Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil?  If they would only all go home what a pleasant place China would be for the Chinese!  We do not allow Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.

China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time.  The Boxer is a patriot.  He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people.  I wish him success.  We drive the Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of his country.  I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.

Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in China as Germany had done.  Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to settle for produce—­firecrackers and tea.

The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time.  He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question.  Writing to MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, “I seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so.  It is not more than ten, I think.”  Still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure.  Again to MacAlister: 

I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average) & answered 29 letters.  I have slaved at my mail every day since we arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite & presently I’ll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.

He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak again for a year—­that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the reform of city government.

The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one.  It was a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal reform.  Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening address.  It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark Twain’s declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of slogan for reform.

Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn’t speak again that year.  He had become a sort of general spokesman on public matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied.  He declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.