words. I know
what I meant, and _I will not leave this crowd in doubt_, if I can
explain it to them, what I really meant in the use of that paragraph."

"_I will not leave this crowd in doubt_"; that is the final accent of
our spoken prose, the prose addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the
great public. This is the prose spoken in the humor and satire of
Dickens. Dressed in a queer dialect, and put into satirical verse, it
is the language of the _Biglow Papers_. Uttered with the accent of a
Chicago Irishman, it is the prose admired by millions of the countrymen
of "Mr. Dooley."

Satire written to the "little public" tends toward the social type;
that written to the "great public" to the political type. It is obvious
that just as a newly settled country offers constant opportunity for
the humor of incongruity and the humor arising from a sense of
superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus to the use of satire.
That moralizing Puritan strain of censure which lost none of its
harshness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full play in the
colonial satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the
topics for satire grew wider and more political in their scope, the
audiences increased. To-day the very oldest issues of the common life
of that queer "political animal" named man are discussed by our popular
newspaper satirists in the presence of a democratic audience that
stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Is there, then, a distinctly American type of humor and satire? I think
it would be difficult to prove that our composite American nationality
has developed a mode of humor and satire which is racially different
from the humor and satire of the Old World. All racial lines in
literature are extremely difficult to draw. If you attempt to analyze
English humor, you find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you put
Scotch and Irish humor under the microscope, you discover that most of
the best Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks and the
Egyptians. You pick up a copy of _Fliegende Blatter_ and you get keen
amusement from its revelation of German humor. But how much of this
humor, after all, is either essentially universal in its scope or else
a matter of mere stage-setting and machinery? Without the Prussian
lieutenant the _Fliegende Blatter_ would lose half its point; nor can
one imagine a _Punch_ without a picture of the English policeman. The
lieutenant and the policeman, however, ar