I bring you the stately nation named Christendom, returning,
bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-
Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul
full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of
pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking-
glass.--[Prepared for Red Cross Society watch-meeting, which was
postponed until March. Clemens recalled his “Greeting” for that
reason and for one other, which he expressed thus: “The list of
greeters thus far issued by you contains only vague generalities and
one definite name--mine: 'Some kings and queens and Mark Twain.' Now
I am not enjoying this sparkling solitude and distinction. It makes
me feel like a circus-poster in a graveyard.”]
This was a sort of preliminary. Then, restraining himself no longer,
he embodied his sentiments in an article for the North American Review
entitled, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” There was crying need for
some one to speak the right word. He was about the only one who could
do it and be certain of a universal audience. He took as his text some
Christmas Eve clippings from the New York Tribune and Sun which he had
been saving for this purpose. The Tribune clipping said:
Christmas will dawn in the United States over a people full of hope
and aspiration 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.
A Sun clipping depicted the “terrible offenses against humanity
committed in the name of politics in some of the most notorious East
Side districts “--the unmissionaried, unpoliced darker New York. The Sun
declared that they could not be pictured even verbally. But it suggested
enough to make the reader shudder at the hideous depths of vice in the
sections named. Another clipping from the same paper reported the
“Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions,” as having
collected indemnities for Boxer damages in China at the rate of three
hundred taels for each murder, “full payment for all destroyed property
belonging to Christians, and national fines amounting to thirteen times
the indemnity.” It quoted Mr. Ament as saying that the money so obtained
was used for the propagation of the Gospel, and that the amount so
collected was moderate when compared with the amount secured by the
Catholics, who had demanded, in addition to money, life for life, that
is to say, “head for head”--in one district six hundred and eighty heads
having been so collected.
The despatch made Mr. Ament say a great deal more than this, but the
gist here is enough. Mark Twain, of course, was fiercely stirred.
The missionary idea had seldom appealed to him, and coupled with this
business of bloodshed, it was less attractive than usual. He printed the
clippings in full, one following the other; then he said:
By happy luck we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve--just
the time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and
enthusiasm. Our spirits soar and we find we can even make jokes;
taels I win, heads you lose.
He went on to score Ament, to compare the missionary policy in China
to that of the Pawnee Indians, and to propose for him a
monument--subscriptions to be sent to the American Board. He denounced
the national policies in Africa, China, and the Philippines, and showed
by the reports and by the private letters of soldiers home, how cruel
and barbarous and fiendish had been the warfare made by those whose
avowed purpose was to carry the blessed light of civilization and Gospel
“to the benighted native”--how in very truth these priceless blessings
had been handed on the point of a bayonet to the “Person Sitting in
Darkness.”
Mark Twain never wrote anything more scorching, more penetrating in its
sarcasm, more fearful in its revelation of injustice and hypocrisy, than
his article “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He put aquafortis on
all the raw places, and when it was finished he himself doubted the
wisdom of printing it. Howells, however, agreed that it should be
published, and “it ought to be illustrated by Dan Beard,” he added,
“with such pictures as he made for the Yankee in King Arthur's Court,
but you'd better hang yourself afterward.”
Meeting Beard a few days later, Clemens mentioned the matter and said:
“So if you make the pictures, you hang with me.”
But pictures were not required. It was published in the North American
Review for February, 1901, as the opening article; after which the
cyclone. Two storms moving in opposite directions produce a cyclone,
and the storms immediately developed; one all for Mark Twain and his
principles, the other all against him. Every paper in England and
America commented on it editorially, with bitter denunciations or with
eager praise, according to their lights and convictions.
At 14 West Tenth Street letters, newspaper clippings, documents
poured in by the bushel--laudations, vituperations, denunciations,
vindications; no such tumult ever occurred in a peaceful literary home.
It was really as if he had thrown a great missile into the human hive,
one-half of which regarded it as a ball of honey and the remainder as a
cobblestone. Whatever other effect it may have had, it left no thinking
person unawakened.
Clemens reveled in it. W. A. Rogers, in Harper's Weekly, caricatured
him as Tom Sawyer in a snow fort, assailed by the shower of snowballs,
“having the time of his life.” Another artist, Fred Lewis, pictured him
as Huck Finn with a gun.
The American Board was naturally disturbed. The Ament clipping which
Clemens had used had been public property for more than a month--its
authenticity never denied; but it was immediately denied now, and the
cable kept hot with inquiries.
The Rev. Judson Smith, one of the board, took up the defense of Dr.
Ament, declaring him to be one who had suffered for the cause, and asked
Mark Twain, whose “brilliant article,” he said, “would produce an effect
quite beyond the reach of plain argument,” not to do an innocent man
an injustice. Clemens in the same paper replied that such was not his
intent, that Mr. Ament in his report had simply arraigned himself.
Then it suddenly developed that the cable report had “grossly
exaggerated” the amount of Mr. Ament's collections. Instead of thirteen
times the indemnity it should have read “one and a third times” the
indemnity; whereupon, in another open letter, the board demanded
retraction and apology. Clemens would not fail to make the apology--at
least he would explain. It was precisely the kind of thing that would
appeal to him--the delicate moral difference between a demand thirteen
times as great as it should be and a demand that was only one and a
third times the correct amount. “To My Missionary Critics,” in the North
American Review for April (1901), was his formal and somewhat lengthy
reply.
“I have no prejudice against apologies,” he wrote. “I trust I shall
never withhold one when it is due.”
He then proceeded to make out his case categorically. Touching the
exaggerated indemnity, he said:
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 some 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 one dollar 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.
He offered some further illustrations, including the “Tale of a King and
His Treasure” and another tale entitled “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
scrupulously 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 negroes' 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-
halfshell, 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 niggers. They all do it.”--[The point had
been made by the board that it was the Chinese custom to make the
inhabitants of a village responsible for individual crimes; and
custom, likewise, to collect a third in excess of the damage, such
surplus having been applied to the support of widows and orphans of
the slain converts.]
The justice forgot his dignity and descended to sarcasm.
“Custom of the niggers! 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 whence it came, with the
others. It is not permissible here to apply to any purpose goods
dishonestly obtained; not even to the feeding of widows and orphans,
for this 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.
It was in the midst of the tumult that Clemens, perhaps feeling the need
of sacred melody, wrote to Andrew Carnegie:
DEAR SIR & FRIEND,--You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an
admirer $1.50 to buy a hymn-book with? God will bless you. I feel it; I
know it.
N. B.--If there should be other applications, this one not to count.
Yours, MARK.
P. S.-Don't send the hymn-book; send the money; I want to make the
selection myself.
Carnegie answered:
Nothing less than a two-dollar & a half hymn-book gilt will do for
you. Your place in the choir (celestial) demands that & you shall
have it.
There's a new Gospel of Saint Mark in the North American which I
like better than anything I've read for many a day.
I am willing to borrow a thousand dollars to distribute that sacred
message in proper form, & if the author don't object may I send that
sum, when I can raise it, to the Anti-Imperialist League, Boston, to
which I am a contributor, the only missionary work I am responsible
for.
Just tell me you are willing & many thousands of the holy little
missals will go forth. This inimitable satire is to become a
classic. I count among my privileges in life that I know you, the
author.
Perhaps a few more of the letters invited by Mark Twain's criticism
of missionary work in China may still be of interest to the reader:
Frederick T. Cook, of the Hospital Saturday and Sunday Association,
wrote: “I hail you as the Voltaire of America. It is a noble
distinction. God bless you and see that you weary not in well-doing in
this noblest, sublimest of crusades.”
Ministers were by no means all against him. The associate pastor of the
Every-day Church, in Boston, sent this line: “I want to thank you for
your matchless article in the current North American. It must make
converts of well-nigh all who read it.”
But a Boston school-teacher was angry. “I have been reading the North
American,” she wrote, “and I am filled with shame and remorse that I
have dreamed of asking you to come to Boston to talk to the teachers.”
On the outside of the envelope Clemens made this pencil note:
“Now, I suppose I offended that young lady by having an opinion of my
own, instead of waiting and copying hers. I never thought. I suppose
she must be as much as twenty-five, and probably the only patriot in the
country.”
A critic with a sense of humor asked: “Please excuse seeming
impertinence, but were you ever adjudged insane? Be honest. How much
money does the devil give you for arraigning Christianity and missionary
causes?”
But there were more of the better sort. Edward S. Martin, in a grateful
letter, said: “How gratifying it is to feel that we have a man among us
who understands the rarity of the plain truth, and who delights to utter
it, and has the gift of doing so without cant and with not too much
seriousness.”
Sir Hiram Maxim wrote: “I give you my candid opinion that what you have
done is of very great value to the civilization of the world. There
is no man living whose words carry greater weight than your own, as no
one's writings are so eagerly sought after by all classes.”
Clemens himself in his note-book set down this aphorism:
“Do right and you will be conspicuous.”