As I understand the telegrams, the engineers of your train had never seen a locomotive before . . . .  The government’s official report, showing that our railways killed twelve hundred persons last year & injured sixty thousand, convinces me that under present conditions one Providence is not enough properly & efficiently to take care of our railroad business.  But it is characteristically American—­always trying to get along short-handed & save wages.

A massacre of Jews in Moscow renewed his animosity for semi-barbaric Russia.  Asked for a Christmas sentiment, he wrote: 

It is my warm & world-embracing Christmas hope that all of us that deserve it may finally be gathered together in a heaven of rest & peace, & the others permitted to retire into the clutches of Satan, or the Emperor of Russia, according to preference—­if they have a preference.

An article, “The Tsar’s Soliloquy,” written at this time, was published in the North American Review for March (1905).  He wrote much more, but most of the other matter he put aside.  On a subject like that he always discarded three times as much as he published, and it was usually about three times as terrific as that which found its way into type.  “The Soliloquy,” however, is severe enough.  It represents the Tsar as contemplating himself without his clothes, and reflecting on what a poor human specimen he presents: 

Is it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and worship?—­manifestly not!  No one could worship this spectacle which is Me.  Then who is it, what is it, that they worship?  Privately, none knows better than I:  it is my clothes!  Without my clothes I should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person.  No one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor.  Then who is the real Emperor of Russia!  My clothes!  There is no other.

The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties that are done in his name.  It was a withering satire on Russian imperialism, and it stirred a wide response.  This encouraged Clemens to something even more pretentious and effective in the same line.  He wrote “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” the reflections of the fiendish sovereign who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in his greed—­gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields.  Seldom in the history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture of them.  The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.—­[The