by Mark Twain
As I say, I was not there. I had been here in the East, six, seven, or eight years—but friends of mine were interested. John P. Jones, who has lately resigned as U.S. Senator after an uninterrupted term of perhaps thirty years, was living in San Francisco. He had a great affection for a couple of old friends of mine—Joseph T. Goodman and Denis McCarthy. They had been proprietors of that paper that I served—the Virginia City Enterprise—and they had enjoyed great prosperity in that position. They were young journeymen printers, type-setting in San Francisco in 1858, and they went over the Sierras when they heard of the discovery of silver in that unknown region of Nevada, to push their fortunes. When they arrived at that miserable little camp, Virginia City, they had no money to push their fortunes with. They had only youth, energy, hope. They found Williams there, (“Stud” Williams was his society name,) who had started a weekly newspaper, and he had one journeyman, who set up the paper, and printed it on a hand press with Williams’s help and the help of a Chinaman. They all slept in one room—cooked and slept and worked, and disseminated intelligence in this paper of theirs. Well, Williams was in debt fourteen dollars. He didn’t see any way to get out of it with his newspaper, and so he sold the paper to Denis McCarthy and Goodman for two hundred dollars, they to assume the debt of fourteen dollars and also pay the two hundred dollars, in this world or the next—there was no definite arrangement about that. But as Virginia City developed new mines were discovered, new people began to flock in, and there was talk of a faro bank and a church and all those things that go to make a frontier Christian city. There was vast prosperity, and Goodman and Denis reaped the advantage of it. Their own prosperity was so great that they built a three-story brick building, which was a wonderful thing for that town, and their business increased so mightily that they would often plant out eleven columns of new ads per day on a standing galley and leave them there to sleep and rest and breed income. When any man objected, after searching the paper in the hope of seeing his advertisement, they would say “We are doing the best we can.” Now and then the advertisements would appear, but the standing galley was doing its money-coining work all the time. But after a while Nevada Territory was turned into a State, in order to furnish office for some people who needed office, and by and by the paper, from paying those boys twenty to forty thousand dollars a year, ceased to pay anything. I suppose they were glad to get rid of it—and probably on the old terms—to some journeyman who was willing to take the old fourteen dollars’ indebtedness and pay it when he could.
These boys went down to San Francisco, setting type again. They were delightful fellows, always ready for a good time, and that meant that everybody got their money except themselves. And when the Bonanza was about to be discovered, Joe Goodman arrived here from somewhere that he’d been—I suppose trying to make business, or a livelihood, or something—and he came to see me to borrow three hundred dollars to take him out to San Francisco. And if I remember rightly he had no prospect in front of him at all, but thought he would be more likely to find it out there among the old friends, and he went to San Francisco. He arrived there just in time to meet Jones (afterwards U.S. Senator,) who was a delightful man. Jones met him and said privately “There has been a great discovery made in Nevada, and I am on the inside.” Denis was setting type in one of the offices there. He was married, and was building a wooden house, to cost $1,800, and he had paid a part and was building it on instalments out of his wages. And Jones said “I am going to put you and Denis in privately on the big Bonanza. I am on the inside, I will watch it and we will put this money up on a margin. Therefore when I say it is time to sell, it will be very necessary to sell.” So he put up 20 per cent margins for those two boys—and that is the time when this great spurt must have happened which sent that stock up to the stars in one flight—because, as the history was told to me by Joe Goodman, when that thing happened Jones said to Goodman and Denis “Now then, sell. You can come out $600,000 ahead, each of you, and that is enough. Sell.”
“No,” Joe objected, “It will go higher.”
Jones said, “I am on the inside, you are not. Sell.”
Joe’s wife implored him to sell, he wouldn’t do it. Denis’s family implored him to sell. Denis wouldn’t sell. And so it went on during two weeks. Each time the stock made a flight Jones tried to get the boys to sell. They wouldn’t do it. They said, “It is going higher.” When he said “Sell at $900,000,” they said “No, it will go to a million.”
Then the stock began to go down very rapidly. After a little, Joe sold, and he got out with $600,000 cash. Denis waited for the million, but he never got a cent. His holding was sold for the “mud”—so that he came out without anything and had to begin again setting type.
That is the story, as it was told to me many years ago—I imagine by Joe Goodman, I don’t remember now. Denis, by and by, died poor,—never got a start again.
Joe Goodman immediately went into the broker business. $600,000 was just good capital. He wasn’t in a position to retire yet. And he sent me the three hundred dollars, and said that now he had started in the broking business and that he was making an abundance of money. I didn’t hear any more then for a long time; then I learned that he had not been content with mere broking but had speculated on his own account and lost everything he had. And when that happened, John Mackay, who was always a good friend of the unfortunate, lent him $4,000 to buy a grape ranch with in Fresno County, and Joe went up there. He didn’t know anything about the grape culture, but he and his wife learned it in a very little while. He learned it a little better than anybody else, and got a good living out of it until 1886 or ’87; then he sold it for several times what he paid for it originally.
He was here a year ago and I saw him. He lives in the garden of California—in Alameda. Before this eastern visit he had been putting in twelve years of his time in the most unpromising and difficult and stubborn study that anybody has undertaken since Champollion’s time; for he undertook to find out what those sculptures mean that they find down there in the forests of Central America. And he did find out; and published a great book, the result of his twelve years of study. In this book he furnishes the meanings of those hieroglyphs—and his position as a successful expert in that complex study is recognized by the scientists in that line in London and Berlin, and elsewhere. But he is no better known than he was before—he is known only to those people. His book was published in about 1901.
This account in the New York Times says that in consequence of that strike in the great Bonanza a tempest of speculation ensued, and that the group of mines right around that centre reached a value in the stock market of close upon $400,000,000; and six months after that, that value had been reduced by three-quarters; and by 1880, five years later, the stock of the “Consolidated Virginia” was under $2 a share, and the stock in the “California” was only $1.75—for the Bonanza was now confessedly exhausted.
January 10, 1906
I have to make several speeches within the next two or three months, and I have been obliged to make a few speeches during the last two months—and all of a sudden it is borne in upon me that people who go out that way to make speeches at gatherings of one kind or another, and at social banquets particularly, put themselves to an unnecessary amount of trouble, often, in the way of preparation. As a rule, your speech at a social banquet is not an important part of your equipment for that occasion, for the reason that as a rule the banquet is merely given to celebrate some event of merely momentary interest, or to do honor to some guest of distinction,—and so there is nothing of large consequence—nothing, I mean, that one should feel bound to concentrate himself upon in talking upon such an occasion, whereas the really important matter, perhaps, is that the speaker make himself reasonably interesting while he is on his feet, and avoid wearying and exasperating the people who are not privileged to make speeches, and also not privileged to get out of the way when other people begin. So, common charity for those people should require that the spe
aker make some kind of preparation, instead of going to the place absolutely empty.
The person who makes frequent speeches can’t afford much time for their preparation, and he probably goes to that place empty, (just as I am in the habit of doing), purposing to gather texts from other unprepared people who are going to speak before he speaks. Now it is perfectly true that if you can get yourself located along about number 3, and from that lower down on the program, it can be depended on with certainty that one or another of those previous speakers will furnish all the texts needed. In fact you are likely to have more texts than you do need, and so they can become an embarrassment. You would like to talk to all of those texts, and of course that is a dangerous thing. You should choose one of them and talk to that one—and it is a hundred to one that before you have been on your feet two minutes you will wish you had taken the other one. You will get away from the one you have chosen, because you will perceive that there was another one that was better.
I am reminded of this old, old fact in my experience by what happened the other night at The Players, where twenty-two of my friends of ancient days in the Players Club gave me a dinner in testimony of their satisfaction in having me back again after an absence of three years, occasioned by the stupidity of the Board of Management of that Club—a Board which had been in office ever since the founding of the Club; and if it were not the same old Board that they had in the beginning it amounted to the same, because they must have been chosen, from time to time, from the same asylum that had furnished the original Board.
On this occasion Brander Matthews was chairman, and he opened the proceedings with an easy and comfortable and felicitous speech. Brander is always prepared and competent when he is going to make a speech. Then he called up Gilder, who came empty, and probably supposed he was going to be able to fill from Brander’s tank, whereas he struck a disappointment. He labored through and sat down not entirely defeated, but a good deal crippled. Frank Millet (painter) was next called up. He struggled along through his remarks, exhibiting two things—one, that he had prepared, and couldn’t remember the details of his preparation, and the other that his text was a poor text. In his talk the main sign of preparation was that he tried to recite two considerable batches of poetry—good poetry—but he lost confidence and turned it into bad poetry by bad recitation. Sculpture was to have been represented, and Saint-Gaudens had accepted and had promised a speech, but at the last moment he was not able to come, and a man who was thoroughly unprepared had to get up and make a speech in Saint-Gaudens’s place. He did not hit upon anything original or disturbing in his remarks, and, in fact, they were so tottering and hesitating and altogether commonplace that really he seemed to have hit upon something new and fresh when he finished by saying that he had not been expecting to be called upon to make a speech! I could have finished his speech for him, I had heard it so many times.
Those people were unfortunate because they were thinking—that is Millet and Gilder were—all the time that Matthews was speaking—they were trying to keep in mind the little preparations which they had made, and this prevented them from getting something new and fresh in the way of a text out of what Brander was saying. In the same way Millet was still thinking about his preparation while Gilder was talking, and so he overlooked possible texts furnished by Gilder. But as I had asked Matthews to put me last on the list of speakers, I had all the advantages possible to the occasion. For I came without a text, and these boys furnished plenty of texts for me, because my mind was not absorbed in trying to remember my preparations—they didn’t exist. I spoiled, in a degree, Brander’s speech, because his speech had been prepared with direct reference to introducing me, the guest of the occasion—and he had to turn that all around and get out of it, which he did very gracefully, explaining that his speech was a little lop-sided and wrong end first because I had asked to be placed last in the list of speakers. I had a plenty good enough time, because Gilder had furnished me a text; Brander had furnished me a text; Millet had furnished me a text. These texts were fresh, hot from the bat, and they produced the same eager disposition to take hold of them and talk that they would have produced in ordinary conversation around a table in a beer mill.
Now then, I know how banquet-speeches should be projected, because I have been thinking over this matter. This is my plan. Where it is merely a social banquet for a good time—such as the one which I am to attend in Washington on the 27th, where the company will consist of the membership of the Gridiron Club, (newspaper correspondents exclusively, I think) with as guests the President and Vice-President of the United States and two others—certainly that is an occasion where a person will be privileged to talk about any subject except politics and theology, and even if he is asked to talk to a toast he needn’t pay any attention to the toast, but talk about anything. Now then, the idea is this—to take the newspaper of that day, or the newspaper of that evening, and glance over the headings in the telegraphic page—a perfect bonanza of texts, you see! I think a person could pull that day’s newspaper out of his pocket and talk that company to death before he would run out of material. If it were to-day, you have the Morris incident. And that reminds me how unexciting the Morris incident will be two or three years from now—maybe six months from now—and yet what an irritating thing it is to-day, and has been for the past few days. It brings home to one this large fact: that the events of life are mainly small events—they only seem large when we are close to them. By and by they settle down and we see that one doesn’t show above another. They are all about one general low altitude, and inconsequential. If you should set down every day, by shorthand, as we are doing now, the happenings of the previous day, with the intention of making out of the massed result an autobiography, it would take from one to two hours—and from that to four hours—to set down the autobiographical matter of that one day, and the result would be a consumption of from five to forty thousand words. It would be a volume. Now one must not imagine that because it has taken all day Tuesday to write up the autobiographical matter of Monday, there will be nothing to write on Wednesday. No, there will be just as much to write on Wednesday as Monday had furnished for Tuesday. And that is because life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head. Could you set them down stenographically? No. Could you set down any considerable fraction of them stenographically? No. Fifteen stenographers hard at work couldn’t keep up. Therefore a full autobiography has never been written, and it never will be. It would consist of three hundred and sixty-five double-size volumes per year—and so if I had been doing my whole autobiographical duty ever since my youth all the library buildings on the earth could not contain the result.
I wonder what the Morris incident will look like in history fifty years from now. Consider these circumstances: that here at our own doors the mighty insurance upheaval has not settled down to a level yet. Even yesterday, and day before, the discredited millionaire insurance magnates had not all been flung out and buried from sight under the maledictions of the nation, but some of the McCurdies, McCalls, Depews, Hydes, and Alexanders were still lingering in positions of trust, such as directorships in banks. Also we have to-day the whole nation’s attention centred upon the Standard Oil Corporation, the most prodigious commercial force existing upon the planet. All the American world are standing breathless and wondering if the Standard Oil is going to come out of its Missourian battle crippled, and if crippled, how much crippled. Also we have Congress threatening to overhaul the Panama Canal Commission to see what it has done with the fifty-nine millions, and to find out what it proposes to do with the recently added eleven millions. Also there are three or four other matters of colossal public interest on the board to-day. And on the other side of the ocean we have Church and State separated in France; we have a threat of war between France and Germany upon the Morocco question; we have a crushed revolution in Russia, with the Czar and his family
of thieves—the grand dukes—recovering from their long fright and beginning to butcher the remnants of the revolutionaries in the old confident way that was the Russian way in former days for three centuries; we have China furnishing a solemn and awful mystery. Nobody knows what it is, but we are sending three regiments in a hurry from the Philippines to China, under the generalship of Funston, the man who captured Aguinaldo by methods which would disgrace the lowest blatherskite that is doing time in any penitentiary. Nobody seems to know what the Chinese mystery is, but everybody seems to think that a giant convulsion is impending there.