Part 4

Before the Talmage book was ready for the press, Prince Cantacuzene, the Russian Minister Plenipotentiary at Washington, summoned Doctor Talmage to the deck of a Russian man-of-war, in Philadelphia harbor, and presented to the enraptured American “a complete gold-enameled tea service accompanied by a message of love which I cannot now think of without deep emotion, since Emperor Alexander has disappeared from the palaces of earth to take his place, as I believe, in the palaces of heaven.”

In behalf of the Czar, the formalities of a trial on Judgment Day, were waived, it would seem; and the Czar went direct from Peterhof to his mansion in the skies.

The Emperor Alexander, it is well-known, was succeeded by his son Nicholas, the reigning Czar.

Talmage’s book was published in 1896. Here is what he predicted:

“_I prophesy for Nicholas the Second a long and happy reign!_”

That was a very natural inspiration. Talmage had delved into Russian affairs and found conditions ideal. The government was mild, just, progressive. The people were contented, and devoted to the Czar. There was no cruelty in the administration, and no suffering among the peasants, excepting the locality affected by the drought. The bread had been sent to feed the peasants, and all would be well. The Knout had been abolished. The serf, freed, was happy. Religious toleration was in practice; the circulation of political literature unhampered.

There was not a cloud upon the horizon. George Kennan, Stepniak, Tolstoy, Kropotkin had been slandering vilely the most humane Government of Europe—a Government which Talmage compared to ours, to our discomfiture in various respects.

With a Podsnapian wave of his hand, Talmage said to Europe, “_Let this international defamation of Russia cease._”

With that Royal welcome fresh in his memory, with those public ovations still ringing in his ears, with that “complete gold-enameled tea service” gladdening his eye, with the “message of love” conveyed by the Prince Cantacuzene still warming his heart, how could Doctor Talmage prophesy otherwise?

The spirit of the occasion demanded prophecy, and there it stands recorded, page 432:

“_I prophesy for Nicholas the Second a long and happy reign!_”

_A Prophet Whose Voice Was Not Heeded_

Almost in sight of where I live, there is a heap of stones that marks the spot where stood the hut in which George McDuffie was born.

His folks were “poor folks.” Concerning his ancestry nothing is known.

When I was a boy somebody told me a story to this effect:

Little George McDuffie was at the cowpen where his mother was milking, and he had a calf by the ears holding it away from the cow. A traveler, in a buggy, drove up and stopped. Seeing the boy, and not realizing the absorbing character of the boy’s job, the wayfaring man called out:

“Come here, Bubbie, and hold my horse.”

To which the lad replied: “If you’ll come here and hold my calf, I’ll go there and hold your horse.”

According to the story, the traveler was so tickled by the boy’s readiness of wit, that he took a fancy to him and secured him a position as clerk in a store in the city of Augusta.

Well, George McDuffie wasn’t much of a clerk. He loved to read books better than to wait upon customers. It came to pass that his fondness for books attracted the attention of one of the Calhouns—_not_ John C., but his brother, I believe—and Mr. Calhoun placed the boy at the celebrated school of Dr. Waddell to be educated.

The balance is history. McDuffie became one of the greatest legal advocates and political orators this country has ever known.

Later in life he became involved in a newspaper controversy which drew him into two duels. In one of these he received a wound which injured his spine and affected his brain.

In his melancholy decline, and not long before his death, McDuffie was moved by a yearning to come back to Georgia and visit the spot where his boyhood home had stood. He came from South Carolina by private conveyance, and spent the night with my grandfather. Next day he went on down to the Sweet-water Creek neighborhood where the McDuffie hut had been. My father used to tell me that when they led the broken statesman to the spot, pointed out the remaining shade tree and the dismantled chimney, they drew away, leaving him alone with his memories. After awhile they returned to find Mr. McDuffie sitting upon the stones of the ruined hearth, crying like a child.

When the boy, George McDuffie, left the store in Augusta and went over into South Carolina to go to school, he carried all of his earthly possessions in one little pine box.

When he became a man he made much money, owned large estates and moved as a peer among the proudest leaders of his day.

But he never parted with the little pine box. It was a souvenir of the old days of youth and poverty. It was sacred in his eyes, and he treasured it. When his mind was almost gone, he would put his arms about the box, and tell again the story of how it had held all that he owned when he came into South Carolina—a poor boy, on his way to the great battle-field of life.

Did you know that to this almost forgotten statesman, George McDuffie, belongs the distinction of having made the most powerful and most prophetic speech that was ever made in Congress against our damnable Tariff System?

Well, it does. Such men as Nelson Dingley and Joseph H. Walker were good judges in such a matter, and they regarded McDuffie’s argument as the strongest ever made against the New England scheme of enriching its Capitalists by plundering other sections. Dr. Goldwin Smith should also be a competent judge, and you will find that McDuffie’s speech is the one he quotes from in his “Political History of the United States.”

Mr. McDuffie’s great speech against the protective system is too long to be reproduced here; but in the concluding paragraphs he predicted with such clearness of vision the reign of rotten business and rotten politics which now afflicts us that his words read like inspired prophecy:

“Sir, when I consider that, by a single bill like the present, millions of dollars may be transferred annually from one part of the community to another; when I consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate ambition may perpetrate such an act of injustice and political prostitution, I cannot hesitate, for a moment, to pronounce this system _the most stupendous instrument of corruption_ ever placed in the hands of public functionaries.

“IT BRINGS AMBITION AND AVARICE AND WEALTH INTO A COMBINATION WHICH IT IS FEARFUL TO CONTEMPLATE, BECAUSE IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST.

“Do we not perceive, at this very moment, the extraordinary and melancholy spectacle of less than one hundred thousand capitalists, by means of this unhallowed combination, exercising an absolute and despotic control over the opinions of eight millions of free citizens and the fortunes and destinies of ten millions?

“Sir, I will not anticipate or forbode evil. _I will not permit myself to believe that the Presidency of the United States will ever be bought and sold._ But I must say that there are certain quarters of this Union in which, if the candidate for the Presidency should come forward with this Harrisburg tariff in his hand, nothing could resist his pretensions if his adversary were opposed to this _unjust system of oppression_.”

* * * * *

“Indeed, Sir, when I contemplate the extraordinary infatuation _which a combination of capitalists and politicians_ have had the heart to diffuse over more than one-half of this Union—when I see the very victims who are about to be offered up to satiate the voracious appetite of this devouring Moloch, paying their ardent and sincere devotions at his bloody shrine; I confess I have been tempted to doubt whether mankind was not doomed, even in its most enlightened state to be the dupe of some form of imposture, and the victim of some form of tyranny.

“Sir, in casting my eyes over the history of human idolatry, I can find nothing, even in the _darkest_ ages of ignorance and superstition, which surpasses the infatuation by which _a confederated priesthood of politicians and manufacturers_ have bound the great body of the people of the farming States of this Union as if by a spell, TO THIS MIGHTY SCHEME OF FRAUD AND DELUSION.”

* * * * *

Bear in mind that this speech was made in 1824.

Then look around you and see how prophetically Mr. McDuffie pictured the future.

The Presidency is bought and sold. Congress is bought and sold. The confederated priesthood of politicians and manufacturers do dominate an infatuated people whom it deludes and plunders.

The Trusts are nothing in the world but the legitimate children of Privilege and Protection.

Campaign boodle-funds are nothing in the world but the sop which the Corrupt Combination of Capitalists pay to renew the lease which they hold on the Government.

And, as Mr. McDuffie said, the most astounding feature of the whole diabolical system is the completeness with which the politicians and the Privileged can dupe the victims of Protection into the belief that _Privilege_ benefits the unprivileged.

With the doors of immigration standing wide open vomiting into our industrial world all the cheap white labor of the universe, our Protected capitalists are still able to convince our wage-earners that American capital protects American labor from the competition of foreign “pauper” labor!

Having ground down the price of factory labor to such a low point that they can undersell foreigners in the foreign market, our Privileged and Protected Capitalists can nevertheless convince American laborers that the motive for high tariffs is to enable the Capitalist to pay big wages!

And they swallowed it—the wage-earners swallow it, meekly, blindly, trustfully.

The record of a Century teaches them nothing.

The evidences of their own senses are ignored.

The very factory hands who at Fall River lived off the soup of the Salvation Army devoutly believed that if it hadn’t been for the Protective system they wouldn’t even have got the soup.

The factory girl who is paid five dollars per week, and who, when she complains that she cannot live on the wage, is sardonically advised to get a gentleman friend, actually believes that were it not for Privilege and Protection she would not get the five dollars.

God in heaven! No wonder that George McDuffie expressed his doubt as to whether the masses could ever be enlightened. No wonder his prophetic speech vibrated with an undertone of despair.

Less than one-tenth of the laborers of this country own their homes; yet _they_ have been Protected for a hundred years.

Less than a quarter million men own practically the entire wealth of the whole United States; yet Privilege and Protection are _not_ for their benefit.

You go to the millions of Unprivileged and Unprotected citizens and you point out to them how they are plundered by being made to pay twice as much as they should on every article which they buy.

They understand it; they admit the fact; but the corrupt politician has taught them what to say.

This is the lesson:

“Yes; we pay twice as much as the goods are worth, but it is patriotic and humane, because we thereby enable millions of American wage-earners to get big wages.”

Fine, isn’t it?

If the man who repeats that little lesson, and believes it, would go into the districts where Protection is and where the system has been at work longest he will find himself in precisely the places where wages are lowest, where Capitalists are harshest, where squalor and vice are rankest, and where the maddened victims of our soulless wage-system are nursing in their hearts the passions of hell.

_The Highest Office_

Let seasons come and go, let the sunlight and shadows fall where God’s pleasure puts them—do your duty as conscience and reason reveal it to you. Let no other man measure your work or your responsibilities; let no artful sophistry, in favor of the expedient, veil from your steadfast eyes the summits of Right. Let parties rise and fall; let time-servers flop and flounder, let the heedless praise of the hour lay its withering garlands at the feet of him who will purchase them by bending to every passing breeze, every popular whim, every local prejudice.

Do thou look higher if joy and strength and peace and pride are to be thine. In this brief life (hardly worth the living) know this one thing: that a man’s honor should be just as dear to him as a woman’s virtue is to her. Did the Roman girls not go gladly to the lions, to the bloody death in the arena, rather than to recant their Christian faith, or to accept a lawless lover? Did not the Armenian woman, a few years ago, leap to death over the precipice, rather than to apostatize or to be violated? Isn’t the ground still wet with the life-drops of poor Else Kroegler, who let her white throat be gashed, and gashed, and gashed, by the black devil who assailed her, till her life was gone, rather than to live dishonored? And shall a man be less heroic than a woman? Is there nothing within us that cannot be bought? Is there no Holy of Holies of conviction and principle, into which the corruptor shall not enter? Is there nothing that we hold sacred as the citadel of proud, fearless, upright manhood?

Once upon a time a barbarous peasant worked his way upward and onward, until he wore the imperial purple of Rome; and he said: “I have gained all the honors and none of them have value.” Did not Cæsar, himself, grow sick at heart of the eminence he had wickedly won, and say that he had lived long enough?

If we must bow to what is wrong, flatter what we despise, preach what we disbelieve, and deny what we feel to be true, is success thus won anything but a gilded dishonor?

To be a man, such a man as you know God would have you be—manly, truthful, honest—scorning meanness, hating lies, loathing deceit, meeting the plain duties of life, and shirking none of its plain responsibilities—is not that the highest office you can fill?

_Editorial Comment_

The Washington Post is generally accurate in its statements of facts, but it erred in saying that one of the legal grounds for divorce in Georgia is insanity occurring _after_ the marriage. Our statute book is not disgraced by a provision of that kind.

Insanity is a misfortune for which, as a rule, the victim is not to blame. Besides, it is a disease which is often cured, or a terrible visitation which sometimes passes away as suddenly as it came.

Suppose the Legislature deprives the afflicted wife of possibly her only protector by granting the husband a divorce; suppose the wife then regains her sanity—would not the situation be horrible?

When I reflect upon the shameful things the Wall Street millionaires have led our Legislature to do, I am by no means certain that some Ryan or Morgan, tired of his old wife, might secure from the Hamp McWhorter machine a legislative license to go and buy a fresh one—but such a deal has not, as yet, been consummated.

* * * * *

Congress is beginning to catch on to the enormous frauds in the weighing of the mails. In the first issue of this Magazine, I called attention to the notorious fact that certain Congressmen, who belong to the railroads, were in the habit of lending to their bosses the frank whose mark on mail matter entitles it to go through the mails without payment of postage.

For example: Suppose the Southern Railroad wants the use of the frank of the Honorable Leonidas F. Livingston, whom “the Democratic Party” of the Atlanta, Ga., District sends to Congress. In that case, the Honorable Leonidas will lend his bosses his rubber stamp which, being inked and pressed upon a sack of mail matter, leaves thereon this inscription:

_L. F. Livingston, M. C._

This inscription being placed upon the sack, the postal authorities are compelled by law to carry the sack to any part of the United States free of charge. The magic letters “M. C.” which stand, of course, for “Member of Congress,” are as good as gold in the postal service. Now why does the Southern Railroad want to use the frank of the Honorable Leonidas?

For this reason:

The Government pays the railroads for carrying the mails, at so much per pound; to get at the “average” for the whole year, the Government weighs the mail for ninety days; therefore it is hugely to the advantage of the railroads to make the “average” as high as possible; and consequently the railroads themselves crowd into the mails, _during those ninety days_, every God-blessed piece of old junk they can lay their hands on.

See?

But if the railroads had to pay postage on that old junk, their profits would be cut down to just that extent. They would have to pay thousands of dollars to the Government, in postage, during the ninety days.

By getting from the Honorable Leonidas the use of his frank, the railroad can escape payment of postage on the old junk. By the collusion of the Honorable Leonidas, the Southern Railroad is not only enabled to swindle the Government in the creation of a fraudulent “average,” but _they even unload on the Government the expense of carrying the bogus mail which constitutes the swindle_.

In the first number of this Magazine, I gave Livingston’s name as that of one of the rascals who help the railroad swindle the people.

_I give it again._

The Honorable Leonidas is one of the unscrupulous knaves who covers the multitude of his individual sins with the generous, rubber-coat mantle of “the Democratic Party.”

The time is rapidly approaching in this country when a scoundrel will be treated as a scoundrel, regardless of his being a member of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. Thieves and corporation doodles will not forever escape detection and infamy by crying out “I am a Democrat,” or “I am a Republican.”

* * * * *

The gaping world is told that the Princess Ena, of the Royal House of Great Britain, is about to marry Alfonso, the decadent lad who is King of Spain. The Royal House of Great Britain holds the throne upon the Parliamentary Condition that it shall be Protestant. The Act which recognized the Hanoverian succession reads: “The Princess Sophia and the heirs of her body _being Protestants_.”

But the crown of Spain would not be allowed to rest upon the head of a heretic. No, indeed! The King and Queen of Spain must be Catholics.

But King Alfonso wants the fair Princess Ena, and the ambitious Ena wants to become Queen of Spain.

Is there any way out? Oh, yes. The Princess Ena, of the Royal House whose Protestant faith is a matter of Parliamentary measure, being determined to marry a King whose crown depends upon his being a rigid Catholic, happily solves the problem by “turning” Catholic.

Very well. If to Henry of Navarre “Paris was well worth a mass,” why shouldn’t the throne of Spain be worth as much to the fair Princess Ena?

* * * * *

And, by the way, the Princess Ena has had some illustrious examples set her in the matter of changing one’s creed.

Did not unhappy little Anna Gould “turn” Catholic to ease the conscience of her precious Castellane?

And did not the daughter of the American “house” of Mackay “turn” Catholic when she became an Italian princess?

Human motives are pretty much the same everywhere, and to many people religion is a mere matter of respectable conformity to the manners and customs of those who make up the environment.

* * * * *

John D. Rockefeller is running about from one hiding place to another, to keep from being found by the officers of the law. How silly. Why does he not come into court with a shattered memory and a pack of perjuries like some of the other high-rolling rascals who have been before the courts recently?

As to one-third of the things which might land him in the penitentiary, if he admitted them, he can say, “I decline to answer on advice of counsel.”

To another third he can say that he does not remember.

To the remaining third, he can make perjured replies.

Then old John will be in line with Rogers, McCall, McCurdy, Depew and some others who have recently figured in the New York legal proceedings.

* * * * *

While Rockefeller is hiding out like a common criminal, would it not be appropriate for one of his high-priced preachers to come forth in another sermon, or interview, or signed article, explaining to us common mortals, what a good and pious, and benevolent man old John D. is?

The Recording Angel must have a busy time trying to keep straight the accounts of some of our high-priced city preachers.

There was Bishop Potter, for instance, who choked off the Reverend Mr. Chew when that subordinate divine wanted to give us a piece of his mind concerning Life Insurance rottenness in New York. The high-priced Bishop put himself in the attitude of warding off attack from the robbers of widows and orphans.

* * * * *

The Constitution of the United States expressly declares that no money shall be taken from the Treasury without an appropriation by Congress.

Therefore, when Lyman Gage and Leslie Shaw, Secretaries of the Treasury, took $15,000,000 out of the Treasury and placed it in the Standard Oil Bank in New York City they violated the supreme law of the land. The $56,000,000 which Mr. Roosevelt’s administration has been allowing the National Banks to hold and to use is held and used in violation of the Constitution. What do our big men care for the law? Nothing. The law is for the small and the weak.

* * * * *

It was not _your_ mother or sister or wife, _but it might have been_, and therefore the thing that happened to her should stir your blood.

A lady who is every bit as good, so far as anybody knows or says, as Mrs. Roosevelt, went to the White House to see the President on business. She wanted to plead for her husband, who had been arbitrarily thrown out of a good office at the instance of a very contemptible cur named Hull, who happened to be a Congressman, and chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs.

A swell-head White House official named Barnes, told the lady that the President was engaged and could not see her.

She remarked that she would wait until the President was disengaged—that she meant to stay until she _did_ see him.

In other words, she placed herself in the position of “the importunate widow.” She was desperately in earnest; her husband had been foully wronged; it was a matter of vital importance to her; and her wifely heart made her brave the rebuff of asinine Barnes.

Mr. Roosevelt had recently returned to the White House from a “progress” through the Southern provinces, during which progress he had exhibited himself to his admiring constituents as the most affable, approachable, genial and generous of men. What was more natural than for Mrs. Morris to think that a little persistence on her part would bring the gallant Teddy to the front, beaming with that glorified grin and extending that cordial hand which had so recently enraptured the people of the South?

Stage-play, however, is one thing and “business” is another. Teddy is a genial democrat when playing to the grand-stand, and a bumptious autocrat in some of his White House moods.