Chapter VIII: Part 8

A half-page display ad. with wood-cut portrait of a chamber- set occupying the foreground and the clare-obscure worked up with various sizes and styles of black type, possesses far more charm for him than does the deep blue of our Southern sky, whose mighty concave seems to reach to Infinity's uttermost verge; a two-story brick livery stable or laundry is to him far more interesting than the splendors of the Day-god rising from the ocean's blue; an eighty-cent dollar with its lying legend more beautiful in his eyes than even Austin's violet crown bathed in the radiance of the morning or arched with twilight's dome of fretted gold. The "able editor" cares naught for purple hills, unless they contain mineral; for broad champaigns unless the soil be good; for flashing brooks unless they can be made to turn a millwheel or water a cow.

The "able editor" takes it for granted that everybody is as grossly materialistic as himself,--care not whether the sky above their heads is blue or black so long as the soil beneath their feet is fertile; whether the landscape be pleasant or forbidding so long as it will yield them creature comforts. Perhaps he is very nearly right. The fact that millions will make their homes beneath leaden skies, amid scenes of desolation, while there is room and to spare in our sunny Southland, is not without its significance,-- indicates plainly that man has not yet progressed far into that spiritual kingdom where the soul must be fed as well as the stomach; where sunlight is more necessary than sauer-kraut, where beauty furnishes forth more delights than beer.

Still there must be a few people in this gain-grabbing world not altogether indifferent to the beauties of nature; to whom the gold of the evening sky is more precious than that wrung with infinite toil from the bowels of the earth; to whom the purple of the hills is more pleasing than the crustacean dyes of ancient Tyre; the flashing of clear waters more delightful than the gleam of diamonds; the autumn's rainbow tints more inspiring than the dull red heart of the ruby. To have such a home in Texas were like a sojourn in that pleasant paradise where our primal parents first tasted terrestrial delights. No Alps or Apennines burst from Texas' broad bosom and rear their cold, dead peaks mile above mile into heaven's mighty vault; no Vesuvius belches his lurid, angry flame at the stars like a colossal cannon worked by Titans at war with the Heavenly Hierarchy; no Niagara churns its green waters into rainbow- tinted foam. The grandeur of Texas is not that of destruction and desolation; its beauties are not those which thrill the heart with awe, but fill it with adoration and sweet content. Not dark and dreary mountains riven by the bolts of angry Jove; not gloomy Walpurgis gorges where devils dance and witches shriek; not the savage thunder of the avalanche, but the sun-kissed valley of Cashmere, the purple hills of the lotus eaters' land, the pastoral beauties of Tempe's delightful vale. Here is repeated a thousand times that suburban home which Horace sang; here the coast where Odysseus, "the much-enduring man," cast anchor and declared he would no longer roam; here the Elysian fields "far beyond the sunset"; here the valley of Avilion lies

"Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,"

where Queens nurse the wounded hero back to life; here the lost Atlantis, new-found; the land where it is always summer; where airs softer than those of Araby the Blest are ever blowing; skies bluer than ever arched famed Tuscany bid earthworms look heavenward; sunsets whose gleaming gold might ransom a universe!

What care I who owns this broad expanse of emerald mead and purple hills? who pays the taxes and digs and delves therein for gain? It is all mine, and the sky above it is mine to the horizon's uttermost verge; the flashing waters, the cool mists creeping down the hills, the soft breeze stealing up from Neptune's watery world with healing on its wings, still fragrant with spices of the Spanish main--all, all mine; a priceless heritage which no man toiled for, which no spendthrift can east away.

* * * WOMAN'S WICKEDNESS.

CHASTITY GOING OUT OF FASHION.

By the "social evil" is commonly understood illicit intercourse of the sexes, a violation of law or custom intended to regulate the procreative passion.

The "evil" is probably as old as society, coeval with mankind. History--tradition itself--goes not back to a time when statutes, confessedly human, or professedly divine, were capable of controlling the fierce fires that blaze within the blood--when all-consuming Love was cold Reason's humble slave and Passion yielded blind obedience unto Precept. Although the heavens have been ever peopled with threatening gods and the great inane filled with gaping hells; although kings and courts have thundered their inhibitions forth, and society turned upon illicit love Medusa's awful frown, the Paphian Venus has flourished in every age and clime, and still flaunts her scarlet flag in the face of Heaven.

The history of humanity--its poetry, its romance, its very religion--is little more than a Joseph's coat, woven of Love's celestial warp and Passion's infernal woof in the loom of Time. For sensuous Cleopatra's smiles Mark Antony thought the world well lost; for false Helen's favors proud Ilion's temples blazed, and the world is strewn with broken altars and ruined fanes, with empty crowns and crumbling thrones blasted by the selfsame curse.

In many cities of every land abandoned women are so numerous, despite all these centuries of law-making and moralizing, that they find it impossible to earn a livelihood by their nefarious trade--are driven by sheer necessity to seek more respectable employment. The supply of public prostitutes is apparently limited only by the demand, while the number of "kept women" is constantly increasing, and society becoming day by day more lenient to those favorites of fortune who have indulged in little escapades not in strict accord with the Seventh Commandment. It is now a common occurrence for a female member of the "Four Hundred" who has confessedly gone astray, to be received back on an equality with her most virtuous sisters. In ancient Sparta theft was considered proper, but getting caught a crime. Modern society has improved upon that peculiar moral code. Adultery--if the debauchee have wealth--is but a venial fault, and to be found out a trifling misfortune, calling for condolence rather than condemnation. It is not so much the number of professed prostitutes that alarms the student of sociology, as the brutal indifference to even the semblance of sexual purity which is taking possession of our social aristocracy, and which poison, percolating through the underlying strata, threatens to eliminate womanly continence from the world.

If, despite all our safeguards of law and the restraining force of religion, society becomes more hopelessly corrupt; if, with our advancing civilization, courtesans increase in number; if, with our boasted progress in education and the arts, women of alleged respectability grow less chary of their charms--if the necessities of poverty and the luxury of wealth alike breed brazen bawds and multiply cuckolds--it is a fair inference that there is something radically wrong with our social system.

It might be well, perhaps, for priests and publicists to cease launching foolish anathemas and useless statutes at prostitution long enough to inquire what is driving so many bright young women into dens of infamy,--for those good souls who are assiduously striving to drag their fallen sisters out of the depths, to study the causes of the disease before attempting a cure. I say disease, for I cannot agree with those utilitarians who profess to regard prostitution as a "necessary evil"; who protest that the brute passions of man must be sated,--that but for the Scarlet Woman he would debauch the Vestal Virgin. I do not believe that Almighty God decreed that one-half the women of this world should be sacrificed upon the unclean altar of Lust that the others might be saved. It is an infamous, a revolting doctrine, a damning libel of the Deity. All the courtesans beneath Heaven's blue concave never caused a single son of Adam's misery to refrain from tempting, so far as he possessed the power, one virtuous woman. Never.

Governor Fishback, of Arkansas, recently declared that "houses of ill-fame are necessary to city life," and added: "If you close these sewers of men's animal passions you overflow the home and spread disaster."

This theory has been adopted by many municipalities, courtesans duly licensed, their business legitimatized and accorded the protection of the law. If houses of ill-fame be "necessary to city life"; if they prevent the overflow of the home of bestial lust and the spread of disaster, it follows as a natural sequence that the prostitute is a public benefactor, to be encouraged rather than condemned, deserving of civic honor rather than social infamy. Will Governor Fishback and his fellow utilitarians be kind enough to make a careful examination of the quasi- respectable element of society and inform us how large an army of courtesans will be necessary to enable it to pass a baking powder purity test?

Governor Fishback does not appear to have profited by Pope's suggestion that "The proper study of mankind is man," or he would know full well that the presence in a city of prostitutes but serves to accentuate the dangers that environ pure womanhood. He would know that they add fuel to Lust's unholy fires, that thousands of them are procuresses as well as prostitutes, and that one bad woman can do more to corrupt her sex than can any libertine since the days of Sir Launcelot. He would likewise know that so perverse is the nature of man that he would leave a harem filled with desirous houris more beautiful than ever danced through Mohammedan dream of Paradise, to dig pitfalls for the unwary feet of some misshapen country wench who was striving to lead an honest life. As a muley cow will turn from a manger filled with new-mown hay, and wear out her thievish tongue trying to coax a wisp of rotten straw through a crack in a neighbor's barn, so will man turn from consenting Venus' matchless charms to solicit scornful Dian.

What is it that is railroading so large a portion of the young women to Hell? What causes so many to forsake the "straight and narrow path" that is supposed to lead to everlasting life, and seek the irremediable way of eternal death? What mad phantasy is it that leads so many wives to sacrifice the honor of their husbands and shame their children? Is it evil inherent in the daughters of Eve themselves? Is it lawless lust or force of circumstances that adds legion after legion to the cohorts of shame? Or has our boasted progress brought with it a suspicion that female chastity is, after all, an overprized bauble--that what is no crime against nature should be tolerated by this eminently practical age? We have cast behind us the myths and miracles, proven the absurdity of our ancestors' most cherished traditions and brought their idols beneath the iconoclastic hammer. In this general social and intellectual house-cleaning have we consigned virtue to the rubbish heap--or at best relegated it to the garret with the spinning-wheel, hand-loom and other out-of-date trumpery? Time was when a woman branded as a bawd hid her face for shame, or consorted only with her kind; now, if she can but become sufficiently notorious she goes upon the stage, and men take their wives and daughters to see her play "Camille" and kindred characters. This may signify much; among other things that the courtesan is creeping into social favor--even that a new code of morals is now abuilding, in which she will be the grand exemplar. As change is the order of the day, and what one age damns its successor ofttimes deifies, who knows but an up-to-date religion may yet be evolved with Bacchic revels for sacred rites and a favorite prostitute for high priestess?

Were I called upon to diagnose the social disease; did any duly ordained committee--from the numerous "Reform" societies, Ministerial Association, secular legislatures or other bodies that are taking unto themselves great credit for assiduously making a bad matter worse-- call upon me for advice anent the proper method of restoring to healthy life the world's moribund morality, I would probably shock the souls out of them by stating a few plain facts without troubling myself to provide polite trimmings.

You cannot reform society from the bottom; you must begin at the top.

Man, physically considered, is merely an animal, and the law of his life is identical with that of the brute creation. Continence in man or woman is a violation of nature's edicts, a sacrifice made by the individual to the necessities of civilization.

Like the beast of the field, man formerly took unto himself a mate, and with his rude strength defended her from the advances of other males. Such, reduced to the last analysis, is the basis of marriage, of female chastity and family honor. Rape and adultery were prohibited under pains and penalties, and behind the sword of the criminal law grew up the moral code. As wealth increased man multiplied his wives and added concubines; but woman was taught that while polygamy was pleasing to the gods polyandry was the reverse--that while the husband was privileged to seek sexual pleasure in a foreign bed, the wife who looked with desiring eyes upon other than her rightful lord merited the scorn of earth and provoked the wrath of Heaven.

For long ages woman was but the creature of man's caprice, the drudge or ornament of his home, mistress of neither her body nor her mind. But as the world advanced and matter was made more subject unto mind--as divine Reason wrested the scepter from brute Force--woman began to assume her proper place in the world's economy. She is stepping forth into the garish light of freedom, is realizing for the first time in the history of the human race that she is a moral entity--that even she, and not another, is the arbiter of her fate. And, as ever before, new-found freedom is manifesting itself in criminal folly-- liberty has become a synonym for license.

The "progressive" woman--the woman who is not only well "up-to-date," but skirmishing with the future--is asking her brother: "If thou, why not I? If man is forgiven a score of mistresses must woman, blessed with like reason and cursed with kindred passions, be damned for one lover?" And while the question grates upon her ear, the answer comes not trippingly to the tongue. I do not mean that all women who imagine themselves progressive are eager to assume the same easy morals that from time immemorial have characterized the sterner sex; but this line of argument, peculiar to their class, while not likely to make men better, is well calculated to make foolish women worse. The sooner they realize that he-Dians are as scarce in the country as brains in the head of a chrysanthemum dude; that such sexual purity as the world is to be blessed withal must be furnished by the softer sex, the better for all concerned. That they will eventually cease their altogether useless clamor that bearded men become as modest as blushing maids, and agree with the poet that "Whatever is, is right," the lessons of history bid us hope. When the French people threw of the yoke of the royalist and aristocrat they likewise loudly clamored for equality, fraternity and other apparently reasonable but utterly impossible things, until the bitter school of experience taught them better. The progressive women have not yet set up la Belle Guillotine--in Washington or elsewhere--for the decapitation of male incorrigibles; which significant fact confirms our old faith that the ladies rather like a man who would not deliberately overdo the part of Joseph.

But the female "reformer," with her social board of equalization theories, is but a small factor in that mighty force which is filling the land with unfaithful wives and the potter's field with degraded prostitutes.

When the people of a nation are almost universally poor, sexual purity is the general rule. Simple living and severe toil keep in check the passions and make it possible to mold the mind with moral precepts. But when a nation becomes divided into the very rich and the extremely poor; when wilful Waste and woeful Want go hand in hand; when luxury renders abnormal the passions of the one; and cupidity, born of envy, blunts the moral perceptions of the other, then indeed is that nation delivered over to the world, the flesh and the devil. When all alike are poor, contentment reigns. The son grows up a useful, self-reliant man, the daughter an industrious, virtuous woman. From this class comes nearly every benefactor of mankind. It has ever been the great repository of morality, the balance- wheel of society, the brain and brawn of the majestic world. Divided into millionaires and mendicants, the poor man's son becomes feverish to make a showy fortune by fair means or by foul, while his daughter looks with envious eye upon m'lady, follows her fashions and too often apes her morals. The real life is supplanted by the artificial, and people are judged, not by what they are, but by what they have. The "true-love match" becomes but a reminiscence--the blind god's bow is manipulated by brutish Mammon. Men and women make "marriages of convenience," consult their fortunes rather than their affections--seek first a lawful companion with a well-filled purse, and then a congenial paramour.

The working girl soon learns that beyond a few stale platitudes--fired of much as a hungry man says grace--she gets no more credit for wearing honest rags than flaunting dishonest silks; that good name, however precious it may be to her, is really going out of fashion--that when the world pretends to prize it above rubies it is lying-- is indulging in the luxury of hypocrisy. She likewise learns that the young men really worth marrying, knowing that a family means a continual striving to be fully as fashionable and artificial as those better able to play the fool, seek mistresses rather than wives. She becomes discouraged, desperate, and drifts into the vortex.

Much is said by self-constituted reformers of the lachrymose school anent trusting maids "betrayed" by base-hearted scoundrels and loving wives led astray by designing villains; but I could never work my sympathies up to the slopping over stage for these pathetic victims of man's perfidy. It may be that my tear-glands lack a hair- trigger attachment, and my sob-machine is not of the most approved pattern. Perchance woman is fully as big a fool as these reformers paint her--that she has no better sense than a blind horse that has been taught to yield a ready obedience to any master--to submit itself without question to the guidance of any hand. Will the "progressive" woman--who is just now busy boycotting Col. Breckinridge and spilling her salt tears over his discarded drab--kindly take a day of and tell us what is to become of this glorious country when such incorrigible she-idiots get control of it? It is well enough to protect the honor of children with severe laws and a double-shotted gun; but the average young woman is amply able to guard her virtue if she really values it, while the married woman who becomes so intimate with a male friend that he dares assail her continence, deserves no sympathy. She is the tempter, not the victim. True it is that maids, and matrons too, as pure as the white rose that blooms above the green glacier, have been swept too far by the fierce whirlwind of love and passion; but of these the world doth seldom hear. The woman whose sin is sanctified by love--who staked her name and fame upon a cowardly lie masquerading in the garb of eternal truth-- never yet rushed into court with her tale of woe or aired her grievance in the public prints. The world thenceforth can give but one thing she wants, and that's an unmarked grave. May God in his mercy shield all such from the parrot criticisms and brutal insults of the fish-blooded, pharisaical female, whose heart never thrilled to love's wild melody, yet who marries for money--puts her frozen charms up at auction for the highest bidder, and having obtained a fair price by false pretenses, imagines herself preeminently respectable! In the name of all the gods at once, which is the fouler crime, the greater "social evil": For a woman to deliberately barter her person for gold and lands, for gew- gaws, social position and a preferred pew in a fashionable church--even though the sale be in accordance with law, have the benediction of a stupid priest and the sanction of a corrupt and canting world--or, in defiance of custom and forgetful of cold precept, to cast the priceless jewel of a woman's honor upon the altar of illicit love?

Give the latter woman a chance, forget her fault, and she will become a blessing to society, an ornament to Heaven; the former is fit inhabitant only for a Hell of ice. She has deliberately dishonored herself, her sex and the man whose name she bears, and Custom can no more absolve her than the pope can pardon sin. She is the most dreadful product of the "Social Evil," of unhallowed sexual commerce--is the child of Mammon and Medusa, the blue- ribbon abortion of this monster-bearing age.

TALMAGE THE TURGID.

That man who first coined the phrase, "Nothing succeeds like success," had a great head. Talmage is emphatically a success,--viewed from a worldly point of view. He attracts the largest audiences of any American preacher; his sermons are more extensively printed, more eagerly read than those of any other divine. He is regarded by the public as the greatest of modern preachers, and he evidently thinks this verdict a righteous one. Why this is so, I am at a loss to determine. I have read his sermons and writings with unusual care, hoping thereby to discover in what particular he towers like Saul above his brethren,-- wherein he is greater than the thousands of obscure pulpit- pounders who do battle with the devil for a few dollars and a destructive donation party per year; but so far I have signally failed. I have yet to see in print a single sermon by the so-called "great Talmage" remarkable for wit, wisdom or eloquence; or a single scrap from his pen that might not have been written by a sophomore or a young reporter.

I have before me, while I write, one of his latest oratorical efforts, entitled "Bricks Without Straw." It was delivered to one of the largest audiences that ever crowded into the great tabernacle, is considerably above the Talmagian average, was evidently regarded as one of his "ablest efforts," for the great daily in which I find it prefaces it with a "three-story head," a short biographical sketch and a portrait of the speaker making an evident effort to look wise. Yet such a sermon delivered before a Texas congregation by a fledgling D.D. seeking a "call" would provoke supercilious smiles on the part of those people who considered it their painful duty to remain awake. At the close of the services the good deacons would probably feel called upon to take the young man out behind the church and give him a little fatherly advice, the burthen of which would be to become an auctioneer or seek a situation as "spouter" for a snake side-show.

Had "Bricks Without Straw" been written as a "Sunday special" by a horse-editor of any daily paper in Texas, the managing editor would have chucked it into the waste- basket and advised the young man that journalism was not his forte. It is a rambling fragmentary piece of mental hodge-podge, in which scraps of school book Egyptology, garbled Bible stories, false political economy and fragments of misapplied history tumble over each other like specters in a delirium. It is just such a discourse as one might expect from the lips of a female lieutenant in the Salvation Army who possessed a vivid imagination, a smattering of learning and a voluble tongue, but little judgment. The only original information I can find in the discourse is to the effect that when Joseph was a bare-legged little Hebrew, making mud-pies in the land of his forefathers, his daddy called him "Joe"; that the Bible refers to Egypt and Egyptians just "two hundred and eighty-nine times," and that "Egypt is our great-grandmother."

He goes out of his way to denounce as "lunatics" those who would place the American railways and telegraphs under governmental control. He is quite sure that the logical effect of such a proceeding would be the revival in free America of the old Egyptian tyranny. The analogy between a tyrant enslaving his subjects by means of a monopoly of the food supply, and a free people managing a great property for their own advantage, could only be traced by a Talmagian head.

During the few months that Mr. Talmage was pottering about in the land of the erstwhile Pharaohs, examining mummified cats and drawing a fat salary for unrendered services, he evidently forgot that in his own, his native land, the people "rule the roost"; that the government is but their creature and has to dance to music of their making. If the distinguished gentleman had spent his vacation in the hayloft in close communion with a copy of the constitution of the United States and a primary work on political economy, instead of gadding from the pyramids to the Acropolis hunting for small pegs upon which to hang large theories, perhaps he would be able to occasionally say something sensible.

Of course, in sloshing around over so wide a field, Mr. Talmage gave his hearers his truly valuable opinion of Mohammedanism. He admitted that it is a religion of cleanliness, sobriety and devotion; but the fact that its founder had four wives caused him to sweat in agony. Polygamy, according to Mr. Talmage, "blights everything it touches." Those who practice it are, he is quite sure, the enemies of womankind. Is it not a trifle strange that from so foul a root should spring such a celestial plant as the Christian religion? that from the loins of a polygamous people should come an immaculate Christ? How can we mention Abraham, Isaac and Jacob without a curse, or think of a God whose teachings they followed, without horror--unless indeed we take issue with the public and vote Mr. Talmage an ass of the longest-eared variety.

Mr. Talmage is quite sure that God was on the side of the allies at the Battle of Waterloo; that he was on the side of the Russians during the French invasion. Mr. Talmage does not take it upon himself to explain, however, how the Deity chanced to be on the other side at Marengo and Austerlitz! No wonder that war is a risky business, if the God of battle changes his allegiance so erratically and without apparent provocation! Mr. Talmage should advise the government to cease expending money for ironclads and coast fortifications. In case of a foreign complication it were "all day with us" if the Autocrat of the Universe were swinging a battle-ax against us; while if we chanced to have him with us, we could send Baby McKee out with the jawbone of a hen, and put the armies of the world to shame!

Mr. Talmage should retire to some secluded spot and make a careful analysis of his sermons before firing them out to the press. They may sound all right in the big tabernacle, where a great volume of noise is the chief desideratum; but they make very poor reading. Like a flapjack, they may tickle the palate when served hot and with plenty of "sop"; but when allowed to grow cold are stale, flat and unprofitable.

Mr. Talmage is troubled with a diarrhoea of words and should take something for it. Perhaps the best possible prescription would be a long rest,--of a couple of centuries or so. How in God's name the American people ever became afflicted with the idea that he is a great man, is a riddle which might make Oedipus cudgel his wits in vain. He is not even a skillful pretender, shining like the moon, by borrowed light,--for he does not shine at all. His sentences are neither picturesque, dramatic nor wise. His so-called "sermons" are but fragmentary and usually ignorant allusions to things in general. He seldom or never encroaches upon the realms of science and philosophy, although he frequently attempts it, and evidently imagines that he is succeeding admirably, when he is but sloshing around, like a drunken comet that is chiefly tail, in inane limboes.

I can find no other explanation of Mr. Talmage's distinction than that, like Elliott F. Shepard, he can be more kinds of a fool in a given time than any other man in his profession. That were indeed distinction enough for one man, well calculated to cause the world to stand agaze! Notoriety and fame have, in this age, become synonymous if not exactly the same. The world gauges greatness by the volume of sound which the aspirant for immortal honors succeeds in setting afloat, little caring whether it be such celestial harp-music as caused Thebe's walls to rise, or the discordant bray of the ram's horn which made Jericho's to fall, and Mr. Talmage is emphatically a noise-producer. From the lecherous, but learned and logical Beecher to the gabbling inanity now doing the drum-major act, is a long stride.

* * * NUDE ART AT CHICAGO.

Now the very Old Nick is to pay at the World's Fair, and an exasperating stringency in the money market. The great "uncultured West" is flocking to Chicago to see the show, and is seeing more than it bargained for. Its modest cheek has been set aflame by the exuberant display of the nude in art. And the West is kicking, kicking with both feet, kicking like a bay steer who has a kick coming and knows how to recalcitrate. The culchawed East and blase Yewrup look on with mild astonishment and wondah what ails the bawbarians, doncher know.

We learn from our Chicago correspondent that the great buildings are liberally adorned with "figures of nude men of heroic size, not a detail of which has escaped the loving care of the fin de siecle sculptors. Elsewhere the examples of the nude represent both sexes." Yet the East wonders that the West is shocked,--cannot understand why "wives drag their husbands away and young ladies leave the building with faces ablaze with indignation!" Our correspondent volunteers the information that "a much severer test of the patience of the Western people will come when the art palace is opened"; also that "the treatment the Western people are getting is drastic and cruel, but it will work wonders in cultivating and refining them."

We beg leave to dissent from the conclusion. We hardly think that any of our readers will accuse us of prudery. We are willing to concede special privileges to art. Its province is to portray the beautiful, and the most beautiful thing on all God's earth is a perfect female form. The painter or sculptor who loves his art may be permitted to reproduce in modest pose a naked female figure; but he should not be allowed to force it upon the attention of a mixed multitude. Let him place it where it will only be seen by those who seek it. A man may take his mother, wife,--even his sweetheart to look upon such work of art, and they may be better, purer, nobler for having worshiped at the shrine of beauty; but to compel them to stand before it with a mixed multitude to most of whom it suggests but grossest sensuality, is a brutal crime against modesty. So much for the female nude.

What man would take a woman near and dear to him to look upon a nude male statue or painting,--"not a detail of which has escaped the loving care" of the artist? Certainly few Western or Southern men would do so! Worship of the beautiful may pardon the nude female figure, but the nude male figure never. Hercules nude is but an animal, and Apollo a nightmare. To place nude male figures indiscriminately about the great Fair buildings, where they must be seen by modest maids, whether they will or no, and that while insolent strangers enjoy their confusion, is the very apotheosis of brutality.

The idea that such an outrage upon divine modesty will "cultivate and refine" people sounds like one of Satan's satires. We honor the "uncultured West" for making a heroic kick, and trust that it will keep on recalcitrating until every unclean statue forced upon its attention in the name of art is forever disfigured. The protest of the West proves that its mind is still pure,--that it has not yet reached that plane of "culture" where modesty perishes in the frosts of formalism.

The liberty accorded art has degenerated into license. The beautiful is no longer sought, but the bizarre. It is not the massy shoulders of Hercules, the rounded arm of Juno, the beautiful bust of Hebe, the godlike pose of Apollo or the shapely limb of Aphrodite that painter and sculptor seek to reproduce; it is an "effect" similar to that of Boccaccio or a fragrant French novel. It is not against the true in art that the West is rebelling, but against the vulgar.

* * * "THERE'S ONE COMES AFTER."

A SKETCH.

None so poor but they may build fairy castles in the air; none so wretched but they may fondly gaze upon the fickle star of Hope, flaming ever in that Heaven we see by Faith.

A man, worn with suffering and sorrow and sin, was toiling homeward in the night from a far hunter's camp, whither he had been banished by a doctor's edict, "Rest from labor lest ye die." "That indeed is a misfortune," he had said, and redoubled his vigils at the desk. Then they brought his little son, the last gem in the sacred circle of the home whose breaking up broke his heart, and placed the child upon his knee. He looked at its fair face and said, "I will go." A man for whom the shadows should still be falling toward the west, but old before his time, deep scarred by angry storms, battered and bruised like some presumptuous mortal who had seized his puny spear and plunged into such wars as the Titans were wont to wage upon the Grecian Gods. The jaded steed stumbled along the dark and dangerous way, while its rider dreamed with wide open eyes and sometimes muttered to himself in that dreary solitude.

"There's one comes after--in dying I do not die, in losing I simply pass the sword from sire to son. I may but fill a ditch for a better to mount upon and win the mural crown. What, then, if that other be----"

The owl hooted as he passed, and from the thicket came the angry snarl of wolves. "How human!" he bitterly exclaimed. "Hoots and hungry howls, all along life's path-- a weird pilgrimage in the dark."

He nodded, his head bowing almost to the saddle-bow, then awoke humming, he knew not why,

"As long as the heart knows passion.
As long as life, as long."

His dog, a powerful mastiff, bristled and uttered an angry growl as a great gray wolf slunk along in the dry grass but a few yards distant. "The brutes follow the wounded," he muttered, "and I am stricken deep." He unslung his heavy fowling-piece and fired. The eyes of the brute glowed like green globes of phosphorescence in the light of the gun, then sank down with a howl that drew its comrades about it, not to succor and to save, but to tear and rend. He watched them a moment, muttering again, "How human!" and turning to an aged oak that spread its branches wide, built a fire of brush and bivouacked. But he could not sleep--the blue devils were playing at hide-and-seek within his heart, and phantoms that once were flesh came trooping from out the gloom and hovered round him. He put out his hands to them, he cried to them to speak to him, but they receded into the darkness from whence they came--the grave had given up its dead only to mock him, to emphasize his utter desolation. He embraced the sturdy oak as though he would draw strength from its stubborn heart which had defied the storms of a thousand years, then sank prostrate at its base and, with only dumb animals to note his weakness, wept as only strong men weep when shivered by the bolts of Destiny.

"One left--but one of those I loved; my strength is broken, my labors are in vain--I can but die; yet must I live, lest the one in whom is centered all my hopes, doth fall in evil ways and also come to naught."

He dreamed of the days that were dead, and of those rushing upon him from the mystic future, "each bearing its burden of sorrow." He trod again life's thorny path, from the cradle to manhood's somber noon, a path strewn with wreck and wraith and wet with blood and tears. Again the well-known forms came from beyond the firelight and, winding their shadowy arms about his neck, wept for his loneliness. He tried to embrace them, to gather them to his heart as in the old days when they welcomed his homecoming with glad acclaim, but clutched only air--his kisses fell on vacancy. As they receded into the gloom he followed crying, "Stay! Stay!" and wandered here and there through bogs and briers and over the rough rocks, calling them each by name with many an endearing term, until he fell exhausted, and, putting forth his hand to break his fall, encircled the neck of his faithful dog and lay there bruised and bleeding. Then other phantoms came, two women, one old, one young, bearing a ghastly burden, around which little children wailed. They laid it down at his feet, a horrid thing with wide-scaring eyes and gaping wounds all wet with gore. And the elder bowed herself upon it and kissed the rigid hands, the lips and hair and moaned that she was left childless in her age, but the younger stood erect, imperious, the frightened children clinging to her skirts and, calling him by a name that froze his blood, bade him look upon her widowhood.

"It was self-defense," he doggedly replied, as he met the glance of her scornful eyes.

"O egotist!" she cried; "must a man die that a dog may live? Must a mother's gray hairs be brought in sorrow to the grave; must the heart of a wife be crushed within a bloody hand and children never know a father's loving care, that such a thing as thou may'st yet encumber this fair earth? Precious indeed must be that life, purchased at such a price!"

But again the forms that had fled returned, and one, a frail, sweet-faced woman with a world of pity in her eyes, stood between him and his accuser. She took the scornful woman's hand and gently said: "Sister, 'twas thee or me, 'twas thine or mine;" and in the music of her voice the ghastly object vanished.

The hoot of the owl and the howl of the wolf grew faint and far away; he fell into an uneasy slumber and saw himself, aged and gray, trying to keep pace with a fair youth, who mounted with free and graceful step a mountain whose summit was crowned with the light of everlasting day. Steeper and steeper grew the path, yet he strove with failing strength. The youth reached out a strong hand to him and said, "Lean on me;" but he put it back, crying fiercely: "No! no! climb thou alone farther I cannot go. On! On to the summit, where breaks the great white light, and there is no death!"

The youth struggled with the steeps and overcame them one by one, and mounted higher and ever higher, until he stood where never man had stood, the glory of the gods upon his face, the immortelles upon his brow. And people wondered and said to him, "Who is it that stands upon the mountain top where only tread the gods?" And he answered, "It is I--it is my other self." And they said, "The poor old man is mad; let be, let be."

The dog crept closer to its master and laid its head upon his breast. The vision changed, and he sat by a seacoal fire in chambers that once had echoed the glad voices of those whose graves were 'mid the soughing pines. He held his one treasure to his heart and sang to it the old ditties that its mother was wont to sing when soothing her babe to slumber, until the golden head drooped low upon his breast. He wove about it fond dreams of what should be in the years to come, when, grown to manhood, it entered the arena of the world. A bony hand stole over his shoulder and seized the child, and looking up he beheld Death standing by his chair. He clasped his treasure close and struggled with the grisly specter, but it only mocked him, and tearing the child from him, fled into the outer void. He struggled to his feet and from his parched lips there burst a cry that echoed and reechoed through the dark woods and was hurled back from the distant hills.

At dawn the rustics found him, lying cold as his rocky bed, the beaded dew upon his grizzled beard, his horse with head low hanging over him, his dog keeping watch and ward.

* * * POOR OLD TEXAS.

'Twas said in days of old that misfortune never comes singly. The fates are turning upon Texas an unkindly eye. She is o'erwhelmed quite, sunk in the Serbonian bogs of dark despair. First our mighty Democratic majority slipped up on the Hoggeian banana peel and drove its vertebrae through the crown of its convention plug, while unfeeling Populists and Republicans jeered and flouted us. Then our blessed railway kermishen lost its linchpin and the soulless corporations heaped coals of fire upon our heads by reducing rates, thereby making our boasted wisdom a byword and a reproach. The cyclone swooped down upon us from Kansas and swiped our crops, making our boasts that here was an Elysium beyond the storm-belt sound as hollow as Adam's dream of Eden after he was lifted over the garden wall. Still we bore up and presented a bold, if not an unbroken front to a carping world. But the vials of wrath were not yet exhausted. Pandora's box had not yet emptied itself of all its plagues. Our sorrow's crown of sorrow was yet to come. It is here; our humiliation is accomplished, our agony is complete. A lone highwayman has held up and robbed a populous passenger train in Texas--in West Texas, the rendezvous of the sure-enough bad man, who catches catamounts and clips their claws,-- who defies whole barrels o' Jersey lightning and uses the bucking-broncho for his laughter, yea, his sport! Shades o' Ben Thompson and Luke Short, has it come to this,--that a rank stranger can lasso a Texas train, drive the passengers under the seats, plunder them at his pleasure, with no one to molest or make him afraid! Half a hundred Texans trembling at sight of one gun were a sight worth seeing,-- and they did not even know it was loaded! Gone is our ancient glory--our rep. is irretrievably in the tureen. Henceforth when a pilgrim from the pathless Southwest registers at an Eastern hotel the bell-boys will not fall over each other to do him honor as a dime-novel hero, nor the gilded clerk insure his life before politely requesting him to pay in advance. The last lingering shadow of our greatness hath departed. The tenderfoot will trample upon us, and the visiting capitalist neglect to ask us up to the bar. The fair ladies of other lands will no longer worship us as the picturesque knights of a reckless but romantic chivalry. They will remember that in a whole trainload of Texans there was not one who would fight even on compulsion,-- will sweep by with frigid hauteur, leaving us to weep for the days that are no more. Alas, poor Texas!

* * * THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT.

A correspondent wants to know what I think of "the Single Standard of Morals, which assumes that tampering with the Seventh Commandment is as demoralizing to men as to women."

The single standard of morals, like the single standard of money, would be a magnificent thing were there at least double the present amount of raw material for it to measure. I hope to see the day when the libertine will be relegated to the social level of the prostitute where he logically belongs; but we are not dealing now with theories, but with actual conditions. I trust that I may speak plainly on this delicate subject without offending the unco' guid or giving the priorient pulpiteers a pain. I believe the sexes should be equally pure--when I make a world all my women shall be paragons of virtue, and all my men he-virgins. I'll construct no Messalinas nor Cleopatras, no Lovelaces or Sir Launcelots. I'll people the world with St. Anthonys and Penelopes, Josephs and Rebecca Merlindy Johnsings. I'll apply the soft pedal to the fierce scream of passion and pull all the barbs from the arrows that whiz from the Love God's bow. Life will not then be quite so exhilarating, but it will be much better worth the living. Meantime a little spraining of the Seventh Commandment is by no means so demoralizing to man as to woman, despite the frantic protests of those who would drag the millennium in by the ears by forcing upon society, willy nilly, the single standard of morals. Man is the grosser animal, has not so far to fall; the shock to his sensibilities is not so serious--he is not so amenable to shame. A coat of black paint ruins a marble Diana, but has little appreciable effect on an iron Hercules. Illicit intercourse is not so demoralizing to man as to woman, for the further reason that it is not considered so great a crime. An act is demoralizing or degrading in proportion as the perpetrator thereof considers it criminal, as it lowers his self-respect; and men regard their crinolinic peccancy as a venial fault, while women consider such lapses on the part of their sex as grievous sin; hence the lightning of lust scarce blackens the pillar while it shatters the vase. The moral effect of an act is determined by the prevailing standard of ethics. Were polyandry the general practice, a woman could have a multiplicity of husbands and be considered pure; where polygamy is the rule, a man may have a multitude of wives and be regarded as moral. Ethical codes ever adapt themselves to conditions. Solomon was one of the most honorable men of his age, but were he alive to-day he would be branded as a shameless lecher, a contumacious criminal. There have been religions, existing through long ages and extending over vast empires, in which the organs of generation were considered as sacred symbols and prostitution in the purlieus of the temple regarded as pleasing to the gods. It is easy enough for bigoted ignorance to brand those people as barbarians; but in many provinces of art and science they have ever remained our masters. "The tents of the maidens" were simply places where fair religious enthusiasts sold themselves to the first stranger who offered them a piece of silver, and laid their gains upon the altar of the gods. The robber barons of old-time Germany, the diplomatic liars of medieval Italy, the thieves of ancient Lacedaemon and the polygamists of biblical Palestine considered themselves as respectable people, and as they were so regarded by their compatriots, they were not morally degraded by their deeds. But the robber and the liar, the thief and the polygamist of this age are cattle of quite another color--there has been a radical change in the moral code, the peccadillos of the past have become the crimes of the present. The cross, once an obscene pagan symbol, has been transformed from an emblem of reproduction into one of destruction; the "tents of the maidens" are struck; Corinth no longer implores the gods to increase the number and enhance the beauty of its courtesans; Venus Pandemos has given place to Our Lady of Pain, and the obscene Dionysius fled before a crucified Christ. No more does the fair religious postulant play the bacchante in flower-strewn palaces while naked Cupids crown the brimming cup and sandaled feet beat time on polished cedar floors to music that is the cry of brute passion in the blood--kneeling in the cold gray dawn upon the stones she clasps a marble cross. The wanton worship of the flesh has passed with the world's youth; but though much of man's crassness has been purged away in Time's great crucible, he is still of the earth earthy and clings tenaciously to his ancient prerogative of polygamy. When he marries, society does not really expect him to respect his oath to "forsake all others"--regards it as a formal bow to the convenances, a promise with a mental reservation annex; but it considers a woman's vow as sacred and the breaking thereof as rankest blasphemy. He is allowed but one wife, but he may have a score of mistresses and society will placidly wink the other eye--until some tearful maiden requires him to share the shame she can no longer conceal or an "injured husband" goes a-gunning. This should not be so, but so it is. There be fools, both male and female, who will rise up to exclaim that this is false; but that it is Gospel truth is proven every day in the year in every community on the American continent. Men with reputations for licentiousness that would shame old Silenus are cordially received in the most exclusive society. They are found at every high-falutin' "function," bending over the white hands of the most accomplished ladies in the land; on every ballroom floor, encircling the waists of debutantes; in the parlors of our best people, paying court to their young daughters. The noblest women in this world become their wives--fondly undertake their "reformation" while indignantly drawing their skirts aside lest they come in contact with the tawdry finery of females whom these lawless satyrs have debauched. Of course when a woman learns that her reformatory work has proven a failure, drear and dismal, she complains bitterly, may even demand a divorce; yet she could count upon the fingers of one hand the hubbies whom she would trust behind a sheet of paper with a wayward daughter. She doesn't believe a little bit in the virtue of the genus male, yet insists that her own husband be a saint--assumes that her own charms should cause him to regard all other women with indifference, and when she learns of his polygamous practices suffers all the pangs of wounded pride.