The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 01
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Jameson is England's military lion and President George T.
Winston of the Texas 'varsity her representative of learning!
The English proper are but "a nation of shopkeepers," and
the greatest shops are not conducted by Anglo-Saxons.
England's great manufacturers are Scots, her merchant
princes are Irishmen, her leading bankers are Jews and her
reigning family an indifferent breed of Low Dutch. The
Romans overran England, but unable to subjugate either
Scotland or Ireland, abandoned "perfidious Albion," as a
worthless conquest. Everybody took a turn at robbing it
whenever it had anything worth carrying off, until the
Norman buccaneers appropriated it bodily and reduced the
Saxons to serfdom. By amalgamation with the inferior race
they produced the Tudors, who gave them 'An'some 'Arry
and a Virgin (?) Queen. Then the Scotch Stuarts took a
turn at ruling and robbing England, and were followed by
the religious bigots and witch-burners. The French
ruled it awhile through their puppets and were succeeded
by the Dutch, who held it in such contempt that they would
not permit its language to be spoken at court. They are still
milking it for more than three millions per annum, with an
extra pull at the udder whenever one of the seventy-odd
descendants of the Sovereign concludes to found a family.
The Scotch, the Welsh and Dutch enabled England to
enslave and plunder Ireland, and upon this meat John Bull,
the J. Caesar of pawnbrokers, is growing great.
I much fear that President Winston studied sports under the
tuition of Referee Earp, else he could have scarce given a
decision to the favorite of the college campus. Football
requires neither the intellect nor the perfect organization
which is a sine qua non to success in our great "national
game." Its chief requisites are long hair, leathery lungs and
abnormally developed legs. The game owes its popularity
to the average boy's predilection for the brutal, his inherent
animalism. Football has for ages been a favorite game with
savages, while baseball is a product of civilization. I am not
decrying football--I incline to the view that an occasional
rough-and-tumble scrapping match in which there is
imminent danger of black eyes, and even of broken bones,
is good for a boy I simply point out that as an intellectual
game it not only ranks far below chess, billiards and
baseball, but does not rise to a parity with pugilism. It is a
mistake to assume that an intellectual divertisement must
be popular with an intellectual people. The highest culture
is but a film cast over a fathomless sea of savagery. The
most learned of the Greeks, the most cultured of the
Romans gloried in brutal games, and to-day a dog fight, a
slugging match or even a college football game is relished
by the Titan of intellect as keenly as by the Bowery tough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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