Chapter 10

But the Gall of the girl who puts her picture in the papers, accompanied by a paid puff of her "purty," scarce equals that of the conceited maid who imagines she has only to look at a man and giggle a few times to "mash him cold"--to get his palpitating heart on a buckskin string and swing it hither-and-yon at pleasure. How the great he-world does suffer at the hands of those heartless young coquettes--if half it tells 'em be true! David said in his haste that all men are liars. And had he carefully considered the matter he would have come to the same conclusion. Washington may have told his father the truth about that cherry-tree; but later in life he became entirely too popular with the ladies for a man unable to lie.

It is natural for men to pay court to a pretty woman as for flies to buzz about a molasses barrel; but not every fly that buzzes expects to get stuck, I beg to state. The man who doesn't tell every woman who will listen to him --excepting, perhaps, his wife--that she's pretty as a peri, even though she be homely enough to frighten a mugwump out of a fat federal office; that she's got his heart grabbed; that he lives only in the studied sunshine of her store- teeth smile and is hungering for an opportunity to die for her dear sake--well, he's an angel, and he-seraphs are almighty scarce I beg of you to believe. Since Adonis died and Joseph was gathered to his fathers none have appeared that I am aware of. These young gentlemen were all right, I suppose; but I'd like to see either of them get elected nowadays on the Democratic ticket in Texas.

But feminine conceit, fed on flattery, were as milk-shake unto mescal, as a kiss by mail to one by moonlight compared with the insufferable egotism of the "pretty man" who puts his moustache up in curl-papers and perfumes his pompadour; who primps and postures before an amorous looking-glass and imagines that all Eve's daughters are trying to abduct him. Whenever I meet one of these male irresistibles I'm forcibly reminded that the Almighty made man out of mud--and not very good mud at that. The two-legged he-thing who makes a clothes-horse of himself and poses on the street-corner perfumed like an emancipation day picnic; who ogles a pretty woman until the crimson creeps into her cheek, then prides himself on having captured her heart like the boy caught the itch,-- because he couldn't help it--when she's only blushing for the mother who bore the pitiful parody on manhood; who imagines that every maid who deigns to waste a smile on him is sighing her soul out for his sweet sake, has allowed his Gall to go to his head and curdle his brains.

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More than a moiety of our so-called great men are but featherless geese, possessing a superabundance of Gall-- creatures of chance who ride like driftwood on the crest of a wave raised by forces they cannot comprehend; but they ride, and the world applauds them while it tramples better men beneath its brutal feet. Greatness and Gall, genius and goose-speech, sound and sense have become synonyms. If you fall on the wrong side of the market men will quote the proverb about a fool and his money: if on the right side you're a Napoleon of finance. Lead a successful revolt and you are a pure patriot whose memory should be preserved to latest posterity; head an unsuccessful uprising and you are a miserable rebel who should have been hanged. "Nothing succeeds like success." Had the Christian religion failed to take root, Judas Iscariot would have been commemorated in the archives of Rome as one who helped stamp out the hateful heresy, and had Washington got the worst of it in his go with Cornwallis he would have passed into history as a second Jack Cade.

Alexander of Macedon was great, as measured by the world's standard of eminence. After two-and-twenty centuries our very babes prattle of this bloody butcher, and even his horse has been enshrined in history. In our own day Father Damien left kindred and country and went forth to die for the miserable lepers in the mid-Pacific, but he is already forgotten--his name and fame have faded from the minds of men. Yet greater and grander than all the blood-stained princes and potentates of earth; nobler, more god-like than all the proud prelates that ever aired their turgid eloquence at Christian conference or ecumenical council was that young priest; but no cenotaph rises to commemorate his sacrifice--silent as his own sealed lips is the trumpet of fame.

But for Gall of the A1, triple X brand, commend me to the little pot-house politician who poses as a political prophet and points out to wiser men their public duties. We have to-day in this land of the free and home of the crank, thousands of self-important little personages who know as little of political economy as a parrot of the power of prayer, prating learnedly of free-trade or protection, greenbackism or metallic money. Men who couldn't tell a fundamental principle from their funny- bone, an economic thesis from a hot tamale--who don't know whether Ricardo was an economist or a corn-doctor-- evolve from their empty ignorance new systems of "saving the country," and defend them with the dogmatic assurance of a nigger preacher describing the devil--make gorgeous displays of their Gall. I have noticed that, as a rule, the less a man knows of the science of government the crazier he is to go to congress. About half the young statesmen who break into the legislature imagine that Roger Q. Mills wrote the Science of Economics, and that Jefferson Davis was the father of Democracy.

But the Gall is not confined to the little fellows--the big political M.D.'s have their due proportion. The remedies they prescribe for Uncle Sam's ailments remind me of the panaceas put on the market by the patent-medicine men-- warranted to cure everything, from a case of cholera-morbus to an epidemic of poor relations. We have one school of practitioners prescribing free-trade as a sure-cure for every industrial ill, another a more drastic system of protection. One assures us that the silver-habit is dragging us down to the demnition bow-wows, another that only an heroic dose of white dollars will save us from industrial death. Political claptrap to corral the succulent pie-- "issues" to get office. We have had high and low tariff, the gold and silver standard, greenbackism and "wild-cat" currency; we have had presidents of all shades of political faith and congresses of every kind of economic folly; yet in a single century America has risen from the poorest of nations to the wealthiest in all the world. True it is that wealth is congested--that willful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand--that the land is filled with plutocrats and paupers; but this distressing fact is due to the faults of our industrial system itself, and can never be reformed by placing fiddle-strings on the free list or increasing the tariff on toothpicks.

Gall? Ye gods! Look at the platform promises of the blessed Democratic party--then at its performances! Look at the party itself--a veritable omnium-gatherum of political odds and ends, huddled together under the party blanket like household gods and barn-yard refuse after a hurricane. High and low tariffs and free-traders; gold- bugs, green-backers and bi-metallists; Cleveland and Croker, Altgeld and Olney, Hill and Hogg, Waco's Warwick and Colonel Culberson's kid, all clamoring to be dyed- in-the-wool Democrats! When I get a new main-spring put in my vocabulary I'm going to tackle the Gall of the Populists and Republicans.

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Some specimens of Gall amaze me by their greatness, some amuse me, while others only spoil my appetite. Of the latter class is the chronic kicker who is forever fuming about feminine fashions. If the hoop-skirt comes in this critic is in agony; if the "pull-back" makes its appearance he has a fit and falls in it. Ever since Eve attired herself in a few freckles and fig-leaves he's been reforming the fashions. Don't mind him, ladies. Like a peacock crying in the night, he's disagreeable, but not dangerous. Adorn yourselves as you see fit; follow such fashions as seem good in your sight, and have no fear that the sons of men will ever forsake you because of your clothes. When you find a man dictating to the ladies what they shall wear you're pretty apt to see his head housed in a stove- pipe hat--the most inartistic and awkward monstrosity ever designed by the devil to make the Almighty ashamed of his masterpiece. In all history there's no record of a great idea being born in a beegum. I never saw a statue of a hero or picture of a martyr with a plug hat on. Imagine the Lord laying aside a silk cady preparatory to preaching that Sermon on the Mount--or Napoleon apostrophizing the pyramids in a plug! Before finding fault with the fashions of the ladies just imagine Apollo in the make-up of a modern society swell, loafing into court on High Olympus! Why Jove would hit him with a thunderbolt so hard there'd be nothing left of him but a wilted chrysanthemum and a pair o' yaller shoes!

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For a specimen of Gall that must amaze the very gods commend me to a crowd of pharisaical plutocrats, piously offering, in a hundred thousand dollar church, prayers to him who had nowhere to lay his head; who pay a preacher $15,000 per annum to point the way to Paradise, while in the great cities of every Christian country children must steal or starve and women choose between death and dishonor. New York is crowded with costly churches that lift their proud spires into the empyrean, that part the clouds with golden fingers--monuments which Mammon rears as if to mock the lowly Son of God. Their value mounts up into the millions; yet I learn--from a religious paper, mark you--that 100,000 men, women and children were evicted in New York alone last year for the non- payment of rent; turned into the streets to suffer summer's heat or winter's cold--to beg, or starve, or steal, as they saw fit. I find these startling statistics in the same column with a tearful appeal for more money to send missionaries to black barbarians--on the same page with a description of a new church that must have cost a cold half-million of cash. That's what I call sanctified assurance--gall masquerading as grace. And what is true of New York is true, in greater or less degree, of every town from Plymouth Rock to Poker Flats, from Tadmor-in-the- Wilderness to Yuba Dam. Everywhere the widow is battling with want, while we send Bibles and blankets, prayer- books and pie, salvation and missionary soup to a job-lot of lazy niggers whose souls aren't worth a soumarkee in blocks-of-five--who wouldn't walk into heaven if the gates were wide open, but once inside would steal the eternal throne if it wasn't spiked down. Let the heathen rage; we've got our hands full at home. I'd rather see the whole black-and-tan aggregation short on Bibles than one white child crying for bread.

While Europe and America are peddling saving grace in pagan lands--and incidentally extending the market for their cheap tobacco, snide jewelry and forty-rod bug-juice --they are also building warships and casting cannon-- preparing to cut each other's throats while prating of the prince of peace! The idea of countries that have to build forts on their frontiers and keep colossal standing armies to avoid being butchered by their own Christian brethren; that are full of divorce courts and demagogues, penitentiaries and poorhouses, sending young theological goslings, who believe that all of divine revelation can be found in one book, to teach the philosophic Hindu the road to heaven! Gall! Why the men we are trying to convert were preaching the immortality of the soul when the Hebrew prophets were putting people to the sword for accepting it; they were familiar with all the essential features of the Christian faith a thousand years before the crucifixion of Christ. Charity begins at home. In our own country children are coming up in ignorance and crime, while sect vies with sect in the erection of proud temples in which polite society may display its Parisian finery while pretending to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush.

I haven't much use for gold-plated godliness. Christ never built a church, or asked for a vacation on full pay, --never. He indulged in no political harangues--never told his parishioners how to vote--never posed as a professional Prohibitionist. He didn't try to reform the fallen women of Jerusalem by turning them over to the police, a la Parkhurst. Although gladiatorial shows were common in his country--and that without gloves--he didn't go raging up and down the earth like some of our Texas dominies, demanding that these awful crimes against civilization should cease. There is no record of his engineering a boycott against business men who dissented from his doctrine. I think he could have read a copy of the ICONOCLAST with far more patience than some of his successors. Human or divine, he was the grandest man that ever graced the mighty tide of time. His was a labor of love, instead of for lucre. The groves were his temples, the mountain-side his pulpit, the desert his sacristy, and Jordan his baptismal font.

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Then there's the unconscious Gall of the pious parrot who is quite sure that the only highway to the heavenly hereafter is outlined by his little sect, macadamized by his creed; that you've got to travel that or get into trouble, perhaps fall into the fire.

Just imagine that dear Lord, who so loved sinners that he died to save them from death eternal, looking over heaven's holy battlements and observing a miserable mortal plunging downward to his doom, leaving behind him a streak of fire like a falling star, his face distorted with fear, his every hair erect and singing like a jewsharp. He asks St. Peter:

"Who's that?"

"Oh," says the man on the door, "that's old John Smith."

The Lord goes over to the office of the Recording Angel and turns the leaves of the great ledger. He finds the name, "John Smith, No. 11,027," and on the credit page these entries: "He was fearless as Caesar, generous as Macaenas, tender as Guatama and true to his friends as the stars to their appointed courses. He was a knight of nature's nobility, a lord in the aristocracy of intellect, courtier at home and a king abroad. On the debit page he reads: "Went fishing on Sunday. There was a miscue on his baptism. He knew a pretty woman from an ancient painting, a jack-pot from a prayer-book, and when smitten on one cheek he made the smacker think he'd been smuck by a cyclone." Good-bye, John!

It may be that the monarch of the majestic universe marches around after every inconsequential little mortal, note-book in hand, giving him a white mark when he prays for the neighbor who poisons his dog, or tells his wife the truth regardless of consequences; a black one when he bets his money on the wrong horse or sits down on the sidewalk and tries to swipe the front gate as it goes sailing by; but I doubt it. If I could make the sun, moon and stars in one day and build a beautiful woman of an old bone, I'd just like to see the color of that man's hair I'd waste much time and attention on.

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Why should we quarrel about our faiths and declare that this is right and that is wrong, when all religions are, and must of necessity ever be, fundamentally one and the same --the worship of a superior power, the great

"Father of all, in every age, in ev'ry clime adored, By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord."

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Man's cool assumption that the Almighty made him as his "masterpiece" should be marked Exhibit A in the mighty aggregation of Gall. That after millions of years experience in the creation business--after building the archangels and the devil; after making the man in the moon and performing other wondrous miracles, the straddling six-foot biped who wears a spike-tail coat and plug- hat, a silk surcingle and sooner tie; who parts his name on the side and his hair in the middle; who sucks a cane and simpers like a school-girl struggling with her first compliment; who takes it for granted that he knows it all, when his whole life--including his birth, marriage and death--is a piece of ridiculous guess-work; who insists that he has a soul to save, yet labors with might and main to lose it; protests that there's a better land beyond the grave, yet moves heaven and earth to keep from going to it so long as he can help it--the assumption, I say, that this was the best the Creator could do, is prima facie evidence of a plentitude of Gall of the purest ray serene.

The calm assurance of man that the earth and all it contains were made for his especial benefit; that woman was created solely for his comfort; that the sun was made to give him light by day and the moon to enable him to find his way home from the lodge at night without the aid of a policeman; that the heavens were hung with a resplendent curtain of stars and the planets sent whirling through space in a majestic dance about the God of Day, simply to afford him matter for wonder or for amusement when too tired to talk politics or too bilious to drink beer, evinces an egotism that must amuse the Almighty.

Masterpiece indeed! Why, God made man, and, finding that he couldn't take care of himself, made woman to take care of him--and she proposes to discharge her heaven- ordained duty or know the reason why. Tennyson says that, "as the husband is the wife is"; but even Tennyson didn't know it quite all. When wives take their hubbies for measures of morality, marriage will become an enthusiastic failure and Satan be loosed for a little season. We acknowledge woman's superiority by demanding that she be better than we could if we would, or would be if we could.

We are fond of alluding to woman as "the weaker vessel"; but she can BREAK the best of us if given an opportunity. Pope calls man the "great lord of all things"--but Pope never got married. We rule with a rod of iron the creatures of the earth and air and sea; we hurl our withering defi in the face of Kings and brave presidential lightning; we found empires and straddle the perilous political issue, then surrender unconditionally to a little bundle of dimples and deviltry, sunshine and extravagance. No man ever followed freedom's flag for patriotism (and a pension) with half the enthusiasm that he will trail the red, white and blue that constitute the banner of female beauty. The monarch's fetters cannot curtail our haughty freedom, nor nature's majestic forces confine us to this little lump of clay; we tread the ocean's foam beneath our feet, harness the thunderbolts of imperial Jove to the jaunting car, and even aspire to mount the storm and walk upon the wind; yet the bravest of us tremble like cowards and lie like Cretans when called to account by our wives for some of our cussedness,

But you will say that I have wandered from my text-- have followed the ladies off and got lost. Well, it's not the first time it's happened. But really, I'm not so inconsistent as I may seem; for if the gentler sex exceeds us in goodness it likewise surpasses us in Gall. Perhaps the most colossal exhibit of polite and elegant audacity this world can boast is furnished by that female who has made a marriage of convenience; has wedded money instead of a man,--practically put her charms up at auction for the highest bidder--yet who poses as a paragon of purity; gathers up her silken skirts--the price of her legalized shame--lest they come in contact with the calico gown of some poor girl who has loved, not wisely, but too well.

Marriage is the most sacred institution ever established on earth, making the father, mother and child a veritable Holy Trinity; but it is rapidly degenerating into an unclean Humbug, in which Greed is God and Gall is recognized high-priest. We now consider our fortunes rather than our affections, acquire a husband or wife much as we would a parrot or a poodle, and get rid of them with about as little compunction. Cupid now feathers his arrows from the wings of the gold eagle and shoots at the stomach instead of the heart. Love without law makes angels blush; but law without love crimson even the brazen brow of infamy.

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But the fact that so many selfish, soulless marriages are made is not altogether woman's fault. Our ridiculous social code is calculated to crush all sentiment and sweetness out of the gentler sex--to make woman regard herself as merchandise rather than as a moral entity, entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The average woman must select a husband from a narrow circle; must make choice among two or three admirers or elect to live a loveless old maid--to forego the joys of motherhood, the happiness of a home. Man is privileged to go forth and seek a mate. The world is before him, a veritable "Dream of Fair Women." He wanders at will, as amid a mighty parterre of flowers, sweet as the breath of morn, and finally, before some fair blossom he bows the knee --pours forth the incense of his soul to the one woman in all the world he would make his wife. True, she may refuse him and marry some other fellow; but he is at least privileged to approach her, to plead his cause to employ all the art and eloquence of love to bring her into his life. Woman enjoys no such privilege. She must wait to be wooed, and if her king comes not she must take the best that offers and try to be content.

Every daughter of Eve dreams of an ideal,--of a man tender and true, who will fill her life with love's own melody; his word her law, his home her heaven, his honor her glory and his tomb her grave. And some day, from these castles in the clouds he comes--these day-dreams, golden as the dawn, become the halo of a mortal man, to whom her heart turns as the helianthus to the sun. At last the god of her idolatry doth walk the earth; but she must stand afar,--must not, by word or act, betray the holy passion that's consuming her, lest "that monster custom of habits devil," doth brand her bold and bad. Love ofttimes begets love, as the steel strikes fire from the cold flint, and a word from her might bring him to her feet; but she must stand with dumb lips and assumed indifference and see him drift out of her life, leaving it desolate as the Scythian desert, when it should have budded and blossomed like the great blush rose. So she drifts desolate into old maidenhood and the company of Maltese cats; else, when hope is dead in her heart--when the dream of her youth has become dust and ashes--she marries for money and tries to feed her famished heart with Parisian finery, to satisfy her soul with the Dead Sea fruit of fashion.

No; I wouldn't give woman the ballot--not in a thousand years. I want no petticoats in politics--no she-senators or female presidents; but I'd do better by woman; I'd repeal that ridiculous social law--survival of female slavery--which compels her to wait to be wooed. I'd put a hundred leap-years in every century, give woman the right to do half the courting--to find a man to her liking and capture him if she could. Talk about reforms! Why, the bachelors would simply have to become Benedicts or take to the brush, and there'd be no old maids outside the dime museums. But I was speaking of Gall.

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