BY JOHN A. MORRIS. A few seasons ago when Audrey Beardsleyism was the rage and Oscar Wilde a lion in “sassiety” gay plaid stockings in Persian or Audrey Beardsley designs sold as high as $7.50 a pair, enough I should say to enable a poor devil like me to live a week. But this is […]

Sometime ago a correspondent sent the ICONOCLAST a newspaper report of the “jubilee sermon” of a Rev. Mr. Reed, rector of a Protestant Episcopal church, and inquired if the statements contained therein were true. The clipping has been mislaid, and I do not now remember where Rector Reed is located; but I do know that […]

A correspondent calls my attention to the recommendation of a commission appointed by the governor of Massachusetts, to the effect that “all taxes on intangible property be abolished.” He adds that, “as much of the wealth of Massachusetts is in stocks, bonds and mortgages this would relieve the rich at the expense of the poor.” […]

Bishop Wilyum Doane hath an abiding place at Albany, N. Y., a village on the Hudson where the peons of the political bosses most do congregate to leg for bribes. In his recent annual address to the clergy the Bish. lamented bitterly that the American “jingo” was provoking dear patient Christian England to put on […]

APOTHEOSIZING THE PROSTITUTE. The Trilby craze has overrun the land like the “grip” bacillus or the seven-year locust. Here in America it has become almost as disgusting as the plague of lice sent upon Egypt to eat the chilled steel veneering off the heart of Pharaoh the fickle. Everything is Trilby. We have Trilby bonnets […]

AND OTHER BURROS. “Force first made conquest, and that conquest, law;Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made.She, from the rending earth and bursting skies,Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise;Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest abodes;Fear made her devils and weak […]

Seymour, Texas, Nov. 4, 1897. MR. BRANN: Will you please answer the following question and thereby settle a dispute in Seymour: Is love intoxicating? CHAS. E. RUPE. My correspondent neglects to state whether Seymour is a Prohibition town. Of course if it is and love is listed as an intoxicant, the blind god will be […]

The ICONOCLAST receives frequent complaints from laboring people in the lumber districts of Texas and Louisiana, that their employers are robbing them by compelling them to accept orders on mill stores, where they are charged exorbitant prices for all they purchase. I have been unable to visit the lumber districts and make personal investigation of […]

The “able editor” is perhaps the only quack doctor extant who greedily swallows his own medicine and foolishly imagines that it does him good. Puffery is the “able editor’s” invariable prescription, no matter whether the patient be a moss-grown town, a broken-down political roue–the victim of early indiscretions–or a Cheap-John merchant suffering the first paroxysms […]

The Women’s Rescue League met recently at Washington and launched a double-shotted anathema at the female bike fiend. The Leaguers attribute to the bicycle craze “the alarming increase” in the number of courtesans, and call upon ministers and respectable women everywhere to denounce cycling by the sex as “vulgar and indecent.” Nor do they stop […]

Unless you accept the testimony of the Bible as conclusive, what evidence have you of God’s existence and man’s immortality?–GLADSTONE. The same evidence that we would have of the existence of the ocean were one drop of water withdrawn, of the life of a forest, were a single leaf to fall. The Bible did not […]

This is preeminently the era of the reformer, and there are few things, great or small, upon which he has not tried his Archimedean lever with more or less effect. Progress should ever be the shibboleth of man, but progress and improvement are not always synonyms. When a man becomes possessed of an idea that […]

There have been mortals, favorites of the gods, to whom it was given to understand the language of the lower animals, and such I have ever envied, for “Beast and bird have seen and heardThat which man knoweth not.” Never could I get beyond an imperfect knowledge of their alphabet, enabling me to spell out […]

A WORLD-WIDE WAR. Unless all signs fail, the world is on the eve of a war such as was never known in all the mighty cycles of human history. Lucky indeed will it be if the twentieth century is not born amid the shock of universal battle. Is our boasted civilization breaking down beneath its […]

STORY OF JOSEPH REVISITED For more than six-and-thirty centuries the brand of the courtesan has rested on the brow of Potiphar’s wife. The religious world persists in regarding her as an abandoned woman who wickedly strove to lead an immaculate he-virgin astray. The crime of which she stands accused is so unspeakably awful that even […]

MAKING WISE MEN BY MACHINERY. If I might presume to tender a few words of advice to so high and mighty a personage as the president of the University of Texas, I should recommend that he carefully study the Solomonic proverb: “Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise; and he that […]

Is there a life beyond the grave? Ten thousand thousand times this question hath been answered, yet answer there is none that satisfies the soul. Never yet did man look into the cold face of one he loved and not feel, creeping like a thousand-fanged adder into his desolate heart, the awful fear that death’s […]

HER TEARS ANENT TURKISH ATROCITIES “Christian England” is agonizing over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making frantic swipes at the mote in the […]

COL. R. G. INGERSOLL: My Dear Colonel:–I have not picked up my pen for the express purpose of annihilating you at one fell swoop. Even were such the case, I do not flatter myself that your impending doom would cause you to miss meals or lose sleep, for you have become somewhat used to being […]

Sir Edwin Arnold is a profound optimist, and apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said to a reporter: “The course of mankind is constantly towards perfection. I believe in humanity. I believe in the world’s great future. The trend of human events emphasizes the truth of this statement; though we may be […]