to the world's ridicule. Bran has been damned as an atheist. By people who have never read and are incapable of reading and understanding a single paragraph from his pen. The author of Tian's Tafua, Charity, Man's Immortality, was not an atheist. He refused to bend the knee to superstition to lend a patient ear to earth's self-constituted vice-regions of omniscience. But God spoke to him through nature. The flowers he so passionately loved were reminders of his loving tenderness. In the Divine Music of Wagner List in Chopin, he recognized the voice of God. His faith was broad as the universe, deep as infinity. He loved purity, he hated hypocrisy, and for this he died a martyr. Inspiration comes from God. The children of a genius needs must be the favorites of omniscience. Yet theologians velify Bran from the pulpit. Teachers denounce him to their pupils. For nearly ten years he has been the target of vindictive spite. Such spite as only a narrow bigoted mind can be capable of. This is the greatest compliment mediocrity can pay to genius. Bran is dead. Still forever is the pin whose wondrous alchemy transposed the English language, with all its inherent harshness, into music as sweet as song of Israel. Still is the heart that stood alone, defiant a bulwark against the wave of corruption that is engulfing our land. Bran is dead. But when Baylor University has sunk beneath the wave of oblivion, when the very bones of the splenetic-hearted hypocrites who goaded to his death the grandest man America has ever produced have crumbled into the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, Bran's name will live, a beacon light for those who love truth for truth's sake. Bran is dead. The blow that wrung our hearts with unavailing English but ushered him into the company of Shakespeare, Carlisle, Hugo, and Wagner, and there, whether it be in the light that beats on God's great throne or in the cerbonian darkness of a hell more terrible than that pictured by Dante, is the true heaven. Signed Abbot Graphic End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of the Complete Works of Bran 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 William Jones The Complete Works of Bran the Iconoclast Volume 12, Chapter 17, Bran's Brave Battle With humble soul and heavy heart we take up our pen to chronicle the death, yea, the murder of one of the brightest and purest noblemen that God ever created, W. C. Bran. A few years ago he, W. H. Ward, and the writer each occupied desks side by side in the editorial rooms of the Waco Morning News. There butted a friendship between that trio that we full believe she'll blossom into ripe fraternal love on his shore as yet unknown to Mr. Ward and the writer. Mr. Bran was editor of the Iconoclast, and as its name indicates it is a smasher of idols from Tadmor in the wilderness to the mountains of Hepsidon. Scorning the sensual always against the vulgar, in much the same manner as Carlisle, Bran stuck the gaffles of deep truth into the sides of wrong in high places, and exposed rottenness wherever found. With rugged English twisted into sentences more cutting than whips of scorpion's tails, he stood up and fought for right as opposed to might. He tore off the plaster of moral cancerous ulcers, now so prolific on the body politic of the world, and held high the treachery, the bigotry, the superstition, and damnably dirty doings of a generation that accepts hidebound dogmas for the ultimate hule of reasoning and truth. Precept for right, and in reality worships at the shrine of exploded fables and crowns by its own acts, the parrot as its preceptor, lives and dies, having no desire to do anything that somebody has not done before. Is it any wonder that such a man as W. C. Bran should fall a victim to such a populace? He was hounded to his death, mobbed, spat upon, shot and murdered by several thousand pinheaded, obstreperous patrons and followers of little P. W. College that turns young ladies out in Siente almost yearly, and hires its professors for less salaries than a railroad breakman gets. Bran's good work will live. His fame will survive, and an intellectual race will yet rise up and bless his name when the lying epitaphs of the assassin sent to the death by him shall have crumbled to earth ten thousand years. We cannot close this faint tribute of respect to our dead friend without acknowledging the worth of such true men as Mr. W. H. Ward and Judge G. B. Gerald, both of whom are able brave, high-toned gentlemen, and both of whom came near dying, and both were willing to die, or see that Mr. Bran got a fair play while he lived. CHAPTER XVII. Section XVIII. OF THE COMPLETE WORKS OF Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume XII. 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 Rita Butros. The complete works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume XII. Section XVIII. Bran is no more. On the first of April, all fools' day, W. C. Bran of the Iconoclast and T. M. Davis riddled each other with bullets in Waco, Texas. Both of them died the following day. The trouble between them grew out of the attack made by Bran in his paper on the Baylor University, a Baptist institution attended by the daughter of Davis. At the time that Bran accused the students of the College of Immorality, he was assaulted by them and barely escaped lynching at their hands. He was forced to make a retraction and was ordered to leave town. Being a courageous man, Bran refused to emigrate. The Irish standard chronicles the untimely and awful death of Mr. Bran with poignant regret and tenders its condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways, he won the admiration of the American people. He was a man of great mental endowments and in the use of invective, often degenerating into Billingsgate, he stood without a rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and he despised religious intolerance. As an American, he loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo-American alliance. He held hypocrites in supreme contempt and lashed the Pharisees unmercifully. When Catholic priests and sisters were misrepresented by sectarian bigots, he used his tongue and pen in their defense. So ably did he vindicate the Catholic Church from their aspersions that many supposed him to be a Jesuit in disguise. In the last issue of the iconoclast, he told a correspondent what he thought of Mrs. Shepard and ex-priest, Shinnokwe. Had Bran lived in a more civilized community than among the bigoted Baptists of Texas, he would have used more elegant language in his magazine than it contained for the past few months. We entirely disagree with the pioneer press in its characterization of the deceased journalist when it says, From attacking the private lives of the prominent and successful men of every quarter of the union, and levying blackmail as the price of silence from those who slips or frailties his keen hyena-like appetite for filth had enabled him to scent, it was an easy step to the most scurrilous assaults on men and women whose only offending lay in their uprightness and virtue. Bran never attacked men and women for their uprightness and virtue and our St. Paul contemporary is guilty of calumny when it says so. Every evildoer and hypocrite feared him, while upright men and virtuous women had a champion in him. His bitterest enemies never accused him of being a blackmailer, and the editor of the pioneer press took care he was dead before he made the unwarrantable charge. The Irish Standard End of Section 18. Section 19 of the Complete Works of Bran, 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 Rita Boutros. The Complete Works of Bran, The Iconoclast, Volume 12 by William Cowper Bran. Section 19. Brave and Brainy Bran. The killing of W. C. Bran in a duel at Waco, Texas a few days ago is but a repetition of the punishment that generally falls to newspaper men who persistently print the truth. Bran was an intellectual giant. The rarest accomplishments possible for a human mind to acquire were not too intricate for him to master. His versatility was as boundless as his originality was unique. Absolutely fearless and utterly indifferent regarding his personal safety, he dared to expose the charlatan and the trickster in whatever walk of life he chanced to meet him. Endowed with a mind that was only circumscribed by the infinite itself and fortified with a thorough classical education, he held the hypocrite up to contempt and public scorn and deservedly lashed him with the lash of sarcasm. True, some of our erudite members of the press have presumed to pass judgment upon him. Men as incapable of rendering a just criticism of his talents as they have found it impossible to rise to his standard of excellence. One who is especially in love with himself has said that had Bran been less soulless, he might have been an ornament to his trade. Trade. When men attain Bran's intellectual understanding and they are as rare as the intellectual Slavin is numerous, the trade evolves into a profession. It is indeed disheartening to see one devote his life and his talents to truth and justice, only to be belittled after death by those whose poverty-stricken understandings render them incapable of half appreciating the man's genius. To say nothing of his nobility of purpose in endeavoring to elevate mankind. He has been accused of blasphemy by another who has probably been as startled by Bran's truthful declarations as he himself would have been had he at some time dared to commit such a rash act. Despite these intellectual pewees, Bran's writings will live long after the surf of eternity has carried the penny aligners out upon the Sea of Oblivion. In the tragic death of W. C. Bran the world has lost the most versatile pen this century has produced and it is with sincere grief that we chronicle his sudden taking away. The Gilroy, California, Telegram. End of Section 19. Section 20 of the Complete Works of Bran, 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 John Brandon. The Complete Works of Bran, The Iconoclast, Volume 12. Section 20. W. C. Bran, the fearless editor of The Iconoclast, is no more. The Iconoclast is published at Waco, Texas and was started but a few years ago by its gifted author with no more capital than his genius and the courage of his convictions. The Iconoclast has sailed every form of avarice, hypocrisy, and infamy. In a few months the publication gained a worldwide reputation and amassed for its editor a handsome fortune because it was bought and read by thousands of people who love truth when boldly proclaimed for truth's sake. Some time ago the Iconoclast laid bare the iniquities of some white sepulchral hypocrites having charge of a young lady's seminary under the auspices of a religious denomination. The pious and lecherous scoundrels and their ilk who felt aggrieved by the publication of the sensational facts, instead of resorting to the law and proving that they had been liable and vindicating themselves by the imprisonment of Bran, resorted to mob violence. And what they lacked in courage they supplied with numbers and beat their helpless victim into insensibility. In the very next issue of the Iconoclast, Bran, its outraged but incomparably fearless editor, in speaking of his cowardly assailants, used the following defiant and sadly prophetic words, truth to tell there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's worth a charge of buckshot who deserved so much honor as being sent to hell by a white man's hand. If Socrates was poisoned and Christ was crucified for telling unpalatable truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of their time, it would ill become me to complain of martyrdom for a like offense. Bran was shot in the back by a drunken local politician, who doubtless had as much conception of morality and honor as did those whom Bran had assailed openly and above board in the Iconoclast. Bran, though mortally wounded, turned and shot his assassin, wounding him fatally. Bran and his assassin have both died, one mourned as a martyr in the cause of truth, the other mourned by the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of Waco and elsewhere. CHARLESTON ENTERPRISE Iconoclast Volume 12 Section 21 Or Bran has fallen a martyr to Baptist bigotry, the foul-minded crowd who imported slattery to Waco, Randy University, whose iniquities Bran exposed. The deacons of the church and the preachers combined against him and his life was attacked again and again because he was not afraid of telling the truth. The last attempt was successful and his blood is on the head of the bigots of Waco. We have not read in any of our American dailies nor have we seen in any of our evangelical weeklies a condemnation of this outrage on free speech. If the conditions had been reversed, if a Catholic had shot down the defamer of Catholic women, the country would have rung with the enunciations of Catholic bigotry. But the Baptist beetle-browed can for months plan the death of a man who has exposed their hypocrisy and the assassination is taken as one of the few occurrences which diversify life in those monotonous Texas towns. Bran was not a Catholic. In the eyes of the majority Baptist of Waco, he was an infidel. He had no sympathy with any creed as a creed, but as far as we can judge, he loved truth and justice and hated wrong and hypocrisy. It was this natural feeling for right and fair play which led him into the battle with the APA, the battle in which he perished. We believe that he acted according to his lights and to those who live by the law, as it is shown to them, God will not deny grace. Many a man and woman who never saw Bran and do not sympathize with the extreme views he held on certain religious matters and might perhaps take exception to his style of conveying his opinions, will yet because of his manly defensive ladies slandered without cause by the vilest of the vile, breathe a silent prayer that God may have mercy on his soul. As long as you did it unto these, you did it unto me. Even a cup of cold water shall not lose its reward. The Monitor, San Francisco, California End of Section 21, Recording by John Brandon Section 22 of the Complete Works of Bran, 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 John Brandon The Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume 12, Section 22 The editorial supervision of the May Iconoclast has been to me a labor of love. The stress of circumstances under which the work has been done is too well known for either explanation or apology or its shortcomings. This issue of the paper is intended as a memorial of the man who founded it, whose genius has so long adorned its pages and whose personality has endeared it to so many thousands of readers throughout the land. W. H. Ward In the Vicksburg Dispatch of Sunday, February 13, appeared an article from the pen of Ida Clyde Gallagher of Vicksburg, a very bright and gifted writer in which she pays a feeling tribute to the character of W. C. Bran. The article in question has been widely read and copied. It was written while Mr. Bran was on his Sunday lecture tour, and is particularly appropriate to this issue of the Iconoclast. I therefore reproduce it with pleasure. The development of all really great forces afford an interesting study for the mind capable of grasping and measuring them. The overflow of a river, the eruption of a volcano, or the devastation of a storm arouse admiration even while they inspire terror and awaken awe. But it is the purely human force with its infinite variety which charms while it enthralls. A man born and reared as other men bound by the same ties subject to the same laws fettered by the same conventionalities to throw off the yoke of circumstances, break through the trammels of the conventional, grapple with and overcome every obstacle that lies in his path until he reaches the summit of Olympus and bodily fronts the gods or towers among men like Saul above his brethren. We may envy him as we ever envy the truly great, or be disposed to close his lips in death because he tells us unpalatable truths. Yet admire him secretly and in our hearts exalt him. We may not confess as much while he lives in labors, but when his lips are dumb in death, his breasts pulseless, we lay our hatred and envy in the dust at his feet and rear in marble a gleaming shaft to commemorate the virtues of the dead. The name of Bran has inspired this homily. Bran of the Iconoclast, the man whose praises are being sung, loved by half the world by the other half condemned whose whole life has been a battle and a march who wars as did the Titans as if he gropes blindly at times, ever struggles toward the light. This is the man who began his education while rearing a family and went from behind the smokestack of a locomotive to the tripod of a daily paper who in a few years has risen to dizzy heights of fame whose utterances are waited for and attended by more than half a million people, many of whom he does not and cannot convert, but all of whom he impresses. A man who is said to be an ideal husband and father, a tender, loyal, and devoted friend, yet whose entire existence is devoted to the warfare against existing evils, bitter as death and uncompromising as the grave. You may not always be right, Mr. Bran. Indeed, we shrewdly suspect you are not, but we respect you and admire you just the same because you attack boldly and fight fearlessly. Yes, we admire you and shall not wait to whisper it to your tombstone either. If the futility of brute force has an appeal to reason required an object lesson, it might easily be found in the fact that while the hand that wielded one pen lies motionless in death, hundreds of others have been raised up to fight under the same banner. Several months ago a number of the students of the Baylor University, acting without regard for the laws of either God or man, attempted to mob the editor of the iconic last in an effort to bridle his pen. The hand which they sought to restrain has now been enjoined by a court whose order is irrevocable. In every state in the Union, men have come forward to take up a fight which Bran himself considered ended, and the object is accomplished. In reproducing tributes to the memory of the dead editor, I have felted my duty, in several instances, to blue pencil certain passages which might have been considered as reflecting upon those who are innocent and unoffending. The moral here needs no pointing. To his readers and admirers who have uniformly expressed regret over the death of her husband, Mrs. W. C. Bran desires to return a woman's thanks, for the kindly sympathy extended. End of Section 22, Recording by John Brandon Section 23 of the Complete Works of Bran the Iconic Last, 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 Bran the Iconic Last, Volume 12, Section 23 Simple Statement to Facts by W. H. Ward Concerning the tragedy of April 1, in which W. C. Bran lost his life and I, myself, was slightly wounded, as a sensational event, enough and more than enough, has already been said in the Daily Press. I should not have mentioned the matter here at all, but I know the readers of the Iconic Last will expect a statement of the facts. I therefore give a subjoined account of the affair from the independent pulpit published in Waco by J. D. Shaw. Mr. Shaw is well known to the people of Texas. There is not a man in the state who will doubt that his account of the tragedy is in absolute accord with truth and justice. In the extract referred to, Mr. Shaw says, Let the plain truth be told. The lateness of this pulpit affords me an opportunity to correct some false impressions with regard to the recent tragedy in which W. C. Bran lost his life. That there should have been some errors of view among bystanders as to the various incidents in that deadly conflict is not surprising, and of these trifling in their nature I will not hear right. The idea that Bran was seeking a difficulty with Davis is certainly false. He had made his arrangements to go on a lecturing tour, had spent the day at his home, went to town about four o'clock that afternoon to get a shave, and on his return walked with his business manager, Mr. W. H. Ward, by the office in which Davis was sitting. Having passed the office a few steps, Davis stepped out and shot him in the back. This was the shot that killed him, and was after receiving it that he turned, drew his revolver, and opened fire upon his assailant. Now as to Mr. Ward, he left Bran's house some time after Bran did, had joined the latter a few minutes before the firing, and was at the time walking by his side. When Davis fired, Ward jumped at him in an attempt to get his, Davis's pistol, caught hold of it over the muzzle, and was shot through the hand. Ward was unarmed, having left his revolver in a grip at Mr. Bran's house. His hands were gloved, and he had no idea of a difficulty at the time. I state these facts not through any feeling of prejudice, having never been mixed up in the Bran-Baler trouble, but solely in the interest of the truth. I can understand how an excited observer, seeing Mr. Ward extend his hand to get Davis's pistol, and seeing immediately the fire of the same, might have thought that Ward did the shooting, and it was this mistake that caused his arrest. Independent Pulpit To this I will only add that neither Mr. Bran nor myself were in the slightest anticipation of trouble. He left home having the boy to drive him down in his buggy, shortly before four o'clock on the afternoon of the tragedy. I awaited his return to drive to the train to meet my brother, whom I was expecting with a party of friends that evening. At twenty minutes to six o'clock he had not returned, and I took the first car down, as several ladies who chanced to be and Mr. Bran's home will testify. I left the car at Fourth and Austin Streets at about six o'clock, walked to Hertz Brothers, gave an order for some books, and met Mr. John Garan, walked with him toward the depot, met Mr. Bran at the corner of Fourth Street and Bankers Alley, chatted with him for a moment when Mr. Garan walked on, and Mr. Bran and myself crossed the street and walked towards Austin Avenue. We had passed the place where I afterwards learned Davis's office was located about ten paces when Davis came out and opened fire from the rear. His opening fire was the first warning of the trouble. We were walking side by side, conversing together when the first shot was fired. That shot entered Mr. Bran's back and caused his death. I will add that I was unarmed and had not removed my driving gloves, which were taken off when my wound was dressed, and had been with Mr. Bran not more than three minutes when the shooting occurred. These are the facts, as substantiated by the signed statement of over a score of eyewitnesses, the same now being in the hands of my attorneys, Messers Baker and Ross, and C.R. Sparks. I do not wish to speak ill of the dead, therefore I shall have but little to say of Mr. Davis. My acquaintance with him was brief. I never met him but once, when he was shooting another man in the back. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Greg Giordano. Reference has been made by Judge Gerald to the pathetic tragedy in Bran's life, because of the loss of his daughter. The burden of sorrow which he bore is beautifully revealed in the following account of that tragedy, which was written by Bran. The last lesson. Is there no stoning save with flint and rock? Yes, as the dead we weep for testify. No desolation but by sword and fire? Yes, as your moaning's witness, and myself, and lonelier, darker, earthlier for my loss. Poor and gold and goods, yet richer than fancy ever fabled, in home and happiness. The young father toiled and hoarded his scant wage. The little mother denied herself a thousand things that women covet, and they said, It is for her, our Inez, our fairy queen. Her feet shall find no thorns in life's path. A father's strength, a mother's love, shall fill it with sweetest flowers. Beautiful to their eyes, and other eyes was she, as Grecian sculptor's dream, and still more beautiful when childhood's early years flashed by, and the bud was bursting into womanhood's glorious bloom. No crowned empress, so imperial seemed, yet pried so womanly, and softened by such grace, that each and all yielded sweet allegiance to her sway. And they would sit and watch her at her books or play, drinking with greedy ear her admiring teacher's off-told tale of triumphs won in classroom. Were on the green, and watched her comrades, loving subjects they, weave crowns of flowers for her fair brow, and hail her queen. And so the days went by, toilsome yet happy days until, when scarce past to her teens, the youthful swings began to sigh for her, and bashful cast their tribute to flowers, such as they knew she loved, and to the open door, then blushingly retreat, fearing cold comfort from her imperious eyes. And when there was of her own age, who seemed to haunt the street, until the mother noticed it, and said, Daughter, what does he ever near the house? And the father fretted, and spoke harshly of the boy, and sharply to his child, saying, You do encourage the little fool to haunt the place. Speak to him no more. And the daughter made reply, Father, I never spoke to him, nor he to me. And she arose, and taking her music, Role went forth, and the boy followed her. Our daughter deceives us, cried the father, fierce with rage, and he followed the twain. You have deceived me, daughter! His voice was sharp, and quailing before his wrath, as though it were a blow, she gasped, Oh, Father! and returned with him in silence to their home. And the little mother fretted, and lectured her. But she sat silent, brooding upon the great wrong, and the queenly eyes were full of tears, that seemed frozen by her pride, and could not fall. They never fell. The gust of anger from the doting father's lips, the breath of doubt of her dear word, and her little heart seemed broken quite, the world seemed desolate. The father's good night kiss, the mother's tender solicitude, were in vain. The wound was too deep to heal, and while they slept and dreamed sweet dreams of her fair future, she poured her heart out to the good God, who never doubted her, and leaving a little note that was a wailing cry of hopeless pain, passed by her own fair hand to the great beyond. And the father kissed the dead lips of his first born, and knew that he had killed her, and ever in his heart there is a cry, I killed her! And night and day that cold, sweet face doth haunt him, and day and night he hears that piteous cry rung from his child when he broke her heart. Oh, father! And ever the little mother's lamentation goes up to heaven. Our house is left unto us desolate. 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 25, Salma Gundy. There's a class of men who take a special delight in pistol practice, when the other fellow furnishes the target. They shut their eyes and literally feel what is going on. See pistols flashing, as the man, with a well-developed Texas jag, sees keyholes in the door at three o'clock GM. Just legions of them. As a matter of fact, when pistols are really cracking, powder actually burning, and bullets sweetly singing near my god to thee, these are the first to seek the sheltering arms of a two-foot wall. Most any old wall, so it won't leak lead. I wish to call attention to the readers of the Iconoclast, to the pack of journalistic jackals who are raising their infamous howl over the body of brand. As usual, when the lion is dead, the hyena comes forth for a feast. Life is too short, and the game too mean to justify individual firing, so I will take a pot shot at the pock. These animals are so much alike in tastes, character, and habits that one will typify all. I therefore call attention to Major Burbanks of the New Orleans Piquin. The State Constitutional Convention has eliminated the Negro from Louisiana politics. Had that body also placed journalism under the color ban, they would have disposed of the Major most effectively, and I might add to the entire satisfaction of all concerned, unless indeed the Coons had objected to their company. So help me, God, I would rather be a yellow dog, with an abbreviated narrative, and belong to a disreputable Negro, than go around with my cowardly heart in my throat, fearing to look a man in the face while alive, than mercilessly assail his character after death. Bah, the mere existence of such creatures revolutionizes Darwin's theory, argues the survival of the unfittest. It is well for the public to understand that the murder of W. C. Brand did not remove all of the abuses from which this country suffers, and the frauds and fakes which prey upon it. Assassination may shatter an instrument, but it cannot conquer a cause. There is still work for the iconoclast to do, and it will be done. It will continue to place its brand upon the forehead of the seducer, the winding hibikrit, the sniveling rogue, the confidence man, the fake ear, and the fool. It is proposed to show this country that the pistol is unconvincing as an argument, and useless as a break upon reform. Brand is dead, but there are men alive who lack his phenomenal ability, perhaps, but who share his deathless hatred of the rotten in morals and in politics. The mission for the iconoclast is unchanged and unended. Its field is its own. It will be filled. The man who seeks the American spirit must look for it in the south and west. He will not find it in the east. That part of our common country is inhabited by a nation of shopkeepers, as distinct from the peoples of the other sections, as the lion is distinct from the jackal. They are smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogues, tied to the counter and till, dollar-marked knee-drillings of the department stores, jack-rabbits of Wall Street, coyotes of the boards of trade. If every man who has traded upon the distress of his country, and the peril of his kinsfolk were to be shot this morning, the air of the North Atlantic states would be heavy with powder smoke. From that well-kept and weary-some prostitute and buffoon, chauncey-depew, down to the smallest operator of a bucket-shop, they are all tired with the same brush, things in trousers who would sell their souls for coin. They own the president of this country, and they own many of the congressmen having bought and paid for them. America, I suppose, is as religious as its neighbors, but it is for the dollar first and for Christ afterward. Easter is a period devoted to commemoration of the saddest and noblest event in human history, the highest and most important event. It is used by thousands of our merchants, however, as a time specially devoted to making money. From the manufacture of Easter cards to the maker of hot cross buns, the signs and symbols of religion are made the means of chasing the nimble ten-cent piece. The cross is the hallmark of printed sentiment, to be sold for a quarter, and the crucifixion is done over and over again in gingerbread. The iconoclast may not get to heaven by the Baptist route or the Methodist route, or by any one of the thousand routes which Christians have been pleased to blaze out for sinners in the centuries since Christ died, but it is a long way above that kind of impiety. Sacrilege is a better word for it. How does the Republican Party, the Party of Gold, look now, from fat Tom Reed at its head, down to Nancy Green, son of Hetty Green, at its tail? Is it the Party of Patriotism? May it be trusted to uphold the honor of the nation? Is it honest? Is it even decent? Nay. I say that nine out of every ten Republican congressmen who voted for the intervention resolutions did so because they were driven to it by fear of outraged citizens, Democrats and Republicans alike, not because they were Patriots. I say that the representatives of the Republican Party are bound hand and foot to the millionaires of America. I say that the leaders of that Party are without principle. The polls next November will show what the honest money and honest patriotism people of the nation think of the Republican Party. From the time that Fitzhugh Lee reached Washington, the myrmidons of William McKinley sought to detract from his services to the country and to belittle his rugged patriotism and love of truth. The pop-n-j in the White House could not bear to listen to the roar of welcome that greeted him as he stepped from the train. It was like the oleaginous Ohio paltrune to inspire detraction of one who is his official inferior and his superior in everything that goes to make a man. The Virginian is not intellectually great. He is plain of speech and manner, but he has carried high the unstained banner of the Leeds. He has stood to his post in the face of danger. He has bared the traitorous Spaniard in his stronghold. He has demonstrated once that God never made a more courageous animal than the southern gentleman. Besides such a man, the purchasable McKinley's and gross scoundrel-ly hannas of the nation are dwarfs. Dr. Dowie of the Chicago Zion, a place where faith cure fools who have strosis of the liver are allowed to die for a consideration, has written a circular and sent out a million or two of copies. He wants every adult person in the United States to send him fifty cents, so that he can have money to send out more literature with which to catch more fools. The people of Chicago can confer a favor upon themselves and humanity at large by taking Dowie five miles out into Lake Michigan, tying three hundred pounds of scrap iron to his heels and dumping him overboard. Mrs. Henritan, president of the Federation of Women's Clubs, has telegraphed McKinley from Chicago that she, as the representative of that influential band of hens, cordially and heartily endorses everything he has ever done or thought of doing. It is proper to say that Mrs. Henritan no more represents her sisters than I represent the WCTU. She is only another instance of the modern, highly developed female, eaten by an itch for writing and getting her name into the newspapers. The mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, and sweethearts of America no more endorse William McKinley than they endorse any other coward. The women of the Federated Clubs are much like other women when they stop playing upon the ink bottle and begin playing upon the cook stove. They have taken off Mrs. Henritan's back hair, and she now eats her meals from the mantelpiece, all of which is proper. Little Jimmy Eccles, Cleveland's undersized underling, got some hand claps and whoops from the Chicago Credit Men's Association when he addressed the members at the Grand Pacific Hotel on the night of April 12th. He talked about the businessmen's longing for war when the country is insulted, and these snipes and jack bailiffs of the big mercantile houses, warmed into drunken courage by gallons of cheap wine, yelped in unison. This oriferous insect, who was for four years Comptroller of the Currency, is remembered in Washington chiefly for a remarkable burst of speed, displayed one night when his timorous mind conceived the idea that a somnolent hack man was going to rob him. He had his dress suitcase in one hand and his plug hat in the other, and he covered three blocks in ten seconds. The cabbie whom he had hired waked in time to discover the meteoric dash, and was the most puzzled man in the capital. Eccles is a warrior, and his credit giving or refusing listeners are all warriors. Jay Guy Smith of Catoola was locally called, so I am informed, brand number two. Like most other men, he was far behind W.C. Bran in Wealth of Intellect, in largeness of heart, in charity, in his hatred of wrong and the oppressor. It appears, however, that he had the habit of speaking his mind, and he was shot for it. Also that he was shot in the back. Joe Leiter, the wheat speculator of Chicago, is followed about all day by detectives whom he has hired to protect him. I do not know if anyone contemplates giving him his desserts, but since he has used his inherited millions to make bread dearer in thousands of poor mouths, he should be whipped twice a day for a month. Under a properly constituted and administered government, Leiter and his kind would be sent to the penitentiary at hard labor. He is as much a robber as any brigand of the Italian passes, and as much of a thief as any pickpocket in America. A great many people imagine that your uncle Sam will frazzle hell's bells out of Spain in one word and two motions, that all of this preparation for threatened conflict with Spain is much ado about little, that the United States will get up early some morning and administer the paternal slipper to the Spanish pantaloon, simply by way of diversion or to get up an appetite for breakfast. The result of the scrap may show that the job had best be undertaken after a square meal. As the war is not yet on, I rise to remark that it is my sincere wish that those who have lost a scrap may find it, that those who have clamored so hard and so long for hostilities to begin, may find standing room only in the theatre of war, and be given positions in the full glare of the footlight, with the corporals' guard behind them, to see that they do not strike a retrograde motion when the curtain rises on the first act. This completes the last issue of the iconoclast. The publication of the paper was not continued, though evidently this was intended when the May issue was printed. The following articles were written shortly after the death of Bran, but did not appear in the iconoclast. End of Section 25, Recording by Brian Keenan. Mr. Bran, who was killed in Waco last Friday, was a much greater man than even his admirers knew. He had many virtues which, in a way, his peculiar tactics and journalism belied. For instance, his paper was read for the most part by people who took a delight in his calling a spade a spade, and in fact in his seeking out spades to write about. This was not the true Bran at all. The man was clean-minded in his conversation. He thought cleanly. He lived cleanly as a gentleman should, though he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous ruffian reveling in the slums. He was essentially a family man and a student who scored delights and lived laborious days. His regard for the purity of women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up to his own preachment on all of the various forms of integrity with much more strictness than people who effected to believe he was a leper. Furthermore, the man was an ascetic in his essential spirit. He had a true taste for the finally done thing in letters, and as if he did not devote himself to what might be called the more refined literary artistry, it was because he felt that there was danger of drawing too fine the lessons he thought at his duty to impart. There was no use, he said in writing to the few. One should write so that all might read running. He maintained that the way to instill principles in the people was to secure their attention first, and he did not hesitate to secure their attention by any device that seemed available. Therefore, he felt himself justified in appealing to the lower instincts in men in order that, while they were all unsuspecting, he might inculcate something better. And so there ran through his publication the strangest contrast of sweetness and salacity, of eloquence and bombast, of purity and pornography, of dual phrases and gutter slang, excerpts of enthralling poetry and brothel Billingsgate. He pointed his morals with futurity and he adorned his really beautiful style with barbarities and banalities, which makes one shudder. He set his fine thoughts like jewels in compost. He ravished the classics to mix them up with sentences that stunk of the stews. The man seemed to indulge in special flights of poetry with no other purpose than to achieve a disgusting anti-climax of mockery and mockery. The person who read Bran intelligently was impressed most by his habit of irony in the Waconian. It was of the essence of his iconoclasm. He had something in his effects in this line that was piteous. There was no denying his appreciation of the pure air, of the beautiful in life and nature, of the truth as thinkers see and feel it. It seemed to me that when he had soared up towards the ever-vanishing ideal, he reached a point whereat he turned in disgust and hurled himself madly back to the dungiest part of this dungy earth. There was a mighty dissatisfaction, even a despairing Bran, and a touch of sadness in his writing as in his face. The more I read of his deliberate pandering to the literarily extramencious appetite, the more I saw, or thought I saw, that he was afflicted with a mighty ennui, and was chiefly trying to escape from his own torture, as one who knew not whether solace was to be found, either in the spiritual or the earthly nature of man. Such a one as he might have been expected to take up any cause that assailed the existing condition of things politically and sociologically. While he was an ascetic, his asceticism was only a reeking of his own bitterness upon himself. He was a man in whom strong emotions were easily excited, and he put into his writing all the passion which he suppressed in his dealings with his fellows socially. He never felt malice towards people whom he assailed most maliciously. He saw them simply as representatives of some fault of our social or political system, and he felt that he was doing his duty by his own conception of what the world should be, by pilloring them as object lessons of characters to be eliminated in his good time coming. When he saw a foul wrong, he saw it personified in some man or woman. Then he went abroad in search of foul things to say about it, and he found them, and he hurled them at the object, and he polluted the atmosphere for a mile around. When he wrote about the abstractions of poetry and philosophy, he wrote with a sweeping, swinging rhythm that thrilled anyone. He was master of the diapason. His ear was not attuned particularly to minor chords. He loved cyclonic clashes of words, and he would strike out fecal flashes to eliminate them. This courageosity was at times overpowering. His vocabulary overcame him often, wore him away from his thought, and landed him in some swamp out of which he was wont to extricate himself, to the great delight of the semi-educated reader by some quip or quirk equally meretricious and mephetic. Thus would he metaphorically throw filth at himself. He felt all the time that he was pursuing the best course, bending things he despised and loathed to better purposes. Mr. Brand believed that the country was, if not in itself decadent and degenerate, under the control of decadent, degenerate, and depraved men. He believed that society was a social cesspool. He thought that most religion was hypocrisy. He believed that most wealth represented nothing more than the superior and diabolical genius of dishonesty. So believing, he so preached, and he preached with a vehemence that was in a sense vicious. His terribly irony made his work an engine of anarchy. Not that he meant anarchy at all, but because the people who were caught by his banalities could not differentiate sufficiently to extract the core of truth from the great superstructure of extravagances with which he hid it. Mr. Brand meant only to lift the world up, and one of his queer conceptions was that his own dragging down of things pure to the lowest level of life and thought and feeling was calculated to make his multitudinous clientele look upward. He was mistaken. He came to know it too, for he said to me one evening, I'm only a fad. I'll pass away when my vogue is done, like Brick Pomeroy. He wished to believe that the best way to help people up was to take a stand and view a little above them. He said when it was suggested that he tried this tack that he feared it was too late. Not that he wholly abandoned his belief in his own plan, but it seemed to me that he felt sorry that once attention could be attracted by being shocking, it could only be held by a continuance of the shocks. In my personal dealings with Mr. Brand, I found him a person of almost feminine fineness. It was amusing to meet him after some particularly atrocious issue of the iconoclast. Either personally or by letter. And have him roar as gently as a sucking dove. In such moods he revealed a character that was really sweet, though I must apologize for that misused word. He was impressed with the pity of life. He loved to toy intellectually with subtleties of thought. He had intuitions in art and poetry and music touched him truly and deeply. I never have seen such a gentle man with women, and his estimate of woman, either in conversation or writing, was a high and noble one. If at times he wrote so that his conception of virtuous womanhood was unpleasantly associated with ideas that revolted you, it was his peculiar belief that purity was all the purer for the contrast and antithesis. He loved children too, and in his more familiar moods according to his intimates he was like one whose heart was as a little child. He cared no more for money after he began to make it than he cared in his bohemian days when he was readyer to give than to take. He loved his friends blindly. He did not hate his enemies. He despised them. He had all the manly virtues, courage, generosity, modesty. Yes, modesty, for egoism such as he had was not foolish pride. His egotism was only his own force asserting itself. His friendship was almost foolish. He praised too generously. He was inclined to help everybody he could, and I am sure that he never assailed anyone or anything that did not represent to him uncharity and snobbery. He was not envious. His mind was on the Texas scale. He knew no meanness. His was Kentucky origin, and he was tainted with Kentucky's chiotism. He loved liberty and he loved love. He was the friend of the people as he dreamed they should be. He was the advocate of the greatest enlargement of rights, with little of what he strove for in immediate political issues did I sympathize. He believed more in what is called socialism than I do, but he believed it most earnestly. He was the greatest force in this country with his 80,000 issues of his magazine per month for all the things that go with free silver. His following included all the thinking followers of Brian, and his work had no little effect in his powerful music and color upon many people to whom Brianism represented the political abomination of desolation. As to the manner of Mr. Brand's death, there is only to be said that he expected it. He judged from the characters of those he attacked that they would assassinate him. He died as he expected to die, without any cringing to his enemies. Some people he attacked who did not deserve his vitriolic attentions, but he thought they did. In the main he scourged and sacrificed only those who deserved. The manner in which he was killed and the cause in which he was killed, the cause of an institution in which a girl was debauched in the name of Christ, and turned out of doors to starve to the glory of religion, glorify him. He who fought in the open was shot by his sneak from behind. The sneak himself was shot in his act of cowardice. Mr. Brand was brilliant and brave. He partook of the qualities of the men who immortalized the Alamo. He was the first man who identified Texas with thought. He loved Texas so well that he defended the code of private and public mobbery for writing wrongs. To that cruel coward code he fell a victim. With all his faults, as I see them, I can think of him only as worthy of being buried in some high place, to the strains of Siegfried's funeral march, and can only say with browning of the dead grammarian, here, here is his place, where meteors shoot clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go, let joy break with the storm, peace let the day send. Lofty designs must close in life-effects, loftily lying. Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying. The Mirror for April 7, 1898. End of Section 26, Recording by John Brandon