by Mark Twain
To my certain knowledge, privately acquired from the understudy, the doctors have worked the stock market on this case from the start, selling bulletins to the brokers a week in advance -- sometimes to such as were long on danger, sometimes to such as were short. Once, with consols at 102, they secretly treated with both parties, offering to send the market up to 108 in the one case or down to 94 in the other, according to the best bid. It is a fact; the understudy told me so. The bulls got it; she told me that, too. In innumerable other cases they have sold for a rise or a fall, though she did not know the figures. One can see by this what value a bulletin is, where the patient has doctor-sickness. Well, it's a [word illegible] of a worldl
VI TWO FRAGMENTS FROM A SUPPRESSED
BOOK CALLED "GLANCES AT HISTORY" OR
"OUTLINES OF HISTORY"
These two fragments belong here but can be no further identified. The suppressed book is mentioned nowhere else, and if the Adam papers contained any more of it, at least Mark Twain translated no more. The two passages treat of a correspondence between the collapse of democracy in Methuselah's middle years and the one which, in 1906, the Father of History believed to be imminent. He was thinking of the occupation of the Philippines and, in the second fragment, of Theodore Roosevelt's Executive Order No. 78, both of which had analogies in the Adamic plutocracy.
Nothing has been omitted. The marks of elision at the beginning of each passage are Mark Twain's own. B.DV.
... In a speech which he made more than five hundred years ago, and which has come down to us intact, he said:
We, free citizens of the Great Republic, feel an honest pride in her greatness, her strength, her just and gentle government, her wide liberties, her honored name, her stainless history, her unsmirched flag, her hands clean from oppression of the weak and from malicious conquest, her hospitable door that stands open to the hunted and the persecuted of all nations; we are proud of the judicious respect in which she is held by the monarchies which hem her in on every side, and proudest of all of that lofty patriotism which we inherited from our fathers, which we have kept pure, and which won our liberties in the beginning and has preserved them unto this day. While that patriotism endures the Republic is safe, her greatness is secure, and against them the powers of the earth cannot prevail.
I pray you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object --
robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick -- a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor -- none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
For in a republic, who is "the Country"? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
Who, then, is "the Country"? Is it the newspaper? is it the pulpit? is it the school superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand: it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn't.
Who are the thousand -- that is to say, who are "the Country"? In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country -- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands.
The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: "Even if the war be wrong we are in it and must fight it out: we cannot retire from it without dishonor." Why, not even a burglar could have said it better. We cannot withdraw from this sordid raid because to grant peace to those little people upon their terms -- independence -- would dishonor us. You have flung away Adam's phrase -- you should take it up and examine it again.
He said, "An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war."
You have planted a seed, and it will grow.
. . . But it was impossible to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people's liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. From showily and sumptuously entertaining neighboring titled aristocracies, and from trading their daughters to them, the plutocrats came in the course of time to hunger for titles and heredities themselves. The drift toward monarchy, in some form or other, began; it was spoken of in whispers at first, later in a bolder voice.
It was now that the portent called "the Prodigy" rose in the far south. Army after army, sovereignty after sovereignty went down under the mighty tread of the shoemaker, and still he held his conquering way -- north, always north. The sleeping Republic awoke at last, but too late. It drove the money-changers from the temple, and put the government into clean hands -- but all to no purpose. To keep the power in their own hands, the money-changers had long before bought up half the country with soldier-pensions and turned a measure which had originally been a righteous one into a machine for the manufacture of bondslaves -- a machine which was at the same time an irremovable instrument of tyranny -- for every pensioner had a vote, and every man and woman who had ever been acquainted with a soldier was a pensioner; pensions were dated back to the Fall, and hordes of men who had never handled a weapon in their lives came forward and drew three hundred years' back pay. The country's conquests, so far from being profitable to the treasury, had been an intolerable burden from the beginning. The pensions, the conquests, and corruption together had brought bankruptcy in spite of the maddest taxation; the government's credit was gone, the arsenals were empty, the country unprepared for war. The military and naval schools, and all commissioned offices in the army and navy, were the preserve of the money-changers; and the standing army -- the creation of the conquest days -- was their property.
The army and navy refused to serve the new Congress and the new Administration, and said ironical
ly, "What are you going to do about it?" A difficult question to answer. Landsmen manned such ships as were not abroad watching the conquests -- and sunk them all, in honest attempts [to] do their duty. A civilian army, officered by civilians, rose brimming with the patriotism of an old forgotten day and rushed multitudinously to the front, armed with sporting guns and pitchforks -- and the standing army swept it into space. For the money-changers had privately sold out to the shoemaker. He conferred titles of nobility upon the money-changers, and mounted the Republic's throne without firing a shot.
It was thus that Popoatahualpacatapetl became our master; whose mastership descended in a little while to the Second of that name, who still holds it by his Viceroy this day.
VII EXTRACT FROM SHEM'S DIARY OF 920 A.C.
This was Mark Twain's last translation from the Adamic. It is at least as late as 1907 and possibly belongs to 1908. There is evidence that he meant to go on and translate more of what must have been a long and stirring record. Shem would probably have described the deluge, Ararat, and the bright new world. But Mark's interest finally flickered out -- because he preferred to treat the Ark in "Letters from the Earth"? -- and we end at an appropriate and symbolic moment, with Methuselah jeering at his deluded relatives, the populace deriding its prophet, and the world spinning on toward destruction. B. DV.
Sabbath Day -- As usual -- nobody keeping it. Nobody but our family. Multitudes of the wicked swarming everywhere, and carousing. Drinking, fighting, dancing, gambling, laughing, shouting, singing -- men, women, girls, youths, all at it. And at other infamies besides -- infamies not to be set down in words. And the noise! Blowing of horns, banging on pots and kettles, blaring of brazen instruments, boom and clatter of drums -- it is enough to burst a person's ears. And this is the Sabbath -- think of it!
Father says it was not like this in the earlier times. When he was a boy everybody kept the Day, and there was no wickedness, no pleasuring, no noise; there was peace, silence, tranquillity; there was divine service several times a day and in the evening.
This was near six hundred years ago. Think of that time and this! One can hardly believe such a change could come in so little a while that men not yet old can remember it.
These horrible creatures have come in even greater crowds than usual, today, to look at the Ark, and prowl over it and make fun of it. They ask questions, and when they are told it is a boat, they laugh, and ask where the water is, out here in the dry plain.
When we say the Lord is going to send the water from heaven and drown all the world, they mock again, and say, "Tell it to the marines."
Methuselah was here again today. While he isn't the oldest person in the world, he is the oldest distinguished person in it, and because of that peculiar supremacy, he is regarded with awe by everybody; and wherever he appears the riotings cease and silence falls upon the multitude, and they uncover and salute him with slavish reverence as he passes by, murmuring to each other, "Look at him -- there he goes -- 'most a thousand years old -- used to know Adam, they say." He is a vain old creature, and anybody can see how it gratifies him, though he dodders along with his nose in the air and a simpering cake-walk gait, pretending to be pondering some great matter profoundly, and letting on that he doesn't know anything is happening.
I know, from certain things I have noticed, that he is of a jealous disposition; envious, too. Perhaps I ought not to say this, for I am related to him by marriage, my wife being his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter, or somewhere along there, and indeed I wouldn't say it in public, but I think there can be no harm in my saying it in the privacy of my diary, which is merely the same as saying it to myself. He is jealous about this Ark, I am quite sure of it. Jealous because he wasn't asked to build it instead of Father. The Ark is such a wonder to all the nations around that it has raised Father from obscurity to world-wide fame, and Methuselah is jealous of that. At first, people used to say, "Noah? -- pray who is Noah?" -- but now they come miles to get his autograph. It makes Methuselah tired.
He doesn't have to sit up nights doing autographs, but we do. All of us -- the whole eight; for Father can't do them all, nor even a tenth of them, his hand being old and stiff. Methuselah has a most unpleasant disposition. I think he is never happy except when he is making other people uncomfortable. He always speaks of my brothers and me and our wives as "the children." He does it because he sees that it hurts our feelings. One day Japheth timidly ventured to remind him that we were men and women. You could have heard him scoff a mile! And he closed his eyes in a kind of ecstasy of scorn, and puckered his withered lips, exposing his yellow fangs and the gaps between them, and hacked out a dry odious laugh with an asthmatic cough mixed with it, and said, " Men and women -- the likes of you! Pray how old are you venerable relics?"
"Our wives are nearly eighty; and of us I am the youngest and I was a hundred last spring."
"Eighty, dear me! a hundred, dear mel And married! dear, dear, dear! You cradle-rubbish! You rag dolls! Married! In my young days nobody would ever have thought of such a thing as children getting married. It's monstrous!"
Japheth started to remind him that more than one of the patriarchs had married in early youth, but he wouldn't listen! That is just his way; if you catch him out with an argument that he can't answer, he raises his voice and shouts you down, and the only thing you can do is to shut your mouth and drop the matter. It won't do to dispute with him; it would be considered a scandal, and irreverent. At least it would not do for us boys to talk back. Neither us nor anybody else. Except the surgeon. The surgeon isn't afraid of him, and hasn't any reverence, anyway. The surgeon says a man is just a man, and his being a thousand years old doesn't make him any more than a man.
Letter to the Earth
OFFICE OF THE RECORDING ANGEL
Department of Petitions, Jan. 20
Abner Scofield
Coal Dealer
Buffalo. New York
I have the honor, as per command, to inform you that your recent act of benevolence and self-sacrifice has been recorded upon a page of the Book called Golden Deeds of Men; a distinction, I am permitted to remark, which is not merely extraordinary, it is unique.
As regards your prayers, for the week ending the 19th, I have the honor to report as follows:
1. For weather to advance hard coal 15 cents a ton. Granted.
2. For influx of laborers to reduce wages 10 percent. Granted.
3. For a break in rival soft-coal prices. Granted.
4. For a visitation upon the man, or upon the family of the man, who has set up a competing retail coal-yard in Rochester. Granted, as follows: diphtheria, 2, 1 fatal; scarlet fever, 1, to result in deafness and imbecility. NOTE. This prayer should have been directed against this subordinate's principals, the N. Y. Central R. R. Co.
5. For deportation to Sheol of annoying swarms of persons who apply daily for work, or for favors of one sort or another. Taken under advisement for later decision and compromise, this petition appearing to conflict with another one of same date, which will be cited further along.
6. For application of some form of violent death to neighbor who threw brick at family cat, whilst the same was serenading. Reserved for consideration and compromise because of conflict with a prayer of even date to be cited further along.
7. To "damn the missionary cause." Reserved also -- as above.
8. To increase December profits of $22,230 to $45,000 for January, and perpetuate a proportionate monthly increase thereafter -- "which will satisfy you." The prayer granted; the added remark accepted with reservations.
9. For cyclone, to destroy the works and fill up the mine of the North Pennsylvania Co. NOTE: Cyclones are not kept in stock in the winter season. A reliable article of fire-damp can be furnished upon application.
Especial note is made of the above list, they being of particular moment. The 298
remaining supplications classifiable under the head of
Special Providences, Schedule A, for week ending 19th, are granted in a body, except that 3 of the 32 cases requiring immediate death have been modified to incurable disease.
This completes the week's invoice of petitions known to this office under the technical designation of Secret Supplications of the Heart, and, which, for a reason which may suggest itself, always receive our first and especial attention.
The remainder of the week's invoice falls under the head of what we term Public Prayers, in which classification we place prayers uttered in Prayer Meeting, Sunday School, Class Meeting, Family Worship, etc. These kinds of prayers have value according to classification of Christian uttering them. By rule of this office, Christians are divided into two grand classes, to wit: (1) Professing Christians; (2) Professional Christians. These, in turn, are minutely subdivided and classified by Size, Species, and Family; and finally, Standing is determined by carats, the minimum being 1, the maximum 1,000.
As per balance sheet for quarter ending Dec. 31st, 1847, you stood classified as follows:
Grand Classification: Professing Christian.
Size: one-fourth of maximum.
Species: Human-Spiritual.
Family: A of the Elect, Division 16.
Standing: 322 carats fine.
As per balance sheet for quarter just ended -- that is to say, forty years later --
you stand classified as follows:
Grand Classification: Professional Christian.
Size: six one-hundredths of maximum.
Species: Human-Animal.
Family: W of the Elect, Division 1547.
