Twains Letters vol 5 1901-1906 | Page 9

lurid
theatricality of his exit do it--and the duplicate crime follows; and that
begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on. Every
lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white
men, and lights another pyre--115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8
months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.
Yes, the wild talk you see in the papers! And from men who are sane
when not upset by overwhelming excitement. A U. S.
Senator-Cullom--wants this Buffalo criminal lynched! It would breed
other lynchings--of men who are not dreaming of committing murders,
now, and will commit none if Cullom will keep quiet and not provide
the exciting cause.
And a District Attorney wants a law which shall punish with death
attempts upon a President's life--this, mind you, as a deterrent. It would
have no effect--or the opposite one. The lunatic's mind-space is all

occupied--as mine was--with the matter in hand; there is no room in it
for reflections upon what may happen to him. That comes after the
crime.
It is the noise the attempt would make in the world that would breed the
subsequent attempts, by unsettling the rickety minds of men who envy
the criminal his vast notoriety--his obscure name tongued by
stupendous Kings and Emperors--his picture printed everywhere, the
trivialest details of his movements, what he eats, what he drinks; how
he sleeps, what he says, cabled abroad over the whole globe at cost of
fifty thousand dollars a day--and he only a lowly shoemaker
yesterday!--like the assassin of the President of France--in debt three
francs to his landlady, and insulted by her--and to-day she is proud to
be able to say she knew him "as familiarly as you know your own
brother," and glad to stand till she drops and pour out columns and
pages of her grandeur and her happiness upon the eager interviewer.
Nothing will check the lynchings and ruler-murder but absolute
silence-- the absence of pow-pow about them. How are you going to
manage that? By gagging every witness and jamming him into a
dungeon for life; by abolishing all newspapers; by exterminating all
newspaper men; and by extinguishing God's most elegant invention, the
Human Race. It is quite simple, quite easy, and I hope you will take a
day off and attend to it, Joe. I blow a kiss to you, and am Lovingly
Yours, MARK.
When the Adirondack summer ended Clemens settled for the winter in
the beautiful Appleton home at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson. It was a
place of wide-spreading grass and shade-a house of ample room. They
were established in it in time for Mark Twain to take an active interest
in the New York elections and assist a ticket for good government to
defeat Tammany Hall.

XLI
LETTERS OF 1902. RIVERDALE. YORK HARBOR. ILLNESS OF
MRS. CLEMENS
The year 1902 was an eventful one for Mark Twain. In April he
received a degree of LL.D. from the University of Missouri and
returned to his native State to accept it. This was his last journey to the
Mississippi River. During the summer Mrs. Clemens's health broke

down and illnesses of one sort or another visited other members of the
family. Amid so much stress and anxiety Clemens had little time or
inclination for work. He wrote not many letters and mainly somber
ones. Once, by way of diversion, he worked out the idea of a curious
club--which he formed--its members to be young girls--girls for the
most part whom he had never seen. They were elected without their
consent from among those who wrote to him without his consent, and it
is not likely that any one so chosen declined membership. One
selection from his letters to the French member, Miss Helene Picard, of
St.-Die, France, will explain the club and present a side of Mask Twain
somewhat different from that found in most of his correspondence.
To Miss Picard, in St.-Die, France:
RIVERDALE-ON-THE-HUDSON, February 22, 1902. DEAR MISS
HELENE,--If you will let me call you so, considering that my head is
white and that I have grownup daughters. Your beautiful letter has
given me such deep pleasure! I will make bold to claim you for a friend
and lock you up with the rest of my riches; for I am a miser who counts
his spoil every day and hoards it secretly and adds to it when he can,
and is grateful to see it grow.
Some of that gold comes, like yourself, in a sealed package, and I can't
see it and may never have the happiness; but I know its value without
that, and by what sum it increases my wealth.
I have a Club, a private Club, which is all my own. I appoint the
Members myself, and they