Brann the Iconoclast Volume 1 Part 5

"Were I a man I would not tramp from city to city begging employment only to be refused. Were I a man I would not see my babies starve while people are piling up millions of money which they can never need. In this country there should be an opportunity for every man to make a living.

Were I a man I would make an effort to release myself and my unhappy fellows from this brutal industrial bondage, this chronic pauperism--if it cost my life. I have two sons, whom G.o.d knows I do dearly love; but I would consecrate them to the holy cause of human liberty if I knew they would perish on the scaffold. I would rather see them die like dogs than live like slaves."

He sat a long time silent after returning the letter to his pocket, then said as though speaking to himself:

"I wonder if the rich people ever pause to reflect that there's a million brawny men in my condition to-night--a million men who only lack a leader? I wonder if they think we'll stand this kind o' thing forever? Don't talk to me about patriotism," he interrupted, fiercely. "No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach! Why should I care for the preservation of a government of, for and by the plutocrat? Let it go to the devil across lots! D--n a flag beneath which a competent and industrious mechanic cannot make a living. Anarchy? Is anarchy worse than starvation? When conditions become such that a workingman is half the time an ill-fed serf, and the other half a wretched vagabond, he's ready for a change of any kind--by any means. I am supposed to be ent.i.tled to 'Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.' I have Liberty--to starve--and I can pursue Happiness--or rainbows--to my heart's content. There's absolutely no law prohibiting my using the horns of the moon for a hatrack if I feel so disposed!"

The optimists who are depending upon the "conservatism"

of the American people to maintain intact our political and industrial systems; who proclaim that the present too apparent spirit of unrest is but the ephemeral effect of a few professional agitators, are of the same myopic brood as those French aristocrats who declared that all was well until the crust over the tartarean fires--steadily eaten away from beneath, steadily hammered upon from above--gave way with a crash like the crack of doom and that fair land was transformed as if by infernal magic into a high-flaming vortex of chaos, engulfing all forms and formulas, threatening the civilization of a world.

"After us the deluge!" cried those court parasites, who, with more understanding than their fellows, read aright the mene, mene, tekel upharsin traced upon the walls of royalty. But the deluge waited not upon their convenience.

Like another avatar of Death gendered by Pride in the womb of Sin, it burst forth to appall the world. But the American multi-millionaires mock at the "deluge"--can in nowise understand how it were possible for the thin crust that holds in thrall the fierce Gehenna fires to give 'way beneath THEIR feet, dance they upon it never so hard.

The American nation is trembling on the verge of an industrial revolution--a revolution that is inevitable; that will come peaceably if it can, forcibly if it must. So ripe are the American workingmen for revolt against the existing order of things; so galled are they by the heavy yoke laid upon them; so desperate have they become that it but needs a strong man to organize and lead them, and our present industrial system--perhaps our political, also--would crumble like an eggsh.e.l.l in the grip of an angry t.i.tan.

Nor is the dissatisfaction confined to the industrial cla.s.s, the farmer, that Atlas upon whose broad shoulders the great world rests, is in full sympathy with every attack made upon the Cormorant by the Commune. While not ready for a revolution by force, he would not take up arms in defense of the prescriptive rights of the plutocrat from the a.s.saults of the proletariat. Yet the American press proclaims that all is well! The "able editor" looks into his leather spectacles-- free trade or high tariff brand--and with owl-like gravity announces that if the import tax on putty be increased somewhat, or fiddle-strings be placed on the free list, the American mechanic will have money to throw at the birds-- that mortgages and mendicancy will pa.s.s like a hideous nightmare, and the farmer gayly bestride his sulky plow attired like unto Solomon in all his glory.

What is wrong? In G.o.d's name, what is right? Here we have the most fertile land upon the globe, the best supplied with all things necessary to a prosperous people. Our resources are not half developed; there is no dearth of capital; our working people are the most intelligent, energetic and capable upon which the sun ever shone.

Man for man the world never contained their equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; toiling, saving--at very death-grips with destiny--they are sinking year by year deeper into the Slough of Despond--into that most frightful of all Gehennas, the h.e.l.l of want!

Nor is this all. While those who toil are but fighting a losing battle wearing out hand and heart and brain for a crust that becomes ever scantier, ever more bitter--there are thousands and tens of thousands who cannot even obtain the poor privilege of tramping in this brutal treadmill, but must stand with folded arms and starve, else beg or steal.

All this might be borne--would be endured with heroic fort.i.tude--if such were the lot of all; but while the opportunity to wear out one's strength for a bare existence is becoming ever more a privilege to be grateful for, we are making millionaires by the hundreds. While the many battle desperately for life, the few are piling up fortunes beside which the famed wealth of ancient Lydia's kings were but a beggar's patrimony. The employer is becoming ever more an autocrat, the employee ever more dependent upon his good pleasure for the poor privilege of existing upon the earth.

To say that the "conservatism" of the American workingman will cause him to patiently endure all this is to brand him a spiritless slave, deserving not only slavery, but the shackles and the knout. He will not endure it much longer, and when his patience reaches its utmost limit-- when he tires of filling his belly with the East wind supplied him in such plent.i.tude by aspiring politicians and "able editors," look ye to see something break.

The problems for our statesmen to solve are, First, how to insure to every person able and willing to work an opportunity to earn an honest livelihood; Second, to effect a more suitable distribution of the wealth created among the factors engaged in its production. All other problems now engaging the attention of publicists sink into insignificance beside these. They are to practical statecraft what the immortality of the soul is to theology. They must be solved; at least, some progress must be made in that direction or force will ere long attempt it. The trouble with such convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil, but do not always compensate it with permanent good.

They are a kind of social mania a potu, racking the whole organism, debilitating it--good chiefly as frightful examples of what evil customs lead to.

To diagnose the disease and prescribe a remedy were no easy task. There is infinitely more the matter than a maladjustment of the tariff, inflated railway stocks or a dearth of white dollars. It is a most difficult, a wonderfully intricate problem--one entirely without precedent. The rapid development of America; the still more remarkable advancement in the science of mechanics, conjoined to a political organism not yet fully developed, but half understood, yet marking an epoch in man's social progress; commercial customs of by-gone days surviving in the midst of much that is new--really when you come to think of it you may well wonder that we have got thus far without more than one great convulsion! Clearly it is no place for catholicons.

That a comparatively small cla.s.s of men are absorbing the wealth of the country as fast as it is produced, leasing to those who create it scarce a bare subsistence, is patent to all; that the vast body of the people, clothed with political power and imbued with the spirit of "equality," will not permit such conditions to long continue, any thoughtful man will concede. Even in European countries, where the working people have come to regard privileged cla.s.ses as a matter of course, there are mutterings of a coming storm that will only gather fresh terrors by delay. In Europe the change will probably be wrought by revolution; in America it may be achieved by peaceful evolution if the moneyed aristocracy does not, with its checks and repressions--with its corrupted judiciary, purchased legislators and obsequious press--drive a people, already sorely vexed, to unreasoning madness.

What shall we do? We must avoid the two extremes--that of the radical reformer and the apostle of laissez faire.

We will find a middle course safest and best--will need to proceed with caution, but by no means with cowardice.

The politico-economic school that would at once change the existing order of things with as much sang-froid as a miller subst.i.tutes steam for water-power forgets that society is not a machine; that it was not made to order like a newspaper editorial, and that to attempt by a radical process to make it other than what it is--to change its genius arbitrarily--were as fatuous as trying to transform a wolf into a watchdog by a chemical process or surgical operation. But while the radical "reformer"--the man who would ignore the lessons of history and launch boldly out upon the tempestuous sea of experimentalism--is one dangerous extreme, we must remember that it is not the only one. In avoiding Scylla we must not forget Charybdis. If we are to look ever to the past, to make no experiments, to become the bondslaves of precedent, then progress is at an end and society must petrify, retrograde or consume itself in fierce fire whirlwinds.

When the American people emanc.i.p.ate themselves from party-slavery--than which there is none more debasing; when they cease to fight the battles of ambitious place- hunters and begin in true earnest to fight their own, then, and not till then, will the faults of our social organism be rapidly reduced to the minimum. When the common people of this country decline to be divided into two or more hostile camps by "issues" carefully concocted by political harlequins, then will the combined wisdom, purified of partisan prejudice, evolve the best possible national polity.

How many of the hard-working people of this nation who are now a.s.siduously a.s.sailing or defending the dogma of protection or free trade or any other of the many "issues"

evolved from time to time by professional politicians as a kind of Pegasus upon which they fondly hope to ride into power--ever carefully considered the question in all its bearings; studied it from a national, sectional or even individual standpoint. Questions upon which Adam Smith and Auguste Compte, Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed, are settled by the dicta of a partisan convention--composed chiefly of political hacks and irresponsible hoodlums--with less trouble than a colored wench selects a calico gown.

The American people, as P. T. Barnum long ago pointed out, have a weakness for humbugs. They are the natural prey of the charlatan, and in nothing more so than in matters political. Despite their boasted intelligence, they will follow with a trust that partakes of the pathetic the mountebank who can perform the most sleight-of-hand tricks, the demagogue who can make the most noise. They think, but are too busy or indifferent to think deeply, to reason closely. They "jump at conclusions," a.s.sert their correctness stubbornly and prove the courage of their convictions by their ballots. They demonstrate their "independence" by choosing their political fetich, their confidence in the infallibility of their judgment by worshiping it blindly. Herein lies the chief danger--danger that the American workingman will follow this or that ignus fatuus, hoping thereby to find a shorter northwest pa.s.sage to impossible spice islands, until poverty has degraded him from a self-respecting sovereign into a volcanic sans culotte; until he loses hope of bettering his condition by whereases, resolutions, trades-unions, acts of Congress, etc., and, like another blind and desperate Samson, lays his brawny hands upon the pillars of the temple and pulls it down about his ears.

THE WOMAN THOU GAVEST ME.

Now that the clarion voice of the reformer is heard in the land, demanding for woman all the rights and privileges enjoyed by the sterner s.e.x, perhaps it would be well to ask the fair client to come into court and establish that "natural equality" so vigorously claimed for her, as well as the fact, if fact it be, that she is being "wronged" and "cruelly oppressed" by the tyrant man.

Is it possible that the dear creature has, for some thousands of years, been robbed of her birthright and relegated to an inferior position in matters mundane simply because her biceps are not so large as those of her big brother, and she has no warlike whiskers?

As her attorneys in the suit to try t.i.tle to this world's wardship clamor for truth without tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, and rest their case upon "principles of justice" untainted by prescription or praemunire, suppose we grant their prayer and proceed to the consideration of their cause unhandicapped by chivalric sentiment.

That the greater intelligence should control the lesser must be conceded. To deny it would be to deny man's right to the life and labor of inferior animals, to question G.o.d's authority to govern man or beast. If the experience of several thousand years may be admitted in evidence the subserviency of the minor to the major intelligence is an immutable law of nature. Only equal minds can be accorded equal authority without doing violence to this law.

Is woman man's intellectual peer, ent.i.tled to share equally with him the wardship of this world? The simple fact that for thousands of years man has been able to hold her in that "state of subjection" of which her attorneys so bitterly complain, is sufficient answer to this question,--is proof positive that he is as much her superior mentally as physically. This sounds unchivalrous, but she will please remember that her attorneys insist that this cause be tried solely upon its merits. Brute force does not rule the world.

If it did the lion or the elephant would be creation's lord, and the Ethiop and the red Indian drive the Caucasian into the waste places of the earth or reduce him to slavery.

Knowledge is power; brain not brawn is master throughout the world. Had all Eve's fair daughters been blessed with more than masculine strength their position would have been practically the same. They would have sung lullabies to the little ones, adorned themselves, and dreamed of love and love's conquests while their brothers founded empires, subdued the forces of nature and measured the stars.

And both s.e.xes would have been well content, as they have ever been, despite the protests of self-const.i.tuted "reformers" of the order established by the Infinite. Man is creation's lord de facto and de jure. The immutable laws of nature make his sovereignty both a privilege and a duty. The voice of prophecy proclaims him king; he wears his crown by Divine ordination and right of conquest.

Woman was created to be "an help-meet unto man," not his co-ruler. It matters not whether Genesis be fact or fiction; that such was her destiny she has proven by fulfilling it.

Whatever "rights and privileges" she enjoys must be man's free gift. Man a.s.serts his position; woman can but ask to share the fruits of his victories. These he can divide with her; but he could not if he would, share with her his sovereignty, his power, because he cannot endow her with his judgment, his mental vigor, his courage and enterprise.

Whether he wills it or not, man must perforce remain the master of the world, G.o.d's sole viceregent on this earth.

In very few civilized countries does man manifest much opposition to the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman. Many favor it heartily, and those who object do so chiefly on the ground that woman does not want it. Let a majority of the women in any state of the American Union ask enfranchis.e.m.e.nt and it will be accorded them. Let them unite in demanding any particular legislation and it will be enacted. Let them ask any possible thing whatsoever of their husbands and brothers and it will not be denied them.

Woman does not demand the ballot, because her interest centers in her home rather than her country; because she shrinks from responsibility; because she knows that she may safely trust her destiny to those who would die for her.

Paradoxical as it may appear, woman is at once the subject and the sovereign of man, his inferior and superior, mentally and physically. His inferior in strength she is his superior in beauty. Woman is the paragon of physical perfection. It is small wonder that the simple people of bygone days believed that G.o.ds and angels became enamored of the daughters of men and left heaven to bask in their sunny smiles. The mental differences of the s.e.xes correlate with the physical. Woman's mind is not so comprehensive, her intellect not so strong as that of man, but it is of finer texture. What it lacks in vigor it gains in subtility. If the mind of man is a Corliss engine, throbbing with resistless strength and energy, that of woman is a Geneva watch, by which the mightier machine is regulated.

Occasionally a woman enters the field of masculine endeavor and keeps pace with the strongest; but such cases are rare exceptions. The women who have really taken high rank in art or literature may be counted on the fingers of one hand, and those who have achieved anything remarkable in the field of invention, science or government, upon the fingers of the other.

"It is not good that man should be alone;" and it would not be did he, like Cadmus' soldiers, spring full grown from the earth. Man is the brain, woman the heart of the human race. She is the color and fragrance of the flower, the bright bow in the black o'erhanging firmament of life, the sweet chord that makes complete the human diapason.

If woman is kept in a "state of subjection," as those who are trying to drag her into court and force her to file a bill of grievances against her companion a.s.sert, she is certainly the proudest of earthly subjects. If she is a "slave"

she is bound with chains of her own forging and wears them because she wills it. In obeying she rules, in serving she leads captive her captor. Really she is the autocrat of earth, the power behind the throne, the ruler of those who rule.

In all life's battles woman's love is man's chief incentive, his greatest guerdon of victory. For woman he bares his bosom to every peril, braves every danger. It is for her that he subdues the elements and searches out the hidden treasures of earth; for her that he measures the stars and determines the procession of the planets, for her that he fills the world with art and luxury,--for her that he is a creative G.o.d, rather than a destructive demon.

Woman is with us but not of us. She is in very truth "but little lower than the angels," and we should not drag her down to our level under pretense of lifting her to greater heights. Give to her every possible advantage; open to her every calling and profession that she cares to enter; accord her all she asks, not grudgingly but cheerfully; but do not force upon her "rights" she does not want, duties she would shun, and which that beneficent G.o.d, who gave her to us to civilize and humanize us, destined for our own strong hands.

CHRIST COMES TO TEXAS.

AND CALLS ON THE ICONOCLAST.

The editor was reading a report of the regular meeting of the Dallas Pastors' a.s.sociation, at which the Second Coming of Christ was learnedly considered. Dr. Seasholes declared that all good people will rise into the air, like so many larks, to meet the Lord and conduct him to earth--with flying banners and a bra.s.s-band, I suppose-- where he will reign a thousand years. At the conclusion of this felicitous period Satan is to be loosed for a little season, and after he has pawed up the gravel with his long toe-nails and given us a preliminary touch of Purgatory, we are to have the genuine pyrotechnics. Some of the divines did not agree with the spectacular ceremonies arranged by Dr. Seasholes for the Second Coming; but he seems determined to carry out his program or enjoin the procession. The editor was musing on this remarkable controversy and wondering, in a vague, tired way, why the fool-killer did not take a pot-shot at the Dallas Pastors'

a.s.sociation, when there came a gentle rap at his door and a strange figure stood before him. It was that of a man of perhaps three-and-thirty years, barefoot, bareheaded and clothed in a single garment, much worn and sadly soiled.