Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his
arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner. His housekeeper,
Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand
Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street. No contract
had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman's
extortionate charge was refused. He persisted in it, and she sent into
the house for her employer. Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one
to countenance an extortion. He reasoned with the man kindly enough
at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his
number, which was at first refused. In the end he paid the legal fare,
and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether
unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost
any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity.
In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he
wrote:
If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one
thing--he will decide it against you every time. And so will the
New York policeman. In London if you carry your case into court the
man that is entitled to win it will win it. In New York--but no one
carries a cab case into court there. It is my impression that it is
now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into
court there.
Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to
sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers' union and the public in
general a lesson in good-citizenship. At the end of the hearing, to a
representative of the union he said:
“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir. It is simply practical
business. You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour
or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal
interest whatever. I am doing this just as any citizen should do. He
has no choice. He has a distinct duty. He is a non-classified policeman.
Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police
and the magistracy in every way he can, and give his time, if necessary,
to do so. Here is a man who is a perfectly natural product of an
infamous system in this city--a charge upon the lax patriotism in this
city of New York that this thing can exist. You have encouraged him,
in every way you know how to overcharge. He is not the criminal here
at all. The criminal is the citizen of New York and the absence of
patriotism. I am not here to avenge myself on him. I have no quarrel
with him. My quarrel is with the citizens of New York, who have
encouraged him, and who created him by encouraging him to overcharge in
this way.”
The driver's license was suspended. The case made a stir in the
newspapers, and it is not likely that any one incident ever contributed
more to cab-driving morals in New York City.
But Clemens had larger matters than this in prospect. His many speeches
on municipal and national abuses he felt were more or less ephemeral.
He proposed now to write himself down more substantially and for a wider
hearing. The human race was behaving very badly: unspeakable corruption
was rampant in the city; the Boers were being oppressed in South Africa;
the natives were being murdered in the Philippines; Leopold of Belgium
was massacring and mutilating the blacks in the Congo, and the allied
powers, in the cause of Christ, were slaughtering the Chinese. In his
letters he had more than once boiled over touching these matters, and
for New-Year's Eve, 1900, had written: