ain for a
year--that he would not speak then only that the matter concerned the
reform of city government.

The occasion of January 4, 1901, was a rather important one. It was
a meeting of the City Club, then engaged in the crusade for municipal
reform. Wheeler H. Peckham presided, and Bishop Potter made the opening
address. It all seems like ancient history now, and perhaps is not very
vital any more; but the movement was making a great stir then, and Mark
Twain's declaration that he believed forty-nine men out of fifty were
honest, and that the forty-nine only needed to organize to disqualify
the fiftieth man (always organized for crime), was quoted as a sort of
slogan for reform.

Clemens was not permitted to keep his resolution that he wouldn't speak
again that year. He had become a sort of general spokesman on public
matters, and demands were made upon him which could not be denied. He
declined a Yale alumni dinner, but he could not refuse to preside at the
Lincoln Birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, February 11th, where he
must introduce Watterson as the speaker of the evening.

"Think of it!" he wrote Twichell. "Two old rebels functioning there:
I as president and Watterson as orator of the day! Things have changed
somewhat in these forty years, thank God!"

The Watterson introduction is one of the choicest of Mark Twain's
speeches--a pure and perfect example of simple eloquence, worthy of
the occasion which gave it utterance, worthy in spite of its playful
paragraphs (or even because of them, for Lincoln would have loved them),
to become the matrix of that imperishable Gettysburg phrase with which
he makes his climax. He opened by dwelling for a moment on Colonel
Watterson as a soldier, journalist, orator, statesman, and patriot; then
he said:

It is a curious circumstance that without collusion of any kind, but
merely in obedience to a strange and pleasant and dramatic freak of
destiny, he and I, kinsmen by blood--[Colonel Watterson's forebears
had intermarried with the Lamptons.]--for we are that--and one-time
rebels--for we were that--should be chosen out of a million
surviving quondam rebels to come here and bare our heads in
reverence and love of that noble soul whom 40 years ago we tried
with all our hearts and all our strength to defeat and dispossess
--Abraham Lincoln! Is the Rebellion ended and forgotten? Are the
Blue and the Gray one to-day? By authority