e semi-feudal
paraphernalia of the British monarchy. Despite its note of Yankee
blatancy, 'A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur' is a remarkable brief
for democracy and the brotherhood of man. So eminent a publicist as Mr.
William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its first appearance, one
of the most significant books of our time; and classed it (with Henry
George's 'Progress and Poverty' and Edward Bellamy's 'Looking Backward')
as the third great book from America to give tremendous impetus to the
social democratic movement of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of
a future life; found more of sorrow than of joy in life's balances; and
even, in his latter years, lost faith in humanity itself. But amid the
wreck of faiths and creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American
optimism: he never lost faith in democracy, and fought valiantly to the
end in behalf of equality and the welfare of the average man.

Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship,
Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early
eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club
to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose
deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the
religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper
in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he
felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to
the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every
man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his
training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking,
heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. "I did
not read that paper," Mr. Clemens said to me, "but I put it away,
resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and
then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it,
to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added
something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century,
that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies
published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the
book to indicate its authorship." A few days later he gave me a copy,
and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the
prefatory note:

"Every thought in them (these papers) has be