The plan had been variously tried since, Clemens said, and he could not remember any case in which it had failed.  The idea may have grown out of his own pilot apprenticeship on the river, when cub pilots not only received no salary, but paid for the privilege of learning.

Clemens discussed public matters less often than formerly, but they were not altogether out of his mind.  He thought our republic was in a fair way to become a monarchy—­that the signs were already evident.  He referred to the letter which he had written so long ago in Boston, with its amusing fancy of the Archbishop of Dublin and his Grace of Ponkapog, and declared that, after all, it contained something of prophecy.—­[See chap. xcvii; also Appendix M.]—­He would not live to see the actual monarchy, he said, but it was coming.

“I’m not expecting it in my time nor in my children’s time, though it may be sooner than we think.  There are two special reasons for it and one condition.  The first reason is, that it is in the nature of man to want a definite something to love, honor, reverently look up to and obey; a God and King, for example.  The second reason is, that while little republics have lasted long, protected by their poverty and insignificance, great ones have not.  And the condition is, vast power and wealth, which breed commercial and political corruptions, and incite public favorites to dangerous ambitions.”

He repeated what I had heard him say before, that in one sense we already had a monarchy; that is to say, a ruling public and political aristocracy which could create a Presidential succession.  He did not say these things bitterly now, but reflectively and rather indifferently.

He was inclined to speak unhopefully of the international plans for universal peace, which were being agitated rather persistently.

“The gospel of peace,” he said, “is always making a deal of noise, always rejoicing in its progress but always neglecting to furnish statistics.  There are no peaceful nations now.  All Christendom is a soldier-camp.  The poor have been taxed in some nations to the starvation point to support the giant armaments which Christian governments have built up, each to protect itself from the rest of the Christian brotherhood, and incidentally to snatch any scrap of real estate left exposed by a weaker owner.  King Leopold II. of Belgium, the most intensely Christian monarch, except Alexander VI., that has escaped hell thus far, has stolen an entire kingdom in Africa, and in fourteen years of Christian endeavor there has reduced the population from thirty millions to fifteen by murder and mutilation and overwork, confiscating the labor of the helpless natives, and giving them nothing in return but salvation and a home in heaven, furnished at the last moment by the Christian priest.

“Within the last generation each Christian power has turned the bulk of its attention to finding out newer and still newer and more and more effective ways of killing Christians, and, incidentally, a pagan now and then; and the surest way to get rich quickly in Christ’s earthly kingdom is to invent a kind of gun that can kill more Christians at one shot than any other existing kind.  All the Christian nations are at it.  The more advanced they are, the bigger and more destructive engines of war they create.”