* * * SOME GOLD-BUG GUFF.

If it is gold that has appreciated, as the silverites claim, aren't the farmers now getting two dollars a bushel for their wheat?—Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser.

The foregoing is irrefutable evidence that the fool-killer is enacting the role of cunctator. Only a gold-bug editor could insult the people of Alabama with such an exhibition of idiocy. I am heartily tired of this whole currency question; but the Advertiser has been fairly stinking for attention a long time—its Smart Alecism has become simply insupportable. Politically considered, the Advertiser has been all things to all men and "nothing to nobody." It is a journalistic George Clark, mistaking political treachery for diplomacy and impudence for intellect. As Clark cannot interview himself to the extent of half a column for the Morning Bazoo without getting his goozle entangled in the skein of his own intorted argument, so the Advertiser cannot grind out an editorial of equal length without getting hoist with its own logical sequence, split from vermiform appendix to occipitofrontalis by the recoil of its own syllogisms. The Advertiser is unreliable as Proteus; the base vulpine instinct serves it in lieu of brains; the clink of cash in the counting room is the keeper of its conscience. At least such is the pen-portrait drawn of it by the best men in Alabama. Its allusion to $2 wheat is a trick that would disgrace the sophists who practice in our municipal courts with drunks and courtesans for clients. Such a horse-play for the benefit of the political gallery gods would be contemptuously ignored by the ICONOCLAST were not the Advertiser's betters indulging in the same unmitigated bosh. Our Alabama contemporary is but an anile echo of the New York Tribune, a faint adumbration of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. The bigwigs cut out the work for the journalistic wiggletails. They pitch the tune and all the intellectual eunuchs come in on the chorus. The editorials of all such sheets as the Advertiser are but a stale re-hash of Eastern utterances. They pick up these things and "work 'em over," just as the Herald of Astoria, Ore., revamps articles from the ICONOCLAST and runs them as original. The farmer IS now receiving $2 a bushel for his wheat. That is to say, the dollar with which he is paid has double the purchasing power of the dollar two decades ago. He is exactly as well off as though he received two old-time dollars—if he chances to be out of debt. If he is not out of debt, if he must discharge old scores with these 200-cent dollars, he is being deprived of his adventitious good fortune resulting from foreign crop failures. It makes no earthly difference what the measure of value may be if it is immutable. The purchasing power of the dollar might be safely increased or decreased 90 per cent. were the whole business of this country on a cash basis. Under such conditions we might contract our volume of money to a million dollars or expand it to five billions, and harm nobody; but it seems to me that any fool on earth—even the editor of the Advertiser could comprehend the following unequivocal facts: (1) that a majority of the American people owe money; (2) that an enhancement of the purchasing power of the dollar must work grievous injury to the debtor; (3) that unless the volume of money keeps pace with the increase in the money work to be done the unit of value must inevitably appreciate. Let us state the case in kindergarten language for the benefit of intellectual infants; while the demand for money is increasing in a ratio of geometrical progression we have eliminated one great source of supply—have cast upon gold alone the money work which from time immemorial had been done by two metals. The gold product has not kept pace with the growth of the world's business; the law of supply and demand is irrevocable; ergo, gold HAS appreciated and the debtor HAS been despoiled. The temporary rise in price of one or two or a score of American products in obedience to the laws of trade cannot obscure these incontrovertible facts. WHILE THE PRICE OF WHEAT HAS ADVANCED THE PRICE OF LABOR HAS DECLINED. The wage-worker now receives LESS than formerly, while it costs him MORE to feed his family. And this is what the Republican press and its mugwump echo call prosperity! The wheat-growers, numerically unimportant, are prospering despite the gold standard, just as the placer-miner who washes out ten dollars each day and gives up five of it nightly to cut-throat gamblers; but in this prosperity the great body of the American people have neither lot nor part. Texas is selling middling cotton at 5 1/2 and paying $3 for flour. Adult male operatives are working in Massachusetts cotton mills for 50 cents a day, and their families doing without flour. Pennsylvania miners are braving subterranean dangers for 90 cents a day and living on potatoes and point. Although this is the busiest season of the year—the time when the Republican tidal wave of prosperity is supposed to buss the very clouds—there is scarce a town or city in the United States where able-bodied men are not begging for employment. If you don't think so put a 3-line "ad" in your morning paper that you want to employ a man for any purpose, and offer ONE-HALF the salary that such service would have commanded before the demonetization of silver, and see how quickly your office will be jammed! Texas has probably suffered less than any other American state from hard times, Waco less than any other Texas city, for here we can subsist on climate and sanctification. Waco is a city of but 30,000 souls—conceding that the Baptists are supplied with that immortal annex; yet when it was reported the other day that the ICONOCLAST needed another book- keeper applications were filed before night by a score of men competent in the craft. Men apply a month ahead for employment on mailing day, because at that time a dozen or so extras can each earn a dollar. I have in hand an article by one of the brightest journalists of Chicago, who states that reporters are paid $10 to $25, editorial writers $25 to $35 per week, and that a man who offends the newspaper trust can get no further employment in the town. Twenty years ago a scribe who could turn a bright editorial paragraph or manufacture an interesting falsehood was worth $50 to $75 a week in Chicago, and if lost one situation he'd find two more before he got half- sober—but that was before Markhanna and his peon took charge of this country's prosperity. Will the Advertiser or any other mugwump organ, kindly explain why it is, if the gold standard is making this country to flourish like a green-bay horse, the idle money of Europe and New England continues to pour across the state of Texas, ignoring its matchless resources, to find employment in free-silver Mexico! Why wages are slowly but steadily rising in that country and are steadily declining in this? Why is it that when a man cannot obtain employment here he turns his face to "the Land of God and Liberty" if he has the price of passage, feeling assured that there he has but to ask for a job to obtain it? Why is that above all this cackle about prosperity can be heard the stentor tones of Markhanna's organ advising American workmen that they must come squarely down to the European wage level before they can hope for permanent employment? Perhaps I could find answers to these questions myself had not my Baptist brethren lately pounded my head to a pulp. As it is, I humbly ask for information, beseech the Advertiser to uncork its omniscience. Will the millions of Americans who can barely make a living of it during the busy season, thank God and the gold-buggers for manifold mercies when the fall trade is over and the crops are all in?

* * * "THE TYPICAL AMERICAN TOWN."

BY THE COLONEL.

It is worth a man's life in Chicago to state his unbiased opinion of Chicago. The city is filled with dirt and vanity. Its population is the most complex in the world. It has more than 300,000 people who do not speak, read or write the English language. In certain of its west side districts a sound of the mother tongue is not heard from year's end to year's end. The number of bodies within its limits closely approximates 1,500,000. It will be noticed that I do not say "souls." Not a daily paper published in the city has a bonafide circulation of 100,000 copies, which is, in itself, a striking commentary upon the character of the people who live in the largest town of Cook county. A circulation of that size is not thought to be a thing to be bragged about in New York. In Chicago, its attainment is the ambition and heart's desire of every newspaper publisher in the town.

A traveling man who was not from St. Louis, once summarized Chicago as "a big, dirty, noisy roaring bluff." He was a fellow who had a just appreciation of the value of adjectives. That is what it is. It is said of the merchants that in the summer time they load wagons with empty barrels and drive them about the streets to simulate business. I don't doubt it. If they haven't done it, they forgot it. There is no shady trick of commercial competition that they will not stoop to, nothing short of a penitentiary offense that they will balk at. Sometimes they do not stop there.

Chicago has been called "the representative American city." It is. It represents the America of to-day, because more than any other municipality, its life is wrapped in the pursuit of the dollar. A man in Chicago is weighed by dollars. The attractions of his wife and daughters are judged by dollars. His value as a citizen, his worthiness as an American, his fitness for public service, his chances of heaven are measured by the standard of the dollar.

There is a merchant prince in Chicago whose private life contains a scandal that is absolutely unprintable. He is looked up to by men and admired by women. His name is often upon the lips of the good, although I cannot learn that he gives freely to charity, or to the city's advancement. He is held up as a model for young men struggling in the race of life. He is pointed out to girls as an epitome of brainy American manhood. It cost him $500,000 to hush up this scandal, or rather to keep it out of print. It is known to thousands of course, because a matter of this kind can no more be stilled than the winds and the waves can be stilled. But the dollars did the work they were designed to do. Not a paper of the newspaper trust contained a line in reference to it. The man advertises, you see.

There is another man high in Chicago financial circles. Men tip their hats to him on the streets. His name appears on the prospectuses and in the lists of directors in many powerful institutions. He is a prominent figure at many social functions. His hair is white with age, but he still has a lust for tender maidenhood. This man has served a term in the penitentiary for stealing from his government. As a result of that theft he has many dollars.

When a man hears of Chicago he is pretty apt to hear of Yerkes. Yerkes owns all of the north side street railways and is a dictator in a dozen enormous enterprises. It is the fashion to regard Yerkes as an octopus who has Chicago grasped in his strangling arms. It is the custom to hurl abuse at Yerkes and hold Yerkes responsible for all the many ills of the city. In the popular mind Yerkes is the Chicago exemplar of the grasping, soulless, blood-sucking monopolist. This is because the newspaper trust does not like Yerkes. He began fighting it a long time ago, holding war to be cheaper than tribute. Up to date Yerkes has a long way the best of the contest. He has a thick skin. Abuse glides off him like water off an oiled board. Yerkes, too, is a jail bird. He has served, it is said, a term in a Pennsylvania penitentiary. Yerkes went to the penitentiary, it is further said, because he would not betray his fellow robbers. He took his punishment, but he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he "did not peach on his pals." It will be seen that there is a good deal of a man in Yerkes—much more, in fact than is to be found in any one of his newspaper publishing traducers; but even his fondest intimates have never denied that he is a rascal.

There are women high in the society of Chicago who know more about the services of unscrupulous midwives than they would care to tell. There are girls still wearing their maiden names whose white arms and throats flash with the ransoms of princes who will feel no blush stealing over neck, cheek and chin when they lie waiting in the bridal bed. Three are mothers of children—many of them—who have "graduated" from Dwight and whose breaths still reek with the fumes of whiskey. There are wives whose annual flitting to the summer resorts means six weeks of unrestrained lechery. Meanwhile the old man, who is left in the city to wrestle for some more of the dollars, is not overlooking any bets. It is possible that he knows his wife is unchaste. Certainly he makes no pretensions to chastity himself.

Things have reached this pass in "the representative American city": A youth born, reared and educated there believes that it is his mission and his duty to get dollars and has no other idea. A girl born and reared there thinks it her mission and her duty to marry dollars. If her parents are poor, if she is compelled to "work out" as stenographer, typewriter, shop-lady, or whatnot, and if she keeps her virtue, she is a phenomenon. The vaudeville stage is recruited from her ranks. The bawdy houses are recruited from her ranks. The fetid river's yearly burden of corpses is recruited from her ranks.

What is to become of it? What is the natural fruit of such a tree? What is the legitimate of a million and a half of such humanity cooped into one space and boiling and seething with ten million different aims and passions? What part in the drama of the future is to be played by the 300,000 non-English speaking residents, many of whom are voters? Men say that the signs of the times point to revolution. Men behind the scenes say that this country was dangerously near it in 1896. It needs no prophet to foresee trouble when the rich are becoming richer, through scoundrelism, and the poor are becoming poorer, through drunkenness, idleness, dirt and all viciousness. Of that revolution when it comes Chicago will be the fountain and the center. I dare to say that if there are 5,000 open anarchists in Chicago to-day there are 50,000 anarchists unconfessed. The trouble is that their indictment against the wealthy ruling classes contain true counts. They are not worth the powder and lead necessary to their execution, but are those who sit in the high places any better?

Preachers on fat salaries may preach in rich churches, scrolled and cavern and mullion-windowed, then form laisons with choir-singers; hired writers may write of the goodness of the times, then pose in beer-joints and denounce God and the universe. Christian Endeavorers and all the other bands of inane asses may shout their mawkish hymns, but facts are facts. The city of the dollar is in a bad way, and it is the "representative American city."

More men to tell the truth are needed. More men willing to lead clean lives. One object lesson is worth a hundred told from books. More women are wanted who will hold their virtue as God-given and a priceless gem. Such men and such women would be laughed at for a while as oddities in Chicago, but even the modern Gomorrah would be affected by them in time. Missionary boards are spending thousands every year in endeavors to induce highly moral Chinamen to become immoral Christians; but right before their eyes in the county of Cook, state of Illinois, is a more fruitful field than they have ever plowed, a field that is lying fallow, although there are ministers enough camped on it, God knows. It is the fashion of the snug missionary board, however, to see only those things which are far off. It has been so since missionary boards first tortured savages whose chief offense was that they worshipped God in their own way, and it will continue to be so until the last missionary has taken up his last collection and laid in his winter's coal therewith. The ICONOCLAST has done its level best to snatch the Chicago brand from the burning and now and then some Chicago man walks straight for a little way under the influence of its teaching, but one journal cannot do the work of a hundred, nor is the whole of heathendom to be saved by one preacher. Until the great sweeping time comes around and Chicago is purified in the most cleansing of all liquids, though each quart of it means a human life, the money changers will sit in the temple and the bawds and lovers of bawds drink in the sanctuary.

. . .

Not long ago Chicago had a celebration. It placed a statue to "Black Jack Logan" on the lake front. This statue, which is by St. Gaudens, represents a large-moustached man on a slimly-built horse that has his right hoof elevated to his ear, apparently endeavoring to paw a fly therefrom. Of course, it is understood that any natural horse which stood in that way, would fall down and skin his pasterns and hocks and stifles and barrel and withers and other parts of him known to the veterinarians. I am no horse doctor.

The large-moustached man has on cavalry boots which are dug into the stirrups and his legs are very stiff and calm. He holds a flag in his right hand—holds it far up and away and its folds are blown by the wind. Every child knows that a United States flag and staff weigh only two ounces and a man on horse-back can swing it around as if it were a feather. These things do not enter into the rapt dream of St. Gaudens. Nothing enters into his dream save poetry to be expressed in bronze and the dollars that are to come therefrom. The statue is well enough in its way. Let it go at that.

. . .

There was a celebration. Troops came and marched from many states. Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic tramped along and the people cheered them. I suppose that one quarter of the heroes who are drawing $160,000,000 a year in pensions from the government were on hand. I have been unable to find out anything that "Black Jack" did, other than the fact that he came back from the front in 1863, and legged for Abraham Lincoln, thereby getting into politics and staying in until he died. Also he scoured the country carefully and found everybody that was connected with him by blood or marriage and put him or her into office. At one time Logan and family were drawing enough money from Uncle Sam to draw a respectable navy. As the orators were orating and the cannon were barking and the sweating people on the sidewalks were shouting, they knew not and cared not for what, I thought of some lines which opened a Washington letter in the Boston Globe many years ago, when John A. Logan was in the United States Senate. There was a tariff discussion on and he took a part. These were the lines: "Pranced there in, on the arena of the great debate, like a trick mule in a circus or a spavined nightmare on the track of a beautiful dream, Logan of Illinois." They fitted him.

A part of that celebration consisted of fireworks which were given at the Coliseum, a large building which stands in the southern part of the city and is used as a place of entertainment. John T. Dickinson, formerly of Texas, and now of the earth, is the president of the Coliseum Company, and engineered the display. It takes money to have fireworks and the company of "big-bugs" who bossed the entire marksman's contest, told him so. With that hustle which made him a marked man in Austin and other large cities in which he lived before he broke into Chicago, Dickinson rushed out and raised the money. He got subscriptions from prominent merchants, collected the funds and turned them over to William R. Harper, who was chairman of the committee on arrangements and committee on glory and pretty nearly everything else. The fireworks were touched off and fizzed and banked and spluttered, and the people cheered some more.

The fellows who furnished the Catherine wheels and sky rockets and so forth, sent in their bills, which were audited and marked correct and Harper was requested to settle. He refused. The fireworks were not a success, he said. The fireworks men represented to him that whether the display was a success or a heart-breaking failure sawed no frozen water whatever. They were not entrusted with the management of the affair. They had furnished the goods and wanted their money. Harper refused. Dickinson jumped in once more and carried to Harper testimonials from the men who had furnished the money, saying that there never had been any fireworks so good as those fireworks. Harper refused. Harper was then bombarded with orders from the subscribers directing him to pay out the $2,500 which he held to their credit. He refused.

So the matter stands. The fire-cracker men are desolate. Dickinson has lost thirty of his 250 pounds. Harper has the money. Chicago has the scandal of a lot of unpaid workmen and manufacturers who helped to celebrate the unveiling of the pawing horse and big moustache out on the lake front-the bronze memorial of "Black Jack" Logan, who never did anything but wed a smart woman and hold office and beget a son who married money in Ohio.

. . .

These are the components of the Chicago newspaper trust, of which many people have heard: The Tribune, the Record, the Times-Herald, the Chronicle, the Post, the Journal and the News. The object of the trust is to advance the interests of the proprietors and swell their bank accounts at the expense of individuals and the public in general. It is an offensive alliance against decency and fair play. It is powerful. Such enterprises as it elects to boom are boomed. Such as it elects to destroy are destroyed. Such men as it cares to advance are advanced. Such men as it cares to attack are viciously lampooned day after day and week after week and month after month. It does not lampoon anyone who pays it. In each of these papers the editorial room is utterly and thoroughly dominated by the counting room. It gets its order day by day from the business counter and it obeys them with a slavish servility. The merchant with a display advertisement in their columns is safe from attack, no matter what his crime. From end to end it is one man journalism, and each of the papers is run for the benefit of the one man who is its proprietor. The Tribune is owned by Joe Medill, the Times-Herald and Post are owned by H. H. Kohlsast, the Record and News are owned by Victor Lawson, the Journal is owned by the McRae- Scripps league and the Chronicle is owned by John R. Walsh, a banker.

The effects of the newspaper trust upon the public are so well known that they need not be further enumerated. Its effects upon the individual worker in journalism are damnable.

The Chicago journalist belongs to the man who hires him, or he moves away, or he starves. That is all there is to it. If discharged by one, he cannot be hired by another. He is blacklisted until the man who discharges him chooses to reinstate him. If employed by one paper and does exceptional work, he cannot go to another one at an increase of salary. This is one of the strongest rules of the trust. His only chance to get approximately what his work is worth is to resign and risk being hired elsewhere, and he will be hired elsewhere in Chicago only if his former owner does not object. He can, too, go to another paper at the same wages and take his chance of a raise.

The result of this is not only to peon men, but to pay them merely living wages. There has never been a time in the history of America when the pay of a competent newspaper man was so low as it is in Chicago. Reporters run from $10 to $25 a week, copy readers get $25 on morning papers, telegraph editors about the same, editorial writers and paragraphers are paid from $30 to $35. Wages in other parts of the business "up-stairs" are formed on a like model. These wages are from one-third to one-half of what are paid in New York. There is no newspaper trust in New York. As it is, the list of unemployed newspaper men in Chicago numbers more than 200. Any one of them would be glad to take a place at starvation wages if he could get it.

There is one gleam of hope for the Chicago newspaper man. It is rumored that W. R. Hearst of the New York Journal intends to start a morning paper there. I do not believe that he will, but if he does he will force some of the trust members to publish newspapers or get out of the business. Hearst is called a "yellow journalist," and what not, and may be he is, but he is a boon to the workers. There can be no manner of doubt about that. Chicago, October 15.

* * * THE AUTHOR OF EPISCOPALIANISM. VERSAILLES, Mo., August 31.—Editor, ICONOCLAST: Will you please inform me who was the father of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry the Eighth, giving citations. JOHN D. BOHLING.

Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Henry VIII. of England, and Lady Boleyn. This is so well known to every student of history that "giving citations" seems superfluous; but of the first that comes to my mind I'll furnish a few: Dr. Bayley ("Life of Bishop Fisher") says that before the wedding of King Henry to Anne occurred, Lady Boleyn addressed to the former these words: "Sir, for the reverence of God, take heed what you do in marrying my daughter, for, if you record your own conscience well, she is your own daughter as well as mine"; to which the king replied: "Whose daughter soever she is, she shall be my wife." Dr. Sander ("Anglican Schism") says that Henry VIII. was the father of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Dr. D. Lewis, in his introduction to the book, says that both Lady Boleyn and her daughter Mary were King Henry's mistresses, and adds: "Nothing remains but to accept the fearful story told, not by Dr. Sander only, nor by him before all others, and say that, at least by the confession of the King and both Houses of Parliament, Anne Boleyn was Henry's child." Van Ortroy (Vic de B. Martyr Jean Fisher") says that Anne was the daughter of Henry, and that the fact was so generally known that it was the subject of ribald songs in continental capitals. William Cobbett ("History of the Protestant Reformation") says that Anne Boleyn became first the mistress and then the wife of her father. Gasquet, in his notes on that work, endorses the statement. By act of Parliament (28 Henry VIII C. 7) Elizabeth, daughter of Henry and Anne, was declared a bastard; that "certain just and lawful impediments" were unknown to the King when the marriage occurred, but had since been officially "confessed by the said Lady Anne." Archbishop Cranmer, who divorced Henry from Catherine, also divorced him from Anne, declaring in his latter decree "in the name of Christ and for the honor of God, the marriage was and always had been null and void." This sentence was signed by both houses of Convocation. It was approved by Parliament. Yet Cranmer, the Convocation and Parliament recognized Henry's divorce from Catherine as valid. According to English law, both religious and secular, Henry had no other wife when he married Anne, she no other husband. The only "lawful impediments" to the marriage were those stated by Anne's mother. They were positively known before Anne's marriage to Henry, the first official head of the Church of England, and who formulated and enforced its first body of doctrine, and there is every reason to believe that they were known at that time to Cranmer, the first archbishop of the parent of Episcopalianism, the sweet-scented author of the "Book of Common Prayer."

* * * Dr. Rufus C. Burleson is not a perfect man. He has not always treated the ICONOCLAST either with Christian charity or courtesy; but as men go, he's far above the average. While he was president of Baylor University its students did not get drunk. They were not encouraged to arm themselves and commit lawless acts of violence. All the good that is in Baylor University is due to his untiring efforts and self-sacrifice. There would be no Baylor University to-day but for Dr. Burleson; yet after nearly half a century of service, he has been pitched out and humiliated and lied about by creatures who are not worthy to breathe the same atmosphere. The Baptist fight is none of mine; but I am the champion of fair play; and I say here that even in his so-called "dotage," Dr. Burleson has more brains, more good morals, more manhood, than have Carroll, Cranfill, and all their scurvy crew. If the enemies of Burleson triumph at the coming state convention, then the Baptist sect ought to perish from the earth. Shake, Doctor; Baylor has treated you a damned sight worse than it has treated me.

* * * A GIPSY GENIUS.

BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

Men are the only things worth while, in this world, and I purpose to write briefly of a man, who, though living in these, our own, so-called, degenerate days, would have found a perfect setting in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth." He would have been a worthy companion of Raleigh, half-pirate and half-poet. He had in his time but one soul-kinsman, and that man was at once England's shame and glory, embalmed forever in the ominous work, Khartoum.

Sir Richard Burton was the last of the English "gentleman adventurers." He came late into the world, but he had in him the large, strong qualities that have made England master of the world. He was a Gypsy genius, though his utmost research could never find more clew to a Romany ancestry than the fact that there was a Gypsy family of the same name. He looked the Gypsy in ever feature, and he had upon him such an urging restlessness as no man ever had, save, perhaps, the Wandering Jew. His life was an epic of thought, of investigation and of adventure. The track of his wanderings laced the globe. He loved "the antres vast and deserts idle," and he had the FLAIR, the houndscent, as it were, to find the hearts of strange peoples. His "Life," by his wife, is the most interesting biography since that of Boswell, and strangely enough, it is, like the famous "Johnson," as interesting for its revelation of the biographer as for its portrayal of the subject. Burton's wife was the loving-est slave that ever wedded with an idol. The story of the courtship is ridiculous almost to the verge of tragic. As a girl, a gypsy woman named Burton, told Isabel Arundell that she would marry one of the palmist's name, would travel much, and receive much honor.

One day, at Boulogne, she was on the ramparts, with companions, when she saw Burton. She describes him raptuously; tall, thin, muscular, very dark hair, black, clearly-defined, sagacious eye-brows, a brown weather-beaten complexion, straight Arab features, a determined looking mouth and chin. And then she quotes a clever friend's description, "That he had the brow of a God, the jaw of a Devil."

His eyes "pierced you through and through." When he smiled, he did so "as though it hurt him." He had a "fierce proud melancholy expression," and he "looked with contempt at things generally." He stared at her, and his eyes looked her through and through. She turned to a friend and said in a whisper, "That man will marry ME." The next day they walked again. This time this man wrote on the wall, "May I speak to you?" She picked up the chalk and scrawled, "No, mother will be angry." A few days later they met in formal manner, and were introduced. She started at the name, Burton. Her naif rhapsodies on the meeting are refreshing. One night he danced with her. She kept the sash and the gloves she wore that night as sacred mementoes. Six years passed before she saw her Fate again. He had been in the world though, and she had kept track of his actions. In 1856 she met him in the Botanical Gardens "walking with the gorgeous creature of Boulogne—then married." They talked of things, particularly of Disraeli's "Tancred." He asked her if she came to the Gardens often. She said that she and her cousin came there every morning. He was there next morning, composing poetry to send to Monkton-Milnes. They walked and talked and did it again and again. "I trod on air," wrote the lady in her old, old age. Why not? She was one woman who had found a real hero. He asked her if she could dream of giving up civilization, and of going to live there if he could obtain the Consulate of Damascus. He told her to think it over. She said, "I don't WANT to think it over—I've been thinking it over for six years, ever since I first saw you, at Boulogne, on the ramparts. I have prayed for you every day, morning and night. I have followed all your career minutely. I have read every word you ever wrote, and I would rather have a crust and a tent with YOU than to be Queen of all the world. And so I say now, yes, yes, yes." She lived up to this to the day of his death, and long after it.

In 1859 she was thinking of becoming a Sister of Charity. She had not heard from Burton in a long time. He had left her without much ceremony to search for the sources of the Nile with Speke. Speke had returned alone, Burton remained at Zenzibar, and she says, "I was very sore "because Burton, according to report, was not thinking of coming home, to his love, but of going for the source of the Nile once more. She called on a friend. The friend was out. She waited, and while waiting Burton popped in upon her. He had come to see the friend to get her address. Her description of the meeting is a pitifully exact reproduction of her emotions over the reunion. He was weakened by African fevers. Her family, ardent Catholics, opposed the idea of marriage. The lovers used to meet in the Botanical Gardens, whence she often had to escort him fainting, to the house of sympathetic friends, in a cab. He was poor. He was out of favor with the government. Speke had pre-empted the honors of the expedition. But she was happy.

Then one day, in April, 1860, she was walking with some friends when "a tightning of the heart" came over her, that "she had not known before." She went home, and said to his sister, "I am not going to see Richard for some time." Her sister re-assured her. "No, I shall not," she said, "I don't know what is the matter." A tap came at the door, and a note was put in her hand. Burton was off on a journey to Salt Lake City, to investigate Mormonism. He would be gone nine months and then he was to come back, to see if she would marry him. He returned about Christmas, 1860. In the later part of January they were married, the details of the affair being appropriately unconventional, not to say exciting. The marriage was, practically, an elopement. Lady Burton's description of the event, and of every event in their lives, ever after, discloses an idolatry of the man that was almost an insanity. She reveals herself as a help-mate, with no will but her husband's, no thought that was not for, and of, him. She annihilated herself as an individual, and she has left in her own papers a set of "Rules For a Wife," that will make many wives, who are regarded as models of devotion, smile contemptuously at her. She was utterly happy in complete submission to his will. She described how she served him almost like an Indian squaw. She packed his trunks, was his amanuensis, attended to the details of publishing his books, came, or went, as he bade, suffered long absence in silence, or accompanied him on long journeys of exploration, uncomplainingly, was proud when he hypnotized her for the amusement of his friends. One can but feel deeply sorry for her, for with all her servility, she was a woman of the finer order of mind. The pity of her worship grows, as the reader of his life, and hers, realizes how little return in demonstrative affection she received as the reward for her vast, and continuous lavishment of love. She strikes me, in this, as a strange blend of the comic and the tragic. The world neglected Burton. He almost deserved it; so great a sacrifice as his wife consecrated of her life to him would compensate for the loss of anything. You admire it; but you catch yourself suspecting that this consecration must have been, at times, an awful bore to him. He was unfaithful to her, it is said, with ethnological intent, in all the tribes of the earth. He had no morals to speak of. He had no religion, having studied all. He was a pagan beyond redemption, though his wife maintained that he was a Catholic. Unfortunately, for her, his masterpiece refutes her overwhelmingly. He wrote the most remarkable poem of the last forty years, one that is to be classed only with Tennyson's "In Memoriam" and the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam. By this poem, and, probably, by the revelation of the love he excited in one woman, he will live. This poem expresses himself, and his conclusion, after years spent in wandering, fighting, studying languages, customs and religions. To understand the man and his poem, we must understand what he did, and since the time of the Old Romance, no man surpassed him in "deeds of derring-do." He was a modern, a very modern, Knight of the Round Table. He was the possessor of innumerable abstruse, and outlandish accomplishments. He was a scientist, a linguist, a poet, a geographer, a roughly clever diplomat, a fighter, a man with a polyhedric personality, that caught and gave, something from and to every one. And he died dissatisfied, at Trieste, in 1890, at the age of sixty-nine, and Swinburne sang a dirge for him that was almost worth dying for.

What he did is hard to condense into an article. I can do no more than skim over his career, and make out a feature here and there. He was an unstudious youth. He was not disciplined. He grew as he might, and he absorbed information at haphazard from any book he found to his liking, but he was a sort of intellectual Ishmael. He studied things not in the curriculum. He plunged into Arabic and Hindustani, and was "rusticated." He cared nothing for the classics, yet he left a redaction of Catullus that is a splendid exposition of that singer's fearful corruption, and with all of his art. He entered the Indian Army, and he became so powerful, though a subordinate, that he was repressed. His superiors feared, that in him, they would find another Clive or Hastings. Then he joined the Catholic church, but he joined many a church thereafter to find its hidden meaning. He was trusted to a limited extent by Sir Charles Napier, and he so insinuated himself with the natives, that he was one of them, and sharer of their mysterious powers. Kipling has pictured him under the name of "Strickland" as an occultly powerful personage in several of his stories. He was close to the Sikh war, and he mingled with the hostile natives in disguise, until he knew their very hearts. His pilgrimage to Mecca was a feat that startled the world. He was the first "infidel" to kiss the Kaabba. To do this he had to become a Mohammedan, and to perform almost hourly minute ceremonials, in which, had he failed of perfection, he would have been torn to pieces. His book on this journey is a narration that displays the deadly cold quality of his courage, and indeed a stupendous consciencelessness in the interest of science. Next we find him in the Crimea in the thick of things, and always in trouble. He said that all his friends got into trouble, and Burton was, usually, "agin the government." It was after the Crimea that he met the lady who became his remarkable wife, in the remarkable manner I have sketched. Then he went off to discover the sources of the Nile, and with Speke navigated Lake Tanganyika. He knew that he had not discovered the source, and he wanted to try again, but he and Speke quarreled, and pamphleteered against each other in the press. Burton, deficient in money, and in sycophancy, was discredited for a time, although now his name is immortal in geography as a pioneer of African travel. We have seen how he left his betrothed to study the Mormons, and he studied them more closely than his wife's book intimates, for she everything extenuated and ignored for her God-like Richard.

After his experiences of marriage in Mormondom, undertaken it now seems, in a desire to ascertain if polygamy were not better for him than monogamy, he returned to London, and was married despite the objections of Isabel Arundell's Catholic family. The lot of the couple was poverty, although now and then, thoughtful friends invited them to visit, and they accepted to save money. After a long wait he was appointed Consul at Fernando Po, on the West African coast. This was a miserable place, but Burton made it lively; he disciplined the negroes, and he made the sea captains fulfill their contracts under threat of guns. He went home, and then went back to Fernando Po, and undertook delicate dealings with the king of Dahomey, and explored the west coast. He went to Ireland, but Ireland was too quiet for him, but he found there were Burtons there, which accounted to himself for much of himself. After that he went to Brazil as Consul at Santos, Sao Pablo, another "Jumping off place." He explored. He found rubies, and he obtained a concession for a lead mine for others. He met there the Tichborne Claimant, and invented a Carbine pistol. He visited Argentina. All this time he was writing upon many things, or having his wife take his dictation. She went into the wilds, down into the mines, everywhere with him. Next he was transferred to Damascus, where his honesty got him into trouble, and his wife's Catholicity aroused great sentiment against him. He went into Syria, and he created consternation among the corrupt office holders in Asia Minor. One can scarcely follow his career without dizziness. By way of obliging a friend, who wanted a report on a mine, he went to Iceland, and came back to take the Consulship at Trieste. He went back to India and into Egypt, and then returned to Trieste to die. He wrote pamphlets, monographs, letters and books about everything he saw, and every place he visited. He had information exact, and from the fountain head about innumerable things; religions, races, ruins, customs, languages, tribal genealogies, plants, geology, archaeology paleontology, botany, politics, morals, almost everything that was of human interest and value, and besides all this, he was familiar with Chaucer's vocabulary, with recondite learning about Latin colloquialisms, and read with avidity everything from the Confessions of Saint Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus is familiar to students, but not edifying. He wrote a curious volume on Falconry in India, and a manual of bayonet exercise. He collated a strange volume of African folk-lore. He translated several Brazilian tales. He translated Apulius' "Golden Ass." And he had notes for a book on the Gypsies, on the Greek Anthology, and Ausonius. The Burton bibliography looks like the catalogue of a small library. All the world knows about his book, "The Scented Garden," which he translated from the Persian, and which, after his death, his wife burned rather than permit the publication of its naked naturalism. It was in the same vein as his "Arabian Nights," and contained much curious comment upon many things that we Anglo Saxons do not talk about, save in medical society meetings, and dog Latin.

When such a man sat down to write a poem, embodying his view of "the Higher Law," what could have been expected but a notable manuscript. With his poem, "the Kasidah," we shall now concern ourselves. It purports to be a translation from the Arabic of Haji Abdu El Yezdi. Its style is like that of the Rubaiyat. It is erude, but subtile. It is brutal in its anti-theism, and yet it has a certain tender grace of melancholy, deeper than Omar's own. It is devoid of Omar's mysticism and epicureanism, and appallingly synthetic. It will not capture the sentimentalists, like the Rubaiyat, but, when it shall be known, it will divide honors with the now universally popular Persian poem. Burton's "Kasidah" is miserably printed in his "Life," but Mr. Thomas Mosher, of Portland, Maine, has issued it in beautiful and chaste form, for the edification of his clientele of searchers for the literature that is always almost, but never quite completely forgotten. The "Kasidah" was written in 1853, and it is, in its opening, much like Fitz Gerald's Rubaiyat, though Burton never saw that gem of philosophy and song, until eight years after. "The Kasidah" was not printed until 1880. It is difficult to interpret, because it so clearly interprets itself. It must be read. It cannot be "explained."

The Kasidah consists of about 300 couplets of remarkable vigor in condensation. It reviews all the explanations of "the sorry scheme of things" that man has contrived, and it holds forth the writer's own view. He maintains that happiness and misery are equally divided, and distributed in this world. Self cultivation is, in his view, the sole sufficient object of human life, with due regard for others. The affections, the sympathies, and "the divine gift of Pity" are man's highest enjoyments. He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of "Facts, the idlest of superstitions." This is pure agnosticism. There runs all through the poem a sad note that heightens the courage with which the writer faces his own bleak conclusion, and, "the tinkling of the camel bell" is heard faint and far in the surge of his investive, or below the deepest deep of his despair. In Arabia, Death rides a camel, instead of a white horse, as our occidental myth has it, and the camel's bell is the music to which all life is attuned. Burton reverts from time to time to this terrifying tintinnabulation, but he blends it with the suggested glamour of evening, until the terror merges into tenderness. The recurrence of this minor chord, in the savage sweep of Burton's protest against the irony of existence, is a fascination that the "Kasidah" has in common with every great poem of the world. The materialism of the book is peculiar in that it is Oriental, and Orientalism is peculiarly mystical. The verse is blunt, and almost coarse in places, but here and there are gentler touches, softer tones, that search out the sorrow at the heart of things. It is worthy, in its power, of the praise of Browning, Swinburne, Theodore Watts, Gerald Massey. It is Edward Fitz Gerald minus the vine and the rose, and ali Persian silkiness. The problem he sets out to solve, and he solves it by a petitio principii, is

Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of Must, Without our leave or ask or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust?

The impermanence of things oppresses him, for he says in an adieu,

. . . Haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same man shall meet; the years shall make us other men.

He crams into one couplet after another, philosophy after philosophy, creed after creed, Stoic, Epicurean, Hebraic, Persian, Christian, and puts his finger on the flaw in them all. Man comes to life as to "the Feast unbid," and finds "the gorgeous table spread with fair-seeming Sodom-fruit, with stones that bear the shape of bread."

There is an echo of Koleleth in his contempt for the divinity of the body. It is unclean without, impure within. The vanity of vanity is proclaimed with piteous indignation. "And still the weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man, Weaving the unpattern'd, dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan. Dost not, O Maker, blush to hear, amid the storm of tears and blood, Man say thy mercy made what is, and saw the made and said 'twas good?"

And then he sings:

Cease Man to mourn, to weep, to wail; enjoy the shining hour of sun; We dance along Death's icy brink, but is the dance less full of fun?

In sweeping away the old philosophies and religions, he is at his best as a scorner, but he has "the scorn of scorn" and some of "the love of love" which, Tennyson declares, is the poet's dower. His lament for the Greek paganism runs:

And when at length, "Great Pan is dead" uprose the loud and dolorous cry, A glamour wither'd on the ground, a splendor faded in the sky. Yes, Pan is dead, the Nazarene came and seized his seat beneath the sun, The votary of the Riddle-god, whose one is three, whose three is one. . . .

Then the lank Arab, foul with sweat, the drainer of the camel's dug, Gorged with his leek-green, lizard's meat, clad in his filmy rag and rug, Bore his fierce Allah o'er his sands Where, he asks, are all the creeds and crowns and scepters, "the holy grail of high Jamshid?" Gone, gone where I and thou must go, borne by the winnowing wings of Death, The Horror brooding over life, and nearer brought with every breath. Their fame hath filled the Seven Climes, they rose and reigned, they fought and fell, As swells and swoons across the wold the tinkling of the camel's bell.

For him "there is no good, there is no bad; these be the whims of mortal will." They change with place, they shift with race. "Each Vice has borne a Virtue's crown, all Good was banned as Sin or Crime." He takes up the history of the world, as we reconstruct it for the period before history, from geology, astronomy and other sciences. He accepts the murderousness of all processes of life and change. All the cruelty of things

"Builds up a world for better use; to general Good bends special Ill." And thus the race of Being runs, till haply in the time to be Earth shifts her pole and Mushtari-men another falling star shall see: Shall see it fall and fade from sight, whence come, where gone, no Thought can tell,— Drink of yon mirage-stream and chase the tinkling of the camel-bell. Yet follow not the unwisdom path, cleave not to this and that disclaim; Believe in all that man believes; here all and naught are both the same. Enough to think that Truth can be; come sit me where the roses glow, Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to unknow.

He denies the Soul and wants to know where it was when Man was a savage beast in Primeval forests, what shape it had, what dwelling place, what part in nature's plan it played. "What men are pleased to call the Soul was in the hog and dog begun."

Life is a ladder infinite-stepped that hides its rungs from human eyes: Planted its foot in chaos-gloom, its head soars high above the skies.

The evolution theory he applies to the development of reason from instinct. He protests against the revulsion from materialism by saying that "the sordider the stuff, the cunninger the workman's hand," and therefore the Maker may have made the world from matter. He maintains that "the hands of Destiny ever deal, in fixed and equal parts their shares of joy and sorrow, woe and weal" to all that breathe our upper air. The problem of predestination he holds in scorn. The unequality of life exists and "that settles it" for him. He accepts one bowl with scant delight but he says "who drains the score must ne'er expect to rue the headache in the morn." Disputing about creeds is "mumbling rotten bones." His creed is this:

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other Life is living Death, a world where none but Phanton's dwell, A breath, a wind, a soul, a voice, a tinkling of the Camel's bell.

He appreciates to the full the hedonism of Omar but he casts it aside as emptiness. He tried the religion of pleasure and beauty. His rules of life are many and first is "eternal war with Ignorance." He says: "Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane. The Atom must fight the unequal fray against a myriad giants. The end is to "learn the noblest lore, to know that all we know is naught." Self-approval is enough reward. The whole duty of man is to himself, but he must "hold Humanity one man" and, looking back at what he was, determine not to be again that thing. "Abjure the Why and seek the How." The gods are silent. The indivisible puny Now in the length of infinite time is Man's all to make the best of. The Law may have a Giver but let be, let be!

Thus I may find a future life, a nobler copy of our own, Where every riddle shall be ree'd, where every knowledge shall be known; Where 'twill be man's to see the whole of what on earth he sees a part; Where change shall ne'er surcharge the thought; nor hope deferred shall hurt the heart. But—faded flower and fallen leaf no more shall deck the parent tree; A man once dropt by Tree of Life, what hope of other life has he? The shattered bowl shall know repair; the riven lute shall sound once more; But who shall mend the clay of man, the stolen breath to man restore? The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed shall pipe again; But we, we die and Death is one, the doom of brutes, the doom of men. Then, if Nirvana round our life with nothingness, 'tis haply blest; Thy toils and troubles, want and woe at length have won their guerdon—Rest. Cease, Abou, cease! My song is sung, nor think the gain the singer's prize Till men hold Ignorance deadly sin till Man deserves his title, "Wise." In days to come, Days slow to dawn, when Wisdom deigns to dwell with men, These echoes of a voice long stilled haply shall wake responsive strain: Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not thy humble tale to tell— The whispers of the Desert wind: the tinkling of the Camel's bell.

So ends the song. The notes appended thereto by Burton are a demonstration of his learning and his polemic power. The poem is his life of quest, of struggle, of disappointment coined into song more or less savage. It seems to me that he overlooked one thing near to him that would have lighted the darkness of his view, while looking To Reason for balm for the wounds of existence. He ignored his wife's love which, silly and absurd as it seems at times, in the records she has left us, is a sweeter poem than this potent plaint and protest he has left us. He explored all lands but the one in which he lived unconsciously—the Land of Tenderness. This is the pity of his life and it is also its indignity. He was crueler than "the Cruelty of Things." He "threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe"—a woman's heart. But—how we argue in a circle!—that he, with his fine vision could not see this, is perhaps, a justification of his poem's bitterness. Even her service went for naught, seeing it brought no return of love from its object.

Burton was a great man, though a failure. His wife's life was one continuous act of love for him that he ignores and her life was a failure, too, since she never succeeded in making the world worship him as she did. Still "the failures of some the infinities beyond the successes of others" and all success is failure in the end. Still again, it is better to have loved in vain than never to have loved at all, and fine and bold and brave as was Richard Francis Burton, his wife, with her "strong power called weakness," was the greater of the two. She wrote no "Kasidah" of complaint, but suffered and was strong. St. Louis, August 16th, 1897.

* * * MARRIAGE AND MISERY.

BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

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

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

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

What is marriage? as we see it. The veneered vulgarity of the international marriage goes on merrily notwithstanding public opinion freely expressed. We bury the individuality and personality of our daughters and give them as so much chatel to the physically and financially anaemic nobility across the water, to infuse into its diseased and impoverished veins pure blood and into its depleted exchequer pure gold. And this we call marriage. The weak-minded chattel and fatuous mother should be promptly chloroformed without benefit of clergy. But they are instead solemnly consecrated by their clergy, their church and their Fifth Avenue Christ.

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

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

In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's religion—"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a kindergarten. Thus have we grown avaricious and vulgar and in their weariness of things as they are, have our women grown base. They know that their lives miss something, they know that their fierce rivalry and feverish straining for precedence bring them no nearer the Mecca that closes its austere gates to their aching eyes. And for the dignity and pride their lives have lacked, they give their fortunes and sell their bodies and exchange, for a title, the name of which they have grown ashamed. They perhaps shrink, in physical repulsion, from the man who they feel despises while he endures them. They perhaps hunger, with all the woman- nature their pitiful lives have left them, for other lips murmuring in slumber beside them. But over their burning eyes they press the metal circle for which they have crushed their hearts and outraged their sex, and around the delicate limbs they draw the ermines that cannot hide their shame, and in all their poor, empty glory they only read in the cold eyes of the patrician women around them the chill contempt that stamps them as among, but not of their order. "I sometimes think it wisest not to think," and this warped and twisted human nature has a pathos in all its chasing after a gilded butterfly that has always a grinning skull peering through the gold of its wings. The hunger that finds but Apples of Sodom, the life-labor that wins but the gold of Midas, the ambition that crushes its toy baloon—"and man plods his way through thorns to ashes."

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

Is there plan and purpose in all the meaningless mystery and misery? Is "heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, hell the shadow of a soul on fire?" And are we both? Are we improving? Look on life within its gates. Are we retrograding? Strip the curtains from the hearts of men and women. And marriage, the great pivot upon which swings life itself, what is it? Is it covenant with deity, or contract with the devil? Boise, Ida., October 1.

* * * SALMAGUNDI.

My attention has been several times called by the citizens of Nevada, Ia., to a series of articles appearing in a little boiler-plate paper published at that place by an old plug named Payne and his idiot son. The articles purport to have been written by one G. W. Bailey, from West Point, Columbus, McComb, Magnolia, and other places in Mississippi, and are the most brutally slanderous of the South and the Southern people of anything yet put in print. As the writer is too grossly ignorant and hopelesly imbecile to concoct a falsehood to deceive a diapered pickaninny, I should pay no attention to his screeds, but for the indignant protests of the Iowa people. One gentleman sends me some excerpts from the articles and says: "Do not imagine us big enough fools to be deceived by this lying scoundrel. He would, if necessary to get his name in print, defame his own parents. Bailey is an intellectual bawd with an abnormal itch for notoriety. The paper in which his screeds appear has a very limited circulation. I have never detected anybody in the crime of reading it, hence it can do no harm. I was in the federal army and know something about the South. I learned it at Pittsburg Landing. Some mischief-making, blatherskites ought to have their d——d tongues cut out." Another gentleman writes from Iowa: "It seems that this fellow Bailey once got a small Federal appointment to some place in China. He remained their long enough to pick up a few curios, contract the opium habit and the name of 'Tankkee.' He returned and began lecturing on China, but the dope was too much for his little encephalon. He took the Keeley cure for the opium habit, but he's as great a liar as ever. You know what Macaulay says about Bertrand Barere? Well, this fellow can outlie the 'Witling of Terror' and not half try. I think if he should accidentally tell the truth about anything he'd drop dead.

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

. . .

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

A few American newspapers and magazines of the genus mugwump, enemies of Cuban liberty and apologists for the Weylerian butcheries and brutalities, are now busily engaged in belittling those who enabled Senorita Cisneros to escape from her captors, are heaping their feculence upon Mesdames Jefferson Davis, Jno. A. Logan and the other "old women" who had the temerity to appeal to the Spanish Queen Regent in behalf of the young heroine—are even repeating the stale lies of Weyler's understrappers reflecting upon her chastity. What brave American journalists! How proud of such sons Columbia should be! It is quite possible the New York Journal undertook the young lady's rescue for advertising purposes only; but just the same, she is on American soil, and she can well afford to ignore the petty malice of emasculated mugwump editors, knowing as she must, that the chivalry of this country is with her to the last man. I do not believe the statement of the Spanish official whom Senorita Cisneros accused of insulting her, and who retorted that she had thrown herself at his head. A gentleman could not make such an assertion even though it were true, for a woman's illicit favors set upon the lips of the recipient the seal of eternal silence. The defamer of Senorita Cisneros is but another Don Matthias de Silvae of Le Sage. . . .

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

My attention has been several times called to one W. D. McKinstry of Watertown, N. Y., by people of that place. They plead with me that he is really spoiling for a "roast." McKinstry is publishing a little paper which somewhat resembles an over-ripe dish-rag, or an unlaundered sheet from the bed of a colored baby; but I have no idea why he is so unpopular. It may be because he possesses the physique of a bull elephant and the brains of a doodle-bug. It may be that the appearance of such an animal outside a dime museum, or a pig sty, angers the people. I can see nothing in his editorials at which to take offense. Reading them were like drinking the froth out of a pop-bottle or filling one's belly with the east wind. McKinstry is trying to settle the "negro problem" for the South; but that has so long been a favorite occupation of Smart Alec editors who never saw a cotton patch that no one minds it any more. Waco has the coon and Watertown has McKinstry, hence it is in order for the two towns to mingle their tears instead of animadverting each upon the other's misfortune. If I might advise the mighty McKinstry I would suggest that he change his occupation. As an editor he is a dismal failure, but he would be a dazzling success as ballast for a canal boat. . . .

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

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

A Galveston traveling man writes me as follows:

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

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

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

Do you mind him as he walks the street, The Dean? With his highly elevated nose, The Dean. And his old imported hat And his time worn black cravat, Any one could tell that He's the Dean.

He is "furnist" this country, Is the Dean, "It's nothing like old Hingland," Says the Dean. In language somewhat torrid, With a countenance quite florid, He says our schools are "orrid," Does the Dean.

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

All the sycophantic little sassiety sheets are now engaged in the delectable task of belittling Miss Edna Whitney, selected by Chillicothe, Mo., as maid of honor to the Kween of the Kansas City Karnival, but objected to by the snob management on the ground that she was a working girl. The sheets aforesaid have discovered that since that event brought her into public notice Miss Whitney has accepted $500 from a cigarette firm for the use of her photo, and are now industriously arguing that a young woman who will permit her portrait to be so employed is not a proper person to be brought for a moment into contract with the eminently respectable sassietyest. Rats! ditto rodents. The Karnival was not a "social function," but a commercial scheme gotten up by the merchants of Kansas City to draw trade to that enterprising town. It was a blowout for everybody; the world was invited—the gates thrown open to the Canary in his Canaryism as well as to Sir Alymer in his Alymerism. Lady Vere de Vere and the chambermaid in the dollar-a-day hotel were alike invited to make themselves at home, enjoy the show and spend their siller. Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying for the publication of decollete portraits and sickening "write-ups" of themselves. Miss Whitney is poor and, I am told, supports a widowed mother. To a girl so situated $500 is a great sum. She could scarce be expected to have the fine aesthetic feelings of a highly educated woman reared in the lap of luxury. Her portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,—like those of the swell society set—and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package—I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' in the same place. These pitiful sheets, which are belittling Miss Whitney to ingratiate themselves with the snobocracy of Kansas City, are entirely destitute of shame. Their editors are, in most instances, a cross between Jeames de la Pluche and Caliban. Their presence at "social functions" is tolerated for the same reason that nigger waiters are admitted. They are used by the parvenues and heartily despised by the very people whom they so obsequiously serve. . . .

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

My correspondent is indeed "A Merry Kuss" else he could find no pleasure in calling a man a liar in an anonymous letter. To call that creature a cur who flings an insult which he fears to father, were a damning libel on every decent dog in Christendom. My correspondent is probably a mongrel cross between a male hyena and a gila monster, begotten in a nigger grave-yard, suckled by a sow and educated by an idiot. But, perhaps, being familiar with his own birth and breeding he will consider this a compliment. McKinley coralled more than 90 per cent. of the nigger vote and carried every state in which foreign-born people exceeds 21 per cent. of the entire population. He received his largest majorities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, Minnesota, California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, one-third of whose people, collectively considered, are of foreign birth; his smallest majorities in Kentucky, Indiana, West Virginia and Maryland, where those of foreign birth amount to about 8 per cent. of the entire population. Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas constituted Bryan's strongholds and their people collectively considered, show a foreign birth of less than 5 per cent. Colorado is the only state having a considerable foreign- birth population that stands in the Democratic columns, all the others having gone for McKinley. While it is true that thousands of our foreign-born citizens are intelligent, honest and patriotic—a credit to the land of their adoption—it is likewise true that following in their wake we find Huns, Pollocks, Sicillians, "Souwegian" and other undesirable offscourings of the old world, imported by Mark Hanna and other "industrial cannibals" to degrade our labor and debauch our politics. It is the vote of this latter class, and the scarcely less corrupt and ignorant "coons" which constitute McKinley's popular plurality. McKinley was the candidate of the assisted immigrant and the Ethiopian, Bryan of the native-born Americans; and I submit it to a candid world which of these two parties was likely to have the good of this country most at heart, or know best how to promote it. . . .

I am obliged to my friends for divers and surdry scraps of information regarding the cur-ristian trustee of Baylor who led the last assault upon me in the name of a long-suffering Savior. It would make interesting reading for Waco Baptists no doubt, but I can put these columns to better use than rehashing ancient history. Those who are anxious to learn what kind of an animal this member of Baylor's board of managers actually is, are referred to the Galveston News of July 26th, 1883. Any one can secure access to the files of that paper for the asking. I cannot afford to "damn to everlasting fame" every backwoods hypocrite who raises a howl. The ICONOCLAST leaves such cattle to the bill collectors. . . .

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

THE GOO-GOOS AND TAMMANY'S TIGER.

BY H. S. CANFIELD.

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

This organization is one of the results of a long continued era of official corruption that has no parallel in modern municipal history. Until times quite recent Tammany has had things all its own way in the Eastern metropolis. The extent of corruption was not suspected until the Lexow investigating committee brought it to light. It is certain that not even the committee itself conceived the vastness of the system of thuggery and blackmail. Having begun its labors, evidence poured in upon it in a constantly increasing stream. It could do no less than go ahead. Its prosecuting attorney, John C. Goff, who not so many years ago was a counter jumper in a big New York store, and is now the city recorder at a salary of $12,000 a year and perquisites, woke to find himself famous. The Lexow committee was indirectly a result of the Parkhurst crusade and the Parkhurst crusade was made necessary by an unheard of state of public immorality. Of Parkhurst and Lexow the "Citizens' Union" is the child and more than the child. It stands for purity in politics and the rights of the honest citizen. It objects to high salaries and little work. It desires economy in public places. It wants each vote counted once and only once. It believes in the civil service. It swears by Teddy Roosevelt. It thinks that the workingman is able to judge for himself. It does not think that the world is governed enough. It is certain that it has in its ranks young men of vigor and intellect who would draw salary and serve the public in a manner hitherto never approached. It boasts that it is "the better element." It does not know the alphabet of politics. It is virtuously theoretical and practically impotent. It cannot be brought to understand that successful politics demands a "machine." Each of its individual members is a boss. They have been derisively termed "goo-goos," which is a contraction of "goody-goods." They are youthful, sanguine, patriotic, impertinent, impractical and self-sufficient. Their idea of conducting a campaign is nebulous. They believe that a number of voluble young men, clad irreproachably in evening dress and touring the city in carts after nightfall, stopping on corners and haranguing the multitude, cannot fail to command success. They have a large campaign fund, which will go to the printing of esoteric literature and the hire of carts. There is good in them and any amount of energy. Recognizing this, the leader of the regular Republican organization asked them for a conference. They bouncingly refused. It was explained to them that the best effort of every honest man in Greater New York was needed to defeat Tammany and that a divided front meant defeat, but they would have none of it. "Come into our camp," they said, and be soldiers under us. Accept our commands. Do as we say, work as we direct, spend as we decide, or go to the devil." This being so, the veterans of the regular Republicans, men who have fought through dozens of campaigns and know the meaning both of victory and defeat, naturally decided to go to the devil.

Mr. Low, the candidate of the "Citizens' Union," is a good man. He is a kind man. He is a gentleman and a scholar. He is an educator. Columbia University loves him. All through the campaign its students will give their college yell for him with vigor and much satisfaction to themselves. He has friends who believe in the massive strength of their own influence. But it is to be feared that he will be butchered to make a tiger's holiday. His personal characteristics are all that they should be. His morals could not be improved, but he will know more in November than he knows now. It is to be doubted that the New York voter will rush to the polls and plump ballots for him with the frenzied enthusiasm of which he has been told. The New York voter is a low animal at best, much lower than the Chicago voter, and he enthuses only when filled with beef and beer. Tammany understands him. Thomas C. Platt understands him. Tammany and Thomas C. Platt are not saying a word. They are sitting still and watching the inception of the meteoric canvass of Low.

Integrally the "Citizens' Union" is all right. The trouble lies in the fact that it believes that no good men can come out of Nazareth. There is but one right way, and it has that way. It is purse-proud, bull-headed and inexperienced. It will hold daily conferences with Mr. Low. It will fill him with vain hopes and longings and it will send out the young men on the carts. Also it will publish essays on the dignity of the American ballot. These essays will be written by its own scribes, who will joy to see themselves in print, and they will be scattered broadcast through the city. They will serve to wrap up butter pats and as tails to small boys kites. They will not be read, of course, for who, in the hurly-burly of a city campaign, has time or inclination to read tracts?

The Citizens' Union will not make a house-to-house canvass; it will not make and keep a record of the name, business and preference of every voter; it will not have trained proselyters at work; it will not organize clubs; it will not descend to the brutish level of the torchlight procession; it will not employ the agonizing brass bands; it will not send out men on election day whose business it is to see that every voter gets to the polls at least once, and more times if necessary.

The regular Republican organization ought to win, but it entered the contest heavily handicapped. If the tiger of Tammany again inserts a paw into the public treasury and converts the humblest office into a reward for rascality, the responsibility will rest directly upon the "Citizens' Union"—whose self constituted mission is to purify politics and elevate the ballot box.

The success of Tammany would be deplorable—calamitous. It would mean the restoration of the old era of trickery, jobbery and blackmail in a richer and wider area. But, owing to the split among those who ought to know better, it has never in its history had a better opportunity, nor has it ever fought for so grand a prize. "Greater New York" is composed of the original city, Brooklyn, which by the census of 1890 contained more than 900,000 people, several Long Island towns, suburban to Brooklyn, and a large part of Westchester county, lying north of the city proper. The total population will approach 4,000,000. The taxable wealth is enormous. The number of salaried place holders is close to 25,000. The salary list that is disbursed monthly runs far into the millions. Once in possession of this enormous power, Tammany would build up a machine to pale the records made by the administration of Boss Tweed. There was never any reason for the formation of "Greater New York" other than the fear that Chicago would oustrip the old town in the race for pre-eminence among American cities. There were grave reasons against it, chief among them being the acquisition of an enormous debt and the affording of an opportunity for plunder at the hands of the organization that now threatens. It is certain that the citizens of older New York have carried their pigs to a bad market. If history teaches anything, they will live to regret that they allowed urban pride to run away with common sense.

The methods of Tammany are well known. It is preeminently the American representative and practitioner of the low and effective in politics. It is the oldest and most powerful political society this country has ever known, and possibly ever will know. It is twofold. There is the Tammany general committee, to which any citizen of the city who is a Democrat, may belong. It numbers some 100,000 members. There is a wheel within a wheel, called the Society of Tammany. This is a secret concern, whose lodge-room is in the hall on Fourteenth street, near Third avenue. All of the leading Tammanyites belong to it. From its ranks the executive committee is chosen. It keeps the rolls and the records, makes the assessments, appoints the captains of the various election precincts, holds them responsible for the discipline of their men, rewards faithful service and punishes treachery. The society makes no special pretensions to purity. Its motto is to the victors belong the spoils. While Democratic in politics and of large influence in the national councils of the Democracy, it has never hesitated to sacrifice a national candidate for local gain. It is of and for New York City first, last and all the time. Occasionally it is loyal to a presidential candidate, but more often it is disloyal. Trades are always possible. For instance, it was true to Mr. Cleveland in 1884 and untrue in 1888. It was true again in 1892, and there is no doubt that at the last general election its members were told to knife Mr. Bryan whenever they wished.

It is the most persistent and thoroughly equipped warrior in our political lists. There is not a square foot of New York City that it does not know. On the day before election it is able always to tell within a fraction the number of votes it will poll. Every member is forced to go to his voting place and deposit his ballot. The political preference of every man in every precinct of every ward is known. Its agents are everywhere and always at work. It spends money like water. It is quick to reward and fierce to punish. It has no sentiment. It battles for so much place, so much power and the handling of so many dollars. If it wins, its spoils are promptly and equitably divided. Against such a machine, so intelligently and mercilessly handled, a divided enemy is almost certain beaten. The Republican party of New York and the respectability of New York are able to defeat Tammany when they go hand in hand, but only when they go hand in hand. It is to be feared that the chasm between them in the present campaign is not to be bridged. Their active and unscrupulous foeman may be trusted to leave no stone unturned and no device untried. Chicago, Ill., October 1.

* * * THE HON. BARDWELL SLOTE, OF COHOSH. BY JUNIUS.

The man whom poor dead Billy Florence used to make the dominant, laughter-breeding memory-haunting figure in "The Almighty Dollar," is with us still. He infests Washington for many months of each year. He saves the country with persistency. I purpose to tell of him as I have known him. A residence of three years in the Capital City and a daily converse with its legislators has convinced me that nearly all congressmen are Bardwell Slotes, more or less. It is a fact that to a dweller in the District of Columbia there are no great men. Washington people are valets to these heroes. They get to know them with their rouge and corsets off. The sight is not pretty, but it is instructive. Sometimes it fills a man with despair of the future of this country. It convinces him that the greatest republic of history cannot hold together for another century. It makes him think that statesmanship is dead, never to resurge, and that its place is taken by narrow foul politics. But generally mirth comes as a relief. There is so much of the ridiculous in the modern American Cicero or Catiline that one's visions of his shortcomings is blurred by the tears that laughter brings.

In nine cases out of ten the man sent to Washington to represent his people is uneducated. In the tenth case he is ill-bred. I once showed to twenty congressmen the following stanza, asking them to translate it.

"Le bruit est pour le fat, La painte est pour le sot, L'honnete homme s'eloigne trompe, Et ne dit pas mot."

It is the simplest of French doggerel and means, freely translated, that while the fat-headed and the weakly foolish do a great deal of jawing when mistreated by the powerful, the sensible man picks himself up and totes himself far from the neighborhood wherein he is unwelcome and never says a word. Of my twenty congressmen but one offered a translation. That was the dead William H. Crane, of Texas. The men were taken at random, and I may say that I did not expect any translations when I started out. Most frequently a man gets to congress through a practically acquired knowledge of dirty politics backed by the ability to make a stump speech, to tell a smutty story, and to plead for his job with a slavish lickspittleism that would disgust a Digger Indian. The ordinary congressional candidate when smitten upon one cheek will turn the other, and when smitten upon the other will hoist his coat-tail and request the honor of a kick.

It is but natural that a job which is obtained by eating filth and drinking filth and sleeping in filth is held to with a tenacity that rises superior to all manliness and all decency. The congressman knows but one God—the people who elected him. He has but one object—to pleasure those people and get a renomination. He does not represent the United States of America. He represents his district. His idea of statesmanship is to get as many federal jobs for the voters of his District and as many and large federal appropriations for his District as he can. That is all of it. Any individual Congressman, if he had his way would fill the government places entirely from his District and erect a Federal post-office and custom house at every cross roads in his Districts. If he could do these things, he thinks he would be certain of reelection, and he is right. Federal patronage is a fanged whip that hangs ever above his shoulders and occasionally it falls. The recipient of the blow cringes, cowers and howls like a beaten hound, but he does not resent. When Grover Cleveland called the Fifty-third congress into extraordinary session, the object being to repeal the Sherman act and utterly demonetize silver, thus completing the vast robbery of 1873, he knew that there was a pro-silver majority against him, but he knew also that he held the handle of the patronage whip in his fat beer-swelled hand and that his slaves would troup to do his will at the first crack of its lash. The result justified his confidence. The Democratic party had a majority of nearly 100 in the house of representatives, but that majority voted directly against its convictions. It was told that it would get no jobs for constitutents until it had surrendered its honesty. American history contains no such pitiful instance of cowardice and grovelling meanness. Instead of one Benedict Arnold selling his soul for temporary gain, we had fifty. It did the soul of me good to read the returns of the next Congressional election and to know that the truckling, craven disgusting majority was wiped out as a boy rubs a wet sponge across a slate.