by Mark Twain
Next day she did not come. Nor the next day, nor the day after that. Then three more days, and still she did not come. It was very strange; nothing quite the match of this had ever happened before. Our curiosity began to be excited. Adam was of the opinion that if she had not come next day, or at furthest the day after, we ought to send Cain and Abel to look.
So we did that. They were gone three days, but they found her. She had had adventures. In the dark, the first night, she fell in the river and was washed down a long distance, she did not know how far, and was finally flung upon a sandbar. After that, she lived with a kangaroo's family, and was hospitably entertained, and there was much sociability. The mama-kangaroo was very sweet and motherly, and would take her babies out of her pocket and go foraging among the hills and dales and fetch home a pocketful of the choicest fruits and nuts; and nearly every night there was company
-- bears and rabbits and buzzards and chickens and foxes and hyenas and polecats and other creatures -- and gay romping and grand times. The animals seemed to pity the child because she had no fur; for always when she slept they covered her with leaves and moss to protect her dainty flesh, and she was covered like that when the boys found her. She had been homesick the first days, but had gotten over it.
That was her word -- homesick. We have put it in the Dictionary, and will presently settle upon a meaning for it. It is made of two words which we already had, and which have clear meanings when by themselves, though apparently none when combined. Building a dictionary is exceedingly interesting work, but tough; as Adam says. . . .
IV PASSAGE FROM EVE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
YEAR OF THE WORLD, 920
With the next passage we reach the ominous year that had come almost to obsess the translator.
We plunge into a modern world whose complexity is highlighted by the simplicities described in the earlier papers, and we begin with one of its most urgent problems, overpopulation. It is at once clear that the second decade of the tenth century After Creation seemed to the Father of History very much like the first decade of the twentieth century After Christ. This passage from Eve's autobiography (erroneously attributed to her diary in the translator's notes) serves, with its quotation from a review, as a prelude to the more detailed study in the next chapter.
The date of this translation is, I think, 1906. B. DV.
Ah, well, in that old simple, ignorant time it never entered our unthinking heads that we, humble, unknown and inconsequential little people, were cradling, nursing and watching over the most conspicuous and stupendous event which would happen in the universe for a thousand years -- the founding of the human race!
It is true that the world was a solitude in the first days, but the solitude was soon modified. When we were 30 years old we had 30 children, and our children had 300; in 20 years more the population was 6,000; by the end of the second century it was become millions. For we are a long-lived race, and not many died. More than half of my children are still alive. I did not cease to bear until I was approaching middle age. As a rule, such of my children as survived the perils of childhood have continued to live, and this has been the case with the other families. Our race now numbers billions.
EXTRACT FROM AN ARTICLE IN "THE RADICAL,"
JANUARY, 916
. . . When the population reached five billions the earth was heavily burdened to support it. But wars, pestilences and famines brought relief, from time to time, and in some degree reduced the prodigious pressure. The memorable benefaction of the year 508, which was a famine reinforced by a pestilence, swept away sixteen hundred millions of people in nine months. It was not much, but it was something. The same is all that can be said of its successors of later periods. The burden of population grew heavier and heavier and more and more formidable, century by century, and the gravity of the situation created by it was steadily and proportionately increased.
After the age of infancy, few died. The average of life was six hundred years. The cradles were filling, filling, filling -- always, always, always; the cemeteries stood comparatively idle, the undertakers had but little traffic, they could hardly support their families. The death rate was 2,250 in the million. To the thoughtful this was portentous; to the light-witted it was matter for brag! These latter were always comparing the population of one decade with that of the previous one and hurrahing over the mighty increase -- as if that were an advantage to the world; a world that could hardly scratch enough out of the earth to keep itself from starving.
And yet, worse was to come! Necessarily our true hope did not and could not lie in spasmodic famine and pestilence, whose effects could be only temporary, but in war and the physicians, whose help is constant. Now then, let us note what has been happening. In the past fifty years science has reduced the doctor's effectiveness by half.
He uses but one deadly drug now, where formerly he used ten. Improved sanitation has made whole regions healthy which were previously not so. It has been discovered that the majority of the most useful and fatal diseases are caused by microbes of various breeds; very well, they have learned how to render the efforts of those microbes innocuous. As a result, yellow fever, black plague, cholera, diphtheria, and nearly every valuable distemper we had are become but entertainments for the idle hour, and are of no more value to the State than is the stomach-ache. Marvelous advances in surgery have been added to our disasters. They remove a diseased stomach, now, and the man gets along better and cheaper than he did before. If a man loses a faculty, they bore into his skull and restore it. They take off his legs and arms, and refurnish him from the mechanical junk shop, and he is as good as new. They give him a new nose if he needs it; new entrails; new bones; new teeth; glass eyes; silver tubes to swallow through; in a word, they take him to pieces and make him over again, and he can stand twice as much wear and tear as he could before. They do these things by help of antiseptics and anesthesia, and there is no gangrene and no pain. Thus war has become nearly valueless; out of a hundred wounded that would formerly have died, ninety-nine are back in the ranks again in a month.
What, then, is the grand result of all this microbing and sanitation and surgery?
This -- which is appalling: the death rate has been reduced to 1,200 in the million. And foolish people rejoice at it and boast about it! It is a serious matter. It promises to double the globe's population every twelve months. In time there will not be room in the world for the people to stand, let alone sit down.
Remedy? I know of none. The span of life is too long, the death rate is too trifling.
The span should be thirty-five years -- a mere moment of Time -- the death rate should be 20,000 or 30,000 in the million. Even then the population would double in thirty-five years, and by and by even this would be a burden again and make the support of life difficult.
Honor to whom honor is due: the physician failed us, war has saved us. Not that the killed and wounded amount to anything as a relief, for they do not; but the poverty and desolation caused by war sweep myriads away and make space for immigrants.
War is a rude friend, but a kind one. It keeps us down to sixty billion and saves the hard-grubbing world alive. It is all that the globe can support. . . .
V THE WORLD IN THE YEAR 920 AFTER CREATION
This section requires no annotation. The Family's world is ripe for destruction -- and Noah is hammering at the Ark. We are surrounded by unmistakable evidence of social rot, adequately analyzed by the Mad Prophet and by the Professor of the Science of Historical Forecast who reports him. They are as familiar to us today as they were to the Father of History and I need only note that the hint here given of the Prodigy, the shoemaker-dictator, was apparently elaborated at length in other portions of the Adam papers which Mark Twain intended to translate but did not. There is a slight discrepancy in the texts; clearly, the Shoemaker appeared following the collapse of the democratic experiment which Methuselah's diary mentions and which occurred in the fifth century. But he was also a product of the industrial revol
ution, which is here attributed to the eighth century. The error must be subjective: Mart Twain was thinking of the progress of science and invention in the nineteenth century after Christ and believed that the next collapse of civilization was at hand in the early twentieth century.
Corruptions and confusion of the texts in this part of the archives caused the translator much trouble -- which his editor was to repeat after him. I have had to piece these translations together from a variety of manuscripts, fragmentary, half-deleted, partly revised, with few clues to the order that Mark Twain intended them to have. I have arranged them in what seems to me a proper sequence, in a sequence which at least progressively describes the chaos of society. I cannot date any of the manuscripts but I think that they were all written in 1906. Possibly the "Lecture" may be earlier than that; in fact, it may be earlier than any other of the papers except Methuselah's diary. B.DV.
FROM THE DIARY OF A LADY OF THE BLOOD, THIRD GRADE
Received the Mad Prophet today. He is a good man, and I think his intellect is better than its reputation. He got his nickname long ago, and did not deserve it; for he merely builds prognostications, not prophecies. He pretends to nothing more. Builds them out of history and statistics, using the facts of the past to forecast the probabilities of the future. It is merely applied science. An astronomer foretells an eclipse, yet is not obnoxious to the charge of pretending to be a prophet. Noah is a prophet; and certainly no one has more reverence for him and for his sacred office than has this modest dealer in probabilities and prognostications.
I have known the Mad Prophet -- or the Mad Philosopher, for he has both names
-- ever since he was a student in college, in the beginning of the third century. He was nineteen or twenty then. I have always had a kindly feeling for him; partly, of course, because he was a relative (though distant), but mainly, I am sure, because of the good qualities of his head and heart. He married when he was twenty-four, and when neither he nor the girl was properly situated to marry, for they were poor and belonged to families which had the same defect. Both families were respectable enough, and in a faraway fashion were allied to the nobility; but as Adam always said, "Respectability butters no parsnips," and it was not just the right capital to marry on. I advised them to wait a while, and of course they did it, since advice from a Personage of the Blood was -
- and is -- law, by courtesy and custom of the race; but they were an impatient little pair and dreadfully in love with each other, and they only waited long enough to cover the bare necessities of etiquette. My influence got the lad a small mathematics professorship in his university and kept him in possession of it, and he worked hard and saved faithfully. Poor things, they endured the suspension of life, as they called it, .as long as they could; they waited sixty years, then they got married. She was a lovely little rat, and sweetly captivating: slender, lissome, brown-eyed, dimpled, complexioned like a peach blossom, frisky, frolicsome, graceful -- just a picture, she was, just a poem. She was of foreign extraction; her little drop of nobility had trickled down to her, in the lapse of time, from a great lord whose habitat was in a remote land many meridians of longitude away, the Duke of Washoe. He was descended from me through -- I forget the name, now -- but the source was my daughter Regina's branch, I mean the one proceeding from Regina's second marriage. He was second cousin to -- but I have forgotten that name, too. The little bride's name was Red Cloud, and was as foreign as her extraction. It was a kind of inheritance.
The couple remained poor, and are poor yet, but as happy as many that are richer. They have always had enough for their needs, for my influence has kept him in his post, and has also augmented his salary a little, more than once. Their tranquil life has suffered one blight, one heavy sorrow, which fell upon them toward the end of the first century of their union, and whose shadow lies upon their hearts yet. They lost sixteen children in a railway accident.
Before he came, today, the Philosopher had been examining the mobile which is propelled by the wonderful new force, liquefied thought. He was profoundly impressed.
He said he could see no reason why this force should not displace steam and electricity, since it is much more powerful than those agents, occupies almost no space, and costs next to nothing. That is, the cost to the Trust that owns the patent is next to nothing. It is the same Trust that owns the globe's railways and ships -- the globe's transportation, in a word.
"Five years ago," said he, "this new force was laughed at by the ignorant, and discounted by the wise -- a thing which always happens when there is a new invention.
It happened with the Liograph, it happened with the Hellograph, it happened with the Mumble'n'screechograph, and it will go on happening with new inventions to the end of time. Why cannot people learn to wait for developments before they commit themselves? Surely experience has given them warnings enough. Almost as a rule the apparently insane invention turns out well by and by, through the discovery and application to it of improvements of one kind and another. Five years ago liquefied thought had no value but as an Imperial Academy Show on Ladies' Night. The cost of production was prohibitory, as far as business and commerce were concerned, for at that stage of development the only raw material which would answer had to be taken from statesmen, judges, scientists, poets, philosophers, editors, sculptors, painters, generals, admirals, inventors, engineers, and such like, but now -- as Methuselah says -
- you can get it from politicians and idiots; adding, in his unpleasant way, 'But that is tautology; politician and idiot are synonymous terms.'
"I am of the opinion that the development of this mysterious new force has not yet proceeded beyond the infancy stage. I think we know but little about it now, compared with what we shall know a few decades hence. Why, it may turn out to be the renowned and lamented Lost Force of old tradition! And it isn't mere tradition; there is history for it. You know the tradition yourself, gracious Excellency, -- like the rest of the world -- but you do not know the history. It has just been deciphered from the clay archives of an exhumed city of the Double Continent; and when it is published the nations will perceive that when the amazing man called 'the Prodigy,' who rose out of obscurity in the middle of the fifth century and in a few years conquered the world and brought all its kingdoms under his imperial scepter, where they still abide under the scepter of his son today, had formidable help in his stupendous work from a source outside of his colossal genius for war, statesmanship, and administration, unrivaled and unapproachable as these confessedly were. That source was the agent known to tradition, romance, and poetry as the Lost Force. It is true that that humble young shoemaker did sweep the Double Continent from end to end with fire and sword without that help, to establish his autocratic sway over all its monarchies by merely the faculties that were born in him, and that he handled a billion men in the field under a million generals trained by himself and subject to his sole will unhampered by meddling ministries and legislatures, and left mountains of dead and wounded upon his battlefields, but be subdued the rest of the globe without spilling blood, except in a single instance.
"That mystery is explained, now, by the clay records. It came to his knowledge that one Napeer, an obscure person but learned in science, had stated in his will that he had discovered a means whereby he could sweep a whole army out of existence in an instant, but that he would not reveal his secret, since war was already terrible enough and he would not be a party to the augmentation of its destructiveness.
"The shoemaker-emperor said, 'The man was foolish -- his invention would abolish war altogether,' and commanded that all papers left behind by him should be brought to him. He found the formula, mastered its details, then destroyed it. He privately manufactured that tremendous agent, and went out alone against the sovereigns of the eastern world, with it in his pocket. Only one army ever came against him. It formed itself in battle array in a great plain, and at a distance of twelve miles he blew it into the air, leaving no vestige of it behind but a few rags and butto
ns.
"He claimed the sovereignty of the globe and it was accorded him without an objecting voice. As you are aware, his reign of thirty years was a reign of peace; then, by accident, he blew himself up with his machine, along with one of his viceregal capitals, and his formidable secret died with him. Then the dreadful wars began again, and for the world's sins they still continue. But the universal empire which he established was founded in wisdom and strength, and today his son sits as securely upon its throne as he did when he mounted it so many centuries ago."
It was quite interesting. He was just beginning to speak about his "Law of Periodical Repetition" -- or perhaps it was about his "Law of the Permanency of the Intellectual Average" -- but was interrupted. He was to be received by her Grandeur, and was now called to that exalted privilege by an officer of the Household.
EXTRACT FROM THE DISCOURSE OF REGINALD SELKIRK,
THE MAD PHILOSOPHER, TO HER GRANDEUR, THE ACTING
HEAD OF THE HUMAN RACE
"Our wonderful civilization? I will not object to the adjective -- it rightly describes it
-- but I do object to the large and complacent admiration which it implies. By all accounts -- yours in chief, Excellency -- the pure and sweet and ignorant and unsordid civilization of Eden was worth a thousand millions of it. What is a civilization, rightly considered? Morally, it is the evil passions repressed, the level of conduct raised; spiritually, idols cast down, God enthroned; materially, bread and fair treatment for the greatest number. That is the common formula, the common definition; everybody accepts it and is satisfied with it.
"Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect, as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskite Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep, which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place.