I love to see the holy ones air their smug pieties and admire them and smirk over them, and at the same moment frankly and publicly show their contempt for the pieties of the Boer—­confidently expecting the approval of the country and the pulpit, and getting it.

I notice that God is on both sides in this war; thus history repeats itself.  But I am the only person who has noticed this; everybody here thinks He is playing the game for this side, and for this side only.

               With great love to you all
          
                                   mark.

One cannot help wondering what Mark Twain would have thought of human nature had he lived to see the great World War, fought mainly by the Christian nations who for nearly two thousand years had been preaching peace on earth and goodwill toward men.  But his opinion of the race could hardly have been worse than it was.  And nothing that human beings could do would have surprised him.

To Rev. J. H. Twichell, in Hartford: 

London, Jan. 27, 1900.  Dear Joe,—­Apparently we are not proposing to set the Filipinos free and give their islands to them; and apparently we are not proposing to hang the priests and confiscate their property.  If these things are so, the war out there has no interest for me.

I have just been examining chapter LXX of “Following the Equator,” to see if the Boer’s old military effectiveness is holding out.  It reads curiously as if it had been written about the present war.

I believe that in the next chapter my notion of the Boer was rightly conceived.  He is popularly called uncivilized, I do not know why.  Happiness, food, shelter, clothing, wholesale labor, modest and rational ambitions, honesty, kindliness, hospitality, love of freedom and limitless courage to fight for it, composure and fortitude in time of disaster, patience in time of hardship and privation, absence of noise and brag in time of victory, contentment with a humble and peaceful life void of insane excitements—­if there is a higher and better form of civilization than this, I am not aware of it and do not know where to look for it.  I suppose we have the habit of imagining that a lot of artistic, intellectual and other artificialities must be added, or it isn’t complete.  We and the English have these latter; but as we lack the great bulk of these others, I think the Boer civilization is the best of the two.  My idea of our civilization is that it is a shabby poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogancies, meannesses, and hypocrisies.  As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs.

Provided we could get something better in the place of it.  But that is not possible, perhaps.  Poor as it is, it is better than real savagery, therefore we must stand by it, extend it, and (in public) praise it.  And so we must not utter any hateful word about England in these days, nor fail to hope that she will win in this war, for her defeat and fall would be an irremediable disaster for the mangy human race....  Naturally, then, I am for England; but she is profoundly in the wrong, Joe, and no (instructed) Englishman doubts it.  At least that is my belief.