FullReads

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 her war-paint. “The English press,” quoth he, “has been most patient.” Yea, it hath–in the optic of ye animal yclept the hog. For two years past nearly every English paper, large and small, has systematically insulted Uncle Sam–has belched upon him all the feculent bile it could rake from its putrid bowels, all the moldy mucus it could snort from its beefy brain. Even the press of Canada–that Christ-forsaken land of bow-legged half-breeds which continues to lick the No. 7 goloshes of old Gilly Brown’s leavings because it lacks sufficient sand to set up for itself–barks across the border like a mangy fleabitten fice yawping at a St. Bernard. But Doane would have America swallow it all–just as the Thibetans swallow pastiles made of the excrement of their Dalai Lama. The Bish. evidently has John Bull’s trademark branded on the rear elevation of his architecture. So Hingland is growing blawsted tired of our Hawmewikan himpudence. Aw! Vewy likely, don-cherknow. But we shoved it down the old harlot’s throat twice with the business end of a bayonet, and we’ll fill her pod again with the same provender whenever she passes her plate. Doane ought to amputate his ears and send them to the British monarch to be used as door-mats.

. . .

My old friend, Major-General Whistletrigger Vanderhurst, of the Amazonian Guard, minister plenipotentiary of the Gal-Dal News, has just run a superb “scoop” on all his contemporaries. He rustled out one morning all by his lone self and discovered that prosperity had arrived–that every Texan afflicted with chronic hustle hath greenbacks to burn, and blue yarn socks galore stuffed to the bursting point with “yellow boys,” while ye farmer simply slings the silver dollar of our sires at marauding blackbirds. Whistletrigger turns up his patrician nose at all “pessimists” and broadly intimates that the man who hasn’t a new silk cady, seventeen pair o’ tailor-made “pants,” a silken nightshirt and sufficient provender in his pantry to run a Methodist camp-meeting for a month, would starve to death in a Paradise whose springs run Pomery Sec, and whose trees grew pumpkin pies, hot weinerwurst and pate de foie gras. Texas, according to this Columbus of prosperity, is a veritable Klondyke bowered with roses instead of imbedded in snowbanks–a place where every financial prospect pleases and only the popocrat is vile. But I note with pained surprise that the farmers are still selling middling cotton below six cents, buying bacon and wearing pea-green patches on the bust of their blue jeans two-dollar hand-me-downs; that I can hire all the common labor I want at 75 cents a day despite the advance in flour; that scores of mechanics are idle; that there is no longer a wage rate in any trade; that the streets are full of able-bodied beggers, while merchants offer me 2 per cent a month for the use of a little money. I note that in every Texas city realty is being cast upon the bargain counter, while great newspapers are cutting down the pay of their employees. There’s prosperity and prosperity. Perhaps Whistletrigger has been talking to the agent of some mortgage company or to Colonel Hogg–who’s making so much money compromising railroad cases with the Chollie Boy Culberson administration and suppressing prize-fights for $2,500 fees that he really cannot afford to serve Texas in the United States Senate.

. . .

Now that Henry George is dead, those papers and politicians that were wont to abuse and misrepresent him most brutally are fairly falling over each other to do him honor. The post-mortem gush is sickening because of its insincerity. If Henry George was not a great man living he is not a great man dead. If his economic views were fatuous while he was among us they are folly forevermore. I am not of those jackasses that delight in kicking dead lions; I insist that simple justice be done a man while he is in the land of the living–that we should not hound him to the grave with gross misrepresentation then try to make restitution by placing him among the stars. Henry George was a good man, but he was not great. He was an advocate, not an originator. He created no new epoch; he added nothing of importance to the world’s knowledge; but he did stimulate most wonderfully economic investigation. He was a thought-compeller. He brushed the mold of prejudice and the cobwebs of partisanship from many a brain. By so doing he rendered the world invaluable service and is entitled to its profoundest gratitude. So long as men can be induced to THINK there is hope for the race. Although his Single Tax theorem will perish, it has served a good purpose.