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meannesses and hypocrisies. As for the word, I hate the sound of it, for it conveys a lie; and as for the thing itself, I wish it was in hell, where it belongs." And consider this grave conclusion in one of his later letters: "Well, the 19th century made progress—the first progress in 'ages and ages'—colossal progress. In what? Materialities. Prodigious acquisitions were made in things which add to the comfort of many and make life harder for as many more. But the addition to righteousness? Is that discoverable? I think not. The materialities were not invented in the interest of righteousness; that there is more righteousness in the world because of them than there was before, is hardly demonstrable, I think. In Europe and America there is a vast change (due to them) in ideals—do you admire it? All Europe and all America are feverishly scrambling for money. Money is the supreme ideal—all others take tenth place with the great bulk of the nations named. Money-lust has always existed, but not in the history of the world was it ever a craze, a madness, until your time and mine. This lust has rotted these nations; it has made them hard, sordid, ungentle, dishonest, oppressive." Who can fail to see that the whole tendency of Mark Twain's spirit ran precisely counter to the spirit of his age, that he belonged as naturally in the Opposition as all the great European writers of his time? Can we not also see, accordingly, that in stultifying him, in keeping him a child, his wife and his friends were the unconscious agents of the business regime, bent upon deflecting and restraining a force which, if it had matured, would have seriously interfered with the enterprise of industrial pioneering?

Far from having any stimulus to satire, therefore, Mark Twain was perpetually driven back by the innumerable obligations he had assumed into the role that gave him, as he said, comfort and peace. And to what did he not have to submit? "We shall have bloody work in this country some of these days when the lazy canaille get organized. They are the spawn of Santerre and Fouquier-Tinville;" we find Thomas Bailey Aldrich writing to Professor Woodberry in 1894. There was the attitude of Mark Twain's intimates toward social and economic questions: the literary confraternity of the generation was almost a solid block behind the financial confraternity. In the moral and religious departments the path of the candidate for gentility was no less strait and narrow. "It took a brave man before the Civil War," says Mr. Paine, "to confess he had read