Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  When Ellsworth got through with his effort to raise a fund of twelve or fifteen thousand dollars, he had secured sixteen hundred, and was a sad, sad man. It is possible that he sometimes admiringly reflects, now, that I am a wise person. As for me, I wish there were some more of us in the world, for I find it lonesome.

  Wednesday, November 21, 1906

  Father Hawley, and the meeting at which he presided in Hartford, thirty years ago—showing the ill effects of having too many orators when trying to raise money by public speaking.

  Before I close this talk about methods of raising money for charities, I wish to speak of one very common method which I have not yet mentioned. It is exploited with considerable frequency in every community in the Christian world. A public meeting is called, and orators appointed to move the audience to tears and charity. The scheme is good, and when it is well managed the results are about all that could be desired. But oftener than otherwise, I think, mismanagement is the rule. Commonly, instead of enlisting one strong speaker whose whole heart is in his work, and then promptly shutting off his oratory the moment that he has worked up the house to the highest attainable point of enthusiasm for the cause, three or four—or half a dozen—minor speakers are added to the list, and they weary the house; they exasperate it; and the results for the charity are deplorable.

  I am now once more reasoning from experience, not hearsay—an experience which makes me unhappy now, and has made me unhappy every time it has risen upon my memory in the long stretch of thirty years since it burnt for itself a habitation there. It is an incident of the Hartford days. A Mr. Hawley was the city missionary—a man with a big generous heart, a charitable heart; a man whose pity went spontaneously out to all that suffer, and who labored in behalf of the poor, the forsaken, the forlorn, and the helpless, with an eager and tireless zeal not matchable among men, I think, except where the object is the acquiring of somebody else’s money upon gratifyingly hard and sordid terms. He was not a clergyman, nor an officer in any church; he was merely a plain, ordinary Christian; but he was so beloved—not to say worshiped—by all ranks and conditions of his fellow-citizens that he was called “Father” by common consent. It was a title of affection, and also of esteem and admiration; and his character and conduct conferred a new grace and dignity upon that appellation.

  Father Hawley collected money, clothing, fuel, food, and other necessaries of life for the people, and personally attended to the distribution of these things among the Hartford poor—not among the professional paupers; he left those to the city government, and to the regular charity organizations, and confined his efforts to the seeking out in garrets and cellars of worthy and honest poor families and individuals who had fallen into poverty through stress of circumstances but endured their miseries in silence and concealment, and would not beg. All the year long, day and night, Father Hawley prosecuted his still-hunt after the sick and hungry of this class, and once annually he summoned the city and gave an account of his stewardship.

  That was always a great night in Hartford, a memorable night. There was no house that could hold the people, but as many got in as could find sitting room or standing-space, for when Hawley set out to tell of the pitiful things he had seen in the cellars and the garrets there was no eloquence like to his; not even the coldest heart in the house could listen unmoved.

  I was present at one of these annual assemblages, and although it was a matter of thirty years ago, I find no difficulty in remembering it. The house was packed to suffocation. When Hawley came forward upon the platform, the house rose, with one impulse, and greeted him with a storm of welcome which continued during a minute or more. Then he began his report—not with a flourish, not with wordy embroideries and decorations, but quietly, without gestures, and in the simplest words. He stood there like another Wendell Phillips—indeed, he reminded me of Wendell Phillips; and it is not too high praise to say, that in his way, and on his own specialty, he was that master’s peer. Wendell Phillips used to stand motionless, and seemingly emotionless, and deliver gentle and simple sentences that blighted and blasted, and which drove his hearers to almost uncontrollable fury. And in the same way, Father Hawley, standing solitary, and still, and gestureless, told in the simplest language tales of sorrow, and suffering, and grief, and unearned misery, which wrung the hearts of his house and made their tears flow like rain.

  At the end of twenty minutes, that packed audience was beside itself; it was beside itself in the sense that it was lifted above itself, exalted to lofty and generous and hitherto unknown altitudes of feeling; and every individual there was eager and anxious and aching to put his hand in his pocket and contribute every penny he had to the cause for which Father Hawley was pleading. I was like the rest. I had four hundred dollars in my pocket, in bills. I wanted somebody to come and get it; and I wished I had any rag of paper that I could write a check upon. That man had so stirred my compassion for his poor that my emotions had overmastered me, and I was in a sense insane. If they had passed the plate at that supreme moment, that vast audience would have gone forth from that place beggars, paupers, proper subjects for Father Hawley’s own benevolent ministrations.

  But no—always when there is a chance for an ass to work his gift, that ass is always there. He was there on that night to help mismanage the enterprise and defeat it. Father Hawley may have talked a half hour, in making his report, but I think it was not so much. When he sat down the house was wild to impoverish itself for the cause. But four speakers followed him, and then the fatigue began; also the cooling process—that is, the pocket-books began to cool, but not the hides of their owners—far from it! By this time every man was sweltering; and it will never be known how hot the place really was, because there was only one thermometer, and it vomited its quicksilver out at the top and left no record of what it had scored.

  The first speaker abolished my desire to get a piece of paper and do a check; the second one reduced my proposed four-hundred-dollar contribution to two hundred; the third and fourth reduced it to nothing; and at last, when the plate did get to me I put in a button and took out ten cents.

  This experience, taken along with others of a similar sort, has convinced me that when a public call for a benevolence is resorted to, the very first thing to be considered and cared for is the management of it. A professional manager ought to be engaged, and paid for his services. Under amateur management, mismanagement is almost always the rule, I believe; with the result, as I think, that the right moment for passing the plate is missed, and, by consequence, dimes collected where dollars could have been secured if the orators had been gagged at the time that they ought to have received that attention. The management ought always to provide gags, and they ought always to be applied when the proper time arrives.

  Thursday, November 22, 1906

  The international copyright bills before Congress in ’86—Mr. Clemens supported the Chace Bill—The young physician (now very old) who by drawing quaint pictures and writing original poems persuaded his little patients to take his odious mixtures, and who afterwards had these published in book form and is still living on income from his book, as he is a citizen of an honest country, Germany. Mr. Clemens will be seventy-one next week. His copyrights will soon begin to expire, therefore he must continue writing.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Feb. 12, ’86.

  Papa has long wanted us to have an international copywright in this country, so two or three weeks ago, he went to Washington to see what he could do to influence the government in favor of one. Here is a newspaper’s description of the hearing of the Senate that he attended. Jan. 30, ’86.

  The Outlook for International Copyright.

  WASHINGTON, January 30.—It is the impression of those who have followed the hearing in international copyright that the Senate Committee on Patents will report favorably the bill with the “printers’ amendment,” which is advocated by General Hawley, by Senator Chace, by Mr. Clemens, and other publishers who are also
authors, and is accepted by the representative of the Typographical Union, which, as the agent of that Union somewhat grandiloquently told the Committee, through its affiliation with the Knights of Labor, speaks for from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 people. Although it was clearly demonstrated to the Committee by Mr. Lowell and others that the American author is the only laborer who is obliged to compete with those who are not paid anything, the influence of the book manufacturers, and of labor unions, and of the various protected interests, is so strong in Congress that those who boast that they are “practical legislators” will not support a bill solely on the ground that, as Mr. Lowell put it, “it is a measure of morality and justice.” It is not, however, measures of morality and justice that can control the most votes. Mr. Clemens, in his humorous way, during the hearing said a very practical thing, in accordance with which the Committee is very likely to act. He said that while the American author has a great interest in American books, there are a great many others who are interested in book-making in its various forms, and the “other fellows” are the larger part.

  There were two international copyright bills before Congress at the time: (1) the Chace Bill, which recognized the claims of American printers and binders, and other trades which had acquired vested rights in the business of book-making, and (2) the Hawley Bill, which ignored these claims. It did not seem to me that Congress could properly abolish those rights; therefore in speaking before the Senate Committee I supported the Chace Bill. It was finally passed, and in the summer of 1891 it went into effect. It was a lame, poor bill, as regards the rights and interests of foreign authors, but this can be said with truth, and emphatically, of any copyright law, either foreign or domestic, that has ever come into being since the invention of printing—except in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Russia, and some other countries, civilized, half civilized, and savage. Of unmentioned governments there remain two, Great Britain and the United States. Neither of these has ever passed a copyright bill which was not conspicuously distinguished for ignorance, robbery, and silliness. As I have said, the Chace Bill was a lame poor affair, yet it was a great improvement upon any that had ever passed through the criminal Congressional mill before. It had its share of silliness and villainy, but it could not be British nor American without these characteristics.

  Somewhere about 1888 or ’89, if my memory is correct, I went, one day, and paid my respects to the venerable author of “Struwwelpeter.” He was very old, not far short of eighty, I think. When he was a young physician and just getting into practice, his methods were the methods of that ancient time—that is to say, if a patient had any blood in him he pumped it out, and then filled up his body, a dipperful at a time, with bitter and nauseating and odious mixtures compounded of ordure, and dead men’s fat, and the dried livers of toads, and ipecac, and calomel, and raisins, and spices, and lemon juice, and sugar, and spiders, and sewage, and asafetida, and molasses, and some of the blood that had been pumped out of the sufferer the day before. In some cases the patient survived; but in cases where the patient was a little child, the physician and the mother met with difficulty, and obstruction, and resistance, and sobs, and tears, and pleadings, when the dipperful of filth was offered and the pair of touched and sympathetic executioners implored the child to swallow it.

  By and by the young physician discovered a new and powerful persuader, by accident. He did not know how to draw, and that was the valuable part of his discovery, for he drew a child that was so unlike any child that God had been able to design up to that time, that when the little patient by whose bed he was watching got a glimpse of it, that child was excited and delighted to the verge of convalescence. The young physician did not know how to write poetry, and that was another inestimably valuable addition to his discovery, for when he appended to the picture some lines of poetry, they were so far beyond human help, in their abandoned unliterariness, that when they were read to the patient they completed the cure. To make it still completer, the young physician offered to make another picture, and purge himself of another poem, if the child would agree to swallow the offered dipperful of slush without murmuring. The child was glad to sign the contract.

  From that day forth, the young physician moved upon all suffering nurseries equipped with pencil and paper and water-colors, and he had no more trouble with the children. He could draw a picture and do a poem in five minutes, and he was always able to trade these fascinatingly dreadful manufactures to his little patients on the terms just indicated. He kept his drawings and poems, in order that he might administer them, from time to time, to children that had not yet seen them but needed their persuasions, and by and by his accumulation of these things sufficed to fill a small table-drawer. Crude as the pictures were, and unconventional and fearfully original as the poetry was, they were smart and witty and humorous, and to children they were limitlessly captivating. Somebody suggested to the young doctor that he publish these works in a little book. He did it. The little book was a primer, and was sold at a price which brought it within reach of even the leanest purse—four or five cents, I should say, I do not remember exactly. The sale was prodigious, and it has never ceased from being that in any year from that time till to-day.

  In the course of time it came to pass that the doctor stood in need of the income produced by that accidentally begotten primer, and when I saw him, in his old age, that income was his sole support. But it was sufficient. At that time his book was more than fifty years old—I should say fifty-five—but he was a citizen of an honest country, and his Government sat tranquilly by and saw him buy his bread with his own money without making any attempt to rob him of it, for by the German law the copyright term was fifty years, and as many more years added to that as the author might live; whereas if he had been of the English or American breed of Christians, and product of the English and American breed of civilization, I should not have seen him, for he would have been already a dozen years in the poor house, and meantime his and other publishers would have been stealing his children’s share of the profits of his book, with his Government standing by and approving.

  I am nearly seventy-one. I shall be seventy-one a week from now. I have supported myself by my own labor during every year for fifty-nine years. If I were living under an honorable government I could retire from work, now, and take a holiday for the two or three years that possibly remain of my life; but I am not privileged to do that, because five years from now my copyrights will begin to expire, under the forty-two-year limit, and the publishers and their confederate, the Government, will begin to steal from my children the bread which I have earned for them; therefore instead of taking a vacation, I must dictate these memoirs and build them as a protecting fortress around and about my twenty-five books, and by this means confer upon those books the equivalent of another twenty-eight years’ copyright.

  I should like to stop dictating and blaspheme a while, now, but I must not do it—I have reformed, until day after to-morrow.

  Friday, November 23, 1906

  Mr. Clemens tells of his idea in regard to international copyright, which he disclosed to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes thirty-five years ago.

  I was supposing that I had said, yesterday, all that I wanted to say about copyright, but I was probably mistaken. This morning’s mail brings a printed circular from Thorvald Solberg, Register of Copyrights, Washington, conveying notice of the fact that the Senate and House Committees on Patents will resume hearings upon the pending Copyright Bill on December 7th and 8th, and that the two Committees will sit conjointly in the Senate Reading Room at the Library of Congress. Mr. Solberg requests that those persons desiring to be heard will as soon as possible notify his office, stating the amount of time they will require and the particular provisions of the bill upon which they will desire to speak.

  This softly, sweetly, gently, wafts me back, as upon perfumed zephyrs, to the dim and dreamy and devilish past. Reminiscences connected with copyright-anguishes crop up all around me, and I am surprised to fi
nd that I have foolishly wasted in this drunken and nefarious traffic so many hours that might have been usefully employed. Thirty-five years ago, an idea, in the line of international copyright, was born to me in Hartford, and I took the first train and carried it, proud and rejoicing, to Boston, and exposed it to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes for his homage and admiration. This idea was very simple in construction—even a Congressman could have understood it. It was based upon principle, and it ignored policy, as being unworthy to travel in its high company. It proposed that our copyright law should be so amended as to extend each and every one of its protections and benevolences to all foreign authors upon the same terms as those enjoyed by the American author; that this apparent grace should be extended not as a grace but as the foreign author’s right, thus putting the foreign author’s clothes and his book upon the same basis—as being his property, and not righteously and fairly filchable from him by any government, Christian or pagan. And finally, this recognition of the foreign author’s right to his property was to be a gratis act; nothing was to be required of any foreign government in return; the act was to be a simple act of justice, and unsullied and undegraded by any trading and trafficking in, and selling of, said justice.

  Dr. Holmes laughed at this project most cruelly and cordially. He said it was Utopian; that governments didn’t deal in gratis contributions of pecuniarily valuable graces; that governments did not trade in dreams and romance; that they did not give something for nothing; that it had been their settled policy, from the beginnings of civilization—and earlier, for that matter—to always require something for something in a trade with a foreign government, and also always to try to get two somethings for one something, and accomplish it if humanly possible. He said that if our Government should do this juvenile thing, all the other Christian governments would laugh at it, and would gladly accept our sentimental charity and chuckle over it, and never dream of furnishing anything in return.