Part 6

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

* * * SPEAKING OF SPIRITUALISM.

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

"Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime,"

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * * 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.

. . .