The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
History
The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
Congregations that can afford to erect fine churches and
export saving grace to the pagans of foreign climes, can
afford to pay taxes and thereby help American heathern
out of the hole. A million men out of employment, pacing
our streets in grim despair; a million children coming
up in ignorance and crime; a million women hesitating
between the wolf of want and the abundance of infamy,
and the church--supposed to be God's ministering angel--
crying, "Give, give! If you can't give much, give little.
Remember the widow's mite"--so acceptable to a pauper
deity.
Give for what? To build fine temples in whose sacred
shadows will lurk the gaunt specter of Famine and the
grisly gorgon of Crime. To buy grand organs and costly
bells to peal praises to One who had nowhere to lay his
head. To pay stall-fed preachers five, ten, twenty thousand
dollars a year to expound the doctrine of a poor
carpenter who couldn't have kept a silver dollar in his
jeans a single day while there was poverty and suffering
in the world.
While the wealth-producer is robbed to pension
millionaires who suffered mental anguish because of the draft,
and to administer worse than useless laws, still the amount
so unnecessarily abstracted would be but a mere bagatelle
if labor was steadily employed and reaped its just reward.
With the mighty energies of this nation in full play and
the wealth remaining with its producers, we could give
even all the candidates an office, with plenty to get and
little to do, and still have pie in the pantry and corn in
the crib. There is something more the matter than governmental
waste--there's something RADICALLY wrong.
. . .
In tracing the causes of panics and periods of business
depression, we invariably find our currency more or less at
fault. Now don't get frightened. I'm not going to dose
you with free silver nor give you the gold cure. This is
neither Coin's Financial School nor a gold-bug incubator.
The currency question is one you know all about. Everybody
does--especially the corner-grocery politician. He
understands it from A to Izzard--knows almost as much
about it as a hello-girl does of the nature of electricity.
Prof. Jevon truly says that "a kind of intellectual vertigo
appears to seize people when they talk of money." Perhaps
the Goddess of Liberty on the silver dollar has 'em
Trilbyized.
We hear a great deal of late about the "science of
money." It's supposed to be something very esoteric--
something that a fellow can only master by drawing heavily
on his gray matter, by working his think-machine up
to the limit and sweating blood. Now let me tell you that
there is no "science of money," any more than there's a
science of harvesting hoop poles or fighting flies. When a
man begins to give you an interminable song and dance
about the science of money, just you send for the police
and have him locked up as a dangerous lunatic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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