BY REV. “GOLIGHTLY” MORRILL

Pastor People’s Church, Minneapolis, Minn.

“Easy is the descent to hell”—except by way of Venezuela, at whose ports of entry one suffers so many inconveniences in the form of passport visÉs, custom fees, red-tape, delay and insolence, that if the Devil wishes to sustain his reputation of a conductor of luxurious pleasure-tours to the infernal regions, he should immediately get rid of his disagreeable officials there. At La Guayra, custom authorities rob the traveler of time, money and patience. These sun-burnt bandits would steal the pennies from the eyes of their dead father, and body-snatch their dead grandmother to sell her entrails for sausage-casings. The visitor should be on his guard, too, lest the city’s dark-eyed daughters of delight steal away his heart.

La Guayra seÑoritas, like the scenery, are wild, beautiful and romantic, though there are many wizened witches, rheumatic, mustachioed and flea-bitten, who make one sea-sick on land. The local enchantresses give the stranger a good (bad) time—as well as a choice assortment of undesirable souvenirs. It is a pestiferous port where the laudable profession of prostitution is much practised. These moral lepers are much more dangerous than the physical ones in the big asylum in the outskirts. Gay girls throw kisses to the tenderfoot as he walks the streets—a most sanitary and microbeless pastime.

Here I entered a girls’ school where the young misses were learning much and not missing anything, for as a practical object-lesson in physiology a naked little boy had strolled in from the street and was roaming about the room. Some of the citizens are quite devout and show their gratitude to God for his numerous blessings. I passed a saloon bearing the inscription, “Gracios a Dios” (Thanks to God). Thus do the simple-minded people obey the Scriptural command, “In everything give thanks.”

A few minutes’ train ride takes you to Maiquitia, where there is a popular shrine and a more popular brewery. At the other end of the town lies Macuto, where, if lucky, you may “clean up” yourself in a sea-bath, or a pile of filthy lucre at the roulette table.

As our vessel steamed away from La Guayra, I thought what a magnificent city it was—from the stern of a ship.

In Valencia I read a placard in a church admonishing the men not to wink at the girls during service. The town had just been ravaged by a fever called “Economica,” because it was said the people caught it in the morning, languished in the afternoon and died at night.

At the Hotel Los BaÑos, Puerto Cabello, one goes in swimming au naturel. Many modest maidens are only clad in a blush, making a tableau vivant. Verily, as the guide-book saith, “The natural beauties of the place are charming.” The harbor is deep; so is the despair of the political prisoners who I saw working in rags. One poor fellow was toiling away stark naked among the breakers and sharp rocks. It is reported that the victims are beaten in the early morning, during the call of the reveille, to cover up their cries.

Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, lies at a 3,000-foot “hell”evation above the sea. It is the “Paris of South America” with its churches, parks, public buildings, Pantheon, palace and promenades. The nerve-center of the city is Plaza Bolivar, with an equestrian statue of the hero who stood for liberty, and around which congregate people who stand for everything. Certain “Carac”teristics make this a viva “city” and lubri “city.” The climate is cool, but tempered by the “melting” glance of the bonita muchachas, whose smiles would ripen peaches on a wall.

The dapper younkers of Caracas pursue their studies at the University, and the seÑoritas on the highway. Their “curriculum” also includes the race-track, bull-ring, roulette-wheel (as omnipresent as the Victoria coach-wheel), and art works, imported from Paris and Barcelona, as vile and vivid as the paintings of Parrhasius. Even picture portraits of Beethoven and Wagner are made by grouping together nude portions of female figures.

Lottery-tickets are not the only things sold in town. Mothers come to the Plaza with their daughters for sale. Wantons from the suburb lupanars solicit under shadows of the trees, and their “Hist! hist!” is as familiar as the sibilant call of the filles publiques in Paris, who figure so frequently in the tales of De Kock, Sue and Maupassant.

At “Madame Gaby’s” mansion of shame I found a girl scarcely 12 years old. How shocking! But one expects to be shocked in a city that is subject to earthquakes. Not only pedestrians, but pederasts, i. e., “maricos” or “fairies,” haunt the streets and parks of Caracas. Powdered and painted, they promenade with mincing gait and ogling glance, marching to the music of the band and making “overtures” to the bystanders. The police know of this disgusting depravity, and of the hordel resorts “for men only,” but wink at it. This is as rank and rotten as anything I ever saw in Algiers, or the Cairo “fish-market,” where men were dressed as women.

In old Egypt the Temples of Isis were centers of disgusting filth. In ancient Greece, even among her greatest orators and philosophers, “Socratic love” was proverbial and portrayed on the stage in the plays of Aristophanes, although the Athenians officially punished it with death. Livy, in his History of Rome, castigates this heresy of love. The Ganymed pervert, Geiton, is the hero of Petronius’ sinister novel, “Satyricon.” Martial’s epigrams and Juvenal’s satires flay this moral decadence. Out from Naples I visited the island of Capri, where the Roman goat Emperor, Tiberius, hired companies of catamites for his entertainment. Domitan forbade the practice while Christianity did much to suppress it. The student of history knows the infamous lives of Russian rulers and of Henry III, of France, in the seventeenth century. St. Paul scored the Romans for this sin—what an epistle could he indite against the Caracas “maricos” who amuse, instead of disgust, the Caraquenians, who seem to believe with Baudelaire that “La DÉbauche et la Mort sont deux amiables filles” (Debauch and Death are two amiable girls).

The worst spot in Venezuela is the despot dictator, President Gomez. His authority is absolute, with the accent on the “loot.” He takes what he wants; a man’s personal property, wife or daughter. Dark stories make him a modern Bluebeard. He is a moral and physical leper. Rumor says that he sacrifices children and drinks their blood to cure his maladies. Gomez is the government; the legislative, executive and judicial branches consisting of the cockpit, race-track and palace harem. He has panderers who scour the country to procure beautiful women for him. His personal and public character is so putrid, that many of the inhabitants would like to elect him president of a Guano island, with a salary in Guano. In the land of Bolivar, the Liberator, Gomez muzzles the press, suppresses free speech, maintains an army of spies, and has imprisoned some of the best and brainiest men of Venezuela in horrible dungeons for the crime of loving liberty. The following would seem to be his daily prayer:

Coffee, cacao, cane, cattle, corn and illegitimate children are the principal products of the country. At one time the official census for three years in Caracas gave legitimate births as 3,848, and illegitimate as 3,753. The ratio is even worse in the country districts. A Venezuela bachelor who hasn’t a half-dozen mistresses, has lost caste and is looked down on; a married man is expected to run two or three home establishments. Love is free, but drugs are costly. A friend of mine in the interior had a dear motherly lady come to him and offer her three daughters for five dollars a week.

’Tis said Alexander the Great wanted to destroy the antique town of Lamsachus because of its Priapus worship and obscene rites. Caracas was overturned by an earthquake in 1812, when 12,000 people perished. If that was a visitation of God’s wrath on account of its wickedness, another punishment is due, for it is in the class of the “Cities of the Plain”—

Why Sergeants Are Liked

For a miserable hour the new squad had been drilled by the sergeant, and then this army product remarked sweetly to the men:

“When I was a child I had a set of wooden soldiers. There was a poor little boy in the neighborhood and after I had been to Sunday school one day and listened to a talk on the beauties of charity I was softened enough to give them to him. Then I wanted them back and cried, but my mother said:

“‘Don’t cry, Bertie, some day you will get your wooden soldiers back.’

“And believe me, you lob-sided, mutton-headed, goofus-brained set of certified rolling-pins, that day has come.”

Parley Vouz?

Several officers were seated around the mess table in France. One serious-minded major was in habit of taking a French girl out to lunch two or three times per week and taking a French lesson afterward.

“How much do you figure your French lessons have cost you to date?” queried one of his companions, winking around the board.

“Roughly?” asked the major.

“No, respectably.”

Shocking!

My brother Roscoe, who is a captain in the Air Service, tells the following:

Officers in a garrison school were studying “Small Problems for Infantry.” Turning to the large-sized map on the wall, the major instructor called upon one officer, Jones by name.

“Jones,” said he, “your battalion is camped here at cross-roads 435 (indicating on map). It is enemy country and you are told to cross this cornfield toward farmhouse half-mile distant for the purpose of bringing in the farmer or somebody who might furnish information of the movements of the enemy. It is in September, the corn is cut but not shocked, and as you make your way across the field you suddenly ran into two young ladies. What do you do?”

“I-I-I-I don’t know,” falteringly replied the second looey. “I didn’t get time to study the lesson today. But, did I understand you to say that the corn had not been shocked?”