DEAR JOE,--It is another off day, but tomorrow I shall resume work to a
certainty, and bid a long farewell to letter-scribbling.
The news of the President looks decidedly hopeful, and we are all glad,
and the household faces are much improved, as to cheerfulness. Oh, the
talk in the newspapers! Evidently the Human Race is the same old Human
Race. And how unjust, and unreflectingly discriminating, the talkers
are. Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers are
saying wild things, crazy things--they are out of themselves, and do not
know it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice they
declare the assassin sane--a man who has been entertaining fiery and
reason--debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months. Why, no one
is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it.
Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying
forms--fortunately harmless forms as a rule--but in whatever form
they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us
distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form
happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out--and so must the
spectator.
This ass with the unpronounceable name was probably more insane than
usual this week or two back, and may get back upon his bearings by and
by, but he was over the sanity-border when he shot the President. It is
possible that it has taken him the whole interval since the murder of
the King of Italy to get insane enough to attempt the President's life.
Without a doubt some thousands of men have been meditating the same act
in the same interval, but new and strong interests have intervened and
diverted their over-excited minds long enough to give them a chance to
settle, and tranquilize, and get back upon a healthy level again. Every
extraordinary occurrence unsettles the heads of hundreds of thousands
of men for a few moments or hours or days. If there had been ten kings
around when Humbert fell they would have been in great peril for a day
or more--and from men in whose presence they would have been quite safe
after the excess of their excitement had had an interval in which to
cool down. I bought a revolver once and travelled twelve hundred miles
to kill a man. He was away. He was gone a day. With nothing else to do,
I had to stop and think--and did. Within an hour--within half of it--I
was ashamed of myself--and felt unspeakably ridiculous. I do not know
what to call it if I was not insane. During a whole week my head was in
a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset a
stronger reason than mine.
All over the world, every day, there are some millions of men in
that condition temporarily. And in that time there is always a
moment--perhaps only a single one when they would do murder if their man
was at hand. If the opportunity comes a shade too late, the chances are
that it has come permanently too late. Opportunity seldom comes
exactly at the supreme moment. This saves a million lives a day in the
world--for sure.
No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous details of it are ravenously
devoured by a hundred thousand men whose minds dwell, unaware, near the
temporary-insanity frontier--and over they go, now! There is a day--two
days--three--during which no Ruler would be safe from perhaps the half
of them; and there is a single moment wherein he would not be safe from
any of them, no doubt.
It may take this present shooting-case six months to breed another
ruler-tragedy, but it will breed it. There is at least one mind
somewhere which will brood, and wear, and decay itself to the
killing-point and produce that tragedy.
Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain of
another one--I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the lurid
theatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; and
that begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on. Every
lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white
men, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8
months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.
Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane when
not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S. Senator-Cullom--wants this
Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed other lynchings--of men who are
not dreaming of committing murders, now, and will commit none if Cullom
will keep quiet and not provide the exciting cause.
And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death
attempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent. It
would have no effect--or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space is
all occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no room
in it for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after the
crime.
It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the
subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy
the criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by stupendous
Kings and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the trivialest
details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how he sleeps,
what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of fifty
thousand dollars a day--and he only a lowly shoemaker yesterday!--like
the assassin of the President of France--in debt three francs to his
landlady, and insulted by her--and to-day she is proud to be able to say
she knew him “as familiarly as you know your own brother,” and glad to
stand till she drops and pour out columns and pages of her grandeur and
her happiness upon the eager interviewer.
Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute
silence--the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to manage
that? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a dungeon for life;
by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all newspaper men; and by
extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the Human Race. It is quite
simple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a day off and attend to it,
Joe. I blow a kiss to you, and am
Lovingly Yours,
MARK.
When the Adirondack summer ended Clemens settled for the winter in
the beautiful Appleton home at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. It was a
place of wide-spreading grass and shade-a house of ample room. They
were established in it in time for Mark Twain to take an active
interest in the New York elections and assist a ticket for good
government to defeat Tammany Hall.