FullReads

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Thomas M. Harris, who claims to be 84 years old, has writ a little yellow pamphlet entitled, “Rome’s Responsibility for the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” I have expended almost 5 minutes glancing over Mr. Harris labored lucubations, and must confess that I have in that time acquired more information–of its kind–than I ever did in 5 hours before. Of the reliability of his statements there can be no question, as most of them are grounded on the testimony of “Father” Chiniquy–conceded to be the most accomplished liar since Ananias gave up the ghost. It was Chiniquy who first started the story that the Pope was responsible for the assassination of President Lincoln, and I am expecting him to prove that Guiteau who gave the death-wound to Garfield, was a Jesuit in disguise and acted on orders received from Rome. Harris says that agents of the Confederacy in Canada–whom he admits were not Catholics–employed Booth and his accomplices to do the bloody business; that John Wilkes Booth was a Catholic; that the priests were all Southern sympathizers; that but 144,000 Irishmen enlisted in the Federal army, of whom 104,000 deserted; that the cellars of Catholic cathedrals are filled with munitions of war to be used against the government, that Catholics hold the bulk of the offices and dominate the American press. Harris says other things equally awful and interesting. I much fear that he got to thinking how many of his A. P. Apes have broken into the penitentiary, and dreamed a bad dream.

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I once mentioned a little saweiety sheet, published in New York, under the title of Town Topics, because it afforded me a kind of languid pleasure to kick the feculent sewer-rat back into the foul cloaca from which it had crawled to beslime the ICONOCLAST. I must beg the patient reader’s pardon for again soiling my sandal-shoon with what should only be touched with a shovel. I have been receiving through the mails for some time past, both from disgusted Northerners and indignant Southerners, a paragraph clipped from its epecine columns where in some mental misfit eager to do the Smart Alex act begs to be informed what right Mrs. Jefferson Davis had “to address a peculiar letter to the Queen Regent of Spain, demanding the release of a party accused of a serious crime,” then adds: “If Miss Cisneros is released it will be because she is innocent, and not because her case has been meddled with by a party of irresponsible old freaks.” I sometimes wish the ICONOCLAST had no lady readers, that I might freely express my opinion of such pestiferous pole-cats. I dearly love the ladies, but they are awfully in the way when only full-grown adjectives will do a subject justice. If the Tee-Tee editor had half the gumption of a Kansas Gopher he would know that neither Mrs. Davis nor any other American woman made such “demand.” Perhaps he did not know it,–if it be possible for the editor of such a quintessential extract of utter idiocy to know anything–but couldn’t resist the boorish impulse to insult an aged woman, because he’s built that way. The case of Senorita Cisneros appealed to the sympathy of every manly man and noble woman throughout the world–to every living creature within whose hide there pulses one drop of human blood unblended with that of unclean breasts. Mrs. John A. Logan, Mrs. Jefferson Davis and other magnificent types of American womanhood, HUMBLY PETITIONED the Queen Regent of Spain in behalf of the Cuban heroine. And these noble women, whose names are respected in the very brothels and boozing kens of Boiler Avenue, are referred to by this foul parody on God’s masterpiece as “a party of irresponsible old freaks.” Christ! is it possible that aught born of woman–that any animal that can learn to walk on its hinder legs–should sink to such infamous depths of degradation! Yet this is the fellow who was so concerned for the feelings of certain sawciety she- males who personated French prostitutes at the Bradley-Martin debauch, that when I criticized their brazen bid for “business” he came near having hydrophobia. Did the Tee-Tee trogolodyte contain within his anthropodial diaphragm a single diatom of decency he would have applauded Mrs. Davis’ womanly act, else blocked the yawning hole in his prognathic head with a flat-car load of compost. If Mrs. Davis is permitted to petition the King of Kings to have mercy on the miserable journalistic piano-pounder for Gotham’s high-toned honk-a-tonks, certainly she may with propriety appeal to the substitute sovereign of a nation of bankrupt assassins to spare Senorita Cisneros.