o’clock — and in the meantime we would be searched for, but not with avidity; and if we were in the Territory after that stagecoach left, we would be the first victims of the new law. Judge North was anxious to have some object-lessons for that law, and he would absolutely keep us in the prison the full two years.
Well, it seemed to me that our society was no longer desirable in Nevada; so we stayed in our quarters and observed proper caution all day — except that once Steve went over to the hotel to attend to another customer of mine. That was a Mr. Cutler. You see Laird was not the only person whom I had tried to reform during my occupancy of the editorial chair. I had looked around and selected several other people, and delivered a new zest of life into them through warm criticism and disapproval — so that when I laid down my editorial pen I had four horsewhippings and two duels owing to me. We didn’t care for the horsewhippings; there was no glory in them; they were not worth the trouble of collecting. But honor required that some notice should be taken of that other duel. Mr. Cutler had come up from Carson City, and had sent a man over with a challenge from the hotel. Steve went over to pacify him. Steve weighed only ninety-five pounds, but it was well known throughout the territory that with his fists he could whip anybody that walked on two legs, let his weight and science be what they might. Steve was a Gillis, and when a Gillis confronted a man and had a proposition to make, the proposition always contained business. When Cutler found that Steve was my second he cooled down; he became calm and rational, and was ready to listen. Steve gave him fifteen minutes to get out of the hotel, and half an hour to get out of town or there would be results. So that duel went off successfully, because Mr. Cutler immediately left for Carson a convinced and reformed man.
I have never had anything to do with duels since. I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise, and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now, I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot, and kill him.
Mark Twain.
(To be Continued.)
NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW
No. DCVI.
JANUARY 4, 1907.
CHAPTERS FROM MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY. — IX.
[Dictated December 13, 1906.] As regards the coming American monarchy. It was before the Secretary of State had been heard from that the chairman of the banquet said:
“In this time of unrest it is of great satisfaction that such a man as you, Mr. Root, is chief adviser of the President.”
Mr. Root then got up and in the most quiet and orderly manner touched off the successor to the San Francisco earthquake. As a result, the several State governments were well shaken up and considerably weakened. Mr. Root was prophesying. He was prophesying, and it seems to me that no shrewder and surer forecasting has been done in this country for a good many years.
He did not say, in so many words, that we are proceeding, in a steady march, toward eventual and unavoidable replacement of the republic by monarchy; but I suppose he was aware that that is the case. He notes the several steps, the customary steps, which in all the ages have led to the consolidation of loose and scattered governmental forces into formidable centralizations of authority; but he stops there, and doesn’t add up the sum. He is not unaware that heretofore the sum has been ultimate monarchy, and that the same figures can fairly be depended upon to furnish the same sum whenever and wherever they can be produced, so long as human nature shall remain as it is; but it was not needful that he do the adding, since any one can do it; neither would it have been gracious in him to do it.
In observing the changed conditions which in the course of time have made certain and sure the eventual seizure by the Washington government of a number of State duties and prerogatives which have been betrayed and neglected by the several States, he does not attribute those changes and the vast results which are to flow from them to any thought-out policy of any party or of any body of dreamers or schemers, but properly and rightly attributes them to that stupendous power — Circumstance — which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final, and must be obeyed by all — and will be. The railway is a Circumstance, the steamship is a Circumstance, the telegraph is a Circumstance. They were mere happenings; and to the whole world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial, wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. No man, and no party, and no thought-out policy said, “Behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, in spite of anything that anybody can do to prevent it.”
The changed conditions have come, and Circumstance knows what is following, and will follow. So does Mr. Root. His language is not unclear, it is crystal:
“Our whole life has swung away from the old State centres, and is crystallizing about national centres.”
“ … The old barriers which kept the States as separate communities are completely lost from sight.”
“ … That [State] power of regulation and control is gradually passing into the hands of the national government.”
“Sometimes by an assertion of the inter-State commerce power, sometimes by an assertion of the taxing power, the national government is taking up the performance of duties which under the changed conditions the separate States are no longer capable of adequately performing.”
“We are urging forward in a development of business and social life which tends more and more to the obliteration of State lines and the decrease of State power as compared with national power.”
“It is useless for the advocates of State rights to inveigh against … the extension of national authority in the fields of necessary control where the States themselves fail in the performance of their duty.”
He is not announcing a policy; he is not forecasting what a party of planners will bring about; he is merely telling what the people will require and compel. And he could have added — which would be perfectly true — that the people will not be moved to it by speculation and cogitation and planning, but by Circumstance — that power which arbitrarily compels all their actions, and over which they have not the slightest control.
“The end is not yet.”
It is a true word. We are on the march, but at present we are only just getting started.
If the States continue to fail to do their duty as required by the people —
“ … constructions of the Constitution will be found to vest the power where it will be exercised — in the national government.”
I do not know whether that has a sinister meaning or not, and so I will not enlarge upon it lest I should chance to be in the wrong. It sounds like ship-money come again, but it may not be so intended.
Human nature being what it is, I suppose we must expect to drift into monarchy by and by. It is a saddening thought, but we cannot change our nature: we are all alike, we human beings; and in our blood and bone, and ineradicable, we carry the seeds out of which monarchies and aristocracies are grown: worship of gauds, titles, distinctions, power.
