Speaking For Myself

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Title:     Speaking For Myself
Author: William Cowper Brann [More Titles by Brann]

The ICONOCLAST receives thousands of letters to which it is impossible for me personally to reply. Many of them refer to the attempts made to forcibly suppress the ICONOCLAST, and to the terrible tragedy resulting from those attacks. I take this opportunity of thanking my friends for their kindly interest, and to assure them that I have stood from the first solely upon the defensive. I have made a decent attempt to set an example of Christian forbearance for my religious brethren. To the kindly offers of other cities to afford the ICONOCLAST an asylum and protect its editor from outrage, I will simply say that I do not consider either my property or person in the slightest danger. A majority of the Texas people are both broad gauged and law-abiding. We probably have our proportion of intolerant bigots and splenetic-hearted little blatherskites who preach mob violence from the pulpit; but such people are not dangerous so long as they are well watched. My forbears helped make Texas a republic; they helped make it a state of the American union. I like the climate, and most of the people, and am in no hurry to move. I may have to seek a better distributing point for my publications, as they are already too extensive to be properly handled from any Texas town; but I shall not pull my tent stakes for a day or two. If I do move--sometime within the next twelve-month--it will be bruited throughout the universe that I was driven out of Waco,--just as my brethren in Christ say I was driven out of San Antonio; but that won't worry my soul a cent's worth. I've been lied about so d----n much, that I feel ill at ease and neglected unless the target of vindictive mendacity by tearful souls who fail to pay their debts. I've been kept so badly frightened all month by threats to drag me out of my home and hang me, or otherwise measure me up for a crop of angelic pin-feathers that I've been unable to write anything worth reading. But as soon as I can swallow my heart and quit shivering I will grab the English language by the butt-end and make it crack like a new bull-whip about the ears of hypocrites and humbugs. Meanwhile I desire to state that there is nothing the matter with the ICONOCLAST's contributors. They are a bouquet of pansy blossoms of whom any publisher might well be proud. Should the editor chance to swallow too much water the next time he is baptized, they can be depended upon to keep the flag of the ICONOCLAST afloat until the red headed heir-apparent learns to write with one hand and shoot with the other. Let it go at that. BRANN.

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Princeton, N. J., is dreadfully disappointed because the "Stuffed Prophet" didn't call his kid Grover Cleveland. It is really pitiful to contemplate the agony of Princeton; but the average tax-payer is likely to conclude that one Grover Cleveland is quite enough in any country. It is to be hoped that the son will not resemble the sire--that he will not have the beefy mug of the booze-sodden old beast who disgraced the presidency by playing that high office for his personal profit. Let it never be forgotten that G. Cleveland was the only man to enter the presidency a pauper and leave it a plutocrat. And he managed to do this at a time when millions of better men were going hungry to bed.

[The end]
William Cowper Brann's essay: Speaking For Myself

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