We are here to honor the birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other has yet produced.  The old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader—­with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now indistinguishably fused together and nameable by one common great name—­Americans!

CCXIV

MARK TWAIN AND THE MISSIONARIES

Mark Twain had really begun his crusade for reform soon after his arrival in America in a practical hand-to-hand manner.  His housekeeper, Katie Leary, one night employed a cabman to drive her from the Grand Central Station to the house at 14 West Tenth Street.  No contract had been made as to price, and when she arrived there the cabman’s extortionate charge was refused.  He persisted in it, and she sent into the house for her employer.  Of all men, Mark Twain was the last one to countenance an extortion.  He reasoned with the man kindly enough at first; when the driver at last became abusive Clemens demanded his number, which was at first refused.  In the end he paid the legal fare, and in the morning entered a formal complaint, something altogether unexpected, for the American public is accustomed to suffering almost any sort of imposition to avoid trouble and publicity.

In some notes which Clemens had made in London four years earlier he wrote: 

If you call a policeman to settle the dispute you can depend on one thing—­he will decide it against you every time.  And so will the New York policeman.  In London if you carry your case into court the man that is entitled to win it will win it.  In New York—­but no one carries a cab case into court there.  It is my impression that it is now more than thirty years since any one has carried a cab case into court there.

Nevertheless, he was promptly on hand when the case was called to sustain the charge and to read the cabdrivers’ union and the public in general a lesson in good-citizenship.  At the end of the hearing, to a representative of the union he said: 

“This is not a matter of sentiment, my dear sir.  It is simply practical business.  You cannot imagine that I am making money wasting an hour or two of my time prosecuting a case in which I can have no personal interest whatever.  I am doing this just as any citizen should do.  He has no choice.  He has a distinct duty.  He is a non-classified policeman.  Every citizen is, a policeman, and it is his duty to assist the police and the magistracy