Brann the Iconoclast Volume 12 Part 20

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-cla.s.s fodder, he's got to chase the almighty dollar on week-days like a hungry coyote camping on the trail of a corpulent jack-rabbit, and spend Sunday figuring how to circ.u.mvent 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 lover's 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 G.o.d the golden calf.

The dollar is indeed "almighty." It's the Archimedean lever that lifts the ill-bred boor into select society and places the ignorant sap-head in the United State Senate.

It makes presidents of "stuffed prophets," governors of intellectual geese, philosophers of fools and gilds infamy itself with supernal glory. It wrecks the altars of innocence and pollutes the fanes of the people, breaks the sword of Justice and binds the G.o.ddess 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 behests, 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 t'other 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.

Slave or Sovereign? The last is an individual ent.i.ty, 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 condition that of a majority of the American people to-day?

Are they not at the subsequent end of a financial hole, the sides soaped and never a ladder in sight?

In a country so favored--a veritable garden of the G.o.ds, 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 market-place and the song of the spindle is silent: they freeze while beneath their feet are countless tons of coal--incarnate kisses of the sun-G.o.d'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 to-day--how wide the gulf that separates Dives and Lazarus, how pitiful the poverty of millions of their fellowmen. 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 to-day. 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.

But 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 h.o.a.rd 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 G.o.d only knows. In one year 3,000 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 sandlots of San Francisco proves that already the curse has travelled 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 fool-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 to-day than a century ago. That is half a truth, yet wholly a falsehood. A century ago the workman knew naught 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 finger nails, attires himself in a streak of red paint for winter overcoat and a few freckles for summer ulster. 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 such 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 cayuse, his employer was not erecting palaces in which to stable his blood stock, nor purchasing dissolute princes for his daughters to play at marriage and divorce with. If the farmer's wife wore linsey-woolsey and went barefoot to save her shoes, her neighbor did not import $5,000 gowns from "Paree" 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 Have revel in luxury such as Lucullus never knew, while within sound of their feasting gaunt children fight like famished beasts for that which the breakfast garbage barrels afford. Private 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 pa.s.s 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 duly grateful.

No man can be a freeman while dependent upon the good will of an other for his bread and b.u.t.ter. He may be a Sovereign dejure, but he's a Slave defacto. 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 reimparadise 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 burros 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 $3,000,000 capitol--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 hypocrite's whine, straight corn- juice for the champagne-jag and the hip-pocket court for the jacka.s.s verdict of the pet.i.t jury. But the cowboy now plays penny-ante on credit or shoots c.r.a.ps for small coin; the common laborer carries in his belt only a robust appet.i.te, 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. Development, 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 subst.i.tution 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 wheelwright could not return to his shop nor the shoemaker to his last and live in comfort.

Compet.i.tion 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 compet.i.tion 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 bra.s.s 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 G.o.d and the plutocracy for an opportunity to toil 300 days in the year for a bare subsistence.

Unfortunately, I have no catholicon for every industrial ill--but the political drug-stores are full of 'em. 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 cure-me-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 physic to the dogs, exercise a little common-sense and give nature a chance. There's an old story of an Arkansaw 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 $2 a day and some fellow abroad is building 'em for 50 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 garment's ripped from narrative to neck-band. I can't pay you $2 and compete with an employer who pays but 50 cents."

That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the G.O.P. 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 Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 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 ward 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 ICONOCLAST --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 belly-band 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 is not proud of his parentage should have been born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy'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--why 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 G.o.ddess of Reason; maddened by the insolence of hereditary officialism, our fathers placed the rod of power in the hoodlum's reckless hand and bound upon the stupid brow of hopeless nescience 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 G.o.d'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-G.o.d follows the dawn.

Knowledge is power. When those who vote fully understand that every dollar expended by government, federal, state or munic.i.p.al, 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 a hundred and forty 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 fetich known as the "gold-reserve"; we'll cease making so many needless laws and paying aspiring patriots fat salaries to hara.s.s us with their enforcement; we'll cease exempting from taxation the half-million dollar church and laying a heavier mulct on the mechanic's cottage and the widow's cow; we'll cease paying preachers five dollars a minute to stand up in our legislative halls and insult Almighty G.o.d 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 will divide criminals into cla.s.ses--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 fifteen million wealth creators in this country, and the last farthing of it comes out of their pockets--something over $66 apiece! 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.

Perchance 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 munic.i.p.al 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 a.s.sortment of holes!

We're governed entirely too much--Officialism is becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's Sinbad. 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 by-your-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 h.e.l.l. Every criminal law this state and county and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that 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 circ.u.mlocution 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 parity with his ultra-orthodox brother--until we compel church property to bear its pro rata 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d's ministering angel-- crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little.

Remember the widow's mite"--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 peal praises to One who had nowhere to lay his head. To pay stall-fed preachers five, ten, twenty thousand dollars 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 steadily 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.