3. Doing it in order to filch Cuba, the formal and distinct disclaimer
in the ultimatum being very, very thin humbug, and easily detectable as
such by you and virtuous Europe.
4. And finally you are ashamed of all this because it is new, and base,
and brutal, and dishonest; and because Europe, having had no previous
experience of such things, is horrified by it and can never respect us
nor associate with us any more.
Brutal, base, dishonest? We? Land thieves? Shedders of innocent blood?
We? Traitors to our official word? We? Are we going to lose Europe’s
respect because of this new and dreadful conduct? Russia’s, for
instance? Is she lying stretched out on her back in Manchuria, with her
head among her Siberian prisons and her feet in Port Arthur, trying to
read over the fairy tales she told Lord Salisbury, and not able to do it
for crying because we are maneuvering to treacherously smouch Cuba from
feeble Spain, and because we are ungently shedding innocent Spanish
blood?
Is it France’s respect that we are going to lose? Is our unchivalric
conduct troubling a nation which exists to-day because a brave young
girl saved it when its poltroons had lost it--a nation which deserted
her as one man when her day of peril came? Is our treacherous assault
upon a weak people distressing a nation which contributed Bartholomew’s
Day to human history? Is our ruthless spirit offending the sensibilities
of the nation which gave us the Reign of Terror to read about? Is our
unmanly intrusion into the private affairs of a sister nation shocking
the feelings of the people who sent Maximilian to Mexico? Are our shabby
and pusillanimous ways outraging the fastidious people who have sent an
innocent man (Dreyfus) to a living hell, taken to their embraces the
slimy guilty one, and submitted to a thousand indignities Emile
Zola--the manliest man in France?
Is it Spain’s respect that we are going to lose? Is she sitting sadly
conning her great history and contrasting it with our meddling, cruel,
perfidious one--our shameful history of foreign robberies, humanitarian
shams, and annihilations of weak and unoffending nations? Is she
remembering with pride how she sent Columbus home in chains; how she
sent half of the harmless West Indians into slavery and the rest to the
grave, leaving not one alive; how she robbed and slaughtered the Inca’s
gentle race, then beguiled the Inca into her power with fair promises
and burned him at the stake; how she drenched the New World in blood,
and earned and got the name of The Nation with the Bloody Footprint; how
she drove all the Jews out of Spain in a day, allowing them to sell
their property, but forbidding them to carry any money out of the
country; how she roasted heretics by the thousands and thousands in her
public squares, generation after generation, her kings and her priests
looking on as at a holiday show; how her Holy Inquisition imported hell
into the earth; how she was the first to institute it and the last to
give it up--and then only under compulsion; how, with a spirit
unmodified by time, she still tortures her prisoners to-day; how, with
her ancient passion for pain and blood unchanged, she still crowds the
arena with ladies and gentlemen and priests to see with delight a bull
harried and persecuted and a gored horse dragging his entrails on the
ground; and how, with this incredible character surviving all attempts
to civilize it, her Duke of Alva rises again in the person of General
Weyler--to-day the most idolized personage in Spain--and we see a
hundred thousand women and children shut up in pens and pitilessly
starved to death?
Are we indeed going to lose Spain’s respect? Is there no way to avoid
this calamity--or this compliment? Are we going to lose her respect
because we have made a promise in our ultimatum which she thinks we
shall break? And meantime is she trying to recall some promise of her
own which she has kept?
Is the Professional Official Fibber of Europe really troubled with our
morals? Dear Parisian friend, are you taking seriously the daily remark
of the newspaper and the orator about “this noble nation with an
illustrious history”? That is mere kindness, mere charity for a people
in temporary hard luck. The newspaper and the orator do not mean it.
They wink when they say it.
And so you are ashamed. Do not be ashamed; there is no occasion for it.
DUELING
(Vienna, Austria, 1898)
This pastime is as common in Austria to-day as it is in France. But with
this difference--that here in the Austrian states the duel is dangerous,
while in France it is not. Here it is tragedy, in France it is comedy;
here it is a solemnity, there it is monkeyshines; here the duelist risks
his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with
pistol or saber, in France with a hairpin--a blunt one. Here the
desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint
the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a
stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music.
At the end of a French duel the pair hug and kiss and cry, and praise
each other’s valor; then the surgeons make an examination and pick out
the scratched one, and the other one helps him on to the litter and pays
his fare; and in return the scratched one treats to champagne and
oysters in the evening, and then “the incident is closed,” as the French
say. It is all polite, and gracious, and pretty, and impressive. At the
end of an Austrian duel the antagonist that is alive gravely offers his
hand to the other man, utters some phrases of courteous regret, then
bids him good-by and goes his way, and that incident also is closed. The
French duelist is painstakingly protected from danger, by the rules of
the game. His antagonist’s weapon cannot reach so far as his body; if he
gets a scratch it will not be above his elbow. But in Austria the rules
of the game do not provide against danger, they carefully provide _for_
it, usually. Commonly the combat must be kept up until one of the men is
disabled; a nondisabling slash or stab does not retire him.
For a matter of three months I watched the Viennese journals, and
whenever a duel was reported in their telegraphic columns I scrap-booked
it. By this record I find that dueling in Austria is not confined to
journalists and old maids, as in France, but is indulged in by military
men, journalists, students, physicians, lawyers, members of the
legislature, and even the Cabinet, the bench, and the police. Dueling is
forbidden by law; and so it seems odd to see the makers and
administrators of the laws dancing on their work in this way. Some
months ago Count Badeni, at that time chief of the government, fought a
pistol duel here in the capital city of the Empire with Representative
Wolf, and both of those distinguished Christians came near getting
turned out of the Church--for the Church as well as the state forbids
dueling.
In one case, lately, in Hungary, the police interfered and stopped a
duel after the first innings. This was a saber duel between the chief of
police and the city attorney. Unkind things were said about it by the
newspapers. They said the police remembered their duty uncommonly well
when their own officials were the parties concerned in duels. But I
think the underlings showed bread-and-butter judgment. If their
superiors had carved each other well, the public would have asked,
“Where were the police?” and their place would have been endangered; but
custom does not require them to be around where mere unofficial citizens
are explaining a thing with sabers.
There was another duel--a double duel--going on in the immediate
neighborhood at the time, and in this case the police obeyed custom and
did not disturb it. Their bread and butter was not at stake there. In
this duel a physician fought a couple of surgeons, and wounded both--one
of them lightly, the other seriously. An undertaker wanted to keep
people from interfering, but that was quite natural again.
Selecting at random from my record, I next find a duel at Tranopol
between military men. An officer of the Tenth Dragoons charged an
officer of the Ninth Dragoons with an offense against the laws of the
card table. There was a defect or a doubt somewhere in the matter, and
this had to be examined and passed upon by a court of honor. So the case
was sent up to Lemberg for this purpose. One would like to know what the
defect was, but the newspaper does not say. A man here who has fought
many duels and has a graveyard says that probably the matter in question
was as to whether the accusation was true or not; that if the charge was
a very grave one--cheating, for instance--proof of its truth would rule
the guilty officer out of the field of honor; the court would not allow
a gentleman to fight with such a person. You see what a solemn thing it
is; you see how particular they are; any little careless speech can lose
you your privilege of getting yourself shot, here. The court seems to
have gone into the matter in a searching and careful fashion, for
several months elapsed before it reached a decision. It then sanctioned
a duel and the accused killed his accuser.
Next I find a duel between a prince and a major; first with pistols--no
result satisfactory to either party; then with sabers, and the major
badly hurt.
Next, a saber duel between journalists--the one a strong man, the other
feeble and in poor health. It was brief; the strong one drove his sword
through the weak one, and death was immediate.
Next, a duel between a lieutenant and a student of medicine. According
to the newspaper report, these are the details: The student was in a
restaurant one evening; passing along, he halted at a table to speak
with some friends; near by sat a dozen military men; the student
conceived that one of these was “staring” at him; he asked the officer
to step outside and explain. This officer and another one gathered up
their capes and sabers and went out with the student. Outside--this is
the student’s account--the student introduced himself to the offending
officer and said, “You seemed to stare at me”; for answer, the officer
struck the student with his fist; the student parried the blow; both
officers drew their sabers and attacked the young fellow, and one of
them gave him a wound on the left arm; then they withdrew. This was
Saturday night. The duel followed on Monday, in the military riding
school--the customary dueling ground all over Austria, apparently. The
weapons were pistols. The dueling terms were somewhat beyond custom in
the matter of severity, if I may gather that from the statement that the
combat was fought “unter sehr schweren Bedingungen”--to wit, “distance,
15 steps--with 3 steps advance.” There was but one exchange of shots.
The student was hit. “He put his hand on his breast, his body began to
bend slowly forward, then collapsed in death and sank to the ground.”
It is pathetic. There are other duels in my list, but I find in each and
all of them one and the same ever-recurring defect--the _principals_ are
never present, but only by their sham representatives. The _real_
principals in any duel are not the duelists themselves, but their
_families_. They do the mourning, the suffering; theirs is the loss and
theirs the misery. They stake all that, the duelist stakes nothing but
his life, and that is a trivial thing compared with what his death must
cost those whom he leaves behind him. Challenges should not mention the
duelist; he has nothing much at stake, and the real vengeance cannot
reach him. The challenge should summon the offender’s old gray mother
and his young wife and his little children--these, or any of whom he is
a dear and worshiped possession--and should say, “You have done me no
harm, but I am the meek slave of a custom which requires me to crush the
happiness out of your hearts and condemn you to years of pain and grief,
in order that I may wash clean with your tears a stain which has been
put upon me by another person.”
The logic of it is admirable; a person has robbed me of a penny; I must
beggar ten innocent persons to make good my loss. Surely nobody’s
“honor” is worth all that.
Since the duelist’s family are the real principals in a duel, the state
ought to compel them to be present at it. Custom, also, ought to be so
amended as to require it; and without it no duel ought to be allowed to
go on. If that student’s unoffending mother had been present and
watching the officer through her tears as he raised his pistol, he--why,
he would have fired in the air! We know that. For we know how we are all
made. Laws ought to be based upon the ascertained facts of our nature.
It would be a simple thing to make a dueling law which would stop
dueling.
As things are now, the mother is never invited. She submits to this; and
without outward complaint, for she, too, is the vassal of custom, and
custom requires her to conceal her pain when she learns the disastrous
news that her son must go to the dueling field, and by the powerful
force that is lodged in habit and custom she is enabled to obey this
trying requirement--a requirement which exacts a miracle of her, and
gets it. In January a neighbor of ours who has a young son in the army
was awakened by this youth at three o’clock one morning, and she sat up
in bed and listened to his message:
“I have come to tell you something, mother, which will distress you, but
you must be good and brave and bear it. I have been affronted by a
fellow officer and we fight at three this afternoon. Lie down and sleep,
now, and think no more about it.”
She kissed him good night and lay down paralyzed with grief and fear,
but said nothing. But she did not sleep; she prayed and mourned till the
first streak of dawn, then fled to the nearest church and implored the
Virgin for help; and from that church she went to another and another;
church after church, and still church after church, and so spent all the
day until three o’clock on her knees in agony and tears; then dragged
herself home and sat down, comfortless and desolate, to count the
minutes, and wait, with an outward show of calm, for what had been
ordained for her--happiness, or endless misery. Presently she heard the
clank of a saber--she had not known before what music was in that
sound--and her son put his head in and said:
“X was in the wrong and he apologized.”
So that incident was closed; and for the rest of her life the mother
will always find something pleasant about the clank of a saber, no
doubt.
In one of my listed duels--However, let it go, there is nothing
particularly striking about it except that the seconds interfered. And
prematurely, too, for neither man was dead. This was certainly
irregular. Neither of the men liked it. It was a duel with cavalry
sabers, between an editor and a lieutenant. The editor walked to the
hospital; the lieutenant was carried. In Austria an editor who can write
well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle
a saber with charm.
The following very recent telegram shows that also in France duels are
humanely stopped as soon as they approach the (French) danger point:
(Reuter’s Telegram)
PARIS, _March 5th_.
The duel between Colonels Henry and Picquart took place this morning
in the riding school of the École Militaire, the doors of which were
strictly guarded in order to prevent intrusion. The combatants, who
fought with swords, were in position at ten o’clock.
At the first re-engagement Lieut.-Col. Henry was slightly scratched in
the forearm, and just at the same moment his own blade appeared to
touch his adversary’s neck. Senator Ranc, who was Colonel Picquart’s
second, stopped the fight, but as it was found that his principal had
not been touched, the combat continued. A very sharp encounter ensued,
in which Colonel Henry was wounded in the elbow, and the duel then
terminated.
After which the stretcher and the band. In lurid contrast with this
delicate flirtation, we have an account of a deadly duel of day before
yesterday in Italy, where the earnest Austrian duel is in vogue. I knew
one of the principals, Cavalotti, slightly, and this gives me a sort of
personal interest in his duel. I first saw him in Rome several years
ago. He was sitting on a block of stone in the Forum, and was writing
something in his notebook--a poem or a challenge, or something like
that--and the friend who pointed him out to me said, “That is
Cavalotti--he has fought thirty duels; do not disturb him.” I did not
disturb him.
SKELETON PLAN OF A PROPOSED
CASTING VOTE PARTY
(1901)
NOTE.--Mark Twain’s effort was always for clean politics. In 1901 he
formulated what to him seemed a feasible plan to obtain this boon. It
is here first published.--A. B. P.