if so many take an active part, where the peril is
so dire, is this not evidence that the sympathizers
who keep still and do not show their hands, are countless
for multitudes? Can you break the hearts of thousands
of families with the awful Siberian exodus every year
for generations and not eventually cover all Russia
from limit to limit with bereaved fathers and mothers
and brothers and sisters who secretly hate the perpetrator
of this prodigious crime and hunger and thirst for
his life? Do you not believe that if your wife
or your child or your father was exiled to the mines
of Siberia for some trivial utterances wrung from
a smarting spirit by the Czar’s intolerable
tyranny, and you got a chance to kill him and did not
do it, that you would always be ashamed to be in your
own society the rest of your life? Suppose that
that refined and lovely Russian lady who was lately
stripped bare before a brutal soldiery and whipped
to death by the Czar’s hand in the person of
the Czar’s creature had been your wife, or your
daughter or your sister, and to-day the Czar should
pass within reach of your hand, how would you feel—and
what would you do? Consider, that all over vast
Russia, from boundary to boundary, a myriad of eyes
filled with tears when that piteous news came, and
through those tears that myriad of eyes saw, not that
poor lady, but lost darlings of their own whose fate
her fate brought back with new access of grief out
of a black and bitter past never to be forgotten or
forgiven.
If I am a Swinburnian—and clear to the marrow I am—I hold human nature in sufficient honor to believe there are eighty million mute Russians that are of the same stripe, and only one Russian family that isn’t.
MarkTwain.
Type-setter matters were going badly. Clemens still had faith in Jones, and he had lost no grain of faith in the machine. The money situation, however, was troublesome. With an expensive establishment, and work of one sort or another still to be done on the machine, his income would not reach. Perhaps Goodman had already given up hope, for he does not seem to have returned from California after the next letter was written—a colorless letter —in which we feel a note of resignation. The last few lines are sufficient.
To Joe T. Goodman, in California:
Dear Joe,--...... I wish you could get a day off and make those two or three Californians buy those privileges, for I’m going to need money before long.
I don’t know where the Senator is; but out on the Coast I reckon.
I guess we’ve got a perfect machine at last.
We never break a type, now,
and the new device for enabling the operator to touch
the last letters
and justify the line simultaneously works, to a charm.
With
love to you both,
mark