Fifty years ago Macaulay wrote of Bertrand Barere: "When we put everything together, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can be found in history." It is indeed a pity the great essayist did not live to contemplate this pair of Texas attorneys. He would have learned, doubtless to his surprise, that "the Anacreon of the guillotine" was a pretty decent fellow—by comparison. Barere was a monster born of a reign of blood. He gave the friends of his youth to the guillotine. So terrible was his savagery that he became known as "the Witling of Terror." He was an able-bodied and enterprising liar who never told the truth unless by accident; but in his most demoniac moods it did not occur to him to prove recreant to his race, to torture children that he might enjoy their agony, to brand innocent girls, who could scarce look upon their own budding bosoms without a blush, as the depraved paramours of syphilitic Senegambians. Ah Macaulay! from thy Seventh Heaven, reserved for the lords of intellect—the children of genius, who needs must be the favorites of Omniscience—shake down a drop of cold water upon the blistered lips of Bertrand Barere, for they did not frame the supreme falsehood—nor did he strive to unchain a black lecher that he might imperil the honor of the ladies of his native land. Despite all his sin and shame, he would have looked upon that dishonored daughter of the Caucasian race and cried for vengeance.

Carlyle, greatest of critics, the supreme lord of literature—that Scottish Arcturus before whom even Shakespeare's glorious star pals its ineffectual fires—awards the palm of correlated cussedness to Cagliostro; yet the "count" was merely a successful swindler and professional pander. He plucked rich dupes, but I find not in his long catalogue of crime that he slandered youthful serving maids—for a consideration. He was advocate for many an unclean thing, but it is not recorded that he ever took a fee from a negro rape-fiend—that he ever defended a lecherous son of Ham who had dared raise his wolfish eyes to the fair face of Japhet's humblest daughter. Even when put on trial for his own worthless life he did not seek to save himself by the perjured testimony of the sons of slaves.

Cagliostro, Barere and Meeser—the positive, comparative and superlative of infamy hitherto! but we must turn to "Grand old Texas" to find unblushing effrontry and irremediable rascality. Some months ago a creature named Otis, who conducts somewhere in Southern California a putrid abortion miscalled a newspaper, declared in his columns that Southern women are often paramours of black bucks, and that the frequent lynching of so-called rape-fiends are due to discovery of these unnatural liaisons. But as Otis commanded a company of coons during the war—a job which no gentleman would have accepted to save his immortal soul—and as he has a head shaped like a gourd and a face strongly suggestive of a degenerate simian, his foolish lies only produced a general laugh; yet here are two alleged Southern gentlemen, certifying in open court that Otis' cowardly falsehoods have a broad foundation of fact! In the whole world's history there is but one other instance of such shameless infamy, and that too belongs to Texas. When the 14-year old "ward of the Baptist church" was debauched at its chief storm center of bigotry and bile, Baylor University, the sweet scented son-in-law of President Burleson tried to make it appear that she was enciente by a Senegambian—that young and innocent girls committed to its care were so poorly guarded that it was possible for them to have nigger babies!—Yet this defamer of Baptist womanhood has not yet been introduced to a rope by the male students, attacked from the rear by Baylor trustees, or told to leave town! Fortunately the young lady was able to refute this slander of the University and its inmates by putting a white baby in evidence—the pickaninny specialty having been reserved by Providence for the manager of the Baptist missionary board.

One cannot help asking if Miss Wulff has no male relatives, or if gunpowder is no longer sold in the Alamo City. As I understand it, her people are late from the Fatherland—have yet to learn that in some cases society expects a man to overlook the law, to kill as unclean curs those who thus defame a female member of their family. It is possible that there are other shyster lawyers as mean, other bipedal coyotes as contemptible as those under consideration; but if so they have not yet been called to the attention of the ICONOCLAST. True it is, however, that the average attorney cares more for victory than for virtue. Howsoever honest and upright he may be in private life, the moment he enters the court-room he becomes an unnatural monster, willing to accept the devil as client and win his case at any cost. It is likewise true that the courts allow too large a liberty to lawyers in the examination of witnesses for the opposition, permitting them to call in question the honor of men of well-known probity and cast suspicion on the character of women full as good as their wives in order to make an impression on the jury that will redound to the interest of cut-throat clients. It has come to such a pass in this so-called chivalrous country that sensitive women will submit to almost any wrong rather than seek redress in our courts of law, where they are liable to be subjected to studied insult by unconscionable shysters. It were well for the people to take this matter in hand and make it plain to all concerned that courts do not exist for the express purpose of enabling blackguard lawyers to pocket fat fees for aiding professional criminals to escape the legitimate consequence of their crimes, but to secure even and exact justice—to insist that henceforth these legal parasites be compelled to treat them with common courtesy. It might be well for the South to vary the program by lynching fewer rape-fiends and more shysters lawyers.

* * * COINING BLOOD INTO BOODLE.

Some months ago the ICONOCLAST paid its respects to the old line insurance companies. It demonstrated beyond the peradventure of a doubt that they are but so many cut-throat gambling concerns. It proved that they are consuming the substance of the people by returning in satisfaction of matured policies about one-third what they collect in premiums. Of course, the expose aroused the ban-dogs of Dives, and they made the welkin ring from Tadmor in the wilderness to Yuba Dam. The ICONOCLAST became a target for oodles of cheap wit and barrels of black-guardism by the journalistic organ-grinders for the insurance buccaneers; but as yet none of the megalophanous-mouthed micrococci have attempted to answer its arguments or to demonstrate that the indictment was too drastic. A gentleman who has made an exhaustive study of the insurance problem sends me some valuable data which I propose to draw upon from time to time, not with the expectation of making high-toned thieves ashamed of themselves and thereby effecting their reformation, but to keep their newspaper panders and potwallopers snarling and snapping until general attention is attracted to the consummate meanness of their masters and thereby curtail somewhat their powers of despoilation. The old line life insurance fake is the most colossal scheme of predacity known to human history. Enough money is annually filched from the people to clothe every pauper like unto Solomon in all his glory and feed him upon the fat of the land. Millions of Americans are today denying themselves creature comforts to pay premiums on policies that will never yield their dependents one penny. The old line fraud flourishes simply because, in the language of the erstwhile P. T. Barnum, the American people love to be hood-dooed and humbugged. I do not by this mean to reflect upon the commercial integrity of all men soliciting old line insurance. Many of them are elegant gentlemen who have engaged, quite unconsciously, in very bad business. The Deity should forgive them for they know not what they do. They really believe that they are engaged in a work of philanthropy, while devoting their best energies to the promotion of a fraud. The average policy-holder knows little or nothing about life- insurance. He desires to provide for his dependants; but being unable to accumulate much property, he scrapes and saves and pays to some remorseless robber all his surplus money. He wants to be doubly sure that the company is solvent and will remain so, hence he selects one boasting enormous "assets." It does not once occur to him that the aforesaid assets have been accumulated in a very few years by bumping the heads of other suckers. He pays the rate prescribed without considering whether it be high enough to keep the company solvent or low enough to stamp his investment as commercial sanity. He is little concerned about "dividends," but wants to be assured that at the time of his death his heirs will be paid a certain number of dollars. So he goes up against a mammoth slot-machine which absorbs dollars while it rolls out dimes. He knows that the widow so-and-so was paid so much insurance, and takes it for granted that it is a good thing. He sees the little pile of coin poured into her lap, but he does not see the greedy hands of the corporation despoiling a hundred pockets to make up treble the amount. He hears much about what the Flim- Flam Life Insurance Co. has paid on policies, but nothing about what it has collected in premiums. So he makes his old threadbare coat do for another decade, lets his wife go without a new gown, feeds his children on slapjacks and sop and surrenders for life insurance the surplus thus saved. No "cheap insurance" for him!—he wants to get into a "time-tried" financial Gibralter. He is told by the agent of an old liner of its enormous "legal reserve," and innocently supposes this to be a portion of its available assets—the one thing which makes it "solid." He contemplates a long array of figures and assumes that Old Mortality might sweep the land with War or pestilence without affecting the solvency of his patron saint. The agent neglects to inform him that the "legal reserve," which looms up like a seventy four in a fog, cannot be utilized in the discharge of death-claims, that insofar as the average policy holder is concerned it is simply a beautiful legend on an advertising blotter. When I was editor of the San Antonio Express the philanthropic proprietor gave me a block of land in the city of Laredo in lieu of a raise of salary, but neglected to supply me with a deed to same. The land is mine, all right enough, but is no part of my available assets—it's my "legal reserve." Like its insurance namesake, it's a liability to the exact extent that it's an asset. It is an awfully nice thing to have, but adds never a cent to my solvency. My correspondent points out that it costs policy holders in old line companies more to maintain the legal reserve than it does to provide for losses by death, and adds that this is proven by the fact that all such companies doing business in the State of New York must have on hand in cash, or in invested assets approved by the insurance department, the reserve belonging to all the policies which they have in force. This means that they must retain or keep invested a sum equal to about two-thirds of all the premiums paid on all existing policies. The moment they part with any portion of this reserve for any purpose whatsoever, they are declared insolvent and wound up by a receiver. In other words, the corporation is d——d if it does and the policy holder is d——d if it doesn't. That the latter gets the sulphur bath goes without saying. The four largest old system companies doing business in New York had, on Jan. 1, 1893, $48,265,798 more in legal reserve than the total amount which they have paid in death losses and endowments during their entire existence! With this fact before him, how in the name of heaven any sane man can be induced by an old system company to enact the role of sucker surpasses my comprehension. Five years ago the net assets of the largest old line life insurance company in the world amounted to $165,000,000, of which more than $158,000,000 was legal reserve. Had a shrinkage of 10 per cent occurred in the value of its investments its reserve would have been impaired and the corporation declared insolvent. So long ago as 1878 the Union Mutual Life Insurance Co. acknowledged over the signatures of its general officers that it had collected from its policy holders more than $45,000,000 "beyond the necessities of our business." It felt so badly about this that it proceeded to raise the cost of management from $5 to $11.57 on the $1,000 and shove up the premium something more than 20 per cent! It is believed that the gutta percha conscience of the general officers is now reasonably easy—that "the necessities of our business" are not on a parity with the ability of the corporation to yank the legs of the guileless yap. In 1873 this company paid in dividends $29 on each $1,000 insurance in force; in 1895 it paid—despite the increased cost of premiums—but $2.16. All the old line companies, so far as I know, have been increasing premiums and cost of management while decreasing dividends. "Loading" is another scheme by which all old line or legal reserve companies rob the people. "Loading" means simply the placing of a sufficient burden on the patron to freeze him out before maturity of his policy and enable the company to pocket all he has paid in premiums. The idea of the old liners is to squeeze a victim dry and get rid of him—to "load" him until his financial back is broken. That the system is proven by the fact that only one policy in seven is ever paid. Six out of every seven people who insure in the old line companies pay heavy premiums for a longer or shorter period and never receive back a cent. They lie down under their "load." By such methods these systematic blood-suckers acquire those vast assets that make them so "solvent." By such practices they are enabled to pay $75,000 salaries to their presidents while the chief magistrate of the Republic must worry along on less money. By the pernicious system of "loading" a patron is charged four times as much for operating expenses at 60 years of age as he is charged at 25, although it costs the same to collect his premiums and furnish a receipt therefor. The idea is that the older he grows the more likely he is to prove a loss to the company, hence his burden is made too grievous to be borne. Life insurance should be a public blessing instead of a bane. Properly applied it would well-nigh eliminate pauperism. As matters now stand it is too often a promoter of poverty instead of a preventative. To shelter one family the old line companies turn two or more into the street. To feed the few they starve the many. They coldly speculate in the holiest affections of the human heart. They remorselessly coin blood into boodle. They wring the last farthing from the thin purse of labor for their own enrichment. They obtain patronage of the ignorant by false pretenses. They permit the people to regard their legal reserve as available for all purposes. They parade eight and nine-figure assets as things to be proud of, when they are in reality the fruits of shameless despoiliation of the poor. They pose as benevolent institutions while the land is filled with those whom they have robbed and wrecked. The government should suppress these eminently respectable gambling games. They have caused more sorrow, destitution and crime than all the cards and dice this side of the dark dominion of the devil. The horse-leech's daughters should be pulled off the body politic. Not only should the government suppress these shameless skin games which collect gold and distribute copper, but it should supply life insurance to heads of families at cost and make it compulsory. It should be an offense against the law, punishable by imprisonment for a man to bring a child into the world without first providing for its support in case of his death or disability, and in no other way can the poor so easily make such provision as by a system of life insurance conducted for the benefit of the many instead of the enrichment of the few.

A BIGOTED ARCHBISHOP.

All the fools are not confined to any one political party or religious cult. As a rule the Catholic clergy, while ultra-dogmatic, are thoroughly decent. While standing up stiffly for all the claims of their creed, they treat their Protestant neighbors with courteous toleration. There are exceptions to most rules, hence it does not infallibly follow that a man is a gentleman because he is a priest of the Church of Rome. The unworthy are usually discovered and weeded out, but their dismissal does not entirely repair the damage done by criminal or foolish utterance. It is seldom indeed that the Mother-Church permits a small-bore bigot or brainless blatherskite to rise to the dignity of an archbishop, but one such has evidently escaped her watchful eye. Archbishop Cleary, of Kingston, Can., recently distinguished himself by an ebullition of unchristian bile that will long be used as an excuse for the existence of the A.P.A. His utterances were a disgrace to his office. They were beneath the dignity of the humblest neophite of the Church of Rome. They remind one of the old Puritanical tongue-borers and witch- burners. They suggest the Star Chamber of England and the Inquisition of Spain. The brutality staggers the brain and chills the blood. They compel those who have ever felt kindly towards Catholicism to pause and consider. Although the voice of the Vatican is strangely at variance with the astounding mandate of the Archbishop, the latter has been pounced upon and exploited by the "Apes" as an official utterance of the Pope. It appears that a Catholic young lady officiated as bridesmaid for a friend who was married in a Protestant church and according to the rites of that religion. Therefore his reverence proceeded to have a cataleptoid convulsion and cut fantastic capers before high heaven. It was entirely within his sacerdotal province to administer a reprimand. He could, without transcending the proprieties have advised the Catholics of his diocese to refrain from officiating at Protestant marriages in future. He did neither the one nor the other, but proceeded to issue a mandate which, reduced to the last analysis, means simply that a marriage not consummated by the Catholic church is no marriage at all, but simply concubinage born of lust and wickedly sanctioned by human law. He forbade Catholics, under pain of his dire displeasure, even witnessing Protestant marriages or attending as mere spectators at Protestant funerals. Archbishop Cleary has flagrantly insulted every non-Catholic wife in the world. He cast the baleful bar-sinister on the escutcheon of every child born of non-Catholic parents. With all due respect to his holy office, Archbishop Cleary is one ass. He is a brute who should be taken out and bastinadoed. Of course due allowance must be made for the fact that he is a Canuck. Canada is but half-civilized. It is still "loil" to old England, the strumpet of nations, the governmental harlot of history. It continues to take its manners and customs from the old country. It is to the Queen's apron strings like an idiot's scalp to the belt of an Apache squaw. Whenever John Bull whistles it comes a running like a half-grown spaniel at the call of a stable-boy. It has never mustered up sufficient sense and sand to set up for itself. It is the red bandana upon which Britannia blows her protrusive bugle. It is the cuspidore into which she voids her royal rheum. We could not expect much even from a Catholic archbishop in such a country. In fact, the Canadian Catholics, like the Canadian Protestants, are so narrow between the eyes that they can look through a key-hole with both eyes at once. Their heads are small and ill-furnished. The winters are so long that the sap cannot rise to the top—it stops at the belly-band and there coagulates. Canadians of any faith are scarce so broad in the religious beam as Texas Baptists, who believe that unless a man be treated to a sanctified plunge- bath by some acephalous shouter he is headed direct for hell. Still it is something of a shock to hear even a Canadian archbishop branding four-fifths of the people of this world as bastards. It makes one ashamed of the genus homo to hear him forbidding Catholics attending the funerals of their Protestant friends. One cannot help asking, What of marriage and motherhood during the long ages before St. Peter became Pope? Was Eve a concubine and Sara a slut? Has Archbishop Cleary an hundred generations of harlotry behind him? I am seeking no controversy with Catholicism. With its peculiar ideas of marriage and divorce I have nothing at present to do. I am simply tying a few bow-knots in the ears of an ass. I deny, however, that it is within the power of any church to add to the sanctity of a marriage ceremony. Marriage is nothing more or less than formal notification to the world that a man and woman have already become husband and wife. It matters not how this announcement is made, so long as due respect is shown the established customs of the country, so long as it is generally accepted as sufficient. "What God hath put together, let no man put asunder," cried the Archbishop as he contemplates the possible annulment of a non-Catholic marriage contract. What God hath put together no man CAN put asunder. Even the almighty hand of death cannot break that sacred bond. But how does God join people together?—how does he make a man and woman husband and wife? Is it by the mumbled formula of priests or magistrates? If so, then is a MARIAGE DE CONVENIANCE AS SACRED as the mating of Cupid and Psyche. Then is the union of a snub-nosed American parvenu with an idiotic European "nobleman" whom she has bought with her daddy's dollars as holy in the sight of heaven as that of old Isaac's son with Laban's beauteous daughter. God joins man and woman together only with the golden links of love. When they are joined thus they are bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh. Were they alone in the world no marriage ceremony would be needful; but being a portion of society they must obtain its sanction. When they are joined together by church or state and love is lacking the union is not of heaven, but of hell. The woman is no true wife, but a kept mistress, and every child born unto her is a bastard. She has sold herself, and the priest or preacher who knowingly sets the seal of his approval upon her sin becomes an accomplice in a subterbrutish crime. But neither church nor state can read a woman's heart—all it can do is to announce to the world, "This woman elects to be that man's wife." There's naught more sacrosanct in the act of church or state in so far as the marriage ceremony is concerned than in the newspaper notice of its consummation. A few years ago a young and cultured woman, a woman beautiful as the dawn and with a suggestion of the Madonna in her fair young face, was persuaded by an ambitious mother to marry an old Silenus whom the political ocean in its madness had scooped out of the ooze and thrown among the stars. Three children have been born to her, and if current report may be credited, all are semi-idiots. Her gross husband is so repulsive to her that her babies are conceived as in some devil's dream and brought forth in despair. Thank heaven this ill-mated couple are not Catholics. But had they been: does Archbishop Cleary mean to tell me that all the power of the Church of Rome could have rendered their union holy? It is quite likely that Archbishop Cleary will not have to wait very long for a letter from Rome. When it comes I opine that it will contain a friendly tip from the Pope not to talk too much. His Holiness is a man of great good sense, and it will naturally occur to him that while reasonable church discipline is desirable it may be enforced without flagrantly insulting the millions of very worthy people who decline to accept his dogma.

* * * SALMAGUNDI.

This year's crop of Christmas accidents appears to be up to the average. As an angel-maker Christmas outclasses St. Patrick's day and is almost equal to the Fourth of July. The North celebrates the birth of our dear Lord by stuffing itself to the bursting point with plum budding, while the South manifests its appreciation of God's mercy by blowing itself to pieces with gunpowder. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds lost more or less important portions of their anatomy while a great army of new-made dyspeptics goes marching onward to the grave. I cannot understand what either plumpudding or gunpowder has to do with saving grace. The man must be very gross who can celebrate with gluttony and drunkenness the birth of the Redeemer. Why should anyone desire to transform the world into a murderous pandemonium because of the arrival of the Prince of Peace? Truth to tell, Christmas has become a secular holiday rather than a day for religious rejoicing, and Deists, Atheists and Agnostics take as much interest in its observation as do those who believe in the divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem. More people get drunk on Christmas than on any other day in the year. It is a time of violence and blood, rather than of "peace on earth, good will to men." I move that we switch, and instead of celebrating the nativity of Christ, observe the birth of Bacchus. We will then be privileged to drink until we are drunken. We can then stuff ourselves with the good things of earth and be consistent. We can then explode cannon-crackers, fire anvils and yoop with our mouths open without being guilty of the slightest disrespect to our God. But what must Christ Jesus think as he looks over the jasper walls, of this high revel, supposedly held as a sacrament? Surely he must be sorry he was ever born of woman. But gluttony, and drunkenness and fireworks are not the full extent of a so-called Christian world's offering. We have perverted the communistic doctrine of Christ in our practice of giving Christian presents. So long as custom confines gifts to immediate relatives and dependents it was well enough, for the largesse was usually selected with discretion and prompted by love; but it has now become the practice to send gifts to pretty much the entire circle of one's acquaintances. The result is the expenditure of tens of millions of money annually in the purchase of useless plunder. And the worst of it is that presents are usually given on the reciprocity plan—the custom has well nigh left the realm of sentiment and degenerated into social tyranny or brute selfishness. The homes of this land are littered to-day with trash which the recipients did not want and cannot use. And half the people who incurred this foolish expense are suffering the inconvenience of poverty. On the day after Christmas a lady shoved me her presents. They made a truly imposing pile. "There's not a solitary thing in the entire load," said she, "for which I have the slightest use. I cannot retain much of the stuff as keepsakes because of the bulk, and I am neither privileged to sell it or to give it away. I would have appreciated a rose or a ribbon from one I love more than all this trumpery from the people who are for the most part mere acquaintances. And I? Oh I adhered to the custom—went broke buying a lot of useless truck with which to encumber others. And now that Christmas is over and we contemplate our thin purses and impossible presents, we all wonder why 'that monster custom' doesn't permit us to exercise a little common sense. Christmas is becoming ever more and more a nightmare to me. The dinners are simply dreadful. The housewife begins a month in advance to plot against the stomachs of her people. I never ate but one Christmas dinner for which I did not feel like apologizing to my doctor, and that was not eaten in strictly religious company. It was a regular Bohemian lunch partaken of on a Pullman by myself, a newspaper man and two other sinners. The everlasting roast turkey, the pudding, pies and all the rest of the greasy, indigestible mass was missing. We had tongue sandwiches and Budweiser, deviled ham and more beer. I remarked that we were awfully wicked, but the newspaper man consoled me by saying the Christ was something of a Bohemian himself. We take an infinite deal of pains and spend an awful sight of money just to make ourselves miserable." One great trouble with the American people is that they do not have nearly enough holidays. In fact, Christmas is the only one really worthy of the name, for on New Year's, and July Fourth, we do not cease business until noon, while on Thanksgiving we forget to chase the nimble nickel merely long enough to feed. Next to gain-getting, eating seems to be the important business of the Universe. It is the manner in which a semi-civilized people express pleasure. Ouida has called attention to this fact somewhere. If a general wins an important battle, if a poet writes an immortal epic, if a Columbus discovers a new world, or if a God becomes incarnate we—eat! Yet there be sentimentalists who say that soul and stomach are not synonymous! It appears that the heart cannot feel, that the brain cannot enjoy unless we're shovelling a varied assortment of provender into the belly. That humble but useful organ seems to be the seat of all joy, as it is the source of most sorrow.

. . .

The American custom of "treating" is receiving some severe criticism from the European press. It deserves it. It is one of the most ridiculous and hurtful that ever cursed mankind. It is responsible for the bulk of the crime and pauperism usually accredited to John Barleycorn. Where there is no treating there's usually little intemperance. When a man steps into a "resort" for a glass of beer he's pretty apt to find a party lined up at the bar. He wants to pay for his beer, drink it and take his departure. But this is not permitted. He may have no more than a passing acquaintance with any of those present, but he must drink with the crowd, and having done so feels obligated to ask the crowd to drink with him. It does so, and he's "out" from one to three dollars. Having drunk with Tom he must drink with Dick and with Harry, and when he departs he's more than half drunk. The chances are that he could ill afford the expense incurred—that if left to himself he would have taken one drink instead of a dozen. "Treating" is a foolish custom that should be abolished in the interest of sobriety. It is good neither for the saloon nor for society. It is not good for the saloon because it occasions drunkenness and disorder and causes it to be avoided by thousands of otherwise good paying patrons. It is not good for society because weak men waste their substance, and a drunken man is an unsafe citizen. But the treating habit has too strong a grip on the American people to be eliminated by magazine essays—it must be made a misdemeanor. I am told that in Germany it matters NOT how friendly the members of a symposiac may be, everybody is expected to order and pay for his own booze. The result is that the German drinking place is respectable as the average restaurant and is patronized by almost the entire people. Temperance is the rule—stimulants are freely used but seldom abused. The treating habit is born of the American desire to "splurge." It means an enormous waste of money. It likewise means a sinful waste of good wine, for when a crowd of men belly a bar and pour stimulants into themselves as swine absorb swill it really matters little whether they drink Pomeroy See or barrel-house booze. They do not enjoy their potations—their only desire is to make drunk come. The treating habit is making of us a swinish people and strengthening the hands of the Prohibitionists. . . .

The "Rev." Sam Jones of Jawgy has broken loose again. This time he sets his cornstalk spear in rest and charges full tilt at the public school system and pretty much everything else in sight. His pathway is strewn with a gruesome wreck of the English grammar. Sam discussing the merits of education suggest a brindle mule criticising the Venus de Milo or a scavenger expatiating on the odors of Araby. His reverence (?) has become imbued with the idea that it spoils a boy to educate him, which goes to prove that the less a man knows the more he despises knowledge. But we can scarce blame Sam for railing at education. He is but obeying the law of self-preservation. When the people learn to distinguish between a hawk and a heron-saw they will drive this putrid-mouth little blatherskite from the pulpit. . . .

The New York Press wants all niggers holding federal offices in the South "armed to the teeth" for their own protection. It has an idea that the South is peopled only by "white savages" whose favorite sport is the shooting of nigger officer-holders from ambush. Like the erstwhile Artemus Ward's monkey, the editor of the Press is "a most amusin kuss." The South never gets angry at that kind of an animal. Occasionally a corrupt Republican administration appoints some ignorant Ethiopian to office who becomes insufferably insolent to his white neighbors and is called down with a six-shooter; but for every negro office-holder "assassinated by Southern savages" at least five white women are dragged from their homes by Northern white-caps and brutally abused. Who says so? I do; and I stand ready to prove it by the files of the leading Republican paper of this nation for ten years past. I refer, of course, to the St. Louis Globe- Democrat, the best all-around newspaper in the world. The South has very little affection for nigger office- holders, but they are full as safe as any other class of citizens so long as they behave themselves. The black man is not to blame for accepting an office, it is the Republican administration that deserves censure in thus making him the political superior of his white brethern. It is not the nigger who deserves killing, but the meddlesome Yankee editors who encourage him to be insolent.

. . .

According to press report a fashionable New York society female has dismissed her maid and engaged a valet. Well, if the dear creature enjoys having a man dress and undress her, comb her hair and lace her corsets why should an envious world stand on its hinder legs and carp? New York fashionables must have some antidote for ennui. If it be proper for ladies to have valets I presume that it is permissible for men to have maids. What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander. Verily "the world do move."

. . .

In the morning Mr. Logan wore a doeskin box coat with pearl buttons nearly as large as alarm clocks in two rows on it. His spats were old-gold color to match. In the afternoon he wore a dark plaid coat and trousers and a saffron-colored vest. The vest was garnished with maroon-colored inch-and-a-quarter checks. He wore an Ascot scarf, dark blue, with lavender polka dots. His scarfpin was a gold whip four inches long and set with a half-inch turqoise in the middle. He wore ox-blood shoes in the morning and ox-blood gloves and in the afternoon his shoes and gloves were buff colored. In the evening he wore full dress.—Chicago Times-Herald.

And still we wonder at the increase of crime! Could any self-respecting Texan with a six-shooter concealed about his person be expected to meet such a gorgeous bird o' paradise and suffer it to escape? I wonder if Mr. Logan scrapes his tongue, manicures his toes and puts his moustache on curl papers? And I wonder what the devil old "Black Jack" would say could he wake up long enough to take survey of his clothes-horn of a son? And I wonder what the deuce the woman who married it will do with it? And I wonder why the hades his ma doesn't lead the little man out into the woodshed, remove his panties, lay him across the maternal knee and hit him 'steen times across the rear elevation with a green cypress shingle? Think of a featherless he animal playing peacock—no mission in God's world but to dress and undress itself three times a day. . . .

The New York Medical Record says that "a custom prevails in this country that ministers should be considered as free from pecuniary obligation to the doctor for service rendered." The Record then proceeds to file a very vigorous kick because of the aforesaid custom, broadly intimating that sky-pilots in general are long on gall and short on gratitude. There is certainly no reason why the preacher, who usually receives a good salary, should not pay for his poultices and pills. When he relieves cases of soul-sickness he does so "for the glory of God" and the long green. He expects to be paid twice for his services—once here and again in heaven. The doctor of medicine is not infrequently poorer in this world's goods than the preacher, and he looks forward to but one fee. He should not be deprived of that by men who sweetly sing:

"I would not live always, I ask not to stay."

If the doctors treat the dominies gratis it follows as a matter of course that they must recoup themselves by adding to the bills of their lay brethren, just as railway companies which carry preachers at half-rate must saddle the loss upon their other patrons.

. . .

Mintonville, Ky., not only sticks to its gods, but insists on clinging with a death grip to its good old orthodox devil, horns, hoofs and tail. The Rev. Gilham of the Christian church of that city, who has doubtless discovered recently that that unimportant portion of the world which moves and has its being outside of Mintonville had several centuries back diplomatically dropped the devil question, undertook to inform his flock that he, too had arrived at the conclusion that his Satanic Majesty was a myth, a delusion and a snare, a howling farce. The reverend gentleman's intentions were good, but he had reckoned without his congregation. They had always had a devil who was responsible for their pecadilloes; he was a convenient little institution to have around when the pecadilloes were a little more numerous than was compatible with the moral standard of Mintonville, and they realized that if the devil were removed from the Mintonville directory they would have to reform or shoulder their own shortcomings. Either course was quite too sad to contemplate. In fact the Mintonvillians positively would not contemplate them. Give them their devil and they could safely straddle between the horns of their dilemma. Remove their devil and they were undone. But Parson Gilham asserted that there was no devil. Mintonville had consequently to choose between their devil and their parson. The world could furnish more parsons but it couldn't furnish more devils. It was the parson and the devil for it and the red downed the black—the parson had to go. The reverend gentleman was ejected from his sacred office with scorn and contumely and likewise a number of pistol shots. It is to be supposed that the devil now reigns triumphant in Mintonville, while Gilham smooths down his clerical coat-tails from the horizontal to the proper perpendicular and wonders if he has not, like the proverbial parrot, talked too damned much.

* * * THE FOOTLIGHT FAVORITES. BY ETHELYN LESLIE HUSTON.

In the December ICONOCLAST there appeared a tirade on "The Stage and Stage Degenerates" that was as sweeping in its assertions as it was narrow in its views. The writer revels in reminiscences of his newspaper associations with the cheap beer-drinking, sand-floor class, swings their vices and vulgarities before the public, describes them as garbed in "loud patterned" trousers and snow- white overcoats and epitomizes the whole thing as an Augean stable, impure, impossible, vile, vulgar and bad. He then tells us calmly that "these are the representatives of their profession, so far as America is concerned," and he gives them to us as the "middle class of the people of the footlights."

If these are the "middle class," what is the next grade below? Where does he place the dividing line? Does he make no distinction between the vaudeville, continuous performance buffoons and the thousands who are "not stars," but working well and perhaps hoping? Does he call our scullery-maids and stable-boys "representative American middle class?" Does he call Mable Strickland and other dainty little hard-workers in minor parts typical of the hideous coarseness and vice he has described? Does he bracket THEM with his beer-drunk, easy-virtue "chorus-girls?" Does he realize all he means when he says of those he depicts "there were no stars among them, and none of the lower stratum?" Briefly, did he know what he was writing about?

When a man sits down on a curb stone with his feet in the gutter to "study life" and imagines himself a philosopher, while he moralizes on the muddy feet that pass him, he would probably feel grieved if the strong hand of some clear-headed individual lifted him up out of the gutter's filth and he was informed that much depended upon one's view being from a level, not an incline. We do not Judge our middle-class citizens by our cooks, and it is apt to suggest unwisdom, to express it very mildly, to gauge the men and women workers of the stage by beer-hall habitues and fleshling courtesans.

This an age of work and a generation of workers. The times, the conditions, the needs of the century are driving women out into the world as never before in the world's history. They must work to live and to help others live and in every line of work possible is woman found. The stage gives employment to thousands of women eminently fitted to entertain and amuse the public. Under ordinary conditions the great army of players find its lot a not unpleasant one. Women bears its harness lightly, to whom manual labor would be a mental and physical crucifixion. It is a labor of brain as well as body, of the soul as well as the senses, of the artistic as well as the prosaic. Its temptations are many and its pitfalls are many, but they are little, if any, more than are the temptations in many other fields of self-support for women. And notwithstanding the gentleman's profound deductions, there are a number of good women on the American stage even if they are not "given credit for being so by their fellow professionals"—and iconoclastic writers. And by these I do not mean the weary females described by Lizzie Annandale as reclining on the shoulders of their men companions, in mal-adorous day coaches on cross-continent "jumps." These women, if he will pardon the contradiction, are not the "representative middle class of the American stage." They are the scullery-maid class, for they are on the lowest rung of the professional ladder and few ever ascend from that lowest rung. It is their native element.

But these women who are neither "stars or the lower stratum," who study and labor, even though the labor be light through being one of love for their profession, who give a refinement and a sweetness to the many little dramas that appeal to critique and common folk alike, who speak to us of wife and sister and mother and sweetheart, and whose voices are as sweet and gestures as gentle and personalities as refined as are those of our own home women nestling safe in the firelight of our ingle-nook—these women are not immoral in a ratio of "ten to one." And with them, as with our home women, it is not their sense of morality that is their greatest safe-guard. It is their sense of refinement. It is a mistake to think that only Christian and moral women are virtuous. "Passion leaps o'er cold decree," and Christian precepts and moral teaching are cold and distant things when the blood leaps like molton lava through heart and brain. With Marguerite telling her beads, the prayers become but a babble of empty sound on her lips when the sweet poison of her lover's teachings crept through ear and heart and opened to her wondering, frightened dreams a Paradise of sense and sound and sweetness and dreamy, swooning loveliness before which her pictured pearl and golden heaven waxed chill and distant and austere. Prayers did not save Francesca from the sweet torment of her Passion and her Purgatory. Prayers save but rarely, for they are to darkness and to mystery that give back only the awful weight of silence—silence under which the frantic heart struggles and stifles as beneath a pall. Prayers reach out to an infinity that is shrouded always, but the lover's lips are sweet and the caress is close and the arms are warm and human. What wonder if the brain forgets when the heart thirsts and pleads? What wonder if the reason waver and faint when the winged god nestles close in the breast? What woman if the woman wake and thrill and "answers to the touch of one musician's hand" as an instrument that is silent till the master touch sweep the strings? What wonder if the marble warm and waken and throb to quick life beneath the passion of Pygmalion's kiss? What wonder if women love with an answering love if their God have so created? And what wonder if their prayer to him faint on their lips beneath the surging diapason of the waking heart beneath? If he so created, what then? If he "saw them made and said 'twas good," what then? If he made love chief, to deity and then destroy, its ecstacy blending with agony "as swells and swoons, across the wold the tinkling of the camel's bell," what then? If he made the greatest thing in the world and life speaks to life as a magnet to the pole, what then? Can you break that strong, silent current by a breathed invocation? Did not the Man cry from the cross in his exquisite agony, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!" And if his divine faith fainted on the threshold of his kingdom, is it strange if human faith sink beneath life's crucifixion and the babble of priest grow poor and harsh before the sweetness of "a little laughter and a little love"—the only hyssop in the sponge of vinegar? And we wander so far to find so little!

In Jean Paul's cry "How lonely is everyone in this wide charnal of the universe!"—is the explanation of—much.

We are as we are. And Allah is great.

And because we are as we are, it is fallacy to think that the good women, in the accepted sense of the term, are the only virtuous ones. Women of the stage and of the world ponder little on Moses and the prophets. Their lives are too full of grinding fact to reck much of unsubstantial fancies. And Prayer and Priest save women from little if Personality be not there. Teachings of virtue and morality are lip service and things of air. But when a woman's self rises to defend her honor—an honor that is a sacred thing in its own worth, not a question that will but win her reward in other life, then does true morality speak and then does woman find her greatest safeguard. A woman is but a weak thing who must cower behind the skirts of her religion to guard her purity. And these women of the stage who are its "middle class" are also its gentlewomen. For unfortunately its "stars" many of them but rival the other "stratum" in lawless infamy. In that, did the writer in December make his supreme mistake.

Temptation in the footlight world is strong, but a woman's pride is stronger. Under temptation's test, her religion might was dim, but her refinement would rise as a battlement in defense. Her church and creed might waver and sink, but that undefinable innocence which we call womanhood, would lead her, a Dian, through the fires of hell. In society and the slums a large percentage of women are courtesans by choice. The one has a refinement that is but a veneer, and the other has no refinement at all. And as with the world, so with the stage. In the middle class are found the truer gentlewomen. Women of the drama must of necessity be gentlewomen, the refinement must be innate, or they would fail utterly. An actress who is a gentlewoman can with her art stoop to portray sin, but an actress who is a common woman cannot rise to portray a refinement of which her coarse nature has no conception. Mrs. Kendal a woman who is as the wife of Caesar, can become a "Second Mrs. Tanguery" before the footlights. But Lizzie Annadale's chorus girl could never enact the role of a Mrs. Kendal on or off the stage. The former is a comparatively light task. The latter is an impossibility. And because they are refined women, though not necessarily "good" women, are they as a class virtuous women. Their instinctive womanhood would shrink from an impure life as quickly as they would lift their skirts from the mire of the gutter. The deadly chill of physical repulsion would be as strong in one case as in the other. In individual cases they have "sinned" as we term it, but qui voulez vous! The ratio on the stage is little larger than that of the world's middle class and not at all larger than that of the world's society women. I also object to those wild fanatics who would "elevate the stage," not because it would be Herculean labor, but because the aforesaid fanatics would find larger and more fruitful fields for their efforts in the shadow of their own church spire. Let them leave the women of the footlights alone and turn their attention to the women in the boxes. It would give a bored public relief and be distinctly and beautifully amusing—as an experiment. Waco, Texas, December 11, 1897.

* * * GINX'S BABY. BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

In an old book store I found the other day, a little book that should not have been forgotten. It was written almost twenty-eight years ago by a man named Jenkins, an Englishman, born in India, and educated in part, in the United States. The name of the book is "Ginx's Baby; His Birth and Other Misfortunes."

With the remarkable growth of altruism or humanitarianism in the last thirty years, with the application of sincere sympathy as one of the possible solvents of the mystery of misery, it is strange that this book should have passed from the minds of men. The book is a true satire. That is to say its irony is excited for the benefit of mankind. The pessimism of the story, its note of despair, is in reality, a summons to man to do better by his brother. Underlying its bitterness there is such a gentleness of heart as must uplift the reader's own.

The author has the great gift of humor, which all true pessimists possess, and none more than Schopenhauer. He loves humanity though he scourges it. He loves, above all, the little children whom Christ loved, as typifying the heart perfect in innocence.

Somewhat the quality of Dickens is in his method of thought, and his turns of expression; but he is not the evident artist that Dickens is. He does not seek opportunity to revel in mere rhetoric. He goes for the heart of his subject and his literary charms are displayed quite incidentally to his progress thereto. His stylism does not clog his story or cumber his argument. The result is that he produced a tract of the Church of Man which is a powerful argument for a realization in Man of the Church of God. His book is superbly human and "Ginx's Baby" deserves immortality with other dream- children of good men's hearts and minds in story and in song.

Room for Ginx's Baby in the gallery of undying children; with Marjorie Fleming, Sir Walter's "Bonnie, Wee Coodlin' Doo," with Pater's "Child in the House," with Ouida's "Bebe," with Mrs. Burnett's "Fauntleroy," with Barrie's "Sentimental Tommy," with all the little ones in the books of Dickens and the poems and stories of Eugene Field.

The child in literature is something new, comparatively. We need more of the effort to understand the child mind, the child heart, the child point of view. It will aid us to develop the child, if once we can enter his world and come into sympathy with his impression. It will purify ourselves, this fresh, new, beautiful world of the child's; its clear, pure air will wash clean our souls; its innocence of doom will revive our hope. The child is a soul fresh from God's mint. If only we could study it more we might re-gain, from the contemplation, some of our own lost innocence, and, when we come to die, go to our Maker, like Thackery's immortal Col. Newcombe, with our hearts "as a little child's."

But "Ginx's Baby" is not an idyl. It is a tragedy. It breathes the spirit of Malthus, only the spirit is transformed into one of pity for the victim of life rather than one of preservation of the nation. We are not, in this book, the victim of the baby. The baby is our victim. His story will illustrate the philosophy better than any attempt at interpretation, and the humor of the telling only intensifies the tragedy. "The name of the father of Ginx's Baby was Ginx. By a not unexceptional coincidence, its mother was Mrs. Ginx. The gender of Ginx's Baby was masculine." That is the first paragraph of the book, and there you have a hint of the flippant flavor; also a very strong suggestion of Mr. Charles Dickens. The hero of the book was a thirteenth child. Ominously humorous! The mother previously had distinguished herself. On October 25th, one year after marriage, Mrs. Ginx was safely delivered of a girl. No announcement of this appeared in the papers. On April 10th, following, "the whole neighborhood, including Great Smith Street, Marsham Street, Great and Little Peter Street, Regent Street, Horseferry Road, and Strutton Ground, was convulsed by the report a woman named Ginx had given birth to "a triplet, consisting of two girls and a boy." The Queen heard of it, as this birth got into the papers, and sent the mother three pounds. Protecting infant industry! And protection, it seems, resulted in over-production for, in a twelvemonth, there were triplets again, two sons and a daughter. Her Majesty sent four pounds. The neighbors protested and began to manifest their displeasure uncouthly, so the Ginx family removed into Rosemary Street, where the tale of Mrs. Ginx's offspring reached one dozen. Then Ginx mildly entered protest. If there were any more, singles, twins or triplets, he would drown him, her or them, in the water-butt. This was immediately after the arrival of Number 12.

Here, under the chapter-heading of "Home, Sweet Home," the author, still reminiscent of Dickens, but delightfully compact and laconic, describes the miserable dwelling of the Ginx's with a bitterness of humor that mocks the sentiment of Howard Payne's song. As a specimen of clean realism, this description is more effective than anything of Zola's; for Zola's realism is idealism gone mad. The squalor of the slum is heightened by the associations that cling to the name Rosemary. A bit of sermonizing upon the responsibilities of landlords for the souls in that slum, and the author reverts to Ginx and his family.

"Ginx had an animal affection for his wife, that preserved her from unkindness even in his cups." You thank the author for not succumbing to realism and making Ginx a brute. Ginx worked hard and gave his wife his earnings, less sixpence, with which sum he retreated, on Sundays, from his twelve children, to the ale-house to listen sleepily while ale-house demagogues prescribed remedies for State abuses. He was ignorant of policies and issues; simply one of a million victims of the theories upon which statesmen experiment in legislation and taxation. He was one of the many dumb and almost unfeeling "chaotic fragments of humanity" to be hewn into shape in one of two ways; either by "coarse artists seeking only petty profit, unhandy, immeasurably impudent," or by instruction to be made "civic corner-stone polished after the similitude of a palace." He was appalled by the many mouths he had to feed. He was touched by his wife's continuous heroism of sacrifice for the children, and he felt, in a dim fashion, something of an intuition of "her unsatisfied cravings and the dense motherly horrors that sometimes brooded over her" as she nursed her infants. She believed that God sends food to fill the mouths He sends. She had been able to get along. She would be able to get along.

Ginx, feeling another infant straw would break his back. determined to drown the straw. Mrs. Ginx, clinging to No. Twelve, listened aghast. The stream of her affections, though divided into twelve rills, would not have been exhausted in twenty-four, and her soul, forecasting its sorrows, yearned after that nonentity Number Thirteen. Ginx sought to comfort her by the suggestion that she could not have any more. But she knew better.

After eighteen months the baby was born. Ginx thought it all out before the event. "He wouldn't go on the parish. He couldn't keep another youngster to save his life. He would not take charity. There was nothing to do but drown the baby." He must have talked his intentions at the ale-house, for the people in the neighborhood watched her "time" with interest. Going home one afternoon, he saws signs of excitement around his door. He entered. He took up the little stranger and bore it from the room. "His wife would have arisen but a strong power called weakness held her back." Out on the street, with the crowd following him, Ginx stopped to consider. "It is all very well to talk about drowning your baby, but to do it you need two things—water and opportunity. He turned toward Vauxhall Bridge. The crowd cried "Murder!"

"Leave me alone nabors," shouted Ginx; "this is my own baby and I'll do wot I likes with it. I kent keep it an' if I've got anythin' I can't keep, it's best to get rid of it, ain't it? This child's goining over Vauxhall Bridge."

The women clung to his arms and coat-tails. A man happened along. "A foundling? Confound the place, the very stones produce babies."

"It weren't found at all. It's Ginx's baby," cried the crowd.

"Ginx's baby. Who's Ginx?'

"I am," said Ginx.

"Well?"

"Well!"

"He's going to drown it!" came the chorus.

"Going to drown it? Nonsense!" said the officer.

"I am," said Ginx.

"But, bless my heart, that's murder!"

"No, 'tain't," said Ginx. "I've twelve already at home. Starvashon's shure to kill this 'un. Best save it the trouble."

The officer declares this is quite contrary to law and he recites the law, but that doesn't affect Ginx. He fails utterly to see why, if Parliament will not let him abandon the child, Parliament does not provide for the child; for all the other twelve. The officer declares that the parish has enough to do to take care of foundlings and children of parents who can't or won't work. Says Ginx: "Jest so. You'll bring up bastards and beggars' pups but you won't help an honest man keep his head above water. This child's head is goin' under water anyhow!" and he dashed for the bridge, with the screaming crowd at his heels.

A philosopher interposes at this stage with a query as to how Ginx came to have so many children. Of course Ginx had to laugh. The philosopher urges that Ginx had no right to bring children into the world unless he could feed, clothe and educate them, and Ginx replies that he's like to know how he could help it, as a married man. The philosopher goes over the old, old tale of rationalism in life. Ginx should not have married a poor woman, should not have gone on sub-dividing his resources by the increase of what must be a degenerate offspring, should not have married at all.

"Ginx's face grew dark. He was thinking of 'all those years' and the poor creature that, from morning to night and Sunday to Sunday, in calm and storm, had clung to his rough affections; and the bright eyes and the winding arms so often trellised over his tremendous form, and the coy tricks and laughter that had cheered so many tired hours. He may have been much of a brute, but he felt that, after all, that sort of thing was denied to dogs and pigs."

The philosopher could not answer these thoughts nor the rejoinder question to his own: what is a man or woman to do that doesn't marry?

And so the argument proceeds, the philosopher losing ground all the time because his rationality is based upon changing man's nature, not on making something out of "what's nateral to human beings." The act of parliament idea of solving the problem is riddled effectively by a stonemason, who points out that the head-citizen is not so worthy as the heart-citizen. In brief, the philosopher is routed by the doctrine that love is better than law.

Ginx proceeds to the river again, but is stopped by a nun who asks for the child. She uncovers the queer ruby face and kisses it. After this Ginx could not have touched a hair of the child's head. His purpose dies but his perplexity is alive. The nun takes the child, and Ginx, in gratitude for her assurance that the child shall not be sent back to him, stands treat for the crowd. The child's life in the convent is material for some good satiric writing upon the question of his salvation. The picture is absurdly over-drawn so far as its effectiveness against conventional charity is concerned, but it touches the question of religious bigotry surely and strongly. Indeed the method of treatment here verges closely upon the Rabelaisian, as where the sisters want to make the sign of the cross upon Mrs. Ginx's breasts before allowing the baby to suck. Mrs. Ginx refused "the Papish idolaters" and the Protestant Detectoral Association is brought to the rescue of the child from superstition.

A little man with a keen Roman nose—he could scent Jesuits a mile off—took up the cause of the child and it got into court. The matter became a cause celebre. London was in a turmoil over "the Papal abduction." The author sketches it all graphically with a convincing fidelity of caricature. The "Sisters of Misery" triumphed. They retained the baby. Then after attempting to sanctify the baby—a ceremony wholly imaginary and described with a smutch of revolting coarseness—the sisters send the baby packing back to the Protestant Detectoral Association.

The Protestants had him, but the Dissenters protested against his being given to an Anglican refuge. The scene at the mass-meeting to celebrate young Ginx's rescue from the incubus of a delusive superstition is described with rare appreciation of the foibles of character. The bombast, the cant, the flapdoodle and flubdub, the silly unction of different kinds of preachers are "done to a hair." Five hours the meeting raged, and at last a resolution that the Metropolitan pulpit should take up the subject, and the churches take up a collection for the Baby on the next Sunday having been passed, the meeting adjourned—forgetting all about the Baby. A strange woman took the Baby "for the sake of the cause." He had been provided with a splendid layette by an enthusiastic Protestant Duchess.

"Some hours later Ginx's Baby, stripped of the Duchess' beautiful robes was found by a policeman, lying on a door step in one of the narrow streets not a hundred yards" from the meeting place. "By an ironical chance he was wrapped in a copy of the largest daily paper in the world."

"The Baby was recovered, the preachers "praught." The collections and the donations and subscriptions amounted to thirteen hundred and sixty pounds, ten shillings, and three and one-half pence. How the money was spent is shown in a deliciously absurd balance-sheet. Not quite 100 pounds were spent upon the Baby. The other money was wasted in various forms and styles of "guff." "In an age of luxury," says the Baby's biographer, "we are grown so luxurious as to be content to pay agents to do our good deeds, but they charge us three hundred per cent. for the privilege."

How the police found and treated the Baby is a chapter full of subtle sarcasm, leading up to the still more sarcastic portrayal of the way the Baby fared in the hands of the Committee appointed to take care of him. He was likely to be torn to pieces between contending divines. The debates in Committee are illuminating expositions of different varieties of bigotry. His body was almost forgotten, while the philanthropists were trying to decide what to do with his soul. Few of the reverend gentlemen "would be content unless they could seize him when his young nature was plastic and try to imprint on immortal clay the trade-mark of some human invention."

Twenty-three meetings of the Committee were held and unity was as far of at the last as at the first. The Secretary asked the Committee to provide money to meet the Baby's liabilities, but the Committee instantly adjourned and no effort afterwards could get a quorum together. The persons who had charge of the foundling began to dun the Secretary and to neglect the child, now thirteen months old. They sold his clothes and absconded from the place where they had been "framing him for Protestantism." As a Protestant question Ginx's Baby vanished from the world.

Wrapped in a potato sack, the baby was found one night, on the pavement exactly over a line dividing two parishes. The finder was a business man. He noted the exact spot where the child lay and took it to—the other parish. He would not be taxed for its support. The parish guardians would not accept the child. As the man who found the child was a guardian of the other parish, he was trying to foist a bastard,—perhaps his own—upon their parish. A motion was made to "get rid of the brat." "A church warden, who happened to be a gentleman," suggested the services of a lawyer. The brutality of the guardians as they examined and discussed the child is depicted with terrible power. The lawyer says the Board will have to take the Baby, pro tem, or "create an unhappy impression on the minds of the public."

"Damn the public!" said Mr. Stink, a dog-breeder member of the Board, thus antecedently plagiarizing an American millionaire. The parish accepts the Baby under protest, and a formal written protest addressed to the Baby, name unknown, is pinned on the potato sack. The two parishes go to law about the child. Neither wishes to take care of it. At Saint Bartemeus's workhouse, a notice was posted forbidding the officials, assistants and servants to enter the Baby's room, pendente lite, or to render it any service or assistance on pain of dismissal. The Baby was nigh starvation. The master of the work-house stealthily fed him on pap, saying in a loud voice as he did so, "Now youngster, this is without prejudice, remember! I give you due notice—without prejudice."

The Baby became ill. A nobleman discovered him and laid his case before a magistrate. The papers made a sensation on the Baby's case. There was a terrific hullabaloo. An inquiry was held. The guardians became furious. "The reports of their proceedings read like the vagaries of a lunatic asylum or the deliberations of the American Senate." They discharged the kindly master. The Baby was locked in a room. Food was passed to him on a stick. The inquiry was denounced and the bewildered public gnashed its teeth at everybody who had anything to do with, or say of, Ginx's Baby. "At last St. Bartemeus' parish had to keep him and the guardians, keeping carefully within the law, neglected nothing that could sap little Ginx's vitality, deaden his instincts, derange moral action, cause hope to die within his infant breast almost as soon as it was born." Every pauper was to them an obnoxious charge to be reduced to a MINIMUM or NIL. The Baby's constitution alone prevented his reduction to NIL.

The bill of costs against St. Bartemeus was 1,600 pounds. Just as it was taxed, one of the persons who had deserted Ginx's Baby was arrested for theft. The Baby's clothes, given by the Duchess, were found in this person's possession. She confessed all about the Baby, and so the guardians traced the Baby's father and delivered to Ginx, through an agent, the famous child, with the benediction—"There he is; damn him!"

Mrs. Ginx couldn't recognize the Baby. His brothers and sisters would have nothing to do with him. Ginx took the Baby out one night, left it on the steps of a large building in Pall Mall, and slunk away out of the pages of "this strange, eventful history." The Baby piped. The door of the house, a club, opened and the baby was taken in. It was the Radical Club, but it was as conservative as it could be in its reception of the waif, and it was only in perfunctory kindness that the Club gave him shelter. The Fogey Club heard of the Baby and bethought itself of making campaign material of him. The Fogies instructed their "organs" to dilate upon the disgraceful apathy of the Radicals toward the foundling. The Fogies kidnapped the Baby; the Radicals stole him back. The Baby was again a great "question." However, other questions supervened, although it was understood that Sir Charles Sterling was "to get a night" to bring up the case of Ginx's Baby in Parliament. Associations were formed in the metropolis for disposing of Ginx's Baby by expatriation or otherwise. A peer suddenly sprung the matter by proposing to send the Baby to the Antipodes at the expense of the nation. The question was debated with elaborate stilted stultitude and the noble lord withdrew his motion.

The Baby tired of life at the clubs. He borrowed some clothes, some forks, some spoons, without leave, and then took his leave. No attempt was made to recover him. He was fifteen. "He pitted his wits against starvation." He found the world terribly full everywhere he went. He went through a career of penury, of honest and dishonest callings, of 'scapes and captures, imprisonments and other punishments.

Midnight on Vauxhall Bridge! The form of a man emerged from the dark and outlined itself against the haze of sky. There was a dull flash of a face in the gloom. The shadow leaped far out into the night. Splash! "Society, which, in the sacred names of Law and Charity, forbade the father to throw his child over Vauxhall Bridge, at a time when he was alike unconscious of life and death, has at last driven him over the parapet into the greedy waters."

The questions of the book I have condensed here are as alive to-day as are thousands of other Ginx's Babies in all our big cities. While philanthropists and politicians, priests and preachers, men and women theorize about the questions, the questions grow "more insoluble." What is to be done? is the first question. How is it to be done is a question which is secondary and its discussion is useless until the first is settled. Too much State drove Ginx's Baby into the Thames. What's everybody's business is nobody's business. If the uncountable babies of innumerable Ginx's are to be aided, some one must aid them for the mere pleasure there is in loving-kindness.

A baby is a human being, not a problem. A baby can't be explained away by pure reason, because he didn't come by that route. Love brought him here and only Love can nourish him to the fullness of growth in soul and mind. True many come who, seemingly, were better drowned like surplus puppies or kittens. But who shall select those to survive? Grecian wisdom once attempted to improve on "natural selection" and Greece is the ghost of a vanished glory. Why shouldn't Ginx have drowned his Baby—or himself before the multiplication in the result of which the Baby was a unit?

I don't know why, unless because there is, in every life, even the most successful, apparently, enough of unhappiness and failure and emptiness to justify, at a given moment, a "leap in the dark." This logic of suicide would annihilate the race. The unwelcome Baby may be the best. Life must try us all. Those who do not stand the test disappear. Their own weakness eliminate them. Myriads must fail that a few may succeed a very little.

Ginx at least owed his Baby reparation for bringing about the first misfortune, his birth. Ginx was a sophist. His mercy of murder for the child was regard for himself. His reasoning was right. His heart was full of self and, ergo, wrong. Ginx surrendered before the fight was fought. So did the Baby. There is nothing for it, my good masters, but a fight to a finish. Yes, even though Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, still must we fight, like Macbeth, and all the more valiantly for that we know our sins are heavy upon our heads and hearts. "Courage, my comrades, the devil is dead," said Denys of Burgundy. But there is a greater courage, my comrades: it is fighting the devil who never dies until the devil in us all shall die. This is not the courage of despair, but of hope and faith that by conquest of ourselves shall Evil be slain, though only in a fair, far time, and by scores of deaths of us and of our kind. That is why the book "Ginx's Baby" is false in its demonstration that it had been better if the "hero" had been thrown off the bridge at first. Its philosophy is the philosophy of the "quitter." The only courage is to endure.

And what shall we do for the Ginx's Babies so multitudinous in their misery? These, too, we must endure. It were well to love them a little, as babies, and not to discuss them so much as "questions." It were well if there were a little more individual charity; a good deal less of the kind described by Boyle O'Reilly as conducted "in the name of a cautious statistical Christ." If every one would do a little good for the poor, the unfortunate, the afflicted, the sum of all our doing would be a great deal of good. Take a penny from every person in the United States and give it to one man and he has seven hundred thousand dollars. Every Ginx's Baby in any land can be helped somewhat, and Ginx himself must do his share, to the full limit of his capacity for doing. We cannot save them all; cannot make their lives successes. Success is the sum of many failures. A million seeds must die that one rose may bloom. You or I may be the means, in part, of saving one child from the plunge of Vauxhall Bridge or through the gallows-trap. And one is worth while. That is the way to "look out for number one." Individual effort for individuals is the true humanitarianism. Lift up the person nearest you, who needs assistance. Bend to him and feel your own statue increase by so much as you uplift him. Et voila tout. St. Louis, December 16th, 1897.

* * * WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH MISSOURI? BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY.

The art of politics in Missouri is not more depraved than in most other states, I imagine; but it seems that in Missouri the practitioners of that art are somewhat coarser-grained and smaller-minded than men in the like charlatanry elsewhere. I think I may write of them and their methods in the capacity of critic, without obtruding my prejudices as a gold-bug.

Missouri, like every other Western State, took kindly to the silver theory; indeed, possessing, as one of its chief citizens, Mr. Bland, a champion of silver for thirty years, Missouri was as ready for 16 to 1 as any silver producing State. "Coin's" book found welcome wide and warm when it appeared among a people who admired Mr. Bland, and who had equally admired "Farmer" Hatch.

But while the people of Missouri were for silver it was only partly in deference to popular opinion that the Democratic party declared for that doctrine.

When Col. Chas. H. Jones became editor of the Republic, coming from Jacksonville, Florida, he was taken up by the then Governor David R. Francis, a grain merchant, or speculator, a very rich man and an aristocrat. The two were fast friends until, Col. Jones having married, the wife of the governor, for reasons sufficient to herself, refused to receive Mrs. Jones. Out of this social episode grew a feud. As the first result of that feud Col. Jones was forced out of the Republic. He went to the New York World. Ad interim, however, he managed to defeat the plan of President Cleveland to name Mr. Francis as a member of his cabinet in 1893. When Col. Jones fell out with Mr. Francis, the editor made an alliance with Mr. Joel Stone, who succeeded Mr. Francis as governor of Missouri.

In course of time Col. Jones was sent West to take charge of the Post-Dispatch. When he arrived in St. Louis he conferred with Governor Stone. Col. Jones wanted to destroy Francis, who had control of the Democratic party machinery. Francis had been "mentioned" for president. He was the brilliant, if chilly, leader of the party. He had wealth and he and his friends could "take care of" the visiting rural committeeman. Col. Jones scented the silver sentiment in the State. That sentiment suggested, naturally, antipathy to wealthy bosses and "grain gamblers." Col. Jones declared that the way to destroy Francis was by "taking up silver." And Col. Jones "took it up" with a vengeance. The sentiment had been lurking among the people all the time. For years the party committees warned the speakers to "steer clear of the money question." Col. Jones in print and Governor Stone on the stump, appealed to the people on the very thing the old rulers of the party had hedged on, and the battle was on.

Mr. Francis evaded the fight. He wanted harmony. He was suave and clammy but non-committal. He did not wish to come out for silver. He did not wish to oppose the silver people. Once or twice he threatened to fight and then he threw up his hands. Missouri declared for silver at 16 to 1, without a dissenting voice in the convention. The State committee was enlarged to render Mr. Francis' friends innocuous. Col. Jones and Governor Stone voted to support Bland for President at the Chicago convention and the National battle was precipitated. When Missouri declared for silver, with a candidate who represented the silver issue wholly and whose character endeared him especially to the bucolics everywhere, the silver sentiment became a political force to reckon with the stampede that ended with the nomination of Mr. Bryan was started.

So it seems to me that if Mrs. Francis had swallowed her prejudices and received Mrs. Jones there might have been a great deal of different history. Mrs. Jones was the Helen of the Siege of Wall Street. This incident is important only as showing, once again, how trifling things affect the destinies of Nations.

Had Mr. Francis and Col. Jones never disagreed, Col. Jones never would have left the "Republic." Col. Jones would have stood by Francis' interests as a banker and monied man. Col. Jones never would have obtained control of the "Post-Dispatch." Silver sentiment would have been smothered by the politicians of Missouri and Bland never would have been a candidate. There would have been no Missouri alliance with Mr. Altgeld and the combination of peculiar political ability that was attracted to Stone. Jones and Altgeld never would have dominated the Chicago convention as wholly as they did. To resent an affront to Mrs. Jones the Democratic party was rent asunder. Mr. Bland was taken up to destroy Mr. Francis and was himself destroyed in due time. The senators from Missouri, Messrs. Vest and Cockrell, were forced into the anti-Francis movement under threat of defeat by the men who had identified themselves with the popular feeling for their own purposes.

The late Mr. McCullagh of the Globe-Democrat, told me, when Vest became a silver champion that it was because he had to do so to retain his seat, and that Mr. McCullagh was a friend and extravagant admirer of Mr. Vest and his abilities.

Whatever one may think of silver he must admit that the turning down of Mr. Francis was a good thing. Mr. Francis represented the dodging Democracy. He stood for the evasion of a great issue; for intellectual and moral cowardice, for nauseous neutralism. Mr. Francis was the impersonation of political insincerity. He thought of the party—of keeping the party together, with himself on top—and his stand for what the opponents of silver call "sound money" was a very perfunctory performance. He never declared himself against the Chicago platform until he was offered the Secretaryship of the Interior, vice Hoke Smith, resigned.

In this we have a picture of the man whom I saw alluded to the other day as "the leader of the sound money forces in Missouri." A leader! Why, he couldn't be induced to come within the borders of the State, during the fight, nor did he come until he came home to vote, when, under the inspiration of a stupendous sound money parade, he declared himself.

When silver was the cry every spoilsman took it up, and the fact is that some of the loudest shouting was done by men who cared not at all for the doctrine. All the politicians got on the popular side. Every fellow that wanted an office became a shrieker for silver. All the men who had truckled to Francis while he was in power left him and went with the crowd. The party in Missouri had been in power for years and the same old gang had controlled the offices. They stayed together and they still retained their grip upon the offices. The gang got together on silver as upon everything else. The elimination of Francis carried out of the party no politicians of note. They remained. The corporation "attorneys" or lobbyists stood by the regulars. The fine workers of the Missouri Pacific, the 'Frisco, the Burlington roads were hand in glove with the party which was making war on corporations, with its mouth. Some of the railroads contributed to the support of the men who were "denouncing them in unmeasured terms." No one was more regular than "Bill" Phelps, the Missouri Pacific lobbyist, against whom Governor Stone and Col. Jones made war in connection with the enactment of a fellow-servant law. Col. Spencer of the Burlington was with the regulars too. All the party hacks, the caucus bosses, the township and country and congressional district leaders who had made the ticket for years fell in line. There was made no real change in party management. Mr. Francis and his lieutenant, Mr. Maffitt, were turned down, but the crowd that had trained with them went over to the opposition. I am not aspersing the silver cause. I mean to say only that the gang that ran things joined the silver cause in order to stay in power. There were no politicians at all in the ranks of the Missouri Gold Democrats. The politicians seized upon silver, which represented a general desire for change, in order to fasten themselves more thoroughly upon the party.

The result was that the nominations for State offices went to the same old crowd. Mr. Sesueur was nominated for Secretary of State. Mr. Siebert, who had been auditor, was nominated again. Frank Pitts, an ex-Confederate, who had been a candidate for a dozen things, but who, when defeated, never had done aught but "take his medicine," was nominated for Treasurer. Mr. Lon V. Stephens, who had been Treasurer was nominated for Governor and elected. He had been appointed Treasurer by Francis after the Noland defalcation, had been elected and had changed his allegiance from Francis to Stone. Mr. Stone, a man with somewhat of the scholarly taint to him, inclined to think, but prone to machination, ambitious, vindictive, able, elusive, made Stephens the nominee, and has been "sore at himself" ever since.