The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 10
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
The claim set up by my assailants that I had slandered the female
students of Baylor University is a malicious calumny, that was
but made a lying pretext for the attacks. That my article in the
October ICONOCLAST did NOT impeach the character of the Baylor
girls is amply evidenced by the fact that my offer to leave the
matter to the decision of a committee of reputable business men,
to abjectly apologize and donate $500 to any charity these
gentlemen might name in case the decision was against me, was
flatly refused. "The honor of young ladies is not a proper
subject for arbitration," I was told. Quite true; but the proper
construction of an article which is made a pretext for mob
violence, IS a proper matter for cool-headed and disinterested
parties to pass upon. The Baylorians insisted upon being judge,
jury and executioner--proof positive that they well knew the
article would not stand the arbitrary construction they had
placed upon it. After the first outbreak the Baylor bullies of
the lost manhood stripe and their milk-sick apologists held a
windy powwow in a Baptist church, and there bipedal brutes with
beards, creatures who have thus far succeeded in dodging the
insane asylum, whom an inscrutable Providence has kept out of the
penitentiary to ornament the amen-corner--many of whom do not
pretend to pay their bills--some of whom owe me for the very meat
upon the bones of their scorbutic brats--branded me as a
falsifier while solemnly protesting that they had never read a
line of my paper. They proclaimed in stentor tones and
pigeon-English that would have broken the heart of Lindley
Murray, that I was a defamer of womanhood--while confessing that
they didn't know whether I had ever mentioned a female. They
howled that they "were willing to sign Brann's death-
warrant"--on mere hearsay. These intellectual eunuchs, who
couldn't father an idea if cast bodily into the womb of the
goddess of wisdom, declared positively that I would be permitted
to print nothing more about their beloved Baylor--and that
without knowing whether I had advertised it over two continents
as an oasis in a moral Sahara or a snakehole in the Dismal Swamp.
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. But every man at that meeting who said he never read the
ICONOCLAST deliberately lied. The Baptists all read it. Some
subscribe and pay for it like gentlemen, some buy it, some borrow
it, and the rest steal it from the newsstands. The greatest
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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