 CHAPTER XI. STURRING TIMES IN AUSTRIA. PART IV. THE HISTORIC CLIMAX. During the whole of November things went from bad to worse. The all-important Osklike remained hard aground, and could not be sparred off. Badeni's government could not withdraw the language ordinance and keep its majority, and the opposition could not be placated on easier terms. One night, while the customary pandemonium was crashing and thundering along at its best, a fight broke out. It was a surging, struggling, shoulder-to-shoulder scramble. A great many blows were struck. Twice Schoenberg lifted one of the heavy ministerial fortes, some say with one hand, and threatened members of the majority with it, but it was wrenched away from him. A member hammered Wolf over the head with the President's bell, and another member choked him. A professor was flung down and belabored with fists and choked. He held up an open pen-knife as a defense against the blows. It was snatched from him and flung to a distance. It hit a peaceful Christian socialist who wasn't doing anything, and brought blood from his hand. This was the only blood drawn. The men who got hammered and choked looked sound and well next day. The fists and the bell were not properly handled, or better results would have been apparent. I am quite sure that the fighters were not in earnest. On Thanksgiving Day the sitting was a history-making one. On that day the harried, bedeviled, and despairing government went insane. In order to free itself from the thralldom of the opposition, it committed this curiously juvenile crime. It moved an important change of the rules of the house, for bad debate upon the motion, put it to a stand-up vote instead of eyes and nose, and then gravely claimed that it had been adopted, or as to even the dullest witness, if I without immodesty may pretend to that place, it was plain that nothing legitimately to be called a vote had been taken at all. I think that Salt Peter never uttered a truer thing than when he said, whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Evidently the government's mind was tottering when this bald insult to the house was the best way it could contrive for getting out of the frying-pan. The episode would have been funny if the matter at stake had been a trifle, but in the circumstances it was pathetic. The usual storm was raging in the house, as usual many of the majority and the most of the minority were standing up to have a better chance to exchange epithets and make other noises. Into this storm Count Falkenhayn entered, with his paper in his hand, and at once there was a rush to get near him and hear him read his motion. In a moment he was walled in by listeners. The several clauses of his motion were loudly applauded by these allies, and as loudly dis-applauded, if I may invent a word, by such of the opposition as could hear his voice. When he took his seat the President promptly put the motion, persons desiring to vote in the affirmative stand up. The house was already standing, had been standing for an hour, and before a third of it had found out what the President had been saying he had proclaimed the adoption of the motion, and only a few heard that. In fact, when that house is legislating you can't tell it from artillery practice. You will realize what a happy idea it was to side-track the lawful eyes and nose and substitute a stand up vote by this fact, that a little later, when a deputation of deputies waited upon the President and asked him if he was actually willing to claim that that measure had been passed, he answered yes, and unanimously. It shows that, in effect, the whole house was on its feet when that trick was sprung. The Lex Falkenhayn, thus strangely born, gave the President power to suspend for three days any deputy who should continue to be disorderly after being called to order twice, and it also placed at his disposal such force as might be necessary to make the suspension effective. So the house had a sergeant at arms at last, and a more formidable one as to power than any other legislature in Christendom had ever possessed. The Lex Falkenhayn also gave the house itself authority to suspend members for thirty days. On these terms the house-like could be put through in an hour, apparently. The opposition would have to sit meek and quiet and stop obstructing or be turned into the street, deputy after deputy, leaving the majority an unvexed field for its work. Certainly the thing looked well. The government was out of the frying pan at last. It congratulated itself and was almost girlishly happy. Its stock rose suddenly from less than nothing to a premium. It confessed to itself with pride that its Lex Falkenhayn was a master-stroke, a work of genius. However there were doubters. Men who were troubled and believed that a great mistake had been made. It might be that the opposition was crushed and profitably for the country, too. But the manner of it, the manner of it. That was the serious part. It could have far-reaching results. Results whose gravity might transcend all guessing. It might be the initial step toward a return to government by force, a restoration of the irresponsible methods of obsolete times. There were no vacant seats in the galleries next day. In fact, standing room outside the building was at a premium. There were crowds there, and a glittering array of helmeted and brass-buttoned police on foot and on horseback to keep them from getting too much excited. No one could guess what was going to happen, but every one felt that something was going to happen, and hoped he might have a chance to see it, or at least get the news of it while it was fresh. At noon the house was empty, for I do not count myself. Half an hour later the two galleries were solidly packed, the floor still empty. Another half hour later Wolf entered and passed to his place. Then other deputies began to stream in. Among them many forms and faces grown familiar of late. By one o'clock the membership was present in full force. A band of socialists stood grouped against the ministerial desks in the shadow of the presidential tribune. It was observable that these official strongholds were now protected against rushes by bolted gates, and that these were in ward of servants wearing the house's livery. Also the removable desk boards had been taken away, and nothing left for disorderly members to slat with. There was a pervading anxious hush, at least what stood very well for a hush in that house. It was believed by many that the opposition was cowed, and that there would be no more obstruction, no more noise. That was an error. Presently the president entered by the distant door to the right, followed by Vice President Fuchs, and the two took their way down past the Polish benches toward the tribune. Instantly the customary storm of noises burst out, and rose higher and higher and wilder and wilder, and really seemed to surpass anything that had gone before it in that place. The president took his seat and begged for order, but no one could hear him. His lips moved, one could see that. He bowed his body forward appealingly, and spread his great hands eloquently over his breast, one could see that. But as concerned his uttered words, he probably could not hear them himself. Below him was that crowd of two dozen socialists glaring up at him, shaking their fists at him, roaring imprecations and insulting epithets at him. This went on for some time. Suddenly the socialists burst through the gates, and stormed up through the ministerial benches, and a man in a red cravat reached up and snatched the documents that lay on the president's desk, and flung them abroad. The next moment he and his allies were struggling and fighting with a half-dozen uniformed servants who were there to protect the new gates. Meantime a detail of socialists had swarmed up the side steps and overflowed the president and the vice, and were crowding and shouldering and shoving them out of the place. They crowded them out, and down the steps, and across the house, past the Polish benches, and all about them swarmed hostile polls and checks who resisted them. One could see fists go up and come down, with other signs and shows of a heady fight. Then the president and the vice disappeared through the doors of entrance, and the victorious socialists turned and marched back, mounted the tribune, flung the president's bell and his remaining papers abroad, and then stood there in a compact little crowd, eleven strong, and held the place as if it were a fortress. Their friends on the floor were in a frenzy of triumph, and manifested it in their deafening way. The whole house was on its feet, amazed and wondering. It was an astonishing situation, and imposingly dramatic. Nobody had looked for this. The unexpected had happened. What next? But there can be no next. The play is over. The grand climax is reached. The possibilities are exhausted. Bring down the curtain. Not yet. That distant door opens again, and now we see what history will be talking of five centuries hence. A uniformed and helmeted battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the floor of the house, a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force. It was an odious spectacle, odious and awful. For one moment it was an unbelievable thing, a thing beyond all credibility. It must be a delusion, a dream, a nightmare. But no, it was real. Pitifully real, shamefully real, hideously real. These sixty policemen had been soldiers, and they went at their work with the cold, unsentimentality of their trade. They ascended the steps of the Tribune, laid their hands upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door, then ranged themselves in stately military array in front of the ministerial estrade, and so stood. It was a tremendous episode. The memory of it will outlast all the thrones that exist today. In the whole history of free parliaments the like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes its imposing place among the world's unforgettable things. I think that in my lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but I know that I have seen it once. Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly. The Badani government came down with a crash. There was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna. There were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law. The Jews and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed. In other Bohemian towns there was rioting. In some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs, and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on. We are well along in December now, it is the ninth, M.T. The new minister-president has not been able to patch up a peace among the warring factions of the parliament, therefore there is no use in calling it together again for the present. Public opinion believes that parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not absolutely certain thing. Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention, and did what was claimed for it. It got the government out of the frying pan. End of Part 4 The Historic Climax and End of Chapter 11 Stirring Times in Austria Some months ago I published a magazine article descriptive of a remarkable scene in the imperial parliament in Vienna. Since then I have received from Jews in America several letters of inquiry. They were difficult letters to answer for they were not very definite. But at last I received a definite one. It is from a lawyer, and he really asks the questions which the other writers probably believed they were asking. By help of this text I will do the best I can to publicly answer this correspondent and also the others, at the same time apologizing for having failed to reply privately. The lawyer's letter reads as follows, I have read Stirring Times in Austria, one point in particular is of vital import to not a few thousand people, including myself, being a point about which I have often wanted to address a question to some disinterested person. The show of military force in the Austrian parliament, which precipitated the riots, was not introduced by any Jew. No Jew was a member of that body. No Jewish question was involved in the Ausgleich or in the language proposition. No Jew was insulting anybody. In short, no Jew was doing any mischief toward anybody whatsoever. In fact the Jews were the only ones of the nineteen different races in Austria which did not have a party. They are absolutely non-participants. Yet in your article you say that in the rioting which followed all classes of people were unanimous only on one thing, these in being against the Jews. Now will you kindly tell me why in your judgment the Jews have thus ever been and are even now in these days of supposed intelligence the butt of baseless, vicious animosities? I dare say that for centuries there has been no more quiet, undisturbing and well-behaving citizens as a class than that same Jew. It seems to me that ignorance and fanaticism cannot alone account for these horrible and unjust persecutions. Tell me therefore from your vantage point of cold view what in your mind is the cause? Can American Jews do anything to correct it either in America or abroad? Will it ever come to an end? Will a Jew be permitted to live honestly, decently and peaceably like the rest of mankind? What has become of the Golden Rule? I will begin by saying that if I thought myself prejudiced against the Jew I should hold it fairest to leave this subject to a person not crippled in that way. But I think I have no such prejudice. A few years ago a Jew observed to me that there was no uncourteous reference to his people in my books and asked how it happened. It happened because the disposition was lacking. I am quite sure that, bar one, I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being. That is enough for me. He can't be any worse. I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind this is irregular. It is un-English. It is un-American. It is French. Without this precedent, Dreyfus could not have been condemned. Of course Satan has some kind of a case, it goes without saying. It may be a poor one, but that is nothing. That can be said about any of us. As soon as I can get at the facts I will undertake his rehabilitation myself, if I can find an un-Politic publisher. It is a thing which we ought to be willing to do for anyone who is under a cloud. We may not pay him reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents. A person who has for untold centuries maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order. In his large presence the other popes and politicians shrink to midges for the microscope. I would like to see him. I would rather see him and shake him by the tail than any other member of the European concert. In the present paper I shall allow myself to use the word Jew, as if it stood for both religion and race. It is handy, and besides, that is what the term means to the general world. In the above letter one notes these points. One, the Jew is a well-behaved citizen. Two, can ignorance and fanaticism alone account for his unjust treatment? Three, can Jews do anything to improve the situation? Four, the Jews have no party, they are non-participants. Five, will the persecution ever come to an end? Six, what has become of the Golden Rule? Point number one. We must grant the proposition, number one, for several sufficient reasons. The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country. Even his enemies will concede that. He is not a loafer, he is not a sought. He is not noisy, he is not a brawler nor a rioter. He is not quarrelsome. In the statistics of crime his presence is conspicuously rare in all countries. With murder and other crimes of violence he has but little to do. He is a stranger to the hangman. In the police court's daily long role of assaults and drunk and disorderlies his name seldom appears. That the Jewish home is a home in the truest sense is a fact which no one will dispute. The family is knitted together by the strongest affections, its members show each other every due respect, and reverence for the elders is an inviolate law of the house. The Jew is not a burden on the charities of the state nor of the city. These could cease from their functions without affecting him. When he is well enough he works. When he is incapacitated his own people take care of him. Not in a poor and stingy way, but with a fine and large benevolence. His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men. A Jewish beggar is not impossible perhaps, such a thing may exist, but there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle. The Jew has been staged in many uncomplementary forms, but so far as I know no dramatist has done him the injustice to stage him as a beggar. Whenever a Jew has real need to beg his people save him from the necessity of doing it. The charitable institutions of the Jews are supported by Jewish money and amply. The Jews make no noise about it, it is done quietly. They do not nag and pester and harass us for contributions. They give us peace and set us an example, an example which we have not found ourselves able to follow, for by nature we are not free givers, and have to be patiently and persistently hunted down in the interest of the unfortunate. These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Armed up they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions, that his family life is commendable, that he is not a burden upon public charities, that he is not a beggar, that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessentials of good citizenship. If you can add that he is as honest as the average of his neighbors, but I think that question is affirmatively answered by the fact that he is a successful businessman. The basis of successful business is honesty. A business cannot thrive where the parties to it cannot trust each other. In the matter of numbers the Jew counts for little in the overwhelming population of New York, but that his honesty counts for much is guaranteed by the fact that the immense wholesale business of Broadway from the battery to Union Square is substantially in his hands. I suppose that the most picturesque example in history of a trader's trust in his fellow trader was one where it was not Christian trusting Christian, but Christian trusting Jew, that Hessian Duke who used to sell his subjects to George III to fight George Washington with got rich at it, and by and by when the wars engendered by the French Revolution made his throne too warm for him he was obliged to fly the country. He was in a hurry and had to leave his earnings behind, nine million dollars. He had to risk the money with someone without security. He did not select a Christian, but a Jew, a Jew of only modest means, but of high character, a character so high that it left him lonesome. Rothschild of Frankfurt. Thirty years later, when Europe had become quiet and safe again, the Duke came back from overseas and the Jew returned alone with interest added. Here is another piece of picturesque history, and it reminds us that shabbiness and dishonesty are not the monopoly of any race or creed, but are merely human. Congress passed a bill to pay three hundred and seventy-nine dollars and fifty-six cents to Moses Pendergrass of Libertyville, Missouri. The story of the reason of this liberality is pathetically interesting, and shows the sort of pickle that an honest man may get into who undertakes to do an honest job of work for Uncle Sam. In 1886 Moses Pendergrass put in a bid for the contract to carry the mail on the route from Knoblick to Libertyville and Kaufman thirty miles a day from July 1, 1887 for one year. He got the postmaster at Knoblick to write the letter for him, and while Moses intended that his bid should be four hundred dollars, his scribe carelessly made it four dollars. Moses got the contract, and did not find out about the mistake until the end of the first quarter when he got his first pay. When he found at what rate he was working, he was sorely cast down, and opened communication with the post-office department. The department informed him that he must either carry out his contract or throw it up, and that if he threw it up his bondsmen would have to pay the government one thousand four hundred and fifty-nine dollars and eighty-five cents damages. So Moses carried out his contract, walked thirty miles every weekday for a year, and carried the mail, and received for his labor four dollars, or to be accurate six dollars and eighty-four cents, for the route being extended after his bid was accepted the pay was proportionately increased. Now after ten years a bill was finally passed to pay Moses the difference between what he earned in that unlucky year and what he received. The son, which tells the above story, says that bills were introduced in three or four congresses for Moses' relief, and that committees repeatedly investigated his claim. It took six congresses containing in their persons the compressed virtues of seventy millions of people, and cautiously and carefully giving expression to those virtues in the fear of God and the next election, eleven years to find out some way to cheat a fellow Christian out of about thirteen dollars on his honestly executed contract, and out of nearly three hundred dollars do him on its enlarged terms, and they succeeded. During the same time they paid out one billion dollars in pensions, a third of it unearned and undeserved. This indicates a splendid all-around competency in theft, for it starts with farthings and works its industries all the way up to shiploads. It may be possible that the Jews can beat this, but the man that bets on it is taking chances. The Jew has his other side. He has some discreditable ways, though he has not a monopoly of them, because he cannot get entirely rid of vexatious Christian competition. We have seen that he seldom transgresses the laws against crimes of violence. Indeed his dealings with courts are almost restricted to matters connected with commerce. He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practicing oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and arranging for cunning contracts, which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it. He is a frequent and faithful and capable officer in the civil service, but he is charged with an unpatriotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier, like the Christian Quaker. Now if you offset these discreditable features by the creditable ones summarized in a preceding paragraph beginning with the words, these facts are all on the credit side and strike a balance, what must the verdict be? Yes, I think that the merits and demerits being fairly weighed and measured on both sides, the Christian can claim no superiority over the Jew in the matter of good citizenship. Yet in all countries, from the dawn of history, the Jew has been persistently and implacably hated and with frequency persecuted. Point number two. Can fanaticism alone account for this? Years ago I used to think that it was responsible for nearly all of it, but laterally I have come to think that this was an error. And it is now my conviction that it is responsible for hardly any of it. In this connection I call to mind Genesis Chapter 47. We have all, thoughtfully or unthoughtfully, read the pathetic story of the years of plenty and the years of famine in Egypt, and how Joseph, with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts and the crusts of the poor and human liberty, a corner whereby he took a nation's money all the way to the last penny, took a nation's livestock all the way to the last hoof, took a nation's land away to the last acre, then took the nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by child, till all were slaves, a corner which took everything, left nothing, a corner so stupendous that, by comparison with it, the most gigantic corners in subsequent history are but baby things, for it dealt in hundreds of millions of bushels, and its profits were reckonable by hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was a disaster so crushing that its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt today, more than three thousand years after the event. Is it presumable that the eye of Egypt was upon Joseph, the foreign Jew, all this time? I think it likely. Was it friendly? We must doubt it. Was Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long in Egypt, and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to express that character, like Shylock's? It is hardly to be doubted. Let us remember that this was centuries before the crucifixion. I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later, and refer to a remark made by one of the Latin historians. I read it in a translation many years ago, and it comes back to me now with force. It was alluding to a time when people were still living who could have been the saviour in the flesh. Christianity was so new that the people of Rome had hardly heard of it, and had but confused notions of what it was. The substance of the remark was this. Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through error, they being mistaken for Jews. The meaning seems plain. These pagans had nothing against Christians, but they were quite ready to persecute Jews. For some reason or other they hated a Jew before they even knew what a Christian was. May I not assume, then, that the persecution of Jews is a thing which anti-dates Christianity and was not born of Christianity? I think so. What was the origin of the feeling? When I was a boy in the back settlements of the Mississippi Valley, where a gracious and beautiful Sunday school simplicity and unpracticality prevailed, the Yankee, citizen of the New England States, was hated with a splendid energy. But religion had nothing to do with it. In a trade the Yankee was held to be about five times the match of the Westerner, his shrewdness, his insight, his judgment, his knowledge, his enterprise, and his formidable cleverness in applying these forces were frankly confessed and most competently cursed. In the cotton states after the war the simple and ignorant Negroes made the crops for the white planter on shares. The Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the Negroes once on credit, and, at the end of the season, was proprietor of the Negro's share of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before long the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the Negro loved him. The Jew is being legislated out of Russia. The reason is not concealed. The movement was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on a crop, and sell vodka and other necessaries of life on credit, while the crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop, and next year or year after he owned the farm, like Joseph. In the dull and ignorant England of John's time everybody got into debt to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprises into his hands. He was the king of commerce. He was ready to be helpful in all profitable ways. He even financed crusades for the rescue of the sepulcher. To wipe out his account with the nation and restore business to its natural and incompetent channels, he had to be banished the realm. For the like reasons Spain had to banish him four hundred years ago and Austria about a couple of centuries later. In all the ages Christian Europe has been obliged to curtail his activities. If he entered upon a mechanical trade the Christian had to retire from it. If he set up as a doctor he was the best one, and he took the business. If he exploited agriculture the other farmers had to get at something else. Since there was no way to successfully compete with him in any vocation the law had to step in and save the Christian from the poor house. Trade after trade was taken away from the Jew by statute till practically none was left. He was forbidden to engage in agriculture. He was forbidden to practice law. He was forbidden to practice medicine, except among Jews. He was forbidden the handicrafts. Even the seats of learning and the schools of science had to be closed against this tremendous antagonist. Still, almost bereft of employments, he found ways to make money, even ways to get rich. Also ways to invest his takings well, for usury was not denied him. In the hard conditions suggested the Jew without brains could not survive and the Jew with brains had to keep them in good training and well sharpened up, or starve. Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him, his brain, have made that tool singularly competent. Ages of compulsory disuse of his hands have atrophied them, and he never uses them now. This history has a very, very commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look, the business aspect of a Chinese cheap labour crusade. Those prejudices may account for one part of it, but not for the other nine. Protestants have persecuted Catholics, but they did not take their livelihoods away from them. The Catholics have persecuted the Protestants with bloody and awful bitterness, but they never closed agriculture and the handicrafts against them. Why was that? That has the candid look of genuine religious persecution, not a trade union boycott in a religious disguise. The Jews are harried and obstructed in Austria and Germany and lately in France, but England and America give them an open field, and yet survive. Scotland offers them an unembarrassed field, too, but there are not many takers. There are a few Jews in Glasgow and one in Aberdeen, but that is because they can't earn enough to get away. The Scotch pay themselves that compliment, but it is authentic. I feel convinced that the crucifixion has not much to do with the world's attitude toward the Jew, that the reasons for it are older than that event, as suggested by Egypt's experience and by Rome's regret for having persecuted an unknown quantity called a Christian under the mistaken impression that she was merely persecuting a Jew, merely a Jew, a skinned eel who was used to it, presumably. I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria and Germany, nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business in either straight business or the questionable sort. In Berlin a few years ago, I read a speech which frankly urged the expulsion of the Jews from Germany, and the agitator's reason was as frank as his proposition. It was this, that eighty-five percent of the successful lawyers of Berlin were Jews, and that about the same percentage of the great and lucrative businesses of all sorts in Germany were in the hands of the Jewish race. Isn't it an amazing confession? It was but another way of saying that in a population of forty-eight millions, of whom only five hundred thousand were registered as Jews, eighty-five percent of the brains and honesty of the whole was lodged in the Jews. I must insist upon the honesty. It is an essential of successful business, taken by and large. Of course it does not rule out rascals entirely, even among Christians, but it is a good working rule nevertheless. The speaker's figures may have been inexact, but the motive of persecution stands out as clear as day. The man claimed that in Berlin the banks, the newspapers, the theatres, the great mercantile, shipping, mining, and manufacturing interests, the big army and city contracts, the tramways, and pretty much all other properties of high value, and also the small businesses, were in the hands of the Jews. He said the Jew was pushing the Christian to the wall, all along the line, that it was all a Christian could do to scrape together a living, and that the Jew must be banished and soon there was no other way of saving the Christian. Here in Vienna last autumn an agitator said that all these disastrous details were true of Austria-Hungary also, and in fierce language he demanded the expulsion of the Jews. When politicians come out without a blush and read the baby-act in this frank way, when rebuked, it is a very good indication that they have a market back of them and know where to fish for votes. You note the crucial point of the mentioned agitation. The argument is that the Christian cannot compete with the Jew, and that hence his very bread is in peril. To human beings this is a much more hate-inspiring thing than is any detail connected with religion. With most people of necessity bread and meat take first rank, religion second. I am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree to religious prejudice. No, the Jew is a money-getter, and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble. In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite, but that they all worship money. So he made it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty-six centuries ago. He was at it in Rome when that Christian got persecuted by mistake for him. He has been at it ever since. The cost to him has been heavy. His success has made the whole human race his enemy, but it has paid, for it has brought him envy, and that is the only thing which men will sell both soul and body to get. He long ago observed that a millionaire commands respect, a two-millionaire homage, a multi-millionaire, the deepest deeps of adoration. We all know that feeling. We have seen it express itself. We have noticed that when the average man mentions the name of a multi-millionaire, he does it with that mixture in his voice of awe and reverence and lust, which burns in a Frenchman's eye when it falls on another man's centime. Point number four. The Jews have no party. They are non-participants. Perhaps you have let the secret out and given yourself away. It seems hardly a credit to the race that it is able to say that, or to you, sir, that you can say it without remorse. More that you should offer it as a plea against maltreatment, injustice, and oppression. Who gives the Jew the right? Who gives any race the right to sit still in a free country and let somebody else look after its safety? The oppressed Jew was entitled to all pity in the former times under brutal autocracies, for he was weak and friendless, and had no way to help his case. But he has ways now, and he has had them for a century. But I do not see that he has tried to make serious use of them. When the Revolution set him free in France it was an act of grace, the grace of other people. He does not appear in it as a helper. I do not know that he helped when England set him free. Among the twelve sane men of France who have stepped forward with great zola at their head to fight and win, I hope, and believe. Note the article was written in the summer of 1898, editor. The battle for the most infamously misused Jew of modern times. Do you find a great or rich or illustrious Jew helping? In the United States he was created free in the beginning. He did not need to help, of course. In Austria and Germany and France he has a vote. But of what considerable use is it to him? He doesn't seem to know how to apply it to the best effect. With all his splendid capacities and all his fat wealth he is today not politically important in any country. In America, as early as 1854, the ignorant Irish hod carrier who had a spirit of his own and a way of exposing it to the weather made it apparent to all that he must be politically reckoned with. Yet fifteen years before that we hardly knew what an Irishman looked like. As an intelligent force and numerically he has always been a way down, but he has governed the country just the same. It was because he was organized. It made his vote valuable, in fact essential. You will say the Jew is everywhere numerically feeble. It is nothing to the point with the Irishman's history for an object lesson, but I am coming to your numerical feebleness presently. In all parliamentary countries you could no doubt elect Jews to the legislatures and even one member in such a body is sometimes a force which counts. How deeply have you concerned yourselves about this in Austria, France and Germany, or even in America for that matter? You remark that the Jews were not to blame for the riots in this Reichschracht here, and you add with satisfaction that there wasn't one in that body. That is not strictly correct. If it were, would it not be an order for you to explain it and apologize for it, not try to make a merit of it? But I think that the Jew was by no means in as large force there as he ought to have been with his chances. India opens the suffrage to him on fairly liberal terms, and it must surely be his own fault that he is so much in the background politically. As to your numerical weakness, I mentioned some figures a while ago, five hundred thousand, as the Jewish population of Germany. I will add some more. Six million in Russia, five million in Austria, two hundred and fifty thousand in the United States. I take them from memory. I read them in the Encyclopedia Britannica about ten years ago. Still I am entirely sure of them. If those statistics are correct, my argument is not as strong as it ought to be as concerns America, but it still has strength. It is plenty strong enough as concerns Austria. For ten years ago five million was nine percent of the empire's population. The Irish would govern the kingdom of heaven if they had a strength there like that. I have some suspicions. I got them at second hand, but they have remained with me these ten or twelve years. When I read in the E.B. that the Jewish population of the United States was two hundred and fifty thousand, I wrote the editor, and explained to him that I was personally acquainted with more Jews than that in my country, and that his figures were without doubt a misprint for twenty-five million. I also added that I was personally acquainted with that many there, but that was only to raise his confidence in me, for it was not true. His answer miscarried, and I never got it. But I went around talking about the matter, and people told me they had reason to suspect that for business reasons many Jews whose dealings were mainly with the Christians did not report themselves as Jews in the census. It looked plausible. It looks plausible yet. Look at the city of New York, and look at Boston, and Philadelphia, and New Orleans, and Chicago, and Cincinnati, and San Francisco, how your race swarms in those places, and everywhere else in America, down to the least little village. Read the signs on the marts of commerce and on the shops, Goldstein, Goldstone, Edelstein, Preciousstone, Blumenthal, Flowervale, Rosenthal, Rosevale, Wielschenduft, Violetoder, Singavogel, Hamburg, Rosenzweig, Rosebranch, and all the amazing list of beautiful and enviable names which Prussia and Austria glorified you with so long ago. It is another instance of Europe's coarse and cruel persecution of your race. Not that it was coarse and cruel to outfit it with pretty and poetical names like those, but that it was coarse and cruel to make it pay for them, or else take such hideous and often indecent names that today their owners never use them, or if they do only on official papers. And it was the many, not the few, who got the odious names, they being too poor to bribe the officials to grant them better ones. Now why was the race renamed? I have been told that in Prussia it was given to using fictitious names, and often changing them, so as to beat the tax-gatherer, escape military service, and so on. And that finally the idea was hit upon of furnishing all the inmates of a house with one and the same surname, and then holding the house responsible right along for those inmates, and accountable for any disappearances that might occur. It made the Jews keep track of each other, for self-interest's sake, and saved the government the trouble. In Austria the renaming was merely done because the Jews in some newly acquired regions had no surnames, but were mostly named Abraham and Moses, and therefore the tax-gatherer could not tell tether from which, and was likely to lose his reason over the matter. The renaming was put into the hands of the War Department, and a charming mess the graceless young lieutenants made of it. To them a Jew was of no sort of consequence, and they labelled the race in a way to make the angels weep. As an example take these two, Abraham Belish and Shmuel Kotbdamd, called from Naaman's studio by Carl Emil Franzlis, M.T. If that explanation of how the Jews of Prussia came to be renamed is correct, if it is true that they fictitiously registered themselves to gain certain advantages, it may possibly be true that in America they refrain from registering themselves as Jews to fend off the damaging prejudices of the Christian customer. I have no way of knowing whether this notion is well founded or not. There may be other and better ways of explaining why only that poor little two hundred and fifty thousand of our Jews got into the Encyclopedia. I may, of course, be mistaken, but I am strongly of the opinion that we have an immense Jewish population in America. Point number three, can Jews do anything to improve the situation? I think so. If I may make a suggestion without seeming to be trying to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs, I will offer it. In our days we have learned the value of combination. We apply it everywhere, in railway systems, in trusts, in trade unions, in salvation armies, in minor politics, in major politics, in European concerts. Whatever our strength may be, big or little, we organize it. We have found out that that is the only way to get the most out of it that is in it. We know the weakness of individual sticks and the strength of the concentrated faggot. Suppose you try a scheme like this, for instance. In England and America put every Jew on the census book as a Jew, in case you have not been doing that. Get up, volunteer regiments composed of Jews solely, and, when the drum beats, fall in and go to the front, so as to remove the reproach that you have few masanas among you, and that you feed on the country but don't like to fight for it. Next in politics organize your strength, band together, and deliver the casting vote where you can, and where you can't compel as good terms as possible. You huddle to yourselves already in all countries, but you huddle to no sufficient purpose, politically speaking. You do not seem to be organized, except for your charities. There you are omnipotent. There you compel your due of recognition. You do not have to beg for it. It shows what you can do when you band together for a definite purpose. And then, from America and England, you can encourage your race in Austria, France, and Germany, and materially help it. It was a pathetic tale that was told by a poor Jew in Galicia a fortnight ago during the riots, after he had been raided by the Christian peasantry and despoiled of everything he had. He said his vote was of no value to him, and he wished he could be excused from casting it, for indeed casting it was a sure damage to him, since no matter which party he voted for, the other party would come straight and take its revenge out of him. Nine percent of the population of the empire these Jews, and apparently they cannot put a plank into any candidate's platform. If you will send our Irish lads over here, I think they will organize your race and change the aspect of the Reichlich. You seem to think that the Jews take no hand in politics here, that they are absolutely non-participants. I am assured by men competent to speak that this is a very large error, and that the Jews are exceedingly active in politics all over the empire, but that they scatter their work and their votes among the numerous parties and thus lose the advantages to be had by concentration. I think that in America they scatter too, but you know more about that than I do. Speaking of concentration, Dr. Herzl has a clear insight into the value of that. Have you heard of his plan? He wishes to gather the Jews of the world together in Palestine, with a government of their own, under the suzerainty of the Sultan, I suppose. At the convention of Bern last year there were delegates from everywhere, and the proposal was received with decided favour. I am not the Sultan, and I am not objecting. But if that concentration of the cunningest brains in the world was going to be made in a free country, bar Scotland, I think it would be to stop it. It will not be well to let that race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride any more. Point number five. Will the persecution of the Jews ever come to an end? On the score of religion I think it has already come to an end. On the score of race, prejudice, and trade I have the idea that it will continue, that is, here and there in spots about the world where a barbarous ignorance and a sort of mere animal civilization prevail, but I do not think that elsewhere the Jew need now stand in any fear of being robbed and raided. Among the high civilizations he seems to be very comfortably situated indeed, and to have more than his proportionate share of the prosperity he is going. It has that look in Vienna. I suppose the race prejudice cannot be removed, but he can stand without that. It is no particular matter. By his make and ways he is substantially a foreigner, wherever he may be, and even the angels dislike a foreigner. I am using this word foreigner in the German sense, stranger. Nearly all of us have an antipathy to a stranger, even of our own nationality. We pile grip sacks in a vacant seat to keep him from getting it, and a dog goes further and does as a savage would, challenges him on the spot. The German dictionary seems to make no distinction between a stranger and a foreigner. In its view a stranger is a foreigner, a sound position I think. You will always be, by ways and habits and predilections, substantially strangers, foreigners, wherever you are, and that will probably keep the race prejudice against you alive. But you were the favourites of heaven originally, and your manifold and unfair prosperities convinced me that you have crowded back into that snug place again. Here is an incident that is significant. Last week, in Vienna, a hail storm struck the prodigious central cemetery and made wasteful destruction there. In the Christian part of it, according to the official figures, six hundred and twenty-one window-panes were broken. More than nine hundred singing birds were killed. Five great trees and many small ones were torn to shreds, and the shreds scattered far and wide by the wind. The ornamental plants and other decorations of the graves were ruined, and more than a hundred tomb lanterns shattered. And it took the cemetery's whole force of three hundred laborers more than three days to clear away the storm's wreckage. In the report occurs this remark, and in its italics, you can hear it grit its Christian teeth. That was only the Israelite section of the cemetery, which was completely damaged by the hail storm. It is exhibit A in the church's assets, and we pull it out every Sunday and give it an airing. But you are not permitted to try to smuggle it into this discussion where it is irrelevant and would not feel at home. It is strictly religious furniture, like an acolyte, or a contribution plate, or any of those things. It has never been intruded into business, and Jewish persecution is not a religious passion. It is a business passion. To conclude, if the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous, dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also a way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world in all the ages, and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away. The Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality? End of Chapter 12 Concerning the Jews CHICAGO APRIL FIRST 1904 I resume my cable telephone, where I left off yesterday. For many hours now, this vast city, along with the rest of the globe, of course, has talked of nothing but the extraordinary episode mentioned in my last report. In accordance with your instructions, I will now trace the romance from its beginnings down to the culmination of yesterday, or today, call it what you like. By an odd chance I was a personal actor in a part of this drama myself. The opening scene plays in Vienna. Date? One o'clock in the morning, March 31, 1898. I had spent the evening at a social entertainment. About midnight I went away in company with the military attachés of the British, Italian, and American embassies, to finish with a late smoke. This function had been appointed to take place in the house of Lieutenant Hillier, the third attaché mentioned in the above list. When we arrived there, we found several visitors in the room. Young Zepernick, pronounced approximately Zepernick, Mr. K., his financial backer, Mr. W., the latter's secretary, and Lieutenant Clayton, of the United States Army. War was at that time threatening between Spain and our country. And Lieutenant Clayton had been sent to Europe on military business. I was well acquainted with young Zepernick and his two friends, and I knew Mr. Clayton slightly. I had met him at West Point years before, when he was a cadet. It was when General Merritt was superintendent. He had the reputation of being an able officer, and also of being quick-tempered and plain-spoken. This smoking-party had been gathered together partly for business. This business was to consider the availability of the electroscope for military service. It sounds oddly enough now, but it is nevertheless true that at that time the invention was not taken seriously by anyone except its inventor. Even his financial supporter regarded it merely as a curious and interesting toy. Indeed, he was so convinced of this that he had actually postponed its use by the general world to the end of the dying century by granting a two years exclusive lease of it to a syndicate whose intent was to exploit it at the Paris World's Fair. When we entered the smoking-room we found Lieutenant Clayton and Zepernick engaged in a warm talk over the electroscope in the German tongue. Clayton was saying, Well, you know my opinion of it, anyway, and he brought his fist down with emphasis upon the table. And I do not value it, retorted the young inventor with provoking calmness of tone and manner. Clayton turned to Mr. K. and said, I cannot see why you are wasting money on this toy. In my opinion the day will never come when it will do a farthing's worth of real service for any human being. That may be, yes, that may be. Still I have put the money in it and am content. I think myself that it is only a toy, but Zepernick claims more for it, and I know him well enough to believe that he can see farther than I can, either with his telelectroscope or without it. The soft answer did not cool Clayton down. It seemed only to irritate him the more. And he repeated and emphasized his conviction that the invention would never do any man a farthing's worth of real service. He even made it a brass farthing this time. Then he laid an English farthing on the table and added, Take that, Mr. K., and put it away, and if ever the telelectroscope does any man an actual service, mind a real service, please mail it to me as a reminder, and I will take back what I have been saying. Will you? I will, and Mr. K. put the coin in his pocket. Mr. Clayton now turned toward Zepernick and began with a taunt, a taunt which did not reach a finish. Zepernick interrupted it with a hardy retort, and followed this with a blow. There was a brisk fight for a moment or two. Then the attachés separated the men. The scene now changes to Chicago, time the autumn of 1901. As soon as the Paris contract released the telelectroscope it was delivered to public use and was soon connected with the telephonic systems of the whole world. The improved limitless distance telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussable too by witnesses separated by any number of leagues. By and by Zepernick arrived in Chicago. Clayton, now captain, was serving in that military department at the time. The two men resumed the Viennese quarrel of 1898. On three different occasions they quarreled and were separated by witnesses. Then came an interval of two months, during which time Zepernick was not seen by any of his friends, and it was at first supposed that he had gone off on a sight-seeing tour and would soon be heard from. But no, no word came from him. Then it was supposed that he had returned to Europe. Still time drifted on, and he was not heard from. Nobody was troubled, for he was like most inventors and other kinds of poets, and went and came in a capricious way and often without notice. Now comes the tragedy. On the 29th of December, in a dark and unused compartment of the cellar under Captain Clayton's house, a corpse was discovered by one of Clayton's maid servants. It was easily identified as Zepernick's. The man had died by violence. Clayton was arrested, indicted, and brought to trial, charged with this murder. The evidence against him was perfect in every detail, and absolutely unassailable. Clayton admitted this himself. He said that a reasonable man could not examine this testimony with a dispassionate mind and not be convinced by it. Yet the man would be in error, nevertheless. Clayton swore that he did not commit the murder, and that he had nothing to do with it. As your readers will remember, he was condemned to death. He had numerous and powerful friends, and they worked hard to save him, for none of them doubted the truth of his assertion. I did what little I could to help, for I had long since become a close friend of his, and thought I knew that it was not in his character to invagle an enemy into a corner and assassinate him. During 1902 and 1903 he was several times reprieved by the Governor. He was reprieved once more in the beginning of the present year, and the Execution Day postponed to March 31st. The Governor's situation has been embarrassing from the day of the condemnation, because of the fact that Clayton's wife is the Governor's niece. The marriage took place in 1899, when Clayton was thirty-four, and the girl twenty-three, and has been a happy one. There is one child, a little girl, three years old. Did he, for the poor mother and child, kept the mouths of grumblers closed at first, but this could not last forever, for in America politics has a hand in everything. And by and by the Governor's political opponents began to call attention to his delay in allowing the law to take its course. These hints have grown more and more frequent of late, and more and more pronounced. As a natural result his own party grew nervous. Its leaders began to visit Springfield and hold long private conferences with him. He was now between two fires. On the one hand his niece was imploring him to pardon her husband. On the other were the leaders, insisting that he stand to his plain duty as Chief Magistrate of the State, and place no further bar to Clayton's execution. Duty won in the struggle, and the Governor gave his word that he would not again respite the condemned man. This was two weeks ago. As Clayton now said, Now that you have given your word, my last hope is gone, for I know you will never go back from it. But you have done the best you could for John, and I have no reproaches for you. You love him, and you love me, and we both know that if you could honorably save him you would do it. I will go to him now, and be what help I can to him, and get what comfort I may out of the few days that are left to us before the night comes, which will have no end for me in life. You will be with me that day? You will not let me bear it alone? I will take you to him myself, poor child, and I will be near you to the last. By the Governor's command Clayton was now allowed every indulgence he might ask for, which could interest his mind and soften the hardship of his imprisonment. His wife and child spent the days with him. I was his companion by night. He was removed from the narrow cell which he had occupied during such a dreary stretch of time, and given the Chief Warden's roomy and comfortable quarters. His mind was always busy with the catastrophe of his life and with the slaughtered inventor, and he now took the fancy that he would like to have the telelectroscope and divert his mind with it. He had his wish. The connection was made with the International Telephone Station, and day by day and night by night. He called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realized that, by grace of this marvelous instrument, he was almost as free as the birds of the air, although a prisoner under locks and bars. He seldom spoke, and I never interrupted him when he was absorbed in this amusement. I sat in his parlour and read and smoked, and the nights were very quiet and reposefully sociable, and I found them pleasant. Now and then I would hear him say, Give me Yedo, next. Give me Hong Kong, next. Give me Melbourne. And I smoked on, and read in comfort, while he wandered about the remote underworld where the sun was shining in the sky, and the people were at their daily work. Sometimes the talk that came from those far regions through the microphone attachment interested me, and I listened. Yesterday, I keep calling it yesterday, which is quite natural for certain reasons, the instrument remained unused, and that also was natural, for it was the eve of the execution day. It was spent in tears, and lamentations, and farewells. The governor and the wife and child remained until a quarter past eleven at night, and the scenes I witnessed were pitiful to see. The execution was to take place at four in the morning, a little after eleven, a sound of hammering broke out upon the still night, and there was a glare of light, and the child cried out, What is that, papa? and ran to the window, before she could be stopped, and clapped her small hands, and said, Oh, come and see, mama, such a pretty thing they are making! The mother knew, and fainted. It was the gallows. She was carried away to her lodging, poor woman, and Clayton and I were alone, alone and thinking, brooding, dreaming. We might have been statues, we sat so motionless and still. It was a wild night, for winter was come again for a moment, after the habit of this region in the early spring. The sky was starless and black, and a strong wind was blowing from the lake. The silence in the room was so deep that all outside sounds seemed exaggerated by contrast with it. These sounds were fitting ones. They harmonized with the situation and the conditions. The boom and thunder of sudden storm gusts among the roofs and chimneys, then the dying down into moanings and wailings about the eaves and angles, now and then a gnashing and lashing rush of sleet along the window-panes, and always the muffled and uncanny hammering of the gallows-builders in the courtyard. After an age of this another sound, far off, coming smothered and faint through the ride of the tempest, a bell tolling twelve, another age, and it tolled again, by and by again. A dreary long interval after this, then the spectral sound floated to us once more, one, two, three, and this time we caught our breath sixty minutes of life left. Clayton rose and stood by the window and looked up into the black sky and listened to the thrashing sleet and the piping wind, then he said, that a dying man's last of earth should be this. After a little he said, I must see the sun again, the sun! And the next moment he was feverishly calling, China, give me China, Peking! I was strangely stirred and said to myself, to think that it is a mere human being who does this unimaginable miracle, turns winter into summer, night into day, storm into calm, gives the freedom of the great globe to a prisoner in his cell, and the sun in his naked splendor to a man dying in Egyptian darkness. I was listening. What light! What brilliancy! What radiance! This is Peking! Yes, the time? Mid-afternoon! What is the great crowd for, and in such gorgeous costumes! What masses and masses of rich color and barbaric magnificence, and how they flash and glow and burn in the flooding sunlight! What is the occasion of it all? The coronation of our new emperor, the Tsar! But I thought that that was to take place yesterday. This is yesterday to you. Certainly it is. But my mind is confused these days. There are reasons for it. Is this the beginning of the procession? Oh, no! It began to move an hour ago. Is there much more of it still to come? Two hours of it? Why do you sigh? Because I should like to see it all. And why can't you? I have to go presently. You have an engagement? After a pause, softly? Yes. After another pause. Who are these in the splendid pavilion? The imperial family and visiting royalties from here and there and yonder in the earth. And who are those in the adjoining pavilions to the right and left? Those and their families and suites to the right, unofficial foreigners to the left. If you will be so good, I—boom!—that distant bell again tolling the half-hour faintly through the tempest of wind and sleet. The door opened, and the governor and the mother and child entered the woman in widow's weeds. She fell upon her husband's breast in a passion of sobs, and I—I could not stay. I could not bear it. I went into the bed-chamber and closed the door. I sat there waiting, waiting, waiting and listening to the rattling sashes and the blustering of the storm. After what seemed a long, long time I heard a rustle and movement in the parlor, and knew that the clergyman and the sheriff and the guard were come. There was some low-voiced talking, then a hush, then a prayer, with a sound of sobbing. Presently footfalls, the departure for the gallows, then the child's happy voice Don't cry now, Mama, when we've got Papa again and taking him home. The door closed, they were gone. I was ashamed. I was the only friend of the dying man that had no spirit, no courage. I stepped into the room and said I would be a man and would follow. But we are made, as we are made, and we cannot help it. I did not go. I fidgeted about the room nervously and presently went to the window and softly raised it, drawn by that dread fascination which the terrible and the awful exert, and looked down upon the courtyard. By the garish light of the electric lamps I saw the little group of privileged witnesses, the wife crying on her uncle's breast, the condemned man standing on the scaffold with the halter around his neck, his arms strapped to his body, the black cap on his head, the sheriff at his side with his hand on the drop. The clergyman in front of him with bare head and his book in his hand. I am the resurrection and the life I turned away, I could not listen, I could not look. I did not know whether to go or what to do. Mechanically and without knowledge I put my eye to that strange instrument, and there was pecking, and the czar's procession. The next moment I was leaning out of the window, gasping, suffocating, trying to speak, but dumb from the very eminence of the necessity of speaking. The preacher could speak, but I, who had such need of words, and may God have mercy upon your soul, amen. The sheriff drew down the black cap and laid his hand upon the lever. I got my voice. Stop, for God's sake! The man is innocent! Come here and seize upon it face to face! Hardly three minutes later the governor had my place at the window and was saying, strike off his bonds and set him free! Three minutes later all were in the parlor again. The reader will imagine the scene. I have no need to describe it. It was a sort of mad orgy of joy. A messenger carried word to Zipanik in the pavilion, and one could see the distressed amazement dawn in his face as he listened to the tale. Then he came to his end of the line and talked with Clayton and the governor and the others. And the wife poured out her gratitude upon him for saving her husband's life, and in her deep thankfulness she kissed him at twelve thousand miles range. The telelectrophonoscopes of the globe were put to service now, and for many hours the kings and queens of many realms, with here and there a reporter, talked with Zipanik and praised him, and the few scientific societies which had not already made him an honorary member conferred that grace upon him. How had he come to disappear from among us? It was easily explained. He had not grown used to being a world-famous person, and had been forced to break away from the lionizing that was robbing him of all privacy and repose. So he grew a beard, put on colored glasses, disguised himself a little in other ways, then took a fictitious name, and went off to wander about the earth in peace. Such is the tale of the drama which began with the inconsequential quarrel in Vienna in the spring of 1898, and came near-ending as a tragedy in the spring of 1904. 2 Correspondence of the London Times, Chicago, April 5, 1904 Today by a clipper of the electric line and the latter's electric railway connections arrived an envelope from Vienna for Captain Clayton containing an English farthing. The receiver of it was a good deal moved. He called up Vienna and stood face to face with Mr. K., and said, I do not need to say anything. You can see it all in my face. My wife has the farthing. Do not be afraid. She will not throw it away. 3 Correspondence of the London Times, Chicago, April 23, 1904 Now that the after-developments of the Clayton case have run their course, and reached the finish, I will sum them up. Clayton's romantic escape from a shameful death steeped all this region in an enchantment of wonder and joy during the proverbial nine days. Then the sobering process followed, and men began to take thought and to say, But a man was killed, and Clayton killed him. Others replied, that is true, we have been overlooking that important detail. We have been led away by excitement. The feeling soon became general that Clayton ought to be tried again. Measures were taken accordingly, and the proper representations conveyed to Washington, for in America, under the new paragraph added to the Constitution in 1899, Second trials are not state affairs, but national, and must be tried by the most august body in the land, the Supreme Court of the United States. The justices were therefore summoned to sit in Chicago. The session was held day before yesterday, and was opened with the usual impressive formalities, the nine judges appearing in their black robes, and the new Chief Justice, LaMetra, presiding. In opening the case, the Chief Justice said, It is my opinion that this matter is quite simple. The prisoner at the bar was charged with murdering the man's aponic. He was tried for murdering the man's aponic. He was fairly tried, and justly condemned, and sentenced to death for murdering the man's aponic. It turns out that the man's aponic was not murdered at all. By the decision of the French courts in the Dreyfus matter, it is established beyond cavalry or question that the decisions of courts are permanent, and cannot be revised. We are obliged to respect and adopt this precedent. It is upon precedence that the enduring edifice of jurisprudence is reared. The prisoner at the bar has been fairly and righteously condemned to death for the murder of the man's aponic, and in my opinion there is but one course to pursue in the matter. He must be hanged. Mr. Justice Crawford said, But your Excellency, he was pardoned on the scaffold for that. The pardon is not valid and cannot stand, because he was pardoned for killing a man whom he had not killed. A man cannot be pardoned for a crime which he has not committed. It would be an absurdity. But your Excellency, he did kill a man. That is an extraneous detail. We have nothing to do with it. The court cannot take up this crime until the prisoner has expiated the other one. Mr. Justice Hallock said, If we order his execution, your Excellency, we shall bring about a miscarriage of justice, for the Governor will pardon him again. He will not have the power. He cannot pardon a man for a crime which he has not committed. As I observed before, it would be an absurdity. After a consultation Mr. Justice Wadsworth said, Several of us have arrived at the conclusion, your Excellency, that it would be an error to hang the prisoner for killing Zepanik, but only for killing the other man, since it is proven that he did not kill Zepanik. On the contrary, it is proven that he did kill Zepanik. By the French precedent it is plain that we must abide by the finding of the court. But Zepanik is still alive. So is Dreyfus. In the end it was found impossible to ignore or get around the French precedent. There could be but one result. Clayton was delivered over to the Executioner. It made an immense excitement. The State rose as one man and clamored for Clayton's pardon and retrial. The Governor issued the pardon. But the Supreme Court was in duty bound to annull it, and did so, and poor Clayton was hanged yesterday. The city is draped in black, and indeed the like may be said of the State. All America is vocal with scorn of French justice, and of the malignant little soldiers who invented it, and inflicted it upon the other Christian lands. Mark Twain. End of Chapter 13 from The London Times of 1904. Read by John Greenman.