Mark Twain probably exaggerated his sentiments a good deal when in the
Carlyle letter he claimed to be the most rabid of Sansculottes. It is
unlikely that he was ever very bare-kneed and crimson in his anarchy. He
believed always that cruelty should be swiftly punished, whether in king
or commoner, and that tyrants should be destroyed. He was for the people
as against kings, and for the union of labor as opposed to the union of
capital, though he wrote of such matters judicially--not radically. The
Knights of Labor organization, then very powerful, seemed to Clemens the
salvation of oppressed humanity. He wrote a vehement and convincing
paper on the subject, which he sent to Howells, to whom it appealed very
strongly, for Howells was socialistic, in a sense, and Clemens made his
appeal in the best and largest sense, dramatizing his conception in a
picture that was to include, in one grand league, labor of whatever form,
and, in the end, all mankind in a final millennium. Howells wrote that
he had read the essay "with thrills amounting to yells of satisfaction,"
and declared it to be the best thing yet said on the subject. The essay
closed:

He [the unionized workman] is here and he will remain. He is the
greatest birth of the greatest age the nations of the world have
known. You cannot sneer at him--that time has gone by. He has
before him the most righteous work that was ever given into the hand
of man to do; and he will do it. Yes, he is here; and the question
is not--as it has been heretofore during a thousand ages--What shall
we do with him? For the first time in history we are relieved of
the necessity of managing his affairs for him. He is not a broken
dam this time--he is the Flood!

It must have been about this time that Clemens developed an intense, even
if a less permanent, interest in another matter which was to benefit the
species. He was one day walking up Fifth Avenue when he noticed the sign,

PROFESSOR LOISETTE
SCHOOL OF MEMORY
The Instantaneous Art of Never Forgetting

Clemens went inside. When he came out he had all of Professor Loisette's
literature on "predicating correlation," and for the next several days
was steeping himself in an infusion of meaningless words and figures and
sentences and forms, which he must learn backward and forward and
diagonally, so that he could repeat them awake and asleep in order to