Part 19

The very best of people have a touch of the complaint --"the trail of the serpent is over us all." Even our young ladies are said to be, to a certain extent, Humbugs. I have been told that many of them wear patent complexions, "boughten" bangs, and pad out scrawny forms until they appear voluptuous Junos, and thereby deceive and ensnare, bedazzle and beguile the unsuspecting sons of men. I have been told that many of them who are soft- voiced angels before marriage can give a rusty buzz-saw cards and spades and beat it blind after they have succeeded in landing the confiding sucker. But perhaps such tales are only the bitter complainings of miserable Benedicts who have been soundly beaten at their own game of humbuggery. Marriage is, perhaps, the only game of chance ever invented at which it is possible for both players to lose. Too often, after much sugar-coated deception, and many premeditated misdeals on both sides, one draws a blank and the other a booby. After patient angling in the matrimonial pool, one lands a stingaree and the other a bull-head. One expects to capture a demi-god who hits the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum who comes home from the lodge at 2 a.m. and whoops and howls for her to come down and help him hunt for the keyhole, and is then snailed in by a policeman before she can frame a curtain lecture or find the rolling pin.

. . .

False Pride is the father of humbuggery, the parent of Fraud. We are Humbugs because we desire that our fellows think us better, braver, brighter, perhaps richer than we really are. We practice humbuggery to attain social position to which we are entitled by neither birth nor brains, to acquire wealth for which we render no equivalent, to procure power we cannot wisely employ.

While proclaiming love of democracy we purchase peers for our daughters. While boasting liberty of speech we assail like demons those who presume to dissent from our opinions in either religion or politics.

History is full of Humbugs and liberty itself oftimes but a gilded lie. No man is really free who is dependent upon the good will of others for employment. There can be no true liberty where Prejudice usurps the throne of Reason. Men are slaves instead of sovereigns when they suffer themselves to be held in iron thrall by political dogma or religious creed, blindly accepting the ipse dixit of things instead of exercising to the utmost the intelligence which God had given them.

I have said that charity itself is ofttimes a Humbug. It is so when it becomes the handmaid of ostentation instead of the true almoner of the heart; or when men give to the poor only because it is "lending to the Lord," then expect compound interest.

That philanthropist is a fraud who, after piling up a colossal fortune at the expense of the common people, leaves it to found an educational or eleemosynary institute when death calls him across the dark river. Knowing that Charon's boat is purely a passenger packet--that carries no freight, however precious--he drops his dollars with a sigh; but determined to reap some benefit from boodle his itching hand can no longer hold, he decrees that it be used to found some charitable fake to prevent himself being forgotten--some pitiful institute where a few of the wretched victims of his rapacious greed may get a plate of starvation soup, or a prayer-book, and bless their benefactor's name. The very monument erected over bones of the sanctimonious old skin-flint is a fraud; flaunts a string of colossal falsehoods in the face of the world; piously points to heaven--perhaps to indicate that Satan refused to receive him and sent him back to St. Peter with a request that he make other arrangements.

Many of the martyrs whose memory we revere, of the saints we apotheosize, of the heroes we enshrine in history, are one-third fraud and two-thirds fake. The man who ran grow in grace while his pet corn's in chancery, or lose an election without spilling his moral character; who can wait an hour for his dinner without walking all over the nerves of his wife, or crawl out of bed in the middle of his first nap and rustle till the cold, gray dawn with a brace of colicky kids, without broadly insinuating that he was a copper-riveted, nickel-plated, automatic, double-cylinder idiot to ever get married, is a greater hero than he that taketh a city.

The place to take the true measure of a man is not the market-place or the amen-corner, not the forum or the field, but at his fireside. There he lays aside his mask and you may learn whether he's imp or angel, king or cur, hero or Humbug. I care not what the world says of him --whether it crown him with bays or pelt him with bad eggs; I care never a copper what his reputation or religion may be: If his babes dread his home-coming and his better-half swallows her heart every time she has to ask him for a five dollar bill, he's a fraud of the first water, even tho' he prays night and morn till he's black in the face and howls hallelujah till he shakes the eternal hills. But if his children rush to the front gate to greet him, and love's own sunshine illumes the face of his wife when she hears his footfall, you can take it for granted that he's true gold, for his home's a heaven, and the Humbug never gets that near the great white throne of God. He may be a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist, a Mormon and a mugwump; he may buy votes in blocks-of-five and bet on the election; he may deal 'em from the bottom of the deck and drink beer till he can't tell a silver dollar from a circular saw, and still be an infinitely better man than the cowardly little Humbug who's all suavity in society, but who makes his home a hell--who vents upon the hapless heads of wife and children the ill-nature he would like to inflict on his fellow-men, but dares not. I can forgive much in that fellow mortal who would rather make men swear than women weep; who would rather have the hate of the whole he-world than the contempt of his wife --who would rather call anger to the eyes of a king than fear to the face of a child.

The hero is not he that strives with the world for witness--who seeks the bubble fame at the cannon's brazen lip and risks his life that he may live forever.

"Think not that helm and harness are signs of valor true; Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battles ever knew."

To bear with becoming grace the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; to find our heaven in others' happiness, and for their sake to sacrifice and suffer wrongs that might be righted with a thread of steel; to live an honest life in a land where Truth doth feed on crusts while Falsehood fattens at Lucullean feasts, requires more true manhood, more moral stamina, more unadulterated SAND than to follow a flag into the very jaws of hell or die for the faith in the auto da fe. Heroes? Why unurn the ashes of the half-forgotten dead and pore o'er the musty pages of the past for names to glorify? If you would find heroes grander, martyrs more noble and saints of more sanctity than Rubens ever painted or immortal Homer sang; who, without Achilles' armor, have slain an hundred Hectors; without Samsonian locks have torn the lion; without the sword of Michael have thrown down the gage to all the embattled hosts of hell, seek not in the musty tomes of history, but in the hearts and homes of the self-sacrificing wives and mothers of this great world.

"God could not be everywhere," says the proverb, "therefore he made mothers."

Let the heroes of history have their due; still I imagine the world would have been much the same had Alexander died of cholera-infantum or grown up a harmless dude. I don't think the earth unbalanced would from its orbit fly had Caesar been drowned in the Rubicon, or Cleveland never been born. I imagine that Greece would have humbled the Persian pride had there been no Thermopylae, that Rome would have ruled the world had Scaevola's good right hand not hissed in the Tuscan fire. It is even possible that civilization would have stood the shocks had "Lanky Bob" and "Gentleman Jim" met on Texas soil --that the second-term boom of "our heroic young Christian governor" would have lost no gas. One catfish does not make a creek nor one hero a nation. The waves do not make the sea, but the sea furnishes forth the waves. Leonidas were lost to history but for the three hundred nameless braves who backed his bluff. Had there been but one Cromwell Charles the First would have kept his head. In Washington's deathless splendor gleams the glory of forgotten millions, and the history of Bonaparte is written with blood of the unknown brave.

. . .

Humbuggery, fraud, deception everywhere.

"All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players"--

Momus the major-domo, the millions en masque. Even friendship is becoming a screaming farce, intended to promote the social fortune or fill the purse. We fawn that thrift may follow; are prodigal of sweet words because they cost nothing and swell the sails of many a rich argosy; but weigh every penny we put forth, and carefully calculate the chance of gain or loss. It's heads I win, tails you lose, and when we cannot play it on that principle we promptly jump the game.

"Who steals my purse steals trash."

That's Shakespeare.

"He that filches from me my good name . . . makes me poor indeed."

That's nonsense. Reputation is but the ephemeral dew on character's everlasting gold; but he that steals a human heart and tramples it beneath his brutal heel; he that feigns a friendship he does not feel; he that fawns upon his fellows and hugs them hard and after scandals them, is the foulest fraud in all this land of fakes, the most hideous Humbug in all hell's unclean hierarchy.

I am sometimes tempted to believe that the only friendship that will stand fire is that of a yellow dog for a pauper negro. Strike a friend for a small loan and his affection grows suddenly cold; lose your fortune and your sweetheart sends you word that she will be a sister to you; your brother will betray you for boodle, your father fights you for a foolish flag and your heirs-at-law will dance when they hear of your death; but the devotion of a yaller dog for a worthless nigger hath all seasons for its own.

. . .

But the Humbug for whom I have least use is the man who assiduously damns the Rum Demon; makes tearful temperance talks; ostentatiously votes the prohibition ticket; groans like a sick calf hit by a battering-ram whenever he sees a young man come out of a barroom; then sneaks up a dirty alley, crawls thro' the side door of a second-class saloon; calls for the cheapest whiskey in the shop, runs the glass over trying to get the worth of his money; pours it down at a gulp and scoots in a hurry lest somebody ask him to treat; who has a chronic toothache --in the stomach--which nothing but drugstore whiskey will relieve; who keeps a jug of dollar-a-gallon bug-juice hid under his bed and sneaks to it like a thieving hyena digging up a dead nigger--rents his property for saloon purposes, then piously prays the Lord to protect the young from temptation.

. . .

But perhaps the prince of Humbugs, the incarnation of fraud, the apotheosis of audacity, is the street-corner politician. He towers above his fellow fakes like Saul above his brethren. I have been time and again instructed in the most intricate problems of public polity--questions that have perplexed the wisest statesmen of the world-- by men who had never read a single standard work on political economy, and who could not tell to save their souls--granting that they possess such perishable property-- whether Adam Smith wrote the "Wealth of Nations" or the Lord's Prayer; who were not familiar with the constitution of their own state, or the face of a receipted wash-bill; who could scarce tell a sloop from a ship, a bill of lading from a sight draft; a hydraulic ram from a he-goat unless they were properly labeled. Yet no question can arise in metaphysics or morals, government or generalship, upon which these great little men do not presume to speak with the authoritative assurance of a Lord Chief Justice--or a six-foot woman addressing a four-foot husband. They invariably know it all. They could teach Solomon and the Seven Wise Men wisdom, and had they been on earth when Almighty God wrote the Ten Commandments they would have moved an amendment or drafted a minority report.

And these are the fellows who frame our political platforms and dominate our elections--whose boundless cupidity, colossal ignorance and supernal gall bring about starvation in a land of plenty--divide the most industrious and progressive people that ever graced the footstool of Almighty God into bloated millionaires and groveling mendicants.