Brann the Iconoclast Volume 10 Part 6

BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

Charles Goodwin, editor Salt Lake Tribune, puts into the mouth of a figurative John Bull, who is lecturing his children, the following sentence:

"Why, ours is an old family. One of our ancestors was knighted by Henry VII for stealing cattle from the Scotch some time in the fifteenth century. I am tracing up the lineage, and I believe we are all barons. I expect to get the t.i.tle confirmed, and then each one of you boys must sell himself to a beautiful American girl for from 75,000 to 250,000 pounds. Under the rose, it will help the stock d.a.m.nably, for your mother was a barmaid. Things are working all right, my lads. Our conquest of the United States still goes on."

Apropos of a snub given the Prince of Wales by an American girl, Lillian Russell--even our much-married Lillian--raises her voice in protest at international marriages, and incidentally American sn.o.bbery.

What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to the physically and financially anaemic n.o.bility across the water, to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage.

The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their Fifth Avenue Christ.

And yet, to go back to first principles, is it not that the time are out of joint, and the America herself is responsible for her daughters' shame? America has blinded her eyes with avarice and glutted her brain with greed. She has starved her intellect and gorged her ambition. She has bartered her birthright of n.o.bility and sold her soul to crawling sycophants. She has prost.i.tuted her sceptre of power to trusts for tinsel and cowers under the lash of corporations because they bind her brow with a cap of bells that tinkle an empty song of "Freedom." In the mad rush for gain, America has forgotten its greatness, and in their blind struggle for gold Americans forget what is grand. We have sold our freedom to Britain, we have sold our pride, our individuality, our independence, our self-respect, our power, our dignity and our daughters.

The G.o.ds have given us brains to make of our country a brawny one, and we have used our talent to corrupt what was once equality into the unequal factions of power and poverty. The G.o.ds have given us genius to soften the crudities of the early century and to brighten our homes and our lives, and instead the inventions and the creations but serve to gild the mansions of the monopolist and to gird the iron more tightly on the wrist of the toiler. We are avaricious, we are vulgar, and we are base. We have lost the dignity of Nature that gave to a fragile lily a royalty before which Solomon's grandeur paled. We have piled stone and brick where the forest oak towered, and voice our strident city cries where the imperious roar of the forest king once startled the echoes. We have turned the oil and filth of our refineries into the streams that once crept purling and laughing through the wild-flowers and gra.s.ses, and the black smoke of our factories has silenced the plaintive note of the thrush and strangled the wondrous song of the nightingale. Our grandeur is ostentation and our dignity a dead-letter. The greatness that once longed for new worlds to conquer has degenerated into yellow-fingered grasping for ginger-bread display. The powerful figure of the pioneer could swing its mighty as into the forest root, but in the rythm of labor there was time to pause and rest and listen where "soft music ripples along sh.o.r.e, as the lake breathes." In the stillness Nature's G.o.d speaks, and in the patient face of the woman, shading her eyes where she watches him from the cabin door, is sweeter and n.o.bler dreaming than ever finds resting place in the sharpened and querulous features of our modern rushed society woman.

In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's religion--"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a kindergarten. Thus have we grown avaricious and vulgar and in their weariness of things as they are, have our women grown base.

They know that their lives miss something, they know that their fierce rivalry and feverish straining for precedence bring them no nearer the Mecca that closes its austere gates to their aching eyes. And for the dignity and pride their lives have lacked, they give their fortunes and sell their bodies and exchange, for a t.i.tle, the name of which they have grown ashamed. They perhaps shrink, in physical repulsion, from the man who they feel despises while he endures them. They perhaps hunger, with all the woman- nature their pitiful lives have left them, for other lips murmuring in slumber beside them. But over their burning eyes they press the metal circle for which they have crushed their hearts and outraged their s.e.x, and around the delicate limbs they draw the ermines that cannot hide their shame, and in all their poor, empty glory they only read in the cold eyes of the patrician women around them the chill contempt that stamps them as among, but not of their order. "I sometimes think it wisest not to think," and this warped and twisted human nature has a pathos in all its chasing after a gilded b.u.t.terfly that has always a grinning skull peering through the gold of its wings.

The hunger that finds but Apples of Sodom, the life-labor that wins but the gold of Midas, the ambition that crushes its toy baloon--"and man plods his way through thorns to ashes."

America freed her blacks but rests her social aegis on barter far more hideous. Optimists prate of the world growing better, with their eyes on the mountain tops, but when one reads of frail Lais fined ten dollars in the court- room for earning her daily bread in the only manner possible to a nature in which sin has been bred in the bone by generations of ancestors, and then pictures Dr. Brown of exclusive St. Thomas', New York, murmuring "Benedicite!" over an international marriage ceremony, his handsome face and melodious voice and aristocratic bearing doing full justice to the grandeur of the occasion--it is a contrast in which there is a bitter humor, a farce in which there is something horrible, a comedy that smells of the charnel house.

Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, h.e.l.l the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving?

Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida., October 1.

SALMAGUNDI.

My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d----d tongues cut out."

Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.

Now for Christ's sake don't judge Iowa people by this peripatetic Ananias. Where he was born I don't know; neither do I care a d--n; but I suspect that he was begotten in some back yard during the dark of the moon, sp.a.w.ned in a dry goods box and raised on bones." So Bailey is "Tank-Kee." If I mistake not there was a Tank-kee trotting around Texas some years ago beating school-children of the small towns out of their pennies by dressing like a Chinese joss with a double-barrelled jag and exhibiting a lot of old junk. It is my impression that he's a half-breed of some kind, but whether half Chinese or c.o.o.n I cannot with certainty say. If he is hacking around from town to town in Mississippi he is doubtless working a fake of some kind-swindling the people while defaming them. If the Mississippians can locate G. W. Bailey they had best hold him and wire me for copies of his articles in my possession. One thing is c.o.c.k-sure--"Tank-kee" had best keep out of Texas.

The suspicion is growing that Dr. Gutieras, the government expert, has a pint of yellow fever baccilli in his cerebrum. He carries the plague with him, just as a man suffering with mania a potu carries his cargo of monkeys. Had he been called to see Simon's wife's mother, he would have declared that she had a case of Yellow Jack and spread a panic through all Judea. Should he find a man suffering with katzenjammer he would p.r.o.nounce him a "suspect." As Barney Gibbs says, all the yellow fever patients Gutieras discovered during his tour of South Texas were up "hunting either a drink or a job" ere this peripatetic expert was well out of town. I'll gamble four dollars that there is not in the United States to-day a genuine case of Yellow Jack. There's every indication that the cases at Mobile, New Orleans and Biloxi are identical with the disease discovered by Gutieras at Galveston--nothing under heaven but the dengue. Who the devil ever heard of the mortality in a yellow fever epidemic averaging only about 6 per cent.? Why la grippe will beat that as an angel-maker and beat it blind. When good old- fashioned yellow fever reaches for people they begin to sing "Heaven is my home,"

I'd rather have the "plague" now rioting in New Orleans than to contract the buck ague or the itch. These "experts" make my soul aweary. An insanity expert thinks everybody crazy but himself, while a yellow fever expert would isolate a case o' cuc.u.mber colic. What the South needs to do is to quarantine against these special doctors.

A few American newspapers and magazines of the genus mugwump, enemies of Cuban liberty and apologists for the Weylerian butcheries and brutalities, are now busily engaged in belittling those who enabled Senorita Cisneros to escape from her captors, are heaping their feculence upon Mesdames Jefferson Davis, Jno.

A. Logan and the other "old women" who had the temerity to appeal to the Spanish Queen Regent in behalf of the young heroine--are even repeating the stale lies of Weyler's understrappers reflecting upon her chast.i.ty. What brave American journalists!

How proud of such sons Columbia should be! It is quite possible the New York Journal undertook the young lady's rescue for advertising purposes only; but just the same, she is on American soil, and she can well afford to ignore the petty malice of emasculated mugwump editors, knowing as she must, that the chivalry of this country is with her to the last man. I do not believe the statement of the Spanish official whom Senorita Cisneros accused of insulting her, and who retorted that she had thrown herself at his head. A gentleman could not make such an a.s.sertion even though it were true, for a woman's illicit favors set upon the lips of the recipient the seal of eternal silence.

The defamer of Senorita Cisneros is but another Don Matthias de Silvae of Le Sage. . . .

The c.o.o.n seems to be forging rapidly to the front in some portions of this country. On October 2, Mrs. W. E. D. Stokes, a wealthy white woman and owner of one of the largest stock farms in Kentucky, gave a ball and banquet near Lexington to 300 colored people and filled 'em full of beer. Whether Mrs. Stokes danced with the bucks the dispatches do not state. . . .

My attention has been several times called to one W. D. McKinstry of Watertown, N. Y., by people of that place. They plead with me that he is really spoiling for a "roast." McKinstry is publishing a little paper which somewhat resembles an over-ripe dish-rag, or an unlaundered sheet from the bed of a colored baby; but I have no idea why he is so unpopular. It may be because he possesses the physique of a bull elephant and the brains of a doodle-bug.

It may be that the appearance of such an animal outside a dime museum, or a pig sty, angers the people. I can see nothing in his editorials at which to take offense. Reading them were like drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle or filling one's belly with the east wind. McKinstry is trying to settle the "negro problem" for the South; but that has so long been a favorite occupation of Smart Alec editors who never saw a cotton patch that no one minds it any more. Waco has the c.o.o.n and Watertown has McKinstry, hence it is in order for the two towns to mingle their tears instead of animadverting each upon the other's misfortune. If I might advise the mighty McKinstry I would suggest that he change his occupation. As an editor he is a dismal failure, but he would be a dazzling success as ballast for a ca.n.a.l boat. . . .

A correspondent notes that the New York World devotes two ill.u.s.trated pages to the Vanderbilt-Marlborough brat, and wants to know what I think about it? Why, I think that old Josef Phewlitzer has succeeded in elongating the Vanderbilt leg. No editor ever publishes such tommyrot unless paid therefor, because he knows that no sane person will read it. It was an advertis.e.m.e.nt, ordered and paid for by somebody, probably Consuelo's rather gay mother, who, albeit divorced from her first husband for cause, has the distinguished honor to be gran'dam to an incipient duke, who will probably grow up to be as utterly worthless as his daddy. . . .

Jno. H. Holmes, editor of the Boston Herald, writing on the "New Journalism." says: "Huge circulation is extremely profitable. It produced revenue from the sale of the paper, and a still greater revenue from the volume of advertising." In other words, the average "great daily" is simply a mercenary advertising graft. It may "produce revenue," but seldom profit from circulation, for the price to agents is frequently below the cost of white paper and expressage. The subscription price is usually placed below the profit line, and extra inducements offered in the way of "premiums." Somehow, a circulation, bona fide or fake, must be worked up as an excuse for elongating the business man's leg. And he is a "dead easy mark." The yap who purchases checks of strangers and bets on monte is no more gullible than the average victim of the advertising grafter. A sucker is said to be born every minute; and strange to say, most of them are produced in the cities. The business man who makes an advertising contract without investigating the circulation claims of the publisher, would invest in confederate bonds or buy gold bricks. If he suffered the loss it would not much matter--would be simply another case of the fool and his money soon parted; but it is shifted to the consumer. The people must pay the merchant's advertising bills, just as they pay his rent and insurance; and the amount of which they are annually fleeced to pay for what has no actual existence, would meet all expenses of government and leave a tremendous surplus in the treasury. This nation wastes annually for worthless fake advertising more than it pays for education. . . .

A Galveston traveling man writes me as follows:

"I have been for two years past gathering up sc.r.a.ps of your history, and now have the honor to advise you that according to the testimony of many very pious people, among whom are not a few preachers, you are an avowed anarchist who was suspected of being concerned in the Haymarket ma.s.sacre; that you served two terms in the penitentiary before you were born; that you are a renegade Jew and an Italian Jesuit, that for 30 years you were a Baptist preacher, but were bounced out of the ministry for drunkenness and immorality; that you have been a blasphemous Atheist from your youth up; that you deserted from the federal army in the same year that you were four years old; that you have been discharged from all the Texas dailies for incompetency, and are the author of editorials in the Chicago Inter-Ocean slandering the South; that you are a big over-grown bully who abuses weaker people, and a miserable little poltroon who has been kicked by every cripple between New York and Denver. All this is doubtless correct as far as it goes; now will you please inform me whether you have been guilty of anything else?"

This is a fairly correct list of my crimes thus far; but being still a young man, I may reasonably hope to add to it considerably if not shut off by the sheriff. The greatest drawback to my career as a criminal is my inability to lie so consistently as some of my dear brethren in Christ. . . .

The ICONOCLAST'S recent comments on Dean Hart of Denver, provoked the following poetic outburst on the part of a singer of that city:

Do you mind him as he walks the street, The Dean?

With his highly elevated nose, The Dean.

And his old imported hat And his time worn black cravat, Any one could tell that He's the Dean.

He is "furnist" this country, Is the Dean, "It's nothing like old Hingland,"

Says the Dean.

In language somewhat torrid, With a countenance quite florid, He says our schools are "orrid,"

Does the Dean.

To many it's a mystery why The Dean Doesn't leave us and for England hie away; No doubt he can explain it, In England he's not "in it,"

But in this "blooming" country He's a Dean. . . .

All the sycophantic little sa.s.siety sheets are now engaged in the delectable task of belittling Miss Edna Whitney, selected by Chillicothe, Mo., as maid of honor to the Kween of the Kansas City Karnival, but objected to by the sn.o.b management on the ground that she was a working girl. The sheets aforesaid have discovered that since that event brought her into public notice Miss Whitney has accepted $500 from a cigarette firm for the use of her photo, and are now industriously arguing that a young woman who will permit her portrait to be so employed is not a proper person to be brought for a moment into contract with the eminently respectable sa.s.sietyest. Rats! ditto rodents. The Karnival was not a "social function," but a commercial scheme gotten up by the merchants of Kansas City to draw trade to that enterprising town. It was a blowout for everybody; the world was invited--the gates thrown open to the Canary in his Canaryism as well as to Sir Alymer in his Alymerism. Lady Vere de Vere and the chambermaid in the dollar-a-day hotel were alike invited to make themselves at home, enjoy the show and spend their siller.

Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an incorrigible sn.o.b, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical a.s.sociate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying for the publication of decollete portraits and sickening "write-ups" of themselves. Miss Whitney is poor and, I am told, supports a widowed mother. To a girl so situated $500 is a great sum. She could scarce be expected to have the fine aesthetic feelings of a highly educated woman reared in the lap of luxury. Her portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,--like those of the swell society set--and, like the latter, freely commented upon by b.u.mmers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sa.s.siety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package--I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' in the same place. These pitiful sheets, which are belittling Miss Whitney to ingratiate themselves with the sn.o.bocracy of Kansas City, are entirely dest.i.tute of shame. Their editors are, in most instances, a cross between Jeames de la Pluche and Caliban. Their presence at "social functions" is tolerated for the same reason that n.i.g.g.e.r waiters are admitted. They are used by the parvenues and heartily despised by the very people whom they so obsequiously serve. . . .

MR. BRANN: You state in a recent issue of the ICONOCLAST that McKinley's popular plurality "represents the votes of n.i.g.g.e.rs and the scavangers of Europe's back alleys." I denounce that statement as a falsehood. The votes of native-born Americans elected Mr. McKinley. AMERICUS. Waco, Texas, September 10.

My correspondent is indeed "A Merry Kuss" else he could find no pleasure in calling a man a liar in an anonymous letter. To call that creature a cur who flings an insult which he fears to father, were a d.a.m.ning libel on every decent dog in Christendom.

My correspondent is probably a mongrel cross between a male hyena and a gila monster, begotten in a n.i.g.g.e.r grave-yard, suckled by a sow and educated by an idiot. But, perhaps, being familiar with his own birth and breeding he will consider this a compliment.

McKinley coralled more than 90 per cent. of the n.i.g.g.e.r vote and carried every state in which foreign-born people exceeds 21 per cent. of the entire population. He received his largest majorities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, Minnesota, California, Ma.s.sachusetts, New York and New Jersey, one-third of whose people, collectively considered, are of foreign birth; his smallest majorities in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and Maryland, where those of foreign birth amount to about 8 per cent. of the entire population. Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas const.i.tuted Bryan's strongholds and their people collectively considered, show a foreign birth of less than 5 per cent. Colorado is the only state having a considerable foreign- birth population that stands in the Democratic columns, all the others having gone for McKinley. While it is true that thousands of our foreign-born citizens are intelligent, honest and patriotic--a credit to the land of their adoption--it is likewise true that following in their wake we find Huns, Pollocks, Sicillians, "Souwegian" and other undesirable offscourings of the old world, imported by Mark Hanna and other "industrial cannibals" to degrade our labor and debauch our politics. It is the vote of this latter cla.s.s, and the scarcely less corrupt and ignorant "c.o.o.ns" which const.i.tute McKinley's popular plurality.

McKinley was the candidate of the a.s.sisted immigrant and the Ethiopian, Bryan of the native-born Americans; and I submit it to a candid world which of these two parties was likely to have the good of this country most at heart, or know best how to promote it. . . .

I am obliged to my friends for divers and surdry sc.r.a.ps of information regarding the cur-ristian trustee of Baylor who led the last a.s.sault upon me in the name of a long-suffering Savior.

It would make interesting reading for Waco Baptists no doubt, but I can put these columns to better use than rehashing ancient history. Those who are anxious to learn what kind of an animal this member of Baylor's board of managers actually is, are referred to the Galveston News of July 26th, 1883. Any one can secure access to the files of that paper for the asking. I cannot afford to "d.a.m.n to everlasting fame" every backwoods hypocrite who raises a howl. The ICONOCLAST leaves such cattle to the bill collectors. . . .

I would like to have a flash-light photo of W. S. Densickr of Lebanon, Ind. Ter., not for publication, but to add to my private gallery of hypocritical rogues. Densickr wants to build a temple of pure gold twelve miles square and 60,000 high for some backwoods congregation, but of what denomination he has evidently not yet discovered. He insists, however, that the Redeemer demands such a temple, and that the general public should be forthcoming with the necessary cash. He is working what he calls a "church chain"--all for Christ. He writes you a letter asking you to contribute 5 cents to the cause and thereby obtain the blessing of G.o.d. He requests also that you send an exact copy of his letter to three of your friends whom you deem most likely to invest their small change in heavenly grace. The "chain" of letters runs from 1 to 100, and a Cleburne gentleman who was "touched" figures it out that the 25th No. means more than 282 billion letters and more than 21 millions of money if every sucker bites at the bait. If the "chain" doesn't break before the 100th number is played it will corral all the wealth of this world. Mr. Densickr hath a great head. He's a church financier for your galways. Still I opine that the man who complies with his apparently modest request is one large piebald a.s.s who ought to be saddled, bridled and ridden around the block, then turned loose to do the Nebuchadnezzer act.

THE GOO-GOOS AND TAMMANY'S TIGER.

BY H. S. CANFIELD.

For the giant spoils of Greater New York three contestants are in the field. They are the regular Republican organization, Tammany and the "Citizens' Union." The regular Republican organization is headed by United States Senator Thomas C. Platt, and its active, or rather its most visible manager, is ex-Representative Lemuel Eli Quigg. Tammany still has John Croker for its boss, although John C. Shenan is its official head. The "Citizens' Union" is composed of the truly good and every man is its chief. It has for its candidate Seth Low, president of Columbia University.

This organization is one of the results of a long continued era of official corruption that has no parallel in modern munic.i.p.al history. Until times quite recent Tammany has had things all its own way in the Eastern metropolis. The extent of corruption was not suspected until the Lexow investigating committee brought it to light. It is certain that not even the committee itself conceived the vastness of the system of thuggery and blackmail.

Having begun its labors, evidence poured in upon it in a constantly increasing stream. It could do no less than go ahead.

Its prosecuting attorney, John C. Goff, who not so many years ago was a counter jumper in a big New York store, and is now the city recorder at a salary of $12,000 a year and perquisites, woke to find himself famous. The Lexow committee was indirectly a result of the Parkhurst crusade and the Parkhurst crusade was made necessary by an unheard of state of public immorality. Of Parkhurst and Lexow the "Citizens' Union" is the child and more than the child. It stands for purity in politics and the rights of the honest citizen. It objects to high salaries and little work. It desires economy in public places. It wants each vote counted once and only once. It believes in the civil service. It swears by Teddy Roosevelt. It thinks that the workingman is able to judge for himself. It does not think that the world is governed enough. It is certain that it has in its ranks young men of vigor and intellect who would draw salary and serve the public in a manner hitherto never approached. It boasts that it is "the better element." It does not know the alphabet of politics. It is virtuously theoretical and practically impotent. It cannot be brought to understand that successful politics demands a "machine." Each of its individual members is a boss. They have been derisively termed "goo-goos," which is a contraction of "goody-goods." They are youthful, sanguine, patriotic, impertinent, impractical and self-sufficient. Their idea of conducting a campaign is nebulous. They believe that a number of voluble young men, clad irreproachably in evening dress and touring the city in carts after nightfall, stopping on corners and haranguing the mult.i.tude, cannot fail to command success.

They have a large campaign fund, which will go to the printing of esoteric literature and the hire of carts. There is good in them and any amount of energy. Recognizing this, the leader of the regular Republican organization asked them for a conference. They bouncingly refused. It was explained to them that the best effort of every honest man in Greater New York was needed to defeat Tammany and that a divided front meant defeat, but they would have none of it. "Come into our camp," they said, and be soldiers under us. Accept our commands. Do as we say, work as we direct, spend as we decide, or go to the devil." This being so, the veterans of the regular Republicans, men who have fought through dozens of campaigns and know the meaning both of victory and defeat, naturally decided to go to the devil.

Mr. Low, the candidate of the "Citizens' Union," is a good man.