That statement was borrowed not from the scriptures, but from the speculations of the French revolutionists, whose opinion on the subject was to my mind of very small value. You are fond of talking of the equality of all men. The longer I read history, and the more I look around society the more I see profound inequalities in men. It is not true that every man is equal in the sight either of God or of men. What do you mean by God’s having a chosen people if that people have not enormous advantage over their neighbors? Is each man as handsome as his neighbor? Is each man as strong? Is each man as long-lived? Has each man lived in as good a climate? The differences among men are really enormous, and when you go into this question of primitive civilization and compare the natives who have received light from above and those who have not, you will agree with me that of all false platitudes that were ever circulated among a sane people none is more false than the usual adage about the equality of man. I suppose this is an awful heresy, but, at least, as long as I am in this country, I am a free man; so you will allow me to make a clean breast of it.
When Prof. Mahaffy set out to instruct the world about Greece, he began in a rational way: that is, by first instructing himself in his subject. Why would it not have been a good idea to take at least an infant course in American political ideas before setting out to tell Americans what they are? His mountain has been brought to bed of no “heresy,” awful or otherwise, in the above rather premature lying-in. He has misinterpreted a dogma of our Constitution—and ludicrously, if I may be so frank. No American believes that men are born physically equal; and it was not needed that a prophet should come from Dublin to explain, and argue out, and prove, with naive and quaint elaboration, the impossibility of a thing whose impossibility not even the American cats had yet questioned. If he had taken only a thousandth of the trouble to inform himself about us which he took to inform himself about the Greeks, he would have found that the American dogma, rightly translated, makes this assertion: that every man is of right born free—that is, without master or owner; and also, that every man is of right born his neighbor’s political equal—that is, possessed of every legal right and privilege which his neighbor enjoys, and not debarred from aspiring to any dignity to which his neighbor may attain. When a man accepts this rendering of that gospel, it is the same as proclaiming that he believes that whoever is born and lives in a country where he is denied a privilege accorded his neighbor—even though his neighbor be a king—is not a freeman; that when he consents to wear the stigma described by the word “subject,” he has merely consented to call himself a slave by a gentler epithet; and that where a king is, there is but one person in that nation who is not a slave. Professor Mahaffy was right when he observed that as long as he is in this country he is not a slave; and he might have added, without straining our ideas of the truth, that this is his first experience of the condition. For we gratefully believe, and do confidently claim, that this is now the only considerable country in the world where no slave exists. We get a good deal of instruction, first and last, from the strayed or stolen or mislaid European, and as a rule we have been able to get some sort of profit out of it, but this time we do seem to have got left on our base, as the Archbishop of Canterbury would say. If this present instructor is one of the “natives who have received light from above,” what must be the condition of those other natives “who have not”? Of course Chautauqua means well, but it will think twice before she runs this risk again. She gets off by luck, this time. But some day when she isn’t thinking she will import a teacher who knows his subject, and then it will cost her a thousand dollars.
MARK TWAIN
I found the editor of the New York Sun throned in his sanctum. He had his brimless cap on—his thinking cap, he terms it, and well he may, for many an exquisite fancy has it hatched out in its time. He was steeped in meditation. He was arranging in his mind a series of those articles for his next day’s paper which have made the Sun famous in the land and a welcome visitor in every cultivated home circle upon the continent—interesting murders, with all the toothsome particulars; libels upon such men and women as have deserved the attention by being prominently blameless; aggravated cases of incest, with improving and elevating details; prize fights, elucidated with felicitously descriptive technicalities; elaborate histories of executions, assassinations and seductions; zealous defences of Reddy the Blacksmith and other persecuted patrons of the Sun who chance to stumble into misfortune. A high and noble thing it is to be the chief editor of a great metropolitan two-cent journal and mould the opinions of the washer-women and achieve the applause of the bone and sinew of the back streets and the cellars. And when that editor is gifted with that endowment which we term Genius, verily his position is almost godlike. I felt insignificant in the company of Charles A. Dana—and who wouldn’t?
I said:
“Sir, I am a stranger to you, but being a journalist in a small way myself, I have presumed upon this fellowship to intrude upon you, and beg, at the fountain-head of American journalism, for a few little drops of that wisdom which has enabled you to confer splendor upon a profession which groped in darkness till your Sun flamed above its horizon.”
“Be seated, sir, be seated. Ask what you will—I am always ready to instruct the ignorant and inexperienced.”
“To come at once to the point, and not rob of their intellectual sustenance the suffering millions of our countrymen who hang upon your editorials, I desire to know the secret of your success—I desire to know what course one must pursue in order to make the name of his paper a household word at every fireside and a necessity unto all creatures whose idea of luxury soars to the equivalent of two cents.”
“My son, unto none but you would I reveal the secret. You have paid me the homage which the envious multitude of so-called journalists deny me, and you shall be rewarded. Let the others suffer. Listen. The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation.
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