The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
That sounds reasonable and you swing back on the
G.O.P. tow-line and lay a tariff-tax on monkey-wrenches
that looms up like an old-time Democratic majority in
Texas. And while you are burning ratification tar-barrels
and trying to shake hands with yourself in the mirror
at the Mechanic's Exchange, that 50 cent fellow crosses
the briny and robs you of your bench. Your old employer
is protected all right, but where do you come in? You
don't come in; you simply stand out in the industrial
norther. You count the railroad ties from town to town
while your wife takes in washing, your daughter goes to
work in a factory at two dollars a week and your son
grows up an ignorant Arab and gets into ward politics
or the penitentiary. You can't compete with the importation,
because you've been bred to a higher standard of
living. You must have meat three times a day, a newspaper
at breakfast and a new book--or the ICONOCLAST
--after supper. You must have your plunge bath and
spring bed, your clean shave and Sunday shirt. How can
you hope to hold your job when a man is bidding for it
who takes up his belly-band for breakfast, dines on slum-
gullion and sucks his breath for supper; to whom literature
is an unknown luxury, a bath a deplorable accident,
and a crummy old blanket a comfortable bed? You can't
do it, and if you'll take the Apostle's advice you'll quit
trying.
No; I wouldn't prevent the immigration of worthy
Europeans--men of intelligence, who dignify labor. We have
millions such in America, and they are most estimable
citizens. Our ancestors were all Europeans, and that
man who is not proud of his parentage should have been
born a beast. But I'd knock higher than Gilderoy's kite
the theory that America should forever be the dumping-
ground for foreign filth--that people will be warmly
welcomed here whom no other country wants and the devil
wouldn't have.
We have made American citizenship entirely too cheap.
We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs
and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American
Sovereignty--to become an important factor in the formation
of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on
the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the
other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable
tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince
and the poor man a Populist--why we are "great only in
that strange spell, a name."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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