DEAR UNCLE JOSEPH,--Please get me the thanks of the Congress--not next week but right away.It is very necessary.Do accomplish this for your affectionate old friend right away; by persuasion, if you can, by violence if you must, for it is imperatively necessary that I get on the floor for two or three hours and talk to the members, man by man, in behalf of the support, encouragement and protection of one of the nation's most valuable assets and industries--its literature.I have arguments with me, also a barrel, with liquid in it.
Give me a chance.Get me the thanks of Congress.Don't wait for others;there isn't time.I have stayed away and let Congress alone for seventy-one years and I am entitled to thanks.Congress knows it perfectly well and I have long felt hurt that this quite proper and earned expression of gratitude has been merely felt by the House and never publicly uttered.
Send me an order on the Sergeant-at-Arms quick.When shall I come? With love and a benediction.
MARK TWAIN.
This was mainly a joke.Mark Twain did not expect any "thanks," but he did hope for access to the floor, which once, in an earlier day, had been accorded him.We drove to the Capitol and he delivered his letter to "Uncle Joe" by hand."Uncle Joe" could not give him the privilege of the floor; the rules had become more stringent.He declared they would hang him if he did such a thing.He added that he had a private room down-stairs, where Mark Twain might establish headquarters, and that he would assign his colored servant, Neal, of long acquaintanceship with many of the members, to pass the word that Mark Twain was receiving.
The result was a great success.All that afternoon members of Congress poured into the Speaker's room and, in an atmosphere blue with tobacco smoke, Mark Twain talked the gospel of copyright to his heart's content.
The bill did not come up for passage that session, but Mark Twain lived to see his afternoon's lobbying bring a return.In 1909, Champ Clark, and those others who had gathered around him that afternoon, passed a measure that added fourteen years to the copyright term.
The next letter refers to a proposed lobby of quite a different sort.
To Helen Keller, in Wrentham, Mass.:
21 FIFTH AVENUE, Dec.23, '06.
DEAR HELEN KELLER,--...You say, "As a reformer, you know that ideas must be driven home again and again."Yes, I know it; and by old experience I know that speeches and documents and public meetings are a pretty poor and lame way of accomplishing it.
Last year I proposed a sane way--one which I had practiced with success for a quarter of a century--but I wasn't expecting it to get any attention, and it didn't.
Give me a battalion of 200 winsome young girls and matrons, and let me tell them what to do and how to do it, and I will be responsible for shining results.If I could mass them on the stage in front of the audience and instruct them there, I could make a public meeting take hold of itself and do something really valuable for once.Not that the real instruction would be done there, for it wouldn't; it would be previously done privately, and merely repeated there.
But it isn't going to happen--the good old way will be stuck to: there'll be a public meeting: with music, and prayer, and a wearying report, and a verbal description of the marvels the blind can do, and 17 speeches--then the call upon all present who are still alive, to contribute.This hoary program was invented in the idiot asylum, and will never be changed.Its function is to breed hostility to good causes.
Some day somebody will recruit my 200--my dear beguilesome Knights of the Golden Fleece--and you will see them make good their ominous name.
Mind, we must meet! not in the grim and ghastly air of the platform, mayhap, but by the friendly fire--here at 21.
Affectionately your friend, S.L.CLEMENS.
They did meet somewhat later that winter in the friendly parlors of No.21, and friends gathered in to meet the marvelous blind girl and to pay tribute to Miss Sullivan (Mrs.Macy) for her almost incredible achievement.
End Letters Vol.6
by Mark Twain VOLUME VI.
MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1907-1910
