It will not do, my dear friend; you must think again on the Single Tax, even though, in doing so, you might make men suspect that you are not infallible. The sublimest act it will ever be given you to perform is to candidly confess to your grand and ever-growing constituency that you were mistaken in your estimate of the Single Taxers and their faith. "Government must compel each to pay toll in proportion the amount of wealth it has produced—and this is the only equitable law of taxation." Just reflect for a moment what a monstrous conclusion flows from these premises. Labor applied to land produces all wealth. Landlordism as such produces nothing. Therefore labor should bear the whole burden of taxation, while landlordism and all other forms of monopoly should go scot free. The iniquity of our present system of taxation is that a portion of it is levied on land instead of being all levied on labor products, like the tariff! To be strictly just, we must quit taxing land and exact no royalty from owners of coal mines and oil wells! That your view?

"There is every indication that his cult has had its day and is rapidly going to join the many other isms, political and religious, that have been swallowed up like cast off clothes and other exuviae by the great mother of dead dogs." This is fine, incontestably fine! Also forcible, impressibly forcible—with the force of a squirt of tobacco juice. If "the Single Tax party will not long survive its creator," perhaps it is because it has not as much attraction for the great sovereign voter as the blessed protective tariff, which, to use your own fantastic expression, you should "cosset on your heaving brisket" for its splendid success as a survivor of its primogenitors. Look at the pinnacle of political success to which the McKinley bill has brought Bill McKinley (excuse the paltry little pun) and sound money (saving your presence) brought Grover Cleveland, and then contemplate the ignominy and obscurity has brought George and free silver has brought Bryan. Evidently George isn't a mouse to McKinley, while Bryan is but a brindle pup compared to the great and only Grover. Yes, the "public concept of truth" makes it plain that protection is all right and Single Tax all wrong. "George is a reformer who can't reform because he took issue with the wisdom of the world," just like the man who said that the earth was round and that the sun didn't go round it every twenty-four hours, contrary to what the wisdom of the world had long ago decided.

You are not mistaken in saying that "Mr. George was unable to keep one of these expounders of his doctrine (a S.T. paper) from running on the financial rocks." It is a very logical deduction to draw from this fact that the teachings of the paper were worthless. Why should anybody teach what does not, in the teaching, promote his financial prosperity? See what fools Professors Bemis and Andrews have made of themselves. Because they did not have due regard for the "public concept of the truth" they are cashiered; and it serves them right, for the truth must be vindicated—if it pays. On the other hand, see what splendid financial successes the ICONOCLAST, the Galveston News and the so-called yellow journalism of New York all are. "Deserve, in order to command success," the old copy-book headline used to say, from which it follows as mud does rain, that whatever succeeds deserves it, and whatever doesn't, doesn't. It doesn't take much besides capital to succeed, however, "where the conditions for the propagation of empiricism are more favorable than ever before." All you have to do is to propagate and expound the "public concept of truth" and let the truth itself alone. The Single Taxers respectfully solicit some more plain truths on the "Mumbojumboism of George." THOMAS FLAVIN.

. . .

Ever since the appearance of my first courteous critique of the Single Tax theory the followers of that faith have been pouring in vigorous "replies"; but as my articles were directed to Mr. George and not to his disciples, I saw no occasion for the latter to intermeddle in the matter, and the tide of economic wisdom went to waste. Although a publisher is supposed to be privileged to select his own contributors, and Mr. George had been requested to make reply at my expense, the Single Taxers raised a terrible hue and cry that the ICONOCLAST was unfair in that it "permitted one side to be presented." In order to cast a little kerosene upon the troubled waters I decided that they should be heard, and selected Dr. Flavin as their spokesman, believing him to be the ablest of those who have followed this particular economic rainbow into the bogs. So much by way of prolegomenon; now for the doctor.

My very dear sir, I shall heed your advice to "rise above" the abuse of those who mistake impudence for argument, and ignore the discourteous remarks with which you have so liberally interlarded your discourse. Doubtless you include yourself among that numerous tribe of Texas titans who can "unhorse" me as easily as turning a hen over; and having accorded you unlimited space in which to acquire momentum, I would certainly dread the shock were I cursed with an atom of polemical pride. Frankly, I wish you success—trust that you can demonstrate beyond a peradventure of a doubt that all my objections to the Single Tax are fallacious, that it is indeed the correct solution of that sphinx riddle which we must soon answer or be destroyed. At a time when the industrial problem is pressing upon us with ever increasing power, it is discouraging to hear grown Americans prattling of "unhorsing" economic adversaries—priding themselves on polemical fence, like shyster lawyers, and seeking victory through sophistry rather than truth by honest inquiry. That is not patriotism, but a picayune partisanship which I profoundly pity.

Regarding "the public concept of truth" which seems to irritate you sorely, I will simply say that the people are slow to accept new and startling truths like those promulgated by Galileo, Newton and Harvey; but a truth, howsoever strange, GROWS year by year and age by age, while a falsehood creates more or less flurry at its birth, then fades into the everlasting night of utter nothingness. That Mr. George's theory, after several years of discussion, is declining in popular favor, and has never made a convert among the careful students of political economy, is strong presumptive evidence that it is not founded on fact. The more you hammer truth the brighter it glows; the more you hammer Georgeism the paler it gets. It is not for me to prove the fallacy of the Single Tax theory—the onus probandi rests with its apostles, and they but saltate from mistaken premises to ridiculous conclusions. Like the German metaphysicians, they are abstract reasoners who do not trouble themselves about conditions. It is not well to sneer at "the great blind multitude" because it fails to see the beauty or wisdom in the Single Tax, for many a great man before Lincoln's time had profound respect for the judgment of the common people. "Truth," say the Italians, "is lost by too much controversy;" and while the Georges and Flavins split hairs and spute and spout themselves into error, the hard- headed farmer and mechanic, exercising their practical common-sense, arrive at correct conclusions. In saying that Mr. George has, by his sophistry, "deceived hundreds of abler men than himself," I simply accredited him with a feat that has been a thousand times performed. Carliostro was an ignoramus and possessed very ordinary intellect, yet for several years he succeeded in deceiving some of the wisest men of his day with his Egyptian Masonry idiocy. Thousands of fairly intelligent people believed poor looney Francis Schlatter a kind of second Messiah, some of the ablest men of Europe were misled by half-crazy Martin Luther—and Dr. Flavin regards Henry George's economic absurdities as omniscience. The latter has "mistaken the plausible for the actual," has deceived himself with his own sophistry, else he and his few score noisy followers are wiser than all the rest of the world, or, for the sake of gain or cheap notoriety, he's peddling what he knows to be arrant nonsense. You may take as many "pinches of snuff" on that proposition as you please.

All your remarks about land values, their origin and rightful ownership—the tiresome old piece de resistance of every Single Tax discourse—I answered fully in my two former articles on this subject, wherein I also explained how the "unearned increment" is at present appropriated by the public, and I cannot afford to rethresh old straw for the benefit of Single Taxers who WILL write and WON'T read. I will remark en passant, however, that by "unearned increment" I mean exactly what I suppose Mr. George to mean—increase in the market value of land for which the proprietor is not responsible. This, I have explained, is already appropriated by the public, because the total annual increase in land values in this country—barring betterments of course—does not exceed the total annual tax levied upon the land. There's always a boom in land values here and there; but hundreds of millions of acres, urban and suburban, have not increased a penny in selling price during the past decade. The owners are reaping no unearned increment, but they are paying taxes regularly into the public till. "The exclusive creator or producer of a thing is the rightful owner," says Dr. Flavin. Quite true; and as the only thing the community creates for the land owner is the unearned increment, it has no moral right to take anything more. The Single Taxers persist in ignoring the fact that there is an EARNED as well as an UNEARNED increment, and that the former is as much the property of the individual as the barn he builds or the calf he breeds. Of this earned increment more anon.

"The highest homage, the highest act of faith which the human mind and heart can offer to God is to say he could not be God and pronounce the Single Tax to be unjust!" O hell! That's not argument, but simply empty declamation intended to tickle the ears of the groundlings—to raise a whoop among the gallery gods. As you have suggested, "Come, let us argue with dignity and composure," instead of emitting fanatical screeches like fresh converts at a Methodist campmeeting, let's see about this God of Justice business: About 200 years ago a party whom we will call Brann, as that happened to be his name "cleared" a farm in the wilds of Virginia, enduring all the hardships and dangers of the frontier. He built roads and bridges, drained swamps, exterminated Indians and wild animals. His descendants helped drive out the British butchers, some of them being scalped alive by John Bull's red allies, while their wives and children were tomahawked. They contributed in their humble way to secure the blessings of free government which the present inhabitants of Virginia enjoyed. They helped support schools, churches and charities and otherwise make the district desirable as a place of residence. Finally railways were built and stores opened, not to enrich these people, but to be enriched by them. These conveniences added to the value of the land, but were paid for at a good round price, as such things ever are by the users. The land is now worth about $30.00 an acre, and while this value is unquestionably due to the presence of populatoin,{sic} it is fair to assume that in two centuries the estate has yielded that much in the shape of taxes. As the present owner, I ask, has the Old Dominion against that property for unearned increment? I say it has not; that the $30.00 an acre represents the savings of seven generations of my ancestors; that while the community created the land value, said value has been duly purchased and paid for—that it represents EARNED increment. Unearned increment is not what Dr. Elavin is after; he would confiscate the RENT of my patrimony; he would deprive me of the VALUES created by my people—would allow me no larger share therein than he accords to the newly arrived immigrant from that damned island we call England. If our God says THAT is just, then I want no angelic wings—prefer to associate with Satan. Has the son a just right to wealth created and solemnly bequeathed him by his sire? That land is as much mine as the gold would be mine, had my people their savings in that shape, and the rent is mine as justly as the interest on the gold would be. It is quite true that none of my clan CREATED that land; it is true that I cannot show a title to it signed by God Almighty and counter- signed by the Savior, any more than I can show a title from the same high source to the watch I hold in my hand; but I have a title to all the rights, conveniences and profits appertaining to control of the land, issued by their creator, the community, for value received. I have the same title to the land that I have to the watch; not to the material made by the Almighty, but to whatsoever has been added of desirability thereto by the action of man. The community has been settled with up-to-date for both the land and the watch, but has a continuing claim against them so long as it enables me to employ them advantageously than I could without its assistance. If I sell my land the purchaser receives in return for his money all those advantages which it required so many years of toil and danger to win—he pays for the sacrifices made by others in preference to going into the wilderness and making them himself. The market value of my land is a "labor product," just as my watch is a labor product, hence all this prattle about relieving industry of governmental burdens by any economic thaumaturgy whatsoever is the merest moonshine.

It is quite true that "the great middle class" does not own the most valuable lots in New York and London; but I have the "chilled steel" hardihood to affirm that not only the bulk of the land but of the land values are in the possession of people who are poor as compared with the occupants of those sumptuous palaces which the George conspiracy for the further enrichment if Dives and the starvation of Lazaras would exempt from taxation. The total wealth of this nation is not far from 75 billions, while all the land, exclusive of improvements, would not sell for more than 20 billion. The naked land of our 5 million farms is estimated at about 10 billion, so that leaves but about 10 billion for urban lands—less than one-seventh of the total value. I have no reliable statistics at hand showing what proportion of urban inhabitants own their homes; but we may safely assume that one-half do so. Now, if this be true, we may also assume that the land values held by the very wealthy—the people whom the Single Taxers profess to be after,—do not exceed one-fourth of all land values, or one-fifteenth of total property values. Hence you see it is quite possible for 250,000 to own 80 per cent of ALL values, while the bulk of the LAND values remain with the common people. And it is these common people that the Single Tax will crush for the benefit of these 250,000 plutocrats, the bulk of whose wealth is in personal property.

Sit down and think it over, doctor; you are really too bright a man to be led astray by the razzle-dazzle of Single Tax sophistry. You do your enviable reputation for intelligence a rank injustice by mistaking poor old George for an economic Messiah, and if you are not careful somebody will try to sell you a gold-brick or stock in a Klondike company. Suppose that you and Hon. Walter Gresham occupy residence lots worth $1,000 each, but that you inhabit a $1,500 cottage and he a $150,000 mansion; and suppose that your income is $2,000 a year while his is $20,000: Do you think there is any necessity for tearing your balbriggan undershirt because not compelled to put up as much for the maintenance of government as your wealthy neighbor? Is it at all probable that Gresham will become discouraged, refuse to longer serve the corporations and sit in the woodshed and sulk, even jump off the bridge, because taxed in proportion to the property in his possession rather than according to the land he occupies? If Col. Moody builds a million dollar cotton mill on suburban land worth but $500 why should you refuse to sleep o' nights because not required to pay double the taxes of that old duffer? As a worthy disciple of Aesculapius you should know that too heavy a burden on your own back is liable to make you bow-legged.

I suspected all along that the Single Tax would require several able-bodied "corollaries" to enable it to effect much of a reformation, to usher in the Golden Age. It were very nice to throw unused coal and oil lands "open to all on equal terms," have the government pipe off all their products for equal pay, then compel operators by piling on taxes to maintain high prices to consumers "till other companies got well on their feet"—and a combination was effected. If Rockefeller, Hanna, Carnegie, et id genes omnes tried any of their old tricks "we might get after them"—just as we HAVE long been doing. These plutocrats are so afraid of our politicians that there is danger of their dying of neuropathy. If the coal, iron and oil operators advance prices we'll advance their taxes—for the people to pay. And I suppose that when the whiskey trust get gay, the doctor will raise the rent of corn land, when the cotton-seed oil trust becomes too smooth, he'll knock it on the head by adding a dollar an acre to cotton land, and so on until we get the cormorant fairly by the goozle. It's all dead easy when you understand it—works as smoothly as an "iridescent dream" on a toboggan slide! We are continually discovering new coal, iron and oil districts, and these are "open to all on equal terms"—I can acquire them just as cheaply as can Rockefeller or Carnegie. Then what's the matter? I lack the capital to properly develop them, to produce so cheaply as my wealthy competitors. Or if able to become a thorn in the side of the great corporations they either lower prices and freeze me out or make it to my advantage to enter the syndicate. When Rockefeller lowers the price of oil he lowers his rent; when I am either crushed by competition or taken in out of the cold, he advances the price of oil. His rent is regulated by competition for the use of oil lands—you cannot make him pay more than the market price. When you raise his rent you raise that of all the other operators in proportion, and the same is the same as an increase of the excise on whisky—the people get a meaner grade of goods at a higher price. If an ordinary man cooked up such a scheme as that for the benefit of the people, I'd feel justified in calling him a "crank," and I cannot conceive how a man like Dr. Slavin can tack his signature to such tommy-rot. Before we can make the Single Tax "a go" we've got to have government ownership of telegraphs, railways, pipe-lines, etc., etc., and use the taxing power to regulate prices just as the Republicans do the tariff—and for what? To humble the haughty landlord? Oh no; to knock the stuffing out of capital—so long wept over by Single Taxers as a fellow sufferer with toil. Why not call the George system Communism?—"a rose by any other name," etc.

When the doctor get matters arranged it will really make no difference whether a farmer is located in the black-waxy district, or on the arid cactus-cursed lands of the trans-Pecos country, as he will have to surrender to the public all he produces in excess of what the poorest land in use will yield. He will have no incentive to study the capabilities of his land and bring to bear upon it exceptional industry, for he will be deprived of all the increase he can make it yield by such methods. A will be placed on a parity with D because he took the best land he could get instead of the poorest he could find. Intelligence and enterprise are to have no reward under the new regime. You can squat on a sand-bank or pile of rocks in any community and be on a financial parity with the man whose black soil reaches to the axis of the earth—no need to bundle the old woman into a covered wagon, tie the brindled cow to the feed-box and head for a country where better land is to be had. There will be no temptation to carve out a home in the wilderness, for later immigrants will set at naught your toil and sacrifices and deprive your children of their patrimony—the best situated merchant in Waco will have no advantage of the keeper of a tent store on a side street of Yuba Dam or Tombstone. A tax will not longer be "a fine on industry"—it will be a fine on fools.

My Galveston friend should not work himself into a fit of hysteria because I declared that the George doctrine has had its day, it being sheer folly to quarrel with a self-evident fact. When Henry George first flamed forth he made a great deal of money out of his writings, and has thus far shown no more aversion to the silver than has your humble servant. His paper was doubtless launched with a view of promoting his financial and political fortunes, for he did not go broke publishing it "for the good of the cause," but promptly rung off when he found that it did not PAY, hence I fail to see that he is entitled to any more credit than Col. Belo or myself. I called attention to the failure of his paper, not in a spirit of rejoicing over its downfall, but simply to accentuate the fact, after giving some years to consideration of his rather pretty platitudes, that people condemned them—that his heroic attempt to reclothe with living flesh the bones of the impot unique had proven a dismal failure. Now, my dear doctor, I have not undertaken in this hasty article to fully expose this Single Tax fallacy, having attended to that heretofore, but simply to answer a few of your arguments which I had not hitherto heard. Let's drop the subject—let the dead go bury its dead, while we devote our energies to LIVING issues.

* * * TEXAS TOPICS.

I note with unfeigned pleasure that, according to claims of Baylor University, it opens the present season with a larger contingent of students, male and female, than ever before. This proves that Texas Baptists are determined to support it at any sacrifice—that they believe it better that their daughters should be exposed to its historic dangers and their sons condemned to grow up in ignorance than that this manufactory of ministers and Magdalenes should be permitted to perish. It is to be devoutly hoped that the recent expose of Baylor's criminal carelessness will have a beneficial effort—that hence forth orphan girls will not be ravished on the premises of its president, and that fewer young lady students will be sent home enciente. The ICONOCLAST would like to see Baylor University, so called, become an honor to Texas instead of an educational eye-sore, would like to hear it spoken of with reverence instead of sneeringly referred to by men about town as worse than a harem. Probably Baylor has never been so bad as many imagined, that the joint-keepers in the Reservation have been mistaken in regarding it as a rival, that the number of female students sent away to conceal their shame has been exaggerated; still I imagine that both its morale and educational advantages are susceptible of considerable improvement. The ICONOCLAST desires to see Baylor a veritable pantechnicon of learning—at least a place where the careful student may acquire something really worth remembering—instead of a Dotheboys (and girls) hall, a Squeeritic graft to relieve simple Baptist folk of their hard-earned boodle by beludaling the brains of their bairns with mis-called education. Unfortunately there is more brazen quackery in our sectarian colleges than was every dreamed of by Cagliostro. The faculty of such institutions is usually composed of superficially educated people who know even less than is contained in the text-books. As a rule they are employed because they will serve at a beggarly price, but sometimes because their employers are themselves too ignorant to properly pass upon the qualifications of others. You cannot estimate a man's intellect by the length of his purse, by the amount of money he has made and saved; but it is quite safe to judge a man's skill in his vocation by the salary he can command. I am informed that there has never been a time when the salary of the president of Baylor University exceeded $2,000 per annum—about half that of a good whisky salesman or advertising solicitor for a second-class newspaper. If such be the salary of the president, what must be those of the "professors"? I imagine their salaries run from $40 a month up to that of a second assistant book-keeper in a fashionable livery-stable. Judging by the salaries which they are compelled to accept, I doubt if there be a member of the Baylor faculty, including the president, who could obtain the position of principal of any public high school in the state. People cannot impart information which they do not possess; hence it is that the graduates of Baylor have not been really educated, but rather what the erstwhile Mr. Shakespeare would call "clapper-clawed." There is no reason, however, why the institution should be in the future so intellectually and morally unprofitable as in the past. Change is the order of the universe, and as Baylor cannot very well become worse it must of necessity become better. It will have the unswerving support of the ICONOCLAST in every effort to place itself upon a higher educational plane, to honestly earn the money it pockets as tuition fees. I am even willing to conduct a night school free of charge during three months in the year for the instruction of its faculty if each member thereof will give bond not to seek a better paying situation elsewhere as soon as he learns something. In any event, when Baylor can send me a valedictorian fresh from its walls who is better informed than the average graduate of our public schools, I'll give it a thousand dollars as evidence of my regard, and half as much annually thereafter to encourage it in the pursuit of common sense.

. . .

I greatly regret that my Baptist brethren, Drs. Hayden and Cranfill, Burleson and Carroll, should have gotten into a spiteful and un-Christian snarl over so pitiful a thing as Baylor's $2,000 presidency—that they should give to the world such a flagrant imitation of a lot of cut-throat unregenerates out for the long green. If one-half that Hayden and Cranfill are saying about each other in their respective papers be true—that I presume that it is—then both ought to be in the penitientiary. Brethren, please to remember that ye are posing as guardians of morals, as examples for mankind—as people out of whom the original sin has been soaked in the Baptist pool and whose paps are filled to the bursting point with the milk of human kindness. If you must fight and scratch like a brace of Kilkenny cats, why the hell don't you sneak quietly into the woods and fight it out instead of exhibiting your blatant jackasserie to the simple people of Dallas and McLennan counties and thereby bringing our blessed church into contempt! Gadzooks! if you splenetic-hearted old duffers don't sand your hands and take a fresh grip on your Christian charity I'll resign my position as chief priest of the Baptist church and become a Mormon elder. I'll just be cofferdamned if I propose to remain at the head of a church whose educators, preachers and editors are forever hacking away at each other's goozle with a hand-ax and slinging slime like a lot of colored courtesans.

. . .

Our little boiler-plate contemporary, the Austin Statesman, prints a court docket containing 69 divorce cases—side by side with 12 church notices. Which is cause and which effect I will not assume to say; but Austin is headquarters for camp-meetings—and every neurologists endorsed the ICONOCLAST'S theory that emotional religion is a terrible strain on the Seventh Commandment.

. . .

"Our heroic young," etc., etc., announces himself a candidate for the United States Senate to succeed Roger Q. Mills. The young man's modesty is really monumental. Having succeeded by all manner of petty chicanery in capturing the governorship, I am surprised that he isn't seeking the job of Jehovah. Displacing Mills with Culberson were much like substituting a Chinese joss for the Apollo Belvedere or an itch bacillus for a bull-elephant. I really cannot consent that the little fellow be sent to Washington lest some hurdy gurdy man should swipe him. Chawles says: "Next spring and summer I shall canvas the state thoroughly, presenting my views of public questions to the people." Which is to say that while we are paying him a good stiff salary for doing his little best to discharge the duties of one office, he will "canvas the state thoroughly" chasing another. If he attempts to perpetuate such a brazen swindle on the tax-payers of Texas, I'll camp on his trail to some extent, and see that he has a hot time in at least a few old towns. I cannot afford to trail him at my own expense all spring and summer, while he's cavorting around on free passes and drawing $11 a day from the public purse for unrendered services; but I'll trump his card in all the large Texas towns as quick as it strikes the table. I'm getting dead rotten tired of helping pay the salaries of Texas officials for time devoted to fence-building, and it will afford me considerable SATISFACTION to place this cold-blooded little ward on the body politic properly before the people. The duties of the governor's office were supposed to be so onerous that a board of pardons was created at the tax-payers' expense to lighten his labors; yet Mr. Culberson proposed to spend the spring and summer, not in a reasonable effort to earn his salary, but in explaining why he should be sent to the senate. Coming before us thus self-evidently unfaithful over a few things, this "heroic young Christian" poker-player and red-light habitue has the supernal gall to ask us to make him lord over many things,—to accord him political promotion for dereliction of duty! In the name of Balaam's she-ass, does this snub-nosed little snipe suppose that we are all hopeless idiots? You are the state's hired hand, Charlie boy—duly employed to remain at Austin and display your anserine ignorance in the governor's office. The people don't care two whoops in hades what your "opinions" may be on any subject within the purview of the United States Senate. If you want to spend the "spring and summer" rainbow chasing, a proper sense of duty to your employers, even a slight conception of commercial honor, would induce you to resign your present position. If you are destitute of both honor and decency you will probably campaign at our expense as you have promised; but I opine that I can pour enough hot shot under your little shirt-tails in a few engagements to drive you back to your duty, and that you will go in a gallop. What the devil do you suppose that Texans want with a two- faced little icicle like yourself in the United States Senate? What taxpayer has asked you to become a candidate? Despite all your wire-pulling, your trading and self-seeking, and the further fact that you are employing the state machinery to strengthen your pull, you really stand no more show of succeeding Roger Q. Mills than you do of succeeding the Czar of Russia. You have managed to get thus far, not on your own merits, but solely because you are "Old Dave" Culberson's son. Yours is simply a case of magni nominis umbra, and the umbra is getting deuced thin at the edges, is no longer capable of concealing the ass. For many years past we have been paying men fat salaries for gadding about the country exploiting their supposed "opinions." It is high time we put an end to such idiocy, and I have selected you, as probably the worst specimen of these political malefactors, of which to make an example in the interest of honesty.

. . .

A correspondent writes me from Nacogdoches, Texas: "The Baptists of this town have forced your agent to promise to discontinue selling the ICONOCLAST under penalty of expulsion from the church." That's all right; having purchased and paid for a Baptist ticket to the heavenly henceforth, he doesn't want to be bounced from the boat. Being thrown overboard in a canal two feet wide and four feet deep is not so bad by itself considered, but contumacious recalcitrants are invariable boycotted in business by the hydrocephalous sect which boasts that it was the first to establish liberty of conscience and freedom of speech in this country, yet which has been striving desperately for a hundred years to banish the last vestige of individuality and transform this nation into a pharisaical theocracy with some priorient hypocrite as its heierach. The ICONOCLAST is in its seventh volume and has never yet been caught in a falsehood or published an unclean advertisement. I am proud to say that no honest man or virtuous woman was ever its enemy, but that holy hypocrites and sanctified harlots regard it with the same aversion that a pickpocket does a policeman. Yes; the action of the Baptists of Nacogdoches was perfectly natural. What they want is a paper that will afford them a charming mixture of camp-meeting notices and syphilitic nostrums, prayer-meetings and abortion pills, Prohibition rallies and lost manhood restorers. I cheerfully recommend the Baptist Standard to their kindly consideration.

. . .

When J. S. Hogg was governor of Texas he compelled the Southern Pacific road to move a train-load of Coxey-ites, whom it had, carried in from California and side tracked west of San Antonio to starve. As counsel for that impudent corporation—whose officials seem to have been formed of the quintessential extract of the exerementitious matter of the whole earth—he now makes a "compromise" with the Culberson crew whereby it is some $975,000 IN and the state that much OUT. James Stephen can scarce be blamed for securing every possible advantage for his client, even tho' it be such a notorious criminal as the "Sunset"; but had he been attorney for the state instead of for the corporation there would have been no compounding of a felony "for the good of the people," no sacrifice of both dignity and dollars. It is amusing to see Culberson and Crane making a house of refuge of the coat tails of Reagan. "He approved it! he approved it!" Of course he approved it—Attorney General Crane "not having time during his term of office to prosecute all the cases." But he'll "have time" just as hard to spend half of next year chasing the governorship on time paid for by the people. Reagan was compelled to accept the compromise because the Culbersonian crew were too busy office-chasing to prosecute the corporation. If the Culbersonian crowd lined their pockets by that compromise they are a set of thieves; if they didn't line their pockets they simply suffered the corporation to play 'em for a pack of damphools. As neither a thief nor a fool is fit to hold a public office, I move that we build a large zinc-lined political coffin and bury the whole crowd.

. . .

The St. Louis Mirror, the brightest weekly in the world, recently had a remarkably interesting article on Texas politics; but somehow it suggested to my mind that German metaphysician who, having never seen a lion or read a description of one, undertook to evolve a correct idea of the king of beasts from his own inner consciousness.

. . .

It were interesting to know what kind of a swindle W. L. Moody & Co. have in soak this season for the guileless cotton grower. I have provided this office with a car-load of nickel-plated tear-jugs for the benefit of cotton men who will call later to tell me their troubles. My idea is to build a condenser, start a wholesale salt store and supply Baptist dipping-tanks with water free of wiggletails. Say! There's millions in it. Col. Mulberry Seller's eye-water enterprise were as nothing to my graft when I get it agoing.

. . .

I note that the Wrong-Reverend E. H. Harman, formerly presiding elder of the Methodist church at Brenham, but given the grand bounce for getting too gay at Galveston, where, in company with another sanctified ministerial hypocrite named Wimberly, he had "a hot time in the old town," with hacks, harlots and barrel-house booze, has been converted to the Christian (or Campbellite) faith and proposes to preach. Possibly his conversion is genuine; but it is worthy of remark that he saw nothing attractive in the Christian cult until no longer allowed to occupy a Methodist pulpit—until reduced to the necessity of either seeking a job in a new corner of the Lord's vineyard or taking a fall out of the lowly cotton patch. He ought to make an excellent running mate for the "Rev." Granville Jones, the poorty preacher who puts his picture on his evangelical guttersnipes to show the people how a holy man of God looks after confessing to having forged a letter derogatory to a poor motherless working girl's reputation. As my father is a Christian preacher I feel I have a right to protest against his being placed on a clerical parity with bilkers of hack bills and crapulous associates of two-for-a-penny prostitutes. If Harman attempts to defile the Christian pulpit with his presence, I hope to the good Lord that the decent members of that denomination will tie him across a nine-rail fence and enhance the torridity of his rear elevation with a vigorous application of pine plank.

* * * THE RETORT COURTEOUS.

F. L. Lewis writes from San Antonio to an obscure sheet called the Railway Age, that Brann is not an Englishman as the Age editor in one of his elephantine efforts to be humorous seems to have suggested, and that "all Englishmen in this country repudiate his every utterance." Thanks, awfully; that's the highest compliment ever paid an American sovereign by a British subject. When I next visit San Antonio I'll testify my gratitude by giving Lewis 50 cents instead of the usual two-bits for toting my grip from the "Sap" depot to the Menger hotel. I once said, "There are some very decent and brainy Englishmen;" but as all Englishmen in this country repudiate the soft impeachment, I hasten to acknowledge my error. As the editor of the Age is quite anxious to ascertain my nationality he probably suspects that I may be his father.

. . .

The Independent, which I infer from the date-line of a letter calling attention to its existence, is published at Pomeroy, Wash., proposes, bumbye, to "give a history of the robberies committed by Brann during the war." H——;! I can do that myself. Attired in a triangular strip of birds-eye linen and emitting savage yells, I repeatedly stormed and captured the most magnificent breast-works ever built in Kentucky and ravenously appropriated whatsoever I found therein without so much as a thankee mum. Yes sirree, I was a robber dead-right in those old days; but the Independent editor is safe: he's got nothing but a shirt-tail full o' pied type and a card of membership in the A.P.A.—Aggregation of Pusillanimous Asses. I have no use for his "plant," and God knows I would not be caught dead in a Chinese opium den with his certificate of infamy concealed in my clothes.

. . .

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch of August 20, contains a half-page puff of one John Morrissey, who seems to be a peripatetic iconoclast who has started out with a Bible in one hand, and a free lunch in the other to abolish preachers. According to Morrissey he was a Roman Catholic until he learned better, a drunkard until "the Spirit of God entered his heart" and caused his reformation, and used to write sermons for St. Louis preachers who palmed them off as their own. I don't know about that; but I know that of the interview he gave the Pee-Dee a column was cribbed without credit from the article on "Charity" in "Brann's Scrap-Book." "The Spirit of God" may have done much for Morrissey, but it hasn't cured him of the thieving habit, and I would advise people to keep a sharp eyes on their portable property until this religious reformer succeeds in breaking into the penitentiary.

. . .

The Texas Republican, which appears semi-occasionally at Greenville, Tex., denounces in what Dorenus was wont to term "livid language," my statement to the effect that a nation pays for its imports with its exports. He says it is all "iconoclastic foolishness," declares that a nation does nothing of the kind, and proceeds to animadvert in an unchristian spirit on the density of my economic ignorance. My contemporary's criticism is clearly unconstitutional in that it is cruel and unusual punishment. Now that its editor has annihilated my poor little theory, it is his duty as a great public educator and charter member of the Markhanna Illuminati, to inform me what the hades a nation DOES pay for its imports with, instead of permitting me, as he seems inclined, to "burst in ignorance." You have the floor, my sweet little man, and the shades of all the standard economists from Smith to Walker are waiting to see you raise one of their favorite dogmas over the ropes. Call Prof. Jevons a jackass, give Ricardo a tremendous rap, have no mercy on John Stuart Mill, make old Adam Smith's bones to rattle, take a terrible fall out of Turgot—then flap your ears and bray until the welkin rings again. That's the way to settle a political adversary who goes galivanting off after false economic gods. In the meantime it might be a good idea to take your brains out, brush the cobwebs off its cogs and apply a little kerosene with a corncob.

. . .

It is seldom indeed that I give any attention to insulting letters, but I cannot refrain from paying my respects to one Byron Jassack Wales, who, with gray goose-quill for Pelian spear, charges down on the ICONOCLAST as blithely as a gay moss-trooper making an English swine-herd hard to catch. Such insults usually come unsigned—are simply crass insolence which their cowardly authors fear to father; but Byron sets down all the dreaful things he thinks of Brann, boldly signs his name and adds an ornamental flourish of defiance. The possibility of some long- legged, slouch-hatted, wire-moustached cowboy ambling into his august presence armed with a shooting iron carrying iron bullets as big as goose-eggs and hurling him with a flash and whoop into the problematical hitherto, does not shake to its base the heroic fortitude of the man whose mother named him for the most notorious chippy-chaser known to history. Byron proposed to express his opinion, to say what he dad-burned pleases, though the redoubtable Lieutenant-Colonel Rienzi Miltiades Johnsing, of Houston, who does all the ICONOCLAST'S fighting under yearly contract, should swoop down upon him like a double-barreled besom of destruction,

"With death-shot glowing in his fiery hand And eye that scorcheth all it looks upon."

Byron is offended because I saw fit to criticize New York's priorient parvenues for exploiting the pregnancy of their wives in the public-prints, and he lets me know where he can be found in case his remarks offend, by daringly dating his letter "New York." True, he refrains from giving his street and number—even tears the printed headings off the letter paper he employs; but that does not matter, as in a little village like New York a Texan with a hair-trigger temper has only to inquire of the first man he meets to be directed to the one he wants. Byron insists that I print his letter to show people what a desperate dare-devil he is; but I refrain lest it scare all the cattle off the range and cause Bill Fewell and Doc Yandell of EL Paso to move over into Mexico. Among other dreadful things he promises to have my paper suppressed by the postal authorities if I speak of him disrespectfully, which proves that he has a tremendous political pull concealed about his person. I guess I'm safe so far as he is concerned for a careful inspection of his letter makes apparent the utter impossibility of speaking of Lord Byron Jassack Wales disrespectfully—indicates that it were fulsome flattery to refer to him as a blind pile on the body politic, a suppurating sore on the hedonistic society of Sodom.

. . .

T. Shelley Sutton, of Boise City, Idaho, has "writ a pome" entitled "That Man Brann," and the proud author sends me an A.P.A. paper containing his production. It is an excellent composition—of its kind; and I am gratified to learn that it has at least gravitated to its proper level. Some six months ago a commercial traveller sent me substantially the same thing, saying that he had copied from the walls of a water closet in a Kentucky hotel. It appears that it was too foul to harmonize with the place in which it was composed, so it was stolen by a thieving yahoo in search of carrion and puked into the putrid columns of an A.P.A. paper. T. Shelley Sutton can probably find more "original poetry" in the same place.

. . .

"Rev." Bill Homan, who conducts a little pecasmman paper somewhere in North Texas for the long green and the misguidance of three or four hundred fork-o'-the-creek Campbellites, devotes two more columns of his raucous tommyrot and brainless balderdash to the Howell-Jones imbroglio. Although he manages to tell at least three deliberate lies in his idiotic eructation, he dares not deny that the trial committee, of which he was a member, permitted Jones to continue belching his fetid bile in the Christian pulpit after being cornered and compelled to confess to a cowardly crime which should be rewarded with a rope. Until this corticiferous little cur explains why he is defending a fourth-class preacher who confesses to having foully insulted, by a base forgery, a motherless young girl committed to his care, the ICONOCLAST must, for the sake of its own self-respect, decline further controversy.

* * * BRANN VS. BAYLOR.

REVOLVERS, ROPES AND RELIGION.

I have just been enjoying the first holiday I have had in fifteen years. Owing to circumstances entirely beyond my control, I devoted the major part of the past month to digesting a couple of installments of Saving Grace presented by my Baptist brethren, and carefully rubbed in with revolvers and ropes, loaded canes and miscellaneous cudgels—with almost any old thing calculated to make a sinner reflect upon the status of his soul. That explains the short-comings of the present issue of the ICONOCLAST. One cannot write philosophic essays while dallying with the Baptist faith. It were too much like mixing Websterian dignity with a cataleptoid convulsion, or sitting on a red ant hill and trying to look unconcerned. Here in Waco our religious zeal registers 600 in the shade, and when we hold a love-feast you can hear the unctuous echoes of our hosannahs from Tadmor in the Wilderness to the Pillars of Hercules. We believe with St. Paul that faith without works is dead; hence we gird up our loins with the sweet cestus of love, grab our guns and go whooping forth to "capture the world for Christ." When we find a contumacious sinner we waste no time in theological controversy or moral suasion, but promptly round him up with a rope and bump his head, and we bump it hard. Why consume our energies "agonizing with an emissary of Satan," explaining his error and striving by honeyed phrases to lead him into the light, when it is so much easier to seize him by the pompadour and pantelettes and drag him bodily from the abyss? Some may complain that our Christian charity carries a razor edge, that we skim the cream off our milk of human kindness then put the can under an alkali pump before serving it to our customers as a prime article; but bless God! they can scarce expect to

". . . be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, Whilst others fight to win the prize And sail through bloody seas."

My Baptist brethren desired to send me as a missionary to foreign lands, and their invitation was so urgent, their expressions of regard so fervent that I am now wearing my head in a sling and trying to write with my left hand. Although they declared that I had an imperative "call" to go, and would tempt Providence by loitering longer than one short day, I concluded to remain in Waco and preach them a few more of my popular sermons from that favorite text, "If ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." It is quite possible that a few heathen will go to hell whom I might enable to find the river route to heaven, but I believe in doing the duty that lies next my hand—in first saving the heathen right here at home.

But enough of persiflage; now for cold facts. In all candor, I would cheerfully ignore the recent disgraceful occurrences in this city could I do so in justice to the South in general and to Texas in particular. I have no revenge to gratify, no more feeling in the matter than though the assaults had been made upon an utter stranger. It is quite true that for a time I was eager to call my assailants out one by one and settle the affair after the manner of our fathers; but being creditably informed that instead of honoring a cartel, they would make it the basis of a legal complaint and send me to the penitentiary, and having no desire to enact the role of the street assassin, I became once more a law-abiding citizen. Truth to tell, there's not one of the whole cowardly tribe who's worth a charge of buckshot, who deserves so much honor as being sent to hell by a white man's hand. If Socrates was poisoned and Christ was crucified for telling unpalatable truths to the splenetic-hearted hypocrites of their time, it would ill become me to complain of a milder martyrdom for a like offense. It may be urged that having been twice accused of the heinous crime of slandering young ladies, and twice beset on that pretext by armed thugs, I owe it to myself to make some explanation satisfactory to the public. Not at all; from my youth up noble womanhood has been the very god of my idolatry; and now that I have reached the noon of life, if the reputation which I have honestly earned as a faithful defender of the vestal fires can be blown adown the wind by the rank breath of lying rascals, I would not put forth a hand to check its flight. If old scars received while defending woman's name and fame in paths of peril which my traducers dare not tread, fail to speak for me, then to hell with the world, and let its harlot tongue wag howsoever it will. Never but once did I stoop to refute a cowardly falsehood circulated about myself. I was younger then—had not learned that public opinion is a notorious bawd, that "nailing a lie" but accentuates its circulation. Unfortunately, the recent assaults upon me are not altogether my private concern. They were armed protests against a fundamental principle of this Republic—freedom of the press. They are being citied by ill advised or malicious persons as evidence of "Southern Savagery." They are calculated, if suffered to go unexplained, to cast reproach upon revealed religion. They were futile but brutal attempts in the last decade of the Nineteenth century to suppress truth by terror, to conceal the iniquities of a sectarian college by beating to death the only journalist who dared to raise his voice in protest. They were appeals to Judge Lynch to strangle exposure, hence it is imperative that the blame be placed where it properly belongs; not upon the South, which unqualifiedly condemns it; not upon the Baptist church, which indignantly repudiates it; but upon a little coterie of white-livered black-hearted hypocrites, any of whom could look thro' a keyhole with both eyes at once, a majority of whom are either avowed sympathizers with or active members of that unamerican organization known to infamy as the A.P.A. The same old God-forsaken gang of moral perverts and intellectual misfits who more than two years ago brought a Canadian courtesan and an unfrocked priest to Waco to lecture on A.P.A'ism, and who threatened at one of these buzzard-feasts to mob me for calling the latter a cowardly liar, were responsible for my being dragged with a rope by several hundreds hoodlums up and down a Baptist college campus in this city Oct. 2, and for the brutal assault upon me five days later by a pack of would-be assassins who had waited until my back was unsuspectingly turned before they had the nerve to get out their guns. I can overlook the assault made by the college students, although most of them were grown men, because they were encouraged thereto by their elders. I have positively refused to prosecute them; but the last assault was led by a shyster lawyer of middle-age, a so-called "judge," a member of the board of managers of Baylor. I am seeking no trouble with any of them—they are perfectly safe in so far as I am concerned; still if the latter gang are not satisfied with their cowardly crime, if they regret that they were beaten off ere they quite succeeded in sending me to Kingdom Come, they have only to notify me where and when they can be found alone, and I'll give the whole accursed mob a show for their money. I'm too slight for a slugger—cannot lick a herd of steers with one pair o' hands; but I can make a shot-gun sing Come to Christ. I am credibly informed that "at least half a dozen" of my meek and lowly Baptist brethren are but awaiting an opportunity to assassinate me, and that if successful they will plead in extenuation that I "have slandered Southern women." I walk the streets of Waco day by day, and I walk them alone. Let these cur-ristians shoot me in the back if they dare, then plead that damning lie as excuse for their craven cowardice. If the decent people of this community fail to chase them to their holes and feed their viscera to the dogs, then 'd rather be dead and in hades forever than alive in Waco a single day.

The claim set up by my assailants that I had slandered the female students of Baylor University is a malicious calumny, that was but made a lying pretext for the attacks. That my article in the October ICONOCLAST did NOT impeach the character of the Baylor girls is amply evidenced by the fact that my offer to leave the matter to the decision of a committee of reputable business men, to abjectly apologize and donate $500 to any charity these gentlemen might name in case the decision was against me, was flatly refused. "The honor of young ladies is not a proper subject for arbitration," I was told. Quite true; but the proper construction of an article which is made a pretext for mob violence, IS a proper matter for cool-headed and disinterested parties to pass upon. The Baylorians insisted upon being judge, jury and executioner—proof positive that they well knew the article would not stand the arbitrary construction they had placed upon it. After the first outbreak the Baylor bullies of the lost manhood stripe and their milk-sick apologists held a windy powwow in a Baptist church, and there bipedal brutes with beards, creatures who have thus far succeeded in dodging the insane asylum, whom an inscrutable Providence has kept out of the penitentiary to ornament the amen-corner—many of whom do not pretend to pay their bills—some of whom owe me for the very meat upon the bones of their scorbutic brats—branded me as a falsifier while solemnly protesting that they had never read a line of my paper. They proclaimed in stentor tones and pigeon-English that would have broken the heart of Lindley Murray, that I was a defamer of womanhood—while confessing that they didn't know whether I had ever mentioned a female. They howled that they "were willing to sign Brann's death- warrant"—on mere hearsay. These intellectual eunuchs, who couldn't father an idea if cast bodily into the womb of the goddess of wisdom, declared positively that I would be permitted to print nothing more about their beloved Baylor—and that without knowing whether I had advertised it over two continents as an oasis in a moral Sahara or a snakehole in the Dismal Swamp. It was a beautiful, a refreshing sight, this practical approval of mob violence by unfledged ministers on the campus of a Baptist college, this raucous tommyrot about death-warrants and ropes, this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so d——d ignorant that they couldn't find either end of themselves in the dark, this chortling over the fact that one desk-emaciated welter-weight had been caught unawares and trampled upon by a sanctified mob—a refreshing sight, I say, in a temple consecrated to that Christ who forgave even his enemies from the cross. But every man at that meeting who said he never read the ICONOCLAST deliberately lied. The Baptists all read it. Some subscribe and pay for it like gentlemen, some buy it, some borrow it, and the rest steal it from the newsstands. The greatest trouble I have is to prevent, Baptist preachers spoiling my local sale by telling everybody in town what the ICONOCLAST contains before the revised proof-sheets are read. It is but fair to say, however, that the Baptists were not alone to blame. Much of the noise was made by a lot of tickey-tailed little politicians who have no more religion than a rabbit, but who were trying to open a popular jack-pot with a jimmy. Some of the brawlers were self-seeking business men, willing to coin blood into boodle, ready to slander Deity for a plugged dime, anxious to avert a Baptist boycott by emitting a deal of stinking breath. These bloated financial ducks in a provincial mud-puddle have had entirely too much to say. When the present lecture season is over; when I get the Baptist mob thoroughly cowed; when I can walk the streets without expecting every moment to get shot from a stairway or double-banked by the meek and lowly followers of the Messiah; when I have time to amuse myself with trifles, I'll sue this brace of Smart Alecs for $20,000 each for deliberate defamation of character, and if I recover the money I'll use it to make a partial payment on the grocery bills of the rest of the gang. Intellectual pigmies who accumulate much cash by trading in cash or tripe in a country town are quite apt to become too big for their britches and require to be taken down a peg or two, to be taught their place. They sometimes have the nickel-plated nerve to play Rhadamanthus to the purveyors of brains—swell up like unclean toads and conceive themselves to be in "select society." Some of them actually imagine themselves of more importance to this community than Judge Gerald and Waller Baker; yet you could scrape enough intellect from under Gerald's toe-nails to build the crew, while Baker forgets more every fifteen minutes than they have learned since they were born. The meeting held at the Baptist church to ratify the outrage was composed of a lot of self-seekers and whining hypocrites, half of whom would sell their souls for a copper cent and throw in their risen Lord as lagniappe. It was a mob that writhed and wriggled in its own putridity like so many maggots, while the local press cowered before its impotent wrath like young skye-terriers before a skunk. If I couldn't beget better men with the help of a digger Indian harem I'd take to the woods and never again look upon the face of woman. It was a glorious sight to see these "pore mizzuble wurrums of the dust" spraining their yarn galluses trying to hurl the writhen bolts of Olympian Jove—and now bellyaching because hit in the umbilicus with their own boomerang. The second assault, more brutal and cowardly than the first, followed as the logical sequence of that powwow of pietists, peddlers and politicians. The utterances of that congregation of unclean adders, the resolutions adopted by that sanctified body of dead-beats in the sanctum sanctorum of the Baptists, was a bid for blood-injected the idea into the warty heads of a trio of thugs that by way-laying and beating me to death they would pass into history as heroes. Then the real manhood of Waco rose en masse and laid down the law in no uncertain language to the hungry hypocrites and their Baylorian hoodlums. They declared that religious intolerance would no longer be permitted to terrorize this town. Fearing just retribution at the hands of the citizens, Baylor called out its three military companies and mounted guard with rifles furnished by the government, while the very girls in whose name they had dragged me around the college campus with a rope, laughed them to scorn and sent me flowers—and the password of the bold sojer boys. One young lady writes: "The password for the night is 'Napoleon.' Our bold soldiers halted a milk wagon at daylight this morning. Probably they thought Brann was concealed in one of the cans with his bowie-knife." Half a dozen men armed with cannon-crackers could have chased the brave mellish into the Brazos and danced with the Baylor girls till daybreak—and I suspect that the latter would have enjoyed the lark. For a third of a century the bigotry of a lot of water moccasins had been the supreme law of this land. To obtain an office the politician had to crawl to it on his marrow bones and slavishly obey its behests. To obtain trade the merchant had to sneeze whenever it took snuff. To obtain patronage the local publisher had to make it the absolute dictator of his policy. Like Jehushran, it "waxed fat and kicked"—until it got its legs tide in a double bow knot about its OWN neck. Its tyranny became insupportable, murderous, there was a new declaration of American independence, and now this J. Caesar that erstwhile did bestride Central Texas like a colossus, is more humble than Uriah Heep. And what were the A.P.Apes of Waco doing while honest men were raising the standard of revolt and chasing the Baptist hierarchy into its hole? Were they in the front rank shouting their war-cry of "no union of church and state"—the "little red school-house" rampant on their orange-colored rag? Not exactly. They had sneaked off to some bat cave to plot against the whites, to protest against the proceedings of their fellow citizens. Had a Baptist editor been mobbed on the campus of a Catholic college they would have howled a lung out about Popish tyrannys stood on their heads and fanned themselves with their own shirt-tails.

The faculty of Baylor protest that they did all in their power to prevent the brutal outbreak. They confess, however, that it had been brewing all day, yet they neglected to notify either myself or the sheriff. Before me is a Lake Charles, La. paper, in which a letter from one of the scabs who participated in the first attack is published. He says: "The faculty did not say do it, or not do it." And that's about the size of it. That the students were encouraged by one or more members of the board of trustees can be demonstrated beyond the peradventure of a doubt. All the stale bath water in all the Baptist tanks this side Perdition cannot wash the conviction from the public mind that the Baylor management was behind that howling mob. The second assault was led by a trustee, a member of the board of managers; and this after I had stated positively in the local press that I meant no disparagement of the young ladies—that it was the administration of the University I was after. In the October ICONOCLAST I expressed the fervent hope that no more young ladies would be debauched at Baylor. That constituted the ostensible casus belli.. Do the trustees of Baylor dare deny that such things HAVE occurred at that "storm center of misinformation" and ministerial manufactory? If so, they are a precious long time putting me to the proof in the courts of this country. Texas has an iron-clad criminal libel law, and I suspect that I could pay a judgment for damages in any reasonable sum without spraining my credit or bankrupting the ICONOCLAST. If they have not the chilled-steel hardihood to deny that girls have been debauched at Baylor—if by their resounding silence anent this matter they mean to give assent—what then? Do they hope that more girls WILL be ruined there? They may take either horn of the dilemma they like, but I beg to state that the issue here raised cannot be obscured by dragging me around with a rope. When Jonah was caught in a scheme of vindictive rascality he thought he "did well to be angry." The best thing the Baylorites can do is to 'fess up and reform—it's too late in the century to suppress truth with six-shooters. I have heard of no "deplorable accidents" at Add-Ran, the Christian college, consequently it has no complaints to file against the ICONOCLAST. The Convent of the Sacred Heart gets along somehow without "mishaps," and even Paul Quinn, the colored college, is graduating no "missionaries" for Hungry Hill. Because some girls go wrong at an institution for the promotion of ignorance, it by no means follows that all, or any considerable number thereof are deficient in morality. I doubt not that a vast number of the female students of Baylor, past and present, are pure as the flowers that bloom above the green glacier; but some have fallen, and the conclusion is inevitable that they were not properly protected from the wiles of the world. I care not how noble-minded, how pure of heart a girl may be, if she is committed when young and inexperienced to a college where both sexes are received, it becomes the imperative duty of the management to render one false step impossible. When the president of a pretentious sectarian institute must plead with the public that he had "wept and prayed over" a 14-year old girl, but was powerless to prevent her rushing headlong to ruin; when at a grand rally of the faithful to condemn a well-meant criticism and encourage mob violence, an old he-goat who couldn't get trusted at the corner grocery for a pound of soap, confesses to more than the ICONOCLAST had charged, by saying that some ACCIDENTS had occurred at the college, it were well for mothers to look carefully to its management and note its discipline before entrusting it with their young daughters. "Accidents," indeed! Criminal negligence would be a more appropriate name. A university consecrated to the Baptist Christ, whose trustees lead cowardly assaults upon law-abiding citizens and beat them with bludgeons after they are insensible; whose faculty know that mob violence is contemplated yet fail to report it to the police; whose students enter the home of a man for the purpose of dragging him by force and with drawn pistols from the presence of his family (the Baylor thugs had the impudence to invade my home in search of me before finding me in the city)—such an institution, I say, is not a proper guardian for any youth whose father doesn't desire to see him land in the Baptist pulpit or the penitenitary. I have been publicly warned on pain of death, and heaven alone knows what hereafter, not to speak "disrespectful" of Baylor; but I feel in duty bound to caution parents against committing their children to such a pestiferous plague-spot, such a running sore upon the body social.

. . .

Not only has Baylor demonstrated its unworthiness to be the custodian of young people of either sex, but such unworthiness has been proclaimed in the public prints by Dr. Rufus C. Burleson, who served as its president for almost half a century. I insisted that the salaries paid the faculty at Baylor were insufficient to command the services of first class educators, and that those entrusted with the duty of selecting teachers were incapable of correctly estimating the educational qualifications of others Dr. Burleson goes far beyond that, expressly declaring in the Dallas News that a majority of the present board of managers are not college educated, that for them to properly administer discipline and make wise selection of teachers "is simply impossible." What, in God's name, can be expected of an institution containing several hundred young people of both sexes, if it be deficient in dissipline? Of what earthly use is a University if it be not provided with a wisely selected faculty? It now remains to be seen whether the Baptist brethren will mob Dr. Burleson—or sneak up behind him with an assortment of clubs and six-shooters! But that is not the worst that Dr. Burleson says. In a published letter of his now before me he denounces Dr. B. H. Carroll, chairman of the board of trustees and present high muck-a-muck of Baylor, as an ingrate, a self-seeker, a mischief maker and an irremediable liar! Now if Burleson is telling the truth—and I am not prepared to dispute his statements—what can we expect of a University managed by such a man? I am frank to confess that I did not suspect Bro. Carroll to be quite so bad. I knew that he was an intellectual dugout spreading the canvas of a seventy-four, that there was precious little to him but gab and gall; but I did not suppose that he was an habitual falsifier and guilty of base ingratitude. I really hope that Dr. Burleson may be mistaken—that the new boss of Baylor has not contracted such a habit of lying that it is utterly impossible for him to tell the truth. I should dislike to believe all that is said about each other by the two factions of my Baptist brethren now struggling for the control of Baylor. According to Carroll, Dr. Burleson, president emeritus, ought to be in the penitentiary; according to Burleson, Carroll is not a fit associate for a brindle cow. "Speak disrespectfully of Baylor and die!" Good Lord! were I to repeat one-half the Baylor factions are saying about each other I'd wreck the state. Time was when the faculty of Baylor was the pride of the South. Those were the days when many of the noblest men and women of Texas were educated within its walls. They love their alma mater, not for what she is, but for what she was. The old professors are gone, have been supplanted in great part by a lot of priorient little preachers, selected by a board of trustees, half of whom couldn't tell a Greek root from a rutabaga, pons asinorum from Balaam's ass. Dr. Burleson seems to be of the opinion that a majority of the Baylorian managers were educated in a mule-pen and dismissed without a diploma—couldn't tell whether a man were construing Catullus into Sanskrit or pronouncing in Piute a panegeric on a baked pup. Were I not persona non grata I would like to witness the classroom performances of these young professors—chosen with owlish gravity by men who cannot write deer sur without the expenditure of enough nervo-muscular energy to raise a cotton crop, chewing off the tips of their tongues and blotting the paper with their proboscides. Yet for offering to open a night school for the benefit of the Baylorian faculty I was mobbed; for intimating that the hoard of managers had not socked with old Socrates and ripped with old Euripides I was assaulted by one of their number and his brave body guard and beaten with six-shooters and bludgeons until I was insensible.

. . .

It is not my present purpose to drag forth all the grisly skeletons of Baylor and make them dance for the amusement of the multitude. I have yielded to the urgent appeals of my friends to let the institution down easy, to cast a little kerosene on the troubled waters, to hold out the olive branch to Baylor. Besides, I already have more holes in my head than nature intended, and am not particularly anxious to increase the assortment. Let what is hidden from public ken so remain until that great incubator of Christian charity, that ganglion of brotherly love, attempts to redeem its long-standing promise to land me in the penitentiary for criminal libel. It could serve no good purpose at present to trace out here the history of those "accidents" so feelingly referred to at the ratification of the Brann round-up—would but cause cheeks to flame and hearts to break. I would not destroy Baylor; I would make it better. I would deprive the ignorant and vicious of control. I would expel all the hoodlums whose brutality and cowardice have disgraced it. I would place at its head a thorough educator and strict disciplinarian, a man of broad views and who sets a good example by paying his bills. I would make its diplomas badges of honor as in the old days, instead of certificates of illiteracy at which public school children laugh. No, I do not want the presidency—there are enough perspiring Christians for revenue only quarreling and lying about each other because of that beggarly plum already. For months past it has given every Baptist journal in the state a hot-box, has filled every little preacher's head with all the petty intrigues of peanut politics. If one-half that the leaders of the factions, now warring over this $5 per diem bone, say about each other be true—and I have no evidence to the contrary—they would disgrace a boozing ken on Boiler avenue. I do not mean to say that all Texas Baptists are bad; at least 50 per cent. of them are broad-gauge, tolerant, intelligent; the remainder are small-bore bigots upon whom nature put heads, as Dean Swift would say, "Solely for the sake of conformity."

. . .

Baylor and the Baptists complain that the ICONOCLAST has "persecuted them until it has become unbearable." Bless God! who began this thing? Before the ICONOCLAST was three days old it was boycotted by the hydrocephalous sect. As it grew fat on that kind of fodder, ex-Priest Slattery and his ex-nun wife were brought hither to lecture on A.P.Aism, and incidentally make the town too caloric for my comfort. The Baptists took their wives and daughters to listen to Slattery's foul lies about the convents and the confessional, the Pope and "his Waco Apostle," and his most infamous utterances were applauded to the echo. They sent their wives and daughters to hear the Slattery female defame women who had given up the pleasures of the world and were devoting their lives to the reclamation of such unclean creatures as herself. Slattery's last harangue was delivered to men only and the house was packed with Baptists and Baylorites at half-a-dollar a head. The so-called lecture was the foulest thing that ever fell from the lips of mortal man, yet his audience gloated over it and rolled his putrid falsehoods as sweet morsels under its tongue.[1] Unable to restrain my indignation, I arose and denounced his every utterance as a malicious lie. Immediately the audience yelled, "Throw him out! Down with him! Smash him!" I chanced to have my back near the side-wall, and that's why I wasn't mobbed—the cowardly crew couldn't get BEHIND me. They suspected that I'd make an angel of the first sanctified galoot who attempted to place his paws upon me, and none cared to draw on his celestial bank account. That's the identical gang which has the immaculate gall to accuse me of defaming virtuous women—the same gang which applauded Slattery for calling convents priestly harems wants me killed for expressing the hope that no more young girls will be debauched at Baylor.

[1] Brann's reply to Slattery appears in Vol. XII.

. . .

Scarce had Baylor's applause of Slattery and his woman died away, scarce had it ceased to gloat over the "iniquities" of convent schools and priestly harems, scarce had it ceased chuckling over the crimes of "the Scarlet Woman," ere the police discovered that the duly ordained "ward of the Baptist church," who was being educated at Baylor University for missionary work among the heathen Catholics of Brazil, was in a dreadfully "delicate condition." She was brought from Brazil at the tender age of 11 years by a returning missionary, she was formally adopted by the Baptist church, she was consecrated to the salvation of souls and placed at Baylor to be educated. She was under the special supervision of the president and was a member of his household—yet at 14 years of age she became enciente. Did Baylor pity and protect her? Did it strive to secure the punishment of her seducer? Not exactly. It fired her out and made no complaint to the police. When the latter discovered her and she was required by the court to account for her condition, she stated that she had been forcibly despoiled by a young man about town on the premises of Baylor's president. It chanced that this young man was brother to the president's son-in-law, and the whole influence of Baylor was brought to bear to clear the accused! The son-in-law, who is a Baptist preacher and editor (as well as other things not necessary to mention) strove to make her confess that her guilty paramour was a pickaninny—wanted the world to believe that orphan girls committed to the care of that great Baptist college might become enciente by coons! Yet the Baylor students didn't mob him—none of its trustees laid in wait for him and slammed him over the head with a six-shooter. The girl soon put a white babe in evidence—a pretty little 2-pound Baylorian diploma. The doctors declared that she had been raped and the case looked ugly for the accused. The child died. The ignorant little mother wanted money to go to Memphis—and first thing we knew she had signed a "retraction" and had a ticket to Mike Conolly's town. Who bought it—and why! Damfino. The defendant was acquitted of the charge of rape—the age of consent in Texas being 12 years at that time; but whether she was raped or seduced, the infamy occurred at Baylor University. That's ONE of the "deplorable accidents"; but it is not the only one you will please not forget to remember. Reads like a fairy story, doesn't it? But the law doesn't permit Texas editors to tell fairy tales of that type. No doubt the man who has the audacity to breathe a hope that no more girls will be debauched at Baylor deserves to die. Dr. Burleson, in the fullness of his Baptist charity, branded the unfortunate girl as a natural bawd. I don't know about that; but I do know that after she got beyond Baylorian influences she married and began leading a respectable life.

. . .

Defamer of womanhood? Get the sawlogs out of your own eyes, brethren, before howling over the micrococci in the optics of others. For three years past Baptist preachers all over the land of Christ have been telling their congregations that the ICONOCLAST is read only by depraved people,—chiefly criminals and courtesans—and that despite the fact that the names of thousands of the noblest men and women of America are on its subscription books. During the past three years the ICONOCLAST has had upon its books the names of more than a thousand ministers, representing every denomination. Are these men criminals and their wives courtesans? Has any busy little Baptist parson been rounded up with a rope for proclaiming them as such from the pulpit? When a deserted babe was found in the street and carried by the Sisters into the convent, was Jehovah Boanerges Cranfill—organ-grinder for the Baylor bosses—mobbed by the Catholics for saying that it probably came OUT of the convent? Now, you people keep down the narrative of your nether garment and apply a hot mush poultice to your impudence. The ICONOCLAST is only tickling you with snipe-shot now; but don't forget for one moment that it has buck a-plenty in its belt.

. . .

A word to the lady students of Baylor: Young ladies, this controversy does not in the least concern you. The ICONOCLAST has never questioned your good character. You are young, however, and mischievous people have led some of you to believe that it has done so. If you so believe, I am as much in duty bound to apologize as though I had really and intentionally wronged you. A gentleman should ever hasten to apologize to ladies who feel aggrieved; hence I sincerely crave your pardon for having printed the article which gave you offense. Upon learning that you read into it a meaning which I did not intend, I stopped the presses and curtailed the circulation of the October number as much as possible, proving my sincerity by a pecuniary sacrifice. I would not for the wealth of this world either do you a wilful injustice, or have you believe me capable of such a crime. May you prosper in your studies, graduate with honor and bestow your hands upon men worthy of noble women.

. . .

P.S. In looking over the foregoing since it was put in type, I suspect that I have been a trifle too hard on some of those who met to ratify the action of the first mob and publicly brand me as a defamer of women. I would not do my deadliest enemy an injustice. Two wrongs do not make a right; hence I concede that perhaps half of those present pay their debts and make a reasonable effort to be decent. If God neglected to bless them with brains that is their misfortune instead of their fault. Let it go at that. They have had their say, I've had mine, and right here I drop the subject until another attempt is made to run me out of town. I make this concession, not that Baylor deserves it, but at the earnest request of the law-abiding element of this city.

* * * SPEAKING OF SPIRITUALISM.

A correspondent seizes his typewriter (the machine, not the maid) with both hands, and peremptorily demands to be informed why I "don't jump on that fake called Spiritualism." O I don't know, unless it's because more corporeal things than spooks continue to jump on me. It seems a waste of energy to criticize disembodied spirits who do no worse than "revisit the pale glimpses of the moon." I have never heard of a ghost robbing other than its own grave. They are not addicted to despoiling widows and orphans, then putting up long-winded prayers. They do not sing "Jesus lover of my soul" on Sunday, then sell that same soul to the devil for six-bits on Monday. No ghost, so far as I know, was ever accused of lying about his neighbor, fracturing the Seventh Commandment or beating his butcher-bills. They appear to be quite harmless creatures, therefore not legitimate game for the ICONOCLAST. Furthermore, I am not fully convinced that Spiritualism is a "fake." There appears to be as good biblical and natural reasons for belief in Spiritualism as for belief in the Immaculate Conception or the efficacy of baptism. Doubtless some of the professors are frauds, but as much can be said for the professors of all other faiths. I confess that I haven't much confidence in "mejums," who find employment for the shades of G. Washington, J. Caesar, and others of that ilk, at table-tipping, slate-writing and such unproductive enterprises; nor in the class of spooks who "materialize" in dark rooms, come prancing out of "cabinets" and other uncanny corporeal incubators for no other apparent purpose than to enable their mundane manipulators to realize two dollars in the coin of the realm. I opine that a ghost who must retire to a "cabinet" to pull himself together is no honest ghost; that those who consent to tip tables and indulge in crude telegraphy for the entertainment of a lot of long-haired hemales and credulous females must find time hang very heavy on their hands in the great henceforth, and heartily wish themselves back here wrestling with Republican prosperity, doctor bills and other blessings. It seems to me that were I a ghost I would float about on cloud banks and bathe in the splendors of the morning, instead of hiding in bat-caves all day and snooping about all night seeking an unsalaried situation at some dark-lantern seance. When America's greatest lexicographer writes me an ungrammatical message on a double-barreled slate, signs it "noeh webstur," and instructs his terrestial to deliver it to me on payment of one cart-wheel dollar, I suspect that there's something sphacelated in the psychological Denmark. Of course they may have the phonetic system of orthography in Elysium, but in dealing with mortals I scarce think the old man would discredit his own dictionary. A spook manipulator once solemnly assured me that the spirit of Tecumseh was my guardian angel, that the old Shawnee chief was ever at my elbow. I don't believe it; had he been there on recent occasions he would have hit sundry and various Baptists on the head with his tomahawk. If old Tecum is trailing me around I want to give him a pointer right here that as a guardian angel he's utterly no good in a clime

"Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime," and he had best cast his aegis over some Boston editor. It by no means follows, however, that because many professional fakirs and intellectual fuzziewuzzies have "gone in for Spiritualism," it is all a fraud. If the morad floating in a sunbeam be indestructible, existing in some shape from everlasting to everlasting, it is inconceivable that mind, the lord of matter, should perish utterly—should fade like an echo into the great inane. That were a reversal of the law of the survival of the fittest—casting away a priceless jewel while preserving its tawdry setting. That the lesser should survive the greater; that the case of Anaxarchus should continue and Anaxarchus' proud self become nonexistent, were to leave matter without law and wreck the universe, for law itself presupposes prescience. "Natural law," so called, must either be an act of intelligence compelling order, or a freak of nescience entailing chaos; hence if order be eternal mind must necessarily be immortal, for it is an axiom of science that "Nature wastes nothing." What becomes of the mighty life-force of a Milton? If it be utterly extinguished; if it becomes a forceless shade on Acheron's shore, or an "angel" withdrawn from active influence in the universe, it is certainly wasted, in so far as what we call nature is concerned. In his lecture on "Evolution," Henry Ward Beecher said: "I believe there is a universal and imminent constant influence flowing directly from the bosom of God, and that is the inspiration of the human race." Is God continually giving out this "influence," this life-force, this vis vitalis, to the people of this planet, and with each death withdrawing a portion thereof and either casting it into the waste-basket of Perdition or cording it up, like back- number newspapers, in the New Jerusalem, never to be again employed? If it "flows directly from the bosom of God" is it not God? And if Nature waste nothing can Nature's Prince be such a prodigal? Is he not rather the great psychological heart of the universe through which the same life-current, the same intellect flows back and forth forever? But here! We are drifting into metempsychosis—are in a fair way to get ourselves excommunicated. Furthermore, we are actually predicating a probability that the editor of the Chicago Inter-Ocean is a reincarnation of Balaam's ass. I am not prepared to assert that Spiritualism is all brazen charlantry or foolish self-deception. It may be that the "inspiration" of which Beecher speaks as an emanation from God himself, is but a higher wisdom taught the longing heart by those it has loved and lost. The souls of the dead scratch no messages on greasy slates for stupid eyes, shout none across the Styx that can be heard by vulgar ears; but there be men who can hear in the silent watches of the night the music of lips long mute. There be those for whom the veil that separates the two eternities is no black inpenetrable pall, but an Arachne's web, a sacred shadow through which comes sweeping, not the roar of myriad voiced hosannahs and the rustle of countless wings of dazzling white beating the everlasting blue; but the soft incense of love, bringing healing to broken hearts, calm to rebellious souls. These seek no thaumaturgic incantations to secure messages from the other shore, for they are coming continually. They do but listen, and interpret as best they may to their dull-eared brethren, the celestial wisdom. The latter protest that they "inspired," and the trumpet Fame casts upon them her purple robe. It is not the peripatetic "mediums," but the poets and prophets who "call up the spirits" and bid them speak to us; those who find all the dead Past living in the Present; who are themselves so spirituelle that they can understand Nature's finer tones—who realize that

"Life is but a dome of many-colored glass That stains the white radiance of eternity."

All truly great men are spiritualists—even mystics. A materialist may be a logician, a mathematician, in a limited way; but never an orator nor a poet. He is of the earth earthly; an intellectual Antaeus—the moment his feet leave the sodden clay he is strangled by the gods. For him there is no Fount of Castaly whose sweet waters make men mad. Parnassus is but an Egyptian pyramid to be scaled with ladders, and by the aid of guides who serve for salary. Fancy has no wings to waft him among the stars. He sees in the Bible only its errors, never its wild beauty. For him Villon was only a sot and Anacreon a libertine. In his cosmos there's neither Garden of the God, nor Groves of Daphne. He can understand neither the platonic love of Petrarch nor the psychological ferocity of Rousseau.

"The Apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from Woe wrung overwhelming eloquence."

For him all, all is clay—even the laughter of childhood is a cunning mechanism, and the Uranian Venus but a lump of animated earth. The flowers bring him messages only from the muck in which their roots are buried, the "concord of sweet sounds" is but a disturbance of the atmosphere. Such men do not live; they merely exist. They do not enjoy life; they do not even suffer its pangs. They know naught of that sweetness "for which Love is indebted to Sorrow." God pity them.

* * *

The gang of mutton-heads whose duty it was to select twelve poets whose names should be commemorated in the new congressional library, excluded that of Tom Moore on the plea that he wasn't much of a poet, and now the Irish-Americans are fairly seething with indignation. Take it easy; Tom Moore doesn't need a memorial tablet. He will be read and honored centuries after the library building with its poet's corner has perished of old age. He is the poet of the people, and has more readers than any ten of those honored by the committee.