 Section 31 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 1, 1867-1879. Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 1, Section 31, November 26, 1879. How His Time is Wasted, Read by John Greenman. How His Time is Wasted, Shooting in the Dark. Mark Twain misapprehends a post-office regulation and fails to make a hit. To the Editor of the Hartford Current. Sir, the new postal regulation adds quite perceptibly to my daily burden of work—needlessly too, as I think. A day or two ago I made a note of the addresses which I had put upon letters that day, and then ciphered up to see how many words the additional particularities of the new ruling had cost me. It was seventy-two. That amounts to just a page of my manuscript exactly. If it were stuff that a magazine would enjoy, I could sell it, and gradually get rich as time rolled on. As it isn't, I lose the time and the ink. I don't get a cent for it. The government grows no wealthier. I grow poorer—nobody in the world—is benefited. Seventy-two words, utterly wasted. And mind you, when a man is paid by the word—at least by the page, which is the same thing—this sort of thing hurts. Here are one or two specimens from those addresses with the unnecessary additions in italics. Here Atlantic Monthly Care, Mrs. Houghton, Osgoode and Company, Winthrop Square, Boston, Massachusetts Nine words wasted. I used to use only the first line and the word Boston. And until the letter carriers lose their minds, the additional nine words can never become necessary. Professors Arnold, Constable and Company, Core Nineteenth and Broadway, New York, New York. Six unnecessary words. Gillesie House, Core Twenty-ninth and Broadway, New York, New York. Six unnecessary words. Even the dead people in Boston and New York could tell a letter carrier how to find these prominent houses. That same day I wrote a letter to a friend at the Windsor Hotel, New York. Surely that house is prominent enough, ain't it? But I could not precisely name the side streets. Neither did I know the name of the back street, nor the headcook's name. So that letter would have gone to the dead letter office sure, if I hadn't covered it all over, with an appeal to Mr. James to take it under his personal official protection and let it go to that man at the Windsor just this once, and I would not offend any more. Now you know yourself that there is no need of an official decree to compel a man to make a letter address full and elaborate where it is at all necessary, for the writer is more anxious that his letter shall go through than the postmaster general can be. And when the writer cannot supply those minute details from lack of knowledge, the decree cannot help him in the least. So what is the use of the decree? As for those common mistakes, the misdirecting of letters, the leaving off the country, the state, etc., do you think an official decree can do away with that? You know yourself that heedless, absent-minded people are bound to make those mistakes, and that no decree can knock the disposition out of them. Do this! I have been ciphering, and I know the following facts are correct. The new law will compel 18,000 great mercantile houses to employ three extra correspondence at $1,000 a year, $54,000, smaller establishments in proportion. It will compel 30,000,000 of our people to write a daily average of 10 extra words a piece, 300,000,000 unnecessary words. Most of these people are slow. The average will be half a minute consumed on each 10 words, 15,000,000 minutes of this nation's time, fooled away every day. 247,400 hours, which amounts to about 25,000 working days of 10 hours each. This makes 82 years of 300 working days each, counting out Sundays and sickness. 82 years of this nation's time, wholly thrown away every day. Few of the average man's time say $1,000 a year. Now do you see $82,000 thrown away daily, in round numbers $25,000,000 yearly. In 10 years $250,000. In a million years—but I have not the nerve to go on—you can see yourself what we are coming to. If this law continues in force, there will not be money enough in this country by and by to pay for its obituary. And you mark my words it will need one. Now we come to the ink. No, let us forbear, in fancy I already see the fleets of the world sailing in it. It is odd that we should take a spasm every now and then, and go spinning back into the dark ages once more, after having put in a world of time and money and work toiling up into the high lights of modern progress. For many years it has been England's boast that her postal system is so admirable that you can't so cripple the direction of a letter that the Post Office Department won't manage some way to find the person the missive is intended for. We could say that too, once, but we have retired, a hundred years within the last two months, and now it is our boast that only the brightest and thoughtfulest and knowingest men's letters will ever be permitted to reach their destinations, and that those of the mighty majority of the American people, the heedless, the unthinking, the illiterate, will be rudely shot by the shortest route to the dead letter office and destruction. It seems to me that this new decree is very decidedly un-American. Mark Twain, Hartford, November 22nd. End of Section 31, November 26, 1879, How His Time is Wasted, read by John Greenman. Section 32 of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 1, 1867 to 1879. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 1, Section 32, December 14, 1879. The Postal Order Again. Read by John Greenman. The Postal Order Again. Mark Twain answers Mr. Key's private secretary. The Postmaster General's unnecessary appendage, instructed in his duties and privileges. To the editor of the Hartford Current. A day or two ago I received a formidable envelope from Washington, enclosing a letter and some printed matter. This envelope had certain peculiarities about it. For instance, in its right hand, upper corner, an oval black stamp was printed bearing the words, United States Postal Service. In the upper left-hand corner, the following words were printed in large, bold type, in three separate lines thus, Post Office Department, Office of the Postmaster General, Official Business. In the lower left-hand corner was printed the following words in two separate lines thus. A penalty of three hundred dollars is fixed by law for using this envelope for other than official business. In this majestic envelope I found the following among other things. Post Office Department, Washington, D.C., November 30, 1879. S. M. Clemens Esquire, Hartford, Connecticut. Dear sir, noticing your letter to the Hartford Current upon the recent order of the Postmaster General, I take the liberty of enclosing a few copies of a tract which the department has prepared in order to meet such hardened cases as yours. After reading the tract and the enclosed clipping from the Cincinnati Inquirer, which latter I wish you would return to me, as it is the only copy I have, you will see that the unnecessary labor, of which you complain, was really as unnecessary as the complaint, the only utility of which was to add to the already surplus stock of misinformation in the world, and to enable some needy compositors to increase their strings by several thousand, which latter end might have been just as well attained by the use of bogus. I send you by this mail a copy of the postal laws and regulations to explain the illusions in the tract, and hope you will take the trouble to look into the matter thoroughly. The department is a unit in regarding the order as the greatest step toward perfecting the postal service that has been taken for years, and its officers are confident that when the public understand it, they will sustain it. This truly Thomas B. Kirby, private secretary to the postmaster general. My callow friend, when you shall have outgrown the effervescences of youth and acquired a bit of worldly experience, you will cease to make mistakes like that, that is to say, you will refrain from meddling in matters which do not concern you. You will recognize the simple wisdom of confining yourself strictly to your own business. There are persons who would resent this innocent piece of impertinence of yours, and say harsh things to you about it. But fortunately for you, I am not that sort of person. Whatever else I may lack, I have a good heart. Therefore, in a humane and gentle spirit, I will try to set you right upon certain small points, not to hurt you, but to do you good. You seem to think you have been called to account. This is a grave error. It is the post-office department of the United States of America, which has been called to account. There is a difference here which you have overlooked. I will point it out. You are not the post-office department, but only an irresponsible, inexpensive, and unnecessary appendage to it. Grave, elderly men, public instructors, like me, do not call private secretaries to account. Bear this in mind. It will be a help to you. The mistake you have made is simple. You have imagined yourself a dog, whereas you are the tail. You have endeavored to wag the dog. This was not judicious. You should have hung quiescent until the dog wagged you. If I stepped on this tail—and we will grant for the sake of argument that I did—it was not to call the tail's attention to anything, but only to direct the attention of the main body of the animal to a certain matter. To perceive it was simply in the nature of ringing a bell, that is all. My business was not with the bell itself, but with the owner of it. A bell is a useful thing in a measure, but it should not keep on ringing when one is done with it. Do I make myself partially understood? Must there be any doubt, let me illustrate further, by parable. For the parable is the simplest and surest vehicle for conveying information to the immature mind. You seem to have gathered the impression, somehow, that you are a member of the cabinet. This is an error. You are only extraneous matter connected with a member of the cabinet. Your chief is one of the guns of that battery, but you are not. You are not the gun, or the load, or even the ramrod. Neither do you supply the ammunition. You only do up the cartridge, and serve as a fire-stick to touch it off. You are not the barrel of molasses. You are only the faucet through which the molasses is discharged. You are not the boot, but the boot jack. That is to say, you do not furnish the idea, you only pull it off. You are not the lightning, but only the lightning rod. Do you perceive? The thing I am trying to convey to you is that it does not become you to assume functions which do not belong to you. You may think it's strange that I am enclosing this note without saying anything upon the matter which you have broached. Overlook that. Drop it out of your mind. We do not disturb the repose of private secretaries with affairs with which they have nothing to do. The newspaper slip which you have enclosed to me will be returned to you by one of my private secretaries. I keep eleven of these things, not for use, but display. Although I cannot consent to talk public business with you, a benevolent impulse moves me to call your attention to a matter which is of quite serious importance to you as an individual. You, an unofficial private citizen, have written me an entirely personal and unofficial letter, which you have had the temerity to enclose to me in a department envelope bearing upon its surface in clear print, this plain and unmistakable warning, a penalty of three hundred dollars is fixed by law for using this envelope for other than official business. The servants of the government's officers ought to be, for simple decency's sake, among the last to break its laws. You have committed a serious offense, an offense which has none of the elements of a joke about it. An only plain and simple treachery to his duty on the part of your superior can save you from the penalty involved. The kindly and almost affectionate spirit which I have shown you is sufficient evidence that I do not wish you any harm, but indeed the reverse. No, if that treachery shall intervene to shelter you, I shall not be sorry as far as you individually are concerned, but I should be unfaithful to my citizenship if I did not at the same time feel something of a pang to see a law of the land coolly ignored and degraded by one of the very highest officers of the government. As far as I am concerned you are safe, unless you intrude upon me again, in which case I may be tempted to bring you before the courts myself for the violation of that law. There now receive my blessing, though and do not mix into other peoples affairs any more, otherwise you may pick up somebody who will feed disagreeable words to you instead of sugar. Mark Twain The private secretary, Riptorts. To the editor of the Hartford Evening Post. Sir, my attention has been called to a letter in the current of December 9th signed Mark Twain, and apparently intended for me, although Mr. Twain has not as yet had the courtesy to direct one of his eleven private secretaries to send me a copy thereof, so that I should never have known of this letter but for the kindness of some friends. The experience of others during some ten years that I owned and edited a country daily satisfied me that a correspondent who attempted to correct an editor in his own paper had mistaken his calling, and as Mr. Twain is evidently sadly in need of correction, I must ask your indulgence for the following. Washington, D.C., December 11th, 1879. Mark Twain, Esquire. Aged and respected sir. I don't know that I quite grasp the meaning of your letter in the current of the 9th, Inst. There is such a wealth of illustration in it that one almost loses sight of the matter intended to be illustrated in his admiration of the beauty of the illustrations. But as near as I can make it out, you seem to be under the impression that I felt aggrieved, trot upon, sat down upon, pulled, or otherwise misused, either personally or as an irresponsible, inexpensive and unnecessary appendage to the post office department by your letter to which my communication referred. Now, right there is where you make a very serious mistake. There was nothing in your first letter personal to myself, and its misrepresentations of the regulations of the post office department were in themselves no more worthy of notice than those of a hundred irresponsible, ignorant and unknown newspaper writers whose marked effusions are daily sent to the department by their misguided readers. So far as the order of the postmaster general and the regulations of the department are concerned, they need no defense, because any man who has sense enough to comprehend them sees at a glance that they are right, and the officers of the department have no time to waste in correcting the misinformation concerning them so sedulously disseminated by many of the common run of newspaper men. Nothing in the world could have induced me or anybody connected with the Postal Service to notice your letter had it appeared as an editorial in the Barkamstead Bugle of Freedom, from which I thought it had been extracted by the editor of the paper in which I found it, until I came to the signature. But when I saw the signature I said to myself, Now here is another good man gone wrong, grievously wrong. Here is a man that I have been looking up to for years as my guide, philosopher and friend, a man whose fame covers the hemispheres as the inventor of a scrapbook, the inauguration of the movement to erect a monument to Adam, and the only man who ever dared to speak irreverently of members of the Boston Mutual Admiration Society in the presence of a meeting of that society, and this man has been writing about a matter of which he is so utterly and hopelessly ignorant that he thinks he knows all about it. It won't do, said I to myself, to let such a man as this continue to languish in darkness and reflect the same upon his neighbours. So out of pure benevolence I sent you the documents believing that when you had been furnished the evidence that you were all wrong and had been so from the beginning you would not retract, for that would be fatal, but that you would at least say that the department had receded from the position in which you had placed it, and that it was at any rate, according to your latest advices, not exactly the imbecile institution which you had represented it to be. I am glad to see that I was not disappointed, but I am a little surprised to find you laying the responsibility of your former ignorance upon the department. Still I don't know that I can blame you, either for that or for the, to me, somewhat personal preface to your recantation. In an ordinary man it would be regarded as natural, but I had somehow thought better things of you. You see, I supposed, as a matter of course, when you killed your conscience you had also made away with your sensitiveness. To a professional humorist, a man who makes his living by prodding other people, a thin skin is even more inconvenient than a conscience, and I had not the slightest idea that you would get mad at a little thing like my letter. I can only say by way of paliation, but if I have done anything for you to be sorry for, I am glad of it. In conclusion, permit me to suggest that if you will kindly stir up that particular one of your eleven private secretaries, whose duty it is to return that newspaper clipping I sent you, you will greatly oblige. Yours truly, Thomas B. Kirby. End of Section 32, December 14, 1879, The Postal Order Again, and End of Mark Twain in the New York Times, Part 1, 1867-1879, Read by John Greenman