We're governed entirely too much--Officialism is becoming a veritable Old Man of the Sea on the neck of Labor's Sinbad. About every fifth man you meet is a public servant of some sort, and you cannot get married or buried, purchase a drink or own a dog except with a by-your-leave to the all-pervading law of the land. In some states suicide itself is an infraction of the criminal code, and if the police don't cut you down in time to put you in jail the preachers will send you to hell. Every criminal law this state and county and city needs can be printed in a book no larger than the ICONOCLAST, and that so plain that he who runs may read and reading understand. And when so printed and so understood, without the possibility of misconstruction, they could be enforced at one-fifth the cost of the present judicial failure. We have so many laws and so much legal machinery that when you throw a man into the judicial hopper not even an astrologer can tell whether he'll come out a horse-thief or only a homicide --or whether the people will weary of waiting on the circumlocution office and take a change of venue to Judge Lynch. This can never be a land of religious liberty--the atheist can never be considered as on a political parity with his ultra-orthodox brother--until we compel church property to bear its pro rata of the public burdens. And right here let me say a word about the "Apostle." I have been accused by people--for whom no cherry-tree blooms or little hatchet is ground--of being a rank atheist and a red-flag anarchist. It has been broadly intimated that I'm trying to rip the Christian religion up by the roots, rob trusting hearts of their hope and deprive the preacher of his daily bread. Now I might just as well confess to you that I'm no angel. If I were I'd fly out of Texas till the bifurcated Democratic party has another "harmony" deal. When you hear people denouncing me as an atheist, just retire to your closet and pray, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." And you might add, that nobody cares. No mortal son of Adam's misery can produce one line I ever wrote, or quote one sentence I ever uttered, disrespectful of ANY religion--and that's more than you can say of most of the ministers. But it is not right, it is not just that the little holdings of the poor should be relentlessly taxed and costly temples exempted--palatial edifices in which polite society pretends to worship One who broke bread with beggars and slept in the brush. Such an arrangement signifies neither good religion nor good sense. It's the result of sanctified selfishness. I believe in taxing luxuries, and a costly church is not a necessity. At least Christ did not think so, for he never built one.