Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  I was sorry to learn that apparently it is only Christian peoples that stand for Christian morals and teach them from the pulpit, and in the schools, and that Christian governments, placed in power by these same moral people, have no public morals, but deride them, and do it frankly, openly, aboveboard, and even boastfully. I was only half as old, then, as I am now, and I did not know, then, as I know now, that our American governments, municipal, state, and federal, are very poor in public morals, while the men that constitute these governments are in most cases properly equipped with private morals and live up to them in private life.

  I contended that my plan was a good one, even as a measure of policy; that while it might be very true that the English Government might laugh in its sleeve at our romantic exhibition of justice and cleanliness, the English people’s attitude would be very different; that they would be ashamed to receive a common justice at our hands without a return, and would demand that for shame’s sake, and for decency’s sake, we be met half way, and British honor and fairness be saved from reproach. I used that argument, but, at the same time, I really cared not a farthing about a foreign return of our fair-dealing. In my capacity as just a human being, I was not able to conceive of myself entering into an agreement with another human being to leave his property unstolen provided he would respect mine in the same way; and governments being nothing more than assemblages of human beings representative of the people, and ostensibly selected for character and intelligence, I was not able to understand how they could propagate thieving, encourage it, applaud it, and stubbornly refuse to respect property rights, and still keep their own self-respect.

  I ventured another argument. I said we had been living on stolen English literature ever since the discovery of America by Columbus; that we were still living upon it and in that way teaching our people to envy and worship kings, emperors, dukes, high birth, hereditary privilege, and many other offensively undemocratic things; that we were still stealing this unwholesome literature, and thereby rooting and establishing monarchical and aristocratic ideals in the hearts of our nation; and yet, most incongruously, parents, schools, colleges, universities, and Fourth of July stump orators were all engaged in deriding and abusing these very ideals and trying to train the nation in a wholesome disrespect for them. I said that just at the present time England ought to be very glad, and indeed eager, to accept my proposition, because we were stealing fifty books from her where she stole one from us; but that a time could come, and probably would come, when this condition of things would be reversed; when her population would no longer be only a third short of our own, but would have well nigh disappeared under our swarming accumulations of the human animal, and we should be furnishing fifty books to her one, and anxiously and prayerfully wishing an international copyright law could be arranged on a moral basis, leaving policy out.

  However, I did not convince Dr. Holmes. He made game of all my notions, and I went back home very much wilted, and dropped the international copyright scheme out of my mind. I had not mentioned it to any one except Dr. Holmes, and I was glad of that, and made up my mind that I would not furnish anybody else an opportunity to laugh at me. But as it turned out, I had not been so very unstatesmanlike after all. Fourteen years later the Hawley International Copyright Bill, which I have already spoken of, came before Congress, and it was just my scheme over again. But it stood no chance; we were a Christian nation with private and effective Christian morals; our Government was a Christian government with Christian public morals, and a moral Hawley Bill stood no more chance there than it would have stood in that place whither so many Congresses have gone, and will go.

  Saturday, November 24, 1906

  More about international copyright—Congresses and Parliaments made up of men who know nothing about the matter—Mr. Clemens disputes with Lord Thwing his statement that there is no property in ideas.

  I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being, of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers an opinion upon a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training, and experience, it will always be an opinion of so foolish and so valueless a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest to our Heavenly Father that the human being is another disappointment, and that he is no considerable improvement upon the monkey. Congresses and Parliaments are not made up of authors and publishers, but of lawyers, agriculturalists, merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and so on. When bills are proposed affecting these great industries, they get prompt and intelligent attention, because there are so many members of the law-making bodies who are personally and profoundly interested in these things and ready to rise up and fight for or against them with their best strength and energy. These bills are discussed and explained by men who know all about the interests involved in them; men recognized as being competent to explain and discuss and furnish authoritative information to the ignorant. As a result, perhaps no important English or American statutes are uncompromisingly and hopelessly idiotic except the copyright statutes of these two countries. The Congresses and the Parliaments are always, and must always remain, in the condition of the British Parliaments of seventy-five and eighty years ago, when they were called upon to legislate upon a matter which was absolutely new to the whole body of them and concerning which they were as strictly and comprehensively ignorant as the unborn child is of theology. There were no railroad men in those Parliaments; the members had to inform themselves through the statements made to them by Stephenson, and they considered him a visionary, a half-lunatic, possibly even ass and poet. Through lack of previous knowledge and experience of railway matters, they were unable to understand Stephenson. His explanations, so simple to himself, were but a fog to those well-meaning legislators; so far as they were concerned, he was talking riddles, and riddles which seemed to be meaningless; riddles which seemed also to be dreams and insanities. Still, being gentlemen, and kindly and humane, they listened to Stephenson patiently, benevolently, charitably, until at last, in a burst of irritation, he lost his prudence and proclaimed that he would yet prove to the world that he could drive a steam locomotive over iron rails at the impossible speed of twelve miles an hour! That finished him. After that, the law-makers imposed upon themselves no further polite reserves, but called him, frankly, a dreamer, a crank, a lunatic.

  Copyright has always had to face what Stephenson faced—bodies of law-makers absolutely ignorant of the matter they were called upon to legislate about; also absolutely unteachable, in the circumstances, and bound to remain so—themselves and their successors—until a day when they shall be stockholders in publishing houses and personally interested in finding out something about authorship and the book trade—a day which is not at all likely to arrive during the term of the present geological epoch.

  Authors sometimes understand their side of the question, but this is rare; none of them understands the publisher’s side of it. A man must be both author and publisher, and experienced in the scorching griefs and trials of both industries, before he is competent to go before a Copyright Committee of Parliament or Congress and afford it information of any considerable value. A thousand, possibly ten thousand, valuable speeches have been made in Congresses and Parliaments upon great corporation interests, for the men who made them had been competently equipped by personal suffering and experience to treat those great matters intelligently; but, so far as I know, no publisher of great authority has ever sat in a law-making body and made a speech in his trade’s interest that was worth remembering, or that has been remembered. So far as I know, only one author has ever made a memorable speech before a law-making body in the interest of his trade—that was Macaulay. I think his speech is called great to this day, by both authors and publishers; whereas the speech is so exhaustively ignorant of its subject, and so trivial and jejune in its reasonings, that to the person who has been both author and publisher it ranks as another and formidable evidence, and possi
bly even proof, that in discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did the monkey an undeserved injustice.

  Consider a simple example: if you could prove that only twenty idiots are born in a century, and that each of them, by special genius, was able to make an article of commerce which no one else could make; and which was able to furnish the idiot, and his descendants after him, an income sufficient for the modest and economical support of half a dozen persons, there is no Congress and no Parliament in all Christendom that would dream of descending to the shabbiness of limiting that trifling income to a term of years, in order that it might be enjoyed thereafter by persons who had no sort of claim upon it. I know that this would happen, because all Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. Neither England nor America has been able to produce, in a century, any more than twenty authors whose books have been able to outlive the copyright limit of forty-two years, yet the Congresses and the Parliaments stick to the forty-two-year limit greedily, intensely, pathetically, and do seem to believe, by some kind of insane reasoning, that somebody is in some way benefited by this trivial robbery inflicted upon the families of twenty authors in the course of a hundred years. The most uncompromising and unlimited stupidity can invent nothing stupider than this; not even the monkey can get down to its level.

  In a century we have produced two hundred and twenty thousand books; not a bathtub-full of them are still alive and marketable. The case would have been the same if the copyright limit had been a thousand years. It would be entirely safe to make it a thousand years, and it would also be properly respectable and courteous to do it.

  When I was in London seven years ago, I was haled before the Copyright Committee of the House of Lords, who were considering a bill to add eight entire years to the copyright limit, and make it fifty. One of the ablest men in the House of Lords did the most of the question-asking—Lord Thwing—but he seemed to me to be a most striking example of how unintelligent a human being can be when he sets out to discuss a matter about which he has had no personal training, and no personal experience. There was a long talk—but I wish to confine myself to a single detail of it. Lord Thwing asked me what I thought would be a fair and just copyright limit. I said a million years—that is to say, copyright in perpetuity. The answer seemed to outrage him; it quite plainly irritated him. He asked me if I was not aware of the fact that it had long ago been decided that there could be no property in ideas, and that as a book consisted merely of ideas, it was not entitled to rank as property or enjoy the protections extended to property. I said I was aware that somebody, at some time or other, had given birth to that astonishing superstition, and that an ostensibly intelligent human race had accepted it with enthusiasm, without taking the trouble to examine it and find out that it was an empty inspiration and not entitled to respect. I added that in spite of its being regarded as a fact, and as also well charged with wisdom, it had not been respected by any Parliament or Congress since Queen Anne’s time; that in her day, by the changing of perpetual copyright to a limited copyright of fourteen years, its claim as property was recognized; that the retaining of a limit of any kind—of even fourteen years, for instance—was a recognition of the fact that the ideas of which a book consisted were property.

  Lord Thwing was not affected by these reasonings—certainly he was not convinced. He said that the fact remained that a book, being merely a collocation of ideas, was not in any sense property, and that no book was entitled to perpetual existence as property, or would ever receive that grace at the hands of a legislature entrusted with the interests and well-being of the nation.

  I said I should be obliged to take issue with that statement, for the reason that perpetual copyright was already existent in England, and had been granted by a Parliament or Parliaments entrusted with the duty of protecting the interests and well-being of the nation. He asked for the evidence of this, and I said that the New and Old Testaments had been granted perpetual copyright in England, and that several other religious books had also been granted perpetual copyright in England, and that these perpetual copyrights were not enjoyed by the hungry widows and children of poor authors, but were the property of the press of Oxford University, an institution quite well able to live without this charitable favoritism. I was vain of this unanswerable hit, but I concealed it.

  With the gentleness and modesty which were born in me, I then went on and pleaded against the assumption that a book is not properly property because it is founded upon ideas, and is built of ideas from its cellar to its roof. I said it would not be possible for anybody to mention to me a piece of property of any kind which was not based in the same way, and built from cellar to roof out of just that same material—ideas.

  Lord Thwing suggested real estate. I said there was not a foot of real estate on the globe whose value, if it had any, was not the result of ideas, and of nothing except ideas. I could have given him a million instances. I could have said that if a man should take an ignorant and useless dog and train him to be a good setter, or a good shepherd dog, the dog would now be a more or less valuable property, and would be salable at a more or less profitable figure, and that this acquired value would be merely the result of an idea practically and intelligently applied—the idea of making valuable a dog that had previously possessed no value. I could have said that the smoothing-iron, the wash-tub, the shingle or the slate for a roof, the invention of clothing, and all the improvements that the ages have added, were all the results of men’s thinkings and men’s application of ideas; that but for these ideas, these properties would not have existed; that in all cases they owe their existence to ideas, and that in this way they become property, and valuable. I could have said that but for those inspirations called ideas, there would be no railways, no telegraphs, no printing-press, no phonographs, no telephones—no anything in the whole earth that is called property and has a value. I did say that that holy thing—real estate—that sacred thing which enjoys perpetual copyright everywhere, is like all other properties—its value is born of an idea, and every time that that value is increased it is because of the application of further ideas to it, and for no other reason. I said that if by chance there were a company of twenty white men camping in the middle of Africa, it could easily happen that while all of the twenty realized that there was not an acre of ground in the whole vast landscape in view at the time that possessed even the value of a discarded oyster can, it could also happen that there could be one man in that company equipped with ideas—a far-seeing man who could perceive that at some distant day a railway would pass through this region and that this camping-ground would infallibly become the site of a prosperous city, of flourishing industries. It could easily happen that that man would be bright enough to gather together the black chiefs of the tribes of that region and buy that whole district for a dozen rifles and a barrel of whisky, and go home and lay the deeds away for the eventual vast profit of his children. It could easily come true that in time that city would be built and that land made valuable beyond imagination, and the man’s children rich beyond their wildest dreams, and that this shining result would proceed from that man’s idea, and from no other source; that if there were any real justice in the world, the ideas in a book would rank breast to breast with the ideas which created value for real estate and all other properties in the earth, and then it would be recognized that an author’s children are as fairly entitled to the results of his ideas as are the children of any brewer in England, or of any owner of houses and lands and perpetual-copyright Bibles.

  Monday, November 30, 1906

  From Susy’s Biography, item about the ducks—Mr. Clemens tells of his young ducks that had their feet chewed by snapping turtles—Billy Rice’s version of “There is a happy land,” and Mr. Clemens’s recollections of the first negro-minstrel shows.

  From Susy’s Biography.

  Jean and Papa were walking out past the bar
n the other day when Jean saw some little newly born baby ducks, she exclaimed as she perceived them “I dont see why God gives us so much ducks when Patrick kills them so.”

  Susy is mistaken as to the origin of the ducks. They were not a gift, I bought them. I am not finding fault with her, for that would be most unfair. She is remarkably accurate in her statements as a historian, as a rule, and it would not be just to make much of this small slip of hers; besides I think it was a quite natural slip, for by heredity and habit ours was a religious household, and it was a common thing with us whenever anybody did a handsome thing, to give the credit of it to Providence, without examining into the matter. This may be called automatic religion—in fact that is what it is; it is so used to its work that it can do it without your help or even your privity; out of all the facts and statistics that may be placed before it, it will always get the one result, since it has never been taught to seek any other. It is thus the unreflecting cause of much injustice. As we have seen, it betrayed Susy into an injustice toward me. It had to be automatic, for she would have been far from doing me an injustice when in her right mind. It was a dear little biographer, and she meant me no harm, and I am not censuring her now, but am only desirous of correcting in advance an erroneous impression which her words would be sure to convey to a reader’s mind. No elaboration of this matter is necessary; it is sufficient to say I provided the ducks.