Friday, March 29, AD 2024 4:46am

June 17, 1865: Mark Twain Replies to a Correspondent

 

During 1865 Mark Twain was supplying one article a week to a San Francisco weekly literary journal The Californian.  He received $50.00 a month.  That was decent money at the time, more than three times the monthly wage of Union privates who earned fifteen dollars a month.  Judging from this contribution on June 17, 1865, he was worth every cent he was paid:

 

 

MORAL STATISTICIAN. – I don’t want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see but one side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime, (and which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone,) nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these little vicious enjoyments for fifty years, but then what can you do with it? -what use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul; all the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life -therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash? It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees when the contribution box comes around; and you always pay your debts in greenbacks, and never give the revenue officers a true statement of your income. Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as “ornery” and unloveable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous “moral statistics?” Now I don’t approve of dissipation, and I don’t indulge in it, either, but I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don’t want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture, last week, about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

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T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, June 17, AD 2019 6:05am

Yikes!

We could use him today.

The World needs to be saved from people trying to save it: do-gooders do damage.

He took the time to spell it all out.

My go-to is quite unfair. “There are liars. There are damned liars. And, there are statisticians.” To be fair, one could say the same about accountants, stock brokers, real estate agents, . . .

father of seven
father of seven
Monday, June 17, AD 2019 7:21am

Pure hate speech. He clearly needed to be shadow banned. Thank God San Francisco has changed and the likes of Twain wouldn’t be tolerated today. Just another example of white privilege.

OrdinaryCatholic
OrdinaryCatholic
Monday, June 17, AD 2019 7:42am

“Just another example of white privilege.”

And he wasn’t afraid of flaunting his white privilege either with the wearing of his white suits.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Monday, June 17, AD 2019 8:24am

The sectary running the DNC admitted he went to law school because he was bad at math.

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