 Section 01 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain Mark Twain Home Again Newspaper article from The New York Times, October 16, 1900. Mark Twain Home Again Writer reaches America after his prolonged stay abroad, greeted by many friends, talks freely of his travels, his experiences, and his triumphs in the best of health. Mark Twain returned to America yesterday on the Atlantic Transport Line steamship Minnehaha. As is well known, Mark Twain registers at hotels and assigns checks under the name of Samuel M. Clemens, but it was the writer and lecturer Mark Twain, who attracted to the peer so many friends and associates of former days. Mr. Clemens never looked better, was in a splendid humor, and greeted his friends with the most affectionate cordiality. As soon as the author had finished with the salutations of his friends, he was surrounded by a large number of newspaper men and asked for a story of what he had been doing during all the nine years of his absence from his native land. Now, that's a long story, but I suppose I must give you something even if it is in a condensed form, he said. I left America June 6, 1891, and I went to Ex-Leban, France, where I spent the fall and winter. After that I went to Berlin, where I lectured, giving readings from my works. After this, my next stop was the Riviera, where I remained for three months, going from there to the baths near Frankfurt, where I remained during the cholera season. Most of 1892 I spent at Florence, where I rented a home. While there I wrote Joan of Arc, and finished up Putinhead Wilson. For the next two years I was in France. I can't speak French yet. In the spring of 1895 I came to the United States for a brief stay crossing the Continent from New York to San Francisco, lecturing every night. In October of that year I sailed from Vancouver for Sydney, where I lectured, or more properly speaking, gave readings from my works to the English-speaking people. I also visited Tasmania and New Zealand. This was at the time of the famous Venezuelan message of President Cleveland, and it did my heart good to see that the animosities engendered by that message did not affect the affection of a people in a strange land for me. I then proceeded to India, lecturing in Ceylon, Bombay, and Calcutta. I then sailed for South Africa, arriving at Delagoa Bay in April 1896. In South Africa I visited Kimberley, Johannesburg, and finally Cape Town. I met Oom Paul. I had heard and read all about him—hat, beard, frock coat, pipe, and everything else. The picture is a true likeness. At this time the Jameson Raiders were in jail, and I visited them and made little speech trying to console them. I told them of the advantages of being in jail. This jail is as good as any other, I said. And besides, being in jail has its advantages. A lot of great men have been in jail. If Bunyan had not been put in jail, he would never have written Pilgrim's Progress. Then the jail is responsible for Don Quixote. So, you see, being in jail is not so bad, after all. Finally I told them that they ought to remember that many great men had been compelled to go through life without ever having been in jail. Some of the prisoners didn't seem to take much to the joke, while others seemed much amused. All this time my family was with me, and after a short stay at Cape Town we took a steamer for Southampton. On arriving in England we went to Guilford, where I took a furnished house, remaining two months, after which for ten months our home was in London. All this time I was lecturing, reading, or working hard in other ways, writing magazine stories and doing other literary work. After London came Vienna, to which city we went in September 1898, remaining until May of the following year. In order to allow one of my daughters to take music lessons from a man who spelled his name Lescetiske. He had plenty of identification, you see, and with all seemed to be a pretty smart fellow. After Vienna, where, by the way, I had a lot of fun watching the Reichstrat, we returned to London, in which city and Sweden we have been, until our departure for home some days ago. And now I am home again, and you have got the history of a considerable part of my life. Well, everybody's glad you are back, which you know, of course. They gave you the courtesy of the port, didn't they? An intensely interested listener remarked. Yes, I wrote to Secretary Gage telling him that my baggage was on a sixteen thousand ton ship, which was quite large enough to accommodate all I had, which, while it consisted of a good many things, was not good enough to pay duty on, yet too good to throw away. I accordingly suggested that he write the customs people to let it in, as I thought they would be more likely to take his word than mine. How about your plans?" he was asked. I am absolutely unable to speak of my plans, he replied, in as much as I have none, and I do not expect to lecture. At this point the question of anti-imperialism was broached, someone asking, How are you on expansion? Are you for the President, or are you with those that style themselves anti-imperialists? Yes. As near as I can find out, I think that I am an anti-imperialist. I was not, though, until some time ago, for when I first heard of the acquisition of the present Pacific possessions, I thought it a good thing for a country like America to release those people from a bondage of suffering and oppression that had lasted three hundred years, but when I read the Paris Treaty I changed my mind. You were going to vote for Mr. Bryan, then, are you? was the query put to him by another bystander. No, I'm a mugwump. I don't know who I'm going to vote for. I must look over the field. Then, you know, I've been out of the country a long time, and I might not be allowed to register. You are still a citizen of the United States, are you not? interposed a member of the party. Well, I guess I am. I've been paying taxes on this side for the last nine years. I believe, though, a man can run for president, laughingly inquired Mr. Clemens, without a vote, can't he? If this is so, why then I am a candidate for president? Dropping anti-imperialism, Mr. Clemens made the plea that he had been way so long that he really knew very little on the subject, because all of his information had practically been gleaned from foreign papers. Someone in the crowd asked him about his autobiography that is to be published one hundred years hence. It is true I am writing it," he said. That's not a joke, is it? No. I said it seriously. That's why they take it as a joke. You know, I never told the truth in my life that someone didn't say I was lying, while on the other hand I never told a lie that somebody didn't take it as a fact. Well, it's not wrong anyway to tell a lie sometimes, is it? Was a question someone asked in a very conciliatory way. That's right. Exactly right. If you can disseminate facts by telling the truth, why, that's the way to do it. And if you can't, except by doing a little lying, well, that's all right too, isn't it? I do it. Mr. Clemens had become very restless by this time, and the many friends surrounding him on the pier managed to rescue him from the clutches of the newspaper men, who had been firing questions at him since he first appeared on the pier. I'll see you again. I'll be at the Erlington all the winter. I am not going to Hartford till next year. And with a pleasant nod of the head, the famous writer accompanied by his friends began a search for his baggage. End of Mark Twain Home Again. Recording by John Greenman. Section 2 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. The Lotus Club Dinner Speech. First in the New York Times. November 17, 1900. Mark Twain. The Lotus Club Dinner. His speech, and the others. Those present. A Royal Welcome Home was extended to Samuel Langhorn Clemens, Mark Twain, last Saturday night at the Lotus Club. It was the initial dinner of the season at this popular club, which enjoys a reputation for brilliant gatherings and good fellowship. While the Lotus has many successful events set down to its credit, in the judgment of the members, none has surpassed the tribute it has paid to the Dean of American Humour, as Mr. Clemens was described by one of the speakers of the evening. By word and act he was made to feel that he was indeed in the house of his friends. Long before the breaking up of the company he must have been firmly impressed that his place was secure in their affections. Men of high positions in business, literature, politics, and the various professions gathered to do him honour. The dinner was somewhat delayed by the guest himself, who had forgotten that it was Saturday and the night of the feast. To the messenger, who was sent to inquire the reason for his absence, and who found him at his hotel, he said, I am so sorry, but I had forgotten this was Saturday. I thought it was Friday. I'll go right upstairs and dress. It won't take me fifteen minutes." President Franklin R. Lawrence presided, and besides Mr. Clemens, the guests at the main table were Governor-elect Benjamin B. O'Dell, Jr., St. Clair McElway, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, United States Governor Chauncey M. DePew, Booker T. Washington, Ex-Speaker Thomas B. Reed, Henry H. Rogers, George B. M. Harvey, E. Wood Perry, Jr., John Hare, Joseph C. Hendricks, Augustus Thomas, John Kendrick Bangs, Moncure D. Conway, S. E. Moffitt, Frank H. Platt. About ten o'clock President Lawrence wrapped for order and began the speeches of the evening in the following words. Our Lotus Club season opens very happily, for we have just voted ourselves some years of prosperity, and Mark Twain has come home. A applause. When in this fortunate country we want good times, we get them by popular vote. But, for the presence of Mark Twain, we depend upon a more uncertain caprice. Seven years ago he returned from abroad, and was entertained at dinner by this club with the result that he went straight back to Europe, and has remained out of the United States ever since. Laughter. It has been suggested that the club assemble in his honor regularly at similar intervals, but it has felt that after a time this would become a steady habit, and steady habits could never be made popular here. We welcome him home as one of the staunchest and truest members of the club, and we remember that he was one of those who, with the reed and brom, and Florence and Bromley and a score of kindred spirits, made the club sparkling and attractive in its early days, and laid broad and deep the foundation of all its later years of merriment and good fellowship. Our guest became a member of the club when it was only three years old, and now that it has seen more than ten times that number of years, he remains faithful to its principles, or at least he would be faithful to its principles, if it had any, and that amounts to the same thing. Applause and laughter. Well, he has been away, and he has been gone a long time, and I believe he has been around the world, and what he has been doing we only know in part. He says that he has been following the equator. What a fortunate thing it is that he did not, as the climax to a somewhat revolutionary career, induce the equator to follow him. Had that occurred, the equator would probably have passed the remainder of its days in Hartford, Connecticut, or some weird or literary portion of the globe, and its reputation for constancy would have been forever blasted. Some things about him we do know. We know that, while away from us, he has kept up a steady stream of work, furnishing to the world an abundance both of instruction and of amusement, and increasing his old reputation as one who, while he writes in fun, yet ever thinks in earnest. We hail him, as we have done before, as a master of letters, as the pioneer in a new and original field, as the possessor of a quaint and peculiar genius which has discovered unsuspected possibilities of language and of thought, and whose works, from the earliest to the latest, from the lightest to the most serious, have always commanded the widest audience and been received the world over with unbounded applause. We hail him, too, as one who has borne great burdens with manliness and courage, who has emerged from great struggles victorious, and, in welcoming him back to his old place, first taken at the Lotus Board nearly twenty-seven years ago, we greet him with all friendship and in all kindliness and hope that his life may be happy and prosperous, whether here or abroad, through all future time. Applause. Mark Twain. When Mr. Clemens rose to speak he was cheered long and heartily. It was nearly three minutes before he was permitted to proceed. Pushing his bushy white hair back from his forehead, he began. Mr. President and friends, I thank you for this greeting. I thank you all out of my heart. For this is a fraternal welcome. A welcome too magnificent for a humble Missourian, far from his native state, but I feel at home here, as there are other Missourians seated at this table, and I am glad to see Tom Reed here, too. They tell me that, since I have been away, Reed has deserted politics and is now leading a creditable life. He has reformed, and, as he himself says, he is now engaged in raising the standard of beauty. Laughter. Your President has referred to certain burdens which I was weighed with. I am glad he did, as it gives me an opportunity which I would. To speak of those debts, you all knew what he meant when he referred to it, and of the poor bankrupt firm of C. L. Webster and Company. No one has said a word about those creditors. There were ninety-six creditors in all, and not by my finger's weight did ninety-five out of the ninety-six add to the burden of that time. They treated me well. They treated me handsomely. I never knew I knew anything. Not a sign came from them. Don't you worry and don't you hurry! was what they said. How I wish I could have creditors of that kind always. Laughter. Really, I recognize it as a personal loss to myself to be out of debt. I wasn't personally acquainted with ten of them, you know. Don't you worry and don't you hurry! that phrase is written on my heart. You are always very kind in saying things about me, but you have forgotten those creditors. They were the handsomest people I ever knew. They were handsomer than I was. Handsomer than Tom Reed. Cheers and laughter. How many things have happened in the seven years I have been away from home. We have fought a righteous war, and a righteous war is a rare thing in history. We have turned aside from our own comfort and seen to it that freedom should exist not only within our own gates, but in our own neighbourhood. We have set Cuba free and placed her among the galaxy of free nations of the world. We started out to set those poor Filipinos free, but why that righteous plan miscarried perhaps I shall never know. We have also been making a creditable showing in China, and that is more than all of the powers can say. The yellow terror is threatening the world, but no matter what happens the United States says that it has had no part in it. applause. Since I have been away we have been nursing free silver. Laughter. We have watched by its cradle. We have done our best to raise that child. But every time it seemed to be getting along nicely along came some pastiferous Republican and gave it the measles or something. Laughter and applause. I fear we will never raise that child. applause. We have done more than that. We elected a president four years ago. We have found fault with him and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years, with votes enough to spare to do it over again. Laughter. We have tried a governor for two years and we liked him so well that we decided to put him in the great office of Vice President, not that the office may confer distinction upon him, but that may confer distinction upon the office. For a while we will not stammer and be embarrassed when somebody asks us the name of the Vice President. Laughter. He is widely known, and in some places favorably. Laughter. I am a little afraid that these fulsome compliments may be misunderstood. I have been away for a long time and I am not used to this complementary business. I merely want to testify to my old admiration for my friend, the governor. If you give him rope enough, prolonged laughter. I meant to say, well, it is not necessary for me to say any more. You know him. Renewed laughter. Then take O'Dell. You've made him governor. He's another rough rider, I suppose. All the fat things seemed to go to that profession. I would have been a rough rider myself had I known this political Klondike was going to open up. I would have gone to war if I could have gone in an automobile, but never on a horse. I know the horse too well. I know the horse in peace and in war. A horse thinks of too many things to do which you do not expect. He is apt to bite you in the leg when you think he is half asleep. A horse is too capricious for me. Laughter. We have taken Chauncey Depew out of an active and useful life and made him a senator. Embalmed him. Horked him up. Look at that gilded mummy. That man has said many a true thing about me in his time and I always said something would happen to him. That man has made my life miserable at many a banquet on both sides of the ocean and palsied be the hand that draws that cork. Laughter. All these things and many more have happened since I have been away. It only goes to show how little a mugwump, perhaps the last of his race, is missed in this unfeeling world. I come back and find myself a party by myself. Seven years ago when I was old and worn down, you gave me the grip and the word which lifts a man up and makes him glad to be alive. I come back from my exile fresh and young and alive, ready to begin anew. Applauds. Your welcome warms me. It makes me feel that it is a reality and not a glorious dream to vanish with the morning. Governor-elect O'Dell. Mr. Clemens was loudly cheered as he took his seat, and then President Lawrence called upon Governor-elect O'Dell, who received a hearty welcome. I was up in my home in Newburg prepared to take a rest. Usually when I get up there I take the telephone receiver off the hook so that no one can reach me, but I neglected to do so tonight and Riggs and Lorde managed to raise me and tell me I was wanted down here at the Lotus Club. I consulted with Mrs. O'Dell and she told me that while I could go to political dinners at any time there was but one Mark Twain, so I put on my coat and caught the first train to New York and here I am. I have known Mr. Clemens for a long time. The last time I met him was at a dinner given in London by the American Society to celebrate the anniversary of American independence, and I am glad to meet him here tonight at the Lotus Board. McEllaway has said that I am a statement-maker and not an orator, so you must not expect a speech from me. Laughter and applause. Mr. Reed. Ex-speaker Reed was presented by President Lawrence as one who had become a New Yorker and who as yet has shown no sign of being sorry for it. The former czar of the House of Representatives met with a warm welcome and spoke with a drawl which is familiar to those who have heard him. I want it to be understood that I fully appreciate this is a hopeless situation, the hopelessness of trying to meet our guest's ideas of what we ought to say about him. We can say nothing that will not seem to him absolutely inadequate. He will go home tonight and think over his invaluable services to mankind and think how utterly inadequate the words of his friends here have been. He will think it all over and say to himself, well, the boys meant well enough, but if they had known what they had been talking about they would have presented it better. He will learn after a while how to add the proper percent to bring the average of what has been said up to what he thinks should have been said. I want to say some things to him now that I have got him where he can't talk back, which will make it necessary to add on a heavy percentage. Laughter. I have been waiting for seven years to get at him for some things he said about me down in Washington. He came to Washington with a lot of those literary fellows with a vague idea that they were going to prove their rights to some of their own property. They came to see me. I had occasion to remind them that they were sitting under the influence of the political intelligence which fully comprehends things. Laughter. I explained to him that he and his friends were absolutely incapable of self-government. Laughter. We intended to let him keep some small percentage of right to his property, but we were going to benevolently assimilate his property, or most of it. Laughter. Apparently he behaved most creditably, but after he left me it was reported to me that he had gone around town telling people the things he would have said to me if he hadn't been scared. Laughter. We all owe him a debt greater than we can ever discharge for what he has given us. He has described the life on the Mississippi for us as has no other man, but when you read his books think of the wealth of vocabulary he had to draw on when he was writing about life on the Mississippi. Laughter. He says he was named after the prophet Samuel. He says he remembers lying in his cradle and thinking that in five minutes more he would be one day old. He says that he remembers his father and mother talking over a name for him. They spoke of Zerababble. I think that would have fitted him, and Samuel. At that name he says that he arose, climbed over the edge of the cradle, and left home. As he was leaving the door he said, Father I can't be named Samuel, why not, asked his father, because Samuel had to be called by the Lord twice before he had come. In twenty-four years his father overtook him and gave him Samuel and a sound thrashing. Now I can believe that he left his cradle and left home, but I do not believe him when he says the old gentleman overtook him and gave him a thrashing. No one ever overtook him. Great laughter and applause. Mr. Howells. Mr. Lawrence then introduced William Dean Howells in these words. It is many a long day since we had the pleasure of seeing in this club the distinguished author and friend of our guest upon whom I am now about to call. I remember that when Mr. Howells was with us last he began by saying that he could not speak at all, and he ended by making most of the speeches of the evening. I ought perhaps to say, in explanation of that statement, that it happened that our guest that night was a distinguished Italian dramatist who spoke no English, and Mr. Howells found himself in a position of translating all the speeches as he went along. Gentlemen, there is no name greater in contemporary American literature than that of Mr. William D. Howells. I know you will join me in expressing most warmly the gratification it gives us to see him in the Lotus Club, Mr. Howells said. I am not so fortunate tonight, as I was on the occasion that you allude to, because then I had merely to speak for everybody, and now I have to speak for myself. It is very much simpler to translate Italian than to get off one's own English, and if Mr. Clemens had as good as to put his speech into very choice Italian, I should have done my best to put it into equivalent English. However, like all impromptu speakers I prepared myself most carefully beforehand, and I hope you don't mind my reading what I have to say. If you meet a humorist on his own ground, the chances are that you will be thrown down unless you are a very great joker. He will probably not joke you, or if he doesn't people will think he does, which is quite as bad. The only way is to take him seriously, and then if you praise him he will be apt to think you are in earnest. That is why I am going to be serious in the very little I have to say about our great and good friend tonight, though we have not arrived at that happy stage of the complimentary dinner when the guest, unless he is a person of extraordinary perspicacity, does not know whether you are praising him or not. He is so thickly buttered by this time that he thinks everything offered him is butter and in a lordly dish. If you get out your little hammer and drive your little nail into his skull he smiles blindly when it reaches his gray matter, and comes round at the end of the dinner with the head of the nail sticking out to say, Thank you, old fellow, that was very nice of you. I hope you don't have too much on your conscience. Like everyone else here I am glad to have Mr. Clemens among us again, because, for one thing, I hate to see him having such a good time abroad. We always suspect a fellow citizen who has a good time abroad. We are afraid that there must be something wrong about it. We feel that he never could have been what we thought him, if other people think so too. We are jealous of his fame, if it is universal. We should have liked to keep it to ourselves. Many a time in the course of the last nine years my heart has been saddened by the acceptance of our friend in France, Germany, Austria and England, as one of the first humorists of all times, and I have done what little I could to set the right among those who loved him as I did by whispering round that they were overdoing it. But now that we have got him back I am not so sure that they were overdoing it. At any rate I wish to lift my voice in welcoming him home and to be one of the very first publicly to forgive him. I realize that he was not to blame because other peoples have appreciated him in their poor, unintelligent way and told him so in languages which are difficult for any true American to understand. We ought to forgive him in our own interest, if for no other reason, for no one else has been so fully in the joke of us, or known better how to interpret us to ourselves, and at no other period of our national life have we been a greater joke or more needed interpretation. He has probably arrived by a happy instinct to tell us just what we mean, and to declare how about it when we are ourselves most in the dark. He is, at any rate, a humorist of continental dimensions, and he could not be the great humorist he is without being vastly better, if there is anything better. If it is really better to be a sagacious reader of contemporary history, a generous and compassionate observer of one's kind, a philosopher without a theory, a poet whose broad-winged imagination transcends the balance of verse, perhaps it takes all these to make up the sum of a great humorist. At least we find them all summed up in the humorist whom we amusingly suppose ourselves to be honoring tonight, when he is so obviously honoring us. Why, in a manner, he has invented us, and has more than any other man, made us the component parts of the great American joke which we all realize ourselves to be when we are serious. More than others he has discovered us to ourselves. He has determined our modern mental attitude, fixed our point of view, and he could not have done this without being vitally of the material he worked in. He has invented us. But then we invented him to begin with, and that is where I think we have a reason to be proud. Before us no people had a humorist with nothing cruel but everything kindly in his smile who never laughed with the strong against the weak or found anything droll in suffering or deformity. When we look back over our literature and see what savage and stupid and pitiless things have passed for humor, and then open his page, we seem not only to have invented the only true humorist, but to have invented humor itself. We do not know by what mystery his talent sprang up from our soil and flowered in our air, but we know that no such talent has been known to any other, and if we set any bounds to our joy in him, it must be from the innate American modesty, not always perceptible to the alien eye, which forbids us to keep throwing bouquets at ourselves. St. Clair McElway. St. Clair McElway was the next speaker. He said, Years ago we here sought to hold up Mark Twain's hands. Now we all feel like holding up our own in congratulation of him and of ourselves, of him because his warfare is accomplished, of ourselves because he has returned to our company. If it was a pleasure to know him then, it is a privilege and an honor to know him now. He has fought the good fight. He has kept the faith. He is ready to be offered up. But we are not ready to have him offered up. For we want the Indian summer of his life to be long, and that to be followed by a genial winter, which, if it be as frosty as his hair, shall also be as kindly as his heart. He has enough excess and versatility of ability to be a genius. He has enough quality and quantity of virtues to be a saint. But he has honorably transmuted his genius into work, whereby it has been brought into relations with literature and with life, and he has preferred warm fellowship to cold perfection so that sinners love him and saints are content to wait for him. May they wait long. I think he is entitled to be regarded as the Dean of America's humor, that he is entitled to the distinction of being the greatest humorous this nation ever had. I say this with a fair knowledge of the chiefs of the entire corps, from Francis Hopkinson and the author of hasty pudding, down to Bill Nye and Dooley. None of them would I deprecate. I would greatly prefer to honor and hail them all for the singular fittedness of their gifts to the needs of the nation in their times. Hopkinson and Joe Barlow lightened the woes of the revolution by the touch of nature that makes the whole world grin. See how Smith relieved the Yankee sense of tension under the impact of Jacksonian roughness by tickling its ribs with a quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of alkali journalism, and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was insisted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinch-beck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Hart, in verse and story, touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature. Charles F. Brown made Artemis Ward as well known as Abraham Lincoln in the time the two divided the attention of the world. Bill Nye singed the shams of his day and duly dissects for Hennessy the shams of our own. Nor should we forget Eugene Field, the attifier of childhood, or Joel Chandler Harris, the fabulous of the plantation, or Ruth McHenry Stewart, the coronal singer of the joys and hopes, the loves and the dreams of the images of God in Ebony in the Old South, ere it leaped and hardened to the new. To these love and honor, but to this man honors crown of honor, for he has made a mark none of the others has reached. Few of them have diversified the delights to be drawn from their pages of humor. They have, as humorists, in distinction to the work of moralists, novelists, orators, and poets, in which the rarest among them shine, they have, as humorists in the main, worked a single vein, and some of them were humorous for a purpose, a dreary grind that, and some of them were only humorous for a period as well as for a purpose. The purpose served the period past, the humor that was of their life a thing apart ceased. His Clemens' whole existence. Applause. As Bacon made all learning his province, so Mark Twain has made all life and history his quarry, from the jumping frog to the Yankee at Arthur's court, from the inquested petrification that died of protracted exposure to the present Parliament of Austria, from the grave of Adam to the mysteries of the Adamless Eden known as the League of Professional Women, from mulberry cellars to Joan of Arc and from Edward VI to Putinhead Wilson, who wanted to kill his half of a deathless dog. Nevada is forgiven its decay because he flashed the oddities of its zenith life on pages that endure. California is worth more than its gold because he showed to men the heart under its swagger. He annexed the Sandwich Islands to the fun of the nation long before they were put under the flag. Because of him the Missouri and the Mississippi go not unvext to the sea, for they ripple with laughter as they recall Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Poor Jim and the Duke. Europe, Asia Minor and Palestine are open door to the world thanks to this pilgrim's progress with his innocence abroad. Purity, piety and pity shine out from prince and pauper like the eyes of a wandering deer on a torch lighted night from a wooded fringe of mountain and of lake. But enough of what I fear is already too much. In expressing my debt to him I hope I express somewhat at least of yours. I cannot repay him in kind any more than I could rival him. None of us can. But we can render to him a return he would like. With him we can get our way to reality and burn off pretense as acid eats its way to the denuded plate of the engraver. We can strip the veneer of convention from style and strengthen our thoughts in his Anglo-Saxon well of English undefiled. We can drop seeming for sincerity. We can be relentless toward hypocrisy and tender to humanity. We can rejoice in the love of laughter without ever once letting it lead us to libertinism of fancy. We can reach through humour the heart of man. We can make exaggeration the scourge of meanness and the magnifier of truth on the broad screen of life. By study of him the nothing new under the sun can be made fresh and fragrant by the supreme art of putting things. Though none of us can handle his wand, all of us can be transformed by it into something different from and finer than our dull selves. That is our delight. That is our debt. Both do to him. And long may he remain with us to brighten, to broaden, and to better our souls with the magic mirth and with the mirthful magic of his incomparable spell. applause John Hare John Hare, the actor, discussing the drama, said, My task is rendered comparatively easy, because we are here not to enter the lists in oratoricals rivalry, but to unite in paying homage to a great, distinguished, and brilliant writer, and to use an Americanism, a lovely man. The last time I had the pleasure of listening to Mr. Clemens was at a dinner in London on the occasion of Sir Henry Irving's return from America. Among the toasts was one to the drama with the names of Mark Twain and Mr. Pinheiro coupled. We all looked forward to the speeches of these two. Mr. Pinheiro had come, we could see from the expression of his face, all prepared to give us a very weighty essay on the drama, but Mr. Clemens spoke first, and with such brilliant humour and wit that the effect was electrical. We waited for Mr. Pinheiro, but the air was so charged with the electricity of humour that Mr. Pinheiro could only sit down with the remark, I beg to return my thanks for this honour. The health of the drama is extremely good. Its vitality is excessive. In the past we have had as good better plays, and as good players, but at present we have more of them. There may be no genius, but the average is far better. In this there is a great solace and a great danger. Genius may do what it likes. Average ability must be controlled. The practical extinction of the actor-manager in our country and his total extinction in yours are a great menace. It is impossible for the commercial director to amalgamate and control those forces which give to the public the perfect drama. It is the fashion now to cry down the actor-manager. What a mistake! What a folly! The more I look around the more I deplore the lack of state and municipal aid for the theatre. In England we can never hope for it, but in this country it could be, and looking upon the ability of your actors and the grace of your actresses, my impression is that in this country could be founded the finest dramatic school in the world. Senator DePue. Senator DePue was greeted with a round of applause which showed that his popularity had not waned at the lotus. He began by telling a story of a rural friend who once had gone to hear Mark Twain lecture. Upon his return the senator asked, Hear Mark? Yes. Was he funny? Yes, funny. But not damn funny! Mr. DePue then said, I learned later that my friend had listened to a lecture by the reverend Joseph Cook. Our friend Mark owes his distinction to that faculty so much abused in politics and business humor. Every man who has made a success in politics has been handicapped by being a joker. I never yet met a man who had made a fortune who could tell a story or get off a joke. I never yet saw a man worth one million dollars at any function who didn't want to get back to the office in five minutes. No man can make one million dollars if he is funny. That's nothing against the man with the one million dollars or the man who makes a joke. It simply shows that there are two avenues, and some of us take one, and some the other. Tonight's evening post had a leading article on two distinguished citizens, one of whom had recently died. The paper said, Mr. Bryan and myself. Of the late lamented Mr. Bryan, the post said that he had lost the opportunity of being president by lowering himself in his speeches to the level of the common people, and as for Depew, no one who jokes can be president. Having followed Bryan through the canvas, I never expected to be bracketed with him, but I'm willing to have my chances of being president classed with him. I believe that when a man once gets to be president of the United States, if he has wit and humor, they add enormously to the distinction, but that he can never get there if it is known beforehand. Lincoln was not known outside of Illinois when he ran for president, but after he got to be president he began illustrating anything he wanted the people to understand by humor, and he became the greatest factor we ever had in American politics. Lincoln once said to me, I know they say I lower the dignity of the presidential office and that I don't rise to its high plain, but I have found that the plain people are more easily influenced by broad, humorous illustrations than any other way, and, young man, I don't care what hyper-critical people say. It gives me great pleasure to appear before an assembly which comprises so much of the journalistic, artistic, and bohemian circles of our great American Commonwealth. I am pleased with the honor to unite here with you in praising the distinguished guest. He began life in a humble sphere, a characteristic of all men rising to distinction in our country. He became, at one time, connected with the transportation interests of the land. If he had continued in that sphere, he might, some time, have reached the lofty position of president of one of the great carrying companies of our country. Although he began humbly in the pilot-house of a steamboat, I am assured by one who knew him that he had the respect of the passengers and the confidence of the owners of the boat. I am not sure, but he made a mistake when he left that path for the path of literature. He has a genius unique which has secured him recognition on both sides of the Atlantic, and, as an American citizen, I thank him. Had he abandoned humor for the higher walks of literature, which Homer and Aristotle ornamented, I am not sure, but he would have achieved greater distinction. Now, that's the candidate's speech, and I hope the post will give me credit for being equal to the job, if I should take it. Senator Depew then told a new joke on the guest of the evening. The story was that while in London he had received a draft from America for one thousand twenty-five pounds, and attempted to cash the duplicate of it after cashing the original, believing it was another draft. At the first bank he went to, Mr. Depew said they told Mr. Clemens that he was a great humorist, but if it wasn't a joke they would send for the police. At the Union Bank of London he was detained while a man from the Home Secretary's office was summoned. The latter, Mr. Depew said, told the humorist that his reputation was a glory to the literary world, but in order not to destroy the cordiality between the two nations he thought Mr. Clemens had better go home. And that, said Mr. Depew, is why Mark Twain is here tonight. The laughter that followed was mingled with calls for an explanation from the man the joke was on, so Mr. Clemens accommodated them. He said the story was not all true as told. I am, said he, a literary person, and not acquainted with commercial details. I got the draft, and in a day or two I got another just like it, which was a gratifying surprise. I thought it judicious to cash them one at a time. I cashed the first one, but I didn't know what to make of the other, but I thought likely the bank had forgotten it had sent the first one. I needed advice, so I went to Mr. Depew, laid the whole circumstances before him, asked him what he would do about it, and he said he would collect it, and that's what all the trouble was due to. I went from place to place and couldn't get anyone to pay that draft, and finally I suspected Depew. John Kendrick Bangs John Kendrick Bangs was then introduced. He began his remarks with a few gesting allusions to Mr. Clemens' observations on Senator Depew's railway interests, and in proceeding said, I must confess that I have listened with some astonishment and regret to the address of the gentleman who edits an evening paper in the Brooklyn end of Greater New York. I greatly enjoyed Mr. McKellaway's interesting lecture on humor and humorists until he reached a point where he failed to mention, while he admitted two great New Yorkers. Governor-Elect O'Dell, who has a little joker in the political pack, has recently proved quite a pronounced success in his own special line, and another, a great favorite of mine, whose omission reminds me of an experience of my own in a previous state of existence. I was trying to get into politics at the time, and it took all that my friends could do to keep me out. They succeeded, however. But during that brief but bitter period, I was introduced to a willing voter. He was more willing than I was, so I lost him. It seems that I was no better known to him as a combination than as a candidate. For, after gazing at me for a moment with that bewildered expression which the meek and lowly always feel in the presence of the truly great, he observed huskily, My God! Are you John Kendrick Bangs? Yes, said I. Well, by heavens, said he, I've seen you, and I've seen your name. But I'll be damned if I ever put the two together before. Maybe that is the case with Mr. McKellway and his omission of the name of my favorite author from his list of the elect. He has seen his name and he has seen his work, but the combination of humorist did not suggest itself to him, all of which taken together with other incidents this evening rather clears up a situation which has somewhat perplexed me. I could not understand why, however, welcome the task. I should be honored with an invitation to help the Lotus Club in doing honor to our distinguished guest. As the evening has worn on, however, the reason has become obvious. It is quite evident that, in order to heighten the glory of Mark Twain, the committee of arrangements have invited to act as a background to their effulgent guest, all the second-class humorists of this country and abroad, Governor Odell of Newburgh, Thomas Brackett Reed, and St. Clair McKellway of Missouri, and John Hare, and Senator DePue of London, and Sandringham, respectively. How successfully they have carried out their brilliant idea of the speeches we have listened to attest. Now, I suppose that even the mouse which crept into the lion's cage was glad in spite of his physical shortcomings that he belonged to the forefooted order of beings, just as did the more massive creature upon whom he called to pay his respects. I am entitled, therefore, in spite of making shortcomings, to take pride and pleasure in being one of the biped family who have essayed to make the world happier and brighter by calling attention to the lighter side of life, and whatever my failings may have been, I shall leave this gathering tonight with a swelling head as well as with a swelling heart, because as far as I personally am concerned, I regarded as a sufficient distinction in calling to have been permitted to lay my tribute of affectionate esteem and earnest appreciation at the feet of the great philanthropist to whom we are doing honor tonight and in this company. The speeches at the Lotus Club are, as a rule, so numerous and so long that it rarely happens that the majority of the speakers get a chance to say anything until the next morning, so I shall not detain you with any remarks of mine tonight, further than to say that the milestones along the footpath of Mark Twain, from the insignificant beginnings along the brilliant way to success, which he has so persistently followed for so many years, and which has led him into and found for him there, a home in the hearts of the English-speaking people everywhere, are not unlike the little guideposts on the footpath to Peace, which have been so beautifully and eloquently described by Dr. Henry Van Dyke, himself a humorist of no mean order, in his charming prose poem of that name. Dr. Van Dyke's poem is copyrighted, but I know he will forgive me if I read it in part to you in my ardent wish to do honor to the man we pay homage to tonight. It reads as follows, To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars. To be satisfied with your possessions, but not contented with yourself until you have made the best of them. To despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice. To be governed by your admirations rather than by your disgusts. To covet nothing that is your neighbors except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners. To think seldom of your enemies and often of your friends, and to spend as much time as you can with body and with spirit in God's out-of-doors. These are little guideposts on the footpath to Peace. It seems to me, Mr. President, that it is because that in and between every line he has written the sweet underlying principles of the Creed of Peace, as set forth by Dr. Van Dyke, have shone conspicuously forth. Mark Twain is regarded by most of us as a gift of a divine providence. His work is full of the gladness of life. It is full of incentive to love and to work. It is full of play. It is full of God's out-of-doors. The humorist has been satisfied with his possessions, but it is apparent that he has not been contented with himself until he has made the best of them. There is no note of fault finding in anything that he has done save when falsehood and meanness give reason to its being, and that he has feared nothing save cowardice, has been shone by the noble and courageous fight which he has made under conditions so adverse that they would have overwhelmed a man of less strenuous fiber. He has been governed by his admirations rather than by his disgusts, and in his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners he has no reason to covet even his neighbor, for these were gifts which were lavished upon him in richest profusion from the beginning of his ban. It is these qualities that have made the humor of Mark Twain a cherished possession in every home of this land, and which will keep his name alive and reverenced by all who love that which is good and uplifting long after he and we have passed unto the unknown. Secretary Chester S. Lorde then gave those present another opportunity for a hearty laugh by reading a letter from F. Hopkinson Smith, in which Mr. Smith accused Mark Twain of having taken his overcoat, and of not returning it. Mr. Clemens was again called on to defend himself, and confess that he had been guilty of taking the overcoat, but had returned a handkerchief he had found in one of the pockets. Joseph C. Hendricks spoke briefly and eulogized Mr. Clemens. The guest of the evening, he said, told us that he felt a personal loss at being free of debt. I am prepared, on Monday morning, to remedy that if he will give his note, for every banker in the United States knows that note will be paid. Augustus Thomas paid a brief tribute to the guest of the evening, who, he said, was the foremost humorous of his time. III Other Speeches by Mark Twain Mark Twain made three speeches at the reception tendered him by the New York Press Club on Monday night. He was first introduced in most glowing terms by the president of the club, Colonel William L. Brown, whereupon he said, And must I always begin, with a regret, that I have left my gun behind? I've said so many times that if a gentleman introduced me with compliments and then sat down, I'd use a gun. But as I haven't the gun I am going to give this chairman of yours a dose of his own medicine. Gentlemen, you behold before you an old, old man. His features would deceive one. Apparently he is heartened, a person dead to all honest impulses. On these features are the marks of an unimaginable crime. And yet the features belie themselves. Instead of having led a life of crime, as his face indicates, he began in a Sunday school, and will end there. He has always led an exemplary life, one of those lives that make you think of all the long words in the vocabulary that suggest virtue, virtue which he appears to have, but has not. His public history has been merely a deception, milestoneed every now and then by misdemeanors. But these misdemeanors were only the effervescences of a great nature, the accidents of a great career. He really has all the virtues known, and he practices them secretly. Gentlemen, you know him too well for me to further prolong this introduction. Mr. Clemens sat down, and the victim of his joke said a few words to turn the tables on him in which needless to say the victim was unsuccessful. Then Joseph I. C. Clark took the floor and told how Mr. Twain had discovered that the foundation of all humor in life was seriousness. He found that all fun comes from tears, and so he has been making fun of the American people for the last one hundred and fifty years, maybe longer. Why, this marked Twain once made a Scotchman laugh. Mr. Clark closed his talk with a story of how the humorous drew just after the Franco-Prussian War, a map of Paris, showing the position that the German army had occupied by the picture of a depleted brewery. Then Mr. Twain got up again and said, I rise this time, without invitation, in order to defend myself. You need it, you need it," interrupted Colonel Brown. Yes, Mr. Twain went on, and there are others here older than I that need it more. What I was going to say was this. I don't mind slanders and that sort of thing. The facts are what I object to. I don't want anybody to know my true history and I appeal to you journalists to keep it from getting abroad. When you live as long as I have, you'll find out that the world knows you much more favorably than you know yourself. I tell you, when you wake up in the morning feeling bad and thinking yourself a pretty low-down kind of a creature, it is not on account of what the world thinks of the slanders of other people, but on account of some infamous deed you have committed and which nobody but yourself knows anything about. Now, the things that those Westerners said about me were all slanders. There was no truth in them. The true things that I did in the region, they didn't know, so they couldn't tell them. If they could, they would have put me in a hole. I have not been an alleged humorist. I have been a wise man, a Solomon. I have kept secret the things I have done. But it is no wonder that those people told slanderous tales about me. I would have done the same thing for you. Mr. Clark is right in saying that the foundation of humor is seriousness and gravity. Contrast is what brings out humor. To show you that this is true, I will tell you how I came to draw that very map of Paris which he spoke about. It was in 1870 or 1871, I think. In my home was a very sick friend of ours. For days and nights my wife and I sat up and worried. What made the strain worse was the fact that we did not know where to locate the family of our sick friend. In vain we made inquiries to discover what was their post office, so that we might reach them by wire. It was no use, and the strain continued for three long weeks. At the end of that time I was completely worn out, exhausted, miserable. Then came the reaction. I sat down and took a big M and made that map of Paris. But when I went to print the map it was upside down. I had forgotten that the cut of a map had to be made reversely in order to have the map look right on paper. The thing that I printed didn't look any more like Paris than like New York. It was a sight to behold. But it was published nevertheless, and some people said it was very humorous. Under it I placed a dozen explanatory notes, but they didn't explain. Then I attached some more notes, without improving the value of the map as a map. But folks said it was funny. Some American students in Berlin took it from one beer mill to another and laughed over it. Then some native Germans got hold of it and talked excited German about it. These Germans saw nothing funny in it, and there was humor in that very fact. Now you can see how a very sad experience resulted in arousing my humor, for if it hadn't been for that sick friend of ours I would never have drawn the map of Paris. Mr. Clemens was followed by Mr. Hennessy, who began by saying that he had never read any of the humorous books. Then John W. Keller said he had read all those books and declared that newspaper men had no greater source of inspiration than the writings of Mark Twain. Mr. Clemens followed with his Good-Night talk. He said, I want to say good-night. Times have changed, you know. I am old. I am reformed, too. I am just as competent to run all night as I ever was, and more competent to discuss scotch whiskey when it is good, and I see many before me who can do that. But when one becomes respectable, one must go home early. It is to protect my reputation that I am going. The last time I was with you I was like the rest of you, not respectable. All the slanders that were poured upon me tonight, I know, were pure artificialities. The compliments paid me were the only things that had the imprint of truth. I shall take the compliments home and forget the slanders. I have one thing to say before I go. Of all these slanders there is only one that rankles, and it is not a slander on me, but on the man that said it. He said he had never read my books. Now that hurts. Really, I can't understand it. He seemed so intelligent, so intelligent. But how could he be so under the circumstances? If he hasn't read those books, his intelligence must be artificial. Mr. Keller has read them, and he simply oozes intelligence. He is brimming over with it. I bid you good night and thank you very much. Another dinner. Another dinner in this city, to Mark Twain, in honour of his return home, is announced. It will be given by the Aldine Association at its rooms 111 Fifth Avenue on Tuesday evening, December 4. The Committee of Arrangements expects to secure a number of other prominent guests. End of the Lotus Club speech. Recording by John Greenman. Section 03 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. Introducing Winston Churchill. China and the Philippines. At a dinner given in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel December 1900. Winston Spencer Churchill was introduced by Mr. Clemens. For years I've been a self-appointed missionary to bring about the Union of America and the Motherland. They ought to be united. Behold America! The refuge of the oppressed from everywhere, who can pay fifty dollars admission. Anyone except a Chinaman. Standing up for human rights everywhere. Even helping China let people in free when she wants to collect fifty dollars upon them. And how unselfishly England has wrought for the open door for all. And how piously America has wrought for that open door in all cases where it was not her own. Yes, as a missionary I've sung my songs of praise. And yet I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa, which she could not have avoided, just as we sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines. Mr. Churchill, by his father, is an Englishman. By his mother he is an American. No doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America. Yes, we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is complete. The blend is perfect. End of Introducing Winston Churchill. Recording by John Greenman. Section 04 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. A salutation speech from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Taken down in shorthand by Mark Twain. A greeting from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning, bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kyauchu, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of bootle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-glass. December 31, 1900. End of a salutation speech from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Recording by John Greenman. Section 05 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. Letter to Reverend Joseph H. Twitchell, dated 29 January 1901. The letter which follows is a fair sample of Mark Twain's private violence on a subject which, in public print, he could only treat effectively by preserving his good humor. When he found it necessary to boil over, as he did now and then, for relief he always found a willing audience in Twitchell. The mention of his private philosophy refers to What is Man? privately published in 1906, reissued by his publishers in 1916. To Reverend J. H. Twitchell in Hartford. 14 West Tenth. January 29 01. Dear Joe! I'm not expecting anything but kicks for scoffing and am expecting a diminution of my bread and butter by it, but if Livvy will let me I will have my say. This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth, ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there! I can't understand it. You are a public guide and teacher, Joe, and are under a heavy responsibility to men, young and old, if you teach your people as you teach me to hide their opinions when they believe the flag is being abused and dishonored, lest the utterance do them and a publisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience? You are sorry for me. In the fair way of give and take I am willing to be a little sorry for you. However, I seem to be going counter to my own private philosophy, which Livvy won't allow me to publish, because it would destroy me. But I hope to see it in print before I die. I planned it fifteen years ago and wrote it in ninety-eight. I've often tried to read it to Livvy, but she won't have it. It makes her melancholy. The truth always has that effect on people. Would have they if they ever got hold of a rag of it, which they don't? You are supposing that I am supposing that I am moved by a large patriotism, and that I am distressed because our president has blundered up to his neck in the Philippine mess, and that I am grieved because this great ignorant nation, which doesn't know the ABC facts of the Philippine episode, is in disgrace before the sarcastic world. Drop that idea. I care nothing for the rest. I am only distressed and troubled because I am befouled by these things. That is all. When I search myself away down deep, I find this out. Whatever a man feels or thinks or does, there is never any but one reason for it, and that is a selfish one. At great inconvenience and expense of precious time I went to the chief synagogue the other night and talked in the interest of a charity school of poor Jew girls. I know, to the finest shades, the selfish ends that move me, but no one else suspects. I could give you the details if I had time. You would perceive how true they are. I've written another article—you better hurry down and help Livy squelch it. She's out pottering around somewhere, poor housekeeping slave, and Clara is in the hands of the osteopath, getting the bronchitis pulled and hauled out of her. It was a bad attack, and a little disquieting. It came day before yesterday, and she hasn't sat up till this afternoon. She is getting along satisfactorily now. Lots of love to you all. Mark. Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope and inspiration and good cheer. Such a condition means contentment and happiness. The carping grumbler who may here and there go forth will find few to listen to him. The majority will wonder what is the matter with him and pass on. New York Tribune on Christmas Eve From the Son of New York The purpose of this article is not to describe the terrible offenses against humanity committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East Side districts. They could not be described even verbally. But it is the intention to let the great mass of more or less careless citizens of this beautiful metropolis of New World get some conception of the havoc and ruin wrought to man, woman and child in the most densely populated and least known section of the city. Name, date and place can be supplied to those of little faith, or to any man who feels himself aggrieved. It is a plain statement of record and observation written without license and without garnish. Imagine if you can, a section of the city territory completely dominated by one man without whose permission either legitimate nor illegitimate business can be conducted. Where illegitimate business is encouraged and legitimate business discouraged, where the respectable residents have to fasten their doors and windows summer nights and sit in their rooms with asphyxiating air and one hundred degree temperature rather than try to catch the faint whiff of breeze in their natural breathing places, the stoops of their homes, where naked women dance by night in the streets and unsexed men prowl like strangers through the darkness on business, not only permitted but encouraged by the police, where the education of infants begins with the knowledge of prostitution and the training of little girls is training in the arts of frying, where American girls brought up with the refinements of American homes are imported from small towns upstate Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey and kept as virtually prisoners as if they were locked up behind jail bars until they have lost all semblance of womanhood, where small boys are taught to solicit for the women of disorderly houses, where there is an organized society of young men whose sole business in life is to corrupt young girls and turn them over to body houses, where men walking with their wives along the streets are openly insulted, where children that have adult diseases are the chief patrons of the hospitals and dispensaries, where it is the rule rather than the exception that murder, rape, robbery and theft go unpunished, in short, where the premium of the most awful forms of vice is the profit of the politicians. The following news from China appeared in the Sun of New York on Christmas Eve. The italics are mine. The reverend Mr. Amant of the American Board of Foreign Missions has returned from a trip which he made for the purpose of collecting indemnities for damages done by boxers. Everywhere he went he compelled the Chinese to pay. He says that all his native Christians are now provided for. He had seven hundred of them under his charge and three hundred were killed. He has collected three hundred teals for each of these murders and has compelled full payment for all the property belonging to Christians that was destroyed. He also assessed fines amounting to thirteen times the amount of the indemnity. This money will be used for the propagation of the gospel. Mr. Amant declares that the compensation he has collected is moderate, when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics who demand in addition to money, head for head. They collect five hundred teals for each murder of a Catholic. In the Wenxiu country six hundred and eighty Catholics were killed and for this the European Catholics here demand seven hundred and fifty thousand strings of cash and six hundred and eighty heads. In the course of a conversation Mr. Amant referred to the attitude of the missionaries toward the Chinese. He said, I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive, that they generally looted or that they have done anything since the siege that the circumstances did not demand. I criticize the Americans. The soft hand of the Americans is not as good as the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand they will take advantage of it. The statement that the French government will return the loot taken by the French soldiers is the source of the greatest amusement here. The French soldiers were more systematic looters than the Germans and it is a fact that today Catholic Christians carrying French flags and armed with modern guns are looting villages in the provinces of Chile. By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve just in time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes. Teals I win, heads you lose. Our reverend Amant is the right man in the right place. What we want of our missionaries out there is not that they shall merely represent in their acts and persons the grace and gentleness and charity and loving kindness of our religion but that they shall also represent the American spirit. The oldest Americans are the Pawnees. McCallum's history says when a white boxer kills a Pawnee and destroys his property the other Pawnees do not trouble to seek him out they kill any white person that comes along. Also they make some white village pay deceased heirs the full cash value of deceased together with full cash value of the property destroyed. They also make the village pay in addition 13 times the value of that property into a fund for the dissemination of the Pawnee religion which they regard as the best of all religions for the softening and humanizing of the heart of man. It is their idea that it is only fair and right that the innocent should be made to suffer for the guilty and that it is better that 90 and 9 innocent should suffer than that one guilty person should escape. Our reverend Amant is justifiably jealous of those enterprising Catholics who not only get big money for each lost convert but get head for head besides. But he should soothe himself with a reflection that the entirety of their exactions are for their own pockets whereas he, less selfishly, devotes only three hundred teals per head to that service and gives the whole vast thirteen repetitions of the property indemnity to the surface of propagating the gospel. His magnanimity has won him the approval of his nation and will get him a monument. Let him be content with these rewards. We all hold him dear for manfully defending his fellow missionaries from exaggerated charges which were beginning to distress us but which his testimony has so considerably modified that we can now contemplate them without noticeable pain. For now we know that even before the siege the missionaries were not generally outlooting and that since the siege they have acted quite handsomely except when circumstances crowded them. I am arranging for the monument. Subscriptions for it can be sent to the American board. Designs for it can be sent to me. Designs must allegorically set forth the thirteen reduplications of the indemnity and the object for which they were exacted. As ornaments the designs must exhibit six hundred and eighty heads so disposed as to give a pleasing and pretty effect, for the Catholics have done nicely and are entitled to notice in the monument. Mottoes may be suggested, if any shall be discovered that will satisfactorily cover the ground. Mr. Amant's financial feat of squeezing a thirteen-fold indemnity out of the pauper peasants to square other people's offenses, thus condemning them and their women and innocent little children to inevitable starvation and lingering death in order that the blood money so acquired might be used for the propagation of the gospel does not flutter my serenity. Although the act and the words taken together, concrete, a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age. Yet if a layman had done that thing and justified it with those words, I should have shuddered, I know. Or if I had done the thing and said the words myself, however the thought is unthinkable, irreverent as some imperfectly informed people think me. Sometimes an ordained minister sets out to be blasphemous. When this happens the layman is out of the running. He stands no chance. We have Mr. Amant's impassioned assurance that the missionaries are not vindictive. Let us hope and pray that they will never become so, but will remain in the almost morbidly fair and just and gentle temper which is affording so much satisfaction to their brother and champion today. The following is from the New York Tribune of Christmas Eve. It comes from that journal's Tokyo correspondent. It has a strange and impudent sound, but the Japanese are but partially civilized as yet. When they become wholly civilized, they will not talk so. The missionary question, of course, occupies a foremost place in the discussion. It is now felt as essential that the Western powers take cognizance of the sentiment here that religious invasions of Oriental countries by powerful Western organizations are tantamount to filibustering expeditions and should not only be discounted but that stern measures should be adopted for their suppression. The feeling here is that the missionary organizations constitute a constant menace to peaceful international relations. Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way and commit the new century to the game or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first? Would it not be prudent to get our civilization tools together and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of glass beads and theology and maxim guns and hymn books and trade gin and torches of progress and enlightenment, patent adjustable ones good to fire villages with upon occasion and balance the books and arrive at the profit and loss so that we may intelligently decide whether to continue the business or sell out the property and start a new civilization scheme on the proceeds? Extending the blessings of civilization to our brother who sits in the dark has been a good trade and has paid well on the whole, and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked, but not enough in my judgment to make any considerable risk advisable. The people that sit in darkness are getting to be too scarce, too scarce and too shy, and such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality and not dark enough for the game. The most of those people that sit in darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious. The blessings of civilization trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth that the people who sit in darkness have noticed it. They have noticed it and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the blessings of civilization. Or they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The blessings of civilization are all right and a good commercial property. There could not be better in a dim light. In the right kind of light and at a proper distance, with the goods a little out of focus, they furnish this desirable exhibit to the gentlemen who sit in darkness. Love, law and order, justice, liberty, gentleness, equality, Christianity, honorable dealing, protection to the weak, mercy, education, temperance, and so on. There. Is it good? Sir, it is pie. It will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere. But not if we adulterate it. It is proper to be emphatic upon that point. This brand is strictly for export, apparently. Apparently. Privately and confidentially it is nothing of the kind. Privately and confidentially it is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our civilization which we reserve for home consumption, while inside the bale is the actual thing that the customer sitting in darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. That actual thing is indeed civilization. But it is only for export. Is there a difference between the two brands? In some of the details yes. We all know that the business is being ruined. The reason is not far to seek. It is because our Mr. McKinley and Mr. Chamberlain and the Kaiser and the Tsar and the French have been exporting the actual thing with the outside cover left off. This is bad for the game. It shows that these new players of it are not sufficiently acquainted with it. It is a distress to look on and note the mismoves. They are so strange and so awkward. Mr. Chamberlain manufactures a war out of materials so inadequate and so fanciful that they make the boxes grieve and the gallery laugh, and he tries hard to persuade himself that it isn't purely a private raid for cash, but has a sort of dim, vague respectability about it somewhere, if he could only find the spot, and that by and by he can scour the flag clean again after he has finished dragging it through the mud and make it shine and flash in the vault of heaven once more as it had shone and flashed there a thousand years in the world's respect until he laid his unfaithful hand upon it. It is bad play, bad, for it exposes the actual thing to them that sit in darkness, and they say, what, Christian against Christian and only for money? Is this the case of magnanimity, forbearance, love, gentleness, mercy, protection of the weak? This strange and over-showy onslaught of an elephant upon a nest afield mice, on the pretext that the mice had squeaked an insolence at him, conduct which no self-respecting government could allow to pass unavanged, as Mr. Chamberlain said. Was that a good pretext in a small case, when it had not been a good pretext in a large one? For only recently Russia had affronted the elephant three times and survived alive and unsmitten. Is this civilization in progress? Is it something better than we already possess? These harriings and burnings and desert makings in the Transvaal, is this an improvement on our darkness? Is it perhaps possible that there are two kinds of civilizations, one home consumption and one for the heathen market? Then they that sit in darkness are troubled and shake their heads, and they read this extract from a letter of a British private recounting his exploits in one of Methuen's victories, some days before the affair of Machar Fontaine, and they are troubled again. We tore up the hill and into the trenchments, and the boars saw we had them, so they dropped their guns and went down on their knees and put up their hands clasped and begged for mercy, and we gave it them with the long spoon. The long spoon is the bayonet. See, Lloyds Weekly, London of those days, the same number and the same column contained some quite unconscious satire in the form of shocked and bitter upradings of the boars for their brutalities and inhumanities. Next to our heavy damage, the Kaiser went to playing the game without first mastering it. He lost a couple of missionaries in a riot in Shantung, and in his account he made an overcharge for them. China had to pay a hundred thousand dollars apiece for them in money, twelve miles of territory containing several millions of inhabitants and worth twenty million dollars, and to build a monument and also a Christian church, whereas the people of China could have been depended upon to remember the missionaries without the help of these expensive memorials. This was all bad play, bad, because it would not and could not and will not now or ever deceive the person sitting in darkness. He knows that it was an overcharge. He knows that a missionary is like any other man. He is worth merely what you can supply his place for and no more. He is useful, but so is a doctor, so is a sheriff, so is an editor. But a just emperor does not charge war prices for such. A diligent, intelligent, but obscure missionary and a diligent, intelligent country editor are worth much, and we know it, but they are not worth the earth. We esteem such an editor, and we are sorry to see him go, but when he goes we should consider twelve miles of territory in a church and a fortune overcompensation for his loss. I mean, if he was a Chinese editor, and we had to settle for him. It is no proper figure for an editor or a missionary. One can get shop-worn kings for less. It was bad play on the Kaiser's part. It got this property true, but it produced the Chinese revolt, the indignant uprising of China's traduced Patriots the Boxers. The results have been expensive to Germany and to the other disseminators of progress and the blessings of civilization. The Kaiser's claim was paid, yet it was bad play, for it could not fail to have an evil effect upon persons sitting in darkness in China. They would muse upon the event and be likely to say, Civilization is gracious and beautiful for such as its reputation, but can we afford it? There are rich China men, perhaps they could afford it, but this tax is not laid upon them, it is laid upon the peasants of Shantung. It is they that must pay this mighty sum, and their wages are but four cents a day. Is this a better civilization than ours, and holier, and higher, and nobler? Is not this rapacity? Is not this extortion? Would Germany charge America two hundred thousand dollars for two missionaries and shake the mailed fist in her face, and send warships and send soldiers and say, Seize twelve miles of territory worth twenty millions of dollars, as additional pay for the missionaries, and make those peasants build a monument to the missionaries, and a costly Christian church to remember them by? And later would Germany say to her soldiers, March through America and slay, giving no quarter, make the German face there, as has been our German face here, a terror for a thousand years, march through the great republic and slay, slay, slay, carving a road for our offended religion through its heart and bowels? Would Germany do like this to America, to England, to France, to Russia, or only to China the helpless, imitating the elephant's assault upon the field mice? Had we better invest in this civilization, this civilization which called Napoleon a buccaneer for carrying off Venice's bronze horses, but which steals our ancient astronomical instruments from our walls and goes looting like common bandits? That is, all the alien soldiers accept Americas, and, Americans again accepted, storms, frightened villages, and cables the result to glad journals at home every day, Chinese losses 450 killed, ours, one officer, and two men wounded, shall proceed against neighboring village tomorrow where a massacre is reported. Can we afford civilization? And, next, Russia must go and play the game injudiciously. She affronts England once or twice, with the person sitting in darkness observing and noting, by moral assistance of France and Germany she robs Japan of her hard-earned spoil, all swimming in Chinese blood, Port Arthur, with the person again observing and noting. Then she seizes Manchuria, raids its villages, and chokes its great river with the swollen corpses of countless massacred peasants, that astonished person still observing and noting, and perhaps he is saying to himself, it is yet another civilized power with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt civilization and lift ourselves down to its level? And by and by comes America, and our master of the game plays it badly, plays it as Mr. Chamberlain was playing it in South Africa. It was a mistake to do that. Also, it was one which was quite unlooked for in a master who was playing it so well in Cuba. In Cuba he was playing the usual and regular American game, and it was winning, for there is no way to beat it. The master, contemplating Cuba, said, Here is an oppressed and friendless little nation which is willing to fight to be free. We go, partners, and put up the strength of seventy million sympathizers and the resources of the United States. Play! Nothing but Europe combined could call that hand, and Europe cannot combine on anything. There, in Cuba, he was following our great traditions in a way which made us very proud of him, and proud of the deep dissatisfaction which his play was provoking in Continental Europe. Moved by a high inspiration, he threw out those stirring words which proclaimed that forcible annexation would be criminal aggression, and in that utterance fired another shot heard round the world. The memory of that fine saying will be outlived by the remembrance of no act of his but one, that he forgot it within the twelve months and its honorable gospel along with it. For presently came the Philippine temptation. It was strong, it was too strong, and he made that bad mistake. He played the European game, the Chamberlain game. It was a pity. It was a great pity, that error, that one grievous error, that irrevocable error. For it was the very place and time to play the American game again, and, at no cost, rich winnings to gather in, too. Rich and permanent, indestructible. A fortune transmissible forever to the children of the flag. Not land, not money, not dominion. No. Something worth many times more than that dross. Our share, the spectacle of a nation of long, harassed and persecuted slaves, set free through our influence, our austerity's share. The golden memory of that fair deed. The game was in our hands. If it had been played according to the American rules, Dewey would have sailed away from Manila as soon as he had destroyed the Spanish fleet, after putting up a sign on shore guaranteeing foreign property and life against damage by the Filipinos, and warning the powers that interference with the emancipated patriots would be regarded as an act unfriendly to the United States. The powers cannot combine in even a bad cause, and the sign would not have been molested. Dewey could have gone about his affairs elsewhere and left the competent Filipino army to starve out the little Spanish garrison and send it home, and the Filipino citizens to set up the form of government they might prefer, and deal with the suppliers and their doubtful acquisitions according to Filipino ideas of fairness and justice, ideas which have since been tested and found to be of as high an order as any that prevail in Europe or America. But we played the Chamberlain game, and lost the chance to add another Cuba and another honorable deed to our good record. The more we examine the mistake, the more clearly we perceive that it is going to be bad for the business. The person sitting in darkness is almost sure to say, There is something curious about this, curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas, one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once captive's new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him, with nothing to found it on, then kills him to get his land. The truth is, the person sitting in darkness is saying things like that, and for the sake of the business we must persuade him to look at the Philippine matter in another and healthier way. We must arrange his opinions for him. I believe it can be done, for Mr. Chamberlain has arranged England's opinion of the South African matter and done it most cleverly and successfully. He presented the facts, some of the facts, and showed those confiding people what the facts meant. He did it statistically, which is a good way. He used the formula twice two are fourteen, and two from nine leaves thirty-five. Figures are effective. Figures will convince the elect. Now, my plan is a still bolder one than Mr. Chamberlain's, though apparently a copy of it. Let us be franker than Mr. Chamberlain. Let us audaciously present the whole of the facts, shirking none, then explain them according to Mr. Chamberlain's formula. This daring truthfulness will astonish and dazzle the person sitting in darkness, and he will take the explanation down before his mental vision has had time to get back into focus. Let us say to him, our case is simple. On the first day, Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet. This left the archipelago in the hands of its proper and rightful owners the Filipino nation. Their army numbered thirty thousand men, and they were competent to whip out or starve out the little Spanish garrison. Then the people could set up a government of their own devising. Our traditions required that Dewey should now set up his warning sign and go away. But the master of the game happened to think of another plan, the European plan. He acted upon it. This was, to send out an army ostensibly to help the native patriots put the finishing touch upon their long and plucky struggle for independence, but really to take their land away from them and keep it. That is, in the interest of progress and civilization. The plan developed stage by stage and quite satisfactorily. We entered into a military alliance with the trusting Filipinos, and they hemmed in Minola on the land side, and by their valuable help the place, with its garrison of eight thousand or ten thousand Spaniards, was captured. A thing which could not have been accomplished unaided at the time. We got their help by ingenuity. We knew they were fighting for independence, and that they had been at it for two years. We knew they supposed that we also were fighting in their worthy cause, just as we had helped the Cubans fight for Cuban independence, and we allowed them to go on thinking so. Until Minola was ours, and we could get along without them. Then we showed our hand. Of course, they were surprised, that was natural, surprised and disappointed. Disappointed and grieved. To them it looked un- American, uncharacteristic, foreign to our established traditions. And this was natural too, for we were only playing the American game in public, in private. It was the European. It was neatly done, very neatly, and it bewildered them. They could not understand it. For we had been so friendly, so affectionate even, with those simple-minded patriots. We, our own selves, had brought back out of exile their leader, their hero, their hope, their Washington. Aguinaldo brought him in a warship, in high honor, under the sacred shelter and hospitality of the flag. Brought him back, and restored him to his people, and got their moving and eloquent gratitude for it. Yes, we had been so friendly to them, and had heartened them up in so many ways. We had lent them guns and ammunition, advised with them, exchanged pleasant courtesies with them, placed our sick and wounded in their kindly care, entrusted our Spanish prisoners to their humane and honest hands, fought shoulder to shoulder with them against the common enemy, our own phrase, praised their courage, praised their gallantry, praised their mercifulness, praised their fine and honorable conduct, borrowed their trenches, borrowed strong positions which they had previously captured from the Spaniard, petted them, lied to them, officially proclaiming that our land and naval forces came to give them their freedom and displace the bad Spanish government, fooled them, used them until we needed them no longer, then derided the sucked orange, and threw it away. We kept the positions which we had beguiled them of, by and by we moved a force forward and overlapped Patriot ground, a clever thought for we needed trouble, and this would produce it. A Filipino soldier crossing the ground where no one had a right to forbid him was shot by our sentry. The badgered Patriots resented this with arms without waiting to know whether Aguinaldo, who was absent, would approve or not. Aguinaldo did not approve, but that availed nothing. What we wanted, in the interest of progress and civilization, was the archipelago, unencumbered by Patriots struggling for independence, and war was what we needed. We clinched our opportunity. It is Mr. Chamberlain's case over again, at least in its motive and intention, and we played the game as adroitly as he played it himself. At this point in our frank statement of fact to the person sitting in darkness we should throw in a little trade taffy about the blessings of civilization, for a change, and for the refreshment of his spirit. Then go on with our tale. We and the Patriots having captured Manila, Spain's ownership of the archipelago and her sovereignty over it were at an end, obliterated, annihilated, not a rag or shred of either remaining behind. It was then that we conceived the divinely humorous idea of buying both of these spectres from Spain. It is quite safe to confess this to the person sitting in the dark, since neither he nor any other sane person will believe it. In buying those ghosts for twenty millions we also contracted to take care of the friars and their accumulations. I think we also agreed to propagate leprosy and smallpox, but as to this there is doubt. But it is not important. Persons afflicted with the friars do not mind other diseases. With our treaty ratified, Manila subdued, and our ghosts secured, we had no further use for Aguinaldo and the owners of the archipelago. We forced a war and we have been hunting America's guest and ally through the woods and swamps ever since. At this point in the tale it will be well to boast a little of our war work and our heroisms in the field so as to make our performance look as fine as England's in South Africa. But I believe it will not be best to emphasize this too much. We must be cautious. Of course we must read the war telegrams to the person in order to keep up our frankness, but we can throw an air of humorousness over them, and that will modify their grim eloquence a little, and their rather indiscreet exhibitions of gory exaltation. Before reading to him the following display, heads of the dispatches of November 18, 1900, it will be well to practice on them in private first, so as to get the right tang of lightness and gaiety into them. Administration weary of protracted hostilities. Real war ahead for Filipino rebels. Rebels. Mumble that funny word. Don't let the person catch it distinctly. We'll show no mercy. Kitchener's plan adopted. Kitchener knows how to handle disagreeable people who are fighting for their homes and their liberties, but we must let on that we are merely imitating Kitchener and have no national interest in the matter, further than to get ourselves admired by the great family of nations in which Auguste Company, our master of the game, has bought a place for us in the back row. Of course we must not venture to ignore our General MacArthur's reports. Oh, why do they keep on printing those embarrassing things? We must drop them trippingly from the tongue and take the chances. During the last ten months our losses have been 268 killed and 750 wounded. Filipino loss 3,227 killed and 694 wounded. We must stand ready to grab the person sitting in darkness, for he will swoon away at this confession saying, Good God! those niggers spare their wounded, and the Americans massacre theirs. We must bring him to and coax him and coddle him and assure him that the ways of providence are best and that it would not become us to find fault with them, and then to show him that we are only imitators, not originators, we must read the following passage from the letter of an American soldier lad in the Philippines to his mother published in Public Opinion of Decora, Iowa, describing the finish of a victorious battle. We never left one alive. If one was wounded we would run our bayonets through him. Having now laid all the historical facts before the person sitting in darkness, we should bring him to again and explain them to him. We should say to him, they look doubtful, but in reality they are not. There have been lies, yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous, but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True we have crushed a deceived and confiding people, we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us, we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic, we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest, we have bought a shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell, we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty. We have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandits work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear not to follow. We have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world, but each detail was for the best. We know this. The head of every state and sovereignty in Christendom and ninety percent of every legislative body in Christendom, including our Congress and our fifty state legislators, are members not only of the church but also of the blessings of civilization trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness, it is all right. Now then, that will convince the person, it will see, it will restore the business. Also it will elect the master of the game to the vacant place in the trinity of our national gods, and there on their high thrones the three will sit age after age in the people's sight, each bearing the emblem of his service. Washington, the sword of the liberator, Lincoln, the slaves' broken chains, the master, the chains repaired. It will give the business a splendid new start, you will see. Everything is prosperous now, everything is just as we should wish it. We have got the archipelago, and we shall forgive it up. Also we have every reason to hope that we shall have an opportunity before very long to slip out of our congressional contract with Cuba and give her something better in the place of it. It is a rich country, and many of us are already beginning to see that the contract was a sentimental mistake. But now, right now, is the best time to do some profitable rehabilitating work that will set us up and make us comfortable and discourage gossip. We cannot conceal from ourselves that privately we are a little troubled about our uniform. It is one of our prides. It is acquainted with honor. It is familiar with great deeds and noble. We love it. We revere it. And so this errand it is on makes us uneasy. Our flag, another pride of ours, our chiefest. We have worshiped it so, and when we have seen it in far lands, glimpsing it unexpectedly in that strange sky, waving its welcome and benediction to us, we have caught our breath and uncovered our heads, and couldn't speak for a moment for the thought of what it was to us and the great ideals it stood for. Indeed, we must do something about these things. We must not have the flag out there and the uniform. They are not needed there. We can manage in some other way. England manages, as regards the uniform, and so can we. We have to send soldiers. We can't get out of that. But we can disguise them. It is the way England does in South Africa. Even Mr. Chamberlain himself takes pride in England's honourable uniform, and makes the army down there where an ugly and odious and appropriate disguise of yellow stuff such as quarantine flags are made of, and which are hoisted to warn the healthy away from unclean disease and repulsive death. This cloth is called khaki. We could adopt it. It is light, comfortable, grotesque, and deceives the enemy, for he cannot conceive of a soldier being concealed in it. And as for a flag for the Philippine province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one. Our states do it. We can have just our usual flag with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones. And we do not need that civil commission out there. Having no powers it has to grant them, and that kind of work cannot be effectively done by just anybody. An expert is required. Mr. Crocker can be spared. We do not want the United States represented there, but only the game. By help of these suggested amendments, progress and civilization in that country can have a boom, and it will take in the persons who are sitting in darkness, and we can resume business at the old stand. Mark Twain End of To the Person Sitting in Darkness Recorded by John Greenman Section 7 of Anti-Imperialist Writings This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain Training That Pays Newspaper article from the New York Times, March 17, 1901 Mark Twain, on Training That Pays, speaks at the supper of the Male Teachers Association. He says that he intended to build 65 libraries, but changed his mind. The regular monthly supper of the Male Teachers Association of the City of New York was held at the Hotel Albert, East 11th Street and University Place last evening. About 150 teachers from all the boroughs were present. George H. Chatfield, the President of the Association, was the Toastmaster, and the principal speakers were State Superintendent of Schools Charles H. Skinner, and Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain. Dr. Skinner was the first speaker introduced, and he spoke on patriotism for the young. He told of the patriotic exercises used in all the public schools at least once a week. Among other things, he said, our schools must make our citizens, and our richest assets are our children. In these times, under present conditions, citizenship means a great responsibility, a very great responsibility to put on our boys. Our Republic has changed its place from a doubtful position in the line to the first place among the nations of the earth. We have told the world that we care not for contest, but that barbarism cannot be practiced in the Western Hemisphere. Today we do not care to own Cuba, Puerto Rico, or the Philippines, but we do want to keep them from the dark rule of a barbarian people. Mr. Clemens was then introduced, his subject being training that pays. In part, he said, We cannot all agree. That is most fortunate. If we could all agree life would be too dull. I believe, if we did all agree, I would take my departure before my appointed time. That is, if I had the courage to do so. I do agree in part with what Mr. Skinner has said. In fact, more than I usually agree with other people. I believe that there are no private citizens in a Republic. Every man is an official. Above all, he is a policeman. He does not need to wear a helmet and brass buttons, but his duty is to look after the enforcement of the laws. If patriotism had been taught in the schools years ago, the country would not be in the position it is in today. Mr. Skinner is better satisfied with the present conditions than I am. I would teach patriotism in the schools and teach it this way. I would throw out the old maxim, my country right or wrong, etc., and instead I would say, my country when she is right. I would not take my patriotism from my neighbor or from Congress. I should teach the children in the schools that there are certain ideals, and one of them is that all men are created free and equal. Another, that the proper government is that which exists by the consent of the governed. If Mr. Skinner and I had to take care of the public schools, I would raise up a lot of patriots who would get into trouble with his. I should also teach the rising patriot that if he ever became the government of the United States and made a promise, that he should keep it. I will not go any further into politics as I would get excited, and I don't like to get excited. I prefer to remain calm. I have been a teacher all my life, and never got a cent for teaching." The speaker then cited some incidents from his boyhood life which he said he had later incorporated in his books. The Fence Whitewashing incident in Tom Sawyer, he said, brought him in four thousand dollars in the end, when he never expected to get anything for teaching the other boys how to whitewash way back in eighteen forty-nine. I have a benevolent faculty, continued the speaker. It does not always show, but it is there. We have had some millionaires who gave money to colleges. Now we have Mr. Carnegie building sixty-five new libraries. There is an educator for you on a large scale. I was going to do it myself, but when I found out it would cost over five millions, I changed my mind. As I was afraid, it would bankrupt me. When I found out Mr. Carnegie was going to do it, I told him he could have my ideas gratis. I said to him, are the books that are going to be put into the new libraries on a high moral plane? If they are not, I told him he had better build the libraries, and I would write the books. With the wealth I would get out of writing the books, I could build libraries, and then he could write books. I am glad that Mr. Carnegie has done this magnificent thing, and as the newspapers have suggested, I hope that other rich men will follow his example and continue to do so until it becomes a habit they cannot break. Among the other speakers were Sidney C. Womsley, Dr. Myron T. Scudder, and Magnus Gross. End of Training that Pays. Recording by John Greenman. Section 8 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. To My Missionary Critics by Mark Twain. I have received many newspaper cuttings. Also, letters from several clergymen. Also, a note from the Reverend Dr. Judson Smith, corresponding Secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions, all of a like tenor. All saying, substantially, what is said in the cutting here copied. An Apology Due from Mr. Clemens. The evidence of the past day or two should induce Mark Twain to make for the Amen Corner and formulate a prompt apology for his scathing attack on the Reverend Dr. Amant, the veteran Chinese missionary. The result was based on a Peking dispatch to the New York Sun, which said that Dr. Amant had collected from the Chinese in various places damages thirteen times in excess of actual losses. So Mark Twain charged Mr. Amant with bully-ragging, extortion, and things. A Peking dispatch to the Sun yesterday, however, explains that the amount collected was not thirteen times the damage sustained, but one-third in excess of the indemnities, and that the blunder was due to a cable error in transmission. The one-third got converted into thirteen. Yesterday the Reverend Judson Smith, Secretary of the American Board, received a dispatch from Dr. Amant, calling attention to the cable blunder and declaring that all the collections which he made were approved by the Chinese officials. The fractional amount that was collected in excess of actual losses, he explains, is being used for the support of widows and orphans. So collapses completely and convulsively Mark Twain's sensational and ugly bombardment of a missionary whose character and services should have exempted him from such an assault. From the charge the underpinning has been knocked out. To Dr. Amant, Mr. Clemens has done an injustice which is gross but unintentional. If Mark Twain is the man we take him to be, he won't be long in filing a retraction, plus an apology. I have no prejudice against apologies. I trust I shall never withhold one when it is due. I trust I shall never even have a disposition to do so. These letters and newspaper paragraphs are entitled to my best attention. Respect for their writers and for the humane feeling which has prompted their utterances requires this of me. It may be barely possible that if these requests for an apology had reached me before the twentieth of February I might have had a sort of qualified chance to apologize, but on that day appeared the two little cable-grams referred to in the newspaper-cutting copied above, one from the Reverend Dr. Smith to the Reverend Dr. Amant, the other from Dr. Amant to Dr. Smith, and my small chance died then. In my opinion these cable-grams ought to have been suppressed, for it seems clear that they give Dr. Amant's case entirely away. Still that is only an opinion, and may be a mistake. It will be best to examine the case from the beginning by the light of the documents connected with it. Exhibit A. This is a dispatch from Mr. Chamberlain. Note, testimony of the manager of the Sun, chief of the Sun's correspondent staff in Peking. It appeared in the Sun last Christmas Eve, and in referring to it, hereafter, I will call it the C.E. dispatch for short. The Reverend Mr. Amant of the American Board of Foreign Missions has returned from a trip which he made for the purpose of collecting indemnities for damages done by boxers. Everywhere he went he compelled the Chinese to pay. He says that all his native Christians are now provided for. He had seven hundred of them under his charge, and three hundred were killed. He has collected three hundred teals for each of these murders, and has compelled full payment for all the property belonging to Christians that was destroyed. He also assessed fines amounting to thirteen times. Note, cable error for thirteen times read one third. This correction was made by Dr. Amant in his brief cablegram, published February twenty, above referred to. The Amount of the Indemnity This money will be used for the propagation of the Gospel. Mr. Amant declares that the compensation he has collected is moderate when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics who demand, in addition to money, head for head. They collect five hundred teals for each murder of a Catholic. In the Wenxiu country six hundred and eighty Catholics were killed, and for this the European Catholics here demand seven hundred and fifty thousand strings of cash and six hundred and eighty heads. In the course of a conversation Mr. Amant referred to the attitude of the missionaries toward the Chinese. He said, I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive, that they generally looted, or that they have done anything since the siege that the circumstances did not demand. I criticize the Americans. The soft hand of the Americans is not as good as the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand they will take advantage of it. In an article addressed to the person sitting in darkness published in the North American Review for February, I made some comments upon this CE dispatch. In an open letter to me from the Reverend Dr. Smith, published in the Tribune of February 15th, doubt is cast upon the authenticity of the dispatch. Up to the twentieth of February this doubt was an important factor in the case. Dr. Amant's brief cablegram, published on that date, took the importance all out of it. In the open letter Dr. Smith quotes this passage from a letter from Dr. Amant dated November 13th. The italics are mine. This time I proposed to settle affairs without the aid of soldiers or legations. This cannot mean two things, but only one, that previously he had collected by arm force. Also in the open letter Dr. Smith quotes some praises of Dr. Amant and the Reverend Mr. Tewkesbury, furnished by the Reverend Dr. Sheffield and says, Dr. Sheffield is not accustomed to speak thus of thieves or extortioners or braggarts. What can he mean by those vigorous expressions? Can he mean that the first two would be applicable to a missionary who should collect from B, with the aid of soldiers, indemnities possibly due by A, and upon occasion go out looting? Exhibit B. Testimony of George Lynch, endorsed as entirely trustworthy by the Tribune and the Herald, war correspondent in the Cuban and South African wars, and in the march upon Peking for the rescue of the legations. The italics are mine. When the soldiers were prohibited from looting, no such prohibitions seemed to operate with the missionaries. For instance, the Reverend Mr. Tewkesbury held a great sale of looted goods, which lasted several days. A day or two after the relief, when looking for a place to sleep in, I met the Reverend Mr. Amant of the American Board of Foreign Missions. He told me he was going to take possession of the house of a wealthy China man, who was an old enemy of his, as he had interfered much in the past with his missionary labors in Peking. A couple of days afterward he did so, and held a great sale of his enemy's effects. I bought a sable cloak at it for one hundred and twenty-five dollars and a couple of statues of Buddha. As the stock became depleted, it was replenished by the efforts of his converts, who were ransacking the houses in the neighborhood. New York Herald, February 18. It is Dr. Smith, not I, who has suggested that persons who act in this way are thieves and extortioners. Exhibit C. Sir Robert Hart in the fortnightly review for January 1901. This witness has been for many years the most prominent and important Englishman in China, and bears an irreproachable reputation for moderation, fairness, and truth-speaking. In closing a description of the revolting scenes which followed the occupation of Peking when the Christian armies, with the proud exception of the American soldiery, let us be thankful for that, gave themselves up to a ruthless orgy of robbery and manipulation, he says. The italics are mine. And even some missionaries took such a leading part in spoiling the Egyptians, for the greater glory of God, that a bystander was heard to say, for a century to come Chinese converts will consider looting and vengeance Christian virtues. It is Dr. Smith, not I, who has suggested that persons who act in this way are thieves and extortioners. According to Mr. Lynch and Mr. Martin, another war correspondent, Dr. Amant helped to spoil several of those Egyptians. Mr. Martin took a photograph of the scene. It was reproduced in the herald. I have it. Exhibit D. In a brief reply to Dr. Smith's open letter to me, I said this in the Tribune. I am italicizing several words for a purpose. Whenever he, Dr. Smith, can produce from the Reverend Mr. Amant an assertion that the son's character-blasting dispatch was not authorized by him, and whenever Dr. Smith can buttress Mr. Amant's disclaimer with a confession from Mr. Chamberlain, the head of the Lafayne News Service in China, that that dispatch was a false invention and unauthorized, the case against Mr. Amant will fall at once to the ground. Exhibit E. Brief cablegrams, referred to above, which passed between Dr. Smith and Dr. Amant, and were published on February 20. Amant P. King. Reported December 24, your collecting 13 times actual losses, using for propagating the Gospel. Are these statements true? Cable specific answer. Smith. Statement untrue. Collected 1-3 for church expenses, additional actual damages, now supporting widows and orphans. Publication 13 times blunder cable. All collections received approval Chinese officials, who are urging further settlements same line. Amant. Only two questions are asked. Specific answers required. No perilous wanderings among the other details of the unhappy dispatch desired. Exhibit F. Letter from Dr. Smith to me, dated March 8. The italics are mine. They tag inaccuracies of statement. Permit me to call your attention to the marked paragraphs in the enclosed papers, and to ask you to note their relation to the two conditions named in your letter to the New York Times of February 15. The first is Dr. Amant's denial of the truth of the dispatch in the New York Sun, of December 24, on which your criticisms of him in the North American Review of February were founded. The second is a correction by the Sun's special correspondent in P. King of the dispatch printed in the Sun of December 24. Since as you state in your letter to the Tribune the case against Mr. Amant would fall to the ground if Mr. Amant denied the truth of the Sun's first dispatch and if the Sun's news agency in P. King also declared that dispatch false and these two conditions have thus been fulfilled, I am sure that upon having these facts brought to your attention you will gladly withdraw the criticisms that were founded on a cable blunder. I think Dr. Smith ought to read me more carefully, then he would not make so many mistakes. Within the narrow space of two paragraphs totaling eleven lines he has scored nine departures from fact out of a possible nine-and-a-half. Now is that parliamentary? I do not treat him like that. Whenever I quote him I am particular not to do him the least wrong or make him say anything he did not say. One. Mr. Amant doesn't deny the truth of the C. E. dispatch, he merely changes one of its phrases without materially changing the meaning and, immaterially, corrects a cable blunder which correction I accept. He was asked no question about the other four fifths of the C. E. dispatch. Two. I said nothing about special correspondence, I named the right and responsible man Mr. Chamberlain. The correction referred to is a repetition of the one I have just accepted which, immaterially, changes thirteen times to one-third extra tax. Three. I did not say anything about the Sun's News Agency, I said Chamberlain. I have every confidence in Mr. Chamberlain but I am not personally acquainted with the others. Four. Once more Mr. Amant didn't deny the truth of the C. E. dispatch but merely made unimportant ammentations of a couple of its many details. Five. I did not say if Mr. Amant denied the truth of the C. E. dispatch, I said if he would assert that the dispatch was not authorized by him. For example, I did not suppose that the charge that the Catholic missionaries wanted 680 Chinamen beheaded was true but I did want to know if Dr. Amant personally authorized that statement and the others as coming from his lips. Another detail, one of my conditions was that Mr. Chamberlain must not stop with confessing that the C. E. was a false invention, he must also confess that it was unauthorized. Dr. Smith has left out that large detail. Six. The Sun's News Agency did not declare the C. E. dispatch false but confined itself to correcting one unimportant detail of its long list, the change of 13 times to one-third extra. Seven. The two conditions have not been fulfilled far from it. Eight. Those details labeled facts are only fancies. Nine. Finally my criticisms were by no means confined to that detail of the C. E. dispatch which we now accept as having been a cable blunder. Setting to one side these nine departures from fact I find that what is left of the eleven lines is straight and true. I am not blaming Dr. Smith for these discrepancies, it would not be right, it would not be fair. I make the proper allowances. He has not been a journalist as I have been, a trade wherein a person is brought to book by the rest of the press so often for divergencies that, by and by, he gets to be almost morbidly afraid to indulge in them. It is so with me. I always have the disposition to tell what is not so. I was born with it. We all have it. But I try not to do it now, because I have found out that it is unsafe. But with the doctor, of course, it is different. Exhibit G. I wanted to get at the whole of the facts as regards the C. E. dispatch, and so I wrote to China for them when I found that the board was not going to do it. But I am not allowed to wait. It seemed quite within the possibilities that a full detail of the facts might furnish me a chance to make an apology to Mr. Ament, a chance which, I give you my word, I would have honestly used, and not abused. But it is no matter. If the board is not troubled about the bulk of that lurid dispatch, why should I be? I answered the apology urging letters of several clergymen with the information that I had written to China for the details, and said I thought it was the only sure way of getting into a decision to do fair and full justice to all concerned. But a couple of them replied that it was not a matter that could wait. That is to say, groping your way out of a jungle in the dark with guesses and conjectures is better than a straight march out in the sunlight of fact. It seems a curious idea. However, those two clergymen were in a large measure right, from their point of view, and the boards, which is putting it in the form of a couple of questions. One, did Dr. Ament collect the assessed damages and thirteen times over? The answer is he did not. He collected only a third over. Two, did he apply the third to the propagation of the gospel? The answer is this correction. He applied it to church expenses. Part or all of the outlay, it appears, goes to supporting widows and orphans. It may be that church expenses and supporting widows and orphans are not part of the machinery for propagating the gospel. I suppose they were, but it isn't any matter. I prefer this phrasing. It is not so blunt as the other. In the opinion of the two clergymen and of the board, these two points are the only important ones in the whole CE dispatch. I accept that. Therefore let us throw out the rest of the dispatch as being no longer a part of Dr. Ament's case. Exhibit H. The two clergymen and the board are quite content with Dr. Ament's answers upon the two points. Upon the first point of the two, my own viewpoint may be indicated by a question. Did Dr. Ament collect from be, whether by compulsion or simple demand, even so much as a penny in payment for murders or depredations without knowing beyond question that be and not another committed the murders or the depredations? Or in other words, did Dr. Ament ever, by chance or through ignorance, make the innocent pay the debts of the guilty? In the article entitled To the Person Sitting in Darkness, I put forward that point in a paragraph taken from McCallum's imaginary history. Exhibit I. When a white boxer kills a Pawnee and destroys his property, the other Pawnees do not trouble to seek him out, they kill any white person that comes along. Also, they make some white village pay deceased heirs the full cash value of deceased together with full cash value of the property destroyed. They also make the village pay, in addition, thirteen times. Note, for thirteen times, read one-third M.T. End of note. The value of that property into a fund for the dissemination of the Pawnee religion, which they regard as the best of all religions for the softening and humanizing of the heart of man, it is their idea that it is only fair and right that the innocent should be made to suffer for the guilty, and that it is better that ninety and nine innocent should suffer than that one guilty person should escape. We all know that Dr. Ament did not bring suspected persons into a newly organized court and try them by just and fair Christian and civilized methods, but proclaimed his conditions and collected damages from the innocent and the guilty alike without any court proceedings at all. Note, in civilized countries, if a mob destroy property in a town, the damage is paid out of the town treasury, and no taxpayer suffers a disproportionate share of the burden. The mayor is not privileged to distribute the burden according to his private notions, sparing himself and his friends, and fleecing persons he holds a spite against, as in the Orient, and the citizen who is too poor to be a taxpayer pays no part of the fine at all. End of note. That he himself and not the villagers made the conditions we learn from his letter of November 13th, already quoted from, the one in which he remarked that, upon that occasion, he brought no soldiers with him. The italics are mine. After our conditions were known, many villagers came of their own accord and brought their money with them. Not all, but many. The Board really believes that those hunted and harried paupers out there were not only willing to strip themselves to pay boxer damages, whether they owed them or not, but were sentimentally eager to do it. Mr. Mant says, in his letter, the villagers were extremely grateful because I brought no foreign soldiers and were glad to settle on the terms proposed. Some of those people know more about theology than they do about human nature. I do not remember encountering even a Christian who was glad to pay money he did not owe, and as for a Chinaman doing it, why, dear me, the thing is unthinkable. We have all seen Chinaman, many Chinaman, but not that kind. It is a new kind, an invention of the Board, and soldiers concerning the collections. Was the one-third extra? Money due? No. Was it a theft, then? Putting aside the one-third extra, what was the remainder of the exacted indemnity if collected from persons not known to owe it, and without Christian and civilized forms of procedure? Was it theft? Was it robbery? In America it would be that. In Christian Europe it would be that. I have great confidence in Dr. Smith's judgment concerning this detail, and he calls it theft and extortion, even in China, for he was talking about the thirteen times at the time that he gave it that strong name. Note, in his open letter Dr. Smith cites Dr. Ament's letter of November 13th, which contains an account of Dr. Ament's collecting tour, then Dr. Smith makes this comment, nothing is said of securing thirteen times the amount of the losses. Further down Dr. Smith quotes praises of Dr. Ament and his work from a letter of the Reverend Dr. Sheffield, and adds this comment, Dr. Sheffield is not accustomed to speak thus in praise of thieves or extortioners or braggards, the references to the thirteen times extra tax. End of note. It is his idea that when you make guilty and innocent villagers pay the appraised damages, and then make them pay thirteen times that besides the thirteen stand for theft and extortion, then what does one-third extra stand for? Will he give that one-third a name? Is it modified theft and extortion? Is that it? The girl who was rebuked for having born an illegitimate child excused herself by saying, but it is such a little one. When the thirteen times extra was alleged it stood for theft and extortion in Dr. Smith's eyes, and he was shocked. But when Dr. Ament showed that he had taken only a third extra instead of thirteen-fold, Dr. Smith was relieved, content, happy. I declare I cannot imagine why. That editor, quoted at the head of this article, was happy about it too. I cannot think why. He thought I ought to make for the amen corner and formulate a prompt apology. To whom and for what? It is too deep for me. To Dr. Smith the thirteen-fold extra clearly stood for theft and extortion, and he was right, distinctly right, indisputably right. He manifestly thinks that when it got scaled away down to a mere one-third a little thing like that was something other than theft and extortion. Why? Only the Board knows. I will try to explain this difficult problem so that the Board can get an idea of it. If a pauper owes me a dollar, and I catch him unprotected and make him pay me fourteen dollars, thirteen of it is theft and extortion. If I make him pay only a dollar and a thirty-three and a third cents, the thirty-three and a third cents are theft and extortion just the same. I will put it in another way, still simpler. If a man owes me one dog, any kind of a dog, the breed is of no consequence, and I—but let it go. The Board would never understand it. It can't understand these involved and difficult things. But if the Board could understand, then I could furnish some more instruction, which is this. The one-third, obtained by theft and extortion, is tainted money, and cannot be purified even by defraying church expenses and supporting widows and orphans with it. It has to be restored to the people it was taken from. Also there is another view of these things. By our Christian code of morals and laws, the whole one dollar and thirty-three and one-third cents, if taken from a man not formally proven to have committed the damage the dollar represents, is theft and extortion. It cannot be honestly used for any purpose at all. It must be handed back to the man it was taken from. Is there no way, then, to justify these thefts and extortions, and make them clean and fair and honourable? Yes, there is. It can be done. It has been done. It continues to be done by revising the Ten Commandments and bringing them down to date, for use in pagan lands. For example, thou shalt not steal, except when it is the custom of the country. This way out is recognised and approved by all the best authorities including the Board. I will cite witnesses. This newspaper cutting above. Dr. Ament declares that all the collections which he made were approved by the Chinese officials. The editor is satisfied. Dr. Ament's cable to Dr. Smith. All collections received approval of Chinese officials. Dr. Ament is satisfied. Letters from eight clergymen. All to the same effect. Dr. Ament merely did as the Chinese do. So they are satisfied. Mr. Ward of the Independent. The Reverend Dr. Washington Gladden. I have mislaid the letters of these gentlemen and cannot quote their words, but they are of the satisfied. The Reverend Dr. Smith in his open letter published in The Tribune. The whole procedure, Dr. Ament's, is in accordance with the custom among the Chinese of holding a village responsible for wrongs suffered in that village and especially making the head man of the village accountable for wrongs committed there. Dr. Smith is satisfied, which means that the Board is satisfied. The head man, why then, this poor rascal, innocent or guilty, must pay the whole bill if he cannot squeeze it out of his poor devil neighbors. But indeed he can be depended upon to try, even to the skinning them of their last brass farthing, their last rag of clothing, the last ounce of food. He can be depended upon to get the indemnity out of them, though it cost stripes and blows, blood, tears and flesh. The Tale of the King and His Treasurer. How strange and remote and romantic and oriental and Arabian nighty it all seems, and is. It brings back the old forgotten tales, and we hear the King say to His Treasurer, Bring me thirty thousand gold tomones. Allah preserve us, Sire, the Treasury is empty. Do you hear? Bring the money, in ten days, or else, send me your head in a basket. I hear in a bay. The Treasurer summons the head man of a hundred villages and says to one, Bring me a hundred gold tomones. To another, bring me five hundred. To another, bring a thousand. In ten days your head is the forfeit. Your slaves kiss your feet. Ah, high and mighty Lord, be merciful to our hard-pressed villagers. They are poor, they are naked, they starve. Oh, these impossible sums, even the half. Go, grind it out of them, crush it out of them, turn the blood of the fathers, the tears of the mothers, the milk of the babes, to money, or take the consequences. Have you heard? His will be done, who is the fount of love and mercy and compassion, who layeth this heavy burden upon us by the hand of his anointed servants. Blessed be his holy name. The father shall bleed, the mother shall faint for hunger, the babe shall perish at the dry breast. The chosen of God have commanded, it shall be as they say. I am not meaning to object to the substitution of pagan customs for Christian. Here and there and now and then, when the Christian ones are inconvenient. No, I like it and admire it. I do it myself. And I admire the alertness of the board in watching out for chances to trade board morals for Chinese morals and get the best of the swap. For I cannot endure those people, they are yellow, and I have never considered yellow becoming. I have always been like the board, perfectly well-meaning, but destitute of the moral sense. Now, one of the main reasons why it is so hard to make the board understand that there is no moral difference between a big filch and a little filch, but only a legal one, is that vacancy in its makeup. Morally there are no degrees in the stealing. The commandment merely says, thou shall not steal, and stops there. It doesn't recognize any difference between stealing a third and stealing thirteen-fold. If I could think of a way to put it before the board in such a plain and— The Watermelons. I have it now. Many years ago, when I was studying for the gallows, I had a dear comrade, a youth who was not in my line, but still a thoroughly good fellow, though devious. He was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down south in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro, then, as now, to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and besides the watermelons in those negro's private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard, but in the private patches of three other negroes there was a number of competent melons. I consulted with my comrade, the understudy of the board. He said that if I would approve his arrangements, he would arrange. I said, consider me the board. I approve. Arrange. So he took a gun, and went and collected three large melons for my brother on the half-shell, and one over. I was greatly pleased, and asked, who gets the extra one? Widows and orphans. A good idea, too. Why didn't you take thirteen? It would have been wrong. A crime, in fact. Theft and extortion. What is the one-third extra, the odd melon? The same? It caused him to reflect, but there was no result. The justice of the peace was a stern man. On the trial he found fault with the scheme, and required us to explain upon what we based our strange conduct, as he called it. The understudy said, On the custom of the negroes, they all do it. The justice forgot his dignity, and descended to sarcasm. Custom of the negroes. Are our morals so inadequate that we have to borrow of niggers? Then he said to the jury, Three melons were owing. They were collected from persons not proven to owe them. This is theft. They were collected by compulsion. This is extortion. A melon was added for the widows and orphans. It was owed by no one. It is another theft. Another extortion. Return it once it came, with the others. It is not permissible here to apply to any object goods dishonestly obtained, not even to the feeding of widows and orphans, for that would be to put a shame upon charity and dishonor it. He said it in open court before everybody, and to me it did not seem very kind. A clergyman in a church, he reminds me, with a touch of reproach, that many of the missionaries are good men, kind-hearted, earnest, devoted to their work. Certainly they are. No one is disputing it. Instead of many, he could have said almost all, and still said the truth, no doubt. I know many missionaries. I have met them all about the globe, and have known only one or two who could not fill that bill and answer to the question. Almost all comes near to being a proportion and a description applicable also to lawyers, authors, editors, merchants, manufacturers, in fact, to most gills and vocations. Without a doubt Dr. Ament did what he believed to be right, and I concede that when a man is doing what he believes to be right, there is argument on his side. I differ with Dr. Ament, but that is only because he got his training from the board, and I got mine outside. Neither of us is responsible altogether. RECAPITULATION But there is no need to sum up. Mr. Ament has acknowledged the one third extra, no other witnesses necessary. The Reverend Dr. Smith has carefully considered the act and labeled it with a stern name, and his verdict seems to have no flaw in it. The morals of the act are Chinese, but are approved by the board, and by some of the clergy and some of the newspapers as being a valuable improvement upon Christian ones, which leaves me with a closed mouth, though with a pain in my heart. Is the American board on trial? Do I think that Dr. Ament and certain of his fellow missionaries are as bad as their conduct? No, I do not. They are the product of their training, and now that I understand the whole case and where they got their ideals, and that they are merely subordinates and subject to authority, I comprehend that they are rather accessories than principles, and that their acts only show faulty heads curiously trained not bad hearts. Mainly, as it seems to me, it is the American board that is on trial. And again, it is a case of the head, not of the heart. That it has a heart which has never harbored an evil intention no one will deny, no one will question. The board's history can silence any challenge on that score. The board's heart is not in court. It is its head that is on trial. It is a sufficiently strange head. It's way's baffle comprehension. Its ideas are like no one else's. Its methods are novelties to the practical world. Its judgments are surprises. When one thinks it is going to speak and must speak, it is silent. When one thinks it ought to be silent and must be silent, it speaks. Put your finger where you think it ought to be. It is not there. Put it where you think it ought not to be. There you find it. When its servant in China seemed to be charging himself with amazing things in a reputable journal, in a dispatch which was copied into many other papers, the board was as silent about it as any dead man could have been who was informed that his house was burning over his head. An exchange of cable-grams could have enabled it within two days to prove to the world, possibly, that the damaging dispatch had not proceeded from the mouth of its servant. Yet it sat silent and asked no questions about the matter. It was silent during thirty-eight days. Then the dispatch came into prominence again. It chanced that I was the occasion of it. A break in the stillness followed. In what form? An exchange of cable-grams resulting in proof that the damaging dispatch had not been authorized? No. In the form of an open letter by the corresponding Secretary of the American Board, the Reverend Dr. Smith, in which it was argued that Dr. Ament could not have said and done the things set forth in the dispatch. Surely this was bad politics. A repudiating telegram would have been worth more than a library of argument. An extension of the silence would have been better than the open letter, I think. I thought so at the time. It seemed to me that mistakes enough had been made and harm enough done. I thought it questionable policy to publish the letter, for I did not think it likely that Dr. Ament would disown the dispatch. And I telegraphed that to the Reverend Dr. Smith. Personally I had nothing against Dr. Ament, and that is my attitude yet. Once more it was a good time for an extension of the silence, but no, the Board has its own ways, and one of them is to do the unwise thing when occasion offers. After having waited fifty-six days it cabled to Dr. Ament. No one can divine why it did so then, instead of fifty-six days earlier. Note! The Cablegram went on the day, February 18, that Mr. George Lynch's account of the looting was published. See Exhibit B. It seems a pity it did not inquire about the looting, and get it denied. It got a fatal reply, and was not aware of it. That was that curious confession about the one-third extra. Its application not to the propagation of the Gospel, but only to church expenses, support of widows and orphans. And on top of this confession that other strange one revealing the dizzying fact that our missionaries, who went to China to teach Christian morals and justice, had adopted pagan morals and justice in their place. That Cablegram was dynamite. It seems odd that the Board did not see that that revelation made the case far worse than it was before, for there was a saving doubt before, a doubt which was a Gibraltar for strength, and should have been carefully left undisturbed. Why did the Board allow that revelation to get into print? Why did the Board not suppress it, and keep still? But no. In the Board's opinion this was once more the time for speech. Hence Dr. Smith's latest letter to me, suggesting that I speak also, a letter which is a good enough letter, barring its nine defects, but is another evidence that the Board's head is not as good as its heart. A missionary is a man who is pretty nearly all heart, else he would not be in a calling which requires of him such large sacrifices of one kind and another. He is made up of faith, zeal, courage, sentiment, emotion, enthusiasm, and so he is a mixture of poet, devotee, and knight-errant. He exiles himself from home and friends and the scenes and associations that are dearest to him, patiently endures discomforts, privations, discouragements, goes with good pluck into dangers which he knows may cost him his life, and when he must suffer death, willingly makes that supreme sacrifice for his cause. Sometimes the head-piece of that kind of a man can be of an inferior sort, and errors of judgment can result, as we have seen. Then, for his protection, as it seems to me, he ought to have at his back a Board able to know a blunder when it sees one and prompt to bring him back upon his right course when he strays from it. That is to say, I think the captain of a ship ought to understand navigation. Whether he does or not, he will have to take a captain's share of the blame if the crew bring the vessel to grief. Mark Twain To My Missionary Critics Read by John Greenman A Defence of General Funston by Mark Twain Today is the great birthday, and it was observed so widely in the earth that differences in longitudinal time made curious work with some of the cable testimonies of respect paid to the sublime name which the date calls up in our minds. For although they were all being offered at about the same hour, several of them were yesterday to us and several were tomorrow. There was a reference in the papers to General Funston. Neither Washington nor Funston was made in a day. It took a long time to accumulate the materials. In each case, the basis or moral skeleton of the man was inborn disposition, a thing which is as permanent as rock and never goes any actual and genuine change between cradle and grave. In each case, the moral flesh bulk, that is to say, character, was built and shaped around the skeleton by training, association, and circumstances. Given a crooked disposition skeleton, no power nor influence in the earth can mold a permanently shapely form it. Training, association, and circumstances can trust it and brace it and prop it and strain it and crowd it into an artificial shapeliness that can endure till the end, deceiving not only the spectator but the man himself. But there is nothing there but artificiality, and if at any time the props and trusses chance to be removed, the form will collapse into its proper and native crookedness. Washington did not create the basic skeleton, disposition, that was in him, it was born there, and the merit of its perfection was not his, it, and only it, moved him to seek and prefer associations which were contending to its spirit, to welcome influences which pleased it and satisfied it, and to repeal or be indifferent to influences which were not to its taste. Moment by moment, day by day, year by year, it stood in the ceaseless sweep of minute influences, automatically arresting and retaining, like a magnet of mercury, all dust particles of gold that came, and with automatic scorn repelling certain dust particles of trash, and with as automatic indifference allowing the rest of that base kinship to go by unnoticed. It had a native affinity for all influences fine and great, and gave them hospitable welcome and permanent shelter. It had a native aversion for all influences mean and gross, and passed them on. It chose its subject associations for him. It chose his influences for him. It chose his ideals for him. And out of its patiently gathered materials it built and shaped his golden character. And we give him the credit. We give God credit and praise for being all wise and all powerful, but that is quite another matter. No exterior contributor, no birth commission conferred these possessions upon him. He did it himself. But Washington's disposition was born in him. He did not create it. It was the architect of his character. His character was the architect of his achievements. If my disposition had been born in him and his in me, the map of history would have been changed. It is our privilege to admire the splendor of the sun, and the beauty of the rainbow, and the character of Washington. But there is no occasion to praise them for these qualities, since they did not create the source whence the qualities sprang. The sun's fires, the light upon the falling raindrop, the sane and clean and benignant disposition born to the father of his country. Is there a value then in having a Washington since we may not concede to him personal merit for what he was and did? Necessarily there is a value. A value so immense that it defies all estimate. Acceptable outside influences were the materials out of which Washington's native disposition built Washington's character and fitted him for his achievements. Suppose there hadn't been any. Suppose he had been born and reared in a pirate's cave. The acceptable materials would have been lacking. The Washingtonian character would not have been built. Fortunately for us and for the world, and for future ages and peoples, he was born where the sort of influences and associations acceptable to his disposition were findable, where the building of his character at its best and highest was possible, and where the accident of favorable circumstances was present to furnish it a conspicuous field for the full exercise and exhibition of its commanding capabilities. Did Washington's great value then lie in what he accomplished? No. That was only a minor value. His major value, his vast value, his immeasurable value to us and to the world and to future ages and peoples lies in his permanent and sky-reaching conspicuousness as an influence. We are made, brick by brick, of influences, patiently built up around the framework of our born dispositions. It is the sole process of construction. There is no other. Every man and woman and child is an influence. A daily and hourly influence which never ceases from work and never ceases from affecting, for good or evil, the characters about it, some contributing gold dust, some contributing trash dust, but in either case helping on the building and never stopping to rest. The filmmaker helps to build his two dozen associates. The pickpocket helps to build his four dozen associates. The village clergyman helps to build his five hundred associates. The renowned bank robbers name and fame help to build his hundred associates and three thousand persons whom he has never seen. The renowned philanthropists labors and the benevolent millionaires' gifts move to kindly service and generous outlays of money, a hundred thousand persons whom they have never met and never will meet. And to the building of the character of every individual thus moved these movers have added a brick. The unprincipled newspaper adds a baseness to a million decaying character fabrics every day. The high principled newspaper adds a daily betterment to the character of another million. The swiftly enriched wrecker and robber of railway systems lowers the commercial morals of a whole nation for three generations. A Washington standing upon the world's utmost summit, eternally visible, eternally closed in light, a serene, inspiring, heartening example in admonition, is an influence which raises the level of character in all receptive men and peoples, alien and domestic, and the term of its gracious work is not measurable by fleeting generations but only by the lingering march of the centuries. Washington was more and greater than the father of a nation, he was the father of its patriotism, patriotism at its loftiest and best. And so powerful was the influence which he left behind him that that golden patriotism remained undimmed and unsullied for a hundred years lacking one. And so fundamentally right-hearted are our people by grace of that long and ennobling teaching that today already they are facing back for home. They are laying aside their foreign-born and foreign bread-imported patriotism, and resuming that which Washington gave to their fathers, which is American, and the only American, which lasted ninety-nine years and is good for a million more. Doubt, doubt that we did right by the Filipinos, is rising steadily higher and higher in the nation's breast. Conviction will follow doubt. The nation will speak. Its will is law. There is no other sovereign on this soil, and in that day we shall write such unfairness as we have done. We shall let go our obsequious hold on the rear skirts of the septored land thieves of Europe and be what we were before, a real world power, and the chiefest of them all by right of the only clean hands in Christendom, the only hands guiltless of the sordid plunder of any helpless people's stolen liberties, hands reclensed in the patriotism of Washington, and once more fit to touch the hem of the revered shade's garment and stand in its presence unashamed. It was Washington's influence that made Lincoln and all other real patriots the Republic has known. It was Washington's influence that made the soldiers who saved the Union, and that influence will save us always and bring us back to the fold when we stray. And so when a Washington has given us, or a Lincoln, or a Grant, what should we do? Knowing as we do that a conspicuous influence for good is worth more than a billion obscure ones, without doubt the logic of it is that we should highly value it and make a vestal flame of it, and keep it briskly burning in every way we can, in the nursery, in the school, in the college, in the pulpit, in the newspaper, even in Congress, if such a thing were possible. The proper inborn disposition was required to start a Washington. The acceptable influences and circumstances and a large field were required to develop and complete him, the same with Funston. Two. The war was over. End of 1900. A month later the mountain village of the defeated and hunted, and now powerless, but not yet hopeless, Filipino chief, was discovered. His army was gone, his republic extinguished, his abless statesmen deported, his generals all in their graves, or prisoners of war. The memory of his worthy dream had entered upon a historic life to be an inspiration to unfortunate patriots in other centuries. The dream itself was dead beyond resurrection, though he could not believe it. Now came his capture. An admiring author, note, Aguinaldo by Edwin Wildman, Lathrop Publishing Company, Boston, end of note, shall tell us about it. His account can be trusted, for it is correctly synopsized from General Funston's own voluntary confession made by him at the time. The italics are mine. It was not until February 1901 that his actual hiding-place was discovered. The clue was in the shape of a letter from Aguinaldo commanding his cousin Baldormero Aguinaldo to send him four hundred armed men, the bearer to act as a guide to the same. The order was cipher, but among other effects captured at various times a copy of the insurgent cipher was found. The insurgent courier was convinced of the error of his ways, though by exactly what means history does not reveal, and offered to lead the way to Aguinaldo's place of hiding. Here was an opportunity that suggested an adventure equal to anything in penny-awful fiction. It was just the kind of a daredevil exploit that appealed to the romantic Funston. It was something out of the ordinary for a brigadier general to leave his command and turn into a scout, but Funston was irresistible. He formulated a scheme and asked General MacArthur's permission. It was impossible to refuse the daring adventurer, the hero of the Rio Grande, anything. So Funston set to work imitating the peculiar handwriting of Lacuna, the insurgent officer to whom Aguinaldo's communication referred. Some little time previous to the capture of the tagalog courier, several of Lacuna's letters were found, together with Aguinaldo's cipher code. Having perfected Lacuna's signature, Funston wrote two letters on February 24 and 28, acknowledging Aguinaldo's communication and informing him that he, Lacuna, was sending him a few of the best soldiers in his command. Added to this neat forgery, General Funston dictated a letter which was that the relief force had surprised and captured a detachment of Americans, taking five prisoners whom they were bringing to him because of their importance. This ruse was employed to explain the presence of the five Americans—General Funston, Captain Hazard, Captain Newton, Lieutenant Hazard, and General Funston's aide Lieutenant Kitchell, who were to accompany the expedition. Seventy-eight Macabedes, hereditary enemies of the tagalogs, were chosen by Funston to form the body of the command. These fearless and hardy natives fell into the scheme with a vengeance. Three tagalogs and one Spaniard were also invited. The Macabedes were fitted out in cast-off insurgent uniforms, and the Americans donned field-worn uniforms of privates. Three days' rations were provided, and each man was given a rifle. The Vicksburg was chosen to take the daring imposters to some spot on the east coast near Pelanan, where Aguinaldo was in hiding. Arriving off the coast at Casigdán, some distance from the insurgent hidden capital, the party was landed. Three Macabedes, who spoke tagalog fluently, were sent into the town to notify the natives that they were bringing additional forces and important American prisoners to Aguinaldo and request of the local authorities, guides and assistants. The insurgent president readily consented, and the little party, after refreshing themselves and exhibiting their prisoners, started over the ninety-mile trail to Pelanan, a mountain retreat on the coast of the Isabela province. Over the stony declevities and through the thick jungle, across bridgeless streams and up narrow passes, the footsore and bone-racked adventurers tramped until their food was exhausted, and they were too weak to move, though but eight miles from Aguinaldo's rendezvous. A messenger was sent forward to inform Aguinaldo of their position and to beg for food. The rebel chieftain promptly replied by dispatching rice and a letter to the officer in command, instructing him to treat the American prisoners well but to leave them outside the town. What better condition could the ingenious Funston have himself dictated? On the twenty-third of March the party reached Pelanan. Aguinaldo sent out eleven men to take charge of the American prisoners, but Funston and his associates succeeded in dodging them and scattering themselves in the jungle until they passed on to meet the Americans whom the insurgents were notified were left behind. Immediately joining his command, Funston ordered his little band of daredevils to march boldly into the town and present themselves to Aguinaldo. At the insurgent headquarters they were received by Aguinaldo's bodyguard, dressed in blue drill uniforms and white hats drawn up in military form. The spokesman so completely hoodwinked Aguinaldo that he did not suspect the ruse. In the meantime the Macabebes maneuvered around into advantageous positions, directed by the Spaniard, until all were in readiness. Then he shouted, Macabebes, now is your turn! Whereupon they emptied their rifles into Aguinaldo's bodyguard. The Americans joined in the skirmish and two of Aguinaldo's staff were wounded but escaped, the treasurer of the revolutionary government surrendering. The rest of the Filipino officers got away. Aguinaldo accepted his capture with resignation, though greatly in fear of the vengeance of the Macabebes. But General Funston's assurance of his personal safety set his mind easy on that point, and he calmed down and discussed the situation. He was greatly cast down at his capture and asserted that by no other means would he have been taken alive. An admission which added all the more to Funston's achievement for Aguinaldo's was a difficult and desperate case, and demanded extraordinary methods. Some of the customs of war are not pleasant to the civilian, but ages upon ages of training have reconciled us to them as being justifiable, and we accept them and make no demure, even when they give us an extra twinge. Every detail of Funston's scheme, but one, has been employed in war in the past and stands acquitted of blame by history. By the custom of war it is permissible, in the interest of an enterprise like the one under consideration, for a brigadier general, if he be of the sort that can so choose, to persuade or bribe a courier to betray his trust, to remove the badges of his honorable rank and disguise himself, to lie, to practice treachery, to forge, to associate with himself persons properly fitted by training an instinct for the work, to accept a courteous welcome and assassinate the welcomeers while their hands are still warm from the friendly handshake. By the custom of war all these things are innocent, none of them is blameworthy, all of them are justifiable, none of them is new, all of them have been done before, although not by a brigadier general. But there is one detail which is new, absolutely new, it has never been resorted to before in any age of the world, in any country, among any people, savage or civilized. It was the one meant by Naginaldo when he said that by no other means would he have been taken alive. When a man is exhausted by hunger to the point where he is too weak to move, he has a right to make supplication to his enemy to save his failing life. But if he takes so much as one taste of that food, which is holy, by the precept of all ages and all nations he is barred from lifting his hand against that enemy for that time. It was left to a brigadier general of volunteers in the American army to put shame upon a custom which even the degraded Spanish friars had respected. We promoted him for it! Our unsuspecting president was in the act of taking his murderer by the hand when the man shot him down. The amazed world dwelt upon that damning fact, brooded over it, discussed it, blushed for it, said it, put a blot and a shame upon our race. Yet, bad as it was, he had not, dying of starvation, begged food of the president to strengthen his failing forces for his treacherous work. He did not proceed against the life of a benefactor who had just saved his own. April 14. I have been absent several weeks in the West Indies. I will now resume this defense. It seems to me that General Funston's appreciation of the capture needs editing. It seems to me that in his after-dinner speeches he spreads out the heroisms of it, I say it with reference, and subject to correction, with an almost too generous hand. He is a brave man. His dearest enemy will cordially grant him that credit. For his sake it is a pity that somewhat of that quality was not needed in the episode under consideration that he would have furnished it no one doubts, but by his own showing he ran but one danger, that of starving. He and his party were well disguised in dishonored uniforms, American and insurgent. They greatly outnumber Dagnaldo's guard. Note. 89 to 48. Funston's Lotus Club Confessions. End of note. By his forgeries and falsehoods he had lulled suspicion to sleep. His coming was expected. His way was prepared. His course was through a solitude. Unfriendly interruption was unlikely. His party were well armed. They would catch their prey with welcoming smiles in their faces, and with hospitable hands extended for the friendly shake. Nothing would be necessary but to shoot these people down. That is what they did. It was hospitality repaid in a brand new, up-to-date, modern civilization fashion, and would be admired by many. The spokesman so completely hoodwinked Dagnaldo that he did not suspect the roosts. In the meantime the Maccabebes maneuvered around into advantageous positions directed by the Spaniard until all were in readiness. Then he shouted, Maccabebes, now is your turn, whereupon they emptied their rifles into Dagnaldo's bodyguard, from Wildman's book already quoted. The utter completeness of the surprise, the total absence of suspicion which had been secured by the forgeries and falsehoods is best brought out in Funston's humorous account of the episode in his rollicking speeches. The one he thought the president said he wanted to see republished. Though it turned out that this was only a dream. Dream of a reporter, the general says. The Maccabebes fired on those men and two fell dead. The others retreated, firing as they ran. And I might say here that they retreated with such great alacrity and enthusiasm that they dropped eighteen rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Sigismondo rushed back into the house, pulled his revolver, and told the insurgent officers to surrender. They all threw up their hands except Villia, Dagnaldo's chief of staff. He had on one of those newfangled Mauser revolvers, and he wanted to try it. But before he had the Mauser out of its scabbard, he was shot twice. Sigismondo was a pretty fair marksman himself. Alambra was shot in the face. He jumped out of the window, the house, by the way, stood on the bank of the river. He went out of the window and went clear down to the river, the water being twenty-five feet below the bank. He escaped, swam across the river and got away, and surrendered five months afterwards. Villia, shot in the shoulder, followed him out of the window and into the river, but the Maccababes saw him and ran down to the river bank, and they waded in and fished him out and kicked him all the way up the bank and asked him how he liked it. Laughter! While it is true that the dare devils were not in danger upon this occasion, they were in awful peril at one time, in peril of a death so awful that swift extinction by bullet, by the axe, by the sword, by the rope, by drowning, by fire, is a kindly mercy contrasted with it, a death so awful that it holds its place unchallenged as the supremist of human agonies, death by starvation. Aguinaldo saved them from that. These being the facts, we come now to the question. Is Funston to blame? I think not. And for that reason I think too much is being made of this matter. He did not make his own disposition, it was born with him. It chose his ideals for him, he did not choose them. It chose the kind of society he had liked, the kind of comrades it preferred, and imposed them upon him, rejecting the other kinds. He could not help this. It admired everything that Washington did not admire, and hospitality received and coddled everything that Washington would have turned out of doors. But it, and it only, was to blame not Funston. His it took as naturally to moral slag as Washington's took to moral gold, but only it was to blame not Funston. Its moral sense, if it had any, was colorblind, but this was no fault of Funston's, and he is not chargeable with the results. It had a native predilection for unsavory conduct, but it would be in the last degree unfair to hold Funston to blame for the outcome of his infirmity, as clearly unfair as it would be to blame him because his conscience leaked out through one of his pours when he was little, a thing which he could not help, and he couldn't have raised it anyway. It, was able to say to an enemy, have pity on me, I am starving, I am too weak to move, give me food, I am your friend, I am your fellow patriot, your fellow Filipino, and I am fighting for our dear country's liberties like you. Have pity, give me food, save my life, there is no other help. And it was able to refresh and restore its marionette with the food, and then shoot down the giver of it while his hand was stretched out in welcome, like the Presidents. Yet if blame there was, and guilt, and treachery, and baseness, they are not Funston's, but only its. It has the noble gift of humor, and can make a banquet almost die with laughter as a funny incident to tell about. This one will bear reading again, and over and over again, in fact. The Maccababes fired on those men and two fell dead, the others retreated, firing as they ran, and I might say here that they retreated with such alacrity and enthusiasm that they dropped eighteen rifles and a thousand rounds of ammunition. Sigismondo rushed back into the house, pulled his revolver and told the insurgent officers to surrender. They all threw up their hands, except Villia, Aquinaldo's chief of staff. He had on one of those new-fangled Mauser revolvers, and he wanted to try it. But before he had the Mauser out of its scabbard, he was shot twice. Sigismondo was a pretty fair marksman himself. Alhambra was shot in the face. He jumped out of the window, the house, by the way, stood on the bank of the river. He went out of the window and went clear down into the river, the water being twenty-five feet below the bank. He escaped, swam across the river and got away, and surrendered five months afterwards. Villia, shot in the shoulder, followed him out of the window and into the river. But the Maccababes saw him and ran down to the river bank, and they waded in and fished him out, and kicked him all the way up the bank, and asked him how he liked it. Laughter. This was a wounded man. But it is only it that is speaking, not Funston. With youthful glee it can see sink down in death the simple creatures who had answered its fainting prayer for food, and without remorse it can note the reproachful look in their dimming eyes. But in fairness we must remember that this is only it, not Funston. By proxy, in the person of its born servant, it can do its strange work, and practice its ingratitudes and amazing treacheries, while wearing the uniform of the American soldier and marching under the authority of the American flag. And it, not Funston, comes home now to teach us children what patriotism is. Surely it ought to know. It is plain to me, and I think it ought to be plain to all, that Funston is not in any way to blame for the things he has done, does, thinks, and says. Now, then, we have Funston. He has happened, and is on our hands. The question is, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to meet the emergency? We have seen what happened in Washington's case. He became a colossal example, an example to the whole world, and for all time, because his name and deeds went everywhere, and inspired, as they still inspire and will always inspire, admiration, and compel emulation. Then the thing for the world to do in the present case is to turn the guilt front of Funston's evil notoriety to the rear, and expose the back aspect of it, the right and black aspect of it, to the youth of the land. Otherwise he will become an example and a boy admiration, and will most sorrowfully and grotesquely bring his breed of patriotism into competition with Washington's. This competition has already begun, in fact. Some may not believe it, but it is nevertheless true that there are now public school teachers and superintendents who are holding up Funston as a model hero and patriot in the schools. If this Funstonian boom continues, Funstonism will presently affect the army. In fact, this has already happened. There are weak-headed and weak-principled officers in all armies, and these are always ready to imitate successful notoriety-breeding methods, let them be good or bad. The fact that Funston has achieved notoriety by paralyzing the universe with a fresh and hideous idea is sufficient for this kind, they will call that hand if they can, and go at one better when the chance offers. Funston's example has bred many imitators and many ghastly additions to our history. The torturing of Filipinos by the awful water cure, for instance, to make them confess, what, truth, or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless. Yet upon such evidence American officers have actually, but you know about those atrocities which the War Office has been hiding a year or two, and about General Smith's now world-celebrated order of massacre, thus summarized by the press from Major Waller's testimony. Kill and burn. This is no time to take prisoners. The more you kill and burn the better. Kill all above the age of ten. Make Samar a howling wilderness. You see what Funston's example has produced, just in this little while, even before he produced the example. It has advanced our civilization ever so far, fully as far as Europe advanced it, in China. Also, no doubt, it was Funston's example that made us, and England, copy Weyler's Reconcentrato horror after the pair of us, with our Sunday school smirk on, and our goody-goody noses upturned toward heaven, had been calling him a fiend. And the fearful earthquake out there in Krakatau that destroyed the island and killed two million people—no, that could not have been Funston's example. I remember now. He was not born then. However, for all these things I blame only his IT, not him. In conclusion, I have defended him as well as I could, and indeed I have found it quite easy, and have removed prejudice from him, and rehabilitated him in the public esteem and regard, I think. I was not able to do anything for his IT, it being out of my jurisdiction, and out of Funston's and everybody's. As I have shown, Funston is not to blame for his fearful deed, and if I tried, I might also show that he is not to blame for our still holding in bondage the man he captured by unlawful means, and who would not any more rightfully our prisoner and spoil than he would be if he were stolen money. He is entitled to his freedom. If he were a king of a great power, or an ex-president of our republic, instead of an ex-president of a destroyed and abolished little republic, civilization, with a large C, would criticize and complain until he got it. Mark Twain. P.S. April 16. The President is speaking up this morning, just as this goes to the printer, and there is no uncertain sound about the note. It is the speech and spirit of a President of a people, not of a party, and we all like it, traitors and all. I think I may speak for the other traitors, for I am sure they feel as I do about it. I will explain that we get our title from the Funstonian patriots, free of charge. They are always doing us little compliments like that. They are just born flatterers, those boys. M.T. A DEFENSE OF GENERAL FUNSTON. Read by John Greenman. Section 10 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. King Leopold Soliloquy. Part 1. The publisher's desire to state that Mr. Clemens declines to accept any pecuniary return from this booklet, as it is his wish that all proceeds of sales above the cost of publication shall be used in furthering effort for relief of the people of the Congo State. The P. R. Warren Company, Boston, Massachusetts, January 1, 1906. It is I. Leopold II. It is the absolute master of the whole of the internal and external activity of the independent state of the Congo. The organization of justice, the army, the industrial and commercial regimes are established freely by himself. He would say, and with greater accuracy than did Louis XIV, the state it is I. Professor F. Cartier, Brussels University. Let us repeat after so many others what has become a platitude. The success of the African work is the work of a soul-directing will, without being hampered by the hesitation of timorous politicians carried out under his soul-responsibility. Intelligent, thoughtful, conscious of the perils and the advantages, discounting with an admirable prescience the great results of a near future. M. Alfred Poskine in Bilan Congolais. King Leopold Soliloquy, a defense of his Congo rule, by Mark Twain. Second edition, the P. R. Warren Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1905. Throws down pamphlets, which he has been reading. Excitedly combs his flowing spread of whiskers with his fingers. Pounds the table with his fists. Let's off brisk volleys of unsanctified language and brief intervals. Repentantly drooping his head between volleys and kissing Louis XI's crucifix hanging from his neck, accompanying the kisses with mumbled apologies. Presently vises, flushed and perspiring, and walks the floor, gesticulating. Blank, blank. Blank, blank. If I had them by the throat, hastily kisses the crucifix and mumbles, in these twenty years I have spent millions to keep the press of the two hemispheres quiet, and still these leaks keep on occurring. I have spent other millions on religion and art what do I get for it? Nothing. Not a compliment. These generosity's are studdedly ignored in print. In print I get nothing but slanders and slanders again, and still slanders and slanders on top of slanders. Grant them true, but what of it? They are slanders all the same, when uttered against a king. Miscreants! They are telling everything. Oh, everything! I went pilgrimming among the powers in tears with my mouth full of Bible and my pelt oozing piety at every pore, and implored them to place the vast and rich and populous Congo-free state in trust in my hands as their agent, so that I might root out slavery and stop the slave raids and lift up those twenty-five millions of rental and harmless blacks out of darkness into light, the light of our blessed Redeemer, the light that streams from his holy word, the light that makes glorious our noble civilization, lift them up and dry their tears, and fill their bruised hearts with joy and gratitude, lift them up and make them comprehend that they were no longer outcasts and forsaken, but our very brothers in Christ, how America and thirteen great European states wept in sympathy with me and were persuaded, how their representatives met in convention in Berlin and made me head foreman and superintendent of the Congo state, and drafted out my powers and limitations, carefully guarding the persons and liberties and properties of the natives against hurt and harm, forbidding whiskey traffic and gun traffic, providing courts of justice, making commerce free and fetterless to the merchants and traders of all nations, and welcoming and safeguarding all missionaries of all creeds and denominations. They have told how I planned and prepared my establishment and selected my horde of peoples, pals and pimps of mine, unspeakable Belgians every one, and hoisted my flag and took in a President of the United States and got him to be the first to recognize it and salute it. Oh, well, let them blackguard me if they like. It is a deep satisfaction to me to remember that I was a shade too smart for that nation that thinks so smart. Yes, I certainly did bunco a Yankee as those people phrase it. Pirate flag? Let them call it so, perhaps it is. All the same, they were the first to salute it. These meddlesome American missionaries, these frank British consuls, these blabbering Belgian-born trader rebels. Those tiresome parrots are always talking, always telling. They have told how for twenty years I have ruled the Congo State not as a trustee of the powers, an agent, a subordinate, a foreman, but as a sovereign, sovereign over a fruitful domain four times as large as the German Empire, sovereign absolute, irresponsible above all law, trampling the Berlin-made Congo charter underfoot, barring out all foreign traders but myself, restricting commerce to myself through concessionaires who are my creatures and confederates, seizing and holding the state as my personal property, the whole of its vast revenues as my private swag, mine solely mine, claiming and holding its millions of people as my private property, my serfs, my slaves, their labor mine with or without wage, the food they raise not their property, but mine, the rubber, the ivory and all the other riches of the land, mine, mine solely, and gathered for me by the men, the women, and the little children under compulsion of lash and bullet, fire, starvation, annihilation, and the halter. These pests! It is, as I say, they have kept back nothing. They have revealed these and yet other details, which shame should have kept them silent about, since they were exposures of a king, a sacred personage and immune from reproach, by right of his selection and appointment to his great office by God himself, a king whose acts cannot be criticized without blasphemy, since God has observed them from the beginning and has manifested no dissatisfaction with them, nor shown disapproval of them, nor hampered nor interrupted them in any way. By this sign I recognize his approval of what I have done, his cordial and glad approval, I am sure I may say. Blessed, crowned, beatified with his great reward, this golden reward, this unspeakably precious reward, why should I care for men's cursings and revilings of me? With a sudden outburst of feeling, may they roast a million eons in, catches his breath, and effusively kisses the crucifix, sorrowfully murmurs, I shall get myself damned yet with these indiscretions of speech. Yes, they go on telling everything these chatterers. They tell how I levy incredibly burdensome taxes upon the natives, taxes which are pure theft, taxes which they must satisfy by gathering rubber under hard and constantly harder conditions, and by raising and furnishing food supplies gratis, and it all comes out that when they fall short of their tasks, through hunger, sickness, despair, and ceaseless and exhausting labor without rest, and forsake their homes and flee to the woods to escape punishment, my black soldiers, drawn from unfriendly tribes and instigated and directed by my Belgians, hunt them down and butcher them and burn their villages, reserving some of the girls. They tell it all, how I am wiping a nation of friendless creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket-sake, and how every shilling I get costs a rape, a mutilation, or a life. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there of a convenient stripe, as they phrase it, to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to him, who is all mercy and love, and who is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer. They tell only what is against me, they will not tell what is in my favor. They tell how England required of me a commission of inquiry into Congo atrocities, and how to quiet that meddling country, with its disagreeable Congo reform association, made up of Earl's and Bishops and John Morley's and University grandees and other dudes, more interested in other people's business than in their own. I appointed it. Did it stop their mouths? No. They merely pointed out that it was a commission composed wholly of my Congo butchers, the very men whose acts were to be inquired into. They said it was equivalent to appointing a commission of wolves to inquire into depredations committed upon a sheepfold. Nothing can satisfy a cursed English man. Note. This visit had a more fortunate result than was anticipated. One member of the commission was a leading Congo official, another official of the government in Belgium, the third a Swiss jurist. It was feared that the work of the commission would not be more genuine than that of innumerable so-called investigations by local officials, but it appears that the commission was met by a very avalanche of awful testimony. One who was present at a public hearing writes, men of stone would be moved by the stories that are being unfolded as the commission probes into the awful history of rubber collection. It is evident the commissioners were moved. Of their report and its bearing upon the international issue presented by the conceded conditions in the Congo State, something is said on the supplementary page of this pamphlet. Certain reforms were ordered by the commission in the one section visited, but the latest word is that after its departure conditions were soon worse than before its coming. M.T. End of note. And were the fault-finders frank with my private character? They could not be more so if I were a plebeian, a peasant, a mechanic. They remind the world that from the earliest days my house has been chapel and brothel combined and both industries working full time, that I practiced cruelties upon my queen and my daughters and supplemented them with daily shame and humiliations, that when my queen lay in the happy refuge of her coffin and a daughter implored me on her knees to let her look for the last time upon her mother's face I refused, and that three years ago, not being satisfied with the stolen spoils of a whole alien nation, I robbed my own child of her property and appeared by proxy in court, a spectacle to the civilized world, to defend the act and complete the crime. It is as I have said. They are unfair, unjust. They will resurrect and give new currency to such things as those or to any other things that count against me, but they will not mention any act of mine that is in my favor. I have spent more money on art than any other monarch of my time and they know it. Do they speak of it? Do they tell about it? No, they do not. They prefer to work up what they call ghastly statistics into offensive kindergarten object lessons whose purpose is to make sentimental people shudder and prejudice them against me. The remark that if the innocent blood shed in the Congo State by King Leopold were put in buckets and the buckets every side by side, the line would stretch two thousand miles. If the skeletons of his ten millions of starved and butchered dead could rise up and march in single file, it would take them seven months and four days to pass a given point. If compacted together in a body they would occupy more ground than St. Louis covers. World fair and all. If they should all clap their bony hands at once, the grisly crash would be heard at a distance of... blank. Damnation it makes me tired! And they do similar miracles with the money I have distilled from that blood and put into my pocket. They pile it into Egyptian pyramids. They carpet Saharas with it. They spread it across the sky and the shadow it casts makes a twilight in the earth. And the tears I have caused. The hearts I have broken. Oh, nothing can persuade them to let them alone. Meditative pause. Well, no matter I did beat the Yankees anyway, there is comfort in that. Reads with mocking smile the President's order of recognition of April twenty-two, eighteen eighty-four. The government of the United States announces its sympathy with and approval of the main and benevolent purposes of my Congo scheme, and will order the officers of the United States both on land and sea to recognize its flag as the flag of a friendly government. Possibly the Yankees would like to take that back now, but they will find that my agents are not over there in America for nothing. But there is no danger. Neither nations nor governments can afford to confess a blunder. With a contented smile begins to read from Report by Reverend W. M. Morrison, American missionary in the Congo Free State. I furnish herewith some of the many atrocious incidents which have come under my own personal observation. They reveal the organized system of plunder and outrage which has been situated, and is now being carried on in that unfortunate country by King Leopold of Belgium. I say King Leopold because he and he alone is now responsible since he is the absolute sovereign. He styles himself such. When our government in eighteen eighty-four laid the foundation of the Congo Free State by recognizing its flag little did it know that this concern, parading under the guise of philanthropy, was really King Leopold of Belgium, one of the shrewdest, most heartless, and most consciousness rulers that ever sat on a throne. This is apart from his known corrupt morals which have made his name and his family a byword in two continents. Our government would most certainly not have recognized that flag had it known that it was really King Leopold individually who was asking for recognition. Had it known that it was setting in the heart of Africa an absolute monarchy. Had it known that, having put down African slavery in our own country at great cost of blood and money, it was establishing a worse form of slavery right in Africa. With evil joy. Yes, I certainly was a shade too clever for the Yankees. It hurts. It gravels them. They can't get over it. But it's a shame upon them in another way too, and a graver way, for they never can rid their records of the reproachful fact that their vain republic, self-appointed champion and promoter of the liberties of the world, is the only democracy in history that has lent its power and influence to the establishing of an absolute monarchy. Contemplating, with an unfriendly eye, a stately pile of pamphlets, blister the meddlesome missionaries. They write tons of these things. They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings, and everything they see they commit to paper. They are always prowling from place to place. The natives consider them their only friends. They go to them with their sorrows. They show them their scars and their wounds inflicted by my soldier police. They hold up the stumps of their arms and lament because their hands have been chopped off, as punishment for not bringing in enough rubber, and as proof to be laid before my officers that the required punishment was well and truly carried out. One of these missionaries saw twenty-one of these hands drying over a fire for transmission to my officials, and of course he must go and set it down and print it. They travel and travel, they spy and spy, and nothing is too trivial for them to print. Takes up a pamphlet, reads a passage from Report of a Journey Made in July, August and September 1903 by Reverend A. E. Scrivner, a British missionary. Soon we began talking, and without an encouragement on my part the natives began the tales I had become so accustomed to. They were living in peace and quietness when the white men came in from the lake with all sorts of requests to do this and that, and they thought it meant slavery, so they attempted to keep the white men out of their country but without avail. The rifles were too much for them, so they submitted and made up their minds to do the best they could under the altered circumstances. First came the command to build houses for the soldiers, and this was done without a murmur. Then they had to feed the soldiers and all the men and women, hangers on, who accompanied them. Then they were told to bring in rubber. This was quite a new thing for them to do. There was rubber in the forest several days away from their home, but that it was worth anything was news to them. A small reward was offered, and a rush was made for the rubber. What strange white men to give us cloth and beads for the sap of a wild vine! They rejoiced in what they thought their good fortune. But soon the reward was reduced until at last they were told to bring in the rubber for nothing. To this they tried to demure, but to their great surprise several were shot by the soldiers, and the rest were told, with many curses and blows, to go at once, or more would be killed. Terrified they began to prepare their food for the fortnight's absence from the village which the collection of rubber entailed. The soldiers discovered them sitting about. What, not gone yet? Bang, bang, bang, and down fell one and another dead in the midst of wives and companions. There is a terrible wail and an attempt made to prepare the dead for burial, but this is not allowed. All must go at once to the forest. Without food? Yes, without food. And off the poor wretches had to go without even their tinder-boxes to make fires. Many died in the forests of hunger and exposure, and still more from the rifles of the ferocious soldiers in charge of the post. In spite of all their efforts the amount fell off and more and more were killed. I was shown around the place, and the sights of former big chief settlements were pointed out. A careful estimate made the population of, say, seven years ago to be two thousand people in and about the post, within a radius of, say, a quarter of a mile. All told they would not muster two thousand now, and there was so much sadness and gloom about them that they are fast decreasing. We stayed there all day on Monday and had many talks with the people. On the Sunday some of the boys had told me of some bones which they had seen, so on the Monday I asked to be shown these bones. Lying about on the grass within a few yards of the house I was occupying were numbers of human skulls, bones, in some cases complete skeletons. I counted thirty-six skulls, and saw many sets of bones from which the skulls were missing. I called one of the men and asked the meaning of it. When the rubber paliver began, said he, the soldiers shot so many we grew tired of burying, and very often we were not allowed to bury, and so just dragged the bodies out into the grass and left them. There are hundreds all around, if you would like to see them. But I had seen more than enough and was sickened by the stories that came from men and women alike, of the awful time they had passed through. The Bulgarian atrocities might be considered as mildness itself when compared with what was done here. How the people submitted I don't know, and even now I wonder as I think of their patience, that some of them managed to run away is some cause for thankfulness. I stayed there two days, and the one thing that impressed itself upon me was the collection of rubber. I saw long files of men come in, as at Bongo, with their little baskets under their arms, saw them pay their milk tin full of salt, and the two yards of calico flung to the headmen, saw their trembling timidity, and in fact a great deal of that all went to prove the state of terrorism that exists, and the virtual slavery in which the people are held. That is their way. They spy and spy, and run into print with every foolish trifle. And that British consul, Mr. Casement, is just like them. He gets hold of a diary which had been kept by one of my government officers, and although it is a private diary and intended for no eye but its owners, Mr. Casement is so lacking in delicacy and refinement as to print passages from it. READS A PASSAGE FROM THE DIARY Each time the corporal goes out to get rubber, cartridges are given him. He must bring back all not used, and for every one used, he must bring back a right hand. M. P. told me that sometimes they shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting. They then cut off a hand from a living man. As to the extent to which this is carried on, he informed me that in six months the state on the Mumbogo River had used six thousand cartridges, which means that six thousand people are killed or mutilated. It means more than six thousand for the people have told me repeatedly that the soldiers kill the children with the butt of their guns. When the subtle counsel thinks silence will be more effective than words, he employs it. Here he leaves it to be recognized that a thousand killings and mutilations a month is a large output for so small a region as the Mumbogo River concession, silently indicating the dimensions of it by accompanying his report with a map of the prodigious Congo state in which there is not room for so small an object as that river. That silence is intended to say, if it is a thousand a month in this little corner, imagine the output of the whole vast state. A gentleman would not descend to these furtivenesses. Now, as to the mutilations, you can't head off a Congo critic and make him stay headed off. He dodges and straightway comes back at you from another direction. They are full of slippery arts. When the mutilations, severing hands, unsexing men, etc., began to stir Europe, we hit upon the idea of excusing them with a retort which we judged would knock them dizzy on that subject for good and all, and leave them nothing more to say. To it, we boldly laid the custom on the natives, and said we did not invent it, but only followed it. Did it knock them dizzy? Did it shut their mouths? Not for an hour. They dodged and came straight back at us with a remark that, if a Christian king can perceive a saving moral difference between inventing bloody barbarities and imitating them from savages, for charity's sake let him get what comfort he can out of his confession. It is most amazing the way that that consul acts, that spies, and busybody takes up pamphlet treatment of women and children in the Congo State, what Mr. Casement saw in 1903. Hardly two years ago intruding that date upon the public was a piece of cold malice. It was intended to weaken the force of my press syndicate's assurances to the public that my severities in the Congo ceased utterly years and years ago. This man is fond of trifles, revels in them, gloats over them, pets them, fondles them, sets them all down. One doesn't need to drowse through his monotonous report to see that. The mere subheadings of its chapters prove it. Two hundred and forty persons, men, women and children, compelled to supply government with one ton of carefully prepared foodstuffs per week, receiving in remuneration all told the princely sum of fifteen shilling tenpence. Very well it was liberal. It was not much short of a penny a week for each nigger. It suits this consul to belittle it, yet he knows very well that I could have had both the food and the labour for nothing. I can prove it by a thousand instances. Expedition against a village behind hand in its compulsory supplies result slaughter of sixteen persons, among them three women and a boy of five years. Ten carried off to be prisoners till ransomed, among them a child who died during the march. But he is careful not to explain that we are obliged to resort to ransom to collect debts where the people have nothing to pay with, families that escape to the woods sell some of their members into slavery and thus provide the ransom. He knows that I would stop this if I could find a less objectionable way to collect their debts. Hmm! Here is some more of the consul's delicacy. He reports the conversation he had with some natives. Q. How do you know it was the white men themselves who ordered these cruel things to be done to you? These things must have been done without the white man's knowledge by the black soldiers. A. The white men told their soldiers, you only kill women, you must not kill men. You must prove that you kill men. So then the soldiers, when they killed us—here he stopped and hesitated and then pointing to blank—he said, then they—blank—and took them to the white men who said, it is true, you have killed men. Q. You say this is true? Were many of you so treated after being shot? All shouting out, nicoto, nicoto. Very many, very many. There was no doubt that these people were not inventing. Their vehemence, their flashing eyes, their excitement were not simulated. A. Of course the critic had to divulge that. He has no self-respect. All his kind reproached me, although they know quite well that I took no pleasure in punishing the men in that particular way, but only did it as a warning to other delinquents. Ordinary punishments are no good with ignorant savages. They make no impression. Reads more subheads. Devastated region, population reduced from forty thousand to eight thousand. He does not take the trouble to say how it happened. He is fertile in concealments. He hopes his readers and his Congo reformers of the Lord Aberdeen Norbury, John Morley, Sir Gilbert Parker Stripe, will think they were all killed. They were not. The great majority of them escaped. They fled to the bush with their families because of the rubber raids, and it was there they died of hunger. Could we help that? One of my sorrowing critics observes other Christian rulers tax their people, but furnish schools, courts of law, roads, light, water, and protection to life and limb in return. King Leopold taxes his stolen nation, but provides nothing in return but hunger, terror, grief, shame, captivity, mutilation, and massacre. That is their style. I furnish nothing. I send the gospel to the survivors. These censure mongers know it, but they would rather have their tongues cut out than mention it. I have several times required my raiders to give the dying an opportunity to kiss the sacred emblem, and if they obeyed me, I have without doubt been the humble means of saving many souls. None of my traducers have had the fairness to mention this, but let it pass. There is one who has not overlooked it, and that is my solace. That is my consolation." Puts down the report, takes up a pamphlet, glances along the middle of it. This is where the death trap comes in. Metal-some missionary spying around. Reverend W. H. Shepard talks with a black raider of mine after a raid, cousins him into giving away some particulars. The raider remarks, I demanded thirty slaves from this side of the stream and thirty from the other side, two points of ivory, two thousand five hundred balls of rubber, thirteen goats, ten fowls, and six dogs, some corn, chummy, etc. How did the fight come up? I asked. I sent for all their chiefs, sub-chiefs, men and women, to come on a certain day, saying that I was going to finish all the palaver. When they entered these small gates, the walls being made of fences brought from other villages, the high native ones, I demanded all my pay or I would kill them, so they refused to pay me, and I ordered the fence to be closed so they couldn't run away. Then we killed them here inside the fence. The panels of the fence fell down and some escaped. How many did you kill? I asked. We killed plenty. Will you see some of them? That was just what I wanted. He said, I think we have killed between eighty and ninety and those in the other villages I don't know. I did not go out but sent my people. He and I walked out on the plain just near the camp. There were three dead bodies with the flesh carved off from their waist down. Why are they carved so, only leaving the bones? I asked. My people ate them, he answered promptly. He then explained, the men who have young children do not eat people, but all the rest ate them. On the left was a big man shot in the back and without a head. All these corpses were nude. Where is the man's head? I asked. Oh, they made a bowl of the forehead to rub up tobacco and diamba in. We continued to walk and examine until late in the afternoon and counted forty-one bodies. The rest had been eaten up by the people. On returning to the camp we crossed a young woman shot in the back of the head, one hand was cut away. I asked why and Mulumban Kusa explained that they always cut off the right hand to give to the State on their return. Can you not show me some of the hands? I asked. So he conducted us to a framework of sticks under which was burning a slow fire. And there they were, the right hands. I counted them. Eighty-one in all. There were not less than sixty women, Bena Pianga, prisoners. I saw them. We all say that we have as fully as possible investigated the whole outrage and find it was a plan previously made to get all the stuff possible and to catch and kill the poor people in the death trap. Another detail as we see cannibalism. They report cases of it with a most offensive frequency. My traducers do not forget to remark that, in as much as I am absolute, and with a word can prevent in the Congo anything I choose to prevent, then what so ever is done there by my permission is my act, my personal act, that I do it, that the hand of my agent is as truly my hand as if it were attached to my own arm. And so they picture me in my robes of state, with my crown on my head, munching human flesh, saying grace, mumbling thanks to him from whom all good things come. Dear, dear, when the soft hearts get hold of a thing like that missionary's contribution they quite lose their tranquility over it. They speak out profanely and reproach heaven for allowing such a fiend to live, meaning me. They think it irregular. They go shuddering around, brooding over the reduction of that Congo population from twenty-five million to fifteen million in the twenty years of my administration. Then they burst out and call me the king with ten million murders on his soul. They call me a record. The most of them do not stop with charging merely the ten million against me. No, they reflect that, but for me the population by natural increase would now be thirty million, so they charge another five million against me and make my total death harvest fifteen million. They remark that the man who killed the goose that laid the golden egg was responsible for the eggs she would subsequently have laid if she had been let alone. Oh yes, they call me a record. They remark that twice in a generation in India the great famine destroys two million out of a population of three hundred and twenty million and the whole world holds up its hands in pity and horror. Then they fall to wondering where the world would find room for its emotions if I had a chance to trade places with the great famine for twenty years. The idea fires their fancy, and they go on and imagine the famine coming in state at the end of the twenty years and prostrating itself before me saying, Teach me, Lord, I perceive that I am but an apprentice. And next they imagine death coming, with his scythe and hourglass, and begging me to marry his daughter and reorganize his plant and run the business. For the whole world, you see. By this time their diseased minds are under full steam. And they get down their books and expand their labors with me for text. They hunt through all biography for my match, working Atilla, Torquemada, Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, and the rest of that crowd for all they are worth, and evilly exalting when they cannot find it. Then they examine the historical earthquakes and cyclones and blizzards and cataclysms and volcanic eruptions, verdict? None of them in it with me. At last they do really hit it, as they think, and they close their labors with conceding reluctantly that I have one match in history but only one, the flood. This is intemperate. But they are always that when they think of me. They can no more keep quiet when my name is mentioned than can a glass of water control its feelings with a seedlet's powder in its bowels. The bizarre things they can imagine with me for an inspiration. One Englishman offers to give me the odds of three to one and bet me anything I like, up to twenty thousand guineas, that for two million years I am going to be the most conspicuous foreigner in hell. The man is so beside himself with fear that he does not perceive that the idea is foolish. Foolish and un-business-like. You see, there could be no winner. Both of us would be losers on account of the loss of interest on the stakes. At four or five percent compounded this would amount to, I do not know how much exactly, but by the time the term was up and the bet payable the person could buy a hell itself with the accumulation, another madman wants to construct a memorial for the perpetuation of my name out of my fifteen million skulls and skeletons, and is full of vindictive enthusiasm over his strange project. He has it all ciphered out and drawn to scale. Out of the skulls he will build a combined monument and mausoleum to me which shall exactly replicate the Great Pyramid of Cheops, whose base covers thirteen acres and whose apex is four hundred and fifty-one feet above ground. He desires to stuff me and stand me up in the sky on that apex, robed and crowned, with my pirate flag in one hand and a butcher knife and pendant handcuffs in the other. He will build the pyramid in the center of a depopulated tract, a brooding solitude covered with weeds, and the mouldering ruins of burned villages, where the spirits of the starved and murdered dead will voice their laments forever in the whispers of the wandering winds. Radiating from the pyramid like the spokes of a wheel, there are to be forty grand avenues of approach each thirty-five miles long and each fenced on both sides by skullless skeletons standing a yard and a half apart and festooned together in line by short chains stretching from wrist to wrist and attached to tried and true old handcuffs stamped with my private trademark, a crucifix and butcher knife crossed with motto by this sign we prosper. Each oceous fence to consist of two hundred thousand skeletons inside, which is four hundred thousand to each avenue. It is remarked with satisfaction that it aggregates three or four thousand miles, single-ranked of skeletons, fifteen million all told, and would stretch across America from New York to San Francisco. It is remarked further, in the hopeful tone of a railroad company forecasting showy extensions of its mileage, that my output is five hundred thousand corpses a year when my plant is running full time, and that therefore, if I am spared ten years longer, there will be fresh skulls enough to add one hundred and seventy-five feet to the pyramid, making it by a long way the loftiest architectural construction on the earth, and fresh skeletons enough to continue the transcontinental file on piles a thousand miles into the Pacific. The cost of gathering the materials from my widely scattered and innumerable private graveyards, and transporting them and building the monument and the radiating grand avenues, is duly ciphered out, running into an aggregate of millions of guineas, and then, why then, blank, blank, blank, blank, this idiot asks me to furnish the money. Sudden and effusive application of the crucifix. He reminds me that my yearly income from the Congo is millions of guineas, and that only five million would be required for his enterprise. Every day wild attempts are made upon my purse. They do not affect me. They cost me not a thought. But this one, this one troubles me, makes me nervous. For there is no telling what an unhinged creature like this may think of next. If he should think of Carnegie—but I must banish that thought out of my mind. It worries my days. It troubles my sleep. That way lies madness. After a pause, there is no other way. I have got to buy Carnegie. Harassed and muttering, walks the floor a while, then takes to the consul's chapter headings again, reads, Government starved a woman's children to death and killed her sons. Butchery of women and children. The native has been converted into a being without ambition because without hope. Women chained by the neck by rubbered centuries. Women refused to bear children because, with a baby to carry, they cannot well run away and hide from the soldiers. Statement of a child. I, my mother, my grandmother, and my sister, we ran away into the bush. A great number of our people were killed by the soldiers. After that they saw a little bit of my mother's head and the soldiers ran quickly to where we were and caught my grandmother, my mother, my sister, and another little one younger than us. Each wanted my mother for a wife and argued about it, so they finally decided to kill her. They shot her through the stomach with a gun and she fell. And when I saw that I cried very much because they killed my grandmother and mother and I was left alone. I saw it all done. It has a sort of pitiful sound, although they are only blacks. It carries me back and back into the past, to when my children were little, and would fly to the bush, so to speak, when they saw me coming. Resumes reading of chapter headings of the Consul's report. They put a knife through a child's stomach. They cut off the hands and brought them to C.D., white officer, and spread them out in a row for him to see. They left them lying there because the white man had seen them, so they did not need to take them to P. Captured children left in the bush to die by the soldiers. Friends came to ransom a captured girl, but sentry refused, saying the white man wanted her because she was young. Extract from a native girl's testimony. On our way the soldiers saw a little child, and when they went to kill it, the child laughed, so the soldier took the butt of his gun and struck the child with it, and then cut off its head. One day they killed my half-sister and cut off her head, hands and feet, because she had bangles on. Then they caught another sister and sold her to the W.W. people, and now she is a slave there. The little child laughed. A long pause musing. That innocent creature. Somehow I wish it had not laughed. Reads, Mutilated children. Government encouragement of intertribal slave traffic, the monstrous fines levied upon villages tardy in their supplies of foodstuffs, compel the natives to sell their fellows and children to other tribes in order to meet the fine. A father and mother forced to sell their little boy. Widow forced to sell her little girl. Irritated. Hang the monotonous grumbler! What would he have me do? Let a widow off merely because she is a widow? He knows quite well that there is nothing much left now but widows. I have nothing against widows as a class, but business is business, and I've got to live, haven't I? Even if it does cause inconvenience to somebody here and there. Reads, Men intimidated by the torture of their wives and daughters, to make the men furnish rubber and supplies, and so get their captured women released from chains and detention. The century explained to me that he caught the women and brought them in, chained together neck to neck, by direction of his employer. An agent explained that he was forced to catch women in preference to men, as then the men brought in supplies quicker, but he did not explain how the children deprived of their parents obtained their own food supplies. A file of fifteen captured women. Allowing women and children to die of starvation in prison. Musing. Death from hunger. A lingering, long misery that must be. Days and days, and still days and days, the forces of the body failing, dribbling away, little by little. Yes, it must be the hardest death of all. And to see food carried by every day and you can have none of it. Of course, the little children cry for it, and that rings the mother's heart. A sigh. Ah, well, it cannot be helped. Circumstances make this discipline necessary. Reads. The Crucifying of Sixty Women. How stupid, how tactless! Christendom's goose flesh will rise with horror at the news. Profanation of the sacred emblem. That is what Christendom will shout. Yes, Christendom will buzz. It can hear me charged with half a million murders a year for twenty years and keep its composure, but to profane the symbol is quite another matter. It will regard this as serious. It will wake up and want to look into my record. Buzz? Indeed it will. I seem to hear the distant hum already. It was wrong to crucify the women, clearly wrong, manifestly wrong. I can see it now myself, and I'm sorry it happened, sincerely sorry. I believe it would have answered, just as well, to skin them. With a sigh. But none of us thought of that. One cannot think of everything, and after all it is but human to err. It will make a stir. It certainly will. And these crucifixions, persons will begin to ask again, as now and then in times past, how I can hope to win and keep the respect of the human race if I continue to give up my life to murder and pillage. Scornfully. When have they heard me say I wanted the respect of the human race? Do they confuse me with the common herd? Do they forget that I am a king? What king has valued the respect of the human race? I mean deep down in his private heart. If they would reflect, they would know that it is impossible that a king should value the respect of the human race. He stands upon an eminence and looks out over the world and sees multitudes of meek human beings worshiping the persons and submitting to the oppressions and exactions of a dozen human beings who are in no way better or finer than themselves, made on just their own pattern, in fact, and out of the same quality of mud. When it talks, it is a race of whales. But a king knows it for a race of tadpoles. Its history gives it away. If men were really men, how could a czar be possible? And how could I be possible? But we are possible. We are quite safe. And with God's help we shall continue the business at the old stand. It will be found that the race will put up with us in its docile immemorial way. It may pull a rye face now and then and make large talk, but it will stay on its knees all the same. Making large talk is one of its specialties. It works itself up and froths at the mouth, and just when you think it is going to throw a brick, it heaves a poem. Lord, what a race it is! End of King Leopold Soliloquy Part 1. Section 11 of Anti-Imperialist Writings. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Recording by John Greenman. Anti-Imperialist Writings by Mark Twain. King Leopold Soliloquy Part 2. A Pasteboard Autocrat. A despot out of date. A fading planet in the glare of day. A flickering candle in the bright sun's ray. Burnt to the socket. Fruit left too late. High on a blighted bow. Ripe till it's rotten. By God forsaken and by time forgotten. Watching the crumbling edges of his lands. A spineless god to whom dumb millions pray. From Finland in the west to Far Cathay. Lord of a frostbound continent he stands. Her seeming ruin his dim mind appalls. And in the frozen stupor of his sleep he hears dull thunders. Peeling as she falls. And mighty fragments dropping in the deep. Note. B. H. Nadal in the New York Times. End of note. It is fine, one is obliged to concede it. It is a great picture and impressive. The mongrel handles his pen well. Still with opportunity I would cru- flay him. A spineless god. It is the Tsar to a dot. A god. And spineless. A royal invertebrate poor lad. Soft-hearted and out of place. A spineless god to whom dumb millions pray. Remorselessly correct. Concise too and compact. The soul and spirit of the human race compressed into half a sentence. On their knees. One hundred and forty million. On their knees to a little tin deity. Masked together they would stretch away and away and away across the plains. Fading and dimming and failing in a measureless perspective. Why, even the telescope's vision could not reach to the final frontier of that continental spread of human servility. Now why should a king value the respect of the human race? It is quite unreasonable to expect it. A curious race certainly. It finds fault with me and with my occupations, and forgets that neither of us could exist an hour without its sanction. It is our confederate and all-powerful protector. It is our bulwark, our friend, our fortress. For this it has our gratitude, our deep and honest gratitude, but not our respect. Let it snivel and fret and grumble if it likes, and that is all right. We do not mind that. Turns over leaves of a scrapbook, pausing now and then to read a clipping and make a comment. The poets, how they do hunt that poor czar. French, Germans, English, Americans, they all have a bark at him. The finest and capabilities of the pack and the fiercest are Swilburne, English, I think, and a pair of Americans, Thomas Bailey Eldridge and Colonel Richard Waterson Gilder of the sentimental periodical called Century Magazine and Louisville Courier Journal. They certainly have uttered some very strong yelps. I can't seem to find them. I must have mislead them. If a poet's bite were as terrible as his bark, why dear me, but it isn't. A wise king minds neither of them, but the poet doesn't know it. It's a case of little dog and lightning express. When the czar goes thundering by, the poet skips out and rages alongside for a little distance, then returns to his kennel, wagging his head with satisfaction, and thinks he has inflicted a memorable scare, whereas nothing has really happened. The czar didn't know he was around. They never bark at me. I wonder why that is. I suppose my corruption department buys them. That must be it. For certainly I ought to inspire a bark or two. I'm rather choice material, I should say. Why, here is a yelp at me. Mumbling a poem. What gives the holy right to murder hope and water ignorance with human blood? From what high universe dividing power draws thou thy wondrous ripe brutality? Oh, horrible! Thou God who ceased these things help us to blot this terror from the earth. No, I see it is to the czar. Note. Louis Morgan Sill in Harper's Weekly. End of note. After all, but there are those who would say it fits me, and rather snuggly, too. Ripe brutality. They would say the czars isn't ripe yet, but that mine is, and not merely ripe, but rotten. Nothing could keep them from saying that, and they would think it smart. This terror. Let the czar keep that name, I am supplied. This long time I have been the monster. That was their favorite. The monster of crime. But now I have a new one. They have found a fossil dinosaur fifty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high, and set it up in the museum in New York and labeled it Leopold II. But it is no matter. One does not look for manners in a republic. That reminds me, I have never been caricatured. Could it be that the corsairs of the pencil could not find an offensive symbol that was big enough and ugly enough to do my reputation justice? After reflection. There is no other way. I will buy the dinosaur and suppress it. Rests himself with some more chapter headings. Reads. More mutilation of children. Hands cut off. Testimony of American missionaries. Evidence of British missionaries. It's all the same, old thing. Tedious repetitions and duplications of shop-worn episodes, mutilations, murders, massacres, and so on and so on, till one gets drowsy over it. Mr. Morel intrudes at this point and contributes a comment which he could just as well have kept to himself, and throws in some italics, of course. These people can never get along without italics. It is one heart-rending story of human misery from beginning to end, and it is all recent. Meaning 1904 and 1905. I do not see how a person can act, so this Morel is a king's subject, and reverence for monarchy should have restrained him from reflecting upon me with that exposure. This Morel is a reformer, a Congo reformer, that sizes him up. He publishes a sheet in Liverpool called the West African Mail, which is supported by the voluntary contributions of the sap-headed and soft-hearted, and every week it steams and reeks and festers with up-to-date Congo atrocities of the sort detailed in this pile of pamphlets here. I will suppress it. I suppressed a Congo atrocity book there after it was actually in print. It should not be difficult for me to suppress a newspaper. Studies some photographs of mutilated negroes throws them down, sighs. The Kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us indeed. In the early years we had no trouble in getting the press to expose the tales of the mutilations as slanders, lies, inventions of busy-body American missionaries, and exasperated foreigners who had found the open door of the Berlin-Kongo charter closed against them when they innocently went out there to trade, and by the press's help we got the Christian nations everywhere to turn an irritated and unbelieving ear to those tales and say hard things about the tellers of them. Yes, all things went harmoniously and pleasantly in those good days, and I was looked up to as the benefactor of a downtrodden and friendless people. Then all of a sudden came the crash, that is to say, the incorruptible Kodak, and all the harmony went to hell. The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe. Every Yankee missionary and every interrupted trader sent home and got one, and now—oh, well, the pictures get sneaked around everywhere in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak that a child can carry in its pocket gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb. What is this fragment? reads, But enough of trying to tally off his crimes, his list is interminable. We should never get to the end of it. His awful shadow lies across his congo-free state and under it an unoffending nation of fifteen million is withering away and swiftly succumbing to their miseries. It is a land of graves. It is THE land of graves. It is the congo-free graveyard. It is a majestic thought that is this gasliest episode in all human history is the work of one man alone, one solitary man, just a single individual, Leopold, king of the Belgians. He is personally and solely responsible for all the myriad crimes that have blackened the history of the congo-state. He is sole master there. He is absolute. He could have prevented the crimes by his mere command. He could stop them today with a word. He withholds the word for his pocket's sake. It seems strange to see a king destroying a nation and laying waste a country of former sordid money's sake and solely and only for that. Lust of conquest is royal. Kings have always exercised that stately vice. We are used to it. By old habit we condone it, perceiving a certain dignity in it. But lust of money, lust of shillings, lust of nickels, lust of dirty coin, not for the nation's enrichment but for the king's alone. This is new. It distinctly revolts us. We cannot seem to reconcile ourselves to it. We resent it. We despise it. We say it is shabby, unkingly out of character. Being Democrats we ought to jeer and jest. We ought to rejoice to see the purple dragged in the dirt. But, well, account for it as we may, we don't. We see this awful king, this pitiless and blood-drenched king, this money-crazy king towering toward the sky in a world solitude of sordid crime, unfellowed and apart from the human race, sol butcher for personal gain findable in all his caste, ancient or modern, pagan or Christian, proper and legitimate target for the scorn of the lowest and the highest, and the execrations of all who hold in cold esteem the oppressor and the coward. And, well, it is a mystery, but we do not wish to look. For he is a king, and it hurts us, it troubles us. By ancient and inherited instinct it shames us to see a king degraded to this aspect, and we shrink from hearing the particulars of how it happened. We shudder and turn away when we come upon them in print. Why, certainly, that is my protection, and you will continue to do it. I know the human race. An original mistake. This work of civilisation is an enormous and continual butchery. All the facts we brought forward in this chamber were denied at first most energetically, but later, little by little, they were proved by documents and by official texts. The practice of cutting off hands is said to be contrary to instructions, but you are content to say that indulgence must be shown and that this bad habit must be corrected little by little, and you plead, moreover, that only the hands of fallen enemies are cut off, and that if hands are cut off, enemies not quite dead, and who, after recovery, have had the bad taste to come to the missionaries and show them their stumps, it was due to an original mistaken thinking that they were dead. From Debate in Belgian Parliament, July 1903. Supplementary. Since the first edition of this pamphlet was issued, the Congo story has entered upon a new chapter. The King's commission concedes the correctness of the delineation contained in the foregoing pages. It affirms the prevalence of frightful abuses under the King's rule. For eight months the King held back the report, but his commissioners had been too deeply moved by the horrors unfolded before them in their visit to the Congo State, and the testimony presented to them had reached the world through other sources. The digest of the report, as forwarded from Brussels to the European and American press, was skillfully edited, and the report itself does its best to gloss over the King's responsibility for the shame. But the story told in the genuine document is essentially as hideous as anything found in the depositions of plain-speaking missionaries. So the facts are clear, indisputable, undisputed. The train of revilers of missionary testimony, whose rosy-it pictures of conditions under the King's rule have beguiled the uninformed, hurries out at the wings, and Leopold is left to hold the stage, with a skeleton that refuses longer to stay hidden in his Congo closet. One thing the report omits to do, it does not brand or judge the system out of which the foul breed of iniquities has sprung. The King's claim to personal ownership of eight hundred thousand square miles of territory with all their products, and his employment of savage hordes to realize on his claim. Judgment of this policy the commission holds to be beyond its function. Being thus disqualified for striking at the roots of the enormity, the commissioners propose such superficial reforms as occur to them, and the King hastens to take up with their suggestion by calling to his assistance in the work of reform a new commission. Of this body of fourteen members all but two are committed by their past record to defense and maintenance of the King's Congo policy. So ends the King's investigation of himself, doubtless less jubilantly than he had planned, but with all as ineffectively as it was for doomed to end. One stage is achieved. The next in order is action by the powers responsible for the existence of the Congo State. The United States is one of these. Such procedure is advocated in petitions to the President and Congress, signed by John Wanamaker, Lyman Abbott, Henry Van Dyke, David Starr Jordan, and many other leading citizens. If ever the sisterhood of civilized nations have occasion to go up to the Hague or some other accessible meeting-place, a four-ordained hour for their assembling has now struck. Some things the report of the King's commission says. Apart from the rough plantations which barely suffice to feed the natives themselves and to supply the stations, all the fruits of the soil are considered as the property of the state or of the concessionaire societies. It has even been admitted that on the land occupied by them the natives cannot dispose of the produce of the soil, except to the extent in which they did so before the Constitution of the state. Each official in charge of a station, or agent in charge of a factory, claimed from the natives, without asking himself on what grounds, the most diverse imposts in labor or in kind, either to satisfy his own needs and those of his station, or to exploit the riches of the domain. The agents themselves regulated the tax and saw to its collection and had a direct interest in increasing its amount, since they received proportional bonuses on the produce thus collected. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant whom we heard at Leopoldville, were unanimous in accentuating the general wretchedness existing in the region. One of them said that this system which compels the natives to feed three thousand workmen at Leopoldville will, if continued for another five years, wipe out the population of the district. Judicial officials have informed us of the sorry consequences of the porterage system. It exhausts the unfortunate people subjected to it and threatens them with partial destruction. In the majority of cases the native must go one or two days march every fortnight until he arrives at that part of the forest where the rubber vines can be met with in a certain degree of abundance. There the collector passes a number of days in a miserable existence. He has to build himself an improvised shelter which cannot, obviously, replace his hut. He has not the food to which he is accustomed. He is deprived of his wife, exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, and the attacks of wild beasts. When, once he has collected the rubber, he must bring it to the state station, or to that of the company, and only then can he return to his village where he can sojourn for barely more than two or three days because the next demand is upon him. It was barely denied that in the various posts of the A-B-I-R, which we visited, the imprisonment of women hostages, the subjection of the chiefs to servile labour, the humiliations meted out to them, the flogging of rubber collectors, the brutality of the black employees set over the prisoners, where the rule commonly followed. According to the witnesses, these auxiliaries, especially those stationed in the villages, convert themselves into despots, claiming the women and the food. They kill without pity all those who attempt to resist their whims. The truth of the charges is borne out by a mass of evidence and official reports. The consequences are often very murderous, and one must not be astonished if in the course of these delicate operations, whose object it is to seize hostages and to intimidate the natives, constant watch cannot be exercised over the sanguinary instincts of the soldiers when orders to punish are given by superior authority. It is difficult to prevent the expedition from degenerating into massacres, accompanied by pillage and incendiarism. The United States Government and the Congo State The International Association of the Congo was recognized by the United States April 22, 1884. Nine months afterward, recognition was secured from Germany and later, successively, from the other European powers. Two international conferences were held at which the powers constituted themselves guardians of the people of the Congo Territory, the association binding itself to regard the principles of administration adopted. In both these conferences, the United States Government prominently participated. The act of Berlin was not submitted by the President of the United States for ratification by the Senate because its adoption as a whole was thought by him to involve responsibility for support of the territorial claims of rival powers in the Congo region. The act of Brussels, with a proviso safeguarding this point, was formally ratified by the United States Senate. Whether we are without obligation to reach a hand to this expiring people, the intelligent reader will judge for himself. Stanley saw neither fortress nor flag of any civilization save that of the United States, which he carried along the arterial watercourse. The first appeal for recognition and for moral support was naturally and justly made to the government whose flag was first carried across the region. Mr. Cason, in the North American Review, February 1886. This government, at the outset, testified its lively interest in the well-being and future progress of the vast region now committed to Your Majesty's wise care by being the first among the powers to recognize the flag of the International Association of the Congo as that of a friendly state. President Cleveland to King Leopold, September 11, 1885. The recognition by the United States was the birth into new life of the Association, seriously menaced, as its existence was, by opposing interests and ambitions. Mr. Stanley, the Congo, Volume 1, Page 383. He, the President of the United States, desires to see in the delimitation of the region which shall be subjected to this beneficent rule of the International Association of the Congo the widest expansion consistent with the just territorial rights of other governments. Address of Mr. Cason, U.S. Representative at Berlin Conference, 1884. So marked was the acceptance by the Berlin Conference of the Views presented on the part of the United States that Herr von Bunsen, reviewing the action of the Conference, assigns after Germany the first place of influence in the Conference to the United States. Mr. Cason, in North American Review, February 1886. In sending a representative to this assembly, the government of the United States has wished to show the great interest and deep sympathy it feels in the great work of philanthropy which the Conference seeks to realize. Our country must feel beyond all others an immense interest in the work of this assembly. Mr. Terrell, U.S. Representative at Brussels Conference, First Session, November 19, 1889. Mr. Terrell informs the Conference that he has been authorized by his government to sign the General Act adopted by the Conference. The President says that the U.S. Minister's communication will be received by the Conference with extreme satisfaction. Records of Brussels Conference, June 28, 1890. Claiming, as at Berlin, to speak in the name of Almighty God, the signatories at Brussels declared themselves to be equally animated by the firm intention of putting an end to the crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African slaves of protecting effectively the aboriginal populations and of ensuring the benefits of peace and civilization. Civilization in Congoland, H. R. Fox Bourne. The President continues to hope that the government of the United States, which was the first to recognize the Congo Free State, will not be one of the last to give it the assistance of which it may stand in need. Remarks of Belgian President of Brussels Conference, Session May 14, 1890. Aught King Leopold to be hanged? Note, the above article, which came to hand as the foregoing was impressed, is commended to the King and to the readers of his soliloquy. M. T. Stead, with the Reverend John H. Harris, Baringa, Congo State, in the English Review of Reviews for September 1905. For the somewhat startling suggestion in the heading of this interview, the missionary interviewed is in no way responsible. The credit of it, or if you like, the discredit, belongs entirely to the editor of the review, who without dogmatism wishes to pose the question as a matter for serious discussion. Since Charles I's head was cut off, opposite Whitehall, nearly 250 years ago, the sanctity which Doth hedge about a King has been held in slight and scant regard by the Puritans and their descendants, hence there is nothing antecedently shocking or outrageous in the discussion of the question whether the acts of any sovereign are such as to justify the calling in of the services of the public executioner. It is not, of course, for a journalist to pronounce judgment, but no function of the public writer is so imperative as that of calling attention to great wrongs, and no duty is more imperious than that of insisting that no rank or station should be allowed to shield from justice the real criminal when he is once discovered. The controversy between the Congo Reform Association and the Emperor of the Congo has now arrived at a stage in which it is necessary to take a further step toward the redress of unspeakable wrongs and the punishment of no less unspeakable criminals. The Reverend J. H. Harris, an English missionary, has lived for the last seven years in that region of Central Africa, the Upper Congo, which King Leopold has made over to one of his vampire groups of financial associates, known as the A-B-I-R Society, on the strictly business basis of a half-share in the profits rung from the blood and misery of the natives. He has now returned to England, and last month he called at Marbury House to tell me the latest from the Congo. Mr. Harris is a young man in a dangerous state of volcanic fury, and no wonder, after living for seven years face to face with the devastations of the vampire state, it is impossible to deny that he does well to be angry. When he began, as is the want of those who have emerged from the depths to detail horrifying stories of murder, the outrage and torture of women, the mutilation of children, and the whole infernal category of horrors served up with the background of cannibalism, sometimes voluntary and sometimes incredible though it seems, enforced by the orders of the officers, I cut him short and said, Dear Mr. Harris, as in Oriental Dispatches the India Office translator abbreviates the first page of the letter into two words, after compliments, or AC, so let us abbreviate our conversation about the Congo by the two words after atrocities, or AA. They are so invariable and so monotonous, as Lord Percy remarked in the house the other day, that it is unnecessary to insist upon them. There is no longer any dispute in the mind of any reasonable person as to what is going on in the Congo. It is the economical exploitation of half a continent carried on by the use of armed force wielded by officials the aim all and be all of whose existence is to extort the maximum amount of rubber in the shortest possible time in order to pay the largest possible dividend to the holders of shares in the concessions. Well, said Mr. Harris reluctantly, for he is so accustomed to speaking to persons who require to be told the whole dismal tale from A to Z, what is it you want to know? I want to know, I said, whether you consider the time is ripe for summoning King Leopold before the bar of an international tribunal to answer for the crimes perpetrated under his orders and in his interest in the Congo State. Mr. Harris paused for a moment and then said, that depends upon the action which the King takes upon the report of the commission which is now in his hands. Is that report published? No, said Mr. Harris, and it is a question whether it will ever be published. Greatly to our surprise, the commission which everyone expected would be a mere blind whose appointment was intended to throw dust in the eyes of the public turned out to be composed of highly respectable persons who heard the evidence most impartially, refused no bona fide testimony produced by trustworthy witnesses and were overwhelmed by the multitudinous horrors brought before them and who, we feel, must have arrived at conclusions which necessitate an entire revolution in the administration of the Congo. Are you quite sure, Mr. Harris, I said, that this is so? Yes, said Mr. Harris, quite sure. The commissioner impressed us all in the Congo very favorably. Some of its members seemed to us admirable specimens of public-spirited, independent statesmen. They realized that they were acting in a judicial capacity. They knew that the eyes of Europe were upon them, and instead of making their inquiry a farce, they made it a reality, and their conclusions must be, I feel sure, so damning to the state that if King Leopold were to take no action but to allow the whole infernal business to proceed unchecked, any international tribunal which had powers of a criminal court would, upon the evidence of the commission alone, send those responsible to the gallows. Unfortunately, I said, at present, the Hague Tribunal is not armed with the powers of an international assized court, nor is it qualified to place offenders crowned or otherwise in the dock. But don't you think that in the evolution of society the institution of such a criminal court is a necessity? It would be a great convenience at present," said Mr. Harris, nor would you need one atom of evidence beyond the report of the commission to justify the hanging of whoever is responsible for the existence and continuance of such abominations. Has anybody seen the text of the report? I asked. As the commission returned to Brussels in March, some of the contents of that report are an open secret. A great deal of the evidence has been published by the Congo Reform Association. In the Congo the commissioners admitted two things. First, that the evidence was overwhelming as to the existence of the evils which had hitherto been denied, and secondly that they vindicated the character of the missionaries. They discovered, as anyone will who goes out to that country, that it is the missionaries and the missionaries alone who constitute the permanent European element. The Congo state officials come out ignorant of the language, knowing nothing of the country, and with no other sense of their duties beyond that of supporting the concession companies in extorting rubber. They are like men who are dumb and deaf and blind, nor do they wish to be otherwise. In two or three years they vanish, giving place to other migrants as ignorant as themselves, whereas the missionaries remain on the spot year after year. They are in personal touch with the people, whose language they speak, whose customs they respect, and whose lives they endeavor to defend to the best of their ability. But, Mr. Harris, I remarked, was there not a certain Mr. Grenfell, a Baptist missionary, who has been all these years a convinced upholder of the Congo state. It was true, said Mr. Harris, and pity, tis, tis was true, but is no longer true. Mr. Grenfell has had his eyes opened at last, and he has now taken his place among those who are convinced. He could no longer resist the overwhelming evidence that has been brought against the Congo administration. Note. Mr. Grenfell's station is in the lower Congo, a section remote from the vast rubber areas of the interior. End of note. Was the nature of the commissioner's report, I resumed, made known to the officials of the state before they left the Congo? To the head officials, yes, said Mr. Harris. With what result? In the case of the highest official in the Congo, the man who corresponds in Africa to Lord Kursan in India, no sooner was he placed in possession of the conclusions of the commission than the appalling significance of their indictment convinced him that the game was up, and he went into his room and cut his throat. I was amazed on returning to Europe to find how little the significance of this suicide was appreciated. A paragraph in the newspaper announced the suicide of a Congo official. None of those who read that paragraph could realize the fact that that suicide had the same significance to the Congo that the suicide, let us say, of Lord Milner, would have had if it had taken place immediately on receiving the conclusions of a royal commission sent out to report upon his administration in South Africa. Well, if that be so, Mr. Harris, I said, and the Governor-General cuts his throat rather than face the ordeal and disgrace of the exposure. I am almost beginning to hope that we may see King Leopold in the dock at the Hague after all. I will comment upon that, Mr. Harris said, by quoting you Mrs. Sheldon's remark made before myself and my colleagues, Messrs. Bond, Ellery, Ruskin, Walbaum, and Whiteside, on May 19th last year, went in answer to our question, why should King Leopold be afraid of submitting his case to the Hague Tribunal? Mrs. Sheldon answered, men do not go to the gallows and put their heads in a noose, if they can avoid it.