Chapter 22

I once discovered in Massachusetts what I considered to be the world's meanest man. It was Rev. Spenser B. Meeser, engineer of a Worcester gospel-mill. He was a beggar's brat who had been clothed, fed and educated by old Stephen Girard's bounty, but when he grew to manhood--or doghood--he puked on the grave of his benefactor because the latter elected to be an Atheist instead of a bigoted Baptist. I could not at the time conceive of anything meaner wearing the name of man, of a crime blacker than base ingratitude, of aught more damnable than calumniation of the honored dead; but Massachusetts will have to surrender the pennant of infamy to the South. Texas has succeeded in producing two men, either of whom is infinitely meaner than Meeser. The latter did no more than insult the memory of the man whose bread he had broken, and he did this as an excuse for not contributing a little money towards building him a monument. The meanness of Meeser was solely mercenary--he found it easier to slander the dead than to give up a dollar. The San Antonio lawyers sought to turn a black rape-fiend loose to defile the women of the South, to endanger their own daughters; and to perpetrate this crime strove with tooth and nail to commit one even more damnable.

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.