Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 13

Let the heroes of history have their due; still I imagine the world would have been much the same had Alexander died of cholera-infantum or grown up a harmless dude.

I don't think the earth unbalanced would from its...o...b..t fly had Caesar been drowned in the Rubicon, or Cleveland never been born. I imagine that Greece would have humbled the Persian pride had there been no Thermopylae, that Rome would have ruled the world had Scaevola's good right hand not hissed in the Tuscan fire. It is even possible that civilization would have stood the shocks had "Lanky Bob" and "Gentleman Jim" met on Texas soil --that the second-term boom of "our heroic young Christian governor" would have lost no gas. One catfish does not make a creek nor one hero a nation. The waves do not make the sea, but the sea furnishes forth the waves.

Leonidas were lost to history but for the three hundred nameless braves who backed his bluff. Had there been but one Cromwell Charles the First would have kept his head.

In Washington's deathless splendor gleams the glory of forgotten millions, and the history of Bonaparte is written with blood of the unknown brave.

Humb.u.g.g.e.ry, fraud, deception everywhere.

"All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players"--

Momus the major-domo, the millions en masque. Even friendship is becoming a screaming farce, intended to promote the social fortune or fill the purse. We fawn that thrift may follow; are prodigal of sweet words because they cost nothing and swell the sails of many a rich argosy; but weigh every penny we put forth, and carefully calculate the chance of gain or loss. It's heads I win, tails you lose, and when we cannot play it on that principle we promptly jump the game.

"Who steals my purse steals trash."

That's Shakespeare.

"He that filches from me my good name . . . makes me poor indeed."

That's nonsense. Reputation is but the ephemeral dew on character's everlasting gold; but he that steals a human heart and tramples it beneath his brutal heel; he that feigns a friendship he does not feel; he that fawns upon his fellows and hugs them hard and after scandals them, is the foulest fraud in all this land of fakes, the most hideous Humbug in all h.e.l.l's unclean hierarchy.

I am sometimes tempted to believe that the only friendship that will stand fire is that of a yellow dog for a pauper negro. Strike a friend for a small loan and his affection grows suddenly cold; lose your fortune and your sweetheart sends you word that she will be a sister to you; your brother will betray you for boodle, your father fights you for a foolish flag and your heirs-at-law will dance when they hear of your death; but the devotion of a yaller dog for a worthless n.i.g.g.e.r hath all seasons for its own.

But the Humbug for whom I have least use is the man who a.s.siduously d.a.m.ns the Rum Demon; makes tearful temperance talks; ostentatiously votes the prohibition ticket; groans like a sick calf hit by a battering-ram whenever he sees a young man come out of a barroom; then sneaks up a dirty alley, crawls thro' the side door of a second-cla.s.s saloon; calls for the cheapest whiskey in the shop, runs the gla.s.s over trying to get the worth of his money; pours it down at a gulp and scoots in a hurry lest somebody ask him to treat; who has a chronic toothache --in the stomach--which nothing but drugstore whiskey will relieve; who keeps a jug of dollar-a-gallon bug-juice hid under his bed and sneaks to it like a thieving hyena digging up a dead n.i.g.g.e.r--rents his property for saloon purposes, then piously prays the Lord to protect the young from temptation.

But perhaps the prince of Humbugs, the incarnation of fraud, the apotheosis of audacity, is the street-corner politician. He towers above his fellow fakes like Saul above his brethren. I have been time and again instructed in the most intricate problems of public polity--questions that have perplexed the wisest statesmen of the world-- by men who had never read a single standard work on political economy, and who could not tell to save their souls--granting that they possess such perishable property-- whether Adam Smith wrote the "Wealth of Nations"

or the Lord's Prayer; who were not familiar with the const.i.tution of their own state, or the face of a receipted wash-bill; who could scarce tell a sloop from a ship, a bill of lading from a sight draft; a hydraulic ram from a he-goat unless they were properly labeled. Yet no question can arise in metaphysics or morals, government or generalship, upon which these great little men do not presume to speak with the authoritative a.s.surance of a Lord Chief Justice--or a six-foot woman addressing a four-foot husband. They invariably know it all. They could teach Solomon and the Seven Wise Men wisdom, and had they been on earth when Almighty G.o.d wrote the Ten Commandments they would have moved an amendment or drafted a minority report.

And these are the fellows who frame our political platforms and dominate our elections--whose boundless cupidity, colossal ignorance and supernal gall bring about starvation in a land of plenty--divide the most industrious and progressive people that ever graced the footstool of Almighty G.o.d into bloated millionaires and groveling mendicants.

Even patriotism has become a Humbug--has been supplanted by partisanship, and now all are for party and none are for the state. On July 4 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. Twice, yea, thrice within the memory of men now living, America has been on the very verge of an industrial revolution, a Reign of Terror; yet we continue to hang our second Providence on a job-lot of political Jacksnipes who carry their patriotism in their pockets and their sense under their surcingles. While we who feed three times a day; who have a c.o.c.ktail every morning and a clean shirt occasionally, are boasting of our allegiance to "the grand old party," or prating of the principles of Jeffersonian democracy--are blindly trailing in the wake of some partisan band-wagon like a brindle calf behind a Kansas hay-cart-this nation, born of our father's blood and sanctified by our mothers' tears, is dominated by political self-seekers who have taken for their motto, "After us the deluge."

Once after holding forth at some length on Humbugs, a physician said to me:

"Ah-er--you-ah--didn't mention the medical profession."

"No," I replied, "the power of language hath its limits."

The medical, mark you, is the n.o.blest of all professions.

It contains many learned and able men who devote their lives unselfishly to the amelioration of human misery; but I much doubt whether one-half the M. D.'s now sending people to the drug stores with cipher dispatches, could tell what was the matter with a suffering mortal were he transparent as gla.s.s and lit up by electricity. There are doctors doping people with powerful drugs, who couldn't tell whether a patient had a case of cholera-morbus or was afflicted with an incurable itch for office--who have acquired their medical information from the almanacs and could not distinguish between a bunion and a stone-bruise or find the joints in a string of sausage with a search- warrant.

I have noticed that when the doctors took to writing their prescriptions in Latin it quickly became a dead language--that when I take the poet's advice and throw physic to the dogs, their numbers rapidly decrease. But the doctors are jolly good fellows. Let it be recorded to their eternal credit, that, whatever may be their faults, precious few of them will practice in their own families. I have often wished that I was a doctor of medicine instead of a doctor of divinity. There are several fellows for whom I'd like to prescribe. There's a strong affinity between the two professions. The D. D.'s deal in faith and prayer, the M. D.'s in faith and pills.

I have been frequently asked why, in lecturing on Humbugs, I skip the lawyers. There are some subjects to which a lecturer must lead up gradually; so I discuss the doctors in my discourse on Humbugs and save the attorneys for my talk on Gall.

Even our boasted educational system is half a Humbug.

Too many of our professors fondly imagine that when they have crammed the dry formulas of half a dozen sciences into a small head--perhaps designed by the Deity to furnish the directive wisdom for a scavenger cart; when they have taught a two-legged moon-calf to glibly read in certain dead languages things it can in nowise comprehend --patiently pumped into it a whole congeries of things that defy its mental digestive apparatus--that it is actually educated, if not enlightened. And perhaps it is-- after the manner of the trick mule or the pig that plays cards. The attempt of Gulliver scientists to calcine ice into gunpowder were not more ridiculous than trying to transform a fool into a philosopher by the alchemy of education. If it be a waste of lather to shave an a.s.s, what must it be to educate an idiot? True education consist in the acquirement of useful information; yet I have seen college graduates--even men sporting professional sheep- skins--who couldn't tell whether Gladstone's an English statesman or an Irish policeman. They knew all about Greek roots but couldn't tell a carrot from a parsnip.

They could decipher a cuneiform inscription, perhaps, and state whether a pebble belonged to the paleozoic or some other period; but couldn't tell a subpoena from a search- warrant, a box of vermicelli from a bundle of fishworms.

We pore over books too much and reflect too little; depend too much on others, too little upon ourselves. We make of our heads cold-storage warehouses for other people's ideas, instead of standing up in our own independent, G.o.d-like individuality. Bacon says that reading makes a full man. Perhaps so, but it makes a great deal of difference what a fellow's full of. Too many who fondly imagine themselves educated, much resemble Mark Twain's frog with its stomach full of shot--they are crushed to earth by the things they have swallowed.

Neither the public nor any other school system has ever produced one really great man. Those who occupy the dais-throne among the immortals, contended single-handed with the darkness of ignorance and the devil of dogmatism.

Columbus scorned the schools and discovered a world.

Napoleon revolutionized the science of war and himself master of Europe. Bismarck mocked at precedent, and United Germany stood forth a giant. Jesus of Nazareth ignored the learning of the Levites, and around the world arose the fanes of a new faith.

Reading is the nurse of culture; reflection the mother of genius. Our great religions were born in the desert.

Our grandest philosophers budded and burgeoned in the wilderness. The n.o.blest poesy that ever swept the human harpsichord was born in the brain of a beggar, came bubbling from the heart of the blind; and when all the magi of the Medes, and all the great philosophers of Greece had failed to furnish forth a jurisprudence just to all, semi- barbarous Rome laid down those laws by which, even from the grave of her glory, she still rules the majestic world.

I have been accused of being the enemy of education; but then I have been accused of almost everything; so one count more or less in the indictment doesn't matter. I am not opposed to education that is useful; but why should we pay people to fill the empty heads of fools with soap and sawdust?

Perhaps the most aggressive fraud that infects the earth is the professional atheist--the man whose chief mental stock-in-trade consists of doubt and denial of revealed religion, so-called.

About the time a youngster first feels an irresistible impulse to make a fool of himself wherever a female smiles upon him; when he's reached that critical stage in life's journey when he imagines that he knows much more than his father, he began to doubt the religion of his mother; shrewdly asks his Sunday-school teacher who made G.o.d; demonstrates by the aid of natural history diagrams, that a large whale could in nowise swallow a small prophet-- that if he did succeed in relegating him to its internal economy it were impossible for him to slosh around for three days and nights in the gastric juices without becoming much the worse for wear. He attempts to rip religion up by the roots and reform the world while you wait, but soon learns that he's got a government contract on his hands, --that the man who can drive the Deity out of the hearts and homes of this land can make a fortune turning artesian wells inside out and peddling them for telegraph poles.

You can't do it, son. Religion is the backbone of the body social. Sometimes it's unbending as a boarding-house biscuit, and sometimes it's a bad quality of gutta-percha; but we couldn't get far without it. Most youths have to pa.s.s thro' a period of doubt and denial--catch the infidel humor just as they do the measles and mumps, but they eventually learn that the fear of G.o.d is the beginning of wisdom.

There was never an atheistical book written; there was never an infidel argument penned that touched the CORE of any religion, Christian or Pagan. Bibles, Korans, Zandevestas--all sacred books--are but the feeble efforts of finite man to interpret the infinite; to speak forth the unspeakable; to reduce to intelligible human characters the flame-written hieroglyphs of the sky. Who made G.o.d? Suppose, Mr. Atheist, that I find thee an answer?

Who will furnish thee with an intellect to understand it?

How will you comprehend the genesis of a G.o.d when the wisest man for whom Christ died cannot tell why water runs down hill instead of up--cannot understand the basic principle of the law of gravitation--cannot even guess why Gov. Culberson encouraged the managers of Corbett and Fitzsimmons to bring the mill to Texas, then knocked it out at a special session of the legislature at the expense of the general public.

An atheist once solemnly a.s.sured me that he couldn't possibly BELIEVE anything which he couldn't PROVE; but when I asked him what led him to take such a lively interest in the welfare of his wife's children, he became almost as angry as a Calvinist whose confession of faith had been called in question. Figure up how many things you can PROVE of those you BELIEVE, and you'll find that you have got to do a credit business or go into intellectual bankruptcy.

But the man who denies the existence of the Deity because he cannot comprehend his origin, is even less a Humbug than the one who knows all about him--the pitiful dogmatizer who devotes his life to the defense of some poor little guess-work interpretation of the mysterious plans of him who brings forth Mazaroth in his season and guides Arcturus with his sons.

Dogmatism is the fecund mother of doubt, a manacle on the human mind, a brake on the golden wheel of Christian progress; and every dogmatizer, whether in science, politics or religion, is consciously or unconsciously, a Humbug.

You KNOW, do you? Know what? And who told you? Why, the man in whose mighty intellect was stored the world's wisdom; whose words have come down to us from the distant past as oracles, o'ershadowing even Solomon and Shakespeare, wasn't quite sure of his own existence. Men frequently tell me that what they SEE they know. Well, they've got to drink mighty little Prohibition whisky if they do; otherwise they are liable to see things they'll need an introduction to. The wisest is he that knows only that he knows nothing. Omniscient G.o.d only knows. We--you and I--are only troubled with morbid little-ideas, sired by circ.u.mstance and d.a.m.ned by folly. We don't even know how the Democracy stands on the silver question or what caused the slump in the late election.

The average human head, like an egg--or a crock of clabber--absorbs the flavor of its surroundings. It is chiefly a question of environment whether we grow up Catholics or Protestants, Republicans or Democrats, Populists or political nondescripts. And yet we adhere to opinions we have inherited with all the tenacity of a dog to a bone or an American miser to a ten dollar bill. We a.s.sume that our faith political and our creed religious are founded upon our reason, when they were really made for us by social conditions over which we had little control.

We even succeed in humbugging ourselves into the belief that we are the people and that wisdom will die with us, when the fact is that our head is loaded with out-of-date lumber--our every idea moulded or modified by barbarians who were in the bone-yard before Methusaleh was born.

Society is a vast organism in which the individual is but an atom. It is a monstrous tree--a veritable Ygdrasyl-- penetrating both the region of darkness and the realm of light. Whatever its peculiarities--whether monarchical or republican, Christian or Pagan--it is a goodly tree when it brings forth good fruit--when its boughs bend with Apples of Hesperides and in its grateful shade is reared the shrine of G.o.d. Be it of what shape it may, it is an evil tree when its fruit is Apples of Sodom and it casts a upas-shadow upon the earth. If we cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles, how can a society that is essentially false foster that which is literally true? The body social, of which we proudly boast, is producing dodos instead of King Davids, peanut-politicians instead of heaven-inspired poets, cranks instead of crusaders, Humbugs rather than heroes. Instead of exercising in the campus martius our sons cultivate the Henglish hawkcent and the London lope. In the olden days the glory of the young man was his strength; now it is his chrysanthemum and his collar. And it is going from bad to worse in a ratio of geometrical progression; for how can effeminate men--a canesucking, primping, mincing, affected conglomeration of masculine inanity and asininity beget world-compellers. How can women who care much what is on the outside and little what is on the inside of their heads, and whom a box of lily-white, a French novel, a poodle-dog and another dude will make superlatively happy, suckle aught but fops and fools?

Yet we boast of progress! Progress whither? From the savage who knew nothing to the dude who know less.

From the barbarian who'd plundered your baggage, to the civilized Shylock who'd steal the very earth from under your feet. From that state wherein American sovereigns however poor, considered themselves the equals of kings and the superiors of princes, to that moral degradation and national decay in which they purchase the scurvy sp.a.w.n of petty dukes as husband for our daughters. By the splendor of G.o.d, I'd rather be a naked Fiji Islander, dancing about a broiled missionary with a bull-ring in my nose, than a simpering "sawciety" simpleton, wearing my little intellectual apparatus to a frazzle with a study of neckties!

Some of my critics have kindly suggested that the Lord made a great mistake in not consulting me when he made the world; thereby ascertaining just how I would like to have it. I was not consulted anent the creation of the Cosmos, and perhaps it is just as well for them that I wasn't--they might not be here. Too many forget that while the Lord made the world, the devil has been busy ever since putting on the finishing touches. Why, he began on the first woman before she was a week old, and he has been playing schoolmaster to her sons ever since. I confess to a sneaking respect for Satan, for he is pre- eminently a success in his chosen profession. He's playing a desperate game against omnipotent power and is more than holding his own. He sat into the game with a cash capital of one snake; now he's got half the globe grabbed and an option on the other half.

I have been called a defender of the devil; but I hope that won't prejudice the ladies against me, as it was a woman that discovered him. I confess to the belief that Satan is a gentleman compared with some of his very humble servants. We are told that he is a fallen angel who found pride a stumbling-block--that he tripped over it and plunged down to infinite despair; but tho' he fell further than a pigeon could fly in a week, the world is full of frauds who could not climb up to his level in a month; who can no more claim kinship with him in their cussedness than a thieving hyena can say to the royal beast of Bengal, "Thou art my brother." They are not fallen angels; they are risen vermin. They didn't come down from thrones in heaven like falling stars; they crawled up from holes in the earth like vicious little pismires. What can proud Lucifer have in common with the craven hypocrite, who prays with his lips while plotting petty larceny in his heart? Imagine the lord of the lower world seeking the microscopic souls of men who badger, brow-beat and bully-rag their better halves for spending a dollar for a new calico dress, then blow in a dozen times as much with the dice-box in a bar-room, trying to beat some other long-eared burro out of a thimble- full of bug-juice or a schooner o' beer! I don't believe Satan wants 'em. I think if they dodged the quarantine officers and got in amongst those erstwhile angels now peopling the dark regions of the d.a.m.ned, the doctors of that black abode would decide that they were cholera microbes or itch-bacilli and order the place fumigated.

But speaking of the devil--were any of you ever in love?