Mark Twain, A Biography 1900-1907 | Page 8

been in not
requiring fancy rates for "extinguished missionaries" in China as
Germany had done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said,
in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England
had been willing to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea.
The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for
the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for
a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him
made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to MacAlister
at the end of the year, he said, "I seem to have made many speeches,
but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think." Still, a respectable

number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully
written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social
pressure. Again to MacAlister:
I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) &
answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since we
arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite & presently I'll
dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.
He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a
year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the
reform of city government.
The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was a
meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal
reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the
opening address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is
not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then,
and Mark Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of
fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to
disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as
a sort of slogan for reform.
Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't
speak again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on
public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be
denied. He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to
preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February
11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.
"Think of it!" he wrote Twichell. "Two old rebels functioning there: I
as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed
somewhat in these forty years, thank God!"
The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's
speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of
the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful
paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved
them), to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase
with which he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment
on Colonel Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and
patriot; then he said:
It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but

merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of
destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson's forebears
had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time
rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million surviving
quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in reverence and love
of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried with all our hearts and
all our strength to defeat and dispossess-- Abraham Lincoln! Is the
Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are the Blue and the Gray one to-day?
By authority of this sign we may answer yes; there was a
Rebellion--that incident is closed.
I was born and reared in a slave State, my father was a slaveowner; and
in the Civil War I was a second lieutenant in the Confederate service.
For a while. This second cousin of mine, Colonel Watterson, the orator
of this present occasion, was born and reared in a slave State, was a
colonel in the Confederate service, and rendered me such assistance as
he could in my self-appointed great task of annihilating the Federal
armies and breaking up the Union. I laid my plans with wisdom and
foresight, and if Colonel Watterson had obeyed my orders I should
have succeeded in my giant undertaking. It was my intention to drive
General Grant into the Pacific--if I could get transportation--and I told
Colonel Watterson to surround the Eastern armies and wait till I came.
But he was insubordinate, and stood upon a punctilio of military
etiquette; he refused to take orders from a second lieutenant--and the
Union was saved. This is the first time that