 Section 41 of The Complete Works of Braun, 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 Greg Giordano. The Complete Works of Braun, the Iconoclast, Volume 12. Section 41. The Lone Star. These balmy days I often recall my ideas of Texas, before I had the pleasure of mingling with its people, of becoming myself a Texan. I regret to say that I had accepted Phil Sheridan's estimate of the state, an opinion that still prevails in too many portions of our common country. After living in Texas for ten years, I paid a visit to my people beyond the beautiful Ohio. The old gentleman sized me up critically, evidently expecting to see me wearing war-paint and a brace of Bowie knives. So, young man, you're living in Texas? Yes, Pa. Fell kinder thumb among them centipedes, cowboys, and other vermin's, I suppose. Yes, Pa. Well, Billy, you always was a mighty bad boy. I kinder calculated as how you'd all go to hell some day. But praise God, I never thought she was bound for Texas. I assured him that where I certain hell were half as good as Texas, I wouldn't worry so much about my friends, who were in politics for their health. This could well afford to spend a million dollars a year, for a decade, to disabuse the minds of the northern people, to work it through their hair that the Southwest produces something besides Hades and Hoodlums, Jackrabbits and Jays. We're generally known exactly what Texas is, whether people, climate, and resources. There are not railroads enough, running into the state, to handle the men and money that would seek homes and investments here. The year 1900 would see ten million prosperous people between the Sabine and Rio Grande, and it would be a people to be proud of, the young blood of America, the cream of Christendom, the brain and brawn of the Western world. The light at the Lone Star cannot be much longer hidden. It is breaking even now upon the earth. True knowledge of Texas is spreading, spreading over the icy north, spreading over the barren east, spreading over crowded Europe, and knowledge of Texas's power unto her salvation. I was north last summer, and talked to Texas, of course. One day a long, lank, lingering eternity of a gawk, sidled up to me, as though he feared I was loaded and said, "'Great state that Texas, I suppose!' Rather, pretty big, I hear and tell. Look at the map. Gee, Willie Hawkins, Maria, to his pretty dog-gone gosh-all-fire-big, ain't she? That's whatever. Suppose you're a general, or corporal, or something-other, when you're to home? Nope. No? Judge, perhaps? No, sir. I am simply a plain, everyday citizen of Texas, not even a member of the legislature, or candidate for Congress. Huh! Say, Maria, a kinder thought is how that slab beside the galoot was aligned when he said he was from Texas. He could not conceive of a Texan without a title. But Texas will come out all right. I have faith in her future, for many reasons, but chiefly because she has unbounded confidence in herself, because nowhere will you find such local patriotism, such state pride, such love of home as beneath the lone star. There are rivalries, but they are not born of bitterness. A Texas is all for Texas. Within the memory of living men, oppressions fangs, wounded, freedoms snowy breast, and from the ruddy drops Almighty God did make a star, the brightest that ever blessed the world, but ever have the clouds of columny, and the mists of malice obscured its matchless beauty. Slowly but surely the rank vapors are rolling by, and brighter and ever brighter blazes our astral emblem. Born in the field of battle, its lullaby, the cannon's thunder, its cradle the hearts of the brave, its nurse necessity, its baptismal rite, a rain of blood and tears. May it forever be another beacon of Bethlehem to guide us on to a grander future, a harbinger of hope and happiness, an emblem of love and liberty, and in its deathless splendor go ever shining on. End of Section 41, Recording by Greg Giordano, Newport Ritchie, Florida. Section 42, Part 1 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 Butros. The Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, Volume 12, by William Cowper Bran. Section 42, Part 1, Slave or Sovereign, Status of the American Citizen, Synopsis of an Address Delivered by Mr. Bran, August 10, 1895. Fellow citizens, if I had a million of money carefully protected from the income tax by a plutocratic Supreme Court, I would probably not be here to inquire whether you are slaves or sovereigns. And if you could draw your check for seven figures, with any probability of getting it cashed, you would not be here to answer. You'd do just as Dives did, lean back in your luxurious chair and absorb your sangory, while Lazarus scratched his populist fleas on your front steps and exploited your garbage barrels for bones. You'd turn up your patrician nose at the lowly proletaire. And if he did but hint that, having created this world's wealth, he was entitled to something better than handouts, you'd have an anti-communistic cat fit. And denounce him as an insolent hoodlum who should be comfortably hanged. That's human nature to a hair. And you are all human, I suppose, even if the politicians do buy you with gas and sell you for gold. I tell you, frankly, that I'm complaining, not because of the other fellow's colossal fortune, but because I can't strike the plutocratic combination. I'm dreadfully anxious to accumulate a modest fortune, of about fifty millions, that I may build a comfortable orphan asylum for that vast contingent of democratic politicians whom the next election will deprive of their pap. I'm no philanthropist who's trying to reform the world for the fun of the thing who's willing to starve to death for the sake of an attractive tombstone. I want to sow a mend industrial conditions that I won't have to hustle so hard and so long between meals. And when they are bettered for me, they will be bettered for you. And for every man who, with pick or pen, brain or brawn, honestly earns his daily bread. I want more holidays, more time to sit down and reflect that it is good to be alive. More time to go fishing, not fishing for men, but for sure enough suckers. Here in America, if the average mortal aspires to fill a long-felt want with first-class fodder, he's got to chase the almighty Dalaran weekdays like a hungry coyote camping on the trail of a corpulent jackrabbit, and spend Sunday figuring how to circumvent his fellow citizen. Life with the American people is one continental hurry and rush from the cradle to the grave. We're born in a hurry, live by electricity, and die with scientific expedition. Half of us don't take time to become acquainted with our own families. We've even got to courting by telephone, and I expect to see some enterprising firm put up lovers' kisses in tablet form so that they can be carried in the vest pocket and absorbed while we figure cent per cent or make out a mortgage. For a score of years, I had been listening to the boast of the American people that they were sovereigns by right divine, and at last it occurred to me to swear out a search warrant for my crown and go on a still hunt for my scepter, but soon found that the jewels of my throne room, the rod of my authority and my purple robe of office, were conspicuous by their absence, and I wasn't married at the time either. The American citizen is a sovereign, not to the extent of his voice and vote, but to the exact amount of Uncle Sam's illuminated mental anguish plasters at his command. Money is Lord paramount, mammon our prophet, our God, the golden calf. The dollar is indeed almighty. It's the Archimedean lever that lifts the ill-bred boar into select society and places the ignorant sap head in the United States Senate. It makes presidents of stuffed prophets, governors of intellectual geese, philosophers of fools and guilds infamy itself with supernal glory. It wrecks the altars of innocence and pollutes the feigns of the people, breaks the sword of justice and binds the goddess of liberty with chains of gold. It is Lord of the land, the uncrowned king of the commonwealth, and its whole religious creed is comprised in the one verse, to him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance, while from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath. We the people rule in the conventions, but our delegated lawmakers have a different Lord. In 1892 we demanded tariff reform with a whoop that shook the imperial rafters of heaven and declared for the minting of gold and silver without discrimination against either metal. But our so-called public servants, instead of hastening to obey our behest, spent months manufacturing excuses for disregarding their duty. Placed between the devil of the money power and the deep sea of public opinion, they wobbled in and they wobbled out like a drunken boa constrictor taking its jag to a gold-cure joint. They were like the little boy who put his trousers on Tother's side to, we couldn't tell, whether they were going to school or coming home. But our doubts were all dispelled last November. They are the fellows who were going to school, to that school of experience where fools are educated. End of section 42, part 1. Section 43 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 Butros. The Complete Works of Bran, the Iconoclast, volume 12 by William Cowper Bran. Section 43, Slave or Sovereign, status of the American citizen. Part 2, Synopsis of an Address Delivered by Mr. Bran, August 10, 1895. Slave or Sovereign. The last is an individual entity, a controlling power, his will is law. The first goes and comes, fetches and carries at the command of a master. Creating wealth he may not possess, bound by laws he does not approve, dependent upon the pleasure of others for the privilege of breaking bread. Is not the latter conditioned that of a majority of the American people today? Are they not, at the subsequent end of a financial whole, the sides soaked and never a ladder in sight? In a country so favored, a veritable garden of the gods, where every prospect pleases, and not even the politician is wholly vile, the lowliest laborer should be a lord, and each and all find life well worth the living. But it is not so. People starve while sunny savannas bursting with fatness yield no food. They wander houseless through summer's heat and winter's cold, while great mountains of granite, comb, the fleecy clouds, and the forest monarch measures strength with the thunderstorm. They flee naked and ashamed from the face of their fellow men, while fabrics molder in the marketplace, and the song of the spindle is silent. They freeze while beneath their feet are countless tons of coal, incarnate kisses of the sun god's fiery youth. They have never a spot of earth on which to plant a vine and watch their children play, where they may rear with loving hands, lowly roof, and rule. Lords of a little world hemmed in by the sacred circle of a home. Yet the common heritage in the human race lies fair before them, and there is room enough. The people of Texas do not realize how terrible is the industrial condition of the world today, how wide the gulf that separates dives and Lazarus, how pitiful the poverty of millions of their fellow men. The Texas merchant complains of dull trade, the farmer of low prices, the mechanic of indifferent wages. Yet Texas is the most favored spot on the great round earth today. I defy you to find another portion of the globe of equal area and population where the wealth is so well distributed, where so few people go hungry to bed without prospect of breakfast. Yet the grisly gorgon of greed and the gaunt specter of need are coming west and south in the wake of the star of empire. Already Texas has begun to breed millionaires and mendicants, sovereigns and slaves. Already we have an aristocracy of money in which wealth makes the man and want of it the fellow, and year by year it becomes easier for dives to add to his horde and for Lazarus to starve to death. We appeal to New York for capital with which to develop our resources, and New York has it in abundance, countless millions she is eager to let out at usury. Yet it is estimated that ten thousand children perish in that city every year of the world for lack of food. And how many are kept alive by the bitter bread of a contemptuous charity God only knows. In one year three thousand children were debarred from the public schools of Chicago because of lack of clothing to cover their nakedness, and Chicago boasts herself the typical American city. The despised Salvation Army trying to feed a thousand homeless and hungry men on the sand lots of San Francisco proves that already the curse has traveled across the continent. And people who are not only permitted to run at large but actually elected to office prattle of overproduction, while people are starving in nakedness, proposes to eliminate pauperism and inaugurate the industrial millennium by placing fiddle strings on the free list or increasing the tariff tax on toothpicks to relieve the country of the commercial jim jams by means of the gold cure, and the full killer still procrastinates. The American citizen is called a sovereign by those patriots who are preparing to sacrifice themselves on the altar of a nice fat office, and perhaps he is, but I'm free. We are frequently told that the condition of labor is better today than a century ago. That is half a truth, yet wholly a falsehood. A century ago the workman knew not of many comforts and conveniences he now enjoys when he happens to have a job, but that was one age, this quite another. Progress gives no man new wants, and the luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next. To deny this, to limit the laborer to actual necessaries as measured by a former age, were to relegate him back to barbarism, to nomadism and nakedness. If we should be content with what our fathers had, then they should have been satisfied with the comforts enjoyed by their progenitors, and so on, back until man digs roots with his fingernails, attires himself in a streak of red paint for winter overcoat, and a few freckles for summer all-star. It is by comparison with his fellows and not with his fathers that man determines whether he's fortunate or unfortunate, whether he's receiving his proper proportion of the world's increase of wealth. A century ago there was no glaring inequality as now exists. There were no fifty-million-dollar fortunes and no free-soup joints. If the workman's piano was a Jews harp and his Pullman car a spavined chaos, his employer was not erecting palaces in which to stable his bloodstock, nor purchasing dissolute princes for his daughters to play at marriage and divorce with. If the farmer's wife wore Lindsay Woolsey and went barefoot to save her shoes, her neighbor did not import five-thousand-dollar gowns from Pali and put jeweled collars on her pet cur. The difference in the condition of dives and Lazarus is more sharply defined than ever before. It is not so much the pitiful poverty of the many as the enormous wealth of the few that is fostering discontent, pride dallying with sin begot death, willful waste is breeding anarchy in the womb of want. The lords and ladies of the house of Hav revel in luxury such as Lucilus never knew, while within sound of their feasting gaunt children fight like famished beasts for that which the breakfast garbage barrels afford. Wretched fortunes make the famed wealth of Lydia's ancient kings appear but a beggar's patrimony, while brawny giants must beg or steal and starving mothers give the withered breast to dying babes. Labor now seeks employment not as a right but as a privilege. It has come to such a pitiful pass in this land of liberty, this refuge of the world's oppressed, that to afford a man an opportunity to employ his strength or skill in the creation of wealth, a portion of which he may retain for his own support, is regarded rather as a privilege than a free contract between American sovereigns, an act of charity for which the recipient should be dually grateful. No man can be a freeman, while dependent upon the good will of another for his bread and butter. He may be a sovereign de jure, but he's a slave de facto. And under present conditions the more labor-saving machinery he invents, the tighter he rivets his chains. We had hoped and believed that human ingenuity was about to lift the curse laid on Adam by his angry lord. The angel of intellect, to re-imparadise the poor slave, place his fetters on nature's tireless forces, and declare that never again should bread be eaten in the sweat of the brow. But man proposes and is sued for breach of promise. Were a man to declare labor-saving machinery and the general development of the country a curse to the poor, he would be branded as a moss-back or budding candidate for bedlam. Yet it is unquestionably true that the further the average individual gets from the so-called blessings of civilization, the less he is affected by our boasted industrial system, the smaller his danger of starving to death. Many of us can remember when we had little labor-saving machinery in Texas, when railways were scarce as consistent Christians at a colored camp meeting. Goods were carried down from coast on the backs of burrows, and a full-dress suit consisted chiefly of buckskin breeches and a brace of angel-makers. And we remember also that a pauper was a curiosity, that the very cowboys played poker at $10 ante with the sky for limit, the common laborer carried coin in his belt, and the merchant had money to burn. Texas has developed wonderfully during the last few decades. We now have improved machinery and extensive poor farms, railways and political rings, a $3 million capital, and an army of unemployed. We have built fine schools and finer churches, made the black man our political brother and bought his vote. We have exchanged our buckskin for broadcloth, our hair-raising profanity for the hypocrites wine, straight corn juice for the champagne-jag, and the hip-pocket court for the jackass verdict of the petty jury. But the cowboy now plays penny ante on credit or shoots craps for small coin. The common laborer carries in his belt only a robust appetite, while the merchant, who dodges bankruptcy for a dozen years, considers himself the special favorite of fortune. And what is true of Texas is true in greater or less degree of every state in the Union. And so dear to the heart of the patriotic and public-spirited citizen has a tendency to transform an independent and moderately prosperous people into masters and slaves. But this is not the fault of labor-saving machinery nor of capital, nor of development by itself considered. The more wealth labor creates, the more it should enjoy. When the reverse is the case, distribution is at fault. The substitution of expensive machinery for hand labor eliminated the independent artisan. His productive power was multiplied, but his independence, his ability to care for himself without the cooperation of large capital, was gone. The wheel-right could not return to his shop nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort. Competition with the iron fingers of the great factory were impossible. Labor must now await the pleasure of capital. The creature has become lord of its creator. The fierce competition of idle armies forces wages down, and slowly but surely the workman is sinking back to the level occupied before the cunning brain of genius, harnessed the lightning to his lathe, and gave him nerves of steel and muscles of brass with which to fight his battle for bread. With the improved machinery with which he is provided, the American workman can create as much wealth in a week as he need consume in a month. But he goes down on his knees and thanks God and the plutocracy for an opportunity to toil three hundred days in the year for a bare subsistence. Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial ill, but the political drugstores are full of them. All you've got to do is to select your panacea, pull the cork, and let peace and plenty overflow a grateful land, so we're told. Instead of the curmy quicks prescribed by the economic M.D.'s, I believe that our industrial system has been doped with entirely too many drugs. I'd throw physics to the dogs, exercise a little common sense, and give nature a chance. There's an old story of an Arkansas doctor who invariably threw his patients into fits because he was master of that complaint. But the economic M.D.'s can't even cure fits. When they attempt it, the patient goes into convulsions. Instead of going to so much trouble to bar out cheap goods by means of tariff walls, I'd bar out cheap men. If you're making monkey wrenches at two dollars a day, and some fellow abroad is building them for fifty cents, your boss comes to you and says, Jim, we've got to have a tariff to keep out the product of pauper labor, or our nether garments ripped from narrative to neckband. I can't pay you two dollars and compete with an employer who pays but fifty cents. That sounds reasonable, and you swing back on the GOP tow line, and lay a tariff tax on monkey wrenches that looms up like an old time democratic majority in Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar barrels and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror at the mechanics exchange, that fifty cent fellow crosses the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer is protected all right, but where do you come in? You don't come in. You simply stand out in the industrial norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town while your wife takes in washing. Your daughter goes to work in a factory at two dollars a week, and your son grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into war politics or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation because you've been bred to a higher standard of living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper at breakfast, and a new book, or the iconic last after supper. You must have your plunge bath and spring bed. Your clean shave and Sunday shirt. How can you hope to hold your job when a man is bidding for it, who takes up his bellyband for breakfast, dines on slum gullion, and sucks his breath for supper? To whom literature is an unknown luxury, a bath, a deplorable accident, and a crummy old blanket, a comfortable bed? You can't do it, and if you'll take the Apostle's advice, you'll quit trying. No, I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy Europeans, men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have millions such in America, and they are most estimable citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that man who was not proud of his parentage should have been born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilgeroy's kite the theory that America should forever be the dumping ground for foreign filth. That people will be warmly welcomed here, whom no other country wants and the devil wouldn't have. We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap. We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs and call itself a man to sway the scepter of American sovereignty, to become an important factor in the formation of our public polity. And then, with this venal vote on the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the other, anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince and the poor man a populist, while we are great only in that strange spell, a name. In this work of reform, we've got to begin at the bottom with the body politic itself. You can't make a silk purse of a sow's ear, nor sovereigns of men who were born to be slaves. We've got to grade up or we're gone. Only superior intelligence is capable of self-government. Ignorance and tyranny go hand in hand. You may theorize until the bottomless pit is transformed into a skating park. You may vote tariffs high or low, and money hard or soft. You may inaugurate the single tax or transform the American Republic into a commune. But the condition of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water will never be permanently bettered while ignorance and vice have access to the ballot box. We have carried the enchanting doctrine of political equality entirely too far and are paying the penalty. The rebound from the monstrous doctrine of the divine right of monarchs has hurried us into equal error. Disgusted with the rottenness of the established religion, the French people once crowned a courtesan as goddess of reason, maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism. Our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlums' reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless Nessians, Columbia's imperial crown. That the greater must guide the lesser intelligence is nature's immutable law. To deny this were to question our right to rule the beast and God's authority to reign king of all mankind. Self-preservation will yet compel us to guard the sacred privileges of American sovereignty as jealously as did Rome, her citizenship. Do this and all other needed reforms will follow as surely and as swiftly as the day God follows the dawn. Knowledge is power when those who vote fully understand that every dollar expended by government, federal, state, or municipal must be created by the common people that first or last labor must furnish it forth. We'll cease having billion-dollar congresses. We'll cease paying 140 millions per annum in federal pensions. We'll cease wasting a king's ransom annually in pretending to improve intermittent creeks and impossible harbors solely for political navigation. We'll cease borrowing money in time of peace to bolster up that foolish financial fetish known as the Gold Reserve. We'll cease making so many needless laws and paying aspiring patriots fat salaries to harass us with their enforcement. We'll cease exempting from taxation the half-million-dollar church and laying a heavier mulch on the mechanics cottage and the widow's cow. We'll cease paying preachers $5 a minute to stand up in our legislative halls and insult Almighty God with perfunctory prayers. We'll cease building so many palatial prisons where thieves and thugs may be cared for at the expense of honest people. But we'll divide criminals into classes, those who should be peremptorily hanged, and those who should be whipped and turned loose to hustle their own hash. Nothing knocks the sawdust out of false sentiment so quickly as the realization that it's an expensive luxury and that we must pay the freight. Billion-dollar congresses, eh? Do you know what that means? There are less than 15 million wealth creators in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of their pockets, something over $66 a piece. If you had it in silver dollars, and I suppose that most of you would accept silver, you couldn't count it in a century. Lay the coins edge to edge, and they'll belt the world. Pile them on top of each other, and you'll have a silver shaft more than 1,750 miles high. Sand your hands and climb it. Per chance from the top, you'll see many things, among others what is oppressing the poor. And while up in that rarefied atmosphere where the vision is good and thinking probably easy, you will look around for those other pyramids of expense annually erected by state, county, and municipal government, then come down firm in the faith that if this isn't a great government, it ought to be, considering what it costs. No wonder the workman carries in his pocket only an elegant assortment of holes. We're governed entirely too much. Officialism is becoming a veritable old man of the sea on the neck of labor's sin bed. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant of some sort, and you cannot get married or buried, purchase a drink, or own a dog, except with a buyer leave to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states, suicide itself is an infraction of the criminal code. And if the police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail, the preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law, this state, and county, and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the iconoclast, and that's so plain that he who runs may read and reading understand. And when so printed and so understood without the possibility of misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a man into the judicial hopper, not even an astrologer can tell whether he'll come out a horse thief or only a homicide, or whether the people will weary of waiting on the circumlocution office and take a change of venue to judge Lynch. This can never be a land of religious liberty. The atheist can never be considered as on a political parody with his ultra-Orthodox brother until we compel church property to bear its prorata of the public burdens. And right here, let me say a word about the apostle. I have been accused by people for whom no cherry tree blooms or little hatchet is ground, of being a rank atheist and a red flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the roots, rob trusting hearts of their hope, and deprive the preacher of his daily bread. Now I might just as well confess to you that I'm no angel. If I were, I'd fly out of Texas till the bifurcated Democratic Party has another harmony deal. When you hear people denouncing me as an atheist, just retire to your closet and pray. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. And you might add that nobody cares. No mortal son of Adam's misery can produce one line I ever wrote or quote one sentence I ever uttered, disrespectful of any religion. And that's more than you can say of most of the ministers. But it is not right. It is not just that the little holdings of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples exempted, palatial edifices in which polite society pretends to worship one who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries and a costly church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so, for he never built one. Congregations that can afford to erect fine churches and export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes can afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing our streets in grim despair. A million children coming up in ignorance and crime. A million women hesitating between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy. And the church supposed to be God's ministering angel crying, give, give. If you can't give much, give little. Remember the widow's might. So acceptable to a pauper deity. Give for what? To build fine temples in whose sacred shadows will lurk the gaunt specter of famine and the grisly gorgon of crime. To buy grand organs and costly bells. To peel praises to one who had nowhere to lay his head. To pay stall fed preachers five, 10, $20,000 a year to expound the doctrine of a poor carpenter who couldn't have kept a silver dollar in his jeans. A single day while there was poverty and suffering in the world. While the wealth producer is robbed to pension millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle if labor was subtly employed and reaped its just reward. With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give even all the candidates an office with plenty to get and little to do and still have pie in the pantry and corn in the crib. There is something more the matter than governmental waste. There's something radically wrong. In tracing the causes of panics and periods of business depression, we invariably find our currency more or less at fault. Now don't get frightened. I'm not going to dose you with free silver nor give you the gold cure. This is neither coins financial school nor a gold bug incubator. The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody does, especially the corner grocery politician. He understands it from A to Izard. Knows almost as much about it as a hello girl does of the nature of electricity. Professor Jevon truly says that a kind of intellectual vertigo appears to seize people when they talk of money. Perhaps the goddess of liberty on the silver dollar has them trilbyized. We hear a great deal of late about the science of money. It's supposed to be something very esoteric, something that a fellow can only master by drawing heavily on his gray matter, by working his think machine up to the limit and sweating blood. Now let me tell you that there is no science of money any more than there's a science of harvesting hoop poles or fighting flies. When a man begins to give you an interminable song and dance about the science of money, just you send for the police and have him locked up as a dangerous lunatic. Here's a ticket good for so many meals at a restaurant, an order for so much wealth, and here's a silver dollar. No, it isn't. It's a check on a resort, in fact, on a saloon, an IOU for 12 and a half cents. The price of a cigar or something, I suppose, man should not live by bread alone. Now what's the difference between this ticket and check and the currency issued by the government? Simply this. These are the IOUs of individuals' money, the IOUs of the entire American people. These are orders for certain kinds of wealth at particular places. Money is an order for all kinds of wealth at any place within the jurisdiction of the federal government. This ticket is the check of one American drawn against his personal wealth and credit. This bill is the check of all Americans drawn against the collective wealth and credit of the nation. That's all the difference between a cocktail check and a coin, between a meal ticket and a $10 bill. Neither is worth a wrap until it can be redeemed. Like sanctification caught at a camp meeting, there must be a hereafter to it or it's a humbug. But don't you medalists take that as a premise and jump at conclusions or you're liable to sprain your logical sequence? What kind of redemption did I have in view when I acquired this check, I mean this ticket? I expected that it would be redeemed in something that would expand my sursingle and enable me to cast a shadow in eggs and aliyo margarine, cornbread and buttermilk. And if so redeemed on demand, is it not a good ticket? Is it not worth its face? What kind of redemption did I expect when I acquired this bill? I expected it to be redeemed in the necessaries of life or possibly the luxuries. Who issued it? The government. Who's the government? The people. And when the people have given me bread and butter, tobacco and transportation, clothing and cocktails and afforded me police protection to the extent of my $10, hasn't it been redeemed in the manner I anticipated? In the only way in which money can be redeemed? If I exchange this bill for a gold eagle, what have I got? Another governmental drink check or meal ticket that awaits redemption. And there you have the whole science of money over which politicians have so long puzzled their brains that their think tanks have got full of logical wiggle tales. A dollar, whether it be made of gold, silver or paper, is simply an order which the people in their official capacity give against all the wealth, actual and potential of the nation. And unless the holder can get it promptly redeemed in food and clothing, he's in a terribly bad fix. Every few years, our industrial system gets the gym jams. Capital flies to cover. Factories close and labor goes tramping across the country seeking honest employment and receiving a warm welcome from militia companies with shotted guns. Cheerful idiots begin to prattle of overproduction, the economic MDs to refurbish all the old remedies from conjure bags to communism. They all know exactly what caused the crisis and what to do for it. But despite the doctors, the patient usually survives and the MD who succeeds in cramming his pet panacea down its throat, claims all the credit for the recovery. We are slowly emerging from the crash of 93 and the cuckoos are cocks sure that Cleveland who dood with that financial rabbit foot known as the gold reserve that a country fairly bursting with wealth was saved from the damnation bowwows by the blessed expedient of going into debt. That labor found salvation by shouldering an added burden in the shape of interest-bearing bonds. Hereafter, when a borough tries to lie down beneath a load that's making him bench-legged, we'll just pile a brick house or two on top of him and with ears and tail erect, he'll strike a Nancy Hanks gate and come cavorting down the home stretch. When a statesman can see such things as that while wide awake and perfectly sober, he ought to consult a doctor. No wonder the Democratic party split wide open, transformed from an ascendant son into a bifurcated Bela's comet wandering the Lord knows wither. The gold reserve we are told is to protect the credit of our currency, protect it from home. You and I are making no assault upon it, wouldn't hurt it for the world. When we get a paper or silver dollar, we don't try to round to the treasury to have it redeemed in a slug of yellow metal. We make a beeline for the grocery store and have it redeemed in a side of bacon. Who is it that chisels desolation into the blessed gold reserve, the so-called bulwarks of our currency? The fellows who want bonds, the capitalistic, the creditor class, the men who own the mortgages and have millions of dollars corded up in bank, the men who have most to lose by any bobble in the credit of our currency. And every time the capitalist tries to hoist himself with his own petard, the administration smothers the blaze with a block of interest-bearing bonds. If he wants to make a skyrocket of himself, let him kerosene his coattails and apply the match. If the gold reserve were really necessary to the credit of our currency, capitalists would no more make war upon it than they would be stride of buzzsaw making a million revolutions a minute. Instead of systematically draining it, they would, whenever it struck the danger line, gather all the gold they could get and send it on to Washington. The capitalists are not crazy. They've simply got a soft snap in that bulwark business and are working it for all it's worth. Calico is sold by the yard, kerosene by the gallon, coffee by the pound. These measures are immutable and those who buy and sell by them make their contract in perfect confidence. But suppose they altered from day to day or from year to year, the yard ranging from 25 to 50 inches, the pound from 10 to 20 ounces, would our exchanges be affected without much friction, thank you? Would not such a ridiculous system of weights and measures paralyze exchange and demoralize industry? Would not those who could juggle the system to suit themselves, buying by a long and selling by a short yard, accumulate colossal fortunes at the expense of the common people? Would we not have panics in plenty and depression's galore? Well, that is exactly what is happening to the dollar, our measure of value, the most important of all our trade tools. And Mark you, a change in the purchasing power of the dollar is equivalent to an alteration of every weight and measure employed by commerce. Understand? When the purchasing power of the dollar expands or contracts, it has the same effect on exchange as would the expansion or contraction of the yard, the gallon and the pound. A shifting measure of value is the nigger in our industrial wood pile. We have got to have a measure of value that's as immutable as our measure of quantity. A dollar is reliable as an official pound, a dollar that's the same yesterday and today and forever before we see the last of these panics and periods of business depression. We have got to have a currency that will adapt itself automatically and infallibly to the requirements of commerce that will constitute an ever effective exchange medium before we can obtain a smooth working industrial machine and the maximum employment of labor. We know from experience that gold will not supply us with such a currency, that silver will not do it, that by metalism will not do it, that green backism as we understand the term will not come within a mile of it. Then what will do it? That's the problem. Solve it and you forever put an end to commercial panics in a land of plenty. You deprive capital of its power to oppress labor. You assure industry a constant friend where it has so often found an insidious foe. Solve it and Columbia can furnish happy homes for half the world. Homes unhaunted by the wolf of want but crowned with sweet content and gilded with freedoms glory. For a century economists have been seeking the solution of this all important problem. Even conservative old Adam Smith dreamed of the emancipation of the world from the multifarious ills of metallic money. But we still cling with slavish servility to the silver of Abraham and the gold of Solomon. I do not claim to have found the philosopher's stone for which so many wiser men have sought in vain but the currency plan I proposed in 1891 and which was again outlined in the iconoclast for May of this year has been carefully examined by the ableist financiers of Europe and America and they have been unable to point out a fundamental fault. It is known as the inter-convertible bond currency plan by which our circulating media would be bottomed on the entire wealth of the nation instead of upon fragments of metal of fluctuating value by which the volume of the currency would depend not upon the fecundity of the mines, the fiat of Congress or the greed of Wall Street but upon the needs of commerce itself. By this plan the proportion between the money work to be done and the money available to do it is always the same. Hence it would afford an immutable measure of value. In studying the plan, it is well to bear in mind that our foreign trade, that boogeyman of the medalists has no more to do with our currency than with our pint cups and bushel baskets, no more than with our language and religion that we can pay our foreign debts and collect our foreign credits only in commodities that the prattle indulged in by the medalists and then money that is good the world over is mere goose speech that there is no such money. We buy and sell with England and France to the extent of tens of millions annually. Yet I haven't seen a British Guinea or a French Frank in 15 years and if you had a foreign coin and should go around to a resort and call for a glass of buttermilk and plank the little stranger down on the counter, the party in the White Apron and Alaska Dazzler would say, what you're given us? You'd reply, I'm giving you gold, money good the world over. What is it? Watch charm? This ain't no pawn shop, but that's money. A? Money, gold coin that make at the heart glad. What kind of money? It's a British Guinea. Well, why don't you go to Great Britain to blow yourself? But my dear sir, this is money of final payment. This is value itself. This does not depend on the stamp of government but circulates throughout the world on its intrinsic merit. Well, it don't circulate in this joint, see? Slam your theories up against conditions before you tie to them. You all know that in this country there should be no such thing as able-bodied pauperism. You know that until the last arable acre is brought to the highest possible cultivation, every mine developed, every forest made to contribute to the creature comfort of man, there should be remunerative work for all. You know that with the aid of wealth-creating machinery, every laborer should be able to acquire a competence to comfort his declining days. You know that until need is satisfied and greed is gorged, there can be no such thing as overproduction. That under normal conditions, when there's a plethora of necessaries, the surplus energy of the nation turns to the creation of luxuries and the standard of living advances. You know that with such wonderful resources touched by the magic wand of genius, the golden age of which poets have dreamed and for which philanthropists have prayed should be even at our doors. I hope to contribute in some slight degree to the establishment of conditions that will enable us to utilize to the utmost the free gifts of a gracious God, to the proper distribution of wealth, to the emancipation of labor, not by the law of blind force, but enlightened self-interest, not by riotous revolution, but peaceful evolution. I want to see every American citizen in very truth a sovereign to whom life is a joy instead of a curse. I want to see every rag transformed into a royal robe, every hovel into a cultured home. I want to hasten, if by ever so little, the day when we can boast with the proud sons of Imperial Rome that to be an American is greater than to be a king. And when we so amend industrial conditions that each can find employment at profitable prices, we do more to eliminate crime and foster morality than have all the prophets and preachers from Melchizedek the mythical to Talmadge the turgid. No man can be either a patriot or a consistent Christian on an empty stomach. He's merely a savage animal, a dangerous beast. You must get a square meal inside of a man and a clean shirt outside of him before he's fit subject for saving grace. You must give him a bath before he's worth baptizing. And when you get him clean and well-clothed, fed and housed as a reward of his own honest industry, he's not far from the kingdom of God. But if you want to degrade a people beyond redemption, if you want to transform them into contemptible peons and whining hypocrites who encumber the earth like so much unclean vermin, educate them to feed on the crumbs from Dive's banquet board and accept his cast-off clothing with obsequious thankfulness, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of the common people until it was the bread of charity or the blood of the revolution has ever been the herald of moral decay and of national death. So past the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome and if we may judge the future by the past, so will perish the greatest republic that ever gleamed like a priceless jewel on the skeleton hand of time. Self-interest, humanity, patriotism, religion itself admonishes us to weigh well the problem of the hour, a problem born of human progress forced upon us by the mighty revolution wrought in the industrial world by the giant steam and that problem is, shall the average American citizen be a slave or a sovereign? Don't imagine for a moment that I'm an anarchist that I'm going to wind up this seance by unfurling the red flag and throwing a hat full of bombs. I admit that I haven't much respect for law. There's so much of it that when I come to spread my respect over the entire lot, it's about as thin as one of Sam Jones' sermons. Still, I don't believe in strikes and riots and bloodshed. I'm for peace, peace in its most virulent form. I've had a sneaking respect for Cleveland ever since he employed a substitute to put a kibosh on the Southern Confederacy while he remained at home to play pinocchio with the pretty girls. He may not be much of a statesman in time of peace, but there's no picnic ants on his judgment in time of war. It is time that capital and labor realize that their interests are really commutual as interdependent as the brain and the body. Time they ceased their fratricidal strife and uniting their mighty forces under the flag of progress completed the conquest of the world and doomed poverty, ignorance, and vice hell's great triumvirate to banishment eternal. Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase. It can only concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism. It is time that American citizens of alleged intelligence ceased trailing blindly in the wake of partisan bandwagons and began to seriously consider the public welfare. Time they realized that the people were not made for parties, but parties for the people and refused to sacrifice their patriotism on the unclean altar of partisan slavery. They blind obedience to party fiat, the division of the people of one great political family into hostile camps, subjection of the public interest to partisan advantage, placing the badge of party servitude above the crown of American sovereignty. The ridiculous oriflam, a foolish division above old glory's star-jemmed promise of everlasting unity, have brought the first nation of all world to the very brink of destruction. It is difficult for people here in Texas to understand the industrial condition of the American nation today, to appreciate the dangers upon which it is drifting. We are too apt to imagine everybody as prosperous and conservative as ourselves. Or if not so, it's because they do not vote the democratic ticket that panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. Here in Texas, we have hung our second providence on the democratic party. It has become a religion with us. If a man is orthodox in his political faith, all things are forgiven him. But if there's any doubt about his democracy, we are inclined to regard him as an alien, if not an anarchist. Most of us enjoy the shadow of our own vine and fig tree, which it is impossible to mortgage. We feed three times a day, have a cocktail every morning, a clean shirt occasionally. And even when cotton goes so low, it doesn't pay for the Paris green to poison the worms. We blame it on the Lord instead of on our political leaders. But it's different in other sections of the union. America contains more than a million as desperate men as ever danced the car magnol or shrieked with brutal joy when the blood of French aristocrats reddened the guillotine. The dark alleys and unclean dives of our great cities are crowded with dangerous sang-culat and our highways with hungry men eager for bread, though the world blaze for it. Porporism is rampant, the criminal class is increasing, and everywhere the serpent of socialism is leaving its empoisoned slime. Suppose that these desperate elements find a determined leader, a modern marant who will make the most of his opportunities for evil. How many of that vast contingent now clinging with feeble grasp to the rotten skirts of a doubtful respectability would be swept into the seething vortex of unbridled villainy? Note the failure of public officials to protect corporate property, the necessity of calling for federal bayonets and batteries to suppress labor riots, the dangerous unrest of the common people, the sympathy of the farmer, that atlas upon whose broad shoulders rests our political and industrial world. With every quasi-military organization that throws down the gauge of battle to the powers that be, then tell me if you can, where dives may look for defenders should the rabble rise in its wrath, the bullet supplant the ballot in the irrepressible conflict between the cormorant and the commune. And what are we doing to avert the danger? Distributing a little dole and preaching patience to starving people, quarreling about the advisability of counting a quorum or coining a little silver senorage, wrangling over the rites of a mid-Pacific prostitute to rule Celts and Saxons and trying to so reform the tariff that it will yield more revenue with less taxation. We are bowing down before various pie-hunting political gods and electing men to Congress who couldn't tell the federal constitution from Calvin's confession of faith. We are sending street corner economists to state and national conventions to evolve from their innate ignorance and guild with their supernal goal, political platforms which we are pledged beforehand to accept as the essence of all worldly wisdom. Our patriotism has been supplanted by partisanship and now all are for a party and none are for the state. On July 4th, we shout for the old flag and all the rest of the year we clamor for an appropriation. The man who is kicked by a nightmare while dreaming of the draft demands a pension and every burning patriot wants an office. And while our ship of state is threading with unsteady course the stormy straits between the silhouette of greed and the cherubdus of need, it's canvas torn by contending winds, it's decks swept by angry waves. We boast of the strength of our free institutions as though republics had never fallen nor revolutions erased from the map of the world proud empires that imagine themselves immortal. But before God, I do believe this selfish and unpatriotic age will pass as past the age of brutish ignorance, as past the age of tyranny. I believe the day will come, oh blessed dawn, when the angel of intellect will banish the devil of demagogy. When Americans will be in spirit and in truth a band of brothers, the wrongs of one, the concern of all, when labor will no longer fear the cormorant nor capital, the commune, when all men will be equal before the law wherever falls the shadow of our flag. End of section 43, part two. Section 44 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 Butros. The complete works of Bran, the Iconoclast, volume 12 by William Cowper Bran. Section 44, Rainbow Chasers, part one. This is the lecture that Mr. Bran delivered and was to continue on his lecture tour, which was cut short by his death. Ladies and gentlemen, there are many things which I very cordially dislike, but my pet aversion is what is known as a set lecture, one of those stereotyped affairs that are ground out with studied inflection and practice gesture and suggest the grinding of old hundred on a hurdy-gurdy. Hence, I shall ask permission to talk to you tonight as informally and as freely as though we were seated in friendly converse around the soda fountain of a Kansas drugstore. And I want you to feel as free to talk back as though we had gotten into this difficulty by accident instead of design. Ask me all the questions you want to and if I'm unable to answer offhand, I'll look the matter up later and telegraph you at your expense. With such unbounded liberty, there's really no telling whether we will drift, what subjects we may touch upon, but should I inadvertently trample upon any of your social idols or political gods, I trust that you will take no offense. We'll remember that we may honestly differ, that none of us are altogether infallible. Lest any of you should mistake me for an oratorical clearing sale or a locutionary bargain counter, expect a dimostonic display and be disappointed, I hasten to say that I am no orator as Brutus was, but simply a plain blunt man like Mark Antony who spoke right on and said what he did know or thought he knew, which was just as satisfactory to himself. He's dead now, poor fellow. Woman in the case, of course. Shakespeare assures us that men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. However that may be, Antony's just as dead as though he had died for love or become a gold-bug Democrat. Yes, Mark Antony's gone, but we still have Mark Hanna, one through the world away for Cleopatra's smile, the other through Columbia's smile away for a seat in the Senate, and so it goes. Of the two marks, I think Antony was the easiest. But let us take a look at our text. The rainbow is a sign, I believe, that the prohibitionists once carried the country and would have made a complete success of the cold water cure had not the rum demon engineered the ark. Still, it does not necessarily follow that a rainbow chaser is a fellow on the hot trail of a blind tiger. He may be one who hopes to raise the wage rate by means of a tariff wall or expects John Bull to assist Uncle Sam in the remonetization of silver. A rainbow chaser in the common acceptance of the term is a fellow who mistakes shadow for substance and wanders off the plank turnpike into bogs and briar patches. Satan appears to have been the first victim of the rainbow chasing fad to have bolted the Chicago convention and run for president on the reform ticket. At a very early age, I began to doubt the existence of a personal devil whereupon my parent on my father's side proceeded to argue the matter in the good old orthodox way, but failed to get more than half the hussy out of my hide. But we will not quarrel about the existence or non-existence of a party who Milton assures us slipped on a political orange peel. We know that frauds and fakes exist, that hypocrites and humbugs abound. Whether this be due to the pernicious activity of a horned monster or to evil inherent in the human heart, I will not assume to say. We may call that power the devil which is forever at war with truth is the father of falsehood, whether it be an active personality or only a vicious principle. Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the sloth of despond. Conditions have become so desperate that it were well for you and I who are in the world and of it to abate somewhat our partisan ranker, our sectarian bitterness and take serious counsel together. Desperate, I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more difficult for the workman to win his modicum of bread and butter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to go to Hades or elsewhere, but that honor, patriotism, reverence, all things which our fathers esteemed as more precious than pure gold have well nigh departed, that the social heart is dead as a salt herring, that all is becoming bromagem and pinchback leather and prunella, that a curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world and it no longer produces heaven-inspired men, but only some pitiful somolokra thereof, some worthless succidona for such who strive not to do their God-given duty, that the world reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron, but of some pitiful sectarian mud puddle or political goose pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers, we have abandoned the ark of the covenant with its brotherhood of man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis of brute selfishness with a conscience or a creed of following the foolish rainbow of a fatuitous utilitaria and getting even deeper into the bogs. I have frequently been called a chronic kicker, but do not object to the epiphet. There is a need of good lusty kickers, those whose number one tootsie-woodsies are copper-toed, for the world is full of devilish things that deserve to die. Lest any should accuse me of the awful sin of using slang and thereby break my heart, I hasten to say that the Bible twice employs the word kick in the same sense that I used it here. In fact, a goodly proportion of our so-called slang is drawn from the same high source, being vinegar to the teeth of pietistical purists, but quite good enough for God. Some complaint that I should build instead of tearing down should preserve and not destroy. The complaint is well-founded if it be wrong to attack falsehood, to exterminate the industrial wolves and social rottenness, to destroy the tares sewn by the devil and give dollar wheat a chance to arise and hump itself. In determining what should be preserved and what destroyed, we may honestly disagree, but I think all will concede that what is notoriously untrue should be attacked, that we should wage uncompromising war on whatsoever maketh or loveth a lie. I think all will agree that this is preeminently an age of artificiality, that there is little genuine left in the land but the complexion of the ladies. Even that has been called in question by certain unshivalrous old bachelors, those unfortunate whom the ladies of Boston propose to expel from politics for dereliction of duty. Somehow an old bachelor always reminds me of a rainbow, not because he looks like one in the least, but rather because he's so utterly useless for all practical purposes. He also reminds me of a rainbow chaser because what he is compelled to admire is beyond his reach. When hope deferred hath made him heart sick, he begins to growl at the girls and for the same reason that a mastiff barks at the moon. You will notice that a mastiff seldom barks much at anything he can get hold of and bite. We are solemnly assured that the world is steadily growing better and I suppose that so, for in days of old they crucified men head downwards for telling the truth while now they only hammer them over the head with six shooters and drag them around a Baptist college campus with a rope. All that a reformer now needs is a hard head and a rubber neck. The cheerful idiot, alias the optimist, is forever prading of the world's progress. Progress is a desirable thing only when we make it in the right direction. It may be sure and swift down a soaked plank into wild ocean depths, or it may be with painful steps and slow toward the eternal mountaintops where breaks the great white light of God and there's no more of darkness and of death. Progress industrial, the productive power of labor multiplied by two by 10 and with such improved weapons for waging war upon the grizzly gorgon of want, nearly nine millions of the industrial army in India alone died upon their shields. Hosanas mounting in costly churches here, the starving babe tugging at the empty breast of the dead mother there and we send to the famine sufferers many Bibles and hymn books, little bacon and beans. Bibles and hymn books are excellent things in their ways but do not possess an absorbing interest for the man with an aching void concealed about his system. Starving people ask a Christian world for grub and it gives them 41 different brands of saving grace. Each warranted the only genuine. Most of these elixirs of life ladled out by hired missionaries who serve God for the long green and who are often so deplorably ignorant that they couldn't tell a religious thesis from an Iqthisaurian. Progress in religion until there's no longer a divine message from on high, no God in Israel, only a fashionable pulpit hearing to minister to languid minds, the cultivation of foolish fads and the flaunting of fine feathers, the church becoming a mere vanity fair or social clearinghouse, a kind of aesthetic forecourt to Hades instead of the gate to heaven. At the opposite extreme, we find blatant black guardism by so-called evangelists who were educated in a mule pen and dismissed without a diploma yet who set up as instructors of the masses in the profound mysteries of the Almighty. Men who would get shipwrecked in the poetry of Shakespeare or lost in the philosophy of one of his fools pretend to interpret the plans of him who writes his thoughts in flaming words on the papyri of immensity, whose sentences are astral fire. Progress in science until we learn that the rainbow was not built to allay the fears of the Rokin family but is old as the sun and the sea, that bourbon whiskey drills the stomach full of low-holes and that the purest spring water is full of bacteria and we must boil it or switch to beer, that Havana cigars give us tobacco heart, pastry is the hand made of dyspepsia, while even the impurpled grape is but a John the Baptist for appendicitis, that a rich thief has kleptomania and should be treated at a fashionable hospital instead of a plebeian penitentiary, while even the rosebud of beauty is a swarm with bacilli, warning the sons of men to keep their distance on pain of death. If all the doctors discovered be true, then life isn't half worth living, is stale, flat and unprofitable as a Republican nomination in Texas. When the poet declared that men do not die for love, the doctors had not yet learned that a corn-fed kiss that cracks like a dynamite gun may be equally dangerous. I think the bolus builders are chasing rainbows, that if I wait for death until I'm killed with kisses, old Methuselah won't be a marker. Our car of progress, of which we hear so much, has carried us from the vates Vision of Milton and Dante to Alfred Austin's Yaller Dogrell, to the raucous Twitterings of grown men who aspire to play Persian bull bull instead of planting post holes, who mistake some spavined mule for Bellarophon's mount and go chasing metrical rainbows when they should be drawing a fat bacon rind a down-the-shining blade of a buck-saw from the flame size of Sappho that breed mutiny in the blood to the green-sick monderings of atrobalarius maids who are best qualified to build soft soap or take a fall out of the corrugated bosom of a washboard. We now have poetry, so-called everywhere, in books and magazine innumerable, even sandwiched in between reports of camp meetings, political powwows, and newspaper ads for patent liver pills. Oh, that the featherless J-birds now trying to Twitter in long primer type would apply the soft pedal unto themselves, would add no more to life's dissonance and despair. Most of our modern poets are bowed down with more than Wertherian woe. Their sweethearts are cruel or fate unkind. They've got cirrhosis of the liver or palpitation of the heart and needs must spill their scalding tears over all humanity. It seems never to have occurred to the average verse architect that not a line of true poetry was ever written by mortal man, that even the song of Solomon and the odes of Anacrian are but as the jingling of sweet bells out of tone, a dissonance in the divine harmony that you can no more write poetry than you can paint the music of children's laughter or hear the dew-beated jasmine bud breathing its sensuous perfume to the morning sun. The true poets are those whose hearts are harps of a thousand strings ever swept by unseen hands. Those whose lips are mute because the soul of man hath never learned a language. Those we call master poets and crown with immortals, but caught and fixed some far-off echo of deep calling unto deep. The lines of Byron or a Burns, a Tasso or a Tennyson are but the half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of its own imaginings. But we are speaking of progress when diverted by the discordant clamor of featherless crows. I am no pectorist with my face ever to the past. I realize that there has been no era without its burden of sorrow, no time without its fathomless lake of tears, that the past seems more glorious than the present because the heart casts a glamour over days that are dead. From the dust and glare of the noon of life, we cast regretful glances back to the dewy mourn, and as Eve creeps on the shadows, reach further back until they link the cradle and the grave, and all is dark. I would not blot from heaven the star of hope, nor mock one earnest effort of mankind, but I would warn this world that its ideals are all wrong, that it's going forward backwards, is chasing foolish rainbows that lead to barbarism. Palaces and gold, fame and power, these by thy gods, O Israel, mere fly-specked idolons worthy no man's worship. When we have adopted higher ideals, when success is no longer a synonym for vain show, when the man of millions who toils and wails for more is considered mad, when we realize that all the world's wealth cannot equal the splendor of the sunset sky, neither which the poorest trudge, the astral fire that flames at night's high noon above the meanest hut, that only God's omnipotence can recall one wasted hour, restore the bloom of youth, or bid the loved and lost return to glad our desolate hearts with the lambent light of eyes that haunt all our waking dreams, the music of laughter that has become a wailing cry in memories desolate hulls. When we cease chasing lying rainbows in the empty realm of make-believe, and learn for a verity that the kindle green of the workmen may be more worthy of honor than the purple of the prince, why then the world will have no further need of iconoclasts to frankly rehearse its faults, and my words of censure will be transformed into peons of praise. Sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet and soft as their parting tear. We have progressed from the manly independence and fierce patriotism of our forebears to a namby-pamby foreign policy that compels our citizens abroad to seek protection of the consuls of other countries from the spirit that made our flag respected in every land and honored on every sea to the answering cackle of jingoism whenever an American manifests a love of country or professes a national pride. What is jingoism? It is a word coined by enemies of this country and used by toad-eaters. It is a term which under various titles has been applied to every American patriot since our grandsires held the British lion up by the caudal appendage and beat the sawdust out of the impudent brute since they appealed from a crack-brained king to the justice of heaven and wrote the charter of our liberties with the bayonet on the back of Cornwallis Buccaneers. Its synonym was applied to Thomas Paine, the archangel of the revolution, whose pen of fire made independence imperative. Who, through seven long years of blood and tears, fanned liberty's flickering flames with his deathless faith that the omnipotent arm of God would uphold the banner of the free? From the brain of that much-maligned and long-suffering man, Columbia sprang full panoplyd like a Minerva from the brow of Olympian Jove. And what has been his reward? In life he was bitterly belied by the foes of freedom and the slaves of superstition. In death, a mighty wave of calamity rolls above his grave. Greater men have lived and died and been forgotten, but a nobler heart near beat and broke, grander soul near struggle toward the light or bowed before the ever-living God. When the colonists stood debating whether to bear their present ills or fly to other they knew not of, he seized the gauge of battle and flung it full and fair in Britain's haughty face. When defeat followed defeat, when the newborn nation was bankrupt and its soldiers starving in the field, when coward lips did from their color fly and men brave as Roman tribunes wept tears of grim despair, his voice rang out again and again like that of some ancient prophet of Israel cheering on the fainting legions of the Lord. And again and again and yet again the ragged barefoot continentals set their breasts against the bayonet until from the very ashes of defeat dear liberty arose phoenix-like, a goddess in her beauty, a titan in her strength. The term jingoist or its equivalent was applied to Washington and Henry to Jefferson and Jackson. It was applied to James G. Blaine, the typical American of his time, a man from beneath whose very toenails enough intellect might be scraped to make an hundred Clevelands or McKinley's. All were jingos in their day and generation because all prefer the title of sovereign to that of subject, because all believed that Columbia should be mistress of her own fate. The architect of her own fortune, instead of an appendage of England or political orphan under a European protectorate, because all believed that she should protect her humblest citizen from wrong and outrage wheresoever he may be, though it cost every dollar of the nation's treasure and every drop of the nation's blood. And if that be jingoism, then I too am a jingo from alpha to omega, from beginning to end. Who are those who recalcitrate about jingoism? They are people who have never forgiven Almighty God for suffering them to be born American sovereigns instead of British subjects. They are those whose ideal man is some stupid forked radish stuck or with titles hung round with strings and anxious to board with a wealthy American wife to avoid honest work. They are the people whose God is the dollar, their country the stock exchange and who suspect that a foreign policy with as much backbone as a scared rabbit would knock some of the wind and water out of their bogus securities. It is those who would sell their citizenship for a copper cent and throw in their risen Lord as lanyap who are forever prading of jingoism and pleading for peace at any price. And these unclean harpies of greed and gall have been too long permitted to dominate this government. The result is that the greatest nation known to human history, the sum and crown of things is an object of general insult. If it be rumored that we contemplate protecting American citizens in Cuba, every European government emits a growl. There's talk of rebuking Uncle Sam's presumption of standing him in a corner to cool. If it be suggested that we annex an island at the earnest request of all its inhabitants worth the hanging. There, more mandatory catarwalling by the European courts, while even the Mikado of Japan gets his little Ebenezer up and the Akund of Swat, the Nisen of Nowhere and the grand Giasticutus of Jimplecute Intimate that they may send a yaller-legged policeman across the Pacific in a soapbox to pull the tail feathers out of the bird of freedom if it doesn't crawl humbly back upon its perch. If a fourth-class power insults our flag, we accept a flippant apology. If our citizens are wrongfully imprisoned, we wait until they are starved, shot, or perish of blank despair in dungeons so foul that a hog would die therein of a broken heart. Then humbly ask permission to investigate, report that they are dead, and feel that we have discharged our duty. Why? Because this nation is dominated by the dollar, is in the hands of those who have no idea of honor, unless it will yield somewhat to eat, no use for patriotism, unless it can be made to pay. When we concluded to protect our citizens from Wailarian savagery, instead of sending a warship to Havana to read the riot act, if need be, in villainous salt peter, we had our ambassador crawling about the European courts humbly begging permission of the powers. And as we got no permission, we did no protecting. When the church people elect me president of this republic, I'll have anti-mortem investigations when American citizens are held prisoners by foreign powers. And those entitled to old glorious protection will get it in one time and two motions. If Uncle Sam has to shock his seersucker and fight all Europe to a finish, I shall certainly ask no foreign prince potentate or power for permission to protect American citizens in the Western world. There'll be one plank in my platform as broad as a boulevard and as long as a turnpike, and it will be to the effect that the nation which wrongs an American citizen must either apologize with its nose in the sand or reach for its six shooter. I'd rather see my country made a desolation for ever and a day, its flag torn from the heavens, its name erased from the map of the world and its people sleeping in hero's sepulchres than to see it a mark for scorn, an object of contempt. In continually crying peace, peace, Uncle Sam is chasing a rainbow that has a dynamite bomb under either end. If history be philosophy teaching by example, what is the lesson we have to learn? In little more than a century, we've had four wars and only by the skin of our teeth have we escaped as many more. Yet we not only refuse to judge the future by the past, but ignore the solemn admonitions of Washington and Jefferson and stand naked before our enemies. We have no merchant marine to develop these hearty sailors who once made our flag the glory of the sea. We have a little navy commanded chiefly by political pets who couldn't sail a cat boat into New York Harbor without getting a ground or falling overboard. We have an army about the size of a comic opera company officer largely by society's swells who cannot even play good poker are powerful only on dress parade. We have a few militia companies scattered from sunrise to Lake Chance composed chiefly of boys and commanded by homemade colonels who couldn't hit a flock of barns with a howitzer loaded to scatter who show up at state encampments attired in gaudy uniforms that would make Solomon ashamed and armed with so-called swords that wouldn't cut hot butter or perforate a rubber boot. And that's our immediate fighting force. Uncle Sam is a Philadelphia tender foot flourishing a toy pistol at a Mexican fandango. When I succeed Mr. McKinley, I'll weed every dude and dancing master out of the army and navy and put on guard old war dogs who can tell the song of a 10 inch shell from the boom DI of a sham battle. I'll call the attention of my hard shell Baptist Congress to Washington's advice that while avoiding overgrown military establishments we should be careful to keep this country on a respectable defensive posture. And that if that advice is not heated I'll distribute the last slice of federal pie among the female prohibitionists of Kansas. If this is to be a government of four and buy a lot of nice old ladies I'll see to it that none of my official grannies grow a beard or wear their Broncos close pin fashion. And I'll warrant you that were this nation ruled by sure enough women instead of by a lot of anemic he peons of the money power. Columbia would not be caught unprepared when the spider's web woven across the cannon's throat shakes its threaded tears in the wind no more. To the American Patriot familiar with the rapid development of this country it seems that the hour must assuredly come when its lightest wish will be the world's law when foreign potentates will pay homage to the sovereigns of a new and greater Rome. But let us not be too sanguine for nations like individuals have their youth their lusty manhood and their decay. And despite the rapid increase in men and money there are startling indications that Uncle Sam has already passed the zenith of his power. First freedom then glory when that fails wealth vice corruption barbarism at last. Freedom we have won and glory yet both have failed. We have become not the subjects of native Caesars but the serfs of foreign Shylocks. Wealth we now have and oriental vice and corruption that reaches even from the Senate chamber through every stratum of society that we are approaching barbarism may be inferred from the magnificence of the plutocrat and the poverty of the working people. The first reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn while if the latter protest against this grievous injustice they are branded as noisy bryonites or lampooned as lippy populace. To the superficial observer a nation seems to be forging forward long after it has really begun to retrograde. There is an era of splendor of lucelous feasts of Bradley Martin balls and silly dinners. There's grand parade of soldiery and ships miles of costly palaces and wealth poured out like water in foolish pageantry. There's refinement of manners into affectation dilettanteism, epicureanism but is the gilded halo hovering round decay. The heart of that nation is dead its soul hath departed and no antiseptic known to science will prevent putrefaction. How is it with us? 40,000 people own one half of the wealth between two oceans while 250,000 own more than 80% of all the values created by the people. What is the result? Money is omnipotent. Power is concentrated in the hands of a little coterie of plutocrats. The people are sovereigns de jour and slaves de facto. A mongrel anglomaniaism is spreading among our wealthy like mange in a pack of lobo wolves. Our plutocrats have become ashamed of their country probably because it permits them to practice a brutal predacity and now cultivate foreign customs, ape foreign fashions and purchase as husbands for their daughters the upper servants of European potentates people who earned their titles of nobility by chronic boot licking or sacrificing their female relatives to the God of infamy. Year after year these titled paupers these shameless parodies on God's masterpiece paddle across the pond to barter their taughty dishonor for bootle to sell their shame-crested cornets to poor-sign-sold American parvenues who, if spawned by slaves and born in hell would disgrace their parentage and dishonor their country. Our totes and title worshippers now have a society called the Order of the Crown composed of puppies who fondly imagine that they have within their royal hides a taint of the impure blood that once coursed through the veins of corrupt and barbarous kings. Perchance, these doodlets and doodines will yet discover that they are descended in a direct line from King Adam I and are heirs to the throne of Eden. Our country is scarce half-developed yet it is already rank with decadence and smells of decay. Our literature is yellow our pulpit is jaundiced our society is rotten to the core and our politics shamefully corrupt yet people say there's no need of iconoclasts. Perhaps there isn't. The iconoclast used hammers while those who purify our social atmosphere and make this once again a government of for and by the people may have to empty gatling guns and load them with carbolic acid. National decay and racial retrogression may be inferred from the fact that alleged respectable white women have been married to black men by eastern ministers who insist on solving the race problem for God and the South by giving to the typical American of the future the complexion of a new saddle and the perfume of a Republican powwow. When these ethnological experts tire of life they should come to Texas. When white people lose their racial pride they've nothing left that justifies the appointment of a receiver. We hear a great deal about race prejudice and I want to say right here that there's just enough of it in my composition to inspire an abiding faith that the white man should be must be, will be Lord Paramount of this planet. I promise you that when you elect me to the presidency nothing that's black, yellow or tan gets an office under my administration. I shall certainly not follow Mark Hanna's understudy and fill the departments at Washington with big fat saucy blacks to employ white women as stenographers and white men as messenger boys. There's lots of good in the Senegambian lots of it, but not in a thousand years will he be fit for American sovereignty. Half the white people are not fit for it else instead of a wooden headed hickiest doctious we'd have Billy Bryan in the presidential chair today. Whenever I look at McKinley I think of Daniel Webster not because Bill resembles Old Dan but because he doesn't. I like the negro in his place and his place is in the cotton patch instead of in politics despite the opinion of those who have studied him only through the rose-tinted lornette of Uncle Tom's cabin. I also like the Anglo-Maniac in his place and that is the geographical center of Old England with John Bull's trademark seared with a hot iron on the western elevation of his architecture as he faces the rising sun to lace his shoes. As between the nigger and the Anglo-Maniac I much prefer the former. The full-blooded nigger is a full positive but the Anglo-Maniac is an ass superlative. The first is faithful to those who feed him. The latter is a sneaking enemy to the country that has conferred upon him every benefit. End of section 44