Who Is Mark Twain? (9 page)

R
eader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Simply suppose you were a member of Congress. And suppose you started-up what you believed to be your faculties, and worked out the draft of a law to cover the needs of some industry or other which you did not know anything about. What would you do with that draft—submit it to somebody who did know something about it, and get instruction and advice? Yes?

It is natural to think that; but the member of Congress proceeds differently. He drafts that law to cover a matter which he knows nothing about; he straightway submits it to the rest of the National Asylum, who are similarly ignorant concerning the thing; they amend-out any accidental clearnesses or coherences which may have escaped his notice; then they pass it, and it presently goes into effect. It goes into effect, and of course it begins to confuse and hamper interested parties, because they do not understand it. But this has been foreseen, and has also been provided for—in a most curious way. Each public department at Washington keeps a minor asylum of salaried inmates whose business it is to invent a meaning for laws that have no meaning; and to detect meanings, where any exist, and distort and confuse them. This process is called “interpreting.” And sublime and awe-inspiring is this art!

Consider one specimen, then we will move along to the main purpose of this article: The law forbids the importation of pirated American books—intends to, at any rate; it certainly thought it forbade such importations. Well, Postmaster General Jewell entered into a convention with the Postmaster General of Canada which permits pirated American books to be sent into this country in the United States mail! and more than that, the United States government actually levies and pockets a duty on this contraband stuff! There, you see, is a law whose intent—though poorly and pitifully supported, as to penalties—was in the interest of the citizen; but the interpretation is wholly in the interest of the foreigner, and that foreigner a thief. And who gets any real benefit out of it? The thief makes a hundred dollars, the United States get a hundred dollars, and the American author loses a thousand, possibly ten thousand. How long will the thing remain in this way? Necessarily until a Congressman who is not a fool shall re-draft the copyright law; and have at his back a sufficiency of Congressmen also not fools, to pass it; and by luck hit upon an interval when they chance to be out of idiots in the interpretation-retreat of the Departments, and consequently no immediate way available to misconstrue its language and defeat its intent. Six hundred years, think? Or would you be frank, and say six hundred thousand?

And now let us stop prefacing, and pass to the real subject of this article. In old times, postage was very high: ten, fifteen, twenty-five cents on a single letter. Take fifteen hundred pages of manuscript, for a book, and apply those rates to the package, and what is the result? We have a couple of historical illustrations. An American girl shipped her manuscript book across the ocean to get Sir Walter Scott’s “candid opinion” upon it—that is to say, a fulsome puff. She discreetly left him to pay the postage, which he did—twenty-five dollars! But, being afraid that that copy might chance to get lost, she shipped him a duplicate by the next vessel. He paid the postage again—twenty-five dollars. In this case, Sir Walter paid; but if the girl had sent her book to a publisher, she would have been careful not to invite his prejudice—she would have prepaid. When the publisher declined it and sent it back—a thing which publishers usually did then, and usually do yet—he would be sure to leave her to pay again. So she would be out of pocket the probable value of the book and forty-nine dollars besides. The same with the friends who had been incautious enough to lend her the money. Would she stop there? No. We never do. She would go on shipping that MS. to publisher after publisher, until she had tried the whole thirteen then existing in this country—if her friends continued to believe in the immortal merit of the book; and they always do. Six hundred and fifty dollars gone for postage! No, let us call it six hundred and twenty-five, and consider, for the sake of argument, that the thirteenth publisher is a dare-devil, and accepts the book. He reads the rough proof, but sends a “revise” containing scattering markings, to her. The markings turn it into constructive manuscript, and so she has to pay letter postage on it—say a dollar a batch, twenty-five batches, in all. She corrects the revise, returns it with markings of her own—and pays another twenty-five on it. Now the sum total has really reached six hundred and fifty dollars for the item of postage on the book. When it is published will she get the money back? In most cases, no.

Here was a very heavy burden laid upon a few individuals, and they of the recognized pauper class. In those days, forty-six books were accepted and published, per year, in the United States, and some fraction under fifteen hundred thousand rejected and returned. Please figure on that; I have lost my pencil. But any way it was somewhere along about seventy-five or eighty million dollars a year for book-postage, you see.

The government finally took hold of the thing and passed a law which afforded an immense relief. It said that “Authors’ Manuscripts” should pass through the mails at the rate of a half cent per ounce—and I think it was still cheaper than that, at first. But even at that rate you could send a book manuscript clear across the country for half a dollar or a dollar. The law also allowed proof-sheets to come under the head of “Authors’ MS.”

There was high rejoicing among the literary tribe. Such a mighty impulse was given to literature that—but, I must not venture to reveal how many billions of books were offered and rejected during the next few years, lest I be disbelieved. All went swimmingly for a time. Then the Department-idiot went to interpreting the law; possibly, also, the Asylum fell to amending it—as to that, I do not know. At first, everything designed for publication was Authors’ MS. Except, I believe, newspaper correspondence. I remember trying, a long time ago, to send a daily newspaper letter from San Francisco as Authors’ MS., and not succeeding. The lopping and barring-off began pretty early, and proceeded swiftly. Presently, one could send nothing but book and magazine MS., and proofs and revises. By and by magazine MS was shut off; and in 1871 I was refused permission to send a “Galaxy” article for other than letter postage, but was allowed to receive and return proof-sheets of it at the Authors’ MS. rate!

But by that time, and even earlier, we had ceased to need the U.S. mail and its fickle and fluctuating charity, for the express companies had got into full swing, and their service was as cheap as the government’s, and rather prompter and surer. So the custom of sending MS. books by mail soon died; and inasmuch as nothing remained privileged except proof-sheets, the law presently became a dead and useless cumberer of the statute books.

Eleven years winged their changeful flight—as the novels say. Eleven years winged their changeful flight, and last week came at last. I had been expressing book MS to Boston, a couple of chapters at a time, all summer, from a farm out in interior New York. One day I enveloped one of these thin batches; and just then I happened to think that twenty-five cents for it was bad economy; so I stuck a two-cent stamp on it, marked it “Authors’ MS.,” and sent it down by a friend. Whereupon ensued a conversation by telephone:

“Postoffice authorities say it must be open at both ends.”

“Very well, open it at both ends.”

Silence for ten minutes. Then—

“Authorities find no
proof-sheets
with it. Can’t send it.”

“What do they want with proof-sheets?”

“Law extends Author’s privilege to book manuscript
only when accompanied by proof-sheets!”

I sat down and waited for this piece of colossal idiocy to sink home and settle securely to its right place among my bric-a-brac collection of unpurchasable mental curiosities; then I said—

“How in the world am I to furnish a proof-sheet of
manuscript which has never been printed?”

“I don’t know; but that is what the Post Office Department of the United States requires.”

“The Post Office Department of the United States is an Ass.”

“Second the motion. But the law—or at least the official interpretation of it—is as I have said.”

“Please borrow the book for me. I wish to see the inspired words with my own eyes.”

Here they are. United States Official Postal Guide, for January, 1882. “Ruling,” or interpretation No. 34, page 642:

“Book manuscript, manuscript for magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and music manuscript, are now subject to full letter rates of postage,
except they be accompanied by
PROOF-SHEETS,
or corrected proof-sheets,
OF SUCH MANUSCRIPT, etc., etc.”

There it is—read it for yourself. If that isn’t the very dregs of human imbecility and ignorance, where shall you go to find it? Is there another idiot asylum outside the Post Office Department of the United States that can fellow that?

Look at it all around—inspect it in detail—for it is the gem-stupidity of all the ages. You see, they have admitted newspaper MS to the privilege, now; and have added music; and have restored the magazine and the periodical to their early place with book MS.—and by a simple turn of the wrist, and the most miraculous piece of leatherheadedness the world ever saw, the interpreter-idiot has shut every one of them out and made the law an absolute and hopeless nullity!

You think that if
you
were a law-builder or a salaried law-tinker, and didn’t know anything about a matter which came officially before you, you would go and get advice and information from somebody who did know something about it, before you meddled with it. But I whisper in your ear, now, as I did in the outset, and say to you that those laborious and well-meaning, and complacent, but groping, and shell-headed and inadequate Washington tumble-bugs have not that useful habit.

T
o the Editor of the Times.

S
IR
: I think you will grant that the source of religion and of patriotism is one and the same—the heart, not the head. It seems established by ages of history that none but the weakest and most valueless men can be persuaded to desert their flag or their religion. We regard as a base creature the man who deserts his flag and turns against his country, either when his country is in the right or when she is in the wrong. We hold in detestation the person who tries to beguile him to do it. We say loyalty is not matter of argument but of feeling—its seat is in the heart, not the brain. I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors. We have lacked the opportunity of hearing a foreign missionary who has been forced upon us against our will lauding his own saints and gods and saying harsh things about ours. If, some time or other, we shall have these experiences, it will probably go hard with the missionary.

History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government. Christianity, like Mohammedanism, has made its conquests by force, not persuasion. The Christendom of to-day is the result, solely, of the sword in some cases, and of royal mandate in the others. Since these two missionaries retired from the field the industry has stood still. Persuasion has accomplished nothing. Nothing, for the reason that for every convert it has made, more than a thousand pagans have been born to fill up his place. If the missionary trade had been a commercial enterprise, its sane and practical board of directors would have seen, two centuries ago, that there was no profit in it and no profit possible to it on this side of eternity, and they would have gone into liquidation, paid ha’pence in the pound, and taken in their sign; reporting to the stockholders that “the balance of trade being 1,000 to 1 against us we have considered it wise to retire from the enterprise and apply our energies to something worth while.” But mission-propagators are apparently not open to (business) logic. They have paid out millions upon millions of pounds to add an almost invisible Christian fringe around the globe’s massed heathen billions; they are aware that the body of the fabric increases in bulk a thousand times faster than the fringe; they know that a convert is by far the most expensive bric-a-brac in commerce; they know that if he is a grown-up convert he is as a rule a poor thing and always a traitor, and was not worth harvesting at any figure. And yet they are quite well satisfied with the triumphs they are achieving. That is the name they usually call it by.

Still, if it amuses the missionary and his backer, should the man in the street object? Is it any of his affair? Is he in any way affected by it? Does it do him any harm? It is a question worth considering. Let him put himself in the pagan’s place, and examine some of the facts by that light. Wherever the missionary goes he not only proclaims that his religion is the best one, but that it is a true one while his hearer’s religion is a false one; that the pagan’s gods are inventions of the imagination; that the things and the names which are sacred to him are not worthy of his reverence; that his fathers are all in hell, and the dead darlings of his nursery also, because the word which saves had not been brought to them; that he must now desert his ancient religion and give allegiance to the new one or he will follow his fathers and his lost darlings to the eternal fires. The missionary must teach these things, for he has his orders; and there is no trick of language, there is no art of words, that can so phrase them that they are not an insult. In Fiji the old pagan said, “And all I loved are in hell? I am not a dog; I will follow them.” That a missionary ever survives his first exhibition of his samples shows that there is something very fine and patient and noble about the pagan. It seems a pity to ever missionary it out of him. When a French nun in Hong Kong proposed to send to France for money wherewith to establish an asylum for fatherless little foundlings where they might be fatted up physically and spiritually, the authorities said, “How kind of you to think of us—are you out of foundlings at home?” The missionary has no wish to be an insulter, but how is he to help it? All his propositions are insults, word them as he may. In an ignorant and bigoted Chinese village the mere sight of him is an insult—particularly when he is there by grace of foreign force. Two hundred years ago the Chinese hated him, ordered him away, and slaughtered him when he tarried. They have hated him ever since, and henceforth they will hate him more than ever.

And have they not reason for it? When a white man there kills a Chinaman is he dealt with more severely than he would be in Europe? No. When a missionary is killed by a Chinaman, are the Chinese blind to the difference in results? When an English missionary was lately killed there in a village, a British official visited the place and arranged the punishments himself—exacted them and secured them: a couple of beheadings; several sentences to prison, one of them for ten years; a heavy fine; and the village had to put up a monument and also build a Christian chapel to remember the missionary by. If we added fines and monuments and memorial churches to murder-penalties at home—but we don’t; and we do not add them in China except when it is a missionary that is killed. And then they are insults, and they rankle in the Chinese breast, and bring us no advantage, moral, political, or commercial. But they move the Chinaman to ponder dubiously upon the meek and forgiving religion and its pet child the gilded and feathered “civilization” which the Christian Governments are so anxious to confer upon him.

Two years ago the Chinese killed a German missionary. The German Government sent in its bill promptly, and it was paid: £40,000 cash; a new Christian church; and a “lease” of sea-bordered territory twelve miles deep. Would Germany have ventured to charge so much if the missionary had been killed in Russia or England? And does not this question rise in the Chinaman’s mind and move him to anger? Would the charge have been made for any German but a missionary? If there had been no missionaries in China would there be any trouble there to-day? I believe not. Commercial foreigners get along well enough with the Chinese. But the missionary has always been a danger, and has made trouble more than once. He was Germany’s happy opportunity: when he is not making trouble himself we perceive that he can be a calamitous pretext for it. He must be held responsible for the present condition of things in China and for the massacre of the Ministers. We are told that Germany’s act was the thing which finally broke down the Chinaman’s patience and started the present upheaval. If that missionary had only been a German sailor he would have been settled for on terms which would have added no affronting memorial churches to China and bred no bad blood.

He has surpassed all his former mischiefs this time. He has loaded vast China onto the Concert of Christian Birds of Prey; and they were glad, smelling carrion; but they have lit and are astonished, finding the carcase alive. And it may remain alive—Europe cannot tell, yet. If the Concert cannot agree, they cannot appoint a Generalissimo; without a Generalissimo they can have plenty of scattered picnics, but no general holiday excursion in China. And it is not unlikely that the picnic parties will fall out among themselves. That the Concert can agree and stay so, no one believes, not even the office-cat. The China war may turn out a European war, and China go free and save herself alive. Then, when the world settles down again, let us hope that the missionary’s industries will be restricted to his native land for all time to come. Is the man in the street concerned? I think he is. The time is grave. The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into.

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