 Section eighty-nine of Mark Twain of Biography—Appendixes. From Mark Twain's first lecture, delivered October 2, 1866, C. 54, Hawaiian Importance to America. After a full elucidation of the sugar industry of the Sandwich Islands, its profits and possibilities, he said, I have dwelt upon this subject to show you that these islands have a genuine importance to America—an importance which is not generally appreciated by our citizens. They pay revenues into the United States Treasury, now amounting to over a half a million a year. I do not know what the sugar yield of the world is now, but ten years ago, according to the Patent Office reports, it was eight hundred thousand hogsheads. The Sandwich Islands, properly cultivated by go-ahead Americans, are capable of providing one-third as much themselves. With the Pacific Railroad built—the great China mail line of steamers touching at Honolulu—we could stock the islands with Americans and supply a third of the civilized world with sugar, and with the silkiest, longest stapled cotton this side of the sea islands, and the very best quality of rice. The property has got to fall to some air, and why not the United States? Native passion for funerals. They are very fond of funerals. Big funerals are their main weakness. Fine grave clothes, fine funeral appointments, and a long procession are things they take a generous delight in. They are fond of their chief and their king. They reverence them with a genuine reverence, and love them with a warm affection, and often look forward to the happiness they will experience in burying them. They will beg, borrow, or steal money enough and flock from all the islands to be present at a royal funeral on Oahu. Years ago a Kanaka and his wife were condemned to be hanged for murder. They received a sentence with manifest satisfaction because it gave an opening for a funeral, you know. All they care for is a funeral. It makes but little difference to them whose it is. They would as soon attend their own funeral as anybody else's. This couple were people of consequence, and had landed estates. They sold every foot of ground they had, and laid it out in fine clothes to be hung in, and the woman appeared on the scaffold in a white satin dress, and slippers, and fathoms of gaudy ribbon, and the man was arrayed in a gorgeous vest, blue claw hammer coat, and brass buttons, and white kid gloves. As the noose was adjusted around his neck, he blew his nose with a grand theatrical flourish, so as to show his embroidered white handkerchief. I never, never knew of a couple who enjoyed hanging more than they did. View from Haleakala. It is a solemn pleasure to stand upon the summit of the extinct crater of Haleakala, ten thousand feet above the sea, and gaze down into its awful crater, twenty-seven miles in circumference, and two hundred and twenty feet deep, and to picture to yourself the seething world of fire that once swept up out of the tremendous abyss ages ago. The prodigious funnel is dead and silent now, and even has bushes growing far down in its bottom, where the deep sea-line could hardly have reached in the old times when the place was filled with liquid lava. These bushes look like parlor shrubs from the summit where you stand, and the file of visitors moving through them on their mules is diminished to a detachment of mice almost, and to them you, standing so high up against the sun, ten thousand feet above their heads, look no larger than a grasshopper. This in the morning, but at three or four in the afternoon, a thousand little patches of white clouds, like handfuls of wool, come drifting noiselessly one after another into the crater, like a procession of shrouded phantoms, and circle round and round the vast sides, and settle gradually down, and mingle together until the colossal basin is filled to the brim with snowy fog, and all its seared and desolate wonders are hidden from sight. And then you may turn your back to the crater and look far away upon the broad valley below with its sugar houses glinting like white specks in the distance, and the great sugar fields diminished to green veils amid the lighter-tinted verger around them, and abroad upon the limitless ocean. But I should not say you look down, you look up at these things. You are ten thousand feet above them, but yet you seem to stand in a basin, with the green islands here and there, and the valleys and the wide ocean, and the remote snow peak of Mauna Loa, all raised up before and above you, and pictured out like a brightly tinted map hung at the ceiling of a room. You look up at everything. Nothing is below you. It has a singular and startling effect to see a miniature world thus seemingly hung in mid-air. But soon the white clouds come trooping along in ghostly squadrons and mingle together in heavy masses a quarter of a mile below you and shut out everything, completely hide the sea, and all the earth save the pinnacle you stand on. As far as the eye can reach, it finds nothing to rest upon but a boundless plain of clouds tumbled into all manner of fantastic shapes, a billowy ocean of wool, a flame with the gold and purple and crimson splendors of the setting sun. And so firm does this grand cloud pavement look that you can hardly persuade yourself that you could not walk upon it, that if you stepped upon it you would plunge headlong and astonish your friends at dinner ten thousand feet below. Standing on that peak, with all the world shut out by that vast plain of clouds, a feeling of loneliness comes over a man which suggests to his mind the last man at the flood perched high upon the last rock with nothing visible on any side but a mournful waste of waters and the ark departing dimly through the distant mists and leaving him to storm and night and solitude and death. Notice of Mark Twain's lecture, the trouble is over. The inimitable Mark Twain delivered himself last night of his first lecture on the Sandwich Islands or anything else. Sometime before the hour appointed to open his head, the Academy of Music on Pine Street was densely crowded with one of the most fashionable audiences it was ever my privilege to witness during my long residence in this city. The elite of the town were there and so was the Governor of the State occupying one of the boxes whose rotund face was suffused with a halo of mirth during the whole entertainment. The audience promptly notified Mark by the usual sign, stamping, that the auspicious hour had arrived, and presently the lecturer came sidling and swinging out from the left of the stage. His very manner produced a generally vociferous laugh from the assemblage. He opened with an apology by saying that he had partly succeeded in obtaining a band, but at the last moment the party engaged backed out. He explained that he had hired a man to play the trombone, but he, on learning that he was the only person engaged, came at the last moment and informed him that he could not play. This placed Mark in a bad predicament and, wishing to know his reasons for deserting him at that critical moment, he replied that he wasn't going to make a fool of himself by sitting up there on the stage and blowing his horn all by himself. After the applause subsided, he assumed a very grave countenance and commenced his remarks proper with the following well-known sentence. When in the course of human events, etc., he lectured fully an hour and a quarter, and his humorous sayings were interspersed with geographical, agricultural, and statistical remarks, sometimes branching off and reaching beyond, soaring, in the very choicest language, up to the very pinnacle of descriptive power. End of Appendix D. from Mark Twain's first lecture, delivered October 2, 1866, read by John Greenman. Section 90 of Mark Twain of Biography. 1. Advertisement. Mark Twain is too well known to the public to require a formal introduction at my hands. By his story of the frog, he scaled the heights of popularity at a single jump, and one for himself, the sobriquette of the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope. He is also known to fame as the moralist of the main, and it is not unlikely that as such he will go down to posterity. It is in his secondary character as humorist, however, rather than the primal one of moralist, that I aim to present him in the present volume, and here a ready explanation will be found for the somewhat fragmentary character of many of these sketches, for it was necessary to snatch threads of humor wherever they could be found, very often detaching them from serious articles and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled. Originally written for newspaper publication, many of the articles referred to events of the day, the interest of which has now passed away, and contained local illusions which the general reader would fail to understand. In such cases excision became imperative. Further than this remark or comment is unnecessary. Mark Twain never resorts to tricks of spelling nor rhetorical buffoonery for the purpose of provoking a laugh. The vein of his humor runs too rich and deep to make surface gliding necessary, but there are few who can resist the quaint similes, keen satire, and hard good sense which form the staple of his writing. J. P. II. From Answers to Correspondence. I don't want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking, and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee, and in playing billiards occasionally, and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these vicious little enjoyments for fifty years, but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life. Therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing good-table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry, and you never dare to laugh in the daytime, for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in good humour, will try to borrow a dollar of you, and in church you are always down on your knees with your eyes buried in the cushion when the contribution box comes around, and you never give the revenue officers a true statement of your income. Now you all know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then. What is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous moral statistics? Now, I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either, but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices, whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove. Three, from A Strange Dream, example of Mark Twain's early descriptive writing. In due time I stood, with my companion, on the wall of the vast cauldron, which the natives, ages ago, named Holly Malmal, the abyss wherein they were want to throw the remains of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might never tread above them. We stood there at dead of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring ocean of fire, shaded our eyes from the blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson waves, with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet, manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might presently sail up out of the remote distance, started when tremendous thunderbursts shook the earth, and followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten lava that sprang high up toward the zenith, and exploded in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens with an infernal splendor. What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to this? My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie, and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the occasion and the surroundings. We came at last to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies of dead chieftains into this fearful cauldron, and my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that the founder of his race, Old King Kamehameha I, that invincible old pagan Alexander, had found other sepulcher than the burning depths of the Halimaumau. I grew interested at once. I knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse of the warrior king had never been fathomed. I was aware that there was a legend connected with this matter, and I felt as if there could be no more fitting time to listen to it than the present. The descendant of the Kamehamehas said the dead king was brought in royal state down the long winding road that descends from the rim of the crater to the scorched and chasm-riven plain that lies between the Halimaumau and those beatling walls yonder in the distance. The guards were set, and the troops of mourners began the weird wail for the departed. In the middle of the night came a sound of innumerable voices in the air and the rush of invisible wings. The funeral torches wavered, burned blue, and went out. The mourners and watchers fell to the ground, paralyzed by fright, and many minutes elapsed before anyone dared to move or speak, for they believed that the phantom messengers of the dread goddess of fire had been in their midst. When at last a torch was lighted, the beer was vacant, the dead monarch had been spirited away. CHAPTER 60 New York Herald editorial on the return of the Quaker City pilgrimage, November 19, 1867. In yesterday's Herald we published a most amusing letter from the pen of that most amusing American genius, Mark Twain, giving an account of that most amusing of all modern pilgrimages, the pilgrimage of the Quaker City. It has been amusing all through this Quaker City affair. It might have become more serious than amusing if the ship had been sold at Jaffa, Alexandria, or Yalta, in the Black Sea, as it appears might have happened. In such a case the passengers would have been more effectually sold than the ship. The descendants of the Puritan pilgrims have, naturally enough, some of them, an affection for ships. But if all that is said about this religious cruise be true, they have also a singularly sharp eye to business. It was scarcely wise on the part of the pilgrims, although it was well for the public, that so strange a genius as Mark Twain should have founded mission into the sacred circle. We are not aware whether Mr. Twain intends giving us a book on this pilgrimage, but we do know that a book written from his own peculiar standpoint, giving an account of the characters and events on board ship, and of the scenes which the pilgrims witnessed, would command an almost unprecedented sale. There are varieties of genius peculiar to America. Of one of these varieties, Mark Twain is a striking specimen. For the development of his peculiar genius, he has never had a more fitting opportunity. Besides, there are some things which he knows, and which the world ought to know about this last edition of The Mayflower. Section 92 of Mark Twain a Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain a Biography. Albert Bigelow Paine. Appendix G. Mark Twain at the Correspondence Club, Washington. C. Chapter 63. Woman. A Eulogy of the Fair Sex. The Washington Correspondence Club held its anniversary on Saturday night. Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, responded to the toast, Woman, the Pride of the Professions and the Jewel of Hours. He said, Mr. President, I do not know why I should have been singled out to receive the greatest distinction of the evening, for so the office of replying to the toast to Woman has been regarded in every age. Applauds. I do not know why I have received this distinction, unless it be that I am a trifle less homely than the other members of the club. But be this, as it may, Mr. President, I am proud of the position, and you could not have chosen anyone who would have accepted it more gladly or labored with a heartier goodwill to do the subject justice than I, because, sir, I love the sex, laughter. I love all the women, sir, irrespective of age or color, laughter. Human intelligence cannot estimate what we owe to Woman, sir. She sews on our buttons, laughter. She mends our clothes, laughter. She ropes us in at the church fairs. She confides in us. She tells us whatever she can find out about the private affairs of the neighbors. She gives good advice, and plenty of it. She gives us a piece of her mind sometimes, and sometimes all of it. She sews our aching brows. She bears our children ours, as a general thing. This last sentence appears in Twain's published speeches and may have been added later. David Widger, Project Gutenberg. In all relations of life, sir, it is but just and a graceful tribute to Woman to say of her that she is a brick, great laughter. Wheresoever you place Woman, sir, in whatsoever position or estate, she is an ornament to that place she occupies, and a treasure to the world. Here Mr. Twain paused, looked inquiringly at his hearers, and remarked that the applause should come in at this point. It came in. Mr. Twain resumed his eulogy. Look at the noble names of history! Look at Cleopatra! Look at Desdemona! Look at Florence Nightingale! Look at Joan of Arc! Look at Lucretia Borgia! Disapprobation expressed. Well, said Mr. Twain, scratching his head doubtfully, suppose we let Lucretia slide. Look at Joyce Heth! Look at Mother Eve! I repeat, sir, look at the illustrious names of history! Look at the widow McCree! Look at Lucy Stone! Look at Elizabeth Caddy Stanton! Look at George Francis Train! Great laughter! And, sir, I say with bowed head and deepest veneration, look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not lie, could not lie, applause. But he never had any chance. It might have been different with him if he had belonged to a newspaper correspondence club, laughter, groans, hisses, cries of, put him out! Mark looked around placidly upon his excited audience and resumed, I repeat, sir, that in whatsoever position you place a woman, she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superior laughter. As a cousin, she is convenient. As a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious. As a wet nurse, she has no equal among men, laughter. What, sir, would the people of this earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir. Might he scarce? Another line added later in the published speeches, D. W. Then let us cherish her, let us protect her, let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy, ourselves. If we get a chance, laughter. But, jesting aside, Mr. President, woman is lovable, gracious, kind of hard, beautiful, worthy of all respect, of all esteem, of all deference. Not any here will refuse to drink her health right cordially, for each and every one of us has personally known, loved, and honored, the very best one of them all, his own mother. Applauds. End of Appendix G. Mark Twain at the Correspondence Club, Washington. Read by John Greenman. Section 93 of Mark Twain of Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain of Biography. By Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix H. Announcement for lecture of July 2, 1868. See Chapter 66. The Public to Mark Twain. Correspondence. San Francisco, June 30. Mr. Mark Twain. Dear sir, hearing that you are about to sail for New York in the PMSS Company's steamer of the 6th of July to publish a book, and learning with the deepest concern that you propose to read a chapter or two of that book in public before you go, we take this method of expressing our cordial desire that you will not. We beg and implore you do not. There is a limit to human endurance. We are your personal friends. We have your welfare at heart. We desire to see you prosper. And it is upon these accounts, and upon these only, that we urge you to desist from the new atrocity you contemplate. Yours truly. Sixty names, including Bret Hart, Major General Ord, Major General Halleck, the orphan asylum, and various benevolent societies, citizens on foot and horseback, and 1500 in the steerage. Reply. San Francisco, June 30. To the 1500 and others. It seems to me that your course is entirely unprecedented. Here to fore, when lecturers, singers, actors, and other frauds have said they were about to leave town, you have always been the very first people to come out in a card, beseeching them to hold on for just one night more, and inflict just one more performance on the public. But as soon as I want to take a farewell benefit, you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community, and the Board of Aldermen, praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me from my foul purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it, what do they stay here for? Am I to go away and let them have peace and quiet for a year and a half, and then come back and only lecture them twice? What do you take me for? No, gentlemen, ask of me anything else, and I will do it cheerfully. But do not ask me not to afflict the people. I wish to tell them all I know about Venice. I wish to tell them about the city of the sea. That most venerable, most brilliant, and proudest republic the world has ever seen. I wish to hint at what it achieved in twelve hundred years, and what it lost in two hundred. I wish to furnish a deal of pleasant information, somewhat highly spiced, but still palatable, digestible, and eminently fitted for the intellectual stomach. My last lecture was not as fine as I thought it was, but I have submitted this discourse to several able critics, and they have pronounced it good. Now, therefore, why should I withhold it? Let me talk only just this once, and I will sail positively on the sixth of July, and stay away until I return from China, two years. Yours truly, Mark Twain. Further remonstrance, San Francisco, June thirtieth. Mr. Mark Twain, learning with profound regret that you have concluded to postpone your departure until the sixth of July, and learning also with unspeakable grief that you propose to read from your forthcoming book, or lecture again before you go at the new mercantile library, we hasten to beg of you that you will not do it. Curb this spirit of lawless violence, and emigrate at once. Have the vessel's bill for your passage sent to us, we will pay it. Your friends, Pacific Board of Brokers, and other financial and social institutions. San Francisco, June thirtieth. Mr. Mark Twain, dear sir, will you start now without any unnecessary delay? Yours truly, proprietors of the altar, bulletin, times, call, examiner, and other San Francisco publications. San Francisco, June thirtieth. Mr. Mark Twain, dear sir, do not delay your departure. You can come back and lecture another time. In the language of the worldly you can cut and come again. Your friends, the clergy. San Francisco, June thirtieth. Mr. Mark Twain, dear sir, you had better go. Yours, the chief of police. Reply. San Francisco, June thirtieth. Gentlemen, restrain your emotions. You observe that they cannot avail. Read New Mercantile Library, Bush Street. Thursday evening, July 2nd, 1868. One night only. Farewell, Lecture of Mark Twain. Subject, the oldest of the republics, Venice, past and present. Box office, open Wednesday and Thursday. No extra charge for reserved seats. Admission, one dollar. Doors open at seven. Orgies to commence at eight p.m. The public displays and ceremonies projected to give fitting ecla to this occasion have been unavoidably delayed until the fourth. The lecture will be delivered certainly on the second, and the event will be celebrated two days afterward by a discharge of artillery on the fourth, a procession of citizens, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and by a gorgeous display of fireworks from Russian Hill in the evening, which I have ordered at my sole expense, the cost amounting to eighty thousand dollars. At New Mercantile Library, Bush Street. Thursday evening, July 2nd, 1868. End of appendix H. Announcement for lecture of July 2nd, 1868. Read by John Greenman. Section 94 of Mark Twain, A Biography. Appendixes. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography. By Albert Bigelow Payne. Appendix I. Mark Twain's Championship of Thomas K. Beecher. C. Chapter 74. There was a religious turmoil in Elmira in 1869, a disturbance among the ministers due to the success of Thomas K. Beecher in a series of meetings he was conducting in the opera house. Mr. Beecher's teachings had never been very orthodox or doctrinal, but up to this time they had been seemingly unobjectionable to his brother clergyman, who fraternized with him and joined with him in the Monday meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira, when each Monday a sermon was read by one of the members. The situation presently changed. Mr. Beecher was preaching his doubtful theology to large and nightly increasing audiences, and it was time to check the exodus. The Ministerial Union of Elmira not only declined to recognize and abet the opera house gatherings, but they requested him to withdraw from their Monday meetings on the ground that his teachings were pernicious. Mr. Beecher said nothing of the matter, and it was not made public until a notice of it appeared in a religious paper. Naturally such a course did not meet with the approval of the Langdon family, and awoke the scorn of a man who so detested bigotry in any form as Mark Twain. He was a stranger in the place, and not justified to speak over his own signature, but he wrote an article and read it to members of the Langdon family and to Dr. and Mrs. Taylor, their intimate friends, who were spending an evening in the Langdon home. It was universally approved, and the next morning appeared in the Elmira advertiser over the signature of S. Cat. It created a stir, of course. The article follows. Mr. Beecher and the Clergy The Ministerial Union of Elmira, New York, at a recent meeting passed resolutions disapproving the teachings of Reverend T. K. Beecher, declining to cooperate with him in his Sunday evening services at the Opera House, and requesting him to withdraw from their Monday morning meeting. This has resulted in his withdrawal, and thus the pastors are relieved from further responsibility as to his action. New York Evangelist Poor Beecher. All this time he could do whatever he pleased that was wrong, and then be perfectly serene and comfortable over it, because the Ministerial Union of Elmira was responsible to God for it. He could lie if he wanted to, and those ministers had to answer for it. He could promote discord in the Church of Christ, and those parties had to make it right with the deity as best they could. He could teach false doctrines to empty opera-houses, and those sorrowing lambs of the Ministerial Union had to get out their sackcloth and ashes, and stand responsible for it. He had such a comfortable thing of it, but he went too far. In an evil hour he slaughtered the simple geese that laid the golden egg of responsibility for him, and now they will uncover their customary complacency, and lift up their customary cackle in his behalf no more. And so, at last, he finds himself in the novel position of being responsible to God for his acts, instead of to the Ministerial Union of Elmira. To say that this is appalling is to state it with a degree of mildness which amounts to incipidity. We cannot justly estimate this calamity without first reviewing certain facts that conspired to bring it about. Mr. Beecher was and is in the habit of preaching to a full congregation in the independent congregational church in this city. The Meeting House was not large enough to accommodate all the people who desired admittance. Mr. Beecher regularly attended the meetings of the Ministerial Union of Elmira every Monday morning, and they received him into their fellowship and never objected to the doctrines which he taught in his church. So, in an unfortunate moment, he conceived the strange idea that they would connive at the teaching of the same doctrines in the same way in a larger house. Therefore, he secured the opera house and proceeded to preach there every Sunday evening to assemblages comprising from a thousand to fifteen hundred persons. He felt warranted in this course by a passage of Scripture which says, Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature. Opera houses were not ruled out specifically in this passage, and so he considered it proper to regard opera houses as a part of all the world. He looked upon the people who assembled there as coming under the head of every creature. These ideas were as absurd as they were far fetched, but still they were the honest abolitions of a diseased mind. His great mistake was in supposing that when he had the Saviour's endorsement of his conduct, he had all that was necessary. He overlooked the fact that there might possibly be a conflict of opinion between the Saviour and the Ministerial Union of Elmira, and there was, wherefore blind and foolish Mr. Beecher went to his destruction. The Ministerial Union withdrew their approbation, and left him dangling in the air, with no other support than the countenance and approval of the Gospel of Christ. Mr. Beecher invited his brother ministers to join forces with him and help him conduct the opera house meetings. They declined with great unanimity. In this they were wrong. Since they did not approve of those meetings, it was a duty, they owed to their consciences and their God, to contrive their discontinuance. They knew this. They felt it. Yet they turned coldly away and refused to help at those meetings, when they well knew that their help, earnestly and persistently given, was able to kill any great religious enterprise that ever was conceived of. The Ministers refused, and the calamitous meetings at the opera house continued, and not only continued but grew in interest and importance, and sapped of their congregations, churches, where the Gospel was preached, with that sweet monotonous tranquillity and that impenetrable profundity which stir up such consternation in the strongholds of sin. It is a pity to have to record here that one clergyman refused to preach at the opera house at Mr. Beecher's request, even when that incendiary was sick and disabled. And if that man's conscience justifies him in that refusal, I do not, under the plea of charity for a sick brother. He could have preached to that opera house multitude a sermon that would have done incalculable damage to the opera house experiment, and he need not have been particular about the sermon he chose, either. He could have relied on any he had in his barrel. The opera house meetings went on. Other congregations were thin and grew thinner, but the opera house's stemlages were vast. Every Sunday night, in spite of sense and reason, multitudes passed by the churches where they might have been saved, and marched deliberately to the opera house to be damned. The community talked, talked, talked. Everybody discussed the fact that the ministerial union disapproved of the opera house meetings, also the fact that they disapproved of the teachings put forth there. And everybody wondered how the ministerial union could tell whether to approve or disapprove of those teachings, seeing that those clergymen had never attended an opera house meeting, and therefore didn't know what was taught there. Everybody wondered over that curious question, and they had to take it out in wondering. Mr. Beecher asked the ministerial union to state their objections to the opera house matter. They could not—at least they did not. He said to them that if they would come squarely out and tell him that they desired the discontinuance of those meetings, he would discontinue them. They declined to do that. Why should they have declined? They had no right to decline, and no excuse to decline. If they honestly believed that those meetings interfered in the slightest degree with the best interests of religion, that is a proposition which the profoundest head among them cannot get around. But the opera house meetings went on. That was the mischief of it. And so, one Monday morning, when Mr. B appeared at the usual minister's meeting, his brother clergyman desired him to come there no more. He asked why. They gave no reason. They simply declined to have his company longer. Mr. B said he could not accept this execution without a trial, and since he loved them and had nothing against them, he must insist upon meeting with them in the future just the same as ever. And so, after that, they met in secret, and thus got rid of this man's importunate affection. The ministerial union had ruled out Beecher. A point gained. He would get up in excitement about it in public. But that was a miscalculation. He never mentioned it. They waited and waited for the grand crash, but it never came. After all their labour pains, their ministerial mountain had brought forth only a mouse, and a stillborn one at that. Beecher had not told on them. Beecher malignantly persisted in not telling on them. The opportunity was slipping away. Alas, for the humiliation of it, they had to come out and tell it themselves. And after all their bombshell did not hurt anybody when they did explode it. They had ceased to be responsible to God for Beecher, and yet nobody seemed paralyzed about it. Somehow it was not even of sufficient importance apparently to get into the papers, though even the poor little facts that Smith has sought of trotting team and Alderman Jones' child, as the measles, are chronicled there with avidity. Something must be done. As the ministerial union had told about their desolating action, when nobody else considered it of enough importance to tell, they would also publish it, now that the reporters failed to see anything in it important enough to print. And so they startled the entire religious world, no doubt, by solemnly printing in the evangelist the paragraph which heads this article. They have got their excommunication bulls started at last. It is going along quite lively now, and making considerable stir, let us hope. They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be. It excited a two-line paragraph there. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that a little Congress of congregationless clergymen, of whom it had never heard before, have crushed a famous Beecher, and reduced his audiences from fifteen hundred down to fourteen hundred and seventy five at one fell blow. Happy, happy world, that knows at last that these obscure innocence are no longer responsible for the blemishless teachings, the power, the pathos, the logic, and the other, and manifold intellectual pyrotechnics that seduce, but to dam, the opera house assemblages every Sunday night in Elmira. And miserable, oh, thrice miserable Beecher, for the ministerial union of Elmira will never, no, never more be responsible to God for his shortcomings. Excuse these tears. For the protection of a man who is uniformly charged with all the newspaper devil-tree that sees the light in Elmira journals, I take this opportunity of stating under oath, duly subscribed before a magistrate, that Mr. Beecher did not write this article, and further still that he did not inspire it, and further still the ministerial union of Elmira did not write it, and finally the ministerial union did not ask me to write it. No, I have taken up this cudgel in defence of the ministerial union of Elmira solely from a love of justice. Without solicitation I have constituted myself the champion of the ministerial union of Elmira, and it shall be a labour of love with me to conduct their side of a quarrel in print for them whenever they desire me to do it. Or if they are busy, and have not the time to ask me, I will cheerfully do it anyhow. In closing this, I must remark that if any question the right of the clergymen of Elmira to turn Mr. Beecher out of the ministerial union to such, I answer, that Mr. Beecher recreated that institution after it had been dead for many years, and invited those gentlemen to come into it, which they did, and so, of course, they have a right to turn him out if they want to. The difference between Beecher and the man who put an adder in his bosom is that Beecher put in more adders than he did, and consequently had a proportionately livelier time of it when they got warmed up. Cheerfully, a scat. End of Appendix I Mark Twain's Championship of Thomas K. Beecher Read by John Greenman Section 95 of Mark Twain, A Biography Appendixes This Libber Box recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain, A Biography By Albert Bigelow Payne Appendix J The indignity put upon the remains of George Holland by the reverend Mr. Sabine See Chapter 77 What a ludicrous satire it was upon Christian charity, even upon the vague theoretical idea of it, which doubtless this small saint mouths from his own pulpit every Sunday. Contemplate this freak of nature, and think, what a cardiff giant of self-righteousness is crowded into his pygmy skin. If we probe and dissect, and lay open this diseased, this cancerous piety of his, we are forced to the conviction that it is the production of an impression on his part that his guild do about all the good that is done on the earth, and hence are better than common clay. Hence are competent to say to such as George Holland, you are unworthy, you are a play actor, and consequently a sinner. I cannot take the responsibility of recommending you to the mercy of heaven. It must have had its origin in that impression, else he would have thought, we are all instruments for the carrying out of God's purposes, it is not for me to pass judgment upon your appointed share of the work, or to praise, or to revile it. I have divine authority for it, that we are all sinners, and therefore it is not for me to discriminate, and say we will supplicate for this sinner, for he was a merchant prince, or a banker, but we will beseech no forgiveness for this other one, for he was a play actor. It surely requires the furthest possible reach of self-righteousness to enable a man to lift his scornful nose in the air, and turn his back upon so poor and pitiable a thing as a dead stranger, come to beg the last kindness that humanity can do in its behalf. This creature has violated the letter of the Gospel, and judged George Holland. Not George Holland, either, but his profession through him. Then it is, in a measure, fair, that we judge this creature's guild through him. In effect he has said, we are the salt of the earth, we do all the good work that is done. To learn how to be good and do good, men must come to us. Actors and such are obstacles to moral progress. Pray look at the thing reasonably a moment, laying aside all biases of education and custom. If a common public impression is fair evidence of a thing, then this minister's legitimate, recognized, and acceptable business is to tell people calmly, coldly, and in stiff written sentences from the pulpit, to go and do right, be just, be merciful, be charitable, and his congregation forget it all between church and home. But for fifty years it was George Holland's business on the stage to make his audience go and do right, and be just, merciful, and charitable, because by his living, breathing, feeling pictures he showed them what it was to do these things and how to do them, and how instant and ample was the reward. Is it not a singular teacher of men, this reverend gentleman, who is so poorly informed himself as to put the whole stage under ban and say, I do not think it teaches moral lessons? Where was ever a sermon preached that could make filial ingratitude so hateful to men as the sinful play of King Lear? Or where was there ever a sermon that could so convince men of the wrong and the cruelty of harboring a pampered and unanalyzed jealousy as the sinful play of Othello? And where are there ten preachers who can stand in the pulpit preaching heroism, unselfish devotion, and lofty patriotism, and hold their own against any one of five hundred William Tells that can be raised upon five hundred stages in the land at a day's notice? It is almost fair and just to aver, although it is profanity, that nine tenths of all the kindness and forbearance and Christian charity and generosity in the hearts of the American people today got there by being filtered down from their fountain the gospel of Christ through dramas and tragedies and comedies on the stage and through the despised novel and the Christmas story and through the thousand and one lessons, suggestions, and narratives of generous deeds that stir the pulses and exalt and augment the nobility of the nation day by day from the teeming columns of ten thousand newspapers and not from the drowsy pulpit. All that is great and good in our particular civilization came straight from the hand of Jesus Christ, and many creatures and of diverse sorts were doubtless appointed to disseminate it, and let us believe that this seed and the result are the main thing, and not the cut of the sower's garment, and that whosoever in his way and according to his opportunity sows the one and produces the other has done high service and worthy, and further let us try with all our strength to believe that whenever old simple hearted George Holland sowed this seed and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself. Am I saying that the pulpit does not do its share toward disseminating the marrow, the meat of the gospel of Christ? For we are not talking of ceremonies and wire-drawn creeds now, but the living heart and soul of what is pretty often only a spenter. No, I am not saying that. The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week, nearly two hours altogether, and does what it can in that time. The theatre teaches large audiences seven times a week, twenty-eight or thirty hours altogether, and the novels and newspapers plead and argue and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade and supplicate at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day and all day long and far into the night, and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard and the pulpit till the other tenth. Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, You unanointed are coarse clay and useless. You are not, as we, the regenerators of the world. Go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of heaven. How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores? Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has black crooks in it, forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had crooks and callocks and sabines in it. No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ, but I am trying to get a moment's hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services. I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time oppressive business causes it to forget it. I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with un-inflammable truisms about doing good, bores them with correct compositions on charity, bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript. And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way. And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people, but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the self-same gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose and that they accomplished the object of their creation and accomplished it well should protest. And having protested it is also fair and just being driven to it as it were to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman under the breath a simple instructive truth and say ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth nor his most efficient ones either by a very very long distance sensible ministers already know this and it may do the other kind good to find it out but to cease teaching and go back to the beginning again was it not pitiable that spectacle honored and honorable old George Holland whose theatrical ministry had for fifty years softened hard hearts bred generosity in cold ones kindled emotion in dead ones uplifted base ones broadened bigoted ones and made many and many a stricken one glad and filled it brim full of gratitude figuratively spit upon in his unoffending coffin by this crawling slimy sanctimonious self-righteous reptile end of appendix J the indignity put upon the remains of George Holland by the Reverend Mr. Sabine read by John Greenman section 96 of Mark Twain a biography appendixes this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Mark Twain a biography by Albert Bigelow Payne appendix K a substitute for Ruloff have we a Sydney Carton among us see chapter 82 to editor of Tribune sir I believe in capital punishment I believe that when a murder has been done it should be answered for with blood I have all my life been taught to feel this way and the fetters of education are strong the fact that the death law is rendered almost inoperative by its very severity does not alter my belief in its righteousness the fact that in England the proportion of executions to condemn nations is one to 16 and in this country only one to 22 and in France only one to 38 does not shake my steadfast confidence in the propriety of retaining the death penalty it is better to hang one murderer in 16 22 38 than not to hang any at all feeling as I do I am not sorry that Ruloff is to be hanged but I am sincerely sorry that he himself has made it necessary that his vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world in this mine and the public's is a common regret for it is plain that in the person of Ruloff one of the most marvelous of intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed and that too while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university and yet by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus in abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pygmies in his presence by the evidence of Professor Mather Mr. Cerbridge Mr. Richmond and other men qualified to testify this man is as familiar with the broad domain of philology as common men are with the passing events of the day his memory has such a limitless grasp that he is able to quote sentence after sentence paragraph after paragraph chapter after chapter from a gnarled and naughty ancient literature that ordinary scholars are capable of achieving little more than a bowing acquaintance with but his memory is the least of his great endowments by the testimony of the gentleman above referred to he is able to critically analyze the works of the old masters of literature and while pointing out the beauties of the originals with a pure and discriminating taste is as quick to detect the defects of the accepted translations and in the latter case if exceptions be taken to his judgment he straightway opens up the quarries of his exhaust less knowledge and builds a very Chinese wall of evidence around his position every learned man who enters Rulof's presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments one scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research comprehensive grasp of subject and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Rulof's intellectual equal what miracles this murderer might have wrought and what luster he might have shed upon his country if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly but what if the law could be satisfied and the gifted criminal still be saved if a life be offered up on the gallows to atone for the murder Rulof did will that suffice if so give me the proofs for in all earnestness and truth I ever that in such a case I will instantly bring forward a man who in the interests of learning and science will take Rulof's crime upon himself and submit to be hanged in Rulof's place I can and will do this thing and I propose this matter and make this offer in good faith you know me and know my address Samuel Langhorn April 29 1871 end of appendix K a substitute for Rulof have we a Sydney Carton among us read by John Greenman section 97 of Mark Twain a biography appendix is this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Mark Twain a biography by Albert Bigelow Payne appendix L about London address at a dinner given by the Savage Club London September 28 1872 c chapter 87 reported by Moncure D Conway in the Cincinnati commercial it affords me sincere pleasure to meet this distinguished club a club which has extended its hospitality's and its cordial welcome to so many of my countrymen I hope and here the speaker's voice became low and fluttering you will excuse these clothes I am going to the theater that will explain these clothes I have other clothes than these judging human nature by what I have seen of it I suppose that the customary thing for a stranger to do when he stands here is to make a pun on the name of this club under the impression of course that he is the first man that that idea has occurred to it is a credit to our human nature not a blemish upon it for it shows that underlying all our depravity and God knows and you know we are depraved enough and all our sophistication and untarnished by them there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still when a stranger says to me with a glow of inspiration in his eye some gentle innocuous little thing about twain and one flesh and all that sort of thing I don't try to crush that man into the earth no I feel like saying let me take you by the hand sir let me embrace you I have not heard that pun for weeks we will deal in palpable puns we will call parties named king your majesty and we will say to the smith that we think we have heard that name before somewhere such is human nature we cannot alter this it is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose let us not repine but though I may seem strange may seem eccentric I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it a week I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours its wonders seem to me to be limitless I go about as in a dream as in a realm of enchantment where many things are rare and beautiful and all things are strange and marvelous hour after hour I stand I stand spellbound as it were and gaze upon the statuary in Lester Square Lester Square being a horrible chaos with the relic of an equestrian statue in the center the king being headless and limbless and a horse in little better condition I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry the eighth and judge Jeffries and the preserved gorilla and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most I go to that matchless Hyde Park and drive all around it and then I start to enter it at the marble arch and am induced to change my mind cabs are not permitted in Hyde Park nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage it is a great benefaction is Hyde Park there in his handsome cab the invalid can go the poor sad child of misfortune and insert his nose between the railings and breathe the pure health-giving air of the country and of heaven and if he is a swell invalid who isn't obliged to depend upon parks for his country air he can drive inside if he owns his vehicle I drive round and round Hyde Park and the more I see of the edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive and I have been to the zoological gardens what a wonderful place that is I have never seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild animals in any garden before except mobile I never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there and I don't believe it yet I have been to the British Museum I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for five minutes if you have never been there it seems to be the noblest monument this nation has yet erected to her greatness I say to her our greatness as a nation true she has built other monuments and stately ones as well but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world stage destroying tyrants and delivering nations and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust I refer to the Wellington and Nelson monuments and the Albert Memorial sarcasm the Albert Memorial is the finest monument in the world and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity the library at the British Museum I find particularly astounding I have read their hours together and hardly made an impression on it I revere that library it is the author's friend I don't care how mean a book is it always takes one copy a copy of every book printed in Great Britain must by law be sent to the British Museum a law much complained of by publishers and then every day that author goes there to gaze at that book and is encouraged to go on in that good work and what a touching sight it is of a Saturday afternoon to see the poor care-worn clergymen gathered together in that vast reading room cabbaging sermons for Sunday you will pardon my referring to these things everything in this monster city interests me and I cannot keep from talking even at the risk of being instructive people here seem always to express distances by parables to a stranger it is just a little confusing to be so parabolic so to speak I collar a citizen and I think I am going to get some valuable information out of him I ask him how far it is to Birmingham and he says it is 21 shillings and six pence now we know that doesn't help a man who is trying to learn I find myself downtown somewhere and I want to get some sort of idea where I am being usually lost when alone and I stop a citizen and say how far is it to Charing Cross shilling fair in a cab and off he goes I suppose if I were to ask a Londoner how far it is from the sublime to the ridiculous he would try to express it in a coin but I am trespassing upon your time with these geological statistics and historical reflections I will not longer keep you from your orgies it is a real pleasure for me to be here and I thank you for it the name of the savage club is associated in my mind with the kindly interest and the friendly offices which you lavished upon an old friend of mine who came among you a stranger and you opened your English hearts to him and gave him a welcome and a home Artemis Ward asking that you will join me I give you his memory end of appendix l about London read by John Greenman section 98 of Mark Twain a biography appendixes this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Mark Twain a biography by Albert Bigelow Payne appendix M letter written to Mrs. Clemens from Boston November 1874 prophesying a monarchy in 61 years c chapter 97 boston november 16th 1935 dear Livy you observe I still call this beloved old place by the name it had when I was young limerick it is enough to make a body sick the gentlemen in waiting stare to see me sit here telegraphing this letter to you and no doubt they are smiling in their sleeves but let them the slow old fashions are good enough for me thank god and I will none other when I see one of these modern fools sit absorbed holding the end of a telegraph wire in his hand and reflect that a thousand miles away there is another fool hitched to the other end of it it makes me frantic with rage and then I am more implacably fixed and resolved than ever to continue taking 20 minutes to telegraph you what I might communicate in 10 seconds by the new way if I would so debase myself and when I see a whole silent solemn drawing room full of idiots sitting with their hands on each other's foreheads commuting I tug the white hairs from my head and curse till my asthma brings me the blessed relief of suffocation in our old day such a gathering talked pure drivel and rot mostly but better that a thousand times than these dreary conversational funerals that oppress our spirits in this mad generation it is 60 years since I was here before I walked hither then with my precious old friend it seems incredible now that we did it in two days but such is my recollection I no longer mention that we walked back in a single day it makes me so furious to see doubt in the face of the hearer men were men in those old times think of one of the puerile organisms in this effeminate age attempting such a feat my airship was delayed by a collision with a fellow from china loaded with the usual cargo of jabbering copper colored missionaries and so I was nearly an hour on my journey but by the goodness of god 13 of the missionaries were crippled and several killed so I was content to lose the time I love to lose time anyway because it brings soothing reminiscences of the creeping railroad days of old now lost to us forever our game was neatly played and successfully none expected us of course you should have seen the guards at the ducal palace stare when I said announce his grace the arch bishop of Dublin and the right honorable the Earl of Hartford arrived within we were all eyes to see the Duke of Cambridge and his duchess wondering if we might remember their faces and they ours in a moment they came tottering in he bent and withered and bawled she blooming with wholesome old age he peered through his glasses a moment then screeched in a reedy voice come to my arms away with titles I'll know ye by no names but twain and twitchle then fell he on our necks and jammed his trumpet in his ear the witch we filled with shoutings to this effect god bless you old howls what is left of you we talked late that night none of your silent idiot communings for us of the olden time we rolled a stream of ancient anecdotes over our tongues and drank till the lord archbishop grew so mellow in the mellow past that Dublin ceased to be Dublin to him and resumed its sweeter forgotten name of New York in truth he almost got back into his ancient religion too good Jesuit as he has always been since O Mulligan the first established that faith in the empire and we canvassed everybody bailey aldridge marquis of pankapog came in got nobly drunk and told us all about how poor osgood lost his earldom and was hanged for conspiring against the second emperor but he didn't mention how near he himself came to being hanged too for engaging in the same enterprise he was as chaffy as he was sixty years ago too and swore the archbishop and I never walked to Boston but there was never a day that pankapog wouldn't lie so be it by the grace of god he got the opportunity lord high admiral came in a hail gentleman close upon seventy and bronzed by the suns and storms of many climbs and scarred by the wounds got in many battles and I told him how I had seen him sit in a high chair and eat fruit and takes and answer to the name of johnny his granddaughter the eldest is but lately married to the youngest of the grand dukes and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the houses may rain in the land and I must not forget to say while I think of it that your new false teeth are done my dear and your wig keep your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes and so cheat your persecuting neuralges and rheumatisms would you believe it the Duchess of Cambridge is deffer than you deffer than her husband they call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery and usually when it thunders she looks up expectantly and says come in but she has become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now except when uncommonly vexed god knows my dear it would be a happy thing if you and old lady harmony would imitate this spirit but indeed the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture when I throw chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it but you you are but a creature of passion the monument to the author of Gloverson and his silent partners is finished Ralph Keeler c. 83 it is the stateliest and the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man this noble classic has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is adored by all nations and known to all creatures yet I have conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own great grandchildren I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponca Pog I love them as dearly as ever but privately my dear they are not much improvement on idiots it is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless anecdotes three and four times of an evening forgetting that they had jabbered them over three or four times the evening before Ponca Pog still writes poetry but the old time fire has mostly gone out of it perhaps his best effort of late years is this oh soul soul soul of mine soul soul soul of throw thy soul my soul two souls entwine and sing thy lords in crystal wine this he goes about repeating to everybody daily and nightly in so much that he is become a sore affliction to all that know him but I must desist there are drafts here everywhere and my gout is something frightful my left foot hath resemblance to a snuff bladder God be with you Hartford these to Lady Hartford in the earldom of Hartford in the upper portion of the city of Dublin end of appendix m letter written to mrs. Clemens from Boston November 1874 prophesying a monarchy in 61 years read by John Greenman