Joe, do you know the Irish gentleman & the Irish lady, the Scotch gentleman & the Scotch lady?  These are darlings, every one.  Night before last it was all Irish—­24.  One would have to travel far to match their ease & sociability & animation & sparkle & absence of shyness & self-consciousness.  It was American in these fine qualities.  This was at Mr. Lecky’s.  He is Irish, you know.  Last night it was Irish again, at Lady Gregory’s.  Lord Roberts is Irish, & Sir William Butler, & Kitchener, I think, & a disproportion of the other prominent generals are of Irish & Scotch breed keeping up the traditions of Wellington & Sir Colin Campbell, of the Mutiny.  You will have noticed that in S. A., as in the Mutiny, it is usually the Irish & Scotch that are placed in the forefront of the battle....  Sir William Butler said, “the Celt is the spearhead of the British lance.”

He mentions the news from the African war, which had been favorable to England, and what a change had come over everything in consequence.  The dinner-parties had been lodges of sorrow and depressing.  Now everybody was smiling again.  In a note-book entry of this time he wrote: 

    Relief of Mafeking (May 18, 1900).  The news came at 9.17 P.M. 
    Before 10 all London was in the streets, gone mad with joy.  By then
    the news was all over the American continent.

Clemens had been talking copyright a good deal in London, and introducing it into his speeches.  Finally, one day he was summoned before a committee of the House of Lords to explain his views.  His old idea that the product of a man’s brain is his property in perpetuity and not for any term of years had not changed, and they permitted him to dilate on this (to them) curious doctrine.  The committee consisted of Lords Monkswell, Knutsford, Avebury, Farrar, and Thwing.  When they asked for his views he said: 

“In my opinion the copyright laws of England and America need only the removal of the forty-two-year limit and the return to perpetual copyright to be perfect.  I consider that at least one of the reasons advanced in justification of limited copyright is fallacious—­namely, the one which makes a distinction between an author’s property and real estate, and pretends that the two are not created, produced, or acquired in the same way, thus warranting a different treatment of the two by law.”

Continuing, he dwelt on the ancient doctrine that there was no property in an idea, showing how the far greater proportion of all property consisted of nothing more than elaborated ideas—­the steamship, locomotive, telephone, the vast buildings in the world, how all of these had been constructed upon a basic idea precisely as a book is constructed, and were property only as a book is property, and therefore rightly subject to the same laws.  He was carefully and searchingly examined by that shrewd committee.  He kept them entertained and interested and left them in good-nature, even if not entirely converted.  The papers printed his remarks, and London found them amusing.