William Cowper Brann

“ Let every citizen contribute to the support of government in exact proportion to his means. To exempt the man who makes $500 a year and place the entire burden upon the man who earns $1,000 a year and upwards is to make of the first a political pauper. The graduated income tax, so-called is wrong to one class of citizens and an insult to the other. Let us tax all property once and only once; but let us see to it that unctuous old hypocrites like Rockefeller are not permitted to rob the public—that they do not build collegiate monuments to their own memory with other people's money. ”

“ A baby is a human being, not a problem. A baby can't be explained away by pure reason, because he didn't come by that route. Love brought him here and only Love can nourish him to the fullness of growth in soul and mind. True many come who, seemingly, were better drowned like surplus puppies or kittens. But who shall select those to survive? Grecian wisdom once attempted to improve on "natural selection" and Greece is the ghost of a vanished glory. Why shouldn't Ginx have drowned his Baby—or himself before the multiplication in the result of which the Baby was a unit? ”

“ In the stillness Nature's god speaks, and in the patient face of the woman, shading her eyes where she watches him from the cabin door, is sweeter and nobler dreaming than ever finds resting place in the sharpened and querulous features of our modern rushed society woman.
In English homes are the friendships of generations and beneath their spreading trees their lives epitomise the lotus eater's religion—"There is no joy but calm." Our women know neither the one nor the other. Our social creed and dogma know nothing of friendship, and calm to them is as Greek papyri in a kindergarten. ”

“ It takes so long to starve, and life, after all, is sweet; so they make their choice, shirking from death while age is still so far away, and hope is bounding in the pulses; and having so chosen are shut out from hope forever more. Yet there are items in the society columns of the morning papers only too often, which, if the truth could stand out through the flattering lines, would tell how this or that fashionable girl has sold herself for money, her mother standing by well-pleased, and all her five hundred friends sending presents to commemorate the occasion. ”

“ Is God continually giving out this "influence," this life-force, this vis vitalis, to the people of this planet, and with each death withdrawing a portion thereof and either casting it into the waste-basket of Perdition or cording it up, like back- number newspapers, in the New Jerusalem, never to be again employed? If it "flows directly from the bosom of God" is it not God? And if Nature waste nothing can Nature's Prince be such a prodigal? Is he not rather the great psychological heart of the universe through which the same life-current, the same intellect flows back and forth forever? ”

“ Take a penny from every person in the United States and give it to one man and he has seven hundred thousand dollars. Every Ginx's Baby in any land can be helped somewhat, and Ginx himself must do his share, to the full limit of his capacity for doing. We cannot save them all; cannot make their lives successes. Success is the sum of many failures. A million seeds must die that one rose may bloom. You or I may be the means, in part, of saving one child from the plunge of Vauxhall Bridge or through the gallows-trap. ”

“ We hover around the one with flatteries and soft courtesies, and we hound down the other with pitiless vengeance, human and divine.
And in all this does our world show its shallowness and its immeasurable stupidity. How dare woman say to her sister woman, "I am better than thou!" In how much has she been tried and tempted? How much does she know of life and its hideous tests? How much does she know woman's love that is at once her glory and her shame, her crown and her crucifix, her heaven and her Calvary? ”

“ The old line life insurance fake is the most colossal scheme of predacity known to human history. Enough money is annually filched from the people to clothe every pauper like unto Solomon in all his glory and feed him upon the fat of the land. Millions of Americans are today denying themselves creature comforts to pay premiums on policies that will never yield their dependents one penny. The old line fraud flourishes simply because, in the language of the erstwhile P. T. Barnum, the American people love to be hood-dooed and humbugged. ”

“ Is it possible you have not learned that where all the land value is taken in taxation there can be no selling value? And where is the land to-day with a community settled upon it that has not selling value? If land value is already absorbed by taxation, what is it that goes to maintain landlordism? Perhaps you'll contend that landlordism doesn't exist. What value is it that a man pays for when he buys an unimproved lot in the heart of a city? What is it that the boomer booms and the land speculator gambles on when he adds acre to acre and lot to lot without any intention of productive use? ”

“ I doubt not that a vast number of the female students of Baylor, past and present, are pure as the flowers that bloom above the green glacier; but some have fallen, and the conclusion is inevitable that they were not properly protected from the wiles of the world. I care not how noble-minded, how pure of heart a girl may be, if she is committed when young and inexperienced to a college where both sexes are received, it becomes the imperative duty of the management to render one false step impossible. ”

“ But these women who are neither "stars or the lower stratum," who study and labor, even though the labor be light through being one of love for their profession, who give a refinement and a sweetness to the many little dramas that appeal to critique and common folk alike, who speak to us of wife and sister and mother and sweetheart, and whose voices are as sweet and gestures as gentle and personalities as refined as are those of our own home women nestling safe in the firelight of our ingle-nook—these women are not immoral in a ratio of "ten to one." ”

“ When working-girls are treated thus, what wonder that some of them become imbittered, discouraged, and go head-long to the devil—affording the wretched pharisees whose brutality wrought their ruin, an opportunity to "rescue" them and pose before the world as Christian philanthropists! What inducement has a young and beautiful woman to toil early and late for an honest livelihood when by so doing she forfeits the right to be called respectable—is flouted by even the paltry plutocracy of a country town and proclaimed a social pariah by such a headless phthirius pubis as Halliwell! ”

“ It is really pitiful to contemplate the agony of Princeton; but the average tax-payer is likely to conclude that one Grover Cleveland is quite enough in any country. It is to be hoped that the son will not resemble the sire—that he will not have the beefy mug of the booze-sodden old beast who disgraced the presidency by playing that high office for his personal profit. Let it never be forgotten that G. Cleveland was the only man to enter the presidency a pauper and leave it a plutocrat. And he managed to do this at a time when millions of better men were going hungry to bed. ”

“ And this actually happened in San Antonio, a city whose very name thrills every fibre of American manhood—a city from whose turrets the flags of five nations have proudly fluttered—a city whose every foot of soil has been time and again baptised with the blood of the brave—a city that twice within the century has put Thermopylae to shame! Yet I am told that these unclean birds, who befoul so fair a nest are allowed to live in San Antonio, to walk her streets, to elbow her proud sons and look her proud daughters in the face! How have the mighty fallen! ”

“ We see such things every day, and it is not polite to call them by their names. For that is the bitterness of it; that ruin and disgrace and the swift downward road to hell are set by society before the feet of the woman who errs, while for the man who was at least her equal partner in crime, there are cordial greetings, and a thousand doors, opened by women, alas!—and he may have some pure girl for a wife, if he likes, and go serenely every evening to a happy home, untroubled by remorse. ”

“ And it is these common people that the Single Tax will crush for the benefit of these 250,000 plutocrats, the bulk of whose wealth is in personal property.
Sit down and think it over, doctor; you are really too bright a man to be led astray by the razzle-dazzle of Single Tax sophistry. You do your enviable reputation for intelligence a rank injustice by mistaking poor old George for an economic Messiah, and if you are not careful somebody will try to sell you a gold-brick or stock in a Klondike company. ”

“ To feed the few they starve the many. They coldly speculate in the holiest affections of the human heart. They remorselessly coin blood into boodle. They wring the last farthing from the thin purse of labor for their own enrichment. They obtain patronage of the ignorant by false pretenses. They permit the people to regard their legal reserve as available for all purposes. They parade eight and nine-figure assets as things to be proud of, when they are in reality the fruits of shameless despoiliation of the poor. ”

“ The search for happiness, when carried to the extreme, becomes a torture. The desire for happiness is selfish, and selfishness is never happy. Happiness dispensed is like bread cast upon the water, and will return after many days. Those who seek it stray from it. All laws and all literature that arouse the spirit of discontent, of selfishness and of desire for happiness, are vicious because they defeat the very object which they seek to accomplish, and make people more miserable than they were by increasing their capacity for suffering without a coexistent power to gratify the desires aroused. ”

“ Despite his thick veneer of selfishness, man is at heart a creature of sentiment, and religion is the poetry of the common people. Crude it may be, but its tendency is toward the stars, while all else in man is animalistic and of the earth. Strike the religion, the poetry, out of a people, and you reduce them to the level of educated animals. Annul the power that draws them upward and they must sink back to primordial savagery. The individual may accept logic as a substitute for sentiment, but a nation cannot do so. The masses are not swayed through the head, but through the heart. ”

“ Their creditors do not have even the mournful satisfaction of contemplating the hole—the amateur editor invariably pulls it in after him. But until his first notes fall due he is an iridescent glory. He adores himself with a long-tailed hand-me-down Albert Edward and carries the universe in his arms. He pokes his meddlesome proboscis into everything and gives oodles of advice, unasked. He may not have as much principle as a tomcat in rutting time, but he poses before all men as a "guardian of public morals." ”

“ They come out of it, and become part of our lives. Glory is a vivid creature, with her moods and fancies, her dual nature, with the one side of her in love with John Storm and his work, and the other side—and so much the stronger side, alas! in love with the world, and filled with merry, buoyant life. One follows her through every step of her course, and feels the moral deterioration coming upon her so gradually and yet so surely. ”

“ Then is the union of a snub-nosed American parvenu with an idiotic European "nobleman" whom she has bought with her daddy's dollars as holy in the sight of heaven as that of old Isaac's son with Laban's beauteous daughter. God joins man and woman together only with the golden links of love. When they are joined thus they are bone of one bone and flesh of one flesh. Were they alone in the world no marriage ceremony would be needful; but being a portion of society they must obtain its sanction. ”

“ If I am taxed on my bonds, I must "put it in the bill," just as the merchant puts rent, interest and insurance. If Massachusetts owns ten million dollars of Texas securities she has simply transferred that much tangible wealth to this state for us to tax. If the paper evidence that this property is located here be taxed in Massachusetts, Texas must pay the piper. Let it never be forgotten that a tax is but a toll and can only be taken of something tangible. You cannot get blood out of a ghost or wealth out of a paper evidence of property. ”

“ It was a beautiful, a refreshing sight, this practical approval of mob violence by unfledged ministers on the campus of a Baptist college, this raucous tommyrot about death-warrants and ropes, this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so d——d ignorant that they couldn't find either end of themselves in the dark, this chortling over the fact that one desk-emaciated welter-weight had been caught unawares and trampled upon by a sanctified mob—a refreshing sight, I say, in a temple consecrated to that Christ who forgave even his enemies from the cross. ”

“ How can a press be trusted in its assaults on the old order when it suppresses the truth that the men and methods of the old regime are flourishing to the profit of the former under the new? What use is any platform, however noble in its aspirations or purposes, if the men who attain to power upon it continue all the meanness and nefariousness of the men who flourished under the old domination of the bosses, the corporations and the trusts? ”

“ America has blinded her eyes with avarice and glutted her brain with greed. She has starved her intellect and gorged her ambition. She has bartered her birthright of nobility and sold her soul to crawling sycophants. She has prostituted her sceptre of power to trusts for tinsel and cowers under the lash of corporations because they bind her brow with a cap of bells that tinkle an empty song of "Freedom." In the mad rush for gain, America has forgotten its greatness, and in their blind struggle for gold Americans forget what is grand. ”