rely the agent of
better and wiser men, or men whom the country cannot venture to laugh
at. I will ask the President to recommend the thing in his message (and
if he should ask me to sit down and frame the paragraph for him I should
blush, but still I would frame it). And then if Europe chooses to go
on stealing from us we would say, with noble enthusiasm, "American
lawmakers do steal, but not from foreign authors--not from foreign
authors,".... If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead
of being in such a sweat to get Him into the Constitution, it would be
better all around.

The petition never reached Congress. Holmes agreed to sign it with a
smile, and the comment that governments were not in the habit of setting
themselves up as high moral examples, except for revenue. Longfellow
also pledged himself, as did a few others; but if there was any
general concurrence in the effort there is no memory of it now. Clemens
abandoned the original idea, but remained one of the most persistent and
influential advocates of copyright betterment, and lived to see most of
his dream fulfilled.--[For the petition concerning copyright term in
the United States, see Sketches New and Old. For the petition concerning
international copyright and related matters, see Appendix N, at the end
of last volume.]

CIII. "ATLANTIC" DAYS

It was about this period that Mark Twain began to exhibit openly his
more serious side; that is to say his advocacy of public reforms.
His paper on "Universal Suffrage" had sounded a first note, and his
copyright petitions were of the same spirit. In later years he used to
say that he had always felt it was his mission to teach, to carry the
banner of moral reconstruction, and here at forty we find him furnishing
evidences of this inclination. In the Atlantic for October, 1875, there
was published an unsigned three-page article entitled, "The Curious
Republic of Gondour." In this article was developed the idea that the
voting privilege should be estimated not by the individuals, but by
their intellectual qualifications. The republic of Gondour was a Utopia,
where this plan had been established:

It was an odd idea and ingenious. You must understand the
constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested
right, and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not
say that certain individuals might not be given two votes or ten.
So an amendatory clause