it this that 140,000,000 Russians kiss the dust before and
worship?--manifestly not! No one could worship this spectacle which
is Me. Then who is it, what is it, that they worship? Privately,
none knows better than I: it is my clothes! Without my clothes I
should be as destitute of authority as any other naked person. No
one could tell me from a parson and barber tutor. Then who is the
real Emperor of Russia! My clothes! There is no other.

The emperor continues this fancy, and reflects on the fierce cruelties
that are done in his name. It was a withering satire on Russian
imperialism, and it stirred a wide response. This encouraged Clemens to
something even more pretentious and effective in the same line. He wrote
"King Leopold's Soliloquy," the reflections of the fiendish sovereign
who had maimed and slaughtered fifteen millions of African subjects in
his greed--gentle, harmless blacks-men, women, and little children whom
he had butchered and mutilated in his Congo rubber-fields. Seldom in the
history of the world have there been such atrocious practices as those
of King Leopold in the Congo, and Clemens spared nothing in his picture
of them. The article was regarded as not quite suitable for magazine
publication, and it was given to the Congo Reform Association and issued
as a booklet for distribution, with no return to the author, who would
gladly have written a hundred times as much if he could have saved that
unhappy race and have sent Leopold to the electric chair.--[The book was
price-marked twenty-five cents, but the returns from such as were sold
went to the cause. Thousands of them were distributed free. The Congo, a
domain four times as large as the German empire, had been made the
ward of Belgium at a convention in Berlin by the agreement of fourteen
nations, America and thirteen European states. Leopold promptly seized
the country for his personal advantage and the nations apparently found
themselves powerless to depose him. No more terrible blunder was ever
committed by an assemblage of civilized people.]

Various plans and movements were undertaken for Congo reform, and
Clemens worked and wrote letters and gave his voice and his influence
and exhausted his rage, at last, as one after another of the
half-organized and altogether futile undertakings showed no results. His
interest did not die, but it became inactive. Eventually he declared: "I
have said all I can say on that terrib