together.  They can compel peace, and peace without compulsion would be against nature and not operative.  A sliding scale of reduction of 10 per cent a year has a sort of plausible look, and I am willing to try that if three other powers will join.  I feel sure that the armaments are now many times greater than necessary for the requirements of either peace or war.  Take wartime for instance.  Suppose circumstances made it necessary for us to fight another Waterloo, and that it would do what it did before—­settle a large question and bring peace.  I will guess that 400,000 men were on hand at Waterloo (I have forgotten the figures).  In five hours they disabled 50,000 men.  It took them that tedious, long time because the firearms delivered only two or three shots a minute.  But we would do the work now as it was done at Omdurman, with shower guns, raining 600 balls a minute.  Four men to a gun—­is that the number?  A hundred and fifty shots a minute per man.  Thus a modern soldier is 149 Waterloo soldiers in one.  Thus, also, we can now retain one man out of each 150 in service, disband the others, and fight our Waterloos just as effectively as we did eighty-five years ago.  We should do the same beneficent job with 2,800 men now that we did with 400,000 then.  The allies could take 1,400 of the men, and give Napoleon 1,400 and then whip him.

But instead what do we see?  In war-time in Germany, Russia and France, taken together we find about 8 million men equipped for the field.  Each man represents 149 Waterloo men, in usefulness and killing capacity.  Altogether they constitute about 350 million Waterloo men, and there are not quite that many grown males of the human race now on this planet.  Thus we have this insane fact—­that whereas those three countries could arm 18,000 men with modern weapons and make them the equals of 3 million men of Napoleon’s day, and accomplish with them all necessary war work, they waste their money and their prosperity creating forces of their populations in piling together 349,982,000 extra Waterloo equivalents which they would have no sort of use for if they would only stop drinking and sit down and cipher a little.

Perpetual peace we cannot have on any terms, I suppose; but I hope we can gradually reduce the war strength of Europe till we get it down to where it ought to be—­20,000 men, properly armed.  Then we can have all the peace that is worth while, and when we want a war anybody can afford it.

Vienna, January 9.  P. S.—­In the article I sent the figures are wrong—­“350 million” ought to be 450 million; “349,982,000” ought to be 449,982,000, and the remark about the sum being a little more than the present number of males on the planet—­that is wrong, of course; it represents really one and a half the existing males.

Now and then one of Mark Twain’s old comrades still reached out to him across the years.  He always welcomed such letters—­they came as from a lost land of romance, recalled always with tenderness.  He sent light, chaffing replies, but they were never without an undercurrent of affection.

To Major “Jack” Downing, in Middleport, Ohio: