Any one who has read Mark Twain’s, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” has a pretty good idea of his opinion of kings in general, and tyrants in particular.  Rule by “divine right,” however liberal, was distasteful to him; where it meant oppression it stirred him to violence.  In his article, “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” he gave himself loose rein concerning atrocities charged to the master of Russia, and in a letter which he wrote during the summer of 1890, he offered a hint as to remedies.  The letter was written by editorial request, but was never mailed.  Perhaps it seemed too openly revolutionary at the moment.

     Yet scarcely more than a quarter of a century was needed to make it
     “timely.”  Clemens and his family were spending some weeks in the
     Catskills when it was written.

An unpublished letter on the Czar.

Onteora, 1890.  To the editor of free Russia,—­I thank you for the compliment of your invitation to say something, but when I ponder the bottom paragraph on your first page, and then study your statement on your third page, of the objects of the several Russian liberation-parties, I do not quite know how to proceed.  Let me quote here the paragraph referred to: 

“But men’s hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting to a dire fate they cannot escape.  Besides, foreigners could not see so clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated Russia.  But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of humanity against Russian tyranny.  And the Tzar’s Government, stupidly confident in its apparently unassailable position, instead of taking warning from the first rebukes, seems to mock this humanitarian age by the aggravation of brutalities.  Not satisfied with slowly killing its prisoners, and with burying the flower of our young generation in the Siberian desserts, the Government of Alexander III. resolved to break their spirit by deliberately submitting them to a regime of unheard-of brutality and degradation.”

When one reads that paragraph in the glare of George Kennan’s revelations, and considers how much it means; considers that all earthly figures fail to typify the Czar’s government, and that one must descend into hell to find its counterpart, one turns hopefully to your statement of the objects of the several liberation-parties—­and is disappointed.  Apparently none of them can bear to think of losing the present hell entirely, they merely want the temperature cooled down a little.