busy assembling those colonial empires that now comprise today’s desperate third world. Twain, succinctly for him, lists who was stealing what from whom and when, and all in the name of the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust.” But now the American writer is so shocked at what his countrymen are capable of doing in the imperial line that he proposes a suitable flag for the “Philippine Province”: “We can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones.”
In 1905, Twain published a second pamphlet (for the Congo Defense Association), “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” subtitled “A Defence of His Congo Rule.” On the cover there is a crucifix crossed by a machete and the cheery inscription “By this sign we prosper.”
The soliloquy is just that. The King of the Belgians is distressed by reports of his bloody rule over a large section of black Africa. Leopold, an absolute ruler in Africa if not in Belgium, is there to “root out slavery and stop the slave-raids, and lift up those twenty-five millions of gentle and harmless blacks out of darkness into light. . . .” He is in rather the same business as Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt of the earlier pamphlet.
Leopold free-associates, noting happily that Americans were the first to recognize his rule. As he defends himself, his night-mind (as the Surrealists used to say) gets the better of him and he keeps listing his crimes as he defends them. He notes that his enemies “concede—reluctantly—that I have
one
match in history, but only one—the
Flood
. This is intemperate.” He blames his current “crash” on “the incorruptible
kodak
. . . the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” Twain provides us with a page of nine snapshots of men and women each lacking a hand, the King’s usual punishment. Twain’s intervention was not unlike those of Voltaire and Zola or, closer to home, Howells’s denunciation of the American legal system—and press—that had found guilty the non-perpetrators of the Haymarket riots. Imperialism and tyranny for Twain were great evils but the more he understood—or
thought he understood—the human race, the darker his view of the whole lot became, as he would demonstrate in the epigraphs from
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
at the head of each chapter of his travel book
Following the Equator
(1897).
* In Paris, 1895, Twain, his wife, Olivia, and their daughter Clara started on a round-the-world lecture tour. They crossed the Atlantic; then the United States; then, on August 23, they set sail from Vancouver bound for Sydney, Australia. For several years Twain had suffered a series of financial setbacks. Now the lecture tour would make him some money, while a look at the whole world would provide him with a great deal of copy, most of which he was to use in
Following the Equator
.
At the start of the tour, Twain seems not to have been his usual resilient self. “Mr. Clemens,” wrote Olivia to a friend, “has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old.” Definitely a filmy time for someone Olivia referred to as “Youth.”
The pleasures of travel have not been known for two generations now; even so, it is comforting to read again about the soothing boredom of life at sea and the people that one meets aboard ship as well as on shore in exotic lands. One also notes that it was Twain in Australia, and not an English official recently testifying in an Australian court, who first noted that someone “was economical of the truth.”
In Twain’s journal, he muses about the past; contemplates General Grant, whose memoirs he had published and, presumably, edited a decade earlier. One would like to know more about that relationship since Gertrude Stein, among
In 1905, Twain published a second pamphlet (for the Congo Defense Association), “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” subtitled “A Defence of His Congo Rule.” On the cover there is a crucifix crossed by a machete and the cheery inscription “By this sign we prosper.”
The soliloquy is just that. The King of the Belgians is distressed by reports of his bloody rule over a large section of black Africa. Leopold, an absolute ruler in Africa if not in Belgium, is there to “root out slavery and stop the slave-raids, and lift up those twenty-five millions of gentle and harmless blacks out of darkness into light. . . .” He is in rather the same business as Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt of the earlier pamphlet.
Leopold free-associates, noting happily that Americans were the first to recognize his rule. As he defends himself, his night-mind (as the Surrealists used to say) gets the better of him and he keeps listing his crimes as he defends them. He notes that his enemies “concede—reluctantly—that I have
one
match in history, but only one—the
Flood
. This is intemperate.” He blames his current “crash” on “the incorruptible
kodak
. . . the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” Twain provides us with a page of nine snapshots of men and women each lacking a hand, the King’s usual punishment. Twain’s intervention was not unlike those of Voltaire and Zola or, closer to home, Howells’s denunciation of the American legal system—and press—that had found guilty the non-perpetrators of the Haymarket riots. Imperialism and tyranny for Twain were great evils but the more he understood—or
thought he understood—the human race, the darker his view of the whole lot became, as he would demonstrate in the epigraphs from
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar
at the head of each chapter of his travel book
Following the Equator
(1897).
* In Paris, 1895, Twain, his wife, Olivia, and their daughter Clara started on a round-the-world lecture tour. They crossed the Atlantic; then the United States; then, on August 23, they set sail from Vancouver bound for Sydney, Australia. For several years Twain had suffered a series of financial setbacks. Now the lecture tour would make him some money, while a look at the whole world would provide him with a great deal of copy, most of which he was to use in
Following the Equator
.
At the start of the tour, Twain seems not to have been his usual resilient self. “Mr. Clemens,” wrote Olivia to a friend, “has not as much courage as I wish he had, but, poor old darling, he has been pursued with colds and inabilities of various sorts. Then he is so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old.” Definitely a filmy time for someone Olivia referred to as “Youth.”
The pleasures of travel have not been known for two generations now; even so, it is comforting to read again about the soothing boredom of life at sea and the people that one meets aboard ship as well as on shore in exotic lands. One also notes that it was Twain in Australia, and not an English official recently testifying in an Australian court, who first noted that someone “was economical of the truth.”
In Twain’s journal, he muses about the past; contemplates General Grant, whose memoirs he had published and, presumably, edited a decade earlier. One would like to know more about that relationship since Gertrude Stein, among
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